BY THALIB RAZI
The year is 2562 AD – the Second Hijri Millennium. Terraforming the New Nile on al-Qahirah (the Sultanate of Mars) has not gone according to plan…
“Jinn and mankind! If you can pass beyond the regions of heaven and earth, then do so: you will not pass without Our authority.” Qur’an, 55:33
Sultan Harun al-Sa’idi snapped shut the battered hard copy of the Book he had been reading from, a little too hard – then kissed it and put it to his forehead apologetically before setting it down upon his touchscreen desk, a crowded mosaic of spreadsheets, maps, and incoming messages.
“Authority” – Sultan – that was what his title was supposed to mean. In fact, the verse he was reading could be interpreted to mean that he, the Sultan of Mars, was in fact the very authority which both jinn and mankind needed for their exodus from the Blue Planet. The court scholars of New Cairo had settled on that exact interpretation when his ancestors united the terraformed wadis of al-Qahirah al-Hamrah, the Vanquishing Red Planet.
But he was starting to doubt their exegesis.
For instance, there were hardly any jinn around anymore, for him to be “The Authority over the Humans and Jinn of Mars” as the scholars had crowned him. The jinn had revealed themselves during humanity’s greatest time of need; the good ones had, anyway – plus some bad ones who realized that they would no longer be able to possess and whisper to humans, feeding off their delicious doubts and worries, if humanity killed itself off by burning those smoky fossil fires.
Earth’s climate had become mercurial, alternating between scorching Venus and frozen Europa, without any break from the storms, droughts, fires, and famines for even a breath… So five hundred years ago, a group of the jinn set aside their bickering over which of humanity’s good and bad emotions were the tastiest and made the obvious choice of revealing themselves where they’d long known humanity best: Old Egypt.
They had accepted Islam, the dominant religion in Old Egypt at the turn of the Christian Second Millennium, and quickly set about embedding their supernatural, smokeless fires into the engines of human technology, breathing inexplicable life into a long-shuttered “Masr to Mars” Egyptian national space program, which had until then been largely a bureaucratic publicity stunt.
The rest was history. The jinn evacuated humanity to Mars – and then disappeared.
Harun looked out the window of his study onto the bustling citadel which was downtown New Cairo after evening prayers. Here he was, a human king who relied on jinn technology, whose entire civilization only came into being with their help, and who supposedly ruled the jinn of this planet…
Yet he had not seen one in over a decade.
They could make themselves incorporeal and had no need for air, so they often wandered away from the terraformed bubbles around the Red Nile, carefully designed to flood once every decade for the health of New Cairo’s farmland, as well as the smaller oases scattered across Mars, floating on the winds of Martian dust storms for Allah knew what purposes.
But it was odd that they all left for good around the time of the Nile’s last Flood – which never came.
Especially odd, since they didn’t need to drink water…
“Permission, sultan.”
“Enter,” Harun said without looking, clearing the desk’s screen to space-black with a swipe. Even his trusted vizier Iskandar shouldn’t see what he was working on.
And yet his keen eye had. “Still researching the Caves, then?” the grey-bearded advisor asked wryly. I once again remind you that – “
“Yes, yes,” the dark-skinned Sultan snapped. “The Caves of the Sleepers are right at the edge of the Nile bubble, and no sultan before me has ever entered or bothered them, as they are likely booby-trapped to tear a hole in the Nile bubble, destroying our terraformed home’s atmosphere and radiation protection, killing us all. But time is passing, Iskandar! Don’t you read Surat al-Kahf?”
“Every Friday,” Iskandar said solemnly. “’The sleepers stayed in their cave for three hundred years,” he recited, flipping through the Book on the desk to find the chapter. “But what makes you think that those old hibernators from the Indigo War would help our current situation in any way?”
“You didn’t finish the verse. Don’t you think it’s a bit strange that they set the timer for their stasis to exactly the same decade that the Flood failed to come down from the mountains of New Habash, for the first time ever since humans and jinn terraformed it to, centuries ago? Maybe they predicted something. Besides, it’s the common people who discovered the timer at the Caves’ entrance; they’re going to want answers when it hits zero.”
The vizier checked his watch. “Oh, as in now, you mean?” He looked out the window.
“N-now?!” Sultan Harun spluttered, following his gaze to the distant mountains beyond the city, at the edge of the Nile bubble. The lights of hundreds of rovers were gathering at one spot – and tonight was not one of the desert festivals when they did so to party…
“’.. And they added nine more,’” Iskandar finished. “I added the Caves’ timer to my watch; I thought you would’ve done the same. Well?” He set aside the Book and turned around, chuckling a bit smugly.
Harun was gone.
He had already jumped out the window, rappelling down his own tower with his grappling gun and then firing it back up to the window so that Iskandar could use it next. “Get in the rover!” he shouted. “We’ve got some really Old Believers to meet.”
The vizier groaned. He was too old for this.
As the local Bedouins who had accidentally uncovered it years ago now stood around it, eagerly waiting, the green digits on the timer buried into the red soil at the entrance of the Cave of the Sleepers hit 000:00:00, just as a line of smaller text scrolled along the bottom of its black screen:
309:00:00. ‘Our Lord, grant us Your mercy, and find us a good way out of our ordeal.’
You can find more from Thalib on X @Thalib_Razi. His debut novel, The Enchanter’s Counsel, is available on Amazon.