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Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to christian fiction, fiction lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. She'd been tempted to slap the woman who uttered the words. Perhaps if the Americans knew Saudi history better, they would hold their tongues. True enough, a woman was traditionally forbidden from some of the activities accepted by the West—driving, for example.
Or giving testimony in a dispute. Or walking about freely with her face uncovered. But all of these practices advanced Saudi culture in ways the West did not see. Saudis understood the value of strong families, for example.
Of loyalty to God and his word. Of respect for an order that supported both families and God. Miriam let her mind drift over the events that had placed her and her friend Sita here, in this magnificent palace, where they awaited the ceremony that would change Sita's life as she knew it.
The kingdom's first king, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, conquered Riyadh in He was in his early twenties then. The four kings who had ruled since his death in were all his sons. But when Miriam looked down history's foggy halls, she decided it was the first king's women, not his sons, who shaped the country.
He'd taken over three hundred wives, and it was these women who gave him so many sons. Miriam let the curtain fall back in place and turned around. Sita sat like a small doll dressed in lace and pink. At weddings, all the women, from bride to servants, shed their black abaayas and veils for colorful dresses. Her eyes were round and dark—so very insecure.
Miriam and Sultana had rescued Sita from a flock of aunts busying her for the final ceremony and brought her here, to this room they'd dubbed the piano room for the white grand piano sitting to their right. The carpet, a thick Persian weave with a lion embroidered at the center, swallowed their feet. Evidently the designer Salman hired liked big cats; the walls of the room formed a virtual zoo of cat paintings. Sita's lips trembled.
It won't be the end of the world. At least he's wealthy. Better to marry into palaces than into the gutter. I understand that Hatam is no older than fifty-five. A year earlier, Miriam's father had taken Haya as a bride when Miriam's biological mother died. Haya was only thirteen at the time. As was customary, the girl took over the duties of the wife in their household, even though she was younger than those under her charge.
Miriam had been nineteen then. At first Miriam resented the child. But one look at Haya's nervous eyes after the wedding changed her heart. Haya slipped into her role of submissive wife with surprising grace. But Sita was not Haya. Sita was still a child too.
A small part of Miriam wanted to cry. But she could never cry, especially not now, just minutes before the ceremony. Sultana looked out the window. Of the three, she was perhaps the boldest. She was twenty-three and barren. But she was married to a good man who treated her well and turned a blind eye when she spoke out against the marriage of young girls.
Sultana's frequent trips to Europe had given her a somewhat Western perspective on that particular practice. Miriam glanced up. It was unusual for anyone to see her betrothed before the actual wedding. He'll kill me. Though she'd made inquiries, she'd been able to learn only that Hatam was a wealthy oil mogul from Dammam on the Persian Gulf. Sita sniffed and wiped her nose with a frail, shaky hand.
She spoke quietly. He will not touch me while I am alive. Today you'll find your life enriched beyond words, you'll see. Miriam felt her stomach turn. And you have this secret love with Samir. I hate you for it! You better not hate me, because you're like a sister to me, and I love you dearly.
Rumor had it that dozens of suitors had approached Father for Miriam's hand, and he'd turned them all away. His denial was a sore subject for her. Sultana placed a silencing hand on Miriam's shoulder. Salman protects you. They are ready! I know you are frightened, but we all grow up, don't we? But you must think beyond the uncertainty that you feel and consider the wonderful privileges that await you as the wife of a powerful man. He will give you a good life, and you'll bear him many children.
What else could a woman ask? It will be a great honor to bear his children. You'll see. I am so proud of you. Just yesterday you were still a child, playing with your dolls. Now look, you've grown into a beautiful young woman. The drummers are waiting. And with that Sita's fears were hidden. The only men present were the bride's father, the groom whose father was dead of old age , and the religious man who would perform the marriage. Hatam walked out alone, and Miriam nearly gasped aloud.
Blubber sat like a bloated tube around his stomach, sloshing with each step under a tent of a tunic. The fat under his chin hung like a reservoir of water.
To say the man was large would be a horrible miscalculation. He was an obese mountain. Beside Miriam, Sultana groaned softly. Several women glanced at her, but she ignored them. The drums beat again. Sita's mother and her aunt led the bride out. Hatam smiled and lifted her veil. Sita stared at him, and in her cloaked defiance, she looked more beautiful than Miriam could remember.
The ceremony lasted only a few minutes. The actual marriage had been performed hours earlier, first with the bride and then with the groom, separately, signing documents that affirmed the agreed upon dowry and terms of marriage.
Now the religious man looked at Sita's father and spoke the token words that confirmed the union. After a nod, he glanced at the groom, who replied that he accepted Sita as his bride.
A thousand women broke the silence with joyful ululating. Today the noise sent chills down Miriam's arms. Hatam walked past his new bride, tossing coins to the women. Sita hesitated, then followed. Hatam led Sita from the room, and Miriam saw that her friend walked like a newborn lamb still searching for its legs.
The women began to move outside, where food, music, and festivity awaited. They would celebrate for another two days after the groom departed with his new bride. But Miriam wasn't sure she could participate. Not with Sita's oath ringing in her ears. She quietly begged her friend to come to her senses so that she could enter her new life with joy. Popular, because he possessed both the sharpest mind the university had seen since its inception and the kind of ail-American face the media loved.
Lonely, because he felt oddly disconnected from that popularity. If he'd learned anything at Berkeley, it was that when academia put you on a pedestal, it expected you to perform as advertised.
If it wanted you to grow green skin, you'd better paint your skin green, because if you came out onstage with blue skin, it would resent you. Ironic, considering the freedom preached by those in this neck of the woods. Seth stared out the small windows that ran along the high wall of the lecture hall, thinking he was a blue person in a green person's world.
Blue, like the sky outside—another cloudless California day. He ran a hand through his shaggy blond mop and released a barely audible sigh. He glanced at the complex equation on the whiteboard behind the professor, solved it before he finished reading it, and let his mind drift again.
He was twenty-six, and his whole life had felt like a long string of abandonments. Sitting here listening to graduate lectures on quantum physics by Dr. Gregory Baaron with forty other students only seemed to reinforce the feeling. He should be doing something to lift himself out of this valley. Something like surfing. TED DEKKER Surfing had always been his one escape from a world gone mad, but the last time he'd seen the really good side of a wave was three years ago, back at Point Loma in San Diego, during a freak storm that deposited fifteen-foot swells along the coast from Malibu to Tijuana.
There was nothing quite like catching the right wave and riding in its belly until it decided to dump you off. Seth first experienced the freedom of surfing when he was six, when his mom bought him a board and took him to the beach—her way of helping them both escape his father's abuse. Paul loved three things in life and, as far as Seth saw, three things only: Pabst Blue Ribbon. In no particular order. The fact that he'd married a woman named Rachel and had a kid they'd named Seth barely mattered to him.
His mom, on the other hand, did love her son. They had, in fact, saved each others lives on more than one occasion, most memorably when his dad confused their bodies for baseballs. It was during the worst of those times when Seth asked his mom if she would take him to the library. She took him the very next day in the Rust Bucket, as she called their Vega.
From age six on, Seth's life comprised a strange brew of surfing, reading, and being kicked around the house by his dad. You ignore what your father says. As it turned out, Seth was more than special. He was a genius. In any other setting his unique gift would have been discovered and nurtured from the time he was two or three.
Unfortunately —or fortunately, depending on your point of view—no one really BLinKflfanEYE understood what an exceptional young boy Seth was until he was older. His mother was a hairdresser, not a schoolteacher, and although she made sure all the other beauticians knew about her boy's quick wit, she wasn't equipped to recognize genius.
And because Rachel would just as soon take him to the beach or the library as to the school, his reputation as a student languished. He was nine before anyone in the academic world even noticed Seth's brilliance.
A surfer named Mark Nobel who attended the small Nazarene university on Point Loma had watched him surf and insisted Seth give his surfboard a spin. By the time Seth washed back to shore, the student had left for class. Seth wandered onto the campus looking for Mark.
Half an hour later Seth found him in the math department, wading through a calculus equation with twenty other students and a professor who seemed to be having difficulty showing them just how simple this particular equation really was. Seeing Seth at the door, the professor jokingly suggested that he come forward and show this band of half-wits how simple math could be.
He did. Then he solved another, more complex equation that the professor scribbled on the board. And another. He left the stunned students twenty minutes later, not quite sure how he knew what he knew. The equations just came together in his mind like simple puzzles. The teachers at his grade school learned of his little adventure the next day, and their attitude toward him brightened considerably.
He agreed to some tests. They said that less than 1 percent of humans had an IQ greater than and that Einstein's was estimated to be Seth's IQ was They told him he couldn't dare waste such an exceptional mind. School simply wasn't a meaningful part of his world.
Life improved when his dad left for good after discovering just how effectively an angry thirteen-year-old boy could fight back. But by then Seth had lost his taste for formal education altogether. It wasn't until he was twenty that he began responding to pressure that he pursue a real education. He'd selected Berkeley in part for its proximity. It wasn't in his backyard, where he was the local curiosity who could count by primes in his sleep; it wasn't two thousand miles away either.
He thought he'd be a blue guy in a green world at Harvard or Yale or any of the other half-dozen universities that begged him to attend.
Berkeley seemed like a good compromise. The three years that followed failed to challenge him. As much as Seth hated to admit it, he was bored. Bored with academia, bored with his own mind. The only real challenge to this boredom came from an unlikely source: a recruiter from the NSA named Clive Masters.
Berkeley's dean of students had summoned a gathering of drooling recruiters exclusively for Seth during his freshman year. Sony Pictures sent a rep—evidently movie magic took brains. But Clive was the only recruiter who captured Seth's attention. Your disinterest in education just might be a crime. Were you born wrapped in a flag? I was born to be challenged," Clive said. Sounds like a ball.
The stupid ones, which make up about 99 percent of the lot, and the brilliant ones—each singlehandedly capable of the damage done by a thousand idiots. I've gone up against some of the sharpest. But I think you've already figured that out, haven't you? We have something in common, you and I. Still, solving mathematical challenges has its place. Cryptology isn't easy work.
The halls down in Fort Meade are lined with some of the world's brightest. Unlike the other sycophant recruiters, Clive seemed more interested in Seth's psyche than in what he could do for the organization.
But when you get bored—and the best always do—you think about me. No, 1 don't surf, but 1 think I understand why you do. Seth never seriously thought he would ever follow the path Clive had taken, but he felt a connection to this man who, despite being no intellectual slouch, applied his brilliance to thrillseeking. The possibilities were enough to help Seth slog through the months of boredom. Seth received his bachelor's in his second year at Berkeley. He skipped the master's program and was now in the second year of his doctorate.
But four years of this stuff was wearing thin, and he was no longer sure he could stomach all the nonsense required to finish after all. If the graduate dean, the very fellow lecturing at this very moment, Gregory Baaron, would allow him to write his dissertation and be done with it, that would be one thing. But Baaron had— "Perhaps you'd like to tell us, Mr.
Baaron was staring over bifocals. Baaron was one of the leading lights in the field of particle physics and had taught this basic material a hundred times. Much of his work was based on the equation now written on the board. Unfortunately, the equation was wrong. But because of Baaron's stake in the matter, the dean would hardly consider, much less accept, the possibility that it was wrong. Even worse, Baaron seemed to have developed a healthy dose of professional jealousy toward Seth.
Watch yourself, boy. Tread easy. He paraphrased from Baaron's own textbook. That is, apply the principle of least action by defining a quantity called the Lagrangian action, the integral of which is minimized along the actual observed path.
The easiest way to set the equation up is to use Feynman diagrams and to insert terms in the action for each of the first-order interactions. I read his Nobel-winning papers when 1 was fifteen. Some interesting thoughts. But he couldn't. Or just didn't. The conceptual problem is that the equations seem to say that the reality we observe is just the sum of all possible realities.
On an explanatory level, you have to apply the renormalization factors to make the numbers come out right. That's hardly the sign of a really good predictive theory. Putting both problems together, I'm inclined to think the theory's misguided. You do realize that the calculations of this method accord well with reality, at least in the world most of us live in. Are we really to believe that of all imaginable futures, the real one—the one we actually experience—is simply the weighted sum of all the others?
I don't think so. Someday this theory might look as outdated as a flat-earth theory. He felt his pulse quicken. Baaron stared at him for what must have been a full five seconds. He'd been here before, jumping off the same cliff. Without fail, the experience proved not only unsatisfying, but painful.
The knowledge of this fact didn't stop him. There were over two hundred stadium seats in the hall, sloping from the podium up to a sound booth, and although only forty were filled, the eyes of every occupant turned Seth's way. He slipped his hands into his pockets and palmed the Super Ball at the bottom of his right pocket. From where I'm standing, your reasoning looks ugly. People who don't have them can't possibly understand. There might have been a barely audible gasp in the auditorium.
Seth wasn't sure. Maybe the air-conditioning just came on. You're digging yourself a grave, Seth. Just because you have a natural talent does not mean you've conquered ignorance. To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the disease of the ignorant. And we all know that nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action—" "You're stepping over the line, Mr.
You have a responsibility that comes with your mind. I suggest you keep your wits about you. He who doesn't lose his wits over certain things has no wits to lose. The professor paused. You think you're cute, flaunting your questionable wit?
Why don't you engage me on the point, boy? He'd lost his cool with Seth once, when Seth came to class barefoot, dressed in surf shorts, and toting a surfboard. He'd hollowed out the board and cemented his laptop into it so that the whole contraption became his computer.
The exchange got ugly when Seth expounded on the superiority of surfing over education before a howling class. Nobody was howling now.
I'm merely saying what our most brilliant scholars have said better before me. Rather than tackle your noteworthy intellect with my own, I'm afraid I've stolen from others.
In fact, not a word I've spoken has been my own. Then George Savile from the seventeenth century. They are far too imaginative to associate with the tiny minds of this institution anyway.
Then again, maybe not. Graduate Dean Gregory Baaron turned and walked out the side door without another word. No one moved. Seth glanced at the clock on the wall—five minutes to the hour. He regretted his words already.
Why did he do this? Why hadn't he just answered Baaron's stupid question? A book slammed closed. One of the students vacated the back row and slipped out the rear entrance.
The rest just sat there. Matt Doil, a forty-five-year-old engineer from Caltech, twisted in his chair near the front. He flashed a grin and shook his head. He cleared his throat.
Why not? He'd done as much damage as he could possibly manage already. He might as well redeem himself in some small way. He finished the last stroke, stabbed the board with the marker, and turned around. To a student they were glued to him. The numbers on the wall behind me tell us that the future is calculable as the sum of all possible futures.
But I don't think it is. I think the future's beyond our calculation. And I think the future's singular. That there's only one possible future, namely the future that will happen, because it's known by a designer. Trying to communicate some of the ideas that popped into his head was often more complicated than the ideas themselves.
Language had its limits. He dropped the marker in the tray and stepped back. It was the first time even he had seen the new equation actually written down. He turned to the class. They were wide-eyed. Some were writing furiously. Some still didn't get it. Matt rose, eyes fixed on the board.
That's amazing. He had no business being here on this stage for everyone to look at. He belonged in a basement somewhere. Back home in San Diego. He turned and walked out through the same door Dean Baaron had used. It was said that Muhammad disliked the church bells of his day, so he insisted on a vocal call to prayer. Miriam thought he was right—a bell was far too harsh. She recited the first sura of the Koran without thinking about the words.
She had taken a keen interest in the holy book, at one point thinking to become a hafiz, the coveted title of one who'd memorized all suras of the Koran. Of course, that would have been impossible: She was a woman.
But the poetic nature of the Koran was like music to her mind and she found it pleasing. The word Koran meant "recitation. So then, if she could recite as well as a man, couldn't she be a great theologian? She stood and rearranged the pillows on her bed.
Her room was decorated in purple because her father had decided many years ago that it should be, despite Miriam's vocal dislike of the color. Her declaration that he best leave decorating to women with good taste earned her a slap. Miriam headed for the main living room, where her mother, young Haya, was instructing the servants' preparations of Salman's breakfast.
Like many men with multiple wives, Salman rotated villas every TED DEKKER day, so that he was with each woman only every fourth day—a blessing or a curse for the wife, depending on her view of him. Haya slid across the room toward Miriam, frowning. She wore a brilliant blue dress and strings of pearls that stood out nicely against her creamy neck. When the villain, Darth Vader, appeared on screen cloaked in black, she'd gasped aloud. Saudi women looked like Western movie villains!
Haya had applied a touch of makeup, something she did only when Salman came. The phone rang. Miriam crossed to the door, eager to find Samir on the grounds or in the garage. She slipped into her black abaaya, pulled on her veil, and stepped outside. The garage stood detached, twenty meters from the entrance. Like all males outside the family, Samir was prohibited from seeing her face, and indeed he hadn't. The first of those times skipped through Miriam's mind as she walked to the garage.
It was three years ago, in the late afternoon, just after she turned seventeen. She'd been on the back lawn walking with her sister, Sara, when Samir ran out to tell them that their mother was waiting for them in the car.
His shout startled a goose, which leaped from the pond and rushed at Miriam. Panicked by the honking bird's aggression, she spun to flee.
In spinning she tripped on her sister's foot. Samir rushed to chase the goose away, which he did easily enough. But in her fall, Miriam's veil flew off.
She was on her feet and staring at a stunned Samir before she realized her face was bare. For long seconds, neither moved. Something in Miriams soul changed with that look. In his eyes, she was a person. Not because of her beauty, but because in that moment she had become more than a black sack among a million other black sacks. Samir had fallen in love. She could not resist loving him in return. So began a forbidden romance that took them, on two separate occasions, to Spain, where they slipped away from the family and spent hours staring into each other's eyes and talking about love.
On the second occasion he had vowed to love her forever and marry her, no matter the consequence. He wore the traditional white cotton thawb, but in her mind she pictured the strength of his arms and chest under the garment. His dark hair swept over milky brown eyes. Miriam glanced back at the villa and walked into the shadows, her heart pounding as much from the impropriety of it as from her love.
And how is my love? No one can hear. Perhaps Sita's wedding had emboldened her. He grinned. I will turn you into a lamb.
I miss you, Samir. When can we go away again? To Spain again. Maybe this time we will stay. Don't tempt me if you can't also make a promise. The thought made her hands tremble. Where did you hear such a silly saying? Do you like it? And I am crazy for you, my lion. At eleven. With whom? The sheik. He was one of the most influential Shia sheiks in the country, but not a Sunni, certainly not a Wahhabi.
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