by John Dalmas
He thumbed through the sheaf of SUMBAA's mathematics then, but gave it no more than a glance. His own math was adequate for nothing beyond aerial surveys and simple ballistics. To him, this was gibberish. He had no doubt it would be to his old math professor, too.
It occurred to him then to wonder what "multi-terminal" meant with regard to SUMBAA. As a child, he'd supposed that each planet's SUMBAA was a terminal of one common computer. Later, when he appreciated the multi-week data lapse between planets, he assumed they were independent, and that "multi-terminal" derived from the innumerable limited-access terminals in the bureaucracy's many offices.
How much data had SUMBAA needed, this SUMBAA, to predict serious labor problems on Saathvoktos? And how had those data been obtained? In the empire, data from every computer, every significant recorded transaction of any kind, was said to be read and stored by SUMBAA. Supposedly and apparently, much of it was to be held confidential, used only as raw material for computations. That he'd known since childhood. But how had SUMBAA here on Varatos gotten the necessary, and presumably voluminous data about Saathvoktos? The two planets were almost four weeks apart by hyperspace message pod.
Perhaps it wasn't a problem; the best data cubes stored a huge quantity of raw data. Probably the SUMBAAs exchanged data cubes by pod. Perhaps SUMBAA here was as fully informed about things on Saathvoktos as it was about things here on Varatos. Except for that four-week data delay! Knowledge here about any other world was inevitably out of date.
And SUMBAA had said it answered whatever questions were asked. If that was true, how had organized crime survived? And destructive rivalries? Even conflicts between planets? Did the potentials for these grow out of privacy laws?
Of course, SUMBAA had also said it lied "as necessary." Necessary for what?
The Kalif pressed fingers to his forehead; he was beginning to have a headache-a rarity for him. Too much pure thinking and not enough doing, he told himself. He keyed the computer on his desk to waken him in half an hour, then lay down on a couch and went to sleep at once.
***
Alb Jilsomo Savbatso sat at the desk in his office. He hadn't yet returned his attention to the material logged in on his desk terminal; his mind was occupied with the Kalif. He'd known Coso Biilathkamoro as a newly appointed, probational prelate, doing administrative flunky work around the Sreegana. And been impressed by him then. Been more impressed by him as a staff aide to the College. Had been deeply impressed with the way he'd handled the assassination and its dangerous aftermath, and how he'd taken on and adjusted to the responsibilities of a Kalif these past few days, just under a week now.
But the way he'd questioned the director of SUMBAA this morning, and SUMBAA itself… Obviously the director didn't control SUMBAA; only SUMBAA did that. The Kalif had questioned and found that out in his first week; he himself had overlooked it for eleven years as an exarch.
This Kalif was far more than simply a man of action. He was acutely perceptive, aggressively intelligent, and as powerfully analytical as anyone he'd ever known. He was enough, Jilsomo told himself ruefully, to give one an inferiority complex.
He wondered what having Coso Biilathkamoro as Kalif would mean to the empire.
Four
Year of The Prophet 4723
The van slid smoothly along the surfaced hoverway, leaving the tree-bordered spaceport behind. For a short distance, the vehicle was exposed to the sweep of a stiff, chill, east wind before entering the belt of woods sheltering Royal Park. From the woodland strip, it emerged into Royal Park itself, passing a race track, groves, sports fields, gardens where peasant laborers spaded autumn-crisped flowers into the soil.
Ahead towered another belt of trees, dark and majestic-royal khooms standing more than 200 feet tall-the hoverway tunneling into it. The van entered there, too. On the other side were lawns patterned with fruit trees and ornamental shrubs, and flowerbeds turned by peasant spades. A wall enclosed the sultan's palace compound. Veneered with marble and not particularly high, its function was more seclusion than protection.
The van stopped before the gate. The vehicle and its driver were well known to both human and electronic security there. After identifying him and scanning the van for embargoed materials, a process that required perhaps a second, an enclosed hover scooter emerged from a narrow side gate. Its driver received two bags from the driver of the van, then the scooter turned and re-entered the compound.
***
More than five years earlier, in the Year of The Prophet 4718, Rashti Yabakaloonga, Sultan of Klestron, had sent out a small exploration flotilla to seek hubward for habitable planets. It had been done under the Sultan's authority as supreme commander of the fleet, without the knowledge of the Klestronu Diet. Though of necessity, a handful of nobles were privy to the project. Lies had been invented, documented, and elaborated to account for absences. Preparations were made strictly under the "need to know" policies. Logistics and budget were not a problem; stocks on hand were largely sufficient to supply it; broad naval allocations financed it by dint of cuts elsewhere.
It had also been done without imperial approval, which would undoubtedly have been refused. Klestron was one of the three mother worlds in the empire, and therefore bolder than most to act as it saw fit. Besides, Klestron was the planet with the most severe overpopulation. If a new world could be found to take the more critical surplus…
Anciently, the Blessed Flenyaagor had written that Kargh had created eleven worlds for man to live upon. That had been long before space travel, before even the Industrial Revolution. And eventually, ships from Varatos had accounted for eleven. Afterward, exploration continued for a time, but the additional planets found were unfit for colonies.
Thus Flenyaagor's scriptures had been confirmed on every count, even to the existence of three worlds, the mother worlds, on which humans were found to live. As for the other eight, he'd written that once, humankind had lived on them, too, but had sinned beyond forgiveness, undertaking to create life from non-life. Especially, they had undertaken to create humans in great kettles! Therefore, "Kargh punished the eight worlds by slaying their people with great rains of fire, so that no one was left alive on them."
And when those eight worlds were discovered, more than fifteen hundred years after Flenyaagor's death, on every one of them, the remains of cities could still be found here and there, overgrown with forest or half buried in sediment.
These verifications of The Prophet's ancient writings had resurrected Karghanik, the religion of Kargh, and in time it became the sole religion permitted in the empire. Finally, in the terms of the Peace of 3243, the emperor was deposed and the Kalif took the throne. Whereupon the Kalif declared that to seek further habitable worlds would show disbelief-doubt at least-in the words of The Prophet. In the face of earlier unsuccessful explorations, no one had tested the injunction implied by the first imperial Kalif.
Until, after more than 1,400 years, the Sultan of Klestron, with no fanfare, had quietly sent out his small flotilla.
Sultan Rashti had long been a student of the Chronicles of the Disciples. Including the four rejected scriptures, books judged apocryphal and therefore not respectable. These apocrypha had twice been banned, but each time the ban had been lifted. For where they did not conform with The Book of The Prophet, they did not contradict it but simply went beyond it.
And after all, the disciple Shoser had written in his holy chronicle, "Flenyaagor went apart from us to the home of a miller named Kren, and there sat for two days, immersed in the rumbling of millstones, communing with KARGH and writing, as he did from time to time. When he returned to us, he carried with him a scroll, but he did not read to us what he had written on it. The time, he said, had not come." (Shoser, Chapter 3.) And no one disputed the truth of Shoser. Also the disciples Ranjik and Poorlok had mentioned The Prophet going apart to meditate and write.
So clearly, Flenyaagor had written further divine messages after The Book of The Prophet. Might not they be t
he apocrypha?
And what did the principle apocryphum, The Book of the Mountain say? Summarizing: On the eight worlds where Kargh killed the people for their iniquities, he'd allowed certain righteous men to escape with their families in great arks that flew away "into the farthest depths of the sky."
Might not Kargh have created worlds for these to live upon? This had been Sultan Rashti's inspiration and his temptation. Presumably the Kalif had learned of the covert flotilla; he had his spies. But as Rashti had expected, he'd heard nothing on it from the Kalif. Who had not chosen to punish him and endanger the sometimes uncertain unity of the empire, nor to admonish him without punishment, which would have been taken as weakness. And in his turn the new Kalif, though a firm man, had shown no interest in what to him was old business, yesteryear's trouble. If in fact he even knew.
Now Rashti had been vindicated. The morning's message cubes had included one from the flotilla, the explorers now incredibly distant in space. It seemed to Rashti the most exciting and compelling cube that any ruler had ever received. He read the abstract, then called his inner council together, five archprelates, and in the security of the council room they'd reviewed the full report, including some of the appendices. It had taken from mid-morning till late evening, and their meals had been brought to them.
It could have taken less time, but Sultan Rashti preferred to hear reports as well as read them, so SUMBAA had read it aloud over the council-room terminal while the script scrolled slowly up the wall. Videos had shown the habitable world they'd found-a rich world, rich in water, rich in forests, rich in animal life.
There were also humans, though in numbers incredibly small from the viewpoint of imperial worlds.
Commodore Tarimenloku had parked his ships outside the radiation belts and landed his brigade of marines on the world he'd found, taken prisoners there from among its officials and brought them to his flagship. DAAS, the flagship's computer, had developed a translation program for their language, and they'd been interrogated, under instrumentation to assess the truth of what they said. A lot had been learned from them.
Terfreya, THe world the flotilla had found, was one of many occupied by humans in that sector. There was a confederation with twenty-seven member worlds, and many other worlds were tributary to them. Terfreya was a very minor tributary world, little visited by ships from the others.
The Confederation was not warlike, and though none of the officials interrogated was highly knowledgeable about the Confederation fleet, it was not large and its technology was inferior. The individual member worlds had no navies of their own at all.
The marine brigade had had to fight, however. A force of Confederation cadets had been training on Terfreya, and though their weapons were inferior, the cadets were excellent fighters. They had not yet been eliminated when the message pod had been sent back to Klestron. When they were, the flotilla would return home.
There had been a complication en route to Terfreya, but apparently-hopefully-it was nothing serious. The flotilla had passed through a vast sector seemingly occupied by-at least containing-intelligent non-humans with advanced military capabilities. In fact, the flotilla had twice emerged within the non-human sector, and the instrument ship had been destroyed by non-human attack.
Intelligent non-humans! Every councilman had been shaken by the information. The possibility had never occurred to them when they'd planned the expedition. The Book of The Prophet said that all other creatures than man were created without soul or reason, to serve man and be subject to his mercy.
Only one source said otherwise. And when the realization had struck the sultan, he'd stopped the report until his chills had subsided.
There was, or was said to be, a fifth apocryphum: The Book of Shatim, banned by the first Kalif. Real or not, still existing or not, every schoolboy had heard of it, and knew in a general way what it supposedly said: That Kargh was not the only god. That there was a lesser god, an evil god, Shatim, who'd been driven away when the eight worlds had been punished, for he had been the source of their evil. And with Shatim's help, certain evil men had escaped one of the eight worlds. As part of their pact with Shatim, these evil men had accepted Shatim's ugly spiritual form, just as the rest of mankind had the spiritual form of Kargh.
Every councilman had been sworn to absolute secrecy with regard to the non-humans. Any leak would be tracked down, and the guilty party executed, impaled, along with his immediate family. The reasoning was that if word of the non-humans leaked, people throughout the empire would connect it with the Book of Shatim. And there would be those who would say that Shatim was more powerful than Kargh because his empire was so vast and its ships so strong.
Fortunately, according to the report, the non-humans could be avoided by remaining in hyperspace for a long enough time-something over an imperial year! The sultan had shaken his head in near disbelief at that. How could an empire, any empire, be so large? The problems of communication and control would be enormous.
***
As he prepared himself for bed that night, Sultan Rashti Yabakaloonga wasn't worrying about the non-humans. Stay in hyperspace, perhaps making occasional abrupt changes in direction, and there'd be nothing the non-humans could do. They probably wouldn't even know what, if anything, was passing through their empire. That's what his science aide had told him.
The important thing was the potential for conquest and colonization. Although clearly, such conquest was not feasible for Klestron by itself, despite superior armaments. It would be an undertaking for the empire.
Of course, the Imperial Diet might not approve the authority and funds for an invasion. His own SUMBAA had declined to recommend or condemn it, on the basis that too little was known about the Confederation's fleet. SUMBAAs lacked boldness. Also, imperial politics could be a snake pit, and there were always those who couldn't see past tomorrow. There was even the possibility that the Kalif wouldn't push, though it seemed to Rashti that this Kalif was almost sure to.
Well, if the Imperial Diet wouldn't do it, perhaps he himself could put together a coalition of the worlds that were interested. Politically it would be both difficult and risky. The military aspects would have to be treated as strictly accessory to the commercial, and even so it might bring imperial intervention.
That was a question for the future though. The sultan told the lights off, than stretched out on his luxurious LG bed with his hands folded lightly on his stomach. Klestron was only eight days from Varatos by hyper-space pod, but he didn't expect much more than an acknowledgment from the Imperium in the near future; it was appropriate that the Kalif do and say little of substance until the flotilla returned. Which would be in slightly less than an imperial year, assuming it had started home a month after sending the pod. That's what his science aide had said.
Meanwhile he'd have to return his attention to more humdrum issues: particularly to the budget, and the food riots in Kwahoolo. That was life for you.
Five
Year of The Prophet 4724
The early-autumn sun was hot, and Sultan Rashti Yabakaloonga wiped moisture from his forehead as he watched the heavy cruiser HRS Blessed Flenyaagor settle onto the landing pad. At his command, the troop transport was still parked 35,000 miles out, beyond the outer radiation zone, with orders to hold the marines in stasis. He wasn't ready to let them land.
The flotilla had emerged from hyperspace well beyond the orbit of Gunweeya, and had taken nearly two days to arrive at Klestron. Its commodore had pulsed his full report to the sultan, and the sultan, after having SUMBAA read it to him, had decided to meet the ship anyway, with the full Synod of Archprelates.
Driven from the Confederation world by force! By an enemy force apparently smaller and more poorly armed! If the opponents of conquest, and there'd be plenty of them, needed help for their cause, that would qualify.
There were traditions in the empire, some of them good, others unfortunate. One was that a commander who lost a war should be executed. Tarimenloku h
ad to be thinking about that; he was traditional to a fault.
The sultan grunted, drawing a surreptitious glance from his aide. In this case there were grounds for calling it an encounter instead of a war, he told himself, or perhaps the first battle of a war not yet won.
A cloud intervened between the sultan and the sun, a welcome intervention, and the sultan's eyes raised to it. A large cloud, happily. Initially, he'd waited for the expedition's return with as much eagerness as a sixty-nine-year-old could muster. That eagerness had thinned when the flotilla had emerged in real space and pulsed its report.
Yet basically the situation didn't seem seriously less favorable than before: The Confederation's fleet was inferior to the empire's, and the war would be won in space by the stronger fleet. The stronger fleet could go to whatever system it wished. And controlling the space around a planet, one could concentrate one's surface forces wherever advantageous.
A movement caught the sultan's eyes; the main gangway opened in the side of the cruiser, and a ramp extruded. Marine guards stepped smartly out onto the ramphead and to its sides, then turned about and saluted. A heavy-set man in an admiral's full-dress uniform stepped out and returned their salute, then, his aide behind him, rode the ramp toward the ground.
Traditional to a fault, the sultan thought watching him. There aren't too many around like you.
***
Debriefs had taken five days. The sultan himself had debriefed Commodore Igsat Tarimenloku, then had spent four days reviewing other debriefs. What he'd learned was no surprise, no worse than he'd expected.
After that he'd spent an hour questioning the marine general, Saadhrambacoora. The experience had been unsettling. The general had been a hard old officer. He was a veteran of the Ikthvoktos Suppression, and as a young man had led an armored company in the crushing of the Sangjee Uprising-as much fighting experience as probably any Klestronu officer alive. All of it creditable till this.