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 the 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.