Donald Moffitt - Mechanical Sky 1 - Crescent in the Sky

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CRESCENT
IN THE
SKY
Book One of The Mechanical Sky
Donald Moffitt
Copyright © 1989 by Donald Moffitt
Library of congress Catalog Card Number: 89-91802
ISBN 0-345-34477-4
Cover Art by Don Dixon
e-book ver. 1.0
"We have pried into the sky, but found it
filled with strong guards and meteors. "
the koran, sura 72: The Djinn II
CHAPTER 1
T he call to prayer sounded from his wrist monitor, and Abdul Hamid-Jones reluctantly pressed the hold
button on the haft of his micromanipulator remote and set it down care-fully on the laboratory bench. With a
martyr's sigh, he consulted the glowing 3-D arrow that seemed to be floating somewhere within his wrist on
the little holographic display.
It was a little complicated this afternoon. Mecca was located somewhere underfoot, through the entire
bulk of Mars, with an ambiguous east-west orientation, and moreover, since that face of the Earth
happened to be turned away at the moment, it was upside-down in Hamid-Jones's frame of reference.
He cast a last despairing glance at the magnified events un-folding on the big bench-mounted screen. The
restriction en-zymes had done their work, but DNA was leaking all over the place, and if he didn't do
something about annealing the loose ends immediately, the carefully prepared plasmid chimera wait-ing in
the wings would be spoiled. He was almost tempted to skip the afternoon devotion, but the door to his
cubicle was open, and the overseer, Yezid the Prod—a man of limited un-derstanding—had been on the
prowl all day.
The insect buzz of the muezzin's voice grew more insistent at his wrist. "Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar!'' it
repeated for the last time; "La ilaha ilia Allah!" With a muttered "All right," Hamid-Jones drew the
monofilm prayer rug out of his shirt pocket and unfolded it to full size. He flexed his wrist a couple of times,
making sure that the arrow held steady, then hastily made his silent declaration of intention—though
somewhat guiltily limiting himself to the minimum number of rak'as.
"Allahu akbar," he responded with not a moment to spare and sank to his knees in the light Martian
gravity, prostrating himself in the direction that, according to the astronomical com-puter's tiny brain, most
nearly approximated that of Mecca.
Halfway through his specified rak'as, he felt a shadow fall across his back. He knew without looking that
it was Yezid and was awfully glad that he had not given in to the impulse to evade his religious duties.
Yezid had been more foul-tempered than usual of late. Only a few days ago he had had an unfortunate
Callistan slave flogged for a minor infraction of department reg-ulations. Not that Hamid-Jones himself was
in danger of such treatment; Yezid would hardly dare to touch an assistant to the Clonemaster of the Royal
Stables. But it would be deucedly embarrassing to be hauled in front of a religious court and scolded, and it
might hinder his advancement.
The shadow went away. Hamid-Jones finished his prayers and scrambled to his feet. He left the rug
where it was; his first thought was for the bright twisting shapes of the gene assembly displayed above the
lab bench.
He gave a groan. It was ruined. Even from the pseudoimage with its computer-assigned colors, he could
see that it was a hopeless tangle. The passenger gene had come unstuck and at-tached itself to a section of
an inverted repeat sequence on the wrong strand of the heteroduplex he had created that morning.
He shuddered to think of the consequences if a clone with a hidden defect ever were allowed to come to
foal. He was work-ing with genetic material from the Emir's prize stallion. The Emir tended to take a
personal interest in the offspring of his beloved al-Janah, the Winged One.
Knowing that it was hopeless, he punched up the magnifica-tion and called for a schema to confirm the
bad news. The com-puter obliged with a color-coded abstraction that showed the sequencing of base pairs
on the offending palindrome as a series of little plugs and sockets. The replication fork was busily zip-ping
itself up to the end of the molecule—a repeat structure gone wild.
Hamid-Jones flushed it all away. He was going to have to do it all over again, from scratch. Wearily he
began assembling the components of another plasmid from the DNA fragments he had in storage.
"Ya Abdul, why so serious?" a voice said from the door. "Coming to tea?"
Hamid-Jones looked around. It was Rashid, from the protein assembly section. Like himself, Rashid was
descended from mawali, or "client" forebears, and it showed in Rashid's sandy hair and boiled complexion.
Hamid-Jones, on the other hand, might almost have passed for a pure-blooded ethnic Arab—with his
hawklike visage, deeper coloring, and fierce dark eyes—but he was painfully aware of his origins. Like it or
not, he was an Anglo-Arab—forever to be known in the social scheme of things as an 'arab al masta
ariba, "one who becomes an Arab." He was not as low on the social scale as the ubiquitous dhimmi, or
unbelievers—who nevertheless enjoyed perfect tolerance as long as they paid the jizza, or head tax, of the
unconverted—but he would never achieve the status of a true Arab of tribal descent, an 'arab al' ariba.
He would always have to work harder to get ahead.
"No, I'll skip tea today," he told Rashid somewhat brusquely. "I want to finish this."
He bent over the workbench again, a rather ordinary young man in cheap shirt and trousers, with a
headcloth that was care-lessly askew. Hamid-Jones's six feet two inches would have been considered tall
on Earth, but he had already completed half his growth when his parents had emigrated to the Martian
Emirate, and as a consequence he was a head shorter than most of his Marsborn co-workers, and had
heavier bones and musculature. Strength, he had often had cause to notice, was not as important in the
world as height; it was eye level that counted. There was still a trace of the British Protectorate in his
Arabic accent— another factor setting him apart.
Rashid did not go away, as Hamid-Jones had hoped. He lin-gered in the doorway, his eyes straying alertly
to the screen. "Let it go, whatever it is," he said. "It can't be that important.''
Hamid-Jones reached up and switched to a muon-scope view in uninformative shades of gray. He went
on working without replying. After a moment, Rashid tried again.
"Who's it for?" he asked slyly. "Not a falcon or saluki for someone in the palace, is it? That would be a
terrific plum."
"It's a horse," Hamid-Jones said unwillingly.
"Ah, a horse. Very nice." Rashid's oily gaze shifted to the sealed cryocontainer that Hamid-Jones had
neglected to stow out of sight.
"I'm giving it a third lung, like that mutation that cropped up in the Horse Guard stables."
Rashid pounced immediately. "Ah . . . but you're working with sequestered material, I see. That means . .
." Hamid-Jones clammed up. "You'd better get going if you don't want to miss the tea break."
"As you like," Rashid said with a shrug. "Ma'al salaama." He left, the envy plain in his eyes.
Hamid-Jones set doggedly to work once more. Rashid would be spreading gossip in the canteen, but there
was nothing he could do about it. The assignment was a plum, and he had no intention of shirking it. The
Clonemaster, the esteemed Hassan bin Fahd al-Hejjaj, was grooming him for higher things—there was no
doubt about it. There had been other tests before this one.
It was a great opportunity, but not without its perils. One of Hamid-Jones's predecessors in the job had
come to the Emir's personal attention—unfavorably—and the story was still told in whispers of how he had
been fed alive to the Royal Aviary. Of course the circumstances were hardly comparable; the unfortu-nate
cloning assistant had been guilty not of mere failure, but of stealing sequestered genetic material and selling
it to mem-bers of the minor aristocracy anxious to improve the breeding of their hunting dogs. But
salukis—the Noble Ones—were a royal prerogative. They could never be sold, only exchanged or given as
gifts—and that went for their DNA, too. Still, stealing genetic material of treasured animals was a
time-honored cus-tom, and it was usually the servants who were caught. Even in the time of the Prophet
more than two millennia before, enter-prising desert sheiks had schemed to purloin the semen of prize
stallions and race it across the sands to waiting mares. That was how the Arabian breed had spread.
Nowadays it was done by contraband nucleotides.
It took Hamid-Jones an hour of patient work to put together another plasmid carrying the passenger gene
and to tease out an undamaged six-foot strand of the Winged One's DNA from the precious hoard the
Clonemaster had entrusted him with. An enucleated egg had already been summoned from the files and
was on standby. Now he was ready to prepare the cleavage sites. He was just about to set the computer to
do a search of base pair sequences on the long molecule when he became aware of a growing hum of
voices in the main dome outside his cubicle. Doors slammed. There was a gregarious babble, almost like a
Thursday night. A chattering group hurried past his door, and he could distinguish calls of "Allah isalmak"
and "Take care." It sounded as if the laboratory was emptying out, but it was still a couple of hours till
quitting time.
Rashid poked his head inside the door with a big grin. Beyond him, Hamid-Jones could see two of his
friends, Ja'far and Fei-sel, looking flushed and excited.
"Why are you still hanging around?" Rashid demanded. "We're being let off early."
"Huh? What are you talking about?"
"A holiday's been declared," Feisel supplied, leaning in past Rashid's shoulder. "Three whole days, starting
at sunset. There'll be public feasts and everything. Old Yezid Bent-Stick came round himself to pass the
word. Yallah, come on, the place is closed."
"But we've just celebrated Iid al-Fitr. And the Feast of the Sacrifice is still two months off."
"It's a new holiday, I tell you," Feisel said impatiently. "It's been declared by the Vizier at the orders of the
Emir himself."
Hamid-Jones scratched his head. "Why? What's it for?"
"Haven't you heard? The Emir is having himself beheaded again."
The passageways were crowded with people milling about looking for something to do or hurrying home
early to make holiday preparations. A few scruffy vendors and street enter-tainers were already circulating
to get a head start on the pleasure-seeking throngs that could be expected later as the cel-ebrations
gathered steam; Hamid-Jones at one point had to squeeze past a clot of idlers who had collected around a
juggling act, completely blocking the intersection of the Tharsis North and Gazelle Lane tunnels. There was
not a tricab to be had when he emerged from the transit tube, and he was resigned to walk-ing the rest of
the way home.
He had tried to stay on at the darkened lab until he could finish the annealing job and get the altered
nucleus safely into the egg, but Yezid had come around with his jangling key ring and kicked him out. Now
another clone had been spoiled, and Hamid-Jones was going to have to screw up enough courage to ask the
Clonemaster for more specimens from the Winged One after the three-day holiday was over.
He dodged past some workmen who were stringing colored lights across the main concourse and ducked
into the maze of narrow, winding tunnels that led to the Old City, the Medina al-Kadima. Here the
warrens of closetlike shops that lined the walls had been hacked out of the rock of Mars itself, and
gen-erations of owners had been adding illegally to their property by excavating the long alcoves inch by
inch at the rear; sections of tunnel had been known to collapse when the burrowers went too far and met
fellow moles from parallel lanes.
"Balak, balak, watch where you're going, fellow!" a voice shouted close behind him, and he jumped
aside to let a beeping scooter past. Its rider was a plump, complacent man in flowing robes, with baskets
piled up high behind him—a merchant lay-ing in stock to take advantage of the unexpected fête,
Hamid-Jones supposed. The man's robes brushed Hamid-Jones's leg as he squeezed past, and the scooter
continued threading its dig-nified way through the thickening traffic, its wheels masked by the merchant's
skirts, so that he seemed like a floating apparition in white.
The suq was already gay with colored streamers that the shop-keepers had draped from the upper
arcades, and Hamid-Jones could sense movement behind the lacy shutters where hidden eyes followed the
excitement down below. One of the shop-keepers saw him standing there and came out of his boxlike stall
to accost him.
"Ya sidi, don't you want to wear your finest for the holiday?" he said, staring accusingly at Hamid-Jones's
cheap plastic san-dals. "Yallah, let me show you a pair of shoes in real leather."
Hamid-Jones shook him off and continued. Other tradesmen clamored at him from their stalls, for the
most part automatically after assessing him as a poor prospect, and turned to importune the better-dressed
uptunnel slummers and unwary tourists from the starships docked at Phobos.
A man with alcohol on his breath bumped into him and reeled away after mumbling an apology. An early
celebrant with the bad judgment to be drunk in public. Hamid-Jones hurried to be out of the idiot's vicinity as
quickly as possible. It was best not to be around such people. Sooner or later they were picked up by the
religious police. Even the rug merchant toward whom the man now lurched was not eager to have anything
to do with him and melted into the depths of his cubicle.
Another twenty minutes' walking took Hamid-Jones to his own tunnel, the Street of the Well, with its cleft
ceiling and rough-hewn rear escarpment. The well was only a centuries-old memory, but the Emir's
pipelines brought untaxed water to the district, and even the meanest streets in the capital city were plugged
into the power grid.
He reached the blank stone face of his lodgings and rattled the gate until the porter came to let him in. "
Ya Ibrahim, you're getting slow," he said, smiling.
"People going in and out at any hour they choose," the old man grumbled. "What's the world coming to?"
He was a dour, creaking person with one milky eye where an autocloned re-placement, after some accident
in his youth, had failed to take. Hamid-Jones had often urged him to have it done over again and had even
offered to take him to the Palace employee clinic where he could help him finagle a discount, but the old
man would only sigh, "Inch'allah, it is the will of God." Hamid-Jones knew that he was afraid of the
procedure.
The gate swung shut behind them, and Ibrahim shuffled off to his cubbyhole in the wall where his equally
ancient wife no doubt was preparing his holiday supper.
Hamid-Jones skirted the rocky wall of the courtyard toward the back stairs that led to his own room,
hoping to avoid a protracted encounter with the small coterie of lodgers who liked to sit out here at this hour
for tea and interminable conversation. Mr. Faqoosh the mullah, in particular, liked to lecture him at length
about the wicked ways of today's youth.
But they saw him, and he was trapped. "Ya Abdul, come join us!" Mr. Najib called out genially. Mr. Najib
was the manager of a prayer-rug factory with a good source of income from rake-offs on government
contracts; a portly, self-important man who liked to lord it over the others.
"Bikul surur, with great pleasure," Hamid-Jones replied, and trudged resignedly across the yard to the
circle of old chairs and sofas that had been arranged cosily to make a sort of diwa-niyyah—an open-air
social hall—in the angle of the wall.
He sat down on one of the sprung couches next to Mr. Fahti, an inoffensive little man who was employed
as a farash, the person who made the coffee, in some government bureau—and saw too late that he had
placed himself opposite the mullah.
He looked around. It was a larger group than usual this eve-ning, when people would be dying to discuss
the meaning of today's surprising turn of events. Hamid-Jones saw Mr. Ka-reem, a desk clerk at the
Tharsis-Savoy, who usually kept aloof, and shabby, furtive Mr. Daud, who lived in one room with a rarely
glimpsed wife and a swarm of noisy brats whom he kept hidden behind a curtain.
"Messakum, ya Abdul. Allah bil khair." The greetings be-gan, and he had to go through them one by
one and respond in kind until everybody had had a chance at him. Then it was his turn; he inquired ritually
about the health of each of them until the circle was completed a second time.
"Have some tea, ya Abdul," Mr. Najib coaxed him, and the landlord's servant, Saleh, was at his elbow,
pouring it for him out of an imitation Wedgwood pot that Hamid-Jones recognized as being from the
landlord's second-best service, trotted out for special occasions. The landlord was laying out the
refreshments this evening, too—trays of hard candies, melon seeds, and sweet cakes. Hamid-Jones was
impressed. The servant passed him a tray of sweet cakes. Hamid-Jones accepted one reluctantly; the
landlord, al-Hajji Arif ibn Zayd, a stingy buzzard who had long since forgotten whatever virtues he had
acquired on the pilgrim-age to Mecca that had given him the right to his honorific, usu-ally found a way to
make one pay for his sporadic acts of "hospitality."
He bit into the cake. It was a kolaicha, made with cardamom seed, just as if it were the Small Holiday
itself that was being celebrated.
The discussion that had been going on before his arrival re-sumed in full swing. "I don't understand why
the Emir decided to have himself beheaded all of a sudden," Mr. Najib said with a frown. "His current body
can't be more than fifty years old."
"That's right." Little Mr. Fahti nodded. "I remember when the last transposition of heads took place. It
was exactly thirty years ago—the Year of the Prophet 2451. I remember it well because that was the year
the Christians—may God forgive their impiety—celebrated the beginning of the year 3000 in their
cal-endar. They made a great fuss over it. Some of their more fanatic sects even claimed their messiah
would reappear to usher in the Third Millennium and overturn the order of things. They stopped paying their
head tax, can you imagine? There would be no taxes in heaven, they said. But the Emir—may God
preserve him— was merciful. He gave them time to come to their senses, and then when it became plain
that there would be no Second Com-ing, made an example of the leaders who had led them astray. The
cages were on display for a month, if you remember, until people began to complain about the smell. Then
he collected double the jizza for that year, to the enrichment of the treasury. Such is his wisdom."
"The Emir is too lenient with unbelievers," the mullah growled. "The old Emir would have done away with
all of them, jizza or no jizza."
"Yes, yes," Mr.Najib said, impatient at the digression, "it was thirty years ago exactly." He turned
indulgently to Hamid-Jones to include him in the conversation. "You would not re-member, of course, ya
Abdul; it was before you were born."
"That is true, ya sidi," Hamid-Jones acknowledged. It was all that was required of him for the moment.
"The cloning prosthesis was a youth of twenty," Mr. Najib continued. "It's still a good, strong body—good
for another ten or fifteen years, conservatively speaking."
Mr. Fahti's head bobbed up and down in agreement. "It's another twenty years before it's due to show the
first signs of the degenerative disorder that always afflicts the Emir at that age, and afflicted his father
before him, may God rest his memory."
"Twenty years at least," Mr. Najib said firmly. "Changing bodies is not a thing to be undertaken lightly.
The Emir's pre-vious grafts have always been delayed until his body was well past sixty—not that any of us
are old enough to remember those occasions personally. And then, from the tales of my father and
grandfather, the event was scheduled at least two years in ad-vance, so that the public celebrations could
be properly planned and the utmost profit taken." His ample jowls quivered. "The loss to the economy will
be severe, and that is what I find par-ticularly hard to understand. The Emir has always been consid-erate
of the interests of businessmen. This sudden rush to decapitate seems precipitous . . . even impulsive." He
added hastily, "Though I'm sure the Emir's advisors must have had good reasons for urging this abrupt
course of action on him at this time."
"It's politics," Mr. Kareem said.
Mr. Najib blinked at the interruption. "I beg your pardon?"
"It's all to do with the politics of the Caliphate Congress." The dapper desk clerk crossed an indolent leg
to show off a foot shod in English leather and looked round the dowdy circle with a condescending smile.
"It's obvious to anyone with an under-standing of these matters."
"And why is that?" Mr. Najib asked politely.
"He wants to complete the hajj before the pan-Islamic sum-mit next year," Mr. Kareem said, as if he
were amused by the subject. "He simply wants to get his decapitation over with. The pilgrimage season is
only two months away, and he'll need time to recover."
"But the Emir has already completed the hajj—and more than once, may God reward him for his
devotion," Mr. Fahti pointed out.
"Aha, but only his head has performed the hajj. His current body has not been thus sanctified; the last
time he visited Mecca, he was wearing a different body. And some nitpicking mullah would be sure to
point that out at the conference."
"By heaven, he's right!" burst out one of the regulars, a bearded retiree named Khaled, who was
obscurely related to the landlord. "When you think of it that way, the Emir is a hajji only from the neck up."
Kareem gave a self-satisfied nod. "Exactly. You can imagine the ammunition that would give the Emir's
rivals for the Caliph-ate—especially the Sultan of Alpha Centauri. His lobbyists would be working overtime
to sway the delegates. No, my friends, the Emir is a very smart politician. He's simply moving decisively to
remove any possible shadow from the legitimacy of his can-didacy."
Mr. Fahti looked stricken. "The Emir at least is part hajji. But the Sultan is not a hajji at all, and never will
be, may God destroy him for his evil machinations!"
Mr. Faqoosh, the mullah, scowled under heavy black brows. "The Centaurans are spawn of the devil,
perish their hands and perish they themselves," he rumbled. "They will be dragged screaming to the great
fire whose fuel is men."
"I've met many Centaurans, and I can assure you that they are not devils," Kareem said with a laugh.
"They're like any other star dwellers who stop off at the Savoy on their way to Earth, and a fair number of
them have come to this system to make the pilgrimage to Mecca."
"Assuming it is so that the Emir plans to perform the hajj once more for political reasons," Mr. Najib said,
looking down his nose at the upstart desk clerk, "why is it necessary for him to change bodies? He could
just as well do it with his current prosthesis."
"An impression of vigor is very important in politics," Ka-reem said promptly. "A new, young body will be
an asset in his campaigning. Besides, if he waited too long to make the change, there's always the possibility
that he might be caught short at an inconvenient time."
It was too much for the mullah. "It is forbidden to alter the creations of Allah!" he erupted. "If sculpture is
enjoined by the Prophet, how much greater an abomination is it to sculpt living flesh? Six-legged camels!
Horses with toes! Turbofalcons and three-headed hunting dogs! The production of novelties for the idle
rich! And now the idolaters have not shrunk from dabbling in man himself!"
He sat back, breathing hard and dribbling a little at the corner of the mouth. Faqoosh was a dear, seedy
old thing, and everyone tried to help him out with the odd donation, but there was no denying that his views
were antediluvian; he was one of those extreme fundamentalists who held that Mars was flat, space travel
a hoax perpetrated on the pilgrims, and that Mecca was actually on the other side of the Tharsis Range and
could be reached on foot. He had no regular connection with a mosque and eked out a bare living by
presiding at krayas and filling in at weddings and sacrifices.
Some of the other lodgers looked away in delicate embarrass-ment. Hamid-Jones carefully studied his
fingernails. Poor, se-cretive Mr. Daud cringed in his chair, terrified at being caught in company where the
Emir and his self-cloning program were criticized even by implication.
Mr. Najib moved smoothly to deflect the conversation back toward politics. He dispensed a smile to
Hamid-Jones and said, "Well, here is the young man who ought to know about the ins and outs of such
things. Tell us, ya Abdul, the announcement from the Palace caught all of us by surprise, but you must have
been in on the preparations. What's the inside story? Is the Emir renewing himself because of the hajj?"
"I'm only a junior cloning assistant and not privy to matters of state," Hamid-Jones protested. He saw the
mullah glaring at him and gulped before going on. "My work is in the stables— mostly things like
propagating mounts for the Horse Guard. The Emir insists on them being uniform, and he changes their look
frequently. Earlier this year, for example, we got out a rush order for one hundred duplicates of a hoofed
albino that had caught his fancy. Of course we often craft a special order for some high palace official, like
when the Vizier wanted a peacock that could sing and we provided a flock of peacock-nightingale chimerae
for his garden, but mostly it's just dull, ordinary work." He did not mention the special job the Clonemaster
had entrusted him with.
Mr. Najib raised a heavy eyelid. "You're not involved in the cloning of spare parts for . . . important
functionaries, then?" Everybody knew he was being too discreet to refer to the Emir directly.
"Oh, no," Hamid-Jones demurred. "Medical cloning is the province of the Palace Clonemaster."
"New hearts for overweight eunuchs," Kareem said irrever-ently. "Livers and lungs for faithful courtiers.
The occasional royal brain cell."
"No," Hamid-Jones said shortly, refusing to rise to the bait. It was common knowledge that the Emir kept
himself on this side of senility through periodic cortical transplants. His head was close to two hundred
years old and showed it, and one day it would finally give out, despite the succession of youthful bod-ies.
The hotel clerk persisted with bright malice. "And you're not involved in any of the Emir's pet projects,
like the research program for genetically altering women for submissiveness and nonsentience?"
That, too, was common knowledge. It was one of the Emir's more unpleasant ideas. The first, unfortunate
project managers had tried to point out the immense difficulty of stabilizing sex-linked characteristics and
limiting them to genes on the X chro-mosome, and the fact that a change in human heredity such as the one
contemplated by the Emir would end up affecting the entire population, both male and female. Computer
simulations had borne them out. But the Emir was simply unable to grasp the notion and had executed the
bearers of the bad tidings for willful disobedience. The subsequent project managers had been hacks who
strung the Emir along and brought him hopeful tid-bits from time to time. Mullahs like Mr. Faqoosh didn't
last long around the Emir either; those who opposed such tampering with the clay of Allah had been done
away with and replaced by tame religious authorities who were adept at finding theological justification in
the Koran for the Emir's wishes.
"We don't work with human genetic material in our depart-ment," Hamid-Jones said stiffly. "Of course on
great state oc-casions, like the decapitation ceremony tomorrow, my chief, the Clonemaster of the Royal
Stables, the noble Hassan bin Fahd al-Hejjaj, will be present as a matter of professional courtesy. But I
myself have never been within the inner palace precincts."
"Come, come, Abdul, you are too modest," Mr. Najib said insincerely.
It was the taciturn Dr. Daud, unexpectedly, who got the con-versation back on track a second time, to
everyone's relief, "Is-sayid Fahti is right," he ventured timidly. "The Emir doesn't need to make another hajj.
The Sultan of Alpha Centauri is his only serious rival for the Caliphate, and the Sultan will never make the
hajj. He doesn't dare to leave his kingdom for the length of time it would take."
He gathered his frowsy robes about him and shrunk within himself again.
The others nodded agreement. "Alpha Centauri is the closest of all the kingdoms that lie beyond the sun,"
Mr. Najib said, taking up the theme, "but the round trip still takes ten years, even at speeds close to that of
light. Any ruler would be stupid to leave his affairs unattended for that length of time. One cannot rule by
radio, especially when the radio message takes almost as long as the physical journey. Why, the Centauran
Sultanate could be overthrown by an usurper and the event not even known for four years!"
"Yes, and how much truer that is for the furthest kingdoms, like Beta Hydri," Mr. Fahti put in. "Intrigues
at home would run wild. Time may shrink for the traveler—Allah be praised for his miracles—but whole
new dynasties could spring up while a ruler absented himself. That is why those who hold power in their
hands—may God forgive them for their neglect of His in-junctions—are precisely the ones who never visit
our sun to perform the hajj, save for a few sainted exceptions, like the sovereign of Tau Ceti—may God
ease his way to Paradise—who renounced his throne and came to Mecca as a simple pilgrim in the winter
of his years."
"And that is why Islam is at peace, brothers," the gray-bearded pensioner, Khaled, said sagely. "Allah has
arranged the laws of nature so that there is no way for an ambitious ruler to run an interstellar empire."
"No way to wield temporal power, I grant you," Kareem said, carefully picking a piece of lint off the
sleeve of his al-Sevilerow jacket. "Not with a four-year communication lag even for the Sultan of Alpha
Centauri. Even if he were to govern through the most trusted of satraps, he'd find it impossible to react to
events. And if a satrap got too big for his britches, how could he be replaced? Poisoned through a spy at
court? The exercise would take eight years from informer to assassin." He flashed an irritating smile. "No,
the Sultan knows that empire in the usual sense is impossible. But if the Caliphate were to be revived—ah,
that's another matter entirely."
"Whoever became Caliph would be the undisputed spiritual leader of all Islam," Mr. Fahti said as sternly
as his mild nature would allow him to. "He would exercise the moral authority passed on by the hand of the
Prophet himself."
Kareem favored him with a condescending stare. "Not only moral authority, my friend. We may take a
lesson from the Christians. Through all the long centuries of darkness, the kings ruled Europe, but the Pope
ruled the kings. And Rome re-mained the real center of wealth and power."
Mr. Faqoosh stirred and muttered a little at the mention of Christians, but there was no outburst from him,
for which Hamid-Jones was grateful. The Joneses had always been as good Moslems as anyone else, but
Hamid-Jones had received his share of thoughtless snubs as a child and had never entirely outgrown the old
sensitivity.
"Alpha Centauri would become the center of things—the glit-tering capital of the Islamic universe, as
Baghdad was in the days of the Abbasid caliphs," Kareem went on expansively. "It would draw in the
wealth of the stars. And power goes with wealth, as is well known."
"This is all nonsense," Mr. Najib said, finally losing his patience. "The Sultan cannot campaign effectively
for the Ca-liphate from afar. The Emir is a shoo-in."
Mr. Najib's gray-bearded relative cleared his throat and said with all due deference, "There are those
who favor King Bandar al-Saud of Greater Arabia. As custodian of Mecca, he has a natural claim."
"The king is a mere tour director and hotel keeper, living off the alms of pilgrims," Mr. Najib said
scornfully. "No, my friends, Earth is too fragmented to agree on one of its own. It's the Emir or nobody."
"I don't agree," Kareem persisted, either too stupid or too arrogant to know that he had been rebuked by
the older man. "The Sultan of Alpha Centauri has his adherents here. His cre-dentials for donning the robe
of the Prophet are impressive, despite the fact that he's never performed the hajj. Not only is he a member
of Mohammed's tribe, the Quraish, and a certified chereef, as the Sunnis require, but it is being put about
that he is a descendant of Ali, the fourth Caliph, which makes him acceptable to the Shi'ites. Moreover, he
has the Twelvers wrapped around his little finger. There are those among his followers who believe him to
be the reappeared twelfth imam, the Expected Mahdi—the Rightly Guided One himself—and I must admit
that he encourages this belief with a certain amount of mumbo jumbo."
Mr. Faqoosh almost choked on his tea. "Blasphemy!" he sputtered.
"Now, now, sidi," Mr. Najib soothed him. "Don't upset yourself. No one here believes that. He is only
repeating what is said by foreigners. We need not take it seriously."
"The Mahdi was raised up by Allah and hidden somewhere between heaven and earth!" the mullah
ranted. "On the day when the sun will be folded up—when the skies will split and the stars scatter—he will
return to show us the way! There have been false Mahdis before, and they will roast in hell!"
"Yes indeed," Kareem said languidly. "There are always fanatics, like the mad mullah, Mohammed
Ahmed, who gave the British such a hard time at Khartoum, or that lot who actually seized the Great
Mosque in Mecca a thousand years ago, and had to be flushed out by the Saudi army. Their Mahdi, as I
recall, turned out to be some lunatic university student with mystic pretensions."
Mr. Faqoosh was actually foaming at the mouth. Hamid-Jones watched, fascinated, as a bubble grew at
the mullah's scraggly fringe of beard and burst.
"The Sultan is certainly wicked to encourage such claims," Mr. Najib interposed hastily. "But he is an
arrant mischief-maker. On the one hand he claims the bond of Islamic broth-erhood and sends the Emir
gifts of Centauran novelties. On the other hand, his agents secretly channel funds to terrorist groups like the
followers of the Pretender, al-Sharq, whose forebears were ousted by the Emir's father, but who persists in
claiming that he is the true Emir!"
"He also provides funds for the Christian Jihad, or so I have heard," Mr. Fahti said. "Anything to stir up
trouble."
"It was the Christian fedayeen who claimed responsibility for the rash of recent bombings of the oxygen
pipelines," Khaled, the retiree, said with a sober nod. "A troublesome and conten-tious people."
"So did the pan-Sufist mujahidin and the Wahhabi Revivalists and the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Israel and a half-dozen other splinter groups with various causes." Mr. Najib sighed. "It's impossible to
know who was responsible. We live in difficult times."
With the conversation safely back on a secular plane, Mr. Faqoosh subsided. Everybody relaxed.
"Islam has been headless for too long," Khaled agreed. "The Nadha—the Great Resurgence—has lasted
for a thousand years now, and in all that time there has been no Caliph. But now, by the grace of God—and
if the Caliphate Congress does its work— we will have one, and it will be our own Emir!"
There was a pause while everyone digested this, and then Mr. Fahti, his eyes shining, said, "Think of it! A
Caliphate Congress has not been convened since the Christians' twentieth century, when the Ottoman
empire finally disintegrated and the Turk, Mustafa Kemal—may God roast him—abolished the Caliphate
and tried to Westernize his country in imitation of the British and the Germans. A golden age is coming, my
friends!"
"Yes, that was the start of it, though no one realized it at the time," Mr. Najib agreed. "The Christians had
their two thou-sand years, and then it was our turn again. Allah saw fit to give us most of the world's
precious oil—and the resources to invest massively in space—just as the westerners lost their steam."
"We have a thousand years to go, it seems," Kareem said with a thin smile.
"The universe is Allah's," Mr. Najib said comfortably. "The next thousand years is just the beginning."
"Ah, here comes our landlord," Kareem said, getting to his feet. "You'll excuse me if I don't stay. I have a
previous en-gagement."
"A godless young man." Mr. Najib frowned when Kareem had gone. "Typical of the new generation."
He smiled belatedly to show that he did not intend to include Hamid-Jones in his condemnation, and Mr.
Fahti picked up the cue.
"Yes, that Kareem pup will talk out of turn someday in front of the wrong people, and then the
shurtayeen will come in the night to take him away—may God have pity on him then. But not all of today's
youth are so thoughtless. Our Abdul is a fine young man who knows how to show respect to his elders, and
if his attendance at Friday mosque is not as regular as it might be, he is not given to mocking the order of
things to show his cleverness."
He smiled a yellow-toothed benediction at the blushing Hamid-Jones.
"Quite," Mr. Najib said with a broad wink to the others, "though I think our young friend's mind may be
too much on the ladies. Those nighttime excursions. That preoccupied look. Too much mooning about on
street corners, staring up at harem windows, perhaps? We all ought to know, eh? We're not too old to
remember what it is like. Take my advice, ya Abdul—you should marry and settle down, and then you
would not be so nervous."
Hamid-Jones writhed in embarrassment. The others regarded him benignly.
"Let me make an appointment for you with a friend of my cousin," Khaled offered. "The family is trying
to arrange a marriage for a very fine girl who is already sixteen and becom-ing overripe. The girl has nice
eyes, and is the daughter of a chereef. You should snap her up before someone else does."
Even Mr. Faqoosh joined the nods of approval and murmured grudgingly, "The sacred Koran tells us,
'Blessed are the believ-ers who control their sexual desires except with their wives and slave girls, which is
blameless, but whoever goes beyond that is a transgressor.' "
"Perhaps you prefer your horses, ya Abdul," Mr. Najib teased. "The Prophet also has said, 'After woman
came the horse, for the enjoyment and happiness of man.' "
The others laughed. Hamid-Jones smiled weakly.
"It is some particular girl, is it, ya Abdul?" Mr. Fahti probed kindly. "Nothing can come of pining. You
should make a straightforward offer to her kinsmen."
Hamid-Jones was saved from having to reply by the arrival of the landlord, who planted himself in their
midst, looked them over sourly, and said in Terran style, "Ayamak sa'ida, ya jamas. Happy holiday."
The others inclined their heads and returned the greeting. "Good evening, ya hajji Araf ibn Zayd." "
Salaam aleikum." "Messakum, Allah bil khair."
Mr. Najib became noticeably less expansive; he could not compete with ibn Zayd's status as a hajji,
though he had been telling people for years that he had long had the passage money to Earth put aside and
that he intended to make the pilgrimage as soon as the rug factory could spare him.
Ibn Zayd rocked on his heels for a moment, sucking on a tooth. He was a sallow, liverish individual,
narrow as a slat except for a hard round belly that made a bulge under a crimson cummerbund. Finally he
mustered a grimace that passed for a smile and said, "On this happy occasion, I would be honored if you
gentlemen would be my guests at a repast to celebrate al-Id al-Rass, the Feast of the Head, which the
Emir has pro-claimed."
To punctuate his words, his servant, Saleh, bustled up and began clearing away the plates of
refreshments.
"We would be delighted, hajji," Mr. Fahti said. Mr. Najib quickly put on an ingratiating smile and echoed,
"Yes, of course, hajji." Mr. Daud, with a furtive glance at the quarters where he kept his wife secreted,
accepted with alacrity, and the others followed suit.
"And you, ya Abdul?" the landlord said, looking down his nose at Hamid-Jones.
"Thank you, hajji, no," Hamid-Jones stammered."I'm not hungry. I stopped for a bite at the suq on my
way home."
The landlord studied him with pursed lips, saying nothing. Hamid-Jones was sure that ibn Zayd knew
about the strictly illegal alcohol burner he kept in his nonhousekeeping room, on which he cooked an
occasional frugal bachelor meal to save money, and was only waiting for the opportune moment to charge
him for it.
Mr. Fahti came to his rescue."Our young friend has no ap-petite. He is in love."
He had to endure another small round of gentle teasing after that. "Ya Abdul, you should eat to keep up
your strength," Mr. Najib winked.
"I can have the slave girl bring you up some tea and falafel later," ibn Zayd said, unsmiling. "No charge."
"Please don't bother, hajji," Hamid-Jones said hastily. He made his escape, feeling the eyes of Mr. Fahti
and the others on him as he crossed the rocky courtyard and climbed the outside stairs to his room.
CHAPTER 2
The sun slammed Hamid-Jones across the eyes, and he awoke with a start. A glance at the window
showed him that he had forgotten to close the curtains the night before, and a preliminary buzzing at his
wrist told him that he had also ne-glected to turn off his communicator. With a groan, he turned over and
tried to squeeze his eyes shut.
"Prayer is better than sleep," the little voice exhorted, as if reading his thoughts. He punched savagely at
the button, and the muezzin's miniature face disappeared from the tiny holo display, to be replaced by an
image of the time. He squinted at it Wearily. Something was wrong; dawn should have been at least
another hour away.
Then he remembered; it was Decapitation Day. It must have been arranged for the sun to rise early this
morning, in order to give an extra measure of time for all the festive activities.
He padded barefoot to the window. People were already mov-ing about in the Street of the Well, which
was just visible over the lowest part of the courtyard wall. He raised his eyes to the overhanging tent of
rock and, yes, there indeed was the street's piece of sun, piped down from the surface and blazing pinkly
from the big overhead mirrors. The engineers would have had to readjust the tilt of one of the orbital
mirrors—even alter its orbit—but of course no expense could be spared where the Emir was concerned.
The overhead mirrors had been washed sometime during the night, and the multiplied images of the
golfball sun were hard and bright, free of the film of dust that ordinarily gave the Street of the Well such a
dingy appearance by daylight.
He looked down into the courtyard and saw Mr. Faqoosh in his tatty robes leading a small band of the
faithful in the morning prayer. Sandals and shoes were lined up in a neat row and prayer rugs were already
spread out. Hamid-Jones stepped back from the window so that the mullah would not see him.
The muezzin's call made a noise like a trapped wasp. Hamid-Jones started to turn it off, then the sound of
the response from the worshippers in the courtyard weakened his resolve. He per-formed his ablutions in
one minute flat, jammed his keffia down over his head, checked the current location of Mecca in the
miniaturized zij—incidentally discovering that Mr. Faqoosh and his flock were facing the wrong way—and
was down on his knees, his forehead touching the bare floor, in time to catch up.
Finished, he scowled at his communicator, and this time he did turn it off. By Allah, today was a day off,
and he was going to enjoy the morning, at least, without anyone bothering him!
He cast a glance at his bed, but he was too wide-awake now to go back to it. He fixed himself a
breakfast of tea, bread, and leftover fool from one of the fast-food places in the suq, reheated on the little
alcohol stove, and sat down to eat.
He found after a few bites that he wasn't very hungry. He pushed the plate aside. Mr. Fahti had been
uncomfortably close to the mark the previous night. Perhaps love did affect the ap-petite.
Or perhaps it was only a sense of hopelessness that was rob-bing him of the pleasure of the day. He
cursed himself for an idiot. Nothing could come of foolish yearnings; Mr. Fahti had been right there, too.
He moped around half the morning, hearing the crowds in the street grow steadily noisier and the sound
of hired musicians drifting in from adjoining courtyards where various private cel-ebrations were in
progress. There was nothing on television except respectful commentators droning on about the day's
prep-arations, mullahs preaching, shots of crowded mosques, and long shots of the Martian surface looking
toward the candy min-arets of the New Palace, where the big event was going to take place. Below, from
the kitchen and dining hall, he could hear the clatter of utensils and the scurrying feet of servants as
to-night's feast was readied. Hamid-Jones grimaced. He had better leave the house or he'd be invited to
that one, too. The prospect of having to endure the stultifying company of the other lodgers for endless
hours of ritual conversation, and then being charged for it by the landlord, did not appeal to him at all.
He rummaged through his closet for a seldom-worn djel-laba—everyone outside would be dressed in their
finest, and he did not want to be conspicuous—and sat down on the bed to put on a suitable pair of shoes.
From outside came the sound of footsteps on the stone staircase, accompanied by scuffling and laughter. A
moment later they were knocking on his door.
"Ya Abdul, open up!"
It was no good pretending he wasn't home; the television was still on. He turned down the sound and
opened the door. Ja'far and Feisel tumbled inside, still horsing around.
"Still here? Feisel thought we might catch you. We thought we'd stop by and pick you up. What are you
waiting for?" Ja'far's eyes fell on the djellaba, Hamid-Jones's Friday best, laid out on the bed. "We're just on
our way to collect Rashid, and then we're going to the Upper Promenade. That's where the best
entertainments are—they're having a regular fechta, with acro-bats, stick fighters, skits, and there'll be a
feast laid on by the Vizier. Pigeon pie, stuffed lamb for everybody—no expense spared!"
"And afterward," Feisel put in as he and Ja'far winked and nudged each other, "we may even visit a
house of women that Rashid's heard about. He swears he's already been twice, but I think he's still working
up his nerve."
"Uh . . . thanks, but I thought I'd just stay home and watch it on television."
"What?" Ja'far's tone was incredulous. "Don't be a stick-in-the-mud. That's the trouble with you, ya
Abdul. All work, no fun. Loosen up! What's life for?"
"Besides," Feisel pointed out, "there'll be big screens set up at all the public feasts—the mosques, too. So
you won't miss anything."
"Ugh, who wants to see it anyway?" Ja'far said, making a face.
"Well, how about it?" Feisel demanded.
"I can't," Hamid-Jones said. "Go on without me. Have a good time. Insharih!" He saw Feisel's eyes
摘要：

CRESCENTINTHESKYBookOneofTheMechanicalSkyDonaldMoffittCopyright©1989byDonaldMoffittLibraryofcongressCatalogCardNumber:89-91802ISBN0-345-34477-4CoverArtbyDonDixone-bookver.1.0"Wehavepriedintothesky,butfounditfilledwithstrongguardsandmeteors."thekoran,sura72:TheDjinnIICHAPTER1Thecalltoprayersoundedfro...

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