Excerpt from Historical Abstract of the Home Sector, translated from the Tyspi, with commentary by Sir Varlik Lormagen. Until otherwise authorized, distribution of this book is restricted to The Movement. The material summarized here was compiled and refined over several millennia by T'swa seers. An entire monastery of the Order of Ka-Shok was occupied with the task for more than a millennium, and the work is continually being updated.
The ancient home of humankind was dubbed "the Home Sector" of the galaxy by early investigators. . . . This civilization, an empire consisting of fifty-three planets, was destroyed by a megawar more than 21,000 years ago, the principal source of destruction being His Imperial Majesty's ship Retributor, an immense warship designed to destroy planets.
Rumors of the emperor's intention to build the Retributor undoubtedly caused the confrontation between the imperium and its antagonists. Otherwise the megawar might never have happened, for the imperium was decaying, and the opposition, usually factionalized, might well have resigned itself to awaiting the empire's self-generated dissolution. As it was, rebellion and mutinies, more or less coordinated, broke out on a number of worlds, involving powerful forces both loyal and in rebellion.
When Retributor sallied forth under the command of its mad emperor, it did not spare worlds already ravaged. They too were "punished"—literally blown apart. And when the emperor blew himself up with his ship, only one subsector of his empire—eleven inhabited or previously inhabited worlds—remained intact. Of these, eight had been totally depopulated, or so nearly depopulated that humans did not long survive on them. What was left of the empire's population, once nearly 600 billion, was at most a few score million, probably fewer, scattered on three planets. And those millions diminished further before they began to increase.3
Eventually they did increase, but they had lost every trace of civilization and history. After a long time, civilization re-emerged, and eventually, on the planet Varatos, a culture arose that reinvented science. In time there was hyperspace travel again. By 19,000 years after the megawar, the other ten surviving planets, two of them populated, had been rediscovered, and those without humans had been colonized.
The eleven worlds found themselves surrounded by a vast region of space without habitable planets. They didn't know why, of course. In fact, it seemed to them that they occupied an aberration—a region with habitable planets in a universe where there seemed to be no others. Science provided no convincing rationale; by that time it was in serious decline. . . .
In the year 742 Before Pertunis, the eleven worlds became a religious empire—the Karghanik Empire. The statutory structures within the empire are largely but not entirely uniform. Actually, the "empire" consists of eleven somewhat autonomous, single-system sultanates, mutually engaged in political and economic rivalries. Neither the empire nor its sultanates are true theocracies. In each, the religious hierarchy shares power with a secular aristocracy.
The imperial worlds are tied together by a complex network of political treaties and trade agreements administered largely through an artificial intelligence known as SUMBAA.4 It is probably only through SUMBAA that the Karghanik empire has survived in the face of rivalries and especially of distance. Each planet has its SUMBAA; the SUMBAA for Varatos serves the imperial administration.
The empire has a fleet and army more than sufficient to its rather modest needs.5 Its ships are manned by a mixed crew from all the worlds of the empire, the mixes and proportions being based on recommendations by SUMBAA. The higher command strata are filled largely by officers from Varatos, the Imperial Planet. Army and marine units, up to battalions, are each from a different world, each with its own officers, and no imperial battalion is stationed on its home world. Divisions never contain more than two battalions from the same world.
Each world has its own flag, and also its own several warships and planetary forces under its own command, partly for purposes of home-planet security and partly for reasons of prestige.6
The monastery named Dys Tolbash stood on a narrow side ridge that descended from a much higher ridge to the east. The building, long and proportionately narrow, was constructed in the form of three uneven steps, accommodating it to the sloping ridge crest. It seemed almost to have grown out of the ridge crest. The lower step stood on an outlook, below which the crest slanted down abruptly like the edge of some rough plowshare, to the boulder-cluttered valley at its foot.
A tower stood at each corner of each step, eight irregular towers in all, overlooking the desert valley two thousand feet below and the two ravines whose craggy walls formed the ridge sides.
It was summer, a season of furnace heat on Tyss, a heat scarcely moderated by the elevation of 3,400 feet. In the west, the evening sun squatted on the horizon, and the temperature had fallen a bit, to 121°F. Master Tso-Ban didn't know that—there was no thermometer at the monastery—and he'd have given it no importance if he had known. At the moment he was climbing the stone stairs that slanted up the outer north wall of a tower.
His tower was at an upper corner, and therefore one of the two highest. At the top step, he paused to scan the rhyolite outcrops and the bristly scrub that broke their starkness here and there. In the pale sky, a carrion bird rode an updraft, tilting, watching, silent. A lesser movement caught Tso-Ban's large, still-sharp eyes. A rock goat, male and solitary, stood browsing with careful tongue among the leaves of a fishhook bush.
The old T'swa monk turned then and entered the top of the tower, a small cell with thick stone walls on three sides, open to the north, away from the sun. On the others, wide eaves-shaded windows gave access to whatever breeze might come. The only furnishings were two pegs in the wall, and a stone platform a foot high, padded with a hide over which a straw mat was spread. On one peg he hung his waterbag, on the other his unbleached white robe. At his age, the skin he exposed was no longer the black of a blued gun barrel, but a flat, faintly grayish black. Seating himself on the platform, he arranged his legs in a full lotus.
In seconds his eyes lost focus; in seconds more they saw nothing, though they did not close. It took a moment to find his unwitting connection, a man who never imagined that someone like Tso-Ban existed, or the planet Tyss. Unfelt, Tso-Ban touched him, and in a sense, in that moment, was no longer on Tyss, in a tower in the Lok-Sanu foothills. His attention was on the bridge of a warship, the flagship of a small exploration flotilla, outward bound from a world named Klestron.
Tso-Ban was a player at Wisdom/Knowledge, and had taken the Home Sector world of Klestron as his psychic playground. For some time, the Sultan of Klestron had been his unknowing connection. The sultan, an ambitious man, had decided to gamble, to send out a flotilla of three ships, with orders not to return until they'd found a new, habitable world. This action was quite unprecedented, by imperial standards illogical and arguably illegal. So of course it attached Tso-Ban's interest.
The sultan had given command of the flotilla to a brevet admiral, Igsat Tarimenloku, making him its commodore. Tarimenloku wasn't brilliant, but he was loyal, a devout son of Kargh, and a friend of the sultan, insofar as the sultan had friends.
Tarimenloku had become the T'swa monk's new connection. Tso-Ban could have used the ship as his connection, but far more information was available this way. In trance he became almost one with Tarimenloku, perceiving through him and with him, sensing his emotions, his surface thoughts, and in a general way his underlying intentions. But always there was a certain separation, Tso-Ban remaining an observer.
It was ship's night in the command room, the light soft, free of glare. Others were there, but Tarimenloku's—and with it Tso-Ban's—attention went to them only now and then. Mostly the commodore watched his instruments, which after a bit told him that in real space there were a major and a minor nodus adjacent to his ship's equivalent location in hyperspace. If he emerged now, he'd find a previously unknown solar system near enough to examine.
It would be better though to be nearer. Tarimenloku tapped keys, changing course, moving "nearer" to the major nodus and "farther" from the minor. He touched a key, and a bell tone alerted all personnel of impending emergence—a standard courtesy and precaution—then touched two other keys. Together his three ships emerged into "real-space," Tso-Ban sharing the commodore's moment of mild disorientation. And there, only 1.8 billion miles away, was a system primary, as he'd known there'd be, at 277.016° course orientation, with a gas giant barely near enough to show a disk unmagnified, at 193.724°. His survey ship, small, totally automated, crewless except for a dozen maintenance personnel, began scanning to locate the system's planets and compute first approximations of their orbits, radioing its data to the flagship's computer as well as storing it in its own. The troop ship followed, its marine brigade inert, unconscious in their stasis lockers.
Tarimenloku's main screen showed the alien vessel almost as quickly as his instruments found it, showed it newly emerged at a distance of only twelve miles. Looking like a disorderly stack of scrap metal and rods welded together, it was presumably a patrol ship. The commodore stared, alarmed: Clearly it had perceived him in hyperspace with a most unusual precision, to have emerged so remarkably near and on a matched course: Clearly the alien had technology well beyond his own. The alternative explanation was coincidence, and the odds of that were too small to compute.
Suddenly, on the screen, he was looking into what seemed to be their bridge, the first of his species, so far as he knew, to see an intelligent alien life form. The screen showed creatures vaguely humanoid, with thick leathery skin and vestigial horns, and somehow it seemed to him they were larger than men.
If there'd been any doubt of their technical superiority before, this dispelled it. Their instruments and computer were sufficiently sophisticated that in seconds they'd remote-analyzed the flotilla's electronics sufficiently to beam video signals compatible with Klestronu7 equipment.
Then a voice came out of his speaker, seemingly a computer simulation of human speech. But the words—they certainly sounded like words—meant nothing to Tarimenloku. There was about a sentence-worth of them; then they stopped. After a pause of two or three seconds they were repeated.
"I do not understand you," he answered, and repeated it three times.
DAAS, his computer, spoke to him. "Commodore, there is an alien electronic presence in my databank, scanning."
Tarimenloku's brows knotted and he set his exit controls. "Gunnery," he said quietly, "do you have a fix on the alien?"
"Yes, commodore."
"Have you identified his control structure?"
"Yes, commodore."
"Fire bee-pees one through four."
As soon as his systems screen told him the pulses had been fired, he touched the flotilla control key with one hand and the exit key with the other. His three ships flicked back into hyperspace.
Then he keyed his microphone to confidential. He'd better record right now his justification for what he'd done. (Second thoughts were already pressing his consciousness, and he pushed them away.) It wouldn't do to have the alien reading, and surely recording, the contents of his databank uninvited; simply to try could be considered a hostile act. (But there was a subliminal awareness that the alien might have had no hostile intention at all.)
He had no idea how much damage he'd done to the alien ship. It seemed possible he'd destroyed it. Hopefully he'd at least prevented it from pursuing him.
"DAAS," he said to the computer, "what was the nature of the data being scanned?"
"Sir, it first found my vocabulary. Then it began to read verbal data files indiscriminately."
Another thought occurred to Tarimenloku, a thought that left a moment of bleakness in its wake: After the alien's failed attempt to speak to him, it might have been taking data for a linguistic analysis, for communication. If so, his action might have made a dangerous enemy for the empire and humankind, of beings who initially had not been hostile. He hoped he'd destroyed them, and that their government would never know who'd done it.
One more thought occurred to him; he wasn't sure whether it was trivial or important: Who had they thought he was when they tried talking to him in that unfamiliar speech?
One thing was certain. He wouldn't return to real space for three imperial months at least—best make that four or five—regardless of any interesting-looking nodi that said "system."