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The ambitious Sultan of Alpha Centauri can only claim the illustrious title of Caliph if he makes a ritual pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. This journey completed, he will rule the entire population of the greater Islamic universe. But human knowledge has not yet been able to overcome the significant challenges presented by interplanetary travel. However, the Sultan resourcefully enlists the help of Abdul Hamid-Jones, a clever fugitive with a price on his head and the law on his heels. Thrown into the bewildering world of the Sultan's schemes, Abdul receives a hasty introduction to complex physics and the even more complex political intrigues of the Sultan's court. Responsible for the successful execution of the Sultan's plan, Abdul slowly realizes with horror that the fate of the entire Solar system could be resting on his shoulders.
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A GATHERING OF STARS Book Two of The Mechanical Sky Donald Moffitt Copyright © 1989 by Donald Moffitt Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-91891 ISBN 0-34.5-36574-7 Cover Art by Don Dixon e-book ver. 1.0 Grateful acknowledgment is made to Arthur C. Clarke and his agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 3rd Avenue, New York, NY 10022, for permission to reprint an excerpt from "Space the Unconquerable" from PROFILES OF THE FUTURE by Ar-thur C. Clarke. "Try to imagine how the War of Independence would have gone if news of Bunker Hill had not arrived in England until Disraeli was Victoria's prime minister and his urgent instructions on how to deal with the situation had reached America during President Eisenhower's second term. Stated in this way, the whole concept of inter-stellar administration or culture is seen to be an absurdity." arthur c. clarke CHAPTER 1 The mullah's knife flashed, and a spurt of arterial blood drenched his white robes. He continued sawing away at the sheep's throat until he was satisfied, then untangled his fin-gers from the woolly head and let it drop limply to the plastic sheet that the spaceport janitorial crew had spread to protect the inlaid floor of the departure lounge. "Well, you're guaranteed a safe voyage, at any rate," said Hamid-Jones's baby-sitter, an impressively self-possessed young attaché from the Centauran embassy. "Are you going to go over there to dip your fingertips for luck?" "I don't think so," Hamid-Jones said. Droplets of blood were hanging in the air, settling impercep-tibly in the almost nonexistent gravity of Deimos. A couple of members of the maintenance crew were sweeping the air with large sponges to catch stray drops escaping the tarpaulined area, but one jet of blood had traveled twenty feet, and another cover-alled worker was hurrying to intercept it with a catch basin. "Wise decision," said the watchdog. "Your ident's as good as we could make it, but it's best to stay in the background as much as possible till you're safely aboard Centauran territory." The mullah was winding up the sacrificial rites with a prayer. A number of passengers were self-consciously lining up for in-dividual blessings. "What about the person whose place I took?" Hamid-Jones asked. "He'll be sent back down to Mars in the same diplomatic pouch that brought you up, and we'll do a lot of computer shuf-fles over the next few months to pass along the hiatus till it's diluted enough to be wiped out. How was the ride? Uncomfort-able?" "It wasn't too bad." The "pouch" had, in fact, been a sealed cylinder large enough to stretch out in. An outer shell was filled with an inert gas and lined with a lot of sophisticated baffles, some of which projected false images of the cylinder's interior. An inner suspension con-tained a cocoon that protected the passenger against jolts. There was a miniaturized life-support facility that provided enough oxygen for thirty-six hours, and a rather embarrassing sanitary facility that