“It just does, that’s all,” O’Brian responded. “We’re a team. A sisterhood. It’s not good that we blab about to strangers without the rest of us bein’ there, so to speak.”
“What’re we gonna do, lass? Trick ye into the secrets of the universe or somethin’?” Murphy put in. “We’re just as bored as everybody else. You always was friendly to me, so why not to them, too? It’s all goin’ your way.”
She looked over at the sergeant with a look of distrust. “I dunno, Cap. I just don’t trust ’em no farther than I can throw ’em, that’s all. They ain’t like us, y’know. They’d probably get along just fine with the folks back home. If them stuffed brains could figure out a way to have kids without sex they’d jump on it. But to really do it… You ain’t real human if you don’t got no sex.”
“I can’t know how different we are, really,” Maslovic admitted. “I’ve never been somebody like you or the captain, so how can I? But I feel human.”
“Well, you ain’t. Got to be cold inside with your balls chopped off and all. And that weird one up front. Don’t she never move?”
“Lieutenant Chung’s the pilot. She monitors everything on the ship and gets us safely where we’re going,” the sergeant explained. “To do that best, she actually plugs in and becomes part of the ship. In a way, we’re kind of riding inside her now.”
O’Brien made an ugly face. “Ugh! That’s what I mean. You don’t know what’s human and what’s machine. It’s all the same to you ’cause you don’t feel inside. Not like people. I mean, the captain here, he never was connected up like that to his ship.”
“That’s true enough,” Murphy responded. “But that’s ’cause I never got the implants in me head to make it all work. If I had one big, fancy ship with all the modern stuff I might’a done it, but them old junkers… Who’d want to become one o’ them?”
O’Brian looked around the lounge from eye level to ceiling. “So can your pilot see us now? And hear us?”
“Absolutely,” Maslovic told her.
“And in the back, too?”
“She’s the ship, like I told you. She and the ship are one. You wouldn’t want the gravity to go funny when you flush the toilet in the head, would you? Or have the air go bad, or any one of a million things that she can keep in her head and do something about because she’s part of the ship? Space will never be anywhere that’s really safe, you know. You’re always one tiny thing wrong from death.”
O’Brian shivered. “I don’na wan’ta think on it.”
“Well, that’s why she’s doing what she’s doing. So we don’t have to think about it or worry about it. And, unlike some people who actually become permanently part of their ships, she can disconnect when we’re in port and become a real person again.”
“There are folks who make themselves into the machines?” Irish O’Brian was appalled at the thought. “They do it by choice?”
He nodded. “Many do. Particularly the ones who are scouts searching beyond anywhere we know for new worlds and new life. Not just navy people, although the big ship you were on, the one we came from, has three minds permanently a part of their system.”
“Oh, my god! And you wonder why we don’t like the way things are goin’ here?”
The sergeant shrugged. “Who’s ‘we’? Your sisterhood? The religion you’re serving? Just curious.”
Irish O’Brian gave a sly smile. “Ah, but you’ll not be gettin’ me to speak more of that. None of your tricks there, if you please! We got our secrets, y’know.”
“Okay, then, let’s talk about something else.” Maslovic seemed to be thinking a moment, as if deciding what to talk about. His eyes came to her neck after a bit, and he brightened and asked, “What’s that gem around your neck? Or is that some kind of religious secret, too?”
O’Brian’s hand went to the large gem and seemed to cover it from his gaze for a moment, then she relented. “It’s a relic, y’might say. A kind of way of sayin’ who and what we are, like them Holy Joes back home what think they got the direct word of God straight from Heaven to their holy book. They wear their crosses and their medals. We got ours.”
“It’s an excellent imitation of a Magi stone,” the sergeant remarked, as if he’d heard of them before an hour or so previous and knew all about them.
“Imitation! I’ll have you know this is the real thing! ’Twouldn’t do to have no fake around our necks!”
Maslovic chuckled. “Now, come on. I don’t doubt that you believe it’s real, but everybody knows that there are only a few hundred of those in the whole known galaxy, and most of them are in the hands of museums, governments, and the very rich. How could you have a real one, let alone three, coming from a primitive world like Tara Hibernius?”
Her left hand went to the gem and held it up defiantly to him, still on the neck chain. “You see? It’s real.”
“Even I know that those things give off some kind of rays that affect people deep inside,” the sergeant pressed. Murphy kept silent but decided to watch his back from now on around the military man; he was pretty damned good!
“You want to see if it’s real? C’mon over here. I know you ain’t got no feelin’ for me tits, so come close and look straight into it! You don’t hav’ta hold it, just get close and look inside! You’ll see!”
“Maybe he won’t,” Murphy put in. “Even if it is a real one, how can a machine feel what them things are said to give off? Or is that nothin’ but the blarney?”
Maslovic slid over very close to her and let her angle the gem towards him. It was quite impressive, more elaborate than any gemstone, real or artificial, that he’d ever seen or studied about. It was as large as a hen’s egg, colored as if a translucent emerald with a center of some darker material substance that, when viewed from different angles, seemed to form, well…
“Can I hold it?” he asked her. “You can keep it on the necklace around your neck. I just want to feel it.”
“Gettin’ to ya, huh? All right, but mind your manners!”
He reached out and turned the sparkling emerald-colored gem so that its slightly flattened face was towards him and stared into the darker area.
The deep green exterior sparkled with each capture of the light and seemed to flash and move with every breath the girl took, or every slight movement his hand caused.
The darker area inside was also green, but a green so dense and deep it seemed like some sort of liquid, swirling and going down much farther than the gem itself was deep.
And in that dark area, pictures began to form.
Maslovic couldn’t decide if those pictures were in fact real and emanating from the stone or somehow in his mind, caused by some sort of radiation from the stone, but they nonetheless seemed very real if also very surreal, as if actual shapes and places were being viewed through some dense liquid lens.
The images were strange, bizarre. Human figures twisted into grotesque shapes, creatures very nonhuman twisting and writhing and swarming, all superimposed against alien landscapes, distorted scenes of people and unknown animals in lush but unknown tropical bush; a swirling hell of intense storms and volcanic fire; and, finally, a barren, dark landscape with structures, structures clearly not in current use but rather the remnants of ancient cataclysm.
The sets of impressions never came fully into solid focus for all their sense of three dimensions and movement, nor did the various parts ever blend with one another, but rather continued changing in a constant series of superimpositions. It was endlessly fascinating, yet totally mystifying. Was he seeing something real in there, or perhaps many realities, or was this being dragged from his subconscious or, just as possible, from the nightmares of Irish O’Brian and perhaps even Patrick Murphy? He couldn’t tell, but if they were from anyone’s subconscious, then they were disturbing indeed, and if they showed some twisted realities, then it was more disturbing still.
Slowly he became aware that one of the images was not changing radically, but rather in distance and pe
rspective only. It was the dark world of wreckage and the sense of death and gloom, and slowly, ever so slowly, the image was coming to the foreground as the point of view resolved on some sort of eerie cavern.
He felt himself pulled down towards the cavern, and then, just inside in the darkness, there was… another.
He let out a sharp, short cry and dropped the gem, which settled back against Irish O’Brian’s cleavage, and he backed away. It took him several seconds to compose himself again, breathe normally, and regain complete control of himself. Captain Murphy was looking at him, curious and puzzled at one and the same time, but Irish O’Brian had a smirk on her face that was almost unbearable.
“So you met dear Tad, didn’t you?” she asked with a sense of total satisfaction.
V: OF MEN AND WOMEN AND MACHINES
“All right, lad, so just what did you see in there?” Murphy asked Maslovic when both were again alone in the lounge. “You looked like you saw your own death in that devil’s thing.”
Maslovic shook his head. “No, no. Not that. Something infinitely more disturbing, I think. The trouble is, I don’t really know just what I saw. I can’t explain it. You take a look in one next time and we can compare notes.”
“No, I think not,” the old captain responded. “Maybe I might have just for curiosity’s sake, but after watchin’ you, I ain’t got no yen for that sort of thing. Makes me wonder why in hell them rich bastards pay so damn much for them things. Pay a fortune to be shocked and scared to death? I guess the rich are really different than you and me.”
The sergeant nodded. “I can see the appeal, oddly enough. You just have to know where to look and sense when to look away. I don’t know. Maybe even that’s somebody’s thrill. The pet demon in the gemstone. Nobody else would have one.”
“Could be. But was it real?”
Maslovic thought a moment. “I’ve been trying to decide that. It’s certainly real to the looker, as an experience, and I think it’s possible that part of the experience, if you can call it that, is real. I’m going to have to get my datalink and see if it says anything about these Three Kings. Descriptions, maybe.”
“Oh, I can tell you that. One’s supposedly a kind of paradise, a Garden of Eden place, and one’s a land of fire and water and mineral riches, and the third’s a cold, dark place of mountains and caverns. That’s all part of the legend and, I suspect, it’s from the original scouting report.”
“That’s certainly close to where I was looking. But how is that possible? I mean, how could I see real worlds so remote we’ve never rediscovered them? And what of all the stuff superimposed on them? I’d love to get one of those things in the lab. Then at least I’d know if what I was looking at was a real, natural kind of gemstone or some kind of alien device that merely looked that way.”
“Well, they say that nobody who looks into ’em sees the same thing, but they all see the Three Kings. Beyond that, the other images, them’s personal. Sooner or later, though, everybody backs away with the absolute conviction that even as they’re watchin’ the show, somehow the show’s watchin’ them. I saw how you jumped. So did she. The difference is that she’s the first one I ever heard of who wasn’t scared of whoever or whatever was lookin’ back. You get any idea of what the devil the thing looked like?”
“Not a bit. It was only a shadow. It was more like a meeting of minds that caused the reaction. I could sense that whatever was in that shadow could not only see me, it could look straight through me and into the deepest part of my mind. It was a sense of… oh, I don’t know. Violation? Being unable to stop anybody from going where only you can go and maybe into parts of yourself you don’t want to look at, which is why you put them there. Does that make any sense?”
“Kinda. Look up the term ‘rape’ sometime and you’ll see a lot of the same feelin’s and terms used. That’s sexual, but there’s a lot more to the act than just sex. Congratulations, Sergeant. I think you’ve just proved you’re human after all.”
“Perhaps. If nightmares are what make you human, then I guess that counts. But, the point is, we’ve proven two things. First, those gems are the genuine articles, and that raises as many new questions as it answers. Second, that, natural or artificial, they are some sort of communications medium. A two-way medium at that.”
“Are you sure? That would make them machines of some kind in my book. Interesting.”
“Not necessarily. You can create a primitive radio using quartz crystals. You can generate a mild current that is still sufficient to run some very small devices using the stored energy in a potato. No, they could still be either, and it really doesn’t matter which. I now think that your legendary scout’s signals were intercepted and interfered with by someone or something that did not want all the details of their existence known. They probably didn’t know enough about us and our technology at that point, considering the sample they had, to react in time to keep all the knowledge from us, but it was enough. Later on, when the second expedition solved where it was somehow and made it there, it was a different story. By that point, whoever is out there had a fair cross section of humans along with their data, both in their minds and in their ship and computers, to learn quite a lot. The second contact, that exploration ship, was sent back. Sent back by whoever it is, with just enough of those gems. They knew what would happen to them, where they would go, how they would be used. Their captives or whatever could tell them that.”
“You mean they were spies. Remote control windows to look at us.”
Maslovic nodded. “And if they can also transmit using those things, then they could learn an awful lot fast and have unwitting agents tell them all that they needed.”
“Witting agents, more like, considerin’ not only them girls but also whoever is sendin’ ’em to Barnum’s World.”
“Now, yes. But how long ago did this legend start? Centuries, you said.”
“Seems like. I dunno for sure, but it’s been around longer than I have, and that’s a fair amount of time. Sounds like our aliens are pretty patient buggers, though. Surely with that mind control stuff, they had enough information on us ages ago to conquer us if they wanted to.”
“I don’t know. Conquer might not be the right word. Maybe they’re just curious. Maybe they’re toying with us. The devil worship business indicates that they’ve achieved a pretty sophisticated sense of humor as well as a sense of how to utilize humans. Maybe there aren’t very many of them. Or maybe they don’t know anything more about the Great Silence than we do and think that whatever happened to our ancestors will be coming for us and then for them. It would be useful to keep us as a permanently monitored buffer race. We’re only guessing, though, and those girls can’t tell us. Whoever’s behind them, though, is closer to us than to the alien masters, you’re right about that much. Whether they’re partners or surrogates for the watchers doesn’t make much difference. The trouble is, if they’re on Barnum’s World, they’re going to be a lot better positioned than we are, and they’ll know us because now one of their remote masters knows me.”
“I dunno where you’re gettin’ that ‘us’ business, if you include me in that,” Murphy said. “I, for one, am willin’ to let ’em play their silly games if their money’s still good, and I think I’ll be long dead before they start doin’ whatever it is they’re plannin’ to do. Still and all, you got to figure that it ain’t just you and your pilot that they know. Not now.”
“Huh?”
“I wonder if they ever had the chance to poke into the innards of the most powerful military battle group left in this whole region? Maybe in all this side of the Great Silence? Three rovin’ eyes plus access to that whole blasted ship’s master computer of yours. Your nabbin’ me with them three had to be a godsend for ’em, don’t you think?”
The master of logic seemed suddenly dumbstruck by the enormity of Murphy’s words and the implication of it all. “Of course! I was just too close to it to see it! Damn! They really do have it all, don’t they?�
��
“Don’t feel too bad,” the old captain consoled. “You’re a pretty bright lad who brung it this far. You just were born and raised in that navy factory. It’s your mother, father, sister, brother, womb and probable grave. It’s the most secure place you can think of in the whole damned galaxy. It takes an old scoundrel like me to pull you that last little bit, that’s all.”
“Yes, but they know everything! Everything! And we—we know exactly nothing at all. Militarily, the only thing left for us is to take out ceremonial swords like the ancient warriors of Old Earth and rip our guts out.”
Murphy shook his head slowly from side to side. “Nope, I don’t think so, Sergeant. I don’t think they’re gonna let you or any of us off that easy…”
* * *
She lay there in an almost fully reclined position, strapped in and padded so that she was unlikely to shift and fall out, with small motors exercising and massaging various parts of her body while other probes monitored all her vital signs down to the most minute detail to insure that she was not in any way suffering injury or long-term impairment. Small tubes fed her and others took away her waste, so that her mind did not have to have any part of itself occupied with such things nor distracted from them.
The mind, in a sense, wasn’t even there.
Many who had never experienced at least this level of bonding, mind and machine, could not imagine why so many in the past had elected to simply discard their human bodies and mate brain and ship into one permanent organism. In the Meld, as it was generally referred to by those who did it often, it was easy to think how wonderful it would be to be like this permanently, to become one with the machine and live with this enhanced power, trading a fragile human body for one that could withstand the cold vacuum of space and the heat of a reentry, who could see and control all parts of themselves at once, with senses enhanced beyond any ordinary human’s imagination.
The navy, however, reserved that entirely for the Admiralty, insisting that you remain with your body and exist when not on station or on a mission in that body and not in the permanency of the Meld. It limited you in ways that you could never explain to others, and it meant that you would have to constantly readjust to the situation, but the navy wanted no Meld that it could not control, no cybernetic bond that it could not break. Humans had almost been wiped out when they’d allowed their self-aware machines free reign and will, and they were not about to trust even partly human cybernauts with it, either.
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