The old man nodded. “Aye. I’ve handled them things now and then but I don’t like ’em.”
“Well, aren’t there a fair number of rich people like Macouri with those stones? Some sort of status symbol?”
“Yes, okay.”
“And even more, I bet, in the hands of government and scientific researchers. Brilliant people, I’m talking about. And not a one of them, or any three of them, could take over and control a naval cruiser’s main computer. A computer using proprietary languages and codes, impossibly complex, and a device for which they’d have no knowledge of nor understanding of how it worked. And these three illiterate farm girls from nowhere just do it like it’s second nature. You see what I mean? Even I would have a lot of trouble handling that kind of complex interface, not to mention disabling all the protections, breaking through all those complex firewalls and security traps. Only the Admiralty together manage that, and they knew what it is and how it works and all the codes and bypasses.”
“Power,” Maslovic muttered aloud, thinking.
“Huh?”
“That’s what old Georgi said it was all about. Power. I wonder how they found out that these girls had that kind of gift?”
Murphy had an idea. “You got plenty of money in this devil cult, and you felt that presence, that whatever it is, slowly emerge when you studied the stones. So did I. It’s so real, so scary, you could easily see demons and build a cult out of it. So their recruiters bring one or even a few with ’em, all paid for with the rich leadership’s money, and they go to the strictest, most fundamentalist, socially repressive places in the colonies. Why, hell, they’d have no trouble finding converts among the young malcontents and with that effect from them stones, well, you see what happens and how it goes. And maybe one gets left with the leader of the cult or coven or whatever they call it so they’ll always have their own demon.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Maslovic said. “Go on. You’re doing fine.”
“And along come these three unhappy farm girls, probably gonna be forced into arranged marriages and break their backs with work and havin’ babies and all, and for some reason the stones react to them and them to the stones in a way nobody’s seen before. Maybe they have, but I bet it’s really rare. Power they can’t tap in these not terribly bright but terribly unhappy young lasses. But the recruiters, the leaders, they know what it’s all about. You stumble on the ultimate weapon, but the thing’s on automatic and just fires randomly in all directions. Dangerous to all. But if you pick it up and treat it good and point it careful like, then it’s your weapon. Sarge, you give most of the prisoners a whole bag of them stones and I bet not much happens. But you give one each to the three, and you put ’em together in the same room so they can act as one, and I think you got, well, some kind of biological amplifier. Now your three young ladies, under your control, can take over whole damned planets.”
“Okay, but why Barnum’s World?”
“Well, possibly just because Macouri was livin’ there and already had a lot of influence and knew the lay of the land and who in the authorities can be counted on to look the other way. And when you got a city maintained by central automated computers, much like a ship like this one is, it’s a wonderful test. Let’s take over and reprogram the computers. Let’s become the sole authority and power in Port Bainbridge. If it works, then you go on. Lots more worlds out there with far more people.”
“Then why get them out of town so quickly?” Broz asked him. “It seems to me you’d want them there.”
“Not until you had them under your control, and with them three I think it would take a while for anybody to get ’em under control. Until then, you risk tippin’ your hand early, like discoverin’ who it was that was chargin’ all sorts of fancy stuff on invalid but accepted credit accounts. Their power’s so natural they hardly even realized they was doin’ it. No use in alerting the smart boys in authority until you were ready to take over their city. But you get ’em off in the swamps with folks like the woman in charge of much of the computer security for New Bainbridge, and you practice. Now you can spread your filthy religion and your naked power in a nice, safe, controlled progression. It was wheelbarrows they had me smugglin’. You put it to ’em. Macouri and his gang, that is. I bet they’ll give it away if it’s you tellin’ them.”
Maslovic looked at the others. “What do you think? Honest answers, please. If we put this to them, it’ll have to be from total conviction. We want them to believe that one of the others cracked and bragged so they’ll feel free to fill in the blanks. Darch?”
“Smacks a lot of mysticism to me,” the tech responded. “All my life I been hearing friend-of-a-friend stories about telepaths and telekinesis and all sorts of psychic powers. Never actually met one myself, nor seen a convincing demonstration. The idea that three stupid little twits can just waltz in to where one of these stones is and suddenly cause it to be the amplifier to enormous power… I don’t know.”
“But you’ve seen it! We all saw it!” Broz pointed out. “Right here. It took our best efforts for days to execute a parallel system switch without crashing the ship. Otherwise who knows what nasty little worms they might have left in our main computers. And Captain Murphy said it, too—that a city like that one back there isn’t much different than a ship like this.”
“But the kind of specialized knowledge and skills needed to hack the system are way beyond what I can accept as intuitive. Nobody gets that kind of information from evolution,” Darch maintained. “Those systems are so complex they’re designed by computers even larger and more complex than the ones they build. If not a conscious plot against us, where did it come from?”
“Possibly from the devices, for that’s almost certainly what they really are,” Maslovic replied. “Or from the intelligence that made them. Possibly more machine than animal itself. Not from Hell, which I am not at all sure exists, but from someone, somewhere. Too faint to be more than a jolt to us. Our brains interpret the attempt at feeding into us, controlling us, as some kind of presence, some kind of powerful and, yes, evil presence, but no more. It shows up randomly and it looks back at you, or at least that’s what it feels like it’s doing. Something in the girls’ brains, maybe only when they’re all together, is more sensitive. It can amplify what’s coming through. And thus the ‘demon’ connects in the same way the lieutenant here connects to her ship. Where do they get it from there? Who knows? Possibly from us. Possibly from our machines, constantly communicating through the very air and empty space we occupy. I don’t know how those things work, but whoever or whatever is behind them has been waiting for the likes of those three for some time. Magic, mystical stones of power made in a way we can’t duplicate even now. Magic is science we haven’t figured out yet.”
“So what now?” the lieutenant asked.
“I’ll have to feed this through higher command,” the sergeant replied, “but it seems that there can’t be but one possible answer to this, and one response. The question is, do these people know what we need to know?”
“And that is?”
“These stones, these—things—first showed up on a derelict spaceship. More, according to records, have appeared in wrecks mostly connected to this Three Kings legend. We saw the displays and pictures in Macouri’s place back in New Bainbridge. If they weren’t the Three Kings I can’t imagine what they might be. It all comes down to the legend of the Three Kings. People go there but none come back. Their ships occasionally do, but they’re ghost ships running on automatic or wrecks. How convenient that we keep finding them, considering how impossible this place is alleged to be.”
“You think they exist, then?” Chung asked him. “And that the answers, the ones behind this, are operating from there?”
“The evidence is pointing that way. And who do the records identify as going there over the past couple of hundred years? Visionaries and missionaries and greedy mercenaries. Not the kind of people best suited for facing a potentially hostile alie
n force using them to probe and possibly control us, bit by bit.”
“I agree, Chief, the Three Kings is where the answers lie,” Broz put in. “So let’s go there and see.”
“Slight problem with that, isn’t there?” Chung responded. “I mean, if there were any maps to that route, it would have been overrun by now. We don’t know where they are or how to find them.”
Maslovic gave a wry smile. “But I have a sneaking suspicion that at least one of our new guests here does. This might get to be very interesting and profitable after all.”
And, with that, he got up and headed back for a second round with Georgi Macouri.
* * *
“Tell me about the Three Kings, Georgi,” said Maslovic.
Macouri laughed. “A superstition by an outdated religion that won’t go away.”
“You know what I’m talking about. You have portraits of them in your house, surrounding your happy devil.”
The little man seemed surprised and irritated. “You were in the building? You saw all that?”
“How else did I know of the blood sacrifices?”
“True, true. Hadn’t connected the two. There are other ways to find that out if you really want to look. Not prove it, mind, but find it out. How do you like the looks of my god, Sergeant? Does he look like the Lord of Terror?”
“I couldn’t care less. It’s what frames his statue that I want to know about. Those huge pictures.”
“Well, you must know something of the history in order to recognize them at all. Those aren’t artist renderings or educated guesses, you know. They’re exquisite digital blowups of actual frames. Those are in fact the Three Kings. Not exactly the worlds of everybody’s dreams, are they?” He chuckled some more.
“If that’s so, how did you get hold of them? They’re not supposedly available to the public, although I have no idea who has the originals at this point.”
“Oh, my family got them back. I assume you know the legend?”
“I didn’t, but I do now,” Maslovic told him.
“Couldn’t do much about the names, but my grandfather was quite the explorer in his time. His hobby was going into unknown areas and mapping and charting them. He was certain that, somewhere out here, there just had to be some creatures, some civilization, if not contemporaneous to us at least one or more that had been here long ago, and he was going to find it. He wasn’t crazy. That was his chosen field, and he did it in style. Made some really major discoveries in that super luxury yacht of his. Then he got this data that convinced him that he could locate the legendary and missing Three Kings. Something in that old fool of a priest’s truncated survey caught my grandfather’s eye and he was convinced that there might well be traces of ancient alien civilizations there. He went off, and he found them. The pictures prove that, as does some of the survey information that survived. You know the rest, though. The yacht came back but not any human or AI device that could tell us anything about it. Worse, no trace of how to find those three worlds or what my grandfather discovered. But inside—inside that perfectly good, working luxury spacecraft were the pictures, the strange little artifacts like nothing ever seen before and, of course, what came to be horribly misnamed as the Magi stones. I think you’re aware of them and their peculiar, shall we say, properties?”
Maslovic nodded. It was all finally falling into place. “And because it was your family’s property, when all was analyzed and said and done much of it came back to the Macouris. Your father put the artifacts in traveling shows and gave many of the stones out to rich and influential people as the ultimate status symbols. And he let some get sold at auction by the finest art houses, didn’t he?”
“You’re smarter than you should be,” Georgi Macouri told him, in the closest thing to a compliment he could muster. “I’m impressed. We didn’t need the money, of course, but the legend that went with them, that was the important thing. That silly El Dorado stuff. My father was convinced that somewhere, someone had my grandfather’s papers, his research and calculations, that would give away the location of the Three Kings. What better way to find it, when the best detectives in the known universe couldn’t, but to make it a contest, a quest for the Holy Grail, the magical place of dreams. And good legends really help sell status symbols, you know, and they grow in the retelling. We never did get the pictures back, and a lot of the data recordings, but we got copies of the interesting stuff. There was still a semblance of interstellar government then; it hadn’t begun to break down. I assume that just as this ship and its crew are all leftover relics of that past time, somewhere out here there’s still a bunch of folks who think they’re the intelligence service of some big, monolithic government who are still classifying everything Top Secret and pretending that the Silence never happened. It doesn’t matter.”
“Odd that after all that, and such a clever plan, nobody ever found the stuff, though,” the sergeant commented. “You’d think something would leak after all this time.”
“Oh, it has. Your pitiful pretense at being part of some vast navy has blinded you to subsequent history in many areas. I think there’s been a slow but steady progression of people and ships out there as the location turned up. I’ve traced many. The trouble is, just like my grandfather, nobody who goes comes back. Or, if they do, they come back very, very dead.”
Maslovic sat up very straight. “You do know where the Three Kings are, then, don’t you?”
Georgi Macouri gave his Cheshire Cat smile. “Who? Me?”
“But you haven’t ever gone out looking. Your father’s great dream, and his clever plan uncovered the coordinates, yet you never used them. Why not?”
“You assume too much not in evidence,” the little man responded. “Why, just a few years ago a group of brave men and women got the address from a third party and went off to mine the riches and return. They haven’t yet. Nothing. Not even a trace of their ship, either, although its wreckage, perhaps in tiny pieces, may be all over a half a light-year-wide region out there.”
“But you never made the try.”
Macouri shrugged. “Sergeant, I inherited everything. The money, the power, the influence, the excellent wine cellars, you name it. I even enjoy the thrill of risk. I bathe in it sometimes. But if it’s not to be even odds, then the odds must be on my side. I seem to lack the recklessness.”
“So you just have manipulated and sent others over and over, and to no avail.”
“Oh, there’s been some profit. Some of the wrecks that made it back—and not all do—have some goodies in them. Magi stones in several varieties and types, enough to depress the market if anybody else knew. Soil samples including tons of those funny little enigmatic machined thingies, too. Stuff like that. Stuff that survives being twisted and flattened and turned inside out inside a wild wormhole. No, Sergeant, I’ve gotten some things back. Not this last batch, but half the time. Why should I risk it until I can speak with someone who’s made the return trip?”
It was Maslovic’s turn to smile. “So I was right about you, you see. Deep down, there’s that hollow spot in your brain, that secret place called Doubt. As deep as you can go, you really don’t have faith in your religion. It’s just a game. Otherwise, you’d be overjoyed with the idea of going off to meet your masters at the Three Kings and you’d not even worry about a return. And if by some stretch you really do believe in them, then you don’t really trust them. Not a good position for somebody serving a god, is it?”
Macouri didn’t like this direction, and his face showed it. “I think we end this for now. It’s not any fun any more.”
“You can’t end it until I say we end it,” Maslovic pointed out. “You’re stuck here, Georgi, as long as we want you. Now we’ve established a new level, though, that may be working to your advantage.”
“Indeed?”
“Now it’s not just that I have you. Now you, in fact, have something I want. For the first time, there is a basis for negotiation.”
Macouri sat up and st
ared at the big, bald man in uniform sitting there across the table from him. “And what do I have that you truly want, Sergeant?”
“We want the Three Kings. We want the address and anything else you might have on them.”
“And if I give them to you? What do I get?”
“Out of here. Off this ship. As a permanent prisoner here, you’re a liability. You consume but do not contribute. But you must believe this, Georgi: If we don’t get what we want, if you don’t give us what we want freely and accurately and willingly, then you will stay here. For years. For decades. For what will pass for forever to you. And you’ll do it in a padded room, a little box, with nothing even to write with or do yourself or us harm. Alone. Forever.”
Maslovic got up and started towards the security door, his back to the prisoner. He had delivered his ultimatum and now it was up to the other man.
“Sergeant?”
Maslovic stopped but didn’t turn around. “Yes?”
“Your word. On the official record, endorsed by all your superiors. You will not take this information and then just discard me or throw me back in the hole?”
“I guarantee you that you’ll not die here, and that we’re not going to do you harm. If you want off this ship, that is the only way.”
“And the others?”
Maslovic turned around and faced the little man who was still sitting at the table. “I don’t see any grounds for holding the cook, and I’m going to allow this Joshua of yours to make his own choice. The three girls aren’t your worry or responsibility any more. That’s basically it.”
“Why do you want to go there? You won’t get back, you know. I understand that much now.”
“Well, we can say we’re looking for a little payback for what was done to our own operations here,” the intelligence man said. “Or maybe we think there might be answers to questions out there that can stop this drift of humanity into oblivion. At least we might find out the answer to the greatest philosophical question of our time.”
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