The worlds, in their own ways, also lived up to their ancient reputation, judging from the samples sent back.
Here was a small sack of apparently natural gems, gems as large as hens’ eggs and colored in translucent emerald or ruby or sapphire, with centers of some different substance that, when viewed from different angles, seemed to form almost pictures or shapes—familiar ones, unique to each viewer, subjective and ever-changing devices of fascination. Machines could make synthetic copies that were almost but not quite like the real thing, of course—but the real thing was unique in nature and thus precious.
There was sand in exotic colors, mixed within containers but nonetheless unmixed, as if the colors refused to blend with each other and the individual grains appeared to prefer only their own company. The properties were electromagnetic in nature but would take a long time to yield up their secrets, particularly how such things could have come about in nature.
Plant samples at once familiar and yet so alien that they appeared to be able to convert virtually any kind of energy into food, including, if one was not careful, any living things that touched them. Rooted plants that nonetheless responded to sounds and actions and would attempt to bend away from probes or shears and whose own energy fields could distort instruments and short out standard analyzers.
But most fascinating of all were the Artifacts.
They were always afterwards called the Artifacts, with a capital “A,” because there was nothing like them and no way to explain them. Ishmael Hand found no signs of any sentient lifeforms on any of the three worlds, nor ruins, nor any signs that anyone had ever been there before, but he, too, understood what was implied by the Artifacts.
They were not spectacular, yet they were the greatest of all finds. One was a simple cylinder, perfectly machined, with tolerances so small, with dimensions so perfect, that one had to go down almost to the atomic level to find a flaw. And it was machined out of an absolutely one hundred percent pure block of titanium.
It also looked very much as if it had been manufactured in a lab within the past few hours, yet the tag with it indicated that it was lying half buried in the surface. But the entire thing was coated, to the thickness of only a dozen atoms, in a hard coating that was close enough to one used in human manufacturing that it was inconceivable to think of it as natural.
The second was a gear, perhaps a half a meter around, with one hundred and eighty-two fine and perfect teeth. It, too, was machined just like the cylinder, to absolute perfection, and it, too, had the synthetic protective coating.
The third and final Artifact was a one-meter coil, made out of a totally synthetic and absolutely clear polymerlike substance and created to the same perfect tolerances as the other two. The coil had nineteen turns and its ends were smooth, not broken. The substance was unlike any that had ever been seen before, yet made of stuff that contemporary labs would have no trouble duplicating. In fact, it was easily as good as what was being used but cheaper and easier to make.
“There must be a lot of this junk around,” Ishmael Hand’s report noted. “Consider that my probes were able to discover these three pieces with ease, although none are all that large. Don’t try and put them together, though. I doubt if they’re from the same device. In fact, I’m nearly positive that they aren’t. You see, the coil came from Balshazzar, the gear from Melchior, and the cylinder was sticking out of the purple desert sands on Kaspar.”
* * *
After all this time, Ishmael Hand could only have faith that anyone was even listening. He had been sent out from a holy world, a retreat and monastic place designed to help you to find what God had in mind for you. One of its orders had trained many of the scouts like Ishmael Hand in the mental disciplines required for such a life, and had carefully prepared them for the long, lonely Communion. Once the Great Silence came about, they had but a few dozen scout ships fully outfitted and not many more candidates than that. They sent half back in the direction of the Arm and Old Earth in hopes of reestablishing contact; the others, like Hand, were sent forward to find the colonies and remap what might be out there. Thus it was that Hand had discovered what had already been discovered, but had also been lost. His broadband, uncoded broadcasts back to every region where there might be listeners were public property. He was not out there for riches or material rewards.
There was enough interest and excitement about the rediscovery of the Three Kings to attract the best and the worst of spacefaring humanity. There was only one problem. While the reporting probe contained the samples and the report and vast amounts of data, nowhere inside could they find star maps or location data or the beacon system that would allow them to get there in a hurry.
This was the fourteenth solar system Ishmael Hand had reported on in the two and a half centuries since he’d launched himself into the unknown, but it was the first and only one where the location data was lacking. It wasn’t like Hand to have any such lapses, and he certainly gave no indication in his report that he didn’t expect a horde of expeditions to be heading out to the Three Kings straightaway. Nor did any of the data suggest damage or instability in Hand’s ship and cybernetic parts. Not even His Holiness in Exile and his monastic group understood what might have caused problems with Hand at this key moment.
And yet nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in any of that data, did it show where the heck the Three Kings were, and at no point was there enough of a star sky given that would allow the position to be deduced.
Hand, as usual for him, wound up his broadcast report with a long string of prayers and chants from the Bible and other holy books, but then he stopped in the middle and added, “You know, if I wasn’t sure this was the Three Kings I’d never have named them that. I still considered naming them something else, but there’s much to be said for tradition. Nonetheless, beware! The three perfect names I would otherwise have bestowed on these little beauties are Paradiso, Purgatorio, and Inferno. But which was which would only have confused you secular scientists anyway. God be with you when you arrive on these, though, for nobody else will be, and your lack of faith might well be the death of you! Amen!”
And that was the end of the report.
The Three Kings had gone from legend to reality, but were now more maddeningly desired and more maddeningly out of reach than ever.
Still, they had been discovered not once, but twice, even if centuries apart. By hook, by crook, by luck, faith, or perhaps destiny, somebody would discover them again.
Or solve the mystery of Ishmael Hand.
Those in space now divided neatly into two types of people. There was the profane group, the pirates and raiders who made a living from a bit more knowledge of the colonial worlds’ positions and assets than most others. And there was the holy group. Not just Ishmael Hand and the Catholic priests and nuns who followed him and his kind, but the others as well, the evangelists and teachers of every conceivable faith who could put together a ship and who were as determined as Ishmael Hand to return the truth of God to the lost colonies.
And finally someone had found a way to the Three Kings, or so he believed. The eccentric former physicist turned iconoclastic evangelist Dr. Karl Woodward had, it was said, discovered the way to Paradise. He had fitted his great ship for a rough ride through a natural wormhole, something considered suicidal for anything save robots and scouts, and he had vanished shortly after. Others tried to follow, lured less by the promise of theological perfection than by the riches of Paradise, but whether any had managed to follow him all the way wasn’t known.
What was known was that the route hadn’t been left around for others to follow, and nobody, not Woodward or his people, nor anyone who followed, had returned.
The Three Kings of Ishmael Hand seemed as elusive and mythical as ever…
I: SCIENTISTS DIE FOR LOVE
In twenty years of exploring strange worlds and seeking out some kind of indication that possibly humanity wasn’t alone, Randi Queson had never found any signs of any alien civiliz
ations, past, present, or future, but she’d found a number of human ones. Perhaps it was because only human beings were both adaptable enough and insane enough to settle even the armpits of the universe that they were surviving at all.
This was a particularly ugly place, all gray and white, with constant winds whipping a fine sand against any exposed parts of the body. In most places where there was this kind of sandblasting there had at least been great natural carvings out of the rock, but the ugly pillars and squat, black, twisted forms created here were more reminiscent of a ghastly entryway to Hell than of the kind of unique beauty that would have drawn tourists and preservationists back in the old days when spaceships had been plentiful and space travel relatively cheap.
But there was water here; not on the surface, but not far underground, and in great quantities, filtered by the rock and sand base into a mineral-rich freshness that would nourish almost anything you wanted to plant. And so humans had come here, in better times, to set up vast enclosed hydroponic farms and draw the rich water and its minerals and make it explode into life. Just by standing there and staring down at the flat plain with the ruins of those great automated farms, she could imagine how it had all looked at its peak, even though it was before her time.
Just so much junk now.
Highly automated surface farming was impossible now; they’d manufactured no spare parts here, nor had they the means and materials to innovate beyond a certain level. When the pumps went and the power supplies finally wore out and the spare parts for the robotic monitors were gone, there had been nobody to bring them more, nobody to trade the rich and probably exotic high-demand delicacies they’d raised here for what they needed.
“There are some places even people can’t manage after a while, huh, Doc?” a man’s voice commented near her.
“Perhaps,” she responded. “But I wouldn’t put it past some remnants to have made it here, perhaps in caves or underground. They knew what was happening, and they had time to plan. I don’t know what shape they’d be in after all these years, but I wouldn’t be shocked to find some pockets here and there, people living in sheltered areas and somehow getting by. It wouldn’t be much of a life, but back on Old Earth and in several worlds out here we’ve seen people get by with less. In deserts so hot and dry they’d boil your brains, and in areas so cold that you’d swear nothing could find enough food and warmth. Keep that in mind, all of you, when we go down there! We don’t want any ugly surprises, and we’re not exactly in the business of giving poor stuck farmers a ride.”
The man chuckled. “You’re all heart, Doc.” He turned and looked at the rest of the team, all in environmental suits with helmets on to protect against the elements, and waved them forward. All of them were armed. “Everybody spread out and be at the ready! I don’t think we’re gonna find anybody down there in those ruins, but you never know who or what’s gonna pop up from where. If they’re around, though, they’ll already know we’re here.”
“So what do we do if they come out and welcome us as liberators and shit like that?” one of the team asked.
“Keep it friendly and businesslike,” Queson told them. “If there’s anybody around, they know where everything of interest to us is. It’s a lot easier to have it given to you than to take it. If nobody is stupid then they don’t have to know until the very last moment that we’re not leaving with anybody we didn’t bring. Understand?”
The tall, thin man in the rust colored e-suit who moved to take the point nodded, still chuckling. “All heart for sure,” he muttered as he checked the charge on his pistol.
The fact that no alien civilizations had been discovered didn’t mean that there wasn’t a lot of alien life, and they all understood that. Any world that was habitable by humans tended to be inhabited by something, and the more water present as a liquid the more likely that was. Much of the life that had been discovered wasn’t very smart, but it was astonishingly dangerous. All the more dangerous because until you met it you often didn’t know anything about it at all, and after you met it you hoped you could figure it out before it got you.
They weren’t there to be gotten, but to get.
In the old days, they would identify themselves as being in the salvage business, and salvage was in fact what they did. With few factories capable of the quality of work that used to be available before the Great Silence had cut off the children of humanity from their roots, this was how you did things. Groups could make a living finding one of the lost colonies, hoping against hope that it had failed and that everyone who’d lived there was long dead, and then stripping it of everything of value before anybody else found it and selling it as best they could.
Most of the salvagers were pretty tough people. Some of them wouldn’t care if the colony they found was dead or alive, desperate or thriving. The bigger, more civilized, more developed worlds needed this stuff, and tended to look the other way as to where it came from. The philosophy professors called it “mutually beneficial amorality”; others retained their immorality by pretending that everything that came in was from ruins of the dead, and they prayed for the souls of the departed as they bought their property.
This group was a varied lot, as all such salvager cooperatives had to be. In the old days, you just had to be brutish and amoral to be a pirate; now you needed high technical skills of varied sorts to do this sort of thing. Only the soul had to be piratical, or dead.
Take Randi Queson, Ph.D. Nobody else on the crew knew why she’d chosen this life, or even whether she had chosen it or had been forced into it. They all knew that she was very smart, very knowledgeable, and totally pragmatic about the job. That was all they needed to know.
Yet, in a sense, beyond the ship’s crew and maintenance, she was the most important person aboard the Henry Morton Stanley. You could hire a captain and a crew, and much of the salvage work was automated, but only she was knowledgeable enough to know what was valuable and what was junk. She, and the chief engineer, Jerry Nagel, who could say if some particular gadget or gizmo could be put back into service or whether its parts were potentially golden or simply fried goo. That was why both had to be down on the surface with the exploration team, and why the rest of the team’s main job was protecting the two of them.
Queson was in fact the only one aboard who knew the irony of being a member of a ship’s complement named after Henry M. Stanley. Stanley, a British-born American newspaperman who set out to find David Livingstone, a famous explorer and missionary, found him, wrote a book about it, and became a legend. What was not as well-known was that he then went with his exploration experience, his maps and charts, to European powers, most notably the King of Belgium, and created one of the nastiest and most immoral colonies since the days of slavery, the Belgian Congo. Stanley’d gotten famous for Livingstone, but he’d gotten rich by exploitation.
Livingstone, a godly man with a love of Africa, died, nearly a saint, bringing medicine and Christianity to the natives he loved, and who loved him, while sending back the maps that the Stanleys of that time would use to rape the continent.
The ship was not named for David Livingstone.
Nagel signaled to the rest of the team and they approached the first of the vast series of structures that had once been a great farm supporting a town that was clearly intended to become a city. The cold wind continued to swirl and howl all around them, like some sort of ghostly presence, or perhaps the pain that dreams feel when they die.
The buildings seemed to go on and on; long, boxy affairs with high-pitched roofs facing the maximum sun. A mass of greenhouses, perhaps, although they did not, had never, depended on that sun for very much.
Still, much of the structures had been designed to be, if not transparent, then nearly so. Now, they were nearly opaque, sandblasted over decades without any attempt at maintenance to clear them. Here and there there were jagged holes in the surface, like the remains of great rocks thrown through plate glass.
Only this wasn’t glass, it was a sy
nthetic material designed to withstand far worse than this miserable planet could normally dish out. Rocks, even huge ones catapulted by who knows what, would have been very noisy and created a lot of vibration, but they wouldn’t have penetrated that stuff.
You needed to shoot these holes in those panes. Nothing less would have done.
“What do you think, Doc?” Nagel asked her, standing in front of one of the holes now. “Civil war? Riot? Revolution? Or maybe early raiders?”
She examined the wound in the building pane. “Hard to say. Not raiders, though, I wouldn’t think. Hard to tell with all this dust and sand piled up, but the curvature on the edging here indicates that it was blown out, not in. I’d bet you’ll find some missing shards if you dig enough in this pile. Bring up one of the big searchlights. We’re going inside.”
Two of the crew floated in an obelisk-shaped remote light. About a meter and a half high and slightly thicker at the base, it was not heavy, and very, very useful.
A tap on one symbol at the base brought the entire thing to light, giving a bright but diffuse lighting to a large area. Other settings allowed different kinds of light as required, at different intensities and, if needed, it could be brought to bear on any point with the greatest accuracy and illumination that any spotlight ever made could manage. They moved it inside, and the two leaders followed.
Inside wasn’t as bad or as beaten up as they’d assumed. In fact, it looked relatively intact, although any remains of plants once grown there appeared to be either missing or turned to dust.
Nagel examined the hydroponic rows one by one. “Pretty worn, showing their age and heavy use, but still more than serviceable,” he proclaimed. “With the exception of the broken panes, we could probably dismantle this down to the flooring and do pretty well. It ain’t sexy but it sure looks profitable.”
Queson took her personal light and took a close look at the holding membranes for the plants. It was a familiar design, pretty standard about two centuries earlier, and still very much in use back in civilization. She went close, opened her kit, and took scrapings from the whole area, including the holes.
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