Melchior's Fire tk-2

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Melchior's Fire tk-2 Page 15

by Jack L. Chalker


  “Comm Nav check. Good day, Captain,” he said in a conversational voice.

  “Hello, Jerry. It’s good that we’re able to go out together again,” responded a pleasant, melodic woman’s voice. It didn’t seem to come from any sort of speaker, but seemed centered as if from an invisible person standing in the middle of the room.

  “Yes, well, I’m not too pleased with the setup—I think I’d rather have another go-round with that worm, since I know more about it and its world than I do where we’re going—but at least we’re not all up the creek with no paddle. I guess your share of this, if we pull it off, will pay off your debts and make you fully independent and self-sufficient?”

  “We will see. It would require a lot of money. Still, that is what I’ve been working for. Being leased and sent out on orders is something of a cross between slavery and prostitution. I think I’d rather be well away from that. It is worth the risk.”

  Talk about a lack of privacy, Nagel thought, but neither he nor the others ever really minded the captain. She was the ship’s chief operator, and boss in the getting there and getting back department. Even though her brain and parts of her old nervous system were all that was left of her human days, integrated, preserved, protected in some sort of gelatinous mass deep within the ship, linked to a massive synthetic computer and to every sensor and point within the ship as if it were her natural body, she was still part of the salvage crew, an equal with the others.

  “Do you really think you can thread this needle, Cap?”

  “It does not seem impossible. I’ll be busy, but it’s not impossible. When you’re inside a wormhole you are outside of many of the rules of space-time, and you must anticipate and adjust thousands of tiny settings to keep centered. I look upon it as a challenge. As for the mission, it is precisely why I chose to become a ship in the first place. I want to know what the Three Kings are. I want to see them, and be among the first to return and tell others.”

  “I want to bring back millions in exotic but marketable merchandise,” he told her. “This is just the means to an end.”

  “I do not believe that. Not entirely. I believe all of you really want to be out there, to be in exotic places seeing things others never will. What would you do with your money? Retire? Do nothing for the rest of your life? I do not believe you studied all that long and hard and became expert in all that you are in order to become a playboy and wastrel. The Doc even less so. She could have remained teaching and living a decent life until she was ancient, not going through all this. You all have your reasons, but they aren’t the ones you even tell yourselves. An Li, for example. Tough, self-centered, cold as ice—but it isn’t for money that she is doing this. She is doing this to make a mark. To do something important. To wind up somebody.”

  “Well, maybe you’re right about them,” Nagel allowed, “but not me. I’m doing this because it’s the only damned thing I was ever good at. I don’t particularly like it, or enjoy it, but it’s the only thing I can do well. There’s something to be said, I guess, when you find you’re one of the best folks in the known universe to tear things down and blow things up.”

  “We may see.”

  “So, why did you decide to stop piloting ships and become one? For real?”

  The captain thought a moment, then answered, “It is difficult to explain, and it will sound very egocentric, more than anything An Li ever did. Nonetheless, it is true.”

  “Yes?”

  “It is the closest any living being can get to becoming a god.”

  He thought about that a lot of times after the captain first said it to him, but he never could quite understand it. Perhaps it was all power and perception, like most everything else, but what was godlike and the ultimate to somebody like the captain wasn’t his idea of paradise. He was never sure that he ever knew what his idea of paradise really would be, anyway; only that without lots of money he couldn’t begin to find out.

  Even the captain had that in common with him, and probably with the others as well. You could even decide that you hated money and try to live without it, but that was much easier to do when you knew it was there if you absolutely needed it.

  He’d discussed that with Randi on the last trip, and she’d brought up some long-dead queen in some long-forgotten kingdom back on old Earth who’d lived in the world’s greatest palace and had never lacked for one thing in her whole life, but who really wanted to try and understand her subjects. So she had a little mock peasant village built on the palace grounds, and she and her courtiers would go there now and then and play peasant and grow flowers and cabbages and whatnot. Of course, the servants did most of the real work, and kept it antiseptically clean and nice, and no matter how realistic they wanted to get they all knew, and could see, that golden palace up on the hilltop that they could return to at any moment. It was a sincere attempt, but it was doomed.

  He seemed to remember that the Doc said that the real peasants finally got so pissed off at actually living in shit and watching their kids starve from the other side of that big castle they finally stormed it and cut her head off or something equally drastic. She probably died, totally confused, unable to comprehend why her “children” had so turned on her.

  He’d known a number of dictatorial types on various worlds who had wound up with nearly identical fates, and, to a one, they, too, had had baffled and bewildered looks on their faces as they were shot down.

  One thing the money folks rarely remembered: Give the little people some small share of the pie or else one day they’re gonna come after your neck. And if you play peasant, make sure you play with real peasants.

  He was sick and tired of being a peasant, but things were too broken to get up a lot of enthusiasm to storm the palace. They all were tired. They weren’t really peasants, either, in the traditional sense—he was university trained, the Doc was, as the title said, a doctor of philosophy, and even An Li, Lucky Cross, and Sark had knowledge and skills that were the products of a lot of training and hard work. All any of them wanted was a score so they could relax for a little bit, or be comforted that their palace was somewhere up on one of those hills if they needed it.

  They were all worse than peasants, really. Peasants continued to grub for food and take it until they boiled over or keeled over. Not them. This crew took about an hour to decide to gamble on a tiny chance that maybe they could jump off that bridge and live, knowing that it was most likely suicide. And if it stormed any castles, it was to get enough to last out their lives in comfort, not for any vision of a brighter future.

  Even that queen had been an optimist. Optimism was in short supply these days, though.

  He’d seen the photos of the wrecked ships and wizened bodies. They all had.

  “Ever ridden a wild hole?”

  Who had? Wasn’t there a reason, maybe, why nobody in this well-traveled, highly experienced crew had ever met anybody who did? Couldn’t even think of somebody who had?

  His research showed a ton of ships and crews trying. Sometimes the ships came back, most times they didn’t, but when they did their crews were almost always dead, dead, dead. The few who survived were never the same, as broken and battered as their ships.

  Suddenly, storming the golden palace with pitchforks seemed like the eminently more sane activity of the two.

  So the Captain wants to be a demigod, and all I want is to pay off all my creditors and stay in suites like the one Sanders was in, maybe with at least the female companion he had with him or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

  It didn’t matter what they wanted or didn’t want. They all had to be pretty damned desperate or pretty damned insane to take this job.

  Three worlds, or something like that. A small, pretty one, a cold, ugly one and a big messy one. That was all that had ever really come through.

  Gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Which one had the gold and which had the spices?

  Gold was pretty common out here, so common it wasn’t even worth the salvage in most case
s. The other two had reasonable imitations of equal or greater value. He didn’t know what frankincense and myrrh were anyway except that they were some kind of ancient precious spices and perfumes. Gifts for a king, or a King of Kings?

  He wished that somebody other than a religious fanatic had discovered these places. Then the data might make sense without having to go to a court astrologer.

  Well, he’d go over and over what data was there all the way to the Three Kings. If, that is, Sanders’s information was correct and not a bunch of junk, and if the theory that a cybership could ride the wild hole and emerge both ways in decent shape was correct, and if there was really anything there of value.

  And it wasn’t just the wild hole, either. Whatever forces created and sustained it as a near permanent fixture had to be massive. The ship might well have a smooth ride there and then be torn apart as it emerged. Certainly the captain knew that, but that was all she really knew, and it was the unspoken biggest question mark about her part of the journey.

  What happens if, at the end of a tricky but successful journey, you are suddenly rushing into a massive stone wall?

  Oh, he was going to get a lot of sleep this trip! Sheesh…

  * * *

  Norman Sanders and his bookends looked absolutely resplendent in their finery as they came to see the Stanley off. He was all smarmy smiles and platitudes and shaking hands all around with that dead fish handshake of his, and sounding so confident of success that you almost believed he really thought so himself.

  Like the others, An Li was only impressed that he bothered to get up early enough to show up at all.

  “Well, it was the least I could do for you brave explorers,” he said effusively.

  “Yes, the very least you could do,” An Li agreed a bit cynically. “All right, we’ve got your pet robot, we’ve got the supplies, the Captain says she’s got your data, so the only thing left to do is to do it. We’ve got clearance in less than an hour, so I’d suggest you get off now unless you’ve reconsidered and want to come along.”

  Sanders sighed. “I’m afraid that I lack some essential skills and attributes for such a mission,” he admitted, sounding genuinely contrite. “Courage, for one thing. Skills to do more than get in the way, for another. I think it’s best that each and every person do what they do best. On the other hand, deep down, I honestly do wish I could just ride along, somehow, seeing what you’re going to see, things that nobody else knows or has ever seen and lived to tell about it. With communication through a wild hole impossible, though, I guess I’m just going to have to make do here and watch the raw footage when you get back. Good luck and godspeed to you all, and I do very much mean that.”

  She almost believed him on that last one, although whether he meant it because of his own potential for risk-free profit or because, deep down, there really was something inside him that wanted to know—well, who could fathom that Machiavellian mind and darkness of soul to ever know for sure? She wasn’t even certain Sanders himself could tell sincerity from the act anymore.

  She watched them go, heard the hissing of the airlock, and waited until she felt the vibration of the service tug pulling away before she turned and headed for her own quarters.

  The ship looked and smelled almost brand new; it was hard to even grasp that this was the same tub they’d been on when they went for salvage and found a great worm.

  Randi Queson hadn’t even bothered to see Sanders off, and was sitting in the renovated wardroom hunched over her portaterminal. She barely glanced up when An Li came into the room.

  “What are you doing so intently?” An asked her.

  “Just going over all the data again and again. Jerry’s an engineer and the closest to a physicist we have on the crew, but engineers don’t see things the way scientists do. I’m more a scientific mind, but my background’s not in the physical sciences. Still, a different point of view, a different emphasis, and just as he might see something I’d miss completely in the same data, I might see something he wouldn’t. Still, what bothers me most is that time and again I see an intelligence that we know nothing about behind this Three Kings stuff. It’s kept very hidden, except maybe for that gemstone gimmick—unless that’s just an interactive property that triggers paranoia within our own minds. I mostly believe it’s the latter, since we get such personalized visions until the perceived That Behind All That shows up.”

  “I still kind of wish he’d let us bring it along,” An Li said. “If that last sense is real it might be a way to pinpoint where they’re hiding. That’s what I like least— they get to hide and maybe play games with us, while we’ve got to go in blind.”

  “It’s always that way, or so it seems. Still, I’m glad old status symbol Sanders wouldn’t let us have it. If there is some kind of communication within it, then the last thing I want is two Eyegors wandering around the ship, one Normie’s and one God Knows What. Still, I think we have to separate the suggestion of an intelligent behavior pattern from things like the Magi’s Stones. As a social scientist, I can sense the logic pattern at least enough to form theories about it, but until I have proof that the stones aren’t just giving off some perfectly explainable phenomena, such as radiating something that interacts with the electrochemical patterns in the brain, I can’t accept the things as spies of the mind. Still, I’m going to keep an open mind. If we find them scattered in some geologically similar areas, they’re natural. If we find them in little sacks or stacked up like coins, maybe not. Either way, I’m wondering what the effect would be of a large number of them aboard ship. Drive us all psychotic, maybe.”

  “That’s a cheery thought. How would we tell?”

  There was a sudden sounding of a klaxon-like horn and then the captain’s voice came on all speakers.

  “Attention. We are now powering up to leave orbit. Time to first genhole two hours twenty-one minutes.”

  “Never mind the first one,” Lucky Cross called into thin air. “How long until we get to the wild one?”

  “I have not been able to access that information. I must relinquish navigational functions to the subroutine and thus cannot access anything not on my standard charts. I will certainly let you know when we arrive and before we enter. At that point I will have complete control restored, as only I can take us through.”

  “Normie the Weasel strikes again,” An Li grumped. “Like we can broadcast this information?”

  Lucky Cross came into the ward room and settled down in a large padded chair. “But we could,” she said simply.

  “Huh?”

  “If the cap had full access to that data, we could sell it, trade it, do whatever we wanted with it. And pirates, military, you name it, could pry it out of us. As it stands, what we don’t know we can’t divulge, voluntarily or not. No, I think you underestimate the little bastard just because he’s a little bastard.”

  Randi Queson still felt uneasy about it. “So what happens if we get there and there’s no ‘there’ there? I mean, what if the thing’s screwed up?”

  “There’s either a wild hole exactly where it says or there ain’t,” Cross pointed out. “If there ain’t, then we turn around and go find Normie.” She sighed. “I’d almost like that better than there bein’ one there.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “Look, the only way we get from Point A to Point B is through wormholes. They was all wild holes of one sort or another once upon a time, but we tamed ’em, shaped ’em, made ’em bigger or smaller to suit us, and made sure they opened at the same place and went to the predictable place on the chart. That’s the genhole—generated hole. A tunnel through space-time. You get where you need to go faster than light ’cause you don’t pass through no space in between. What you do pass through, nobody’s still sure. Like a lot of things. You listen to all the so-called brains give a zillion different explanations, you say ‘So what?,’ then you use it—not ’cause they can explain it, but because it works. It works the same way every time. But a wild one, now, tha
t’s a different story. No genhole generators, no shaping, no stability, no nothin’. Hell, there ain’t even supposed to be any wild holes, at least not that you can use. Wormholes wink in and out all the time, but they last from a few millionths of a second to a few seconds, period, then they wink out and wink in someplace a thousand light-years away.”

  “But not this one,” An Li noted.

  “Nope. Oh, there are fields where wild holes wink in and out all the time. Somethin’ causes ’em, some kind of forces of nature, who knows? But they still wink in, wink out, wink in, wink out, and who knows where the hell they go to? This one, and this one alone, supposedly always goes the same place, and it’s been doin’ it for at least the couple of centuries or so since it was found, maybe a lot longer. It’s a natural hole that’s also consistent and predictable. And that ain’t possible. Even I know that much physics. Like some kind of predictable lightning bolt. Nope, this sucker may look natural and feel natural, but if you can go there and it shows up, it ain’t natural. And that to me spells ‘trap.’ ”

  Queson shook her head slowly from side to side, almost in disbelief. “Everybody’s suddenly so gloomy about this, even me. Is it the new paneling or something in the coffee? I mean, didn’t we all just volunteer for this? And didn’t we all know we were probably going into some kind of trap? I mean, why else all the weapons and sensor equipment? We’re about as well-armed with weaponry and probes as a naval destroyer! If everybody thinks this is a one-way trip into an alien dissection lab, why did we all volunteer?”

  Cross looked at An Li, who stared back at Cross. Finally, they both shrugged, and it was An Li who answered, “Maybe because we had nothing better to do?”

  * * *

  It took eleven days to reach the entry region. From the command center aboard the Stanley, they could see that this was in fact one of the places you’d expect to find the entry point, but picking the right wild hole was something else entirely.

 

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