Balshazzar's Serpent

X: HEAVEN HAS THREE CIRCLES

The hospital facilities on The Mountain were among the best; even when Woodward would skimp and save things he always made certain that the medical division had the best.

Up until now, this particular expedition had not been the most profitable. In fact, after treating the wounded and doing all the long-term work necessary to get the former hostages at least physically back to par, together with the losses in equipment and supplies that were more routine, The Mountain and its mission were in some trouble.

Near the end of every mission cycle, they’d had to return to civilization and endure weeks or months of refitting, repairs, and the like so that they could go out again. During that period they would spend much of their time anxiously fund-raising, but, the fact was, if they didn’t bring back something from the missions themselves there wouldn’t be enough to do the job with what they could raise elsewhere.

Doctor Woodward, it was rumored, was considering something far more radical before going in to a refit they could not possibly manage. He would never give up what he considered his commission from God, but even he had limits in that he couldn’t bring himself to just go begging like so many denominations and missionaries did.

So while everyone else was getting well, licking their wounds, straightening up, and into intensive Bible study and work on the meaning of faith, the Doctor, alone save for one of two of his closest friends, was studying the uploads from Sapenza and thinking.

“Our science and engineering people have seen this?” he asked at last.

Thomas Cromwell nodded. “In one sense, it’s pretty straightforward. In another, it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen. Still, the risk is in the going and, if that thing can’t be stabilized, very much more in the return. The question is whether any computer ever made can predict that writhing, snaking monster of a natural wormhole and get it exactly right. That’s what we think happened to Tymm’s ship. She was essentially shaken to death. It was certainly an ugly way to go.”

“We run those kinds of risks all the time,” Woodward responded. “We just did something like that from a risk point of view. There are times when you trust to your people and your machines and leave the rest to God. For some reason, God didn’t want her to have it. I have to wonder if perhaps all this was to put it into our hands.”

“Sapenza seemed to think he was doing us no favors,” Cromwell pointed out. “The question is, what didn’t he tell us? What does he know that we don’t? He admitted not trying it himself. Not with the ship he had.”

“Oh, I suspect that his ship was better suited to threading this wormhole than ours, and certainly better than Mother Tymm’s,” Woodward commented. “But he didn’t find Tymm’s ship, he just stole it all from the ones that did, and at some cost in battle. I think he was backtracking Tymm based on this data when he got ambushed by somebody else who knew at least part of the story.”

“Do you really think this ship can get there, and back?” Cromwell asked him.

“I do. I believe God has a special assignment for us and that this is part of it. No matter what, it would prove the existence of the Three Kings for certain and would allow us to pick up things of substantial value that could be used to virtually make this ship over. And if one of them is as liveable as legend has it, then we may well also find our own home.”

Captain Jorge Lime, one of the three rotating captains of The Mountain and also one of the Elders, shook his head. “I don’t know. This whole complex, all these people—in a wild hole. It would truly require a miracle to go both ways.”

“Then we’ll pray for a miracle!” the Doctor shot back. “I’m sick and tired of all the people on this ship, which is in itself a miracle that shouldn’t exist, suddenly having no faith at all in God’s hand or His plan for us! I think we have to do it for that reason alone! I’m sick and tired of having to keep demonstrating faith, but I certainly expect it from my leaders! Are you saying that you will not take us there, Captain?”

The captain felt stung by the remarks. “No, sir, I am not saying that I will not take us there, but I am laying out the facts and the odds. If I were to take a pistol, fully charged and tested, point it at your head and pull the trigger, the odds are you would have your head blown off. There is a fine line between faith and common sense in some of this.”

“We’ll make it, at least one way!” the Doctor said emphatically. “Whether or not we can make it back, or even are meant to, is something for God to decide.”

Even so, after they’d all left to pray and think things over, he couldn’t help but dwell for a moment on the enigmatic figure of Judas.

Not Judas the Betrayer, but Judas the Prideful. Judas never did understand the message, but he was pretty sure of the messenger. The Messiah was supposed to rise up and liberate the Jewish people from the yoke of the House of Herod and of Imperial Rome. Instead he kept refusing and talking all sorts of things, even accommodation with the Romans as in the exhortation to pay your taxes. But when He took a whip to the money changers, then the fire and fury had come out. Judas decided to push his Messiah to reveal Himself, to rise up and be a leader. If they arrested, convicted, and went to crucify Him, then He’d have to move, right?

And so Judas the Prideful decided that, since he didn’t like how God was doing things, he’d push Him into a corner so He’d see things and do things Judas’s way.

There was always the danger that a leader could go past that point, commit the same sin as Satan, and be damned. Woodward worried about that constantly, with his own ego and his own arrogance. If they only knew how alone he really was, how much doubt he always had to fight.

In the end, what Judas did was what God already had planned. He damned himself but managed at the same time to save countless souls yet unborn. Ironic, but that, too, was something he always had to live with.

He had to act on faith, no matter what! Otherwise, this was all a waste, and he was just another hypocrite and charlatan or self-deluded false prophet.

He understood the physics of it—that was one of his fields of expertise, and one that he understood well. He did not understand the full data about the Three Kings. Three planet-sized moons around a gas giant well into the life zone of a G-class star. All three with both temperatures and atmospheres that would support human life or any life as they knew it.

The old monk who’d first discovered them hadn’t wanted to name them after the Kings; he’d wanted to name them after Dante. Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradisio. Those, too, were interesting choices. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven. Woodward’s own beliefs didn’t allow for a Purgatory, but he could see its appeal as analogy.

Why had he changed his mind?

Why did Sapenza think that the Kings would crush his faith?

He had to go. Deep down he felt that was a given as sure as anything he’d ever believed or thought in his whole life. He had to go as a demonstration of faith, not just to the crew of The Mountain but also as much before God and to himself.

Three Kings. Three was the number of God.

John Robey stared at the sluglike thing in the tray and shook his head.

Robey still had temporary direct sensory implants so he could hear while his new eardrums bonded and settled in, so it made everything and everybody sound a little tinny and distant, but it was good enough to keep him functional.

“That’s the thing?” he asked.

The medtech nodded. “In a way, it’s not much different from our ferrets and fish. Same general material, actually, although the thing is designed to do a bit different job. Sloppy, really, because it can’t get in through the pores but has to essentially drill a small hole, and so much is taken up with medical instructions on how to deploy I’d suspect there’s little in the way of independent instructional ability, but it sure does the job. The only way we could get it out was to suspend the two of them, remove the things and the collateral brain stem and connectors, and then replace the removed natural parts with cultured cloned duplicates. It’s always a bit tricky when you’re working that close to and partly in the brain, but it looks like things will work out. I just wish we’d had the codes for this little critter. Then it would have been simple to just tell it to detach and leave.”

Robey continued to shake his head in wonder at the thing. “What kind of sick mind would come up with something like that?”

“Oh, this is very old technology,” the medtech responded, oblivious to the other’s moral tone. “They’ve got them down to preprogrammable injectables now, I hear. Lots of spy and black market type stuff in them. That’s the kicker. If it had been one of the newer ones I could have pulled how to reprogram it from our database; it’s these old development types that are the problem. They were lab stuff and changed almost weekly.”

Robey was appalled, not just by the callousness but also by the thought that these things had been “perfected” and could be bought by the likes of Sapenza on the black market. “So that’s the future for the rest of us?” he mused, aloud but as much to himself as to the other. “Just slaves, perfect and obedient? Programmed like cleaning robots?”

“Probably not. Not worth it,” the tech replied. “However, it’s a reminder of what’s out there. There’s stuff that would make you wake up convinced beyond any ability of anybody to talk you out of it that you were the Red Queen of Wonderland and everybody else were rabbits. We exist in a kind of balance, Brother Robey. The main reason we’re who and what we are in this day and age is that most of us aren’t worth the trouble to somebody to screw around with.”

Now there was a comforting thought. “What about Eve? When will she be—back to normal, I guess is the way to put it.”

The medtech sighed. “Probably never. Oh, physically, with some physical therapy and a decent monitoring program, she’ll get back to normal, but mentally… Well, this sort of stuff does things to you. I’ve seen it time and again. We’ve got it with many if not most of the former hostages we rescued. Some of them had particularly ugly times. Most of the women were raped, some brutally and repeatedly. The kind of therapy that erases that sort of thing also erases part of your mind and memories.”

“You don’t mean Eve was—”

“Oh, no, actually. No rape, not in the usual sense of the word. But both of them, the man as well as the woman, will have an even harder thing to overcome. They just spent a long period as passengers in their own bodies. I don’t think you or I could really understand what that feels like, how helpless and insecure it makes you. Just like that—zap!—and you have no control at all, period. To get over that, to fully get your nerve back, to sleep well after that, it’s almost impossible. When something like that happens in normal planetary situations we use a kind of sophisticated device that creates a data worm that goes into the mind and simply deletes that whole experience. You wake up and it’s an hour before it happened and that’s that. We have no such things here. The Doctor believes that such things subvert the whole system of good and evil in the universe. It removes choice and will. So, she’s going to have to learn to live with it. If she doesn’t, she’ll be no good to anyone, least of all herself.”

“Can I see her?”

“In a few days. She’ll be in an induced coma for a while yet, then be brought up slowly. Leave your extension and we’ll give you a call when you can see her.”

Great! he thought sourly, heading back towards the quarters for his group. Just great!

“Attention! Attention, brothers and sisters!” the ship’s intercom suddenly announced. “At zero six hundred all personnel are to be in the Olivet section cathedral, a sector chapel, or in a ward room where video is available to hear an important talk by Doctor Woodward on the future of this mission. This will be repeated for all shifts. All personnel are required to attend and to listen. The lives and very future of everyone here is at stake. Do not take this one lightly. This announcement will be repeated every half hour until zero six hundred.”

Robey frowned. That was odd. It was one thing to have services or classes, but these kinds of announcements were pretty much saved for initial briefings after taking off on a new long mission or before coming into a major port. It was very rare to have this kind of required mass meeting while underway in midmission, as rotten as this one had been up to now. The Doctor was known to be displeased with the assembly for its depression and lagging faith under these conditions, but that wasn’t handled like this.

One thing for sure: it would be the only topic of conversation aboard until the appointed time, and there would be few not present or glued to a screen.

And when it came, it was vintage Woodward plus.

He spent the first twenty minutes just haranguing those who’d doubted or given up during the battle of wits on the planet. He was careful to note those who stuck with him and his decisions and those who helped make the hard choices, but he was very upset that many, if not most, of the youngest and “best taught” had talked compromise with evil or had simply conceded the victory. So many of these were in the parts of the Arm of Gideon that was not taken hostage. Gideon had slain thousands with a mere three hundred warriors because they had the power of faith, he reminded them. Complacency and lack of faith had done the damage here.

“We came out of this with several positives, however, which I will now put to use,” he told them. “First, we triumphed over a festering and ruthless evil force because enough of us had faith enough to believe that God would not allow us to fail. We are tougher and better for it as well, for we’ve been slapped down and shown the cost of taking it all for granted. We are constantly being tested, because we’re the last hope the remnants of humanity have, and not many of them will awaken in New Jerusalem. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that things will be easy,” he reminded them. “It only says you’ll be able to win if you’re willing to put your body where God requires it to be.”

Old stuff, mostly, but essential as a pep talk for what was coming. Everybody knew that this was merely a prologue.

And, finally, he came to the subject of the gathering, and it gripped them when they saw it.

“Ever since a monk discovered them, the location of the Three Kings has been closely guarded, lost, or in the hands of evil men whom God would not permit to reach them. They are there for us. Remnants of the holy empire that was, and the one that will spread and become part of God’s universe once more. Prophecy told us long ago that we were the inheritors of the Three Kings, and that we would eventually be shown the way. Now that prophecy has been fulfilled. I intend to go claim that promise, which will require an ultimate test of faith. Let me show you why that is so, and the price of coming up a bit short.”

The old video of Mother Tymm’s ship, battered and derelict, with the grotesque vacuum-preserved corpses of some of that crew, opened the second phase of the talk. It was sobering stuff.

To navigate via wormholes required precision computers and a ship whose systems were in top condition. Genholes tended to be “easy” in that they were either artificial or artificially enhanced and maintained; their paths internally tended to be straight, their courses predictable and mapped. Short of a catastrophic failure, the genhole system established by the old Combine and still in use at least on this side of the Great Silence was almost like a railroad network of centuries past, and no more dangerous.

“Wild” holes were something else again. They were natural; they expanded and contracted without warning, they were not a consistent internal shape, and they weren’t all that consistent in how or where they emerged. A very strong one such as the one charted in the Three Kings data recordings made it certain that it would be a very nasty, rough, and perilous ride to the end, but that it would wind up where you wanted to go, in the Three Kings system.

The pressures on such a hole, though, and particularly the forces that came to bear on the ends, made it much like a dangerous serpent. They writhed and wriggled and danced, and particularly within a strong solar system which would tend to concentrate the pressures and forces of nature trying to close or tame such a hole, much like a hose left on the floor or ground as the pressurized material streamed out.

If a ship merely grazed by a hole wall, the forces returned on the ship might be enough to destroy it and would certainly be enough to damage it. That was why your systems had to be in excellent shape, always adjusting to keep the ship centered in the tunnellike hole. Shields could help lessen the damage, but they were like cardboard in terms of really being able to protect a craft that made such mistakes.

Even so, if your ship’s systems were good enough, if your guidance and navigational computers were the best and properly programmed, trained, and maintained, andif that wriggling end wasn’t pointing too close to something solid or the heart of a star, you had a chance of making it to the system. The original Vaticanus scout, Mother Tymm, and perhaps others had done that much.

“Our computers and engineers have done a full analysis of these recordings and all the relevant data accompanying them and then compared them to the last status checks of our own ship and equipment,” Woodward told them. “They tell me there is a seventy percent chance of making it through with no serious problems.”

It sounded reassuring, but the only alternative to getting through was to die like those in that first video, and a thirty percent chance of the loss of all aboard was more sobering.

And getting back—there was an even greater challenge.

“It appears that the hole is very nondescript at this end,” Woodward continued. “In fact, while it’s in the middle of nowhere, it’s one of hundreds of such in that region actually on the charts. It’s listed as a dead-end anomaly because no probe sent into it ever sent data back from a position beyond it. It’s apparently an easy entry but gets very rough very quickly. It is also, apparently, quite long. We shall have to maintain ourselves inside it for almost six days.”

That caused some gasps and murmurs within the groups watching. Most genholes bypassed our universe and its laws almost entirely, curving away into something far different and then coming back. Raw holes were always much longer, sometimes minutes, hours, days, even weeks or months. There was no way to tell, but six days in an environment that was constantly trying to murder you… That was another thing to be very uneasy about.

“Back should be no more difficult than going, except that this is a system dominated by gas giants and the forces that create the other end of the hole are part of the physics of the system itself. Gravity is in a delicate balance in all such systems, but when you’re dealing with one this complex you often have a hole that drains away or adds just enough for it all to work. That is our spitting, wriggling hose. Appropriately, our serpent, keeping us on one side of the gate. To enter, we would have to be perfectly centered inside a constantly moving and probably not wholly predictable target. Miss, and you die. Go in even the slightest bit off center, you spend six days bouncing off the hole walls. You saw the results in the opening sequence to that. And that brings me to the challenge to this congregation.”

Most of them were uneasy at this, many were appalled, and only a few seemed ready for this sort of challenge and that may have been bravado. Still, there it was, all laid out, leaving only the Doctor to put it in the starkest, simplest terms.

“There they are, people!” he thundered. “Three crosses. How good is your faith? Who’s going to be the first to climb up there and yell, ‘All right! Nail me here!’?”

There was some murmuring and a lot of wide eyes and open mouths at this, but, more, Woodward could feel the sense of unease sweeping through just the church part that he could see. They didn’t like this. They didn’t like this at all, and the older staff seemed to like it less than anybody else.

The Doctor let it all ripple around and sink in, waiting for the proper time to continue. Finally, he sensed it. He never understood how anybody ever effectively gave a talk or lecture without a live audience in front of them to gauge reaction.

“I see you don’t like this,” he teased them. “I see that, when the chips are down, you really don’t believe it all, do you? When they said ‘faith’ in the early church, it meant marching out into the arena with no defense to face deliberately starved and mistreated lions. It meant being put against a wall and stoned, or thrown off the side of a wall or cliff. For all this time since, for all those centuries, people have paid lip service but when it came to putting their own bodies there they balked. Very well. I am going to the Three Kings. God wants me to, He’s handed them to me, and I’m not about to second-guess Him. Some of my closest friends have agreed and are coming with me. Whether we come back or not is also up to God. We may not even have to. But we have to go. You do not. I hereby throw you the lifeboat to damnation. We will have to manage a full systems check and transfer those who can not consciously make this choice because they are still in suspension having had their bodies already in harm’s way and not broken. I’ll take no one who does not volunteer. When we reach our transfer point, I will cheerfully allow anyone, even if it’s most of you, to disembark. Go. Leave. Go anywhere you want. Do whatever you want. You’d better make the most of it, because the only rewards you’ll have are what you grab now. I don’t want you. I don’t want excuses. Just go. The rest—we will go together to the Three Kings or to Glory or to the Gates of Hell if need be!”

Critics had always called The Mountain a cult, a crazy offshoot of old evangelical Protestantism like so many others that were there before and flourished even more after the Great Silence. But Woodward was no cult leader and these people were not brainwashed or programmed in any conventional sense. To do so, as the medtech had said to John Robey, would have been to deny the free choice he so valued.

They would not follow him blindly, and he knew it. He would have it no other way.

“Now you have the information. The only thing you will not take with you is the route to the Three Kings. That we reserve. All else, go and good riddance. Don’t come to me with excuses, either! Don’t cry about spouses and children and all that. I want you all, but if you’re a parent your job is to choose wisely for the family. Just make sure it’s the right choice. When the time comes, just—leave. Wash your hands of all this because I will consider you dead and damned at that moment! That is all!”

Usually when the Doctor left the stage he got applause or shouts or some sort of audience appreciation, but not this time. There was almost dead silence in the hall and in the chapels and ward rooms. And, after a minute or two, a few began to whisper, then the whispers became talking, and the places erupted in a roar of conversation and debate.

When the duty rosters came out the next day, they showed eleven days until planetfall. It was too long, much too long. It would split families and eat at their souls.

“It’s just not fair,” Mike, one of Robey’s long-time roommates, complained for the umpteenth time. “I mean, we don’t have all the data, all the facts he’s got. He won’t even show us what these planets or moons or whatever they are look like, or why they’re supposed to be so special! It’s like making a test of faith of Russian roulette!”

Robey thought about the analogy. “Well, Russian roulette is a test of faith,” he noted. “If you really think you’re going to get the live round, you wouldn’t play. But this is the toughest test the old man’s ever come up with.”

“Have you decided yet? Brother Timothy Supulveda is organizing a group to continue the key parts of the teaching under a new banner, you know. He thinks the old man’s gone nuts.”

Robey in fact knew about Brother Timothy. He’d been with The Mountain for a very long time, maybe since the Doctor had taken over, but he always seemed to be on the periphery of any controversy, never at its center. Now he seemed to feel that things had gone too far, that this comfortable mission life had been thrown into jeopardy by this most risky of decisions. Timothy, in fact, had never felt comfortable going to search for lost colonies along the frontier. No good will come of it, there aren’t many out there, the real mission work is in the anarchic but established colonial groups with technology and political systems, all that. Now he was attracting many, particularly men and women with families.

“Do you think the old man’s gone nuts?” Robey asked his old friend.

“I don’t honestly know. Maybe I don’t have enough faith. Maybe I am damned and like the faithless servant should get all I can. I keep wondering about that. I keep praying and I keep coming to ‘the way is hard’ and I keep wondering if the way isn’t impossible for mortal men. And I’m not sure of the way anymore, either. You know how many distinct religious groups are out there, just on our side of the Great Silence?”

“No, never bothered to look. A bunch, I’d guess.”

“Over seventy thousand, from a thousand variations of Christianity, several flavors of Judaism, several of Buddhism, three or four of Islam, plus Hindu, Zoroastrianism, Baha’i, forty or fifty variations of naturism complete with shamans, black witches, white witches, and that’s not counting the folks who think we’re all property of some alien entity that’s using us for entertainment or food or whatever and all sorts of other stuff. When you start diagramming these belief systems they all sound remarkably profound and also remarkably stupid and primitive. There are even more than a dozen churches that deny that there is any supernatural at all! I mean, why bother with a church? A guild hall or even a decent bar would do, I’d think.”

“So you’re a true believer but you haven’t figured out what you believe in?” Robey pressed. “That sounds about as confused as the First Church of Atheism.”

“Yeah, well, why go unless you are totally convinced that he’s one hundred percent, and I mean one hundred percent right? Otherwise, like Brother Timothy, you think of him not as some infallible Pope but as a guy who got most of it, maybe more of it than others, but he’s not infallible and he’s not the only agent of God in the universe.”

“Oh, I can think of a good reason for going even if I were in the First Church of Atheism,” Robey replied.

“Yeah?”

“Greed. You don’t think Captain Sapenza wasn’t going?”

“Yeah, but the guys he stole that from didn’t go.”

“Maybe they didn’t have a ship that could take it. Maybe they were looking to steal only the very best. Maybe the timing was close and they never had the chance. But, I think if this location and all this data were known there’d be a rush to it like the rushes to riches past. I saw that jewel, that wondrous, weird jewel. It seemed to be able to reach inside the mind, to give each looker a unique vision for good or ill. What kind of natural force could create such a thing? Chance? What other wonders are there that we don’t know about, that are maybe too hidden or too big to have been brought back? Even in the old days, when they could make almost anything you could imagine, I don’t think they could have made that thing. That’s why it’s so valuable.”

“So you’re risking your life for treasure?”

Robey sighed. “I don’t know. I doubt if I’m high enough on anybody’s list to share in any treasure, or even how the money might be spent. I’d be better on Sapenza’s crew for that, providing he had the ship and directions and not us. But, let’s face it, I’ve got no family I know of here. Like you, I was more or less bred in the labs and raised by a group. Lots of friends, yes, but in a sense the only thing I have ties to is the congregation as a whole. That being the case, I keep wondering if I could live my life without going. If I wouldn’t always be wandering around and saying to myself, ‘What did I miss? What wonders did I give up for boring security? Did I really kick God in the ass by refusing?’ I’m not sure I can live with that.”

Mike stared at him for a moment, as if hearing his own inner thoughts echoed. Finally, he asked, “What do you think is there, at the Three Kings? This hasn’t been the best trip in the ship’s records. We’ve lost over a hundred lives on three planets that could be described as unfriendly, hostile, and murderous. How many new souls were saved? Any?”

“Some, perhaps,” Robey assured him. “We had twenty couples stay behind on that pest hole we just left after all that they did to us. Forty people, stuck there, forever missionaries on a forgotten speck in the middle of nowhere. All volunteers, because they believed that the church could grow there. Now that’s faith.”

On the seventh day he got to see Eve.

She was out of that horrible tank and out of her coma, but still weak and pretty well immobile. Machines now were giving her gentle but regular exercise, getting her brain used to using the newly implanted neural connections to transfer instructions. In a sense, it was like having to learn to crawl, then walk, then do increasingly sophisticated and coordinated things, all over again, but on an accelerated timetable.

Even talking was still a problem, and she was occasionally hard to understand, but the medtechs insisted that she was light years ahead of where she’d been just a day or two earlier.

She looked weak and drawn and haggard, with only traces of the old Eve flashing from time to time. Even her long hair had been shaved and she had only a fraction of a centimeter grown back out. It gave her a curiously androgenous look.

“Hey, how you doin’?” he greeted her, smiling.

She managed something of a smile back, although the medtechs had warned that most of what she put on was a brave front. She was masking nightmares.

“Twying to recite Shakespeah,” she managed. “Got a lipsp.”

“Yeah, that is a lisp,” he agreed. “I’m still working on new eardrums. Got my old ones busted playing hero in the wrong place.”

She looked at him for a long time without saying anything, then she managed, “I—wemembah. I wemembah evvything… You thot me!”

He chuckled. “Yeah, I shot you, but only to save you. I’d do it again, too, so watch it!”

She shifted, as if trying to use her lower extremities to push off, but she was still too weak for that. “Thoulda used a throngah beam.”

He frowned. “A stronger beam? What do you mean?”

“You thoulda used a throngah beam. Then I’d be dead.”

His expression grew deadly serious. “I don’t want you dead. Why do you? I know it must have been a horrible experience, and you’ll never completely push it from your mind, but you have to learn to get past it.”

“No! You don’t know… Can’t move, can see, can think, but can’t act. Yoah body woaks and you have nothin’ t’do with it. Make you do—evil sthings.”

He couldn’t know what she’d gone through, true, but he also couldn’t see how she could blame herself for any of it. “But they made you. You couldn’t not do it. If you don’t have a choice, then the evil’s entirely on them, not you!”

He realized, though, that ministers, maybe even the Doctor himself, had already been down here and were probably better at this than he was.

“Ah you going or sthaying?” she asked him.

For a moment he thought she was asking if he was leaving her bedroom, but suddenly he realized that she was asking about the Doctor’s new direction. “Truthfully, I don’t know. I’m inclined to stay. How many people get to see mythical places that most folks don’t even believe in? Still, I haven’t completely made up my mind yet. What about you? Have they made arrangements to get you to a rehab facility?”

She shook her head. “I’m not goin’. I’m sthayin’ wight here.”

“You shouldn’t! You need a lot more than they can give you here!”

“I don’t need what sthey can’t gimme heah. Moth of uth ah gonna sthay. The captives, that ith.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. Maybe justh becauth what sthey did t’us hath gotta mean thumething…”

He stayed a bit longer, but they finally ordered him out. Her therapy was constant and computer controlled and monitored and couldn’t be interrupted. He accepted that, and, walking back towards his quarters, he had to think about her and the others.

He was surprised that the medtechs and the psych computers agreed with them that they should not be transferred. The Mountain was their home; they were, in effect, natives. This ship represented the only safety and security they could possibly imagine. To throw them out against their will might make psychological rehabilitation impossible. Then you were into mindwipes, and that was something everybody tried to avoid at all costs.

And, in point of fact, most of them didn’t care if they lived or died anyway.

Robey was beginning to think that he’d already made his own decision, too.