Balshazzar's Serpent

VII: MOUNTAIN MOVES FAITHS

The question really was, when was faith truly faith and when was it a synonym for doing something stupid? How many cult types in human history had jumped off cliffs or taken poison because they were convinced it was the act of faith God wanted?

It was so easy to go through these problems in classes, to imagine yourself in this or that position, but it was like contemplating death: you knew it was possible, but there was always the chance that an exception might be made.

The one problem with martyrs was that they were all dead.

Not that she didn’t believe in God with all her heart, but her group taught that it wasn’t as simple as that. Believing wasn’t enough; you had to act on that belief, and you had to do it without God’s instructions from the omnipresent parallel dimensions called Heaven. Get it wrong, and you wind up with all the cultists of history in that other set of extra-dimensional ether some called Hell.

If she spit food back in the faces of her captors next feeding, would it mean martyrdom or degradation?

The pirate leader seemed almost disappointed by the lack of real resistance. Captain Morgudan Sapenza had actually attended all but the last of the Doctor’s lectures, and he’d been quite impressed with the old patriarch. Sapenza hadn’t been raised Christian, but there was a lot to like in the old man’s tough and gritty brand of it, and some good common sense as well. His mother had believed in seven Heavens and nine Hells; his father allowed as how there might be something else to life but that it wasn’t worth looking at because all it did was cramp your style. He was his father’s child, and always had been.

He finished off a beer and lit a cigar. He knew the damned things were bad for people but he’d gotten this far and that was pretty far indeed, at least until he’d wound up against this damned dirt ball of a wall.

There was suddenly an awful commotion down one tunnel and everybody’s hands went to their sidearms, but it was soon clear that it was just a woman with a really big mouth almost hysterical about something.

“What is it?” he shouted to the woman as she tried to shake off restraining hands and run right to him. “Let her go!”

She ran up to him. “The children, sir! The children from Village Nine!”

“What about them?”

“They came this morning and they took them! Took them all away to their big ship! Troopers with guns, not holy folks in robes!”

He sat up. “Just calm down. Sit, get a drink. We’ll take care of this!”

Now she allowed herself to be taken away, and he started to think hard. He hadn’t expected this. These people were after his own heart. They thought ugly.

He had only pragmatic regard for the kids; he had none himself that he knew of, but some of his people had them and they wouldn’t be easy to control if their kids were suddenly taken up to a Holy Joe education never to be seen again. It was time to start playing the hand he’d dealt. “Megak! Tollya! Front and center!” he called in an authoritative tone.

Two ragged-looking members of the band, one male, one female, came over to him and waited expectantly.

“We haven’t gotten any would-be martyrs or principled sacrificial lambs, it seems,” he said, “so we’re just gonna have to use what we got and pick a couple at random. Tollya, go to the nearest holding pen and pick some woman at random. Meg, you do the same with one of the men. Keep ’em sedated, treat them like your worst enemies, because from what I saw they’re probably very well trained and could break your necks if given half a chance.”

“Sure, Cap,” Meg replied. “But where do we take ’em?”

“Clinic. We got a few leeches left, and we may as well use a couple. Just make sure they don’t break ’em. We can’t spare them.”

Megak grinned. “Leeches, huh? Why don’t you let me pick the woman and let her pick the guy? Get better results.”

“Never mind that! I don’t want them harmed, just leeched. I’m gonna have to talk to this Doctor and I think he’s one tough son of a bitch. They also got a few people up there with full combat gear. Three or four of them could wipe us out if they could find us and their people. You keep that in mind, too! The odds are we’re gonna suffer for this, but it was take a chance or learn to love wheat threshing. Now—go! They’re starting to pick up their own hostages, and we can lose some real support at our backs as well as much of the village if we don’t get cracking!” He turned to a woman standing by. “You contact that Doctor. You tell ’em we’ll talk in—oh, make it an hour. I don’t want this to drag on, and that should be enough time for the leeches to set in.”

“Right away, sir!”

“Gerta—use human runners from outside town. Do not use any comm links. Not yet. They’ll be ready to pounce on the slightest transmission.”

He’d hoped to be able to use the hostages’ own links, but they apparently had a receiver implanted. Not practical if you wanted to use it yourself. He thought a moment. Or was it? Wouldn’t the pair he would have with him be perfectly okay for that?

The native woman came in and looked around, as if thinking about something, or perhaps judging each of the hostages on some unknown level. Finally she looked at Eve, who was closest to her and to the cave opening, shrugged, and gestured for two very large men with a crude wooden cart to enter. “May as well take that one,” said the woman, pointing to Eve. “She’s small and light and nearest the exit.”

Eve wasn’t sure whether this was a good or a bad thing. Certainly unhooking her from the wall and harness was both excruciatingly painful and wonderful at one and the same time, but she was then placed, still bound, on the small cart. One of the men pulled it, while the other man and the woman made certain she stayed on the wooden bed.

They went through the small complex of modern-style cubicles built, or rather stacked, along both sides of a wide cavern within the cave, and she felt both ashamed that they could see her nakedness and yet curiously detached from it. It was hard to think about such things and be that concerned about them; she hadn’t broken, but she was very much on the edge.

Down one of the caves that led out of the cavern complex, and into a “room” that was certainly carved out of a much smaller natural opening but was anything but natural now. It looked quite familiar in its basics—a clinic, not the kind of place you went for major operations or diagnostics but the kind of place you went when you just felt a bit off or had a splinter you couldn’t get out of your finger, that kind of thing.

It did, however, have a fully reclining surgical bed that had seen better days and perhaps better years. It looked as if the entire population had used it repeatedly, and it had been inexpertly reupholstered far too many times. Still, it served. A medic, or at least somebody in a medic’s gray tunic, came over, gave her a cursory examination while still on the cart with a diagnostic wand, checked a few readings, and then picked up a small pressure syringe. He set the dosage and then injected whatever it was into her behind. She didn’t feel it, not even the pressure of the thing against her skin. She was that numb.

Within a minute she was drifting off, the residual pain ebbing away, and she felt some relief and a pleasant feeling of floating through the clouds.

Once she was unconscious, they undid her chains and the two big men straightened her out, something that would have produced unbearable agony had she not been sedated. Now they lay her on the surgical bed and the medic performed a far more extensive series of tests.

“You all can go now, prepare the male. This won’t take long,” the medic told them. “However, you should tell the Captain that neither one of them are likely to be physically able to walk for some time.”

“He won’t like that,” one of the men warned.

The medic shrugged. “Then he shouldn’t truss them up like this. You can’t get full muscular function back easily or quickly after such abuse any more than you can stop a storm by telling it to not get you wet. If reality was like that then he could just will the damned crashed ship to fix itself and take off. Now, go.”

“You sure she’s not gonna wake up and maybe do some harm in here?” the woman asked.

“Were you listening? Odds are this girl couldn’t lift her arms or walk two feet at the moment. I’m sure if we had a full ship’s hospital we could do wonders, but we don’t even have a real doctor here, so forget it. Besides, the shot I gave her is good for an hour or more at her weight. My only danger from her is if I spend that hour talking to you and then turn my back on her.”

With that, they left, leaving him to his business.

There was bruising and cramping for sure, but nothing that couldn’t be overcome if she went through a series of exercises over the next day or so. Without the automatic machines to do that, though, he could only rely on the leech.

He had often wondered who had invented the ghastly things, and he was sure that he never wanted to meet them. They certainly were an unfinished product. An artificial parasite, programmable, controllable, and knowledgeable about the human nervous system. He pulled down the full body probe and passed it over her from head to foot, then back again. The data piled up in the medical computer he normally used to see about internal injuries and breaks and the like and gave a three-dimensional hologram of the woman. He could even spot the implants in her head and admired the workmanship. If only they had that kind of skill!

Then he reached into a drawer and pulled out a small sealed container. There weren’t many in there, and there were no more when these were gone. He put the container directly into a special socket made for it in the medlab computer console, and said, “Download human schematic.” What the probes had learned, which was quite a lot, was compressed, condensed, and passed down to the leech.

The damned things scared him a bit, not so much for what they did but for what they probably could do in their finished, polished form which must be perfected by now somewhere in the human side of colonization. This thing could turn a complex human into a far simpler machine. Very limited usefulness, really. He could imagine, though, that whatever mad scientist or madder government or agency had been working on these must by now have one that fused with and reprogrammed the host. You’d seem the same, but you’d be always totally loyal to the leader, you would be obedient to all law and authority, and you’d turn in your own mother if she deviated. And that would be just for starters. This was bad enough, but at least it was basic and as easy to recover as to implant.

Maybe somebody had blown up the gates going back to the Mother System. Maybe they didn’t want a virus of slavery spreading so quickly. That sure would explain the Great Silence.

He turned her over on her side a bit. She gave a mumbled protest but didn’t awaken, and he didn’t need very much area. He looked over, saw green, and removed the container from the programming slot, then turned it and positioned it just so against her neck. When he had the exact spot he wanted, he pushed a small switch at the end of the container. The thing quivered, and something small and black and sluglike went from the container into her body at that point. He withdrew the container, noted the clean but small and almost antiseptic-looking wound, got some cotton and alcohol and cleaned it off, then patched it with artificial skin. In a few hours there would be no trace of it unless you were looking for it, and even most medical diagnostics would miss the leech as it virtually merged with the spinal column just at the back of the head where it emerged from the brain. And you’d need the code and the container to transmit it to get the thing out.

One of the men who’d brought her in came back. “You all done, Doc?”

“As much as I can right now. I want you to take her to the recovery area, lie her flat, and find and bring me her robe and put it in there. Make sure there’s nothing in it, of course.”

“Oh, they all been stripped. Kind of a shame, though. You gonna dress her? I mean, she looks—”

“Never mind. There’s enough of that around as it is. We want control, nothing more. When you’ve done that, bring in the male.”

I’ve been here too long, the medic told himself. I’m beginning to care again.

For Eve, it was like coming out of a sweet, motherly embrace back to a colder and harsher consciousness. Still, there was no pain, and perhaps for good reason. She found herself barely able to feel much of anything at all, almost like she’d been bathed in some painkilling lotion that had made her skin dead and nonreceptive.

She was lying on her back on a basic straw mattress, and that was interesting. She tried moving, but nothing at all seemed to work. It was as if she were paralyzed; perfectly awake, but unable to move or even feel much of anything at all.

The thought brought momentary panic. What if they had paralyzed her? It didn’t take much—you learned that in martial arts classes. Naturally, when The Mountain was whole and everything and everybody was on ship’s routine you could use the medical labs there and grow new connections, but down here, like this, it was a particularly frightening idea.

The big men wheeled in another figure, this time a man, and for a moment she was afraid that it was John Robey. She tried to move her head to see, but she simply couldn’t. She was blinking, she was breathing, even swallowing as needed or required, but she could control nothing at all.

They’d put him next to her, so it wasn’t possible to see much beyond his legs and feet. He was a hairy guy, anyway, and appeared to be, well, large if that which was partly glimpsed was what she thought it was. Still, there was no way to even tell when or if he was awake, let alone communicate with him. It was as frustrating as the cave where they’d been chained, although, she had to admit, less painful.

The medic came in after a few minutes and examined each of them professionally and clinically, top to bottom. She was somewhat embarrassed by this but could hardly protest. What good would it have done had she been able to, anyway? This was the man who’d paralyzed them both, wasn’t it?

He finished, stood back, and unclipped a small rod-shaped device from a utility belt and held it like a small portable microphone. He pressed two buttons on the side and then said into it, “Legs up in the air, backs flat against the bed.”

To her complete astonishment, her legs went straight up vertical to her hips and held there.

“Legs together. Yes, that’s right,” he continued. “Now, because I know you know what this means, I want you to use only the legs and do a bicycle movement with both. Slowly, now. Yes, that’s good.”

In both their cases, their legs were going back and forth as if riding some sort of imaginary bicycle or exercise machine. What was amazing to her was that she barely felt it, and had nothing to do with it.

“Excellent. Keep doing that at that rate. Back remaining flat, arms up in the air parallel to the legs. Now close fists. Bring the arms down bending at the elbows until the elbows touch the bed. Good. Now raise the arms up and at the same time open your hands completely and rapidly wiggle all your fingers. Good. Now repeat that action until I tell you to stop.”

It was effortless exercise, but also frightening. Whatever this man told them to do, they had to do! How elaborate it was she couldn’t imagine, but it was a kind of torture she might have imagined a demon to wield. But, of course, demons misused technology better than anyone, didn’t they?

While there was still the overriding numbness, there were twinges here and there in both the arms and the legs, which told her that the pain that created them must really be horrible.

The medic nodded. “You may stop now. Arms down at your sides, hands flat against your sides, legs down in rest.” He did a physical check of both of them again, and seemed satisfied.

In fact, the medic was surprised. They were in far better shape than he’d expected, or than he or most others here would be after this long in those restraints. The Captain might well be able to use them in fairly short order.

What a pity it would be to hand the controller over, though. This kind of thing might be worrisome but it gave such a rush! Power always beat every drug he’d tried.

“Well,” he sighed, “since you’re in such good shape, let’s see how good.” He brought the small tube near his mouth and she could see that he was actually holding down the buttons. Apparently one was her, one was him, and both buttons in operated both of them at once. “Arms vertical, hands forward, fingers closed,” he instructed. “Now, sit up and try and touch your toes.”

The first couple of tries she couldn’t do it; then, with an effort she could feel, she rose up and, with several rocking motions, managed to touch her toes. Since she had nothing to do with the operation, she tried to see if the man was doing it, too. If so, he wasn’t to her stage yet.

She could hear him breathing heavily, and then there was a mighty heave and he managed it, more or less, although he couldn’t keep his fingers on the toes. It was very possible, though, that he couldn’t before they’d done this to him. Different people were assembled in different ways.

“Very well, now arms at rest, pivot to your right on your ass and sit with your legs dangling over the side of the bed.”

She found herself doing it, although it required a little bit of adjustment. She was now facing the young man, who was in fact quite handsomely put together but still sitting with his arms reaching to his toes. He looked familiar, but not anybody of her age or classes and not anyone she’d worked with before.

The medic repeated the instructions but with a turn to the left rather than the right, but she found that they had no effect on her, only on him, as he pivoted and then sat facing her. There was some life, and recognition, in the eyes, but little else. Eye movement was automatic as needed, just like the use of the arms and hands for balance, but it was nothing either could control.

Walking proved more difficult, and the first time she’d been told to try it she’d had to reach out and grab the bed to keep from falling. Still, the medic kept at it, very professionally, until she managed to walk across the room to the wall, turn, and walk back to the bed. Her companion had even more trouble, but managed eventually to get it, too.

She wasn’t a really large woman, and both of these men were unusually tall; her companion in misery must have had twenty centimeters on her, and probably thirty kilos as well. The medic was even slightly taller than the Arm man, but thinner. Still, her level of total helplessness was compounded by standing there feeling dwarfed by the company. She had never felt so totally helpless in her life.

Well, Lord, if you are testing me, help me to pass my test, she prayed to the only one who could help her at that moment.

He had them do knee-bends and push-ups and several other exercises to check them out, but when it became easy and virtually effortless to do what he instructed, he tired of the game. It was clear that they were in remarkably good shape, even if visibly bruised where the chains and restraints had held them.

It was also becoming clear that whatever had been used to turn them into nothing more than automatons had serious limits in the number and complexity of instructions that would work with them. Simple things, from “Walk forward” and “Stop” to the slightly more complex “Follow me” worked fine, but any complex series of actions had to be told one instruction at a time and then combined into a sequence that would then be repeated ad nauseam. Even “Mop the floor” was tricky, since without any judgment they would just keep mopping the floor interminably until told to stop. If you couldn’t simply define when and where to stop, it didn’t work out. Still, she had to wonder if some of the limits weren’t more than enough.

What would happen if they were told to take these guns and go back to the ship and then shoot anybody they saw who was with the Doctor? She wasn’t sure there wasn’t a stepped sequence of orders that would allow that to be done.

She also had to wonder how long it might be before she was sexually violated. It seemed to her that these kind of people would be unable to not do that, sooner or later, when they had somebody like her who couldn’t resist. Particularly because the medic would have discovered right off in his probe that although the subject was well into her twenties she was still a virgin.

The same sort of thoughts had kept going through the medic’s own mind as he got them into condition to do whatever the Captain had in mind, but, damn it, he couldn’t and hope to still wake up the next day. Not now, not yet, and certainly not without the Captain and Committee’s permission.

It was time to hand these two over and at least get a pat on the head for being competent.

And the Captain was pleased. Very much so. He sensed the medic’s reluctance to give up the control stick, which was simply one of the leech containers set up to control up to four units from one panel, but he also understood it and grinned. “Maybe later. We have a lot of girls we can have fun with.”

“Not like that one,” the medic replied. “At least, not with more than four more without doing extractions and reprogramming. Oh—and I brought their robes. Didn’t bother to put ’em on yet, though.”

“Save it. I had been thinking along one set of lines, but now that I see these two I think perhaps I’ll go a different direction. What could be more intimidating and frightening to Woodward’s bunch than to see two of their own naked and totally obedient to the bad guys? They might even think that the rest of them were that way, too, and since they probably wouldn’t know the method they have no way of knowing if we can’t do it to everybody. A little misdirection and your mark’s ignorance of your own capabilities can do wonders.”

“I dunno,” the medic sighed.

“Eh? What?”

“They sure as hell know we can’t get off this rock without ’em.”

The Captain looked like he was going to have one of his infamous and dangerous flashes of serious temper, but he caught himself right off. “That’s okay, Doc. Trust me on this one. Go now. I’ll take it from here. But, if you like her looks, hell, if it don’t go well you can have your fun.”

The medic gave a slight shrug and left.

The Captain came up to them and walked around them, examining them from head to toe as if they were some kind of strange animals or specimens. He’d used leeches before, but rarely in recent years. Too much chance of them getting broken. He’d paid dear for these decades ago on the black market in Ceberan and he never felt he’d been cheated.

He dreamed often of Ceberan, its vast bazaars and haunts and other pleasures, and what they could give to anyone who had something of serious value to trade.

Fate had played a nasty trick on him since then, giving him the address to riches beyond all his wildest dreams and then marooning him here, hiding from the others who knew not what he knew but only that he knew. After almost thirty years on this dirt ball ruling over a bunch of yokels, he was desperate to get out, to get anywhere but here.

It was still going to be damned tough. The only saving grace was that it should be easier with a loopy and tough evangelist than with a Navy cruiser or, worst case of all, some of his old comrades. Friendships died awful easy when you had the goods. A lot of his friends had died pitifully easy at his hand for those very same goods, in this case a piece of information.

“Follow me, you two,” he said into the controller. “Walk behind me but walk where I walk and stop or turn when I turn.”

He walked over to one of the lower cubicles, one on the end of the big row, and they followed him dutifully, unable to do much else.

For the next hour, the Captain prepared them. He was used to giving orders to subordinates to carry out, yet here he did not wish to relinquish the control rod at all and thus he was an active overseer.

The quarters were more like those of an officer aboard a ship than a real home, but the unit actually had running water and a small sit-down sort of ship’s shower installed. He had the male slave lather and wash her completely off, and then she him, and, lastly, she also was commanded to do the Captain. He was a bit more imaginative at that point than she’d expected, and Eve feared that this was where he was going to go into her. He didn’t, but he did force some oral acts that she found repugnant even as she did as ordered.

After, he fed both of them from a private stock that apparently came from far on the eastern side of the continent, but which was very well preserved. They were tubular fruit and a kind of thick gruel in a bowl eaten with a spoon, but they appeared to be sufficiently nutritious, washed down with a blend of some sort that was thick but filling and also quenched thirst. He clearly wanted them well prepared for whatever he intended to do.

Eve felt totally alone, totally helpless and humiliated, and she knew that the poor guy who shared her fate probably felt the same way, but, still, she had to admit, she was very curious as to how this bastard thought kidnapping even a hundred of the Arm would get the Doctor to move one millimeter. The Doctor got mad, and sometimes he got even, but he just about never compromised.

That didn’t necessarily cheer her up. It pretty much implied that she was going to be stuck down here with these monsters permanently.

“Please, sir! He’s my only child! He did nothing to you or your people! He’s only a little boy!”

The woman’s agony was apparent in her face and her trembling and tears, but Karl Woodward understood that the reason why the small group of all women had been sent was because they would be the best way to tug at his conscience and his heartstring. And, to an extent, they did just that—he could understand what they were going through.

Still, he knew that the children were not only in no danger, they were having the best meal and playing with the most toys of any point in their lives, and they were being carefully looked after. The older kids were being held apart from the small ones, but in a theater-type setting with, again, toys appropriate for their ages, holographic entertainment modules with content suited to their age groups, and, hell, even an automated beauty and makeover station from the makeup department. With the older ones all girls, this was a very popular place.

They also had good meals, good tasting drinks, and ice cream and candy. Heck, the kids were in a little heaven and probably mostly worried that it was all going to end too soon.

These moms and grandmas, though, they didn’t know that, and that was what kept him firm, stern, and all business.

“Stop all this wailing!” he shouted to them in that Voice of the Almighty he could call upon when preaching and teaching. Most of them stopped, or at least wound down to sniffles.

“Now, the first thing we’re gonna do here is get some things straight,” he thundered. “Over eighty of my people were kidnapped last night, kidnapped even though they’d done nothing but help you and your villages and shown you kindness and Christian charity. For all I know they may be dead, or tortured, or worse. And some of it was with your doing. Village women, not these Pirates of Belial! Laughing village women at that! Want to see the recordings? Maybe I can match faces to faces here. Didn’t know our cameras saw in the dark, did you? I can see it in your faces! So, I wondered, if they can take my young people and laugh, then what can I take from them to shut off this laughter? And then it struck me! I can take their children to replace the ones you’ve taken!”

There was more wailing and gnashing of teeth and sobbing; he almost felt like he was in some kind of Biblical scene. What he didn’t hear was confession, contrition, or much else.

“Now we can trade them back, or not. Your choice. And your problem. You have no concept of how huge a ship I’ve got up there. This is a mere lifeboat!” That wasn’t true, but it was only a tenth of the complex. He and Cromwell and the rest of the Elders had spent all of the night before praying that they didn’t blow this, that they did it right, that there would be no loss of life and that they would foil Satan’s attack. He had to trust God after that, and play it out, have faith that his actions were God’s directions. Otherwise, he would have been living a lie.

Nevertheless, no matter how it turned out, Not my will, but thine, O Lord.

“Now, then,” he continued. “Let’s stop all the games. You and this planet have descended into the grip of Satan, who is wherever air is, as he is the Prince of the Power of the Air. You’ve sold your souls, and now you don’t seem to like living with the consequences. So, if you acted on instructions of the Father of Lies, then who gave you those instructions? The truth, now, and none of this minding my own business crap. We minded our own business and you attacked. Very well. Now you, your children, maybe this entire foul planet are my business. So you tell me exactly what I want to hear. You tell me who your people are, how they came here, why, and then why you threw in your lot with a bunch of shipwrecked pirates. Pick a spokeswoman and let her speak for all of you. You have certainly learned nothing from me or from God in the past week, else you would have approached me very differently. Now you stand before me as my enemy, both physical and spiritual. I will hear the truth!”

And, eventually, that’s what he believed he received.

They were called the Seeders. A few of the original members, now very old, were still alive, but most of them had been born later, after the group had raised just enough money for supplies and paid a none too reputable independent freighter for passage to a habitable region not on the standard charts.

This world, which they called simply the Foundation, was where their group had been brought. Quasi-religious, they were not truly of any specific faith but rather a generalized gathering of like-minded and unhappy souls looking for some way to start over and forget the rest of the universe. Their group was of a type historians called the Naturalist Movement, in which much of the advances of humankind over the ages was viewed as evil, negative; having virtually used up and fouled up the mother planet Earth beyond nature’s ability to repair, they saw the colonization movement as simply an extension of the same, to find all the pretty, natural worlds and screw them up, probably destroy them, as well. They would raise their families there in a natural way, promoting natural ways and harmony with the land and raising their children to think that way as well.

Like most such groups, they had been organized around a charismatic leader whom they called Mother Tymm. She must have been, in her own way, quite a character and dominant personality, and she received her marching orders through visions and dreams and trances. It was a curious mixture of traditional religions, old shamanlike spiritualism, and Oriental mysticism. It was said that she’d given the captain of that first freighter precise coordinates for them to have popped out here, even though this was at the end of a genhole network and had been forgotten and uncharted because it was established just as the Great Silence fell and things fell apart. That, too, Mother Tymm was supposed to have foreseen.

They set up the space defenses as best they could, but they’d even bought those on the economic level where they had no idea what they were getting or whether any of it would work or last. Then they’d established the main landing station, just to get things up and running, and Mother Tymm and a few of her councillors had left with the freighter promising to return quickly with additional seed and livestock and full title to this place as well as sufficient spare parts to keep the landing center active.

But she’d never returned, and, for almost a century, neither did anybody else. Without their leader and her closest advisors there wasn’t even a lot of organization, but they had a firm belief that, like Jesus and the Second Coming, Mother Tymm would someday, somehow, return. Until then, they abandoned what they could not support and ran the towns and the cottage industries and the farms the way she’d set them up.

They ultimately were discovered, but by a ragtag old tent evangelical group out wandering the stars and searching for Heaven. They hadn’t paid the group very much attention or taken them very seriously, and the ship they’d come in was much too small for any practical uses, and the evangelist hadn’t even heard of Mother Tymm, so they let him show up, gave him the cold shoulder, and he eventually took the hint and left. When that happened, somebody found and turned on the defense grid, such as it was.

Only a few years later a Franciscan priest and two nuns showed up in a ship even smaller and more austere than the evangelist’s. They refused to even allow them to land, but they tried coming in anyway. One of the defensive units managed to target them, and while it didn’t destroy them it made their ship inoperable. It came in at the wrong angle and burned up in the atmosphere. Those who’d warned them away said they heard them praying all the way down, and then they heard the screams before they were cut off. At that point several muscular types smashed the last of the system communications equipment.

That’s why they didn’t even know about the pirate vessel until it screamed through the atmosphere and overhead a bit over thirty years ago and crashed into the lake. Locals assumed, though, that the ship had been downed and destroyed by the same defense grid and felt a great deal of guilt about that.

But the ship hadn’t been harmed by the defense grid; its shields were in fairly good shape and the defense grid by that point was not. They also had begun to believe that the only people left with interstellar spacecraft were preachers and missionaries. They quickly found out that this latest group to come in had survived the crash, but not by prayers and hymns.

In point of fact, the newcomers’ ship had been badly shot up, and it was clearly on the run. Down and unable to repair it or get it back up, they had no choice but to sink it in the lake and then set up here until somebody else came along to get them out of there. They had no idea how long it would be.

The colonists originally helped them transfer their huge cargo, only to discover that once the newcomers decided to put it down in the extensive caverns and allow nothing of their technology to show, they also didn’t want anyone knowing just exactly how they’d set it up or just where they’d put it, so they massacred all the colonists who’d helped them, and everyone else in the district surrounding the lakeshore near the crash site. Then they irradiated the ground for kilometers around so that nothing, absolutely nothing, could be grown there, and thus there would be no more villages in the area.

And then, oddly, they struck a deal with the colonists who did not see or know of this at the time. They were hiding out, all things below ground, and there most of them would live and do whatever they wanted as well. They wanted to be as sure as they could be that any newcomers to Foundation would see only the original colonists. Some of them would also work with the locals, but more in the nature of advisors than fellow farmers. “Efficiency experts,” their leader called them.

They would harm no more villagers—everybody knew that their “tragic mistake” on landing was a lie, but the colonists could hardly do much about it and pragmatism was the best course—but would consume some of the food and drink as a “fee.” In return for that “fee,” they would train and allow the use of the complex learning system they had along with its practical library, which allowed much of the network of irrigation among other things to be improved and developed and which, also, gave their children an education and practical skills, and they would handle the one area most needed by the colonists: medical and pharmaceutical skills and goods. They also established a far more efficient and motorized underground trade route system so that foods that normally could never reach, say, the nearby village, would now be readily available and some could even be stored. Refrigeration units, power units, and the like from the ship were established underground for that purpose.

They mostly lived in this region because there were only a few hundred of them and because in this area the strata and oddities in the magnetic fields and other things the women didn’t understand made it possible for them to hide from the most sophisticated scanners.

But the thing that had brought everybody up short and made the alliance a willing one after some early roughness was the reason why they had been in a fight, and what they had that everyone else wanted.

A little piece of knowledge. Something stolen, most likely, but something among the most valuable snippets of knowledge in the entire known galaxy if truth be told.

Mother Tymm had prophesied from the start that even Foundation was but a way stop, a stepping stone. That the true Naturalists would actually meld with the forces of nature, the deities of the Garden, and that their children and grandchildren would walk and live in perfect harmony with nature and the natural and supernatural upon the world of Paradise among the Three Kings. And she’d further prophesied that this would come about from the Tree of Evil imparting to the Knowledge of Good, and that Darkness would take the Seeders to the Light.

“Are you telling me that this pirate leader claims to have the location of the Three Kings?” Karl Woodward responded, incredulous. Cromwell and some of the others behind him were beyond that and almost into derision. Every charlatan anybody ever met claimed to know the location of the Three Kings, and every cult and nut group and even some perfectly normal, natural, and straightforward political and religious groups always seemed to fall for it.

“And because of this prophecy you think that these men and women of darkness are the ones that are here to take you to the Three Kings?” the Doctor asked them.

They nodded. “And that is why we live with them and do as they say and protect them as they do what they must. We are sorry that it was you, but whoever it was becomes part of the prophecy, don’t you see? And they have kept their word to us for a very long time now.”

“But what makes you certain that they really know where the Three Kings are any more than we do?” Woodward pressed. “These people are in the grips of the Father of Lies.”

“We know, but Mother Tymm did not lie, and her prophecies came true. Something these people had, something real and physical, convinced those who made the bargain that this knowledge was there, and after that, since it was impractical to show it to everyone, there was and is a measure of faith involved. You spoke on just such a topic.”

“Physical proof? You’ve not seen this proof, though, or know what it might be if it really exists?”

“No, but we have Mother’s prophecies, in her own hand. We believe in them. They have always been the true guide.”

This was a rough one. Christians certainly weren’t the only members of a belief system that acted in faith, and the old Biblical axiom was that the test of a prophet was that his—or her—prophecies came true.

“I’d like to see and read the writings of this Mother Tymm,” he told them. “But, for now, I have a more immediate problem. Where are my people being held?”

“Honestly, sir, we don’t know,” the chief spokeswoman assured him. “We are not allowed in most of the cave complex, save the parts that are part of their bargain with us. The caves run forever, almost. Hundreds and hundreds of kilometers. And they have some slow but steady transport down there that can carry loads. Now and then they treat us to tropical fruits of a kind that we know some of the farthest villages can grow but which no one here has ever seen because they spoil long before they can get here by crindin wagons. They do not grow them below, so they must get them from those same villages, yet they are always just ripe. If they can cover that distance, and underground, in that short a time, then your people can be anywhere at all.”

Woodward sat back and sighed. Much of the history and background was now out in the open, but nothing else had changed. One shoe was on the pirates’ foot, the other was waiting for the scoundrels’ to drop. If they went into the caves in full combat armor following the ferrets then people would die, some of the combat gear might even be lost due to clashes with who knew what sort of weapons, and, in the end, you could only find hostages dead using the brute force method.

They still had to continue to drill holes in likely areas and send the ferrets in and hope they got lucky. Until then, they would have to wait for the bastards on the other side to make a move.

“Sir?” the chief spokeswoman for the group called out.

“Yes?”

“Our children—what about the children?”

“Nothing has changed, at least not yet,” he reminded them. “What happens to the children depends entirely on what this spawn of Hell hiding appropriately below decides to do next.”

He suspected that they wouldn’t have long to wait, and he was right.