Kaspar's Box

XII: KASPAR’S BOX

At one hundred and eighty kilometers above the planet-sized moon, the instrumentation and cameras could do an excellent job. If somebody had stopped off there and left graffiti on a rock, they could read it. The trick was noticing the rock in the first place.

It was a forbidding-looking place in any event. The residual heat from the big and still officially unnamed mother planet plus pressure deep under its oceans, freezing around the coasts but still liquid for most of their expanse, allowed it to maintain a barely habitable temperature during its long semi-night, but it just gave an even more eerie look to the place.

“Not any signs of glaciation,” Nagel noted, feeling a sense of deja vu as he looked once more on the forbidding little world and said much the same to a new but at least more appreciative audience. “It must melt pretty good on the sunward leg. Lots of erosion in the regions against the mountains, but the main land masses have been so chewed up they’re just cold powdery desert. Those dunes and that wind would make it even nastier. And we thought that overrun colony’s choice of worlds was bad!”

“Atmospheric content?” Maslovic asked.

Darch checked the figures. “Very cold at the moment and dry as a bone, but the oxygen and hydrogen mix is within limits. I wouldn’t like to do it without a breather just to keep the grit from choking you, but the air would be okay. I don’t know what we’d eat, though, and any fresh water in those big lakes would take a fission reactor to properly melt for use. It’s probably as ugly but very different on the solar traverse. No way to tell until we can see it, and that’s still almost fifteen standard days, I think.”

“The subsurface scan will show you what we found,” Nagel told him. “Nobody’s dumb enough to live up here, but that’s not the only place to live.”

“It’s honeycombed, a vast cavernous system down there,” Darch noted. “Most of the interior caverns, some of which seem to go way down, appear to be relatively dry, and those figures there just might indicate some running water even at this point. That’s how you survive the cold cycle. Ten to one the caves maintain an above freezing temperature that’s either constant or nearly so. The surface is only comfortable half the year. Odd, though.”

“I’m sure you’ve already seen what we saw in the makeup there,” Nagel commented, kind of needling the tech.

“Yes, I see what you mean,” Darch responded, oblivious to the dig. “Caverns of that signature tend to be sedimentary rock, easily eroded away over time by the underground rivers and streams, and certainly all the makings are there for a classic setup. Note, though, that there are no such caverns within a hundred or more kilometers of the coastlines. They’re away from the oceans and in the highlands no matter where you look. There doesn’t seem to be a major change in bedrock composition in most of those cases that would explain it. The planet’s got a heavy but mostly solid core that’s maintained the gravity and kept the atmosphere, but a lot of the underground water doesn’t seem to obey the laws all that well. It’s probably scrambled data from all this interference, but on the face of it, it seems like as many of those deep rivers are flowing upward as are flowing downslope.”

“Yeah, I noticed the uphill flow when we were first here,” Nagel told him. “We never did figure it out. Li thought it was caused by pressure, using some of the caverns like pipes.”

“Interesting. Plumbing for a race driven from the surface? Fascinating concept, but we’re getting heavy organics but nothing that would suggest a civilization or even a big colony that would justify building works like that. If our master aliens are down there, then they’re probably long dead or reduced to a primitive existence. This is a planet you can survive on, it’s not one you ever want to try and live and work on if you don’t have to.”

“That’s why we thought the place wasn’t as interesting as it first looked.”

“Perhaps, but the fact is that the entire Three Kings is an artificial construct.” Darch saw their stares. “Somebody built them, and this whole thing, and is maintaining it. That’s more than enough down there for a maintenance base.”

“We’re coming up on the wreck,” Randi Queson put in. “We were all excited by it, I remember, since we hadn’t seen all the life on the other two yet. It’s still impressive, though. There! See?”

It did look very much like an artificial structure, but not for humans. It also gave off virtually no power signatures, meaning that it either used a power system unknown to them and therefore unmeasurable or, more likely, it was a derelict from times long past, covered and then uncovered by the shifting sands.

It was a huge ball shape, perhaps three hundred meters across, sticking out of the sand. It was light gray in color, and all over its surface it had short probelike protrusions. A close-up didn’t reveal much more about it, but it did reveal at least one clear breach of the hull or exterior or whatever it was. A jagged hole, half in the sand and possibly anchoring it there.

“That’s been down there a while,” Darch noted. “You can smell it as a long-term derelict, an ancient shipwreck. Sure, you wonder if any of ’em survived and, if so, did they manage to set up something permanent down there, but it’s a long shot. More telling is that it’s there at all, and that there’s good evidence it’s been buried by the sands and winds several times, and maybe baked and thawed as well on the sunward side. Good bait, though, for the curious.”

“Not a bad spot to visit, either, if they’ve gotten the shuttle cleaned up,” Maslovic noted. “If they’re putting that thing there to attract visitors, why not, well, visit?”

“Maybe because it could be a trap?” Murphy suggested.

“Could be. Let’s see… I’ve got full suits for my team, and most of you can fit into them, but Ann, it’s going to be a very loose fit.”

“I’ve had your computerized shops working on modifications as we approached,” the strange woman responded. “I think you’ll find there’s one that’s just my size.”

Maslovic was now positive who he had aboard. Now all he had to do was decide whether or not he liked it. Certainly he felt as if he could handle it.

“Okay, then. Surface team… Might as well make this a political thing; it sure doesn’t seem like we’re going to do battle down there, or that it would do us much good if we could. That makes it me in the lead, Ann of Balshazzar, Cap if you want to try it, and Nagel and Queson of Melchior. Bring one of the stones each but we won’t distribute until we’re away from the ship. The rest stay locked and secure so our little girls won’t have the run of the place while we’re gone.”

“I would like to come as well,” Joshua put in.

Maslovic was surprised. “You joining the team?”

“I am in the service of the one who killed Macouri,” he told them. “Besides, I have nowhere else to go.”

“Okay. That makes a pretty awful military team but a good science and muscle blend. Draw your suits and check your equipment, suit up, and be outside Bay One in an hour. My own team, who are showing really nasty looks at me at the moment, will be backup. We’re not going in blasting here. I have a feeling that this is pretty close to the group whoever it is down there would want invited.”

“Not at all by the book,” Ann muttered. “About what I’d expect of an intelligence man.”

The fit for the suits, including Ann’s, was quite good. Nobody there would have to face the elements, nor go in cold. All also had sidearm weapons, but it was understood that those were a last resort and Maslovic had a cutoff. If anyone got too nervous, he could stop them from shooting.

They decided on the alien spaceship simply because it was so prominent. Anyone who actually landed would be almost forced to check it out and, for that reason alone, it seemed to be the logical place to start.

Nobody said much on the way down. Joshua took it slow and easy on manual and put it down about a hundred meters from the alien wreck, which seemed even more ghostly and bizarre close up.

“Okay, you can expose your stones to the outside,” Maslovic told them. “Let’s see if they act as old Kaspar’s candy and bring the natives for a treat.”

“Yeah, us,” Murphy said gloomily. It was too dark, too barren, and too alien for him.

Queson and Nagel finally got to examine the wreck close up. It was gigantic, and much of the interior that had stayed intact didn’t make a lot of sense, but clearly it was what it appeared to be. What had come in it? How long had it been since they’d crashed here, and where were they or their descendants now? These questions had no obvious answers.

After several hours of surveying the wreck and the surrounding area, though, it appeared that they had guessed wrong.

“We’re going to have to pack it up and move, folks,” Maslovic told them, gathering them around him against the eerie backdrop of the ruined ship. “This is getting us nowhere. I propose we try one of the low cave entrances. There appears to be illumination just inside, so maybe we’ll have to go knocking.”

They all agreed, turned to go back to the shuttle for the move, and stopped dead in their tracks.

How long the creatures had been there it was impossible to say. They didn’t show up as a recognized life-form on any of the instruments, yet they had something of a familiar look. And, Ann noted, they were even smaller than she was.

There were six of them, one for each of the humans it was supposed, and they looked identical.

In one sense, they were humanoid. Less than a meter tall, they stood on two thick trunklike legs with massively oversized feet and they had two arms ending in equally outsized hands, three fingers and an opposable thumb that extended opposite the index finger rather than at the end of the hand. Their heads were hairless balls, with two big, round black dots for eyes flanking either side of what seemed to be a massive nose that began almost at the top of the head and extended down and out to the waist, sausage-shaped but with a number of tiny pits at the end rather than a single large pair of openings. Two outsized floppy ears, one on each side of the head, completed the look, as well as earth-tone tunics and pants, leatherlike floppy boots, and light brown gloves.

Most important, each wore a ring on the middle finger that clearly contained one of the Magi stones.

“Silica based,” Nagel commented, checking his readings. “Definitely not the natives here.”

One of the little creatures stepped out from the others and looked at each of the humans in turn. The huge round eyes captured and reflected the pale light, but there was no question that it was examining each of them in turn. Finally, it raised one oversized gloved hand and, with its index finger, it pointed in turn to several of them. Ann, and Maslovic, Queson and Nagel, and then, after a thoughtful pause, it pointed to Joshua and to Murphy. With a dismissive wave, it made absolutely clear that those were the only ones it wanted, period.

“I wonder what would happen if the squad followed us, no matter what the big-nosed bastard wants?” Maslovic mused aloud.

“I don’t think they’d get very far,” Ann responded matter-of-factly. “Any group or power that can keep several high-tech masses on a world by negating their technology and who can play the kind of games they’ve played so far isn’t likely to be overcome by a show of force. These things, or whoever or whatever they serve, most likely built these three worlds and rearranged the furniture of this less than hospitable solar system to maintain it. I don’t know about the other worlds, but you have no idea how advanced one of the other alien colonies is on Balshazzar. They were nonetheless as helpless as we were.”

“Are,” Randi Queson reminded her. “I feel about as empowered at the moment as I did sealed in the control room of our salvage station on a different world far from here, hoping that something very alien couldn’t find a crack to ooze through. I have this nasty feeling that I’ve been here before.”

Although the surveys had shown a vast network of caves beneath the surface and some wide entrances to them, the little gnome surprised them by simply going over to what seemed to be a barren rocky knob, which proved to be an artificial hatch of some sort that began to open, first with a hissing sound, then a rush of steam. When the steam floated off into the cold atmosphere of Kaspar, they discovered that it had emerged from a steep set of stairs going down beyond their point of view into the heart of Kaspar. The stairway seemed carved or fabricated out of a single unbroken rock wall and was also scaled better for the gnome than for the much larger party of visitors, but it was manageable. The gnome had no hesitation and jumped in, taking the stairs at a good clip. The humans were much slower, but, one by one, they managed to get down into the hole and, with the aid of a suddenly visible thin but sturdy hand rail, were able to make it, single file.

The top of the stair was also icy, which they hadn’t expected, but the condition didn’t last long and caused only minor discomfort in spite of the depth of the passage. When the last of the party had descended below the surface, the hatch closed behind them and there was another hissing sound as if sealing an airlock, followed by a deep rumble from far below and a rush of much warmer air into the stairwell.

“Temperature’s going up,” Jerry Nagel noted. “This may be comfortable in a little while.” It was already in the mid-twenties Celsius, and the humidity level was going from moist to tropical in a hurry.

“Maybe uncomfortable in a few minutes more,” Ann noted. “I think these little people like hot and wet. I am already thinking of Dante’s Inferno.” Sensing that nobody else seemed to understand the reference, she added, “He was the author of an account, widely believed at the time, of his walking trip to Hell. It went from dull and boring to boiling and beyond.”

“Ah, that’s what I thought you might be thinkin’ of,” Captain Murphy responded, already beginning to sound tired and breathing a little heavily. “And the devil himself was at the bottom, as I recall, chewin’ on the worst sinner of all.”

“Well,” Ann responded, “let us hope that the similarities don’t end there. Dante, after all, walked out of the place safe and sound.”

“I’m just wondering if these little people built all this, or are the natives here?” Nagel said. “They don’t look like planet builders.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” Ann cautioned. “On Melchior we met some creatures that seemed incapable of much at all, yet they were as smart or smarter than we, had built and flown their own spaceships here, and had created quite advanced colonies. One of them saved my life. That in spite of their having lost any belief system they might have had long before they were stuck there, and being pretty cynical. Doctor Woodward is a challenge for them. They have been trying to argue him out of his faith and he’s been trying to convince them of the reality of his for decades now.”

“Any progress?” Queson asked, curious, but also pleased to have something to take her mind off the fact that they were rapidly descending into a place that might not allow them out.

“He has them very worried,” Ann told her. “But they are aliens in more ways than we can imagine. Not even humanoids like these little creatures here. Before you can successfully argue you have to be very clear as to the terminology you can use, and that what you think you are saying is what the other is receiving. We all think that is what’s been going on here as well. The ones behind the Three Kings want to get to know all of us very well.”

“The question there is to what end?” Maslovic noted.

Funny, Randi Queson thought after the exchange. None of us have even considered the idea that these funny little creatures might be the masters. I wonder what that says about all of us?

They reached, if not bottom, at least the bottom of the passage after a few minutes and looked out on a vast cave complex that seemed to stretch and branch in so many directions it was hard to understand how the surface of the moon kept itself from caving in. There was little wonder why the surface had resembled Swiss cheese in the survey scans. The odd-shaped pillars seemed too thin and flimsy to support the whole structure, yet they had to be doing so.

The caverns certainly weren’t dark, either. The whole place had a kind of fluid texture, as if it were wet and glistening, yet to the touch it was merely cool and somewhat smooth in feel. Randi thought of it as “soapy,” although she couldn’t quite say why.

It was, however, a radiator of ghostly light, mostly a dull yellow but occasionally almost lime green or light red. There were spots where the light seemed to run in threads, or veins, creating eerie abstract patterns on the walls, floor, and ceiling, yet visibility was never poor.

They encountered large numbers of the gnomes now, off on some mysterious errand or another; it wasn’t clear what they did, or why. They moved with little sound in the caverns even though noise tended to amplify and echo, and not once had any of them uttered a word or so much as a sound.

Once they came upon one of their villages, and it seemed like something out of an old human fairy story; gumdrop houses, not a consistent straight line or quite identical building, yet all made out of the same kind of rock as the caves and either mined or carved from them. There were small rivers through the area, leading into fresh water pools in some cases, and, for the first time, there was vegetation as well—growths of some sort of plants that resembled mosses and lichen but which also echoed the colors of the minerals in the walls, often contrasting with whatever they were against. Seas of yellow clung to walls of strawberry red, and light blue growths seemed to crawl up or down lime-green or lemon-yellow walls. Now and then one of the little people would go up to some of the growths, tear off a small strip, and stuff it into its tiny mouth nearly hidden behind the huge nose. Clearly this was the food source, although it didn’t seem to need much if any care; there were at times a lot of the gnomes around yet little sign of large gaps in the surrounding growths.

“Constant temperature down here, plenty of food and water, lots of easy building materials,” Maslovic noted. “Looks like a pretty comfortable life for such a bleak world.”

“Yes, but what do they do?” Ann wondered.

As they went through chamber after chamber the mystery didn’t seem ready to be solved. Still, now they came across monstrous side caverns in which were sitting what had to be monstrous machines of unknown purpose and design.

“They do somethin’ ” the old captain noted, impressed by the sheer scale of the things.

“Or they did, or somebody did,” Nagel responded. “They’re mostly overgrown with the mosses and there’s little sign they’ve moved in ages. They were used once, but not in a long, long time I don’t think. I wonder if these little people were the operators, or the descendants of the operators? Hard to say.” There were what looked like mounds covered in blue and purple lichen all around, and, on impulse, he reached down into one of them and brought up a handful of what at first looked like gravel.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, looking at the material as he continued the slow walking pace behind the lead gnome. “Take a look, Randi. Familiar?”

She took some of it and looked it over. It wasn’t gravel at all, but a mass of those mysterious little shavings and small remnants they’d found in concentrations all over their area on Melchior. Ann took a look and said, “Yes, we’ve seen a lot of that on Balshazzar.”

“Those are some of the holy artifacts of the Macouris,” Joshua said, breaking what had been a long silence. “They were brought back along with the Magi stones by the ship of the First Emissary. No one could divine what they were.”

“Machine poop,” Captain Murphy commented. “I’ll be damned! It’s the leftovers from the innards of them damned giant playthings there!”

“Probably some kind of byproduct,” Nagel agreed. “The stuff was formed by the ton, that’s for sure. They probably used it to help shape and maintain certain essential land features. Over time, it would have been eroded and show up, even in a volcanic hell like Melchior. We may never know for sure, but apparently the machines just can’t not make something out of anything they have on hand, even if it’s just miniatures of whatever they were doing. In a way you’re right, Captain. Giant machine shit.” He chuckled. “And so are the icons of the gods exposed.”

“I have a feeling that we’re at the end of this journey,” Maslovic said, looking ahead. “You feel it?”

He didn’t have to elaborate; they could all feel it. That horrible eerie sense of uncaring power that the Magi stones exuded, magnified now over and over again. And, too, a sense of something, perhaps someone else, waiting just ahead.

“It’s a bit colder,” Randi Queson pointed out. “And there’s a bit of movement in the air. There’s something pretty big just around that bend.”

“That’s an odd sound, too,” Maslovic added.

It was impossible to describe; an alien thing, yet a pulsing tone that seemed to go very deep and wash in a steady series of waves right through them, body and mind, in a machinelike rhythmic perfection. It got no louder as they entered the final chamber, but it seemed all around them, all pervasive.

“Oh, my god!” Randi Queson breathed.

“I believe we are here,” Maslovic said simply, looking around in a mixture of awe and fascination as they walked out onto a bridge that seemed to go on forever, spanning a round pit easily kilometers wide and going both up and down to what seemed infinity in both directions. If it was false perspective, as surely the gap above them had to be, it was perfectly staged.

The bridge was perhaps four meters wide and polished so smoothly that they could see themselves clearly reflected in it as they walked. It looked so pristine that it seemed unimaginable that anyone had ever walked on it before, yet they themselves were making no mark, their boots giving no trace of scuffing or wear.

“You feel the presence?” Randi whispered to Jerry Nagel.

He nodded. “He’s here,” he replied, and none of them had to be told what he meant. That unseen presence, who always crashed the party and stole the wonder from the Magi stones after a while, was most certainly present.

Murphy frowned. “Hey! Where’s our wee one?”

They had all been so busy gaping as they’d walked out onto the bridge that they hadn’t seen the gnome make an exit, but exit it had. They were alone, six tiny figures in a grandiose pulsating shaft of some kind.

“Ouch! Suddenly me head’s poundin’ like a son of a bitch!” Murphy exclaimed.

They were all feeling it now, increasingly intense headaches that were not at all helped by the deep and inexorable sonic two note.

“Look at the walls!” Ann almost screamed at them. “Good Lord! No wonder…!”

As throbbingly painful as the headaches were, they all managed to look and saw immediately what Ann meant.

Magi stones… Hundreds… thousands… Billions of them! The entire shaft was either made of them or coated with them, each with a tiny solitary light that came on from within to illuminate the chamber so brightly it was as hard to see suddenly as it was to think through that pounding.

Silica based, that’s what the gnomes had been. And not just the gnomes. These stones weren’t just baubles, gems to amuse the rich and famous and befuddle the geologists and physicists, no. These stones were alive!

“I believe I can adjust your responses to allow you some comfort here,” a voice said, a voice both coldly alien yet somehow familiar to them. As the headache seemed to retreat to a low throb fairly easy to endure and the light level became a bright but not unbearable glow, they were finally able to think.

“Li? Is that you?” Randi Queson managed.

“All that An Li was and knew is a part of me, except, of course, for the physical body. I am others, too, if you would prefer someone else.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Nagel told the voice. Still, he couldn’t help thinking, Great! The alien wanted an idea of what we were like and winds up picking Li! Boy is this gonna be a tough first contact!

“Please do not be concerned, Mister Nagel,” the voice responded as if he’d said rather than merely thought the comment. “We are well aware of the differences in your people. We have been analyzing them for quite a while now. Your variety at this level of maturity is unusual, but hardly complex.”

“I should have known you could read minds in here with this gathering of stones,” the engineer commented, mostly to let the others know the context of what was going on. “Considering I’ve seen somebody else move into the body Li left.”

“Surface thoughts only. To read everything, even of the small samples on this and the other two moons, would be more confusing than useful if they could not be tuned. We get a sufficient sample from those who, you might say, overdose on the wave amplification effects that are a byproduct of what you call the Magi stones, and the sample is more useful because it is random. Had we not uploaded An Li at the point we did she would have had an embolism and died taking all her life’s experience with her. What a waste that would have been.”

“You grow those stones on all three worlds, don’t you? That’s what you’re doing here,” Maslovic said to it.

“Of course, Maslovic. In the same way as your birthing machinery creates new and well fitted and designed soldiers, we must replicate ourselves. As should be obvious, though, we do not have the innate mobility of your people. We have power you cannot dream of, yet we need others for the simplest of things. It is our curse, an evolutationary curse of sorts, which has caused much misery and despair. It keeps us always hiding, always fearful, never able to stop what threatens our long existence, yet which also destroys countless civilizations who die in total ignorance and bewilderment of why they are being extinguished.”

Maslovic seemed to be the first one to understand. “Our people are silent for a reason, aren’t they? We’re not cut off from them. They aren’t there any more.”

“Always the military man must correctly analyze the tactical situation,” the voice responded, a voice which, they now all realized, was only in their minds, but radiating from the tiny creatures within the walls themselves, perhaps collectively, perhaps selectively.

All the Magi stones were alive. The ones here, the ones back home, the ones on the other moons. Each contained that tiny spark of life, perhaps pure energy encased in a physical shell, that made up an almost imperceptible part of the vast intellect represented here. That was who you saw when you gazed too long into the stone. You began to sense the tiny living being within, and, eventually, the infinitely greater whole that it was somehow linked to. No wonder it seemed both alien and scary.

“What do you mean by them not bein’ there?” Murphy asked the sergeant.

It was Ann who gestured with a wave at the huge alien population all around them and explained, “They aren’t scouting us. And with the kind of knowledge they’ve absorbed from their long history and with the help of a few other groups of creatures, they don’t need us or anything from us.” She looked around at the multitude. “You’re hiding here, aren’t you? You’re hiding here from whoever or whatever it was that killed seventy percent of humanity. You’re not spying on us, you’re spying through us. My God! What in hell can be hunting you, who can create whole solar systems and keep them stable?”

“We ain’t gonna like this answer, right?” the old captain asked with a sigh.

“There is another race as ancient as we,” the voice said slowly, even a bit wistfully. “Their names do not matter any more than ours do. They are, however, quite different. Your Doctor Woodward would call them a race born without souls. They have great power as well, but are mobile as we are not, and are not part of a greater whole as we are, but more in some ways like you might become, as some of your past cultures became. They are a race capable of any greatness you might imagine, but they can not imagine greatness. Their motivating factor is fear.”

“You speak of demons,” Joshua noted. “Why would demons fear you or anything?”

“Demons. Not a bad concept, but perhaps too mystical. Just imagine this one concept. It is by no means all of the story, but it is enough, and is something easily grasped. Imagine if you were a god. Imagine if you had the powers of a god, to rule, to create, to destroy at your command. The absolute command of all you survey. And now imagine one more thing. It is not something as common as you might imagine, nor is it easy to achieve, but it is something that does happen often enough that you know that it can happen to you.

“Imagine you are a god who can die.”

“These—others… They can die?” Randi Queson asked, mostly to confirm the bizarre concept they had been given.

“They can die. They have physical form and no direct continuity. They can upload their consciousnesses to new or artificial bodies, but they are still each alone, and they can be caught by the accidents of the universe or in a few ways by deliberate entrapment.”

“These demons hunt you because you can kill them?” Joshua asked.

“No. They know we could never get them all, that we are both too few and bound in some ways not to exterminate. No, they might have fought us forever because of our power, but not in this single urge to sterilze the universe. They would merely enslave it and play with it as toys. No, you misunderstand the depths of their fear and paranoia. They will kill us all, our race and your race and tens of thousands of other races, a few of which are represented here in what you call the Three Kings. They have tried without success to kill us many times. Now they are going about it differently. Since we cannot do anything on our own but think, they will wipe out any race that might be our arms and legs, you might say. It is not hard for them to do it once they find it. A few unstable stars coerced into monstrous explosions, gamma ray showers so intense that nothing at all of any sort of life of use to us could survive it.”

“And that’s what happened to our people? That’s the Great Silence?” Maslovic asked.

“Yes. But as with others over the eons they did not get everyone. It is a brute force approach. But, sooner or later, they will find your people, or, accidentally, your people will find them. That is why the route to the Three Kings was kept so secret after we were accidentally discovered. When a second expedition found us, we knew that our safe haven here could not last forever. So we sent back some of us as sentinels, as listeners, and we used the fringe, the cults, to minimize our obvious presence. We needed our arms and legs as usual, so that if and when the others come the secret yet findable route here can be sealed and our sentinels recalled. It will give us time to move again.”

“There’s nothing we can do to stop them?” Maslovic asked. “I mean, you said they were mortal. If they’re mortal…”

“We know what you are thinking, but you would not get the chance. We have been working the problem now for two billion years. It is not hopeless, but it has not yet been solved. Until then, we hide, and we move.”

“Then at least let us return to try and prepare our people, even if you won’t help in a defense,” the sergeant almost pleaded.

“We are sorry, but no. You are in the Three Kings. You must remain. The passage is deliberately controlled. In a word, you know too much to be allowed to fall back into the hands of the coming enemy.”

“But you just told us there was hope!” Randi protested.

Ann sighed. “Don’t you get it, Doctor? They’ve all but come out and told us why the others hate them so much, will destroy the universe rather than let them be. It’s the corrolary of the fact that they are like gods but can die. Get it now?”

“Well, I sure don’t,” Murphy grumped.

“Consider what happened to me, Captain,” Ann prompted. “I was on Balshazzar, watching a horror through these very transceivers, unable to help and wanting desperately to do so. They allowed it. With pride, I thought Doc and I had figured it out and managed it on our own, but we’d never done anything like that before. Not loading consciousness into another body somewhere else, let alone him into my old one. We just thought we did. These people did it. Or, they understood what we desperately wanted, made a decision to help, and it was done. The result was that I not only changed my gender I also lost almost a century and a half in age. A century and a half, Captain. You understand it now?”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! I’m an old con man, lass! I ain’t no brain!”

“They’re immortal,” Randi said, almost too soft to hear. “These people simply grow something new and move in, probably automatically. The memories, the intellect, who knows what? It all keeps.” She turned to the wall. “That’s it, isn’t it? They might have been able to stomach a limited rival in power, but the only thing worse than them being able to die is to discover that you don’t!”

There was no immediate reply, and it allowed the stunned others to recover somewhat.

“I got an inkling right off, when they said that everything that Li was was still there,” she went on. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” came the answer at last. “And it is a limited gift that can be shared. Those who help us and work with us can have it if they want it. Not everyone does.”

“Sweet Jesus! Me three empty-headed darlin’s can dance till Doomsday?” Murphy muttered.

“My people are still stuck on Balshazzar,” Ann pointed out. “What good will they do you?”

“They are stuck because at least one of the races there is not only not inclined to help but is inclined to hinder. Something will have to be done about it, but your Doctor and your people are already trying to win them. In the end, they will be left but your people will not, and all by their own choice. We have more than enough people. We do not have enough good people.”

Joshua suddenly roared and reached into his utility pack and pulled out a very nasty laser pistol. “No!” he screamed, his voice echoing in the shaft. “You are the angels of control! I swore to serve the demons of freedom!”

Maslovic, nearest the big man, went into action almost reflexively, bringing up a leg and kicking hard into Joshua’s backside. Not expecting it, the big man fell slightly forward, talking several steps nearer the edge of the bridge, but not losing his grip on the pistol or completely losing his balance. He managed to put out his other hand and stop his forward motion a good meter short of the edge, and it was clear he was going to make it, turn, and begin firing. He did not, however, decide to go down on his kees and turn and fire, a movement that they might not have been able to counter, but instead struggled unsteadily back to full erectness.

Patrick Murphy raised his leg and pushed it right into the big man’s groin. Joshua yelled again and took several steps backward, trying to bring the pistol up and aim it first at the one who’d just kicked him. He stepped back one step, two steps, three steps.

He didn’t have three steps.

With a look less of madness than total bewilderment, Joshua plunged into the seemingly bottomless chasm, his roars of defiance fading quickly.

Murphy smiled. “I didn’t know I had it in me!”

“I never did understand why we brought him along,” Maslovic commented.

Jerry Nagel looked up at the wall. “I assume your folks can lead us out of here? At least for now?”

“We had to bring you here. You represent all the factions of your race. You can be our ambassadors to them now.”

Randi Queson looked at where Joshua had gone over into oblivion. “He made his choice. Now we get to make ours.”

The gnome was suddenly there, gesturning for them to follow.

As soon as they cleared the bridge, Murphy reached into his own pouch and brought out a flask. He drank a good deep belt, then offered it to the rest, including the gnome, who sniffed with that huge nose and then made it clear that it was to be nowhere near him.

Ann took a slug herself, then handed it back. “I wonder if we can perhaps help them to win this thing? Or at least believe that they can.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Maslovic responded. “But now at least we know the score. It’s always the challenge that makes life worth living, isn’t it?”

“I can see that you will have to learn a bit more about being human,” Ann responded. “It took me a very long while myself. Still, there’s great power here, and opportunity, and none of us have anyone left back in the colonial systems to worry or worry about.”

“You’re going to have to start introducing him to some philosophy,” Randi Queson noted.

“You don’t go back to Balshazzar for that,” Jerry Nagel put in. “I think we start with the captain, there.”

“Aye, lad! I think this will be a heavy time. I think maybe I can weather it, with me whiskey here, and maybe some good cigars someplace, and with three beautiful girls. The rest of you can think the deep thoughts and save worthless humanity. Maybe you just might. I think of meself as keepin’ the home fires burnin’…”