Kaspar's Box tk-3

by Jack L. Chalker

  “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 wa
s 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 th
em, 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!