“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’…”
THE END
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Document creation date: 04.03.2011
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Kaspar's Box tk-3 Page 28
