Melchior's Fire tk-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  It was a pretty world, whether a moon or a planet. The explorers and scouts would classify it as a Class One Terran, not only a world capable of sustaining human life unaided but one that might even evolve such life. If An Li’s aliens existed and were in any sense of the word life as they knew and understood it, then this was the world they would have come from.

  “Sixty-three percent ocean, another three percent internal lakes, and thirty-three percent land masses,” Jerry Nagel noted. “Axial tilt’s under eight degrees, so there’s probably little in the way of seasons from that source. Rotation on axis twenty-two point six standard hours, pretty close to nominal. Two northern continents with several huge islands, and a matching two southern continents, different in shape and size, plus more islands big and small. The majority of land is in the mid-latitudes, which is all to the good, since the periods when this sucker is getting hit from the sun have got to fry almost anything within those eight-degree tropics. Otherwise, we’re talking a high when facing the mother planet of roughly thirty-one degrees centigrade, a low about eighteen, those at sea level, of course. Ocean water is saline, temperatures from the tropic lines to the continental borders roughly twenty-seven to thirty degrees, polar side temps about twenty-one degrees down to maybe thirteen at the surface. Within the tropics the temps are bearable now, but even if they cool down at the current rate while on this side they’ll be within tropical norms for this type of planet. Sunward, I’d put those tropical regions at crisp, extra crisp, well done, and deep fried.”

  “So the life’s on the continents, mostly, and the islands?” An Li asked, looking at the pictorials.

  “Well, that’s the thing. It’s everywhere. The oceans are teeming with it, the continents have their sparse spots but dense concentrations in the best overall geographic areas. Still, I would suspect as much from the wide variations produced by this system. Since there’s no evidence of roads or major structures to accompany the areas of dense population, I’d say that unless some of them have wings, they walk everywhere, and that probably means they stick fairly close to home. Territorial. When your ‘year’ is only fifteen or sixteen standard days, your ‘seasons’ basically last for maybe three or four days each. Not much time for real variation, but it sure keeps the weather systems stirred up. Most storms are produced by cold air meeting warm air. I bet the transition from sun to planet source only is pretty violent in the weather department, and you can see a lot of nasty-looking local stuff swirling around in the tropics right now. Give them solar heat and they’ll become monsters.”

  “You’re making it sound a lot less appealing all of a sudden,” Randi Queson commented. “Stuck in your local garden, killer storms and tropical rains, and no machines worth a damn. That’s a recipe for taking humanity back hundreds of thousands of years or more.”

  Nagel shrugged. “Maybe. They probably don’t have to do much hunting, though, or wander too far to eat. That looks damned rich down there, and if there are human heat signatures then a lot of it is edible for folks like us. And, of course, it’s a life of essentially leisure, fresh air, all natural foods and drink, and no natural enemies. If the nonhuman elements either don’t mix or are friendly, then everybody’s in the same boat, as it were. It’s probably pretty damned dull.”

  Queson sighed. “Poor Dr. Woodward.”

  “Huh? Why do you say that?”

  “A man of his great intellect and great faith, down on an alien world, meeting up with aliens as smart or smarter than we are who also are probably the survivors or descendants of survivors of expeditions past. Imagine the meeting. Imagine how it might shake him when he discovers they haven’t discovered Jesus, or perhaps have a totally different concept of God and the universe, perhaps even no religious beliefs or concepts at all.”

  “Wouldn’t bother guys like him a bit,” Nagel assured her. “I seem to remember that those types went looking for civilizations that hadn’t heard the Word as they themselves saw it and then converted them, by force, hook, or crook if necessary. Vaticanus still has an Office for the Propagation of the Faith, or whatever they called it, better known as the Inquisition. Torture them until they either convert or die. Either way, God’s will is done. Bring Bibles to the heathen, but make sure you also bring booze to trade for the slaves. Or God tells the faithful to join an army and conquer the world for Him. So they do, and destroy the other religions as heathen, desecrate or destroy the old churches, temples, and monuments, and if you can’t convert ’em, well, their children will convert, or be slaves. Naw… He wouldn’t see it as a break in his faith. He’d see it as being handed by God the opportunity to be the first one to convert nonhumans.”

  “My, you are cynical,” she responded.

  “You’re the social scientist. My world is hard science. Numbers, experiments, repeatable data searches. We hard science types never were great at grasping how human behavior works on the grand scale, but I think I have my history pretty much right, don’t I?”

  “More or less, I guess. But not everybody is like that, even within a religious faith.”

  “Well, much of human history’s misery has been caused by religion. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all bunk.”

  “Well, we’ll all go our own way on that. Coming up on Balshazzar now. Cap, you have an energy signature that might in any way match a downed shuttle of the type Woodward’s group used?”

  “I’ve got a possibility,” the captain responded. “I am trying to hail it on all standard frequencies in use at that time. Nothing so far.”

  “Yeah, well, I think if I were down there and spent eighty years calling with nobody picking up the other end I’d probably stop hanging out near the phone myself,” Nagel said. “Still, there’s enough power for them to keep things going assuming the ship’s intact?”

  “Oh yes, although one would expect it to be half buried and overgrown in that area by now. There has definitely been flooding in the area, although the floodplain may not have been in that area when they landed. These do shift.”

  “What’s the population in that floodplain area right now?” Queson asked her. “Roughly speaking, of course.”

  “Difficult to say. Rough estimate would be between one thousand and one thousand five hundred. They are camped just off the plain, in a very large area of groves and springs, but it may well be that we have had some luck if we want to contact them. I am not at all certain you are correct that they remain in one place. This looks like a migration of sorts, or perhaps a pilgrimage. They are just now gathering. It is impossible to know how many there will ultimately be, but it could be a lot.”

  “All human?”

  “Mostly human. There are readings that indicate some lateral traffic from some sort of life giving off nonhuman signatures.”

  “Does it appear like a hostile movement?”

  “Who can say? Logic tells me that if you are thinking of being hostile to a group of one to two thousand you’d best bring more than a few dozen of your own.”

  “Good point. Okay, so either they don’t go into the old ship anymore because they can’t, they think it’s holy ground, or they already have everything they can get from it, or they just haven’t gotten enough of a crowd yet. In any event, we’re in no position to wait for them to do it, and we have no idea whether they can or will pick up the communications. It’s pretty clear we need some way to talk to them, after first letting them know we’re here at all. Any suggestions? Anybody?”

  “I could just take the shuttle down and say hello,” Lucky Cross suggested. “That seems the simplest and easiest.”

  “On the surface, yes,” An Li responded. “But if that’s Woodward’s ship and people and it’s got power, they might be expected to have checked the rest of the system out. They didn’t. Neither did the aliens, if that’s what they are, and we have signatures from their ships as well. How many ship-to-ground shuttles have we got on this run, Lucky?”

  “You know damn well we only got the same one. Otherwise it’s just the escape
pods.”

  “I say we need a unanimous vote, then, to take that shuttle down anywhere, since we have no evidence it can get back up again from down there and some evidence maybe it can’t. Without that shuttle, we may as well go home.”

  Jerry Nagel looked over at Eyegor. “There’s always the robot. Hell, this is a much better place to send the thing than the other one. At least it won’t be alone down there.”

  “You seem bent on getting rid of me,” the robot responded. “In response this time I ask a variation of the same question just asked on the shuttle. Is it plausible that at least one, perhaps most of those stuck down there brought with them AI devices of some sort? If so, where are they? They should also show up on our scans.”

  “The thing’s got a point,” Nagel said, nodding. “Not much in the way of mechanized anything down there, unless it’s levers and ropes and pulleys. There are several known combinations of radiation and energy fields known to damage or destroy AI synapses while being harmless to humans. There are more the other way around, I admit, but the former’s not that unusual.”

  “So what does that leave?” Queson asked nobody in particular.

  “A probe,” the captain responded. “It is simple and has minimal AI circuitry and maximum shielding. It is used for low-level measurements.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just a remote-controlled camera ball like old Eyegor’s head there,” Sark pointed out. “What good does that do us?”

  “It can be rigged to carry a few things,” the captain reminded them. “Its cargo is limited, but we could put a couple of ferrets in there, or perhaps simply use it not as a recorder but as a playback device. If they can call us, it’ll tell them to do so. If they can’t, we’ll work out a way to send something down that can.”

  “Too much AI in the ferrets to take a chance until we know for sure they’ll work,” An Li said firmly. “But the idea of using a probe as basically a speaker works well, and since a probe is designed to be disposable we don’t have to worry if it can’t get back. Stick a handheld ship-to-ship intercom in the storage compartment just in case. I’m not thrilled about losing one, but we have to talk to them.”

  Once decided, it was easier to rig up and execute than it was to discuss it.

  The probes were very small devices shielded for entry and designed to send up close-in data across any spectrum, do soil and atmospheric analysis, and give the basics they or anyone else would need before planning a manned landing on an alien world. In essence they were simply small, remote-controlled data collectors made cheaply and designed for simple tasks. Analysis was always aboard ship; they only sent a data stream of what they were told to examine.

  It was something of a microphone, and all a speaker is is a microphone in reverse, creating the opposite pattern on a surface capable of receiving it. These were strictly single use, send or receive—but they included the ground-to-air handheld transceiver in case they didn’t have a better way.

  “Last chance,” the captain warned. “Everyone still all right with this?”

  “Send it,” Nagel told her. The probe was quickly away.

  To keep it intact and from burning up as it entered the atmosphere, they took about an hour and a quarter to get the thing into the atmosphere. After that, it was a simple matter to fly it towards the supposed human colony while the Stanley took up geosynchronous orbit.

  “Jeez! I just thought of something,” Randi Queson said worriedly.

  “Yeah? What?” Nagel was just hoping to hear about all those weird jewels for the taking, or maybe alien technology, and other stuff like that.

  “I was just thinking—if they’ve gone this long without anything mechanical, and if life is hard enough down there so the elders are basically dead, then what kind of reaction are we gonna get when this—this voice suddenly comes out of this little ball? They might think God is talking to them!”

  “All the better,” Nagel replied cynically. “Then God can just command them to go gather all their valuables. Much easier than telling them, ‘This is a stickup.’ ”

  X: WEST OF EDEN…

  “You don’t live on a floodplain if you don’t have to,” Randi Queson noted, talking as much to herself as to the others. “I wonder why they leave better pickings up north and come down here? It certainly must be something they do at broader intervals; it wouldn’t make any sense to do this except once in a great while, maybe as a ritual, maybe as simply a gathering of a clan that’s otherwise spread out.”

  “Well, you’re the anthropologist,” Nagel said. “Me, I have a hard time spelling it. But if that’s the old preacher’s ship, and it’s sure looking big enough to be a whole damned cathedral, then maybe it’s Christmas or something.”

  “Well, maybe they can tell us,” An Li commented. “We’re in heavy air and going in close. Cap, can you turn the live shot on from the probe?”

  “A few more seconds,” the captain responded. “Nothing to see yet. Ah! There! Well, at least they’re human and they’re not quite Adam and Eve.”

  “Sure they are,” Queson breathed. “Just after the Fall.”

  It was quite an assembly of bodies they saw, all weathered and darkened by exposure. There seemed to be a mixture of philosophies on how to deal with the primitive conditions as well; men and women either tended to have very long hair, the men beards as well, or they shaved their heads. There didn’t seem to be anybody obvious with a middle-ground point of view.

  None of them, save the youngest children, were naked, although the women tended to be bare-breasted, with a few exceptions for some sort of halter top, and just about all had their private parts concealed at least in a basic fashion, primarily by vines worn tightly at the hips with some kind of leaves or short woven grasses draped over the front and sometimes back and held there in some way. All were barefoot.

  They were roughly equally divided by sex, although there might have been a few more women than men per plot of ground, and they seemed to represent all ages. None appeared particularly chubby, but likewise none looked to be starving, either. The thin ones were naturally thin, the more full-figured types seemed to be, well, filled out a bit more, that was all.

  But they did have possessions. Clearly somebody had figured out how to make cloth by hand out of a cottonlike plant, and others had found dyes, for there were blankets, even homemade tent shelters made with the blankets and gathered and trimmed sticks so the little ones, and anybody else who felt he or she needed some shelter, could get it. There were also gourds that clearly carried water or other drinks.

  “I doubt if they go back long enough to have evolved to this social and technological level,” Randi commented. “From what I can see, these are people who are forced to primitivism and know it, not people who are necessarily primitives.”

  “Could be,” An Li agreed. “Catch the Elders there.”

  What she referred to were a number of men, perhaps a few dozen within the range of the camera, who seemed markedly different from the others. They had manes of gray or even snow-white hair, flowing beards, and carried long walking sticks, possibly staves of office. They were also the only ones who wore full-body clothing, a robe made of what seemed a lighter-grade cloth than the blanket material that hung on their bodies, with a hole cut in the center for the head and two other holes for the arms. They were all dyed a kind of pink-orange color, which made them very easy to spot in the mobs.

  “Buddhist monks who fell off the wagon?” Sark asked cynically.

  “The Kingdom of Prester John,” Randi Queson said, ignoring the snide jokes. “An ancient legend of a European-style kingdom far off in the Himalayan Mountains, the source of Buddhism, but yet Christians. It’s just what I’d expect a Karl Woodward to come up with.”

  “We’ll take your word for it,” Lucky Cross responded dryly. In point of fact, Queson was probably the only one there who knew what the term “European” meant, let alone the details and legends, but she was right about one thing.

  Karl Woodward would h
ave known, and it was very much the sort of thing he might come up with.

  “We’ve been noticed,” the captain pointed out.

  The probe wasn’t very large, designed more for carrying information and perhaps a soil sample than anything else, but it was certainly larger than anything native to Balshazzar, and very, very odd looking.

  The kids had seen it first, then started shouting and pointing at it, and this caused the adults and ultimately the pink-robed elders to pay attention as well.

  “It’s showtime,” An Li said. “Enable probe speaker mode.”

  “Enabled,” the captain reported.

  An Li took a deep breath, then said, in a calm, measured tone, “Hello, people of Balshazzar. We are the exploration ship Stanley in orbit around your world. If you still have any functioning communications devices on your ship, please have someone who knows how to use them do so. We will wait. If you do not, please indicate this when I say the word ‘over’ and we will drop one to you. Over!”

  There was a hushed silence as the probe again became a receiver. Even the kids had suddenly fallen silent, and save for the cries of some of the infants there was a nearly dead silence.

  “You think maybe they don’t understand us?” An Li asked.

  Queson shook her head “no.” “It’s just shock. They didn’t expect this. Wait a little bit.”

  Finally, one of the elders with flowing white hair and beard, looking, save for the saffron-colored robe like some Biblical patriarch, came forward and clearly meant to address them.

  “We must wait for the Doctor before we can enter the Cathedral,” he said in the kind of tones you might expect from some ancient epic. “Only he may enter, then we follow.”

  “Jesus! You don’t suppose old Doc Woodward’s still alive down there, do you?” Lucky Cross exclaimed. “He’d be like three hundred years old or something!”

  An Li shrugged. “Enable speaker.”