Melchior's Fire tk-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  “I think it’s a good point,” An Li noted, studying the small one in her hand. “Still, this is almost definitely what they were either going to or coming from, and they sure looked like they was gonna load up. Not much to eat around here, but it seems stable enough to bring in our equipment and pick up a fair load. As you say, we can control the output until, at least, ours are sold.”

  Jerry looked around at the high walls of volcanic rock and dust and the big planet above. “Night’s falling, and pretty fast,” he said. “Everybody put a handful of these things in their packs and let’s get back to where Lucky can pick us up. We got twenty hours to shit, shave, eat, sleep, and analyze. After that, I think we bring the C&C module down.”

  There was no argument on that.

  * * *

  The captain’s own labs isolated the compounds that gave off the odor in the stones, but neither those labs nor the Doc’s could do much more. The Magi’s Stones lived up to their reputation and shattered when you tried any sort of analysis on them. What jewelers could do was to shape the stones to a very small degree, mostly by shaving away the obsidian. Only in a few cases could the lightest of robotic hands split them along a single outer crystal boundary. Anything more, and you had dust that the analytical labs found little different in general composition from the obsidian plus a few odd and by no means consistent trace minerals.

  Every crystal, though, appeared filled with microscopic bubbles of the gas that gave the sense of flavor. Not, it seemed, because it really did smell like lemon, or orange, or lilacs, or whatever, but because it was a mild hallucinogen that stimulated that sensation in the brain.

  The hallucinogen might have explained An Li’s paranoia about the alien lurker, stimulated by Norman Sanders’s theatrical setup, and the sense of looking into the past, but it wasn’t all that clear if that was all there was to it.

  An Li, using a sealed lab unit in which she was not physically sharing any space with the stone, nor breathing any air nor touching it except in a virtual manner by manipulating robotic probes through a head unit, nonetheless received visions staring at the stone Sark had given her, visions that also now came with odd physical sensations that ran from dizziness to tingling in all extremities and even to mild orgasm. And, after a half dozen minutes or so, she felt the sensation once more of Him and backed out fast.

  Randi Queson tried the same tack, and got results that in some cases were similar, some different. Her visions were of darkness and something like spirits moving across the face of a frozen sea, suddenly bursting into a riot of colors and shapes that were beyond figuring out but nonetheless were beautiful and fascinating and, most of all, mathematical to a large degree.

  Eventually she, too, felt the sensation of others becoming aware of her, of being able in some way to interact with her, but, unlike An Li, the presences were plural and carried with them no sense of menace, no voyeuristic violation. She had the distinct impression that they were trying to tell her something, or at least convey some sort of message or warning to her, but they were too unfamiliar, too alien, and if in fact they were sending and she was receiving she had no way to decode and thereby comprehend whatever it was they were saying.

  Jerry Nagel had something in between, with a sensation of going through space, of light and dark, fire and ice, joy and sadness, but on a level he more sensed than could comprehend from the wash of visions. His overall sensation, though, was clear.

  There was a war, he thought. Or, possibly, is a war. He couldn’t be sure. At times he had the sensation of time covering eons and distances beyond any human ability to comprehend, yet just as quickly he had a sense of seeing things now, or perhaps no older than yesterday. At no time did he sense anyone aware of him, but eventually the lightning-fast visions and sounds and smells and shapes overwhelmed him and translated into running a gamut of physical and psychological sensations in rapid-fire succession until he couldn’t take it anymore. When he bailed out, he found that he was soaked in perspiration, his muscles tensed into knots, and yet he was as turned on as he’d ever been in his life.

  Sark seemed particularly troubled by the effect of the stones and would not take them on one on one, even though there was never any question of his courage.

  Still, when they compared notes, little really made sense.

  “Clearly the gems are broadcasting something, and that means it’s coming from somewhere,” Randi Queson insisted. “The question is, what is the source of it and why does it have this series of similar if unique effects on us?”

  “Well, we’ve all wound up really turned on,” Nagel pointed out, “but we also have other things in common here. Fleeting but deep senses of hunger, thirst, fear, laughter, all the range of emotions and urges, right down to the bowels. That says to me that something’s messing with our minds. And if it’s random, as it seems to be, that something isn’t necessarily directing them. I’ve seen similar stuff in drug reactions.”

  “But we factored out the gas,” An Li pointed out.

  “Sure, we factored out the gas, but we didn’t factor out other things. This is something we’ve not seen before, and have experienced only in a few of these that survived and got back home,” the Doc said thoughtfully. “Now we know the brain is an electrical device, so to speak. It works by being able to store, filter, and then bring together in one central command area what’s needed for thoughts and ideas or to compel actions. Even the least of us is smarter than our ancestors because they were genetically bred or enhanced, so our brains are pretty damned fast, although never as fast as the fastest quasi-organic computers. Still, it’s fetch data and assemble, then act if A but not B is true. All that’s done by electrical signals. Drugs often interfere with those signals to get their effects, or drop blockers or substitutes into receptors to get others. I think something inside these Magi’s Stones is some kind of natural electrical transmitter, very small power but somehow on a wavelength our brains can receive. We get that effect, and inside our heads our brains try to make sense of the random signals coming in. There’s stimulation while it rumbles around in there trying to find a place to put it, and there’s hallucination as it tries to make sense of things. That sound logical?”

  “You mean it really is all in our heads?” An Li asked, sounding skeptical.

  “I think so. It’s this very effect, though, that makes many drugs so attractive to some people, and it’s what makes these things unique and valuable to others. I think after we sleep but before we go down again and start setting up we ought to swap stones and see what happens. If we get the exact same sensations from different stones, then it’s proof that the signals are random and our brains are doing it from the Magi’s Stone’s stimulation. If it’s wildly different, or if we get each other’s sensations, then there might be something external that they’re picking up. An Li’s seeing much the same thing in her stone as she saw in Sanders’s gem, though, makes me suspect it’s us.”

  “Regardless, how the hell are we going to mask the effect so we can harvest the pile?” Nagel wanted to know. “And how far away can we stow them here so they won’t have any effect on us, or maybe even the captain?”

  “I get nothing from the samples you brought up,” the captain assured them.

  “Yeah, maybe, but we’re not talking about a kilo or so. We’re talking a ton of the stuff that went right through and along the labs’ neural nets,” Nagel pointed out. “I keep wondering if some of those derelicts from the Kings weren’t because of the shielding or wormholes at all, but maybe were because people went nuts.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to try and be smarter than they were,” An Li put in. “I don’t like the damned things one bit, but if we pick up a ton of them and get out of here and back home, I do know we’ll have one hell of a nest egg for all our futures. We sure haven’t found anything else we can carry.”

  “Maybe we did,” Jerry replied thoughtfully. “Hell, our primary job is salvage, and we’ve got a ship designed for it. If we can pick up th
at alien whatever, bring it up, and stick it in the hold, then we’ve got an extra-value cargo that might really make us all rich, particularly if there’s some remains of dead aliens left inside it.”

  “Great,” Randi sighed. “Going back, which nobody’s ever done before in any case, with a ship stuffed with hallucinogenic gemstones and rotting alien corpses. What fun!”

  “Nevertheless, at sun—er, at planetrise, Lucky and we take the C&C down to the surface and we get to work,” An Li declared. “Let’s get this over and out of here before one of those multiple ugly mountains down there decides it doesn’t like us, either!”

  XIII: HOT CROSSED PILGRIMS

  The experiment with swapping stones was inconclusive. None of the trio had the same complete set of hallucinations as before, but each had visions more in tune with their original experiences than with the others’, and Queson felt confident that her theory was correct.

  Sark seemed convinced that it was a natural sort of thing as well, but he wanted no part in playing with them. They didn’t ask why; everybody’s past was their own in this sort of business. Still, it was clear that he’d had some kind of run-in with drugs or other stimulations, and the experience had been bad.

  Now that it was suddenly more of a familiar operation for them, they felt more confident in spite of the effects that the stones induced. Lucky detached the modular C&C from the Stanley with the shuttle docked in it and then brought the whole thing down through the atmosphere of the big moon and onto the huge plateau of lava about a kilometer from the rockfall, where it could be easily docked and lifted off in a hurry but would be away from any sudden avalanches and could be settled fairly level, its support legs doing the rest to make it not just solid as a rock, but considering the area, much more solid than these rocks had ever been.

  Conditions, however, were much poorer than they’d been when they’d landed the first time. Clouds had rolled in, covering the sky and descending even below the high volcanic peaks all around them, and they rushed to scoop up and dump inside the containers within the C&C complex what they could of the slide and its strange but valuable cargo before it became impossible to do so. They managed to accumulate quite a lot, perhaps a third of their capacity, before the lightning started all around them, striking with increasing rapidity and force and causing thunderous explosive sounds to echo off the mountainsides and cliffs, finally accompanied by rain that seemed to come from under vast waterfalls rather than to precipitate from clouds.

  They rushed fearfully back on their scooters to the C&C in the distance, thinking that at any moment the magnetic drives would pull down some of the fierce lightning and electrocute them as they fled for cover. The air already smelled of ozone, but they made it back, soaked and exhausted.

  “I wouldn’t even want to take off in this stuff if I didn’t have to,” Lucky Cross told them. “The only good thing is it’s not bloody likely that any of those alien thingies are gonna venture out this way, either.”

  “So we lose a little time,” Nagel told them. “And, yeah, we’d probably have been happier losing it up top, but we’re better off down here, acclimating to the gravity. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling like I just had to fight my way out of the toughest bar on Sepuchus just from yesterday’s action, and we rode almost the whole way!”

  “Well, take a little painkiller and relax,” An Li told him. “Any idea how long this shit will last?”

  “Observations say it could be days, but probably won’t be,” Cross assured her. “Man! You think it’s bad now, try it with my weight! I feel like I’m in a permanent squat!”

  “You weren’t out in that stuff!” Jerry Nagel replied, then sighed. “Well, let’s spend some time setting up as much in the way of an automated security perimeter as we can. We did that when we thought we were alone, and we know that there are other races, many races, with colonies on this dirtball, and that at least one of them knows where this place is, and who knows with this little crew and no mother hen whether or not we’ll all doze off. I wouldn’t want one of those headless snakes showing up with boundless curiosity during that time.”

  As they set up the scanners and established both automatic warnings and weapons thresholds, Randi Queson couldn’t help thinking of that funny-looking vehicle they were going to try and salvage at the end of this. “I wonder why they left it?” she mused, aloud.

  “Huh? What do you mean? Who’s ‘they’ and what did ‘they’ leave?” Jerry responded.

  “Oh—just thinking aloud. But this isn’t exactly on the known trade routes, and anything as sophisticated as that alien vehicle had to be brought here as part of their exploration and maybe prospecting, salvage, or whatever operation. One, maybe a lot more, were put into it just like we’re here in the C&C module and sent out to look things over, maybe even discover and pick up Magi’s Stones. There’s no sign of any settlement of anything, least of all something that could build and drive that, anywhere on this side of the island, so it was brought here—flown here, floated here, who knows?—to do what it did. And then it got tripped up, stuck, and had to be abandoned or whatever. So why hasn’t anybody come for it to fix it? It’s got to be very valuable to them, even as salvage. Why did they leave it abandoned?”

  “Maybe everybody inside made it back on foot or whatever they travel on and they didn’t have what it took to fix the thing,” Nagel suggested. “What’s the big deal? It’s not going anywhere.”

  “But it is! Don’t you see? If it doesn’t eventually get rolled over and possibly washed away by storms like these over time, or by a new slide caused by one, then one of these mountains is going to rumble and maybe spew in this direction, or at least cause some major and minor volcanic quakes. That’s why we put this unit where we did, and the best we could get was a seventy-six percent probability that we’d be okay here for the duration of our job. No, I would love to know why they abandoned it.”

  “Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the slide was worse than you think and they’re all dead in there from shock or something,” Cross suggested. “That’d make Jerry happy. He could sell the first alien DNA.”

  “Then why, if they went to so much trouble to get it here, didn’t anybody come looking for them? No, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well, maybe someday somebody can come here with all the right diplomatic and translation moves and ask them,” An Li said, reclining on a bunk and yawning. “Me, I don’t give a damn unless it’s worth money to know or it’s something that might impact me.”

  Randi just hoped that the answer didn’t impact them. They were, after all, now stuck down here surrounded by barely dormant volcanoes on a lava plain of uncertain thickness for the duration of a howling storm.

  Had they been able to see through the storm all the way to the cliff face, and particularly whenever the cliff face was struck by lightning, they would have worried a bit more, for then they’d have seen the entire obsidian cliff throb like some living thing, some beating heart, with a glow that pulsed like a beacon in a swirl of terrorizing winds and rain.

  One by one, each of the five in the C&C began to feel tired and dizzy, and almost without thinking more about it they either reclined in chairs or went to their bunks to let things pass. Randi Queson did have a fleeting thought that this might be some effect of the electrical storm and the stored Magi’s Stones, but before she could grab hold, announce it, and perhaps act to do something about it she, too, passed into a kind of nether sleep.

  Randi Queson tried to mentally hold on, to at least keep steady against the onrushing hallucinations, but she could not. None of them could.

  She was flying, flying through some strange, alien greenish sky with pink and yellow clouds.

  Although it was clearly a point in some kind of atmosphere, she could see through it to the stars beyond, the whole starfield laid out before her, but not in the usual visual spectrum but through some other means. It was almost as if she were viewing some kind of photographic negative of the sky, an alien sky sh
e’d never seen before filled with all the stars and formations of a globular cluster, but where light was dark and black was a kind of bright, soft pink.

  Looking below, she saw a vast world that was heavily developed but long past its prime. Great domed cities stretched in uncounted number to the horizon, encapsulating ancient and dying masses whose shape and other details could not be determined from this height.

  It would have been awesome if she hadn’t felt permeated with a sense of awful hopelessness, a feeling that all those billions plus billions down there were in total despair, creating so much unhappiness that it collected and beamed from every individual and every dome and perhaps every centimeter of the planet, and beyond, going to and right through Randi Queson. She felt tremendous sorrow for them, all the more because she knew that she could not help them in any way, only watch their decline into despair and death.

  The others were all with her. She could feel them, sense them in a hundred inexpressible ways, yet she could not see her companions. They were wraiths, flying over a planet of the dead, but they were still wraiths, as helpless as any specter.

  And now they were off the world, and into the strangely inverted and bizarrely colored void.

  There were others out here as well. Many others, but wraiths just like themselves, able to witness but only to witness, as they went from world to world, system to system, in a flash of darkness, instantly going from world to world and finding only the feelings of horror, despair, and death.

  There were Others, as well, on some of those worlds, and going between them. It was no more possible to tell anything else about them than it had been to tell details of the first and subsequent civilizations, but this was a different realm, a different sort of sensory perception, and they were clear as could be.