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  Balshazzar's Serpent

  ( Three Kings - 1 )

  Jack L. Chalker

  With the universe’s wormholes collapsed, darkness has fallen across interstellar civilization until Dr. Karl Woodward, commander of the starship The Mountain, ventures to an uncharted world and into a terrifying confrontation.

  Balshazzar’s Serpent

  by Jack L. Chalker

  PROLOGUE:

  THE LEGEND OF THE THREE KINGS

  Rationalists predicted that religion would be the first thing to fall when humanity finally went to the stars and found no gods, no heaven or hell, that could not be explained in physics and the other sciences. Scientists never had been all that good at predicting or understanding human culture and sociology; they never even noticed that, when they finally went out there, every deity and supernatural belief system known at the time went right with them.

  Humanity was late to the stars, considering how young in its life it had begun the quest, but, like all things it had done, once it decided to go and had the means, it went like wildfire.

  The discovery of the wormgate system and the way in which it could stabilize and link wormholes that folded space and took you many times faster than light by the simple method of stepping around it made space travel efficient and affordable.

  First out were the unmanned, super-hardened ships that could withstand the forces within a naturally occurring wormhole and exploit and force it open, go through, and establish a temporary stabilizing gate on the other side. Then came the follow-ups, mostly robotics with some human supervision, who would convert that makeshift gate into a permanent and optimized one. Then a small maintenance station both for the gate and ships that might come after was built and stocked, so that parts and labor were available as needed.

  Natural wormholes created weaknesses within several parsecs, allowing other holes to form. Most were quite small and many were highly unstable, but the little probes punched through and were successful, at least most of the time.

  Next came the government types, of course, in quasi-military equipped highly reinforced ships, looking for alien lifeforms and new worlds to exploit.

  And they found them! Not exactly alien civilizations, but certainly alien lifeforms in incredible abundance in a universe that seemed filled with potentially human habitable planets. Much of the alien life was basic and primitive, the equivalent of Earth’s insects and animal and plant life, strange as it might be to the humans who went out there. Still, while nothing was a precise match to Earth forms, and much was surprising and even revolutionary to science, nothing really broke the rules.

  Nothing also seemed to have evolved intelligence, let alone civilization, beyond the most rudimentary; evolution was borne out, but the requirement for a fast-thinking brain seemed to be a low priority in nature’s schemes. Interest in the program waned, as humanity’s fickle public always tended to do when things went along without real surprises, and the scientists and corporations who depended upon it sought other methods of funding the still expanding program. Ultimately, they came up with the idea of selling off some of the best planets to interest groups back on Earth and on the few planets that had been developed to bleed off excess Earth population. It seemed an outrageous and unworkable idea. How many groups would even want their own planet, anyway? After all, even if they were livable, the only reason to sell them at all would be because science and government had decided that the worlds had nothing profitable to offer. And who could afford it? Certainly all of the worlds in question could be used in a self-supporting mode, assuming importing and developing Earth plants and animals that could thrive there and using the mineral resources for building, but all this would offer would be a return to a more primitive life with little to bargain with.

  The answer was, just about every group and leader with a dream or a vision or a political theory wanted a world. Every established religious group, and religious dissident group, and every cult open and secret that had survived history or had emerged from it wanted their own world. And they all seemed to have amazing abilities to raise sufficient funds to get one, too.

  Soon there were hundreds, spread all over the near galaxy, connected by a network of self-powered and self-maintained wormgates that, mapped, looked like some drunken spider’s webbing. But the one thing they weren’t, not really, was independent.

  The Earth System Combine wanted a single level of control, a single military force, and control of the economy of the entire expanding system if only to pay for its own expenses and expansion. To do this over such a vast distance and with so many quasi-independent “colonies” direct political and military control would be expensive and impractical. Instead, the economic system was divided so that none of the worlds established out there were in more than the most basic sense self-sufficient. Oh, most could certainly maintain a subsistence living, perhaps much better than that, but for the latest technology, the cutting edge of what was possible, they were made cleverly interdependent, with no single world having more than a tiny part of the whole and often specializing in certain things. Any worlds that matured and chafed at interstellar rules and regulations, or balked at their share of the “user and facilitation fees” paid to the Combine, was welcome to drop out. It was then that they discovered how dependent they really were, and what it was like to be on your own in a cleverly constructed system that even controlled access to its own parts. If you weren’t a member, the costs and fees were huge, and prohibitive to a degree.

  Some tried it anyway, but no terraforming was that far along or that absolute, and none of the worlds were true Earthly paradises. The worlds settled by ones who stayed out and cut all ties were often revisited out of curiosity decades later by Combine ships only to be revealed as worlds where no human survivors could be found.

  The skills that had originally made humans dominate their home planet were now dead; nobody knew them anymore. The machines did it, but who programmed and maintained the machines? And what happened if no more machines came?

  And each rebel thus became an example, all without firing a shot. The Combine grew fat, and lazy, and rich, and complacent.

  Nobody knew what had caused it, nor who. The best guess was one more grab for power by yet another faction back home who ran into a ruling clique who decided that if they couldn’t have the power and control nobody else would. A miscalculation, a failure of intelligence or perhaps a misjudgment of will. Perhaps it was an unforeseen enemy in their midst or from somewhere else in the vast starfields. It didn’t matter.

  Whatever it was, what happened was that, one day, with no notice and no particular alarms, almost a third of the wormgate system, the part that led back towards Earth System and the headquarters of the Combine, simply stopped. Nothing more emerged from the gates, even though traffic was ordinarily brisk, and, perhaps as ominously, nothing that went into the gates after that one point ever was seen or heard from again.

  Messenger probes went in and never came out. There was some indication that they may not have arrived anywhere.

  It was the Great Silence.

  Two thirds of the system, and part of the military and commercial fleets, remained working and intact, but it was from the developing to the least developed points. There was no longer any direction, and the finely tuned interdependency which included the third now gone could not exist any longer. Worlds did not fall into savagery or worse, at least not most of them, but they were far more on their own than before, and the ones who now ran what was left of the show were the ones with operating spaceships.

  The trouble was, that was a commodity that was strictly originated from the Combine and near Earth systems; there weren’t any spaceship factories in the remaining two thir
ds, nor the automated systems to create them and power them safely. There was maintenance, yes, but that was it, and going through artificially enlarged and artificially maintained wormholes left little tolerance for error.

  The military tended to become a force unto itself, claiming all jurisdiction over interstellar space and the gates, financing itself by taxing the commercial ships that still ran. The commercial ships became the prizes, trying to continue their runs, keep their ships safe and maintained, and avoid both the military and potential pirates and privateers at the same time.

  Things were breaking down and fast. Only the most profitable worlds and markets were of interest; most of the other worlds were forgotten, neglected, or just ignored.

  It was another century before the Supreme Cardinal of Vaticanus, a world maintained and developed as a religious retreat by the Roman Catholic Church before the Great Silence, became one of the first to try and put some order back into the system. Without contact with the Pope or even knowing for certain if there still was one but maintaining out of faith that there had to be, the board of cardinals who’d run the retreat and seminary world had run things as they hoped God wished, awaiting a relinking with Earth. It hadn’t come, and now they were finally using some of their wealth, some of their connections on the more developed colonies, and their backup of the vast Vatican library system to send out a few dedicated priests to try and find the lost worlds.

  * * *

  It was probably because his name really was Ishmael.

  The small probe ship came out of the void with the keys to Heaven, Hell, and perhaps someplace in between; it brought with it evidence of fabulous riches and perhaps more, but what it didn’t bring back was a road map to the stars.

  Along with the spiritual part of humanity, the legends, both good and bad, had also survived, particularly amongst the few who still knew of or could follow the patterns of the scouts to the stars. Fear, doubt, and death were out there, it was true, but perhaps not only that. Somewhere out there, in stories and songs and legends from forgotten origins, were the Three Kings.

  Every civilization had at least one; every faith as well. It might be the Kingdom of Prester John, or the fabled El Dorado, or, on a more ethereal plain, it might be called Paradise, Heaven, or a state of Nirvana. On a more secular level, it was the big one, the find of a lifetime, the jackpot, the ultimate strike. Nobody really knew what it looked like, but everyone had their own vision, their own dream, and their own deep down conviction that, sooner or later, they would find it.

  The major difference between all of those and the Three Kings was that almost everyone was convinced that the Three Kings existed, and there was in fact physical evidence of it. The trouble was, its location was as mysterious and mystical as any of the others.

  Ishmael Hand was one of the breed of loners the church called Prophets and everybody else called scouts. Half human, half machine, merged into a cybernetic ship that was almost an organism in and of itself, able to build, or perhaps grow would be a better word, the probes and contact devices it required, these volunteers to go forever into the eternal void in search of the unknown had a million motives. Hand was a mystic, and not alone in that category of scout; he had turned himself into the ultimate pilgrim, searching among the stars, praying, meditating when in between, looking for something that may be out there, may actually be within his own mind, or might not exist at all. To those who sent them out, the motive didn’t matter, so long as the supply of volunteers continued.

  It was initially done entirely by machines; smart machines, machines that were every bit the observer and evaluator, but those machines proved lacking in several ways. They had never been living beings, born and raised in organic environments, feeling what organic sentient beings feel, understanding in non-academic ways what organic sentient beings really wanted or needed. They could only send back samples and reports; they could never send back impressions that others might understand and interpret. They could quantify, but they could not dream.

  Sentient beings like the human Ishmael Hand, however, also had their limits, not just physical but mental and emotional as well, and they didn’t live long enough for some of these distances, nor did they have the precision and detail that cybernetic equipment could bring to a job. The marriage of creature and machine was, after much trial and error, found to be the perfect vehicle.

  Within, of course, limits.

  For if they were not a little bit mad when they left, they certainly were after decades of roaming the vastness of the universe, yet their machine sides were precise and detailed. As time went on, it often became difficult to interpret all the data properly…

  Once an uncharted system was sighted, scouted, and thoroughly investigated, the procedure was simple. The ships themselves were almost organic; they could take in debris, dust, rock, whatever was out there and convert it to what they needed, just as their external scoops turned some of it into the interstellar fuels that ran them. From this material they grew small probes according to designs within their complex memory banks, and sent them everywhere in the system. Every type of analysis was performed, every part of everything evaluated. The most dead of worlds could contain something of great or unique value.

  Premiums, of course, were first and foremost lost colonies; then solid planets within the life zone that could be the source of new life or, if not of anything particularly interesting, turned with minimal cost or effort into new colonies. Beyond that, they looked for things they had never seen before, beautiful and unique creations, knowledge.

  There was a lot of life in the galaxy; that was well known. The trouble was, only a miniscule portion of it had any brains at all, and of the handful of races bumped into by expanding humanity none had been anything but primitive.

  Ishmael Hand had recognized what he’d stumbled on almost immediately. Long before the Great Silence there were half-whispered tales of them, but never, until now, solid physical evidence of their existence. Three planets in the life zone that had not gone bad over the eons was just about unheard of; even two was almost never seen. That was why, Hand speculated, nobody had really found the Three Kings since the ancient and messed-up machine-only scouts had first reported them.

  Not three planets, not exactly. One enormous planet, a world at the outer limits of even gas giants, and three moons, very different, yet each with thick oxygen rich atmospheres and water.

  The largest one, bigger than the Earth, wasn’t the sort of place you wanted to visit. As big as it was, it contained vast active volcanic fields, and in some places the land was forever changing, floating and twisting where lava fractured it.

  And yet there was water, even two huge oceans, making almost a dance of solidity and water and then fire and flux, then water and solid land again and then another fiery area. Much of it was concealed in clouds, but now and then there were breaks and those breaks, considering the size of the place, showed the bizarre and fractured landscape below. It was hot on its surface, even in the “cool” solid regions, but perhaps not too hot. There was vegetation, in a riot of colors, wherever it could cling and not be burnt off or knocked off by internal forces. It wasn’t a nice place to live and work, but it was fascinating if only because nobody, not Ishmael Hand nor the vastly larger and more complex thinking machines of the home empire he’d abandoned could figure out how the heck a planet that dynamic and contradictory could possibly exist. Although the Three Kings name was ancient, it remained for the scout to make sense of it, and he called this huge planet Melchior.

  And then there were the other large moons, among countless rather standard small ones. One of the larger ones was warm but not a raging madhouse like the huge planet below that held it captive; almost twenty-five thousand kilometers at its equator, a small planet in captivity, it was a wonderland of islands large and small in a continuous sea, more than forty percent land yet with no major gaps so that any part of the water could be called an ocean, nor land masses so huge that they might be considered con
tinents. It was a world of lakes and islands, teeming with plants and perhaps small animals, wild, primitive, and beautiful. This moon Hand called Balshazzar.

  The third moon also had an atmosphere, but it was farther out, cold, full of bizarre and twisted rocks and spires, great sand desertlike regions of red and gold and purple, yet somehow it retained, without large bodies of surface water, nor the thick vegetation that would normally go with such an atmosphere, a significant amount of water vapor in the air that rose in the night from the ground in thick mists and vanished in the light, and which, somehow, kept an atmosphere containing oxygen, nitrogen, and many other elements needed for life. The atmosphere was thinner than humans liked it, but they could exist there, as they’d learned to exist atop three and four kilometer mountain ranges on their mother Earth and elsewhere. This third moon Hand christened Kaspar.

  “None of the figures make a lot of sense, I admit,” the scout’s report continued, “but it will make some careers to determine how these ecosystems work. God is having fun with us here, challenging us. I do not have the means to start solving these riddles, but I feel certain that you have ones who have more than that.”

  The worlds, in their own ways, also lived up to their ancient reputation judging from the samples sent back.

  Here was a small sack of apparently natural gems, gems as large as hens’ eggs and colored translucent emerald or ruby or sapphire with centers of some different substance that, when viewed from different angles, seemed to almost form pictures or shapes—familiar ones, unique to each viewer, subjective and ever-changing devices of fascination. Once glimpsed, machines could make synthetic copies that were almost but not quite like the real thing, of course, but the real thing was unique in nature and thus precious.

  There was sand in exotic colors, mixed within containers but nonetheless unmixed, as if the colors refused to blend with each other and the individual grains appeared to prefer only their own company. The properties were electromagnetic in nature but would take a long time to yield up their secrets, particularly how such things could have come about in nature.