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  Kaspar's Box

  ( Three Kings - 3 )

  Jack L. Chalker

  For centuries, interstellar prospectors had searched for the fabled worlds of the Three Kings, the lost El Dorado of the galaxy. The mad cyborg Prophet, Ishmael Hand, discovered the mysterious system—and the alien minds behind it—and he will face a decision that may determine the fate of the entire human race.

  Kaspar’s Box

  by Jack L. Chalker

  I: MELCHIOR: SURVIVING THE FIRE

  “If the Universe is full of advanced civilizations, where are they?”

  “The trouble is,” Gail “Lucky” Cross griped, “even after all this time marooned on this pest hole, I still haven’t lost any weight!”

  Jerry Nagel looked up at the sky. “I think you’re gonna get the chance real soon. Looks like we’re coming around the big planet and into the sunlight. If not today, then tomorrow for sure.”

  They had been dreading that moment since they’d been marooned on this hot, horrid Hell of a world. It was bad enough as it was.

  The entire planet was an active volcanic zone, so far as they could tell. Every mountain, large and small, seemed to be slightly conical and had smoke rising either from the top or from fissures along the sides. Even the flat plains were nothing more than magma flows, recent and not so recent, with soft spots that could crack or invert or turn into pools of magma without notice. The air, heated partly from the proximity of the great gas giant that was a barely failed proto-sun, was further warmed by convection from the large number of hot spots. Since the environmental suits had been put away in case of severe emergency, there was no air conditioning or other comforts, either. The thermometer built into Jerry Nagel’s watch said it was a comfy thirty-two degrees Celsius, and the perceived heat was much greater thanks to the tremendous and constant humidity that varied between ninety and a hundred percent. That it rained—a lot—was the only positive about the place. It cooled them off and drained some of the humidity from the air, at least for a short period.

  There was also a constant haze: dust particles from the countless eruptions that went on around the planet in a near continuous cycle. They had small nasal dust filters in the survival kit, but it seemed like they were always getting clogged. Three, four hours and you had to wash them out and clean them. They at least allowed breathing, but they were all covered most of the time by fine chalky dust or, when it was wet, a light gray mud.

  And yet they were surviving. The rainfall was easily captured and provided a steady supply of drinking and cooking water, and the lush vegetation on the oldest, thickest plains contained plants that proved to be almost made for them. The fruit, while not anything to write home about, was nourishing and had vitamins as well as sugars, starches, and fibers. Their kit told them they could live on it, and they’d been doing so.

  There were creatures, both the flying and crawling kind, that served the purpose of insects to the plants, but they didn’t seem to be in unmanageable numbers, nor did they seem to be on the prowl for some fresh human. In fact, the things tended to avoid them; either they lacked what the creatures needed or maybe they just smelled wrong.

  Jerry Nagel was an engineer by trade. The red and purplish fronds provided huge surfaces for cover and seemed quite tough; other plants resembled bamboo and similar plants that could be depended upon for some structure. With help, he’d managed to fashion a couple of shelters, which allowed them to store the salvaged equipment and some spare materials, and which also provided shelter from the elements to an extent. After the shelters were up, they were able to keep some harvested wood dry, and Lucky Cross had fashioned a crude kiln from lava rock and the nearby fires. She’d already made some large amphora-like jars as well as small cups and trays. Water could be stored before it got fouled by the dust, and they could eat and drink off something other than lava rock.

  They had made no attempt to contact or in any way even alert the neighbors that they were around. The nearest creature colony, stranded aliens like them—or the descendants of stranded aliens—was about fifteen kilometers away and they wanted to keep it that way. The things might well be smart, but something that had a giant sucker for a face and clawed appendages clearly designed for ripping and tearing by some violent evolution were not likely to be easy to talk to, and they did not want to become a new taste treat. The alien colony was oriented towards the ocean shore, not inland. For now that was all right with them.

  Nagel saw Randi Queson sitting on a rock under a giant fern and thought she looked like a gnome or some other fairy creature from the old children’s books. She had average looks and figure, and was putting on a little weight, as they all were with this heavy sugar and starch diet, but she could afford it.

  Spacer crews generally took what the doctors called “lust abater” drugs subcutaneously to keep things from getting out of hand in the close quarters of interstellar space, but because people didn’t want them to last forever, they tended to wear off after a set period of time, at which point they could be renewed if need be or let go. It was long past the six-month period since those last implants and, as the only man left alive out of the crew, marooned on a planet with three women, he could hardly hide that fact sometimes, but he tried. It wasn’t like any of them could have kids; that was abated as a matter of course until undone by a medical science long out of reach somewhere in those vast starfields beyond. Not that any of them wanted kids, particularly on this hellhole, but it was certain that they weren’t going to be like the holy commune over on Balshazzar. There would be no human colony on Melchior.

  In a way, that made it a lot easier here. They were responsible only for themselves and each other, not anybody else, and the future was pretty much now.

  He went over to Queson and sat beside her. “You’ve been thinking again,” he kidded her in a mock scolding tone.

  She smiled. “It’s an occupational hazard.”

  “We don’t have occupations anymore. We’re castaways on a desert island with no hope of rescue. Food, shelter, little more, and always afraid the sucker-faced pirates will find us.”

  “You had a broader education than most engineers,” she noted.

  He shrugged. “Broader interests, maybe, or maybe just broad-minded parents. My mother was a literary historian who made hand-colored pottery in her spare time. Dad was a mathematician with a passion for playing the piano in an age when few even knew the term except as a digital sound. Both throwbacks. I think they met somewhere in the old Combine, maybe even on or near Old Earth, when he was trying to find a robotic program that could tune a piano and she was working in the library that day on the restoration of ancient live performances. She was actually an expert on children’s literature in an age when nobody had to be literate any more and few were or are, I guess, so she got drafted for all sorts of shit like that.”

  She looked over at him. “That’s interesting. I never knew that. Maybe we haven’t all talked ourselves out yet. At least we haven’t started killing each other. Truth is, I never paid much attention to that sort of thing before, but what I’d give for books and recordings and complinks now. My god I’m bored!”

  He sighed. “Yeah, well, there isn’t much to do here, that’s for sure. I’ve been thinking, though, that it might be time to see if there was anything at all that we could do.” He looked up at the always bright sky, now dominated by the gas giant. In a few hours, rotation would bring them back into the light of the great sun beyond and the temperature would rise to unbearable levels and they would have to seek shelter, shade, and whatever protection they could. He had worked out a system where they collected rainwater from the frequent, violent thunderstorms in rock basins, over which they’d built a thatch and leaf roof. In the worst of the h
eat they got into the pools and just stayed there until it was over. It wasn’t great—often the water temperature was almost too hot to bear on its own—but, usually, it helped. The fact that there was always a breeze from either the inland or ocean sides helped, too. But you didn’t live through midday on Melchior, you just survived it.

  “Six more days and we’ll be out of the sun,” she noted. “At least it’ll make things bearable.”

  “Uh-huh. For fifteen days. But it’s still fifteen days of nothing much, just improving our area so we can survive the next fifteen days’ exposure to the sun. I don’t know about you, but I’m just not the type to live like this.”

  She looked up at the great gas giant that lit the huge moon even when it was away from the sun and shook her head. “At least the Reverend or whatever he is up there has something. Friendly aliens to learn from and about, a large mixed population, probably the books and entertainment we miss in his wrecked ship. Hell, we don’t even have that. Just what we salvaged.”

  He paused a moment. “Well, I’ve been thinking about them. Particularly on the night side, when you can see them, almost think you can reach out to them, high in the night sky when Balshazzar approaches. They’re farther out—it’s hot as hell there, too, at midday, but I bet they have a better or more comfortable time. Maybe caves that aren’t lava tubes that may or may not open up again at any moment.”

  “I’ve been thinking about those. They are cooler, and there are some that collect a fair amount of rainwater. We’ve seen two or three whoosh out, but most of them are long dead and plugged. Temperature’s gotta be, what? Ten, fifteen degrees cooler in there at mid-sun? I’m willing to take the chance on that just to not have to turn into a boiled dinner for hours every day.”

  “We can move. I can’t see any reason not to. Not now, anyway. If one of them did give way it would be a quick death, not a slow one like this. The Rev might not be trapped in heaven like it looked, but we’re sure stuck in Hell.”

  “Li’s claustrophobic,” she reminded him. “That’s the only problem.”

  Nagel shrugged. “I’m not sure we can do any good by making ourselves martyrs to our problem child. I keep thinking that, if the situation was reversed, the old An Li wouldn’t have hesitated a minute if it was her comfort against somebody else’s misfortune. She doesn’t have to come if she can’t hack it. We’ll be back over here when it’s a little cooler—like now.”

  “Yeah, can’t be more than thirty-five Celsius,” she commented. “Not like midday.”

  She was being facetious, but it wasn’t far off the mark. They had some instruments salvaged from the shuttle before it went down in the lava and the midday sun at this latitude had reached as high as fifty degrees, enough to kill any of them if they were exposed for any length of time. Only the countless storms saved them at all.

  “You’re not just thinking of the lava tubes, are you?”

  She shook her head slowly. “No, not really. Just a first step to doing something.”

  “You’re thinking of Magi stones again, aren’t you?”

  She nodded. “I know, they’re probably just a natural phenomenon, an emitter of some kind of radiation that causes hallucinations, but we’ve compared notes. Even in that horrible overdose, you, me, Lucky—we all had the same hallucinations. And even with the ones and twos, that sense of observing and being observed, of an intelligence out there, looking back at us, aware of us, but in a way that is alien, possible malevolent, possibly just indifferent or removed, like some Greek god looking down on a peasant village. I can’t shake the idea that there’s something more to them.”

  “They’re definitely natural. We saw where they were formed.”

  “Yes, there were several such, but all localized, all seeming to extrude from the hard volcanic basalt. It was almost like… like they were being somehow manufactured in those spots. I know it’s crazy, but I can’t kick it. It’s probably the heat and the hopelessness, but what the hell can I do?”

  The sameness of the hallucinations had gotten to him as well, almost as if they either were one collective mind at that point or were all receiving the same very strong signal, a signal directly to the brain.

  “But it destroyed Li’s mind,” he reminded her. “She’s like a little child. Trusting, not thinking very much, just sort of existing. Almost like a lobotomy. Almost like everything that was there came out in that hallucinatory session and in that butchery of Sark. Little An Li, maybe forty, forty-five kilos, beating up and taking apart a man half again her height and more than twice her bulk.”

  “And she might do it again, if she got close to the stones.”

  He nodded. “I’ve always been afraid of that. I could take the old An Li coming back, but I’m scared of that monster that came out of her. I want to know it left her rather than went back into hiding.”

  “I think that monster’s in all of us,” Randi told him. “Except maybe no more in her. In all this time here I’ve seen no sign of any change. Have you?”

  He shook his head. “No, none. Maybe that frenzy killed it, but it makes the point even more. If it’s also inside you and me, what’s to keep us from winding up letting it out, or letting it run away?”

  She shrugged. “After a lot of thought, I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter. If we can learn something by studying the stones, maybe use them, then great. If what was buried deeper in us than in her gets out and one of us dies, so what? Beats living endless years like this, at least to me.”

  “And if it escapes and runs away?”

  “Then we’ll be like poor An Li. We’ll happily sing little songs and pick flowers and not even care if we crap as we walk and we’ll die sooner, but we won’t feel a thing.”

  He looked over at the shelter. “You talk to Lucky about this idea?”

  She sighed. “No, but I think we should. Either way, I’m going to try it. You feel like going cave shopping with me?”

  He chuckled. “I thought you’d never ask. Our first date. And if we happen to have to go far afield and find an extrusion of Magi stones…”

  “Then,” she said, “we’ll see what develops.”

  Lucky was divided on the idea, but decided to come along anyway. It was better than being stuck back here as nursemaid to An Li. As for Li, she either came with them or she stayed. She didn’t seem capable of too many decisions, and that was one she might hate but was capable of making.

  They decided that it was best to simply lay it on her as they were going to leave. There was no use in bringing up anything in the future, even a few days in the future, with her, nor giving her any time to go into hysterics or childish rants. They would simply go. She would come, or not, and that would be that.

  * * *

  The scout who had first discovered and named the Three Kings system had never mentioned that the planet-sized worlds he named after the Magi were moons, so there was no name for the huge planet that loomed over them half of each day. Queson thought of naming it Jerusalem, since Bethlehem seemed too modest for such a monster of a failed star, but Jerry Nagel had nixed that idea. “Next year in Jerusalem,” he said. “Jerusalem is hope, the destination we hope to reach. I’m more inclined towards Pharaoh, since it holds us unwilling captives.”

  “I was thinking more of Babylon,” she commented. “Or maybe Egypt?”

  “No, not Egypt, nor Babylon, either. There’s a will here someplace. The Holy Joes on Balshazzar felt it, sensed it, and warned us of it. The will that traps them there. Pharaoh was the stubborn captor; Egypt was just the place. And not Babylon, surely, and not just for the same reason. Nebuchadnezzar would be a fitting name it’s true, but Babylon, and Assyria, and Persia are where the Three Kings came from, right? And we don’t know which conqueror is lurking here someplace, making the rules. No, we’ve got Alexander or Cyrus somewhere in the shadows playing games with us, but not up there. Pharaoh, I think, will do.”

  “What’re you guys talkin’ about?” Lucky asked, already breathing hard from the
long walk, carrying, as they all were except An Li, supplies for several days on their otherwise bare backs. “All them names nobody can pronounce. They sound like those names a Hindu guy once spouted trying to explain his charms to me when we was offloading freighters back in the old days. Never got that right, either.”

  “Well, they’re from a religion,” Randi Queson responded. “Judaism and Christianity, mostly. But the places were real, and historical.”

  “You study all that shit?”

  “Some of it,” she replied. “A lot more I picked up, and some was from my own family. Mostly, I think I just looked into things because I found them interesting and I got curious.”

  “And I’m pretty much the same,” Nagel told her. “Not much on the family side—they were about as religious as you are—but from other people I worked with or got to know. You weren’t curious about the Hindu fellow’s beliefs?”

  “Not really. Sounded pretty silly to me. So does all this shit. Fancy names from folks too long dead talkin’ about places that probably don’t exist no more if they ever did and old fairy stories. What good does it do to know any of that? Does it fill your belly or get you a job or make you well when you’re sick? Just stories, that’s all. We’re all the way out here in the middle of who knows where, a zillion light-years from anything or anybody ’cept the others stuck here, too, and we ain’t bumped into no gods yet.”

  “I wonder,” Randi muttered.

  “Huh?”

  “Somebody once said that if we ever ran into a race so advanced that they were as far ahead of us as we were of bugs and germs they’d be supernatural to us. Maybe that’s what God and the angels really are.” She paused a moment, liking the idea. “And maybe Satan and his demons, too. A lot of our myths and legends and core beliefs came from real events and real people at some point, even if they got twisted or misinterpreted. Certainly those monks who scouted the known and unknown universe were devoted to looking for God. That’s how we got these names for these moons.”