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  Plant samples at once familiar and yet so alien that they appeared to be able to convert virtually any kind of energy into food, including, if one was not careful, any living things that touched them. Rooted plants that nonetheless responded to sounds and actions and would attempt to bend away from probes or shears and whose own energy fields could distort instruments and short out standard analyzers.

  But most fascinating of all were the Artifacts.

  They were always afterwards called the Artifacts, with a capital “A,” because there was nothing like them and no way to explain them. Ishmael Hand found no signs of any sentient lifeforms on any of the three worlds, nor ruins nor any signs that anyone had ever been there before, but he, too, understood what was implied by the Artifacts.

  They were not spectacular, yet they were the greatest of all finds. One was a simple cylinder, perfectly machined, with tolerances so small, with dimensions so perfect, that one had to go down almost to the atomic level to find a flaw. And it was machined out of an absolutely one hundred percent pure block of titanium.

  It also looked very much as if it had been manufactured in a lab within the past few hours, yet the tag with it indicated that it was lying half buried in the surface. It was only at the atomic and subatomic level that it was discovered that the entire thing was coated, to the thickness of only a dozen atoms, in a hard coating that was close enough to one used in human manufacturing that it was inconceivable to think of it as natural.

  The second was a gear, perhaps a half a meter around, with one hundred and eighty-two fine and perfect teeth. It, too, was machined just like the cylinder, to absolute perfection, and it, too, had the synthetic protective coating.

  The third and final Artifact was a one-meter coil, made out of a totally synthetic and absolutely clear polymerlike substance and created to the same perfect tolerances as the other two. The coil had nineteen turns and its ends were smooth, not broken. The substance was unlike any that had ever been seen before, yet made of stuff that contemporary labs would have no trouble duplicating. In fact, it was easily as good as what was being used but cheaper and easier to make.

  “There must be a lot of this junk around,” Ishmael Hand’s report noted. “Consider that my probes were able to discover these three pieces with ease, although none are all that large. Don’t try and put them together, though. I doubt if they’re from the same device. In fact, I’m near positive that they aren’t. You see, the coil came from Balshazzar, the gear from Melchior, and the cylinder was sticking out of the purple desert sands on Kaspar.”

  * * *

  After all this time, Ishmael Hand could only have faith that anyone was even listening. He had been sent out from a holy world, a retreat and a monastic place to find what God had in mind for him. One of its orders had trained many of the scouts like Ishmael Hand in the mental disciplines required of such a life, and had carefully picked and then prepared them for the long, lonely Communion. Once the Great Silence came about, they had but a few dozen such ships fully outfitted and not many more candidates than that. They sent half back in the direction of the Arm and Old Earth in hopes of reestablishing contact; the others, like Hand, were sent forward to find the colonies and remap what might well be out there. Thus it was that Hand had discovered what had already been discovered, but which had also been lost. His broadband, uncoded broadcasts back to every region where there might be listeners was public property. He was not out there for riches or material rewards.

  There was enough interest and excitement among any with spaceships in the rediscovery of the Three Kings now to attract the best and the worst of spacefaring humanity. There was only one problem. While the reporting probe contained the samples and the report and vast amounts of data, nowhere inside could they find the star maps or location data nor the beacon system that would allow them to get there in a hurry.

  This was the fourteenth solar system Ishmael Hand had reported on in the long years since he’d launched himself into the unknown, but it was the first and only one where the location data was lacking. It wasn’t like Hand to have any such lapses, and he certainly gave no indication in his report that he didn’t expect a horde of expeditions to be heading out to the Three Kings straightaway. Nor did any of the data suggest damage or instability in Hand’s ship and cybernetic parts. Not even His Holiness in Exile and his monastic group understood what might have caused problems with Hand at this key moment.

  And yet nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in any of that data, did it show where the heck the Three Kings were, and at no point was there enough of a star sky given that would allow the position to be deduced.

  Hand, as usual for him, wound up with a long string of prayers and chants from the Bible and other holy books, but then he stopped in the middle and added, “You know, if I wasn’t sure this was the Three Kings I’d have never named them that. I still considered naming them something else, but there’s much to be said for tradition. Nonetheless, beware! The three perfect names I would otherwise have bestowed on these little beauties are Paradisio, Purgatorio, and Inferno. But which was which would only have confused you secular scientists anyway. God be with you when you arrive on these, though, for nobody else will be, and your lack of faith might well be the death of you! Amen!”

  And that was the end of the report.

  The Three Kings had gone from legend to reality, but were now more maddeningly desired and more maddeningly out of reach than ever.

  But they had been discovered not once, but twice, even if centuries apart. By hook, by crook, by luck, faith, or perhaps destiny, somebody would discover them again.

  Or solve the mystery of Ishmael Hand.

  Those in space now divided neatly into two types of people. There were the profane—the pirates and raiders who made a living from a bit more knowledge of the colonial worlds’ positions and assets than most others—and the holy. Not just the Ishmael Hands and the Catholic priests and nuns who followed him and his kind, but the others as well, the evangelists and teachers of every conceivable faith who could put together a ship and who were as determined as Ishmael Hand to return the truth of God to the lost colonies.

  Many of them dreamed as well of finding the Three Kings of Ishmael Hand.

  I: ON FAITH & MOUNTAINS

  Faith moved The Mountain; it had long ago come to Muhammad, and received a chilly reception, but now it was heading for friendlier but less exotic worlds farther in towards the galactic melding.

  And, indeed, as always, faith moved The Mountain, faith expressed in the sums large and small that had paid for its construction, its outfitting, and its traveling expenses.

  There were a number of such ships, large and small, moving throughout the known galaxy, representing every conceivable faith and some inconceivable ones as well, and while this one was more conventional than not, its faithful aboard were not considered exactly mainstream Christians. Then, again, since the Silence and the long years that followed it, the same could be said of many faiths on the former colonial worlds.

  It had been predicted that when humanity finally went out and colonized the stars that this would collapse the parochial religions of Earth, save, perhaps, for some of the cosmic types like Hinduism and the introspective like classical Buddhism, but it hadn’t happened. Indeed, cut off for long periods and by vast distances from the rest of human culture, it was the religions of humanity that kept them together, kept them sane for the most part, and provided the same sort of social framework as the settlers of the American west or the Siberian and Alaskan east had spread with such faithfulness. But long distances did not bring with them a sufficient number of conventional clergy, nor did the doctrine and study of conventional faiths remain locked in stone. With distance came distortion, and error. And, after the Great Silence severed contact with the mother churches and seminaries, save only the Roman Catholic one, came the greatest evangelical boom since the days of Earthbound colonialism, mostly due to the actions of men and women to whom God spoke after destroying t
he old civilization that had strayed from the True Path, whatever that Path was, not due to trained and ordained clerics.

  Most were also commercial types, or they hitched a ride on commercial vessels. Spaceships were few and far between and precious. But a few had their own ships, or partially converted freighters to their floating colonies, and the ones without prohibitions against blowing the hell out of pirates, privateers, and outfoxing the occasional military patrol did quite well.

  The Mountain was one of the truly grand ones, a tent show with a tent so great that it would have been like some early preacher’s visions of Heaven. Nobody knew how anyone save Vaticanus could have afforded to put together such a craft, let alone maintain it. That alone made it a matter of great curiosity, wonder, and awe, and even some suspicion among the planetary governments.

  Traveling between the stars and in and out of star gates the ship didn’t look so grand; like most, it was a great power plant scooping up and converting the debris of ancient solar system formation and the cosmic dust of the void into the power to get to the gates and make the jumps. Once inside such a gate the ordinary rules of space-time did not seem to apply; depending on the speed and angle with which your ship entered, you would travel for minutes, hours, days, or even weeks or months, and come out, well, somewhere else, at another gate, impossibly far from where you’d begun, yet often, by the strict chronometers of the gates and maintenance stations around them, before you had left where you’d come from. Nobody had ever met themselves in real space, but there were often temporal surprises for the freighters and military craft that loosely connected the worlds of humanity out there. It was an eerie kind of second-hand time travel that committed spacefaring folk to themselves and themselves alone.

  That was why The Mountain also had living quarters for almost a thousand men, women, and children. Whole families were there; they met, married, and procreated in the main forward area of the vast two-point-five kilometer rotating cylinder. That was the Mount Sinai. A smaller ship actually was contained inside the nose, and was launched only when The Mountain was safely docked in stable orbit around an inhabited planet. This was called, when separated, Mount Olivet. Joined, they were always just The Mountain. The pattern and layout were similar enough to that of a freighter that it was clear that the big ship had been adapted from one, but it looked nothing like a standard freighter now.

  Mount Olivet was small by comparison to Mount Sinai, it was true, and was designed to land on worlds even if they had no spaceport. In truth, it was an impressive, oblong-shaped craft of creamy white material over a thousand meters long and six hundred meters wide, and it descended on a flat base that was itself a hundred or more meters high. It was powered by a magnetic field drive and was designed for a totally self-contained landing. Indeed, its shape and size made it unwelcome at conventional spaceports, which was just fine with the crew that would take it down to surface after surface. They required a huge flat area not far from some population center yet far enough so that such a landing was practical and the ship, after that, would be accessible.

  Finding that type of space, and a crowd that didn’t also come well armed and ready to tar and feather at the minimum was a job in and of itself.

  As soon as The Mountain cleared the automated wormgate the first order of business was to pull up and scan the entire region. Many of the wormgates were in poor shape and the ship’s technicians often spent days or even weeks inside the automated station making at least basic repairs and checks to insure that they could comfortably stay a bit yet get out quickly if need be. In-system probes looked for the reason why the gate was there. It always meant a colony, of course, but so many of them were discovered failed and dead, so many had not been viable once the Great Silence had cut them off, or, worse, had become vulnerable to those who roamed the space lanes now with no regard for life but only an appetite for plunder. Others had descended so far into barbarism that they were ignorant of their own origins. Some were hostile, often for good reason, to all outsiders and needed to be coaxed into acceptance of The Mountain and its mission, or, sometimes, written off when no compromise was negotiable.

  Nobody knew the reception they would get, but there was no question that the second planet in the eight-planet system was Earth Type A, inhabited, and retained at least some technological information.

  They were being scanned from monitors mounted on the gate as well as from scanners in fixed orbits farther in-system, and those scans were being beamed to the second planet.

  This was not necessarily happy news. It implied that high tech defensive systems were probably also deployed and still operable, and that this would take a bit of diplomacy before proceeding.

  There was no purpose in delay, though. They were potential targets even where they were, although it was unlikely that there would be any actions that might blow up the gate as well. That was a true last resort and would close the door for good on any hope of friends finding them.

  Still, right now the planetary defense system knew more about them than they did about it or the planet and people it guarded, and that had to be rectified.

  “Reconciliation ship Mountain to unknown planetary civilization,” the captain called via an all-frequency radio link. “We are pleased to have found you, but we have no idea who you are. You are on none of our charts. We come in faith and friendship as an arm of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have sophisticated databases and robotic synthesizing and repair systems, and we have agricultural seed, culturable DNA for domestic cloning of farm animals, and much more.” Many places would run from an evangelical group, particularly one with a ship this grand, but it was a lot harder to turn down the more material benefits they also brought and bargained for access to the hearts and minds of people.

  There was no immediate reply. The captain waited a minute or two, then repeated his call almost word for word.

  Still silence returned.

  He shrugged and turned to see the Doctor entering the bridge. Everybody snapped to, even though they were used to the big bear of a man who looked and sounded much like a biblical patriarch but with the patience of a divine right monarch convinced of his infallibility.

  Doctor Karl Woodward, Ph.D., was just short of two meters tall, and built so broadly and solidly that he filled a space. He wasn’t fat; in fact, he was in excellent shape for a man his age and delighted in challenging younger members of The Mountain’s family in all sorts of heavy exercise. He had flowing white hair that tumbled over his shoulders, and a full beard that gave his face a kinder look than perhaps the body’s build projected, and his rough, ruddy complexion beneath all the hair was cut only by sharp but very cold deep blue eyes. When he spoke, it was always the voice of the prophet, the voice of command, and in a deep, spellbinding baritone.

  He waved his hand idly at the captain. “Keep going. It may take them a while to decide if they even want to talk to us.”

  The captain shrugged and nodded, but noted, “It may be all automated as well, sir. We’ve run into that before, particularly if this is a pirate world or old military or maybe just plain paranoid.”

  “They’re all paranoid at this level, Captain,” the Doctor responded. “But most paranoids don’t trust machines to do their vital thinking for them. Haven’t yet seen that, doubt I ever will. We do have live bodies on that world out there?”

  “Definitely, sir. Hard to tell the size from this distance, but the best located of the three continental land masses appears to have a significant although not overwhelming population. Good climate, looks like decent rain patterns. The others are a lot more rugged.”

  “How many?”

  “Computer scan estimates no more than eight to ten thousand, well scattered, no cities, although it looks like everything is centered around a series of tiny towns. Surface roads indicated, mostly unpaved, but development does show a spoke pattern. JoAnn, that’s your department.”

  A young woman with flaming red hair, in a tight fitting red bridge deck suit, looked at
her console. “Aye, Captain. Landing site was near a large inland lake, which is fairly common, and somewhat centrally located. It appears they had a basic spaceport, the usual layout, but there’s not much sign it’s been used in recent memory or could be. The scans are definitely being reported to the complex there, but it’s not like it’s the capital city we might expect. In fact, I’d say it has only a few hundred inhabitants, no more than the obviously agricultural support towns in the central plain. There may be an administrator of sorts, but I would sincerely doubt if there is even as much as a centralized governmental authority with any real clout. No presidents, Maximum Leaders, or whatever. This is a classic frontier pattern.”

  “That’s not a lot of people for this length of time,” the Doctor commented. “Any snakes in their Eden we can see?”

  “No, sir. Climate’s good and it appears that agriculture is thriving. It may just be that there weren’t very many people to begin with, or that many of them left when the Silence descended and never came back. All that’s guesswork. Anything more would require we go down there and look.”

  The Doctor’s massive white eyebrows went up. “What do you think, Captain? Should we send somebody down to look? Can we cover them?”

  “I think we could cover them to planetfall, sir,” the officer responded, “but once they were on the ground they’d be sitting ducks. I’d recommend a robotic probe. Harder to protect, but it would give us information without risking lives.”

  “I know that!” the Doctor snapped irritatedly. “Don’t patronize me! Ever! I helped design this thing, remember!”