Before the Great Silence, what the Stanley crew had managed would have garnered applause, awards, instant fame and glory, and even poor Achmed would have gotten a statue at the very least. The Earth System Combine would then have dispatched a military unit including a battleship capable of turning a planet into dust to the system, and then if dialogue was irrelevant, and they couldn't be talked out of it, the threat would be totally vaporized.
That was something governments on a wide colonial level were good for.
But there wasn't such a government, hadn't been such a government or colonial empire for almost two centuries now. There were still some massive naval vessels and even combat groups, but they were responsible only to themselves and their officers and, although they claimed to still police the spaceways, they were often hard to tell from the pirates and private armies that prowled the region. A report would be sent to the nearest naval group, of course, since it would no more want that creature to get out of its planetary prison than anyone else would, but whether or not it would be considered enough of a threat to waste precious energy on was problematical. They hadn't been there.
At least no other salvagers would be tempted to try because of the potential profits. That was what Sark and Nagel had been doing while Achmed had sealed the cliff entrances. Planting and igniting enough thermite bombs to reduce all those greenhouses and all that potential salvage to bubbling, hissing primal goo.
They had reason to be proud of themselves, too. They'd stopped possibly the greatest threat to all humanity in its tracks and they'd done whatever they could to keep it there. A half dozen dirty old salvagers and a beaten-up old salvage ship. All that with the loss of just one of their number.
And they would have felt proud, if you could have spent proud, or gotten some reward for being noble. Instead, they were going back to Sepuchus, a dirty, smoky little planet that was the current headquarters of the Kajani Salvage Works, the company that had chartered the Stanley to go get that dead colony's physical remains and bring them back to be recycled and remade into new things once again.
That was what the crew had been hired to do, and that was what they most definitely had not done. The lease on the Stanley plus the time and the expendables was substantial. The crews were the least of the expenses, though; they drew no salaries, and worked for a percentage of the wholesale value of the salvage.
If the Kajani family could eat the expense, they would still take a huge hit on the expenses and the extensive base unit repairs and have little new to sell; if they couldn't, then a venerable old company would be bankrupted and taken over by creditors. Either way, the crew of the Stanley would get absolutely nothing, and might well be black carded by the guilds, branding them unreliable and therefore unemployable. There were more crews than ships these days.
There would be no gold, no laurel wreaths down the metaphorical Appian Way for saving humanity. That hadn't been their job, either.
"I really think that we made one and only one big mistake back there," Jerry Nagel commented over coffee in the Stanley's cozy lounge.
Randi Queson looked up from examining her scientific notes and responded, "Yes?"
"I think we should have just brought the damned worm back. Keep it in the base unit, all sealed up, and then drop it on the first bank that shows up."
She sighed. "And you think that just because it would absorb the bank that it wouldn't foreclose anyway?"
"You've got a point. Too much alike to begin with, banks and worms."
"Have you thought what you might do?" she asked him.
He shrugged. "I'm an engineer without references at this point. Never had any big scores and now I've got a major blowout. Still, I'll make do. The one thing that we're always short of is people who know how to fix things. God! Who would have thought in the romantic days of interstellar colonies we'd be an economic basket case slowly breaking down? One of these days, or years, or decades, we won't be able to fix it anymore. When the machines die and can no longer be fixed, people like me will still be around making do. Sark? He's muscle. Even in the age of machines you need occasional muscle. He'll make do as well, as somebody's personal bodyguard or in some private army someplace. Lucky'll wind up crop-dusting some dirtball, and people like An Li always seem to come out smelling like a rose sooner or later. What about you?"
She sighed. "Going over my notes here. I've got enough to keep them going in academia for a while here, from biology to philosophy. I'm the only known human being who ever had any sort of conversation with an alien intelligence, at least as far as we know. That should be good for a position in some minor department someplace, lecturing on the rights and wrongs of containment and whether or not it's really true that you can't have a dialogue with a unified intelligence. It'll drive me nuts after a while, but it'll be good for eating and sleeping money for a couple of years, anyway. At least it's Li who'll have to face the Kajanis, anyway. Better her than me, and she sure as hell deserves it. We're just the hired help."
Jerry Nagel nodded and looked up at the ship's chronometer. "Well, it's been nice working with you, anyway. It's about two hours until we have to get out and walk."
That wasn't literally true, of course. In two hours they'd be in orbit, and then they'd have to wait until An Li went down and filed the official reports. The entire account of the mission would already be there by now, of course, downloaded as they'd come within range, but face-to-face reporting was the last of it. As team leader, Li would have to find them some kind of quarters and arrange for some sort of holding position until the crew could be taken to various civilized destinations. That wouldn't take long; there were always ships, big and small, coming in and out of Sepuchus, shopping at one of the sector's biggest salvage yards for whatever they needed.
The account would be part of the public record, as tradition dictated, so it would spread as well. That would both help and hurt them, but there wasn't much they could do about it.
"You know, I've got a virgin fifth of bourbon, really good aged stuff, private label, in my cabin," she commented. "I was saving it for a little celebration when we got back and could total up the shares. Not much I can do about that now, but even coming back flat broke and a failure again it's at least an occasion. Want to break a seal and have a few toasts?"
"Real alcoholic booze, huh? No funny pills, no virtual mindblasts, just good old-fashioned good-going-down-make-you-puke-later stuff? You know, you're a real throwback, Doc."
"Well, we may as well get used to it," she responded. "Just in case this is an omen, the spare parts aren't there anymore, and it's sooner than we think, that time when you can't fix things anymore. . . ."
An Li was not a very happy person going down to the surface, nor was she much happier coming back. The chewing-out, screaming, cursing, and threats she expected; par for the course. The accusation that they'd failed to do the job because of cowardice was unacceptable. They'd seen the records and the data, the same that she'd looked at before okaying the abort. There was no way that those greenhouses could have been salvaged entirely by automation, and the loss of Achmed was proof that when you put people back into there, well, sooner or later they would be gotten. It was very easy to second-guess from afar, and long after the fact.
There were twenty-one vessels in orbit with the Stanley at the time she was getting her ass chewed. These included nine capital ships, three large military vessels, and several slick yachts clearly used to move purchasing agents to the wares they needed as quickly as possible, which meant that their employers were desperate and would pay through the nose.
The cost of repairs on the base and the consumables would be stiff, but she'd done the math, and they'd brought the ship and base back intact, when common sense had said to leave that base and smelter and disassembly unit behind. That loss might have broken the company, but not a simple failure to reclaim a site. She would almost wager that more than enough to cover the Stanley's bills was being paid out just today by those various orbiting ships looking for vital parts to keep going.
Poison the ocean indeed! she sniffed, thinking of the exchange. Like that would have stopped them from becoming translucent units of a greater whole.
Well, she'd get the crew put up at Canyer's Guild Hostel about a hundred kilometers south of here. That would at least have them out of Kajani territory, so any funds that might be dropped by or on behalf of the crew wouldn't go back to those bastards.
What she needed was a room, a hot bath with real water, and maybe a few patches of squibs to send her into another and more pleasurable state of mind for a while. Canyer's had mineral baths, and even if she would have to tap her private account for some privacy, it was available.
She looked around the place for the last time and sighed. We, too, are in the funeral business, she thought sourly. In this day and age, it's everyone for themselves and if it takes grave robbing, then so be it. These days what was left of civilization maintained itself by robbing the failures of the past and by cannibalizing the rest. Eat. drink, and be merry, for tomorrow . . . Nobody thought much about tomorrow, herself included. Not in this day and age. No money, no job, you did what you had to do. She'd worked her way up to here from a start in a navy brothel, and she'd do it again if she had to.
Those Kajani bastards! Did they think she'd have let such a threat as that thing in the sea stop her from a profit even if it had cost the whole damned ground crew? She'd authorized the shutdown because it was impossible to salvage without even her becoming a part of that thing. "Dialogue is irrelevant." What a stupid worm that was! It wasn't enough to imitate, you had to learn from your victims. She'd have sold out the whole damned human race except for her own private places if that thing had been smart enough to make a deal.
And this would have been a hell of a great base for taking over the rest of the race, too. Everybody came here eventually, everybody who could. Three of the biggest salvage yards in the remnants of the empire were right here. Hell, that destroyer up there . . . How long would it take the worm to have taken every soul down to the rats and roaches on the damned thing? A few days? Less? And then it goes back and takes a planet destroyer, and the rest of the battle group, and there's power. That's what she would have done, but she didn't have to spread her knowledge over countless cells. It was nice, compact, and in one place for easy correlation.
Trouble was, I needed to become the worm, not the other way around, she reflected bitterly.
Canyer's Guild Hostel looked like the kind of place that put up working stiffs between jobs on a junkyard planet. Cobbled together from every conceivable kind of old building site, it seemed less a large building than an assemblage of junk that had somehow come alive from the weight of salvage all around and under it. It could have been described as ball-shaped, triangular, oblong, rectangular, starlike, and flowing adobe and been pretty well depicted correctly. The only assurance was that, because it had been put together by the same sort of people who might need to stay in it for a while, it was pretty damned stable. No two rooms were remotely alike.
Getting the crew set up wasn't a problem; the guilds owned the place, and if you had a valid card they couldn't refuse you, even if you couldn't afford to stay there. Salvagers, like other skilled workers in guild or union organizations, took care of their own because, God knew, nobody else would.
There weren't many different guild facilities on a dump of a world like this. Salvagers', engineers', longshoremen's, and entertainment were about it. "Entertainment," of course, was always there except on the Holy Joe-type worlds, and, buried deep, even on a couple of those. The folks who lived in the entertainment hostels didn't exactly do Shakespeare. They were more like a service industry.
The odd thing was, she was a card-carrying member with some experience in three out of four. Engineers required more than on-the-job training; when you were dealing with the complex cybernetic spaceships and robotic design and reprogramming, well, you needed an education for that.
But she'd run tugs to and from orbital freighters, she'd been on and then led salvage teams, and she'd begun, actually had been born, in one of those entertainment guild hostels, so she had the other three. She might have had the fourth one, too, if she'd ever had the time to learn to read and write. That was a luxury in an automated age, even one that was falling apart. She'd never felt the need nor figured out the sense of knowing those skills.
She set up the crew and signaled them to pack up and come on down, and suddenly felt empty, almost drained. It took her a moment to realize why.
For the first time in a very long time, she was absolutely on her own. She'd done the last thing she had to do. Oh, a few added debriefings, and some soft soap and maybe fancy moves when the leasing company digested the fact that the Stanley's rent hadn't been paid, but, otherwise, she was done.
She had a week or two, she knew, before things began to get ugly. Word didn't exactly travel instantaneously around the known galaxy anymore; it took time for these things to get back to the leasing people, for somebody to figure out the score, and maybe for some enforcers to be sent out to see what could be done, if not to collect, perhaps to make examples for the future.
Avoiding those types wasn't a real challenge, either, for the same reason as it took for word to get around. The distances involved in this kind of life were vast. The real challenge was the DNA sample they had of her, but even that could be fudged, if it came to that.
What was required was what she didn't have: money.
She wasn't worried about the others. They were a guild crew and had been properly hired; she was the one with her ass on the line, putting her neck on the chopping block thanks to a talkative young marine who'd seen this whole deserted colony while on his last patrol and who wanted to show off just where he'd been.
She knew now that she should have left it to the marines, but the money potential had been so huge that it had been worth the risk. She still would take such a risk again for such a possible prize. Those who didn't take those kinds of risks remained insects, grunts on the ground or in the brothels doing the same monotonous and degrading shit until they either died or killed themselves leaving no permanent marks on the landscape of history.
It was time to find her own room here, take a shower, dress for optimism, and go on over to a bar.
She didn't want a place close to the guild billets; it would do her no good to run into everybody she knew or try and pick up another broke guildsman. Hocking what little she had left, she got herself more than presentable and took a taxi over to the Hotel Center where the buyers and sellers of all sorts of junk congregated.
Most of the time she always hated being so small. A hundred and forty-five centimeters put you well below most, and even if your body was very well proportioned, forty plus kilos didn't make for an imposing figure. You had to do that on look, on bearing, on how you moved. Her entertainer background was always the most useful to her when not in space, although much of it came as naturally to her as her height or weight. She hadn't been designed as an entertainer in some genetics lab, but the odds were her mother, or maybe her whole lineage, had been.
That's why she'd liked space so much, though, other than that you were on your own or the equal or boss of the rest of your fellow workers. If you were in a weightless area you could move a ton of ore just as easily as someone twice your size, and even if you were piloting a tug, the tug became an extension of you and made you just as powerful as anybody else in one.
Now it was back-to-basics time until she had enough to break away again and guarantee a disappearance into another more equalizing position.
The dumb-clever name of the Prefabricated Inn showed up between two of the five central hotels in the business district. It looked like the right kind of place, although she didn't remember it from the past.
She paid the taxi with her card and then got out and looked around the place as the little vehicle, itself rescued and rehabbed from the junk pile, buzzed off.
It hadn't been too long ago that she'd been a guest in one of these, after she'd taken the prospectus and proofs to the agency reps and gotten financing for the salvage trip. It had been, in many ways, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream: Here not because you were doing escort duty, plying business information, or giving other forms of personal service, but because you were a guest, a paying guest who belonged here. Being called "Miss" and "Ma'am," having the service types try and solicit you, walking into places like this bar like you were about to sign a billion-dollar deal.
Well, she was dressed pretty much the same now, and had the same look, so maybe she'd be remembered. If so, nobody would be looking for her as just another escort on the make. She just hoped she could find a mark quickly and easily in this place.
She couldn't afford to be sitting around one very long otherwise, and it was a long, long trip back to the hostel if she didn't score.
Young, old, male, female, it didn't really matter so long as they had some money. Even information wouldn't be all that valuable now. Not until she could clear the decks and her obligations and take chances again.
The place wasn't a dump like the world it was on, but it was a prefab model that some designer had tried to disguise as something interesting while only making it something more plastic. It probably was something from the salvage yard—even the fancy hotels in this area were assembled from true surplus projects—but, for a bar with some limited food service, it looked and smelled pretty clean.
It wasn't all that busy, though. Oh, there were a few dozen men and women, mostly business types, sitting around talking in low tones to each other, and a few young people in military uniforms over in one corner accompanied by a man and a woman who were clearly both from the escort services and doing their usual fine acting to their paying clients. She recognized the guy—Yuri, his name was—from old times, but she gave no acknowledgment nor would he to her if he saw and recognized her. It was part of the code.
You knew you were in a first-class establishment, though, because there were real people doing drink service. Usually it was all automated: you gave your order into a hidden speaker, it arrived on a robot tray after being mixed by some barely concealed bartending machine, and that was that. Nobody needed to wait tables, or be waited upon. It was all ego, all part of making you feel like you really were better than other people. Not like the escorts. Cybersex could be far more intense than real sex and very, very authentic, but it turned out that you paid a real price physically for doing a lot of it, and it got cold after a while, too, because you knew it was fake and you knew just how it would wind up. Until people became machines they needed other people.
She had always wondered about those who did merge with machines. It was a one-way trip; you could be switched to other mechanical devices but you'd never be human again. Like the woman who was the captain of the Stanley, for example: a brain and spinal cord in a charged fluid bath whose thoughts controlled every aspect of that big ship and whose thought processes and calculating abilities were augmented by a gigantic high speed quasi-organic super computer. What would make somebody do that? You really didn't live much longer, overall, unless you were employed by people willing to put in constant maintenance. Even then, even if you got to live a few extra centuries, what did it matter? You might feel superhuman and all powerful, but you were really just a part in a big hulking ship that went where others told it to go, and you could never touch or feel other human beings, never really come down here, even to a dump like this, and enjoy life.
But you sure were anonymous if you wanted to be. After all that experience, An Li realized that she never knew the captain's name, nor anything about her past except that she'd been a woman. She'd been nothing but a disembodied voice, the captain. She was up there now, unable to move out of orbit until somebody with the correct codes allowed her to do so, and then only to where those signals told her to go.
One thing was sure—you had to be crazy or desperate to become like that. Little more than a slave to some corporation, forever locked in a cold vacuum of space, looking down on what you could never again share.
She could never do that. She thought death far preferable to that kind of life, but because others thought differently she and the rest of humanity could still travel on working ships requiring no crew and no skilled bridge. It wasn't the only way to travel through space, but it was the most cost-effective, the most efficient way to do it.
"What would you like, ma'am?"
She was startled out of her reverie by the question. She looked up and saw a young, dark, curly-headed man in a kind of uniform wearing a barely visible headset and microphone.
"Oh, give me a half carafe of the house chablis," she responded.
"Yes, ma'am. Coming right up."
She wasn't used to being waited on, and she couldn't see the appeal of it. Hell, with the all-automated system she'd have ordered when she wanted to and had a quick response. Now she'd been interrupted, would have to wait until this boy got the wine from probably the same kind of machine they had in the lower-class places, have him bring it when he had the time and noticed it was up, and then she'd have to pay him or even tip him. It seemed not only archaic but so . . . unnecessary.
She decided to keep to something mild and controllable. Any of the fun drugs would just siphon precious cash while impairing her, and hard booze was murder on somebody her size. Wine was low-alcohol, and she could sip it.
She looked around, and settled for some reason, perhaps past experience or just plain instinct, on one guy who was sitting at the end of the bar near the route to the rest rooms. She wasn't sure why her senses were attracted to him; certainly he looked less like he belonged here than she did. Maybe that was the reason—he just looked like a fish out of water. Rumpled clothes that looked like they'd been slept in, but of an expensive designer-type cut and look. Gray and black peppered hair that went in all directions at once and looked not only uncombed but perhaps uncombable, and a full but very nicely trimmed beard and mustache of the same middle-aged mix that fit his face quite well but which also marked him as an anachronism. Nobody who traveled between worlds had beards these days. Too much trouble. And the fact that the thick facial hair got a lot of attention when the rest of him did not told her that the look he had was the look he deliberately cultivated.
And he smoked! She wasn't sure what he smoked, but the pipe was clearly visible when he reached inside his coat for something. People who smoked were just about flaunting their wealth and position, particularly these days.
What was a guy like that doing on a world like this drinking beer alone in an overpriced bar?
She decided to see if she could find out.
The method wasn't subtle nor innovative, but it usually worked if a guy liked women. Sitting as he was on the stool just in front of the rest rooms, it was fairly simple to go by him fairly ostentatiously to get a feel if he noticed you, and, whether he did or not, when you came out (assuming he was still there) you were simply stuffing something, maybe a small makeup kit or anything that would make a real clatter on the floor, and you just dropped things near the guy. Most people were polite enough to notice and even help, and it broke the ice.
This guy was no exception. In fact, she felt his eyes on the back of her neck as she went in, and, after five minutes or so, when she emerged and dropped the small makeup kit so that it opened and scattered small stuff all over the floor, he was fairly quick to slide off the stool and begin to help her retrieve things.
She gave him the patented smile and thanked him for helping. It didn't take a minute to recover and put away the dropped materials. "Thanks," she said. "I do that a lot, I'm afraid, after I've been offworld for a while and then get back on. Different gravity or something, I guess."
His eyes, an odd blue-gray unusual in any company, widened a bit and his bushy eyebrows rose. "You've been in space as more than a passenger, I take it?" It was a throaty baritone, one that wouldn't carry all that far but had a kind of friendly, relaxed texture to it. The accent was definite but unplaceable; he was from someplace she'd never been.
She nodded. "Just got back from saving the universe and getting canned for my trouble. We weren't getting paid to save the universe, we were getting paid to salvage a dead world."
He was definitely interested, possibly hooked. "You were with that group that ran into that thing that ate a whole colony? I heard about that."
"Everybody has. All it's done is make me and most of my crew unemployable around here. I shoulda brought back some of the damned worm and let it eat my creditors. Trouble is, the worm would then know what they knew and it would still come after me for the money." She looked around. "Pardon, but I'm standing and my drink's over there. Care to join me, Mister . . . ?"
"Norman Sanders," he responded. "Thank you, I'd be delighted for the company."
It was as easy as that. It still amazed her after all this time, but it usually was as easy as that.
"You know," he said, sitting down opposite her, "this is quite a coincidence. I was actually thinking of getting in touch with you, or at least one of your party, when I heard the story. Might not pay much to these hard-bitten salvage types, but it might well make a great production."
"Production?"
"Yes, that's part of my work. I'm a producer. Actually, I'm a writer, but you have to be officially a producer or they rank you lower than the janitor."
"A producer of what?" She honestly didn't know what the guy was talking about.
"Comedies, dramas, extravaganzas. Whatever they'll pay to watch. Go in, pay your money, and become one of the crew of—what was the name of your ship?"
"The Stanley."
"Ah, yes! Become one of the crew of the Stanley as it explores a bizarre and sinister world of the dead. Feel what it's like to be pursued by a voracious monster! And, if you survive and get away, this time you'll be a hero. It's a natural. I write it and get a real producer to finance it—piece of cake with all the clearances in hand—and then we use some classic virtual actors and a few real ones and we pump in the adrenaline and it's a natural. Fine tune it, pump it up, and sell it to the bored and stuck masses on a hundred worlds, particularly the young folks, and we got a hit. And based on a true incident, hell, it's critic proof!"
She tried to follow him. "You write—plays? Books? Cyber experiences?"
"All of the above," he responded with a smile and a shrug. "It's a lot more complicated these days in some ways, but the professional storyteller remains the oldest profession of humankind!"
"I thought something else was the oldest profession," she noted.
He chuckled. "That's what they all think! But, listen, it wasn't just animal lust that got the first whore in bed with the first man. No, ma'am. It was because that first man, and first woman probably, and maybe even the first whore, all had fantasies. The fantasies came first, then the act, then more storytelling afterwards as the first man tried to explain it away to the first woman. It doesn't matter. We storytellers sometimes get shot but we generally don't starve. One of the earliest tales is of Scheherazade, who was supposed to be executed for something or other but got to telling stories the king found fascinating. She knew when she ran out of stories she'd lose her head, so she kept telling them, a thousand and one, until the old king forgot or dropped dead or whatever. And thousands of years later and on worlds hundreds of light-years from Old Earth, they still remember her name, the storyteller's name, while nobody knows who that king was."
"So you lie for a living, so to speak?"
"Well, not really. I entertain, or I'm at the start of the entertainment chain. Without me there's nothing to watch, nothing to see, hear, or experience. It's not a lie if you know it's not the truth, but it entertains you. You mean you never saw any of the big productions? Never walked into a cyberworld story or even had a favorite story or poem you read as a kid?"
She gave a wry smile but decided not to mention her lack of reading skills. "No, not really. I've done some cybersex stuff and I've heard a lot of stories in my time, but I never was anywhere where you could see the kind of stuff you're talking about. The most I ever saw on that score was a play once, with one real actor interacting with a bunch of cyber characters on a stage. They all looked and sounded real enough, but it was kind of boring. The language was so weird you could hardly follow it, but it did get bloody now and then."
He shrugged. "Sorry about that. That's kind of a lowbrow, low-budget cousin to the kind of things I do. Still, we might be able to put together a package that would make us all a little money. What do you say about that?"
"I can use it. They're gonna be coming after me real soon for the ship rental. How much are we talking about?"
He gave a low, apologetic cough. "Well, not much up front, but once we get a script and studio deal and then start production there'll be more. Most of it would be in royalties, percentage of the net, after the thing's released and the money comes in. That can take a while."
"How long's a while?"
"Oh, a year or two. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But it goes on and on."
"I don't have a year. I need some money in days, or weeks," she told him honestly. "The kind of people who'll be coming to look for me to collect don't like waiting around."
"Huh! Too bad! What kind of money you talking about? That you owe, that is?"
"Rental of the Stanley for sixty days, which is sixty thousand, and repair of damages and losses to equipment, maybe another twenty or so."
He whistled. "Eighty thousand? That's a bit steep for what you'd get up front on this deal, although you might well make much more than that down the pike. Wonder if they'd accept your percentage in payment?"
"If they would, it would solve everything, but, truth to tell, if they didn't I'd be a dead woman, and I don't plan to have to stand there while we find out. No, my best bet is to try for a smaller amount and just screw it. For under ten grand I could become somebody else. Somebody they wouldn't recognize even with a genetic scanner."
Norman Sanders leaned back thoughtfully in his chair and said nothing for a while. Then he reached into his inner coat pocket and removed what appeared to be a small jewel case. He opened it, and carefully removed a huge gem from its custom holder inside, then leaned forward and held it out to her.
"Ever see one of these?" he asked her.
It was, apparently, a natural gem almost as large as a hen's egg, colored in a translucent emerald-green color with a clearly visible center of some different substance that, when viewed from different angles, seemed to form pictures or shapes of some sort. She had never seen anything like it.
Staring into it, she was startled to see that the pictures inside seemed to congeal into images of strange, bizarre landscapes peopled with real, familiar figures from her own past, glimpsed only fleetingly. It was like watching tiny bits of past experiences in her own life against a backdrop of lavalike motion creating the shapes and swallowing them almost as fast as the act of creation had made them.
"I—how does it do that?" she asked, mouth agape, watching the increasingly personalized visions, many of which were becoming quite disturbing.
"Nobody knows. It comes from your own mind, though. I don't know what you're seeing, but it wouldn't be what I see, or what anybody else would see in it. It's a Magi's Stone, sometimes called the Magi's Gift. There are fewer than a thousand known, and they all pretty much look alike and do that sort of thing, although some are colored more like rubies, others sapphires, running through the gamut of gem colors. It's quite rare. In fact, there are a lot of folks around who'd kill for that thing, even though they couldn't sell it. They're all registered, their owners known, and the insurance boys would make the ones after you look like teddy bears when they hunted for it."
She couldn't take her eyes off it. "Where—where did it come from?"
"Nobody is really sure. The name comes from the general belief that it comes from the Three Kings. Ever hear of them?"
"Who hasn't? Paradise, the Joys of Heaven. Three worlds nobody knows the location of that will give you your heart's desire. Never much believed they really existed, though. Maybe now I do, sort of. But if this thing's so valuable, how do you dare carry it with you? Particularly on a world like this?"
"Well, because I'm fairly well armed in spite of what you see, and in its case it's so booby-trapped that it would kill anyone trying to get it. Better hand it back. I know it's endlessly fascinating, but the images get darker and darker as you look, and eventually—"
She suddenly gave a cry and dropped the stone onto the table. He was prepared and quickly reached out, grabbed it on the first bounce, and put it back into the case, closed it, then put it back in his pocket.
"There was—something. Somebody . . ." she managed, in something of a whisper.
"Yes, I know," he replied.
"Something that knew, and instead of me seeing it through that thing, it was seeing me!"
"Oh, yes. He always shows up, sooner or later."
She stared at him, genuinely shaken as even the worm had never bothered her. "He?"
"Well, I call it a `he,' but it's probably not a he, or a she, but more of an `it.' I just feel more comfortable calling it a he, that's all. Gives you the willies, doesn't he?"
She nodded. "Is he—real? I mean, is he actually looking at me when I'm looking in there, or is it just an illusion, like the personal visions?"
"Nobody knows. He doesn't show up all the time, or at any given interval, either on this one or in the others, but he's always around somewhere. That's why you don't stare too long. They've never been able to synthesize these, not the real ones. Some neat-looking imitations, but nowhere near the real thing. You know the real thing the moment you look into it, whether he shows up or not. They've never figured out what triggers the images in the mind, either. Best guess is some sort of natural force or radiation, but they've never been able to measure and identify one. They can't really get inside one, either. The word is that they tried when the first batch was discovered. Every time you try and cleave it, and I mean every time, it shatters into a million tiny fragments, nothing more than powder, that analysis shows have some unusual chemical bondings, but nothing so alien as to explain the effect or give away its secrets. There are, however, people who won't look into them. Not just superstitious types, real smart and powerful people. They think there's a possibility that the thing works in some unknown, alien way as a receiver and transmitter."
"How's that?"
"That while you look at it, the thing's reading all your memories and broadcasting them in some way, through a medium we can't understand, to his data banks."
She felt a slight chill. Just the idea that that . . . thing inside there that she'd touched on some plane for just a few brief moments was doing some kind of mental readout made her feel more violated than a physical rape. It was that disturbing a sensation when she'd connected with it.
She began to understand just what the Doc had been feeling locked in the C&C talking to that worm.
"Why did you show me this, Mr. Sanders?"
He gave her a wry smile. "I thought you might be tempted to do a little prospecting."
She stared at him. "Where? And with what?"
"I've been using some of my off-time for several seasons looking for just the right combination of people to do this sort of job," he told her. "I told you I was going to look you up if we hadn't met here, and I meant it. You and your people seem almost uniquely qualified for this sort of thing."
"And `this sort of thing' is what, exactly?"
He took a deep breath, then said, "I am almost positive I know how to reach the Three Kings. No kidding, no joke, no fake theatrical gimmicks. I'm too rooted in reality to believe in all that paradise guff, but I do know this: just a handful of these Magi's Stones and you could buy yourself your own paradise. There are other things as well that are associated with the Kings that could be worth even more. It's not a salvage job exactly, but that's why I came here. Salvage people might be able to go get these riches, figure out what was what, and do something nobody else has so far managed to do: get back in one piece."
"I was wondering about that," she told him. "Everybody's heard of this magical realm, and there are all sorts of stories about wrecked ghost ships being discovered with treasures from them inside, and even one in good shape with nobody in it, but I never heard anybody who claimed they'd been there and come back, even the drunk and stoned braggarts of the universe. It's a deathtrap, if it exists at all. And now that I've met your little buddy in that green hellstone, I think the Kings are probably a scam. Not our scam, maybe. His scam, maybe. Send pretty little baubles to the barbarians so a few would come and become his pets or lab experiments or something like that. That's a one-way trip, mister."
"Perhaps. But the stones are real. The artifacts are real. The detailed scouting reports from the Three Kings' discoverer, with the locations unfortunately damaged in transit, were real enough to prove that these are real worlds. Moons, most likely, from what I can tell. Big, planet-sized moons around a massive gas giant. Three of them warm enough and with atmosphere enough to support life as we understand it. I'm pretty sure I know how to get there, and I'm just as sure I know why nobody's made it all the way back yet, at least why most ships are wrecked if they try. You have to get there using a wild hole. No wormgates, and a wild and totally uncharted and unpredictable ride there and back. Not many ships could take the punishment, and even fewer captains could. But nobody since the first scout so long ago has been a cybernetic ship, a living ship, and I think your captain, the Stanley's captain, is uniquely qualified to do it successfully. She's ridden a couple of wild holes before. I looked up her history. And you, you and your current crew, they've met an alien intelligence and they beat it. You all beat it. You know salvage, you know value, you've got the guts, and you're virtually unique in having outthought and outfought an alien mind. If this ship and crew couldn't make it in and out, then I don't know who could."
"You can can the flattery, but I'm beginning to see your point here. The question is, first, why should we chance it? The odds were almost nil that we got back in one piece this last time. The odds on this one are much, much smaller."
He gave a Cheshire Cat-type grin. "You've got only two choices. You all find whatever little menial jobs you can and dream of what might have been, or you do this and maybe wind up owning a world or two. You are certainly holding the bag if nobody else is. You won't get the money for that ID change here. It would take months driving a tug to make that kind of money, and on a place like this, one of the universe's assholes, selling yourself would bring in even less. You don't even have passage to anywhere the syndicate goons won't find you in a matter of days anyway. You know what's going to happen. If you don't kill yourself or make them kill you, they'll take you back, jack into your brain, and make you a conspicuous slave to feed their egos, with decades of public exhibition and humiliation as an example with no way out. But you'll make them kill you first, if you can, won't you? I've heard excerpts of the conversations you had ship to ground on that ghost world. There's only room for you in your universe; you'd have let them die if they'd tried to get out without bringing back all the shit, or if there was any chance of bringing up the worm. If the computers had given you any odds at all of success you'd have tried to salvage that anyway, even if it meant all their lives. Excuse me for being blunt, but you'll do it because you've got nothing left to lose."
All at once she hated him. She'd killed once for not much more of that kind of smug assholery than he'd just given her. The problem was, in his case, he was trying to make her do a deal on his terms, and in that she almost admired him for that same insulting toughness. It was so much like, well, her.
"So, if we could make a deal, what makes you think I could get the others?"
He smiled broadly. "Let's all meet for lunch tomorrow in my suite at the Stellar. I can be very persuasive."
"I'll have to think about it," she warned him.
He nodded sagely. "You do that. You think about it a great deal." And, polishing off his beer, he got up and left, saying no more.