Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

Putting the cursing together with the attitudes towards outsiders and the reaction that was so dramatic at lunch— “Found!” —these people had to be fugitives, or, rather, the descendants of fugitives. That was why this place was off the old commercial charts and had no other references. The genhole gate, of course, was charted, but it was one of tens of thousands and there wasn’t any indication that it wasn’t just the latest in an exploratory chain that had not yet been developed.

They had certainly come from more than one world and one culture. The curses and the variety in names coupled with the apparent universal use of a form of English showed that they’d had wide exposure to different cultures and attitudes and that they’d had to settle on a language that was probably not native to any of their ancestors but was practical to know simply because it eliminated that divide when setting up a new colony.

What had they been running from that had thrown them together like this? And what were they still scared of?

The dark skins and generally similar features didn’t really mean much; there would be a lot of intermarriage in just the early stages and there was no way to check every village and make sure that there weren’t more dramatic differences. Still, it looked like there was one dominant group and it pretty well was absorbing the others.

All of this was deduction; even though they quickly got used to him and even joked about his “getting dirty with the peasants,” they volunteered just about nothing. Whatever their immediate ancestors had run from, it was something they didn’t want to bring up.

He wasn’t in the same physical condition they were, but they seemed impressed that he could hold his own. Preachers weren’t supposed to have muscles or work with their hands; the fact that a lot of it was good physical conditioning via daily workouts aboard ship and the lesser gravity of this world he’d still not learned the name of, he decided not to explain.

He walked back with them just before sunset. They were a tired group, but they had done a fair day’s work and they were ready to eat and relax. And now Gregnar was willing to talk to him about what came next.

“So you want to preach to us, is that it?”

Robey shook his head. “No, not me. Our leader is a great teacher and scholar and he’s the one we want you to hear. You and as many others from villages in the region as can be reached. If we plant well, then some like me will remain to teach and train. If not, well, you will not see us again. It is our way.”

“But you will spread the news that we exist,” the big man pointed out.

Robey wasn’t sure if he was being threatened or merely sounded out. “No, we don’t work that way. In fact, we’re right now repairing and upgrading the defense system from the old days that should have been a real challenge for us but wasn’t. Anybody else who comes here will have a much harder time. We can’t guarantee security—who can but God?—but we can make it as good as we can.”

Gregnar seemed interested, and as he invited both John and Eve to eat with them, he became more open and friendly. It didn’t take a genius to notice, though, that this openness was strictly one way.

“You have no home but your ship? You have no world that sends you?”

“No. A great many of the faithful built and modified our ship on several different worlds where spaceships could still be built or fixed. It was a freighter, but after the Great Silence broke things down, it was used as the basis for building our community. ‘Home’ to us is Heaven, when we will be reborn in new bodies in the presence of God. Until then, we bring His truths to those who will hear.”

“So how will you do this here?”

“We have many people in the villages around here by this point, so we’ll pick a place that everyone can get to and we’ll put down and set up. Then we’ll move, until we’ve managed to teach everyone.”

“Sounds like it will take you years here.”

“If we had to do it by walking and riding distance, probably, but we have ways to show everything to villages over a wide area if they are too far to get to us and back in time. We have been at this a long time. We will not disturb things for long that do not wish to be disturbed.”

“So where and when will your great leader put down first?”

“Not far from here,” Robey told him. “That is, unless there is an objection from you or others as to where. We had planned on doing it perhaps on the hard flat rocky region about nine kilometers south of here. It is a good location for getting people from many villages in and back, and it will support our ship.”

That seemed to really interest him. “Your ship will land near here?”

“Our interplanetary module will, yes. The starship part was never designed to land and will not.”

“Inter—?”

“Interplanetary. A part of our larger ship that’s a ship in and of itself. It is designed to land on planets and can go between them if need be, but it can not go between stars. It docks with the starship most of the time, and undocks to bring our platform so that people may come. It is impressive to see land, in fact.”

“I would like to see that, yes. I don’t think there will be any problems on the flats. Just don’t come down on or near crops or rivers and creeks or flooded areas. We will need those.”

“Don’t worry,” Robey assured him. “We know what we’re doing.”

Eve, later, wasn’t so sure. As the group cleaned up from dinner and finished off tankard-sized gourds full of dark, heavy beer brewed by the village itself in preparation for going to sleep, she got her companion to one side and switched off filtration. This wouldn’t keep a local from overhearing, but it would make it about as hard for them to understand the talk as they’d had initially understanding the villagers.

“So, it’s all set,” he said, sounding smug and satisfied.

“Yes, but I don’t like it. I watched the women today, and I watched that man you were so chummy with and his companions. They’re up to something.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! They’re closed-mouthed, yes, but I think that’s because they’re the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of a convict ship or rebel captives or something of that nature. They’re still basically hard-working subsistence farmers.”

“That may be, but they’re not ignorant. Whatever they’ve been taught, it’s pretty complete considering I saw no schools. They know astronomy, they don’t have many superstitions about places or things in space, and they seem pretty knowledgeable about the way things are considering there’s no evident reason why they should. Something about this smells.”

He shrugged, obviously not bothered as she was. “Well, don’t worry about it. It’s not our call, anyway. It’s the Doctor’s to decide, and he’s got the staff to really make things go or not go.”

“Still, do you mind if I put my reservations on the record?”

Again he shrugged. “Suit yourself. I just don’t see it.”

She nodded grimly. “Yeah, nobody ever sees the one that gets them, and we’re the ones here on the ground.”

The Doctor did not explain his reasons for making decisions. He was an often friendly and sometimes gentle man, but he was a total autocrat. He alone, he believed, was answerable to God; his people were answerable to him as God’s messenger.

And the Doctor decided to come down.

It was an impressive sight to the crowds who watched the ship descend, and there were always crowds since it never could or did sneak onto a planet. These people were poor and hard working but they were not in want; nobody seemed to be hungry, and it was not necessary to have everybody in the fields all the time. Once they saw the descent, or heard of it beforehand, they tended to start moving to where they could at least get a good view of the thing coming down from the stars.