Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

He paused a moment, then added, “I’d like you and all the Elders to meet me in the Meditation Room in one hour. I believe that, before we act, we must consult a higher power. Only with His will and strength behind us will we have a good ending here tomorrow.”

The question really was, when was faith truly faith and when was it a synonym for doing something stupid? How many cult types in human history had jumped off cliffs or taken poison because they were convinced it was the act of faith God wanted?

It was so easy to go through these problems in classes, to imagine yourself in this or that position, but it was like contemplating death: you knew it was possible, but there was always the chance that an exception might be made.

The one problem with martyrs was that they were all dead.

Not that she didn’t believe in God with all her heart, but her group taught that it wasn’t as simple as that. Believing wasn’t enough; you had to act on that belief, and you had to do it without God’s instructions from the omnipresent parallel dimensions called Heaven. Get it wrong, and you wind up with all the cultists of history in that other set of extra-dimensional ether some called Hell.

If she spit food back in the faces of her captors next feeding, would it mean martyrdom or degradation?

The pirate leader seemed almost disappointed by the lack of real resistance. Captain Morgudan Sapenza had actually attended all but the last of the Doctor’s lectures, and he’d been quite impressed with the old patriarch. Sapenza hadn’t been raised Christian, but there was a lot to like in the old man’s tough and gritty brand of it, and some good common sense as well. His mother had believed in seven Heavens and nine Hells; his father allowed as how there might be something else to life but that it wasn’t worth looking at because all it did was cramp your style. He was his father’s child, and always had been.

He finished off a beer and lit a cigar. He knew the damned things were bad for people but he’d gotten this far and that was pretty far indeed, at least until he’d wound up against this damned dirt ball of a wall.

There was suddenly an awful commotion down one tunnel and everybody’s hands went to their sidearms, but it was soon clear that it was just a woman with a really big mouth almost hysterical about something.

“What is it?” he shouted to the woman as she tried to shake off restraining hands and run right to him. “Let her go!”

She ran up to him. “The children, sir! The children from Village Nine!”

“What about them?”

“They came this morning and they took them! Took them all away to their big ship! Troopers with guns, not holy folks in robes!”

He sat up. “Just calm down. Sit, get a drink. We’ll take care of this!”

Now she allowed herself to be taken away, and he started to think hard. He hadn’t expected this . These people were after his own heart. They thought ugly.

He had only pragmatic regard for the kids; he had none himself that he knew of, but some of his people had them and they wouldn’t be easy to control if their kids were suddenly taken up to a Holy Joe education never to be seen again. It was time to start playing the hand he’d dealt. “Megak! Tollya! Front and center!” he called in an authoritative tone.

Two ragged-looking members of the band, one male, one female, came over to him and waited expectantly.

“We haven’t gotten any would-be martyrs or principled sacrificial lambs, it seems,” he said, “so we’re just gonna have to use what we got and pick a couple at random. Tollya, go to the nearest holding pen and pick some woman at random. Meg, you do the same with one of the men. Keep ’em sedated, treat them like your worst enemies, because from what I saw they’re probably very well trained and could break your necks if given half a chance.”

“Sure, Cap,” Meg replied. “But where do we take ’em?”

“Clinic. We got a few leeches left, and we may as well use a couple. Just make sure they don’t break ’em. We can’t spare them.”

Megak grinned. “Leeches, huh? Why don’t you let me pick the woman and let her pick the guy? Get better results.”

“Never mind that! I don’t want them harmed, just leeched. I’m gonna have to talk to this Doctor and I think he’s one tough son of a bitch. They also got a few people up there with full combat gear. Three or four of them could wipe us out if they could find us and their people. You keep that in mind, too! The odds are we’re gonna suffer for this, but it was take a chance or learn to love wheat threshing. Now— go! They’re starting to pick up their own hostages, and we can lose some real support at our backs as well as much of the village if we don’t get cracking!” He turned to a woman standing by. “You contact that Doctor. You tell ’em we’ll talk in—oh, make it an hour. I don’t want this to drag on, and that should be enough time for the leeches to set in.”

“Right away, sir!”

“Gerta—use human runners from outside town. Do not use any comm links. Not yet. They’ll be ready to pounce on the slightest transmission.”

He’d hoped to be able to use the hostages’ own links, but they apparently had a receiver implanted. Not practical if you wanted to use it yourself. He thought a moment. Or was it? Wouldn’t the pair he would have with him be perfectly okay for that?

The native woman came in and looked around, as if thinking about something, or perhaps judging each of the hostages on some unknown level. Finally she looked at Eve, who was closest to her and to the cave opening, shrugged, and gestured for two very large men with a crude wooden cart to enter. “May as well take that one,” said the woman, pointing to Eve. “She’s small and light and nearest the exit.”

Eve wasn’t sure whether this was a good or a bad thing. Certainly unhooking her from the wall and harness was both excruciatingly painful and wonderful at one and the same time, but she was then placed, still bound, on the small cart. One of the men pulled it, while the other man and the woman made certain she stayed on the wooden bed.

They went through the small complex of modern-style cubicles built, or rather stacked, along both sides of a wide cavern within the cave, and she felt both ashamed that they could see her nakedness and yet curiously detached from it. It was hard to think about such things and be that concerned about them; she hadn’t broken, but she was very much on the edge.

Down one of the caves that led out of the cavern complex, and into a “room” that was certainly carved out of a much smaller natural opening but was anything but natural now. It looked quite familiar in its basics—a clinic, not the kind of place you went for major operations or diagnostics but the kind of place you went when you just felt a bit off or had a splinter you couldn’t get out of your finger, that kind of thing.

It did, however, have a fully reclining surgical bed that had seen better days and perhaps better years. It looked as if the entire population had used it repeatedly, and it had been inexpertly reupholstered far too many times. Still, it served. A medic, or at least somebody in a medic’s gray tunic, came over, gave her a cursory examination while still on the cart with a diagnostic wand, checked a few readings, and then picked up a small pressure syringe. He set the dosage and then injected whatever it was into her behind. She didn’t feel it, not even the pressure of the thing against her skin. She was that numb.

Within a minute she was drifting off, the residual pain ebbing away, and she felt some relief and a pleasant feeling of floating through the clouds.