Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

Like most such groups, they had been organized around a charismatic leader whom they called Mother Tymm. She must have been, in her own way, quite a character and dominant personality, and she received her marching orders through visions and dreams and trances. It was a curious mixture of traditional religions, old shamanlike spiritualism, and Oriental mysticism. It was said that she’d given the captain of that first freighter precise coordinates for them to have popped out here, even though this was at the end of a genhole network and had been forgotten and uncharted because it was established just as the Great Silence fell and things fell apart. That, too, Mother Tymm was supposed to have foreseen.

They set up the space defenses as best they could, but they’d even bought those on the economic level where they had no idea what they were getting or whether any of it would work or last. Then they’d established the main landing station, just to get things up and running, and Mother Tymm and a few of her councillors had left with the freighter promising to return quickly with additional seed and livestock and full title to this place as well as sufficient spare parts to keep the landing center active.

But she’d never returned, and, for almost a century, neither did anybody else. Without their leader and her closest advisors there wasn’t even a lot of organization, but they had a firm belief that, like Jesus and the Second Coming, Mother Tymm would someday, somehow, return. Until then, they abandoned what they could not support and ran the towns and the cottage industries and the farms the way she’d set them up.

They ultimately were discovered, but by a ragtag old tent evangelical group out wandering the stars and searching for Heaven. They hadn’t paid the group very much attention or taken them very seriously, and the ship they’d come in was much too small for any practical uses, and the evangelist hadn’t even heard of Mother Tymm, so they let him show up, gave him the cold shoulder, and he eventually took the hint and left. When that happened, somebody found and turned on the defense grid, such as it was.

Only a few years later a Franciscan priest and two nuns showed up in a ship even smaller and more austere than the evangelist’s. They refused to even allow them to land, but they tried coming in anyway. One of the defensive units managed to target them, and while it didn’t destroy them it made their ship inoperable. It came in at the wrong angle and burned up in the atmosphere. Those who’d warned them away said they heard them praying all the way down, and then they heard the screams before they were cut off. At that point several muscular types smashed the last of the system communications equipment.

That’s why they didn’t even know about the pirate vessel until it screamed through the atmosphere and overhead a bit over thirty years ago and crashed into the lake. Locals assumed, though, that the ship had been downed and destroyed by the same defense grid and felt a great deal of guilt about that.

But the ship hadn’t been harmed by the defense grid; its shields were in fairly good shape and the defense grid by that point was not. They also had begun to believe that the only people left with interstellar spacecraft were preachers and missionaries. They quickly found out that this latest group to come in had survived the crash, but not by prayers and hymns.

In point of fact, the newcomers’ ship had been badly shot up, and it was clearly on the run. Down and unable to repair it or get it back up, they had no choice but to sink it in the lake and then set up here until somebody else came along to get them out of there. They had no idea how long it would be.

The colonists originally helped them transfer their huge cargo, only to discover that once the newcomers decided to put it down in the extensive caverns and allow nothing of their technology to show, they also didn’t want anyone knowing just exactly how they’d set it up or just where they’d put it, so they massacred all the colonists who’d helped them, and everyone else in the district surrounding the lakeshore near the crash site. Then they irradiated the ground for kilometers around so that nothing, absolutely nothing, could be grown there, and thus there would be no more villages in the area.

And then, oddly, they struck a deal with the colonists who did not see or know of this at the time. They were hiding out, all things below ground, and there most of them would live and do whatever they wanted as well. They wanted to be as sure as they could be that any newcomers to Foundation would see only the original colonists. Some of them would also work with the locals, but more in the nature of advisors than fellow farmers. “Efficiency experts,” their leader called them.

They would harm no more villagers—everybody knew that their “tragic mistake” on landing was a lie, but the colonists could hardly do much about it and pragmatism was the best course—but would consume some of the food and drink as a “fee.” In return for that “fee,” they would train and allow the use of the complex learning system they had along with its practical library, which allowed much of the network of irrigation among other things to be improved and developed and which, also, gave their children an education and practical skills, and they would handle the one area most needed by the colonists: medical and pharmaceutical skills and goods. They also established a far more efficient and motorized underground trade route system so that foods that normally could never reach, say, the nearby village, would now be readily available and some could even be stored. Refrigeration units, power units, and the like from the ship were established underground for that purpose.

They mostly lived in this region because there were only a few hundred of them and because in this area the strata and oddities in the magnetic fields and other things the women didn’t understand made it possible for them to hide from the most sophisticated scanners.

But the thing that had brought everybody up short and made the alliance a willing one after some early roughness was the reason why they had been in a fight, and what they had that everyone else wanted.

A little piece of knowledge. Something stolen, most likely, but something among the most valuable snippets of knowledge in the entire known galaxy if truth be told.

Mother Tymm had prophesied from the start that even Foundation was but a way stop, a stepping stone. That the true Naturalists would actually meld with the forces of nature, the deities of the Garden, and that their children and grandchildren would walk and live in perfect harmony with nature and the natural and supernatural upon the world of Paradise among the Three Kings. And she’d further prophesied that this would come about from the Tree of Evil imparting to the Knowledge of Good, and that Darkness would take the Seeders to the Light.

“Are you telling me that this pirate leader claims to have the location of the Three Kings?” Karl Woodward responded, incredulous. Cromwell and some of the others behind him were beyond that and almost into derision. Every charlatan anybody ever met claimed to know the location of the Three Kings, and every cult and nut group and even some perfectly normal, natural, and straightforward political and religious groups always seemed to fall for it.

“And because of this prophecy you think that these men and women of darkness are the ones that are here to take you to the Three Kings?” the Doctor asked them.

They nodded. “And that is why we live with them and do as they say and protect them as they do what they must. We are sorry that it was you, but whoever it was becomes part of the prophecy, don’t you see? And they have kept their word to us for a very long time now.”