Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

He was still thinking about it many minutes later when, at orbital velocity, Olivet made the turn that would reunite it with its interstellar-capable big brother.

There was never any real doubt in the Doctor’s mind that the offer would be accepted, but if Sapenza could not be brought to account by human judgment, at least he would have to wait a bit and sweat.

There were people on The Mountain who were opposed to any deal and who, in fact, urged Woodward to blast the radio and the entire region north of the lake tubes, but this just made the Doctor angry and sad at the same time.

“Have you learned nothing here? Is my whole life a failure?” he thundered. “Do you so easily give yourselves over to hatred and vengeance? We protect ourselves! God can’t abide wimps! But the moment, the moment we turn into our enemy then we might as well become the enemy! God knows that in my own heart I can never truly forgive the bastards, but I am content to leave their ultimate fate to God’s judgment! This is not the Navy! We aren’t in the business of taking lives! God will take care of them and bring justice! Our job is to look ahead to His new work!”

Have I been deluding myself? he wondered. Don’t they truly understand anything? Damn them! Act in faith, not out of vengeance and hatred. Somehow, sometime, when he wasn’t looking, the devil had snuck back aboard and corrupted them. He hated that realization more than he hated the dead and wounded. They were supposed to be better than that.

“All right, Sapenza, you have a deal,” he told the pirate below. “But what you initially stated is what you get. Nothing more, and nothing less. I will trust to God that you will rot here, and leave it entirely in His hands whether or not you do. In exchange, you send all the pertinent details, a copy of everything you have on the Three Kings. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” the captain responded.

“You sound too self-satisfied,” the Doctor commented suspiciously. “Don’t alter or edit the material. We will test it out, and if there’s any funny business you will be on the map of everyone in creation as quickly as we can manage it. That’s understood?”

“Understood.”

“Then what the hell’s making you so smug, Sapenza?”

The captain paused a moment. “I think, at least, I’ve blown a lot of your confidence in your own faithful,” he commented. “I’d bet on that. But I haven’t laid a glove on you. I’m doing you no favor, Doctor, but I suspect you won’t take my warning. Keep your faith and erase what I send and forget the Three Kings. That’s my good deed advice of the day. If you do, you may wind up living the rest of your life and dying in self-deluded saintliness. But if you go to the Three Kings, like Mother Tymm, you’re going to find your faith is far too simplistic and no matter how smart you are, deep down you’re just like your people who you think have failed you. This is my revenge, Doctor. I tell you that right up front. And you won’t even believe it until it happens. When it does, when your faith fails you, then think of me, stuck here, but laughing! I’m sending the data now as we speak, Doctor. See you in Hell!”

The hospital facilities on The Mountain were among the best; even when Woodward would skimp and save things he always made certain that the medical division had the best.

Up until now, this particular expedition had not been the most profitable. In fact, after treating the wounded and doing all the long-term work necessary to get the former hostages at least physically back to par, together with the losses in equipment and supplies that were more routine, The Mountain and its mission were in some trouble.

Near the end of every mission cycle, they’d had to return to civilization and endure weeks or months of refitting, repairs, and the like so that they could go out again. During that period they would spend much of their time anxiously fund-raising, but, the fact was, if they didn’t bring back something from the missions themselves there wouldn’t be enough to do the job with what they could raise elsewhere.

Doctor Woodward, it was rumored, was considering something far more radical before going in to a refit they could not possibly manage. He would never give up what he considered his commission from God, but even he had limits in that he couldn’t bring himself to just go begging like so many denominations and missionaries did.

So while everyone else was getting well, licking their wounds, straightening up, and into intensive Bible study and work on the meaning of faith, the Doctor, alone save for one of two of his closest friends, was studying the uploads from Sapenza and thinking.

“Our science and engineering people have seen this?” he asked at last.

Thomas Cromwell nodded. “In one sense, it’s pretty straightforward. In another, it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen. Still, the risk is in the going and, if that thing can’t be stabilized, very much more in the return. The question is whether any computer ever made can predict that writhing, snaking monster of a natural wormhole and get it exactly right. That’s what we think happened to Tymm’s ship. She was essentially shaken to death. It was certainly an ugly way to go.”

“We run those kinds of risks all the time,” Woodward responded. “We just did something like that from a risk point of view. There are times when you trust to your people and your machines and leave the rest to God. For some reason, God didn’t want her to have it. I have to wonder if perhaps all this was to put it into our hands.”

“Sapenza seemed to think he was doing us no favors,” Cromwell pointed out. “The question is, what didn’t he tell us? What does he know that we don’t? He admitted not trying it himself. Not with the ship he had.”

“Oh, I suspect that his ship was better suited to threading this wormhole than ours, and certainly better than Mother Tymm’s,” Woodward commented. “But he didn’t find Tymm’s ship, he just stole it all from the ones that did, and at some cost in battle. I think he was backtracking Tymm based on this data when he got ambushed by somebody else who knew at least part of the story.”

“Do you really think this ship can get there, and back?” Cromwell asked him.

“I do. I believe God has a special assignment for us and that this is part of it. No matter what, it would prove the existence of the Three Kings for certain and would allow us to pick up things of substantial value that could be used to virtually make this ship over. And if one of them is as liveable as legend has it, then we may well also find our own home.”

Captain Jorge Lime, one of the three rotating captains of The Mountain and also one of the Elders, shook his head. “I don’t know. This whole complex, all these people—in a wild hole. It would truly require a miracle to go both ways.”

“Then we’ll pray for a miracle!” the Doctor shot back. “I’m sick and tired of all the people on this ship, which is in itself a miracle that shouldn’t exist, suddenly having no faith at all in God’s hand or His plan for us! I think we have to do it for that reason alone! I’m sick and tired of having to keep demonstrating faith, but I certainly expect it from my leaders! Are you saying that you will not take us there, Captain?”

The captain felt stung by the remarks. “No, sir, I am not saying that I will not take us there, but I am laying out the facts and the odds. If I were to take a pistol, fully charged and tested, point it at your head and pull the trigger, the odds are you would have your head blown off. There is a fine line between faith and common sense in some of this.”