Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

“We’ll make it, at least one way!” the Doctor said emphatically. “Whether or not we can make it back, or even are meant to, is something for God to decide.”

Even so, after they’d all left to pray and think things over, he couldn’t help but dwell for a moment on the enigmatic figure of Judas.

Not Judas the Betrayer, but Judas the Prideful. Judas never did understand the message, but he was pretty sure of the messenger. The Messiah was supposed to rise up and liberate the Jewish people from the yoke of the House of Herod and of Imperial Rome. Instead he kept refusing and talking all sorts of things, even accommodation with the Romans as in the exhortation to pay your taxes. But when He took a whip to the money changers, then the fire and fury had come out. Judas decided to push his Messiah to reveal Himself, to rise up and be a leader. If they arrested, convicted, and went to crucify Him, then He’d have to move, right?

And so Judas the Prideful decided that, since he didn’t like how God was doing things, he’d push Him into a corner so He’d see things and do things Judas’s way.

There was always the danger that a leader could go past that point, commit the same sin as Satan, and be damned. Woodward worried about that constantly, with his own ego and his own arrogance. If they only knew how alone he really was, how much doubt he always had to fight.

In the end, what Judas did was what God already had planned. He damned himself but managed at the same time to save countless souls yet unborn. Ironic, but that, too, was something he always had to live with.

He had to act on faith, no matter what! Otherwise, this was all a waste, and he was just another hypocrite and charlatan or self-deluded false prophet.

He understood the physics of it—that was one of his fields of expertise, and one that he understood well. He did not understand the full data about the Three Kings. Three planet-sized moons around a gas giant well into the life zone of a G-class star. All three with both temperatures and atmospheres that would support human life or any life as they knew it.

The old monk who’d first discovered them hadn’t wanted to name them after the Kings; he’d wanted to name them after Dante. Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradisio. Those, too, were interesting choices. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven. Woodward’s own beliefs didn’t allow for a Purgatory, but he could see its appeal as analogy.

Why had he changed his mind?

Why did Sapenza think that the Kings would crush his faith?

He had to go. Deep down he felt that was a given as sure as anything he’d ever believed or thought in his whole life. He had to go as a demonstration of faith, not just to the crew of The Mountain but also as much before God and to himself.

Three Kings. Three was the number of God.

John Robey stared at the sluglike thing in the tray and shook his head.

Robey still had temporary direct sensory implants so he could hear while his new eardrums bonded and settled in, so it made everything and everybody sound a little tinny and distant, but it was good enough to keep him functional.

“That’s the thing?” he asked.

The medtech nodded. “In a way, it’s not much different from our ferrets and fish. Same general material, actually, although the thing is designed to do a bit different job. Sloppy, really, because it can’t get in through the pores but has to essentially drill a small hole, and so much is taken up with medical instructions on how to deploy I’d suspect there’s little in the way of independent instructional ability, but it sure does the job. The only way we could get it out was to suspend the two of them, remove the things and the collateral brain stem and connectors, and then replace the removed natural parts with cultured cloned duplicates. It’s always a bit tricky when you’re working that close to and partly in the brain, but it looks like things will work out. I just wish we’d had the codes for this little critter. Then it would have been simple to just tell it to detach and leave.”

Robey continued to shake his head in wonder at the thing. “What kind of sick mind would come up with something like that?”

“Oh, this is very old technology,” the medtech responded, oblivious to the other’s moral tone. “They’ve got them down to preprogrammable injectables now, I hear. Lots of spy and black market type stuff in them. That’s the kicker. If it had been one of the newer ones I could have pulled how to reprogram it from our database; it’s these old development types that are the problem. They were lab stuff and changed almost weekly.”

Robey was appalled, not just by the callousness but also by the thought that these things had been “perfected” and could be bought by the likes of Sapenza on the black market. “So that’s the future for the rest of us?” he mused, aloud but as much to himself as to the other. “Just slaves, perfect and obedient? Programmed like cleaning robots?”

“Probably not. Not worth it,” the tech replied. “However, it’s a reminder of what’s out there. There’s stuff that would make you wake up convinced beyond any ability of anybody to talk you out of it that you were the Red Queen of Wonderland and everybody else were rabbits. We exist in a kind of balance, Brother Robey. The main reason we’re who and what we are in this day and age is that most of us aren’t worth the trouble to somebody to screw around with.”

Now there was a comforting thought. “What about Eve? When will she be—back to normal, I guess is the way to put it.”

The medtech sighed. “Probably never. Oh, physically, with some physical therapy and a decent monitoring program, she’ll get back to normal, but mentally… Well, this sort of stuff does things to you. I’ve seen it time and again. We’ve got it with many if not most of the former hostages we rescued. Some of them had particularly ugly times. Most of the women were raped, some brutally and repeatedly. The kind of therapy that erases that sort of thing also erases part of your mind and memories.”

“You don’t mean Eve was—”

“Oh, no, actually. No rape, not in the usual sense of the word. But both of them, the man as well as the woman, will have an even harder thing to overcome. They just spent a long period as passengers in their own bodies. I don’t think you or I could really understand what that feels like, how helpless and insecure it makes you. Just like that— zap! —and you have no control at all, period. To get over that, to fully get your nerve back, to sleep well after that, it’s almost impossible. When something like that happens in normal planetary situations we use a kind of sophisticated device that creates a data worm that goes into the mind and simply deletes that whole experience. You wake up and it’s an hour before it happened and that’s that. We have no such things here. The Doctor believes that such things subvert the whole system of good and evil in the universe. It removes choice and will. So, she’s going to have to learn to live with it. If she doesn’t, she’ll be no good to anyone, least of all herself.”

“Can I see her?”

“In a few days. She’ll be in an induced coma for a while yet, then be brought up slowly. Leave your extension and we’ll give you a call when you can see her.”

Great! he thought sourly, heading back towards the quarters for his group. Just great!

“Attention! Attention, brothers and sisters!” the ship’s intercom suddenly announced. “At zero six hundred all personnel are to be in the Olivet section cathedral, a sector chapel, or in a ward room where video is available to hear an important talk by Doctor Woodward on the future of this mission. This will be repeated for all shifts. All personnel are required to attend and to listen. The lives and very future of everyone here is at stake. Do not take this one lightly. This announcement will be repeated every half hour until zero six hundred.”