Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

“So you’re risking your life for treasure?”

Robey sighed. “I don’t know. I doubt if I’m high enough on anybody’s list to share in any treasure, or even how the money might be spent. I’d be better on Sapenza’s crew for that, providing he had the ship and directions and not us. But, let’s face it, I’ve got no family I know of here. Like you, I was more or less bred in the labs and raised by a group. Lots of friends, yes, but in a sense the only thing I have ties to is the congregation as a whole. That being the case, I keep wondering if I could live my life without going. If I wouldn’t always be wandering around and saying to myself, ‘What did I miss? What wonders did I give up for boring security? Did I really kick God in the ass by refusing?’ I’m not sure I can live with that.”

Mike stared at him for a moment, as if hearing his own inner thoughts echoed. Finally, he asked, “What do you think is there, at the Three Kings? This hasn’t been the best trip in the ship’s records. We’ve lost over a hundred lives on three planets that could be described as unfriendly, hostile, and murderous. How many new souls were saved? Any?”

“Some, perhaps,” Robey assured him. “We had twenty couples stay behind on that pest hole we just left after all that they did to us. Forty people, stuck there, forever missionaries on a forgotten speck in the middle of nowhere. All volunteers, because they believed that the church could grow there. Now that’s faith.”

On the seventh day he got to see Eve.

She was out of that horrible tank and out of her coma, but still weak and pretty well immobile. Machines now were giving her gentle but regular exercise, getting her brain used to using the newly implanted neural connections to transfer instructions. In a sense, it was like having to learn to crawl, then walk, then do increasingly sophisticated and coordinated things, all over again, but on an accelerated timetable.

Even talking was still a problem, and she was occasionally hard to understand, but the medtechs insisted that she was light years ahead of where she’d been just a day or two earlier.

She looked weak and drawn and haggard, with only traces of the old Eve flashing from time to time. Even her long hair had been shaved and she had only a fraction of a centimeter grown back out. It gave her a curiously androgenous look.

“Hey, how you doin’?” he greeted her, smiling.

She managed something of a smile back, although the medtechs had warned that most of what she put on was a brave front. She was masking nightmares.

“Twying to recite Shakespeah,” she managed. “Got a lipsp.”

“Yeah, that is a lisp,” he agreed. “I’m still working on new eardrums. Got my old ones busted playing hero in the wrong place.”

She looked at him for a long time without saying anything, then she managed, “I—wemembah. I wemembah evvything… You thot me!”

He chuckled. “Yeah, I shot you, but only to save you. I’d do it again, too, so watch it!”

She shifted, as if trying to use her lower extremities to push off, but she was still too weak for that. “Thoulda used a throngah beam.”

He frowned. “A stronger beam? What do you mean?”

“You thoulda used a throngah beam. Then I’d be dead.”

His expression grew deadly serious. “I don’t want you dead. Why do you? I know it must have been a horrible experience, and you’ll never completely push it from your mind, but you have to learn to get past it.”

“No! You don’t know… Can’t move, can see, can think, but can’t act. Yoah body woaks and you have nothin’ t’do with it. Make you do— evil sthings.”

He couldn’t know what she’d gone through, true, but he also couldn’t see how she could blame herself for any of it. “But they made you. You couldn’t not do it. If you don’t have a choice, then the evil’s entirely on them, not you!”

He realized, though, that ministers, maybe even the Doctor himself, had already been down here and were probably better at this than he was.

“Ah you going or sthaying?” she asked him.

For a moment he thought she was asking if he was leaving her bedroom, but suddenly he realized that she was asking about the Doctor’s new direction. “Truthfully, I don’t know. I’m inclined to stay. How many people get to see mythical places that most folks don’t even believe in? Still, I haven’t completely made up my mind yet. What about you? Have they made arrangements to get you to a rehab facility?”

She shook her head. “I’m not goin’. I’m sthayin’ wight here.”

“You shouldn’t! You need a lot more than they can give you here!”

“I don’t need what sthey can’t gimme heah. Moth of uth ah gonna sthay. The captives, that ith.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. Maybe justh becauth what sthey did t’us hath gotta mean thumething…”

He stayed a bit longer, but they finally ordered him out. Her therapy was constant and computer controlled and monitored and couldn’t be interrupted. He accepted that, and, walking back towards his quarters, he had to think about her and the others.

He was surprised that the medtechs and the psych computers agreed with them that they should not be transferred. The Mountain was their home; they were, in effect, natives. This ship represented the only safety and security they could possibly imagine. To throw them out against their will might make psychological rehabilitation impossible. Then you were into mindwipes, and that was something everybody tried to avoid at all costs.

And, in point of fact, most of them didn’t care if they lived or died anyway.

Robey was beginning to think that he’d already made his own decision, too.

Although few of the large crew/congregation suspected it, the most nervous man aboard The Mountain when it made orbit at Marchellus, a well-developed old colonial world with no dry dock but a great many maintenance facilities and all the services and connections to elsewhere in the colonial region, was Doctor Karl Woodward himself. For all his bluster, he was still half convinced that, when access to the planet below was allowed, he’d find himself almost alone aboard his big vessel.

Well, he thought nervously. At least we won’t have much overhead.

In the end, some did go. More than he would have liked, far fewer than he feared. Out of a ship’s company of well over a thousand, barely ten percent left, and a few of those, around that son of a bitch Timothy, he didn’t allow to choose. If they wanted that after all he’d taught them, then they should go after it.

Timothy actually tried to say goodbye and justify himself even though he should have known better. Woodward had refused to see him, and when the man persisted he had sent him a handwritten note that read, simply, “In the name of God, just go now!” Old Timothy and his band would do all right with their “Just believe” campaign, but they wouldn’t get anybody to God that way, only create another movement of people feeling good showing off their godliness to each other.

During the refitting, he also received word from some of his old colleagues outside of religion, and those messages he accepted. At least one, Doctor McGraw, whom he’d have wagered a bundle that the old boy had been dead of old age for a decade, was actually on Marchellus and wanted to see him. McGraw was a theoretical physicist, one of the smartest men around, and they’d worked together on a number of complex problems before Woodward’s decision to change careers, as he sometimes referred to it.

McGraw had been very young and very handsome in the old days, and it was a shock to see this little, bent old man come aboard instead. Still, Woodward knew that he didn’t look much like the young firebrand of physics who’d gotten his first doctorate at seventeen and was going to solve all the remaining mysteries of the cosmos by the time he was thirty.