Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

After so many decades of bringing the gospel to so many isolated worlds, to have scored so badly and been so wounded this last time out had to mean something. It had to mean that the time for spreading the Word was over, that God was giving him the stewardship He had promised in that first dream, so long ago.

No hallucinogens, no drunkenness, it hadn’t been like that. Most of his old friends and colleagues, Oscar among them, thought it was a small stroke caused by overwork and stress. Even he had wondered, but it was impossible to explain it fully to himself or put it aside, even though he could never have explained it to his old colleagues.

You just had to be there, he thought.

Like Ebenezer Scrooge waiting for the Ghosts of Christmas, he had lain there in his bedroom, comfortable and fat, but, like tonight, having trouble sleeping for some reason, and into the bedroom had come an angel.

The creature had been beautiful, radiant, grandiose, an unbelievably wonderful creature, yet as real as anybody he’d ever known. He sensed immediately that he was seeing the creature as something deep down from his childhood told him angels should look like, but it didn’t matter. It had been a conscious entity of great power and intellect and a sense of goodness and purity that came through any physical manifestation.

“If you run the next series of simulations, you will get a byproduct, a single series of equations, that will cause the human race to annihilate itself,” the angel had warned him. “That which has always been feared will come true by your hands, and very quickly. The first practical field test of the equations will do it. Alter the simulation even slightly and these byproduct equations will not come forth. Then study God’s word as you have studied God’s work. You will find that its logic is sound and that the truth is not what you or most religions think. Your choice.”

And, with that, the angel had vanished.

The next day he slightly altered the simulation and things went rather smoothly. Later, when he’d worked out the method, he was able to privately run a subset of the original under a routine that essentially erased itself as it ran. The byproducts showed up, and, to him, they were obvious in their implications.

Had the angel been a figment of his imagination, a psychological construct to deliver what his mind had already suspected, or was it divine intervention and warning? He’d been brought up in a totally secular environment with just about no religious background at all. What he knew of religion of any sort at that point was what he’d seen and dismissed as childish superstition for the ignorant masses when he’d seen services on broadcasts or passed churches, mosques, synagogues, whatever.

It was the fact that he’d barely given it any thought at all his whole life up to that point that convinced him that the experience hadn’t been entirely in his own mind. He began his studies, and the more he studied religion the more he discovered that most of the others seemed to have been based on old traditions, long histories, but nobody appeared to have read the books. And then he found this ministry that seemed to say what he was coming up with, and after the death of its leader he’d assumed the leadership. It seemed so natural and so true.

But he’d not gotten a single divine message after that one. Everything else was either subtle, with things just falling in his way, or realized through hard work. His old colleagues who thought him stressed out and dropping out of serious work to flee from its pressures didn’t understand just how tough a job this was. Working with computers so smart he could not even comprehend their internal musings, and simulations, and budget committees seemed almost a vacation compared to running a show like this one.

If Oscar only knew…

And if the congregation, too, only knew. Knew that he doubted as often as they, and had long periods when his old rational self wondered if he hadn’t been delusional. It was easy when things were going well; it was exciting, exhilarating, to go out to the colonies and plant new seed. But three worlds now, in a row… Three worlds that had been vicious, nasty, had cost a huge percentage of the ship’s company, mostly its youth, just to get out in one piece. All those kids… Abused, raped, tortured, murdered…

This really wasn’t to renew their faith. Not really. It was to renew his.

And as he lay there, tossing and turning, wondering if what he was doing was right, wondering if much of his life had been based on truth or delusion, he heard a voice. A familiar voice, one he’d not heard in a very, very long time. There was no physical manifestation, and it might have been in a dream in one of those fitful brief sleeps, but there it was.

“The Three Kings each bear gifts to the Christ child. One of those gifts He gives to you. Choose wisely, but only one.”

Gold or spices. He wondered if it would be that obvious.

There was a sudden, persistent, and irritating buzzing noise. He tried to shut it out, to hear if the Voice had anything more to tell him, but he finally couldn’t and opened his eyes.

“Yes?”

“Sir, we’re about to leave orbit,” Captain Lime’s voice informed him. “You said you wanted to be notified.”

“Huh? Oh, yes, yes! Proceed, Captain!”

He needed a good cup of coffee. No, he needed a good pot of coffee. This was going to be a long day. Sure, he could have popped a pill and been wide awake and energized in a minute, but where was the pleasure in that?

By the time he reached the bridge, he saw the large carafe in the anchor just to the right of his judge’s seat overlooking the whole complex and knew that they had done their jobs and anticipated him.

The bridge of a starship was unlike the bridge of anything else. Even Olivet had its bridge forward and actually had both screens and areas of hull that could be made transparent if asked. A starship’s bridge was amidships of the engine module, dead center, with the protection of the ship all around it. There were screens to show good representations of what was outside if you wanted to see it or, rather, if there was anything much to see, but they were all taken from the sensors built into the entire vessel.

For the most part, computers flew the ship without human intervention, and in some areas, such as when passing through any sort of wormhole, artificial and stable or wild and extreme as this one was, the computers could not be overridden by human hands or commands. The human brain simply couldn’t think fast enough to make any difference in that sort of environment.

Still, it was the computer’s job to interpret the wishes of the captain and carry them out, while always maintaining the safety and integrity of the ship and its passengers and crew if at all possible. That wasn’t necessarily possible in a wild hole; the kind of chaos-based mathematics that could be used to predict the safety and success levels of such a trip could only be initiated after you entered the hole and had at least some sense of the demands placed upon the ship. That was why you had to have real faith or be crazy, or maybe both, to go through a wild hole like this one.

But first the captain and crew would be doing some decision-making inside the more normal constraints of space and genholes. That was because ships trailing other ships had computers of about equal abilities, so shaking a tail wasn’t all that easy. You needed to put in some random, and often illogical, moves just to throw them off.

As soon as they entered the first genhole, Cromwell’s people went to work disabling or jamming all the devices that had been planted for tracking purposes. These would be of little use within the wormhole, but would leave signatures when they emerged if left to do their jobs. The way you shook tails in space was to go through increasing genhole gates leading to multiple-choice exits and entrances and, frankly, picking each one at random until you wound up certain that you’d shaken everybody off.