Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

“There’s one right here, and a second over there,” the navigator noted, highlighting them on the screens. “Either would be a respectable planet in its own right. This thing is big enough it has its own system and it’s amazingly stable. The largest, on the left there, is almost sixty thousand kilometers in diameter, solid, and shows evidence of heavy volcanism. Much of the cloudy atmosphere is actually water, though. My bet is that the place is very hot and very wet all at once. Whether the atmosphere is breathable or the surface temperature bearable, unlikely but impossible to tell without probes and a much closer look.”

“The second one, on the right-hand side, is about thirty-eight thousand kilometers in diameter, quite average, a bit farther out and on the chilly side. The large white areas are ice, probably pretty deep, and those are heavy polar caps. Still, atmospheric analysis shows a breathable if slightly weak atmosphere, and those large snow fields could very easily be the frozen tops of oceans. Equatorial region seems to be a cold desert, mostly. Conditions there would be livable, but not pleasant. I don’t—”

She suddenly paused and gave a slight gasp as a third planet-sized satellite suddenly came into view. Smaller than the other two at under thirty thousand kilometers in diameter, it was nonetheless a gem, a jewel, and it shouted beauty and life, a blue and white haven in the distance.

“That’s water all right, sir,” the navigator reported. “Oceans, continental land masses, an atmospheric balance with a very slightly rich oxygen content that’s compensated by the humidity. No really cold regions, but it appears to be a bit scorched in spots near the equator. Subtropical over most of the latitudes north and south of there, though. The kind of readings I’m getting, sir, say it’s a greenhouse, but one that is optimum for plants and maybe people.”

“Correlation?”

“Well, sir, it’s hard to say for sure, but I’d say that, checking against the Three Kings data and legends, the pretty blue one is Balshazzar, the cold one is Kaspar, and the large cloud-obscured hot one is Melchior. Not as romantic to look at as the legends, but otherwise things do match up. Those are the only planet-sized moons capable of supporting life, and they are in remarkably stable orbits considering that monster of a planet and the chaos it causes all around. Those just about have to be the Three Kings.”

They also fit the old scout’s alternate names according to the legends. A little paradise of a world, a world cold and inhospitable but livable where one might work things off in a kind of Purgatory, and a hot and cloudy place that was Inferno.

“One and one only. Choose wisely.”

It would be pretty easy from this early data to choose, and there would be popular sentiment only for the garden, but the Doctor wondered about the other part of that scout legend, where the monk warned to look beyond the obvious. Why hadn’t he used his original Dante-inspired names? Why had he thought they would be misleading?

“How long can we maintain ourselves in Olivet alone?” he asked the captain.

“Well, sir, we’ve fewer people than before, but Olivet was never designed to take the whole company anywhere. The food generators and waste cycling, water demands, all that will put an enormous strain on it. We can fly, although it’s going to be a bit tricky with all those gravitational forces and with all the debris bound to be in between those rings—”

“Just cut to the chase!” the Doctor snapped.

“Well, sir, I think I don’t want to maintain it in that space for very long in any event, particularly not under these conditions. With so much power to the shields, I’d recommend putting down on one of them and using the small scouts to take a look at the others. If a piece of rock penetrates the shields, then instead of having just one ship we’ll have no ship. I know how you hate this sort of thing, and no more than I do, but we’re going to have to pretty well choose where we want to go in the next few days, and we’re going to have to head there as straightaway as possible in Olivet after we do. And that’s assuming that Sinai can hold together enough to get us reasonably close. You’ve really got a choice on Olivet between shields on the one hand and food, heat, and toilets on the other. You see what I mean, sir?”

Woodward did. This should be a matter of careful exploration and good science, but in this case faith would have to be enough.

The obvious choice to everyone else was not the obvious choice to him, though. The pretty blue and white world with the subtropical climate and spectrographic analysis that it would accept the seeds of key fruits, vegetables, and the like allowing for a stable food supply from the Mountain ’s supplies seemed obvious, but it also seemed too easy. There would be little to challenge or test the people; it looked like an invitation to grow soft and fat.

Three Kings… Gold, frankincense, myrrh… The blue world was certainly one of the spices, the cold world represented gold and might well be where the curious gems and other artifacts from the Three Kings had been found. The clouded, volcanic world had to be another spice or scent; he wished he could see below and know if it really was a place where they could survive. Was the atmosphere toxic, or did the clouds cause some sort of greenhouse effect? Most of his experts doubted the latter; if it had been a planet in orbit around the star, certainly, but the composition and the position around the gas giant would allow for sufficient cooling. As to the toxicity, though, they couldn’t guess without probes.

All three were supposedly places where humans could live, but that was legend. Two at least bore this out; if so, there was some reason to believe that the harsh and violent surface of Melchior was livable as well.

But what about the water quality, the soil, the other essentials that would make sustaining life possible? Did he dare commit all of them to that level of unknown?

Please, Lord! Show me what to do!

“Ship!” somebody shouted. “There’s another ship just shot out of the wormhole and if looks are any indication it’s worse beat up than us!”

It looked to be a small Talcan raider, a fast and heavily armed single unit vessel related to the much larger class of ships Sapenza had commanded. These had been built as local warships that could also be used for official business by the more prosperous colonial worlds, and to give them some autonomy from the interstellar naval forces that might not have their best interests at heart nor be under their command.

Many had gone pirate or mercenary, or been turned to it, over the years since the Great Silence. This had to be one such, probably from some colonial trace in the neighborhood of Marchellus who’d picked up the rumor. The captain had to be pretty good; it seemed to be the only one they hadn’t shaken.

That, however, appeared to have been a decidedly mixed blessing to the ship, which was desperately trying to right itself, stop its merciless spin, and which was, rather clearly, trailing parts of spacecraft.

The small ship managed a measure of stability and turned itself in-system, but it still seemed to have little control, and even its energy shields were intermittently changing strength or cutting out and then coming back in again.

“What do you think, Captain?” Woodward asked.

“I think that fellow’s in far worse shape than we are, that he’d better get himself and his people into lifeboats if he’s got them and get the hell down someplace. He’s going about as fast as he can go without breaking apart, and he’s going to pass us in a matter of hours. That ship just can’t take it for very long, and when it gets within the gravitational field of that big planet it’s going to be pulled every which way from Sunday.”