Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

Close up, Balshazzar looked even more like the old classical versions of Paradise than they’d imagined. Four main continents sitting on well developed continental plates with quite a number of islands of all sizes in the oceanic realm. In fact, only one ocean area seemed to have no land mass at all, and it was well south and towards the polar regions.

There was a lot of active weather; lightning was quite abundant, but not in quantities any more dangerous than the average colonial world, and there was some continental weather. There were, however, no ice caps, which explained why the islands were plentiful and the continents relatively small.

Temperatures in the mid latitudes seemed to vary little, north or south, averaging about thirty-two degrees Celsius. The equatorial zones were considerably hotter and probably would not be great for any long-term settlement; temperatures there easily reached forty-five or greater, particularly during the period when the planet was on the sunward side of the great giant, but dropped only about five degrees when facing the big planet, no more than ten during the short night.

It was a hot world. Even the poles reached fifteen to eighteen degrees.

That was an oddity they hadn’t thought of with light. With the moon’s rotation, they had a relatively normal day/night cycle even though, being fairly small, a full day was closer to nineteen hours than the human standard twenty-four. But when it was on the sunward side of the gas giant night was not very dark; even though you could follow the planetary shadow on the surface of the big planet, the thing was so huge and so dominating that it illuminated the dark side facing it to about fifty percent of daylight levels. This was a very bright world overall.

And plants seemed to have evolved on it just for that. Big plants, small plants, jungle plants, grasses, it didn’t matter. Every square centimeter of land was covered with growth, all verdant and abundant. There didn’t seem to be much sign of animal life, but they’d have to get down there to find out for sure.

It was certainly carbon-based life, too, which held out the possibility that, as alien as it should be, there might well be plants down there that human beings might eat and take nourishment from.

Cromwell homed in on the lifeboat beacon and brought one of the four scout ships Olivet had left down to the surface about a kilometer from the signal, in a storybook meadow complete with placid fresh-water lake.

They already knew that the oxygen-nitrogen mix was breathable, but they checked out all of the elements of the air before opening the hatches. Some slightly heavier than normal concentrations of inert gasses might well explain why the slightly elevated oxygen level didn’t result in more intense fires, but the overall mix had nothing new or unusual, and nothing they hadn’t seen before on other worlds.

“Too good,” one of the environmental engineers commented. “Ten to one the place smells like rotten garbage.”

“There is only one way to find that out,” Cromwell noted, and gave the security code to open the hatch.

Stepping through the airlock felt like someone had soaked a wool blanket in water and thrown it on them. The air was incredibly humid, heavy, thick, and also all-around hot. Still, it didn’t smell particularly bad.

“Kind of smells like cinnamon,” one of the techs commented. “And several other spices, too.”

“More like incense,” said another. “Several flavors mixed together. A little sweet for me, but not really bad, I don’t think. Beats rotten garbage, anyway.”

“Frankincense,” Cromwell muttered.

“Sir?”

“The Three Kings, also known as the Three Maji or the Three Wise Men who brought gifts to the baby Jesus. You know that. The gifts were gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The first is self-explanatory. The other two are exotic spices used in ancient times in perfumes and incense. In those days they were all incredibly valuable. What we’re smelling here is close to frankincense. That worries me.”

“Sir?”

“I do not believe that the atmosphere of this world smells uniformly like frankincense. So why does it smell of it just here, where we land?”

They stood there for a few moments, saying nothing, although a couple of the techs were checking samples.

“Curious,” Cromwell noted, not really talking to them.

“Sir?” one of the techs responded.

“Listen. Just everyone stop what they’re doing and listen.”

There was the sound of wind blowing through the tops of trees, the sound of small ripples from the lake hitting the shore, and the sound of a gurgling brook coming from the lake and heading off towards the sea many kilometers away, but not much else that they could hear, and one of the engineers said so.

“That’s exactly the point,” the security chief replied. “There’s no real sounds at all. No birds, no insects, no animal sounds. Just wind and water. Life sensors?”

“Nothing really, sir. Just plant matter. If the plants here cross pollinate, they sure don’t do it in the usual manner.”

“Microorganisms?”

“ Those we got,” the engineer responded. “I’d say there’s enough new species here to keep an exobiologist happy for three lifetimes just in this pond scum. Nothing extraordinary, though. They don’t look like ones in our databases, but why should they? They do look like normal evolutionary variants. I expect we’re going to find them everywhere, and everywhere a new set of species.”

It was impossible at the moment to know if any were harmful to humans, but it was not only unlikely—only a few dozen organisms had ever crossed the interstellar species barriers—it was also moot. They would have to face them or similar groupings no matter where they settled. It wasn’t like they had a wide range of choices.

“Now, here’s something interesting,” one of the techs commented, examining a fruit picked off a low tree. “Very bananalike, would you say?”

Everyone looked. “Yes? So? It’s a common form,” another tech said dismissively.

“Yeah, well, it’s not a bananalike fruit at all. In fact, the analysis here says that the only thing it can possibly be is a real, live banana, ancient Brazilian strain, no significant genetic differences nor abnormalities.”

“What! That’s impossible!” Cromwell roared. “Are you certain?”

“Yes, sir. Just like those are common coconut palms imported and raised on countless planets—I’d need to run the genetics to tell you which variety—and I’ll bet most anything that those are mangoes, those are papayas, and so on.” She stopped and shook her head, looking incredibly puzzled. “If we find a grove with a bunch of apple trees off by themselves, I’m out of there,” she added, muttering.

Cromwell was suspicious. “If there are no noticeable insects here, how are they pollinated? Who brought them? They seem to be growing wild, but there’s not a lot exotic here. They don’t look like they aggressively displaced anything.”

“Sir, there were large areas of the planet having no correlatable growths to anything we know,” the other tech noted. “In fact, this region here showed to be far smaller and more mixed from above, but it has definite boundaries. Kind of like a self-maintaining greenhouse for somebody’s exotic fruit and vegetable collection.”

Cromwell looked around suspiciously. “I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised, considering the legends about this area. Who knows who or what is here, or has been here before, or in fact was trapped just like we are? Keep at it, people. I’m going to take a look at that crashed lifeboat.”

The lifeboat was about a kilometer or so from them, but fairly easy to locate using the orbital positioning system relayed down to his suit. As he walked, slowly, carefully, deliberately, but without any sense of real danger to himself, he heard an odd sound. At first it seemed like the rustling of wind in the higher trees, but there was no wind to speak of here and now, and the more he listened the more it sounded close, on the ground, not up in the forest heights.