Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“So you lie for a living, so to speak?”

“Well, not really. I entertain, or I’m at the start of the entertainment chain. Without me there’s nothing to watch, nothing to see, hear, or experience. It’s not a lie if you know it’s not the truth, but it entertains you. You mean you never saw any of the big productions? Never walked into a cyberworld story or even had a favorite story or poem you read as a kid?”

She gave a wry smile but decided not to mention her lack of reading skills. “No, not really. I’ve done some cybersex stuff and I’ve heard a lot of stories in my time, but I never was anywhere where you could see the kind of stuff you’re talking about. The most I ever saw on that score was a play once, with one real actor interacting with a bunch of cyber characters on a stage. They all looked and sounded real enough, but it was kind of boring. The language was so weird you could hardly follow it, but it did get bloody now and then.”

He shrugged. “Sorry about that. That’s kind of a lowbrow, low-budget cousin to the kind of things I do. Still, we might be able to put together a package that would make us all a little money. What do you say about that?”

“I can use it. They’re gonna be coming after me real soon for the ship rental. How much are we talking about?”

He gave a low, apologetic cough. “Well, not much up front, but once we get a script and studio deal and then start production there’ll be more. Most of it would be in royalties, percentage of the net, after the thing’s released and the money comes in. That can take a while.”

“How long’s a while?”

“Oh, a year or two. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But it goes on and on.”

“I don’t have a year. I need some money in days, or weeks,” she told him honestly. “The kind of people who’ll be coming to look for me to collect don’t like waiting around.”

“Huh! Too bad! What kind of money you talking about? That you owe, that is?”

“Rental of the Stanley for sixty days, which is sixty thousand, and repair of damages and losses to equipment, maybe another twenty or so.”

He whistled. “Eighty thousand ? That’s a bit steep for what you’d get up front on this deal, although you might well make much more than that down the pike. Wonder if they’d accept your percentage in payment?”

“If they would, it would solve everything, but, truth to tell, if they didn’t I’d be a dead woman, and I don’t plan to have to stand there while we find out. No, my best bet is to try for a smaller amount and just screw it. For under ten grand I could become somebody else. Somebody they wouldn’t recognize even with a genetic scanner.”

Norman Sanders leaned back thoughtfully in his chair and said nothing for a while. Then he reached into his inner coat pocket and removed what appeared to be a small jewel case. He opened it, and carefully removed a huge gem from its custom holder inside, then leaned forward and held it out to her.

“Ever see one of these?” he asked her.

It was, apparently, a natural gem almost as large as a hen’s egg, colored in a translucent emerald-green color with a clearly visible center of some different substance that, when viewed from different angles, seemed to form pictures or shapes of some sort. She had never seen anything like it.

Staring into it, she was startled to see that the pictures inside seemed to congeal into images of strange, bizarre landscapes peopled with real, familiar figures from her own past, glimpsed only fleetingly. It was like watching tiny bits of past experiences in her own life against a backdrop of lavalike motion creating the shapes and swallowing them almost as fast as the act of creation had made them.

“I—how does it do that?” she asked, mouth agape, watching the increasingly personalized visions, many of which were becoming quite disturbing.

“Nobody knows. It comes from your own mind, though. I don’t know what you’re seeing, but it wouldn’t be what I see, or what anybody else would see in it. It’s a Magi’s Stone, sometimes called the Magi’s Gift. There are fewer than a thousand known, and they all pretty much look alike and do that sort of thing, although some are colored more like rubies, others sapphires, running through the gamut of gem colors. It’s quite rare. In fact, there are a lot of folks around who’d kill for that thing, even though they couldn’t sell it. They’re all registered, their owners known, and the insurance boys would make the ones after you look like teddy bears when they hunted for it.”

She couldn’t take her eyes off it. “Where—where did it come from?”

“Nobody is really sure. The name comes from the general belief that it comes from the Three Kings. Ever hear of them?”

“Who hasn’t? Paradise, the Joys of Heaven. Three worlds nobody knows the location of that will give you your heart’s desire. Never much believed they really existed, though. Maybe now I do, sort of. But if this thing’s so valuable, how do you dare carry it with you? Particularly on a world like this ?”

“Well, because I’m fairly well armed in spite of what you see, and in its case it’s so booby-trapped that it would kill anyone trying to get it. Better hand it back. I know it’s endlessly fascinating, but the images get darker and darker as you look, and eventually—”

She suddenly gave a cry and dropped the stone onto the table. He was prepared and quickly reached out, grabbed it on the first bounce, and put it back into the case, closed it, then put it back in his pocket.

“There was— something. Somebody… ” she managed, in something of a whisper.

“Yes, I know,” he replied.

“Something that knew, and instead of me seeing it through that thing, it was seeing me! ”

“Oh, yes. He always shows up, sooner or later.”

She stared at him, genuinely shaken as even the worm had never bothered her. “ He? ”

“Well, I call it a ‘he,’ but it’s probably not a he, or a she, but more of an ‘it.’ I just feel more comfortable calling it a he, that’s all. Gives you the willies, doesn’t he?”

She nodded. “Is he— real ? I mean, is he actually looking at me when I’m looking in there, or is it just an illusion, like the personal visions?”

“Nobody knows. He doesn’t show up all the time, or at any given interval, either on this one or in the others, but he’s always around somewhere. That’s why you don’t stare too long. They’ve never been able to synthesize these, not the real ones. Some neat-looking imitations, but nowhere near the real thing. You know the real thing the moment you look into it, whether he shows up or not. They’ve never figured out what triggers the images in the mind, either. Best guess is some sort of natural force or radiation, but they’ve never been able to measure and identify one. They can’t really get inside one, either. The word is that they tried when the first batch was discovered. Every time you try and cleave it, and I mean every time, it shatters into a million tiny fragments, nothing more than powder, that analysis shows have some unusual chemical bondings, but nothing so alien as to explain the effect or give away its secrets. There are, however, people who won’t look into them. Not just superstitious types, real smart and powerful people. They think there’s a possibility that the thing works in some unknown, alien way as a receiver and transmitter.”

“How’s that?”

“That while you look at it, the thing’s reading all your memories and broadcasting them in some way, through a medium we can’t understand, to his data banks.”