Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“We will see. It would require a lot of money. Still, that is what I’ve been working for. Being leased and sent out on orders is something of a cross between slavery and prostitution. I think I’d rather be well away from that. It is worth the risk.”

Talk about a lack of privacy, Nagel thought, but neither he nor the others ever really minded the captain. She was the ship’s chief operator, and boss in the getting there and getting back department. Even though her brain and parts of her old nervous system were all that was left of her human days, integrated, preserved, protected in some sort of gelatinous mass deep within the ship, linked to a massive synthetic computer and to every sensor and point within the ship as if it were her natural body, she was still part of the salvage crew, an equal with the others.

“Do you really think you can thread this needle, Cap?”

“It does not seem impossible. I’ll be busy, but it’s not impossible. When you’re inside a wormhole you are outside of many of the rules of space-time, and you must anticipate and adjust thousands of tiny settings to keep centered. I look upon it as a challenge. As for the mission, it is precisely why I chose to become a ship in the first place. I want to know what the Three Kings are. I want to see them, and be among the first to return and tell others.”

“I want to bring back millions in exotic but marketable merchandise,” he told her. “This is just the means to an end.”

“I do not believe that. Not entirely. I believe all of you really want to be out there, to be in exotic places seeing things others never will. What would you do with your money? Retire? Do nothing for the rest of your life? I do not believe you studied all that long and hard and became expert in all that you are in order to become a playboy and wastrel. The Doc even less so. She could have remained teaching and living a decent life until she was ancient, not going through all this. You all have your reasons, but they aren’t the ones you even tell yourselves. An Li, for example. Tough, self-centered, cold as ice—but it isn’t for money that she is doing this. She is doing this to make a mark. To do something important. To wind up somebody .”

“Well, maybe you’re right about them,” Nagel allowed, “but not me. I’m doing this because it’s the only damned thing I was ever good at. I don’t particularly like it, or enjoy it, but it’s the only thing I can do well. There’s something to be said, I guess, when you find you’re one of the best folks in the known universe to tear things down and blow things up.”

“We may see.”

“So, why did you decide to stop piloting ships and become one? For real?”

The captain thought a moment, then answered, “It is difficult to explain, and it will sound very egocentric, more than anything An Li ever did. Nonetheless, it is true.”

“Yes?”

“It is the closest any living being can get to becoming a god.”

He thought about that a lot of times after the captain first said it to him, but he never could quite understand it. Perhaps it was all power and perception, like most everything else, but what was godlike and the ultimate to somebody like the captain wasn’t his idea of paradise. He was never sure that he ever knew what his idea of paradise really would be, anyway; only that without lots of money he couldn’t begin to find out.

Even the captain had that in common with him, and probably with the others as well. You could even decide that you hated money and try to live without it, but that was much easier to do when you knew it was there if you absolutely needed it.

He’d discussed that with Randi on the last trip, and she’d brought up some long-dead queen in some long-forgotten kingdom back on old Earth who’d lived in the world’s greatest palace and had never lacked for one thing in her whole life, but who really wanted to try and understand her subjects. So she had a little mock peasant village built on the palace grounds, and she and her courtiers would go there now and then and play peasant and grow flowers and cabbages and whatnot. Of course, the servants did most of the real work, and kept it antiseptically clean and nice, and no matter how realistic they wanted to get they all knew, and could see, that golden palace up on the hilltop that they could return to at any moment. It was a sincere attempt, but it was doomed.

He seemed to remember that the Doc said that the real peasants finally got so pissed off at actually living in shit and watching their kids starve from the other side of that big castle they finally stormed it and cut her head off or something equally drastic. She probably died, totally confused, unable to comprehend why her “children” had so turned on her.

He’d known a number of dictatorial types on various worlds who had wound up with nearly identical fates, and, to a one, they, too, had had baffled and bewildered looks on their faces as they were shot down.

One thing the money folks rarely remembered: Give the little people some small share of the pie or else one day they’re gonna come after your neck. And if you play peasant, make sure you play with real peasants.

He was sick and tired of being a peasant, but things were too broken to get up a lot of enthusiasm to storm the palace. They all were tired. They weren’t really peasants, either, in the traditional sense—he was university trained, the Doc was, as the title said, a doctor of philosophy, and even An Li, Lucky Cross, and Sark had knowledge and skills that were the products of a lot of training and hard work. All any of them wanted was a score so they could relax for a little bit, or be comforted that their palace was somewhere up on one of those hills if they needed it.

They were all worse than peasants, really. Peasants continued to grub for food and take it until they boiled over or keeled over. Not them. This crew took about an hour to decide to gamble on a tiny chance that maybe they could jump off that bridge and live, knowing that it was most likely suicide. And if it stormed any castles, it was to get enough to last out their lives in comfort, not for any vision of a brighter future.

Even that queen had been an optimist. Optimism was in short supply these days, though.

He’d seen the photos of the wrecked ships and wizened bodies. They all had.

“Ever ridden a wild hole?”

Who had? Wasn’t there a reason, maybe, why nobody in this well-traveled, highly experienced crew had ever met anybody who did? Couldn’t even think of somebody who had?

His research showed a ton of ships and crews trying. Sometimes the ships came back, most times they didn’t, but when they did their crews were almost always dead, dead, dead. The few who survived were never the same, as broken and battered as their ships.

Suddenly, storming the golden palace with pitchforks seemed like the eminently more sane activity of the two.

So the Captain wants to be a demigod, and all I want is to pay off all my creditors and stay in suites like the one Sanders was in, maybe with at least the female companion he had with him or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

It didn’t matter what they wanted or didn’t want. They all had to be pretty damned desperate or pretty damned insane to take this job.

Three worlds, or something like that. A small, pretty one, a cold, ugly one and a big messy one. That was all that had ever really come through.

Gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Which one had the gold and which had the spices?

Gold was pretty common out here, so common it wasn’t even worth the salvage in most cases. The other two had reasonable imitations of equal or greater value. He didn’t know what frankincense and myrrh were anyway except that they were some kind of ancient precious spices and perfumes. Gifts for a king, or a King of Kings?