Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

More comfortable but by no means pleasant were the islands of the mid latitudes, some of enormous size. Like the continent, they were primarily volcanic, but whole areas appeared to be either ages dormant, with often only one, or even no, active ones. There were still active volcanic regions in other respects, but their mountain-building days seemed to have slowed to a crawl or stopped.

Still, the place seemed to teem with life. Vast areas of foliage, low broad-leafed trees and enormous vines, and possibly a lot more, and not just on the islands, either. Life always found a way if there was one, and even on the most active areas of the continent there were large areas of vegetation. White steam rising said that hot magma might not be too far below the ground even there.

Sark looked at the pictures of the three on the big screen and commented in his low, perpetually sour voice, “Well, if I got stuck out here I know which one I’d head for and move to.”

“Huh? Oh, you mean Balshazzar?”

“The pretty one. Sure.”

An Li wasn’t as convinced. “I wonder if it isn’t supposed to be that way. Everybody who likes our kind of climate would be naturally attracted to that one, but if there’s any kind of rhyme or reason to this then that’s the one I’d stay away from. You draw the bugs with sugar and then you trap ’em.”

Nagel chuckled. “Ah, the secret hidden alien masterminds again, huh? Why would they want to lay a trap for such as us? And keep such an elaborate and expensive trap open to little bits of us over such a long time? No, I can’t buy it.”

“Three worlds that all could support human life? That’s not suspicious?”

“I don’t think so. Unprecedented, sure, but it’s a big universe. One, two, three, a dozen, what’s the difference? And if not here, then somewhere else.”

“But they are here,” she persisted. “And linked to human regions via a self-renewing wormhole.”

Randi Queson thought a moment, then said, “You might both be right for all that it matters. The point is, Li’s got a point. Look, from the point of view of sheer pragmatism and a knowledge of human nature, let’s look at the three. Want to find remnants of anybody who came before and might still be around? Go for the pretty one. But don’t expect to find much of value there other than refugees. You’d have to have mines and other heavy-duty works to find much of value on it, particularly with that necessary level of erosion and deposition. Now, if you want to hunt for those mysterious artifacts of some long-gone alien civilization, I’d take Kaspar, the little cold one. Anything left there in the sands or probably in the cliffs would eventually be exposed by the wind and such, and the cold would be a good preservative. But if you want your gemstones, I’d take Melchior. It’s far too dynamic for much else, but those kind of internal forces are just the kind that create unique mineral recipes from whatever compounds are beneath the earth. So, what do we want to go hunting for first? Refugees and aliens, maybe, or even alien refugees, or artifacts, or gems?”

“Gems,” An Li, Lucky Cross, and Sark all responded as one.

“Then we go to Melchior and we hold our noses. I bet you that world is gonna stink something awful. And considering those rains, everybody better know how to swim, too.”

“I think we ought to do a systematic survey before committing to any planetfall,” Jerry Nagel said to them.

“Why? What’s the difference?” An Li shot back.

“Because we don’t see any derelicts here, that’s why. Lots of forces, lots of history, but no clear-cut signs we aren’t the first ones here. I think I want to know what I’m getting into before I go down, particularly this time. It may not be as easy as it looks to park and go down and scoop up treasure, even if we can find it. Let’s look at them all. There aren’t enough of us to do any kind of real exploration, and none of us are gonna live that long to completely cover one, let alone all three, of these things. It makes it all the more important that we decide right off which one we want to commit to this first trip, make sure we’re landing where there’s something worth taking, and, if possible, spot what we can of ugly surprises. Why not? You got something better to do?”

His logic wasn’t what they wanted to hear, but it made too much sense to be argued with. Gold and frankincense and myrrh were not lying all over the ground down there waiting to be picked up and stuffed in their pockets. The Three Kings weren’t quite the easy El Dorado of spacefarer legends, but just three new and very odd worlds. They needed more information, and getting it wasn’t something you could argue yourself out of.

Lucky Cross sighed, a little disappointed. “All right. Agreed.” And, one by one, the others echoed her sentiments.

“I’ll plot a systematic route,” the captain told them, sounding very satisfied with their decision. “Kaspar, Balshazzar, then Melchior. Then you’ll have to decide.”

“Fair enough,” Nagel replied. “When we go down and come back up, and when we go back, I want to already have enough stuff so that no matter what Normie pulls or tries to pull on us—and he’ll definitely try and pull something, bet on it—our share will still be enough so we don’t have to worry or ever come back again unless we want to.”

They settled back and headed for Kaspar.

“I found something interesting in the database,” Randi Queson told them as the Stanley approached the ghostly and frozen moon of Kaspar. “An old Christian melody. I wonder if that monk was tweaking our future collective noses a bit?”

Nagel’s bushy eyebrows rose. “A melody? You mean a religious song?”

“One of many about them, although hardly a religious song in the usual sense. There wasn’t any real agreement ever on whether or not they really were kings or more likely astrologers or some sort of magicians high up in royal courts. I looked through the bunch—there are even some operas—but this one is kind of interesting. I half suspect that if anything was running through that cybernetic brain when those reports were sent, it was this one.”

“Not my background, but let’s hear it.”

Nagel shrugged. “Sounds pretty innocuous to me, the parts that make sense.”

“Christian tradition, mostly, The Christian Bible really says little about them except that they were so naive they inadvertently made the local king so paranoid he tried to kill all the babies. But the traditions would be in the mind of this monastic scout, that’s for sure. He would have been raised with them. It might just be a kind of perverse sense of humor—monk humor, maybe. In this case our kings don’t follow a star but a failed star, but it’s sure a star of wonder and beauty as these things go. But in the song all the kings bear gifts to give to the Christ child. They come, they do it, but in the process cause infanticide. A warning, perhaps, to those who know the story?”

Nagel wasn’t impressed. “Maybe, maybe not. I remember an old legend once about the oracle that always gave infallible predictions, but in riddles. Trouble was, you could never figure out what the oracle meant until the thing came true, so it was useless. If that old boy had any kind of message in mind, other than being creative in his names, I doubt if we could figure it out until after it’s too late, so what’s the point? Maybe we should have brought along a priest, huh?”