Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

They ignored him. “So be speculative based on what you know. What might happen if Woodward got this far but with a banged-up ship?”

“He’d never fully control it if it were really banged up,” Cross noted. “And that thing was a fuckin’ nightmare. All patchwork, the drives of different shapes and sizes and manufacture… Wouldn’t take much to really screw ’em up, and this system’s got everything you need. If he had no real control, then he’s gone, either into the void, into the big gasbag there, or into the sun, and so are all his followers. But if he could get it stabilized to any degree, long enough to cram his people into his planetary lander, then he’d be able to do something if he and they got away from the big mother fast enough. That far out, you’d spend most of your fuel fighting gravity for control, and even then you’d be pulled right into Mama’s orbit here. That many people, that big a craft, that antique equipment and long struggle to get in-system… He’d have to make a quick decision. Pick one and head for there. And which one would you pick under those circumstances, assuming he could see and get some details of all three?”

There was an easy answer to that. “So you’d say the big part probably went into the planet or the sun, but my largest residual power supply is probably his lander?”

“That’d be my guess. Unless they were really creamed, there’s no reason they shouldn’t have gotten down all right, but they would stay there.”

“You think the moon would prevent a takeoff?”

“Nope. But takeoff to where ? You ain’t got power to get back to the hole, let alone get through it. And you’d be in a ship with no instrumentation or drives capable of wormhole travel. That’s certain death even if they did the impossible and made it that far back, and I’m damned sure they couldn’t. The best they could do would be to risk that topheavy, probably damaged and overlarge antique to go to one of the other moons. So where do you go? Volcano City or Sandstorm Hell? Even if you could even make it that far.”

“Point taken. But that was only… what? Under a century, certainly. There could very well be survivors of Woodward’s original crew still living down there, assuming it’s not a blind and that some of this life we’re reading is edible. And they’d have a pretty solid colony there by now.”

An Li looked at the optical view of Balshazzar in the C&C main board view window. “Yeah, and I bet there’s edible stuff there. The thing is, those other signatures. Put that together with our alien ship from Kaspar and we got a more interesting question on this one.”

“Yeah? What?”

“If those are alien survivors and groups down there—the other signatures, I mean— then did they wipe out the humans as they prayed, or are they commingling, or is there war in Paradise?”

Randi Queson shrugged. “I think we’ll know in under a day, assuming we can keep off the damned surface of the place.”

It was a pretty world, whether a moon or a planet. The explorers and scouts would classify it as a Class One Terran, not only a world capable of sustaining human life unaided but one that might even evolve such life. If An Li’s aliens existed and were in any sense of the word life as they knew and understood it, then this was the world they would have come from.

“Sixty-three percent ocean, another three percent internal lakes, and thirty-three percent land masses,” Jerry Nagel noted. “Axial tilt’s under eight degrees, so there’s probably little in the way of seasons from that source. Rotation on axis twenty-two point six standard hours, pretty close to nominal. Two northern continents with several huge islands, and a matching two southern continents, different in shape and size, plus more islands big and small. The majority of land is in the mid-latitudes, which is all to the good, since the periods when this sucker is getting hit from the sun have got to fry almost anything within those eight-degree tropics. Otherwise, we’re talking a high when facing the mother planet of roughly thirty-one degrees centigrade, a low about eighteen, those at sea level, of course. Ocean water is saline, temperatures from the tropic lines to the continental borders roughly twenty-seven to thirty degrees, polar side temps about twenty-one degrees down to maybe thirteen at the surface. Within the tropics the temps are bearable now, but even if they cool down at the current rate while on this side they’ll be within tropical norms for this type of planet. Sunward, I’d put those tropical regions at crisp, extra crisp, well done, and deep fried.”

“So the life’s on the continents, mostly, and the islands?” An Li asked, looking at the pictorials.

“Well, that’s the thing. It’s everywhere . The oceans are teeming with it, the continents have their sparse spots but dense concentrations in the best overall geographic areas. Still, I would suspect as much from the wide variations produced by this system. Since there’s no evidence of roads or major structures to accompany the areas of dense population, I’d say that unless some of them have wings, they walk everywhere, and that probably means they stick fairly close to home. Territorial. When your ‘year’ is only fifteen or sixteen standard days, your ‘seasons’ basically last for maybe three or four days each. Not much time for real variation, but it sure keeps the weather systems stirred up. Most storms are produced by cold air meeting warm air. I bet the transition from sun to planet source only is pretty violent in the weather department, and you can see a lot of nasty-looking local stuff swirling around in the tropics right now. Give them solar heat and they’ll become monsters.”

“You’re making it sound a lot less appealing all of a sudden,” Randi Queson commented. “Stuck in your local garden, killer storms and tropical rains, and no machines worth a damn. That’s a recipe for taking humanity back hundreds of thousands of years or more.”

Nagel shrugged. “Maybe. They probably don’t have to do much hunting, though, or wander too far to eat. That looks damned rich down there, and if there are human heat signatures then a lot of it is edible for folks like us. And, of course, it’s a life of essentially leisure, fresh air, all natural foods and drink, and no natural enemies. If the nonhuman elements either don’t mix or are friendly, then everybody’s in the same boat, as it were. It’s probably pretty damned dull.”

Queson sighed. “Poor Dr. Woodward.”

“Huh? Why do you say that?”

“A man of his great intellect and great faith, down on an alien world, meeting up with aliens as smart or smarter than we are who also are probably the survivors or descendants of survivors of expeditions past. Imagine the meeting. Imagine how it might shake him when he discovers they haven’t discovered Jesus, or perhaps have a totally different concept of God and the universe, perhaps even no religious beliefs or concepts at all.”

“Wouldn’t bother guys like him a bit,” Nagel assured her. “I seem to remember that those types went looking for civilizations that hadn’t heard the Word as they themselves saw it and then converted them, by force, hook, or crook if necessary. Vaticanus still has an Office for the Propagation of the Faith, or whatever they called it, better known as the Inquisition. Torture them until they either convert or die. Either way, God’s will is done. Bring Bibles to the heathen, but make sure you also bring booze to trade for the slaves. Or God tells the faithful to join an army and conquer the world for Him. So they do, and destroy the other religions as heathen, desecrate or destroy the old churches, temples, and monuments, and if you can’t convert ’em, well, their children will convert, or be slaves. Naw… He wouldn’t see it as a break in his faith. He’d see it as being handed by God the opportunity to be the first one to convert nonhumans.”