Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“My, you are cynical,” she responded.

“You’re the social scientist. My world is hard science. Numbers, experiments, repeatable data searches. We hard science types never were great at grasping how human behavior works on the grand scale, but I think I have my history pretty much right, don’t I?”

“More or less, I guess. But not everybody is like that, even within a religious faith.”

“Well, much of human history’s misery has been caused by religion. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all bunk.”

“Well, we’ll all go our own way on that. Coming up on Balshazzar now. Cap, you have an energy signature that might in any way match a downed shuttle of the type Woodward’s group used?”

“I’ve got a possibility,” the captain responded. “I am trying to hail it on all standard frequencies in use at that time. Nothing so far.”

“Yeah, well, I think if I were down there and spent eighty years calling with nobody picking up the other end I’d probably stop hanging out near the phone myself,” Nagel said. “Still, there’s enough power for them to keep things going assuming the ship’s intact?”

“Oh yes, although one would expect it to be half buried and overgrown in that area by now. There has definitely been flooding in the area, although the floodplain may not have been in that area when they landed. These do shift.”

“What’s the population in that floodplain area right now?” Queson asked her. “Roughly speaking, of course.”

“Difficult to say. Rough estimate would be between one thousand and one thousand five hundred. They are camped just off the plain, in a very large area of groves and springs, but it may well be that we have had some luck if we want to contact them. I am not at all certain you are correct that they remain in one place. This looks like a migration of sorts, or perhaps a pilgrimage. They are just now gathering. It is impossible to know how many there will ultimately be, but it could be a lot .”

“All human?”

“ Mostly human. There are readings that indicate some lateral traffic from some sort of life giving off nonhuman signatures.”

“Does it appear like a hostile movement?”

“Who can say? Logic tells me that if you are thinking of being hostile to a group of one to two thousand you’d best bring more than a few dozen of your own.”

“Good point. Okay, so either they don’t go into the old ship anymore because they can’t, they think it’s holy ground, or they already have everything they can get from it, or they just haven’t gotten enough of a crowd yet. In any event, we’re in no position to wait for them to do it, and we have no idea whether they can or will pick up the communications. It’s pretty clear we need some way to talk to them, after first letting them know we’re here at all. Any suggestions? Anybody?”

“I could just take the shuttle down and say hello,” Lucky Cross suggested. “That seems the simplest and easiest.”

“On the surface, yes,” An Li responded. “But if that’s Woodward’s ship and people and it’s got power, they might be expected to have checked the rest of the system out. They didn’t. Neither did the aliens, if that’s what they are, and we have signatures from their ships as well. How many ship-to-ground shuttles have we got on this run, Lucky?”

“You know damn well we only got the same one. Otherwise it’s just the escape pods.”

“I say we need a unanimous vote, then, to take that shuttle down anywhere, since we have no evidence it can get back up again from down there and some evidence maybe it can’t. Without that shuttle, we may as well go home.”

Jerry Nagel looked over at Eyegor. “There’s always the robot. Hell, this is a much better place to send the thing than the other one. At least it won’t be alone down there.”

“You seem bent on getting rid of me,” the robot responded. “In response this time I ask a variation of the same question just asked on the shuttle. Is it plausible that at least one, perhaps most of those stuck down there brought with them AI devices of some sort? If so, where are they? They should also show up on our scans.”

“The thing’s got a point,” Nagel said, nodding. “Not much in the way of mechanized anything down there, unless it’s levers and ropes and pulleys. There are several known combinations of radiation and energy fields known to damage or destroy AI synapses while being harmless to humans. There are more the other way around, I admit, but the former’s not that unusual.”

“So what does that leave?” Queson asked nobody in particular.

“A probe,” the captain responded. “It is simple and has minimal AI circuitry and maximum shielding. It is used for low-level measurements.”

“Yeah, but that’s just a remote-controlled camera ball like old Eyegor’s head there,” Sark pointed out. “What good does that do us?”

“It can be rigged to carry a few things,” the captain reminded them. “Its cargo is limited, but we could put a couple of ferrets in there, or perhaps simply use it not as a recorder but as a playback device. If they can call us, it’ll tell them to do so. If they can’t, we’ll work out a way to send something down that can.”

“Too much AI in the ferrets to take a chance until we know for sure they’ll work,” An Li said firmly. “But the idea of using a probe as basically a speaker works well, and since a probe is designed to be disposable we don’t have to worry if it can’t get back. Stick a handheld ship-to-ship intercom in the storage compartment just in case. I’m not thrilled about losing one, but we have to talk to them.”

Once decided, it was easier to rig up and execute than it was to discuss it.

The probes were very small devices shielded for entry and designed to send up close-in data across any spectrum, do soil and atmospheric analysis, and give the basics they or anyone else would need before planning a manned landing on an alien world. In essence they were simply small, remote-controlled data collectors made cheaply and designed for simple tasks. Analysis was always aboard ship; they only sent a data stream of what they were told to examine.

It was something of a microphone, and all a speaker is is a microphone in reverse, creating the opposite pattern on a surface capable of receiving it. These were strictly single use, send or receive—but they included the ground-to-air handheld transceiver in case they didn’t have a better way.

“Last chance,” the captain warned. “Everyone still all right with this?”

“Send it,” Nagel told her. The probe was quickly away.

To keep it intact and from burning up as it entered the atmosphere, they took about an hour and a quarter to get the thing into the atmosphere. After that, it was a simple matter to fly it towards the supposed human colony while the Stanley took up geosynchronous orbit.

“Jeez! I just thought of something,” Randi Queson said worriedly.

“Yeah? What?” Nagel was just hoping to hear about all those weird jewels for the taking, or maybe alien technology, and other stuff like that.

“I was just thinking—if they’ve gone this long without anything mechanical, and if life is hard enough down there so the elders are basically dead, then what kind of reaction are we gonna get when this—this voice suddenly comes out of this little ball? They might think God is talking to them!”

“All the better,” Nagel replied cynically. “Then God can just command them to go gather all their valuables. Much easier than telling them, ‘This is a stickup.’ ”

“You don’t live on a floodplain if you don’t have to,” Randi Queson noted, talking as much to herself as to the others. “I wonder why they leave better pickings up north and come down here? It certainly must be something they do at broader intervals; it wouldn’t make any sense to do this except once in a great while, maybe as a ritual, maybe as simply a gathering of a clan that’s otherwise spread out.”