Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

An Li saw no reason to doubt him. She positioned the probe just above the gray man and opened the small, iris-like hatch and tilted the ball slightly. The communicator fell out, and the man caught it and examined it.

“Still surplus,” he commented, as much to himself as to them. “I gather the Great Silence is still—silent?” He punched the controls like a man who knew the equipment perfectly. “This better?”

“For us, yes,” An Li told him.

“You are here but your ship is still functional?”

“Yes. We used a cybernetic pilot. It seems to be the only way to do it right.”

“Damn! We should have thought of that! The Doctor, however, doesn’t feel comfortable with cyberships. He tends to think that one of the things that doesn’t get moved is a soul.”

“Could be,” An Li told him. “I’ve never seen anybody’s soul so I can’t comment on whether the captain has one or not—or me, either, for that matter. But I sure didn’t sell it, so if I had one it’s still here someplace.”

“Most people do not sell their souls,” the gray man told her, taking the comment seriously. “Most people give theirs away, and far too cheaply. And you are…?”

“An Li, Exec of the Stanley . Other than the captain, I have a ship-to-surface and surface-craft pilot, Gail Cross; a chief engineer, Jerry Nagel; a technician, Olon Sark; and a cultural anthropologist and sometimes geologist and lots of other things as well, Dr. Randi Queson.”

“My name is Cromwell. How did you find the route to this place, if I may ask?”

“You are Dr. Woodward’s colony?”

“You might call it that, yes.”

“Well, that’s how. The Doctor consulted with an old colleague and gave him the key to finding the Kings, knowing the man would never violate the trust nor come himself. Well, that colleague died, and someone with too much money bought the effects, including that, and then went looking for people dumb enough to see if it was real. Here we are.”

“You are an exploration ship?”

“No, actually, we’re all salvagers. Just not this trip. Salvagers were the only ones crazy enough to take this job. And desperate enough.”

Cromwell thought about it. “I see. Well, first and foremost, you must not land here.”

“Is there a problem? Or aren’t we welcome?”

“You are as welcome as anyone, but if you come down you will not get back off. This is not a natural place. It looks like Heaven, but it is not. Cain went to the lands east of Eden and began human civilization. This is more or less west of Eden. All our basic needs are here, but there are no heavy metals nor other major components that would allow us industry. In other words, we’re pretty well stuck like this, and so is everybody else who lands. Limbo, we sometimes call it, or Eden with the snake already in charge. I have your communicator. Try and retrieve your probe. Go ahead, try it.”

An Li looked at the others, who pretty much shrugged, so she said, “Cap, bring the probe back.”

“Retrieving,” the captain responded. The probe lifted off rather normally, quickly reducing the people below to dots and then to nothing as it got high and encountered a cloud layer.

“That must be a hell of a cloud layer,” Cross commented.

But it wasn’t. “The probe ascent has slowed to almost stationary,” the captain told them. “I have it at full power and I appear to have full control, but it simply will not rise any more.”

She took a horizontal approach, but every time she tried to increase altitude above the six-thousand-meter mark, it stuck.

“Dump your samples, see if that will work,” Cross suggested.

“Did that already. Something is exerting a specific gravitational or magnetic or whatever kind of force on the probe. It kicks on at six thousand, it kicks off at any point below it. I believe we have experienced the man’s demonstration. I am returning the probe to its old position so we can see them again easily.”

An Li didn’t wait. “All right, we’re impressed.”

“So were we,” the gray man responded. “And so was everyone else who landed on this world. You can come here, you can live here, within its limits, you can do what you like, but nothing, once down, rises again. We tried to track it, assuming it was some sort of beam or directional ray, but our instruments showed nothing. Perhaps yours…?”

“Nothing here either,” the captain told them. “I have no idea how or from where it’s being applied.”

“I take it, then, we should attempt no landing here considering this situation?”

“I would not advise it, although there are advantages to living here. For example, I not only should be dead of old age here, I in fact was killed here when we first landed. And yet, here I am.”

“Are you saying that you’re immortal? That you rose from the dead?” Randi Queson was more of a believer than Jerry Nagel, but not to this degree.

“Oh, not really. You just don’t age at the same rate here as you do off this planet. I have no idea if it is a natural phenomenon or something connected to the same force or forces that prevent anything from leaving—if, indeed, they are artificial forces and not just some other natural phenomenon we haven’t any way to measure as yet. Your guess is as good as mine. At least it appears that we have no problems communicating outside the atmosphere, although we’ve been unable to communicate with any of the other moons.”

“You’ve tried?”

“Yes, we did everything you’d think of all those years ago when we finally wound up here. And, before us, several nonhuman groups as stuck as we are tried as well. We have only limited contact to this day with most of them—I don’t believe anyone ever really realizes what the term ‘alien’ really means until you face it—but one set, the Meskok, we’ve had excellent relations with from the beginning. I am by no means convinced that they are any less alien than the others, and physiologically they are bizarre, but they are also directional telepaths, meaning they don’t read minds in the mass but can convey thoughts and receive directed thoughts when speaking to specific people. They are very good at it. They seem, mentally, just like us, and they are quite sly and yet knowledgeable about us because they can get things from our minds. Whether they are simply adapted to being great interspecies communicators or are truly good poker players can’t be known, since we, obviously, can’t read their thoughts beyond what they use for conversation. They are also excellent at adapting to even the most alien biology. It was one of them who brought me back to life within minutes of my being shot and killed so long ago, not far from this spot. They’ve been essential to us as basic medical resources, since, like most people in our age, even our doctors don’t know how to fix a hangnail without a computer surgery.”

“And what do they get from you?”

“Diversions. A new group for study. They are fascinated by how different races of beings come to be, and how they come up both in invention and cultures. We were the first humans of sufficient numbers for their study. They know it probably won’t mean much, considering they’re trapped here as much as we, but it gives them something to do. I suspect your anthropologist could sympathize. This group is more or less in the same business.”

“Are any there?” Randi asked him. “I should like to speak to one.”

“Not possible. I could bring one over, but you’d need a translator, and it would be awkward considering how they communicate. There is no way for them to broadcast over any of our communicators, nor for you to receive and comprehend any of theirs.”