Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“A little, since the wind shifted a bit away from me,” she told him. “Bring me one of those things. I want to take a look at it. Only one! I seem to have a worse reaction than the rest of you!”

Nagel gestured to Sark, who went back and handed An Li a fairly large one. She examined it, frowned, then said, “I think I know what these are! That swirl pattern around the single large facet in the center gives it away. It’s an unpolished, unfinished Magi Stone. I don’t remember any smells coming from the one Sanders had, but otherwise I can see the finished, set product in this one!”

“Maybe it loses its scent over a period of time,” Randi suggested, “or maybe it’s sealed when they cut and shape the gems. I hadn’t realized they were cut and shaped at all. Hell, maybe these smell and the others found before don’t. Most of them were found on derelicts anyway. Who knows what they went through or where they came from? Melchior, it looks like, but not here, not this place. This one’s too new.”

“That implies that this kind of stuff is fairly common here,” Nagel pointed out. “It means you’re gonna have to be very careful in the number of these introduced into the interplanetary economy. Too common and their value’s gonna drop like a stone. Still, if we can get a few bags of these, of various sizes, back with odors intact, we’re looking at more than enough to amortize the trip right here and now! And if Normie’s dumb enough to flood the market later, ours will already have been sold.”

“Good point,” Doc responded. “Still, while most of these will be put in vacuum storage, I’d like to keep a couple out just for tests and examination. I’d love to know what the hell causes these weird effects when you get close to these stones. The odor? Or is their makeup such that they’re receiving something, something weird, from someplace else? Who knows? With this many, I’d sure like to find out.”

“Interesting those aliens thought these were important, too,” Sark noted. “I mean, it can’t have the same effect on them, can it? And them ant things wasn’t wearin’ no jewels.”

“I think it’s a good point,” An Li noted, studying the small one in her hand. “Still, this is almost definitely what they were either going to or coming from, and they sure looked like they was gonna load up. Not much to eat around here, but it seems stable enough to bring in our equipment and pick up a fair load. As you say, we can control the output until, at least, ours are sold.”

Jerry looked around at the high walls of volcanic rock and dust and the big planet above. “Night’s falling, and pretty fast,” he said. “Everybody put a handful of these things in their packs and let’s get back to where Lucky can pick us up. We got twenty hours to shit, shave, eat, sleep, and analyze. After that, I think we bring the C&C module down.”

There was no argument on that.

The captain’s own labs isolated the compounds that gave off the odor in the stones, but neither those labs nor the Doc’s could do much more. The Magi’s Stones lived up to their reputation and shattered when you tried any sort of analysis on them. What jewelers could do was to shape the stones to a very small degree, mostly by shaving away the obsidian. Only in a few cases could the lightest of robotic hands split them along a single outer crystal boundary. Anything more, and you had dust that the analytical labs found little different in general composition from the obsidian plus a few odd and by no means consistent trace minerals.

Every crystal, though, appeared filled with microscopic bubbles of the gas that gave the sense of flavor. Not, it seemed, because it really did smell like lemon, or orange, or lilacs, or whatever, but because it was a mild hallucinogen that stimulated that sensation in the brain.

The hallucinogen might have explained An Li’s paranoia about the alien lurker, stimulated by Norman Sanders’s theatrical setup, and the sense of looking into the past, but it wasn’t all that clear if that was all there was to it.

An Li, using a sealed lab unit in which she was not physically sharing any space with the stone, nor breathing any air nor touching it except in a virtual manner by manipulating robotic probes through a head unit, nonetheless received visions staring at the stone Sark had given her, visions that also now came with odd physical sensations that ran from dizziness to tingling in all extremities and even to mild orgasm. And, after a half dozen minutes or so, she felt the sensation once more of Him and backed out fast.

Randi Queson tried the same tack, and got results that in some cases were similar, some different. Her visions were of darkness and something like spirits moving across the face of a frozen sea, suddenly bursting into a riot of colors and shapes that were beyond figuring out but nonetheless were beautiful and fascinating and, most of all, mathematical to a large degree.

Eventually she, too, felt the sensation of others becoming aware of her, of being able in some way to interact with her, but, unlike An Li, the presences were plural and carried with them no sense of menace, no voyeuristic violation. She had the distinct impression that they were trying to tell her something, or at least convey some sort of message or warning to her, but they were too unfamiliar, too alien, and if in fact they were sending and she was receiving she had no way to decode and thereby comprehend whatever it was they were saying.

Jerry Nagel had something in between, with a sensation of going through space, of light and dark, fire and ice, joy and sadness, but on a level he more sensed than could comprehend from the wash of visions. His overall sensation, though, was clear.

There was a war, he thought. Or, possibly, is a war. He couldn’t be sure. At times he had the sensation of time covering eons and distances beyond any human ability to comprehend, yet just as quickly he had a sense of seeing things now, or perhaps no older than yesterday. At no time did he sense anyone aware of him, but eventually the lightning-fast visions and sounds and smells and shapes overwhelmed him and translated into running a gamut of physical and psychological sensations in rapid-fire succession until he couldn’t take it anymore. When he bailed out, he found that he was soaked in perspiration, his muscles tensed into knots, and yet he was as turned on as he’d ever been in his life.

Sark seemed particularly troubled by the effect of the stones and would not take them on one on one, even though there was never any question of his courage.

Still, when they compared notes, little really made sense.

“Clearly the gems are broadcasting something, and that means it’s coming from somewhere, ” Randi Queson insisted. “The question is, what is the source of it and why does it have this series of similar if unique effects on us?”

“Well, we’ve all wound up really turned on,” Nagel pointed out, “but we also have other things in common here. Fleeting but deep senses of hunger, thirst, fear, laughter, all the range of emotions and urges, right down to the bowels. That says to me that something’s messing with our minds. And if it’s random, as it seems to be, that something isn’t necessarily directing them. I’ve seen similar stuff in drug reactions.”

“But we factored out the gas,” An Li pointed out.

“Sure, we factored out the gas, but we didn’t factor out other things. This is something we’ve not seen before, and have experienced only in a few of these that survived and got back home,” the Doc said thoughtfully. “Now we know the brain is an electrical device, so to speak. It works by being able to store, filter, and then bring together in one central command area what’s needed for thoughts and ideas or to compel actions. Even the least of us is smarter than our ancestors because they were genetically bred or enhanced, so our brains are pretty damned fast, although never as fast as the fastest quasi-organic computers. Still, it’s fetch data and assemble, then act if A but not B is true. All that’s done by electrical signals. Drugs often interfere with those signals to get their effects, or drop blockers or substitutes into receptors to get others. I think something inside these Magi’s Stones is some kind of natural electrical transmitter, very small power but somehow on a wavelength our brains can receive. We get that effect, and inside our heads our brains try to make sense of the random signals coming in. There’s stimulation while it rumbles around in there trying to find a place to put it, and there’s hallucination as it tries to make sense of things. That sound logical?”