Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

“No, ma’am. Not that he didn’t try. It is simply going to be much easier to show you. There is no threat here that I can determine, except for an incredible number of those execrable stones.”

“Shit! The portable stash! I don’t even know why I bothered,” Jerry Nagel said, mostly to himself. “I’d forgotten all about them.”

Maslovic wasn’t buying anything until he had the full story. “Sanchez, Nasser. Cover the shuttle when it docks in Bay One. Take no guff from anybody. Understand?”

The truth was, neither they nor he did understand. Why quit and give up when you walked through security and a cyberlinked ship without being noticed? Did Joshua kill Macouri? Had they misjudged him? Or what?

The truth, such as it was, was soon plain when the shuttle docked and the hatches hissed and then opened. Joshua emerged first, and was clearly both unarmed and no threat. In fact, he looked to the marines as if he had suddenly grown very tired and very old and beyond any of this.

Nasser gestured for Sanchez to keep a watch on Joshua and went inside. He wasn’t gone long, and when he emerged he had a look that no marine had shown for a very long time.

“It’s a butchery in there,” he told his partner and by extension the others waiting above. “I’ve been in a few nasty fights, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Behind him, a tiny figure emerged, dark, weathered like the others of Melchior and, like them, almost a stick figure in spite of long and still messy-looking matted hair trailing down its back.

The one who was once An Li looked neither shocked nor traumatized in any way, although she did have a little bit of that pissed-off look she’d had from the start.

“I may have to get used to this for a while,” she said, “but I don’t have to sacrifice. Anybody on this tub smoke cigars?”

“That’s not Li,” Nagel commented. “It may be her body, but that’s not her. Not even before. The face, the walk, the movements, all different.”

“Wake Murphy up and get him up here,” Maslovic instructed Broz. “We may just be making a first contact here and, if so, this is definitely right up his alley.”

The one in An Li’s body sat there in the ward room looking at the rest and somewhat enjoying it. Even Murphy hadn’t been able to come up with a cigar, but he did have some Irish-style whiskey that the little one seemed to find very much to her liking.

“Well, I see you all gathered round and hovering like scavengers over dead meat, so we might as well get this over with,” she said. “I admit right now I expected to feel a lot better than I do. I think I’ve got bruises in places where until not long ago I didn’t have places.”

“Needless to say, you are not An Li,” Randi Queson attempted a more casual beginning.

“No, hardly. But I’m not the folks I suspect you’re looking for, either. Let’s just say I’m from Balshazzar, or at least I’ve been there a very long time. This is a trick we’d discovered and practiced quite often down there over the years, although it’s no mean trick to do, let me tell you, even face-to-face, and from surface to orbit—well, I’m surprised it worked. Whether I’m pleased I don’t rightly know. I’m not used to being this, well, diminutive, let’s say, or to be assembled in quite this fashion. However, when the watchers below observed the ship and zeroed in on it and immediately saw what was about to go on in it, we just had to do something. Much good came of that decision, which was made in quite a hurry. Karl Woodward, the founder of the group below, was dying, and dying ugly. By millimeters. Slow and painful. Mostly it was age, together with a lot of things that we carry with us. He could have used this method. Young people were willing to give their bodies to save him, but he wouldn’t have it. Now he’s got one. Not as young as it should be, but younger, and in better overall condition. And I have performed an excellent operation and surgically removed an extremely evil man from this plane of existence. Karl would be shocked to hear me say that, particularly in that manner, but it’s true nonetheless.”

“And An Li? What of her?” Randi asked.

“I don’t know. There was precious little home when I moved in, I can tell you that, and it had noplace to go so it’s still here. I can access it, and there really isn’t anything there. You thought it was trauma, but I think the old An Li was too tough for that. I think you all went to bed in that mountain of Magi stones and in the mental seizures it caused, she either was wiped clean or, maybe like me being here inside this shell, she went somewhere else. Where? Who knows? But it gives me some peace that I didn’t destroy or force a cohabitation with anyone to pull this off.” She looked around. “Pretty small crew for a ship this size.”

“We’re the suicide brigade,” Maslovic told her. “Mostly automated. A shuttle couldn’t have made it, and it was too risky to bring through the fleet. That left us.” Quickly, he introduced everyone. “And you are…?”

She thought a moment. “The old one was Li, so let’s just call me Ann. I think maybe it’s best that way. There’s no going back, and I’m not sure I could ever get up the emotion and total commitment it took to do this sort of thing again. I can tell you though, seeing, feeling that terror and that evil I had no hesitation whatsoever. The moment he thought he was in complete control and cut her bonds, I moved. Even then, without all those stones all heaped up and arranged around the rapist’s bed, I wouldn’t have had the power. As it was, it just happened. That’s what we have found gives the most power with these things. Pure emotion. You don’t think, you act. I suspect that’s why we’re going to stay second-tier citizens. I think they can control the power through reason and will. We need rage or lust or something equally base to really do the impossible.”

“Were you one of the ministers there in the cul—religious commune?” Randi pressed.

“Please! No more! Who I was I will never be again and that is for the best. That person is now dead. Who this person was,” tapping her chest, “is the same, or so I suspect. If she shows up again and demands it, I couldn’t deny her entry, but I suspect that she and I will never meet in this life. I suspect that Doctor Woodward will tell you the same. On the other hand, here I am, off Balshazzar. That’s something nobody has managed to do before in any incarnation.”

“Why do they keep you there, but not us on Melchior?” Nagel wondered aloud. “I’ve been trying to figure that out since the start.”

“We’re huge down there, and we multiply. The other races down there are about as alien as you can imagine, but in many ways they’re the same. Breeders, high technology types, who got snared here just like we did. They are all threats, or maybe just enough to gum up the works a bit, and all are from civilizations that would come swarming in here. You, you were a few stranded prospectors nobody would miss. Nothing personal. And none of the other races on Melchior seem sensitized to the stones.” She looked straight up at Maslovic. “You know what you have to do.”

The sergeant, who had a mild suspicion that he might have indirectly known the person now in the tiny woman’s body but who decided not to press it, nodded. “We have to go to Kaspar.”

Murphy sighed. “The one pretty one in the bunch and we got to go to the cold, dark place.”

“We’re still here, Captain,” Maslovic responded. “It appears that, of all the ones who have come here before, for any and all reasons, we have been invited.”

It must have been odd, Randi thought, to look through the stones and see yourself somewhere else down there on the planet, but that’s what Ann was doing.