Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

“I should have known you could read minds in here with this gathering of stones,” the engineer commented, mostly to let the others know the context of what was going on. “Considering I’ve seen somebody else move into the body Li left.”

“Surface thoughts only. To read everything, even of the small samples on this and the other two moons, would be more confusing than useful if they could not be tuned. We get a sufficient sample from those who, you might say, overdose on the wave amplification effects that are a byproduct of what you call the Magi stones, and the sample is more useful because it is random. Had we not uploaded An Li at the point we did she would have had an embolism and died taking all her life’s experience with her. What a waste that would have been.”

“You grow those stones on all three worlds, don’t you? That’s what you’re doing here,” Maslovic said to it.

“Of course, Maslovic. In the same way as your birthing machinery creates new and well fitted and designed soldiers, we must replicate ourselves. As should be obvious, though, we do not have the innate mobility of your people. We have power you cannot dream of, yet we need others for the simplest of things. It is our curse, an evolutationary curse of sorts, which has caused much misery and despair. It keeps us always hiding, always fearful, never able to stop what threatens our long existence, yet which also destroys countless civilizations who die in total ignorance and bewilderment of why they are being extinguished.”

Maslovic seemed to be the first one to understand. “Our people are silent for a reason, aren’t they? We’re not cut off from them. They aren’t there any more.”

“Always the military man must correctly analyze the tactical situation,” the voice responded, a voice which, they now all realized, was only in their minds, but radiating from the tiny creatures within the walls themselves, perhaps collectively, perhaps selectively.

All the Magi stones were alive. The ones here, the ones back home, the ones on the other moons. Each contained that tiny spark of life, perhaps pure energy encased in a physical shell, that made up an almost imperceptible part of the vast intellect represented here. That was who you saw when you gazed too long into the stone. You began to sense the tiny living being within, and, eventually, the infinitely greater whole that it was somehow linked to. No wonder it seemed both alien and scary.

“What do you mean by them not bein’ there?” Murphy asked the sergeant.

It was Ann who gestured with a wave at the huge alien population all around them and explained, “They aren’t scouting us. And with the kind of knowledge they’ve absorbed from their long history and with the help of a few other groups of creatures, they don’t need us or anything from us.” She looked around at the multitude. “You’re hiding here, aren’t you? You’re hiding here from whoever or whatever it was that killed seventy percent of humanity. You’re not spying on us, you’re spying through us. My God! What in hell can be hunting you, who can create whole solar systems and keep them stable?”

“We ain’t gonna like this answer, right?” the old captain asked with a sigh.

“There is another race as ancient as we,” the voice said slowly, even a bit wistfully. “Their names do not matter any more than ours do. They are, however, quite different. Your Doctor Woodward would call them a race born without souls. They have great power as well, but are mobile as we are not, and are not part of a greater whole as we are, but more in some ways like you might become, as some of your past cultures became. They are a race capable of any greatness you might imagine, but they can not imagine greatness. Their motivating factor is fear.”

“You speak of demons,” Joshua noted. “Why would demons fear you or anything?”

“Demons. Not a bad concept, but perhaps too mystical. Just imagine this one concept. It is by no means all of the story, but it is enough, and is something easily grasped. Imagine if you were a god. Imagine if you had the powers of a god, to rule, to create, to destroy at your command. The absolute command of all you survey. And now imagine one more thing. It is not something as common as you might imagine, nor is it easy to achieve, but it is something that does happen often enough that you know that it can happen to you.

“Imagine you are a god who can die.”

“These—others… They can die?” Randi Queson asked, mostly to confirm the bizarre concept they had been given.

“They can die. They have physical form and no direct continuity. They can upload their consciousnesses to new or artificial bodies, but they are still each alone, and they can be caught by the accidents of the universe or in a few ways by deliberate entrapment.”

“These demons hunt you because you can kill them?” Joshua asked.

“No. They know we could never get them all, that we are both too few and bound in some ways not to exterminate. No, they might have fought us forever because of our power, but not in this single urge to sterilze the universe. They would merely enslave it and play with it as toys. No, you misunderstand the depths of their fear and paranoia. They will kill us all, our race and your race and tens of thousands of other races, a few of which are represented here in what you call the Three Kings. They have tried without success to kill us many times. Now they are going about it differently. Since we cannot do anything on our own but think, they will wipe out any race that might be our arms and legs, you might say. It is not hard for them to do it once they find it. A few unstable stars coerced into monstrous explosions, gamma ray showers so intense that nothing at all of any sort of life of use to us could survive it.”

“And that’s what happened to our people? That’s the Great Silence?” Maslovic asked.

“Yes. But as with others over the eons they did not get everyone. It is a brute force approach. But, sooner or later, they will find your people, or, accidentally, your people will find them. That is why the route to the Three Kings was kept so secret after we were accidentally discovered. When a second expedition found us, we knew that our safe haven here could not last forever. So we sent back some of us as sentinels, as listeners, and we used the fringe, the cults, to minimize our obvious presence. We needed our arms and legs as usual, so that if and when the others come the secret yet findable route here can be sealed and our sentinels recalled. It will give us time to move again.”

“There’s nothing we can do to stop them?” Maslovic asked. “I mean, you said they were mortal. If they’re mortal…”

“We know what you are thinking, but you would not get the chance. We have been working the problem now for two billion years. It is not hopeless, but it has not yet been solved. Until then, we hide, and we move.”

“Then at least let us return to try and prepare our people, even if you won’t help in a defense,” the sergeant almost pleaded.

“We are sorry, but no. You are in the Three Kings. You must remain. The passage is deliberately controlled. In a word, you know too much to be allowed to fall back into the hands of the coming enemy.”

“But you just told us there was hope!” Randi protested.

Ann sighed. “Don’t you get it, Doctor? They’ve all but come out and told us why the others hate them so much, will destroy the universe rather than let them be. It’s the corrolary of the fact that they are like gods but can die. Get it now?”

“Well, I sure don’t,” Murphy grumped.