And that was the end of the report.
The Three Kings had gone from legend to reality, but were now more maddeningly desired and more maddeningly out of reach than ever.
But they had been discovered not once, but twice, even if centuries apart. By hook, by crook, by luck, faith, or perhaps destiny, somebody would discover them again.
Or solve the mystery of Ishmael Hand.
Those in space now divided neatly into two types of people. There were the profane—the pirates and raiders who made a living from a bit more knowledge of the colonial worlds’ positions and assets than most others—and the holy. Not just the Ishmael Hands and the Catholic priests and nuns who followed him and his kind, but the others as well, the evangelists and teachers of every conceivable faith who could put together a ship and who were as determined as Ishmael Hand to return the truth of God to the lost colonies.
Many of them dreamed as well of finding the Three Kings of Ishmael Hand.
I: ON FAITH & MOUNTAINS
Faith moved The Mountain; it had long ago come to Muhammad, and received a chilly reception, but now it was heading for friendlier but less exotic worlds farther in towards the galactic melding.
And, indeed, as always, faith moved The Mountain, faith expressed in the sums large and small that had paid for its construction, its outfitting, and its traveling expenses.
There were a number of such ships, large and small, moving throughout the known galaxy, representing every conceivable faith and some inconceivable ones as well, and while this one was more conventional than not, its faithful aboard were not considered exactly mainstream Christians. Then, again, since the Silence and the long years that followed it, the same could be said of many faiths on the former colonial worlds.
It had been predicted that when humanity finally went out and colonized the stars that this would collapse the parochial religions of Earth, save, perhaps, for some of the cosmic types like Hinduism and the introspective like classical Buddhism, but it hadn’t happened. Indeed, cut off for long periods and by vast distances from the rest of human culture, it was the religions of humanity that kept them together, kept them sane for the most part, and provided the same sort of social framework as the settlers of the American west or the Siberian and Alaskan east had spread with such faithfulness. But long distances did not bring with them a sufficient number of conventional clergy, nor did the doctrine and study of conventional faiths remain locked in stone. With distance came distortion, and error. And, after the Great Silence severed contact with the mother churches and seminaries, save only the Roman Catholic one, came the greatest evangelical boom since the days of Earthbound colonialism, mostly due to the actions of men and women to whom God spoke after destroying the old civilization that had strayed from the True Path, whatever that Path was, not due to trained and ordained clerics.
Most were also commercial types, or they hitched a ride on commercial vessels. Spaceships were few and far between and precious. But a few had their own ships, or partially converted freighters to their floating colonies, and the ones without prohibitions against blowing the hell out of pirates, privateers, and outfoxing the occasional military patrol did quite well.
The Mountain was one of the truly grand ones, a tent show with a tent so great that it would have been like some early preacher’s visions of Heaven. Nobody knew how anyone save Vaticanus could have afforded to put together such a craft, let alone maintain it. That alone made it a matter of great curiosity, wonder, and awe, and even some suspicion among the planetary governments.
Traveling between the stars and in and out of star gates the ship didn’t look so grand; like most, it was a great power plant scooping up and converting the debris of ancient solar system formation and the cosmic dust of the void into the power to get to the gates and make the jumps. Once inside such a gate the ordinary rules of space-time did not seem to apply; depending on the speed and angle with which your ship entered, you would travel for minutes, hours, days, or even weeks or months, and come out, well, somewhere else, at another gate, impossibly far from where you’d begun, yet often, by the strict chronometers of the gates and maintenance stations around them, before you had left where you’d come from. Nobody had ever met themselves in real space, but there were often temporal surprises for the freighters and military craft that loosely connected the worlds of humanity out there. It was an eerie kind of second-hand time travel that committed spacefaring folk to themselves and themselves alone.
That was why The Mountain also had living quarters for almost a thousand men, women, and children. Whole families were there; they met, married, and procreated in the main forward area of the vast two-point-five kilometer rotating cylinder. That was the Mount Sinai. A smaller ship actually was contained inside the nose, and was launched only when The Mountain was safely docked in stable orbit around an inhabited planet. This was called, when separated, Mount Olivet. Joined, they were always just The Mountain. The pattern and layout were similar enough to that of a freighter that it was clear that the big ship had been adapted from one, but it looked nothing like a standard freighter now.
Mount Olivet was small by comparison to Mount Sinai, it was true, and was designed to land on worlds even if they had no spaceport. In truth, it was an impressive, oblong-shaped craft of creamy white material over a thousand meters long and six hundred meters wide, and it descended on a flat base that was itself a hundred or more meters high. It was powered by a magnetic field drive and was designed for a totally self-contained landing. Indeed, its shape and size made it unwelcome at conventional spaceports, which was just fine with the crew that would take it down to surface after surface. They required a huge flat area not far from some population center yet far enough so that such a landing was practical and the ship, after that, would be accessible.
Finding that type of space, and a crowd that didn’t also come well armed and ready to tar and feather at the minimum was a job in and of itself.
As soon as The Mountain cleared the automated wormgate the first order of business was to pull up and scan the entire region. Many of the wormgates were in poor shape and the ship’s technicians often spent days or even weeks inside the automated station making at least basic repairs and checks to insure that they could comfortably stay a bit yet get out quickly if need be. In-system probes looked for the reason why the gate was there. It always meant a colony, of course, but so many of them were discovered failed and dead, so many had not been viable once the Great Silence had cut them off, or, worse, had become vulnerable to those who roamed the space lanes now with no regard for life but only an appetite for plunder. Others had descended so far into barbarism that they were ignorant of their own origins. Some were hostile, often for good reason, to all outsiders and needed to be coaxed into acceptance of The Mountain and its mission, or, sometimes, written off when no compromise was negotiable.
Nobody knew the reception they would get, but there was no question that the second planet in the eight-planet system was Earth Type A, inhabited, and retained at least some technological information.