“Nobody is really sure. The name comes from the general belief that it comes from the Three Kings. Ever hear of them?”
“Who hasn’t? Paradise, the Joys of Heaven. Three worlds nobody knows the location of that will give you your heart’s desire. Never much believed they really existed, though. Maybe now I do, sort of. But if this thing’s so valuable, how do you dare carry it with you? Particularly on a world like this?”
“Well, because I’m fairly well armed in spite of what you see, and in its case it’s so booby-trapped that it would kill anyone trying to get it. Better hand it back. I know it’s endlessly fascinating, but the images get darker and darker as you look, and eventually—”
She suddenly gave a cry and dropped the stone onto the table. He was prepared and quickly reached out, grabbed it on the first bounce, and put it back into the case, closed it, then put it back in his pocket.
“There was— something. Somebody…” she managed, in something of a whisper.
“Yes, I know,” he replied.
“Something that knew, and instead of me seeing it through that thing, it was seeing me!”
“Oh, yes. He always shows up, sooner or later.”
She stared at him, genuinely shaken as even the worm had never bothered her. “He?”
“Well, I call it a ‘he,’ but it’s probably not a he, or a she, but more of an ‘it.’ I just feel more comfortable calling it a he, that’s all. Gives you the willies, doesn’t he?”
She nodded. “Is he— real? I mean, is he actually looking at me when I’m looking in there, or is it just an illusion, like the personal visions?”
“Nobody knows. He doesn’t show up all the time, or at any given interval, either on this one or in the others, but he’s always around somewhere. That’s why you don’t stare too long. They’ve never been able to synthesize these, not the real ones. Some neat-looking imitations, but nowhere near the real thing. You know the real thing the moment you look into it, whether he shows up or not. They’ve never figured out what triggers the images in the mind, either. Best guess is some sort of natural force or radiation, but they’ve never been able to measure and identify one. They can’t really get inside one, either. The word is that they tried when the first batch was discovered. Every time you try and cleave it, and I mean every time, it shatters into a million tiny fragments, nothing more than powder, that analysis shows have some unusual chemical bondings, but nothing so alien as to explain the effect or give away its secrets. There are, however, people who won’t look into them. Not just superstitious types, real smart and powerful people. They think there’s a possibility that the thing works in some unknown, alien way as a receiver and transmitter.”
“How’s that?”
“That while you look at it, the thing’s reading all your memories and broadcasting them in some way, through a medium we can’t understand, to his data banks.”
She felt a slight chill. Just the idea that that… thing inside there that she’d touched on some plane for just a few brief moments was doing some kind of mental readout made her feel more violated than a physical rape. It was that disturbing a sensation when she’d connected with it.
She began to understand just what the Doc had been feeling locked in the C&C talking to that worm.
“Why did you show me this, Mr. Sanders?”
He gave her a wry smile. “I thought you might be tempted to do a little prospecting.”
She stared at him. “Where? And with what?”
“I’ve been using some of my off-time for several seasons looking for just the right combination of people to do this sort of job,” he told her. “I told you I was going to look you up if we hadn’t met here, and I meant it. You and your people seem almost uniquely qualified for this sort of thing.”
“And ‘this sort of thing’ is what, exactly?”
He took a deep breath, then said, “I am almost positive I know how to reach the Three Kings. No kidding, no joke, no fake theatrical gimmicks. I’m too rooted in reality to believe in all that paradise guff, but I do know this: just a handful of these Magi’s Stones and you could buy yourself your own paradise. There are other things as well that are associated with the Kings that could be worth even more. It’s not a salvage job exactly, but that’s why I came here. Salvage people might be able to go get these riches, figure out what was what, and do something nobody else has so far managed to do: get back in one piece.”
“I was wondering about that,” she told him. “Everybody’s heard of this magical realm, and there are all sorts of stories about wrecked ghost ships being discovered with treasures from them inside, and even one in good shape with nobody in it, but I never heard anybody who claimed they’d been there and come back, even the drunk and stoned braggarts of the universe. It’s a deathtrap, if it exists at all. And now that I’ve met your little buddy in that green hellstone, I think the Kings are probably a scam. Not our scam, maybe. His scam, maybe. Send pretty little baubles to the barbarians so a few would come and become his pets or lab experiments or something like that. That’s a one-way trip, mister.”
“Perhaps. But the stones are real. The artifacts are real. The detailed scouting reports from the Three Kings’ discoverer, with the locations unfortunately damaged in transit, were real enough to prove that these are real worlds. Moons, most likely, from what I can tell. Big, planet-sized moons around a massive gas giant. Three of them warm enough and with atmosphere enough to support life as we understand it. I’m pretty sure I know how to get there, and I’m just as sure I know why nobody’s made it all the way back yet, at least why most ships are wrecked if they try. You have to get there using a wild hole. No wormgates, and a wild and totally uncharted and unpredictable ride there and back. Not many ships could take the punishment, and even fewer captains could. But nobody since the first scout so long ago has been a cybernetic ship, a living ship, and I think your captain, the Stanley’s captain, is uniquely qualified to do it successfully. She’s ridden a couple of wild holes before. I looked up her history. And you, you and your current crew, they’ve met an alien intelligence and they beat it. You all beat it. You know salvage, you know value, you’ve got the guts, and you’re virtually unique in having outthought and outfought an alien mind. If this ship and crew couldn’t make it in and out, then I don’t know who could.”
“You can can the flattery, but I’m beginning to see your point here. The question is, first, why should we chance it? The odds were almost nil that we got back in one piece this last time. The odds on this one are much, much smaller.”
He gave a Cheshire Cat-type grin. “You’ve got only two choices. You all find whatever little menial jobs you can and dream of what might have been, or you do this and maybe wind up owning a world or two. You are certainly holding the bag if nobody else is. You won’t get the money for that ID change here. It would take months driving a tug to make that kind of money, and on a place like this, one of the universe’s assholes, selling yourself would bring in even less. You don’t even have passage to anywhere the syndicate goons won’t find you in a matter of days anyway. You know what’s going to happen. If you don’t kill yourself or make them kill you, they’ll take you back, jack into your brain, and make you a conspicuous slave to feed their egos, with decades of public exhibition and humiliation as an example with no way out. But you’ll make them kill you first, if you can, won’t you? I’ve heard excerpts of the conversations you had ship to ground on that ghost world. There’s only room for you in your universe; you’d have let them die if they’d tried to get out without bringing back all the shit, or if there was any chance of bringing up the worm. If the computers had given you any odds at all of success you’d have tried to salvage that anyway, even if it meant all their lives. Excuse me for being blunt, but you’ll do it because you’ve got nothing left to lose.”