“Gems,” An Li, Lucky Cross, and Sark all responded as one.
“Then we go to Melchior and we hold our noses. I bet you that world is gonna stink something awful. And considering those rains, everybody better know how to swim, too.”
“I think we ought to do a systematic survey before committing to any planetfall,” Jerry Nagel said to them.
“Why? What’s the difference?” An Li shot back.
“Because we don’t see any derelicts here, that’s why. Lots of forces, lots of history, but no clear-cut signs we aren’t the first ones here. I think I want to know what I’m getting into before I go down, particularly this time. It may not be as easy as it looks to park and go down and scoop up treasure, even if we can find it. Let’s look at them all. There aren’t enough of us to do any kind of real exploration, and none of us are gonna live that long to completely cover one, let alone all three, of these things. It makes it all the more important that we decide right off which one we want to commit to this first trip, make sure we’re landing where there’s something worth taking, and, if possible, spot what we can of ugly surprises. Why not? You got something better to do?”
His logic wasn’t what they wanted to hear, but it made too much sense to be argued with. Gold and frankincense and myrrh were not lying all over the ground down there waiting to be picked up and stuffed in their pockets. The Three Kings weren’t quite the easy El Dorado of spacefarer legends, but just three new and very odd worlds. They needed more information, and getting it wasn’t something you could argue yourself out of.
Lucky Cross sighed, a little disappointed. “All right. Agreed.” And, one by one, the others echoed her sentiments.
“I’ll plot a systematic route,” the captain told them, sounding very satisfied with their decision. “Kaspar, Balshazzar, then Melchior. Then you’ll have to decide.”
“Fair enough,” Nagel replied. “When we go down and come back up, and when we go back, I want to already have enough stuff so that no matter what Normie pulls or tries to pull on us—and he’ll definitely try and pull something, bet on it—our share will still be enough so we don’t have to worry or ever come back again unless we want to.”
They settled back and headed for Kaspar.
IX: FOLLOWING YONDER STAR…
“I found something interesting in the database,” Randi Queson told them as the Stanley approached the ghostly and frozen moon of Kaspar. “An old Christian melody. I wonder if that monk was tweaking our future collective noses a bit?”
Nagel’s bushy eyebrows rose. “A melody? You mean a religious song?”
“One of many about them, although hardly a religious song in the usual sense. There wasn’t any real agreement ever on whether or not they really were kings or more likely astrologers or some sort of magicians high up in royal courts. I looked through the bunch—there are even some operas—but this one is kind of interesting. I half suspect that if anything was running through that cybernetic brain when those reports were sent, it was this one.”
“Not my background, but let’s hear it.”
Nagel shrugged. “Sounds pretty innocuous to me, the parts that make sense.”
“Christian tradition, mostly, The Christian Bible really says little about them except that they were so naive they inadvertently made the local king so paranoid he tried to kill all the babies. But the traditions would be in the mind of this monastic scout, that’s for sure. He would have been raised with them. It might just be a kind of perverse sense of humor—monk humor, maybe. In this case our kings don’t follow a star but a failed star, but it’s sure a star of wonder and beauty as these things go. But in the song all the kings bear gifts to give to the Christ child. They come, they do it, but in the process cause infanticide. A warning, perhaps, to those who know the story?”
Nagel wasn’t impressed. “Maybe, maybe not. I remember an old legend once about the oracle that always gave infallible predictions, but in riddles. Trouble was, you could never figure out what the oracle meant until the thing came true, so it was useless. If that old boy had any kind of message in mind, other than being creative in his names, I doubt if we could figure it out until after it’s too late, so what’s the point? Maybe we should have brought along a priest, huh?”
“Not with the percentage Vaticanus would demand. And I don’t think Normie was the religious type, and definitely not that kind of religious. Interesting, though, if even that was a part of the old monk’s description. They’re a strange lot, those people. I mean, which star is he talking about if he’s referring to here? The conventional one, or the almost-star that traps the Kings? That planet gives me the creeps anyway. For all its awesome beauty, the fact that it’s active enough to send out light and heat on its own, and that kind of throbbing luminescence on what should be the dark side… I don’t know.”
The captain’s voice interrupted them. “I am placing us in a medium orbit above Kaspar as we speak. On the way out, I will launch a mapping satellite that should be able to produce an excellent and detailed surface study over time. Do you want to just look over the place with the screens now, or send down a surface probe?”
“We just want an overview for now,” Nagel told her. “We’ll launch a probe if we see anything we really want to look at.”
At 180 kilometers above the planet-sized moon, the instrumentation and cameras could do an excellent job. If somebody had stopped off there and left graffiti on a rock, they could read it. The trick was noticing the rock in the first place.
It was a forbidding-looking place. The residual heat from the big and still officially unnamed mother planet, plus pressure deep under its oceans, freezing around the coasts but still liquid for most of their expanse, allowed it to maintain a barely habitable temperature during its long semi-night, but just gave an even more eerie look to the place.
“Not any signs of glaciation,” Nagel noted. “It must melt pretty good on the sunward leg. Lots of erosion in the regions against the mountains, but the main land masses have been so chewed up they’re just cold, powdery desert. Those dunes and that wind would make it even nastier. And we thought that overrun colony’s choice of worlds was bad!”
“Could you breathe down there? Without aid?” An Li asked him.
He checked the figures. “Yes, looks like it. Pretty damned cold at the moment and dry as a bone, but the oxygen and nitrogen mix is within our limits. I wouldn’t like to do it without some sort of facemask to keep the grit from choking you, but the air would be okay. I don’t know what you’d eat, though, and any fresh water in those big lakes would take a fission reactor to properly melt for use. It’s probably as ugly but very different on the solar traverse. No way to tell until we can see it, and that’s still almost fifteen standard days, I think.”