Kaspar's Box

The scout who had first discovered and named the Three Kings system had never mentioned that the planet-sized worlds he named after the Magi were moons, so there was no name for the huge planet that loomed over them half of each day. Queson thought of naming it Jerusalem, since Bethlehem seemed too modest for such a monster of a failed star, but Jerry Nagel had nixed that idea. "Next year in Jerusalem," he said. " Jerusalem is hope, the destination we hope to reach. I'm more inclined towards Pharaoh, since it holds us unwilling captives."

"I was thinking more of Babylon," she commented. "Or maybe Egypt?"

"No, not Egypt, nor Babylon, either. There's a will here someplace. The Holy Joes on Balshazzar felt it, sensed it, and warned us of it. The will that traps them there. Pharaoh was the stubborn captor; Egypt was just the place. And not Babylon, surely, and not just for the same reason. Nebuchadnezzar would be a fitting name it's true, but Babylon, and Assyria, and Persia are where the Three Kings came from, right? And we don't know which conqueror is lurking here someplace, making the rules. No, we've got Alexander or Cyrus somewhere in the shadows playing games with us, but not up there. Pharaoh, I think, will do."

"What're you guys talkin' about?" Lucky asked, already breathing hard from the long walk, carrying, as they all were except An Li, supplies for several days on their otherwise bare backs. "All them names nobody can pronounce. They sound like those names a Hindu guy once spouted trying to explain his charms to me when we was offloading freighters back in the old days. Never got that right, either."

"Well, they're from a religion," Randi Queson responded. "Judaism and Christianity, mostly. But the places were real, and historical."

"You study all that shit?"

"Some of it," she replied. "A lot more I picked up, and some was from my own family. Mostly, I think I just looked into things because I found them interesting and I got curious."

"And I'm pretty much the same," Nagel told her. "Not much on the family side-they were about as religious as you are-but from other people I worked with or got to know. You weren't curious about the Hindu fellow's beliefs?"

"Not really. Sounded pretty silly to me. So does all this shit. Fancy names from folks too long dead talkin' about places that probably don't exist no more if they ever did and old fairy stories. What good does it do to know any of that? Does it fill your belly or get you a job or make you well when you're sick? Just stories, that's all. We're all the way out here in the middle of who knows where, a zillion light-years from anything or anybody 'cept the others stuck here, too, and we ain't bumped into no gods yet."

"I wonder," Randi muttered.

"Huh?"

"Somebody once said that if we ever ran into a race so advanced that they were as far ahead of us as we were of bugs and germs they'd be supernatural to us. Maybe that's what God and the angels really are." She paused a moment, liking the idea. "And maybe Satan and his demons, too. A lot of our myths and legends and core beliefs came from real events and real people at some point, even if they got twisted or misinterpreted. Certainly those monks who scouted the known and unknown universe were devoted to looking for God. That's how we got these names for these moons."

Lucky Cross looked over the blasted volcanic landscape and coughed some dust and sulphur from her lungs. "And you think God's hiding around here playing with us now or something?"

Randi Queson looked around at the same landscape and shook her head. "No, not God. Definitely not God…"

There was a darkening above and the sounds of rumblings in the distance.

"Going to rain soon," Jerry Nagel noted. "We ought to find some shelter while we have time."

"Great!" grumped Cross, in a singularly bad mood this day. "So we'll be stuck in mud and wrapped in mud and slip-sliding the rest of the day."

"It'll cool things off for a bit," Queson noted hopefully.

"Make us human mud-pies, that's all," Cross responded.

"Where's An Li?" Jerry asked them, looking around. "Li! An Li!" he shouted.

"You two go find us a shelter," Randi told them. "I'll find An Li."

The former leader of the salvage team that employed them all wasn't far away; she'd simply gotten distracted by something and that became the only thought in her mind. She was sitting there, dusty and stark naked, staring at something she'd found in the volcanic ash and humming a little tune from some distant point in her childhood.

"Li, honey, you can't go off by yourself like this," Randi scolded. "You have to stay with us."

An Li didn't seem to hear, but she was certainly aware that the older woman was there. She turned, looked up at Randi Queson, and smiled a vacant, little child's smile, and held out whatever she had to show the team geologist what she'd found. "Pretty," she said.