Kaspar's Box

"No, hardly. But I'm not the folks I suspect you're looking for, either. Let's just say I'm from Balshazzar, or at least I've been there a very long time. This is a trick we'd discovered and practiced quite often down there over the years, although it's no mean trick to do, let me tell you, even face-to-face, and from surface to orbit-well, I'm surprised it worked. Whether I'm pleased I don't rightly know. I'm not used to being this, well, diminutive, let's say, or to be assembled in quite this fashion. However, when the watchers below observed the ship and zeroed in on it and immediately saw what was about to go on in it, we just had to do something. Much good came of that decision, which was made in quite a hurry. Karl Woodward, the founder of the group below, was dying, and dying ugly. By millimeters. Slow and painful. Mostly it was age, together with a lot of things that we carry with us. He could have used this method. Young people were willing to give their bodies to save him, but he wouldn't have it. Now he's got one. Not as young as it should be, but younger, and in better overall condition. And I have performed an excellent operation and surgically removed an extremely evil man from this plane of existence. Karl would be shocked to hear me say that, particularly in that manner, but it's true nonetheless."

"And An Li? What of her?" Randi asked.

"I don't know. There was precious little home when I moved in, I can tell you that, and it had noplace to go so it's still here. I can access it, and there really isn't anything there. You thought it was trauma, but I think the old An Li was too tough for that. I think you all went to bed in that mountain of Magi stones and in the mental seizures it caused, she either was wiped clean or, maybe like me being here inside this shell, she went somewhere else. Where? Who knows? But it gives me some peace that I didn't destroy or force a cohabitation with anyone to pull this off." She looked around. "Pretty small crew for a ship this size."

"We're the suicide brigade," Maslovic told her. "Mostly automated. A shuttle couldn't have made it, and it was too risky to bring through the fleet. That left us." Quickly, he introduced everyone. "And you are…?"

She thought a moment. "The old one was Li, so let's just call me Ann. I think maybe it's best that way. There's no going back, and I'm not sure I could ever get up the emotion and total commitment it took to do this sort of thing again. I can tell you though, seeing, feeling that terror and that evil I had no hesitation whatsoever. The moment he thought he was in complete control and cut her bonds, I moved. Even then, without all those stones all heaped up and arranged around the rapist's bed, I wouldn't have had the power. As it was, it just happened. That's what we have found gives the most power with these things. Pure emotion. You don't think, you act. I suspect that's why we're going to stay second-tier citizens. I think they can control the power through reason and will. We need rage or lust or something equally base to really do the impossible."

"Were you one of the ministers there in the cul-religious commune?" Randi pressed.

"Please! No more! Who I was I will never be again and that is for the best. That person is now dead. Who this person was," tapping her chest, "is the same, or so I suspect. If she shows up again and demands it, I couldn't deny her entry, but I suspect that she and I will never meet in this life. I suspect that Doctor Woodward will tell you the same. On the other hand, here I am, off Balshazzar. That's something nobody has managed to do before in any incarnation."

"Why do they keep you there, but not us on Melchior?" Nagel wondered aloud. "I've been trying to figure that out since the start."

"We're huge down there, and we multiply. The other races down there are about as alien as you can imagine, but in many ways they're the same. Breeders, high technology types, who got snared here just like we did. They are all threats, or maybe just enough to gum up the works a bit, and all are from civilizations that would come swarming in here. You, you were a few stranded prospectors nobody would miss. Nothing personal. And none of the other races on Melchior seem sensitized to the stones." She looked straight up at Maslovic. "You know what you have to do."

The sergeant, who had a mild suspicion that he might have indirectly known the person now in the tiny woman's body but who decided not to press it, nodded. "We have to go to Kaspar."

Murphy sighed. "The one pretty one in the bunch and we got to go to the cold, dark place."

"We're still here, Captain," Maslovic responded. "It appears that, of all the ones who have come here before, for any and all reasons, we have been invited."

* * *

It must have been odd, Randi thought, to look through the stones and see yourself somewhere else down there on the planet, but that's what Ann was doing.