The Jesus Incident w-2

by Frank Herbert

  - Morgan Oakes, The Diaries

  LEGATA HAMILL knew groundside was to be their permanent home eventually, but she did not like these courier jobs on which Oakes sent her. There was a sense of power in them, though; no denying it. Her pass (often just an identifying look at her by a guard) admitted her anywhere. She was an arm of Morgan Oakes. She knew what they saw when they looked at her: a small woman with pale skin and ebon hair, a figure almost lush in its femininity. They saw a woman The Boss wanted and who, because of that, was powerful and dangerous.

  Every inspection trip she took for Oakes created tension.

  This time she was to inspect Lab One at Colony. And all of it would be on holo to make a full record for Oakes to review.

  "Penetrate it," Oakes had said.

  The way he said "penetrate" had distinctly sexual overtones.

  She had never been into the Lab One depths before and that alone piqued her curiosity. Lewis had a trusted minion here, Sy Murdoch. She was to meet Murdoch. Usually, Lewis was to be found in the shiny plasteel environs of the lab which was entered via a triple-lock system at the end of a long tunnel. Not today. Lewis was out of communication. A strange way of putting it; and there was no doubt that Oakes was disturbed by this development.

  "Find out where the hell he is, what he's doing!"

  Both suns had been in the sky when the shuttle brought her down. Maximum flare security had been in force. She had been hustled out of the landing complex and into a servo which deposited her at the tunnel. The Colony personnel were quick and harried today - rumors of perimeter difficulties with Pandora's many demons.

  Legata shuddered. Any thought of the predatory creatures which roamed the landscape beyond Colony's barriers filled her with apprehension.

  Murdoch himself met her in the brightly lighted and bustling area where the last lock sealed off the entrance within the lab. He was a blocky man, light complexion and blue eyes, with cropped brown hair. His fingers were short and stubby, the nails well trimmed. He always appeared recently scrubbed.

  "What is it this time?" he demanded.

  She liked the energy focus in his question. It said: We're busy here. What does Oakes want now?

  Very well, she could match that mood. "Where's Lewis?"

  Murdoch glanced around to see who might overhear them. Seeing no workers nearby, he said: "Redoubt."

  "Why doesn't he answer our calls?"

  "Don't know."

  "What was his last message?"

  "Emergency code. Hold all transports. No craft permitted to land at Redoubt. Wait for clearance signal."

  Legata absorbed this. Emergency. What was happening across the waters at the Redoubt?

  "Why wasn't Doctor Oakes informed?"

  "The code signal called for complete security."

  She understood this. No transmissions from Colony to Ship could carry a message involving that restriction. But that was two full Pandoran diurns ago. She sensed another restriction in the last message from the Redoubt, a private Lewis restriction to his own minions. It would be pointless to explore such a conjecture, but she felt its presence.

  "Have you sent an overflight?"

  "No."

  So that was restricted, too. Ba.... very bad. Well, then, she had to get on to the rest of her assignment.

  "I'm here to inspect the lab."

  "I know."

  Murdoch had been studying this woman while they talked. The orders transmitted from The Boss were clear. She was to go into everything except the Scream Room. That would come later for he.... as it came for everyone here. She was a pretty thing: a pocket Venus with a doll face and green eyes. She had a good brain, too, by all accounts.

  "If you know, let's get going," she said.

  "This way."

  He led her down a passage between banked vats of primary clonewombs into the Micro-micro Processing section.

  At first, Legata's interest was intellectual - she knew this and it comforted her. Murdoch even took her hand at one point, leading her past rows of special-application clonewombs. He was so intent in his rhapsody on equipment and techniques that she did not mind his touch. It was, after all, clinical. Or unintentional. Whichever, Murdoch's touch was not born out of affection; this she knew.

  But he knew Lab One as few others could, even perhaps as well as Lewis, and she had never been told to go deep into it before.

  "...but I've accepted that as true," Murdoch was saying, and she had missed the point, being more intent on an incomplete fetus of odd proportions floating behind a screen of transparent plaz.

  She looked at Murdoch. "Accepted what? I'm sorry, I wa.... I mean, there's so much to see."

  "Plasteel by the kilometer, tanks and fluids, pseudo-bodies, pseudo-mind...." He waved his hand in frustration.

  She realized that Murdoch was in a particularly manic mood and this bothered her. She felt the need to suppress unspoken questions about that odd fetus floating behind the screen of plasma glass.

  "So you've accepted all this," she said. "So what?"

  "We birth here. We conceive people here, nurture them fetally, extract them, send some shipside for trainin.... Doesn't it strike you as odd that we can't bring natural births groundside, too?"

  "What Ship decides is for good reason, for the good o...."

  "...of Shipmen everywhere. I know. I've heard it as often as you have. But Ship did not decide. Nowhere in the records can anyone - even you, the best Search Technician we have, so I'm told - find where Ship has demanded that all births take place shipside. Nowhere."

  Without knowing how she knew it, Legata realized he was repeating Lewis' words verbatim. This was not Murdoch's manner of speaking. Why was she supposed to hear this? Was it part of Oakes' scheme to do away with the shipside obstetrics force, the Natali?

  "But we are required to WorShip," she said. "And what greater WorShip can we have than to entrust Ship with our children? It makes sense, to...."

  "It makes sense, it has logic," he agreed. "But it is not a direct command. And it makes a good deal of our work here in Lab One unnecessarily limited. Why, we coul...."

  "Own this world? Morgan says you can do it anyway."

  There, let him chew on that. Morgan, not The Boss, not Doctor Oakes.

  Murdoch dropped her hand and the flush of elation washed out of his cheeks.

  He knows we're on holo, she thought, and I've ruined his act.

  It occurred to her then that Murdoch had been playing to another audience, to Oakes. If the emergency at the Redoubt over on Black Dragon turned out fatal for Lewi.... yes, they would need a replacement. She imagined Oakes' attention on them later from some metallic scanner shipside. But she wanted Murdoch to squirm a bit more. She took his hand and said, "I'd like to see The Garden."

  Her statement was only half-true. She had seen the catalogues which Oakes kept securely locked away, the wide selection of E-clones grown to special purposes here - any purpose, it seemed. Fewer than a dozen people shipside were even aware that such a process existed. And here at Colony, Lab One was a complex of its own, secreted away from the rest of the buildings, its purpose shrouded in the mystique of its name.

  Lab One.

  When asked what went on at Lab One, people usually said, "Ship only knows." Or they began some childish ghost story of hunchbacked scientists peering into the heart of life itself.

  Legata knew that Oakes and Lewis even encouraged the mystery, often started their own rumors. The result was a fearsome aura about the place, and recently there had been mutterings about the disproportionate supply of food allotted to Lab One. TO be assigned here, in the minds of Shipmen and Colonists alike, was to disappear forever. All workers moved into quarters at the complex and, with few exceptions, did not return shipside or to Colony proper.

  These thoughts left her with a feeling of unsettled doubts, and she had to remind herself: I'm not being assigned here. No, that wouldn't happen, not as long as Oakes wanted to get her naked on his couc.... to penetrate her.<
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  Legata took a deep breath of warm air. As in all Colony buildings, temperature and humidity were identical with Ship's. Here in the lab, though, her flesh shuddered off a special kind of chill, a gooseflesh that made her stomach ache and jabbed needles of pain into the knots that her nipples made against her singlesuit. She spoke quickly to mask her disquiet.

  "Your staff people, they look so old."

  "Many of them have been with us from the start."

  There was evasion in his voice and it did not go unnoticed, but Legata chose to watch, not push.

  "But the.... look even older than that. Wha...."

  Murdoch interrupted her. "We have a higher fatality rate than Colony, did you know that?"

  She shook her head. It was a lie; had to be a lie.

  "It's being out here on the perimeter," Murdoch said. "We don't get the protection everyone else does. Nerve Runners are particularly heavy this close to the hills."

  An uncontrollable shudder swept over her arms. Nerve Runners! Those darting little worms were the most feared of all Pandoran creatures. They had an affinity for nerve cells and would eat their way slowly, agonizingly along human nerve channels until they gorged on the brain, encysted and reproduced.

  "Bad," Murdoch said, seeing her reaction. "And the workload we carry here, of cours.... but that's agreed on from the start. These are the most dedicated people groundside."

  She looked across a bank of plaz vats at a group of these dedicated workers - blank, tight-lipped faces. Most of those she had seen here were wrinkled and drawn, pale. No one joked; not even a nervous giggle broke the monotony. All was the clink and click of instruments, the hum of tools, the aching distance between lives.

  Murdoch flashed her a sudden smile. "But you wanted to see The Garden." He turned, waved a hand for her to follow. "This way."

  He led her through another system of locks, only doubles this time, into what appeared to be a training area for young E-clones. There were several of them around the entrance, but they drew back at Murdoch's approach.

  Fearful, Legata thought.

  There was a circular barrier across the training area and she identified another lock entrance.

  "What's over there?" She nodded.

  "We won't be able to go in there today," Murdoch said. "We're sterilizing in there."

  "Oh? What's in there?"

  "Wel.... that's the core of The Garden. I call it the Flower Room." He turned toward a group of the young E-clones nearby. "Now, here we have some of the young products from the Flower Room. The...."

  "Does your Flower Room have another name?" she asked. She did not like his answers. Too evasive. He was lying.

  Murdoch turned to face her and she felt threatened by the pouncing glee in his eyes. Guilty knowledge lay there - dirty, guilty knowledge.

  "Some call it the Scream Room," he said.

  Scream Room?

  "And we can't go in there?"

  "Not...today. Perhaps if you made an appointment for later?"

  She controlled a shudder. The way he watched her, the avaricious glint to his eyes.

  "I'll come back to see you.... Flower Room later," she said.

  "Yes. You will."

  From you, Avata learns of a great poet-philosopher who said: "Until you meet an alien intelligence, you will not know what it is to be human."

  And Avata did not know what it was to be Avata.

  True, and poetic. But poetry is what's lost in translation. Thus, we now permit you to call this place Pandora and to call us Avata. The first among you, though, called us vegetable. In this, Avata saw the deeper meaning of your history and felt fear. You ingest vegetable to use the energy gathered by others. With you, the others end. With Avata, the others live. Avata uses minerals, uses rock, uses sea, uses the suns - and from all this, Avata nurses life. With rock, Avata calms the sea and silences the turbulence inherited from the rip of suns and moons.

  Knowing human, Avata remembers all. It is best to remember so Avata remembers. We eat our history and it is not lost. We are one tongue and one mind; the storms of confusions cannot steal us from one another, cannot pry us from our grip to rock, to the firmament that cups the sea around us and washes us clean with the tides. This is so because we make it so.

  We fill the sea and calm it with our body. The creatures of water find sanctuary in Avata's shadow, feed in our light. They breathe the riches we exude. They fight among themselves for what we discard. They ignore us in their ravages and we watch them grow, watch them flare in the sea like suns and disappear into the far side of night.

  The sea feeds us; it washes in and out, and we return to the sea in kind. Rock is Avata's strength and as strength grows so grows the nest. Rock is Avata's communion, ballast and blood. With all this, Avata orders quiet in the sea and subdues the fitful rages of the tides. Without Avata, the sea screams its fury in rock and ice; it whips the winds of hot madness. Without Avata, the rage of the sea returns to smother this globe in blackness and a thin white horizon of death.

  This is so because we make it so - Avata: barometer of life.

  Atom to atom to molecule; molecule to chain and chain winding around and around the magnificence of light; then cell to cell, and cell to blastula, cilia to tentacle, and from stillness blossoms the motion of life.

  Avata harvests the mysterious gas of the sea and is born into the world of clouds and mountains, into the world the stars walk in fear. Avata sails high with the gas from the sea to find the country of the spark of life. There, Avata gives self to love, thence back to the sea, and the circle is complete but unfinished.

  Avata feeds and is fed. Sheltered, Avata shelters, eats and is eaten, loves and is loved. Growth is the Avata way. In growth is life. As death resides in stillness, Avata strives for stillness in growth, a balance of flux, and Avata lives.

  This is so because Avata makes it so.

  ***

  If you know this of the alien intelligence and still find it alien, you do not know what it is to be human.

  - Kerro Panille, Translations from the Avata

  You are called Project Consciousness, but your true goal is to explore beyond the imprinted pattern of all humankind. Inevitably, you must ask: Is consciousness only a special kind of hallucination? Do you raise consciousness or lower its threshold? The danger in the latter course is that you bring up the military analogue: you are confined to action.

  - Original Charge to the Voidship Chaplain/Psychiatrist

  ON THESE nightside walks through the ship, Oakes liked to move without purpose, without the persona of Ceepee tagging along. He had worked long and hard to remain just a name both shipside and groundside. Few saw his face and most of his official duties were carried out by minions. There was the routine WorShip in the corridor chapels, the food allotments groundside, a minimal endorsement of the many functions that the ship carried out with no human intervention. Ceepee rule was supposed to be nominal. But he wanted more.

  Kingston had once said: "We have too damned much idle time. We're idle hands and we can get into trouble."

  Memories of Kingston were much with Oakes this night as he took his nocturnal prowl. Through the outer passages, sensor eyes and ears dotted corridor walls and ceilings. They strung themselves ahead and behind in diminishing vectors of attention, dim glistenings in the blue-violet nightside lighting.

  Still no word from Lewis, This rankled. Legata's preliminary report left too many unanswered questions. Was Lewis striking out on his own? Impossible! Lewis did not have the guts for such a move. He was the eternal behind-the-scenes operator, not a front man.

  What was the emergency, then?

  Oakes felt that too many things were coming to a head around him. They could not delay much longer on sending this poet, this Kerro Panille, groundside. And the new Ceepee the ship had brought out of hyb! Both poet and Ceepee would have to be bundled into the same package and watched carefully. And it would soon be time to start an eradication project against the kelp. People wer
e getting hungry enough groundside that they were ready for scapegoats.

  And that disturbing incident with the air in his cubby. Had the ship really tried to asphyxiate him? Or poison him?

  Oakes turned a corner and found himself in a long corridor with iridescent green arrows on the walls indicating that it led outward from shipcenter. The ceiling sensors were dots receding into a converging distance.

  Out of habit he noticed the activation of each sensor as he neared it. Each mechanical eye followed his pace faithfully, and, as he approached the limits of its vision, the next one rolled its wary cyclopean pupil around to catch his approach. He had to admit that, in Shipman or machine, he appreciated this sense of guarded watchfulness, but the idea that a possibly malevolent intelligence waited behind that movement set his nerves on edge.

  He had never known a sensor to malfunction. To tamper with one meant dealing with a robox uni...single-minded repair and defense device that respected no life or limb save that of Ship.

  THE ship, dammit!

  Those years of programming, preparation - even he could not shake them. How did he expect others of lesser will, lesser intelligence, to do so?

  He sighed. He expected to sway no one. What he expected was that he would use the tools at hand. With intelligence, he felt that one could turn anything to advantage. Even a dangerous tool such as Lewis.

  Another pair of sensors caught his attention, this time outside the access to the Docking Bays. It was quiet here and pervaded by that odd smell compounded from uncounted sleeping people. Not even freight moved during Colony's nightside which sometimes coincided with Shiptime, but often did not. All the industry of dayside was put away for the community of sleep.

  Except in two places, he reminded himself: life-support and the agraria.

  Oakes stopped and studied the line of sensors. He, of all Shipmen, should appreciate them. He had access to the movements they recorded. Every detail of shipside life was supposed to be his. And he had seen to it that the groundside colony was similarly equipped. Ship's watchfulness was his own.