The Godmakers (8 page)

He thought: It always happens on some routine assignment. We had nothing but a casual suspicion about Sheleb -- the fact that only women held high office.

A simple, unexplained fact and I lose one of my best agents.

He sighed, turned to his desk and began composing the report:

"The militant core on the Planet Sheleb has been eliminated. (Bloody mess, that!) Occupation force on the ground. (Orne's right about occupation forces: For every good they do, they create an evil!) No further danger to Galactic peace expected from this source. (What can a shattered and demoralized population do?)

"Reason for Operation: (bloody stupidity!) R&R -- after two months of contact with Sheleb -- failed to detect signs of militancy.

"Major indicators: (the whole damn spectrum!)

"1.) A ruling caste restricted to women.

"2.) Disparity between numbers and activities of males and females far beyond the Lutig norm!

"3.) The full secrecy/hierarchy/control/security syndrome.

"Senior Field Agent Lewis Orne found that the ruling caste was controlling the sex of offspring at conception (see details attached) and had raised a male slave army to maintain its rule. The R&R agent had been drained of information, replaced with a double and killed. Arms constructed on the basis of that treachery caused critical injuries to Senior Field Agent Orne. He is not expected to survive. I am hereby recommending that Orne receive the Galaxy Medal and that his name be added to the Roll of Honor."

Stetson pushed the report aside. That was enough for ComGo. The commander of galactic operations never went beyond the raw details. The fine print would be for his aides to digest and that could come later. Stetson punched his call box for Orne's service record, set himself to the task he most detested: notifying next of kin. He studied the record, pursing his lips.

"Home Planet: Chargon. Notify in case of accident or death: Mrs. Victoria Orne, mother."

He scanned through the record, reluctant to send the hated message. Orne had enlisted in the Federation Marines at age seventeen standard (a runaway from home) and his mother had given postenlistment consent. Two years later: scholarship transfer to Uni-Galacta, the R&R school here on Marak. Five years of school, one R&R field assignment under his belt, and he had been drafted into the I-A for brilliant detection of militancy on Hamal. Two years later -

- a crechepod!

Abruptly, Stetson hurled the service record at the gray metal wall across from him; then he got up brought the record back to his desk. There were tears in his eyes. He flipped the proper communications switch, dictated the notification to Central Secretarial, ordered it transmitted Priority One. He went groundside then and got drunk on Hochar brandy, Orne's favorite drink.

The next morning there was a reply from Chargon: "Lewis Orne's mother too ill to be notified or to travel. Sisters being notified. Please ask Mrs. Ipscott Bullone of Marak, wife of the High Commissioner, to take over for family." It was signed: "Madrena Orne Standish, sister."

With some misgivings. Stetson called the Residency for Ipscott Bullone, leader of the majority party in the Federation Assembly. Mrs. Bullone took the call with blank screen. There was a sound of running water in the background.

Stetson stared into the grayness swimming in his desk screen. He always disliked blank screens. His head ached from the Hochar brandy and his stomach kept insisting this was an idiot call. There had to be a mistake.

A baritone husk of a voice came from the speaker beside the screen: "This is Polly Bullone."

Telling his stomach to shut up, Stetson introduced himself, relayed the Chargon message.

"Victoria's boy dying? Here? Oh, the poor thing! And Madrena's back on Chargon -- the election. Oh, yes, of course, I'll get right over to the hospital."

Stetson signed off with thanks, broke the contact. He leaned back in his chair, puzzled. The High Commissioner's wife! He felt stunned. Something didn't track here. He recalled it then: The First-Contact! Hamal! A blunderbrain named Andre Bullone!

Using his scrambler, Stetson called for the follow-up report on Hamal, found that Andre Bullone was a nephew of the High Commissioner. Nepotism began on high, obviously. But there was no apparent influence in Orne's case. A runaway in his teens. Brilliant. Self-motivated. Orne had denied any knowledge of a connection between Andre Bullone and the High Commissioner.

He was telling the truth, Stetson thought. Orne didn't know about this family connection.

Stetson continued scanning the report. A mess! The nephew had been transferred to a desk job far back in the bureaucracy: report juggler. There was a green check mark beside the transfer notice, indicating pressure from on high.

Now -- a family linkup between Orne and the Bullones.

Still puzzled, but unable to see a way through the problem, Stetson scrambled an eyes-only memo to ComGo, then turned to the urgent list atop his work-in-progress file.

As the mythological glossary developed our first primitive understanding of Psi, a transformation occurred. Out of the grimoire came curiosity and the translation of fear into experiment. Men dared explore this terrifying frontier with the analytical tools of the mind. From these largely unsophisticated gropings arose the first pragmatic handbooks out of which we developed Religious Psi.

-- HALMYRACH, ABBOD OF AMEL, Psi and Religion

At the I-A medical center, the oval crechepod containing Orne's flesh dangled from ceiling hooks in a private room. There were humming sounds in the dim, watery green of the room, and rhythmic chuggings, sighings, clackings.

Occasionally, a door opened quietly and a white-clad figure would enter, check the graph tapes on the crechepod's instruments, examine the vital connections, then depart.

In the medical euphemism, Orne was lingering. He became a major conversation piece at the interns' rest breaks: "That agent who was hurt on Sheleb, he's still with us. Man, they must build those guys different from the rest of us!

. . . Yeah. I heard he only has about one-eighth of his insides -- liver, kidneys, stomach, all gone . . . Lay you odds he doesn't last out the month .

. . Look at what old sure-thing Tavish wants to bet on!"

On the morning of his eighty-eighth day in the crechepod, the day nurse entered Orne's room for her first routine check. She lifted the inspection hood, looked down at him. The day nurse was a tall, lean-faced professional who had learned to meet miracles and failures with equal lack of expression.

She was just here to observe. The daily routine with the dying (or already dead) I-A operative had lulled her into a state of psychological unpreparedness for anything but closing out the records.

Any day now, poor guy, she thought.

Orne opened his only remaining eye and she gasped as he said in a low whisper:

"Did they clobber those dames on Sheleb?"

"Yes, sir!" the day nurse blurted. "They really did, sir!"

"Another damn mess," Orne said. He closed his eye. His breathing-simulation deepened and heart-demand increased.

The nurse rang frantically for the doctors.

Part of our problem centers on the effort to introduce external control for a system-of-systems that should be maintained by internal balancing forces. We are not attempting to recognize and refrain from inhibiting those self-regulating systems in our species upon which species survival depends. We are ignoring our own feedback functions.

-- LEWIS ORNE's Report on Hamal

For Orne, there had been an indeterminate period in a blank fog, then a time of pain and the gradual realization that he was in a crechepod. Had to be.

He could remember the sudden disrupter explosion on Sheleb . . . the explosion like a silent force thrusting at him -- no sound, just an enveloping nothingness.

Good old crechepod. It made him feel safe, shielded from outside perils.

Things still went on inside him, though. He could remember . . . dreams? He wasn't sure they really were dreams. There was something about a hoe and handles. He tried to recall the elusive thought pattern. He sensed his Linkage with the crechepod and, beyond that, a connection with some kind of merciless manipulative system, a mass effect reducing all existence to a base level.

Is it possible that Man invented war and was trapped by his own invention?

Orne wondered. Who are we in the I-A to set ourselves up as a board of angels to mediate in the affairs of all sentient life we contact?

Is it possible we are influenced by our universe in ways we don't readily recognize?

He sensed his brain/mind/awareness churning, visualized all of this activity as a bizarre tool for symbolizing the drives and energy desires of all life.

Somewhere within himself, he felt there was an ancient function, a thing of archaic tendencies which remained constant despite the marks of the evolution through which it had passed.

Abruptly, he felt himself in the presence of an overwhelming thought/presence: The most misguided effort of sentience is the attempt to alter the past, to weed out discrepancies, to insist on fellow-happiness at any price. To refrain from harming others is one thing; to design and order happiness for others and to enforce delivery invites an equal-and-opposite reaction.

Orne drifted off to sleep with this convoluted thought winding and twisting in his awareness.

The human operates out of complex superiority demands, self-affirming through ritual, insisting upon a rational need to learn, striving for self-imposed goals, manipulating his environment while he denies his own adaptive abilities, never fully satisfied.

-- LECTURES OF HALMYRACH, private publication files of Amel Orne began to show small but steady signs of recovery. Within a month, the medics ventured an intestinal transplant which increased his response rate.

Two months later, they placed him on an atlotl/gibiril regimen, forcing the energy transfer which allowed him to regrow his lost fingers and eye, restore his scalp line and erase the other internal-external damage.

Through it all, Orne found himself wrestling with his soul. He felt strangled by the patterns he had once accepted, as though he had passed through profound change which had removed him from the body of his past. All of the assumptions of his former existence took on the character of shadows, passionless and contrary to the new flesh growing within him. He felt that he had been surprised by his own death, and had accepted the total denial of a life which had melted into a sandpile. Now, he was rebuilding, willfully accepting only a one-part definition of existence.

I am one being, he thought. I exist. That is enough. I give life to myself.

The thought slipped into him like a fire which bore him forward out of an ancestral cave. The wheel of his life was turning, and he knew it would go full circle. He felt that he had gone down into the intestines of the universe to see how everything was made.

No more old taboos, he thought. I have been both alive and dead.

Fourteen months, eleven days, five hours and two minutes after he had been picked up on Shelab "as good as dead," Orne walked out of the hospital on his own two legs, accompanied by an oddly silent Umbo Stetson.

Under the dark-blue I-A field cape, Orne's coverall uniform fitted his once-muscular frame like a deflated bag. The pixie light had returned to his eyes, though -- even to the new eye which had grown parallel with his new awareness.

Except for the loss of weight, he appeared to be the old Lewis Orne. It was a close enough resemblance that most former acquaintances could have recognized him after only a moment's hesitation. The internal differences did not show themselves to the casual eye.

Outside the hospital, clouds obscured Marak's greenish sun. It was midmorning. A cold spring wind bent the pile lawn, tugged fitfully at border plantings of exotic flowers around the hospital's landing pad.

Orne paused on the steps above the pad, breathed deeply of the chill air.

"Beautiful day," he said. His new kneecap felt strange, a better fit than the old one. He was acutely conscious of all his new parts and the regrowth syndrome which made all crechepod graduates share the unjoke label of "twice-born."

Stetson reached out a hand to help Orne down the steps, hesitated, put the hand back in his pocket. Beneath the section chiefs look of weary superciliousness there was a note of anxiety. His big features remained set in a frown. The drooping eyelids failed to conceal a sharp, measuring stare.

Orne glanced at the sky to the southwest.

"Flitter ought to be here soon," Stetson said.

A gust of wind tugged at Orne's cape. He staggered, caught his balance. "I feel good," he said.

"You look like something left over from a funeral," Stetson growled.

"My funeral," Orne said. He grinned. "Anyway, I was getting tired of that walk-around-style morgue they call a hospital. All of my nurses were married or otherwise paired."

"I'd stake my life that I could trust you," Stetson muttered.

Orne glanced at him, puzzled by the remark. "What?"

"Stake my life," Stetson said.

"No, no, Stet. Stake my life. I'm used to it."

Stetson shook his head bearlike from side to side. "Be funny! I trust you, but you deserve a peaceful convalescence."

"Get it off your chest," Orne said. "What's brewing?"

"We've no right to saddle you with an assignment at a time like this," Stetson said.

Orne's voice came out low and amused: "Stet?"

Stetson looked at him. "Huh?"

"Save the noble act for someone who doesn't know you," Orne said. "You've a job for me. All right. You've made the gesture for your conscience."

Stetson managed a wry grin. He said: "The problem is we're desperate and we haven't much time."

"That sounds familiar," Orne said. "But I'm not sure I want to play the old games. What's on your mind?"

Stetson shrugged. "Well . . . since you're going to be a houseguest at the Bullones' anyway, we thought . . . well, we suspect Ipscott Bullone of heading a conspiracy to take over the government, and if you . . ."