The Pandora Sequence: The Jesus Incident, the Lazarus Effect, the Ascension Factor (6 page)

Chapter 11

Poetry, like consciousness, drops the insignificant digits.

—Raja Flattery,
Shiprecords

SHIP’S WARNING that this could be the end of humankind left Flattery with a sense of emptiness.

He stared into the blackness which surrounded him, trying to find some relief. Would Ship really break the . . . recording? What did Ship mean by a recording?

Last chance.

His emotional responses told Flattery he had touched a deep core of affinity with his own kind. The thought that in some faraway future on a line through infinity there might be other humans to enjoy life as he had enjoyed it—this thought filled him with warm affections for such descendants.

“Do You really mean this is our last chance?” he asked.

“Much as it pains Me.” Ship’s response did not surprise him.

The words were torn from him: “Why don’t You just tell us how to . . .”

“Raj! How much of your free will would you give me!”

“How much would You take?”

“Believe Me, Raj, there are places where neither God nor Man dares intervene.”

“And You want me to go down to this planet, put Your question to them, and help them answer Your demand?”

“Would you do that?”

“Could I refuse?”

“I seek choice, Raj, not compulsion or chance. Will you accept?”

Flattery thought about this. He could refuse. Why not? What did he owe these . . . these . . . Shipmen, these replay survivors? But they were sufficiently human that he could interbreed with them. Human. And he still sensed that core of pain when he thought about a universe devoid of humans.

One last chance for humankind? It might be interesting . . . play. Or it might be one of Ship’s illusions.

“Is all this just illusion, Ship?”

“No. The flesh exists to feel the things that flesh feels. Doubt everything except that.”

“I either doubt everything or nothing.”

“So be it. Will you play despite your doubts?”

“Will You tell me more about this play?”

“If you ask a correct question.”

“What role am I playing?”

“Ahhhh . . .” It was a sigh of beatific grace. “You play the living challenge.”

Flattery knew that role. Living challenge. You made people find the best within themselves, a best which they might not suspect they possessed. But some would be destroyed by such a demand. Remembering the pain of responsibility for such destruction, he wanted help in his decision but knew he dared not ask directly. Perhaps if he learned more about Ship’s plans . . .

“Have You hidden in my memory things about the game that I should know?”

“Raj!” There was no mistaking the outrage. It flowed through him as though his body were a sudden sieve thrust beneath a hot cascade. Then, more softly: “I do not steal your memories, Raj.”

“Then I’m to be something different, a new factor, in this game. What else is different?”

“The place of the test possesses a difference so profound it may test you beyond your capacities, Raj.”

The many implications of this answer filled him with wonder. So there were things even an all-powerful being did not know, things even God or Satan might learn.

Ship made him fearful then by commenting on his unspoken thought.

“Given that marvelous and perilous condition which you call Time, power can be a weakness.”

“Then what’s this profound difference which will test me?”

“An element of the game which you must discover for yourself.”

Flattery saw the pattern of it then: The decision had to be his own. Not compulsion. It was the difference between choice and chance. It was the difference between the precision of a holorecord replay and a brand-new performance where free will dominated. And the prize was another chance for humankind. The Chaplain/Psychiatrists’ Manual said: “God does not play dice with Man.” Obviously, someone had been wrong.

“Very well, Ship. I’ll gamble with You.”

“Excellent! And, Raj—when the dice roll there will be no outside interference to control how they fall.”

He found the phraseology of this promise interesting, but sensed the futility of exploring it. Instead, he asked: “Where will we play?”

“On this planet which I call Pandora. A small frivolity.”

“I presume Pandora’s box already is open.”

“Indeed. All the evils that can trouble Mankind have been released.”

“I’ve accepted Your request. What happens now?”

For answer, Flattery felt the hyb locks release him, the soft restraints pulling away. Light glowed around him and he recognized a dehyb laboratory in one of the shipbays. The familiarity of the place dismayed him. He sat up and looked around. All of that time and this . . . this lab remained unchanged. But of course Ship was infinite and infinitely powerful. Nothing outside of Time was impossible for Ship.

Except getting humankind to decide on their manner of Worship.

What if we fail this time?

Would Ship really break the recording? He felt it in his guts: Ship would erase them. No more humankind . . . ever. Ship would go on to new distractions.

If we fail, we’ll mature without flowering, never to send our seed through Infinity. Human evolution will stop here.

Have I changed in hyb? All that time . . .

He slipped out of the tank enclosure and padded across to a full-length mirror set into one of the lab’s curved walls. His naked flesh appeared unchanged from the last time he had seen it. His face retained its air of quizzical detachment, an expression others often thought calculating. The remote brown eyes and upraked black eyebrows had been both help and hindrance. Something in the human psyche said such features belonged only to superior creatures. But superiority could be an impossible burden.

“Ahhh, you sense a truth,” Ship whispered.

Flattery tried to swallow in a dry throat. The mirror told him that his flesh had not aged. Time? He began to grasp what Ship meant by such a length of Time which was meaningless. Hyb held flesh in stasis no matter what the passage of Time. No maturity there. But what about his mind? What about that reflected construct for which his brain was the receiver? He felt that something had ripened in his awareness.

“I’m ready. How do I get down to Pandora?”

Ship spoke from a vocoder above the mirror. “There are several ways, transports which I have provided.”

“So You deliver me to Pandora. I just walk in on them. ‘Hi. I’m Raja Flattery. I’ve come to give you a big pain in the head.’”

“Flippancy does not suit you, Raj.”

“I feel Your displeasure.”

“Do you already regret your decision, Raj?”

“Can You tell me anything more about the problems on Pandora?”

“The most immediate problem is their encounter with an alien intelligence, the ’lectrokelp.”

“Dangerous?”

“So they believe. The ’lectrokelp is close to infinite and humans fear . . .”

“Humans fear open spaces, never-ending open spaces. Humans fear their own intelligence because it’s close to infinite.”

“You delight Me, Raj!”

A feeling of joy washed over Flattery. It was so rich and powerful that he felt he might dissolve in it. He knew that the sensation did not originate with him, and it left him feeling drained, transparent . . . bloodless.

Flattery pressed the heels of his hands against his tightly closed eyes. What a terrible thing that joy was! Because when it was gone . . . when it was gone . . .

He whispered: “Unless You intend to kill me, don’t do that again.”

“As you choose.” How cold and remote.

“I want to be human! That’s what I was intended to be!”

“If that’s the game you seek.”

Flattery sensed Ship’s disappointment, but this made him defensive and he turned to questions.

“Have Shipmen communicated with this alien intelligence, this ’lectrokelp?”

“No. They have studied it, but do not understand it.”

Flattery took his hands away from his eyes. “Have Shipmen ever heard of Raja Flattery?”

“That’s a name in the history which I teach them.”

“Then I’d better take another name.” He ruminated for a moment, then: “I’ll call myself Raja Thomas.”

“Excellent. Thomas for your doubts and Raja for your origins.”

“Raja Thomas, communications expert—Ship’s best friend. Here I come, ready or not.”

“A game, yes. A game. And . . . Raj?”

“What?”

“For an infinite being, Time produces boredom. Limits exist to how much Time I can tolerate.”

“How much Time are You giving us to decide the way we’ll Worship?”

“At the proper moment you will be told. And one more thing—”

“Yes?”

“Do not be dismayed if I refer to you occasionally as My Devil.”

He was a moment recovering his voice, then: “What can I do about it? You can call me whatever You like.”

“I merely asked that you not be dismayed.”

“Sure! And I’m King Canute telling the tides to stop!”

There was no response from Ship and Flattery wondered if he was to be left on his own to find his way down to this planet called Pandora. But presently, Ship spoke once more: “Now we will dress you in appropriate costume, Raj. There is a new Chaplain/Psychiatrist who rules the Shipmen. They call him Ceepee and, when he offends them, they call him The Boss. You can expect that The Boss will order you to attend him soon.”

Chapter 12

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

—Marcel Proust,
Shiprecords

OAKES STUDIED his own image reflected in the com-console at his elbow. The curved screen, he knew, was what made the reflection diminutive.

Reduced.

He felt jumpy. No telling what the ship might do to him next.

Oakes swallowed in a dry throat.

He did not know how long he had sat there hypnotized by that reflection. It was still nightside. An unfinished glass of Pandoran wine sat on a low brown table in front of him. He glanced up and around. His opulent cubby remained a place of shadows and low illumination, but something had changed. He could feel the change. Something . . . someone watching . . .

The ship might refuse to talk to him, deny him elixir, but he was getting messages—many messages.

Change.

That unspoken question which hovered in his mind had changed something in the air. His skin tingled and there was a throbbing at his temples.

What if the ship’s program is running down?

His reflection in the blank screen gave no answer. It showed only his own features and he began to feel pride in what he saw there. Not just fat, no. Here was a mature man in his middle years. The Boss. The silver at his temples spoke of dignity and importance. And although he was . . . plump, his skin remained soft and clear, testimony to the care he took preserving the appearance of youth.

Women liked that.

What if the ship is Ship . . . is truly God?

The air felt dirty in his lungs and he realized he was breathing much too rapidly.

Doubts.

The damned ship was not going to respond to his doubts. Never had. Wouldn’t talk to him; wouldn’t feed him. He had to feed himself from the ship’s limited hydroponics gardens. How long could he continue to trust them? Not enough food for everyone. The very thought increased his appetite.

He stared at the unfinished glass of wine—dark amber, oily on the inner surface of the glass. There was a wet puddle under the glass, a stain on the brown surface.

I’m the Ceepee.

The Ceepee was supposed to believe in Ship. In his own cynical way, old Kingston had insisted on this.

I don’t believe.

Was that why a new Ceepee was being sent groundside?

Oakes ground his teeth together.

I’ll kill the bastard!

He spoke it aloud, intensely aware of how the words echoed in his cubby.

“Hear that, Ship? I’ll kill the bastard!”

Oakes half expected a response to this blasphemy. He knew this because he caught himself holding his breath, listening hard to the shadows at the edges of his cubby.

How did you test for godhood?

How do you separate a powerful mechanical phenomenology, a trick of technological mirrors, from a . . . from a miracle?

If God did not play dice, as the Ceepees were always told, what might God play? Perhaps dice was not challenge enough for a god. What was risk enough to tempt a god out of silence or reverie . . . out of a god’s lair?

It was a stupefying question—to challenge God at God’s own game?

Oakes nodded to himself.

In the game, perhaps, is the miracle. Miracle of Consciousness? It was no trick to make a machine self-programming, self-perpetuating. Complex, true, and unimaginably costly . . .

Not unimaginably, he cautioned himself.

He shook his head to drive out the half-dream.

If people did it, then it’s imaginable, tangible, somehow explainable. Gods move in other circles.

The question was: which circles? And if you could define those circles, their limits, you could know the limits of the god within them. What limits, then? He thought about energy. Energy remained a function of mass and speed. Even a god might have to be somewhere within the denominator of—what kind of mass, how much, how fast?

Maybe godhood is simply another expansion of limits. Because our vision dims is no reason to conclude that infinity lies beyond.

His training as a Chaplain had always been subservient to his training as a scientist and medical man. He knew that to test data truly he could not close the doors on experiment or assume that what he wished would necessarily be so.

It was what you did with data, not the data, that was important. Every king, every emperor had to know that one. Even his theology master had agreed.

“Sell ’em on God. It’s for their own good. Pin the little everyday miracles on God and you’ve got ’em; you don’t need to move mountains. If you’re good enough, people will move the mountains for you in the name of God.”

Ahh, yes. That had been Edmond Kingston, a real Chaplain/Psychiatrist out of the ship’s oldest traditions, but still a cynic.

Oakes heaved a deep sigh. Those had been quiet days shipside, days of tolerance and security of purpose. The machinery of the monster around them ran smoothly. God had been remote and most Shipmen remained in hyb.

But that had been before Pandora. Bad luck for old Kingston that the ship had put them in orbit around Pandora. Good old Edmond, dead on Pandora with the fourth settlement attempt. Not a trace recovered, not a cell. Gone now, into whatever passed for eternity. And Morgan Oakes was the second cynical Chaplain to take on the burden of Ship.

The first Ceepee not chosen by the damned ship!

Except . . . there was this new Ceepee, he reminded himself, this man without a name who was being sent groundside to talk to the damned vegetables . . . the ’lectrokelp.

He will not be my successor!

There were many ways that a man in power could delay things to his own advantage. Even as I am now delaying the ship’s request that we send this poet . . . this whatsisname, Panille, groundside.

Why did the ship want a poet groundside? Did that have anything to do with this new Ceepee? A drop of sweat trickled into his right eye.

Oakes grew aware that his breathing had become labored. Heart attack? He pushed himself off the low divan. Have to get help. There was pain all through his chest. Damn! He had too many unfinished plans. He couldn’t just go this way. Not now! He staggered to the hatch but the hatch dogs refused to turn under his fingers. The air was cooler here, though, and he grew aware of a faint hissing from the equalizer valve over the hatch. Pressure difference? He did not understand how that could be. The ship controlled the interior environment. Everyone knew that.

“What’re you doing, you damned mechanical monster?” he whispered. “Trying to kill me?”

It was getting easier to breathe. He pressed his head against the cool metal of the hatch, drew in several deep breaths. The pain in his chest receded. When he tried the hatch dogs again they turned, but he did not open the hatch. He knew his symptoms could be explained by asphyxia . . . or anxiety.

Asphyxia?

He opened the hatch and peered out into an empty corridor, the dim blue-violet illumination of nightside. Presently, he closed the hatch and stared across his cubby.

Another message from the ship? He would have to go groundside soon . . . as soon as Lewis made it safe for him down there.

Lewis, get that Redoubt ready for us!

Would the ship really kill him? No doubt it could. He would have to be very circumspect, very careful. And he would have to train a successor. Too many things unfinished to have them end with his own death.

I can’t leave the choice of my successor to the ship.

Even if it killed him, the damned ship could not be allowed to beat him.

It’s been a long time. Maybe the ship’s original program has run out.

What if Pandora were the place for a long winding-down process? Kick the fledglings out of the nest a millimeter at a time.

His gaze picked out details of the cubby: erotic wall hangings, servopanels, the soft opulence of divans . . .

Who will move in here after me?

He had thought he might choose Lewis, provided Lewis worked out well. Lewis was bright enough for some dazzling lab work, but dull politically. A dedicated man.

Dedicated! He’s a weasel and does what he’s told.

Oakes crossed to his favorite divan, fawn soft cushions. He sat down and fluffed the cushions under the small of his back. What did he care about Lewis? This flesh that called itself Oakes would be long gone when the next Chaplain took over. At the very least he would be in hyb, dependent on the systems of the ship. And it may not be a good idea to tempt Lewis with that much power, power that would be contingent upon Oakes’ own death. After all, death was the specialty of Jesus Lewis.

“No, no,” Lewis had said to Oakes privately, “it’s not death—I give them life, I give them life. They’re engineered clones, Doctor E-clones. I remind you of that. If I give them life, for whatever purpose, it is mine to take away.”

“I don’t want to hear it.” He waved Lewis away with a brush of his hand.

“Have it your way,” Lewis said, “but that doesn’t change the facts. I do what I have to do. And I do it for you . . .”

Yes, Lewis was a brilliant man. He had learned many new and useful genetic manipulation techniques from the genetics of the ’lectrokelp, that most insidious indigent species on Pandora. And it had cost them dearly.

A successor? What real choice would he make, if he truly believed in the process and the godhood of Ship? If he could exclude all the nastiness of politics?

Legata Hamill.

The name caught him off guard, it came so quickly. Almost as though he did not think it himself. Yes, it was true. He would choose Legata if he believed, if he truly believed in Ship. There was no reason why a woman could not be Chaplain/Psychiatrist. No doubt of her diplomatic abilities.

Some wag had once said that Legata could tell you to go to hell and make you anticipate the trip with joy.

Oakes pushed aside the cushions and levered himself to his feet. The hatch out into the dim passages of nightside beckoned him—that maze of mazes which meant life to them all: the ship.

Had the ship really tried to asphyxiate him? Or had that been an accident?

I’ll put myself through a medcheck first thing dayside.

The hatch dogs felt cold under his fingers, much colder than just moments before. The oval closure swung soundlessly aside to reveal once more nightside’s blue-violet lighting in the corridor.

Damn the ship!

He strode out and, around the first corner, encountered the first few people of the Behavioral watch. He ignored them. The Behavioral complex was so familiar that he did not see it as he passed through. Biocomputer Study, Vitro Lab, Genetics—all were part of his daily routine and did not register on his nightside consciousness.

Where tonight?

He allowed his feet to find the way and realized belatedly that his wanderings were taking him farther and farther into the outlying regions, farther along the ship’s confused twistings of passages and through mysterious hums and odd odors—farther out than he had ever wandered before.

Oakes sensed that he was walking into a peculiar personal danger, but he could not stop even as his tensions mounted. The ship was able to kill him at any moment, anywhere shipside, but he took a special private knowledge with him: he was Morgan Oakes, Ceepee. His detractors might call him “The Boss,” but he was the only person here (with the possible exception of Lewis) who understood there were things the ship would not do.

Two of us among many. How many?

They had no real census shipside or groundside. The computers refused to function in this area, and attempts at manual counting varied so widely they were useless.

The ship showing its devious hand again.

Just as the ship’s machinations could be sensed in this order for a poet groundside. He remembered the full name now: Kerro Panille. Why should a poet be ordered groundside to study the kelp?

If we could only eat the kelp without it driving us psychotic.

Too many people to feed. Too many.

Oakes guessed ten thousand shipside and ten times that groundside (not counting the special clones), but no matter the numbers, he was the only person who realized how little knowledge his people had about the workings and purposes of the ship or its parts.

His people!

Oakes liked it that way, recalling the cynical comment of his mentor, Edmond Kingston, who had been talking about the need to limit the awareness of the people: “Appearing to know the unknown is almost as useful as actually knowing.”

From his own historical studies, Oakes knew that this had been a political watchword for many civilizations. This one thing stood out even though the ship’s records were not always clear and he did not completely trust the ship’s versions of history. It often was difficult to distinguish between real history and contrived fictions. But from the odd literary references and the incompatible datings of such works—from internal clues and his own inspired guesswork—Oakes deduced that other worlds and other peoples existed . . . or had existed.

The ship could have countless murders on its conscience. If it had a conscience.