The Jesus Incident Page 13

  —Raja Flattery, The Book of Ship

  AGAIN, THE communications pellet in Oakes’ neck, made no contact with Lewis. Static or silence, wild images projected onto his waking dreams—these were all he got. He wanted to reach into his neck and rip the thing out.

  Why had Lewis ordered no physical contact with the Redoubt? Oakes chafed at his own inability to raise too much disturbance. The real purposes of the Redoubt remained a secret from most Shipmen; to most it was just a rumored exploratory attempt out on Black Dragon. He did not dare countermand the order which had isolated the Redoubt. Too many would see the size of the place.

  Lewis can’t do this to me.

  Oakes paced his cubby, wishing it were even larger. He wanted to walk off his frustrations but it was full dayside out in the ship’s passages and he knew he would be plagued by the need to make decisions once he stepped from his sanctum. Rumors were raging through the ship. Many had noted his upset. This could not go on much longer.

  I would go down myself . . . except . . .

  No, without Lewis to prepare the way, it is too dangerous.

  Oakes shook his head. He was too valuable to risk down there yet.

  Dammit, Lewis! You could send me some message . . .

  Oakes had come increasingly to suspect that Lewis really was involved in a primary emergency. That or treachery. No . . . it had to be an emergency. Lewis was not a leader. Then it had to be a major threat from the planet itself.

  Pandora.

  In many ways, Pandora was a more immediate and dangerous adversary than the ship.

  Oakes glanced at the blank holofocus beside his couch. A touch of the buttons would call up real-time images of the planet. To what avail? He had tried a sensor search of the Black Dragon coastline from space. Too many clouds . . . not enough detail.

  He could identify the coastal bay where the Redoubt was being built, could even see glinting reflections during the diurn passages of Alki or Rega.

  Oakes took a deep breath to calm himself. This planet was not going to beat him.

  You’re mine, Pandora!

  As he had told Legata, anything was possible down there. They could fulfill any fantasy.

  Oakes examined his hands, rubbed them across his bulging stomach. He was determined that he would never under any circumstances grub out a living on the surface of a planet. Especially on a planet he owned. This was only natural.

  The ship conditioned me to be what I am.

  More than any other person he had ever known, Oakes felt that he knew the nature of the ship’s conditioning processes—the differences from what they had been when they had lived free to scatter on Earth’s surface.

  It’s the crush of people . . . too many people too close together.

  Shipside congestion had been transported groundside. This way of life demanded special adaptations. All Shipmen adjusted the same way at bottom. They drugged themselves, gambled—risked everything . . . even their own lives. Running the Colony perimeter naked except for thonged feet. And for what? A bet! A dare! To hide from themselves. In his long walks through the ship, Oakes knew how he screened out the comings and goings of others. Like most Shipmen, he could retreat into the deepest interior of his mind for privacy, for entertainment, for living.

  In these times of food shortage, this faculty had been especially valuable to him. Oakes knew himself to be the . . . heaviest man shipside. He knew there was envy and angry questioning, but even so no one stared directly at him with such thoughts openly readable.

  Yes, I know these people. They need me.

  Under Edmond Kingston’s tutelage, he had studied well for the psychiatric side of his specialty—all the banks of records handed down for generations . . . eons maybe. The way the ship had put them in and out of hyb, the passage of real time had been lost.

  That unknown length of time bothered Oakes. And the translations from the records produced too many anomalies. Popular apology for the ship said the confusion arose from Ship’s attempt to rescue as many people as possible. Oakes did not believe this. The translations hinted at too many other explanations. Translation? The ship controlled even that. You asked a computer to render the unintelligible intelligible. But linguists pointed out that among the languages found in Records were some which existed in a free-floating universe of their own—without discernible beginnings nor descendants.

  What happened to the folk of those rich linguistic heritages?

  I don’t even know what happened to us.

  His childhood memories told him things, though. Compared to the people of the Earth from which the ship had plucked them, Shipmen were freaks—all of them, clone and Natural Natal alike. Freaks. The shipside mind had become a place to live very quickly for those who had little space, few private possessions to call their own, for people torn between WorShip and dismay. Shipmen cultivated the skills of personalizing whatever the ship provided them. Functional simplicity did not bear the onus or sense of restriction that arbitrary simplicity carried. Each tool, each bowl and spoon and pair of chopsticks, each cubby bore the signature of the user in some small fashion.

  My cubby is merely a larger manifestation of this.

  The mind, too, was the outpost of privacy, a last place to sit and whittle something sensible out of an insane universe.

  Only the Ceepee was above it all; even while he participated, he was above. Oakes felt that sometimes the people around him wore signs revealing their innermost thoughts.

  And what about this Raja Thomas? Another Ceepee and he studied me carefully . . . much the way I sometimes study others.

  It occurred to Oakes then that he had grown careless. Since old Kingston’s death, he had thought himself immune to the probing study of others, alone in the ability to snare a Shipman’s psyche. It was dangerous for someone else to have that weapon. Just one more reason this Thomas would have to be eliminated. Oakes realized he had been pacing back and forth in his cubby—to the mandala, turn and back to the com-console, once more to the mandala . . . He was confronted by the com-console when this realization struck him. His hand went out to the keys and he brought into the holofocus a scene from Agrarium D-9 out on shiprim. He stared at the bustle of workers, at the filtered blue-violet light which set these peoples apart in a world of their own.

  Yes . . . if independence from the were possible, it would begin with food and the cultivation of life. The axolotl tanks, the clone labs, the biocomputer itself—all were but sophisticated toys for the well fed, the sheltered and clothed.

  “Feed men, then ask of them virtue.”

  That was an old voice from one of his training records. A wise voice, a practical one. The voice of a survivor.

  Oakes continued to stare at the workers. They attended their plants with total attention, occupation and preoccupation linked in a particular reverence which he had sensed only among older Shipmen during WorShip.

  These agrarium workers engaged in a kind of WorShip.

  WorShip!

  Oakes chuckled, amused by the thought of WorShip reduced to tending plants in an agrarium. What a grand sight they must be in the eyes of a god! A pack of sniveling beggars. What kind of a god kept its charges in poverty to hear them beg? Oakes could understand a touch of subjugation, but . . . this? This spoke to something else.

  Someone had to be boss, and the rest have to be reminded of that occasionally. Otherwise, how can anything be organized to work?

  No; he heard the message. It said that the ship’s programs were running out. All of the problems were being dumped on the Ceepee’s shoulders.

  Look at those workers!

  He knew they did not have the time to make the ordering decisions for their own lives. When? After work? Then the body was tired and the mind was dulled into a personal reverie which precluded insightful judgments for the good of all.

  The good of all—that’s my job.

  He freed them from the agony of the decisions which they were not well informed enough, not energetic enough, no
r even intelligent enough to make. It was the Ceepee who gave them that more pleasant gift of drifting time, the time to seek their own ease and recreations.

  Recreation . . . Re-creation.

  The association flitted through his mind. Re-creation was where they were made new again, where all they worked for was made real, where they lived. Looking down at the agrarium workers in the holofocus, Oakes felt like the conductor of an intricate musical score. He reminded himself to remember that analogy for the next general meeting.

  Conductor of a symphony.

  He liked that. It was food for thought. Did the ship have such thoughts? He experienced a sudden feeling of affinity for the ship, his enemy.

  What food are we that we deserve reverence and care? What manna? Could the ship . . .

  His reverie was shattered by the abrupt opening hiss of his cubby hatch.

  Who dared . . .

  The hatch slammed back against the bulkhead and Lewis darted through, sealed the opening behind him and dogged it. He was breathing hard and, instead of his usual self-effacing brown fatigues, he wore a crisp new issue singlesuit of dark green.

  “Lewis!”

  Oakes was overjoyed to see the man . . . and then dismayed. When Lewis turned at the sealed hatch, it was apparent that his face bore signs of quick medical patchwork to cover numerous cuts and bruises. And he was limping.

  Chapter 23

  Judgment prepares you to enter the stream of chance and use your will. You use judgment to modulate will. Thinking is the performance of the moment. You sit in judgment, a convection center for the currents where past prepares a future. It is a balancing act.

  —Kerro Panille, The Avata Argue

  HALI EKEL, moving with her usual sure-footed grace, leaped up one-handed to grasp the lift bar for the ceiling hatch leading to the software storage section of Records. Her pribox, suspended on its shoulder harness, slapped her hip as she jumped. She had discovered less than an hour earlier that Kerro Panille was headed groundside. He had done this without farewell, not even a note . . . or a poem.

  Not that I have any special hold on him!

  She opened the hatch and levered herself up into the service tube.

  He refuses the breeding match with me, he . . .

  She pushed such thoughts aside. But his leaving this way hurt. They had come to maturity in the same crèche section, were the same age (within days) and had remained friends. She had heard his stories of Earthside and he had heard her stories. Hali had no illusions about her own emotions. She thought Kerro the most attractive male shipside.

  Why was he always so distant?

  She crouched to scuttle up the curving oval of the tube. It was only one hundred and sixty centimeters in its longest diameter, eight centimeters short of her height, but she was used to moving around Ship through such little-known shortcuts.

  It’s not as though I were ugly.

  Her shipcloth singlesuit, she knew, revealed an attractive feminine figure. Her skin was dark, eyes brown and she wore her black hair cropped short as all technicians did. All of the med-techs were acutely aware of the sanitary advantages of hair shorn to a bristly cap. Not that she had ever wanted Kerro to clip his hair or beard. She found his style exciting. But he did not have to deal with medical problems.

  She found the Records access hatch locked but she had memorized the code and it took only seconds to work the latch. Ship buzzed at her from the interior sensor-eye as she stooped and slipped through into the storage area.

  “Hali, what are you doing?”

  She stopped in shock. Vocal! Everyone knew the flat, metallic work-voice of Ship, the means of necessary contacts, but this was something different . . . a resonant voice full of emotional overtones. And Ship had used her name!

  “I . . . I want a software reader station. There’s always one open in here.”

  “You are very unconventional, Hali.”

  “Have I done something wrong?” Her strong fingers worked to seal the hatchdogs as she spoke, and she hesitated there, fearful that she had offended Ship.

  But Ship was talking to her! Really talking!

  “Some would think your actions wrong.”

  “I was just in a hurry. No one will tell me why Kerro has gone groundside.”

  “Why did you not think to ask Me?”

  “I was . . .” She glanced along the narrow passage between the rotary bins of software discs toward the reader station. Its keyboard and screen were blank, unoccupied as she had expected.

  Ship would not leave it there. “I am never farther from you than the nearest monitor or com-console.”

  She peered up at the orange bulb of the sensor-eye. It was a baleful orb, a cyclopean pupil with its surrounding metal grid through which Ship’s voice issued. Was Ship angry with her? The measured control of that awful voice filled her with awe.

  “I am not angry with you. I merely suggest that you show more confidence in Me. I am concerned about you.”

  “I’m . . . confident of You, Ship. I WorShip. You know that. I just never thought You would talk to me like this.”

  “As I talk to Kerro Panille? You are jealous, Hali.”

  She was too honest to deny it, but words would not come. She shook her head.

  “Hali, go to the keyboard at the end of this aisle. Depress the red cursor in the upper right-hand corner and I will open a door behind that station.”

  “A . . . door?”

  “You will find a hidden room there with another instruction station which Kerro Panille often used. You may use it now.”

  Wondering and fearful, she obeyed.

  The entire keyboard and its desk swung wide to reveal a low opening. She crouched to enter and found herself in a small room with a vaguely yellow couch. Muted green light came from concealed illuminators at the corners of the room. There was a large console with screen and keyboard, a familiar holofocus circle on the floor. She knew the setting—a small teaching lab, but one she had not even known existed. It was smaller than any other of her experience.

  She heard the hatch seal itself behind her, but she felt unaccountably secure in this privacy. Kerro had used this place. Ship was concerned about her. There was the unmistakable musk of Kerro’s flesh on her sensitive nostrils. She rubbed at the gold ring in her nose. There was a stationary swivel seat at the keyboard. She slipped into it.

  “No, Hali. Stretch out on the couch. You will not need the keyboard here.”

  Ship’s voice came from all around her. She looked for the source of that awesomely-measured voice. There were no sensors visible or monitor-eyes.

  “Do not fear, Hali. This room is within my protective shield. Go to the couch.”

  Hesitantly, she obeyed, The couch was covered with a slick material which felt cold against her neck and hands.

  “Why did you come here looking for an unoccupied terminal, Hali?”

  “I wanted to do something . . . definite.”

  “You love Kerro?”

  “You know I do.”

  “It is your right to try to make him love you, Hali, but not by subterfuge.”

  “I . . . I want him.”

  “So you sought My help?”

  “I’ll take any help I can get.”

  “You have free access to information, Hali, but what you do with it is your own decision. You are making a life, do you understand that?”

  “Making a life?” She could feel her own perspiration against the slick material of the couch.

  “Your own life. It is your own . . . a gift. You should treat it well. Be happy with it.”

  “Would You match Kerro and me again?”

  “Only if that really suits you both.”

  “I’d be happier with Kerro. And Kerro’s gone groundside!” It came out almost a wail and she felt tears at the edges of her eyes.

  “Can you not go groundside?”

  “You know I have Shipside medical responsibilities!”

  “Yes, the Shipmen must be kept healthy
that Colony may eat. But I ask about your own decision.”

  “They need me here!”

  “Hali, I ask that you trust Me.”

  She blinked at the empty screen across from the couch. What a strange statement! How could one not trust Ship? All people were creatures of Ship. The invocations of WorShip marked their lives forever. But she felt that some personal response was being demanded and she gave it.

  “Of course I trust You.”

  “I find that gratifying, Hali. Because of that, I have something just for you. You are to learn about a man called Yaisuah. The name is in an ancient language which was known as Aramaic. Yaisuah is a form of the name Joshua and it is where Jesus Lewis gets his name.”

  In all of this, Hali was most startled by Ship’s pronunciation of Jesus. Anyone shipside referring to Jesus Lewis called him Hesoos. But Ship’s diction could not be questioned: “Geezus.”

  She stared at the screen. The lab lights suddenly flared to bright, glinting off the metal surfaces. She blinked and sneezed.

  Maybe it isn’t Ship talking to me, she thought. What if it’s someone playing a joke? This was a frightening thought. Who would dare such a prank?

  “I am here, Hali Ekel. It is Ship speaking to you.”

  “Do You . . . read my mind?”

  “Reserve that question, Hali, but know that I can read your reactions. Do you not read the reactions of those around you?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Do not fear. I mean you no harm.”

  She tried to swallow, recalling what Ship had said she could learn. Yaisuah?

  “Who is this . . . this Yaisuah?”

  “To learn that, you must travel.”

  “Travel? Wha . . . what . . .” She cleared her throat and forced herself to be calm. Kerro had used this lab often and had never shown fear of Ship. “Where will I travel?”

  “Not where, but when. You will stroll into that which you humans call Time.”