The Jesus Incident Read online

  “Yes. You will.”

  Chapter 15

  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

  Chapter 16

  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 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 were 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 unit—a 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.

  “The more we know, the stronger we are in our choices.”

  Kingston’s voice came to him from his training days.

  What a raw but marvelously trainable bit of human material I was!

  Kingston had been almost a master of control. Almost. And control was a function of strong choices. When it came down to it, Kingston had refused certain choices.

  I do not refuse.

  Choices resulted from information. He had learned that lesson well.

  But how can you know the result of every choice?

  Oakes shook his head and resumed his wandering. The sense that he walked into new dangers was an acute pressure in his breast. But there was no stopping this short of death. His feet turned him down a passageway which he saw led to an agrarium. There was the peculiar green smell of the passage even if he had not recognized the wide cart tracks leading through an automatic lock ahead. He stepped across the track-dump, through the lock and found himself in a dimly lighted and frighteningly unbounded space.

  It was nigh
tside here too. Even plants required that diurnal pulse. An internally illuminated yellow wall map at his left showed him his location and the best access routes out. It also showed this agrarium. The largest extrusions of the ship were monopolized for food production, but he had not entered one of these complexes for years—not since provisioning that first attempted colony on Pandora’s Black Dragon continent. Long before they had gained their Colony foothold on the Egg.

  Kingston’s first big mistake.

  Oakes stepped closer to the map, aware of distant movement far out in the agrarium but more interested in this symbol. He was not prepared for what the map told him. The agrarium he had entered was almost as large as the central core of the ship. It spread out, fanlike, from roots in the original hull. Ship and Colony maintenance figures he had been initialing took on a new reality here. And the map’s explanatory footnote was an exclamation point.

  As Oakes looked on, the nightside shift of agrarium workers broke for their mid-meal WorShip. They did so as one and no perceptible signal passed among them, no reluctance of any sort evident. They moved together into the dim blue light of the WorShip alcove.

  They believe! Oakes thought, they really believe that the ship is God!

  As the shift supervisor led them in their litany, Oakes found himself washed in a sadness that came so suddenly and so hard that it held him on the verge of tears. He realized then that he envied them their faith, their small comfort of the ritual that was so much bother to him.

  The supervisor, a squat, bowlegged man with dirt on his hands and knees, led them in the Chant of Sure Growth.

  “Behold the bed of dirt,” and he dropped a pinch of dirt to the floor.

  “And the seed asleep in it,” the crew responded, lifting their bowls and setting them down.

  “Behold water,” he dribbled some from his glass.

  “And the waking it brings,” they raised their glasses.

  “Behold light,” he lifted his face to the U-V racks overhead.

  “And the life it opens.” They spread their hands, palms up.

  “Behold the fullness of the grain, the thickness of the leaf,” he spooned from the communal pot, into the bowl to his left.

  “And the seed of life it plants in us,” each worker spooned a helping for the Shipman on his left.

  “Behold Ship and the food Ship gives.” The supervisor sat down.

  “And the joy of company to share it,” they said, and sat to eat.

  Oakes turned away unnoticed.

  The joy of company! he snorted to himself. If there were less company and more food there would be a damn sight more joy!

  He moved along the rim of the ship’s outer hull then, raw space only a few meters away. His mind was racing.

  That agrarium could feed thirty thousand people. Instead of counting people, they could count agraria and add the support figures! He knew that groundside shipments supplied eighty percent of Colony stores. Here was a key to real numbers! Why had they not seen that before?

  Even as he experienced elation at this thought, Oakes knew the ship would frustrate such an attempt. The damned ship did not want them to know how many people it supported. It blocked their attempts to count; it hid hyb complexes and confused you with meaningless corridors.

  It brought a nameless Ceepee out of hyb and announced a new groundside project outside of Shipman control.

  Well . . . accidents could happen groundside, too. And even a precious Ceepee from Ship could walk into a fatality.

  What difference did it make? The new Ceepee was probably a clone. Oakes had seen the earliest records: Clones were property. Somebody who signed with the initials MH had said it. And there was an aura of power around that statement. Clones were property.

  Chapter 17

  A word of caution about our genetic programs. When we breed for speed, we breed as well for very specific kinds of decisions. Speed chops out, edits out certain kinds of reflexive choices and long-term considerations. Everything becomes the decision of the moment.

  —Jesus Lewis, The E-Clone Directive

  WHEN TEMPORARY seals had closed off the breaks in the perimeter of the Redoubt, Lewis directed the careful dayside cleanup of the interior. It was a long frustrating job, and they worked through the night with emergency lighting. The entire Redoubt stank of chlorine, so strong in some areas that they were forced to wear filters and portable breathing equipment.

  In the morning, they drenched the courtyard with chlorine several times before daring to touch the corpses there. Even then, they moved the bodies with hastily improvised claw grabs attached to mobile equipment.

  Chlorine everywhere, and the inevitable burns of both flesh and fabrics made it an even slower task.

  At Sub-level Four, they came on a welcome surprise: twenty-nine clones and five more of the Redoubt crew sealed in an unlighted storage chamber—all of them hungry, thirsty and terrified. The chamber contained spare charges for the gushguns, permitting Lewis to add fire to the chlorine for a final sterilization sweep.

  Lewis was surprised to find that the E-clones had not attacked the five crewmen. Then he learned that the crewmen had sounded the alarm at the Nerve Runner attack and herded the clones into the chamber. A sense of fellowship between E-clones and normals had developed during the long confinement. Lewis noted it as they emerged—clones helping normals and vice versa. Very dangerous, that. He gave sharp orders to separate them, clones to the more dangerous task of courtyard cleanup, normals to their regular supervisory tasks.

  One observation particularly annoyed him: the sight of a trusted guard, Pattersing, being solicitous over a delicate female E-clone of the new mix. She was tall and emaciated by human standards, a light brown skin and large eyes. Her whole series was flawed by fragile bones, and Lewis had almost decided to abandon it—except that now she was one of his few remaining examples of the genetic mix between human and Pandoran.

  Perhaps Pattersing was merely being careful with valuable material. He must know how fragile the bones of this series were. Yes . . . that could be it.

  Lewis was pleased to note other more successful examples of the new E-clones, the breed incorporating native genetic material. There would be no need to go back through that long, slow and costly development program. The disaster here at the Redoubt had not been total.

  A mood of euphoria came over him as it became increasingly clear that they had sterilized the Redoubt, and that they had a new weapon effective against Runners.

  “At least we’ve solved the food problem,” he told Illuyank.

  Illuyank gave him a strange, measuring look which Lewis did not like.

  “Counting E-clones, there are only fifty of us left,” Illuyank said.

  “But we’ve saved the heart of the project,” Lewis said.

  Too late, Lewis realized he had said too much to this perceptive aide. Illuyank had proved himself capable of making correct deductions on limited information.

  Well . . . Illuyank was going Colonyside. Murdoch would see to things there.

  “We’ll need replacements, lots of them,” Illuyank persisted.

  “I expect us to be stronger because of this testing “ Lewis said.

  Lewis diverted Illuyank then by ordering a complete inspection of the Redoubt—every corner, every bay, no space missed—chlorine and/or fire everywhere. They moved slowly through the passages and across the open areas, their progress marked by the hissing flames of the gushguns and great splashing washes of chlorine. Lewis ordered a final purging with chlorine gas, opening all valves, all hatches within the Redoubt. They then made another inspection with sensor eyes.

  Clean. When it was finished, they pumped the chlorine residue onto the surrounding ground, following it by waves of gas which swept around the rocks and hillocks where the clones had huddled when he had ordered them thrust from the safety of the Redoubt.

  Inevitably, some of the chlorine spilled over the cliff into the sea. It ignited a violent, churning retreat by the halluci
nogenic kelp in the cove. A pack of hylighters came to the excitement. They floated at a safe distance over the surrounding hills, spectators, while Lewis and his meager force sterilized the area around the Redoubt.

  Later, Lewis went grinding out of a lock in an armored vehicle to direct the outside sterilizing team, taking Illuyank as his driver. At one point, Lewis ordered Illuyank to stop and shut down while they studied the arc of hylighters in the distance. It was a scene framed by the thick barrier of plazglass in the crawler. The giant orange bags floated in disconcerting silence, anchored by long black tendrils twining in the rocks of the hills. They were a perimeter of mystery about three kilometers distant and they filled Lewis with angry fear.

  “We’ll have to eliminate those damned things!” he said. “They’re floating bombs!”

  “And maybe more,” Illuyank said.

  One of the surviving clones took this moment to drop his chlorine backpack. The clone turned to face the arc of hylighters, spread his stumpy arms wide and called out in a voice heard through the area: “Avata! Avata! Avata!”

  “Get that damned fool out of here and into confinement!” Lewis ordered. Illuyank relayed the order over their vehicle’s external speakers. Two supervisors scrambled to obey.

  Lewis watched in grumbling impatience. Avata—that had been the other cry of the clone revolt. Avata, and, We’re hungry now!

  If the particular clone out there had not been one of the precious new ones with the genetic mix, Lewis knew he would have ordered the stupid creature killed immediately.

  New security precautions would have to be put into effect, he told himself. Tougher rules about clone behavior. Oakes would have to be brought into these decisions. They would have to raid Colony, and Ship, for replacements—more clones, more staff, more guards, more supervisors. Murdoch and the Scream Room were going to be very busy for a time. Very busy. Well, gardening had always been a brutal business: root out the weeds, kill off the predatory grazers, destroy the pests. Lab One’s special-purpose area was correctly labeled: The Garden. Producing flowers for Pandora.