She could see the rationale of the arguments. Kelp interfered with the aquaculture project and food was short. The argument for extermination, though, she saw as one of dangerous ignorance.
We need more information.
Almost casually, she gunned out a Hooded Dasher, noting that it was the first one seen anywhere near the Peak in twenty diurns.
The kelp must be studied. We must learn.
What did they know about the kelp after all the lives spent and all the frustrating dives?
Fireflies in the night of the sea, someone called them.
The kelp extruded nodules from its giant stems and those nodules glowed with a million firecolors. She agreed with all the others who had seen it and lived to report: the pulsing and glowing nodules were a hypnotic symphony, and the lights might, just might, be a form of communication. There did seem to be purpose in the glowing play of light, discernible patterns.
The kelp covered the planet’s seas except for the random patches of open water called “lagoons.” In a planet with only two major land masses, this represented a gigantic spread of life.
Once again, she returned to that unavoidable argument: what did they really know about the kelp?
It’s conscious, it thinks.
She was certain of it. The challenge of this problem engaged her imagination with a totality she had never dreamed possible. It had caught others as well. It was polarizing Colony. And the extermination arguments could not be thrown out.
Can you eat the kelp?
You could not eat it. The stuff was disorienting, probably hallucinogenic. The source of this effect had thus far defied Colony chemists to isolate it.
It had this in common with the hylighters. The illusive substance had been dubbed “fraggo” because “it fragments the psyche.”
That alone said to Waela that the kelp should be preserved for study.
Once more, she was forced to kill a Hooded Dasher. The long black shape went tumbling down the Peak, green blood gushing from it.
That’s too many of them, she thought.
Warily, she examined her surroundings, probing for movement below her in the rocks. Nothing. She was still scanning the area this way moments later when her relief stepped out of the hatch. She recognized him, Scott Burik, an LTA fitter on the nightside shift. He was a small man with prematurely aged features, but he was as quick as any other Colonist, already scanning the area around them. She told him about the two Dashers as she passed over the ‘burner.
“Good rest,” he said.
She slipped into the hatch, heard it slam behind her then slid down to debriefing where she turned in her kill count and made her assessment of COA—Current Outside Activity.
The debriefing room was windowless with pale yellow walls and a single comdesk. Ary Arenson, a blond, gray-eyed man who never seemed to change expression, sat behind it. Everyone said he worked for Jesus Lewis, a rumor which predisposed Waela to walk and talk softly with him. Odd things happened to people who displeased Lewis.
She was tired now with a fatigue which watch always produced, a drained feeling, as though she were victim of a psychic Spinneret. The routine questions bored her.
“Yes, the Nerve Runner area appears sterilized.”
At the end of it, Arenson handed her a small square of brown Colony paper with a message which restored her energy. She read it at a glance:
“Report to Main Hangar for new kelp research team assignment.”
Arenson was glancing at his Comscreen as she read the note and now he changed expression, a wry smile. “Your replacement . . .” He pointed upward toward the Peak with his chin. “. . . just got it. A Dasher chewed his guts out. Stand by a blink. They’re sending another replacement.”
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 hi
s 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.