The Jesus Incident (Destination: Void #2)

In that hour when the Egyptians died in the Red Sea the ministers wished to sing the song of praise before the Holy One, but he rebuked them saying: My handiwork is drowning in the sea; would you utter a song before me in honor of that?

- The Sanhedrin, Shiprecords

OAKES FELT his heart pumping too fast. Perspiration drenched his green singlesuit. His feet hurt. Still, he staggered away from the Redoubt.

Legata, how could you?

When he could move no farther, he sank to the sand, venturing his first look back. They were not pursuing.

They might've killed me!

Black char fringed the distant hole in the web where the mob had burned a passage to eject him. He stared at the hole. His chest pained him with each breath. Slowly he grew conscious of sounds other than his own gasping. The ground under his hand was trembling with some distant thunder. Waves!

Oakes looked toward the sea. The tide was higher than he had ever seen it. A white line marked the entire sea horizon. Gigantic waves crashed against the headland where they had built the shuttle facility. Even as he watched, a great wedge of headland slid into the waves, opening a jagged gap in the shuttle hangar. He staggered to his feet, stared. Black objects moved in the white foam of the crashing sea. Rocks! There were rocks larger than a man in that surf. Even as he watched, the garden - his precious garden - sloughed away.

Mewling cries like near-forgotten seabirds insinuated themselves across the spume. He looked up and turned around once, completely. Hylighters? Gone. Not one orange bag danced in the sky or hovered above the cliffs.

The cries continued.

Oakes looked toward the cliffs where Thomas had begun the attack. Bodies. The battleground lay there with pieces of people twitching in the harsh glare of the suns. Figures moved among the wounded, lifting some on litters and carrying them toward the cliffs.

Once more, Oakes stared back at the Redoubt. Certain death lay there. He turned toward the battleground and for the first time, saw the demons. A shudder convulsed him. The demons were a silent mob sitting in a wide arc beyond the battleground. A single human in a white garment stood in their midst. Oakes recognized the poet, Kerro Panille.

Those cries! It was the wounded and the dying.

Oakes staggered toward Panille. What did it matter? Send your demons against me, poet!

Here was the fringe of the battlegroun.... mutilated bodies. Oakes stepped on a dismembered hand. It cupped his boot in reflex, and he leaped away from it. He wanted to run back to the Redoubt, back to Legata. His body refused. He could only shuffle on toward Panille, who stood tall amidst the demons.

Why do they just sit there?

Oakes stopped only a few meters from Panille.

"You." Oakes was surprised by the flat sound of his own voice.

"Yes."

The poet's voice came clearly through the pellet in Oakes' neck and there was no movement of Panille's mouth. "You're finished, Oakes."

"You! You're the one who wrecked things for me! You're the reason Lewis and I couldn'...."

"Nothing is wrecked, Oakes. Life here has just begun."

Panille's lips did not move, yet that voice rang through the neck pellet!

"You're not speakin.... but I can hear you."

"That is Avata's gift to us."

"Avata?"

"The hylighters and the kelp - they are one: Avata."

"So this planet's really beaten us."

"Not the planet, nor Legata."

"The ship then. It's hounded me down at last."

"Not Ship."

"Lewis! He did this. He and Legata!"

Oakes felt his tears begin. Lewis and Legata. He was unable to meet Panille's steady gaze. Lewis and Legata. A Flatwing moved away from the poet, crawled onto the toe of Oakes' boot, rested its bristling head there. Oakes stared down at it in horror, unable to command his own muscles. Frustration forced words from him.

"Tell me who did this!"

"You know who did it."

An anguished cry was wrenched from Oakes' throat: "Noooooooooooo!"

"You did it, Oakes. You and Thomas."

"I didn't!"

Panille merely stared at him.

"Tell your demons to kill me then!" Oakes hurled the words at Panille.

"They are not my demons."

"Why don't they attack?"

"Because I show them a world which some would call illusion. No creature attacks what it sees, only what it thinks it sees."

Oakes stared at Panille in horror. Illusion. This poet could fill my mind with illusion?

"The ship taught you how to do that!"

"Avata taught me."

A feeling of hysteria crept into Oakes. "And your Avata's done fo.... all gone!"

"Not before teaching us the universe of alternate realities. And Avata lives in us yet."

Oakes stared down at the deadly Flatwing on his boot. "What does it see?" He pointed a shaking finger at the creature.

"Something of its own life."

A crash shook the ground all around them and the Flatwing crept off his boot to squat quietly on the sand. Oakes looked toward the source of the sound, saw that another coveside section of the Redoubt had slipped away into the surf. The white line of the horizon had moved right up to the land - thunderous waves. The cove amplified the waves, condensing them and sending them high against the shore. Oakes stared in dumb horror as another section of the Redoubt ripped away and fell from view.

"I don't care what you say," Oakes muttered. "The planet's beaten us."

"If that's what you want."

"What I want!" Oakes rounded on him in rage, broke off at the approach of two E-clones carrying a wounded man on a litter. Hali Ekel, her nose ring glittering in the brilliant light, walked alongside. Her pribox was hooked to the patient. Oakes looked down at the litter and recognized the man there: Raja Thomas. The litter carriers stared questioningly at Oakes as they lowered Thomas to the sand.

"How bad?" Oakes directed the question at Hali.

Panille answered: "He is dying. A chest wound and a flash burn."

A chuckle forced its way from Oakes. He gulped it back. "So he won't survive me! At last - no Ceepee for the damned ship!"

Hali knelt beside Thomas and looked up at Panille. "He won't survive being carried to the shelter. He wanted me to bring him to you."

"I know."

Panille stared down at the dying man. Awareness of Thomas lay there in Panille's mind, linked to Vata, to Waela, to most of the E-clones whose genetic mix traced itself back to the Avata. All of it was there, the complete pattern. How profound of Ship to take the Raja Flattery of Ship's own origins and make a personal nemesis out of the man.

Thomas moved his lips, a whisper only, but even Oakes heard him: "I studied the question so lon.... I hid the problem."

"What's he talking about?" Oakes demanded.

"He's talking to Ship," Panille said, and this time his lips moved, his voice was the remembered voice of the poet, full of pouncing awareness.

A series of gasps wracked the dying man, then: "I played the game so lon.... so long. Panille knows. It's the roc.... the child. Yes! I know! The child!"

Oakes snorted. "He just thinks he's talking to the ship."

"You still refuse to live up to the best of your own humanity," Panille said, looking at Oakes.

"Wha.... what do you mean?"

"That's all Ship ever asked of us," Panille said. "That's all WorShip was meant to be: find our own humanity and live up to it."

"Words! Just words!" Oakes felt that he was being crowded into a corner. Everything here was illusion!

"Then throw out the words and ask yourself what you're doing here," Panille said.

"I'm just trying to survive. What else is there to do?"

"But you've never really been alive."

"I'v.... I'v...." Oakes fell silent as Panille lifted an arm.

One by one, the demons moved off at an angle away from the cliffside shelter. The first of them were at the cliff and moving up toward the high plains before Panille spoke.

"I release them as Avata released them. Still they do what they do."

Oakes looked at the departing demons. "What will they do?"

"When they are hungry, they will eat."

It was too much for Oakes. "What do you want of me?"

"You're a doctor," Panille said. "There are wounded."

Oakes pointed at Thomas. "You'd have me save him?"

"Only Ship or all of us together can save him," Panille said.

"Ship!"

"Or all of us together - it's the same thing."

"Lies! You're lying!"

"The idea of saving has many meanings," Panille said. "There's comfort in the intelligence and potential immortality of our own kind."

Oakes backed one step away from Panille. "Lying words! This planet's going to kill us all."

"What are your senses for if not to be believed?" Panille asked. He gestured around him, met Hali's rapt gaze. "We survive. We repair this planet. Avata, who kept this place in balance, is gone. But Vata is their daughter as much as mine."

"Vata?" Oakes spat the word. "What's this new nonsense?"

"Waela's child has been born. She is called Vata. She carries the true seed of Avata placed there at her conception."

"Another monster." Oakes shook his head.

"Not at all. A beautiful child, as human in her form as her mother. Here, I will show you."

Images began to play in Oakes' awareness, howling through his mind on the carrier wave of the pellet in his neck. He wanted to tear the thing from his flesh. Oakes staggered backward, thrusting at Panille with one hand while the other hand clutched at the imbedded pellet.

"Noooo.... n.... no!"

The images would not stop. Oakes fell backward to the sand and, as he fell, he heard the voice of Ship. He knew it was Ship. There was no escaping that presence as it expanded within him, not needing the pellet, not needing any device.

You see, Boss? You never needed a covenant of inflexible words. All you ever needed was self-respect, the self-worship which contains all of humankind and all the things that matter for your mutual immortality.

Pressing his hands to his head, Oakes rolled to his knees. He stared down at the sand, his eyes blurred by tears.

Slowly, Ship withdrew. It was a hot knife being pulled from Oakes' brain. It left an aching void. He lowered his hands and heard the crunch of many feet on sand. Turning, he saw a long line of people - E-clones and Naturals - approaching from the Redoubt. Legata and Lewis led them. Beyond the refugees, Oakes saw smoke drifting on a sea wind, billowing from the wreckage of the Redoubt. His precious sanctuary was being destroyed! Everything! All of Oakes' rage returned as he stumbled to his feet.

Damn You, Ship! You tricked me!

Oakes shook a fist at Legata. "You bitch, Legata!"

Lewis and Legata stopped about ten paces from Oakes. The refugees stopped behind them except for one tall E-clone female with fine features on a bulbous head. She stepped in front of Legata.

"You do not speak to her that way!" the E-clone shouted. "We have chosen her Ceepee. You do not speak to our Ceepee that way."

"That's crazy!" Oakes screamed it. "How can deformed monstrosities choose a Ceepee?"

The E-clone took a step toward Oakes, another. "Whom do you call monstrosity? What if we breed and breed here, and your kind becomes the freak?"

Oakes stared at her in horror.

"You ain't so pretty, you know," she said. "I look at me every day and every day I don't look so bad. But every day you get uglier and uglier. What if I don't think it's right for any more uglies to be born?"

Legata stepped forward and touched the woman's arm. "Enough."

As Legata spoke, a dark shadow flowed over them. They looked up to see Ship passing between Rega and the plain - far lower than Ship had ever been before. The odd protrusions and wing shapes of the agraria were clearly visible. The shadow moved with an awesome slowness, an eternity in the passage. When the shadow touched him, Lewis began to laugh. All who heard him turned toward Lewis and most of them were in time to see him vanish. He became a white blur which dissolved and left nothing where he had stood.

"Why, Ship?" Panille spoke it aloud, startled by the disappearance.

They all heard the answer, a joyous clamor in their heads.

You needed a real devil, Jesus Lewis, the other half of Me. The real devil always goes with Me. Thomas remained his own devi...special kind of demon, a goad. And now he knows. Humans, you have won your reprieve. You know how to worship.

In that instant, they all saw Ship's intentions toward Thomas, the issue hanging on a fragile balance.

Thomas raised himself on one elbow, resisting Hali's attempts to prevent it. "No, Ship," he muttered. "Not back to hyb. I'm home."

Legata intruded. "Let him go, Ship."

If you can save him, he is yours.

Ship's challenge rang through them.

Panille held fast to the awareness of Thomas and sent the call to Vata back in the medical shelter at the cliffs: Vata! Help us!

The old presence of Avata crept into his mind - attenuated but with nothing omitted. Vata was all of what had bee.... and more. Panille felt his daughter as the repository of those long eons when Avata had lived and learned, but welded now to everything human. She reached beyond the plain into the crew remaining aboard Ship, even into the dormant ones of hyb, giving them the new worship and weaving them into a single organism. They came together an awareness at a tim.... even Oakes. And when they were united, they moved threadlike into the flesh of Thomas, closing his wounds, repairing cells.

It was done and they left Thomas asleep on the litter.

Panille took a trembling breath and stared around him at the people on the plain. In the healing of Thomas, all of the wounded had been restored. There were bodies of the dead, but not a single maimed among the living. All stood silent under the shadow presence which slid across the plain.

Legata.

It was Ship again.

Still shaken by the experience of the sharing, she spoke aloud in a trembling voice. "Yes, Ship?"

You have taken My best friend, Legata. Oakes is Mine now, a fair exchange. Where I go, I will need him more than you. She looked up at the Rega-haloed outline. "You're leaving?"

I travel the Ox gate, Legata. The Ox gate - My childhood and My eternity.

She thought about the Ox gate, the scrambled repository in which she had found the truth about Oakes' origins, the near-mystical computer where hidden things emerged. As she thought this, she felt her own consciousness become one with Ship's records. And because they all were linked through Vata, all on the plain shared this.

Ship's words and images rode over this flooding awareness.

Infinite imagination has its infinite horrors, too. Poets turn their nightmares to words. With gods, dreams take on substance and lives of their own. Such things cannot be scratched out. The Ox gate, my morality factor. My psyche moves both ways. If it moves in symbols, it moves through the Ox. Some of my symbols walk and breathe - as it was with Jesus Lewis. Others sing in the words of poets.

Oakes fell to his knees, pleading. "Don't take me, Ship. I don't want to go."

But I need you, Morgan Oakes. I no longer have Thomas, my personal demon, and I need you.

Ship's shadow began to pass beyond the people on the plain. As light touched Oakes, he vanishe...white blur, then an empty place on the sand.

Legata stood there, looking at where Oakes had knelt, and she could not keep the tears from coursing down her cheeks.

Hali stood up beside the litter where her patient slept. She felt emptied and angry, robbed of her role. She stared up at the passing immensity of Ship.

Is this what I was supposed to let them know? she demanded.

Show them, Ekel!

Still angry, she played the images of the crucifixion, then: "Ship! Is that how it was with Yaisuah? Was he just another filament from one of Your dreams?"

Does it matter, Ekel? Is the lesson diminished because the history that moves you is fiction? The incident which you just shared is too important to be debated on the level of fact or fancy. Yaisuah lived. He was an ultimate essence of goodness. How could you learn such an essence without experiencing its opposite?

The shadow was gone from them, flowing away over the cliffs, carrying off the bits of humanity remaining up there - the Natali, the hyb attendants, the hydroponics worker....

"Ship is leaving us," Legata said. She crossed to Panille's side.

In the midst of her words, she felt the blaze of awareness which Ship had shared with them - Shiprecords, all of the pasts carried into the smallest cell on the plain.

"We've been weaned," Panille said. "We have to go it alone now."

Hali joined them. "No more shiptits."

"But alone has lost all of its old meanings," Panille said.

"Is this what the expansion of the universe is all about?" Legata asked. "The fleeing of the gods from their own handiwork?"

"Gods ask other questions," Panille said. He looked down at Hali. "You were midwife to us all when you brought us Vata and the Hill of Skulls."

"Vata brought herself," Hali said. She put a hand in Panille's. "Some things don't need a midwife."

"Or a Ceepee," Legata said. She grinned. "But it's a role we all know now." She shook her head. "I have only one question - What will Ship do with those people up there?"

She pointed upward at the vanishing ship.

They all heard it then, Ship's presence filling the people on the plain, then fading, but never to be forgotten.

Surprise Me, Holy Void!