The Jesus Incident

I like seeing things fall into place.



- Kerro Panille, The Notebooks



NIGHTSIDE AFTER nightside, always nightside! The horror! Legata awoke on the deck in a shipside cubby, her hammock hanging around her like the torn shreds of her nightmares. Sweat and fear chilled her in the dark.



Slowly, reason returned. She felt the remnants of the hammock on and under her, the cold of the deck against her palms.



I'm shipside.



She had come up earlier at Oakes' command to check out reports that Ferry was too far gone on alcohol to be effective. It had shocked her, getting off the shuttle in a familiar shipbay, to see how few Shipmen formed the arrival crew. Staffing raids by Lewis were decimating the shipside work force to replace losses at the Redoubt.



How many people did they really lose?



She tugged pieces of hammock out from under her, hurled them into the darkness.



Ferry, warned of her approach, had gulped too many 'wakepills and had been a jittering mess when she found him. She had dressed him down in fury which had surprised even her, and had removed the last of his Colony liquor supply.



At least, she hoped it was the last of it.



I have to do something about these nightmares.



Some details remained unclear upon waking, but she knew she dreamed of blood and her most tender flesh peeled back by dozens of needlenosed instruments - all of this backed by the feverish glitter of Morgan Oakes' smile. Oakes' thick-lipped smil.... but Murdoch's eyes. An.... somewhere in the backgroun.... Lewis laughing.



She found pieces of her bedding, an intact cushion, pulled them together and, still in the dark, dragged herself across the cubby to a mat. Only once before had she felt this beaten, this empt.... this helpless.



The Scream Room.



It was why she had run th...to regain some pieces of her self-respect. Self-respect regaine.... but no important memories.



What happened in that room? What kind of a game is Morgan playing? Why did he send me in there?



She remembered the preliminaries. Innocent enough. Oakes had given her a few drinks, left her with a holo canister which detailed as he put it, "a few of the treats available to those who can afford them."



He had begun by showing her technical summaries and graphs of the work Lewis was doing on E-clones. The drinks fuzzed her thinking, but most of it remained in memory.



"Lewis has made remarkable modifications in the cloning system," Oakes said.



Remarkable, indeed.



Lewis could grow a clone to age thirty annos in ten diurns.



He could engineer clones for special functions.



It had occurred to her as she watched the holo display of Lab One's clones that she could begin playing this game with Oakes, but that they must switch to her rules.



I didn't even know the game!



When Oakes had suggested she inspect Lab One, she had not suspected that he wanted her t.... that she was expected t....



Nothing is sacred!



The thought kept returning. She breathed in a deep lungful of the sweetly filtered shipside air. How different it was from ground-side. She knew she was wasting time. There were things she must remember before returning to Oakes.



He believes he has nothing to fear from me now. I had better keep it that way.



His powers were not diminished. But after all he had done to her, after the Scream room, she still felt that she was the only person who knew him well enough to beat him. There would be no opposition from him as long as he did not consider her a threa.... or a challenge.



As long as he wants my bod.... and now that I know the game we're really playin....



Anxiety began to build in her - the nightmare.... the lost memorie....



She pounded the deck beside her with both fists. The anxiety rose in her like some thing, like a bastard child got by rape. The unresolved emotions in her were a place, immediately demanding, and she felt that she looked down upon her present upset as the dying were said to look down upon themselves from some high and unresolved corner.



Her hands pained her where she had pounded the deck.



A Chaplain is supposed to ease anxiety, not cause it!



Chaplain - she had searched the word out once and the readout had surprised her: Keeper of the sacred relics.



What were Ship's sacred relics?



Humans?



Slowly, she forced herself to relax in the darkness of the ship-side cubby, but her mind remained a blur of unanswered questions, and once more she caught herself gasping for breath. In sudden dizziness, she saw a memory image of herself touching a dial in the Scream Room. Just a glimpse, and across from her, that twisted clone fac.... those wide terrified eye....



Did I turn that dial? I have to know!



She hugged her knees to keep herself from pounding the deck.



Did I turn that dial myself or did Oakes force my hand?



She held her breath, knowing that she had to remember. She had to. And she knew she would have to destroy Oakes, that she was the only one who could do it.



Even Ship cannot destroy him. She peered up into the cubby's darkness. You can't do it, can You, Ship?



She felt that someone else's thoughts spun in her head - dizziness, dizziness. She shook her head sharply to rid it of the feeling.



Nothin.... i.... sacred.



Violent trembling shook her body.



The Scream Room. She had to remember what happened there! She would have to know her own limits before she went after someone else's limits. She had to face the blank places in her mind or Oakes would continue to own her - not her body, but her most private self. He would own her.



Her hands clenched into fists against her legs. Her palms ached from the bite of her own fingernails.



I must remembe.... I mus....



There was one fogged memory and she clung to it: Jessup kneading her maimed flesh with oddly gentle fingers whose deformity she had not even minded.



That memory was real.



She forced herself to open her clenched fists, relax her legs. She sat cross-legged on the mat, sweating and nude. One hand went out in the dark and groped for one of the bottles of wine she had taken from Ferry. Her hands were shaking so badly she was afraid she would crush a glass - besides, that would require her to stand, turn on lights, open a locker. She uncapped the raw wine and drank straight from the bottle.



Presently, a semblance of calm restored, she found the light control, tuned it for a low yellow, and returned to the bottle she had left on the deck. More of that? She had visions of herself reduced to Ferry's condition. No! There had to be a better way. She recapped the bottle, stuffed it in a locker, and sat on her mat, feet stretched out straight.



What to do?



Her gaze fell on her reflection in the mirror beside her hatch and what she saw made her groan. She liked her body - the suppleness, the firmness. To men, it appeared intensely female and soft, an illusion attributable to large breasts. But even her breasts were firm to touch, toned by a rigorous physical program which few besides herself and Oakes knew she enjoyed. Now, though, she saw red marks across her stomach, down one arm - the beginnings of softness down her thighs where there were more red streaks from her nightmare struggle with the hammock.



She held up her left hand and stared at it. The fingers ached. In that slender arm and those fingers she held the strength of five men. She had discovered this early and, afraid it would mean a life of body-work instead of mind-work, she had concealed this genetic gift. But she could not hide from what the mirror showed - the shambles she had made of her hammock and the marks on her flesh.



What to do?



She refused to go back to the wine. Sweat was beginning to cool on her skin. Her thick hair was stuck to her face and neck - damp dark at the ends. She no longer felt perspiration trickle down the small of her back.



Her green eyes stared back at her from the mirror and pried into her like Oakes' spying sensors.



Damn him!



She closed her eyes in a grimace. There had to be some way of breaking through the memory barrier! What happened to me?



Scream Room.



She spoke it aloud: "Scream Room."



Jessup's terrible fingers kneaded her neck, her back.



Abruptly, images began to rush through her mind like a storm. Bits and shards at first: a glimpse of a face here, an agony there. Writhings and couplings. There was a rainbow of sad clones mounting each other, always sweating, their freak organs slick, wavin....



I took none of them!



Her terrible strength had stunned the clones.



Blood! She saw blood on her arms.



But I did not join them! None of it! She knew it. And because she knew it, there was a new strength in her. An objectifying freedom glared from her eyes when she stared once more into the mirror.



The holorecord!



Oakes had offered to play it for her, amusement in his eye.... and something else ther.... a fearful watching. She had refused.



"No-o-o. Perhaps some other time."



And her stomach was a knot of terror.



The wine or the holorecord? There was a certainty in her that it had to be one or the other, and she experienced an abrupt wave of sympathy for old Win Ferry.



What did they do to that poor old bastard?



There was no doubt about her choice. It had to be the holo, not the bottle. She had to see herself as she had appeared to Oakes. This was the horror required of her before the nightmares could be stopped.



Before Oakes and Lewis and Murdoch could be stopped.



If they're stopped, who keeps Colony alive?



Shipmen had tried four times - four leaders, four failures. "Failure" was the Shipman euphemism for the reality - revolt, slaughter, suicide, massacre. The records were there for a good Search Technician to winkle out.



The present Colony had suffered setbacks, true, but nothing even close to total wipeout - no retreat en masse back to the insulated corridors of Ship. Pandora had become no friendlier. Ship-men had grown wiser. And the wisest of all, beyond question, were Oakes and Lewis.



Ship only knew how many Shipmen crawled the surface of Pandora or the myriad passageways of Ship. And all survived, to whatever degree of comfort or discomfort, because of Oakes and the efficiency of his managemen.... and because Lewis knew how to carry out orders with brutal efficiency. To her knowledge, no other Ceepee team could make such a claim in all the histories of Ship.



Ship will care for us.



She felt Ship around her now, the faint hummings and susurrations of nightside.



But Ship had never agreed to care for Shipmen.



At one time, she had been interested in Shipman's place in the Ship scheme of things. She had pored through a confusing lot of histories seeking some agreement, a covenant, some evidence of even rudimentary formal relationship between the people and their god.



Ship who is God.



All agreements save one had been made by Ceepees on behalf of Ship. Back in the earliest accounts, she had come on one recorded line, a direct demand from Ship: You must decide how you will WorShip Me.



That had to be the origin of present WorShip. It could be traced to Ship. But the demand appeared suitably vague and, when she had recounted it to Oakes, he had seen it as emphasizing the powers of the Ceepees.



"We, after all, command the WorShip."



If Ship were Go.... well, Ship still appeared to be unwilling to interfere directly in the management of Shipman affairs. Every visible thing Ship did could be attributed to work at maintaining itself.



Some Shipmen claimed they talked to Ship, and she had studied these people. They fell into two obvious categories: fools and non-fools. Most of the claimants had a history of talking to walls, bowls, items of clothing and such. But perhaps one out of every twenty who said they talked to Ship were Ship's best. For them, talking with Ship represented the single rare absurdity of their records. It fascinated her that, for this small group, the talking incidents were isolated and seemingly innocuous - almost as though Ship were checking in from time to time.



Unlike Oakes and Lewis, she did not count herself a disbeliever.



But God or not, Ship apparently refused to interfere in the private decisions of Shipmen.



So what if I decide to destroy Oakes?



Did Ship care for him, too?



Oakes was too cautious, too painstakingly right about the things he did. What if he were the only reason Colony had survived? Could she watch Colony wither and die, knowing she had done it?



Was the Scream Room right?



Only the holorecord could decide that for her. She had to see it.



She levered herself to her feet, found a singlesuit and slipped into it. There was a sense of urgency about her motions now compounded of the late hour and the terrors she knew she was holding at bay. A glance at her chrono showed only six hours to dayside. Six hours to call up those records, review them and cover her tracks. And those records spanned most of a diurn - perhaps forty hours. All she needed was to see the essence of it, though.



What did he do to me?



Without conscious decision, she headed for Oakes' abandoned shipside cubby, realizing her own choice only when she grasped the hatchdogs. Yes, the com-console would still be here. It was a good place to search out the record and review it. She knew the code which would call up the Scream Room holo. Her priority number would insure that she got it. And there was something exquisitely right about the choice of the place to do it.



As she keyed the hatchdogs on the cubby, she reminded herself: Whatever he wanted me to do, I did not do it. Some part of her knew that neither the pleasures nor the curiosities of the Scream Room had tempted her - neither ecstasy nor pain. But Oakes wanted her to believe in some willing debasement. He required that she believe.



He'll see.



She released the hatchdogs and stepped inside.