The Jesus Incident by Frank Herbert
“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.
“Nooooo . . . no . . . 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 devil—a 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 been . . . 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 time . . . 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 vanished—a 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.
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 workers . . .
“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!
Afterword
Meeting Frank Herbert & Bill Ransom
Frank Herbert wrote for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer when I was finishing my undergraduate degree at University of Washington in 1967–70. Students at the university started an underground newspaper, Helix, that was an immediate hit nationwide. One afternoon I picked up the latest edition on my way to work and had a good laugh at lunch over an article that bemoaned the mine-shaft gap between the United States and the Soviet Union. During every budget cycle, our government would pump more money into nuclear weapons with the argument that we suffered from an untenable “missile gap” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and that more warheads meant more deterrence. The author, H. Bert Frank, claimed that we didn’t have enough fallout shelters for everyone, which meant that in time of nuclear war, mine shafts would mean the difference between survival and annihilation. He maintained that the Soviet Union had more mine shafts, therefore a higher probability of surviving a nuclear holocaust.
In 1973 my family and I moved to Port Townsend, Washington, to start Centrum, a non-profit foundation for arts programming. The Port Townsend Leader ran a story that celebrated the fact that two authors moved to town, both of whom were nominated for the National Book Award: Frank for Soul Catcher and I for Finding True North & Critter. I loved the wry humor and political juxtapositions of Frank’s journalism, so I dropped a postcard to H. Bert Frank that said, “I write in the mornings and break for coffee at noon. Drop by for a cup anytime.” Two days later, at 12:01, he knocked at the door and presented his own cup. “I write in the mornings, too,” he said. “The next one’s on me.”
Brian Herbert included the circumstances that led Frank and I to experiment with co-authoring in his biography of Frank, Dreamer of Dune, so I refer you there for that story.
The most common question I get at workshops and book-signings is “How do you co-author a novel?” I know only two things about co-authoring novels: The projects with Frank were a pleasure; and a successful “act of collaboration between consenting adults” (as Frank put it) is rare. Several things worked in our favor: we both were writers (not a writer and an expert in something else); we wrote at the same time every day (before internet, on typewriters, three carbons); we wrote the part of the work we were thinking about each morning and worried about ordering the pieces later; we had almost identical childhood backgrounds in the same valley (his cousin married my mother’s cousin); we had the same sense of humor and passion for books of all kinds.
Co-authored novels, with both names on the cover, did not exist in the late 1970s, to our knowledge, so when we made the commitment, we had to recognize the problems we’d face. First, with each other: We shook hands on the agreement that if at any time one of us wanted to cut something and the other really wanted to keep it, we’d keep it. Our thinking was that the friendship was more important than any element of the story. For the record, that problem never came up. The publisher wanted only Frank’s name on the cover for the marketing advantage, claiming that fans would not trust a co-authored work; we both insisted on both names on the cover. As a result, together we received a fraction of the advance that Frank would have received under his name. The whopping success of The Jesus Incident made the issue moot. We had to recognize that some critics would claim that Frank ran out of ideas and had to bring some youngster on board; critics would claim that I was some unknown regional poet riding on the coattails of Frank Herbert. We did hear those criticisms, but because we’d recognized them in advance, we didn’t let them interfere with the work. Frank’s wife, Bev, was our strongest supporter (literally, with the occasional lunch and snacks) in that she helped us to think of these important, non-writing issues that might interfere so that we could strategize around them and proceed with the work.
We mutually despised dictators who controlled people by manipulating their religion and their food supply; we weren’t crazy about war for oil or rubber; we shared very strong views on civil and human rights, and a passion for the natural world. Clones became our vehicle for making human rights a centerpiece in the Pandora Series.
How did we actually work? We met every day for coffee and talked. I wrote a very breezy and porous rough draft to get the basic story down, and in our daily process we role-played various characters and situations. I’d insert a blank sheet wherever we needed a chapter or more that we didn’t have, then Frank took a turn while we continued to meet daily to “talk story.” Frank’s draft came back with roughs of most of the missing chapters for me to rewrite, added some blank pages of his own, and we divvied up the blank pages to draft, then passed them to each other for rewrite. At that point we had a complete draft, and proceeded to go through it side-by-side, line-by-line. That usually generated a handful of new material that we wrote, rewrote, and double-checked side-by-side, line by line. Then we made copies for ourselves, for our editor and one for a safe deposit box downtown.
We proceeded on our solo projects with the momentum we’d worked up together, and we continued daily coffee, which served us well when Putnam/Berkley asked for a sequel. And then another. But those are stories for another time.
The End
Frank Herbert, The Jesus Incident
(Series: The Pandora Sequence # 1)