Frank Herbert - The Godmakers

One step away along the ramp the escalfield hummed softly, ready to drop him into the bustle at the foot of the transport. Priests and passengers were engaged in a ceremony down there—initiation of new students. Orne didn’t know if he would have to undergo such a rite. The portmaster’s agent had told him to take his own time in disembarking.

What were they doing down there? He could hear a throbbing drumchant and a singsong keening almost hidden under the machinery clatter of the port.

As he listened, Orne experienced an abrupt sensation of dread at the unknown which awaited him in the narrow, twisted streets and jumbled buildings of the religious warren. Stories that leaked out of Amel carried such hints of forbidden mystery and power that Orne knew his emotions were tainted. This dread, however, he knew well. It had begun on Marak.

He had been seated in ordinary surroundings at his desk in his bachelor officer quarters. His eyes had been directed without focus at the parklike landscape outside his window—the I-A university grounds. Marak’s green sun, low in the afternoon quadrant, had seemed distant and cold. Amel had seemed just as distant—a place to go after his wedding and honeymoon. He had a permanent assignment to the I-A’s antiwar college as a lecturer on “Exotic Clues to War.”

Abruptly, he had turned away from his desk to frown at the stiffly regulation room. Something in it had gone awry and he couldn’t focus on quite what it was. Everything seemed so much in the expected pattern: the gray walls, the sharp angles of the bunk, the white bedcover with its blue I-A monogram of crossed sword and stylus, the hard chair backed against the foot of the bunk leaving a three centimeter clearance for the gray flatness of a closet door. Everything regulation and in its place.

But he could not put down the premonition that something here had changed… and dangerously.

Into that probing awareness, the hall door had banged open and Stetson had entered. The section chief wore his usual patched blue fatigues. His only badge of rank, golden I-A emblems on collar and uniform cap, appeared faintly corroded. Orne, wondering when the emblems had last seen polish, pushed that thought out of his mind. Stetson reserved all of his polish for his mind.

Behind Stetson like a pet on an invisible leash rolled a mechanocart piled high with cramtapes, microrecords and even some primitive books in stelaperm bindings. The cart trundled itself into the room, its wheels rumbling as it cleared the slideseal at the doorway.

Orne had focused on the cart, knowing it immediately as the object of his dread. He got to his feet, stared hard at Stetson. “What’s this, Stet?”

Stetson pulled the chair from the foot of the bunk, sailed his cap onto the blanket.

His dark hair straggled in an uncombed muss. His eyelids drooped. He said: “You’ve had enough assignments to know the trappings when you see them.”

“Don’t I have any say in that anymore?” Orne asked.

“Well, now, things may’ve changed a bit and then again, maybe they haven’t,” Stetson said. “Besides, this concerns something you say you want.”

“I’m getting married in three weeks,” Orne said.

“Your wedding has been postponed,” Stetson said. He held up a placating hand as Orne’s face darkened. “Wait a bit. Postponed, nothing more.”

“On whose orders?” Orne demanded.

“Well, now, Diana agreed to leave this morning on an assignment which the High Commissioner arranged for us.”

“We were having dinner tonight!” Orne said, outraged.

“That’s been postponed, too,” Stetson said. “She sends her regrets. There’s a visocube in that stuff on the cart—her regrets, her love and all of that, but she hopes you’ll understand the purpose of her sudden departure.”

Orne’s voice came out in a growl: “What purpose?”

“The purpose of getting her out of your hair. You’re leaving for Amel in six days, not in six months, and there’s a mountain of preparation before you’re ready to go.”

“You’d better explain a little more about Diana.”

“She knows she would have wasted your time, distracted you, diverted attention which you absolutely require now. She’s off to Franchi Primus to deliver some important personal information explaining to the Nathian underground there why they no longer are underground and why their handpicked candidate had to withdraw from the election so abruptly. She’s perfectly safe and you can get married when you return from Amel.”

“Provided you don’t dream up some new emergency,” Orne snarled.

“You’re the ones who took the I-A oath,” Stetson said. “She takes her orders just like the rest of us.”

“Oh, this I-A is real fun,” Orne growled. “I must recommend it whenever I find a likely young fellow looking for a job!”

“Amel, remember?” Stetson asked.

“But why so sudden?”

“Amel… well, Lew, Amel isn’t quite the picnic ground you may have imagined.”

“Not the… but it is the place for advanced psi training. You put through my application, didn’t you?”

“Lew, that’s not quite the way it works.”

“Oh?”

“You don’t apply to Amel, you are summoned.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“There’s only one way to go there if you’re not on the approved list, a graduate or priest or some such. That’s as a student—summoned.”

“And I’ve been summoned?”

“Yes.”

“What if I refuse to go as a student?”

Hard lines formed beside Stetson’s mouth. “You took an oath to the I-A. Do you remember it?”

“I’m going to rewrite that oath,” Orne growled. “To the words ‘ I pledge my life and my sacred honor to seek out and destroy the seeds of war wherever they may be found’ let us add: ‘and I will sacrifice anything and anybody in the process. ’”

“Not a bad addition,” Stetson said. “Why don’t you propose it when you get back?”

“If I get back!”

“Granted there’s always that possibility,” Stetson said. “But you have been summoned and the I-A wants desperately for you to accept.”

“So that’s why none of you questioned my request.”

“That’s part of it. Our Psi Branch confirmed that you were a genuine talent… and we had our hopes raised. We want someone of your caliber on Amel.”

“Why? What’s the I-A’s interest in Amel? Never been a war anywhere near the place. The big shots are always afraid of offending their gods.”

“Or their priests.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone having trouble getting to Amel,” Orne said.

“ We’ve always had trouble.”

“The I-A?”

“Yes.”

“But our Psi Branch technicians were trained there.”

“They are assigned to us out of Amel at Amel’s insistence, not at ours. We’ve never been able to send a genuine investigative agent, trustworthy and dedicated, to Amel.”

“You think the priests are cooking up something?”

“If they are, we’re in trouble. How do we handle psi powers? What do we do to confine someone like that guy on Wessel who can jump to any planet in the universe without a ship? How do we deal with a man who can remove our instruments from within his flesh and without making an incision?”

“So you know about that, eh?”

“When our transceiver stopped giving us the noises of your surroundings and started giving us fish-gurgles, yes, we knew,” Stetson said. “How’d you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“And maybe you’re telling me the truth,” Stetson said.

“I just wished for it to happen,” Orne said.

“You just wished! Maybe that’s why you’re going to Amel.”