Frank Herbert - Destination - Void

Who can tell me what to do, O my soul? Who can tell me where my soul might be?

The words of the 139th Psalm slithered through his mind: "I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made."

Do we betray God by making something fearful and wonderful? he wondered.

"Our Father which art in Heaven," he whispered.

But I am in the heavens, he thought. And the heavens expose me still to spiritual risk!

The sound of Bickel and Prudence working in the shop was almost a carrier wave for his thoughts.

Faith and knowledge, he thought. And he sensed the eternal clash that now had taken his body as its arena - knowledge thrusting at the boundaries of faith. And he felt the constructive emotions his faith was engineered to contain.

I could end this nonsense, he thought. But we're all in the same bind and violence betrays us.

"Religion and psychiatry are but two branches of the healing art." He remembered the words clearly. The lecturer in "Uses of Faith," the second-year course preparing him for this role. "Religion and psychiatry share the same stem."

Heal thyself, he thought. Tears started from his eyes. Where were the faith, the hope and the laughter - the love and creativeness he had been enjoined to employ?

Flattery looked up through his tears, saw in the screen both Bickel and Prudence ignoring him, so intent were they on the project.

See how their hands touch; Flattery thought.

He felt guilt at the sight and remembered Brooks' admonition: "Keep clear of concealment; keep clear of the need of concealment."

"What an awful hour when we first meet the necessity of hiding something," he whispered. "Please God, have I forgotten how to pray?"

Flattery ignored the vital console in front of him, closed his eyes, and gripped the stanchion fiercely. "The Lord is my shepherd," he whispered. "I shall not want."

But the words had lost their power over him.

There are no still waters here... or green pastures, he thought.

There never had been these things for him - or for any of them out of the axlotl tanks and the UMB's sterile creches. There had only been the valley of the shadow of death.

"DO NOT BROACH THIS HATCH WITHOUT READING AIR PRESSURE IN THE NEXT PASSAGE."

Every morning on his way to classes - eleven years - he had passed through the hatch with that warning.

"NO TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT WITHOUT FULL SPACESUIT."

That omnipresent sign had set the boundaries on their untrammeled activity. It still did.

The suit was like another social inhibition setting its own limits of behavior. It restricted your contact with other humans, reduced you to code tappings and depersonalized vuphones where every person became like a dancing doll on an oscilloscope screen.The omnipresent enemy was the outside - that total absence of the things to support life that emptiness called space. It was evil and they feared it - constantly. A rod and staff might comfort in the presence of space, but what you dreamed about was washed air and a womblike enclosed cell where you could divest yourself of the damnable suit. This was the true source of comfort no matter if it came from the Devil himself.

The only table you could count on in the presence of this enemy was a squeeze bottle slid from its rack. Oil on the head could only fog a faceplate. You had to crop your hair short and keep down the natural oils with detergent.

Goodness and mercy? That was anything which preserved the hope that you could one day walk unsuited beneath an open sky.

I've lost my faith, Flattery thought. God, why have You taken my faith from me?

"Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God," he whispered.

You were a fool, Matthew, he thought. A harlot can't regain her virginity.

"The whole universe is a matter of chemistry and mechanics, of matter and energy," he whispered.

But only God was supposed to have complete control of manipulating the matter and energy.

We aren't gods, Flattery thought. We're blaspheming by trying to make a machine that thinks of itself by itself. That is why I was set to watch over this mission. We blaspheme by trying to put a soul into a machine. I should go down there now and smash the whole thing!

"Raj!"

It was Bickel's voice booming from the intercom.

Flattery looked up at the screen, his mouth suddenly dry.

"I'm getting independent action on the photosensory loops of the computer's record-and-store circuits," Bickel said. "Prue, check the current drain."

"Normal," she said. "It's no short circuit."

"It... isn't conscious," Flattery said, his voice wooden.

"Agreed," Bickel said. "But what the hell is it? The computer's programming itself in every..." There came a charged moment of silence then: "Damn!"

"What happened?" Prue demanded.

"It stopped," Bickel said.

"What... set it off?" Flattery asked.

"I tied an inhibitor block into one arm of a single nerve-net simulator and sent a test pattern through it. The test evidently set up a resonant pattern that searched right through the Ox and into the computer net via the monitor connections. That's when I started getting the self-programming reaction."

Prudence sighted along her finger, moving it to trace a thick color-coded connection that looped down from the Ox. "The monitor linkage goes only one way into record-and-store. It's buffered right there."

Bickel pulled the connection she indicated.

"What're you doing?" she asked.

"Disconnecting. I'm going to get the pattern of the experiment out of the memory banks and analyze it before proceeding."

Silence.

Flattery stared up at the screen with a deep sense of repugnance which he knew was grounded in his religious training.

It had been drummed into him: "You are not precisely someone. You are a clone."

There had always been too much emphasis on that statement for him to accept it completely. He understood the reasons for this conditioning, though, and accepted them.

But what about this thing that Bickel's making?

UMB had a complete bank of clones sufficient to recreate the Earthling's crew precisely as it had been at the moment of launching. Minor variables might intrude and the Organic Mental Cores could be different. He had never pinned that one down but he knew it was cheaper to take OMCs from damaged humans than to clone them and prepare them for the ship.

In a strange way the OMCs might be more genetically human than the crew.

Flattery knew he was not supposed to feel guilt at the thought of killing the ship - himself included. The message had been clear: "We can recreate all of you here on the Moon. You are infinite. You cannot completely die because your cells will live on and on."

My exact cells? he wondered. My exact consciousness?

But wasn't that the central problem of this whole project?

What is consciousness?

Again, he looked at the screen. If I kill the ship/computer/brain now... will I be killing someone?

ROUTINE SENSOR FIRINGS sent telltale lights flickering across the computer wall. The passage of the lights produced a weird shift in the shop's illumination. The curved bulkhead opposite the computer face reflected yellow, then green, now mauve... red.

The color shift passed across a chart in Timberlake's hand as he read it and compared the chart's predictions with the readings in front of him.