The Race for God

by Brian Herbert

  McMurtrey didn’t like that word. Impact

  “No one is required to employ this system, but anyone dying enroute will be liquefied and jettisoned unceremoniously in a timeburst burial cylinder. I assume that each of you have heard of this procedure, as it is commonly utilized in deep space, and has been described accurately in popular movies and publications.

  “On Mezzanine Level Twelve, the room with the black door is a storage area for your religious paraphernalia. You will find incense sticks and candles there, all in Insurance Laboratories-approved enclosures to prevent torching the ship. There are vestments, even zuchetto-type papal hats if you wish . . . black zuchettos for priests, purple for bishops, red for cardinals, and white for the Pope. Is the KothoLu Pope aboard?”

  No response came. A number of people laughed, for Appy seemed to be having fun with this.

  “Everything is in that room. You want prayer mats or surplices? We got ’em, first come, first served. Be there or be bare, and I don’t say this lightly: many of you will find gadgets appropriate to a number of religions. You may not be able to tell them apart, I fear, and there could be arguments that I would be helpless to prevent.”

  Not really, McMurtrey thought. They could take turns, drawing lots to see who goes first . . .

  “Beneath the main deck are Assembly Room Sublevels A, B and C, and beneath them you will find three more sublevels of generic shrine rooms. You may leave paraphernalia in the shrine rooms, and please—respect the property rights of others!”

  That’ll be interesting, McMurtrey thought.

  “Several of you have asked about toilet facilities and clothing,” Appy continued, “and frankly I’m surprised, even a bit dismayed, at such queries. Foolish questions will not be answered. It is up to each of you to search your inner selves for such information, for it is well within the reasoning capacity of anyone who has come this far. You call yourselves pious? Prove it!”

  What did piety have to do with human waste? McMurtrey shook his head and felt a sudden urge to empty his bladder, which seemed aggravated by the apparent lack of facilities. Appy was a tyrant, a mental mutant!

  He heard what sounded like a toilet flushing, and the noise seemed to emanate from an enclosed cabin just the other side of Corona’s.

  With a little investigation, McMurtrey discovered that the main control panel swung open, revealing three more buttons underneath, all reddish-brown. He tested them one at a time. They controlled, from left to right: (a) A pop-up, unenclosed lavatory that came out of a previously unnoticed deck hatch between the dinette set and the headboard wall. (This presented a potential etiquette problem when visitors were in the cubicle.); (b) a meal menu on a screen that appeared in the center of the table; (c) a laundry chute revealed by a bin that swung open from the headboard wall. A sign on the bin read:

  LAUNDRY

  5 Minutes Wash And Dry

  No bleach, no starch, no ironing, don’t ask!

  The atypical open lavatory included a washbasin, a toilet, and a spray nozzle on a long hose for showering. The lavatory floor was tiled, sloped, and scuppered, apparently designed so that drain water ran into a channel that led to a hole beneath the headboard wall. It seemed primitive in the midst of surrounding technology, but the passengers had no other choices, and many of them from poorer locales were probably accustomed to much worse.

  A tiny drawer opened from a freestanding cabinet beneath the sink, and inside this drawer McMurtrey found toothpaste, a toothbrush, and a flat stainless steel plate that had a handle on one side. The handle was inscribed “Beard Zapper,” but the device had no cord and no switch. He passed the plate over the hair-covered back of his hand, and wherever he did this the hair melted away without a trace. The affected skin area felt numb for a moment, but this passed and left no marks.

  Appy’s excited voice boomed across the P.A.: “Takeoff in ten minutes! Drop screens!”

  From all over the ship, McMurtrey heard the dull thuddings of screens as they locked into place. He hesitated with his own, saw that almost everyone visible on his level and on other levels had activated screens. He and Jin were exceptions, and Corona had left her bunk down with her screen out of view. She wasn’t anywhere to be seen, leaving McMurtrey to assume that she might have talked Appy into letting her perform flight duties.

  Still, he worried about her, for Appy hadn’t said what might happen to a person outside a sleeping enclosure during takeoff and landing. Jin was outside, too.

  Something began to whir, felt through the floor and heard faintly. He picked up the distinct redolence of mint.

  “Eight minutes,” Appy announced, voice tremulous.

  “Hey, Jin!” McMurtrey yelled. “Drop your screen!”

  Jin sat crosslegged, staring straight ahead. His head jerked, and he looked at McMurtrey.

  McMurtrey repeated himself.

  Jin hurried to his control panel, appeared to be having difficulty accessing it.

  McMurtrey bolted toward Jin, making hardly any sound on the cushioned deck.

  A tiny computer voice on Jin’s headboard wall blared, “Intruder! Intruder!”

  “What the hell’s going on here?” McMurtrey asked.

  “The panel has an identity scanner,” Jin said, “and it isn’t responding to me! I don’t know why. It worked before.”

  McMurtrey tried to open Jin’s panel box, but it wouldn’t move, and again the tiny computer voice reported an intruder.

  “Two minutes,” Appy announced.

  “Let’s get inside my cabin,” McMurtrey offered.

  “Wait a minute. I can’t believe this infernal thing won’t work.” Jin tried the panel again, and this time it opened, revealing the buttons inside.

  “I’m okay now,” Jin said. “Thank you.”

  McMurtrey returned to his cabin.

  “One minute!” Appy said. “Hey! What the—”

  “My buttons aren’t working!” Jin shouted. He started toward McMurtrey.

  The ship jolted, and Appy screeched: “Early takeoff! Early takeoff! This is not my fault, and I—”

  A high-pitched whine inundated the ship’s interior, and McMurtrey couldn’t hear the ensuing words. He was pinned to the deck, sliding toward the railing.

  Something arrested his slide abruptly, with a jerk at his midsection. He saw a blue nylester strap around his waist, with a tether leading from one side of the strap to a spot in the center of his unscreened quarters, adjacent to the dinette set and lavatory, which were still popped up in place.

  He hardly had time to consider this, when he left the surface of the deck, floating gently into the air to the limit of the tether, which was about three meters. He was over the railing, looking down on the main passenger compartment deck far below, which was empty of people. His stomach felt queasy. He grabbed hold of the railing, pulled himself inside it and remained there with the tether looped tightly in one hand and the railing held with the other.

  To one side, he saw Jin in a similar state, floating at the edge of a tether out over the main deck.

  High overhead, half a dozen other passengers were tether-suspended, up to the highest mezzanine levels in this broad chimney that ran up the core of the ship. One of them, a man, was flailing his arms wildly and squealing hysterically.

  Was that Corona higher than the man, at the very top of the chimney? Dark skin . . . maybe a maroon jumpsuit . . . He couldn’t determine sex, but realized that Corona’s long hair would be extended above her in zero-gee. He couldn’t get a good enough angle to see the hair, looked away.

  Everyone he saw looked safe, and he hoped Corona was safe as well, wherever she was.

  * * *

  Kelly Corona pushed away from the ceiling, cursed under her breath. The initial extension and whip-action of her tether had sent her thumping face first into the ceiling, but not with much force. It was more an irritation than anything else, and she swung around to look down.

  She rather enjoyed the sensation of height, of floating al
most two hundred meters over the main passenger-compartment deck. There were others floating below her, including a hysterical little man several levels down.

  “Don’t forsake me, Lord!” the man squealed. “Not now! Not after all I’ve been through!”

  “Shut yer trap, twerp!” Corona shouted.

  But the man went on behaving like a child that heard only its own voice.

  Corona wished she had a Muzzier 55 with her, that Middist-manufactured stunshooter that rendered its victims nearly mute by making their lips seem too heavy to move. It had a nice muzzling effect that lasted fifty-five minutes or more, depending upon body size. She hadn’t brought any weapons at all, thinking they wouldn’t be allowed aboard this particular ship.

  How wrong she had been!

  Corona was about to shout again, when she felt a little compression shift in both eardrums, followed by a faint tinnituslike ringing. Then Appy’s voice sounded in her left ear, to the exclusion of all other sound:

  “A plague on you, Shusher. First the hatch and now this. Have you lost complete control of what little senses you had? How dare you override my takeoff and speed commands?”

  Corona heard the porpoise-whine in her other ear. It sounded almost staccato, not simpering as before.

  “The proof is in my program!” Appy shouted. “You’ll have to trust me on that. All takeoff and speed decisions are under my jurisdiction.

  “Sweee! Sweee!”

  “I am not lying!”

  Shusher responded quickly and forcefully: “Ferrrosss . . . seeeah!”

  “Why won’t you listen to me?”

  The ensuing sounds, in varying pitches, seemed almost understandable to Corona. Something like, “My parts! My private parts!”

  Appy: “I’m ordering GravSense now, if that’s all right with you.”

  A short monotone whine ensued.

  The compression changed in Corona’s ears, and once more she heard the hysterical man.

  Static followed over the ship’s P. A. system, and Appy spoke through it: “GravSense in activation.”

  Corona dropped fast, but grabbed the railing neatly to break her fall.

  The little man screamed, and seconds later Corona saw him pulling himself up by his tether to get back on the nearest mezzanine.

  In two rude, bruising thumps, McMurtrey tumbled to the deck, bumping his elbow on the railing.

  This ship has kinks to be worked out, he thought, rubbing his arm.

  Jin was crawling back over the railing to the safety of the mezzanine, his tether still in place. He stood on the deck with his nose in technologically simulated pain, caught McMurtrey’s gaze briefly before looking away.

  Damage, Jin thought. Nose aching and cosmetic repairs necessary . . . something else . . . Central Command melt-weld . . . field-irreparable merging of Duplication and Repair functions.

  What’s the matter with that cabin control panel? Damn!

  When circumstance required one or more functions, Jin’s interpretive core accessed the CC module for instructions, flashing data in a nanosecond from there to bodily points of absorption and action. A field-irreparable melt-weld was one that could only be repaired back on D’Urth in a Bureau of Loyalty shop. It was a rare glitch, shouldn’t have happened so easily.

  A problem with the ship caused this!

  Jin had never been hit in the nose before, and the numbing, unpleasant feeling of it angered him.

  Discreetly, Jin tested himself, sending electrical probes through the fiberoptic passageways of his body, tingling his synthetic nerves. He received a report of nose and undereye discoloration, felt “red sound” automatic functions repairing this, at the same healing speed as a human wearing a healing pack. In a few hours it would be as before, and he could say he wore a pack when no one was looking.

  While Repair and Duplication wouldn’t separate themselves, and Duplication wasn’t responding to test probes, the Repair function appeared to be basically intact. It was one of the most important functions he had, for it contained backups on top of backups, allowing self-repair of virtually every damageable or perishable part and function. When operating as it was now for Jin’s nose and under his eyes, it transmitted “red sound,” which the cyberoo saw and felt in internal coloration.

  Duplication wasn’t nearly so critical. It was a “green sound” training program left in Jin’s circuits, with which the cyberoo had observed human actions and copied them. With this program the cyberoo’s movements, speech and certain nuances had been made to approximate those of seventy-eight humans it had observed firsthand, including half a dozen Plarnjarn monks. It even copied physical pain those humans felt, via a parabolic sensing mechanism.

  From all Jin could determine, his humanlike functions continued unabated.

  To a cyberoo, the Duplication program was like a human appendix, no longer needed. If Repair continued to work, it would bypass Duplication to restore humanlike actions and features as needed, accessing memory banks.

  Jin knew that all the tests he ran fell short of the most important one—the stresses of an actual field emergency. This particular meltweld could be paralyzing, or might amount to nothing of consequence.

  Screens went up all around, and a short woman in a polychromatic chador became visible in a freshly exposed cubicle just beyond Jin’s. Although the chador was designed to cover her from head to toe, she had left her face uncovered, wrapping the extra folds of cloth around her neck. She was black-haired and olive-skinned, with a compact thickness of build that imparted strength to her voice. McMurtrey guessed Isammedan or Nandu, perhaps even a Middistess. In one hand she carried a woven straw prayer mat, rolled.

  “Did you see those ships?” she asked, looking at Jin. “I think we’re the only one that took off! In the moments before we increased acceleration I saw dozens of other ships topple over and kind of sputter with little wisps of smoke. There were BOL choppers rocketing into town from all directions. What do you suppose . . . ? Oh, you’re hurt.”

  She started toward Jin, but he waved her away, said he was all right.

  The woman caught McMurtrey’s gaze, became agitated and turned away. Immediately, she launched into her form of boisterous conversation with an orange-robed man on the other side. The man had a square-cut black beard, wore a sword in a scabbard that was secured to a wide, redstone-encrusted belt.

  McMurtrey looked at the hard plazymer tether clasps on his own waist, tried to figure out how the apparatus got there and how it might be disengaged. His elbow ached.

  The big-voiced woman was talking about an incredible dawn she had seen as the ship rose from D’Urth. McMurtrey hadn’t seen any of that.

  Then Johnny Orbust began shouting through an electronic bullhorn, from the railing on the other side of the mezzanine, not very far away. He had Smith and Tully with him, and God only knew how they had gotten that bullhorn past Appy’s inspection apparatus.

  “One of those ships that didn’t make it had that New Timer Madame Theo aboard, some false prophet Florientals and a bunch of atheist swine disciples of Kevin Wateo. Glory be to God, for He stopped them in their tracks!”

  Many people laughed and made open displays of support for this, and McMurtrey was struck with the strangeness of such behavior in a group professing piety.

  The loud woman near Jin wondered if anyone had been injured on the ill-fated ships, and this comment restored to McMurtrey some modicum of faith in humanity. A number of people shared her concern, and soon people were calling for Orbust to keep quiet.

  But Orbust kept on with his deluge of Krassian noise.

  The loud woman complained of bumps and bruises, and she told the orange-robed man near her that she’d had to hold onto the deck-secured furnishings in her cabin. She didn’t mention any tethers, and none remained in view with the exception of those still secured to McMurtrey and Jin.

  McMurtrey was beginning to get angry with the intransigence of his tether clasp when it burst open, made a little twist and snap in the a
ir, and melted neatly into the floor, so quickly the eye could not discern the manner in which it vanished. Jin’s tether performed a like maneuver, making McMurtrey believe the whole thing had been automatic, with the tethers going the way they had come. This gave him further hope that Corona was safe.

  Presently the woman with the big voice went to the railing and began berating Orbust for his attitude. From where McMurtrey stood she was louder than the man with the bullhorn. More and more people shouted for Orbust to cease, and some of them were becoming openly angry.

  Orbust paused in his diatribe, said something to the rednecked Kundo Smith. They nodded in unison, glared at the woman.

  McMurtrey’s sore elbow was feeling better, and he rubbed it gently.

  He saw Jin rubbing his nose.

  Opposition was growing rapidly, making Orbust increasingly uneasy. His collection of nervous tics, which came and went, were apparent now: the twitching eyelid and tapping foot, the fingers of his free hand rubbing together atop the railing.

  Abruptly he lowered the bullhorn, fell silent and slipped around the nearest partition, into a corridor. Smith and Tully followed.

  McMurtrey told the woman he admired her outspokenness, and she thanked him graciously. She introduced herself as Zatima, and her companion as Nanak Singh.

  “That same awful man gave you a difficult time, too,” she said, obviously referring to McMurtrey’s speech before the crowd in St. Charles Beach. “You handled the Krassian fanatic well.”

  “Did you see his gun?” McMurtrey asked. “Why was he allowed to bring it aboard?”