Win, lose or draw - we were supposed to die.
And only the Chaplain/Psychiatrist had been allowed to suspect this. The serial Voidships and their cloned cargo had one mission: gather information and send it back to Moonbase.
Ship.
That was it, of course. They had created much more than consciousness in their computer and its companion system which Bickel had called "the Ox." They had made Ship. And Ship had whisked them across space in an impossible eyeblink.
Destination Tau Ceti.
That was, after all, the built-in command, the target programmed into their computer. But where there had been no inhabitable planet, Ship had created one: a paradise planet, an earth idealized out of every human dream. Ship had done this thing, but then had come Ship's terrible demand: "You must decide how you will WorShip Me!"
Ship had assumed attributes of God or Satan. Flattery was never sure which. But he had sensed that awesome power even before the repeated demand.
"How will you WorShip? You must decide!"
Failure.
They never could satisfy Ship's demand. But they could fear. They learned a full measure of fear.
"Tick."
He recognized that sound now: the dehyb timer/monitor counting off the restoration of life to his flesh.
But who had set this process into motion?
"Who's there?"
Silence and the impenetrable darkness answered.
Flattery felt alone and now there was a painful chill around his flesh, a signal that skin sensation was returning to normal.
One of the crew had warned them before they had thrown the switch to ignite the artificial consciousness. Flattery could not recall who had voiced the warning but he remembered it.
"There must be a threshold of consciousness beyond which a conscious being takes on attributes of God."
Whoever said it had seen a truth.
Who is bringing me out of hyb and why?
"Somebody's there! Who is it?"
Speaking still hurt his throat and his mind was not working properly - that icy core of untouchable memories.
"Come on! Who's there?"
He knew somebody was there. He could feel the familiar presence of. . .
Ship!
"Okay, Ship. I'm awake."
"So you assume."
That chiding voice could never sound human. It was too impossibly controlled. Every slightest nuance, every inflection, every modulated resonance conveyed a perfection which put it beyond the reach of humans. But that voice told him he once more was a pawn of Ship. He was a small cog in the workings of this Infinite Power which he had helped to release upon an unsuspecting universe. This realization filled him with remembered terrors and an immediate awesome fear of the agonies which Ship might visit upon him for his failures. He was tormented by visions of Hel....
I failed...I faile.... I faile....
St. Augustine asked the right question: "Does freedom come from chance or choice?" And you must remember that quantum mechanics guarantees chance.
USUALLY, MORGAN Oakes took out his nightside angers and frustrations in long strides down any corridor of the ship where his feet led him.
Not this time! he told himself.
He sat in shadows and sipped a glass of astringent wine. Bitter, but it washed the taste of the ship's foul joke from his tongue. The wine had come at his demand, a demonstration of his power in these times of food shortages. The first bottle from the first batch. How would they take it groundside when he ordered the wine improved?
Oakes raised the glass in an ancient gesture: Confusion to You, Ship!
The wine was too raw. He put it aside.
Oakes knew the figure he cut, sitting here trembling in his cubby while he stared at the silent com-console beside his favorite couch. He increased the light slightly.
Once more the ship had convinced him that its program was running down. The ship was getting senile. He was the Chaplain/Psychiatrist and the ship tried to poison him! Others were fed from shiptits - not frequently and not much, but it happened. Even he had been favored once, before he became Ceepee, and he still remembered the taste - richly satisfying. It was a little like the stuff called "burst" which Lewis had developed groundside. An attempt to duplicate elixir. Costly stuff, burst. Wasteful. And not elixir - no, not elixir.
He stared at the curved screen of the console beside him. It returned a dwarfed reflection of himself: an overweight, heavy-shouldered man in a one-piece suit of shipcloth which appeared vaguely gray in this light. His features were strong: a thick chin, wide mouth, beaked nose and bushy eyebrows over dark eyes, a bit of silver at the temples. He touched his temples. The reduced reflection exaggerated his feeling that he had been made small by Ship's treatment of him. His reflection showed him his own fear.
I will not be tricked by a damned machine!
The memory brought on another fit of trembling. Ship had refused him at the shiptits often enough that he understood this new message. He had stopped with Jesus Lewis at a bank of corridor shiptits.
Lewis had been amused. "Don't waste time with these things. The ship won't feed us."
This had angered Oakes. "It's my privilege to waste time! Don't you ever forget that!"
He had rolled up his sleeve and thrust his bare arm into the receptacle. The sensor scratched as it adjusted to his arm. He felt the stainless-steel nose sniff out a suitable vein. There was the tingling prick of the test probe, then the release of the sensor.
Some of the shiptits extruded plaz tubes to suck on, but this one was programmed to fill a container behind a locked panel - elixir, measured and mixed to his exact needs.
The panel opened!
Oakes grinned at an astounded Lewis.
"Well," Oakes remembered saying. "The ship finally realizes who's the boss here." With that, he drained the container.
Horrible!
His body was wracked with vomiting. His breath came in shallow gasps and sweat soaked his singlesuit.