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The native stock who preceded him to Pandora, descendants of the original crew of the Voidship Earthling and the Earthling’s bioexperiments, were humans of a sort. Flattery found them repulsive and decided early on that if one Voidship had found Pandora, another might find something better. Even if it didn’t, Flattery fancied Voidship life to be a sight more comfortable than this.
They can all rot in this pest-hole, he thought. It smells as if they already have.
On clear evenings Flattery derived great pleasure from watching the near-finished bulk of his Voidship in glittering position overhead. He’d pinned a magnificent jewel to the shirt of the sky, and he was proud of that.
Some of these Pandorans are barely recognizable as living creatures, much less human beings! he thought. Even their genetics has been contaminated by that … kelp.
All the more reason to get off this planet. His life at Moonbase had taught him well—space was a medium, not a barrier. A Voidship was home, not a prison. Despite great hardship, these Mermen had developed rocketry and their undersea launch site sophisticated enough to bring Flattery and the hyb tanks out of a centuries-old orbit. If they could do that, he knew from the start he could build a Voidship like the Earthling. And now he had.
If you control the world, you don’t worry about cost, he thought. His only unrestrained enemy was time.
His only trusted associate groundside was a Pandoran, Spider Nevi. Nevi hesitated at nothing to see that the Director’s special assignments, his most sensitive assignments, were carried out. Flattery had thought Dwarf MacIntosh, shipside commander on the Orbiter, to be such a man but lately Flattery wasn’t quite so sure. The squad he was sending up today would find out soon enough.
The more fascinating man, to Flattery, was Spider Nevi, but he never seemed to get Nevi to open up to him though he had presented ample opportunity.
How do you entertain an assassin?
Most of Flattery’s fellow humans died immediately with the opening of the hybernation tanks. Their original Voidship had been outfitted to bring them out properly, safely. When the time came the ship was long-gone over the horizon, leaving the Pandoran natives in pursuit of the hyb tanks and firm as ever in their belief that the Ship itself was God.
Died immediately!
He snorted at the euphemism that his mind dealt him. In that moment that the medtechs called “immediately,” he and his shipmates had experienced enough nerve-searing pain to last twelve lifetimes. Most of his people who survived the opening of the tanks, who had known no illness during their sterile lives at Moonbase, died in the first few months of exposure to Pandora’s creatures—microscopic and otherwise.
Among the otherwise that Flattery learned to respect were the catlike hooded dashers, venomous flatwings, spinarettes, nerve runners and, deadliest of all in Flattery’s mind, this sea full of the kelp that the locals called “Avata.” The first far-thinking Chaplain/Psychiatrist to encounter the kelp had had the good sense to wipe it out. Flattery diverted more than half of his resources to pruning programs. Killing it off was out of the question, so far.
He had spent his recovery studying Pandoran history and the horrors that the planet had in store for him. He and his shipmates had splashed down in the middle of Pandora’s greatest geological and social upheaval. The planet was coming apart and certain civil disputes were flaring. It was a propitious time to be construed as a gift from the gods, and Flattery took swift advantage of it.
He used his title as Chaplain/Psychiatrist, a position that still carried weight among Pandorans, to lead the reorganization of Pandoran mores and economics. They chose him because they had never been without a Chaplain/Psychiatrist and because, as he was swift to remind them, he was a gift from the Ship that was God. He waited a good while to tell them he was building another one.
Flattery had been perceptive, shrewd, and because he noted some distracting murmurings among their religious leaders, he changed his title to, simply, “the Director.” This freed him for some important economic moves, and the Ship-worshipers stayed out of his way during the crucial formative years.
“I will not be your god,” he had told them. “I will not be your prophet to the gods. But I will direct you in your efforts to build a good life.”
They didn’t know what Flattery knew of the special training of Voidship Chaplain/Psychiatrists. Pandoran histories revealed that Flattery’s clone sibling, Raja Flattery number five of the original crew, was the failsafe device and appointed executioner of the very Voidship that had brought them all to Pandora.
It is forbidden to release an artificial consciousness on the universe. The directive was clear, though it was generally believed that any deep-space travel would require an artificial consciousness. The Organic Mental Cores, “brain boxes” as the techs called them, failed with meticulous regularity. The Flattery number five model had failed to press the destruct trigger in time. This Ship that he had allowed to survive was the being that many Pandorans worshiped as a god.
Raja Flattery, “the Nickel.” Now why didn’t he blow us all up as planned?
Flattery wondered, as he often did, whether the trigger that was cocked in his own subconscious still had its safety on. It was a risk that kept him from developing an artificial consciousness to navigate the Voidship.
There was only Flattery left to wonder why he had been the only duplicate crew member in hybernation.
“They wanted to be damned sure that whatever consciousness we manufactured got snuffed before it took over the universe,” he muttered.
Flattery calculated that any one of his three OMCs would get him to the nearest star system with no trouble. By then they’d have a fix and a centripetal whip to a first-rate, habitable system. The necessary adjustments in the individual psychologies of each Organic Mental Core had been made before their removal from their bodies for hardware implant. It was Flattery’s theory that behavioral rather than chemical adjustment would help them maintain some sense of embodiment, something to prevent the rogue insanity that plagued the whole line of OMCs from Moon-base.
Flattery rubbed his eyes and yawned. These nightmares wore him out. Questions nagged at the Director as well, taking their yammering toll, waking him again and again, exhausted, soaked in sweat, crying out. The one that worried at him the most worried him now.
What secret program have they planted in me?
Flattery’s training as Chaplain/Psychiatrist had taught him the Moonbase love for games within games, games with human life at stake.
“The Big Game,” was the game he chose to play—the one with all human life at stake. The only humans in the universe were these specimens on Pandora, of this Flattery was thoroughly convinced. He would do his best with them.
He avoided touching the kelp, for fear of what ammunition it might find should it probe his mind. Sometimes it could do that, he had seen incontrovertible evidence. Fascinating as it was, he couldn’t risk it.
He had never touched Crista Galli, either, be
cause of her connection with the kelp. He harbored a kind of lust for her that his daydreams told him was seated in the thrill of danger. He himself had provided the danger. His labtechs gave her a chemistry appropriate to the fictions he released about her. Without Flattery’s special concoction, the people that touched her would suffer some grave neurological surprises, perhaps death. It would just take a little time …
What if the kelp probes me, finds this switch? If I am the trigger, who is the finger? Crista Galli?
He had wanted Crista Galli more than once because she was beautiful, yes, but something more. It was the death in her touch, the ultimate dare. He feared she, like the kelp, might invade his privacy with a touch.
A wretched dream of tentacles prying his skull open at the sutures kept coming back. Flattery heard that the kelp could get on track inside his head, travel the DNA highway all the way to genetic memory. The search itself might set off the program, put the squeeze on a trigger in his head, a trigger set to destroy them all. He needed to know what it was himself, and how to defuse it, before risking it with the kelp.
Flattery’s greatest fear was of the kelp using him to destroy himself and this last sorry remnant of humanity that populated Pandora. This Raja Flattery did not want to die in the squalor of some third-rate world. This Raja Flattery wanted to play the Director game among the stars for the rest of his days, and he planned for a good many of them.
Should I be god to them today? he wondered, or devil? Do I have a choice? His training dictated that he did. His gut told him otherwise.
“Chance brought me here,” he muttered to his reflection in the cubbyside plaz, “and chance will see me through.” Or not.
His eyes glanced to the large console screen flickering beside his bed. The top of the screen, in bright amber letters, read “Crista Galli.” He pressed his “update” key and watched the wretched news unfold—they hadn’t found her. Twelve hours, on foot, and they hadn’t found her!
