Herbert, Frank - The Godmakers

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2024-12-15 0 0 269.54KB 132 页 5.9玖币
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The Godmakers
Frank Herbert
1972
You must understand that peace is an internal matter. It has to be a self-
discipline for an individual or for an entire civilization. It must come from
within. If you set up an outside power to enforce peace, this outside power
will grow stronger and stronger. It has no alternative. The inevitable
outcome will be an explosion, cataclysmic and chaotic. That is the way of our
universe. When you create paired opposites, one will overwhelm the other
unless they are in delicate balance.
-- The writings of DIANA BULLONE
To become a god, a living creature must transcend the physical. The three
steps of this transcendent path are known. First, he must come upon the
awareness of secret aggression. Second, he must come upon,the discernment of
purpose within the animal shape. Third, he must experience death.
When this is done, the nascent god must find his own rebirth in a unique
ordeal by which he discovers the one who summoned him.
-- "The Making of a God," The Amel Handbook
Lewis Orne could not remember a time when he had been free of a peculiar,
repetitive dream, when he had been able to go to sleep in the sure knowledge
that the dream's wild sense of reality would not clutch at his psyche.
The dream began with music, this really hokey unseen choir, syrup in sound, a
celestial joke. Vaporous figures would come out of the music adding a visual
dimension of the same quality. Finally, a voice would override the whole
silly thing with disturbing pronouncements:
"Gods are made, not born!"
Or:
"To say you are neutral is another way of saying you accept the necessities of
war!"
To look at him, you wouldn't think him the kind of person to be plagued by
such a dream. He was a blocky human with the thick muscles of a heavy planet
native -- Chargon of Gemma was his birthplace. He possessed a face
reminiscent of a full-jowled bulldog and a steady gaze which often made people
uncomfortable.
Despite his peculiar dream, or perhaps because of it, Orne made regular
obeisance to Amel, "the planet where all godness dwells." Because of the
dream's pronouncements, which remained with him all through his waking life,
he enlisted on the morning of his nineteenth birthday in the Rediscovery and
Reeducation Service, thereby seeking to reknit the galactic empire shattered
by the Rim Wars.
After training him in the great Peace School on Marak, R&R set Orne down one
cloudy morning on the meridian longitude, fortieth parallel, of the newly
rediscovered planet of Hamal, terra type to eight decimal places, the
occupants sufficiently close to the homo-S genetic drift for interbreeding
with natives of the Heart Worlds.
Ten Hamal weeks later, as he stood at the edge of a dusty little village in
the planet's North Central Uplands, Orne pushed the panic button of the little
green signal unit in his right-hand jacket pocket. At the moment, he was
intensely aware that he was the lone representative on Hamal of a service
which often lost agents to "causes unknown."
What had sent his hand thrusting for the signal unit was the sight of about
thirty Hamalites continuing to stare with brooding gloom at a companion who
had just executed a harmless accidental pratfall into a mound of soft fruit.
No laughter, no discernible change of emotion.
Added to all the other items Orne had cataloged, the incident of the pratfall-
in-the-fruit compounded Hamal's aura of doom.
Orne sighed. It was done. He had sent a signal out into space, set a chain
of events into motion which could result in the destruction of Hamal, of
himself, or both.
As he was to discover later, he had also rid himself of his repetitive dream,
replacing it with a sequence of waking events which would in time make him
suspect he had walked into his mysterious night world.
A religion requires numerous dichotomic relationships. It needs believers and
unbelievers. It needs those who know the mysteries and those who only fear
them. It needs the insider and the outsider. It needs both a god and a
devil. It needs absolutes and relativity. It needs that which is formless
(though in the process of forming) and that which is formed.
-- Religious Engineering, secret writings of Amel
"We are about to make a god," Abbod Halmyrach said.
He was a short, dark-skinned man in a pale-orange robe that fell to his ankles
in soft folds. His face, narrow and smooth, was dominated by a long nose that
hung like a precipice over a wide, thin-lipped mouth. His head was polished
brown baldness.
"We do not know from what creature or thing the god will be born," the Abbod
said. "It could be one of you."
He gestured to the room full of acolytes seated on the bare floor of an
austere room illuminated by the flat rays of Amel's midmorning sun. The room
was a Psi fortress buttressed by instruments and spells. It measured twenty
meters to the side, three meters floor to ceiling. Eleven windows, five on
one side and six on the other, looked out across the park rooftops of Amel's
central warren complex. The wall behind the Abbod and the one he faced gave
the appearance of white stone laced with thin brown lines like insect tracks -
- one of the configurations of a Psi machine. The walls glowed with pale-
white light as flat as skimmed milk.
The Abbod felt the force flowing between these two walls and experienced the
anticipatory flash of guilt-fear which he knew was shared by the acolyte
class. Officially, this class was called Religious Engineering, but the young
acolytes persisted in their impiety. To them, this was God Making.
And they were sufficiently advanced to know the perils.
"What I say and do here has been planned and measured out with precision," the
Abbod said. "Random influence is dangerous here. That is why this room is so
purposefully plain. The smallest extraordinary intrusion here could bring
immeasurable differences into what we do. I say, then, that no shame attaches
to any one of you who wishes at this time to leave this room and not
participate in the making of a god."
The seated acolytes stirred beneath their white robes, but no one accepted his
invitation.
The Abbod experienced a small, sensation of satisfaction. Thus far, things
went within the range of his predictions. He said:
"As we know, the danger in making a god is that we succeed. In the science of
Psi, a success on the order of magnitude which we project in this room carries
profound reflexive peril. We do, in fact, make a god. Having made a god, we
achieve something paradoxically no longer our creation. We could well become
the creation of that which we create."
The Abbod nodded to himself, reflecting on the god creations in humankind's
history: wild, purposeful, primitive, sophisticated . . . but all
unpredictable. No matter how made, the god went his own way. God whims were
not to be taken lightly.
"The god comes anew each time out of chaos," the Abbod said. "We do not
control this; we only know how to make a god."
He felt the dry electricity of fear building in his mouth, recognized the
necessary tension growing around him. The god must come partly out of fear,
but not alone from fear.
"We must stand in awe of our creation," he said. "We must be ready to adore,
to obey, to plead and supplicate."
The acolytes knew their cue. "Adore and obey," they murmured. Awe radiated
from them.
Ah, yes, the Abbod thought; infinite possibilities and infinite peril, that is
where we now stand. The fabric of our universe is woven into these moments.
He said: "First, we call into being the demishape, the agent of the god we
would create." He lifted his arms, breaking the force flow between the two
walls, setting eddies adrift in the room. As he moved, he felt a
simultaneity, a time-rift in his universe with the image-awareness within him
that told of three things happening together. A vision of his own brother, Ag
Emolirdo, came into his mind, a long-nosed, birdlike human standing in pale
light on faraway Marak, sobbing without cause. This vision flowed into the
image of a hand, one finger depressing a button on a small green box. In the
same instant, he saw himself standing with arms upraised as a Shriggar, the
Chargonian death lizard, stepped from the Psi wall behind him.
The acolytes gasped.
With the exquisite slowness of terror, the Abbod lowered his arms, turned.
Yes, it was a true Shriggar -- a creature so tall it must crouch in this room.
Great scratching talons drooped from its short arms. The narrow head with its
hooked beak open to reveal a forked tongue twisted left, then right. Its
stalk eyes wriggled and its breath filled the room with swamp odors.
Abruptly, the mouth snapped closed: "Chunk!"
When it reopened, a voice issued from it: deep, disembodied, articulated
without synchronization of Shriggar tongue and lips. It said:
"The god you make may die aborning. Such things take their own time and their
own way. I stand watchful and ready. There will be a game of war, a city of
glass where creatures of high potential make their lives. There will be a
time for politics and a time for priests to fear the consequences of their
daring. All of this must be to achieve an unknown goal."
Slowly, the shriggar began to dissolve -- first the head, then the great
yellow-scaled body. A puddle of warm brown fluid formed where it had stood,
oozed across the room, around the Abbod's feet, around the seated acolytes.
None of them dared move. They knew better than to introduce a random force of
their own into this place before the flickering Psi currents subsided.
Anyone who has ever felt his skin crawl with the electrifying awareness of an
unseen presence knows the primary sensation of Psi.
-- HALMYRACH, ABBOD OF AMEL, Psi and Religion, Preface
Lewis Orne clasped his hands behind his back until the knuckles showed white.
He stared darkly out of his second-story window at a Hamal morning. The big
yellow sun dominated a cloudless sky above distant mountains. It promised to
be a scorcher of a day.
Behind him there was the sound of a scratchy stylus rasping across transmit-
paper as the Investigation-Adjustment operative made notes on the interview
they had just completed. The paper was transmitting a record of the words to
the operative's waiting ship.
So maybe I was wrong to push the panic button, Orne thought. That doesn't
give this wise guy the right to ride me! After all, this is my first job.
They can't expect perfection the first time out.
The scratching stylus began to wear on Orne's nerves.
Creases furrowed Orne's square forehead. He put his left hand up to the rough
wooden window frame, ran his right hand through the stiff bristles of his
close-cropped red hair. The loose cut of his white coverall uniform --
standard for R&R agents -- accentuated his blocky appearance. Blood suffused
his full-jowled face. He felt himself vacillating between anger and the urge
to give full vent to a pixie nature which he usually kept under control.
He thought: If I'm wrong about this place, they'll boot me out of the
service. There's too much bad blood between R&R and Investigation-Adjustment.
This I-A joker would just love to make us look stupid. But by god! There'll
be some jumping if I'm right about Hamal!
Orne shook his head. But I'm probably wrong.
The more he thought about it, the more he felt it had been stupid to call in
the I-A. Hamal probably was not aggressive by nature. Very likely there was
no danger that R&R would provide the technological basis for arming a
potential war maker.
Still . . .
Orne sighed. He felt a vague, dreamlike uneasiness. The sensation reminded
him of the drifting awareness before awakening, the moments of clarity when
action, thought and emotion combined.
Someone clumped down the stairs at the other end of the building. The floor
shook beneath Orne's feet. This was an old building, the government
guesthouse, built of rough lumber. The room carried the sour smell of many
former occupants and haphazard cleaning.
From his second floor window Orne could see part of the cobblestone market
square of this village of Pitsiben. Beyond the square he could make out the
wide track of the ridge road that came up from the Plains of Rogga. Along the
road stretched a double line of moving figures: farmers and hunters coming
for market day in Pitsiben. Amber dust hung over the road. It softened the
scene, imparted a romantic out-of-focus look.
Farmers leaned into the pushing harnesses of their low two-wheeled carts,
plodding along with a heavy-footed swaying motion. They wore long green
coats, yellow berets tipped uniformly over the left ear, yellow trousers with
cuffs darkened by the road dust, open sandals that revealed horny feet splayed
out like the feet of draft animals. Their carts were piled high with green
and yellow vegetables seemingly arranged to carry out the general pastel color
scheme.
Brown-clothed hunters moved with the line, but at one side like flank guards.
They strode along, heads high, cap feathers bobbing. Each carried a bell-
muzzled fowling piece at a jaunty angle over one arm, a spyglass in a leather
case over the left shoulder. Behind the hunters trotted their apprentices
pulling three-wheeled game carts overflowing with tiny swamp deer, dappleducks
and porjos, the snake-tailed rodents which Hamalites considered such a
delicacy.
On the distant valley floor Orne could see the dark-red spire of the I-A ship
that had come flaming down just after dawn on this day, homing on his
transmitter. The ship, too, seemed set in a dream haze, its shape clouded by
blue smoke from kitchen fires in the farm homes that dotted the valley. The
ship's red shape towered above the homes, looking out of place, an ornament
left over from holiday decorations for giants.
As Orne watched, a hunter paused on the ridge road, unlimbered his spyglass,
studied the I-A ship. The hunter appeared only vaguely curious. His action
didn't fit expectations; it just didn't fit.
The smoke and hot yellow sun conspired to produce a summery appearance to the
countryside -- a look of lush growing behind pastel heat. It was essentially
a peaceful scene, arousing in Orne a deep feeling of bitterness.
Damn! I don't care what the I-A says. I was right to call them. These
Hamalites are hiding something. They're not peaceful. The real mistake here
was made by that dumbo on First-Contact when he gabbled about the importance
we place on a peaceful history!
Orne grew aware that the scratching of the stylus had stopped. The I-A man
cleared his throat.
Orne turned, looked across the low room at the operative. The I-A agent sat
at a rough table beside Orne's unmade bed. Papers and folders were scattered
all around him on the table. A small recorder weighted one stack. The I-A
man slouched in a bulky wooden chair. He was big-headed, gangling and with
overlarge features, a leathery skin. His hair was dark and straggling. The
eyelids drooped. They gave to his face that look of haughty superciliousness
that was like a brand mark of the I-A. The man wore patched blue fatigues
without insignia. He had introduced himself as Umbo Stetson, chief I-A
operative for this sector.
The chief operative, Orne thought. Why'd they send the chief operative?
Stetson noted Orne's attention, said: "I believe we have most of it now.
Let's just check it over once more for luck. You landed here ten weeks ago,
right?"
"Yes. I was set down by a landing boat from the R&R transport, Arneb
Rediscovery."
"This was your first mission?"
"I told you that. I graduated from Uni-Galacta with the class of '07, and did
my apprentice work on Timurlain."
Stetson frowned. "Then they sent you right out here to this newly
rediscovered backwash planet?"
"That's right."
"I see. And you were full of the old rah-rah, the old missionary spirit to
uplift mankind, all that sort of thing."
Orne blushed, scowled.
Stetson nodded. "I see they're still teaching that 'cultural renaissance'
bushwa at dear old Uni-Galacta." He put a hand to his breast, raised his
voice in elaborate caricature: "We must reunite the lost planets with the
centers of culture and industry, and take up the glor-ious onward march of
mankind that was cut off so brutally by the Rim Wars!"
He spat on the floor.
"I think we can skip all that," Orne muttered.
"You're sooooo right," Stetson said. "Now, what'd you bring with you to this
lovely vacation spot?"
"I had a dictionary compiled by First-Contact, but it was pretty sketchy in .
. ."
"Who was that First-Contact?"
"Name on the dictionary says Andre Bullone."
"Oh -- Any relation to High Commissioner Bullone?"
"I don't know."
Stetson scribbled something on his papers. "And that First-Contact report
says this is a special place, a peaceful planet with a primitive farming-
hunting economy, eh?"
"That's right."
"Uh-huh. What else'd you bring into this garden spot?"
"The usual stuff for my job and reports . . . and a transmitter, of course."
"And you pushed the panic button on that transmitter two days ago, eh? Did we
get here fast enough for you?"
Orne glared at the floor.
Stetson said: "I suppose you've the usual eidetic memory crammed with
cultural-medical-industrial-technological information."
"I'm a fully qualified R&R agent!"
"We will observe a minute of reverent silence," Stetson said. Abruptly, he
slammed a hand onto the table. "It's a plain damn stupidity! Nothing but a
political come-on!"
Orne snapped to angry attention. "What?"
"This R&R dodge, sonny. It's demagoguery, it's perpetuating a few political
lives by endangering all of us. You mark my words: We're going to rediscover
one planet too many; we're going to give its people the industrial foundation
they don't deserve; and we're going to see another Rim War to end all Rim
Wars!"
Orne took a step forward, glaring. "Why'n hell do you think I pushed the
panic button?"
Stetson sat back, his calm restored by the outburSt. "My dear fellow, that's
what we're now trying to determine." He tapped his front teeth with the
stylus. "Now, just why did you call us?"
"I told you! It's . . ." He waved a hand at the window.
"You felt lonely and wanted the I-A to come hold your hand, that it?"
"Oh, go to hell!" Orne barked.
"In due time, son. In due time." Stetson's drooping eyelids drooped even
farther. "Now . . . just what're they teaching you R&R dummies to look for
these days?"
Orne swallowed another angry reply. "War signs."
"What else? But let's be specific."
"We look for fortifications, for war games among the children, for people
drilling or other signs of armylike group activities. . . ."
"Such as uniforms?"
"Certainly! And for war scars, wounds on people and buildings, the level of
wound treatment knowledge in the medical profession, indications of wholesale
destruction -- you know, things like that."
"The gross evidence." Stetson shook his head from side to side. "Do you
consider this adequate?"
"No, damn it, I don't!"
"You're sooooo right," Stetson said. "Hmmmmmm. Let's us dig a little deeper.
I don't quite understand what bothers you about the honest citizenry here."
Orne sighed, shrugged. "They have no spirit, no bounce. No humor. They live
in perpetual seriousness bordering on gloom."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. I . . . I . . . uh . . ." Orne wet his lips with his tongue. "I . .
. uh . . . told the Leaders' Council our people are very interested in a
steady source of froolap bones for making left-handed bone china saucers."
Stetson jerked forward. "You what?"
"Well, they were so damn serious all the time. I had as much of it as I could
take and, well, I . . . uh . . ."
"What happened?"
"They asked for a detailed description of the froolap and the accepted method
of preparing the bones for shipment."
"What'd you tell them?"
"Well, I . . . Well, according to my description they decided Hamal doesn't
have any froolaps."
"I see," Stetson said. "That's what's wrong with this place, no froolaps."
Now I've done it, Orne thought. Why can't I keep my big mouth shut? I've
just convinced him I'm nuts!
"Any big cemeteries, national monuments, that sort of thing?" Stetson asked.
"Not a one. But they have this custom where they plant their dead vertically
and put an orchard tree over them. There are some mighty big orchards."
"You think that's significant?"
Stetson took a deep breath, leaned back. He tapped his stylus on the table,
stared into the distance. Presently, he asked: "How're they taking to
reeducation?"
"They're very interested in the industrial end. That's why I'm here in
Pitsiben village. We've located a tungsten source nearby and --"
"What about their medical people?" Stetson interrupted. "Wound knowledge,
that sort of thing?"
"It's difficult to say," Orne said. "You know how it is with medics. They
have this idea they already know everything and it's difficult to find out
just what they do know. I'm making progress, though."
"What's their general medical level?"
"They've a good basic knowledge of anatomy, surgery and bone setting. I get
no pattern, though, in their knowledge of wounds."
"Do you have any ideas why this planet is so backward?" Stetson asked.
"Their history says Hamal was accidentally seeded by sixteen survivors --
eleven women and five men -- from a Tritsahin cruiser disabled in an
engagement during the early part of the Rim Wars. They landed with a lifeboat
without much equipment and damn little know-how. I take it they were mostly
black gang who got away."
"And here they sat until R&R came along," Stetson said. "Lovely. Just
lovely."
"That was five hundred Standard Years ago," Orne said.
"And these gentle people are still farming and hunting," Stetson murmured.
"Oh, lovely." He glared up at Orne. "How long would it take this planet,
granting they have the aggressive drive, to become a definite war menace?"
Orne said: "Well -- there are two uninhabited planets in the system they
could build up for raw materials. Oh, I'd say twenty to twenty-five S'years
after they got the industrial foundation on their home planet."
"And how long before the aggressive core would have the know-how to go
underground so we'd have to blast the planet apart to get at them?"
"Give 'em a year the way they're going now."
"You are beginning to see the sweet little problem you R&R dummies create for
us!" Stetson pointed an accusing finger at Orne. "And let us make one little
slip! Let us declare a planet aggressive and bring in an occupation force and
let your damn spies find out we made a mistake!" He doubled his hand into a
fist. "Aha!"
They've already started building factories to produce machine tools," Orne
said. "They're quick enough." He shrugged. "They soak everything up like
some dark gloomy sponge."
"Very poetic," Stetson growled. He lifted his long frame from the chair,
strode to the middle of the room. "Let's go take a closer look. And I'm
warning you, Orne, the I-A has more important things to do than go around wet-
nursing R&R."
"And you'd just love to make us look like a pack of fumbleheads," Orne said.
"You're sooooo right, son. That would not make me lose any sleep at all."
"So what if I made a mistake! A first . . ."
"Well see, we'll see. Come along. We'll use my go-buggy."
Here goes nothing, Orne thought. This schlammer isn't going to look very hard
when it's easier to sit back and laugh at R&R. I'm finished before we start.
One of the essential problems in engineering a religion for any species is to
摘要：

TheGodmakersFrankHerbert1972Youmustunderstandthatpeaceisaninternalmatter.Ithastobeaself-disciplineforanindividualorforanentirecivilization.Itmustcomefromwithin.Ifyousetupanoutsidepowertoenforcepeace,thisoutsidepowerwillgrowstrongerandstronger.Ithasnoalternative.Theinevitableoutcomewillbeanexplosion,...

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