The Pandora Sequence: The Jesus Incident, the Lazarus Effect, the Ascension Factor Read Online Free PDF

every conversation in a crowded room, that no gesture or inflection escaped him. There were times when that was true, but he kept to himself his conclusions about such observations. Thus, few were offended by his attentions. No one could find a better audience than Kerro Panille. All he wanted was to listen, to learn, to make order out of it in his poems.
    It was order that mattered—beautiful order created out of the deepest inspiration. Yet . . . he had to admit it, Ship presented an image of infinite disorder. He had asked Ship to show its shape to him once, a whimsical request which he had half expected to be refused. But Ship had responded by taking him on a visual tour, through the internal sensors, through the eyes of the robox repair units and even through the eyes of shuttles flitting between Ship and Pandora.
    Externally, Ship was most confusing. Great fanlike extrusions dangled in space like wings or fins. Lights glittered within them and there were occasional glimpses of people at work behind the open shutters of the ports. Hydroponics gardens, Ship had explained.
    Ship stretched almost fifty-eight kilometers in length. But it bulged and writhed throughout that length with fragile shapes which gave no clue to their purpose. Shuttles landed and were dispatched from long, slender tubes jutting randomly outward. The hydroponics fans were stacked one upon another, built outward from each other like mad growths springing from mutated spores.
    Panille knew that once Ship had been sleek and trim, a projectile shape with three slim wings at the midpoint. The wings had dipped backward to form a landing tripod. That sleek shape lay hidden now within the confusion of the eons. It was called “the core” and you caught occasional glimpses of it in the passages—a thick wall with an airtight hatch, a stretch of metallic surface with ports which opened onto the blank barriers of new construction.
    Internally ; Ship was equally confusing. Sensor eyes showed him the stacks of dormant life in the hybernation bays. At his request, Ship displayed the locator coordinates, but they were meaningless to him. Numbers and glyphs. He followed the swift movements of robox units down passages where there was no air and out onto Ship’s external skin. There, in the shadows of the random extrusions, he watched the business of repairs and alterations, even the beginnings of new construction.
    Panille had watched his fellow Shipmen at their work, feeling fascinated and faintly guilty. A secret spy intruding on privacy. Two men had wrestled a large tubular container into a loading bay for shuttle transshipment down to Pandora. And Panille had felt that he had no right to watch this without the two men knowing it.
    When the tour was over, he had sat back disappointed. It occurred to him then that Ship intruded this way all the time. Nothing any Shipman did could be hidden from Ship. This realization had sparked a momentary resentment which was followed immediately by amusement.
    I am in Ship and of Ship and, in a deeper sense, I am Ship.
    “Kerro!”
    The sudden voice from the com-console beside his holo focus startled him. How had she found him here?
    “Yes, Hali?”
    “Where are you?”
    Ahhh, she had not found him. A search program had found him.
    “I’m studying,” he said.
    “Can you walk with me for a while? I’m really wound up.”
    “Where?”
    “How about the arboretum near the cedars?”
    “Give me a few minutes to finish up here and meet you.”
    “I’m not bothering you, am I?”
    He noted the diffidence in her tone.
    “No, I need a break.”
    “See you outside of Records.”
    He heard the click of her signoff and stood a blink staring at the console.
    How did she know I was studying in the Records section?
    A search program keyed to his person would not report his location.
    Am I that predictable?
    He picked up his notecase and recorder and stepped through the concealed hatch. He sealed it and slipped down through