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

their meaning.
    “It’s been kept quiet, but even the Roman Empire can’t hide this heat. All the chants of all the priests of Ra won’t make one damn whit of difference.”
    “Heat?” his mother shot back. “Heat is something you can live in, you can deal with. But this . . .” she waved her hand at the large window, “this is only a step away from fire.”
    So, he thought, it was the sun made that man black.
    He was ten before he realized that the man who walked past was black from birth, from conception. Still, Morgan persisted in telling the other children in his crèche that it was the sun’s doing. He enjoyed the secret game of persuasion and deception.
    Ah, the power of the game, even then!
    Oakes straightened the cushion at his back. Why did he think of that black man, now? There had been one curious event, a simple thing that caused a commotion and fixed it in his memory.
    He touched me.
    Oakes could not recall being touched by anyone except his parents until that moment. On that very hot day, he sat outside on a step, cooled by the shade of the roof and the ventilator trained on his back from the doorway. The man walked by, as usual, then stopped and turned back. The boy watched him, curious, through the mesh fence, and the man studied him carefully, as though noticing him for the first time.
    Oakes recalled the sudden jump of his heart, that feeling of a slingshot pulled back, back.
    The man looked around, then up at the top of the fence, and the next thing Oakes knew the man was over the top, walking up to him. The black man stopped, reached out a hesitant hand and touched the boy’s cheek. Oakes also reached out, equally curious, and touched the black skin of the man’s arm.
    “Haven’t you ever seen a little boy before?” he asked.
    The black face widened into a smile, and he said, “Yes, but not a little boy like you.”
    Then a sentry jumped on the man out of nowhere and took him away. Another sentry pulled the boy inside and called his father. He remembered that his father was angry. But best of all he remembered the look of wide-eyed wonder on the black man’s face, the man who never walked by again. Oakes felt special then, powerful, an object of deference. He had always been someone to reckon with.
    Why do I remember that man?
    It seemed as though he spent all of his private hours asking himself questions lately. Questions led to more questions, led ultimately, daily, to the one question that he refused to admit into his consciousness. Until now.
    He voiced the question aloud to himself, tested it on his tongue like the long-awaited wine.
    “What if the damned ship is God?”

Chapter 5

    Human hybernation is to animal hibernation as animal hibernation is to constant wakefulness. In its reduction of life processes, hybernation approaches absolute stasis. It is nearer death than life.
    —Dictionary of Science, 101st Edition

    RAJA FLATTERY lay quietly in the hybernation cocoon while he fought to overcome his terrors.
    Ship has me.
    Moody waves confused his memories but he knew several things. He could almost project these things onto the ebon blackness which surrounded him.
    I was Chaplain/Psychiatrist on the Voidship Earthling.
    We were supposed to produce an artificial consciousness. Very dangerous, that.
    And they had produced . . . something. That something was Ship, a being of seemingly infinite powers.
    God or Satan?
    Flattery did not know. But Ship had created a paradise planet for its cargo of clones and then had introduced a new concept: WorShip. It had demanded that the human clones decide how they would WorShip.
    We failed in that, too.
    Was it because they were clones, every one of them? They had certainly been expendable. They had known this from the first moments of their childhood awareness on Moonbase.
    Again, fear swept through him.
    I must be resolute , Flattery told himself. God or Satan, whatever this power may be, I’m helpless before it unless I remain