The Pandora Sequence: The Jesus Incident, the Lazarus Effect, the Ascension Factor by Frank Herbert

of unsettled doubts, and she had to remind herself: I’m not being assigned here. No, that wouldn’t happen, not as long as Oakes wanted to get her naked on his couch . . . to penetrate her.
    Legata took a deep breath of warm air. As in all Colony buildings, temperature and humidity were identical with Ship’s. Here in the lab, though, her flesh shuddered off a special kind of chill, a gooseflesh that made her stomach ache and jabbed needles of pain into the knots that her nipples made against her singlesuit. She spoke quickly to mask her disquiet.
    “Your staff people, they look so old.”
    “Many of them have been with us from the start.”
    There was evasion in his voice and it did not go unnoticed, but Legata chose to watch, not push.
    “But they . . . look even older than that. What . . .”
    Murdoch interrupted her. “We have a higher fatality rate than Colony, did you know that?”
    She shook her head. It was a lie; had to be a lie.
    “It’s being out here on the perimeter,” Murdoch said. “We don’t get the protection everyone else does. Nerve Runners are particularly heavy this close to the hills.”
    An uncontrollable shudder swept over her arms. Nerve Runners! Those darting little worms were the most feared of all Pandoran creatures. They had an affinity for nerve cells and would eat their way slowly, agonizingly along human nerve channels until they gorged on the brain, encysted and reproduced.
    “Bad,” Murdoch said, seeing her reaction. “And the workload we carry here, of course . . . but that’s agreed on from the start. These are the most dedicated people groundside.”
    She looked across a bank of plaz vats at a group of these dedicated workers—-blank, tight-lipped faces. Most of those she had seen here were wrinkled and drawn, pale. No one joked; not even a nervous giggle broke the monotony. All was the clink and click of instruments, the hum of tools, the aching distance between lives.
    Murdoch flashed her a sudden smile. “But you wanted to see The Garden.” He turned, waved a hand for her to follow. “This way.”
    He led her through another system of locks, only doubles this time, into what appeared to be a training area for young E-clones. There were several of them around the entrance, but they drew back at Murdoch’s approach.
    Fearful , Legata thought.
    There was a circular barrier across the training area and she identified another lock entrance.
    “What’s over there?” She nodded.
    “We won’t be able to go in there today,” Murdoch said. “We’re sterilizing in there.”
    “Oh? What’s in there?”
    “Well . . . that’s the core of The Garden. I call it the Flower Room.” He turned toward a group of the young E-clones nearby. “Now, here we have some of the young products from the Flower Room. They . . .”
    “Does your Flower Room have another name?” she asked. She did not like his answers. Too evasive. He was lying.
    Murdoch turned to face her and she felt threatened by the pouncing glee in his eyes. Guilty knowledge lay there—dirty, guilty knowledge.
    “Some call it the Scream Room,” he said.
    Scream Room!
    “And we can’t go in there?”
    “Not . . . today. Perhaps if you made an appointment for later?”
    She controlled a shudder. The way he watched her, the avaricious glint to his eyes.
    “I’ll come back to see your . . . Flower Room later,” she said.
    “Yes. You will.”

Chapter 15

    From you, Avata learns of a great poet-philosopher who said: “Until you meet an alien intelligence, you will not know what it is to be human.”
    And Avata did not know what it was to be Avata.
    True, and poetic. But poetry is what’s lost in translation. Thus, we now permit you to call this place Pandora and to call us Avata. The first among you, though, called us vegetable. In this, Avata saw the deeper meaning of your history and felt fear. You ingest vegetable to use the energy gathered by others. With you, the others end. With Avata, the others