Free The Godmakers by Frank Herbert

bureaucracy: report juggler. There was a green check mark beside the transfer notice, indicating pressure from on high.
    Now -- a family linkup between Orne and the Bullones.
    Still puzzled, but unable to see a way through the problem, Stetson scrambled an eyes-only memo to ComGo, then turned to the urgent list atop his work-in-progress file.
    As the mythological glossary developed our first primitive understanding of Psi, a transformation occurred. Out of the grimoire came curiosity and the translation of fear into experiment. Men dared explore this terrifying frontier with the analytical tools of the mind. From these largely unsophisticated gropings arose the first pragmatic handbooks out of which we developed Religious Psi.
    -- HALMYRACH, ABBOD OF AMEL, Psi and Religion
    At the I-A medical center, the oval crechepod containing Orne's flesh dangled from ceiling hooks in a private room. There were humming sounds in the dim, watery green of the room, and rhythmic chuggings, sighings, clackings.
    Occasionally, a door opened quietly and a white-clad figure would enter, check the graph tapes on the crechepod's instruments, examine the vital connections, then depart.
    In the medical euphemism, Orne was lingering. He became a major conversation piece at the interns' rest breaks: "That agent who was hurt on Sheleb, he's still with us. Man, they must build those guys different from the rest of us!
    . . . Yeah. I heard he only has about one-eighth of his insides -- liver, kidneys, stomach, all gone . . . Lay you odds he doesn't last out the month .
    . . Look at what old sure-thing Tavish wants to bet on!"
    On the morning of his eighty-eighth day in the crechepod, the day nurse entered Orne's room for her first routine check. She lifted the inspection hood, looked down at him. The day nurse was a tall, lean-faced professional who had learned to meet miracles and failures with equal lack of expression.
    She was just here to observe. The daily routine with the dying (or already dead) I-A operative had lulled her into a state of psychological unpreparedness for anything but closing out the records.
    Any day now, poor guy, she thought.
    Orne opened his only remaining eye and she gasped as he said in a low whisper:
    "Did they clobber those dames on Sheleb?"
    "Yes, sir!" the day nurse blurted. "They really did, sir!"
    "Another damn mess," Orne said. He closed his eye. His breathing-simulation deepened and heart-demand increased.
    The nurse rang frantically for the doctors.
    Part of our problem centers on the effort to introduce external control for a system-of-systems that should be maintained by internal balancing forces. We are not attempting to recognize and refrain from inhibiting those self-regulating systems in our species upon which species survival depends. We are ignoring our own feedback functions.

    -- LEWIS ORNE's Report on Hamal
    For Orne, there had been an indeterminate period in a blank fog, then a time of pain and the gradual realization that he was in a crechepod. Had to be.
    He could remember the sudden disrupter explosion on Sheleb . . . the explosion like a silent force thrusting at him -- no sound, just an enveloping nothingness.
    Good old crechepod. It made him feel safe, shielded from outside perils.
    Things still went on inside him, though. He could remember . . . dreams? He wasn't sure they really were dreams. There was something about a hoe and handles. He tried to recall the elusive thought pattern. He sensed his Linkage with the crechepod and, beyond that, a connection with some kind of merciless manipulative system, a mass effect reducing all existence to a base level.
    Is it possible that Man invented war and was trapped by his own invention?
    Orne wondered. Who are we in the I-A to set ourselves up as a board of angels to mediate in the affairs of all sentient life we contact?
    Is it possible we are influenced by our universe in ways we don't readily recognize?
    He sensed his brain/mind/awareness churning,