Free The Godmakers by Frank Herbert Page A

visualized all of this activity as a bizarre tool for symbolizing the drives and energy desires of all life.
    Somewhere within himself, he felt there was an ancient function, a thing of archaic tendencies which remained constant despite the marks of the evolution through which it had passed.
    Abruptly, he felt himself in the presence of an overwhelming thought/presence: The most misguided effort of sentience is the attempt to alter the past, to weed out discrepancies, to insist on fellow-happiness at any price. To refrain from harming others is one thing; to design and order happiness for others and to enforce delivery invites an equal-and-opposite reaction.
    Orne drifted off to sleep with this convoluted thought winding and twisting in his awareness.
    The human operates out of complex superiority demands, self-affirming through ritual, insisting upon a rational need to learn, striving for self-imposed goals, manipulating his environment while he denies his own adaptive abilities, never fully satisfied.
    -- LECTURES OF HALMYRACH, private publication files of Amel Orne began to show small but steady signs of recovery. Within a month, the medics ventured an intestinal transplant which increased his response rate.
    Two months later, they placed him on an atlotl/gibiril regimen, forcing the energy transfer which allowed him to regrow his lost fingers and eye, restore his scalp line and erase the other internal-external damage.
    Through it all, Orne found himself wrestling with his soul. He felt strangled by the patterns he had once accepted, as though he had passed through profound change which had removed him from the body of his past. All of the assumptions of his former existence took on the character of shadows, passionless and contrary to the new flesh growing within him. He felt that he had been surprised by his own death, and had accepted the total denial of a life which had melted into a sandpile. Now, he was rebuilding, willfully accepting only a one-part definition of existence.
    I am one being, he thought. I exist. That is enough. I give life to myself.
    The thought slipped into him like a fire which bore him forward out of an ancestral cave. The wheel of his life was turning, and he knew it would go full circle. He felt that he had gone down into the intestines of the universe to see how everything was made.
    No more old taboos, he thought. I have been both alive and dead.
    Fourteen months, eleven days, five hours and two minutes after he had been picked up on Shelab "as good as dead," Orne walked out of the hospital on his own two legs, accompanied by an oddly silent Umbo Stetson.
    Under the dark-blue I-A field cape, Orne's coverall uniform fitted his once-muscular frame like a deflated bag. The pixie light had returned to his eyes, though -- even to the new eye which had grown parallel with his new awareness.
    Except for the loss of weight, he appeared to be the old Lewis Orne. It was a close enough resemblance that most former acquaintances could have recognized him after only a moment's hesitation. The internal differences did not show themselves to the casual eye.
    Outside the hospital, clouds obscured Marak's greenish sun. It was midmorning. A cold spring wind bent the pile lawn, tugged fitfully at border plantings of exotic flowers around the hospital's landing pad.
    Orne paused on the steps above the pad, breathed deeply of the chill air.
    "Beautiful day," he said. His new kneecap felt strange, a better fit than the old one. He was acutely conscious of all his new parts and the regrowth syndrome which made all crechepod graduates share the unjoke label of "twice-born."
    Stetson reached out a hand to help Orne down the steps, hesitated, put the hand back in his pocket. Beneath the section chiefs look of weary superciliousness there was a note of anxiety. His big features remained set in a frown. The drooping eyelids failed to conceal a sharp, measuring stare.
    Orne glanced at the sky to the southwest.
    "Flitter