Songs of a Sentient Flute

Herbert, Frank. "Songs of a Sentient Flute." Analog (February 1979). The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert. New York, NY: Tor/Tom Doherty Associates, 2014. In Medea: Harlan's World. Harlan Ellison, editor. New York, NY: Bantam Spectra and Phantasia Press, 1985. See Internet Speculative Fiction Database at link.[1]

The Collected Stories reviewed by Bruce A. Beatie, SFRA Review #315 (Winter 2016): pp. 25-29,[2] who gives a brief history of the genesis of the story and identifies it as "a seed story" for The Jesus Incident, which see at link, under Fiction.

Beatie places "Songs" in Herbert's Ship series and summarizes "Songs" (in part):

Nikki, an 18-year-old poet, has spent his life (presumably born there) on an interstellar sentient Ship which had “systematically filled his mind with all the raw data he could master.” ([Stories] 642-3) During his descent to the well-established colony on Medea [...]. Nikki remembers his mother, “the almond-eyed recorder,” who told him that “Poets are the mules of the mystical world. ... Ship is your father” and “will teach you all you need. And, once you leave Ship, Medea will be your mother.” ([Stories] 642) The Medea Central base is, Nikki thinks, “as though he had never left Ship.” ([Stories] 646) (Beatie pp. 26-27)

According to Beatie, Nikki identifies a human-appearing contact he meets on planet as "like a partial God who was made that Ship might understand some things better” (Stories 682; Beatie p. 27); so, we note, Ship comes through strongly as a god-the-father figure, including as a Creator.

In addition to The Jesus Incident, Beatie relates "Songs" to A. C. Clarke's "A Meeting with Medusa".

RDE, finishing, 18Aug21