“Please believe me,” Thomas said. “Unless we learn how to WorShip, we are through. No more humankind anywhere. I . . . I don’t want that to happen.”
“Then why should we attack the Redoubt?”
“Because you say those are the last people groundside—Colony’s destroyed.”
“That’s true, but what would you teach those people by attacking?” Panille’s tone was maddeningly reasonable, a voice which kept its disturbing pace with the sounds of breeze-stirred leaves.
Thomas tried to match that tone: “Lewis and The Boss are destroying the ’lectrokelp and the hylighters. The native life is running out of time, too. Don’t they . . .”
“Avata understands what is happening here.”
“They know they’re being wiped out?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t they want to prevent that?”
“Yes.”
“How do they expect to do that without controlling the Redoubt?”
“Avata will not attack the Redoubt.”
“What will they do?”
“What Avata has always done: nurture. Avata will continue to rescue people when possible. Avata will carry us where we need to go.”
“Didn’t the kelp kill Colonists? You heard what Waela said. . . .”
“Another of Lewis’ lies,” Panille said, and Thomas knew that he was right.
He stared off at the jungle beyond Panille. Somewhere in there, he knew, was a large band of survivors, E-clones and normals, all scooped from Pandora’s surface and planted here as the hylighters planted the scavenged Earthside vegetation. Thomas had not seen this collection of people, but Panille and the hylighters had described it. The hylighters could do this thing . . . but . . . Thomas shook his head in despair.
“They have so much power!”
“Who?”
“The ’lectrokelp and the hylighters!”
“Avata, you mean.” Panille’s voice remained patient.
“Why won’t they use their power to defend themselves?”
“Avata is one creature who understands about power.”
“What? What do you . . .”
“To have power is to use it. That is the meaning of possession. To use it is to lose it.”
Thomas closed his eyes, clenched his fists. Panille refused to understand. Refusing to understand, he doomed them all.
Such a loss! Not just humankind . . . but this, this Avata.
“They have so much,” Thomas whispered.
“Who?”
“The Avata!”
He thought about what the hylighters already had shown him, spoke the thought aloud: “That hylighter, the one that brought me, do you know what it showed me after we were fed?”
“Yes.”
Thomas went on, not hearing: “Just in a few blinks of touching it, I hallucinated the development, very nearly complete, of the entire recent geological and botanical phenomena of Pandora. Think of losing that!”
“Not hallucination,” Panille corrected him.
“What is it, then?” Thomas opened his eyes, stared at the passing moons.
“Avata teaches by touch, at first. A true, but sometimes overwhelming flow of information. As the student learns to focus, the information becomes discrete, discriminated. You separate the needed bits from the babble.”
“Babble, yes. Most of it’s babble, but I . . .”
“You know about focus,” Panille said. “You select which noises to hear and understand. You select which things to see and recognize. This is just a different kind of focus.”
“How can we sit here and discuss . . . discuss this . . . I mean, it’s going to end! Forever!”
“This is the true flow of knowledge between us, Raja Thomas. Avata moves from the mastery of touch to direct communication, mind to mind. Precise identification with another being. You have seen demons eat scraps of exploded hylighters?”
Thomas was interested in spite of his frustration. “I’ve seen it.”
“Direct ingestion of knowledge, precise identification. Some ancient creatures of Earth did it. Planarians.”
“You don’t say.”
“No . . . I don’t limit.”
Thomas jerked away as a passing hylighter trailed tentacles across his face, pausing also to touch the seated Panille. For an instant, Thomas sensed a blur of pictures, dream fragments dancing behind his eyes. And the chatter!
“Avata remains fascinated by the mystery of you, Raja Thomas,” Panille said. “Who are you?”
“Ship’s best friend.”
Panille heard truth in those words and found himself transported in memory back to the shipside teaching cubby. A momentary flicker of jealousy burned at his awareness and was gone.
“Ship’s best friend would start a war?”
“It’s the only way.”
“Who would fight your war?”
“It’s between us and them.”
“But who would be your soldiers?”
Thomas gestured at the jungle, hoping he pointed somewhere near the collection of remnant people brought here by the hylighters.
“And you would move against Oakes with violence?”
“Oakes is a phony. The Chaplain/Psychiatrist is responsible for the first order of WorShip: survival. Oakes would sacrifice the entire future of humankind to satisfy his own selfish goals.”
“That is true. Oakes is selfish.”
Thomas remained caught up in resentment of Oakes: “Survival takes planning and sacrifice. The Ceepee should be willing to sacrifice the most. We give our children to Ship as a matter of WorShip. Oakes engineers more people from cloning, and on a fixed food supply. Children starve while his playthings . . .”
Thomas broke off in frustration. As he stood there, wondering how he could make this poet understand what had to be done, Alki lifted above the eastern horizon, flooding the crater’s mists with milky light. The illumination picked out every leaf-dripping detail nearby but hazed away to a mysterious background of muted colors.
“We’re in danger, terrible danger,” he muttered.
“Life is always in danger.”
“Well, we agree on something.”
Thomas lowered his chin to his chest, looked down at his feet and, in that strange elasticity of time which comes with danger, he saw his boots. He remembered those booted feet dangling below him as the hylighter lifted him from the threat of a Hooded Dasher at the Redoubt.
Terrible danger!
He suddenly recalled another moment akin to this one: when he had pressed the abort trigger aboard the Voidship Earthling, those countless millennia and replays past. In the century between instructing his body to push the abort-trigger and actually pushing it, he had studied the galaxies waving to him from the back of his hand and fingers. One crazy hair, only millimeters long, had poked out from the side of a knuckle on his right index finger, and he recalled the trickle of something small and wet down the side of his left cheek.
“Why did the hylighter bring me here?”
“To preserve your seed.”
“But Oakes and the Lab One people will kill us. Nothing will survive. What they miss, Ship will finish.”
“Yet, we are in Eden,” Panille said. He moved gracefully to his feet, swept an arm wide. “There is food. It is warm. It’s little more than a kilometer over the cliffs to the beach, not more than ten kilometers to the Redoubt—two different worlds, and you would make them the same.”
“No! You don’t understand what I . . .”
Thomas broke off as a shadow passed over them. He jerked his gaze upward as a trio of hylighters swept overhead carrying a long plasteel cutter and several wriggling human shapes. Behind them, cresting the crater’s crags, more hylighters appeared. The tentacles of all were burdened with people and equipment.
Panille touched a dangling tentacle as a hylighter circled over them and dumped the wind from its sail membrane. He spoke in a distant, musing voice: “Lewis has installed Lab One at the Redoubt. T
hese people were driven out. They are terrified. We must take care of them.”
A feeling of elation swept through Thomas. “You ask about troops? Here they are! And the hylighters are bringing weapons! You said they wouldn’t help us attack, but . . .”
“Now I know that you once really were a Ceepee,” Panille said. “The keeper of the ritual and the robes—the trappings and the suits of woe.”
“I tell you there’s no other way! We have to take over the Redoubt and learn how to WorShip!”
Panille stared at him, eyes unfocused. “Don’t you know that humans made Ship? Therefore, humans made all that proceeds from Ship. Ship tells us nothing, demands nothing which is not from and of ourselves.”
Thomas no longer could contain his anger and frustration. “You ask me if I know that humans made Ship? I was one of those humans!”
It was an explosive revelation for Panille—Thomas, a piece of history resurrected! Ship’s hand in this was almost visible—past, present, future woven into a lovely pattern. This thing wanted only a poem to bring it into existence. Panille smiled at his own enlightenment, and spoke in a burst of energy: “Then you must know why you made Ship.”
Thomas heard it as a question.
“We had a Voidship, the Earthling, and we were commanded to turn it into a conscious being. We did it because it was succeed or die. At the moment of consciousness, Ship delivered us from one danger into another, demanding that we learn how to WorShip. It’s what we were supposed to do with our new lives, us and all of our descendants after us.”
Panille did not answer, but continued to stare at the arriving swarms of hylighters each with its cargo of people or equipment. The soft flutings of the hylighters and the terrified babble of the people being lowered to the ground began to fill the open area all around.
“So you talk to Ship as I do,” Panille mused. “Yet you do not hear your own words. Now, I see why Ship needed a poet here.”
“What we really need is an experienced military leader,” Thomas said. “Lacking that, I guess I’ll have to serve.” He turned and strode toward the nearest batch of terrified survivors.
“Where are you going?” Panille asked.
“Recruiting.”
Chapter 60
Through the process of nostalgic filtering, Earth assumed for the Shipmen fairyland characteristics. The different strains of people, telling their different historical memories, could only make such stories mix in a paradise setting. No Shipman ever experienced every Earthly place and clime and society. Thus, over the many generations, the reinforcement of positive memories left only the faith in how things were.
—Kerro Panille, History of the Avata
LEGATA SAT at a comdesk in the working space assigned to her at the Redoubt. It was a small room and showed signs of hasty construction. Directly in front of her across the desk was an oval hatch leading into her own private cubby, a space she seldom occupied now. But Oakes was busy somewhere and she had seized this opportunity.
She punched for shiprecords, keyed for her own private code, and waited. Did they still have contact with Ship?
The instrument buzzed. Glyphs danced across the screen in the desk. She punched for the Ox gate, set up a random-barrier lock and began transferring the data on Oakes into the Redoubt’s own storage system.
There you are, Morgan Lon Oakes!
And the printout remained secreted in Oakes’ old cubby shipside should she ever need it. It was remotely possible that Oakes might stumble on this record here, might erase it and even trace back to the original to erase that. But the printout would remain, stamped with Ship’s imprimatur.
When she had reviewed the data to reassure herself, and once more checked the random-barrier, she keyed the lock, then turned to the question of Lewis. It was not enough to have power over Oakes. Lewis held to his own power base like a man aware of every threat. She did not like the way he stared at her, secretive and measuring.
The Ox gate gave her its open-files response and she asked for anything available about Jesus Lewis.
Immediately the activity light at the command console winked out. She jiggled the switch. Nothing. She tried the override sequence, Oakes’ private code, the vocoder. Nothing.
When I asked for material on Lewis.
It had to be a coincidence. She went through the entire contact routine once more. Ship’s records could not be brought into this console. She stood up, went out and into the passage, through the tension and bustle of E-clone Processing, and borrowed one of their consoles. Same result.
We’re cut off.
She thanked the pale, thin-fingered E-clone who had stepped aside at her request and returned to her own cubby. She knew that the right thing to do would be to tell Oakes. With Colony gone and no communication to Ship, they were isolated, alone in the wilderness that pressed inward all around the Redoubt.
Yes—Oakes would have to be told. She sat down at her desk, called on Voice-Only when nothing else responded, and when he snapped that he was busy, she insisted that her information transcended any other business.
Oakes heard her out in silence, then: “We’re trapped.”
“How can we be trapped?” she asked. “There’s no one to trap us.”
“They’ve set us up,” he insisted. “Wait there for me.”
The ‘coder snapped with his sudden disconnection and it was only then she realized that Oakes had not asked where she was. Did he spy on her all the time? How much of what I did . . . how much did he see?
In less than a minute, Oakes stepped through the hatch, his white singlesuit drenched in sweat. He was speaking as he entered, crackling tension in his voice.
“That TaoLini woman, Panille and Thomas—they’re out to destroy us!”
He stopped just inside the room, glared down at her across the comdesk.
“That’s impossible! I saw the hylighter carry Thomas off. And Panille . . .”
“They’re alive, I tell you! Alive and plotting against us.”
“How . . .”
“More clones have revolted! And we’ve had a strange message from Ferry, threatening. They’re somewhere nearby, some valley, Lewis thinks. People and equipment. They’re going to attack.”
“How could anyone . . .”
“Probe flights, Lewis is sending out probes. And there is something out there. They’re able to drive our search instruments crazy—some kind of interference that Lewis can’t explain—but we’re still getting indications of a lot of life and metal.”
“Where?”
“South.” He gestured vaguely. “What were you doing when the ship broke contact?”
“Nothing,” she lied. “The circuitry just went dead.”
“We need that contact, the people still up there, the material and food. Get them back.”
“I’ve tried. Here, see for yourself.” She slid out of the seat and gestured for him to take it.
“No . . . no.” He seemed actually afraid to sit at her comdesk. “I . . . trust your efforts. I just . . .”
She slipped back into her seat. “You just what!”
“Nothing. See if you can contact Lewis. Tell him to meet me at the Command Center.”
Oakes turned on his heel. The hatch hissed closed behind him.
She keyed a search for Lewis and fed the message into it, then tried once more to contact Ship. No response. She sat back and stared at the comdesk. A feeling of regret swept over her, pre-remorse, a sense of sorrow over the Morgan Oakes who might have been. He was nearing the very kind of desperation she wanted.
Let someone attack the Redoubt. Whatever happened, she would be ready with the material she had stored here.
At the worst possible moment, Morgan Lon Oakes! You may be able to appreciate my timing, although you never have before.
Would it happen in front of Thomas? Was it possible that Thomas had survived and would lead an attack? She thought it distinctly possible. Thomas—another Ceepee. The unfailing Thomas who had seen her r
un the P, who had helped her in that desperate hour, then said nothing of it to anyone.
Discreet. Kind and discreet. Almost a lost breed.
Doubts began to fill her mind then. Perhaps the survival of humans groundside really did depend on Oakes and Lewis. But Colony was gone and the Redoubt was clearly under siege from the planet, if not from some nebulous force headed by Thomas. She thought of the Scream Room then. Where did the Scream Room figure in any scheme of survival? The Scream Room was unjustifiable by any standards. It betrayed negative, anti-survival impulses. Everything about it, that proceeded from it, brought death or hunger or a terrifying subservience. No-—not survival.
Oakes put me through the Scream Room.
Nothing would ever change that. But Thomas had guarded the perimeter hatch for her. His were survival instincts. She determined then that she would see what she could do to keep the Thomas breed from dying out.
At what cost? she wondered then, her doubts returning. At what cost?
Chapter 61
A horrible feeling came over me—a terrible amusement, for I believed that humankind, through the filtering of Ship’s manipulations and the great passage of time, had lost the very ability to engage in war. I thought war had been bred and conditioned out of them at the very moment when they needed this ability the most.
—The Thomas Diatribes, Shiprecords
WHILE HALI was making another examination of Waela’s condition and well before the freighter reached atmosphere, Bitten’s metallic voice barked at them from the overhead ‘coder.
“Do you know a Kerro Panille?”
Waela stirred and mumbled at the sound, then rubbed both hands over her mounded abdomen.
“Yes, we know Panille,” Hali said. She closed and sealed her pribox. “Why?”
“You wish to land at some place other than Colony,” Bitten intoned. “That now may be possible.”