Ferry glared up toward the ‘coder. “You said we had to land at Colony!”
“I have been in contact with Kerro Panille,” Bitten said. “He asserts that Colony has been destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” Hali sat stiffly in her couch, dumb with shock.
Ferry gripped the arms of his command couch, knuckles white. “But we’re programmed for landing at Colony.”
“I remind you that I am the emergency program,” Bitten said. “Present conditions fit the definition of emergency.”
“Then where can we land?” Hali asked. And she felt the stirrings of hope. Contact with Kerro!
“Panille asserts that I can make a sea landing near an occupied site called the Redoubt. He is prepared to guide us to that landing.”
Hali checked the fastenings which held Waela in the passenger couch, returned to her own seat and strapped in. The plaz directly in front of her framed a brilliant circle of cloud-covered planet.
“They meant us to die,” Ferry muttered. “Damn them!”
“Do you desire to land at the alternate site?” Bitten asked.
“Yes, land us there,” Hali said.
“There is risk,” Bitten said.
“Land us there!” Ferry shouted.
“A normal tone of voice suffices for conversational direction of this program,” Bitten said.
Ferry stared at Hali. “They meant us to die.”
“I heard you. What do you mean?”
“Murdoch said we would have to go to Colony.”
Hali looked at him, weighing his words. Was the man unaware of what he had just told her?
“So it was a set-up,” she said. “You staged that fight.”
Ferry remained silent, blinking at her.
“But you cut off one of Murdoch’s ears,” Hali said, remembering.
Ferry bared his old teeth in a terrible grin. “He did something to my Rachel. I know he did.”
Hali crossed her arms over her breast, hearing all the unspoken things in Ferry’s words. Her gaze went to the laser scalpel clipped in a breast pocket of Ferry’s singlesuit: a thin stylus with death or life in its mechanism.
He was supposed to bring the scalpel in case he needed it against me!
“I made it seem like an accident,” Ferry said. “But I knew they did something to my Rachel. And Murdoch’s the one they get to do the nasty stuff.” He nodded at Hali. “In the Scream Room. That’s where they do it.”
As he said Scream Room, he shuddered.
“So we were supposed to go to Colony and it’s destroyed,” Ferry said. “Demons, yes. Very neat. They didn’t like my asking about Rachel.”
Hali wet her lips with her tongue. “What’s . . . what’s the Scream Room?”
“In Lab One where they do the nasty stuff. It was because of Rachel, I know it was. And I drink too much. Lots of us do that after the Scream Room.”
Bitten’s voice intruded: “Correction noted.”
“What was that?” Ferry demanded.
“This is Bitten. I have acknowledged a course correction from Kerro Panille.”
“You’re going to land us in the sea?” Hali asked, filled with sudden concern for her unconscious patient.
“Near shore. Panille asserts there will be help where we land.”
“What about the demons?” Ferry asked.
“If that is a reference to native fauna, you can protect yourselves with the weapons in this freighter’s cargo.”
“You carry . . . weapons?” Hali asked.
“The cargo manifest lists food concentrates, building equipment and tools, medical supplies, groundsuits and weapons.”
Hali shook her head. “I knew you needed weapons to survive groundside, but I didn’t know they were being made shipside.”
“Do you know what a weapon is?” Ferry asked, looking directly at Hali.
She thought of her history holos, and the soldiers at the Hill of Skulls. “Oh, yes. I know about weapons.”
“This laser scalpel.” Ferry touched the stylus shape at his breast. “Acid concentrates, plasteel cutters for construction teams, knives, axes . . .”
Hali swallowed past a lump in her throat. Every bit of her med-tech training cried out against this. “If we prepare to . . . kill,” the word was barely a sigh past her lips, “then we will kill.”
“Down here, it’s kill or be killed,” Ferry said. “That’s the way The Boss wants it.”
In that instant, the freighter skipped into the first thin surface of Pandora’s atmosphere. Vibration hummed all through the cabin, then smoothed.
“Can’t we run away?” Hali asked. Her voice was a low whisper.
“Nowhere to run,” Ferry said. “You must know that. All Shipmen learn enough about groundside to know that.”
Fight or flee, Hali thought, and nowhere to flee. And it occurred to her that Pandora was a place where people were made into primitives.
“Trust me,” Ferry said, and the quavering in his old voice made the statement pathetic.
“Yes, of course,” Hali said.
She felt the freighter’s braking thrust then as it pressed her against the restraining harness, and she glanced back to reassure herself that Waela remained secure.
“We will land in the cradle of the sea,” Hali said. “That’s what Waela said. Remember?”
“What does she know?” Ferry demanded, and it was his fearful, querulous tone, the one which had made her despise him.
Chapter 62
This the true human knows:
the strings of all the ways
make up a cable of great strength
and great purpose.
—Kerro Panille, The Collected Poems
FOR A long time Panille sat in the shadows of the seaside cliff while he felt the approaching presence from space. The sea lay below him down a rugged path, the cliffs soared high behind. Avata had been the first to tell him about this problem and, for a few blinks, he had fallen back into Thomas’ ways of thinking.
The Redoubt will know about this freighter, will send its weapons against it.
But Avata soothed him, told him that Avata would transmit false images to the Redoubt’s systems, concealing the freighter’s passage. Avata would continue to mask the nest’s location with similar projections.
The rock was cold against Panille’s back. From time to time, he opened and closed his eyes. When his eyes were open he was vaguely aware of the amber glow from Double Dusk—the sky alight from two suns dodging just below Pandora’s horizon.
Ship would know he was here and what he was doing. Nothing escaped Ship. Did that omnipotent awareness work through phenomena similar to those of Avata? Was it awareness of even the most minute changes in electrical impulses? Or was it some other form of energy which Ship and Avata monitored?
That presence from space was coming closer . . . closer. He felt it, then he saw it.
The freighter skipped up the horizon, a great stone crossing the surface of a glassy sea. The fall into atmosphere was deceptive. The freighter had entered Pandora’s pull at the lowest point on the horizon. It streaked a long upward arc as Panille felt it fill his awareness. It grew larger with its approach around the planet’s curvature, and he saw it now falling white-hot toward him.
The crunch of gravel told him of Thomas’ approach, but Panille had only a single purpose now. The approaching freighter was himself and he was diving through the sky alight with amber.
“Can you do it?” Thomas asked.
“I am doing it,” Panille whispered. He begrudged the distraction of answering.
Until he had seen the pinpoint of that first glow against the Pandoran dusk, Panille had not been sure he could master this thing.
“I’m thinking them in,” he whispered. There was awe and wonder in his voice.
“Who is coming?” Thomas asked.
“Avata did not say.”
Thomas emitted a wry, jibing chuckle. “It’s a surprise package from Ship. Maybe more recruits
for me.”
He moved around Panille and climbed down out of sight along the narrow path, his figure a mysterious movement in the half light.
Going to the shore where the surf crashes. The surf will make this landing perilous.
As the last sound of Thomas faded from Panille’s awareness, darkness fell—the Double Dark in which Pandora’s greatest mysteries blossomed.
Panille thought of himself now as a beacon. He was a signal transmitter in a known position. The freighter and its unknown passengers depended on his constancy. Avata wanted this freighter to land here. He trusted Avata.
Come to the sea, he thought. The sea . . . the sea . . .
Hylighters began whistling along a rock ledge ahead of him and he knew it was time to join Thomas on the shore. He got up stiffly. It had been a long wait on the observation ledge. Knowing this, he had scavenged a singlesuit of white shipcloth which Avata had stored in the nest.
A hylighter positioned itself above and behind him as he began the slow climb down to the shore. Panille sensed tentacles dangling near, ready to grasp him should he fall.
Avata, Brother, he thought.
It fluted a brief reply.
The sharp rocks and the difficulty of the dark cliff path were second nature to Panille’s body. He did not have to think about the climb. And he found that he could maintain the beacon while his thoughts wandered. His mind strayed back to Thomas’ unbelieving interrogation.
Thomas demanded explanations and refused to believe almost everything he heard.
He believes Avata projects strange images into his mind. He believes I have learned from Avata, that I am a master of hallucination. He believes only what he can touch, and then he doubts that.
Panille recalled his own words: “Avata is not hallucinogenic. They are not even they. That’s why I use the term Avata. That’s why I call a hylighter Avata.”
“I know that word!” Thomas was accusatory.
“The Oneness which is present in the many. It’s a word from one of the old languages of my mother’s people.”
“Your mother!” Thomas was astounded.
“Didn’t Ship tell you? I was womb-bred, womb-grown and nursed. I thought you said Ship told you everything.”
Thomas flashed him a dark scowl which showed that Panille was striking at sensitive areas. But nothing had stopped Thomas from forming his army—no warnings about Avata’s nature, no jibes at Thomas’ limited information. Half of the army waited above them now—a mixed crew of E-clones and normals—all of them praying that the freighter from Ship was bringing weapons and other support. Some had descended earlier to wait among the rocks at the base of the cliff.
Above Panille in the darkness, his Avatan guardian shared amusement and dismay at these thoughts.
Can that army save you? Panille asked.
Avata will die in only a few diurns. Then it may be that a rebirth can occur.
Oakes hasn’t beaten you yet, Panille said. Lewis with his poisons and his virus, none of them understand about power.
Soft flutings rippled from the hylighter, the nearest Avata came to betraying doubts. Panille wondered then: Was this futility aroused by Thomas’ efforts, or by the imminent end of Avata—no more of ’lectrokelp/hylighters, no more of the individual cells, the great plural-singular unity?
This idea disturbed him and he thought angrily as he worked his way down the steep trail to the shore: If you think you’re done, then you are finished!
He emerged from a gap between high rocks onto a wide, rock-mounded sandy beach. Thomas stood far down the sand near the surf—one dark shadow among the many rocks. The surf was high, long rollers crashing onto the shingle. The air was damp with salt spray. Panille felt the surf’s heavy rhythm transmitted through skin and feet simultaneously. He put a hand against one of the gateway rocks through which he had entered this sea realm. The rock was cold and wet, and it also vibrated to the surf.
Without the kelp to subdue the sea, the waves had become destructively wild—raging against the cliffs at high tide, throwing giant rocks in their surgings. Soon, very soon, all that Avata had built here would come crashing down into the wilderness of the sea.
The Avatan guardian hovered near his shoulder. One tendril touched his cheek, transmitting remembered emotions.
Yes, this is the place.
It was here, Panille recalled, that he had learned to appreciate all the centuries of poetry celebrating rock and sand and sea, and the peculiar Avata life-of-Self illuminated by the regular passage of moons and suns. Here, the occasional monotony of wave against shore had been broken by the healthy slap of a nightborn hylighter breaking free of its motherplant and drifting off with its long umbilicus tentacles trailing in the sea. Though all Avata was one creature, Panille had felt his own private kinship with the nightborn hylighter-Avatan. Here, he had listened for them and greeted each birth with a song. A far-off slap would catch his attention and fill him with all the wonder of an answered prayer. Across the gently rolling sea, the tiny creature would rise into darkness.
Never again?
Panille whispered a chant to those lost cells of Avata, feeling his whole body transmit the chant as though he were, at last, truly one with Avata.
The solitary blossom overpowers the bouquet.
Even remembering union, without embrace:
a transformation.
Oh, the golden, night-blooming truth!
As he chanted, the whole line of beach glowed with the moons-rise and the shimmering friendship of Avata. The glow illuminated the people of Thomas’ ragtag army. Panille saw Thomas outlined against the dim light. Pushing himself away from the gateway rock, Panille went down the beach to stand near this mysterious “friend of Ship.”
“They’re less than two minutes away,” Panille said. He felt the beacon within him, a timed fire which linked him to that hot metal behemoth diving toward him.
“Oakes will send probes,” Thomas said.
“Avata will help me jam their signals.” Panille gave a smile to the dark. “Would you care to join me in this?”
“No!”
You hold back too much, Raja Thomas.
“But I need your help,” Panille said. And he felt Thomas fuming, the tension mounting.
“What do I do?” Thomas forced the words out.
“It may help you to touch an Avatan tentacle. Not necessary, but it helps at first.”
A black tentacle came looping down to him then from the night sky. Reluctance apparent in every movement, Thomas reached out and placed a palm against the thrusting warmth.
Immediately, he felt his awareness joined to whoever guided that freighter toward them. He could see two hylighters hovering directly ahead of him and he felt his body standing on surf-drummed sand, a place to go. But the pulse of flight held him in thralldom.
If anybody had told me back at Moonbase that one day I’d land a freighter with my mind and a couple of plants that sing in the dark . . .
And think!
The Avata intrusion could not be avoided. Avata would not accept that designation as plant. Thomas sensed more than heard the aural projection, something not quite pride, but not completely separated from pride.
Avata confuses me, he apologized.
You confuse yourself. Why do you hide your true identity?
Thomas jerked his hand away from the warm tentacle, but the Avata presence remained in his awareness.
You’re prying where you don’t belong! Thomas accused.
Avata does not pry. There was no denying the hurt in this response.
Panille felt like an eavesdropper on a private argument. Thomas was smoldering with anger now, aware that he could not break off the Avata contact at will, aware that Avata wanted to pierce the wall behind which this private idea of himself lay hidden.
“Let’s get the freighter down,” Panille said. “Probes are coming from the Redoubt.”
Panille released his part of the beacon system then, telling himself that he
had to concentrate on the probes. Thomas would have to make his own mistakes.
The first of the probes screamed down the beach, blazing toward them on a course which undoubtedly had been computed against a plot of the incoming freighter.
As Avata had taught him, Panille set up a terrain image all around and transmitted it to the probe. He felt the projected illusion mesh with the probe’s electronic functions. The probe almost shattered from the Gs it pulled, avoiding a sudden cliff which was not there.
They’re getting closer, he thought.
He knew why. Each illusion of mistaken terrain formed a pattern of error from which the computer at Redoubt could derive significant results.
Avata numbers appeared in Panille’s awareness, telling him that he was being monitored constantly now.
Yes, he agreed. The patrols have increased.
Tenfold in twelve hours, Avata insisted. Why does Thomas not understand his role in this?
It is his nature, perhaps.
Have you identified your contact on the freighter?
Panille thought about this question, reviewed his own performance as a beacon, and experienced a sudden wash of insight. Knowing it was urgent, he reinsinuated himself into Thomas’ performance, feeling the affirmation of contact with the freighter.
Thomas, who have you contacted on the freighter? Panille asked.
Thomas considered this. He could feel the approaching presence—almost palpable. If it was illusion, it was a most complete illusion.
Who? Panille insisted.
Thomas knew he could not be in contact with a Shipman up there. Shipmen would panic when alien thoughts intruded. Who could it be then?
Bitten.
The freighter’s identification signal came to him clear and unmistakable: a simple intense concentration without emotion.
“Ahhhhhhh,” Thomas said.
To Panille, the startling thing was Thomas’ emotional response: deep amusement. Bitten was a flight-system computer, and the realization that his mind was in contact with a computer should not have amused the man. This could only be more evidence of the mystery which so attracted Avata.
They were both forced to concentrate on their mental linkage with Bitten then, but Panille could not explain why this aroused a deep fear reaction in him. He felt it, though, a fear which radiated from his own flesh and outward into every cell of Avata.