Wind whipped past him. He smelled it, saw it, felt it. He was turning in the grasp of the hylighter and he saw a mounded mass of hylighters directly below. They opened like flower petals expanding to reveal the gondola in their midst - orange petals and the glistening gondola.
With gentle sureness, tendrils lowered him into the flower, into the gondola's hatch. They followed him, spreading around the interior of the gondola. He knew he was there with Waela and Thomas, yet still saw the flower as its petals closed.
An orange blaze surrounded him and he saw through the plaz, the hylighters all around, holding the gondola in a basket of tendrils.
Again, the wild play of his senses resumed, but now it was slower and he could think between the beats of it. Yes, there were Thomas and Waela, eyes glazed - terrified or unconscious.
Help them, Avata.
***
Even the seemingly immortal gods survive only as long as they are required by mortal men.
- The Oakes Covenant
OAKES BEGAN to sputter and snore. His body lay half-melted into cushions of the long divan which stretched beneath Legata's mural on the porch of the Redoubt. The light was dull red, the early dayside of Rega coming in through the plaz above the sea.
Legata untangled herself from Oakes, slowly eased the sleeve of her singlesuit from under his naked thigh. She stepped over to the plaz and looked out at the dayside light flickering off the tops of waves. The sea was wild turmoil and the horizon a thick line of milky white. She found the uncontrolled violence of the sea repellent.
Perhaps I was not made for a natural world.
She pulled her singlesuit on, zipped it.
Oakes continued to snore and snort.
I could have crushed him there in those cushions, thrown his body to the demons. Who would suspect?
No one except Lewis.
The thought had very nearly become reality back there on the divan. Oakes had been satyric all through the dark hours. Once, she had slipped her arms up around his ribs while he worked at her, sweating and mumbling, but she could not bring herself to kill. Not even Oakes.
Waves whipped high onto the beach across the bay as she scanned the scene. The water slashed high this morning. The pounding surf echoed a deeper trembling of the earth and she could hear the clatter of rock against rock. The sound must be frighteningly loud outside for it to be heard that well in here.
It's the job of waves and rocks to make sand, she thought. Why can't I do my job that wel.... without question?
The answer came immediately, as though she had thought it through countless times: Because changing rock into sand is not killing. It is change, not extermination.
Her artist's eye wanted to find order in the view out the plaz, but all was disorder. Beautiful disorder, but frightening. What a contrast with the peaceful bustle of a shipside agrarium.
She could see the shuttle station off on the isolated point of land to her left, an arc of the bay between, and the low line of the protected passage leading from Redoubt to Station. That had been Lewis' idea: Keep the Station remote, easy to cut off should attackers come from Colony.
She found herself wanting the roll and toss of kelp leaves in the bay, but the kelp was goin.... goin....
A chill crawled up her spine and down her arms.
A few diurns, Oakes had said.
She closed her eyes and the picture that haunted her was her own mural, the accusing finger which pointed straight at her heart.
You are killing me! it said.
No matter how hard she shook her head, the voice would not be still. Against her better judgment, she crossed to the dispenser and keyed it for a drink. Her hand was steady. She returned to the plaz-guarded view, and sipped slowly while watching the waves bite their way up the beach across the bay. The waves had buried the previous high-tide mark at least a dozen meters back. She wondered whether she should wake Oakes.
A hylighter suddenly valved itself low across the beach below the shuttle station. A sentry appeared at the beachside guardpost and snapped her heavy lasgun to her shoulder, then hesitated. Legata held her breath, expecting the bright orange flash and concussion. But the woman did not fire; she lowered her weapon and watched as the delicate hylighter drifted out of sight around the point.
Legata let out her breath in a long sigh.
What happens when we have no others to kill?
Oakes' desire for a paradise planet vanished when she confronted that seascape. He could make it sound so plausible, so natural, bu....
What about the Scream Room?
It was a symptom. Would people turn on each other, band together in tribes and attack each other in the absence of Dashers or Runner.... or kelp?
Another hylighter drifted past farther out.
It thinks.
And the vanishing kelp. Oakes was right that she had seen the reports from the disastrous undersea research project.
It thinks.
There was a sentience here which touched her where cell walls left off, somewhere within that realm of creative imagination which Oakes distrusted and would never enter.
Almost eighty percent of this planet is wrapped in seas and we don't even know what's under there.
She found herself envying the researchers who had risked (and lost) their lives groping beneath these seas. What had they found?
A pair of huge boulders down on the beach beneath her smashed together with a jarring crack that caused her to jump. She glanced at the beach across the bay. As quickly as it crossed the high-tide mark, the waters began their ebb.
Curious.
Tons of boulders had been rolled up against the cliff barrier across the compound. More of them obviously must be on the beach beneath her. The boulders she could see were gigantic.
That much power in the waves.
"Legata.
The abruptness of Oakes' voice and touch upon her shoulder startled her, and she crushed the glass in her hand. She stared down at the hand, the cuts, her own blood, shards of glass glinting in her flesh.
"Sit over here, my dear."
He was the doctor then, and she felt thankful for it. He plucked out broken glass, then unrolled strips of Celltape from a dispenser at his com-console to stop the bleeding. His hands were firm and gentle as he worked. He patted her shoulder when he had finished.
"There. You shoul...."
The buzz of the console interrupted.
"Colony's gone." It was Lewis.
"What do you mean, gone?" Oakes raged. "How can the entir...."
"A shuttle overflight shows nothing but a hole where Lab One was. Plenty of demons, hatchways to all lower levels blow...." He shrugged, a tiny gesture in the console screen.
"That'.... that's thousands of people. Al.... dead?"
Legata could not face Lewis, even on the screen. She crossed to the divan silently and stared out the plaz.
"There could be survivors holed up behind some of the hatches," Lewis went on. "That's how we made it here whe...."
"I know how you made it here!" Oakes shouted. "What are you suggesting?"
"I'm not suggesting anything."
Oakes gritted his teeth and pounded the console. "You don't think we should have Murdoch try to save anyone?"
"Why risk the shuttles? Why risk one of our last good people?"
"Of course. A hole, you say?"
"Nothing but rubble. Looks to've been the work of lasguns and plasteel cutters."
"Do the.... I mean, are there any shuttles left over there?"
"We disabled everything before leaving."
"Ye.... yes, of course," Oakes murmured. Then: "LTAs?"
"Nothing."
"Didn't you and Murdoch say that you cleared everything out of that Lab One site? Moved it all here?"
"Apparently the rioters thought there might be some burst hidden away there. They captured the only remaining communications equipment. They were demanding help fro.... the ship."
"They didn'...." Oakes could
not complete the question.
"The ship didn't answer. We were listening."
A deep sigh shook Oakes.
Without turning to face him or the viewscreen, Legata called out, "How many people did we lose there?"
"Ship knows!" Lewis threw back his head, laughing.
Oakes hit the key to shut him off.
Legata clenched her fists. "How could he laugh that way a....?" She shook her head.
"Nervous," Oakes said. "Hysteria."
"He was not hysterical! He was enjoying it!"
"Calm yourself, Legata. You should get some rest. We have much to do and I'll need your help. We've saved the Redoubt. We have most of the food that was at Colony and far fewer people to eat it. Be thankful that you're among the living."
That worry in his tone, in his eyes.
It was almost possible to believe he felt genuine love for her.
"Legat...." He put out a hand to touch her arm.
She pulled away. "Colony's gone. The hylighters and kelp are next. Then what? Me?"
She knew it was her own voice speaking, but she had no control over it.
"Really, Legata! If you can't handle alcohol, you should not drink it."
His gaze went to the broken glass on the floor.
"Especially this early in the dayside."
She whirled away from him and heard him press the console key and summon a clone worker to clean up the broken glass. As he spoke, Legata felt the last of her hope shatter in the morning air, lost on the wild glinting of the waves she could see out there.
What can I do against him?
***
Human, do you know how interesting it is, this thing you describe? Avata does not have a god. How is it that you have a god? Avata has Self, has this universe. But you have a god. Where did you find this god?
- Kerro Panille, Translations from the Avata
FOR THOMAS and Waela, the return of the hylighters had appeared another concerted attack. Thomas tried to close the gondola's hatch and found it jammed. Waela was shouting up at him to hurry, and asking if he saw Kerro.
Both suns were up now. And the light on the sea was dazzling.
Waela's head was still spinning from the gondola's gyrations.
"What'll they do with him?" she called.
"Ship knows!" He jerked at the hatch cover, but it would not move. Something had hit the mechanism while the gondola was twisted and tilted in the first attacks.
Thomas peered at the tacking hylighters. One of them had its tendrils tucked up tightly. It could be holding Panille in there. He saw that the gondola had been pushed out of the dead kelp into a patch of living green. The sea all around was subdued by a carpet of gently pulsing leaves.
"They're coming back!" Waela shouted.
Thomas abandoned his attempts on the hatch, slid back into the gondola.
"Brace yourself in your seat!" he called. And he followed his own order while he watched the advancing swarm of orange.
"What're they doing?" Waela asked.
It was a rhetorical question. They could both see the hylighters slow their advance at the last instant. In concert, they turned their great sail membranes into the wind and cupped the gondola in dangling tendrils.
Waela freed herself from her seat, but before she could move, the massed hylighters opened a way overhead and Panille was lowered through the hatch.
She tried to avoid the questing mass of tendrils which accompanied Panille, but they found her. They enfolded her face with a sensation of tingling dryness which immediately gave way to a drunken sense of abandon. She knew her body; she knew where she was: right here in the gondola which was being held steady in a cupped hammock of hylighter tendrils. But nothing mattered except a feeling of joy which insinuated itself all through her. She felt that the sensation came from Panille and not from the hylighters.
Avata? What are Avata?
That thought had seemed her own, but she could not be certain.
She was not aware of up or down. There was no spatial solidity.
I'm going crazy!
All of the horror stories about poisonous and hallucinogenic hylighters crashed through her barriers and she tried to scream but could not locate her voice.
Still, the joy persisted. Panille was right there saying things to soothe her. "It's all right, Lini."
Where did he get that name for me? That was my childhood name! I hate that name.
"Don't hate any part of yourself, Lini."
The joy would not be denied. She began to laugh but could not hear her own laughter.
Quite suddenly, an island of clarity opened around her and she knew Kerro Panille lay nude beside her. She felt his warm flesh against her.
Where did my clothing go?
It was not important.
I'm hallucinating.
This was a product of Thomas' command that she seduce the poet. She gave herself up to the dream, to the warmth and hardness of him as he slid into her, rocking her. And she sensed all around the questing tendrils as they explored, joining her with images of flaring stars. That, too, was unimportant - more hallucination. There was only the joy, the ecstasy.
For Panille, the slowed play of the sense-attack wavered when he first saw Waela. He felt his own body and he felt the hylighter's. Wind whipped his sail membranes. Then he heard music, a slow and sensual chant which moved his flesh in time to the dance of tendrils around him. He found himself drawn to Waela, his hands upon her neck. How electric her flesh! His hands unsnapped her singlesuit. She made no move to assist or resist, but kept time to the sensory beat with a soft swaying of her hips which did not stop even when the singlesuit slid off her body.
Strangest sensation of all: He could see her flesh, the lovely body, yet he saw also a golden-orange hylighter rise from the sea and spring free into the sky, and he saw Hali stretched out in warm yellow light beneath a cedar of a treedome. Wonder filled him as he dropped his own suit and drew Waela down to the deck.
Ship? Ship, is this the woman for whom I saved myself?
How is it that you call upon Ship when you could call your human-self?
Was that Ship or Avata? No matter. He could not listen for an answer. There was only the hard beat of sexual magnetism which told him every movement his body should make. Waela became not-Waela, not-Hali, not-Avata, but part of his own flesh entwined with a sensation of enormous involvement by countless others. Somewhere in this, he felt that he lost even himself.
Thomas, still restrained securely by his seat straps when Panille returned, was caught there by entwining tendrils. He tried to fight them off, bu....
Voices! There were voice.... he thought he heard old Morgan Hempstead back at Moonbase, christening their Voidship. Momentous day. There was a buzzing in his nostrils and he smelted the musk of Pandora but he was crouched within his own nostrils recording this. Tendrils! They moved all over his body, under his suit, avoiding no intimate contact. As they moved, they sucked out his identity. First he was Raja Flattery, then Thomas, then he did not know who he was. This amused him and he thought he laughed.
I'm hallucinating.
That was not even his own thought because he was not there to have such a thought. There was a head somewhere spinning out of control. He thought he felt brains rattle and slosh in their cage of skull. He knew he ought to breathe but he could not find where to breathe. He was sliding through a passage which no clone had ever known - the womb of all wombs.
That's how it is to be born.
Panic threatened to overcome him. I was never born! The hylighters are killing me!
Avata does not kill you!
That was a voice echoing in a metal barrel. Avata? He knew that from his Chaplain studies - ancient superego of the Hindu oversoul.
Who am I who knows this?
He glimpsed Panille and Waela, their naked bodies entwined in lovemaking. The ultimate biological principle. Clones don't have that link with their past.
A...clone? Who am I?
He knew what clones were, whoever he was; he knew that. Clones were property. Morgan Hempstead said so. Again, panic threatened him, but it was stifled instantly while he tried to follow a silvery thread of awareness which moved faster and faster as he sped to overtake it.
Wael.... Panill....
He knew those had to be people, but he did not know who, except that the names filled him with rage. Something fought him to calmness.
The mandala on his cubby wall. Yes. He stared at it.
Who was Waela?
A sense of loss flooded through him. He was forever out of his time, far gone from someplace where he had grown, stripped of past and without his own future.
Damn You, Ship!
He knew who Ship was - the keeper of his soul, but this thought made him feel that he was Ship and he had damned himself. No reality remained. Everything was confusion, everything gone to chaos.
It's you damned Avata/hylighters! Keep that Panille out of my mind! Yes, I said MY mind.
Darkness. He was aware of darkness and of motion, sensations of controlled movement, glimpses of light and a glaring sun, then craggy rocks. He could see Rega low on a castellated rock horizon. There was flesh around him and he knew it for his own.
I'm Raja Flattery, Chaplain/Psychiatrist o.... No! I'm Raja Thomas, Ship's Devil!
He looked down to find himself strapped into his command couch. There was no motion to the gondola. When he looked out through the plaz he could see solid groun...damp stretch of Pandoran soil studded with native plants: odd spikey things with fluting silver leaves. He turned his head and there was Waela seated on the deck, completely naked. She was staring at two singlesuits. One of them, Thomas saw, carried Waela's shoulder badge of the LTA service, and the othe.... the other was Panille's.
Thomas looked all around the gondola. Panille was not there.
Waela turned to look up at Thomas. "I think it was real. I think we really did make love. And I was in his head while he was in me."
Thomas pushed himself hard against the back of his seat, his memory struggling for the bits and pieces of what had happened to them. Where was the damned poet? He could not survive out there.
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