Inflection is the adjective of language. It carries the subtleties of delight and horror, the essence of culture and social process. Such is the light-pattern displayed by the kelp; such is the song of the hylighter.
- Kerro Panille, History of the Avata (from the "Preface")
WAELA SAT watching a holo of Panille as a child. Except for the projected action at the holofocus, it was quiet in the small teaching study where Hali Ekel had put her. The chair, a simple sling in a metal frame, presented the holocontrols on its arm beneath her right hand. Soft blue light suffused the room, down-toned to increase resolution at the holofocus. Each time the holosound subsided, a low sussuration of venting air could be heard.
At frequent intervals, Waela turned her head slightly to the left and drank from a tube leading into a shiptit. Her left hand rested lightly on her abdomen and she was certain that the hand felt the growth of the fetus. There was no concealing the rapidity of that growth, but she tried not to think about it. Every time she was forced to confront the mystery of what was happening within her, she felt a hiccup of terro...sensation which subsided in a blink as something dampened it.
A sense of isolation permeated the study - an accent on her awareness that she was being kept out of contact with ordinary shipside life. The Natali were doing this deliberately.
The pangs of terrible hunger controlled the movement of her mouth to the shiptit. She drank greedily and with feelings of guilt. Hali Ekel had not explained why there was a shiptit here, nor why Ship fed her from it when others were denied. Feelings of rebellion welled up in Waela from time to time, but these, too, were dampened by some automatic response. She continued to sit and stare at the holo of the young Panille.
At the moment, the holo showed him sleeping in his cubby. The register gave his age as only twelve standard annos at the time, and there was no mention of who had authorized this holo.
A Ship 'coder rattled in the sleeping child's cubby then, waking Panille. He sat up, stretched and yawned, then increased the cubby's light level with one hand while rubbing his eyes with the other.
Ship's voice filled the cubby with its awful clarity: "Last night-side, you claimed kinship with God. Why do you sleep? Gods need not sleep."
Panille shrugged and stared at the 'coder from which Ship's voice issued. "Ship, have You ever stretched out as long as You can reach and yawned?"
Waela held her breath at the audacity of the child. This question suggested blasphemy and there was no reply.
Panille waited. Waela thought him patient for one so young.
"Well?" he asked, finally, smug in his adolescent logic.
"I'm sorry, young Kerro. I nodded my head but apparently you did not see it."
"How could you nod? You don't have a head to put on a pillow."
Waela gasped. The child was challenging Ship because of Ship's question about kinship with God. She waited for Ship's response and marveled at it.
"Perhaps the head I nod and the muscles I stretch are simply not within your field of vision."
Panille took a glass of water from his cubby spigot and drank before replying.
"You're just imagining what it's like to stretch. That's not the same at all."
"I actually stretched. Perhaps it is you who imagines what it is to stretch."
"I really stretch because I have a body and that body sometimes wants to sleep."
Waela thought he sounded defensive, but there were plain hints at amusement in Ship's tones.
"Never underestimate the power of imagination, Kerro. Notice the word itself: creator of images. Is that not the essence of your human experience?"
"But images ar.... just images."
"And the artistry in your images, what is that? If, someday, you compose an account of all your experiences, will that be artistry? Tell me how you know that you exist."
Waela slapped the shut-off switch. The holo image of young Panille held itself in the negative, like an afterthought, then died. But she thought he had been nodding as she stopped the replay, as though he had acquired sudden insight.
What did he acquire in his odd way of relating to Ship? She felt herself inadequate to the task of understanding Panille, despite these mysterious recordings. How had Hali Ekel known about these holos? Waela glanced around the tiny study cubby. What a strange little place hidden away here behind a secret hatch.
Why did Hali want me to look at these recordings? Will I really find him there in his past - lay the ghost of his childhood to rest or drive his voice from my mind?
Waela pressed her palms against her temples. That voice! In her most unguarded moments of panic, that voice came into her mind, telling her to be calm, to accept, telling her eerie things about someone called Avata.
I'm going mad. I know I am.
She dropped her hands and pressed them against her abdomen, as though this pressure would stop the terrible speed of that growth within her.
Hali Ekel's diffident knock sounded at the hatch. It opened just enough to let her slip through. She sealed the hatch, swung her pribox around to her hip.
"What have you learned?" Hali asked.
Waela indicated the jumble of holo recordings around her chair. "Who made these?"
"Ship." Hali put her pribox on the arm of Waela's chair.
"They don't tell me what I want to know."
"Ship is not a fortuneteller."
Waela wondered at the oddity of that response. There were times when Hali seemed at the point of saying something important about Ship, something private and secret, but the disclosure never came - just these odd statements.
Hali attached the cold platinum node of the pribox to the back of Waela's left hand. There was a moment of painful itching at the contact, but it subsided quickly.
"Why is the baby growing so fast in me?" Waela asked. The hiccup of terror leered in her mind, vanished.
"We don't know," Hali said.
"There's something wrong. I know it." The words came out flat, absolutely devoid of emotion.
Hali studied the instruments of her pribox, looked at Waela's eyes, her skin. "We can't explain this, but I can assure you that everything except the speed of it is normal. Your body has done months of work in only a few hours."
"Why? Is the bab.... ?"
"Everything we scan shows the baby is normal."
"But it can't be normal t...."
"Ship says you're being fed everything you need." Hali indicated the tube into the shiptit.
"Ship says!" Waela looked down at the linkage between her hand and the pribox.
Hali keyed a cardiac scan. "Heart normal, blood pressure normal, blood chemistry normal. Everything normal."
"It is not!"
Waela panted with the exertion required to put emotion into her voice. Something did not want her excited, upset or frustrated.
"This child is growing at a rate of about twenty-three hours for every hour of the gestation," Hali said. "That is the only abnormal thing about this."
"Why?"
"We don't know."
Tears welled up in Waela's eyes, slipped down her cheeks.
"I trust Ship," Hali said.
"I don't know what to trust."
Without conscious volition, Waela turned to the shiptit, drank in long sucking gulps. The tears stopped while she drank. She watched Hali at the same time, how purposefully the young woman moved, changing the settings on the pribox. What a strange creature, this Hali Ekel - shipcut hair as black as Panille's, that odd ring in her nostril.
So mature for one so young.
That was the real oddity about Hali Ekel. She said she had never been groundside. Life was not rendered down to raw survival here the way it was groundside. There was time here for softer things, more sophisticated dalliances. Ship's records at your fingertips. But Hali Ekel had groundside eyes.
Waela stopped drinking, her hunger satisfied. She turned and stared directly at Hali.
Could I tell her about Kerro's voice in my head?
"You scattered the graphs there," Hali said. "What were you thinking?"
Waela felt a warm flush spread up her neck.
"You were thinking about Kerro," Hali said.
Waela nodded. She still felt a tightening of her throat when she tried to talk about him.
"Why do you say hylighters took him?" Hali asked. "Ground-side says he's dead."
"The hylighters rescued us," Waela said. "Why should they turn around and kill him?"
Waela closed her eyes as Hali remained silent and watchful. You see, Hali, I hear Kerro's voice in my head. No, Hali, I'm not insane. I really hear him.
"What does it mean to run the P?" Hali asked.
Waela's eyes snapped open. "What?"
"Records says you once lost a lover because he ran the P. His name was Jim. What does it mean to run the P?"
Slowly at first, then in bursts, Waela described The Game, then, seeing the reason for Hali's question, added: "That has nothing to do with why I believe Kerro's alive."
"Why would the hylighters take him away?"
"They didn't tell me."
"I want him to be alive, too, Waela, bu...." Hali shook her head and Waela thought she detected tears in the med-tech's eyes.
"You were fond of him, too, Hali?"