Behold, these are a small troop, and indeed they are enraging us; and we are a host on our guard.
- Muslim Book of the Dead, Shiprecords
"WHAT YOU'RE talking about is war," Panille said, shaking his head. He sat on the warm ground, his back against a jungle tree, moon-shadowed darkness all around.
"War?" Thomas rubbed his forehead, looked at the shadowy ground. He did not like looking at Panill...naked Pan who seemed to flow in and out of contact with native life - touching a tree here, the tentacle of a passing hylighter there. Contact, physical contact: always touching. "Shipmen have had no experience of war for many generations," Panille said. "Clones and E-clones have no experience of it at all, not even stories or traditions. I know it only from Ship's holos."
With one moon full and another raising its pale face on the jagged horizon, Panille saw Thomas haloed against night sky, a hazy outline amidst the stars. A very disturbed man.
"But we have to take over the Redoubt," Thomas said. "It's our only hope. Shi.... Ship wil...."
"How do you know this?"
"It's why I was brought out of hyb."
"To teach us WorShip?"
"No! To acquaint you with the need to solve that problem! Ship insists w...."
"There is no problem."
"What do you mean there's no problem?" Thomas was outraged, "Ship wil...."
"Look around you." Panille gestured at the moon-shadowed basin, the gentle stirrings of the moist air in the leaves. "If you care for your house, you are sheltered."
Thomas forced himself to take a deep breath, to assume at least the outward appearance of calm. The jungle - yes, there did not appear to be any demons in this plac.... this nest, as the hylighters called it. But this place was not enough! No place was safe from Oakes or from Ship. And there was no escaping Ship's demand. Panille had to be made to understand that.
"Please believe me," Thomas said. "Unless we learn how to WorShip, we are through. No more humankind anywhere......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 the.... ?"
"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 thin.... 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 yo.... ?"
"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 humankin.... 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, bu.... ."
"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 discus.... discuss thi.... 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."
"N.... 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 phoney. 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 plaything...."
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 over 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 wha.... ."
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. These 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, bu...."
"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."
