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 alclass="underline" 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.
Waela moved her tongue against her teeth. She felt that she had lost track of time. She had been out of her body in some new place, but now she knew her body better than ever before. Images. She recalled the earlier, more terrible moments off the south coast of The Egg when she had sprawled on a kelp leaf, fighting for her sanity. This recent experience in the gondola was not the same, but one partook of the other. In both, she felt the aftermath as a loosening of her identity and a mixing of linear memories, shaking bits of her past out of place.
Thomas unfastened his seat restraints, stood and peered out through the filtering plaz. He felt that something had reached into his psyche and drained away the energy. What are we doing here? How did we get here?
There was no sign of hylighters.
What are Avata?
The gondola had been deposited in a broad pocket of flat land surrounded by a rock rim. The place looked vaguely familiar. The outline of the west ri.... He stared at it, caught up in a fugue state of attempted recollection.
"Where are we?" That was Waela.
His throat was too dry to respond. It took a moment of convulsive attempts to swallow before he could speak.
".... think we're somewhere near Oakes' Redoubt. Those rock...He pointed.
"Where's Kerro?"
"Not here."
"He can't be outside. The demons!"
She stood and stared all around over the obstructing panels of instruments, craning her neck to peer every direction. That fool poet! She looked up at the hatch. It was still open.
In that instant an LTA drifted over the rim of rocks to the west; the glare of Rega setting ringed it in a golden halo. The LTA was valved down to a landing beside the gondola, the hiss of its loud vents stirred up the dust. The gondola was a conventional landside type, armored against demons and studded with weapons. The side hatch opened a crack and a voice called from within: "You can make it if you run! No demons near."
Hastily, Waela stood and slipped into her suit. It was like putting on familiar flesh. She felt her sense of identity firming.
I must not think about what has happened. I'm alive. We're rescued.
But somewhere within her she thought she heard a voice crying names: "Kerr.... Ji.... Kerr.... where are you?"
There was no answer, just Thomas insisting that she follow only after he had tested the outside. Damn fool! I'm faster than he is. But she went quietly up the ladder behind him, watched him slide down the smooth plaz curve of the gondola, then followed on his heels. The rescue hatch of the other gondola swung wide as they reached it, and they were jerked inside by two pairs of hands. They were in familiar red shadows with the Shipmen at defensive stations all around the interior.