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?"
"We had our moments." She glanced at Waela's swelling abdomen, "Not those moments, but good just the same."
With a quick shake of her head, Hali turned her attention to the pribox, keyed another scan, converted it to code, stored it.
"Why are you storing that record?"
She's watching me carefully, Hali thought. Do I dare lie to her?
Something had to be done, though, to allay the obvious fears aroused by this examination and the questions which could not be answered.
"I'll show you," Hali said. She called back the record and shunted it to the study screen beyond the holofocus. With an internal pointer, she indicated a red line oscillating across a green matrix.
"Your heart. Note the long, low rhythm."
Hali keyed another sequence. A yellow line wove its way through the red, pulsing faster and with lower intensity.
"The baby's heart."
Again, Hali's fingers moved over the keys. "Here's what happened when you thought about Kerro."
The two lines formed identical undulations. They merged and pulsed as one for a dozen beats, then separated.
"What does that mean?" Waela asked.
Hali removed the node from Waela's hand, began restoring the pribox to its case at her hip.
"It's called synchronous biology and we don't know exactly what it means. Ship's records associate it with certain psychic phenomena - faith healing, for example."
"Faith healing?"
"Without the intervention of accepted scientific medicine."
"But I've neve...."
"Kerro showed me the records once. The healer achieves a steady physiological state, sometimes in a trance. Kerro called it 'a symphony of the mind.'"
"I don't see how tha...."
"The patient's body assumes an identical state, in complete harmony with the healer's. When it ends, the patient is healed."
"I don't believe it."
"It's in the records."
"Are you trying to tell me my baby is healing me?"
"Given the unknowns about this rapid gestation," Hali said, "I would expect greater upset from you. But you don't seem capable of maintaining long periods of physiological imbalance."
"Whatever else she may be, she's still an unformed infant," Waela said. "She could not do that."
"She?"
Waela felt pressure against one of her lower ribs, the baby shifting.
"I've known all along that it's female."
"That's what the chromosome scan says," Hali agreed. "But the odds were even that you could guess right. Your guess doesn't impress me."
"No more than your faith healing."
Waela stood up slowly and felt the baby adjust to this new position.
"Unborn infants have been known to compensate for deficiencies in the mother," Hali said, "but I'm not selling faith healing."