"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."
***
Through the process of nostalgic filtering, Earth assumed for the Shipmen fairyland characteristics. The different strains of people, telling their different historical memories, could only make such stories mix in a paradise setting. No Shipman ever experienced every Earthly place and clime and society. Thus, over the many generations, the reinforcement of positive memories left only the faith in how things were.
LEGATA SAT at a comdesk in the working space assigned to her at the Redoubt. It was a small room and showed signs of hasty construction. Directly in front of her across the desk was an oval hatch leading into her own private cubby, a space she seldom occupied now. But Oakes was busy somewhere and she had seized this opportunity.
She punched for shiprecords, keyed for her own private code, and waited. Did they still have contact with Ship?
The instrument buzzed. Glyphs danced across the screen in the desk. She punched for the Ox gate, set up a random-barrier lock and began transferring the data on Oakes into the Redoubt's own storage system.
There you are, Morgan Lon Oakes!
And the printout remained secreted in Oakes' old cubby shipside should she ever need it. It was remotely possible that Oakes might stumble on this record here, might erase it and even trace back to the original to erase that. But the printout would remain, stamped with Ship's imprimatur.
When she had reviewed the data to reassure herself, and once more checked the random-barrier, she keyed the lock, then turned to the question of Lewis. It was not enough to have power over Oakes. Lewis held to his own power base like a man aware of every threat. She did not like the way he stared at her, secretive and measuring.