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Oakes crumpled the note in his fist.
One Ceepee was all this society could tolerate. The ship was sending another message to him. “You can he replaced.”
He had never doubted that there were other Chaplain/Psychiatrists somewhere in the ship’s hyb reserves. No telling where those reserves might be hidden. The damned ship was a convoluted mess with secret sections and random extrusions and concealed passages which led nowhere.
Colony had measured the ship’s size by the occlusion shadow when it had eclipsed one of the two suns on a low passage. The ship was almost fifty-eight kilometers long, room to hide almost anything.
But now we have a planet under us: Pandora.
Groundside!
He looked at the crumpled note in his hand. Why a note? He and Lewis were supposed to have an infallible means of secret communication—the only two Shipmen so gifted. It was why they trusted each other.
Do I really trust Lewis?
For the fifth time since receiving the note, Oakes triggered the alpha-blink which activated the tiny pellet imbedded in the flesh of his neck. No doubt the thing was working. He sensed the carrier wave which linked the capsule computer to his aural nerves, and there was that eerie feeling of a blank screen in his imagination, the knowledge that he was poised to experience a waking dream. Somewhere groundside the tight-band transmission should be alerting Lewis to this communication. But Lewis was not responding.
Equipment failure?
Oakes knew that was not the problem. He personally had implanted the counterpart of this pellet in Lewis’ neck, had made the nerve hookups himself.
And I supervised Lewis while he made my implant.
Was the damned ship interfering?
Oakes peered around at the elaborate changes he had introduced into his cubby. The ship was everywhere, of course. All of them shipside were in the ship. This cubby, though, had always been different . . . even before he had made his personal alterations. This was the cubby of a Chaplain/Psychiatrist.
The rest of the crew lived simply. They slept suspended in hammocks which translated the gentle swayings of the ship into sleep. Many incorporated padded pallets or cushions for those occasions that arose between men and women. That was for love, for relaxation, for relief from the long corridors of plasteel which sometimes wound tightly around the psyche and squeezed out your breath.
Breeding, though . . . that came under strictest Ship controls. Every Natural Natal had to be born shipside and under the supervision of a trained obstetrics crew—the damned Natali with their air of superior abilities. Did the ship talk to them? Feed them? They never said.
Oakes thought about the shipside breeding rooms. Although plush by usual cubby standards, they never seemed as stimulating as his own cubby. Even the perimeter treedomes were preferred by some—under dark bushes . . . on open grass. Oakes smiled. His cubby, though—this was opulent. Women had been known to gasp when first entering the vastness of it. From the core of the Ceepee’s cubby, this one had been expanded into the space of five cubbies.
And the damned ship never once interfered.
This place was a symbol of power. It was an aphrodisiac which seldom failed. It also exposed the lie of Ship.
Those of us who see the lie, control. Those who don’t see it . . . don’t.
He felt a little giddy. Effect of the Pandoran wine, he thought. It snaked through his veins and wormed into his consciousness. But even the wine could not make him sleep. At first, its peculiar sweetness and the thick warmth had promised to dull the edge of doubts that kept him pacing the nightside passages. He had lived on three or four hours’ sleep each period for . . . how long now? Annos . . . annos . . .
Oakes shook his head to clear it and felt the ripple of his jowls against his neck. Fat. He had never been supple, never selected for breeding.
Edmond Kingston chose me to succeed him, though. First Ceepee in history not selected by the damned ship.
Was he going to be replaced by this new Ceepee the ship had chosen to send groundside?
Oakes sighed.
Lately, he knew he had turned sallow and heavy.
Too much demand on my head and not enough on my body.
Never a lack of couch partners, though. He patted the cushions at his side, remembering.
I’m fifty, fat and fermented, he thought. Where do I go from here?
Chapter 3
The all-pervading, characterless background of the universe—this is the void. It is not object nor senses. It is the region of illusions.
—Kerro Panille, Buddha and Avata
WILD VARIETY marked the naked band of people hobbling and trudging across the open plain between bulwarks of black crags. The red-orange light of a single sun beat down on them from the meridian, drawing purple shadows on the coarse sand and pebbles of the plain. Vagrant winds whisked at random dust pockets, and the band gave wary attention to these disturbances. Occasional stubby plants with glistening silver leaves aligned themselves with the sun in the path of the naked band. The band steered a course to avoid the plants.
The people of the band showed only remote kinship with their human ancestry. Most of them turned to a tall companion as their leader, although this one did not walk at the point. He had ropey gray arms and a narrow head crowned by golden fuzz, the only suggestion of hair on his slender body. The head carried two golden eyes in bony extrusions at the temples, but there was no nose and only a tiny red circle of mouth. There were no visible ears, but brown skin marked the spots where ears might have been. The arms ended in supple hands, each with three six-jointed fingers and opposable thumb. The name Theriex was tattooed in green across his hairless chest.
Beside the tall Theriex hobbled a pale and squat figure with no neck to support a hairless bulb of head. Tiny red eyes, set close to a moist hole which trembled with each breath, could stare only where the body pointed. The ears were gaping slits low at each side of the head. Fat and corded arms ended in two fingerless fleshy mittens. The legs were kneeless tubes without feet.
Others in the band showed a similar diversity. There were heads with many eyes and some with none. There were great coned nostrils and horned ears, dancers’ legs and some stumps. They numbered forty-one in all and they huddled close as they walked, presenting a tight wall of flesh to the Pandoran wilderness. Some clung to each other as they stumbled and lurched their way across the plain. Others maintained a small moat of open space. There was little conversation—an occasional grunt or moan, sometimes a plaintive question directed at Theriex.
“Where can we hide, Ther? Who will take us in?”
“If we can get to the other sea,” Theriex said. “The Avata . . .”
“The Avata, yes, the Avata.”
They spoke it as a prayer. A deep rumbling voice in the band took it up then: “All-Human one, All-Avata one.”
Another spoke: “Ther, tell us the story of Avata.”
Theriex remained silent until they were all pleading: “Yes, Ther, tell us the story . . . the story, the story . . .”
Theriex raised a ropey hand for silence, then: “When Avata speaks of beginning, Avata speaks of rock and the brotherhood of rock. Before rock there was sea, boiling sea, and the blisters of light that boiled it. With the boiling and the cooling came the ripping of the moons, the teeth of the sea gone mad. By day all things scattered in the boil, and by night they joined in the relief of sediment and they rested.”
Theriex had a thin whistling voice which carried over the shuffling sounds of the band’s passage. He spoke to an odd rhythm which fitted itself to their march.
“The suns slowed their great whirl and the seas cooled. Some few who joined remained joined. Avata knows this because it is so, but the first word of Avata is rock.”
“The rock, the rock,” Theriex’s companions responded.
“There is no growth on the run,” Theriex said. “Before rock Avata was tired and Avata was many and Avata had seen only the sea.”
“We
must find the Avata sea . . .”
“But to grip a rock,” Theriex said, “to coil around it close and lie still, that is a new dream and a new life—untossed by the ravages of moon, untired. It was vine to leaf then, and in the new confidence of rock came the coil of power and the gas, gift of the sea.”
Theriex tipped his head back to look up at the metallic blue of the sky and, for a few paces, remained silent, then: “Coil of power, touch of touches! Avata captured lightning that day, curled tight around its rock, waiting out the silent centuries in darkness and in fear. Then the first spark arced into the horrible night: ‘Rock!’”
Once more, the others responded, “Rock! Rock! Rock!”
“Coil of power!” Theriex repeated. “Avata knew rock before knowing Self; and the second spark snapped: I! Then the third, greatest of all: I! Not rock!”
