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“Hold your fire, Captain,” MacIntosh ordered. “This is MacIntosh. You’re in a high-explosive area—”
“Brood’s dead,” a voice interrupted, a voice that cracked with youth and fear. “May Ship accept him. May Ship forgive and accept us all.”
The lasgun barrel tilted up toward the viewscreen and in a flash the last monitor went blank. Beatriz tugged at Mack’s sleeve.
“He’s an Islander,” she said. “The old religion, like my family. Some believe this project, to build an image and likeness of Ship, to be blasphemy. Some believe that the OMC should be allowed to die, that it—she—is a human being held here against her will and enslaved.”
MacIntosh covered the intercom receiver with his hand.
“I don’t necessarily believe that Brood’s dead,” he told her. “That would be too easy. And why shoot out the monitor instead of the OMC? You’re an Islander, you talk to him. Play the religion angle, set up to get him on the air if that’s what he wants. My men here will help you out.”
“Where are you going?”
He saw the unbridled fear in her eyes at the prospect that he would leave her.
What have they done to her? he wondered.
He gripped her shoulders while his men floated the passageway feigning inattention to their covert affections.
“Spud and I know a few ins and outs of this Orbiter that don’t show up on schematic.” She held him as close as their vacuum suits would allow.
“I could take anything but losing you,” she said. “I know I’m making a spectacle of myself in front of your men, but I couldn’t let it go unsaid.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” he said, and smiled. He kissed her in spite of the throat-clearings, harrumphs and chuckles of his crew.
“Chief Hubbard will stay here with you while his men secure this area. By your estimate, we’re still missing a few of Brood’s men. He’s up to something, I have that feeling.”
With a half-salute to the chief, MacIntosh propelled himself toward Current Control with his compressed-air backpack.
Chapter 56
Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.
—John Wisdom
Rico couldn’t see through the illusion and he knew that Ben could not see him, either. Nor could Ben see Nevi and Zentz. Rico whistled the “get down” signal, hoping that the couple wouldn’t run out of the boundaries of the image. They would be visible then, and in the open against an incoming tide. Rico dropped when Nevi started shooting.
Time to send him a more suitable surprise, Rico thought. He wriggled into a position of better cover.
Nevi laid a pattern of fire into the rocks that hid Ben and Crista. Zentz covered Nevi’s rear, keeping the dozen local Zavatans pinned down. Nevi stopped firing, but kept his wary crouch.
“Save charges,” he warned Zentz. “We might be here awhile.”
All was quiet except for their harsh breathing, the seething of the incoming tide and the high-pitched ping of weapon barrels cooling.
The budding tip of kelp vine around Rico’s waist reminded him of his father’s arm, and the way it used to pick him off the deck in one swoop. The feathery bud of kelp felt like the palm of a small woman’s hand on his belly, covering his navel, hugging him from behind.
An image of Snej flashed through his mind and just as suddenly Snej’s face appeared in thin air about ten meters in front of Nevi. The rising tide licked at the hylighter skin beneath her and hissed over Nevi’s boot.
“What the hell … ?”
Nevi advanced a step, two steps. Zentz moved with him, backward, step for step. He glanced over his shoulder and paled when he saw Snej. He snapped his attention back to their rear defense.
“The redhead,” he gurgled, “where’s the rest of her?”
Rico found he could reinforce the intensity of the image by looking at it, concentrating on it. It was like a huge coil of energy feeding on itself, refining itself, awakening. After a couple of slow, calming breaths he was able to materialize the rest of her. She stood in her green singlesuit, hands on her hips, a bit larger than life size staring at Nevi. He wondered if he could make her speak.
“Well,” Nevi said, “she’s here, now.”
Another glance over his shoulder and Zentz began a wet, ragged breathing that Rico could hear a dozen meters away over the surf. He placed his back tight against Nevi’s.
“Shit, Nevi, a head that grows a body,” he whined. “Let’s get back to the foil.”
“Shut up.”
Nevi stopped and looked over the scene behind Snej. It was nearly the same view that Rico had: black rocky stretch of beach between the tide and the cliff, a cluster of large basalt boulders and a foil draped with the wet shards of an unexploded hylighter. In the downcoast distance the great expanse of sea glowed like green lava against the black cliffs.
“Where are they?” Nevi asked her. “I want them.”
A two-toned whistle told Rico that the Zavatans were in position to rush the two men. He noticed that his illusion of Snej didn’t cast a shadow.
Don’t think I can manage that, too, he thought. Talking will be enough of a challenge.
Her shadow melted from her feet on the hylighter skin to where it met the beach, no more. It lay parallel with the other lengthening shadows of the day, but amputated at the rim of the skin. The tide already rushed the edges of the image, breaking up the light. With luck, Nevi wouldn’t notice.
Rico smiled, concentrating on Snej, and quickly thanked Avata in the back of his mind.
“Put your weapons down,” Snej said. “It is finished.”
But no sound came from her lips.
“Shit!” Rico muttered.
Zentz responded with a burst from his lasgun. It came so fast that it startled Rico out of the illusion and it pulverized a rock just a meter in front of him. Avata brought the lost image back. Nevi fired, too, advancing them another step.
“It’s not real,” he told Zentz. “Watch yourself.”
“Maybe we’re dusted,” Zentz said. “All this hylighter crap …”
“Ever know two dusters to share the same hallucination?” Nevi asked. He stopped a pace from Snej, squinting.
“Something’s not right …”
Rico held his breath. If Nevi stepped across the plane of the image, he’d see Ben and Crista, and Rico wouldn’t be able to see Nevi. The entire area over the downed hylighter became a dome of imagination, a hypnotism of light, a life sculpture.
Chapter 57
There must be a threshold of consciousness beyond which a conscious being takes on the attributes of God.
—Umbilicus crew member, Voidship Earthling, from
Mose’s eyes were open so wide that he looked even smaller to Twisp than he had when a refugee band had carried him in half-starved ten years ago. Memories—they kept him from the kelp as they drew Kaleb. Twisp had watched the struggle for nearly a quarter-century. The kelp must be like a drug to Kaleb.
Not the kelp, Twisp thought. The past.
Twisp knew, too, how the kelp always drew him to a particular part of the past, a particular year, a particular woman. Twisp had thought her the most beautiful woman on Pandora. Later, after Flattery and the others had been removed from the hyb tanks, Pandorans got a look at unmutated humans for the first time in over two hundred years.
They were all so testy about being clones, Twisp recalled, when “clone” wasn’t even something you could see.
He remembered the bitter ceremony, with Raja Lon Flattery presiding, in which the hyb tank survivors purged the telltale “Lon” from their names forever. It was done with a ridiculous solemnity, and did not bestow on Flattery’s people any of the attributes that Pandora demanded of them: better reflexes, more intelligence, teamwork.
“What they didn’t tell you in school,” Twisp told Mose, “was that Flattery couldn’t control Kareen Ale’. She was killed, like Kaleb’s parents, by Flattery’s death squad. She was the first victim. I believe it was Nevi himself who did it. Shadow Panille was head of Current Control in those days. He was in love with Kareen Ale’. The combination killed him, too. He was my friend.”
Twisp’s voice barely rose above a whisper.
“I quit searching the kelpways, finally. I prefer my memories the way they deal themselves out. The kelp keeps them too true. Memories are not the drug for me that they are for some. I prefer to go to the kelp for the now, not the then.”
