The Pandora Sequence: The Jesus Incident, the Lazarus Effect, the Ascension Factor (30 page)

Chapter 51

And the Lord said, “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language . . . and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Let us go down and confound their language that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

—Christian Book of the Dead,
Shiprecords

From the instant the first tentacles brushed her face to the moment she boarded the shuttle for Ship, Waela lived in a blur of past-present-future which she could not control. Kerro was gone and Thomas was not available, this much she knew. And contact with the hylighters had left her with a voice in her mind. It flared there in flashes of total demand. She wavered between accepting the voice and believing herself insane.

The voice of Honesty would not answer, but this new voice intruded without warning. When it came, she felt herself filled with the same conceptual ecstasy she had felt in the gondola.

It is the Avata way of learning.

The voice kept repeating this. When she questioned, answers came, but in a jargon which confused her.

Like electricity, humanwaela, knowledge flows between poles. It activates and charges all that it touches. It changes that which moves it and moves within it. You are such a pole.

She knew what the words meant, but they went together in a confusing way.

And all the while, she remained vaguely aware of the processing procedure when the rescue gondola deposited them at Colony. Thomas was taken away somewhere and she was rushed into a medical unit for debriefing. The session was run by Lewis—astonishing!

It was right there that the first demanding flash hit her.

Waela. I have found the Avata.

She knew there was no sound, but the voice filled her sense of hearing. It was Kerro Panille, no denying it. Not his voice, but his identity recognized in an internal way which could not be disguised. She knew it as she knew herself. But she didn’t even know that Kerro was alive!

I’m alive.

Then he had found some way of reaching out . . . or of reaching in.

Either that or I’m insane, she thought.

She did not feel insane as she stood in the Medical section’s glaring tile-white cubicle looking across a metal table at Lewis. Hands supported her. It was nightside; she knew this. Rega had been setting and they had brought her directly in here. Lewis was speaking to her and she kept shaking her head, unable to answer him because of that voice in her mind. An older med-tech said something to Lewis. She heard three words: “. . . too soon for . . .”

Then the whirl of that intruding voice returned. She was uncertain whether she recognized words—or whether it really could be called a voice—but she knew what was being said. It was a non-language, and she knew this when she found that she could not distinguish between “I” and “We” in Kerro’s communication. A language barrier was down.

In that instant of recognition, she knew Avata as Kerro Panille knew Avata. She wondered how she learned this lesson, this ancient bit of human history.

How did I learn, Kerro Panille?

What is done to one is felt by all, humanwaela.

“Why am I humanwaela?” She asked it aloud and saw an odd expression come over the face of Lewis as he turned from talking to the med-tech. This did not bother her. She felt her mind drifting lazily in the Pandoran wind. There were mutterings and head-shakings among people around her—med-techs, several of them . . . an entire team. She filtered them out. Nothing was more important than the voice in her mind.

You are humanwaela because you are at once human and at once Waela. There may be such a time as this is not so. Then you will be human.

“When will that be?”

The cold node of a pribox drilled the back of her left hand, tingled up her arm and sent her down a whirlwind of dis-timed memories which were not her own.

When you know all that otherhumans know, and otherhumans know all of you, then you are human.

She concentrated on that magnificent universe of the interior which this concept opened before her.
Avata
. She had no sensation of time while she floated in the arms of Avata, or whether Avata was really with her. If it was just a dream, she wanted it never to end.

Only you can end it, humanwaela. See?

Memories poured into her—from that first sensory awareness of the first Avata to the coming of Shipmen to Pandora and then to her rescue from the gondola—everything poured into her through a timeless flash, a non-linear stream of sensations.

This is not hallucination!

She saw humans, Shipman/humans of many suns, and uncounted histories which died with them. It baffled her how she understood this.
How . . .

She heard the voice in her mind:
This we trade with those we touch. Lives of all humans alive in each of you. But you and humankerro are the first to recognize the trade. Others resist and fear. Fear erases. Humanthomas resists, but out of humanfear, not out of humanthomas fear. There is something he will not trade.

Waela found herself eavesdropping through another’s eyes. She was looking in a mirror and the face that looked back was Raja Thomas. A shaking hand explored the face, a wan face, tired. She heard a voice which she knew to be Ship’s.

Raj.

Then there were no more mind pictures. He blanked her out. Rejected.

She found herself alone on a gurney in a Redoubt passage.

So Thomas is on speaking terms with Ship.

“Why?” The question was a dry crackle in her throat and a nearby med-tech bent over her. “You’ll be shipside soon, dear. Don’t worry.” The gurney’s straps hurt her breasts.

This is Pandora, humanwaela. All evil has been released here.

There was that voice again. Not Kerro. Avata?

The word tingled on her tongue as med-techs began to roll her gurney onto a shuttle. There was another face above her then—dream or reality? Small, a face like Lewis, but not Lewis. The voices all around were babble. She was being wheeled, pushed and probed, but her attention remained with the voice in her mind and the link she had seen to that intricate chain of humanity.

“She’s pregnant. That means shipside, the Natali. Orders.”

“How long’s she been pregnant?”

“Looks like more’n a month.”

That can’t be!
she thought.
I’ve just arrived here and Kerro and I. . .

She felt a doubled awareness of time then—one told her she had arrived at the Redoubt late in the same diurn that had seen their sub enter the lagoon. The other time-sense lived in her abdomen, and the clock there had gone mad . . . spinning, spinning, spinning. It raced completely out of pace with the clock in her head.

“She’ll be the Natali’s problem pretty soon,” someone said. Those were words in her ears. Time out of sync was more important. From the time Kerro had slipped into her. . . .

The time was out of phase. She knew only that she must be delivered shipside to the Natali. That was the way of WorShip.

How can that be, Avata?

She felt that she was meant to be pregnant and the act of conception was an Avata formality.

As the hatchway opened to the shuttle the lean-faced man took hold of the gurney and she saw that it was one of Murdoch’s people, a long-fingered clone who spoke in a falsetto. A shock of fear jolted her body.

“Am I going shipside?”

She couldn’t bring herself to ask the other half of the question,
Or to Lab One?

“Yes,” he said, as she thumped across the threshold of the shuttle.

“What do we do now?” she asked aloud. And the voice from her mind said,
Save the world.

Then the hatchdogs were secured and she slept.

Chapter 52

CONSCIOUS: from Latin com, with scire (to know).

CONSCIENCE: from Latin com (intensive), with scire.

Conscious—to know; conscience—to know well (or, in the vernacular, to know better).

—Shiprecords

“SHIPSIDE!” OAKES screamed into the vocoder on his console, “Who ordered the TaoLini woman shipside?”

The med-tech facing him on the screen looked terrified and small. His little mouth worked itself into a stumble of words.

“You did, sir. I mean . . . orders. She’s pregnant, sir, and you signed the WorShip order sending all . . .”

“Don’t tell me what I signed!”

“No, sir. Are you ordering her back, sir?”

Oakes pressed a hand against his forehead.

Too late, now. The Natali have her. Reprocessing her groundside would mean an executive order and that would mean attention. The Redoubt was problem enough. Better to let the matter rest until something could be arranged . . .
Damn! Why couldn’t we have moved the Natali down here . . .

“I want to talk to Murdoch.”

“He is shipside, sir.”

“I know he’s shipside! Get him on a line to me as soon as you can!”

He smacked the key on the console with the side of his fist and the frightened little med-tech’s face faded.

Damn! Just when things were going right!

He looked out over the clear bay beside the shuttle station. No more kelp there anyway. The perimeter lights and the arcs from the nightside crew’s torches reflected the flat calm of the water.

No kelp. It’ll be gone from Pandora before we know it.

That left Ship.

The
ship.

And now, that TaoLini woman.
No telling what she knows
. Thomas could have convinced her of anything. After all, he was a Ceepee. . . .

Oakes turned back to his console and activated the holo of Thomas’ debriefing.

Thomas sat in the center of the room, a cell three meters square. He faced the sensor. A tall woman from Behavioral stood facing Thomas and he was shaking his head from side to side.

“No time. No time. ‘You must decide how you will WorShip, Ship says and the clue is in the sea. I know it’s in the sea. WorShip . . . WorShip. And there is no time, after all the eons and all these worlds . . . no time. No time. . . .” Oakes switched off the holo in disgust.

The kelp got to him, that’s for sure. Maybe it’s just as well.

He paced back to the plaz which screened the ocean view, and watched the dazzle of the welders and cutters play across the water.

The kelp is a trade,
he thought.
Thomas wasn’t all that far off. With the kelp gone, we buy ourselves time and with time we buy a world. Not a bad barter.

He retraced his steps again and again, plaz to console, console to plaz. . . . Having that TaoLini woman shipside was too big a variable—something would have to be done.

Damn that tech!
his fist came down again. He should’ve double-talked her into Lab One instead of letting her go shipside.
Can’t the fool think for himself? Do I have to make every decision!

He knew Murdoch was up there in a power-scrimmage with Ferry, but they were Lewis’ people and it was Lewis’ business. This whole fiasco was really Lewis’ fault.

“Until they interfere with the Ceepee,” he said aloud, pointing an affirmative finger at his reflection in the plaz. On the other side of the reflection, the quiet bay began to pick up the rhythmic
rush rush
of small waves licking at the beach.

Chapter 53

Inflection is the adjective of language. It carries the subtleties of delight and horror, the essence of culture and social process. Such is the light-pattern displayed by the kelp; such is the song of the hylighter.

—Kerro Panille,
History of the Avata
(from the “Preface”)

WAELA SAT watching a holo of Panille as a child. Except for the projected action at the holofocus, it was quiet in the small teaching study where Hali Ekel had put her. The chair, a simple sling in a metal frame, presented the holocontrols on its arm beneath her right hand. Soft blue light suffused the room, down-toned to increase resolution at the holofocus. Each time the holosound subsided, a low susurration of venting air could be heard.

At frequent intervals, Waela turned her head slightly to the left and drank from a tube leading into a shiptit. Her left hand rested lightly on her abdomen and she was certain that the hand felt the growth of the fetus. There was no concealing the rapidity of that growth, but she tried not to think about it. Every time she was forced to confront the mystery of what was happening within her, she felt a hiccup of terror—a sensation which subsided in a blink as something dampened it.

A sense of isolation permeated the study—an accent on her awareness that she was being kept out of contact with ordinary shipside life. The Natali were doing this deliberately.

The pangs of terrible hunger controlled the movement of her mouth to the shiptit. She drank greedily and with feelings of guilt. Hali Ekel had not explained why there was a shiptit here, nor why Ship fed her from it when others were denied. Feelings of rebellion welled up in Waela from time to time, but these, too, were dampened by some automatic response. She continued to sit and stare at the holo of the young Panille.

At the moment, the holo showed him sleeping in his cubby. The register gave his age as only twelve standard annos at the time, and there was no mention of who had authorized this holo.

A Ship ‘coder rattled in the sleeping child’s cubby then, waking Panille. He sat up, stretched and yawned, then increased the cubby’s light level with one hand while rubbing his eyes with the other.

Ship’s voice filled the cubby with its awful clarity: “Last nightside, you claimed kinship with God. Why do you sleep? Gods need not sleep.”

Panille shrugged and stared at the ‘coder from which Ship’s voice issued. “Ship, have You ever stretched out as long as You can reach and yawned?”

Waela held her breath at the audacity of the child. This question suggested blasphemy and there was no reply.

Panille waited. Waela thought him patient for one so young.

“Well?” he asked, finally, smug in his adolescent logic.

“I’m sorry, young Kerro. I nodded my head but apparently you did not see it.”

“How could you nod? You don’t have a head to put on a pillow.”

Waela gasped. The child was challenging Ship because of Ship’s question about kinship with God. She waited for Ship’s response and marveled at it.

“Perhaps the head I nod and the muscles I stretch are simply not within your field of vision.”

Panille took a glass of water from his cubby spigot and drank before replying.

“You’re just imagining what it’s like to stretch. That’s not the same at all.”

“I actually stretched. Perhaps it is you who imagines what it is to stretch.”

“I really stretch because I have a body and that body sometimes wants to sleep.”

Waela thought he sounded defensive, but there were plain hints at amusement in Ship’s tones.

“Never underestimate the power of imagination, Kerro. Notice the word itself: creator of images. Is that not the essence of your human experience?”

“But images are . . . just images.”

“And the artistry in your images, what is that? If, someday, you compose an account of all your experiences, will that be artistry? Tell me how you know that you exist.”

Waela slapped the shut-off switch. The holo image of young Panille held itself in the negative, like an afterthought, then died. But she thought he had been nodding as she stopped the replay, as though he had acquired sudden insight.

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 baby . . .”

“Everything we scan shows the baby is normal.”

“But it can’t be normal to . . .”

“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. “Groundside 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, but . . .” 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 never . . .”

“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 that . . .”

“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.”

“But you said . . .”

“I say a lot of things.” She patted her pribox case. “We’ve set up a special exercise cubby down in P-T. You have to keep up your body tone even if . . .”

“If you’re right, this baby will be born in a matter of diurns. What can I do to . . .”

“Just get down to P-T, Waela.”

Hali slipped back out through the hatch before Waela could raise more objections. That was an alert and intelligent woman in there. Waela knew how to search records, and her curiosity would not be dampened by inadequate answers.
Now, what do we do?

Hali turned at the crèche hatch and saw one of the children staring out at her from the open bubble of the play area. Hali knew the child, Raul Andrit, age five. She had treated him for nightmares. She bent toward him. “Hi. Remember me?”

Raul turned his face up to her, wan and listless. Before he could answer, he fell out of the bubble into the passage.

Setting her alarm signal on call, Hali turned the child onto his back and attached the pribox. The emergency readout buzzed and, for the first time, Hali doubted a computer diagnosis. In the snarl of facts blurring past her eyes she read: fatigue . . . exhaustion . . . 10.2 . . .

“Yes?” The voice of a responding medic was thin in her pribox speaker. She briefed him and set the boy up for a glucose and vitamin series from her emergency packet.

“I’ll send a cart.” The speaker blipped as the medic broke the connection.

Hali put a question to her computer: “Raul Andrit: age?”

The screen flashed 5.5.

“What is the age of the subject just tested?”

10.2.

Her fingers scurried across the keys: “The last subject tested was Raul Andrit. How could he be 5.5 and 10.2?”

He has lived 5.5 standard annos. His body exhibits the characteristic intracellular structures of one who is 10.2. For medical purposes, cellular age is the more important.

Hali sat back on her heels and stared down at the unconscious child—dark circles under his eyes, pale skin. His chest appeared too thin and it heaved convulsively when he breathed. What the computer had just told her was that this little boy had doubled his age in a matter of diurns. She heard the cart pull up, a young attendant with it.