"They won't let me go. The groundside food shortage is critical; there are health problems. They've just increased our workload because they've sent some of our best people down."
"We're probably imagining monsters that don't exist, but I'd still like to see the 'lectrokelp for myself."
A high-pitched hum blurted from the ever-present pribox on the ground beside Hali. She pressed the response key.
"Hal...." There was a clatter, a buzz. Presently, the voice returned. "Sorry I dropped you. This is Winslow Ferry. Is that Kerro Panille with you, Hali?"
Hali stifled a laugh. The bumbling old fool could not even put in a call without stumbling over something. Kerro was caught by the direct reference to someone being with Hali. Had Ferry been listening? Many shipside suspected that sensors and portable communications equipment had been adapted for eavesdropping but this was his first direct clue. He took the pribox from her.
"This is Kerro Panille."
"Ahhh, Kerro. Please report to my office within the hour. We have an assignment for you."
"An assignment?"
There was no response. The connection had been broken.
"What do you suppose that's all about?" Hali asked.
For answer, Kerro drew a blank page from his notebook, scribbled on it with a fade-stylus, then pointed to the pribox. "He was listening to us."
She stared at the note.
Kerro said: "Isn't that strange? I've never had an assignment befor.... except study assignments from Ship."
Hali took the stylus from him, wrote: "Look out. If they do not want it known that the kelp thinks, you could be in danger."
Kerro stood, blanked the page and restored it to his case. "Guess I'd better wander down to Ferry's office and find out what's happening."
They walked most of the way back in silence, intensely aware of every sensor they passed, of the pribox at Hali's hip. As they approached Medical, she stopped him.
"Kerro, teach me how to speak to Ship."
"Can't."
"Bu...."
"It's like your genotype or your color. Except for certain clones, you don't get much choice in the matter."
"Ship has to decide?"
"Isn't that always the way, even with you? Do you respond to everyone who wants to talk to you?"
"Well, I know Ship must be very busy wit...."
"I don't think that has anything to do with it. Ship either speaks to you or doesn't."
She digested this for a moment, nodded, then: "Kerro, do you really talk to Ship?"
There was no mistaking the resentment in her voice.
"You know I wouldn't lie to you, Hali. Why're you so interested in talking to Ship?"
"It's the idea of Ship answering you. Not the commands we get over the 'coders, bu...."
"A kind of unlimited encyclopedia?"
"That, yes, but more. Does Ship talk to you through the 'coders?"
"Not very often."
"What is it like whe....?"
"It's like a very distinctive voice in your head, just a bit clearer than your conscience."
"That's it?" She sounded disappointed.
"What did you expect? Trumpets and bells?"
"I don't even know what my conscience sounds like!"
"Keep listening." He brushed a finger against her ring, kissed her quickly, brotherly, then stepped through the hatch into the screening area for Ferry's office.
The fearful are often holders of the most dangerous power. They become demoniac when they see the workings of all the life around them. Seeing the strengths as well as the weaknesses, they fasten only on the weaknesses.
WINSLOW FERRY sat in his dimly lighted office unaware of the random chaos around him - the piles of tapes and software, the dirty clothes, the empty bottles and boxes, the papers with scribbled notes to himself. It had been a long, tense dayside for him, and the place smelled of stale, spilled wine and old perspiration. His entire attention focused on the sensor screen at the corner of his comdesk. He bent his sweaty face close to the screen which showed Panille walking down a passageway with that lithe and succulent med-tech, Hali Ekel.
A wisp of gray hair fell over his right eye and he brushed it aside with a deeply veined hand. His pale eyes glittered in the com light.
He watched Hali on the holo, watched the smoothness of her young body glide from passageway to hatch to passageway. But the musk that surrounded him there in his office was Rachel. At times Rachel Demarest seemed all bone and elbow to him, a hard woman hardly used. He developed an amused distance from her whine. She had dreams that included him because she wanted him, even if he was a sack of graying wrinkles and sour breath. She wanted power and Ferry liked to snuggle up to power. They were good for each other and they tricked themselves into a personal distance by trading information for liquor, wine for position or a warm night together. This game of barter between them walled off the kind of hurt they'd both been dealt at the hands of whimsical lovers.
Rachel was asleep now in his cubby, dreaming herself Senior Chair of a new Council that would wrest power from Oakes, make the Colony self-sufficient and self-governing.
Ferry sat at his console, slightly drunk, dreaming of Hali Ekel.
He waited to shift to the next spy sensor until he could no longer make out the details of Hali's small, firm hips tight against her jumpsuit. What luscious hips! As he switched sensors to the one ahead of them, he forgot to change focus. The two were a blur as they approached the sensor's forward field limit. Ferry fumbled with the controls and lost them.
"Damn!" he whispered, and his old surgeon's hands were shaking like a wihi in a flare.
He touched the screen to steady himself, touched Hali's image blurring past the sensor and into a treedome.
"Enjoy, enjoy, my dears." He spoke aloud, his words absorbed by the piled confusion around him. Everyone knew why young couples went into the treedome. He checked to see that the holo was on record and that sound levels were satisfactory. Lewis and Oakes would want to see this, and Ferry anticipated making a special copy for himself.
"Give it to her, young fellow! Give it to her!"
He felt a pleasant swelling at his crotch and wondered if he could get away to visit Rachel Demarest.