N.... to be honest, she had to admit that she had run away. A sun going nova meant little to a fourteen-year-old girl, a girl whose body had become a woman's much earlier than her contemporaries.
I ran away to Ship.
She had held such conversations with herself many times. Waela closed her eyes. It was as though two people occupied her consciousness. One of them she called "Runaway," and the other, "Honesty." Runaway had objected to Shipman life and railed against groundside dangers.
Runaway asked, "Why was I chosen for this damned risky life, anyway?"
Honesty replied, "As I recall it, you volunteered."
"Then I must've parked my brains somewhere. What in hell was I thinking?"
"What do you know about Hell?" Honesty asked.
"Yeah, I have to know Hell before I can understand Paradise. Isn't that what the Ceepee says?"
"You have it backwards, as usual."
"You know why I volunteered, dammit!" The Runaway voice was edged with tears.
"Yea - because he died. Ten years with him and then - poof."
"He died! That's all you have to say about it, 'He died.'"
"What else would there be to say?" Honesty's voice was level, sure.
"You're as bad as the Ceepee, always answering with questions. What'd Jim do to deserve that?"
"He tested for limits and found them when he ran the P."
"But why doesn't Ship or the Ceepee ever talk about it?"
"About death?" Honesty paused. "What's there to talk about? Jim is dead and you're alive, and that's much more important."
"Is it? Sometimes I wonde.... I wonder what's going to happen to me."
"You live until you die."
"But what's going to happen?"
Honesty paused again, uncharacteristically, and said, "You fight to live."
Waela! Waela, wake up!
It was Thomas' voice. She opened her eyes, tipped her head onto the seatback and looked at him. Light glittered from the plaza above him and there was the sound of workmen pounding metal out in the hangar. She noted that Thomas, too, looked tired but was fighting it.
"I was telling you a story about Earth," he said.
"Why?"
"It's important to me. That fourteen-year-old girl had such dreams. Do you still have dreams about your life?"
Her skin began a nervous glow. Does he read minds?
"Dreams?" She closed her eyes and sighed. "What do I need with dreams? I have my work."
"Is that enough?"
"Enough?" she laughed. "That's not my worry. Ship is sending down my prince, remember?"
"Don't blaspheme!"
"I'm not blaspheming, you are. Why do I have to seduce this poor idiot poet whe....?"
"We won't argue that again. Leave now. Quit. But no more arguments."
"I'm not a quitter!"
"So I've noticed."
"Why did you pry into my records?"
"I was trying to recapture that girl. If she won't start with dreams, maybe she'll get somewhere with dreamers. I want to tell her what's become of those dreams."
"Well, what's become of them?"
"She still has them; she always will."
You speak of gods. Very well. Avata speaks that language now. Avata says consciousness is the Species-God's gift to the individual. Conscience is the Individual-God's gift to the species. In conscience you find the structure, the form of consciousness, the beauty.
HALI FELT no passage of time, but when the echoes of her own voice stopped reverberating in her consciousness, she found she was facing herself. She still sensed the tiny reaching lab which Ship had revealed behind the terminal in Records. And there was her own flesh in that lab. Her body lay stretched out on the yellow couch, and she stared down at it without knowing how she did this. Light filled the lab, splashed from every surface. It startled her how different she appeared from the mirror image she had known all of her life. The slick yellow material of the couch accented her brown skin. She thought the brilliance of the light should be dazzling, but could feel no discomfort. Where her short black hair stopped below her left ear there was a dark mole. Her nose ring caught the light and glittered against her skin. An odd aura surrounded her body.
She wanted to speak and for a panic-seized instant wondered how she could do this. It was as though she struggled to get back into her body. Sudden calm washed her and she heard Ship's voice.
"I am here, Ekel."
"Is that like hybernation?" She had no sensation of speaking, but heard her own voice.
"Far more difficult, Ekel. I show you this because you must remember it."
"I'll remember."
Abruptly, she felt herself tumbling slowly in darkness. And at the front of her awareness was Ship's promise to give her another body for this experience. An old woman's body. How will that feel?
There was no answer except the tunnel. It was a long, warm tunnel and the most disturbing thing was that it contained no heartbeat, no pulse at all. But there was a glimmer of light at some distance and she could glimpse a hillside beyond the light. Raised shipside, she understood corridors without thinking about them, but when she emerged through the oval whiteness it was a shock to find herself in an unconfined area.
Now, there was a pulse beat, though. It was in her breast. She put a hand there, felt rough fabric and looked down. The hand was dark, old and wrinkled. That's not my hand!