And once more, the assault stopped with shocking abruptness.
Panille lay gasping. It was like being immersed in all the most beautiful poetry that humankind had ever produced - everything simultaneous.
You are my first poet, and all poets are known through you.
Panille sensed an elemental truth in this.
What are you doing with me? he asked. It was very much like talking to Ship in his head.
I strive to prevent the death of human and of Self.
That was reasonable.
Panille could make no response to this. All the thoughts which occurred to him felt inadequate. Poison from the gondola had killed kelp. The hylighters, known to originate in the sea, obviously resented this. Yet, this hylighter would save a human. It occurred to him then that he was talking to a source which could explain the relationship between kelp and hylighter. Before he could think through his question, the voice filled his head, a single thoughtburst: Hylighterself-kelpself-all-one.
It was like Ship asking him about God. He sensed another elemental truth.
Poet know.... This thought twined around in his mind until he could not tell if it originated with the hylighter or with himself. Poet know.... poet know....
Panille felt himself washed in this thought. It was still with him when he realized that he was conversing with the hylighter in no language he could recall. The thoughts occurre.... he understood the.... but of all the languages he knew, none coincided with the structure of this exchange.
Humankerro, you speak the forgotten language of your animal past. As I speak rock, you speak this language.
Before Panille could respond he felt the tendrils opening around him. It was a most curious sensation: He was both the tendrils and himself, and he knew he was clinging to the Avata as he was clinging to his own sanity. Curiosity was his grip upon his being. How curious this experience! What poetry it would make! Then he knew he was being dangled over the sea: The foam at the edge of a kelp's fan leaf caught his attention and held it. He was not afraid; there was only that enormous curiosity. He wanted to drink in everything that was happening and preserve it to share with others.
Wind whipped past him. He smelled it, saw it, felt it. He was turning in the grasp of the hylighter and he saw a mounded mass of hylighters directly below. They opened like flower petals expanding to reveal the gondola in their midst - orange petals and the glistening gondola.
With gentle sureness, tendrils lowered him into the flower, into the gondola's hatch. They followed him, spreading around the interior of the gondola. He knew he was there with Waela and Thomas, yet still saw the flower as its petals closed.
An orange blaze surrounded him and he saw through the plaz, the hylighters all around, holding the gondola in a basket of tendrils.
Again, the wild play of his senses resumed, but now it was slower and he could think between the beats of it. Yes, there were Thomas and Waela, eyes glazed - terrified or unconscious.
Help them, Avata.
Even the seemingly immortal gods survive only as long as they are required by mortal men.
OAKES BEGAN to sputter and snore. His body lay half-melted into cushions of the long divan which stretched beneath Legata's mural on the porch of the Redoubt. The light was dull red, the early dayside of Rega coming in through the plaz above the sea.
Legata untangled herself from Oakes, slowly eased the sleeve of her singlesuit from under his naked thigh. She stepped over to the plaz and looked out at the dayside light flickering off the tops of waves. The sea was wild turmoil and the horizon a thick line of milky white. She found the uncontrolled violence of the sea repellent.
Perhaps I was not made for a natural world.
She pulled her singlesuit on, zipped it.
Oakes continued to snore and snort.
I could have crushed him there in those cushions, thrown his body to the demons. Who would suspect?
No one except Lewis.
The thought had very nearly become reality back there on the divan. Oakes had been satyric all through the dark hours. Once, she had slipped her arms up around his ribs while he worked at her, sweating and mumbling, but she could not bring herself to kill. Not even Oakes.
Waves whipped high onto the beach across the bay as she scanned the scene. The water slashed high this morning. The pounding surf echoed a deeper trembling of the earth and she could hear the clatter of rock against rock. The sound must be frighteningly loud outside for it to be heard that well in here.
It's the job of waves and rocks to make sand, she thought. Why can't I do my job that wel.... without question?
The answer came immediately, as though she had thought it through countless times: Because changing rock into sand is not killing. It is change, not extermination.
Her artist's eye wanted to find order in the view out the plaz, but all was disorder. Beautiful disorder, but frightening. What a contrast with the peaceful bustle of a shipside agrarium.
She could see the shuttle station off on the isolated point of land to her left, an arc of the bay between, and the low line of the protected passage leading from Redoubt to Station. That had been Lewis' idea: Keep the Station remote, easy to cut off should attackers come from Colony.
She found herself wanting the roll and toss of kelp leaves in the bay, but the kelp was goin.... goin....
A chill crawled up her spine and down her arms.
A few diurns, Oakes had said.
She closed her eyes and the picture that haunted her was her own mural, the accusing finger which pointed straight at her heart.
You are killing me! it said.
No matter how hard she shook her head, the voice would not be still. Against her better judgment, she crossed to the dispenser and keyed it for a drink. Her hand was steady. She returned to the plaz-guarded view, and sipped slowly while watching the waves bite their way up the beach across the bay. The waves had buried the previous high-tide mark at least a dozen meters back. She wondered whether she should wake Oakes.
A hylighter suddenly valved itself low across the beach below the shuttle station. A sentry appeared at the beachside guardpost and snapped her heavy lasgun to her shoulder, then hesitated. Legata held her breath, expecting the bright orange flash and concussion. But the woman did not fire; she lowered her weapon and watched as the delicate hylighter drifted out of sight around the point.
Legata let out her breath in a long sigh.
What happens when we have no others to kill?
Oakes' desire for a paradise planet vanished when she confronted that seascape. He could make it sound so plausible, so natural, bu....
What about the Scream Room?
It was a symptom. Would people turn on each other, band together in tribes and attack each other in the absence of Dashers or Runner.... or kelp?
Another hylighter drifted past farther out.
It thinks.
And the vanishing kelp. Oakes was right that she had seen the reports from the disastrous undersea research project.
It thinks.
There was a sentience here which touched her where cell walls left off, somewhere within that realm of creative imagination which Oakes distrusted and would never enter.