"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 ar.... 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 bab.... ?"
"Everything we scan shows the baby is normal."
"But it can't be normal t...."
"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. "Ground-side says he's dead."