"It's everything to me."
Words began to pour from him. He wanted to know if Panille was a free agent. Was Panille really sent by Ship? Could Panille be working for Oakes or this Lewis people mentioned in such fearful tones? Who? Who? Doubt...cascade of doubts.
But why the hell should she have to seduce Panille to find out? There was no satisfaction in the answer Thomas gave.
"You have to get through all of Panille's barriers, all of his masks."
Damn!
"Just how important is this project to you?" Thomas demanded.
"It's vita.... not just to me but to the entire Colony."
"Of course it is. That's why you must seduce this poet. If he's to be a working member of this very bizarre team, there are things we must know about him."
"And a hold we must have on him!"
"There's no other way."
"Pull his records if you want to know whether he prefers women. I will no...."
"That's not my question and you know it! You will not refuse my orders and remain on this team!"
"I can't even question the wisdom of your decisions?"
"Ship sent me. There is no higher authority. And there are things I must know for this project to succeed."
She could not deny the intensity of his emotions, bu....
"Waela, you're right that the project's vital. We can't play with time as we play here with words."
"And I have nothing to say about the team?" She was close to tears and did not care that it showed.
"You hav.... ."
"After all I've been through? I watched them all die! All of them! That buys me some say in how this team goes, or it buys me th...R I can collect shipside. You name it."
Thomas, aware of the deepening flush in her skin, felt the intensity of her presence. Such a quick and perceptive person. He felt himself giving over to feelings he had not experienced in eons.
It's been Shipcenturies!
He spoke softly: "We consult, we share data. But all key decisions are mine and final. If that had been the case all along, this project would not have been botched."
Waela keyed the hangar door and they stepped inside to the brilliant focus of lights and activity, the noise and smell of torches. She put a hand on his arm to stop him. How thin and wiry he felt!
"How will seducing the poet make our mission succeed?"
"I've told you. Get to the heart of him."
She stared across at the activity around the new sub. "And replacing the plasteel with pla...."
"No single thing will make it for us. We're a team." He glanced down at her. "And we're going in by air."
"B...." Then she saw the stranded cables reaching up and out of the brilliant illumination into the upper shadows of the hanga...gigantic LTA partly inflated there. The sub was being fitted to a Lighter-Than-Air in place of the usual armored gondola.
"But wh...."
"Because the kelp has been strangling our subs."
She thought back to her own survival from a doomed sub - the writhing kelp near the shore, the bubble escape, her frantic swim to the rocks and the near-miraculous dive of the observation LTA which had plucked her away from predators.
As though he read her thoughts, Thomas said: "You've seen it yourself. At our first briefing, you said you believed the kelp to be sentient."
"It is."
"Those subs did not just get tangled. They were snatched."
She considered this. On every lost mission where they had the data they knew that the sub had been destroyed shortly after collecting samples.
Could the kelp think we were attacking?
Her own reasoning made this possible. If the kelp is sentien.... Yes, it would have an external sensory matrix to respond to pain. Not blind writhing, but sentient response.
Thomas spoke in a flat voice: "The kelp is not an insensitive vegetable."
"I've said all along that we should be attempting to communicate with it."
"And so we shall."
"Then what difference does it make whether we drop in or dive in from shoreside? We're still there."
"We go by lagoon."
Thomas moved closer to the work, bending to inspect a line of welds along the plaz. "Good work; good work," he muttered. The welds were almost invisible. When the conversion was complete, the occupants would have close to three hundred and sixty degrees of visibility.
"Lagoons?" Waela asked as he stepped back.
"Yes. Isn't that what you call those vertical tunnels of open water?"
"Certainly, bu...."
"We will be surrounded by the kelp, actually helpless if it wants to attack. But we will not touch it. This sub is being fitted to play back the kelplights - to record the patterns and play them back."
Again, he was making sense.
Thomas continued to speak as he watched the work: "We can approach a perimeter of kelp without making physical contact. As you've seen, when we go in from shore, that's impossible. Not sufficient room between the kelp strands."
She nodded her head slowly. There were many unanswered questions about this plan, but she could see the pattern of it.
"Subs are too unwieldy," he said, "but they're all we've got. We must find a sufficiently large pocket of open water, drop into it and anchor. Then we dive and study the kelp."
It sounded perilous but possible. And that idea of playing back the kelplights to the kelp: She had seen those coherent patterns herself, sometimes repetitive. Was that the way the kelp communicated?
Maybe Thomas really was chosen by Ship. She heard him mutter something. Thomas was the only man she knew who talked to himself more or less constantly. He faded in and out of conversations. You could never be sure whether he had been thinking aloud or talking to you.
"What?"
"The plaz. Not as strong as plasteel. We had to do some buttressing inside. Makes things much more crowded than you might expect."
He moved through a group of workers to speak to their foreman, a low-voiced conversation which came through to her only in bits: "...then if you lattice th.... and I'll wan.... where w...."
Presently, he returned to her side. "My design isn't as good as it might be, but it'll suffice."
So he has his little mistakes but he doesn't hide them.
She had heard a few snatches of talk among the workers. They stood a bit in awe of Thomas. The man showed a surprising ability at their work, no matter what the work - plaz welding, control desig.... He was a jack of all trades.
Master of none?
She sensed that this was a difficult man to influence: a fearsome enemy, that one friend who does not mirror but mocks when mockery is needed.
This recognition increased her uneasiness. She knew she could like this man, but she felt bad vibrations about the tea.... and it wasn't even a team yet.
And the sub will be crowded even with three of us.
She closed her eyes.
Should I tell him?
She had never told anyone, not in the debriefings, nor in friendly conversation. The kelp had a special hold over her. It was a thing that began happening as soon as the sub started slipping through the gigantic stems and tentacles: a sexual excitement very nearly impossible to control at times. Absurdity, in fact. She had managed a form of balance by hyperventilating but it remained troublesome and sometimes reduced her efficiency. When that happened, though, the shock of it cleared the effect.
Her old teammates had thought the hyperventilating a response to fear, a way of overcoming the terrors all of them felt and suppressed. And now they were all dead - nobody left to hear her confession.
The closeness, the strange sexual air that had taken over the background of the project - the unknowns in Thomas - all frustrated her. She had thought of taking Anti-s to relieve the sexual tensions, but Anti-s made her drowsy and slowed her reflexes. Deadly.
Thomas stood beside her, silently observing the work. She could almost see him making mental notes for changes. There were gears tur
ning in his head.
"Why me?" she muttered.
"What?" He turned toward her.
"Why me? Why do I have to take on this poet?"
"I've told you wha...."
"There are women paid well to do just what yo...."
"I won't pay for this. It's a project thing, vital. Your own word. You will do it."
She turned her back on him.
Thomas sighed. This Waela TaoLini was an extraordinary person. He hated what he had asked her to do, but she was the only one he could trust. The project was that vital to her, too. Panille posed too many unanswered questions. Ship's words were plain and simple: "There will be a poe...." Not: "I have named a poet," or, "I have assigned a poe...."
There will b....
Who was Panille working for? Doubt.... doubt.... doubt....
I have to know.
By the old rush in his veins, he already knew that Waela would follow his orders, and he would sink into a sadness the likes of which he had almost forgotten.
"Old fool," he muttered to himself.
"What?" She turned back toward him and he could see the acceptance and the resolve on her face.
"Nothing."
She stood facing Thomas a moment, then: "It all depends on how much I like the poet." With that, she turned on her heel and left the hangar with characteristic Pandoran speed.
***
Religion begins where men seek to influence a god. The biblical scapegoat and Christian Redeemer are cast from the same ancient mould - the human subservient to an unpredictable universe (or unpredictable king) and seeking to rid himself of the guilt which brings down the wrath of the all-powerful.
- Raja Flattery, The Book of Ship
AGAIN, THE communications pellet in Oakes' neck made no contact with Lewis. Static or silence, wild images projected onto his waking dreams - these were all he got. He wanted to reach into his neck and rip the thing out.
Why had Lewis ordered no physical contact with the Redoubt? Oakes chafed at his own inability to raise too much disturbance. The real purposes of the Redoubt remained a secret from most Shipmen; to most it was just a rumored exploratory attempt out on Black Dragon. He did not dare countermand the order which had isolated the Redoubt. Too many would see the size of the place.
Lewis can't do this to me.
Oakes paced his cubby, wishing it were even larger. He wanted to walk off his frustrations but it was full dayside out in the ship's passages and he knew he would be plagued by the need to make decisions once he stepped from his sanctum. Rumors were raging through the ship. Many had noted his upset. This could not go on much longer.
I would go down mysel.... excep....
No, without Lewis to prepare the way, it is too dangerous. Oakes shook his head. He was too valuable to risk down there yet.
Dammit, Lewis! You could send me some messag....
Oakes had come increasingly to suspect that Lewis really was involved in a primary emergency. That or treachery. N.... it had to be an emergency. Lewis was not a leader. Then it had to be a major threat from the planet itself.
Pandora.
In many ways, Pandora was a more immediate and dangerous adversary than the ship.
Oakes glanced at the blank holofocus beside his couch. A touch of the buttons would call up real-time images of the planet. To what avail? He had tried a sensor search of the Black Dragon coastline from space. Too many cloud.... not enough detail.
He could identify the coastal bay where the Redoubt was being built, could even see glinting reflections during the diurn passages of Alki or Rega.
Oakes took a deep breath to calm himself. This planet was not going to beat him.
You're mine, Pandora!
As he had told Legata, anything was possible down there. They could fulfill any fantasy.
Oakes examined his hands, rubbed them across his bulging stomach. He was determined that he would never under any circumstances grub out a living on the surface of a planet. Especially on a planet he owned. This was only natural.
The ship conditioned me to be what I am.
More than any other person he had ever known, Oakes felt that he knew the nature of the ship's conditioning processes - the differences from what they had been when they had lived free to scatter on Earth's surface.
It's the crush of peopl.... too many people too close together.
Shipside congestion had been transported groundside. This way of life demanded special adaptations. All Shipmen adjusted the same way at bottom. They drugged themselves, gambled - risked everythin.... even their own lives. Running the Colony perimeter naked except for thonged feet. And for what? A bet! A dare! To hide from themselves. In his long walks through the ship, Oakes knew how he screened out the comings and goings of others. Like most Shipmen, he could retreat into the deepest interior of his mind for privacy, for entertainment, for living.
In these times of food shortage, this faculty had been especially valuable to him. Oakes knew himself to be th.... heaviest man shipside. He knew there was envy and angry questioning, but even so no one stared directly at him with such thoughts openly readable.
Yes, I know these people. They need me.
Under Edmond Kingston's tutelage, he had studied well for the psychiatric side of his specialty - all the banks of records handed down for generation.... eons maybe. The way the ship had put them in and out of hyb, the passage of real time had been lost.
That unknown length of time bothered Oakes. And the translations from the records produced too many anomalies. Popular apology for the ship said the confusion arose from Ship's attempt to rescue as many people as possible. Oakes did not believe this. The translations hinted at too many other explanations. Translation? The ship controlled even that. You asked a computer to render the unintelligible intelligible. But linguists pointed out that among the languages found in Records were some which existed in a free-floating universe of their own - without discernible beginnings nor descendents.
What happened to the folk of those rich linguistic heritages?
I don't even know what happened to us.
His childhood memories told him things, though. Compared to the people of the Earth from which the ship had plucked them, Shipmen were freaks - all of them, clone and Natural Natal alike. Freaks. The shipside mind had become a place to live very quickly for those who had little space, few private possessions to call their own, for people torn between WorShip and dismay. Shipmen cultivated the skills of personalizing whatever the ship provided them. Functional simplicity did not bear the onus or sense of restriction that arbitrary simplicity carried. Each tool, each bowl and spoon and pair of chopsticks, each cubby bore the signature of the user in some small fashion.
My cubby is merely a larger manifestation of this.
The mind, too, was the outpost of privacy, a last place to sit and whittle something sensible out of an insane universe.
Only the Ceepee was above it all; even while he participated, he was above. Oakes felt that sometimes the people around him wore signs revealing their innermost thoughts.
And what about this Raja Thomas? Another Ceepee and he studied me carefull.... much the way I sometimes study others.
It occurred to Oakes then that he had grown careless. Since old Kingston's death, he had thought himself immune to the probing study of others, alone in the ability to snare a Shipman's psyche. It was dangerous for someone else to have that weapon. Just one more reason this Thomas would have to be eliminated. Oakes realized he had been pacing back and forth in his cubby - to the mandala, turn and back to the com-console, once more to the mandal.... He was confronted by the com-console when this realization struck him. His hand went out to the keys and he brought into the holofocus a scene from Agrarium D-9 out on shiprim. He stared at the bustle of workers, at the filtered blue-violet light which set these peoples apart in a world of their own.
Ye.... if independence from the ship were possible, it would begin with food and the cultivation of life. The axolotl
tanks, the clone labs, the biocomputer itself - all were but sophisticated toys for the well fed, the sheltered and clothed.
"Feed men, then ask of them virtue."
That was an old voice from one of his training records. A wise voice, a practical one. The voice of a survivor.
Oakes continued to stare at the workers. They attended their plants with total attention, occupation and preoccupation linked in a particular reverence which he had sensed only among older Shipmen during WorShip.
These agrarium workers engaged in a kind of WorShip. WorShip!
Oakes chuckled, amused by the thought of WorShip reduced to tending plants in an agrarium. What a grand sight they must be in the eyes of a god! A pack of sniveling beggars. What kind of a god kept its charges in poverty to hear them beg? Oakes could understand a touch of subjugation, bu.... this? This spoke to something else.
Someone had to be boss, and the rest have to be reminded of that occasionally. Otherwise, how can anything be organized to work?
No; he heard the message. It said that the ship's programs were running out. All of the problems were being dumped on the Ceepee's shoulders.
Look at those workers!
He knew they did not have the time to make the ordering decisions for their own lives. When? After work? Then the body was tired and the mind was dulled into a personal reverie which precluded insightful judgments for the good of all.
The good of all - that's my job.
He freed them from the agony of the decisions which they were not well informed enough, not energetic enough, nor even intelligent enough to make. It was the Ceepee who gave them that more pleasant gift of drifting time, the time to seek their own ease and recreations.
Recreatio.... Re-creation.
The association flitted through his mind. Re-creation was where they were made new again, where all they worked for was made real, where they lived. Looking down at the agrarium workers in the holofocus, Oakes felt like the conductor of an intricate musical score. He reminded himself to remember that analogy for the next general meeting.
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