Here was the fringe of the battlegroun.... mutilated bodies. Oakes stepped on a dismembered hand. It cupped his boot in reflex, and he leaped away from it. He wanted to run back to the Redoubt, back to Legata. His body refused. He could only shuffle on toward Panille, who stood tall amidst the demons.
Why do they just sit there?
Oakes stopped only a few meters from Panille.
"You." Oakes was surprised by the flat sound of his own voice.
"Yes."
The poet's voice came clearly through the pellet in Oakes' neck and there was no movement of Panille's mouth. "You're finished, Oakes."
"You! You're the one who wrecked things for me! You're the reason Lewis and I couldn'...."
"Nothing is wrecked, Oakes. Life here has just begun."
Panille's lips did not move, yet that voice rang through the neck pellet!
"You're not speakin.... but I can hear you."
"That is Avata's gift to us."
"Avata?"
"The hylighters and the kelp - they are one: Avata."
"So this planet's really beaten us."
"Not the planet, nor Legata."
"The ship then. It's hounded me down at last."
"Not Ship."
"Lewis! He did this. He and Legata!"
Oakes felt his tears begin. Lewis and Legata. He was unable to meet Panille's steady gaze. Lewis and Legata. A Flatwing moved away from the poet, crawled onto the toe of Oakes' boot, rested its bristling head there. Oakes stared down at it in horror, unable to command his own muscles. Frustration forced words from him.
"Tell me who did this!"
"You know who did it."
An anguished cry was wrenched from Oakes' throat: "Noooooooooooo!"
"You did it, Oakes. You and Thomas."
"I didn't!"
Panille merely stared at him.
"Tell your demons to kill me then!" Oakes hurled the words at Panille.
"They are not my demons."
"Why don't they attack?"
"Because I show them a world which some would call illusion. No creature attacks what it sees, only what it thinks it sees."
Oakes stared at Panille in horror. Illusion. This poet could fill my mind with illusion?
"The ship taught you how to do that!"
"Avata taught me."
A feeling of hysteria crept into Oakes. "And your Avata's done fo.... all gone!"
"Not before teaching us the universe of alternate realities. And Avata lives in us yet."
Oakes stared down at the deadly Flatwing on his boot. "What does it see?" He pointed a shaking finger at the creature.
"Something of its own life."
A crash shook the ground all around them and the Flatwing crept off his boot to squat quietly on the sand. Oakes looked toward the source of the sound, saw that another coveside section of the Redoubt had slipped away into the surf. The white line of the horizon had moved right up to the land - thunderous waves. The cove amplified the waves, condensing them and sending them high against the shore. Oakes stared in dumb horror as another section of the Redoubt ripped away and fell from view.
"I don't care what you say," Oakes muttered. "The planet's beaten us."
"If that's what you want."
"What I want!" Oakes rounded on him in rage, broke off at the approach of two E-clones carrying a wounded man on a litter. Hali Ekel, her nose ring glittering in the brilliant light, walked alongside. Her pribox was hooked to the patient. Oakes looked down at the litter and recognized the man there: Raja Thomas. The litter carriers stared questioningly at Oakes as they lowered Thomas to the sand.
"How bad?" Oakes directed the question at Hali.
Panille answered: "He is dying. A chest wound and a flash burn."
A chuckle forced its way from Oakes. He gulped it back. "So he won't survive me! At last - no Ceepee for the damned ship!"
Hali knelt beside Thomas and looked up at Panille. "He won't survive being carried to the shelter. He wanted me to bring him to you."
"I know."
Panille stared down at the dying man. Awareness of Thomas lay there in Panille's mind, linked to Vata, to Waela, to most of the E-clones whose genetic mix traced itself back to the Avata. All of it was there, the complete pattern. How profound of Ship to take the Raja Flattery of Ship's own origins and make a personal nemesis out of the man.
Thomas moved his lips, a whisper only, but even Oakes heard him: "I studied the question so lon.... I hid the problem."
"What's he talking about?" Oakes demanded.
"He's talking to Ship," Panille said, and this time his lips moved, his voice was the remembered voice of the poet, full of pouncing awareness.
A series of gasps wracked the dying man, then: "I played the game so lon.... so long. Panille knows. It's the roc.... the child. Yes! I know! The child!"
Oakes snorted. "He just thinks he's talking to the ship."
"You still refuse to live up to the best of your own humanity," Panille said, looking at Oakes.
"Wha.... what do you mean?"
"That's all Ship ever asked of us," Panille said. "That's all WorShip was meant to be: find our own humanity and live up to it."
"Words! Just words!" Oakes felt that he was being crowded into a corner. Everything here was illusion!
"Then throw out the words and ask yourself what you're doing here," Panille said.
"I'm just trying to survive. What else is there to do?"
"But you've never really been alive."
"I'v.... I'v...." Oakes fell silent as Panille lifted an arm.
One by one, the demons moved off at an angle away from the cliffside shelter. The first of them were at the cliff and moving up toward the high plains before Panille spoke.
"I release them as Avata released them. Still they do what they do."
Oakes looked at the departing demons. "What will they do?"
"When they are hungry, they will eat."
It was too much for Oakes. "What do you want of me?"
"You're a doctor," Panille said. "There are wounded."
Oakes pointed at Thomas. "You'd have me save him?"
"Only Ship or all of us together can save him," Panille said.
"Ship!"
"Or all of us together - it's the same thing."
"Lies! You're lying!"
"The idea of saving has many meanings," Panille said. "There's comfort in the intelligence and potential immortality of our own kind."
Oakes backed one step away from Panille. "Lying words! This planet's going to kill us all."
"What are your senses for if not to be believed?" Panille asked. He gestured around him, met Hali's rapt gaze. "We survive. We repair this planet. Avata, who kept this place in balance, is gone. But Vata is their daughter as much as mine."
"Vata?" Oakes spat the word. "What's this new nonsense?"
"Waela's child has been born. She is called Vata. She carries the true seed of Avata placed there at her conception."
"Another monster." Oakes shook his head.
"Not at all. A beautiful child, as human in her form as her mother. Here, I will show you."
Images began to play in Oakes' awareness, howling through his mind on the carrier wave of the pellet in his neck. He wanted to tear the thing from his flesh. Oakes staggered backward, thrusting at Panille with one hand while the other hand clutched at the imbedded pellet.
"Noooo.... n.... no!"
The images would not stop. Oakes fell backward to the sand and, as he fell, he heard the voice of Ship. He knew it was Ship. There was no escaping that presence as it expanded within him, not needing the pellet, not needing any device.