Which of us usurps the function of the other? That has always been the question.

Thomas opened his eyes. “I have to do it.”

That is the origin of the illusion men call kismet.

“I’m too tired to play word games.”

Thomas slipped out of the command seat and stood up. He kept one hand on the seat back, spoke as much to himself as to Ship.

“We could all die tomorrow, Waela, Panille and I.”

I must warn you that truisms represent the most boring of all human indulgences.

Thomas felt Ship’s intrusive presence withdraw, but he knew that nothing had been taken away. Wherever he went, whatever he did, Ship was there.

He found his thoughts winging back to that faraway time when he had been trained (conditioned, really) not merely as a Psychiatrist, but as a Chaplain/Psychiatrist.

“Fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Old Matthew knew how to put the fear of God in you!

Thomas found it took him several blinks to overcome a sense of panic so deep that it kept him locked in place.

Early training is the most powerful, he reminded himself.

Chapter 39

Chapter 39

Man also knows not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falls suddenly upon them.

—Christian Book of the Dead, Shiprecords

FOR A long time after returning to Ship from the Hill of Skulls, Hali could not find the will to leave the room. She stared up and around at the softly illuminated space—this secret place where Kerro had spent so many hours communing with Ship. She remembered the borrowed flesh of the old woman, the painful and halting steps. The ache of aging shoulders. A feeling of profound sensitivity to her familiar body pervaded her awareness; each tiny movement became electric with immediacy.

She remembered the man who had been nailed to the rigid crosspiece on the hill. Barbaric!

Yaisuah.

She whispered it: “Yaisuah.”

It was understandable how this name had evolved into that of Jesus . . . and even to the Heysoos of Jesus Lewis.

But nowhere could she find understanding of why she had been taken to witness that agonizing scene. Nowhere. And she found it odd that she had never encountered historical records of that faraway event—not in Ship’s teachings nor in the memories of Shipmen who came from Earth.

In the first moments of her return, she had asked Ship why she had been shown that brutal incident, and had received an enigmatic response.

Because there are things from the human past that no creature should forget.

“But why me? Why now?”

The rest was silence. She assumed that the answers were her own to find.