For Panille, the slowed play of the sense-attack wavered when he first saw Waela. He felt his own body and he felt the hylighter’s. Wind whipped his sail membranes. Then he heard music, a slow and sensual chant which moved his flesh in time to the dance of tendrils around him. He found himself drawn to Waela, his hands upon her neck. How electric her flesh! His hands unsnapped her singlesuit. She made no move to assist or resist, but kept time to the sensory beat with a soft swaying of her hips which did not stop even when the singlesuit slid off her body.

Strangest sensation of all: He could see her flesh, the lovely body, yet he saw also a golden-orange hylighter rise from the sea and spring free into the sky, and he saw Hali stretched out in warm yellow light beneath a cedar of a treedome. Wonder filled him as he dropped his own suit and drew Waela down to the deck.

Ship? Ship, is this the woman for whom I saved myself?

How is it that you call upon Ship when you could call your humanself?

Was that Ship or Avata? No matter. He could not listen for an answer. There was only the hard beat of sexual magnetism which told him every movement his body should make. Waela became not-Waela, not-Hali, not-Avata, but part of his own flesh entwined with a sensation of enormous involvement by countless others. Somewhere in this, he felt that he lost even himself.

Thomas, still restrained securely by his seat straps when Panille returned, was caught there by entwining tendrils. He tried to fight them off, but . . .

Voices! There were voices . . . he thought he heard old Morgan Hempstead back at Moonbase, christening their Voidship. Momentous day. There was a buzzing in his nostrils and he smelled the musk of Pandora but he was crouched within his own nostrils recording this. Tendrils! They moved all over his body, under his suit, avoiding no intimate contact. As they moved, they sucked out his identity. First he was Raja Flattery, then Thomas, then he did not know who he was. This amused him and he thought he laughed.

I’m hallucinating.

That was not even his own thought because he was not there to have such a thought. There was a head somewhere spinning out of control. He thought he felt brains rattle and slosh in their cage of skull. He knew he ought to breathe but he could not find where to breathe. He was sliding through a passage which no clone had ever known—the womb of all wombs.

That’s how it is to be born.

Panic threatened to overcome him. I was never born! The hylighters are killing me!

Avata does not kill you!

That was a voice echoing in a metal barrel. Avata? He knew that from his Chaplain studies—ancient superego of the Hindu oversoul.

Who am I who knows this?