None of this is normal. Nothing is as it should be.

Blip. The fear lifted in her awareness, then dropped.

What did Murdoch mean that she might no longer be humantype?

Waela tried to recall details of what had happened in the gondola as it floated on Pandora’s sea. All she could remember was the ecstatic wash of her union with something awesome. This shipside command cubby, Usija’s voice—none of this was important any longer. Only the baby growing at its terrible pace within her was important.

I need a shiptit.

An image of Ferry pressed itself into her awareness. He was somewhere else with his inevitable drink in his hand. Murdoch was talking to him. Ferry was trying to protest without success. She heard faint voices, distant and muffled as though they came from a sealed room. There was a high view of Pandora’s sea glowing in the light of two suns. It was replaced by a blurred vision of Oakes and Legata Hamill. They were making love. Oakes lay on his back on a brown woven mat. She was astride him . . . slow movement . . . very slow . . . an insane look of joy on her face, her hands clenching and unclenching the fat of his chest. In the vision, Legata leaned back, trembling and Oakes caught her as she fell.

It’s a dream, a strange waking dream, Waela told herself.

Now, the dream shifted to Hali on her knees in her own cubby. Atop a ledge in front of Hali stood an odd construction of wood—two smooth sticks, one of them fixed off-center across the other. Hali leaned her head close to the crossed sticks and, as she did this, Waela experienced the unmistakable fragrance of cedar, as fresh as anything she had ever smelled in a treedome.

Abruptly, she was back in the command cubby. Hali’s arm was around her shoulder, leading her out the hatch while Usija and Brulagi argued with Murdoch behind them.

“You need food and rest,” Hali said. “You’ve overstressed yourself.”

“Shiptit,” Waela whispered. “Ship will feed me.”

Chapter 55

Chapter 55

The prophets of Israel who preached the idea of the nucleus of ten good men required for a city’s survival, built this concept on the Talmudic idea of the Thirty-Six Just Ones whose existence in each generation is necessary for the survival of Humankind.

—Judaism’s Book of the Dead, Shiprecords