“Avata talks to you. Avata also admires the wheat and com, the apple trees and cedars. Avata planted here what was swept away and abandoned by your kind.”

“Who is Avata?”

Thomas stared up at the hovering hylighter, afraid of the answer he might get.

“This is Avata!”

Visions flooded his senses: the planet in light and darkness, the crags of Black Dragon and the plains of The Egg, seas and horizons—a confusion which overwhelmed his ability to discriminate. He tried to cringe away from it, but the visions persisted.

“The hylighters,” he whispered.

“We choose to be called ‘Avata’ by you, for we are many and yet one.”

Slowly, the visions withdrew.

“Avata brings Panille to help you. See?”

He swung his gaze wide and saw, on his left, another hylighter descending through the blue mist, a naked Kerro Panille clutched in a loop of tentacle. Panille swam in the air like a persistent aftervision. The hylighter dropped him centimeters from the ground. He landed on his feet and strode toward Thomas. The sound of Panille’s feet scuffing in sand could not be denied. The poet was real. He had not died on the plain or been killed by the hylighters.

“You are not hallucinating,” Panille said. “Remember that. This is not fraggo. It is a trading of Self.”

Thomas climbed to his feet and the trailing tentacle of his hylighter moved with him, not breaking the contact against the back of his hand.

“Where are we, Kerro?”

“As you surmised—Eden.”

“You read my thoughts?”

“Some of them. Who are you, Thomas? Avata expresses great curiosity about the mystery of you.”

Who am I? He spoke what was in the front of his mind: “I am the bearer of evil tidings. Ship is going to end humankind forever. We have . . . less than seven diurns.”

“Why would Ship do such a thing?” Panille stopped less than a pace from Thomas, head cocked to one side, a quizzical, half-amused expression on his face.

“Because we cannot learn how to WorShip.”

Chapter 58

Chapter 58

The forgotten language of our animal past conveys the necessity for challenges. Not to be challenged is to atrophy. And the ultimate challenge is to overcome entropy, to break through those barriers which enclose and isolate life, limiting the energy for work and fulfillment.

—Kerro Panille, I Sing to the Avata

FOR A long heartbeat, Hali stood immobile in the passage while she stared at Murdoch and the weapon he carried—that deadly laser scalpel. She could see Docking Bay Eight directly behind him—the freighter and escape lay there. They had less than two minutes now until the automatic system propelled that freighter into space for the long dive to Pandora. A quick glance at the unconscious Waela on the gurney beside her showed no change there, but the target of that laser scalpel appeared obvious. Hali interposed her own body between Murdoch and Waela. She heard old Win Ferry gasp as she moved.