Thomas jerked away as a passing hylighter trailed tentacles across his face, pausing also to touch the seated Panille. For an instant, Thomas sensed a blur of pictures, dream fragments dancing behind his eyes. And the chatter!

“Avata remains fascinated by the mystery of you, Raja Thomas,” Panille said. “Who are you?”

“Ship’s best friend.”

Panille heard truth in those words and found himself transported in memory back to the shipside teaching cubby. A momentary flicker of jealousy burned at his awareness and was gone.

“Ship’s best friend would start a war?”

“It’s the only way.”

“Who would fight your war?”

“It’s between us and them.”

“But who would be your soldiers?”

Thomas gestured at the jungle, hoping he pointed somewhere near the collection of remnant people brought here by the hylighters.

“And you would move against Oakes with violence?”

“Oakes is a phony. The Chaplain/Psychiatrist is responsible for the first order of WorShip: survival. Oakes would sacrifice the entire future of humankind to satisfy his own selfish goals.”

“That is true. Oakes is selfish.”

Thomas remained caught up in resentment of Oakes: “Survival takes planning and sacrifice. The Ceepee should be willing to sacrifice the most. We give our children to Ship as a matter of WorShip. Oakes engineers more people from cloning, and on a fixed food supply. Children starve while his playthings . . .”

Thomas broke off in frustration. As he stood there, wondering how he could make this poet understand what had to be done, Alki lifted above the eastern horizon, flooding the crater’s mists with milky light. The illumination picked out every leaf-dripping detail nearby but hazed away to a mysterious background of muted colors.

“We’re in danger, terrible danger,” he muttered.

“Life is always in danger.”

“Well, we agree on something.”

Thomas lowered his chin to his chest, looked down at his feet and, in that strange elasticity of time which comes with danger, he saw his boots. He remembered those booted feet dangling below him as the hylighter lifted him from the threat of a Hooded Dasher at the Redoubt.

Terrible danger!

He suddenly recalled another moment akin to this one: when he had pressed the abort trigger aboard the Voidship Earthling, those countless millennia and replays past. In the century between instructing his body to push the abort-trigger and actually pushing it, he had studied the galaxies waving to him from the back of his hand and fingers. One crazy hair, only millimeters long, had poked out from the side of a knuckle on his right index finger, and he recalled the trickle of something small and wet down the side of his left cheek.

“Why did the hylighter bring me here?”

“To preserve your seed.”

“But Oakes and the Lab One people will kill us. Nothing will survive. What they miss, Ship will finish.”