Fearful, Legata thought.

There was a circular barrier across the training area and she identified another lock entrance.

“What’s over there?” She nodded.

“We won’t be able to go in there today,” Murdoch said. “We’re sterilizing in there.”

“Oh? What’s in there?”

“Well . . . that’s the core of The Garden. I call it the Flower Room.” He turned toward a group of the young E-clones nearby. “Now, here we have some of the young products from the Flower Room. They . . .”

“Does your Flower Room have another name?” she asked. She did not like his answers. Too evasive. He was lying.

Murdoch turned to face her and she felt threatened by the pouncing glee in his eyes. Guilty knowledge lay there—dirty, guilty knowledge.

“Some call it the Scream Room,” he said.

Scream Room!

“And we can’t go in there?”

“Not . . . today. Perhaps if you made an appointment for later?”

She controlled a shudder. The way he watched her, the avaricious glint to his eyes.

“I’ll come back to see your . . . Flower Room later,” she said.

“Yes. You will.”

Chapter 15

From you, Avata learns of a great poet-philosopher who said: “Until you meet an alien intelligence, you will not know what it is to be human.”

And Avata did not know what it was to be Avata.

True, and poetic. But poetry is what’s lost in translation. Thus, we now permit you to call this place Pandora and to call us Avata. The first among you, though, called us vegetable. In this, Avata saw the deeper meaning of your history and felt fear. You ingest vegetable to use the energy gathered by others. With you, the others end. With Avata, the others live. Avata uses minerals, uses rock, uses sea, uses the suns—and from all this, Avata nurses life. With rock, Avata calms the sea and silences the turbulence inherited from the rip of suns and moons.

Knowing human, Avata remembers all. It is best to remember so Avata remembers. We eat our history and it is not lost. We are one tongue and one mind; the storms of confusions cannot steal us from one another, cannot pry us from our grip to rock, to the firmament that cups the sea around us and washes us clean with the tides. This is so because we make it so.

We fill the sea and calm it with our body. The creatures of water find sanctuary in Avata’s shadow, feed in our light. They breathe the riches we exude. They fight among themselves for what we discard. They ignore us in their ravages and we watch them grow, watch them flare in the sea like suns and disappear into the far side of night.

The sea feeds us, it washes in and out, and we return to the sea in kind. Rock is Avata’s strength and as strength grows so grows the nest. Rock is Avata’s communion, ballast and blood. With all this, Avata orders quiet in the sea and subdues the fitful rages of the tides. Without Avata, the sea screams its fury in rock and ice; it whips the winds of hot madness. Without Avata, the rage of the sea returns to smother this globe in blackness and a thin white horizon of death.