I don’t even know what happened to us.

His childhood memories told him things, though. Compared to the people of the Earth from which the ship had plucked them, Shipmen were freaks—all of them, clone and Natural Natal alike. Freaks. The shipside mind had become a place to live very quickly for those who had little space, few private possessions to call their own, for people torn between WorShip and dismay. Shipmen cultivated the skills of personalizing whatever the ship provided them. Functional simplicity did not bear the onus or sense of restriction that arbitrary simplicity carried. Each tool, each bowl and spoon and pair of chopsticks, each cubby bore the signature of the user in some small fashion.

My cubby is merely a larger manifestation of this.

The mind, too, was the outpost of privacy, a last place to sit and whittle something sensible out of an insane universe.

Only the Ceepee was above it all; even while he participated, he was above. Oakes felt that sometimes the people around him wore signs revealing their innermost thoughts.

And what about this Raja Thomas? Another Ceepee and he studied me carefully . . . much the way I sometimes study others.

It occurred to Oakes then that he had grown careless. Since old Kingston’s death, he had thought himself immune to the probing study of others, alone in the ability to snare a Shipman’s psyche. It was dangerous for someone else to have that weapon. Just one more reason this Thomas would have to be eliminated. Oakes realized he had been pacing back and forth in his cubby—to the mandala, turn and back to the com-console, once more to the mandala . . . He was confronted by the com-console when this realization struck him. His hand went out to the keys and he brought into the holofocus a scene from Agrarium D-9 out on shiprim. He stared at the bustle of workers, at the filtered blue-violet light which set these peoples apart in a world of their own.

Yes . . . if independence from the were possible, it would begin with food and the cultivation of life. The axolotl tanks, the clone labs, the biocomputer itself—all were but sophisticated toys for the well fed, the sheltered and clothed.

“Feed men, then ask of them virtue.”

That was an old voice from one of his training records. A wise voice, a practical one. The voice of a survivor.

Oakes continued to stare at the workers. They attended their plants with total attention, occupation and preoccupation linked in a particular reverence which he had sensed only among older Shipmen during WorShip.

These agrarium workers engaged in a kind of WorShip.

WorShip!