“What do you know about Hell?” Honesty asked.

“Yeah, I have to know Hell before I can understand Paradise. Isn’t that what the Ceepee says?”

“You have it backwards, as usual.”

“You know why I volunteered, dammit!” The Runaway voice was edged with tears.

“Yes—because he died. Ten years with him and then—poof.”

“He died! That’s all you have to say about it, ‘He died.’”

“What else would there be to say?” Honesty’s voice was level, sure.

“You’re as bad as the Ceepee, always answering with questions. What’d Jim do to deserve that?”

“He tested for limits and found them when he ran the P.”

“But why doesn’t Ship or the Ceepee ever talk about it?”

“About death?” Honesty paused. “What’s there to talk about? Jim is dead and you’re alive, and that’s much more important.”

“Is it? Sometimes I wonder . . . I wonder what’s going to happen to me.”

“You live until you die.”

“But what’s going to happen!”

Honesty paused again, uncharacteristically, and said, “You fight to live.”

Waela! Waela, wake up!

It was Thomas’ voice. She opened her eyes, tipped her head onto the seatback and looked at him. Light glittered from the plaza above him and there was the sound of workmen pounding metal out in the hangar. She noted that Thomas, too, looked tired but was fighting it.

“I was telling you a story about Earth,” he said.

“Why?”

“It’s important to me. That fourteen-year-old girl had such dreams. Do you still have dreams about your life?”

Her skin began a nervous glow. Does he read minds?

“Dreams?” She closed her eyes and sighed. “What do I need with dreams? I have my work.”

“Is that enough?”

“Enough?” she laughed. “That’s not my worry. Ship is sending down my prince, remember?”

“Don’t blaspheme!”

“I’m not blaspheming, you are. Why do I have to seduce this poor idiot poet when . . .”

“We won’t argue that again. Leave now. Quit. But no more arguments.”

“I’m not a quitter!”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“Why did you pry into my records?”

“I was trying to recapture that girl. If she won’t start with dreams, maybe she’ll get somewhere with dreamers. I want to tell her what’s become of those dreams.”

“Well, what’s become of them?”

“She still has them; she always will.”

Chapter 25

Chapter 25

You specie of gods. Very well. Avata speaks that language now. Avata says consciousness is the Species-God’s gift to the individual. Conscience is the Individual-God’s gift to the species. In conscience you find the structure, the form of consciousness, the beauty.

—Kerro Panille, Translations from the Avata