Human, do you know how interesting it is, this thing you describe? Avata does not have a god. How is it that you have a god? Avata has Self, has this universe. But you have a god. Where did you find this god?

- Kerro Panille, Translations from the Avata

FOR THOMAS and Waela, the return of the hylighters had appeared another concerted attack. Thomas tried to close the gondola's hatch and found it jammed. Waela was shouting up at him to hurry, and asking if he saw Kerro.

Both suns were up now. And the light on the sea was dazzling.

Waela's head was still spinning from the gondola's gyrations.

"What'll they do with him?" she called.

"Ship knows!" He jerked at the hatch cover, but it would not move. Something had hit the mechanism while the gondola was twisted and tilted in the first attacks.

Thomas peered at the tacking hylighters. One of them had its tendrils tucked up tightly. It could be holding Panille in there. He saw that the gondola had been pushed out of the dead kelp into a patch of living green. The sea all around was subdued by a carpet of gently pulsing leaves.

"They're coming back!" Waela shouted.

Thomas abandoned his attempts on the hatch, slid back into the gondola.

"Brace yourself in your seat!" he called. And he followed his own order while he watched the advancing swarm of orange.

"What're they doing?" Waela asked.

It was a rhetorical question. They could both see the hylighters slow their advance at the last instant. In concert, they turned their great sail membranes into the wind and cupped the gondola in dangling tendrils.

Waela freed herself from her seat, but before she could move, the massed hylighters opened a way overhead and Panille was lowered through the hatch.

She tried to avoid the questing mass of tendrils which accompanied Panille, but they found her. They enfolded her face with a sensation of tingling dryness which immediately gave way to a drunken sense of abandon. She knew her body; she knew where she was: right here in the gondola which was being held steady in a cupped hammock of hylighter tendrils. But nothing mattered except a feeling of joy which insinuated itself all through her. She felt that the sensation came from Panille and not from the hylighters.

Avata? What are Avata?

That thought had seemed her own, but she could not be certain.

She was not aware of up or down. There was no spatial solidity.

I'm going crazy!

All of the horror stories about poisonous and hallucinogenic hylighters crashed through her barriers and she tried to scream but could not locate her voice.

Still, the joy persisted. Panille was right there saying things to soothe her. "It's all right, Lini."

Where did he get that name for me? That was my childhood name! I hate that name.

"Don't hate any part of yourself, Lini."

The joy would not be denied. She began to laugh but could not hear her own laughter.

Quite suddenly, an island of clarity opened around her and she knew Kerro Panille lay nude beside her. She felt his warm flesh against her.

Where did my clothing go?

It was not important.

I'm hallucinating.

This was a product of Thomas' command that she seduce the poet. She gave herself up to the dream, to the warmth and hardness of him as he slid into her, rocking her. And she sensed all around the questing tendrils as they explored, joining her with images of flaring stars. That, too, was unimportant - more hallucination. There was only the joy, the ecstasy.

For Panille, the slowed play of the sense-attack wavered when he first saw Waela. He felt his own body and he felt the hylighter's. Wind whipped his sail membranes. Then he heard music, a slow and sensual chant which moved his flesh in time to the dance of tendrils around him. He found himself drawn to Waela, his hands upon her neck. How electric her flesh! His hands unsnapped her singlesuit. She made no move to assist or resist, but kept time to the sensory beat with a soft swaying of her hips which did not stop even when the singlesuit slid off her body.

Strangest sensation of all: He could see her flesh, the lovely body, yet he saw also a golden-orange hylighter rise from the sea and spring free into the sky, and he saw Hali stretched out in warm yellow light beneath a cedar of a treedome. Wonder filled him as he dropped his own suit and drew Waela down to the deck.

Ship? Ship, is this the woman for whom I saved myself?

How is it that you call upon Ship when you could call your human-self?

Was that Ship or Avata? No matter. He could not listen for an answer. There was only the hard beat of sexual magnetism which told him every movement his body should make. Waela became not-Waela, not-Hali, not-Avata, but part of his own flesh entwined with a sensation of enormous involvement by countless others. Somewhere in this, he felt that he lost even himself.

Thomas, still restrained securely by his seat straps when Panille returned, was caught there by entwining tendrils. He tried to fight them off, bu....

Voices! There were voice.... he thought he heard old Morgan Hempstead back at Moonbase, christening their Voidship. Momentous day. There was a buzzing in his nostrils and he smelted the musk of Pandora but he was crouched within his own nostrils recording this. Tendrils! They moved all over his body, under his suit, avoiding no intimate contact. As they moved, they sucked out his identity. First he was Raja Flattery, then Thomas, then he did not know who he was. This amused him and he thought he laughed.

I'm hallucinating.

That was not even his own thought because he was not there to have such a thought. There was a head somewhere spinning out of control. He thought he felt brains rattle and slosh in their cage of skull. He knew he ought to breathe but he could not find where to breathe. He was sliding through a passage which no clone had ever known - the womb of all wombs.

That's how it is to be born.

Panic threatened to overcome him. I was never born! The hylighters are killing me!

Avata does not kill you!

That was a voice echoing in a metal barrel. Avata? He knew that from his Chaplain studies - ancient superego of the Hindu oversoul.

Who am I who knows this?

He glimpsed Panille and Waela, their naked bodies entwined in lovemaking. The ultimate biological principle. Clones don't have that link with their past.

A...clone? Who am I?

He knew what clones were, whoever he was; he knew that. Clones were property. Morgan Hempstead said so. Again, panic threatened him, but it was stifled instantly while he tried to follow a silvery thread of awareness which moved faster and faster as he sped to overtake it.

Wael.... Panill....

He knew those had to be people, but he did not know who, except that the names filled him with rage. Something fought him to calmness.

The mandala on his cubby wall. Yes. He stared at it.

Who was Waela?

A sense of loss flooded through him. He was forever out of his time, far gone from someplace where he had grown, stripped of past and without his own future.

Damn You, Ship!

He knew who Ship was - the keeper of his soul, but this thought made him feel that he was Ship and he had damned himself. No reality remained. Everything was confusion, everything gone to chaos.

It's you damned Avata/hylighters! Keep that Panille out of my mind! Yes, I said MY mind.

Darkness. He was aware of darkness and of motion, sensations of controlled movement, glimpses of light and a glaring sun, then craggy rocks. He could see Rega low on a castellated rock horizon. There was flesh around him and he knew it for his own.

I'm Raja Flattery, Chaplain/Psychiatrist o.... No! I'm Raja Thomas, Ship's Devil!

He looked down to find himself strapped into his command couch. There was no motion to the gondola. When he looked out through the plaz he could see solid groun...damp stretch of Pandoran soil studded with native plants: odd spikey things with fluting silver leaves. He turned his head and there was Waela seated on the deck, completely naked. She was staring at two singlesuits. One of them, Thomas saw, carried Waela's shoulder badge of the LTA service, and the othe.... the other was Panille's.

Thomas looked all around the gondola. Panille was not there.

Waela turned to look up at Thomas. "I think it was real. I think we really did make love. And I was in his head while he was in me."

Thomas pushed himself hard against the back of his seat, his memory struggling for the bits and pieces of what had happened to them. Where was the damned poet? He could not survive out there.

Waela moved her tongue against her teeth. She felt that she had lost track of time. She had been out of her body in some new place, but now she knew her body better than ever before. Images. She recalled the earlier, more terrible moments off the south coast of The Egg when she had sprawled on a kelp leaf, fighting for her sanity. This recent experience in the gondola was not the same, but one partook of the other. In both, she felt the aftermath as a loosening of her identity and a mixing of linear memories, shaking bits of her past out of place.

Thomas unfastened his seat restraints, stood and peered out through the filtering plaz. He felt that something had reached into his psyche and drained away the energy. What are we doing here? How did we get here?

There was no sign of hylighters.

What are Avata?

The gondola had been deposited in a broad pocket of flat land surrounded by a rock rim. The place looked vaguely familiar. The outline of the west ri.... He stared at it, caught up in a fugue state of attempted recollection.

"Where are we?" That was Waela.

His throat was too dry to respond. It took a moment of convulsive attempts to swallow before he could speak.

".... think we're somewhere near Oakes' Redoubt. Those rock...He pointed.

"Where's Kerro?"

"Not here."

"He can't be outside. The demons!"

She stood and stared all around over the obstructing panels of instruments, craning her neck to peer every direction. That fool poet! She looked up at the hatch. It was still open.

In that instant an LTA drifted over the rim of rocks to the west; the glare of Rega setting ringed it in a golden halo. The LTA was valved down to a landing beside the gondola, the hiss of its loud vents stirred up the dust. The gondola was a conventional landside type, armored against demons and studded with weapons. The side hatch opened a crack and a voice called from within: "You can make it if you run! No demons near."

Hastily, Waela stood and slipped into her suit. It was like putting on familiar flesh. She felt her sense of identity firming.

I must not think about what has happened. I'm alive. We're rescued.

But somewhere within her she thought she heard a voice crying names: "Kerr.... Ji.... Kerr.... where are you?"

There was no answer, just Thomas insisting that she follow only after he had tested the outside. Damn fool! I'm faster than he is. But she went quietly up the ladder behind him, watched him slide down the smooth plaz curve of the gondola, then followed on his heels. The rescue hatch of the other gondola swung wide as they reached it, and they were jerked inside by two pairs of hands. They were in familiar red shadows with the Shipmen at defensive stations all around the interior.

Waela heard the hatch slammed and dogged behind her, felt the gondola lift, swinging. There was the humming of a scanner as it passed over her body. A voice at her ear said: "They're clean."

Only then did she realize that she stood in a sealed-off bubble within the rescue gondola. This spoke of only one threat: Nerve Runners!

There were Runners in the area.

She felt a deep sense of gratitude for the Shipman who had scanned them, risking contact with Runners. Turning, she saw a long-armed monstrosity only vaguely Shipman in shape.

"We take you Lab Oneside," he said and his mouth was a toothless black hole.