Page 6 of The Jesus Incident (The Pandora Sequence 1)

“But how did you . . .”

“Keyed the whole conversation on a ten-minute delay.”

“But . . .”

“See how standard you are on com? I can tape my whole side of a conversation with you and get it right down the line.”

“But the . . .” He nodded at the hatch into software storage.

“Oh, that’s where you always are when nobody can find you—somewhere in there.” She pointed to the storage area.

“Hmmm.” He took her hand and they headed out toward the west shell.

“Why so thoughtful?” she asked. “I thought you’d be amused, surprised . . . laugh, or something.”

“I’m sorry. Lately it’s bothered me when I do that. Never take time for people, never seem to have the flair for . . . the right word at the right time.”

“A pretty strong self-indictment for a poet.”

“It’s much easier to order characters on a page or a holo than it is to order one’s life. ‘One’s life’! Why do I talk that way?”

She slipped an arm around his waist and hugged him as they walked. He smiled. Presently, they emerged into the Dome of Trees. It was dayside, the sunglow of Rega muted through the screening filters. All the greens came with soothing blue undertones. Kerro took a deep breath of the oxygenated air. He heard birds twittering behind a sonabarrier off in heavier bushes to the left. Other couples could be seen far down through the trees. This was a favorite trysting place.

Hali slipped off her pribox strap and pulled him down beside her under a cover of cedar. The needle duff was warm and soft, the air thick with moisture and sun dazzled through the branches. They stretched out on their backs, shoulder to shoulder.

“Mmmmmm.” Hali stretched and arched her back. “It smells so nice here.”

“It? What’s the smell of an it?”

“Oh, stop that.” She turned toward him. “You know what I mean—the air, the moss, the food in your beard.” She brushed at his whiskers, wove her fingers in and out of the coarse hairs. “You’re the only Shipman with a beard.”

“So I’m told.”

“Do you like it?”

“I don’t know.” He reached out and traced the curve of the small wire ring which pierced her left nostril. “Traditions are strange. Where did you get this ring?”

“A robox dropped it.”

“Dropped it?” He was surprised.

“I know—they don’t miss much. This one was repairing a sensor outside that little medical study next to Behavioral. I saw the wire drop and picked it up. It was like finding a rare treasure. They leave so little around. Ship only knows what they do with all the scraps they carry off.”

She slipped her arm around his neck and kissed him. Presently, she pulled back.

He pulled away from her and sat up. “Thanks, but . . .”

“It’s always ‘Thanks, but . . .’” She was angry, fighting the physical evidence of her own passion.

“I’m not ready.” He felt apologetic. “I don’t know why and I’m not playing with you. I just have this compulsion toward timing, for the feeling of rightness in things.”

“What could be more right? We were selected as a breeding pair after knowing each other all this time. It’s not like we were strangers.”

He could not bring himself to look at her. “I know . . . anyone shipside can partner with anyone else, but . . .”

“But!” She whirled away and stared at the base of the sheltering tree. “We could be a breeding pair! One pair in . . . what? Two thousand? We could actually make a child.”

“It isn’t that. It’s . . .”

“And you’re always so damned historical, traditional, quoting social patterns this and language patterns that. Why can’t you see what . . .”

He reached across her, put his fingers over her mouth to silence her and gently kissed her cheek.

“Dear Hali, because I can’t. For me, partnership will have to be a giving so deep that I lose myself in the giving.”

She rolled away and lifted her head to stare at him, her eyes glistening. “Where do you get such ideas?”

“They come out of my living and from what I learn.”

“Ship teaches you these things?”

“Ship does not deny me what I want to know.”

She stared morosely at the ground under her feet. “Ship won’t even talk to me.”

Her voice was barely audible.

“When you ask in the right way, Ship always answers,” he said. Then, an afterthought as he sensed it between them: “And you have to listen.”

“You’ve said that before but you never tell me how.”

There was no evading the jealousy in her voice. He found that he could only answer in one way. “I will give you a poem,” he said. He cleared his throat.

“Blue itself

teaches us blue.”

She scowled, concentrating on his words. Presently, she shook her head. “I’ll never understand you any more than I understand Ship. I go to WorShip; I pray; I do what Ship directs . . .” She stared at him. “I never see you at WorShip.”

“Ship is my friend,” he said.

Curiosity overcame her resentments.

“What does Ship teach you?”

“Too many things to tell here.”

“Just give me one thing, just one!”

He nodded. “Very well. There have been many planets and many people. Their languages and the chronicle of their years weave a magic tangle. Their words sing to me. You don’t even have to understand the words to hear them sing.”

She felt an odd sense of wonder at this.

“Ship gives you words and you don’t understand?”

“When I ask for the original.”

“But why do you want words that you don’t understand?”

“To make those people live, to make them mine. Not to own them, but to become them, at least for a blink or two.”

He turned and stared at her. “Haven’t you ever wanted to dig in ancient dirt and find people nobody else even knew existed?”

“Their bones?”

“No! Their hearts, their lives.”

She shook her head slowly.

“I just don’t understand you, Kerro. But I love you.”

He nodded silently, thinking: Yes, love doesn’t have to understand. She knows this but she won’t let it into her life.

He recalled the words of an old earthside poem: “Love is not a consolation, it is a light.” The thought, the poem of life, that was consolation. He would talk to her of love sometime, he thought, but not this dayside.

Chapter 7

Why are you humans always so ready to carry the terrible burdens of your past?

—Kerro Panille, Questions from the Avata

SY MURDOCH did not like coming out this close to Colony perimeter, even when sheltered behind the crysteel barrier of Lab One’s private exit. Creatures of this planet had a way of penetrating the impenetrable, confounding the most careful defenses.

But someone Lewis trusted had to man this observation post when the hylighters congregated on the plain as they were doing this morning. It was their most mysterious form of behavior and lately Lewis had been demanding answers—no doubt jumping to commands from The Boss.

He sighed. When he looked out on the unprotected surface of Pandora, there was no denying its immediate dangers.

Absently, he scratched his left elbow. When he moved his head against the exterior light, he could see his own reflection in the Plaz: a blocky man with brown hair, blue eyes, a light complexion which he kept meticulously scrubbed.

The vantage point was not the best available, not as good as the exterior posts which were always manned by the fastest and the best the Colony could risk. But Murdoch knew he could argue his importance to the leadership team. He was not expendable and this place did serve Lewis’ purpose. The crysteel barrier, although it filtered out almost a fourth of the light, framed the area they needed to watch.

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nbsp; What was it those damned floating gasbags did out there?

Murdoch crouched behind a swivel-mounted scope-cum-vidicorder, and touched the controls with a short, stubby finger to focus on the ‘lighters. More than a hundred of them floated above the plain about six kilometers out.

There were some big orange monsters in this mob, and Murdoch singled out one of the biggest for special observation, reading what he saw into a small recorder at his throat. The big ‘lighter looked to be at least fifty meters in diameter, a truncated sphere somewhat flattened along the top which formed the muscular base for the tall, rippling sail membrane. Corded tendrils trailed down to the plain where it grasped a large rock which bumped and dragged along the surface, kicking up dust, scattering gravel.

The morning was cloudless, only one sun in the sky. It cast a harsh golden light on the plain, picking out every wrinkle and contraction of the ‘lighter’s bag. Murdoch could make out a cradle of smaller enfolding tentacles cupped beneath the ‘lighter, confining something which squirmed there . . . twisting, flailing. He could not quite identify what the ‘lighter carried, but it definitely was alive and trying to escape.

The mob of accompanying ‘lighters had lined out in a great curved spread which was sweeping now across the plain on a diagonal path away from Murdoch’s observation post. The big one he had singled out anchored the near flank, still confining that flailing something in the tentacle shadows beneath it.

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