Inflection is the adjective of language. It carries the subtleties of delight and horror, the essence of culture and social process. Such is the light-pattern displayed by the kelp; such is the song of the hylighter.
- Kerro Panille, History of the Avata (from the "Preface")
WAELA SAT watching a holo of Panille as a child. Except for the projected action at the holofocus, it was quiet in the small teaching study where Hali Ekel had put her. The chair, a simple sling in a metal frame, presented the holocontrols on its arm beneath her right hand. Soft blue light suffused the room, down-toned to increase resolution at the holofocus. Each time the holosound subsided, a low sussuration of venting air could be heard.
At frequent intervals, Waela turned her head slightly to the left and drank from a tube leading into a shiptit. Her left hand rested lightly on her abdomen and she was certain that the hand felt the growth of the fetus. There was no concealing the rapidity of that growth, but she tried not to think about it. Every time she was forced to confront the mystery of what was happening within her, she felt a hiccup of terro...sensation which subsided in a blink as something dampened it.
A sense of isolation permeated the study - an accent on her awareness that she was being kept out of contact with ordinary shipside life. The Natali were doing this deliberately.
The pangs of terrible hunger controlled the movement of her mouth to the shiptit. She drank greedily and with feelings of guilt. Hali Ekel had not explained why there was a shiptit here, nor why Ship fed her from it when others were denied. Feelings of rebellion welled up in Waela from time to time, but these, too, were dampened by some automatic response. She continued to sit and stare at the holo of the young Panille.
At the moment, the holo showed him sleeping in his cubby. The register gave his age as only twelve standard annos at the time, and there was no mention of who had authorized this holo.
A Ship 'coder rattled in the sleeping child's cubby then, waking Panille. He sat up, stretched and yawned, then increased the cubby's light level with one hand while rubbing his eyes with the other.
Ship's voice filled the cubby with its awful clarity: "Last night-side, you claimed kinship with God. Why do you sleep? Gods need not sleep."
Panille shrugged and stared at the 'coder from which Ship's voice issued. "Ship, have You ever stretched out as long as You can reach and yawned?"
Waela held her breath at the audacity of the child. This question suggested blasphemy and there was no reply.
Panille waited. Waela thought him patient for one so young.
"Well?" he asked, finally, smug in his adolescent logic.
"I'm sorry, young Kerro. I nodded my head but apparently you did not see it."
"How could you nod? You don't have a head to put on a pillow."
Waela gasped. The child was challenging Ship because of Ship's question about kinship with God. She waited for Ship's response and marveled at it.
"Perhaps the head I nod and the muscles I stretch are simply not within your field of vision."
Panille took a glass of water from his cubby spigot and drank before replying.
"You're just imagining what it's like to stretch. That's not the same at all."
"I actually stretched. Perhaps it is you who imagines what it is to stretch."
"I really stretch because I have a body and that body sometimes wants to sleep."
Waela thought he sounded defensive, but there were plain hints at amusement in Ship's tones.
"Never underestimate the power of imagination, Kerro. Notice the word itself: creator of images. Is that not the essence of your human experience?"
"But images ar.... just images."
"And the artistry in your images, what is that? If, someday, you compose an account of all your experiences, will that be artistry? Tell me how you know that you exist."
Waela slapped the shut-off switch. The holo image of young Panille held itself in the negative, like an afterthought, then died. But she thought he had been nodding as she stopped the replay, as though he had acquired sudden insight.
What did he acquire in his odd way of relating to Ship? She felt herself inadequate to the task of understanding Panille, despite these mysterious recordings. How had Hali Ekel known about these holos? Waela glanced around the tiny study cubby. What a strange little place hidden away here behind a secret hatch.
Why did Hali want me to look at these recordings? Will I really find him there in his past - lay the ghost of his childhood to rest or drive his voice from my mind?
Waela pressed her palms against her temples. That voice! In her most unguarded moments of panic, that voice came into her mind, telling her to be calm, to accept, telling her eerie things about someone called Avata.
I'm going mad. I know I am.
She dropped her hands and pressed them against her abdomen, as though this pressure would stop the terrible speed of that growth within her.
Hali Ekel's diffident knock sounded at the hatch. It opened just enough to let her slip through. She sealed the hatch, swung her pribox around to her hip.
"What have you learned?" Hali asked.
Waela indicated the jumble of holo recordings around her chair. "Who made these?"
"Ship." Hali put her pribox on the arm of Waela's chair.
"They don't tell me what I want to know."
"Ship is not a fortuneteller."
Waela wondered at the oddity of that response. There were times when Hali seemed at the point of saying something important about Ship, something private and secret, but the disclosure never came - just these odd statements.
Hali attached the cold platinum node of the pribox to the back of Waela's left hand. There was a moment of painful itching at the contact, but it subsided quickly.
"Why is the baby growing so fast in me?" Waela asked. The hiccup of terror leered in her mind, vanished.
"We don't know," Hali said.
"There's something wrong. I know it." The words came out flat, absolutely devoid of emotion.
Hali studied the instruments of her pribox, looked at Waela's eyes, her skin. "We can't explain this, but I can assure you that everything except the speed of it is normal. Your body has done months of work in only a few hours."
"Why? Is the bab.... ?"
"Everything we scan shows the baby is normal."
"But it can't be normal t...."
"Ship says you're being fed everything you need." Hali indicated the tube into the shiptit.
"Ship says!" Waela looked down at the linkage between her hand and the pribox.
Hali keyed a cardiac scan. "Heart normal, blood pressure normal, blood chemistry normal. Everything normal."
"It is not!"
Waela panted with the exertion required to put emotion into her voice. Something did not want her excited, upset or frustrated.
"This child is growing at a rate of about twenty-three hours for every hour of the gestation," Hali said. "That is the only abnormal thing about this."
"Why?"
"We don't know."
Tears welled up in Waela's eyes, slipped down her cheeks.
"I trust Ship," Hali said.
"I don't know what to trust."
Without conscious volition, Waela turned to the shiptit, drank in long sucking gulps. The tears stopped while she drank. She watched Hali at the same time, how purposefully the young woman moved, changing the settings on the pribox. What a strange creature, this Hali Ekel - shipcut hair as black as Panille's, that odd ring in her nostril.
So mature for one so young.
That was the real oddity about Hali Ekel. She said she had never been groundside. Life was not rendered down to raw survival here the way it was groundside. There was time here for softer things, more sophisticated dalliances. Ship's records at your fingertips. But Hali Ekel had groundside eyes.
Waela stopped drinking, her hunger satisfied. She turned and stared directly at Hali.
Could I tell her about Kerro's voice in my head?
"You scattered the graphs there," Hali said. "What were you thinking?"
Waela felt a warm flush spread up her neck.
"You were thinking about Kerro," Hali said.
Waela nodded. She still felt a tightening of her throat when she tried to talk about him.
"Why do you say hylighters took him?" Hali asked. "Ground-side says he's dead."
"The hylighters rescued us," Waela said. "Why should they turn around and kill him?"
Waela closed her eyes as Hali remained silent and watchful. You see, Hali, I hear Kerro's voice in my head. No, Hali, I'm not insane. I really hear him.
"What does it mean to run the P?" Hali asked.
Waela's eyes snapped open. "What?"
"Records says you once lost a lover because he ran the P. His name was Jim. What does it mean to run the P?"
Slowly at first, then in bursts, Waela described The Game, then, seeing the reason for Hali's question, added: "That has nothing to do with why I believe Kerro's alive."
"Why would the hylighters take him away?"
"They didn't tell me."
"I want him to be alive, too, Waela, bu...." Hali shook her head and Waela thought she detected tears in the med-tech's eyes.
"You were fond of him, too, Hali?"
"We had our moments." She glanced at Waela's swelling abdomen, "Not those moments, but good just the same."
With a quick shake of her head, Hali turned her attention to the pribox, keyed another scan, converted it to code, stored it.
"Why are you storing that record?"
She's watching me carefully, Hali thought. Do I dare lie to her?
Something had to be done, though, to allay the obvious fears aroused by this examination and the questions which could not be answered.
"I'll show you," Hali said. She called back the record and shunted it to the study screen beyond the holofocus. With an internal pointer, she indicated a red line oscillating across a green matrix.
"Your heart. Note the long, low rhythm."
Hali keyed another sequence. A yellow line wove its way through the red, pulsing faster and with lower intensity.
"The baby's heart."
Again, Hali's fingers moved over the keys. "Here's what happened when you thought about Kerro."
The two lines formed identical undulations. They merged and pulsed as one for a dozen beats, then separated.
"What does that mean?" Waela asked.
Hali removed the node from Waela's hand, began restoring the pribox to its case at her hip.
"It's called synchronous biology and we don't know exactly what it means. Ship's records associate it with certain psychic phenomena - faith healing, for example."
"Faith healing?"
"Without the intervention of accepted scientific medicine."
"But I've neve...."
"Kerro showed me the records once. The healer achieves a steady physiological state, sometimes in a trance. Kerro called it 'a symphony of the mind.'"
"I don't see how tha...."
"The patient's body assumes an identical state, in complete harmony with the healer's. When it ends, the patient is healed."
"I don't believe it."
"It's in the records."
"Are you trying to tell me my baby is healing me?"
"Given the unknowns about this rapid gestation," Hali said, "I would expect greater upset from you. But you don't seem capable of maintaining long periods of physiological imbalance."
"Whatever else she may be, she's still an unformed infant," Waela said. "She could not do that."
"She?"
Waela felt pressure against one of her lower ribs, the baby shifting.
"I've known all along that it's female."
"That's what the chromosome scan says," Hali agreed. "But the odds were even that you could guess right. Your guess doesn't impress me."
"No more than your faith healing."
Waela stood up slowly and felt the baby adjust to this new position.
"Unborn infants have been known to compensate for deficiencies in the mother," Hali said, "but I'm not selling faith healing."
"But you sai...."
"I say a lot of things." She patted her pribox case. "We've set up a special exercise cubby down in P-T. You have to keep up your body tone even i...."
"If you're right, this baby will be born in a matter of diurns. What can I do t...."
"Just get down to P-T, Waela."
Hali slipped back out through the hatch before Waela could raise more objections. That was an alert and intelligent woman in there. Waela knew how to search records, and her curiosity would not be dampened by inadequate answers. Now, what do we do?
Hali turned at the creche hatch and saw one of the children staring out at her from the open bubble of the play area. Hali knew the child, Raul Andrit, age five. She had treated him for nightmares. She bent toward him. "Hi. Remember me?"
Raul turned his face up to her, wan and listless. Before he could answer, he fell out of the bubble into the passage.
Setting her alarm signal on call, Hali turned the child onto his back and attached the pribox. The emergency readout buzzed and, for the first time, Hali doubted a computer diagnosis. In the snarl of facts blurring past her eyes she read: fatigu.... exhaustio.... 10.....
"Yes?" The voice of a responding medic was thin in her pribox speaker. She briefed him and set the boy up for a glucose and vitamin series from her emergency packet.
"I'll send a cart." The speaker blipped as the medic broke the connection.
Hali put a question to her computer: "Raul Andrit: age?"
The screen flashed 5.5.
"What is the age of the subject just tested?"
10.2.
Her fingers scurried across the keys: "The last subject tested was Raul Andrit. How could he be 5.5 and 10.2?
He has lived 5.5 standard annos. His body exhibits the characteristic intracellular structures of one who is 1O.2. For medical purposes, cellular age is the more important.
Hali sat back on her heels and stared down at the unconscious child - dark circles under his eyes, pale skin. His chest appeared too thin and it heaved convulsively when he breathed. What the computer had just told her was that this little boy had doubled his age in a matter of diurns. She heard the cart pull up, a young attendant with it.
"Get this child to sickbay. Notify his Natali sponsor and continue treatment for fatigue," she said. "I'll be along shortly."
She hurried toward Physical Therapy and, at the passage turn, bumped into a breathless medic rushing out. "Ekel! I was just coming for you. You signaled with a child who fainted? There's another one in the Secondary play area. This way."
She followed on his heels, listening to the description. "He's a seven-anno in Polly Side's section. Kid can barely stay awake. Eating too much lately and, what with food monitoring, that's a problem; but he was weighed today and found to be down two kilos from last week."
She did not have to be told that this was a significant drop for a child of that age.
The boy was lying on a stretch of thick green lawn in the freeplay area, a shutter-shielded dome overhead. As she crouched beside him to set up her case, she smelled the fresh-clipped grass and thought how incongruous that was - the enticing green odor and this boy ill.
The pribox readout did not surprise her after Raul Andrit. Fatigu.... exhaustio.... signs of agin....
"Should we move him?"
That was a new voice. She turned and looked up at a thin-faced man in groundside blue standing beside the medic.
"Oh, this is Sy Murdoch," the medic said. "He came up to ask some questions of the TaoLini woman. You sent her down to P-T, didn't you?"
Hali stood up, recalling the grapevine stories about Murdoch: Kelp and clones. Lab One director. One of Lewis' people.
"Why would you want to move him?" she asked.
"I understand from the medics that Raul Andrit has been taken to sickbay with a similar seizure. It occurred to me tha...."
"You say Raul Andrit with a certain familiarity," she said. "You're wearing groundside. What do you know abou.... ?"
"Now, see here! I don't have to answer you...."
"You'll answer me or a medical board. This could be a disease brought up from groundside. What's your association with Raul Andrit?"
His face went blank, completely unreadable, then: "I know his father."
"That's all?"
"That's all. I've never seen the child before. I jus.... knew he was here, shipside."
Hali, trained from childhood to be a med-tech, to support life and see that Shipmen survived, knew each bodily muscle, nerve, gland and blood vessel by name and often spoke to them quietly as she worked. Instinctively, she knew that Murdoch was trained otherwise. He repelled her. And he was lying.
"What's your business with Waela TaoLini?"
"That concerns the Ceepee, not you."
"Waela TaoLini has been put in my charge by the Natali. That's Ship's business. Anything concerning her concerns me."
"It's just routine," Murdoch said.
Every mannerism said it was not just routine, but before she could respond, she saw Waela walk into the play area.
While she was still at some distance, Waela called: "They said somebody here was looking for me. Do yo.... ?"
"Stay back there!" Hali called. "We've some sick boys and we don't want them near any expectant mothers. Wait for me over in the Natali Section. I'll join you i...."
"Forget it!" That was Murdoch speaking with a new forcefulness. He gave every indication of someone who had come to an important decision. "We'll meet with Ferry in Medical. Immediately."
Hali protested: "With Ferry? He doesn'...."
"Oakes left him in charge shipside. That should be good enough for you." He turned on his heel and strode from the area.