The Jesus Incident
Chapter Fifty-Four

As the Jesuits recognized, a key function of logic limits argument and, therefore, confines the thinking process. As far back as the Vedanta, this way of tying down the wild creativity of thought was codified into seven logic-directing categories: Quality, Substance, Action, Generality, Particularity, Intimate Relation and Non-existence (or Negation). These were thought to define the true limits of the symbolic universe. The recognition that all symbol processes are inherently open-ended and infinite came much later.
- Raja Thomas, Shiprecords
THE HYLIGHTER with Thomas cradled in its tentacles vented a brief undulating song and began a slow drop into blue haze. Thomas felt the tentacles enfolding him, heard the song - was even aware that Alki was beginning its long slide into sunset. He saw the dark purple of the meridian sky, saw the side-lighted brilliance of the blue haze and a surrounding rim of steep crags. He saw all of this and still was not sure of what he saw, nor was he entirely sure of his own sanity.
The haze enclosed him then, warm and moist.
His memories were confused, like something seen through swirling water. They moved and shifted, combining in ways that frightened him.
Calm. Be calm.
He could not be sure this was his own thought.
Where was I?
He thought he remembered being thrust into the open outside Oakes' Redoubt. The land beneath him, then, could still be Black Dragon. He could not, however, remember being picked up by a hylighter.
How did I get here?
As though his confusion ignited some remote explanation, he saw a distant view of himself sprinting across a plain, a Hooded Dasher close behind, then the swoop of a hylighter as it lifted him to safety. The images played in his mind without his volition.
Rescue? What am I doing here? Ballast? Food? Maybe the hylighter is taking me to its nest and a bunch of hungr.... hungry what?
"Nest!"
He heard the word clearly as though someone spoke directly into his ear, but there was no one. He knew the voice was not his, not Ship's.
Ship!
They had fewer than seven diurns left! Ship was about to break the recording. End of humankind.
I've gone insane, that's it. I'm not really being carried through blue haze by a hylighter.
In his mind, a hatch opened and he heard a babble of voices, Panille's among them. Memorie.... he felt his mind lock onto memories that had been sealed away until this babble of voices. The gondola - the hylighters reaching into the surfaced gondol.... Waela and Panille making love, tentacles all around like long black snakes slitherin.... questing. He heard his own hysterical laughter. Was that another memory? He recalled the LTA carrying them to the Redoub.... the cell - those odd E-clone.... more laughter. I'm hallucinatin.... and remembering hallucinating.
"Not hallucinating."
That voice again! The cradling tentacles shifted, but he still saw only blue haze an.... an.... Nothing else was certain.
The chatter continued in his mind - memories or present, he did not know. His head whirled. Fragments of what appeared to be holorecords danced behind his eyes.
I've finally gone all the way - really insane.
"Not insane."
N.... I just talk to myself.
The chatter had begun to separate into discriminate pieces. He thought he recognized specific snatches of conversation, but the internal holorecord terrified him. He felt that the entire planet had become eyes and ears just for him, that he wa.... everywhere.
In fits and starts, silence returned. He felt it wash through his mind. Slowly - the creep of some small creature up a gigantic wall - he felt those other eyes and ears remove themselves from his awareness.
He was alone.
What the hell is happening to me?
No answer.
But he sensed the cadences of his mind's voice echo down a long, dark system of tunnels and corridors. He was in darkness. And somewhere in this dark was an ear to hear and a voice to answer. Waela was there. He sensed her as though he could reach out with one hand and touc....
The tentacles no longer enclosed him!
One palm touched the groun.... rock, sand. Darkness all around. Waela remained there - calm, receptive.
I've turned into some kind of a damned mystic.
"Live mystic."
That voice! It was as real as the wind he felt abruptly on his face. He knew then that he knelt on some dark ground wit.... with haze turning luminous blue all around. And he remembered, really remembered being picked up by a hylighter. Most precious memory: He nursed it as though it were his only child. Memory: a shimmering expanse of sea, narrow ribbon of coast winding itself out of sight, the most rugged mountains of Pandora lifting from the sea and plain - Black Dragon.
"Look up, Raja Thomas, and see how the child becomes father to the man."
He tipped his head and saw ripplings of bright yellow and orange in the blue mist. A whistling song astounded his ears. It was a small hylighter directly overhead in the mist. Tentacles brushed the ground around him. The mist began to thin, pushed by the breeze he could feel on his skin. He smelled floral perfumes. Visibility moved outward through air thick and warm with water vapor. He looked right and left.
Jungle.
Without knowing how it came about, he understood his surroundings: a large crater nestled in black rock, a captive cloud layer creating an inversion with protected warmth beneath the crater's rim.
One of the hovering hylighter's tentacles snaked toward him, touched the back of his left hand. It felt as warm and soft as his own flesh. A small trickle of condensation ran down the back of his neck. He looked up at the hylighter. Another tentacle dripping condensation dangled directly above him.
Calmness fled.
What's it going to do to me?
His gaze moved all around: warm blue mist.
Crack!
Far overhead, a bright flash of lightning flared horizontally across the haze. He felt the prickling presence of it along the hairs on the back of his neck and arms.
Where is this place?
"Nest."
He felt that he was not really hearing that voice. N.... it played on his aural centers the way Ship's voice played, but it was not Ship.
Still, he sensed reality in what his eyes reported. A hylighter tentacle touched his hand; another hovered over him. The jungle remained right out there. Perhaps he was seeing what he desired most: the legendary refuge, the place of the horn of plenty, where there were no worries and no passage of time: Eden.
I've taken refuge in my own mind because of Ship's decision to end us.
He ventured another look at the mist-wrapped jungle all around - mottled clumps of trees and vines with odd colors hidden in the green.
"Your senses do not lie, Raja Thomas. Those are real trees and vines. Do you see the flowers?"
The colors were blossoms - red, magenta, draping cascades of golden yellow. It was all too perfect, a delicate fiction.
"We find the flowers quite pleasant."
"Wh.... i.... talkin.... t.... me?"
"Avata talks to you. Avata also admires the wheat and corn, the apple trees and cedars. Avata planted here what was swept away and abandoned by your kind."
"Who is Avata?"
Thomas stared up at the hovering hylighter, afraid of the answer he might get.
"This is Avata!"
Visions flooded his senses: the planet in light and darkness, the crags of Black Dragon and the plains of The Egg, seas and horizon...confusion which overwhelmed his ability to discriminate. He tried to cringe away from it, but the visions persisted.
"The hylighters," he whispered.
"We choose to be called 'Avata' by you, for we are many and yet one."
Slowly, the visions withdrew.
"Avata brings Panille to help you. See?"
He swung his gaze wide and saw, on his left, another hylighter descending through the blue mist, a naked Kerro Panille clutched in a loop of tentacle. Panille swam in the air like a persistent aftervision. The hylighter dropped him centimeters from the ground. He landed on his feet and strode toward Thomas. The sound of Panille's feet scuffing in sand could not be denied. The poet was real. He had not died on the plain or been killed by the hylighters.
"You are not hallucinating," Panille said. "Remember that. This is not Fraggo. It is a trading of Self."
Thomas climbed to his feet and the trailing tentacle of his hylighter moved with him, not breaking the contact against the back of his hand.
"Where are we, Kerro?"
"As you surmised - Eden."
"You read my thoughts?"
"Some of them. Who are you, Thomas? Avata expresses great curiosity about the mystery of you."
Who am I? He spoke what was in the front of his mind: "I am the bearer of evil tidings. Ship is going to end humankind forever. We hav.... less than seven diurns."
"Why would Ship do such a thing?" Panille stopped less than a pace from Thomas, head cocked to one side, a quizzical, half-amused expression on his face.
"Because we cannot learn how to WorShip."