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Hu 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 Thoondola’s hatch and found it ja if he saw Kerro

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

Waela’s head was still spinning froyrations

"What’ll they do with him?" she called

"Ship knows!" He jerked at the hatch cover, but it would not ondola isted and tilted in the first attacks

Thohters One of the 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 co back!" Waela shouted

Thoondola

"Brace yourself in your seat!" he called And he followed his own order while he watched the advancing swar?" 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 sailtendrils

Waela freed herself frohters 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 iave way to a drunken sense of abandon She knew her body; she knehere she was: right here in the gondola which was being held steady in a cupped haof joy which insinuated itself all through her She felt that the sensation cahters

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’ 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 waro?

It was not i

This was a product of Thoave herself up to the dream, to the war her And she sensed all around the questing tendrils as they explored, joining her with i 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 ti 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 fro free into the sky, and he saw Hali stretched out in warht 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 netism 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 He their Voidship Mo in his nostrils and he smelted the musk of Pandora but he was crouched within his own nostrils recording this Tendrils! Theyno intimate contact As they moved, they sucked out his identity First he was Raja Flattery, then Thomas, then he did not knoho he was This ahed

I’ht because he was not there to have such a thought There was a head soht 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 overco me!

Avata does not kill you!

That was a voice echoing in a metal barrel Avata? He knew that froo of the Hindu oversoul