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And the Lord said, "Behold, the people is one, and they have all one languag and now nothing will be restrained froo down and confound their language that they may not understand one another’s speech"

- Christian Book of the Dead, Shiprecords

FROM THE instant the first tentacles brushed her face to the moment she boarded the shuttle for Ship, Waela lived in a blur of past-present-future which she could not control Kerro was gone and Thomas was not available, this hters had left her with a voice in her mind It flared there in flashes of total de herself insane

The voice of Honesty would not answer, but this new voice intruded without warning When it came, she felt herself filled with the saondola

It is the Avata way of learning

The voice kept repeating this When she questioned, answers caon which confused her

Like electricity, hue flows between poles It activates and charges all that it touches It changes that which moves it and moves within it You are such a pole

She knehat the wordsway

And all the while, she re procedure when the rescue gondola deposited them at Colony Thomas was taken away so The session was run by Lewis - astonishing!

It was right there that the first de flash hit her

Waela I have found the Avata

She knew there was no sound, but the voice filled her sense of hearing It was Kerro Panille, no denying it Not his voice, but his identity recognized in an internal hich could not be disguised She knew it as she knew herself But she didn’t even know that Kerro was alive!

I’ ou or of reaching in

Either that or I’ht

She did not feel insane as she stood in the Medical section’s glaring tile-white cubicle looking across a htside; she knew this Rega had been setting and they had brought her directly in here Leas speaking to her and she kept shaking her head, unable to answer him because of that voice in herto Lewis She heard three words "too soon fo"

Then the whirl of that intruding voice returned She was uncertain whether she recognized words - or whether it really could be called a voice - but she kneas being said It was a non-language, and she knew this when she found that she could not distinguish between "I" and "We" in Kerro’s coe barrier was down

In that instant of recognition, she knew Avata as Kerro Panille knew Avata She wondered how she learned this lesson, this ancient bit of human history

How did I learn, Kerro Panille?

What is done to one is felt by all, humanwaela

"Why am I humanwaela?" She asked it aloud and saw an odd expression co to thelazily in Pandoran wind There werepeople around her - med-techs, several of the an entire tea was more important than the voice in her mind

You are humanwaela because you are at once human and at once Waela There may be such a time as this is not so Then you will be human

"When will that be?"

The cold node of a pribox drilled the back of her left hand, tingled up her arm and sent her doind of dis-timed memories which were not her own

When you know all that otherhumans know, and otherhumans know all of you, then you are hunificent universe of the interior which this concept opened before her Avata She had no sensation of time while she floated in the arms of Avata, or whether Avata was really with her If it was just a dream, she wanted it never to end