If you know this of the alien intelligence and still find it alien, you do not know what it is to be human.

- Kerro Panille, Translations from the Avata

You are called Project Consciousness, but your true goal is to explore beyond the imprinted pattern of all humankind. Inevitably, you must ask: Is consciousness only a special kind of hallucination? Do you raise consciousness or lower its threshold? The danger in the latter course is that you bring up the military analogue: you are confined to action.

- Original Charge to the Voidship Chaplain/Psychiatrist

ON THESE nightside walks through the ship, Oakes liked to move without purpose, without the persona of Ceepee tagging along. He had worked long and hard to remain just a name both shipside and groundside. Few saw his face and most of his official duties were carried out by minions. There was the routine WorShip in the corridor chapels, the food allotments groundside, a minimal endorsement of the many functions that the ship carried out with no human intervention. Ceepee rule was supposed to be nominal. But he wanted more.

Kingston had once said: "We have too damned much idle time. We're idle hands and we can get into trouble."

Memories of Kingston were much with Oakes this night as he took his nocturnal prowl. Through the outer passages, sensor eyes and ears dotted corridor walls and ceilings. They strung themselves ahead and behind in diminishing vectors of attention, dim glistenings in the blue-violet nightside lighting.

Still no word from Lewis, This rankled. Legata's preliminary report left too many unanswered questions. Was Lewis striking out on his own? Impossible! Lewis did not have the guts for such a move. He was the eternal behind-the-scenes operator, not a front man.

What was the emergency, then?

Oakes felt that too many things were coming to a head around him. They could not delay much longer on sending this poet, this Kerro Panille, groundside. And the new Ceepee the ship had brought out of hyb! Both poet and Ceepee would have to be bundled into the same package and watched carefully. And it would soon be time to start an eradication project against the kelp. People were getting hungry enough groundside that they were ready for scapegoats.

And that disturbing incident with the air in his cubby. Had the ship really tried to asphyxiate him? Or poison him?

Oakes turned a corner and found himself in a long corridor with iridescent green arrows on the walls indicating that it led outward from shipcenter. The ceiling sensors were dots receding into a converging distance.

Out of habit he noticed the activation of each sensor as he neared it. Each mechanical eye followed his pace faithfully, and, as he approached the limits of its vision, the next one rolled its wary cyclopean pupil around to catch his approach. He had to admit that, in Shipman or machine, he appreciated this sense of guarded watchfulness, but the idea that a possibly malevolent intelligence waited behind that movement set his nerves on edge.

He had never known a sensor to malfunction. To tamper with one meant dealing with a robox uni...single-minded repair and defense device that respected no life or limb save that of Ship.

THE ship, dammit!

Those years of programming, preparation - even he could not shake them. How did he expect others of lesser will, lesser intelligence, to do so?

He sighed. He expected to sway no one. What he expected was that he would use the tools at hand. With intelligence, he felt that one could turn anything to advantage. Even a dangerous tool such as Lewis.

Another pair of sensors caught his attention, this time outside the access to the Docking Bays. It was quiet here and pervaded by that odd smell compounded from uncounted sleeping people. Not even freight moved during Colony's nightside which sometimes coincided with Shiptime, but often did not. All the industry of dayside was put away for the community of sleep.

Except in two places, he reminded himself: life-support and the agraria.

Oakes stopped and studied the line of sensors. He, of all Shipmen, should appreciate them. He had access to the movements they recorded. Every detail of shipside life was supposed to be his. And he had seen to it that the groundside colony was similarly equipped. Ship's watchfulness was his own.

"The more we know, the stronger we are in our choices."

Kingston's voice came to him from his training days.

What a raw but marvelously trainable bit of human material I was!

Kingston had been almost a master of control. Almost. And control was a function of strong choices. When it came down to it, Kingston had refused certain choices.

I do not refuse.

Choices resulted from information. He had learned that lesson well.

But how can you know the result of every choice?

Oakes shook his head and resumed his wandering. The sense that he walked into new dangers was an acute pressure in his breast. But there was no stopping this, short of death. His feet turned him down a passageway which he saw led to an agrarium. There was the peculiar green smell of the passage even if he had not recognized the wide cart tracks leading through an automatic lock ahead. He stepped across the track-dump, through the lock and found himself in a dimly lighted and frighteningly unbounded space.

It was nightside here too. Even plants required that diurnal pulse. An internally illuminated yellow wall map at his left showed him his location and the best access routes out. It also showed this agrarium. The largest extrusions of the ship were monopolized for food production, but he had not entered one of those complexes for years - not since provisioning that first attempted colony on Pandora's Black Dragon continent. Long before they had gained their Colony foothold on the Egg.

Kingston's first big mistake.

Oakes stepped closer to the map, aware of distant movement far out in the agrarium but more interested in this symbol. He was not prepared for what the map told him. The agrarium he had entered was almost as large as the central core of the ship. It spread out, fanlike, from roots in the original hull. Ship and Colony maintenance figures he had been initialing took on a new reality here. And the map's explanatory footnote was an exclamation point.

As Oakes looked on, the nightside shift of agrarium workers broke for their mid-meal WorShip. They did so as one and no perceptible signal passed among them, no reluctance of any sort evident. They moved together into the dim blue light of the WorShip alcove.

They believe! Oakes thought, they really believe that the ship is God!

As the shift supervisor led them in their litany, Oakes found himself washed in a sadness that came so suddenly and so hard that it held him on the verge of tears. He realized then that he envied them their faith, their small comfort of the ritual that was so much bother to him.

The supervisor, a squat, bowlegged man with dirt on his hands and knees, led them in the Chant of Sure Growth.

"Behold the bed of dirt," and he dropped a pinch of dirt to the floor.

"And the seed asleep in it," the crew responded, lifting their bowls and setting them down.

"Behold water," he dribbled some from his glass.

"And the waking it brings," they raised their glasses.

"Behold light," he lifted his face to the U-V racks overhead.

"And the life it opens," they spread their hands, palms up.

"Behold the fullness of the grain, the thickness of the leaf," he spooned from the communal pot, into the bowl to his left.

"And the seed of life it plants in us," each worker spooned a helping for the Shipman on his left.

"Behold Ship and the food Ship gives." The supervisor sat down.

"And the joy of company to share it," they said, and sat to eat.

Oakes turned away unnoticed.

The joy of company! he snorted to himself. If there were less company and more food there would be a damn sight more joy!

He moved along the rim of the ship's outer hull then, raw space only a few meters away. His mind was racing.

That agrarium could feed thirty thousand people. Instead of counting people, they could count agraria and add the support figures! He knew that groundside shipments supplied eighty percent of Colony stores. Here was a key to real numbers! Why had they not seen that before?

Even as he experienced elation at this thought, Oakes knew the ship would frustrate such an attempt. The damned ship did not want them to know how many people it supported. It blocked their attempts to count; it hid hyb complexes and confused you with meaningless corridors.

It brought a nameless Ceepee out of hyb and announced a new groundside project outside of Shipman control.

Wel.... accidents could happen groundside, too. And even a precious Ceepee from Ship could walk into a fatality.

What difference did it make? The new Ceepee was probably a clone. Oakes had seen the earliest records: Clones were property. Somebody who signed with the initials MH had said it. And there was an aura of power around that statement. Clones were property.