It was done and they left Thomas asleep on the litter.

Panille took a trembling breath and stared around him at the people on the plain. In the healing of Thomas, all of the wounded had been restored. There were bodies of the dead, but not a single maimed among the living. All stood silent under the shadow presence which slid across the plain.

Legata.

It was Ship again.

Still shaken by the experience of the sharing, she spoke aloud in a trembling voice. "Yes, Ship?"

You have taken My best friend, Legata. Oakes is Mine now, a fair exchange. Where I go, I will need him more than you. She looked up at the Rega-haloed outline. "You're leaving?"

I travel the Ox gate, Legata. The Ox gate - My childhood and My eternity.

She thought about the Ox gate, the scrambled repository in which she had found the truth about Oakes' origins, the near-mystical computer where hidden things emerged. As she thought this, she felt her own consciousness become one with Ship's records. And because they all were linked through Vata, all on the plain shared this.

Ship's words and images rode over this flooding awareness.

Infinite imagination has its infinite horrors, too. Poets turn their nightmares to words. With gods, dreams take on substance and lives of their own. Such things cannot be scratched out. The Ox gate, my morality factor. My psyche moves both ways. If it moves in symbols, it moves through the Ox. Some of my symbols walk and breathe - as it was with Jesus Lewis. Others sing in the words of poets.

Oakes fell to his knees, pleading. "Don't take me, Ship. I don't want to go."

But I need you, Morgan Oakes. I no longer have Thomas, my personal demon, and I need you.

Ship's shadow began to pass beyond the people on the plain. As light touched Oakes, he vanishe...white blur, then an empty place on the sand.

Legata stood there, looking at where Oakes had knelt, and she could not keep the tears from coursing down her cheeks.

Hali stood up beside the litter where her patient slept. She felt emptied and angry, robbed of her role. She stared up at the passing immensity of Ship.

Is this what I was supposed to let them know? she demanded.

Show them, Ekel!

Still angry, she played the images of the crucifixion, then: "Ship! Is that how it was with Yaisuah? Was he just another filament from one of Your dreams?"

Does it matter, Ekel? Is the lesson diminished because the history that moves you is fiction? The incident which you just shared is too important to be debated on the level of fact or fancy. Yaisuah lived. He was an ultimate essence of goodness. How could you learn such an essence without experiencing its opposite?

The shadow was gone from them, flowing away over the cliffs, carrying off the bits of humanity remaining up there - the Natali, the hyb attendants, the hydroponics worker....

"Ship is leaving us," Legata said. She crossed to Panille's side.

In the midst of her words, she felt the blaze of awareness which Ship had shared with them - Shiprecords, all of the pasts carried into the smallest cell on the plain.

"We've been weaned," Panille said. "We have to go it alone now."

Hali joined them. "No more shiptits."

"But alone has lost all of its old meanings," Panille said.

"Is this what the expansion of the universe is all about?" Legata asked. "The fleeing of the gods from their own handiwork?"

"Gods ask other questions," Panille said. He looked down at Hali. "You were midwife to us all when you brought us Vata and the Hill of Skulls."

"Vata brought herself," Hali said. She put a hand in Panille's. "Some things don't need a midwife."

"Or a Ceepee," Legata said. She grinned. "But it's a role we all know now." She shook her head. "I have only one question - What will Ship do with those people up there?"

She pointed upward at the vanishing ship.

They all heard it then, Ship's presence filling the people on the plain, then fading, but never to be forgotten.

Surprise Me, Holy Void!