The Ascension Factor

"No one knows who the Shadows are," he said. "Do you?"

"... no, I don't."

"That's because the Shadows don't exist. Ask any of them. They don't have meetings, pass messages or recruit. Things simply get don...ower blackout, kelpway shift - and something of Flattery's is lost. Supplies circle him, but don't land. Replacements don't sho..."

"That's what I mean," Beatriz said. "I want to know who does it, how do they know when to do it, and what happens."

MacIntosh held her tether and they spun in a lazy spiral through the webworks. The illusion that played across the nets, the beach resort, was tailored for her, designed to help reduce her orientation stress.

He's at home up here, she thought.

She was aware then that up didn't make the same sense now that it had a few hours ago.

"They call it 'tossing the bottle.' You throw something out to the waves, and it's chance. But if you control the waves, or a little part of them, then it's not chance anymore, it's a sure thing. The Shadows' nonsystem encourages every citizen to frustrate Flattery when they see the chance. Divert something this way - say, a subload of hydrogen generators - and go about your business and never do anything like that again. Someone out in the waves sees this diverted load of generators coming along, diverts it that wa... and in blinks it's headed upcoast to a settlement of Pioneers."

He spiraled a finger across the space they shared and bull's-eyed the palm of his other hand.

"Delivery." He winked. "Flattery's project loses and the people gain. No Shadows." He smiled. "It's brilliant. And everyone can play."

"Ye..."

Again, her thoughts were with Ben.

I wonder how long Ben's been playin...

"The Zavatans, Rico and Be..." MacIntosh hesitated, choosing his words, "they don't want Flattery killed. They just want him removed. After all he's done to them, they still don't want to kill him, simply because he's a human being. Do you know how incredible that is? Do you know how far you Pandorans have come from us?"

"Our enemies on Pandora have always been more vicious than ourselves," she said. "Except for the kelp. The kelp has killed its share of humans over the years."

"But who rattled its leash?" MacIntosh asked. "Who threw fire into its cage?''

She closed her eyes again and breathed in slow, deep breaths.

"Are you OK?"

She breathed in and out again, slowly.

"I don't know," she said. "I look around this scene, and I know it's manufactured, fiction, not rea... but people are following us. There are lasgun barrels behind the rocks and plants. Out of the corner of my eye I keep seeing people scurrying for cover."

He hugged her, and they finally kissed that kiss she'd been waiting for. This was no chap-lipped peck on the cheek, and it was just what she needed to bring her back to the world.

"I've wanted to do that," she said. "But it seeme... out of place with all this death."

"Yes," he said, "I've wanted it, too."

He brushed her lips with his fingertips.

"You know, you're going to be jumpy for a while, maybe a long while. We're going to go back out there in a few minutes and finish this matter with Captain Brood. He might think otherwise, but his men have already discovered how little they know about getting around up here. Then we'll see what we can do about your friends groundside."

"You don't think they'r... dead?"

"No," he said. "I don't."

"How do you know?"

"The kelp."

Her face must have registered surprise, because he chuckled.

"You know how much the kelp interests me," he said. "Since Flattery gave me Current Control, I've been able to experiment a little. It paid off."

He kissed her again, then told her about the kelp communications system he'd devised, and his attempts to unify the kelp.

"Which kind of god would the kelp be?" he asked. "Merciful? Vengeful?"

"That's not important now, is it?" she asked. "Brood's a smart one. I won't be able to think of anything else until he'... neutralized."

MacIntosh steered them into a holo of sky that unfolded throughout their webwork - 360 degrees of sky and high clouds covered the latticework that cradled them in free-fall.

"I worry more about Flattery," he said. "Brood's small-time. Flattery's got big things afoot, things big enough to crush anything in his path."

"But he was a Chaplain/Psychiatrist," Beatriz insisted. "He's trained to be better than that."

"He's trained to cope with the necessary thing and to see to it that we all adjust," he reminded her. "No romantic bullshit, just the straight facts. He's programmed to see to it that we don't unleash a monster intelligence upon the universe."

"If he hasn't adjusted and he hasn't coped, why assume that he'll take us all with him?"

"Simple," MacIntosh said. When he smiled his face wrinkled all the way up his shaved head. "The number five Flattery hit the 'destruct' switch, you've read The Histories. That Flattery was a lot more likable than this one. It's just that the program had already come alive, had already anticipated his move and headed it off."

"Maybe we can do it!" Beatriz tried to shake his shoulders but all she did was set them both gyrating through air. "You're right, use the kelp to head him off!"

"Well, now that it knows Flattery's out to get it, the program's already inserted, wouldn't you think?"

"Wel..."

"I have another possibility, and it's regarding Crista Galli."

She felt a curiosity about Crista Galli that went beyond her newsworthiness. Ben saw something in Crista, something in her eyes that swept him up and further away from Beatriz. Even though things were finished between Ben and Beatriz, a woman who could do tha...ounger woman who could do that interested her mightily.

"What's that?"

She heard the rusty bitterness at the edge of her voice, the unnecessary snap of the words past her lips.

"I think the kelp's beat us to it," he said.

She looked up from her nestling spot at his neck to see his wide grin. "I think that Crista Galli is the kelp's experiment in artificial intelligence. I think she's manufactured, incomplete, and alive. It would be nice if we could keep her that way."

A musical tone sounded from the messenger at his belt. He did not take his arms from around her shoulders, but voice-activated the device with a simple command.

"Speak."

"Brood and two of his men sealed themselves off with the OMC. He says if you're not there in five minutes he's going to start scrambling some brains."

***

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fligh...
- Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"

The Orbiter collared the Voidship's nose in a flat wide ring of plasteel. The two cylindrical bodies spun in concert on their long axes. Soon the ring would slip away to remain in orbit around Pandora while its Voidship plied the dark folds of the universe. At the helm would be an OMC, a stripped-down human brain.

The Organic Mental Cores had a definite edge over the mechanical navigators, and this had been determined clearly long ago by experimenters at Moonbase. Navigation in all planes required subtleties of discrimination and symbol-generation that hardware never achieved. The disembodied, unencumbered brain took pleasure, or so they said, in plotting the impossible course. One goad worked on OMCs that had no effect on mechanical navigators - the OMC needed this job to stay alive.

The particular OMC that the techs were preparing for installation, the Alyssa Marsh number six, felt no pain or bodily pleasure as the microlaser welded in the necessary hookups. She had been trained in astronavigation at Moonbase and had borne a child in the year after splashdown on Pandora. The story that she filtered back to Flattery had the child die in an earthquake, and Alyssa Marsh had launched herself into her kelp study project with a passion. Her body had been crushed in a kelp station accident, but Flattery saw to it that her silent brain lived on.

Soon she would be silent no more. Soon her brain would have a body that it could move - the Voidship Nietzsche. She would navigate knowing the differences between ability and desire, knowing the need for dreams. Right now she lay genderless behind a pair of locked hatches dreaming of a banquet where Flattery was the host and she was both the honored guest and the main dish.

Dwarf MacIntosh gathered his forces outside both hatches and tried once more to contact Captain Brood. There was no reply from the OMC chamber. Three of the four monitors inside were blacked out, but the one remaining showed an overhead view of the long, specialized fingers of a nerve tech probing the webwork that encased what remained of Alyssa Marsh.

"Hookup's not scheduled until next week," someone said. "What's going on in there?"

A lasgun barrel appeared on the screen, pointed at the tech. The long, spidery fingers froze, then ascended from the surface of the brain toward the screen, then backed out of view.

"That fool better not touch off his lasgun in there," somebody else drawled, "or we be stardust."

"Hold your fire, Captain," MacIntosh ordered. "This is MacIntosh. You're in a high-explosive area -"

"Brood's dead," a voice interrupted, a voice that cracked with youth and fear. "May Ship accept him. May Ship forgive and accept us all."

The lasgun barrel tilted up toward the viewscreen and in a flash the last monitor went blank.

Beatriz tugged at Mack's sleeve.

"He's an Islander," she said. "The old religion, like my family. Some believe this project, to build an image and likeness of Ship, to be blasphemy. Some believe that the OMC should be allowed to die, that it - she - is a human being held here against their will and enslaved."

MacIntosh covered the intercom receiver with his hand.

"I don't necessarily believe that Brood's dead," he told her. "That would be too easy. And why shoot out the monitor instead of the OMC? You're an Islander, you talk to him. Play the religion angle, set up to get him on the air if that's what he wants. My men here will help you out."

"Where are you going?"

He saw the unbridled fear in her eyes at the prospect that he would leave her.

What have they done to her? he wondered.

He gripped her shoulders while his men floated the passageway feigning inattention to their covert affections.

"Spud and I know a few ins and outs of this Orbiter that don't show up on schematic."

She held him as close as their vacuum suits would allow.

"I could take anything but losing you," she said. "I know I'm making a spectacle of myself in front of your men, but I couldn't let it go unsaid."

"I'm glad you didn't," he said, and smiled. He kissed her in spite of the throat-clearings, harrumphs and chuckles of his crew.

"Chief Hubbard will stay here with you while his men secure this area. By your estimate, we're still missing a few of Brood's men. He's up to something, I have that feeling."

With a half-salute to the chief, MacIntosh propelled himself toward Current Control with his compressed-air backpack.

***

Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.
- John Wisdom

Rico couldn't see through the illusion and he knew that Ben could not see him, either. Nor could Ben see Nevi and Zentz. Rico whistled the "get down" signal, hoping that the couple wouldn't run out of the boundaries of the image. They would be visible then, and in the open against an incoming tide. Rico dropped when Nevi started shooting.

Time to send him a more suitable surprise, Rico thought.

He wriggled into a position of better cover.

Nevi laid a pattern of fire into the rocks that hid Ben and Crista. Zentz covered Nevi's rear, keeping the dozen local Zavatans pinned down. Nevi stopped firing, but kept his wary crouch.

"Save charges," he warned Zentz. "We might be here awhile."

All was quiet except for their harsh breathing, the seething of the incoming tide and the high-pitched ping of weapon barrels cooling.

Rico was held firmly around the waist by a budding tip of kelp vine. It reminded him of his father's arm, and the way it used to pick him off the deck in one swoop. The feathery bud of kelp felt like the palm of a small woman's hand on his belly, covering his navel, hugging him from behind.

An image of Snej flashed through his mind and just as suddenly Snej's face appeared in thin air about ten meters in front of Nevi. The rising tide licked at the hylighter skin beneath her and hissed over Nevi's boot.

"What the hel... ?"

Nevi advanced a step, two steps. Zentz moved with him, backward, step for step. He glanced over his shoulder and paled when he saw Snej. He snapped his attention back to their rear defense.

"The redhead," he gurgled, "where's the rest of her?"

Rico found he could reinforce the intensity of the image by looking at it, concentrating on it. It was like a huge coil of energy feeding on itself, refining itself, awakening. After a couple of slow, calming breaths he was able to materialize the rest of her. She stood there in her green singlesuit, hands on her hips, staring at Nevi. She was a bit larger than life size. He wondered if he could make her speak.

"Well," Nevi said, "she's here, now."

Another glance over his shoulder and Zentz began a wet, ragged breathing that Rico could hear a dozen meters away over the surf. He placed his back tight against Nevi's.

"Shit, Nevi, a head that grows a body," he whined. "Let's get back to the foil."

"Shut up."

Nevi stopped and looked over the scene behind Snej. It was nearly the same view that Rico had: black rocky stretch of beach between the tide and the cliff, a cluster of large basalt boulders and a foil draped with the wet shards of an unexploded hylighter. In the downcoast distance the great expanse of sea glowed like green lava against the black cliffs.

"Where are they?" Nevi asked her. "I want them."

A two-toned whistle told Rico that the Zavatans were in position to rush the two men. He noticed that his illusion of Snej didn't cast a shadow.

Don't think I can manage that, too, he thought. Talking will be enough of a challenge.

Her shadow melted from her feet on the hylighter skin to where it met the beach, no more. It lay parallel with the other lengthening shadows of the day, but amputated at the rim of the skin. The tide already rushed the edges of the image, breaking up the light. With luck, Nevi wouldn't notice.

Rico smiled, concentrating on Snej, and quickly thanked Avata in the back of his mind.

"Put your weapons down," Snej said. "It is finished."

But no sound came from her lips.

"Shit!" Rico muttered.

Zentz responded with a burst from his lasgun. It came so fast that it startled Rico out of the illusion and it pulverized a rock just a meter in front of him. Avata brought the lost image back. Nevi fired, too, advancing them another step.

"It's not real," he told Zentz. "Watch yourself."

"Maybe we're dusted," Zentz said. "All this hylighter cra..."

"Ever know two dusters to share the same hallucination?" Nevi asked. He stopped a pace from Snej, squinting.

"Something's not righ..."

Rico held his breath. If Nevi stepped across the plane of the image, he'd see Ben and Crista, and Rico wouldn't be able to see Nevi. The entire area over the downed hylighter became a dome of imagination, a hypnotism of light, a life sculpture.

***

There must be a threshold of consciousness beyond which a conscious being takes on the attributes of God.
- Umbilicus crew member, Voidship Earthling, from The Histories

Mose's eyes were open so wide that he looked even smaller to Twisp than he had when a refugee band had carried him in half-starved ten years ago. Memories - they kept him from the kelp as they drew Kaleb. Twisp had watched the struggle for nearly a quarter-century. The kelp must be like a drug to Kaleb.

Not the kelp, Twisp thought. The past.

Twisp knew, too, how the kelp always drew him to a particular part of the past, a particular year, a particular woman. Twisp had thought her the most beautiful woman on Pandora. Later, after Flattery and the others had been removed from the hyb tanks, Pandorans got a look at unmutated humans for the first time in over two hundred years.

They were all so testy about being clones, Twisp recalled, when "clone" wasn't even something you could see.

He remembered the bitter ceremony, with Raja Lon Flattery presiding, in which the hyb tank survivors purged the telltale "Lon" from their names forever. It was done with a ridiculous solemnity, and did not bestow on Flattery's people any of the attributes that Pandora demanded of them: better reflexes, more intelligence, teamwork.

"What they didn't tell you in school," Twisp told Mose, "was that Flattery couldn't control Kareen Ale. She was killed, like Kaleb's parents, by Flattery's death squad. She was the first victim. There are those who believe it was Nevi himself who did it. Shadow Panille was head of Current Control in those days. He was in love with Kareen Ale. The combination killed him, too. He was my friend."

Twisp's voice barely rose above a whisper.

"I quit searching the kelpways, finally. I prefer my memories the way they deal themselves out. The kelp keeps them too true. Memories are not the drug for me that they are for some. I prefer to go to the kelp for the now, not the then."

"The kelpways would pink my wattles mightily, Elder," Mose said. "The blue dust takes me to my heart and leaves me there sometimes. I don't know where it would leave me in the kelp."

"With the dust, you face your own conscience," Twisp said. "In the kelp you face the conscience of us all. That does pink your wattles, all right. It demands truth, and singularity of attention. One is easily lost in the cruel maze of someone else's life. Kaleb has learned to filter the kelp as we learn to filter our senses."

"What will he find in there, Elder?"

Twisp shook his head.

The red, green and blue lights intensified and their flicker quickened until the cavern was awash with light. The borer workers left their machine to stand at poolside with the others who gathered in wonder.