The Ascension Factor

"Yes," he said, "he sent me."

"And are you following his orders, blasting in like this?"

"I am following th... the intent of his orders."

"Why wasn'... . ?"

"Because you're part of the problem, Doctor."

Brood swung around to face him fully and Mack saw an age in his eyes that was much older than the boyish face that held them. Now Brood's lasgun pointed at his chest. The light continued its ooze from all of the kelp linkups. A similar glow shimmered on each viewscreen behind the pale-faced captain.

The whole planet's lighting up, Mack thought. It must be the kelp, but what could it be up to?

"My orders were to secure Current Control and keep the lid on the Tatoosh woman," Brood told him.

The man's voice was quiet, almost wistful. "We were to keep Ozette out of the news, replace any of her crew as needed, accompany her up here. The Director thought she might try to - influence you, thereby endangering the security of Current Control as well as the Voidship project."

"So, you terrorized her, executed her crew, murdered my security squad and are now prepared to destroy Current Control and steal the Voidship - even Flattery won't buy this one, Captain."

Brood smiled, showing his fine, sharpened teeth, but his eyes remained hard as plasteel.

"Perhaps it is a family trait, this madness," he said, his voice rising with an edge to it. "You haven't heard the scuttlebutt, then. They say Flattery's my fathe... whoever my mother was, she was one of his diversions back at the beginning. I was the 'poor fruit' of that diversion, as some might say."

Mack was not as surprised at Brood's ancestry as he was by the cold anger with which Brood related it.

Hot anger stings, he thought, but it's cold anger that kills.

Mack started to speak but Brood's upturned hand stopped him.

"Spare me your sympathies, Doctor. It's not sympathy that I require. I am not the only one so privileged, there are others. If he knows, he finds favor in me because I do not challenge him. If he doesn'..."

A shrug, a pull at the lip. The ghost-light pooled his ankles.

"Others have not been so fortunate. My mother, whoever she was, for example. The Director requires power and I require power, that is clear. One way or another, I will have it."

"They've called a 'Code Brutus' down there. Are you a part of that?"

Brood snapped out a laugh. Those sharpened teeth sent a shudder down Mack's spine.

"I'm a winner, Doctor," he said. "I side with winners. I can't lose. If Flattery wins, then I've saved his Voidship for him, saved his precious kelpways, and I win. If Flattery loses, then I've captured the Voidship and the precious kelpways to hold for the winner."

"What happens if one of the others asks your help?"

"Then we'll suffer a communication breakdown," Brood said. "That's nothing new up here, is it, Doctor?"

Mack smiled.

"No, no it's not. We've been having that problem all day."

"So I noticed. My men, they are new to these airwaves, but thorough. We have monitored you here for quite some time - for practice, you understand. I know you quite well, Dr. MacIntosh. How well do you know me?"

"I don't know you at all."

"I wouldn't say that," Brood said. "You knew that I wouldn't blow the Gridmaster - not yet. You knew if I really wanted your men dead they'd be dead, and yourself along with them. Tell me what else you know about me, Doctor."

Mack stroked his chin. Leakage from the body of the number-two man drifted close, globs of blood floating with it like party decorations. Mack kept trying to remember which of his men it was, but it wouldn't come to him. But Brood was in a talkative mood, and Mack tried to keep him at it.

"You've covered all bases," Mack said. "If you take the wrong side, you can always run off with the Voidship - provided you can muster a crew."

"I have you, Doctor," Brood smiled. "An original crew member. I have the OMC, too. And I'll bet that you, a smart man and commander, would have a backup system - probably something handy, like the Gridmaster? Yes, a backup for a backu..."

Brood laughed again, more to himself this time. He reached out his lasgun barrel and nudged the blood globules enough to clump them together and push the glob out of reach toward the turret. A smear of dark blood glistened on the muzzle.

From somewhere deep inside his training-memory, Mack recalled one of his instructors telling him how clean a lasgun kill was, how the charge neatly sealed off blood vessels in its quick cone of burn through the body. In practice, as usual, this wasn't always the case.

Suddenly, the entire Current Control suite filled with overwhelming, blinding light. A stab of pain punched at both of Mack's eyes and he covered them reflexively. He heard Brood struggling nearby, bumping a bank of consoles toward the hatch.

"What the hel... ?"

Mack tried his eyes and found that he could see if he squinted tight enough, but tears poured down his cheeks, anyway. What he saw made his already racing heart race faster.

If light were a solid, this is what it would look like, he thought.

It wasn't bright now as much as it was all-encompassing. He could actually feel the light around him. It wasn't heat, such as sunlight would deliver, but the pressurelike sensation of an activated vacuum suit.

Mack kicked off and made a grab for Brood's lasgun as he fumbled upside-down with the hatch mechanism. He missed the lasgun. Brood happened to open his eyes at that moment and the barrel snapped up to take aim between Mack's eyes.

"Doctor, you just don't get the picture, do you? I ought to cook you on the spot, but I'll wait a bit. I'd rather have you and your girlfriend together for that. Now you tell me what the hell is happening here."

A frightened voice came over the intercom:

"Captain Brood, we can't see in here. There's a light filling the OMC chamber, and it's coming from this brai..."

This was cut short by sounds of a struggle, and Mack assumed that his crew had penetrated the OMC chamber. For the first time, Brood looked worried, perhaps even a little afraid.

"I don't know what's going on her..."

"Don't give me that crap, Doctor," Brood yelled.

A fine spray of saliva skidded into the air around his head.

"It must be the kelp," Mack explained.

He used the calmest possible voice he could muster.

"There are kelp hookups in here and in the OMC chamber."

An eerie, strangled cry came from Brood's throat, and the man's eyes widened at something behind Mack's back. Mack grabbed a handhold and spun around, shading his eyes with his left hand. The bank of viewscreens that faced him seemed to be unreeling wild, random scenes from Pandora, some of them from the early settlement days.

"That'... those are my memories," Brood gasped. "All of the places we live... my famil... except, who is she?"

One face faded in and out, turned and returned and gathered substance from the light. Mack recognized her right away. It was Alyssa Marsh, more than twenty years ago.

A soft voice, Alyssa's voice, came from all around them and said, "If you will join us, now, we are ready to begin."

A great hatch appeared in the light, and a thick stillness took over the room. Nothing else was visible. The hatch hung in midair, looking as solid as Mack's own hand, but the pocket of light that contained them had solidified to exclude Current Control completely - there were no deck, ceiling or bulkheads; no consoles, no sound, nothing but the hatch. Even Brood's heavy breathing got swallowed up in the light. Mack felt as though he were alone, though Brood was near enough to touch. He was tempted to reach out, just to make sure he was real.

Shadowbox, Mack thought. Maybe they've figured out ho...

"What is this shit?" Brood asked. "If this is some kind of kelp trick, I'm not falling for it. And if it's your doing, you're a dead man."

Before Mack could stop him Brood fired a lasgun burst into the hatch. But the burst wouldn't stop, and Brood couldn't let go of the weapon. The detail of the hatch intensified, and the hatch went through dozens of changes at blink-speed, becoming hundreds of doors and hatches that peeled off one another.

The weapon became too hot for Brood to hold and he tried to let it go, but it stuck to his hands, glowing red-hot, until the charges in it were depleted. Though he struggled to scream, with his veins bulging at his neck and his face bright red, Brood did not issue a sound. When it was over, his eyes merely glazed and he floated there, helpless, holding his charred hands away from his body.

Mack heard nothing during this time, and smelled nothing, though he saw the flesh bubble from the man's fingers. Still, the hatch waited in front of him. It had first appeared as one of the large airlock hatches that separated the Orbiter from the Voidship. Now it looked like the great meeting-room door that he remembered from Moonbase. Every time Mack had entered that door it was to be briefed on some new aspect of the Moonbase experiment on artificial consciousness. Some of those briefings had raised his hair and bathed his palms in cold sweat. The door did not frighten him this time.

He did not doubt that this was an illusion, a holo of near perfection. He had been accustomed to working with fourth- or fifth-generation holograms, but this one felt real. The light had been given substance.

"What did it take to do this?" he wondered aloud. "A thousandth-generation holo?"

It was as though every atom in the room, in the air, on his breath had become a part of the screen. He reached out his hand, expecting to pass through the illusion. He did not. It was solid, a real hatch. Brood was no longer nearby. Like the rest of the room, he had simply ceased to be. All that existed were Mack and the great, heavy doors dredged out of his Moonbase memories. He thought he heard voices behind the door. He thought he heard Beatriz there, and she was laughing.

"Please join us, Doctor," the soft voice urged. "Without you, none of this would be possible."

As he reached for the handle, the door changed once again. It became the hatch between Moonbase proper and the arboretum that he visited so often throughout his life there. A safe, plasma-glass dome protected a sylvan setting that he loved to walk through. Here at the edge of the penumbra of Earth's moon he had strolled grassy hillsides and sniffed the cool dampness of ferns under cover of real trees. His mind, or whatever was manipulating it, must want him to open this hatch pretty bad.

The latch-and-release mechanism felt real against his palms. He activated the latch and the hatch swung inward to a room even brighter than the one he stood in. This time, the light did not hurt his eyes, and as he stepped forward a few familiar figures materialized from it to greet him.

I've died! Mack thought. Brood must've shot me and I've died!

***

To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light.
- Carl Jung

The Orbiter's fire-suppression crew floated in their odd vacuum suits up and down the passageway outside of the OMC chamber. Most of them were women, as was the majority of the Voidship crew. Each was equipped with a beltful of tools for bypass or forced entry, and several pushed smothercans of inert gas ahead of them as they patrolled behind Beatriz. All of them had left their job stations to rally against the threat of fire. Only uncontrolled vacuum was more feared than fire aboard the space station. The pithy jokes that they tossed among themselves through their headsets offset the nervousness that their eyes betrayed.

Beatriz had suspected from the start that the young security who had sealed himself inside the OMC chamber was trying to get the OMC on-line. The firefighting captain who stayed with Beatriz was a structural engineer named Hubbard. Like all of the fire-fighters aboard, Hubbard was a volunteer and accustomed to getting twice as much work done in half the time. He deployed his crew according to their real-job skills. In a matter of moments all circuit boxes were opened, their entrails spilling into the passageway.

Four women positioned two plasteel welders, one at the hatchway, one at the bulkhead seam to the OMC chamber. The operating arm of the welder alone weighed nearly five hundred kilos, but here near the axis the only maneuvering problem was its bulk.

These women must've been up here from the start of the project, Beatriz thought. They used their feet as she might use her hands, and their vacuum suits had been adapted to accommodate their more dexterous toes. When she first visited the Orbiter she had thought that this skill came from a particular breed of Islander, but later visits proved otherwise. MacIntosh himself exhibited great facility with his feet and toes, and his vacuum suit reflected these changes, too.

"Buy us fifteen minutes," Hubbard was telling her, "and we'll be all over that guy."

"These guys killed my whole crew," she said. "They joked about eliminating your whole security squad and then they did it. Being all over that guy in fifteen minutes won't be enough to save tha... the OMC."

"How would you do it?"

Beatriz detected no challenge in his tone, just urgency.

"I helped Mack install some hookups to the OMC chamber. There's a crawlway that starts in the circuit panel in the next compartment and leads into the control consoles inside the chamber. I know the way and I ca..."

"Shorty, here, can squeeze through some mighty tight spaces," Hubbard said. "She can bypass their air supply and divert in CO-tw..."

"No," she said, "that's too risky. It won't hurt the OMC but I've seen people panic when their oxygen gets low. We want to keep these guys calm, they might just start shooting up everything in sight."

"You're right," Hubbard said. "Shorty, tell Cronin to whip up some of his chemical magic. We want this guy down and out in a blink, and anybody else that's with him. We want that OMC and the tech in operating condition when this is over, got it?"

"Check, Boss."

"Listen up, everybody," Hubbard said. "Set all your headsets to voice-activated fireground frequency three-three-one." He made the proper settings in her equipment, then explained to Beatriz, "That way we talk and he can't listen, and we don't have to go through the intercom."

Beatriz noted the tools in Hubbard's jumpkit.

"Let me see what you've got there," she said. "I may be able to activate some of the sensors in the chamber through the intercom box. It would help to have eyes and ears."

She slid back the cover and a faint glow pulsed from inside the box. It was not an electrical glow, the cherry-red simmer of bare wires or the blue-white snap of a short-circuit. This glow was pale, cool, with a slight pulse that seemed to intensify as she watched. .

Hubbard's hand moved reflexively to a small canister at his belt, but Beatriz stopped him.

"It must be luciferase," she said, "from the kelp leads that we fed in here last year." She selected a current detector from Hubbard's kit and applied it to one of the fistful of unconventional kelp leads.

"Kelp leads?" Hubbard asked. "What the hell was he stringin... ?"

"Circuits made with kelp don't overload, and they have a built-in memory, among other features. We've done some experimentation with it at Holovisio... OK, there's something here," she said, watching the instrument's flutter in her hand. "I wouldn't call it a current, exactly. More of an excitation."

When the bare back of her hand brushed the bundle of kelp fibers, Beatriz had a sudden unexpected look at the inside of the OMC chamber. The young guard stood across the lab from her, lasgun at the ready, his eyes wide and clearly frightened. Beatriz watched the scene from two vantage points. One was halfway up the bulkhead behind the OMC, probably the outlet connecting with the hookups she held. The other was from about waist-height, facing the security, and she realized she was watching this scene from inside Alyssa Marsh's brain. The kid kept flicking the arm-disarm switch on his lasgun.

"Get inside," she whispered to Hubbard. "Get someone inside. He's going to panic and kill them all."

She gripped the bundle of kelp fibers tight in her fist and dimly heard Hubbard snap out orders to his crew. She felt herself drawn both ways through the fibers, as though she were seeing with several pairs of eyes at once. The sense of herself diminished as she flowed out the fibers, so she gripped a handhold on the bulkhead and forced the flow to come to her.

I can't let this go on, she thought. It has to stop. Oh, Ben, you were so right!

It was nearly more than she could bear, but magnetizing as well. She knew she could let go the fibers, stop the headlong tumble down a tunnel of light, but her reporter instinct told her to hang on for the duration of the ride. She raced through the hookups aboard the Orbiter and the Voidship, then felt herself launched toward the surface of Pandora. She tightened her grip and wondered who was moaning in the background, then realized that the moans were her own.

She was a convection center for the kelp. The pale-faced young security with the huge ears and filed teeth stood barely a meter from her eyes.

Alyssa's eyes, she thought, and repressed a shudder. I've become Alyssa's eyes.

The tech's hands trembled as they worked, and with each new fiber glued in place the eerie glow increased.

"Brood didn't say this was supposed to happen," the kid said, more nervous than ever. "Is this normal?"

"I don't know," the tech said. Beatriz heard the fear in her near-whisper. "You want me to stop?"

The kid rubbed his forehead, keeping his gaze on the OMC. Beatriz knew that he saw Alyssa Marsh's brain being wired to some tangle of kelp-grown neurons, but it was Beatriz who looked back at him. Perspiration dampened his hair and spread dark circles from his underarms.

Fear of the situation? she wondered. Or is he afraid of the OMC?

He was Islander extraction, there might be some superstition but physical abnormality itself would not scare him. A Merman would have a harder time facing a living brain, something an Islander would shrug off.

"No," he said. "No, he said to hook this one up no matter what. I wish he'd answer us."

The kid flicked a switch on his portable messenger and tried again.

"Captain, this is Leadbelly, over."

The only answer was a faint hum across the airways.

"Captain, can you read?"

Still no answer. Leadbelly sidestepped to the intercom beside the hatch. The near-weightlessness made it difficult for him to keep his back in contact with the bulkhead as he went.

"What's the code for Current Control?"

"Two-two-four," the tech said, never looking up from her work. "It's voice-activated from there."

He fingered the three numbers and instantly the glow in the chamber intensified to a near-glare. He armed his lasgun with a metallic sklick-click and Beatriz heard herself shout, "No! No!" just as Shorty propelled herself like a hot charge out of the service vent and onto Leadbelly's shoulders. The tech shrieked and jumped aside, and Leadbelly shouted a garbled message into the intercom.

His lasgun discharged and for Beatriz the world slipped into slow-motion. She saw the muzzle-flash coming directly at her, homing in on her as though pulled by a thread.

This can't be, she thought, a lasgun fires at light-speed.

It was such a short distance to the muzzle that the charge hadn't fully left the barrel yet when it hit the glow around Alyssa Marsh's brain. Beatriz watched the lasgun sucked dry of power in less than a blink. Leadbelly screamed and struggled to fling the hot weapon from himself, but it had melted to the flesh of his hands. Shorty clung tight to Leadbelly with both hands and feet, spinning them across the center of the chamber. The charge triggered some reaction in the glow, and Beatriz found herself surrounded by it, curiously unafraid.

All was quiet inside this bright sphere. Beatriz hung at the nucleus of something translucent, warm, suspended in yellow light.

This is the sensation that the webworks mimicked, she thought.

Beatriz found comfort in the familiar rush of some great tide in her ears and she felt, more than saw, the presence of light all around her.

The center, she thought. This is the center o... of me!

A hatchway appeared and though she did not have hands or feet she flung it open. There stood her brother when he was eleven, his chest bare and brown and his belt heavy with four big lizards.

"Traded three in the market for coffee," he said, and thumped a bag down on the table in front of her. "You won your scholarship to the college, but I'll bet it don't cover this. Let me know when you need some more."

She had been sixteen that day, and unable to know how to thank him. He hurried past her out the hatch, the dead lizards making wet sounds behind him.

A flicker of hatches raced past, each connected to the artery of years. Some dead-ended at years-that-might-have-been. She opened another, this time an Islander hatch of heavy weatherseal, and found herself inside her family's first temporary shelter on real land. It was an organic structure, like the islands, but darker and more brittle than those that ran the seas.

Her grandfather was there, hoisting a glass of blossom wine, and all of her family joined him in a toast.

"To our busy Bea, graduate of the Holographic Academy and new floor director for Holovision Nightly News."

She remembered that toast. It came on the 475th anniversary of the departure of Ship from Pandora. It had become an occasion for somber celebration over the years, with a place left empty at table. Originally this was intended to represent the absence of Ship, but in more recent times the gesture had become a memorial to a family's dead.

"Ship did us a great favor by leaving," her grandfather said.

There was much protestation at this remark. She hadn't remembered hearing this conversation years ago, but it pricked her curiosity now.

"Ship left us the hyb tanks, that's true," her grandfather said. "But we went up there and got them down. And we got them down without any help from anyone or anything inside of them. That's what will raise us up out of our misery - our genius, our tenacity, ourselves. Flattery's just another spoiled brat looking for a handout. You talk about ascension, Momma. We are the ascension factor and, thanks to Ship, we will rise up one day to greet the dawn and we will keep on risin... that right, little girl?"

The party laughter faded and a single hatch floated like a blue jewel ahead of her, waiting. It was like many of the Orbiter's hatches, fitted into the deck instead of the bulkhead. Across the shimmering blue of its lightlike surface the hatch cover read: "Present." She reached for the double-action handle and felt the cool satin of the well-polished steel in her palm. She pulled the hatch wide and dove inside.