The Ascension Factor

She had the same sense of a headlong tumble, like her early clumsy progress in the near-zero-gravity of the Orbiter's axis. She sensed everything about her as though she had a body, and that body was hyper-alert, but she still saw no evidence of one. She sensed others, too, not far away, and part of this sense told her she had nothing to fear. The translucence of the glow about her folded and thickened, forming a shadow at her left shoulder. In a blink it precipitated into Dwarf MacIntosh.

"Beatriz!" He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. "Now I know I've died," he laughed, "I must be in heaven."

"We haven't died," she said. "But we may have gone to heaven. Something's happened with the kelp hookups. I know that I'm still holding onto them outside the OMC chamber, but I also know that I'm here with yo..."

"Yeah, the kelp hookups and holo stage in Current Control got a glow to them, then the viewscreen... the whole world seemed to be shining down there. At first I thought it had something to do with those goons that Flattery sent up here. Now I think it has more to do with the kelp disturbances, the grid collapse. I think that your friend Mr. Ozette and Crista Galli are at the bottom of this."

"But how? We're in orbit. The kelp we touch here touches nothing else. It could just be a psychic disturbance, but then you wouldn't be here with me."

"It's the light," Mack said. "The kelp uses chemicals to communicate, this we've known for some time. Now we've taught it to use light. That holo stage I built for experimentation - it works perfectly, and all components came from the kelp, only the kelp has gone a few steps further. The kelp takes pieces of light, breaks them into components, encodes them chemically or electrically, then reproduces them at will. It's something I refined from what cryptographers used to call the 'Digital Encoding System.' You know more about holography than I do, you tell me what's going on."

"If you're right," she said, "if this is the kelp's holography, then it's learned to use light as both a wave and a particle. We can hug each other, yet we're just holo projections of some kind, right? Maybe the kelp has found another dimension."

"Yes," a woman's voice said, "we are the reorganization of light and shade. Where light goes, we go."

"Are yo... Avata?" Beatriz asked.

A gentle laugh replied, a laugh like moonlight across flat water. A third figure began its mysterious materialization out of the glow. It was a woman, as radiant as the light around them, and because of that she was barely visible. Beatriz recognized her immediately.

"Crista Galli," she gasped. She looked around for sign of another figure, for Ben, but all she saw was the translucent sphere that held them.

"Don't worry, Beatriz, Ben and Rico are with me. As you and Dr. MacIntosh are with the Orbiter crew. What they see now are the shells of our beings, the husks of ourselves. What we meet here is the being itself."

"But I can see you, hear you," Mack said. "Beatriz and I actually touched."

Crista laughed again, and Beatriz felt a giggle coming that she couldn't suppress.

I am safe here, she thought. Brood, Flattery, they can't get me here.

"That's right, we're safe," Crista said. Beatriz realized then that thought was as good as speech in this strange place. Or is it a place?

"Yes, this is a place. It is a who as well as a what and a where. Dr. MacIntosh, we have substance because our minds have made a perceptual jump along with the light. Things change to accommodate our differing subconscious. Did you see a lot of hatches?"

Beatriz watched him hold out his hands, look down at his feet, puzzled.

"Yes, I did, bu..."

"And one reminded you of something pleasant, so you opened it?"

"Yes, and I wound up here."

"So did I," Beatriz said. "But an earlier one led m... back. Back to my family years ago."

"It was Avata's way of reassuring you," Crista said. "It took you to a familiar, comfortable place. You have been terrified lately. Avata does not want your terror. She wants your expertise."

"Expertise?" Beatriz swept a hand out to indicate their surround. "After this, what could I possibly offer?"

"You'll see. Think of this as Shadowbox, as the biggest holo studio in the world, with nearly the whole world as its stage. We will put Flattery at its center, show him off to the world. What then?"

"Stop people from destroying each other," Mack said. "They have not been able to get at him, so they will destroy his engines of power. If they do that, they endanger all of us, Avata included. Exposing Flattery might be more dangerous than you think."

"But look at our method," Beatriz said. "It's incredibly powerful. It will appear as a message from the gods, a vision, a miracle."

"I saw light shimmering above all kelp stands from Current Control," Mack said. "Is that really happening?"

"Yes," Crista nodded, "it is."

"Then we already have the world's attention, right? Everybody must've stopped in their tracks to take a look."

"My people stopped long enough to enjoy the light show," someone said. "They're heading for Kalaloch with everything they have."

Another figure precipitated out of light, a muscular male figure with red hair. Though Beatriz had never met Kaleb Norton-Wang before, she realized that she knew his past nearly as well as her own. At the same moment, she realized this was true of Crista Galli and Mack, as well.

Then they know me, too, Beatriz thought, and saw Mack's responding grin.

"We are part of Avata, now," Crista said. "Others float this drift, too, but we are Avata's ambassadors to our own kind. You, Dr. MacIntosh, believed me to be a manufacture of the kelp. Until this day I, myself, did not know my origins. I owe my life to Avata, my birth to humankind, and my allegiance to both. Are we all not of the same mind?"

Beatriz agreed. "We are. Flattery must be stopped, the killing must stop. Can we do it without becoming just another death squad?"

Beatriz paused, felt a surge of light within her and watched a replay of the encounter with Nevi on the beach. Then she discovered something interesting about being one with Avata - all of them could talk at once and she could follow everything perfectly.

Kaleb said, "I can speak to all of my people, using the kel... I mean, Avata, as you used it to beat Nevi. Who could ignore a giant holo in the sky?"

"I didn't use it to defeat Nevi," Crista said. "I was merely a witness. Avata and Rico worked out a magic between them, but neither used the other."

"I stand corrected," Kaleb said, and bowed slightly. "How are we to cooperate with Avata?"

"We initiated it by seeking contact with Avata in the first place. Each of us has done that, for our own reasons, which we all now know," Crista explained. "Where there is kelp, Avata can project holos. As you can see, these are being refined even at this moment. Our holo selves, here, can hug each other and we can feel it!"

"Our problem is Flattery," Mack said. "He has never been easily persuaded, and now that he's made an emperor of himself he believes only himself capable of rational decisions. Anything else is a threat. He is paranoid, therefore it's a given that he's set traps of one kind or another to protect himself from attack. Remember, he's a psychiatrist, too. He can defend himself from both emotional and physical attack. The ultimate threat, of course, is that if he dies, Avata and, eventually, all humans die as well. We can't have him panic and start lighting fuses."

"Why can't Avata jus... capture him, as it has taken us?" Kaleb asked. "He's not the type to kill himself, and it would buy us some time."

"Flattery takes excruciating pains to stay away from the kelp," Crista said. "He won't even have kelp-paper products in his compound. He must be drawn out to the kelp."

"Or driven out," Kaleb said.

"Or the kelp has to come to him," Beatriz said. "Maybe that's possible. There are the Zavatan..."

Yes, a voice that surrounded them said, Yes, the Zavatans. Suddenly the light cleared around them and Beatriz saw what was left of Kalaloch sprawled out, wounded, beneath her. She floated above the settlement at a great height, with a comfortable sense of well-being that could only be wind buoying her.

"Ah, Beatriz, you have found the hylighter," Crista's voice said. "Let us all join hands in Avata and be with her, now."

Beatriz was vaguely aware of her existence in the light. She felt Mack's hand on her right and Kaleb's to her left, but the sensations she received were from her hylighter perceptions, and these steered her in a tightening circle high above Flattery's Preserve. Three more hylighters tacked her way, and each one snapped its full sail in their traditional greeting.

She hovered directly above the blackened remains of the earlier hylighter explosion. Hundreds of people scrambled in and out of the cover of rubble, pressing in on Flattery's compound. Many of them wore the drab fatigues of his own security forces.

"We must get to Flattery before they do," Crista said. "If he's killed, there may be no hope for Avata, no hope for any of us."

Beatriz valved off some hydrogen and dropped closer, tightening her gyre. Though certain of the combatants below pointed upward to her presence, none raised a weapon or fired on her.

Everyone topside is on one side now, she thought. Exploding a hylighter would be suicide.

She wondered whether Flattery had any faithful snipers in the nearby hills.

Now that she was only a few hundred meters above the compound she noticed dozens of people in orange singlesuits popping out of underground cover throughout the area. The dozens became fifty, a hundred, mor... all Zavatans of the Hylighter Clan. Swiftgrazers had fled the fire zone and scrambled into their burrows about the compound, and now the Zavatans were placing small orange flags at the entrances to these burrows.

They're showing the villagers the way into Flattery's bunkers, she thought. If we can get inside first, we might be able to trap him.

"Excellent!" Mack's voice said. "And even if we don't, he has his seaward escape and we drive him straight into Avata."

The other three hylighters were immense, their supple tendrils dragging ballast nearly fifty meters below their gasbag bodies.

From this vantage point she had the opportunity to see the wildlife from Flattery's Preserve scattered at the periphery of the scene. They had been a luxury, these mysterious Earthside animals. They got food and health care when people starved, but she did not regret their survival.

The people will care for them at least as well as Flattery did, she thought. Ben was right, there isn't a shortage of food, just a very selective distribution.

She drifted low enough to the ground to make out individual Zavatans waving at her and shouting their greetings. The tips of her two longest tentacles stung when they touched the wihi tops. This close to the ground she found maneuvering nearly impossible, but felt no fear-sense from her hylighter host.

Fear not, human, the Avata voice said. Let the ending for this spore-bag mark our birth together on Pandora.

"What do you mean, 'ending'?"

Unlike humans, we crush ourselves under our own weight when grounded. Without the ultimate fire our spore-dusts are trapped forever inside their shells.

"You mean, unless you explode your spores are sterile?"

Yes. Now, you see, we are already too low to recover. I will live in you, now. Hurry. The others, too, must hurry. Find each tentacle a hole, chase Flattery out. Avata wil... Avat...

Beatriz felt as though a ballast rock lay on her chest, she could barely breathe. One by one her ten tentacles found burrows marked by the Zavatans and began their twining into the depths of Pandoran stone. She heard the other three hylighters valving off their hydrogen nearby.

"What is this like for them?" she wondered to her friends. "Like a mother smothering a crying child to save the village?" Then she was alive in the tentacles. It was like having ten sets of eyes, and the light that grew from the dying hylighter turned a groping mystery into a warren of horrors. Eyes looked back at her - eyes and tiny, needlelike teeth pulled back in a hissing snarl. She pushed forward and they attacked, biting off chunks of tentacle as she backed them further into the maze.

"I can't stand it!" she screamed. "They're biting my face! They're horrible littl..."

"Beatriz, listen to me."

It was Mack's voice. Mack was nearby, but he didn't know what was down here, he hadn't seen these littl... things biting and biting, and down here she couldn't close her eyes because it seemed that the whole hylighter became eyes to her.

"Beatriz, talk to me," Mack said. "Don't pull back, now. I'm here, we're all here, holding hands in Avata. We're holding hands in Avata and you're in the Orbiter, holding a kelp hookup. Do you feel me beside you? I'm setting down beside you now."

The Avata voice spoke to her. It sounded like Alyssa Marsh.

Remember it as holding hands, even if you know it wasn't so. When you tell the story, say that you all held hands. It is a symbol, these clasped hands, as the clenched fist is a symbol. Choose which of these you would pass down. Avata taught through the chemistry of touch, the "learning-by-injection" method, as some called it. Humans keep their kind alive by symbols and legends, by myths.

She felt him. She felt a bulk press against her own and the weight on her chest eased off. She could breathe, and wondered whether hylighters breathed, too.

We ar... more similar to yo... than different, the presence said. I will enjoy a deep breat... when you are fre... to take one.

The swiftgrazers kept at her, their little mouths biting, snatching off bits of flesh from her fac...

From this hylighter's tentacles, the voice reminded her.

"I'm down."

This was Crista Galli's voice.

"Me, too," Kaleb said. "Let's kick some ass!"

The burrows were too narrow for the swiftgrazers to launch their typical swarming type of attack. Tentacles pressed them further into their burrows and all they could do was turn for a savage little nip every meter or so. Beatriz felt that she had snaked about half of the length of her tentacles into the ten burrows when they broke into the open. What she saw there with her battered stubs of hylighter flesh was a sight to make her gasp.

A blur of fast little animals streaked into a magnificent garden, a place so beautiful that Beatriz thought she must be in the throes of some hylighter death-vision. She heard cries and groans from the others as they encountered the vicious swiftgrazers and she tried to comfort them by concentrating on the scene before her.

"You're close," she said, "don't give up, you're so close."

Her wounded stubs sniffed the blossoms thick in the green foliage. Mosses and ferns hung down the black-glazed ceiling and carpeted most of the walls. She could not stop the light from spilling out of her into the chamber, but she wouldn't have chosen to even if it had been possible.

She heard other screams, then. Screams of a man being shredded to bone. She saw him, an older man, flailing at the panicked swiftgrazers with a pruning rod. He seemed to melt at first, then he toppled and his screams were muffled by hundreds of little bodies upon him.

A couple of big cats came to the fray. They were bigger than dashers, stronger, but they were no match for the tide of swiftgrazers that continued to pour from the thirty other tunnels nearby. Troops raced inside from an opening across the lagoon, firing their lasguns and smoking up the place. They, too, were no match for the fury of the swarm.

A foil that must've been Flattery's fled beneath the surface of the pool, the splash of its crash-dive drenched the walls. There was nothing more she could do here. Rather than watch the horror, she withdrew to Avata and to the comfort of the light.

***

Ferdinand of Arago... has always planned and executed great things which have filled his subjects with wonder and admiration and have kept them preoccupied. One action has grown out of another with such rapidity that there never has been time in which men could quietly plot against him.
- Machiavelli, The Prince

Flattery heard trouble before he saw it. He had secured the upper bunker system and moved his most trusted personnel to the smaller office complex adjacent to the Greens. It was cramped, but it met his needs and could not be penetrated from above. Here he would have the luxury of waiting out the results of the fighting topside.

"If we sit tight here we can watch everything resolve around us," he told Marta. "Fires burn themselves out, people get too tired or hungry to lift a weapon - then we'll sort out who's who. It will be dark soon. No one will want to be out there in the dark with a breached perimeter. Demons."

He couldn't suppress a shudder and he supposed, under the circumstances, that it didn't matter. Marta and the others were here because they knew him best and they shared his passion for leaving Pandora. They were all a little giddy after the quick move to his private bunker. It helped that there were few claustrophobics on Pandora.

Flattery was pleased to see that, even though they were under fire, his people rallied even more strongly to his cause. Still, he double-latched the security hatch behind him when he returned to the Greens.

If we're required to stay down here for any length of time, I'll have to bring them in here, he thought. I'll put that off as long as possible.

Throughout his life on Moonbase, from his implantation in a surrogate womb to liftoff aboard the Earthling, Flattery remembered no place that was private, unguarded. Part of his training as a psychiatrist had taken this into account. The ultimate privacy was death, he knew this lesson well, and it was because he knew this that he was designed to be the executioner of his species. Who was better trained than a Chaplain/Psychiatrist to recognize the Other - artificial intelligence, alien intelligence? And who could be prepared better to deal with such a threat properly? Moonbase had made the right decision, of this he was certain. Of this he was truly proud.

Pride comes before a fall, a voice said from the back of his head. He shrugged it off with the shudder.

It was possible that he had erred slightly in this matter of the kelp. He needed the kelp - Pandora needed the kelp - therefore keeping it alive was not so much a matter of prudence as necessity. The first C/P on Pandora had ordered the kelp destroyed and that act had very nearly destroyed what remained of humanity and the planet itself. Pruning was risky, Current Control was risky, because there was always more kelp than people to control it. Ten years ago it had already gotten out of hand and he had been forced to concentrate solely on stands that marked important trade routes around Pandora's new coastlines.

Then, five years ago, Crista Galli came into his life. He had suspected at the start that she was an agent of the kelp. He should've known better, but this kind of wariness had kept him ahead of the kelp all along. A chromosome scan of the Galli girl proved she was human. He'd had the tech who did the scan killed with the kelp toxin, and so began the rumors about the death-touch of Crista Galli. Subsequent adjustments to her blood chemistry provided opportunity for other evidence against her. These rumors had suited his purposes better than entire legions of security.

A well-placed rumor along with some sleight-of-hand has immeasurable value in political and religious arenas, he thought.

Flattery was comfortable in spite of the conflict raging around him. In fact, he had to control his glee at the prospect of the aftermath.

This will adjust the population problem, he mused. Old Thomas Malthus comes through again.

The survivors who opposed him would starve, it was that simple. He had all the time in the world, all the world's resources at his fingertips. From his bunker he had access to three of the largest food bins in the world - enough grain and preserved foods to keep five thousand people healthy for at least ten years. The Greens would not provide enough fresh fruit for everyone, but he and a select cadre could be quite happy there indefinitely. All he had to do was wait it out.

His first warning of trouble inside his personal perimeter was a faint hissing that he heard above the wave-slaps in his pool. At the same time he heard high-pitched squeaking above him, then intruder alarms went off. Most of his sensors topside were gone, destroyed or covered by rubble. These, placed in the dozens of swiftgrazer burrows, were not true visual sensors but presence-activated alarms. Flattery summoned his caretaker and the squeaking intensified all around them.

"What is it?" Flattery asked. "It says 'level A activity.'"

"Swiftgrazers," the caretaker said. "Level A is set for them, since they're the most common intruder into the fissures. This shows a lot of them, and deeper than they're usually found."

"This squeaking - it's getting louder."

"There's a lot of them, all right," the caretaker said. He studied the sensor scan and bit his prominent lower lip. "And they're still coming this way."

"Trigger your trapsets."

The caretaker pressed a red spot on the scanner. The hissing that had become squeaks now rose to high-pitched shrieks of anger and terror.

At that moment a few dozen brown swiftgrazers tumbled from a fissure above Flattery and to his right. They were uncomfortably close, spilling from above the hatchway to Flattery's bunker.

"You'd better clean these up here. We don't want them established -"

"They're still coming," the caretaker said. He pointed further back to where there was obvious movement in the foliage against the wall. "I'll need some help here."

"We're not bringing any more people into the Greens than necessary. You told me it was safe to keep these rodents around, you take care of them. Now!"

"Yes, sir." The older man sagged, sighed and armed his lasgun. "There's a lot of them," he said, "I'll need more charges."

A flurry of little bodies and shrieks caught their attention to the left of the pool, near the loading dock and Flattery's foil. Behind them a bright, white light broke through the cover of ferns. Now Flattery could see a similar light approaching through the fissure above his hatch.

"I don't like this," Flattery said. "What do your precious sensors say now?"

The caretaker flurried his nervous fingers across the face of his portable control unit.

"Dead," he said. "Something's shorted out the power to all of the sensors."

Flattery heard the low-throated purr of Archangel behind him, and for the first time realized that it wasn't merely a handful of swiftgrazers invading his garden. In blinks there were hundreds of them. Something had whipped them to a fever pitch, and they displayed none of their usual wariness of humans.

"Start shooting," he said, his voice low. "I'll get some fire-power in here."

By the time he had undogged his hatch and signaled for help, the light inside the Greens was too great a glare to let him pick out anything but little blurs of movement across his path. He hurried to dockside and secured himself inside the foil.

Flattery had started the foil's engines and begun his predive checkout when he realized he'd left the mooring lines secured. He glanced up at the caretaker, who was firing wildly at shadows in the greenery, and saw him suddenly disappear under a thick wad of fur. It was as though he'd slipped on a giant coat of swiftgrazers and then disappeared. The coat melted to the deck and disappeared, leaving only the man's weapon, bloody tatters of clothing and a scatter of fleshy bones. Archangel, too, was no match for them, and Flattery had his doubts about the five-man security squad beginning their sweep.

"Not even smart enough to shut the hatch behind them," he mumbled through gritted teeth. "If they don't stop the..."

Flattery didn't have to dwell on the unpleasantness, he had plenty of evidence of swiftgrazer vengeance all around him. The squad had pushed them back far enough that Flattery could make a dash for the mooring lines and free himself from the pier. His only escape now would be to dive out of the Greens and wait. The light in the Greens was so bright that he could barely read his instruments. It nearly surrounded the pool now and he was sure it was some kind of weapon that the Shadows were using against him.

"Rag-tag bunch of bums," he hissed. "Why don't they leave well enough alone? Even they must be smart enough to know I'll be off this planet soon."

As he flooded the dive compartments he thought he saw faces swirling in the light of the Greens - Crista Galli's face, Beatriz Tatoosh, Dwarf MacIntosh and some young fuzzhead that he didn't recognize. He shook his head and attended to his instruments. As he settled beneath the surface of the pool he breathed easier. The foil's atmosphere was contrived, it was not the cool freshness of the Greens, but it was heaven now to Flattery.

His intent was to wait out the incident safely suspended in the waters of his personal lagoon. The foil had full rations for six, enough to last him months, and it could continue to manufacture its own fuel and air supply as long as the membranes held out. They were Islander-grown from kelp tissue in a method perfected several hundred years ago, and had been known to last up to fifty years.

The light above him continued to intensify and the water began a rhythmic chop that alarmed him. He had been reluctant to venture into open water now that the kelpways were down. The idea of picking his way through a tangle of kelp by instruments alone dried his mouth and he forced himself to slow his breathing.

"I'll head for the launch site," he told himself. "The nightside supply shuttle should be ready for launch in three hours."