The Ascension Factor

  Zentz was finished chewing out the major in charge of the power plant and the configuration of the kelp on the monitor hadn’t changed a bit. Nevi checked his fuel reserves: all four tanks full. He pressurized the fuel, retracted the hydrofoils and extended the airfoil.

  “We’re going back?” Zentz asked. His voice sounded eager, but not greedy.

  “No,” Nevi said, and smiled. “We’re going to pinpoint them from the air, then go in. We have enough fuel for almost an hour.”

  After an hour they’d be forced to set down on the water to extract more hydrogen, but Nevi planned to have everything that he needed aboard by then.

  Chapter 28

  The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

  —T. Robbins, from A Literary Encyclopedia of the Atomic Age

  Beatriz was hustled through the passageway and locked inside the Orbiter’s makeshift HoloVision studio with three techs from Brood’s crew. None of the three had been at the launch site killings, but none of them had anything to say to her, either. A large portable screen behind her hid the wet lights and mirrors that cluttered all six studio bulkheads. The same HoloVision logo she wore at the left breast of her jacket emblazoned the screen: an eye, bidimensional, but the pupil was a holo stage.

  Beatriz had never liked the claustrophobic world inside the studios. She and Ben had worked so well together because they both loved their years in the field, and they’d both passed up promotions to keep that up. Her recent promotion carried a lot of studio work, and her contract guaranteed a room with a view—on paper. She missed the sense of drifting she’d had, growing up an Islander.

  Aboard the Orbiter she was assigned a cubby rimside, more than a kilometer from the studio near the axis. From her cubby she watched Pandora wake and sleep above her bed. Her father, a fisherman, would be taking his midafternoon break right now. Inside the studio there was no day, no night.

  Her instructions from Brood were simple and cold: “Relax, we’ll do the work. You just read what’s in front of you when the red light goes on.”

  A small security camera mounted high on the bulkhead kept track of her every move. It was a toy, a trinket compared to the personalized cameras and triangulators that her team used at the launch site. HoloVision’s equipment got worse every year. She smourned her crew silently.

  They were the best, she thought. The took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Enough!

  She wondered whether Brood’s men had picked up all of her team’s gear. Rico made those sets, she thought, and those triangulators, too. Nobody who knew cameras could pass those up.

  And maybe that last scene is still inside.

  She felt her first rush of real hope. The cameras weren’t down at the launch site at all. They’re here, she thought, or at least they’re in orbit with us. She didn’t want to think about the tapes. For now, she wanted only to focus on the cameras. She couldn’t help wondering what they’d do with the tapes.

  Keep them, as backup. Record over them when their other tapes are full.

  She doubted that whatever this team planned would involve a whole lot of tape. But the techs had brought them along, her logic assured her of that.

  They might still be on the shuttle. She didn’t want to go back to that hatchway, where Beatriz glanced up at the surveillance camera. Is it a person behind that thing, she wondered, or tape?

  Brood’s men had shot those guards down.

  She didn’t think they’d waste the tape. The techs ignored her altogether. They worked quickly at several editing and sound stations, coordinating something among themselves. She suspected it had something to do with her.

  Maybe there’s no one behind it.

  The three-hour light flashed. Three o’clock in the afternoon marked the start of the assembly of the six-clock news. Getting the tapes was only one problem. Inserting them into a HoloVision Nightly News broadcast with Brood’s men watching posed another problem. She knew who could help her with the second problem, and it was the one person she most wanted to see.

  Mack could get a message groundside, coded to the right frequency and digitally encoded. She knew, because he’d done it once for her at Ben’s request. He was teaching me, she realized. Ben must’ve thought something like this might happen.

  Most Pandorans were too hungry to fight, she knew that. Thousands already slept in holes dug in the talus, under torn plastic vulnerable to demons and the weather. From her family she learned that fighting was only one way.

  She remembered something her grandfather had told her, something she’d told Dwarf MacIntosh last time: “Educate, agitate, organize.”

  Flattery had organized the world. Now Beatriz wanted to use that organization against him.

  Communication would do it. People had their bodies. Coordination of all those bodies would be the key to their freedom.

  How to get away with it? Maybe she couldn’t get away with it. What kind of message would she deliver then?

  It might save Ben and Rico, too, she thought, though in a part of her somewhere they were already beginning to disappear. She tried to make her shocked and exhausted mind think through all that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, all that there was to go.

  I’ve got to get to Mack, she thought. That is, if Brood hasn’t … hasn’t …

  She wouldn’t allow herself to complete the thought. She concentrated on what she had to work with. This small studio aboard the Orbiter had been her project all along, her excuse to stay close to the stars. It was a little larger than the one at launch site. Flattery had it installed to be sure that the Voidship project received the best documentation, the best publicity, the world’s complete attention. She knew now what its primary purpose had been all along—diversion, something to keep people looking up while Flattery stole their boots.

  The studio was divided into six engineering units and the one live set where Beatriz worked. Quarters were very cramped. Six editing screens and a couple of very large clocks kept them in touch with the world. A constant barrage of images rolled across the six screens as the editorial team groundside reviewed the day’s film from the field and made their selections. A small holo stage in the center of the room served for final mock-up and a large viewscreen behind it. Both the clocks and the growl in her belly told her things she didn’t want to know.

  “Three hours to air time,” she said.

  Her console indicated she was speaking into a dead microphone.

  She raised her voice. “We’re five hours behind schedule.”

  No answer. The techs worked as though she were a piece of furniture. They relayed tapes of their own groundside for editing and placement.

  Beatriz rolled her tape of the Organic Mental Core up one of the screens and suppressed a shudder. This was a person, a living, thinking brain, kept alive by attachment to a comatose host. She wondered what it was that caused the coma. She was certain that she knew who.

  “I need to talk with Dr. MacIntosh,” she said.

  She’d said it before, and the response was always the same—silence. She’d received the silent treatment from the techs since docking aboard the Orbiter. From the occasional glances in her direction she surmised this to be orders from Brood, rather than choice.

  Unlike counterparts of old, this OMC would be able to talk, using neuroelectrical pickups. When the time came it could communicate with the neuromusculature of the ship, feel everything that transpired aboard. This, Flattery reasoned, would keep the OMC sane where the original OMCs had failed.

  Clearly, Flattery didn’t want to face the kind of artificial consciousness that had brought humankind to Pandora. Some Pandorans still believed that Ship existed, and would return. The hyb tanks that had brought Flattery, Mack and Alyssa Marsh were evidence to Beatriz that Ship could be very much alive, God or not.

  If I can get one of these techs to start talking, that would be a wedge against Brood, she thought. And it might be a way to Mack.

&
nbsp; Current Control and MacIntosh were only a few meters down the passageway. Beatriz could practically feel the vibrations from his throaty speech, his huge body bashing about his offices. Current Control and the HoloVision remote studio shared a few kilometers of cable between them, but no hatchway. Both areas were soundproofed.

  Beatriz tried to remember what Mack had taught her about their hookups. He’d spent a lot of time orienting her during her trips aloft. What came to her were his philosophies and musings, the relaxing tone of his deep voice. She remembered nothing of the linkup between the two rooms. She had already tried a few electronic tricks of her own to contact him, but with no luck.

  He knows I’m due, she thought. Maybe he’ll come looking for me. She hoped that it wouldn’t mean walking into his own execution.

  Chapter 29

  Manipulating the kelp electronically is like making a marionette out of a quadriplegic. The trick becomes keeping it a quadriplegic.

  —Raja Flattery, from “Current Control from the Skies,” HoloVision feature

  Crista felt a pressure on her whole being. Not like the pressurized cabin, like air pressure, it was some indescribable containment of her self inside some huge envelope—like the pressure she imagined the positive pole of a magnet might feel when in the company of another positive pole.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of the kelp pulling this thing apart,” she said. “Flattery’s lab reports say it kept me alive underwater for twenty years. It can keep us alive …”

  “Can is the operative word here,” Ben said.

  He didn’t look her in the eye, but hung his head over her restraints as if staring at them would right the foil and set them on their way. “If what you say is true, it wants you alive. The rest of us are compost.”

  “The kelp’s not like that,” she said. “You’ve been listening to Rico. It’s … I knew it before Flattery’s people cut it back, remember? It kept me alive, for all we know it kept others alive the same way.”

  “Lots of people spend lots of time down under,” he muttered. “Nobody’s seen anything like what happened to you.”

  “Why just me?”

  When Ben’s gaze did meet Crista’s, goosebumps clustered her forearms. Everything that she knew about his kindness, his sacrifices for others, froze inside her with the chill of that look.

  “I’ve wondered that,” he said. “Others have wondered, too.”

  “That’s why Flattery never let me get to the sea,” she said. “He said it was to protect me, but I think he was just suspicious that I’m some kind of Avatan spy, a trigger of some sort. Maybe I was raised by a plant, but I can read people fairly well. Let me … touch the kelp. It will calm down, then, I know it will.”

  “Not a chance. If Flattery’s right, if Operations is right, your chemistry is different now. It could kill you. I don’t want anything to kill you.”

  “I don’t want anything to kill anybody,” she said, “but the kelp is confused. It’s just lashing out … nobody tells it anything …”

  With that the foil pitched upside-down. Ben hung on tight to a handhold, his face pressed into the plasteel bulkhead.

  Crista tried to speak, upside-down and against the pressure of her restraints. “Avata needs our help,” she said, “and we need Avata. You have to help me do this, Ben.”

  There was that strange, stunning snap in the air, the same snap that had stilled a mob for moments at the pier. It was like the discharge of some great capacitor.

  Crista felt their foil slowly roll, pull her tighter into her restraints, then right itself. She watched Ben drop his hands from his ears and sit up on the deck, shaking his head. The damaged foil moaned and chattered about them like mechanical teeth, but the fist of the kelp was gone.

  Crista saw the flicker of the intercom charging, then heard Rico’s tight voice: “Ben, look at the kelp.”

  Only one of the starboard lights still probed the dark, so the view that Crista and Ben had from the galley’s plaz was gray and black, dreamlike, cold. They hadn’t dared activate the kelp’s luciferase, it would make tracking too easy.

  A fine seawater spray wetted them both as they watched the easy dance of deepwater kelp. This was the same kelp that, moments ago, quivered with a tension so strong she thought it might uproot itself.

  Crista, herself, felt a relief that was more than just calm after the storm. It was a release, like the elation she had felt at the start of their journey when she slipped skyward, hitching her consciousness to the hylighter.

  “Can’t really see very well,” Ben said. “Look at the size of those vines! Some of them are a half-dozen meters across and we can’t even see bottom yet.”

  “That should tell you something,” she said. “It should give you an idea of what the kelp’s really like.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said it yourself. Some of those stalks are nearly as thick as this foil is wide. For the kelp it must’ve been something like handling a squawk egg with pliers to keep from crushing us.”

  “Maybe so,” Ben muttered. “We’re headed topside and the kelp’s apparently floating free. We’d better see what kind of damage we took before it changes its mind.”

  Lights dimmed in the galley, brightened and dimmed again.

  “Elvira can’t get the engines to fire,” Ben said. “That’s going to make a lot of things tough—including our oxygen production.”

  The gray hulks of kelp floated dreamlike outside their hull while the chunks of torn fronds and sediment ripped up by its struggle settled around them.

  “See?” she said. “The kelp means us no harm. If you would let me …”

  “We’re all staying put!” Ben said. “The kelp simply stopped. Maybe it got whatever it wanted, maybe that wasn’t us. No point in looking for more trouble.” He nodded toward the spray that had already soaked both of them and started pooling water across the galley deck. “We’ve got a few details to clean up. Let’s get at it.”

  Crista tugged at her harness.

  “I can’t do much until you get me out of this.”

  “Any damage back there?” Rico asked over the intercom.

  “I think we popped a cooling pipe,” Ben said. “It’s not much of a leak now that we’re surfacing. What do you have?”

  “We’re not terminal, but we’re hurt. Elvira says ‘topside,’ so topside we go. You two OK?”

  “We got a little wet,” he said, stamping his feet in the gathering pool.

  At that they both laughed—something she did not do often, something she’d discovered with him before. He opened a panel in the bulkhead beside her and reached inside.

  Water plastered his hair to his head. Crista’s felt just as flat, but when she saw herself reflected back in the plaz, a laugh still teasing her face, she liked what she saw. Her crop of wet white hair framed the green flash of her eyes. She saw that she had twisted in her harness, which explained why, now that things had quieted down, her right breast stung so badly. She wriggled herself free and tugged her clothes straight.

  “There’s a shutoff in here, somewhere,” Ben muttered. He poked his head inside and bumped it. Whatever he said was unintelligible.

  Crista’s gaze fell on the holostrips of the Nightly News field crew, strips that covered the whole interior bulkhead of the galley. Shots of Beatriz, Rico, Ben and a half-dozen bearded strangers were interspersed with location stills of Ben and Rico, Ben and Beatriz—several of Ben and Beatriz. Crista didn’t see Elvira up there.

  “Beatriz is beautiful,” she said, raising her voice so he could hear.

  “Very.”

  “You look happy together,” she said.

  “Yes,” he answered, also raising his voice so she could hear.

  Then she heard a curse and a thump and the water stopped spraying. Ben came out of the access cabinet and wiped his face with the least damp spot on his shirt. His green eyes looked right into her own.

  “When we were together, we were happy,” he said. He
did not turn to look at the pictures. “More often than not, we were on opposite sides of the world. Lately she’s been up there.” His thumb indicated the general direction of the Orbiter overhead.

  “Do you wish … otherwise?”

  “No,” he sighed. “It’s as it should be. I have things to do here.”

  Things to do! Crista thought. What she wanted him to say was, “It’s as it should be. Now I’ve met you.” But he didn’t say that.

  An odd feeling came over her, a dizziness and a weakness in the knees, a tingling in her temples. Like it had been with the hylighter, like her dreams.

  A year ago Crista had begun dreaming dreams that came true. At first, they came only in the night. She knew they weren’t dreams, but she despaired of calling them “visions.” Lately, they came all the time, and inside the last one she forgot to breathe. Crista was sure they came from the kelp, and they were getting more intense.

  She had … feelings, that she’d always explained as “dreaming somebody else’s dreams.” It was something she now knew came from Avata.

  Today, now, she saw two things: She saw Rico in a green singlesuit, and that suit was the fruit on a great vine of kelp. In the distance beyond him she saw a stand of kelp with a human growing from each great vine, looking like a seascape of bowsprits with interesting carvings, or like bait.

  The kelp grew a membrane, clear and goggle-like, about their eyes. It seemed a part of them, like fingernails, but never needed trimming. Their lungs would never want for air, their skimpy bones would soon forget land.

  The second vision pulled away from the first and showed her the kelp from a tremendous height. One kelp vine snaked skyward and a cold light, like luciferase, touched its tip. The vine, the kelp bed, the planet itself began to glow. In the light below she watched the kelp writhe for a blink, then convolute itself into what appeared to be an immense, glowing brain. She felt a sense of easy grace that only came to her now in dreams.