The Ascension Factor
Chapter 24

"It's the dust," Ben muttered, and shook his head. "If the kelp has him, he's probably drowned. We need to get out of here. There are demons, Flattery's peopl..."
He doesn't believe me, she thought. He thinks I'... I'...
A vision gelled in front of her out of thin air, one of Rico wet and gasping in the cavern. Rico tipped back his head and laughed, surrounded b... friendly feelings. It was a side of him she hadn't seen. Someone approached him, a friendly someone.
"Zavatans," she said, cocking an ear, "they will be coming up from the caverns."
"It's the dust, Crista," Ben insisted, "it'll wear off. These are hallucinations. We've got to find Rico and get out of sight. Flattery's peopl..."
"...re here," she said. "They're already here. It's not hallucinatio..." she giggled, "...t's cellophane."
She had unraveled some cellophane in her mind and she saw the sinister figures looking down from the clifftop. Two of them. She reeled her vision closer and saw that she knew them both from Flattery's compound: Nevi and Zentz. Zentz's face and body were grossly misshapen. With Nevi, it was his soul. This she could see in the boiling black aura that seethed from him and sought her out. It sniffed the wind with its black snout like a dasher on the hunt.
She felt Ben pull her backward through the rip in the Flying Fish. The bright sky trailing the storm forced her to squint and focus on a double rainbow that lazed in the sky above them. She wondered whether Ben might be right about the dust. The pink of the rainbow's arch blazed brightest of all the colors and it pulsed in time with her own pulse.
"Do you see it?" she asked.
"The rainbows?" Ben said. "Yes, I do. Give me your hand, I'll help you down here."
"Don't rainbows mean something?" she asked. "A promise of some kind?"
"Supposedly God placed a rainbow in the sky as a promise that he would never destroy the world by flood again," he said. "But that was Earth, and this is Pandora. I don't know whether God's promises are transferable. Here, give me your hand."
The impatience in his voice just made her move slower.
Rico's safe, she thought. He doesn't believe me, so he's worried.
She shielded her eyes from the glare and scanned the cliff. The clifftop was identical to the one in her vision, except for a void, a nothingness where she'd seen the images of Zentz and Nevi.
Another image of Rico, in the cavern. He reached out for the kelp frond that had brought him there and she felt him transported to the dead hylighter at their feet. He stood there, facing them, head cocked and hands on his hips. It was as if he were impatient, waiting for them to make up their minds.
"Look there," she said to Ben, "can't you see Rico?"
She pointed to his image, seating itself at the point where the hylighter touched the sea. He was smiling at her for the first time and beckoned her with a finger.
"I see the sun shining off the water," Ben said. "It's too bright to look at. You'd better be careful of your eyes."
"It's Ric..."
"We're dusted enough," Ben said.
He stepped down from the foil to the ground and reached up for her.
"Try not to touch the hylighter. We're probably safest scaling the cliff."
"No!"
The word was torn from her throat before she could think about it.
"Not the cliff," she said. "I feel something there. I saw them up there, Nevi and Zentz. They're after us."
Ben pulled her free of the wreckage and they stood on the unsteady footing of the slickrock beach.
"OK," he said, and sighed, "I believe you. If not the cliff, then where?"
She couldn't help looking at the sea.
"We can't go there," he said. "Please don't ask me to take you there. Maybe you can live in there, but I can't."
He glanced quickly around them, biting his lip.
"If you can see Rico, how do we get to him?"
She couldn't resist caressing the remnant of hylighter draped over the foil. Though a plant, and clearly dead, it emanated a warmth that pleased her. It tickled something in her memory, something distant about her childhood. The kelp had protected her, nurtured her, educated her chemically in the customs of her fellow humans. She knew at a touch that this hylighter was from the same stand.
She turned in a slow circle, scanning the beach. She knew Ben was wise in some things, that she had to have faith in him. Without the kelp's cilia, she, too would have died in the sea. Much was rushing back to her, in fragments and colors. What she wanted more than anything was to run to it, to bury herself in the kelp's great body, death or not.
That is selfish, some voice warned her. Selfish is no longer acceptable.
She had heard about the barrenness of the upcoast regions, and at first glance black rock was all she saw: sheer black cliff, then black rubble, then a foaming churn of green sea. But there was life among the rubble. Little bits of green squatted among rocks, clinging to crevices in the cliff side. Something, maybe the something that spoke inside her head, pointed her upcoast.
"There."
She took Ben's hand and pointed out a huge black boulder with a single silver wihi clinging to its top. It was about thirty meters upcoast, halfway between cliff and tideline.
"That's where we want to be."
That was when Nevi and Zentz stepped out from behind the boulder, lasguns drawn, picking their way across the rocks toward them. Crista wasn't surprised, nor frightened. She heard Ben mutter "Shit!" under his breath and saw his head twitch quickly left to right, looking for a dodge. But she knew it wasn't necessary. She knew.
The moment came together for her like a great conception. All the world silenced itself - the waves, the breeze, the cautious footsteps of two murderers clattering across wet stones.
"Hands on top of your heads, step away from the foil." Zentz delivered his orders with a shaky voice tinged with slobber.
"Yes," Crista told Ben, "that's where we want to be."
They clung to each other's hands in the stone-still afternoon and watched the huge boulder lift itself back from the ground behind Nevi and Zentz. It came up smoothly, quietly, as though on hinges. Neither man heard a thing.
"Hands on your heads!"
The boulder laid itself carefully down behind them and out of the shadow beneath it climbed a half-dozen men armed only with ropes and throwing nets.
"Tell me you see it, too," Ben whispered. "Tell me I'm not still dusted."
"It is as it should be," she whispered back, her voice a singsong. "There is a great moment at our feet, and it will not be stayed."
Something about the way Nevi's gaze met her own must have given it away. Without a backward glance he sprang sideways, beachward, and whirled. The first net was already settling over the surprised Zentz and another, poorly thrown, grazed Nevi's arms. Two flashes from his lasgun brought down both netmen, but Zentz flailed in a hopeless tangle. When Nevi whirled back, Crista Galli stared down the business end of his lasgun. Even at thirty paces it looked huge.
"I'll kill her," he announced, just loud enough for all to hear. "Trust me. I am very quick."
Everyone froze, and in the silence that went with this stillness Crista felt that they were all graceful subjects inside some great painting. She knew who the painter must be.
Nevi half-crouched in careful aim, his colorful face unreadable, his eyes fixed only on Crista Galli. She felt her head clearing, the return of wave-slaps against rock.
But there's somethin...
It was something she hadn't felt since she'd been dredged up from the sea, something familia...
"Connection," she whispered.
Ben breathed beside her and she felt it as her own breath. They were one person, pulses synchronized with rainbows, waves and the great heartbeat of the void. She knew the choices in his mind and marveled at the sacrifice he was prepared to make. She saw the play in his mind: spin her by the hand, get between her and Nevi, take the hit while the netmen brought him down. At the moment he elected to move, she touched his shoulder.
"No," she said, "it's not necessary. Can you feel it?"
"I feel those sights on my chest," he said. "He's the only thing standing between us and -"
"Destiny?" she asked. "There is nothing between us and destiny."
The image of Rico stood behind Nevi, gesturing wildly to her, still smiling.
Nevi came out of his crouch, moved carefully across the rain-wet rocks toward them. She liked the smell of the rain, a different wetness than the smell of the sea, easier on the lungs but not as rich. The scent of the sea, of the dead hylighter, lay heavily beside her like a sleeping lover.
"Do you see?" she asked Ben, and smiled.
"I think I do," he said.
Nevi barked a few orders and two of the surviving netmen slowly began to disentangle Zentz. Crista Galli had that feeling again, the feeling of being a subject in a painting.
"Be still," she whispered.
Ben didn't move.
Nevi stopped walking, a look of surprise washed over his face.
"Where are they?" he shouted, and he shaded his eyes even though the sun was to his back. "Where did they go?"
Crista suppressed a giggle, and the figure of Rico applauded silently from behind Spider Nevi.
"I don't understand," Ben said. "Are we invisible?"
"We're not invisible," she said, "we're simply not visible. He can't pick us out of this landscape. I think it's a trick that Rico has taught the kelp."
Ben squeezed her hand and started to speak, but that was when the shooting started.
***
I will this morning climb up in spirit to the high places, bearing with me the hopes and the miseries of my mother; and ther... upon all that in the world of human flesh is now about to be born or to die beneath the rising sun I will call down the Fire.
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe
Twisp walked Kaleb to the flickering lights at the Oracle's edge. This was a small cavern, a subset of the great root that Flattery had burned out a few thousand meters downcoast. This was a hushed place, a place to breathe iodine on the salt air and feel the cool pulse of the sea.
Kaleb trod the well-worn path with his father's bearing - tall, shoulders back, large eyes alert to every nuance of light and motion. While his parents lived no one had consulted the Oracle as often as he. In the dim light by the poolside Twisp saw that Kaleb's adolescent gangliness had transmuted into the epitome of athletic grace.
"You are the man your father would most like to know," Twisp said.
"And you are the man my father most liked."
The two of them stood together at the poolside, watching the flickerings of kelp just beneath the surface. Both men kept their voices low, though the kelp chamber carried every whisper to its farthest crannies. Behind them, at a discreet distance, stood the complement of Zavatans who tended the pool. They busied themselves cleaning and reassembling one of the great borers that helped them tunnel out their habitations in the rock.
"When your parents met they were younger than you are now," Twisp said. "Is there someone in your life?"
The perceptible blush that rose from Kaleb's collar reminded Twisp even more of the young man's father. Kaleb's skin was darker, like his mother's, but his naturally kinked, reddish hair was a gift from Brett Norton. "Yes? So there is someone?"
"Victoria is a big place," he said, "I've seen a lot of women." His voice bordered on sullen, bitter.
"'A lot,'" Twisp mused, "and which one broke your heart?"
Kaleb snorted, half-turned away, then turned back to face Twisp. He was smiling.
"Elder," he said, "you are truly a force to be reckoned with. Am I that transparent?"
Twisp shrugged.
"It is a recognizable affliction," he said. "I endured it myself one day. Thirty years, and I still daydream."
He didn't go on. It was more important that Kaleb do some talking.
Kaleb sat at the poolside, dangling his feet in the water, caressing the kelp with his bare soles.
"When I travel the kelpway, and take my father's branch, I see you as he saw you himself. You were good to him - firm, kind, you let him talk too much." Kaleb laughed. "He was a good man, I know. And you, you were a good man, too." He bowed his head and shook it slowly. "I would like to be a good man, but I think I'm different. My life is different."
Then he lowered himself into the pool and lay on his back on the kelp as though reclining on a great couch. His head and chest rested above water. Even in the colorful blue and red flickerings of the kelp-lights about the cavern Twisp could see a new life come into Kaleb's large eyes.
"How are you different, Kaleb?" he asked. "You breathe, you eat, you blee..."
"You know why we're here," Kaleb interrupted. His voice was firm now, none of the hesitation of youth deferring to age.
"How many people died out there today because they wanted to tear Flattery apart but settled for tearing anything apart?"
Twisp remained silent, and Kaleb went on.
"I'll be truthful, I respect you, I want your respect for myself, I want your approval that what I'm doing is right. If this doesn't work, we will probably have to attack him, you know."
His voice was becoming dreamy, and Twisp knew that the kelp was gathering him in, guiding him down the eddies of the past. Twisp steered him past thoughts of failure, past the matter that gave him the sense of failure.
"There is a woman who won't let you sleep," Twisp said. "Tell me about her."
"Yes," Kaleb said, closing his gray eyes.
Kaleb's eyes, like his father's, emanated a maturity beyond his years.
"Yes, she's here. She had two wots before we met. Qita, she knew the kelp as you and I have known it. As an ally. She had other lovers, but I was her last. As she will be the last for me."
This wrenched out of him with such an agonized moan that Twisp's hair raised up on his neck. Kaleb splashed the pool with both fists, but stayed immersed in the kelp, quieting with the caress of the waves.
"Elder," Mose whispered, tugging at Twisp's sleeve, "did you see his eyes?"
Twisp nodded, and before he could respond the kelp's display of flickering lights took on an intensity he'd never seen before. It was like one of the winter magnetic disturbances in the night sky, with great leaping rainbows of color that seemed to transcend water, rock and air. Mose stepped back from the pool in fear, but Twisp reached a hand to stop him.
"Old friends," Twisp whispered. "They are glad to see each other."
Perhaps Kaleb's bloodlines led to this moment. His mother, Scudi Wang, and her mother before her had been the first two to communicate with the waking being that humans called "kelp" and the kelp called "Avata."
When Twisp met Scudi Wang she was a dark young woman passionately working in her mother's wake to reestablish the kelp worldwide. In her own words, she "mathematicked the waves," and in doing so made Current Control possible, a system that saved thousands of Islander lives and revolutionized travel in Pandora's seas.
Scudi Wang was beloved by the kelp - this Twisp had heard from the kelp itself long before Kaleb was born. When Flattery attacked the kelp, lobotomized it, Scudi ordered her inheritance, Merman Mercantile, to stop trading with him. She and Kaleb's father were assassinated three days later.
It seemed to Twisp that Kaleb took on his mother's features as he lay there in the pool. His hair appeared darker, and so did his skin. The kelp enveloped him as though he were in the palm of a giant hand. The lights around them leaped and danced to some silent music. Twisp recalled that day when Scudi placed her hands into the sea and pleaded with the kelp, "Help us," and it did. It saved their lives, and that moment had changed his life forever. It had changed all of their lives.
In the years since Scudi's death she had become something of a Pandoran historical monument, with many plaques and statues erected in her honor. When a massive earthquake ravaged the old Current Control site undersea, the carved glass statue of Scudi Wang was found intact, clutched in the fronds of a nearby stand of kelp. That sign of love from the kelp, that recognition of a symbol enraged Flattery and he entered into a vendetta against the kelp that continued to this day.
Twisp watched Kaleb recline on the back of the kelp root and it seemed as though the root surged up to cradle the young man closer.
"Twisp," he called from the pool, "that was what my mother wanted to do, isn't it? Shut off all supplies to Flattery, starve him out. All these years I have hunted in vain for the day she died, and now I have i..."
Kaleb started to weep, and Twisp had a difficult time making out his words.
"It would have worked then, it would have worked. But now he owns everything, everythin... and now there is no way. No way short of a miracle to reach all of the people at onc... to get them all to shut him out would tak... would take a sign from Go..."
His voice faded into a hum that seemed to keep time with the red and blue lights.
***
Increase the number of variables, but the axioms themselves never change.
- Algebra II
Beatriz liked the feel of the free-fall spin. She kept her eyes closed and imagined herself sprawled across one of those warm organic beds the islanders grew. She wanted to be in a bed like that now with Dwarf MacIntosh, on some other world, under some other star. But of course a bed like that made no sense in near-zero-gee.
MacIntosh gave her one more gentle shove and drifted them both into "the webworks." This was a cavernous room at the Orbiter's tubular axis, sometimes called the "privacy park," often used for naps or meditation between duties, or for an occasional tryst by a desperate pair of lovers. A fine white netting crisscrossed the area, segmenting the huge space into a blur of booths and bins. Holo scenes turned some sections of web work into fantasy worlds, further removing the occupants from the worries of life aboard the Orbiter. All this Beatriz knew from her last tour, so today she kept her eyes shut tight.
"The disorientation is lasting longer this time," she told MacIntosh. "I really don't want to open my eyes."
"After what you went through today, I'm not surprised," he said. "I wouldn't want to open them, either."
She heard his fingers clicking at the keys on his belt messenger, and felt the sudden play of a warm light across her exposed hands and face.
"Well, we're now at Port of Angels, that lush Islander resort you've heard so much about. It's warm, feel it?"
Yes, the movement of air across her cheeks was warm, caressing. She could imagine herself on the beach at Port of Angels, letting her hair dry in the suns and stirring a cold drink. A plate of mango and papaya slices waited at her elbow. There was no wavesound here in the Orbiter, no pulse of the surf against her back that sometimes took her breath awa...
She opened her eyes. A sandy beach stretched away from her in both directions. Greenery poured over the clifftops down to the beach, and several little huts waited under their matched hats to cool her sun-drenched skin. As the two of them turned, the holo turned, responding to a reference point in the messenger.
The holo came complete with their footprints in the sand, following them up from the edge of a blue-green sea. The fictional ferry that had transported them to this illusion had already settled under the waves, leaving only a swirl of current and a trail of bubbles toward the horizon. Sea-pups yapped and dove from the rocks that lined the harbor, hunting fish startled out of hiding by the ferry.
"We needed a few minutes alone," MacIntosh said. "It will take more than a few minutes to clean up the mess up here, track them all down. We've got an exceptional crew, that's why they're up here. Warning's out, so this Brood doesn't stand a chance."
He held one of the overlarge loops at her belt to steer them lazily around inside the holo.