DV 4 - The Ascension Factor

by Frank Herbert

  He looked less skeptical, but kept his guarded posture. She bit back the temptation to talk about her bees, because bees meant honey and fewer than a handful of people knew about her honey production.

  Once her plants were bedded she misted them well and swept her clippings and stray dirt away from the walk. She felt a little nervous. She was stuck in town without transportation. Her neighbor, Billie, had given her a ride to the job first thing this morning. Her Cushette, though practically new, had burned out another something that meant it wouldn't start. She didn't like it in town, anyway. It wallowed in tight places and it always frustrated her. There was the tram into the central area with a transfer out but it was probably shut down because of the mobs. She didn't relish the idea of walking the ten klicks home without Doob to protect her.

  "Stella, my dear, are you finished out here?"

  Mrs. Wittle, the hostess, beckoned her from the front hatchway. She was a gray-haired, prim woman with an honest smile for everyone and a fair skin that could only be Merman-born. Though soft-spoken and delicate, Mrs. Wittle had singlehandedly saved a boatload of Pandora's finest art during that first series of quakes in '73. She had been a volunteer at the museum desk down under when the collapse came and commandeered an old delivery sub. Instead of saving herself, she loaded artwork into the sub even as the seams of the museum dome split, sending streams of waterspray powerful enough to slice a human in half.

  "Yes, Mrs. Wittle. Do you like them?"

  The elderly woman glanced down at the walk and her eyebrows raised ever so slightly.

  "Lovely," she said, and sighed. "They were right about you, my dear. But now I have a problem and perhaps you can help me."

  "What is it?"

  "Some of the help that we were counting on haven't shown up today . . . the troubles, you know. Could you stay awhile longer and greet our guests at the door? I have the guest list here, and name tags are on the table just inside the hatch. Of course, you are welcome to stay as my guest and enjoy the reception. Would you do that for me?"

  Stella had strong feelings about rich people, and they were strong negative feelings. A hundred meters away the starving poor lined up for hours to buy limited rations with their hard-earned pay. Servants of the rich handed over cards stamped "Exception" at the high-security back door loading dock and filled their vans with an abundance of food. Stella had worked parties like this before to be able to take home leftovers. The pay meant nothing, she had always earned more than her ration card allowed her to buy. She had never been able to figure out the red tape process for getting a ration card stamped "Exception."

  But today her Cushette was not running and she had no safe way home.

  "Yes," she said, "I can stay. But I'm not dressed . . . and I'll need a ride home."

  Mrs. Wittle brightened and took her by the elbow.

  "You don't know what a worry you've lifted, dear. Of course we can arrange a ride for you, you just leave that to me. Now, let's have a look at my daughter's wardrobe. She had some wonderful things that should fit you nicely. There's an elegant black dress that will look splendid on you, though I'm sure that anything would look splendid on you."

  Stella blushed at the compliment.

  "Thank you," she said. "She won't mind?"

  Mrs. Wittle's face darkened for an unguarded moment, then she set her chin forward.

  "No, my dear, I'm afraid not," she said. "She was killed in that terrible scene at the college last season. Terrible."

  "I'm . . . I'm sorry to hear that."

  "Well, she had her own mind," Mrs. Wittle said, "and she insisted on using it." Then, in a whisper, she added, "I was so proud of her. I'll tell you the story someday, this is not the time."

  The dress was slinky and black. The fit in the bust was uncomfortably tight, though it seemed that any pressure at all hurt her breasts lately. The neckline plunged a bit, too, showing her off as she hadn't been shown off before.

  "I wish Doob could see me in this," she said, turning in front of a pair of mirrors. "He'd love it."

  "Then you'll just have to keep it, my dear," Mrs. Wittle said. Tears welled in her eyes but nothing spilled. "In fact, I wish you'd look through these clothes and take anything you can use. It's not right that they just hang here, they're not paintings, after all."

  Stella protested but Mrs. Wittle prepared a carton full of her daughter's clothes, then escorted Stella to her position at the small table beside the entry way.

  The guest of honor, Alek Dexter, arrived tugging his shirtsleeves flush with the jacket cuffs and cursing the muggy afternoon. Stella pinned his name tag to his left breast and smoothed the fabric out of habit. Instead of joining the rest of the guests, he lingered beside her and unabashedly appraised her cleavage. She caught his gaze and held it until he looked away.

  "Been in meetings all day," he mumbled. "After this shindig that the distributors put together I have to speak at a Progress Club dinner in two hours and then meet with the Director at a cocktail party at eight. No wonder I'm always out of breath and can't lose weight. You look beautiful, my dear --" he squinted at her name tag and moved closer to her chest, "-- Stella. Stella Bliss."

  They shook hands and she found his palm very sweaty.

  I didn't think these bigshots sweat in public.

  A sheen gathered at his forehead and upper lip and he dabbed at it with a handkerchief.

  The Honorable Alek Dexter motioned to his driver, who lounged nearby in the cool breeze of the entry way.

  "I'll need another shirt," he said, his voice lowered. "Powder blue will do for tonight."

  "Streets are blocked," his driver said. "Couldn't make it back in time to fetch you for dinner."

  His voice sounded sullen to Stella and she suspected from the tightening of his jaw that if there was one thing Alek Dexter did not allow in his presence it was sullenness.

  "Then buy one," he snapped. "Shops are open until curfew, and the market's only a few blocks away." He waved his hand in dismissal. "Take it out of petty cash. Change your attitude or change jobs."

  The hatchway behind the driver framed a small street scene capped with a tumultuous sky. Two guards faced the street with their backs to him. A third tilted his head at the sound of three tones that came from the messenger on his belt. He picked it up, spoke into it, then hurried inside. His face seemed to pale more with each of the five steps that brought him to His Honor's side. Their conversation was brief and whispered, but Stella heard every word.

  "Code Brutus standby warning, sir. Do you want to secure here or at the compound?"

  "Shit!" Alek Dexter said, and he turned his face away as though he'd been slapped. He, like Mr. Wittle, was a possible successor to the Director. He rubbed his forehead while a trackful of security emptied itself out front. His face was as pale as his guard's. He watched the security squad fan out from the track and take up positions outside. A half-dozen armed men covered with grime and streaming sweat shouldered by him and stationed themselves about the reception.

  "These ours?" he asked his guard.

  The guard shrugged, his lasgun gripped white-knuckle tight in his shaking hands. "Don't know, sir."

  "Humph," he grunted. "Guess it's hard to know what side they're on if we don't know what side we're on. Just a warning, you say? Flattery's not . . ."

  "Yes, sir, a warning. Flattery issued it."

  "We'll wait here," Dexter said. "If we're going to find ourselves stuck somewhere, I'd prefer it to be with this lovely young woman."

  He bowed, took Stella's hand and kissed it. Then he strolled inside to the hostess and her guests, passing the long table set with an array of the most beautiful fruits and seafoods that Stella had ever seen. The centerpiece was a meter-high chunk of ice carved to represent a leaping porpoise.

  The fighting sounded closer, and the security quietly closed the double hatch. Stella was more than a little afraid.

  Not once had Dexter glanced at her orchids.

  To be conscious, you must
surmount illusion.

  -- Prudence Lon Weygand, M.D., number five, original crew member, Voidship Earthling

  The series of explosions dropped by Flattery's Skyhawks from the surface wounded the green kelp in sector eight, killed tens of thousands of fishes and a pod of bottlenose porpoises and roiled up enough sediment to clog submersible filters for a fifty-click radius. A huge stand of blue kelp neighboring sector eight retracted all of its fronds instinctively and clamped itself as tight around its central lagoon as possible. In this configuration, its leaves were packed so tight that it could barely breathe. Feeding was out of the question.

  The blue kelp, when fully deployed, reached a diameter of nearly one hundred kilometers. Its outer fringes bordered domestic kelp projects for nearly 280 degrees of its circumference; the rest faced open ocean and some of it was growing daily at a visible rate. For its own safety, it kept out of contact with the domestic kelps. These were slaves to the humans, bound to the electric whip, this much the blue gathered from the dying shards that drifted its way. There would be many such shards soon. Kelp death always followed these explosions. Other deaths followed, too, at times feeding the blue kelp into an incredible spurt of growth.

  This day something else drifted in on the currents. Something like an aura, a fragrance, something that kept the kelp from hugging itself too tight, too long. Something stirred this blue kelp deep within itself, setting its genetic memories tingling. Nothing would quite come to the fore. Soon, the blue could no longer help itself and it opened its fronds wide in hopes of a good strong whiff.

  Feed men, then ask of them virtue.

  -- Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

  Turbulence from the blasts hadn't settled yet when the Flying Fish pitched, helpless, to the surface. Rico's eyes teared instantly in the sudden glare of afternoon sun that jammed the cockpit. He groped for his sunglasses and tried to blink away the afterglow. To starboard, he saw a long gray line that must be the coast. To port, two or three kilometers away, the surface seethed with a mean white froth as far as he could see.

  A puddle of seawater widened into a pool beneath Elvira's command couch. Her nosebleed was slowing and she shook her head, trying to clear the concussion that had hit her with the first of the depth-charges.

  Anybody but Elvira would've been scrat bait out there, Rico thought.

  Somehow she'd made it back into the engine-room airlock by herself, though stunned and quivering from the blast. There were many other blasts, too many to count.

  "That goddamn Flattery's answer to everything is to blow it up," he grumbled.

  Kelp lights winked out all around them as the sea was glutted with shredded fronds and torn vines.

  "Sister Kelp," Elvira said, following his gaze across the tumultuous surface, "she retracts, saves herself."

  "Elvira, I don't want to hear that 'Sister Kelp' crap. I want to get us out of here."

  "Overflights!" she warned, and pointed to two specks at ten o'clock off the port cabin. Her hands automatically worked the dive sequence, but the engines remained still.

  "Jammed," she said, her face impassive and dazed. "Silt and . . . kelp in the niters."

  "Don't sweat it, Elvira," Rico said. He patted her arm. "They're the ones who dropped the charges. If they carried all that payload, they're short on fuel. At least we're not dealing with a bunch of mines out here."

  Rico unharnessed himself and got Elvira a towel out of one of the lockers.

  "Here," he said. "Dry yourself off, change into a new dive suit. We might be here awhile and there's no sense you getting sick."

  She took the towel, and it seemed to Rico that her senses were coming back.

  "Flattery can track a one-seater coracle from port to port with the Orbiter, anyway," he said. "These guys can't set down out here, and with Crista Galli aboard they don't dare blow us up. Meanwhile, we've got to get her and Ben to some big medicine, and fast."

  Two sonic booms rocked them further as the overflights dove in on them and pulled out. Rico could make out the pilots' faces as the tiny aircraft flashed past.

  "They're young, Elvira, did you see that? With their whole lives ahead of them they chain themselves to Flattery." He fisted the arm of his couch and grumbled, "Why do they do that? They should be out cuddling some young thing in a hatchway somewhere. Didn't their mothers teach them any better?"

  "Their mothers are hungry, Rico, and they're hungry now."

  Rico glanced at Elvira with surprise. He was accustomed to speaking to her but getting nothing but grunts for reply. She was already out of her restraints and fighting the toss of the foil, making her way to the aft lockers.

  "You're not going out there again," he said. "The seas are a mess, nothing can get through here."

  "You will calm down," she said, and it sounded like an order. Elvira peeled off her dive suit and toweled off her finely toned musculature with the candor typical of Mermen. "Care for the others. I will clean out the filters."

  As she slipped into a fresh suit, Rico realized he'd been aroused at the sight of Elvira's pale body. Even her thumb-sized nipples seemed muscular in the chill. He would never approach Elvira, both of them knew that, but the surprise of his arousal reminded Rico of Snej, and how much he'd missed her.

  Elvira's plan was the logical thing, he knew. He ticked off a list of priorities.

  Ben and Crista, he thought. Keep them breathing. Monitor the radio, prepare for surprises by Vashon security.

  Elvira swept past him to the hatch without so much as a glance. Rico fought the pitch and roll of the foil to the lockers and pulled out three more dive suits. He worked himself along by handholds in the bulkhead back to the galley. On his way, he listened to the crackle of the radio and the report from the overflights.

  "Skywatch leader to base. Charges away. We have your fish, over."

  "Roger, Skywatch. We mark your position. Our bird is launched. ETA thirty minutes. Status report."

  Thirty minutes! Rico thought.

  Their bird must be a foil, and a fast one.

  Not room for a lot of hardware or a lot of bodies -- good. We might have a few surprises for them.

  The radio continued to chatter about the condition of the Flying Fish and speculation on the occupants, but they were quickly out of range.

  Rico bent over Ben and saw that he was immobile, his chest was not rising and falling, but his color wasn't bad. He put his cheek to Ben's mouth and detected the slightest breath. Checking the pulse at Ben's neck, he noted that his partner's heart was beating, but only a few beats per minute, His eyes were open, but still. They looked dry, so Rico opened and closed the lids a few times to lubricate them, then left them closed.

  He unhooked the restraints and struggled to get Ben into one of the dive suits.

  "We're topside," he said, hoping Ben could hear. "They threw some charges at the kelp, but I think it's just surface damage. Elvira's out there unclogging the intakes. Flattery's people have a foil on our tail, they'll be here in no time. We may have to go over the rail."

  He heard a groan from Crista Galli, and saw that she was trying to sit up against her restraints.

  "Your girlfriend's coming around," he said. "I'll get her into a suit, then get into the code book and let Operations know what's going on. Everybody else seems to know where we are."

  He sealed Ben's suit and inflated the collar, just in case. When Rico turned to Crista Galli, he saw that she was crying. Her red-rimmed, swollen eyes stared at Ben's deathlike form on the galley deck. She seemed to be conscious and aware.

  "Can you understand me?" Rico asked. In spite of her restraints, he remained well out of reach.

  She nodded.

  "Yes."

  "Have you ever had this reaction before?"

  "Yes." Her voice was slurred. "Once. Before he gave me shots. I pretended to take pills, spit them out later."

  "What will happen next?"

  She tried a shrug. "More of the same. Maybe seizures. It takes . . . a while." S
he added, in a slurred whisper, "Nobody's ever made me feel like a human being except Ben."

  Rico noticed that the pupils of her eyes dilated and constricted wildly.

  Must be some potent drugs, he mused. Damn that Flattery.

  "We are in the open," he explained, "and helpless. You need to have a dive suit on in case we go into the water."

  It flashed on him then what Flattery must've realized all along, what Operations warned in their instructions: "Do not let her into the water. Do not let her contact the kelp." This was speculation, precaution. There would be no other choice if Vashon security showed up, there was no point worrying about it.

  "I can help you with it if you can't do it yourself. I'm sorry to say this, but I'd rather not touch you,"

  He held the suit out to her at arm's length.

  "I can't get out of this harness," she said.

  Rico tapped the quick-release mechanism and she was free. He recoiled from her, partly as a reflex, partly because the foil pitched his way.

  At this, she cringed away from him, her face even more pale and her jaw set.

  "And what do you think I am?" she asked.

  "I don't know," he said. "Do you?"

  "I know that I don't think . . . I can't think that I do this . . ." She gestured limply at Ben. "It can't be me!"

  "It's the drugs," Rico said.

  He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. She needed reassurance, not another enemy. "Remember, the drugs are Flattery's doing, not yours."

  Her tears, the way she looked at Ben seemed like the genuine article.

  But look at what happened to Ben, he cautioned himself.

  "Get your suit on," Rico said. "We don't have much time."

  Crista had to slip out of her dress to don the dive suit. Rico knelt beside Ben, a hand on his forehead. He moved a little, and Rico took it for a good sign. His breathing was much stronger.

  Crista did not seem modest at all, nor did she look like a monster.

  Probably spent so much time as a lab animal she didn't have a chance to get shy.