The Greens itself was a lush underground park maintained by an old Islander biologist. At times Flattery called it "the Ark." No one who had worked inside the Greens had lived to leave the compound. Spider Nevi came and went as he chose, and exterminated those who could not. They were easily replaced, and just as easily forgotten.
The hatchway from the Director's quarters in his bunker opened to the edge of a deep salt-water pool, circular, about fifty meters in diameter. A blue glow rimmed the lower portion, light diffusing in from the lamps installed around the lip outside. This had been the rootway gnawed by the kelp, the last vestige of a great Oracle.
A gentle grassy slope led down to the pool, as well as three small streams that issued from the rock bulkheads. Animals did not do as well in the artificial light as Flattery would have liked, but his flowers, trees and grasses thrived. From where he stood inside the hatchway, Flattery admired the thickest concentration of terrestrial foliage in the world.
He maintained no human security inside the Greens itself but his secret did not want for protection. As the bubbling hiss of the ascending foil seethed the waters of the pool, the Director's trained dasher, Goethe, lay in wait. He knew that the other three remained hidden, stumpy tails twitching, somewhere within a quick bound. Nevi's personal signal toned three times, then repeated itself. Flattery dogged the hatch behind him.
The foil that rose from the pool was one of several that Flattery had designed for his own needs. These were the last foils manufactured by Merman Mercantile before the great quake had destroyed their manufacturing complex two years ago. These were capable of flight but with a limited range and payload. They cruised faster submerged than any other models. A glance into the cabin and Flattery put on the proper mask of disapproval for Nevi, frowning and shaking his head.
Well, Mr. Zentz first.
Nevi secured the foil beside one of its twins and waited on deck for Flattery to give the dashers their "all clear" signal. Zentz stood in obvious awe at the hatchway to the cabin, the snags of teeth in his lower jaw glistening saliva.
At the Director's hand signal Goethe slunk back into the foliage. The one he called "Archangel" crouched between himself and Nevi. Archangel, unlike Goethe, was an extraordinary hybrid of a successful gene-swap between the cats in hyb and the hooded dashers of Pandora. They were faithful and wished to please their master - two traits that Flattery admired in anyone, so long as he was the master.
Archangel's eyes watched Nevi's every move and he bristled when Zentz, too, approached the Director. There was another backup "at ease" signal for Archangel, but Flattery didn't give it.
Zentz is cornered, he thought, and cornered animals commit the unexpected.
Since Zentz would be killed soon, Flattery spoke freely in front of him.
"Mr. Director," Nevi said, inclining his head slightly.
"Mr. Nevi."
This was their ritual greeting. Flattery had never known Nevi to shake a hand. To Flattery's knowledge, Nevi only touched the people he killed. He did not know Nevi's record with women and did not intend to ask.
Flattery smiled and indicated the Greens to Zentz with a generous sweep of his hand.
"Welcome to our little secret," he said, and strolled briskly from the docking pool toward a section of fruiting trees.
"Pity there isn't time for a tour. Near-tropical heat, but you don't know much about the tropics, eh? Bore deep enough into rock and you get heat. Fewer than one hundred people have seen this garden."
And fewer than five survive.
Zentz swallowed audibly. "I - I've never seen anything like this."
Flattery did not doubt him.
"One day all of Pandora will look like this."
Zentz brightened so much that Flattery forgave himself the lie.
He turned to Nevi. "You saw the trap sprung topside?"
Nevi nodded. "Looks like we burned about three hundred. Crews are out chasing down the wounded. So far, nobody big. As we suspected, their eagerness outstripped their readiness."
"We cannot make that same mistake," Flattery warned. "That is why you must bide your time with Crista Galli and the others. Her abduction must be turned to our advantage in every way possible. To take them now would be easy, and foolish. Remember, from now on she's only the bait, not the quarry."
A pair of white butterflies tumbled the air between them and Zentz backed away.
Flattery smiled. "They aren't dangerous," he said. "Beautiful, don't you think? We've released these topside. They drink the wihi nectar. They have already multiplied the wihi threefold in and around the Preserve. You know its value for defens...atural booby trap. A problem, at times, with the livestock. The larvae of these beautiful creature... well, another time. I have two specific demands of your mission."
Flattery strolled to a plot of young trees, carefully planted in rows, in various stages of bloom and fruit production. Nearby, several hives of bees kept audibly busy. Nevi did not care for the bees, this Flattery well knew. He enjoyed Nevi's mastery of the neutral expression. He picked each man a fruit.
"Golden Transparent," he said. "A very hardy apple Earth-side. Since I am developing a Garden of Eden of sorts I thought them most appropriate."
He indicated two carved stone benches under the largest of the trees and sat. Nevi was clearly impatient to be off on the chase, but Flattery could not let them go yet. Nor could he bear watching Zentz make a slobber of his magnificent fruit.
"There are objectives more important than their capture," he emphasized. "Ozette must be discredited. He was popular on Holovision, and his disappearance has already been aired, thanks to Beatriz Tatoosh. This only firms our resolve to expose him as a monster. He must be seen as a madman in the clutches of madmen, with the deathly ill Crista Galli as their slave. We will play on her beauty and her innocence, leave that to me and to Holovision. That is the first thing I require of your mission."
"And the second?" Nevi asked.
Such a question was uncharacteristic of Nevi - how much he must want to be on with it! Flattery wondered what this enthusiasm would add to Nevi's performance.
"Crista Galli will be a problem for them shortly," he said. "They'll want her off their hands. We want her to be seen asking for our help. She must want the Director to save her and the people must know this. It is our only way of guaranteeing absolute control after this little action topside - our only way short of all-out extermination of these pocket villages and little Zavatan monasteries that are the breeding grounds for these Shadows."
"Interesting," Nevi said. "This will require some care. Maybe it's a job for your propaganda people at Holovision. Have you found any drugs to be useful for he... persuasion?"
"Details of her drug program are in the briefing you will receive in the foil," Flattery said. He glanced at his timepiece. "I will say that if she has eaten, she could be catatonic any time. Instructions, precautions and drugs have been prepared and are stowed with your briefing materials. Her persuasion is completely up to you. The manner of persuasion, too, is up to you."
Nevi smiled one of his rare smiles. That was what Flattery liked about the ma... if one could call such a creature a man. He rose to a challenge.
"The Tatoosh woman, does she launch today with the drive system and your OMCs?"
"Yes," Flattery said, "as planned. Why do you ask?"
"I don't trust her," he said, and shrugged. "She'll be up there with Current Control and we're going into the kel..."
"She will be no trouble," Flattery said. "She's been very helpful to us. Besides, she's my problem, leave that to me."
Zentz had finished gnashing down his apple and was once again gawking about the Greens.
"Any of those Zavatans ever tunnel in here? They have hidey-holes all over the high reaches."
He still has his uses, Flattery reminded himself.
"My pets love exploring," Flattery answered, indicating Archangel. "Did you know that 90 percent of their brain tissue is dedicated to their sens
e of smell? No one has tunneled in yet, and whoever does will face Archangel. Then we booby-trap the tunnel for the rest."
Zentz nodded. "A good arrangement," he gurgled.
"You haven't tried your apple," Flattery said, nodding to the bright yellow fruit in Nevi's palm.
"I'm saving it," the assassin replied, "for Crista Galli."
***
Do you know how hard it is to think like a plant?
- Dwarf MacIntosh, Kelpmaster, Current Control (from Holovision Nightly News, 3 Jueles 493)
The Immensity prickled its long, gray-green fronds and sniffed the current in its chemical way. The sniff did not detect a presence so much as the hint of a presence. It was more a prescience than proper smell or taste, but the kelp knew that something of itself passed by now in the current.
The Immensity was a convolution of kelp, a subtle interweave of vines that sprawled, like a muscular brain, throughout the sea. It had begun as a wild kelp, an ignored planting inside a long-abandoned Merman outpost. It had barely known "self" from "other" when it first encountered the Avatalogical study team led by Alyssa Marsh. Most of what the Immensity knew of humans it had learned from Alyssa Marsh.
This stand of kelp knew slavery from the human memories that her DNA held, and it knew itself to be enslaved by Current Control. With the right tickle in its vines it raised them, lowered them, retracted or extended them. Another electrical tickle set off the luciferase in the kelp, lighting the passage of human submarine trade. There were other tricks as well, all of which pulsed a current through a channel - simple servility, simple stimulation-response. This was reflex, not reflection.
The Immensity had all of eternity at its disposal. It allowed this exercise because it pleased the humans and did not interfere with the stand's extended contemplations. Thanks to Alyssa Marsh and her shipmate Dwarf MacIntosh, the kelp had learned how to follow the electrical tickle to its source. Everything that humans transmitted now flowed straight to the heart of the Immensity. Everything.
The Immensity was finally prepared to send something back. It was getting closer to a breakthrough to these humans, and that breakthrough would not be through touch or the chemical smell, but through light waves intersecting in air.
Pleasing humans was a trivial matter, displeasing them was not. Once, soon after waking, this kelp had lashed out in pain to pluck a runaway submersible from among its vines. The huge cargo train had torn a hundred-meter swath nearly a kilometer long in its path through the vines. After the kelp slapped the deadly thing and plucked it apart, Flattery's slaves came with cutters and burners to amputate the kelp back to infancy. The Immensity knew that it had not been able to think right for some time after that, and it did not intend to give up its thinking ever again.
A certain stirring now in the tips of its fronds told the Immensity that "the One," the Holomaster, was passing. The Immensity could unite fragmented stands of kelp into one will, one being, one blend of physics that humans called "soul." Deep in its genetic memory lay a void, an absence of being that could not be teased out of the genetics labs of the Mermen. This void waited like a nest for the egg, the Holomaster who would teach the kelp how to unite fragmented stands of humans.
Twice this Immensity gave up its body but never its will. It was capable of neither sorrow nor regret, simply of thought and a kind of meditative presence that allowed it to live fully in the now while Flattery's electrical strings at Current Control manipulated the puppet of its body.
Reflex is a speedy response made without the brain's counsel. Reaction is a speedy response made with minimal counsel. This kelp grew up expecting to be left alone. It learned reaction only after its vines twined with domestic kelp. It learned to kill when threatened and to show no mercy. Then it learned to expect retaliation for killing.
This Immensity expected to live forever. Logic dictated that it would not live forever if it continued reacting to humans. And now, the One was passing! It knew this as surely as the blind snapperfish knows the presence of muree.
The original Immensity of kelp, Avata, encompassed all of the seas of Pandora under one consciousness, one voice, one "being." Its first genetic extinction came early in the formation of the planet. It had been at the mercy of a fungus. A burst of ultraviolet from a huge sunstorm killed off the fungus. Somewhere, a primitive frond lay mummified in a salt bog awaiting Pandora's first ocean.
The second extinction was by human beings, by a human bioengineer named Jesus Lewis. The kelp was teased back to life by a few DNA miners about fifty years later. The revitalized kelp that the Mermen resurrected was developed from these early experiments. Now kelp once again filled the seas, dampening the murderous storms.
Once again the great stands scattered scent. They grew close with the years, their fronds spoke the chemical tongue. This Immensity itself retained two and a quarter million cubic kilometers of ocean.
The One rode a kelpway that skimmed the Immensity's reach. This particular kelpway came out of a stand of blue kelp that had been known to attack its own kind, overpowering nearby stands, sucking out their beings and injecting its own. It had suffered many prunings, and was sorely in need of guidance. This the Immensity knew from snatches of terror that drifted in on torn fronds. The One could not be trusted to such a dangerous stand. At whatever cost, the One must be spared.
The kelp shifted itself slightly, against the electrical stings from Current Control, to bring the One into its outmost currents, spiraling into the safer deeps of its own stand.
***
You have been educated in judgment, which is the essence of worship. Judgment always occurs in the past. It is past-thinking. Will, free or otherwise, is concerned with the future. Thinking is the performance of the moment, out of which you use your judgment to modulate will. You are a convection center through which past prepares future.
- Dwarf MacIntosh, Kelpmaster, from Conversations with the Avata
"Course change."
Elvira's voice was emotionless as rock but Rico detected the slightest edge of worry in the flurry of her fingers across her command console. She never piloted the foil in its voice mode because she preferred to speak as seldom as possible. That Elvira had spoken at all worried him - that, and the increasing shimmy that had begun a few minutes back.
"Why?"
When working with Elvira, Rico picked up her habit of non-speech. She seemed to like that.
"Channel change," she said, nodding toward her screen. "We're being steered off course."
"Steered?" he muttered, and checked his own instruments. They maintained their position in the kelpway, but their compass said the huge undersea corridor was running in the wrong direction.
"Who's doing the steering?"
Elvira shrugged, still busy with her keyboard. She had taken them deep into sub train traffic to minimize tracking, and they ran without the help of sensors that would light their progress through the kelpways.
"We're out of the wild kelp sector outside Flattery's launch site," he said, "that's where the weirdness usually happens."
One-half of his screen displayed the navigation grid projected by Current Control from its command center aboard the Orbiter. The other half of the screen tracked their actual course through the grid, which now appeared to be bent.
Bending, he corrected himself. It looks like our whole end of the screen is pouring down a drain.
"Anything on the Navcom?" he asked.
Sometimes Current Control changed grids through the kelp to accommodate weather conditions further upchannel or the recent stumping of a stand of rogue kelp.
"Negative," she said. "All clear."
The ride began to get bumpy and Rico cinched himself tighter to his couch. He keyed the intercom and said, "Rough water, everybody cinch up. Ben, you'd better come up here."
Below them Rico could see another cargo train careening dangerously close to the kelp, attempting to recover from the sudden change. Their dive lights showed him that the kelp seemed to be in
a struggle with itself, fluttering the channel as if pressing against a great force.
Ben used the hand grips along the bulkhead to work his way to his console.
"Can we get Current Control?" Ben asked. He dropped into his couch and cinched up.
"Not without giving up our position."
"We got out too easy," Ben said. "They've got a bug on this thing, anywa..."
"Had," Rico said, smiling. "I did an E-sweep when we left the harbor, thinking the same thing. Found it. Elvira here jettisoned the little devil into a netful of krill that we passed about a dozen grids back."
"Good work, both of you," Ben said. "All right, then let's try that cargo train belo..."
The Flying Fish was buffeted again by something like a huge fist. Elvira wrestled with the controls to keep them out of the kelp.
Rico knew, as they all knew, that any damage to the kelp could be construed as an attack. A lot of kelp lights were active in this sector. Besides the red and blue telltales of a waking stand, this kelp flashed its cold navigation light at random and occasionally flooded them with the brighter fiber-optic sunlight that it transported from the surface. If the stand was one that had awakened, any mistake could get the foil and themselves torn apart at the seams.
"Didn't Flattery just go on the air to tell us how safe he'd made the kelpways?"
"Just goes to show," Rico said, "you can't believe that bastard for a goddamn blink."
The cargo train passing in the opposite direction beneath them was having even more trouble than they were. A relatively tiny foil could stop in midchannel and hover if necessary, but the cargo train needed to maintain a constant speed for maneuverability. The grid system was set up so that the trains, Pandora's lifeline, could travel the kelpways swiftly and undisturbed with minimal course changes. From what Rico could see of the bucking cargo, the crew below at both ends of the train had their hands full.
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