The Ascension Factor w-4

by Frank Herbert

  This warned Twisp far more about Flattery's depth of paranoia than it did of the dangers of the kelp.

  Flattery successfully discouraged most Pandorans, at least the ones dependent on his settlements and his handouts. His isolation of a kelp neurotoxin made the people even more cautious. His development of an antidote became popular, since contact with the kelp was virtually unavoidable in many traditional professions.

  It could've been a placebo, Twisp thought. What people expect the kelp to do to their minds is pretty much what occurs.

  The brief Pandoran ritual of giving their dead up to the kelp had been all but abandoned. Now the dead were burned, their memories dissipated with smoke to the winds. This Flattery encouraged with his simple plea for hygiene.

  "Decomposing bodies wash up on the beaches," he said. "What little tideland we have stinks with the remains of our dead."

  Twisp shook his head to clear it of Flattery, of the man's grating, nasal voice and supercilious manner. This was not the voyage he wished the dust to lead him down. He sought the deeper currents of history to address the problems of Flattery and hunger.

  "Humans have enslaved humans for all time," he said to himself. "A new galaxy shouldn't require a new solution."

  How had ancient humans broken the bonds of human-inflicted hunger?

  With death, a voice in his mind told him. Death freed the afflicted, or death freed them from the afflictor.

  Twisp wanted Pandorans to be better than that. Flattery's way was starvation, assassination, pitting cousin against cousin. The footprints Twisp sought in the dust must lead away from Flattery, not after him.

  What good does it do for me to become him? We trade a long-armed murderer for a tall one.

  By the time he and Mose lay their burdens down before the monks of the hylighter clan, Twisp felt no need for the ritual. He already swam the heady seas of kelp-memories. His mind waged a reluctant struggle against the babbling current.

  His people around him babbled as they prepared the dust. Twisp made his mouth beg his leave and he perched atop his favorite outcrop alone. Behind him, other elders walked a line of kneeling Zavatans and spooned little heaps of blue dust onto outstretched tongues. They proceeded with waterdrums and chants, songs from Earth, from Ship, from their centuries of voyaging across Pandora and her seas.

  This was where communicants met the dead, here in the aftermath of the blue dust. They traveled backward in time, raveling up memories that had been long forgotten. Some witnessed their parents' lives, or their grandparents'. A few, one or two, branched off into the greater memory of humanity itself, and these were the ones consulted for movement toward a rightness of being.

  Twisp let the syncopated waterdrum lull him back to that first day he had felt the effects of the new kelp. Twenty-five years ago he first touched land, a prisoner of GeLaar Gallow. That was the day he and a few friends defeated Gallow's vicious guerrilla movement and ended a civil war. It was the day the hyb tanks splashed down from orbit and brought them Flattery.

  It all happened atop a peak that the Pandorans now called Mount Avata, in honor of the kelp's role in their salvation. He had waited there for what he had expected to be his death at the hands of Gallow, the Merman guerrilla leader. The kelp brought him a vision then of a bearded carpenter named Noah. Noah was blind, and mistook Twisp for his grandson, Abimael. He fed the hungry Twisp a sweet cake, and down all the years since then Twisp had remembered the fine taste of that sticky-sweet cake.

  "Go to the records and look up the histories," Noah told him.

  Twisp had done just that, and it left him in awe of Noah, the kelp and that sunny day on the Mount.

  "This new ark of ours is out on dry land once and for all," Noah told him. "We're going to leave the sea."

  Twisp had avoided the kelp since then, thinking only that he needed to let the affairs of Pandora go to the Pandorans and the affairs of Twisp to Twisp. Then the Director insinuated himself into the lives of the people. Their lives became Twisp's life, their pain his pain.

  Twisp had studied well, read widely in the histories, and like any Islander he brought the hungry into his home. That home grew as the hunger grew into two homes, three homes, a settlement. Differences with the Director drove them to their perch in the high reaches and to secretly make fertile the rocky plains upcoast, away from Flattery's henchmen. Now, in the grip of the spore-dust, Twisp saw the intricacy of what he'd wrought, and the strength.

  A small voice came to him as the dust was distributed to others. It was a voice of the world of Noah, one that he had never expected to hear, even within his own mind.

  "Fight hunger with food," it told him. "Fight darkness with light, illusion with illumination." It was a tiny voice, nearly a whisper.

  "Abimael," he said. "You are here at last. How did you find me?"

  "The scent of the sweet cake," Abimael said. "And the strong call of a good heart."

  Twisp swept past Abimael in the headlong tumble down the kelpways of his mind. He was out of the fronds, now, out of the peripheral vines and into the mainstem of kelp.

  This hylighter must have come from a grandfather stand, he thought. It is a wonder that they still escape Flattery's shears.

  "It is not wonder, elder, but illusion."

  The voice that Twisp heard was not from inside. He turned slowly, remembering the young Mose. It was then that he noticed Mose's hand on his arm.

  "You travel this vine, too, my cousin?"

  "I do."

  At no time did Mose move his lips. His pupils dilated and constricted wildly, and Twisp knew that his own did likewise. He'd looked into a mirror once after taking the dust, and fallen into places he'd rather not remember.

  "I remember the..." Mose began.

  Twisp interrupted him, concentrating only on what Mose said of illusion. This interruption, too, was spoken without lips.

  "You said, 'illusion,'" Twisp reminded him. "What has the kelp shown you of illusion?"

  "It is a language this hylighter spoke when it grew on the vine," Mose said. "It learned to cast illusion like a hologram. Elder, if you follow the vine of this thought to its root, you will know the power of illusion."

  Suddenly Twisp's mind cartwheeled deeper into itself.

  No, he thought, not deeper into my mind. Deeper into Avata's.

  "Yes, this way," a soft voice coaxed.

  Twisp looked back on his body as though from a great height, incurious about the shell of himself, then he turned onward into the void.

  What is illusion, what is real? he asked.

  "What is a map," the voice replied. "Is it illusion, or is it real?"

  Both, he thought. It is both real - something that can be held and felt - and illusion, or symbol, or representation. The map is not the territory.

  "You, fisherman, if you want to build a boat, what do you do first?"

  Draw a plan, he thought.

  "And the plan is not the boat, but it is real. It is a real plan. What do you do next?"

  Visions of all the boats he had built, or fished on, or coveted floated through his mind.

  Nex...

  He tried to concentrate, tried to remember where it was that Avata was leading him.

  "Don't think about that," the voice chided. "After the plan, what next?"

  Build a model, he thought.

  "It, too, is not the boat. It is a model. It is illusion, it is symbol, and it is real. If you would get a man to live a certain way, how might you do that?"

  Give him a model of behavior?

  "Perhaps."

  Map out his life?

  "Perhaps."

  A moment of silence, and Twisp detected the distinct pulse of the sea in the pause. The voice went on.

  "But a map, a model - these have a basic limitation. What is this limitation?"

  Twisp felt his mind bursting at its seams. Avata was forcefeeding him something, something important. If he could only gras...

  Size!

  Whether it
came to him intuitively, or whether the kelp provided him with the answer, the effect was the same.

  It's size! You can never know truly from a model how it will feel because you can't live in it. You can't try it on for size!

  He felt an immense sigh inside himself.

  "Exactly, friend Twisp. But if you could make the illusion life-size, the lesson, too, would be life-size, would it not?"

  Suddenly he was thrust back in his spore-dust memory and saw the old Pandora through the eyes of one of his bloodied ancestors fighting the Clone Wars. He saw the immensity of Ship blacken out the sky, and heard that final message ring in his mind: "Surprise me, Holy Void." Ship's voice was not the electronic monotone he'd expected. Its voice was relieved, even gleeful, as it made its farewell pass across both suns and disappeared without a sound. It sounded much like the voice he'd been hearing inside his own head.

  "Ship unburdened itself of us when it headed out for the Holy Void," Twisp whispered to himself. "To live to our fullest potential we have to learn how to unburden ourselves of ourselves."

  One more thing nagged at the back of his mind. He didn't know whether he said it aloud or not, but he knew that Mose, at least, heard him out.

  "We have to learn to cast illusion like a spell," Twisp heard himself say. "To capture an enemy without inflicting harm will take a carefully spun illusion."

  Somewhere in his mind he thought he detected a grunt of approval.

  ***

  We Islanders understand current and flow. We understand that conditions and times change. To change, then, is normal.

  - Ward Keel, The Apocryphal Notebooks

  Newsbreak should air within the hour, but Beatriz knew that this team would not make their deadline. They were having some kind of transmission problem that they refused to share with her, but she saw the results on her screens. Whenever their tape was ready for its burst groundside, a review showed that it had been tampered with. Someone seemed to be editing the editors. It was just as well. Leon told her that the short clip she prepared on the OMC would not be transmitted groundside for approval, anyway.

  She recalled an incident several years ago, when Current Control was still undersea in a Merman compound. They were taping one of Flattery's "spiritual hours," a propagandistic little chat with the people of Pandora. All went well until transmission time.

  The kelp interfered, that was the only answer at the time - and an unpopular one. The kelp jammed broadcasts, made deletions on tape...

  The hair on her neck prickled at the thought. She remembered how, finally, it edited tapes and changed the chronology of broadcasts, flipped images and voiceover around to make Flattery look like a fool and make the broadcast adhere more closely to the truth.

  Mack and I wired a lot of kelp fiber into this system, she thought.

  Any delay suited Beatriz just fine. She needed more time to figure out how to say on the air what wasn't in the script without getting herself and others killed. They would only trust her with a token appearance, she would have to make the most of it when the time came. Most Pandorans, even the poor, listened in on radio. She wanted to reach them all. She hoped it wasn't just hysteria that told her the kelp was on her side.

  If there's a coup in progress, who's at the bottom of it? she wondered.

  She ticked off the likely suspects: any of several board members of Merman Mercantile, the Shadows, displaced Islanders, Brood - probably acting for someone else from Vashon Security Force...

  Or maybe the Zavatans, she thought, though she knew it was not their drift. Their response to political trouble was to dig in deeper, to flee further into the high reaches or the formidable upcoast regions.

  Brood's an opportunist, she thought. The killings at the launch site were a mistake, and he's trying to make the best of it. If there is an organized coup, he'll wait and throw in with whoever seems to be winning.

  Beatriz realized that Flattery had no friends and damned few allies. Everyone had good reason for hating him. He had come to Pandora sporting his savior's cap when the very planet had turned on them, and then he turned on them.

  "I am your Chaplain/Psychiatrist," he'd told them, "I can restructure your world, and I can save you all. Your children deserve better than this."

  Why did everyone believe him?

  Her years at Holovision gave her the answer. He was on the air daily, either in person or via his "motivational series," a collection of tapes that she had not seen as propagandistic until now. She had even helped produce several, including her recent upbeat series on the Voidship. Everyone believed him because Flattery kept them too busy to do otherwise.

  Flattery had become the most formidable demon in a world of demons, only he was human. Worse yet, he was pure human, without any of the kelp genes and other genetic tinkerings that Pandorans had to endure. Beatriz knew this now. He did it with their help, with her help. Though trapped, she felt an exhilaration at the notion that Brood's men couldn't shoot a clear signal groundside. They might need her yet.

  If I do this show as written, I'll be helping him again.

  She realized what it was she was helping Flattery to do. She wasn't helping him rescue a world in geological and social flux. She wasn't helping him resettle the homeless Islanders whose organic cities broke up on the rocks of the new continents, or rescue Mermen whose undersea settlements had broken like crackers at the recent buckling of the ocean floor.

  I'm helping him escape, she thought. He's not building this "Tin Egg" to explore the nearby stars. It's his personal lifeboat.

  She cursed under her breath and fisted the console in front of her, but gently, gently. She might need it later. The reflection that bounced back from her screen was of a woman she didn't recognize. The hair color was black, cropped and shaggy like her own, but the haunted brown eyes of her reflection stared out of bloodshot sclera, surrounded by two dark hollows that frightened her. Her nose was red and her complexion pasty for one so dark. Out of reflex she reached for a com-line to call Nephertiti to makeup, then stopped. Nephertiti would never brush her hair again, never again whisper in her ear at the countdown: "You're gorgeous, B, knock "em out!"

  She fisted the console again in despair. Leon glanced her way, but busied himself trying to iron out the glitch with transmissions to the groundside studio. He and his men were unfamiliar with the zero-gee of the Orbiter's axis, and every small task that required movement seemed to anger them more.

  Beatriz knew her performance as written would be helping Brood, too, and this was more than she could bear. He was overseeing the delivery of the OMC to its crypt aboard the Voidship and mercifully out of her sight. If Leon didn't get past the jamming influence on their burst channel, Brood would be back, and he would be mad. She didn't relish the thought of Brood in a tantrum.

  Dwarf MacIntosh was a normal human, a blue-eyed clone from hyb, and Beatriz was a near-normal Islander. Mutations had leveled off over the past few generations and most Islanders, though shorter and darker, appeared as normal as MacIntosh and Flattery. Appearances, among Pandorans, had dictated their lives from the start.

  Flattery's not normal, she thought. His mind is a mutation, an abomination. Humans should not trample their own kind.

  She knew the history of slavery Earthside, and members of her own family lived with the aftermath of the genetic slavery of Jesus Lewis. Today she had awakened at last to Ben's accusations that Flattery had enslaved Pandora, Mermen and Islanders alike, and his grip only got tighter while the people got hungrier.

  The past twenty-five years had been a cumulative string of disasters planetwide: The sea bottom had fractured along a kelp root line to form the first strip of land. More such fractures followed, always along the gigantic roots of kelp beds. The consequent upheavals destroyed dozens of Merman settlements down under and caused the sinking or deliberate grounding of most of the floating organic cities of the Islanders, her own among them. Refugees swarmed to the primitive coastal settlements by the thousands, forced to learn
to survive again on land after nearly three centuries on or under the sea. Flattery had not eased their burden, only added to it.

  "This whole planet's trying to kill us," Mack had told her the first time they talked, "we don't need to give it a hand."

  But Mack took no action against Flattery. He put all of his waking hours and a good number of his dreaming hours into perfecting the Orbiter station as a jumpoff point to the stars. He did this while directing Current Control and becoming the world's expert on its most mysterious resident, the kelp. He worked backward to define his priorities.

  "We need Current Control," he said. "The kelp is fascinating, but reality dictates that we get supplies through it or people die. Controlling the kelp makes this project easier, it makes settlement life easier, it guarantees results."

  That was when he invented the Gridmaster, which bypassed the undersea multibuilding complex of the Mermen's Current Control and allowed the major grid system to be operated from orbit. The Merman complex undersea had sustained heavy damage, but it still carried the hardware and installed new grids. With the Gridmaster in operation, one person could handle all of the kelpways in the richest of Pandora's hemispheres.

  Beatriz had stood at Mack's side two years ago as his special guest the day the Gridmaster went on-line. Though officially a Holovision correspondent for the event, Beatriz liked to believe that there had been more to Mack's invitation than the business at hand. The spark of his blue eyes lit unmistakably in her presence, and they had enjoyed long talks floating through the axis of Orbiter nights and reclining in the webworks. What had begun as the opportunistic brush of hands against hands became a full-fledged love affair.

  I hope we get another chance, she thought, and sighed to head off tears.

  A red flash above the hatchway startled her, then flashed again. It was the studio equivalent of a doorbell that alerted each console throughout the room. It was customary to lock the studio when taping a show.

  Someone wants in.

  Whoever was out there was not one of Brood's men. She knew this because of the fear that bloomed in pale petals across Leon's face.