The Ascension Factor w-4

by Frank Herbert

  Dusted, she thought. I wonder how it feels.

  She was convinced now that the dust had returned her to reality, rather than removed her from it. It was her personal antidote, an antiamnesiac that spun valves and opened the stream of memory.

  She remembered Zentz, too. He had been a mere captain when he came into the lab at the Preserve that made up her home. He took away the researcher who was talking with her at the time, a young Islander woman who taught social psychiatry at TaoLini College. Once a week Addie came to question Crista about her dreams and always spent the afternoon with her in the solarium over tea. Crista had awakened in that lab a twenty-year-old female human without a single memory.

  The psychiatrist, Addie Cloudshadow, tried to get those memories back. In the process she became Crista's first friend. Because of Zentz, Crista hadn't dared another friend until Ben. Zentz had walked into the lab that day with his weapon drawn, said simply, "Come with me," and shot Addie just outside Crista's hatch. Crista was sedated through her hysteria, and Flattery promised to take care of Zentz. Four years later Zentz surfaced as Flattery's Chief of Security and Crista vowed to escape the Preserve.

  Today the mist kept her from seeing either up or down the beach. That glimpse of Zentz would have terrified her a day ago, but today she was not afraid. Something in the flash of kelp-memory warned her of Nevi, the other shadow in the mist, but it also illuminated a tension between the two that she knew would work to their favor.

  The kelp had replayed for her Nevi's refueling incident, and she'd even forayed briefly into Zentz's mind. She had never seen anything so filled with horror and fear. She felt hate there, too, but it had long ago given way to a fear of Flattery that, itself, became an intense personal fear of Spider Nevi.

  Divided they fall, she thought.

  Flattery's world was coming apart, fighting itself, dying a thrashing death faster than it could inflict death on others. This was what Zentz had seen when the kelp grabbed him, and only Crista knew the strength of his resolve not to die at Flattery's feet or at Nevi's hand.

  Crista had one open view from where she stood in the rocks, over the boil of breakers and out to sea. Though the tidelands wallowed in their salty fog, the sea itself glistened out to meet the sky somewhere in the distance. As far as the eye could sea, huge fronds of kelp rose lazily from the sea and splashed lazily back. Crista found comfort in the play of the kelp and the infinity of the horizon.

  "What a time to be dusted," Ben mumbled, and shook his head.

  "Rico has a plan," Crista whispered, "and he's ready to start it righ... now."

  Crista Galli felt her hair prickle when Rico's electric dance of light crackled up like a shield around her. The high suns roiled fog off the wet beach and coated her skin with a fine grit of salt. The mist enhanced the surreal quality of Rico's lifesize hologram. From the back side it was like looking through a fogged mirror that refused her reflection. Crista watched the barest shadows of Nevi and the others as they ghosted the boundaries of the holo image that erased herself and Ben from the visible landscape.

  Nevi and Zentz positioned themselves behind the light curtain, calling out strategy codes to each other.

  "Flank sweep, left," Nevi said. His voice was unhurried, precise. "Cover high. I'll take point and ground."

  "But the... they disappeared!"

  "It's a trick," Nevi said, "a camera trick. They're in there and can't get out. Position?"

  "Secure. Ten meters, left flank. I can't see shit in this soup."

  Zentz spoke more with a gargle than with real words.

  "Ozette!" Nevi called, "she's sick. She goes back or she dies, you know that. It's not a choice. Send her out."

  Ben's finger went to his lips.

  "He can't see us," Ben whispered. "Don't move."

  She couldn't tell one person from the other. The gigantic holo danced on its curtain of mist. Surreal figures outside the holo field became a futile blur. Three lasgun flashes burst the curtain of rippling light and a cascade of prisms lighted up all around her. Ben pulled her to the ground and in a blink the image reformed.

  "Stay low and don't move," he whispered. "This is the perfect holo. Perfect!"

  She wriggled with him into a fold of hylighter against a black lava boulder. Though faint, a wisp of images rose out of the hylighter skin and filled her mind in a steady unraveling of Pandora's tangled politics. The thick skin of the hylighter held the warmth of afternoon sunlight. With Ben tucked close against her she felt safe. Flashes of sunlight sparkled intermittently throughout the hologram that surrounded them. Crista drew a new strength with the hylighter's touch, and a confidence that insisted Nevi would fail.

  "They can't see us as long as we stay inside the image," Ben whispered. His voice strained with the effort of focusing through the dust coursing his veins. He kept low, but his quick eyes took in all of the scene that they could.

  "This is incredible!" he marveled. "We're inside a hol... where the hell did he get the triangulators to bring this off? And the resolutio... ?"

  "From the kelp," Crista said. "He got everything he needed from Avata."

  "I wish we could see what the hell's happening," Ben whispered. "Right now we're inside a hole in the light show. See this edge here? Rico's holo follows the outline of our hylighter. He's made a stage out of a hylighter skin."

  His finger reached out to the edge of the hylighter skin and appeared to disappear as he pushed it through the hologram. A momentary flutter of light and shadow around his finger was the only sign of disturbance of the image.

  "The mist makes the illusion especially colorful," he said. "All the tiny flashes that you see are the lasers catching a water droplet spinning in the mist - kind of pretty."

  "I can take her back dead or alive, Ozette," Nevi's voice insisted. It was closer now, only a few steps away. "If she's dead, the world will think you killed her. If she's aliv... well, then everyone gets another chance."

  "Going back there," she whispered, "that is not living."

  "Don't worry, he knows how it's got to be."

  Three more flashes burst through the light screen and pitted the boulder above them in a dazzle of red and violet. Ben wrapped his arms around Crista to sandwich her between himself and the rock. It seemed that the dust was bringing her out of a dream instead of into it. She felt her head and senses clear beyond anything she'd experienced in Flattery's custody.

  "I think the dus... you were right about it," she told Ben. "It's offset whatever it was that Flattery gave me."

  She pulled Ben's arms tighter around her and felt as though she were melting into him, her busy atoms scooting between the oscillations of his own. She felt herself disassemble into her qualities of light and shade. She was no longer so much a substance as an idea, an image, a dream. She felt no pain or pleasure, just a sense of transmission, of movement with purpose over which she had no control.

  "Ben," she asked, over a stab of fear, "Ben, are you here?"

  "Yes," his breath puffed her ear, "I'm here."

  "I'm sorry," she said. She knew something was coming, some feral intensity crested her awareness and would not be cowed. "I'm sorry."

  A sensation like the one she had felt at the dockside in Kalaloch welled up inside her, then burst with a loud crack that rolled outward from her heart like angry thunder. Everything around her stilled except the wet rush of the incoming tide.

  Welcome home, Crista Galli.

  The voice spoke through her mind, without the impediment of sound. It came at a rush from the dying hylighter, from Avata itself.

  A refreshing sense of detachment, then a familiar disembodiment overcame her. The distinction between hylighter skin and her own blurred. She was encompassed within a familiar tingle. It was a muted, struggling tingle that she knew to be a kind of death in body that hatched the great hylighter of her mind. Her mind flexed its great sail in the sun and caught its first breath.

  We hatched of the same vine, Crista Galli.

  Sh
e remembered, now. Before the bombing that cut her free she had been rooted for safety in a pod of kelp. The memories filled her head so fast they stunned her. Ben's groan in her ear reeled her attention back to their huddle on the beach. The holo was gone, and enough of the mist lifted to reveal a scattering of bodies in the rocks.

  "I thought I was dead," Ben said, rubbing his temples. "Ho... what have you done?"

  Crista couldn't answer. She felt as though she straddled two worlds - one on the beach, with Ben, and one in the sea with her great guardian, Avata. The holo had switched off with the thunderclap, and Nevi lay on the beach, nearly within her reach, his eyes blinking stupidly and blood oozing from his red-veined nose. She got up slowly and retrieved his lasgun. Rico, though wobbly, was the first to recover and he did likewise with Zentz.

  "My apologies, sister," Rico said, with a slight bow and a quizzical smile. "There is much this ignorant brother did not understand."

  He reeled and nearly fell, but caught the side of a great rock and steadied himself.

  Others around them, the stunned ones, began stirring and shaking their heads. A few, victims of the lasguns, would never stir again. She felt bigger now, taller, and it seemed that even Rico looked up to her. A deep breath of the mist-laden air cleared her mind and helped pulse a new strength to her young legs. The tide hissed up to her feet, and a few meters away it licked Nevi's outstretched form in the sand.

  "So, Rico, do you still want to keep me from the kelp?"

  He managed a laugh and shook his head.

  "Two rules," he said. "The first: never argue with an armed woman."

  She hefted Nevi's lasgun as though seeing it for the first time, then inquired, "And the second?"

  "Never argue with an armed man."

  She returned the laugh, and Ben joined them.

  "You argued with Nevi," Ben said, "and look what it got him."

  "I didn't argue with him," Rico said, "I tricked him - that is, Avata tricked him. Now we've got more work to do. Believe it or not, we have to save Flattery. If we don't -"

  "Save Flattery?" Ben's bitterness dripped from his voice. "He started all this, he should suffer the consequences."

  "Not if we all suffer," Crista said. "Not if human life on Pandora is extinguished. He can do that, I feel it. Rico is right. Flattery must be stopped, but he must stay alive."

  The dozen stunned Zavatans struggled to regain their feet and their senses. Ben picked up Nevi under the arms and dragged him out of reach of the water. A Zavatan scout took over and trussed Nevi's thumbs together behind his back with a stout length of maki leader.

  "That holo," Ben said, "I've never seen anything like it. How did you do that?"

  "Thought you'd never ask," Rico said.

  He picked up a length of kelp vine from the water's edge, caressed it momentarily and then dropped it back into the sea.

  "That was the trick. I think our Zavatan friends here have these two zeroes under control. Follow me, I'd like you to meet my friend, Avata, the greatest holo studio in the world."

  A warning shout went up from a scout at the clifftop, and simultaneously a hunt of dashers splashed out of the upcoast mist in a sinister blur. Ben snatched the heavy lasgun from Crista's hand and pushed her toward Rico. He fired a quick burst and the barest scent of ozone accompanied the snapping of the weapon. Two dashers crumpled in a flurry of screams and sand only a dozen meters away. The others began to feed on their dead, as was their instinct. A Zavatan scout emptied his charges into the rest of the hunt.

  "They're s... so fast," she gasped, and discovered herself clinging to Rico's arm.

  He did not cringe or push her away, but put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze.

  "Not much time to think topside," Rico said. Then, to Ben, "I see you're still quick in your old age."

  "Some of us stay young forever," he laughed. "Must be the company I keep."

  Ben's hand took her own and the three of them caught their collective breath.

  "If they're not too chewed up, we'll get you one of those hides for a souvenir," Rico told her.

  "What would I do with a dead thing?" she asked. A huge cold finger ran a shudder down her spine. "I'm a lot more interested in life."

  "Touche," Ben said. "Let's get going. I want a look at Rico's mystery studio."

  A gust of breeze puffed the last of the mist off the tidelands and both afternoon suns caressed Crista's pale skin. The fabric of her dive suit rippled in sunlight as the tide reclaimed, amoebalike, the tumble of rocks that marked its upper reaches. With her hand clasped in Ben's she followed Rico as he scrambled away from the sea up to the cliff. Two Zavatan scouts in green singlesuits flanked a great entry way between boulders.

  "In here," Rico said. "It's not nearly as scary as the way I came in. Watch your step, the wet rock is mighty slick."

  Crista stood at the dark entry, feeling a pulse of damp air rush out at her. A series of carvings decorated the wall inside, carvings of intertwined kelp vines, fishes and suns. She turned her face upward for one more dose of light before facing the darkness.

  "Look there," Ben said, pointing skyward, "hylighters. And they have the foil that these two came in on."

  A half-dozen of them appeared from somewhere landward, two of them cradling the shiny foil in a snarl of tentacles. They all dropped in lazy circles to within a hundred meters of the beach. They valved off their hydrogen, fluting their peculiar songs that included one long shrill "all clear" whistle. Their great sails fluttered and snapped, tacking the coastal breeze. Sunlight through their sail membranes made them glow a dusky orange, and even this far away she could make out the delicate webwork of their veins.

  "Guardians of the Oracle," one of the Zavatans said. "They, like you, are sent by Avata to help us. There is nothing to fear."

  It seemed to her that their flutings called "Avaaaata, Avaaaata," on the wind.

  "Come," Rico said, "let these guys mop up. There isn't much time."

  They passed through the high portal of carved rock and, though she had expected darkness, they entered a chamber of magnificent light. The light came out of the pool itself, fanning out from the kelp and, like the warm breeze on her cheeks, it pulsed ever so slightly as though it, too, were alive.

  "Avata brought me in through the sea," Rico told them. "There's an entry through the kelp itself into the pool. The entry closes off as the tide rises, then opens again at ebb. I just squeaked through. As you can see, it's well-occupied."

  The strong sea-smell of the beach had been replaced with the scent of thousands of blossoms, but there were no blossoms in sight. A kelp root rose out of the pool at the center of the cavern, crowding all the way to the high domed ceiling.

  "The root comes out of the ceiling," Ben said. "This rock was folded upside-down during the quake of '82. Look at that monster!"

  She saw that it was true. It did not rise out of the pool but dropped into it. The top portion of root, thirty meters or more above their heads, was indistinguishable from the rock it clung to. Around it sparkled the thousands of reflections from its mineralization.

  "This is an old one," she said, craning for a good look. "A very old one."

  The cavern walls were terraced up to where the root joined the ceiling. The terraces were cultivated, and thick fruit vines carpeted the walls. A welcoming committee in brightly embroidered costumes smiled down at her from among the greenery. As the three of them stepped from the passageway to the edge of the pool applause broke out and the chant of "Cris-ta, Cris-ta, Cris-ta" pulsed with the brightening light.

  "Look at yourself," Ben said, over the din, "you're glowing."

  It was true. Except for where his hand held hers a light surrounded her body. It was not a reflection of the glow of the kelp on her white skin and white dive suit, because the pulse of this light matched the throb of her own heart. She felt stronger with every beat.

  "Thank you," she said, bowing to the crowd. "Thank you all. Your hopes for a new Pandora wil
l soon be fulfilled."

  She stepped to the edge of the pool and became one with its emanation of white light and felt herself enter again the great heart of Avata. It was as though she opened a thousand eyes throughout the world and looked everywhere at once, and with some of these eyes she watched herself watching Avata at the pool.

  She heard her voice rise to fill the cavern with a richness it had never held before.

  "Fear is the coin of Flattery's realm," she announced. "We shall buy out his interest in kind."

  Images leaped from the pool's surface at the sweep of her outstretched arms and filled the cavern like quick bright ghosts. Her body swelled to its limit in the seas, and she reached her thousands of arms skyward in joy.

  A gasp escaped one of the sentries, then a shout.

  "The kelp! Look at the kelp!"

  But no one had to go outside for a look, it was all played before them inside the cavern. Throughout the seas of Pandora the kelp reached its great vines high above the surface. Colorful arcs of light bridged the gulfs between stands. Even hylighters trailed great streamers of light from their ballast, providing a link between isolated patches of wild and domestic kelp alike.

  Rico smiled through the dazzle of light and Crista realized the difference between the Rico she had first met and the Rico who had saved them on the beach: This Rico was happy.

  "You're looking at Avata," he shouted. "The kelp has risen. Long live Avata."

  Applause and exclamations of joy gave way to the heavy background rhythms of water-drum and flute.

  "But ho... ?"

  Ben swallowed his question back, his eyes desperately trying to follow the display that surrounded him. A parade of ghosts from all over Pandora washed among the people in the cavern like a hologrammatic tide.

  "Like the kelpways of the mind," Rico explained, "only it's no longer just a function of touch."

  Rico turned to Crista and took both her hands into his own. The light around them leaped even higher.

  "Though it seemed like moments, I was gone from you for years," he said. "I witnessed your life, my life, Flattery's life. He buried a secret in his own body that would kill the kelp should he die. If his heart stops a trigger releases his stockpile of toxin worldwide. It would paralyze the kelp in moments and kill it all off in hours. You see now we must isolate him, stop him, save him from his own ignorance. Enter the kelp. Tell the world what you know."