The Ascension Factor: Pandora Sequence

by Frank Herbert

  They actually run up these cliffs, he mused. Why?

  Here, on the bare overlook above the Preserve, he reviewed the latest messages regarding the HoloVision foil and the curious rebellion of the largest stand of kelp in the region.

  “So, Marta, do you really believe that they’ve turned back?” he asked.

  His communications officer, a little plump for her regulation blue jumpsuit, managed a quick chew at her lip before responding. Flattery had bedded her once and recalled that her touch was far more satisfying than her looks. She’d been a slender young thing then—four, maybe five years ago. She had started as a bodyguard on his nightside detail, but showed a facility with electronics that impressed his engineers. When she requested a transfer, he granted it. The move headed off rumors and the inevitable discomfort of extracting himself from a sticky personal situation.

  “I … I don’t know,” she said. “The device that I placed personally on their foil is working perfectly, and its course is consistent with a return to this—”

  “Bah!” Flattery blurted. “They’re not stupid. I insisted that you place the device on or inside her person and you took it upon yourself to place it elsewhere. A Current Control outpost has already confirmed the device to be aboard a crippled sub train dragging a few thousand kilos of dead fish.”

  Flattery enjoyed the stunned look that flattened her face. She looked small and pale now.

  “I was afraid,” she said. “I was afraid to touch her.”

  Marta hung her head as though expecting a blade. The merciless suns here on the bluff widened the circles of sweat forming under her armpits. It was that heavy, sticky time on the coast just before the rain squalls hit. He didn’t have to sniff to smell the rain.

  Flattery remembered that time with her on a hot afternoon like this, and their skins poured sweat. Tiny black hairs from his chest had stuck to her small white breasts and she laughed as she picked them off. She hadn’t been so afraid of him then, just a little bit in awe, which made things easier.

  “Dammit!” he muttered to himself. Bitten by the fiction again.

  He drew himself up to his full height, nearly two heads taller than Marta.

  “Didn’t I assure you that it was safe?”

  This he delivered in his most consoling voice.

  She nodded, but still did not lift her head.

  Flattery was very pleased with himself. If this woman who knew him so well was afraid of Crista, of what her touch might do, then these strangers must be terrified. Thanks to his foresight in the beginning and her daily “medications,” Crista should be withdrawing violently by now, exhibiting the very symptoms attributed to her touch. Perhaps by now she’d be catatonic—something else he’d engineered to see that she was brought back to him.

  The neurotoxin would be oozing from her every pore by now, and the fiction he had laid down so carefully for so long would become true. Everyone, particularly the enemy, would see it with their own eyes. Only he, the Director, could save her. Those Shadows would soon find themselves in the presence of a monster that they could not afford to keep.

  The wonders of chemistry, he thought, and smiled. Aloud, he reassured Marta.

  “I understand your fear,” he said. “The important thing is that we were not fooled by their amateurish attempt at deception. What do you have to report on damage here?”

  Both of them flinched at the simultaneous crackle of two lasguns, and Flattery turned to see that his guards had cooked a pair of hooded dashers closing from the direction of the high reaches.

  “I wonder …”

  He didn’t finish the rest aloud. What he wondered was whether or not the Zavatans were training dashers.

  “I want studies on dasher sightings coordinated with known Zavatan positions,” he said.

  Marta nodded and unholstered the electronic link at her side. The movement drew a subtle shift in Aumock’s position. Marta didn’t notice that his lasgun muzzle had focused on her head before the link cleared daylight. She clicked out her coded entry in her usual unhurried manner.

  Flattery knew something of the Zavatans and their history, but not nearly as much as he’d like. They were patient, organized, and they scavenged everything. If rumor was correct, they grew illicit crops in the upcoast regions and distributed them among refugees. Flattery resented this because it seriously weakened his bargaining position with the masses. He did not have the manpower to police thousands of square kilometers of rugged countryside and complete Project Voidship at the same time. Project Voidship was infinitely more important.

  He saluted approval as one of the men vaulted over the wall to fetch the dasher skins. That much less for those Zavatans, he thought.

  He made a mental note to see what the lab would have to say about where the dashers had been, with whom, what they were eating, when and why.

  “And your report on the fighting?” he asked. “Compound perimeter is secure,” she said.

  Marta pressed the spot behind her right ear that activated the receive mode of her messenger implant.

  “I’m getting a lot of interference here, don’t know the cause. Minimal damage to the compound—the expected rubble but mostly cosmetic, as usual. Rocks and sticks are no match for lasguns. Prisoners are being held in the courtyard.” She paused as more information fed into her messenger.

  “Reports on the power station, the ferry terminal and the grid situation,” he ordered.

  Marta fed something into her messenger, then her expression changed. The facade of the impartial reporter wrinkled into concern at her brow, and she leaned forward as information vibrated her mastoid bone, washed through the fluids and hairs of her inner ear to her brain.

  “There is a massive force congregating at the power station,” she said. “The squad of security that attacked our detachment at the site has dug in and persisted. The refugee camp is less than a kilometer away. People from the camp are backing up the rebel squad, just out of lasgun range of our defense.”

  “Operation H,” Flattery barked. “If they keep coming, have air support shift to the camp.” Marta paled further. She lowered her voice so that the guards wouldn’t hear.

  “Operation H, sir … they’d see it from the camp. If you jelly the attackers, witnesses will know it wasn’t a hylighter.”

  “Use an LTA,” he said. “We have a few balloons in the hangar that look like hylighters. Get them into the air. We’ll worry about witnesses later. I want that squad burned, I want anyone backing them up burned. Is that understood?”

  Marta nodded, and her fingers flicked the orders across her instrument. “The ferries?”

  “Operational, sir. The current shift reported on time. Casualties high, but replacements are already on-site receiving training. The OMC launch lit off and docked at Orbiter station, no update. Current Control terminated their signal to the kelp in sector eight, there is no grid but no aggressive activity.”

  “Terminated?”

  Flattery regretted the lie to MacIntosh. He was sure that the kelp would yield, given the full electrical prod long enough. He had never thought that MacIntosh would terminate the signal.

  Idiot! What could he be thinking, giving the kelp its head. Doesn’t he know how much we need those kelpways open?

  He inhaled one long, slow breath, half in the left nostril, half in the right. He let it out just as slowly.

  “Is it working?” he asked.

  “A few merchant vessels lost,” she said. “Most have surfaced, making repairs. They will not fare well in the storm.”

  “Order Dr. MacIntosh to reestablish the kelpways, or I will do it my way from here. He has one hour.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Flattery’s mood blackened. Two small explosions and a flash came from the center of Kalaloch. He signaled one of his guards.

  “Have security get what they can from the leaders of this rabble. I don’t expect much. Then have the rest of them staked in the open.” He surveyed the cliffside behind him that led to
the high reaches. “Have them staked up there,” he said, “so that everyone below can study the results of their decision in detail. It shouldn’t take long.”

  What Marta had told him about the kelp interested him the most. He’d fabricated such an intricate web of deception about Crista Galli that Flattery himself had difficulty remembering which was his masterful illusion and which reality. His earliest warnings to keep her from any contact with the kelp was based more on hunch than data, but it was clear to him now that his hunch had been good.

  The kelp could actually smell her!

  “I ordered Current Control to opt for a surgical solution,” Marta said. “They have one hour to achieve the grid by any other means. I explained that there were too many subs at stake.”

  “Will it be necessary to dissect the entire stand?”

  “No,” she said. “Like the mob, it should convert easily with minimal damage to the affected area. That corridor will not have the flexibility it once had, but it will be navigable as soon as the debris is swept.”

  “When it’s over, have samples sent to the lab,” he said. “Complete analysis. Find out why it could resist Current Control, then render it down for the toxin stockpile.”

  “The Zavatans …” she began, “it would be good politics to …”

  “To give them what’s left of the kelp?” He snorted in disgust. “Let them dredge their own. I don’t want to be party to their heresy. And I want a lot of toxin on hand, I have a surprise yet for those ‘vermin,’ as Nevi calls them.”

  Marta noted the orders into the messenger at her waist. It was clear to Flattery that the kelp must have sensed Crista Galli’s presence. How else to explain this rebellion? It had occurred along the plotted route of Ozette’s foil after device was jettisoned.

  The kelp must have sensed her when the bug hit the water, he thought. He smiled again, partly out of a distant relief at not being aboard the Flying Fish at the time, but largely at the predicament that now embroiled Ozette and his Shadows.

  “Overflights?” he asked.

  “Bad weather already in,” she replied. “Low probability of contact, high probability of loss. Two Grasshoppers available in the area, but they are frail and of limited range. Orders for them?”

  “Observation patterns as weather permits,” he said. “I want to see who they turn to when they’re in big trouble. Nevi will be on the scene soon enough.”

  Flattery detected a definite shudder across Marta’s shoulders at the mention of Nevi’s name.

  That’s why I use him, he thought. Mere mention of his name gets results.

  He dismissed Marta and surveyed the landscape, his landscape, that fell away before him. Metallic- looking wihi glinted sunlight back at him. Their short, daggerlike leaves deployed toward the bursts of ultraviolet pulsing from Alki, what the old charts called “First Sun”. Flattery admired this dangerous little plant for its tenacity and for the protection it afforded his compound. Its seeds lay dormant undersea for two centuries, waiting to flourish when the oceans rolled back again. It flourished now, and made going difficult for predators near the compound—human or otherwise.

  A rob of tiny swiftgrazers darted among the wihi to his left, near the cliff’s rise to the high reaches. Though reputed to eat anything softer than rock, the grazers preferred to avoid humans. They had survived, like many Earthside rodents, by hiding aboard the organic islands throughout the floods. The poor often chanced netting them for food—a dangerous task. He’d watched an old Islander swarmed to death on this very spot only two years ago. The man had netted only half the rob. The other half waited in the rocks for his return, then set upon his legs until he fell. It was over in a matter of blinks, and Flattery considered it an education. He ordered the whole rob burned out at the nests, of course, and their charred bodies delivered to the villagers. Strictly political.

  The Director knew that anything that protected itself to that extreme could be made to protect him, too. His greenskeeper had a way with animals as well as plants, and now several rob of swiftgrazers nested in vulnerable approach points to the compound. This was one such rob, stationed near the trail to the high reaches. He watched them often, particularly in the evening when their slender, rusty backs caught the sunlight and rippled among the silver wihi.

  “Look there!” his guard warned, and Flattery saw the skulking back of a dasher approach the rob. The guard set his lasgun for the distance about the limit of his effective range, and raised it. Flattery motioned him to wait.

  The dasher closed the final twenty meters in three blurring bounds, slapping at the little animals and stunning a few, but the dasher was skinny from hunger. It tried to gulp a few of them down, and that pause was all the rob needed to regroup. The dasher seemed to melt off its odd bones. Flattery smiled again, as the afternoon clouds gathered offshore.

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?” he asked no one. “Just beautiful.”

  Chapter 41

  We’re more than our ideas.

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

  Twisp the Zavatan elder watched the Director watch the swiftgrazers strip an ailing hooded dasher to bone. The sight reminded him of the old days when he was a simple fisherman at sea. The last effects of blue spore-dust heightened this memory of schools of scrat that devoured maki a thousand times their size in blinks. Twisp had a healthy respect for scrat, and for swiftgrazers.

  Furry little bandits, he thought. One thing about them always made him smile. Their fragile little penises detached during mating, leaving a small fleshy plug in the female that her body absorbed. It kept sperm in, and subsequent suitors out, guaranteeing the genetic survival of the first to mount. The male grew another within weeks, but not soon enough to breed twice in one cycle.

  Something of a game developed among many Pandoran men at the expense of the swiftgrazers. The trick was to trap a swiftgrazer and snatch its penis. They were considered a delicacy, and it was said that the Director enjoyed them steamed atop his salads. It wasn’t easy to isolate a single swiftgrazer. Many a drunk pulled back stumps where there had been fingers.

  The little animals looked like a band of robbers, with their masks across their twitchy noses and their nervous way of having at least half of the rob on alert. He had never known them to attack humans unless molested, but when they attacked it was with a fury, a complete abandon that chilled him. He did not care to find out the limits of their patience.

  Twisp admired swiftgrazers for the way they stuck together. There was no such thing as a hungry swiftie. If one swiftie was hungry, the whole rob was hungry. The Shadows claimed that the people of Pandora would be like swiftgrazers when the time came. “The time is now,” Twisp whispered, watching Flattery.

  His whisper was swallowed in the wind. Just enough spore-dust twinkled in his veins to lend a background music to the gusts of the incoming storm.

  The wind whistled back, “Yesss,” here in the high reaches, as it always did at sea. Only inside, behind the plaz and dogged hatches, did he ever hear it moan, “Nooo.” The first time had been nearly thirty years ago, in the company of a woman he couldn’t forget. The wind had been right then, and Twisp’s broad shoulders sagged a little when he realized it was right now.

  The rob of swifties finished their kill. Most of them stood upright on their slender bodies, sniffing the wind and yawning. The pink of their long tongues flickered visibly as they licked their rusty snouts.

  Twisp trained his monks with scrat and swiftgrazers in mind. The sequestered Zavatans, like the Shadows of every settlement, were honed and ready, prepared to fight, prepared to go hungry. Still, he desperately wanted to find another way.

  He asked the wind, “How can I save the people and Flattery, too?” A crisp lull stilled the afternoon.

  Twisp had long ago noted that the Director cultivated certain rob and eliminated others. Careful observation bore fruit—Twisp knew all of the swiftgrazers’ secret warrens and the myriad entrances
topside. He knew they all would need this kind of patience and attention to detail to turn aside the cruel momentum of Flattery and his machine.

  Beyond the scene of this little death in front of him the greater deaths of charred villagers fanned out from the smoking ruins of the Preserve. As the afternoon winds once again gathered their storm, so did hunger unite Pandora against its most vicious enemy. Twisp watched clumps of the inevitable refugees stagger the trail to the rumor of safety among the Zavatans in the high reaches.

  New recruits for us, for the Shadows.

  His smile was a grim one. Pandorans had never been a warlike lot. There had always been too few humans, too many demons. Even hungry as they were, Pandorans were reluctant to pick up arms against their fellows. Flattery paid his security force, and paid them well, to fight other humans. The disease that Twisp thought he had nipped years ago had burst into an epidemic under Flattery.

  “I, too, believed in him at first,” Twisp said. “Was that wrong?”

  He knew what the wind would say before he heard it. He had been lazy, he had hoped someone else would take care of it. Like everyone else, he had only wanted to live his simple life quietly.

  Twisp’s own patience was worn threadbare as his robe. For nearly twenty-five years he had hoped that Pandora would shrug off the Director’s mantle of hunger and fear. Hope, he knew, had even less substance than dreams. It implied waiting, and too many hungry Pandorans didn’t have the luxury of waiting. To wait was a death sentence, and time was the prosecution.

  When Flattery had seized power, he insinuated himself first into control of Merman Mercantile and then acquired control of all food distribution. He bought into transportation and communications worldwide. This had been accomplished by the deaths of several of Twisp’s friends, people who had owned Merman Mercantile and Current Control.

  Too many accidents, too many coincidences.

  He fought a familiar lump at his throat. They all had been young, naive, and none of them stood a chance against the cunning of the Director. Now, as always, only Flattery could afford to wait.