The Ascension Factor

by Frank Herbert

  Nevi would be the death of him, this he was beginning to understand. With this came the understanding that there was nothing he could do about it, nowhere he could hide. The dasher coiled to spring, that was what Spider Nevi saw when Zentz met his gaze.

  “I am going to make you a hero,” Nevi said. “I have a part for you to play. If we hand the Director Shadowbox we hand him back Pandora. The implications for you and me are obvious. You will, of course, prefer this to whatever the Director has in mind for you here?”

  Zentz did not clear his throat, he did not speak. He nodded once and his grotesque lump of a jaw quivered with what Nevi presumed was the clenching of his teeth.

  “It will be just you and I,” Nevi said. “The more we can tell the Director about these vermin and their warrens, the happier he will be. You desperately need to make him happy.”

  The white foil slipped under the bay’s waves, keeping the burning wreckage between itself and the Vashon Security foil opposite. They would be suspicious of not being challenged during an alert, this Nevi knew, but he still had the advantage. They knew he was behind them, they didn’t know how close.

  Nevi used the sensor system to pan the riot that was now in full bloom in Kalaloch. “They’re working their way toward the Preserve,” he noted. “Can your men handle this?”

  Zentz’s wattles rose in indignation.

  “Security is my business, too, Mr. Nevi. I handle it my way. We will let them throw their tantrum and trash their nest, then we will slaughter them here at the wall. They must be made to be very sorry that they attack the Preserve. The damage they do to their streets will keep the survivors busy for a time.”

  Nevi switched off the sensors and stood, straightening his tight suit with a tug.

  “Secure one of Flattery’s personal foils,” Nevi snapped. “Full gear for two, plus a week’s rations. See to it there’s coffee. Meet me in the Preserve hangar in one-half hour.”

  His eyebrows indicated dismissal and Zentz rose to leave. Nevi saw the seed of hope in Zentz’s eyes, a seed that Nevi would nourish to a rich blossom and snip, when necessary, to make just the right bouquet for the Director.

  Chapter 17

  I consider the positions of kings and rulers as that of dust motes … I look upon the judgment of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs as but traces left by the four seasons.

  —Buddha

  Crista Galli reclined in a leather crew couch that smelled faintly of Rico. She gripped the armrests, eyes closed. Noise and the press of the crowd had always frightened her, at least since she had been blasted free of the kelp five years past. Memory of her life before that blast seemed hopelessly lost.

  The supple leather couch and roomy cabin muted the pierside clamor. The others had finished casting off and were returning to the cabin. A green circle flashed on the pilot’s screen for each hatch they dogged behind them.

  Their pilot, a severe, sensuous woman in her mid-thirties, prepared the ballast tank pumps and other predive systems. She spoke the sequences aloud crisply as she completed her check-off.

  “Taking on ballast.”

  Three fuel tanks flared together from the fire at the center of the bay and Crista felt the concussions puff her lungs. A three-headed rage of fire boiled up from the waters off their bow, heeling the foil over in a lurch to starboard. Ben and Rico sealed off the cabin and strapped in.

  “Going down?” Rico asked, and laughed.

  The pilot didn’t miss a beat.

  “No security challenge,” she reported. “Twenty-meter level-off mandatory until clear of marker five-five-seven …”

  Since boarding the foil Crista had felt a calm such as she’d not known for several years, in spite of the madness outside. She felt something pull her toward the mouth of the harbor, to the open water beyond. Ben handed her a child’s dessert stick from his pocket.

  “You’ll need the energy,” he said. “Once we’re clear of the harbor we can raid the galley. Is the cabin air too dry for you?”

  “No,” she shook her head, “it feels fine. Like my room at the Preserve.”

  Cool, processed air was all that Crista had breathed for five years at the Preserve, free of the charcoal odors of the street braziers, the whiff of raw iodine from the beaches and scant wet blooms of upland slopes. It was air swept nearly clean of humanity—the humanity that idolized Crista Galli, the humanity she had only known now for less than a single day.

  Midmorning still, second sun just clearing the horizon, and Crista felt the race of sunlight through her surging pulse. She was outside the Preserve now. Regardless of the circumstances, she intended never to go back, never to be a prisoner of walls again.

  Watch yourself, an ancient one inside her warned, that you don’t become a prisoner of action, or words. And remember, when you make a choice you abandon freedom of choice.

  She’d had no choice in her appearance among humans, and Flattery had given her no choices since that time. She had been plucked from the vine of the kelp and dropped into Flattery’s basket. Crista thought that if the people of Pandora thought her a god, it was time she acted like one. Now that the water had begun closing about the foil, she felt an energy surge her blood that she’d never felt before.

  What could she do that would help herself and these people who were still alien to her? Even Ben, though she felt a love for him, was a stranger. She had tried daily for five years, and could summon no memories of her earlier life.

  Everyone, everyone is a stranger.

  She’d had this thought before, but today it didn’t surround her with the loneliness that it had in the past. She’d touched Ben Ozette, and seen that he, too, had these thoughts and he’d lived among humans for his whole life.

  This is what they could learn from the kelp, she mused. We are not alone because we are elements of one being.

  She listened as Rico muttered loudly to no one in particular. “Operations won’t like it,” he said. “Under no circumstances is she to be allowed near the sea. Of course, they’re welcome to drop in here and give us a hand after they promised us the airstrip …”

  She could tell that Rico felt more comfortable in the foil. He had smiled, finally, and though he seemed to be complaining he was complaining with a smile.

  “Ever ride a foil?” Ben asked her.

  “Never,” she said, her wide eyes trying to take in everything at once. “I’ve watched them from the Preserve. This one is beautiful.”

  “Let me point out our three-way option,” he said, and indicated certain diagrams on his control panel. “We are riding Pandora’s finest vehicle on, above or under the sea. The hydrofoil mode is fast on the surface, but the foil struts clog up easily in thick kelp. Except in flight, these class-one foils use the old Bangasser converter to retrieve hydrogen from seawater, a virtually infinite source of fuel. If we go to the air, we have to remember that the fuel tanks do get empty.”

  He glanced over at Elvira’s indifference and shrugged.

  “We’re going down under,” he said. “Their lasgun’s no good underwater. But this guarantees we’ll be tracked, all the kelpways are heavily wired—”

  “It might be something bigger than Flattery doing the tracking,” Rico interrupted. “Heads up, we’re going down.”

  He paused and, when there was no response from Ben, he assisted Elvira with the dive checkout. While they busied themselves with tasks at their consoles, Crista watched the water close over the cabin.

  Ironically, it was probably Flattery who best understood her life among the kelp. In his hybernation, Flattery had lain nearly lifeless, his vitals monitored and maintained by several devices on and inside his body. According to Flattery’s lab people, Crista Galli had lived in symbiosis with the kelp, a hundred million kelp cilia inside her, breathing for her, feeding her. They claimed that these tiny projections supported her for her first twenty years, until Flattery had this stand of kelp blown up, lobotomized to the needs of Cur
rent Control.

  “It’s like being an embryo until you’re twenty,” she’d told Ben. “There’s no other way I can explain it. You don’t eat, breathe, or move around much. The only people you meet are in the dreams that Avata brings. Now I don’t know what was dream and what was me, it’s all confused. There was no me until … until that day. But Flattery knows something of how this feels. So does that Dwarf MacIntosh, and that brain that Flattery’s hooking up to his ship.”

  “It sounds horrible,” Ben had said, and she realized that it probably did.

  In dive mode the engine shift vibrated so much that it rocked her from side to side in her seat, forcing her attention back to the present.

  Crista fought back a tear, and couldn’t turn away from the green water surging ahead of the cabin. There are laws against touching me!

  She thought of that kiss again, the one that had lasted only a blink in real time but would replay forever in her mind. Even in the hot climate of Kalaloch, Crista wore the coverings dictated by the Director. But alone, in the privacy of her suite, she had often shucked her clothes in spite of Flattery’s sensors, which she knew to be everywhere.

  Any portion of her skin left bare tingled at its awareness of breezes and light. If she noticed nothing else in a day she noticed the thousand tiny touches between humans around her. It had become difficult to think of herself as human. Now, having glimpsed the public idolatry focused on her, she felt the frayed tether weaken even more.

  A surge in cabin air pressure popped her ears, and the great plasma-glass dome of the cabin settled completely under the waves. She caught herself holding her breath and cautioned herself to relax. She heard the susurrations of voices rise and fall with the pulse of the engines.

  “Are you all right?”

  Crista felt herself rising above Ben’s voice to the ceiling of the cabin, through the ceiling and higher yet, above the Preserve. She was a thousand meters above Kalaloch, and beneath her writhed a mass of brown tentacles.

  She was a hylighter, tacking her great sail across the breeze to keep the shadow of their foil in sight below. She was aware of herself, of her own being inside the foil, but felt every ripple along the hylighter’s supple body as well.

  Ben Ozette was calling her name, barely audible at this distance. She shared an umbilicus from his navel to her own and he was pulling her in by it, reeling her back to the Flying Fish hand over hand.

  Ben touched her cheek and Crista snapped awake. He did not take his hand away.

  “You scared me,” he said. “Your eyes were open and you quit breathing.”

  As she sat forward, resisting his gentle pressure, she saw that Rico also stood over her, an open medical kit beside his feet. He was wearing gloves. What had been blue sky covering the plaz of the cabin was now the green-gray twilight of the middle deep. They were riding a kelpway, and somehow she knew that they had already cleared the harbor, heading north.

  Rico stared at Ben’s hand stroking her cheek, then at Crista.

  “I was gone,” she said. “Somewhere above us. I was a hylighter watching this foil and you reached out and brought me back.”

  “A hylighter?” Ben laughed, but it was a tight, very nervous laugh. “That’s a strange enough dream.

  ‘Gasbag from the sky

  How her tentacles writhe

  for me …’

  Remember that song? ‘Come and Gone …’”

  “I remember that it was some tasteless play on words, ridiculing the hylighter’s spore-casting function. And this was no dream.”

  She saw the snap in her voice reflected in the tightening of his lips, a closing off that she didn’t know how to stop.

  Rico turned without saying anything and stowed the kit beneath his seat. Crista smelled something like anger, something like fear pulse from Rico’s turned back. All of her senses washed back into her trembling body, delivering her into a state of hypersensitivity that she had never known before.

  The undersea landscape of blues and greens blurred past her like the settlement had blurred past her—too much wonder, too little time.

  Chapter 18

  Of everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and of him to whom they have entrusted much, they will demand the more.

  —Jesus

  Beatriz was awaiting her cue for the two-minute windup of News-break when the fully armed security detachment entered the studio, sliding from the hatchway with their backs along the walls. They hung back beyond the fringe of lights, which blazed their reflection in the squad leader’s mirrored sunglasses. Her mouth was suddenly dry, her throat tightening, and she was due for the wrap-up in thirty seconds.

  Still on the air, she thought. The preempt isn’t running yet.

  Her console showed her what the three cameras saw, but the monitor at the rear of the studio showed what went out on the air. Now it showed Harlan fast-talking the weather.

  It could be bypassed.

  She shuddered in her newfound paranoia and thought that the floor director would probably stop Harlan if they’d gone to tape, but she couldn’t be sure anymore.

  Maybe they want to see just how much more I’d try to say.

  She had deviated from the prompter, amid the waving hands of the producer and director. She hadn’t linked Ben with the Galli kidnapping, she’d just listed him as missing, along with Rico, on assignment. She noted signs of surprise and muttering among the crew when she said it. Both Ben and Rico were admired in the industry. Indeed, many of Rico’s inventions and innovations made the holo industry possible.

  Harlan finished morning fishing patterns, and the countdown went to Beatriz. The officer of the security squad had moved up in the studio and placed a man beside each of her cameramen. She had the sudden, weighty thought that her crew might not be on the shuttle this afternoon.

  Harlan finished and smiled from the monitor, and the floor director’s fingers counted her down: Three, two, one …

  “That’s our morning Newsbreak from our launch site studios. Evening Newsbreak will be broadcast live from our Orbital Assembly Station. Our crew will have the opportunity to accompany the OMC, Organic Mental Core, and take you, the viewer, through each step of installation and testing. Other news that we will follow at that time: the abduction of Crista Galli. As you know, there is still no word from her abductors and no ransom demand. More on this and other news at eighteen. Good morning.”

  Beatriz held her smile until the red light faded out, then slumped back into her chair with a sigh. The studio erupted around her in a babble of questions.

  “What’s this about Ben?”

  “Rico, too? Where were they?”

  “Does the company know about this?”

  They cared. She knew they would care, that most of Pandora probably cared, and that was her power. As the mirrored sunglasses made their way through the crew toward her, she knew that there was nothing he could do. Even if they’d preempted and run the canned show, the crew knew and there would be no keeping this leak plugged.

  When the security officer reached her, the babbling in the studio fell quiet. “I must ask you to come with us.”

  These were the words she’d been afraid she might hear. These words, “Come with us,” were what Ben had tried to warn her about for the last couple of years. He had said more than once, “If they ask you to come, don’t do it. They will take you away and you will disappear. They will take the people around you away. If they say this to you, make whatever happens happen in public, where they can’t hide it from the world.”

  “Roll cameras one, two and three,” she announced. Then she turned to Gus, the floor director. “Were we preempted?”

  “No,” he said, and his voice trembled. He was sweating heavily even though she was the one under the lights. “If a preempt signal was sent, I didn’t see it. You went out live.”

  God bless Gus! she thought. She turned to the security. “Now, Captain … I didn’t get your name … what was it you wanted of me?”<
br />
  Chapter 19

  What then shall we do?

  —Leo Tolstoy

  “Trimmed and steady,” Elvira reported. “No pursuit. Course?”

  When Ben didn’t answer, Rico said, “Victoria.”

  Elvira grunted.

  Clearly, Crista thought, Elvira trusts both Ben and Rico. She had seen loyalty at the Preserve, but never trust. She had manipulated the distrust rampant throughout Flattery’s organization to open the hatch for her escape. That same distrust would bring Flattery down, once and for all. Of this she was certain.

  “Flattery’s people hoard information like spinarettes at the web,” she told Ben. “It’s barter to them, a medium of exchange. So no one has the full picture and rumor guides the hand that blesses or damns. That’s why Shadowbox has threatened him more than anything else.”

  “There’s food in the galley,” Rico announced, and she saw the accompanying green indicator flash on the console at her right hand. “Ben, you two take a break. Bring me back some coffee. We’re a few hours out yet. Elvira would like the usual.”

  Ben led Crista to the galley behind the cabin with a hand at her elbow. Her legs seemed wobbly in spite of the even-keeled submersible run of the foil. She had been hungry now for hours. Her head ached with it, and the memory of broiled sebet on the village air charged her stomach.

  “We live in the galley,” Ben told her. “When we’re on a job, this room is jammed, it’s where everything happens.”