The Ascension Factor

by Frank Herbert

  “No,” she said, “that’s too risky. It won’t hurt the OMC but I’ve seen people panic when their oxygen gets low. We want to keep these guys calm, they might just start shooting up everything in sight.”

  “You’re right,” Hubbard said. “Shorty, tell Cronin to whip up some of his chemical magic. We want this guy down and out in a blink, and anybody else that’s with him. We want that OMC and the tech in operating condition when this is over, got it?”

  “Check, Boss.”

  “Listen up, everybody,” Hubbard said. “Set all your headsets to voice-activated fireground frequency three-three-one.” He made the proper settings in her equipment, then explained to Beatriz, “That way we talk and he can’t listen, and we don’t have to go through the intercom.”

  Beatriz noted the tools in Hubbard’s jumpkit.

  “Let me see what you’ve got there,” she said. “I may be able to activate some of the sensors in the chamber through the intercom box. It would help to have eyes and ears.”

  She slid back the cover and a faint glow pulsed from inside the box. It was not an electrical glow, the cherry-red simmer of bare wires or the blue-white snap of a short-circuit. This glow was pale, cool, with a slight pulse that intensified as she watched.

  Hubbard’s hand moved reflexively to a small canister at his belt, but Beatriz stopped him.

  “It must be luciferase,” she said, “from the kelp leads that we fed in here last year.” She selected a current detector from Hubbard’s kit and applied it to one of the fistful of unconventional kelp leads.

  “Kelp leads?” Hubbard asked. “What the hell was he stringing … ?”

  “Circuits made with kelp don’t overload, and they have a built-in memory, among other features. We’ve done some experimentation with it at HoloVision … OK, there’s something here,” she said, watching the instrument’s flutter in her hand. “I wouldn’t call it a current, exactly. More of an excitation.”

  When the bare back of her hand brushed the bundle of kelp fibers, Beatriz had a sudden unexpected look at the inside of the OMC chamber. The young guard stood across the lab from her, lasgun at the ready, his eyes wide and clearly frightened. Beatriz watched the scene from two vantage points. One was halfway up the bulkhead behind the OMC, probably the outlet connecting with the hookups she held. The other was from about waist-height, facing the security, and she realized she was watching this scene from inside Alyssa Marsh’s brain. The kid kept flicking the arm-disarm switch on his lasgun.

  “Get inside,” she whispered to Hubbard. “Get someone inside. He’s going to panic and kill them all.”

  She gripped the bundle of kelp fibers tight in her fist and dimly heard Hubbard snap out orders to his crew. She felt herself drawn both ways through the fibers, as though she were seeing with several pairs of eyes at once. The sense of herself diminished as she flowed out the fibers, so she gripped a handhold on the bulkhead and forced the flow to come to her.

  I can’t let this go on, she thought. It has to stop. Oh, Ben, you were so right!

  The experience was nearly more than she could bear, but magnetizing as well. She knew she could let go the fibers, stop the headlong tumble down a tunnel of light, but her reporter instinct told her to hang on for the duration of the ride. She raced through the hookups aboard the Orbiter and the Voidship, then felt herself launched toward the surface of Pandora. She tightened her grip and wondered who was moaning in the background, then realized that the moans were her own.

  She was a convection center for the kelp. The pale-faced young security with the huge ears and filed teeth stood barely a meter from her eyes.

  Alyssa’s eyes, she thought, and repressed a shudder. I’ve become Alyssa’s eyes.

  The tech’s hands trembled as they worked, and with each new fiber glued in place the eerie glow increased.

  “Brood didn’t say this was supposed to happen,” the kid said, more nervous than ever. “Is this normal?”

  “I don’t know,” the tech said.

  Beatriz heard the fear in her near-whisper. “You want me to stop?”

  The kid rubbed his forehead, keeping his gaze on the OMC. Beatriz knew that he saw Alyssa Marsh’s brain being wired to some tangle of kelp-grown neurons, but it was Beatriz who looked back at him. Perspiration dampened his hair and spread dark circles from his underarms.

  Fear of the situation? she wondered. Or is he afraid of the OMC?

  He was Islander extraction, there might be some superstition but physical abnormality itself would not scare him. A Merman would have a harder time facing a living brain, something an Islander would shrug off.

  “No,” he said. “No, he said to hook this one up no matter what. I wish he’d answer us.” The kid flicked a switch on his portable messenger and tried again. “Captain, this is Leadbelly, over.” The only answer was a faint hum across the airways.

  “Captain, can you read?”

  Still no answer. Leadbelly sidestepped to the intercom beside the hatch. The near-weightlessness made it difficult for him to keep his back in contact with the bulkhead as he went.

  “What’s the code for Current Control?”

  “Two-two-four,” the tech said, never looking up from her work. “It’s voice-activated from there.”

  He fingered the three numbers and instantly the glow in the chamber intensified to a near-glare. He armed his lasgun with a metallic sklick-click and Beatriz heard herself shout, “No! No!” just as Shorty propelled herself like a hot charge out of the service vent and onto Leadbelly’s shoulders. The tech shrieked and jumped aside, and Leadbelly shouted a garbled message into the intercom.

  His lasgun discharged and for Beatriz the world slipped into slow-motion. She saw the muzzle- flash coming directly at her, homing in on her as though pulled by a thread.

  This can’t be, she thought, a lasgun fires at light-speed.

  It was such a short distance to the muzzle that the charge hadn’t fully left the barrel yet when it hit the glow around Alyssa Marsh’s brain. Beatriz watched the lasgun sucked dry of power in less than a blink. Leadbelly screamed and struggled to fling the hot weapon from himself, but it had melted to the flesh of his hands. Shorty clung tight to Leadbelly with both hands and feet, spinning them across the center of the chamber. The charge triggered some reaction in the glow, and Beatriz found herself surrounded by it, curiously unafraid.

  All was quiet inside this bright sphere. Beatriz hung at the nucleus of something translucent, warm, suspended in yellow light.

  This is the sensation that the webworks mimicked, she thought.

  Beatriz found comfort in the familiar rush of some great tide in her ears and she felt, more than saw, the presence of light all around her.

  The center, she thought. This is the center of … of me!

  A hatchway appeared and though she did not have hands or feet she flung it open. There stood her brother when he was eleven, his chest bare and brown and his belt heavy with four big lizards.

  “Traded three in the market for coffee,” he said, and thumped a bag down on the table in front of her. “You won your scholarship to the college, but I’ll bet it don’t cover this. Let me know when you need some more.”

  She had been sixteen that day, and unable to know how to thank him. He hurried past her out the hatch, the dead lizards flopping wet sounds behind him.

  A flicker of hatches raced past, each connected to the artery of years. Some dead-ended at years- that-might-have-been. She opened another, this time an Islander hatch of heavy weatherseal, and found herself inside her family’s first temporary shelter on real land. It was an organic structure, like the islands, but darker and more brittle than those that ran the seas.

  Her grandfather was there, hoisting a glass of blossom wine, and all of her family joined him in a toast.

  “To our busy Bea, graduate of the Holographic Academy and new floor director for HoloVision Nightly News.”

  She remembered that toast. It came on the 475th anniversary of t
he departure of Ship from Pandora. It had become an occasion for somber celebration over the years, with a place left empty at table. Originally this was intended to represent the absence of Ship, but in more recent times the gesture had become a memorial to a family’s dead.

  “Ship did us a great favor by leaving,” her grandfather said.

  There was much protestation at this remark. She hadn’t remembered hearing this conversation years ago, but it pricked her curiosity now.

  “Ship left us the hyb tanks, that’s true,” her grandfather said. “But we went up there and got them down. And we got them down without any help from anyone or anything inside of them. That’s what will raise us up out of our misery—our genius, our tenacity, ourselves. Flattery’s just another spoiled brat looking for a handout. You talk about ascension, Momma. We are the ascension factor and, thanks to Ship, we will rise up one day to greet the dawn and we will keep on rising … that right, little girl?”

  The party laughter faded and a single hatch floated like a blue jewel ahead of her, waiting. It was like many of the Orbiter’s hatches, fitted into the deck instead of the bulkhead. Across the shimmering blue of its lightlike surface the hatch cover read: “Present.” She reached for the double-action handle and felt the cool satin of the well-polished steel in her palm. She pulled the hatch wide and dove inside.

  She had the same sense of a headlong tumble, like her early clumsy progress in the near-zero- gravity of the Orbiter’s axis. She sensed everything about her as though she had a body, and that body was hyper-alert, but she still saw no evidence of one. She sensed others, too, not far away, and part of this sense told her she had nothing to fear. The translucence of the glow about her folded and thickened, forming a shadow at her left shoulder. In a blink it precipitated into Dwarf MacIntosh.

  “Beatriz!” He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. “Now I know I’ve died,” he laughed, “I must be in heaven.”

  “We haven’t died,” she said. “But we may have gone to heaven. Something’s happened with the kelp hookups. I know that I’m still holding onto them outside the OMC chamber, but I also know that I’m here with you …”

  “Yeah, the kelp hookups and holo stage in Current Control got a glow to them, then the viewscreens … the whole world seemed to be shining down there. At first I thought it had something to do with those goons that Flattery sent up here. Now I think it has more to do with the kelp disturbances, the grid collapse. I think that your friend Mr. Ozette and Crista Galli are at the bottom of this.”

  “But how? We’re in orbit. The kelp we touch here touches nothing else. It could just be a psychic disturbance, but then you wouldn’t be here with me.”

  “It’s the light,” Mack said. “The kelp uses chemicals to communicate, this we’ve known for some time. Now we’ve taught it to use light. That holo stage I built for experimentation—it works perfectly, and all components came from the kelp, only the kelp has gone a few steps further. The kelp takes pieces of light, breaks them into components, encodes them chemically or electrically, then reproduces them at will. It’s something I refined from what cryptographers used to call the ‘Digital Encoding System.’ You know more about holography than I do, you tell me what’s going on.”

  “If you’re right,” she said, “if this is the kelp’s holography, then it’s learned to use light as both a wave and a particle. We can hug each other, yet we’re just holo projections of some kind, right? Maybe the kelp has found another dimension.”

  “Yes,” a woman’s voice said, “we are the reorganization of light and shade. Where light goes, we go.”

  “Are you … Avata?” Beatriz asked.

  A gentle laugh replied, a laugh like moonlight across flat water. A third figure began its mysterious materialization out of the glow. It was a woman, as radiant as the light around them, and because of that she was barely visible. Beatriz recognized her immediately.

  “Crista Galli,” she gasped. She looked around for sign of another figure, for Ben, but all she saw was the translucent sphere that held them.

  “Don’t worry, Beatriz, Ben and Rico are with me. As you and Dr. MacIntosh are with the Orbiter crew. What they see now are the shells of our beings, the husks of ourselves. What we meet here is the being itself.”

  “But I can see you, hear you,” Mack said. “Beatriz and I actually touched.”

  Crista laughed again, and Beatriz felt a giggle coming that she couldn’t suppress.

  I am safe here, she thought. Brood, Flattery, they can’t get me here.

  “That’s right, we’re safe,” Crista said.

  Beatriz realized then that thought was as good as speech in this strange place. Or is it a place?

  “Yes, this is a place. It is a who as well as a what and a where. Dr. MacIntosh, we have substance because our minds have made a perceptual jump along with the light. Things change to accommodate our differing subconscious. Did you see a lot of hatches?”

  Beatriz watched him hold out his hands, look down at his feet, puzzled. “Yes, I did, but …”

  “And one reminded you of something pleasant, so you opened it?”

  “Yes, and I wound up here.”

  “So did I,” Beatriz said. “But an earlier one led me … back. Back to my family years ago.”

  “It was Avata’s way of reassuring you,” Crista said. “It took you to a familiar, comfortable place. You have been terrified lately. Avata does not want your terror. She wants your expertise.”

  “Expertise?” Beatriz swept a hand out to indicate their surround. “After this, what could I possibly offer?”

  “You’ll see. Think of this as Shadowbox, as the biggest holo studio in the world, with nearly the whole world as its stage. We will put Flattery at its center, show him off to the world. What then?”

  “Stop people from destroying each other,” Mack said. “They have not been able to get at him, so they will destroy his engines of power. If they do that, they endanger all of us, Avata included. Exposing Flattery might be more dangerous than you think.”

  “But look at our method,” Beatriz said. “It’s incredibly powerful. It will appear as a message from the gods, a vision, a miracle.”

  “I saw light shimmering above all kelp stands from Current Control,” Mack said. “Is that really happening?”

  “Yes,” Crista nodded, “it is.”

  “Then we already have the world’s attention, right? Everybody must’ve stopped in their tracks to take a look.”

  “My people stopped long enough to enjoy the light show,” someone said. “They’re heading for Kalaloch with everything they have.”

  Another figure precipitated out of light, a muscular male figure with red hair. Though Beatriz had never met Kaleb Norton-Wang before, she realized that she knew his past nearly as well as her own. At the same moment, she realized this was true of Crista Galli and Mack, as well.

  Then they know me, too, Beatriz thought, and saw Mack’s responding grin.

  “We are part of Avata, now,” Crista said. “Others float this drift, too, but we are Avata’s ambassadors to our own kind. You, Dr. MacIntosh, believed me to be a manufacture of the kelp. Until this day I, myself, did not know my origins. I owe my life to Avata, my birth to humankind, and my allegiance to both. Are we all not of the same mind?”

  Beatriz agreed. “We are. Flattery must be stopped, the killing must stop. Can we do it without becoming just another death squad?”

  Beatriz paused, felt a surge of light within her and watched a replay of the encounter with Nevi on the beach. Then she discovered something interesting about being one with Avata—all of them could talk at once and she could follow everything perfectly.

  Kaleb said, “I can speak to all of my people, using the kelp … I mean, Avata, as you used it to beat Nevi. Who could ignore a giant holo in the sky?”

  “I didn’t use it to defeat Nevi,” Crista said. “I was merely a witness. Avata and Rico worked out a magic between them, but neither used the other.�
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  “I stand corrected,” Kaleb said, and bowed slightly. “How are we to cooperate with Avata?”

  “We initiated it by seeking contact with Avata in the first place. Each of us has done that, for our own reasons, which we all now know,” Crista explained. “Where there is kelp, Avata can project holos. As you can see, these are being refined even at this moment. Our holo selves, here, can hug each other and we can feel it!”

  “Our problem is Flattery,” Mack said. “He has never been easily persuaded, and now that he’s made an emperor of himself he believes only himself capable of rational decisions. Anything else is a threat. He is paranoid, therefore it’s a given that he’s set traps of one kind or another to protect himself from attack. Remember, he’s a psychiatrist, too. He can defend himself from both emotional and physical attack. The ultimate threat, of course, is that if he dies, Avata and, eventually, all humans die as well. We can’t have him panic and start lighting fuses.”

  “Why can’t Avata just … capture him, as it has taken us?” Kaleb asked. “He’s not the type to kill himself, and it would buy us some time.”

  “Flattery takes excruciating pains to stay away from the kelp,” Crista said. “He won’t even have kelp-paper products in his compound. He must be drawn out to the kelp.”

  “Or driven out,” Kaleb said. “Or the kelp has to come to him,” Beatriz said. “Maybe that’s possible. There are the Zavatans …”

  Yes, a voice that surrounded them said, Yes, the Zavatans.

  Suddenly the light cleared around them and Beatriz saw what was left of Kalaloch sprawled out, wounded, beneath her. She floated above the settlement at a great height, with a comfortable sense of well-being that could only be wind buoying her.

  “Ah, Beatriz, you have found the hylighter,” Crista’s voice said. “Let us all join hands in Avata and be with her, now.”

  Beatriz was vaguely aware of her existence in the light. She felt Mack’s hand on her right and Kaleb’s to her left, but the sensations she received were from her hylighter perceptions, and these steered her in a tightening circle high above Flattery’s Preserve. Three more hylighters tacked her way, and each one snapped its full sail in their traditional greeting.