The Ascension Factor

He indicated two carved stone benches under the largest of the trees and sat. Nevi was clearly impatient to be off on the chase, but Flattery could not let them go yet. Nor could he bear watching Zentz make a slobber of his magnificent fruit.

"There are objectives more important than their capture," he emphasized. "Ozette must be discredited. He was popular on Holovision, and his disappearance has already been aired, thanks to Beatriz Tatoosh. This only firms our resolve to expose him as a monster. He must be seen as a madman in the clutches of madmen, with the deathly ill Crista Galli as their slave. We will play on her beauty and her i

"And the second?" Nevi asked.

Such a question was uncharacteristic of Nevi - how much he must want to be on with it! Flattery wondered what this enthusiasm would add to Nevi's performance.

"Crista Galli will be a problem for them shortly," he said. "They'll want her off their hands. We want her to be seen asking for our help. She must want the Director to save her and the people must know this. It is our only way of guaranteeing absolute control after this little action topside - our only way short of all-out extermination of these pocket villages and little Zavatan monasteries that are the breeding grounds for these Shadows."

"Interesting," Nevi said. "This will require some care. Maybe it's a job for your propaganda people at Holovision. Have you found any drugs to be useful for he... persuasion?"

"Details of her drug program are in the briefing you will receive in the foil," Flattery said. He glanced at his timepiece. "I will say that if she has eaten, she could be catatonic any time. Instructions, precautions and drugs have been prepared and are stowed with your briefing materials. Her persuasion is completely up to you. The ma

Nevi smiled one of his rare smiles. That was what Flattery liked about the ma... if one could call such a creature a man. He rose to a challenge.

"The Tatoosh woman, does she launch today with the drive system and your OMCs?"

"Yes," Flattery said, "as pla

"I don't trust her," he said, and shrugged. "She'll be up there with Current Control and we're going into the kel..."

"She will be no trouble," Flattery said. "She's been very helpful to us. Besides, she's my problem, leave that to me."

Zentz had finished gnashing down his apple and was once again gawking about the Greens.

"Any of those Zavatans ever tu

He still has his uses, Flattery reminded himself.

"My pets love exploring," Flattery answered, indicating Archangel. "Did you know that 90 percent of their brain tissue is dedicated to their sense of smell? No one has tu

Zentz nodded. "A good arrangement," he gurgled.

"You haven't tried your apple," Flattery said, nodding to the bright yellow fruit in Nevi's palm.

"I'm saving it," the assassin replied, "for Crista Galli."

***

Do you know how hard it is to think like a plant?

The Immensity prickled its long, gray-green fronds and sniffed the current in its chemical way. The sniff did not detect a presence so much as the hint of a presence. It was more a prescience than proper smell or taste, but the kelp knew that something of itself passed by now in the current.

The Immensity was a convolution of kelp, a subtle interweave of vines that sprawled, like a muscular brain, throughout the sea. It had begun as a wild kelp, an ignored planting inside a long-abandoned Merman outpost. It had barely known "self" from "other" when it first encountered the Avatalogical study team led by Alyssa Marsh. Most of what the Immensity knew of humans it had learned from Alyssa Marsh.

This stand of kelp knew slavery from the human memories that her DNA held, and it knew itself to be enslaved by Current Control. With the right tickle in its vines it raised them, lowered them, retracted or extended them. Another electrical tickle set off the luciferase in the kelp, lighting the passage of human submarine trade. There were other tricks as well, all of which pulsed a current through a cha

The Immensity had all of eternity at its disposal. It allowed this exercise because it pleased the humans and did not interfere with the stand's extended contemplations. Thanks to Alyssa Marsh and her shipmate Dwarf MacIntosh, the kelp had learned how to follow the electrical tickle to its source. Everything that humans transmitted now flowed straight to the heart of the Immensity. Everything.

The Immensity was finally prepared to send something back. It was getting closer to a breakthrough to these humans, and that breakthrough would not be through touch or the chemical smell, but through light waves intersecting in air.

Pleasing humans was a trivial matter, displeasing them was not. Once, soon after waking, this kelp had lashed out in pain to pluck a runaway submersible from among its vines. The huge cargo train had torn a hundred-meter swath nearly a kilometer long in its path through the vines. After the kelp slapped the deadly thing and plucked it apart, Flattery's slaves came with cutters and burners to amputate the kelp back to infancy. The Immensity knew that it had not been able to think right for some time after that, and it did not intend to give up its thinking ever again.

A certain stirring now in the tips of its fronds told the Immensity that "the One," the Holomaster, was passing. The Immensity could unite fragmented stands of kelp into one will, one being, one blend of physics that humans called "soul." Deep in its genetic memory lay a void, an absence of being that could not be teased out of the genetics labs of the Mermen. This void waited like a nest for the egg, the Holomaster who would teach the kelp how to unite fragmented stands of humans.

Twice this Immensity gave up its body but never its will. It was capable of neither sorrow nor regret, simply of thought and a kind of meditative presence that allowed it to live fully in the now while Flattery's electrical strings at Current Control manipulated the puppet of its body.

Reflex is a speedy response made without the brain's counsel. Reaction is a speedy response made with minimal counsel. This kelp grew up expecting to be left alone. It learned reaction only after its vines twined with domestic kelp. It learned to kill when threatened and to show no mercy. Then it learned to expect retaliation for killing.

This Immensity expected to live forever. Logic dictated that it would not live forever if it continued reacting to humans. And now, the One was passing! It knew this as surely as the blind snapperfish knows the presence of muree.

The original Immensity of kelp, Avata, encompassed all of the seas of Pandora under one consciousness, one voice, one "being." Its first genetic extinction came early in the formation of the planet. It had been at the mercy of a fungus. A burst of ultraviolet from a huge sunstorm killed off the fungus. Somewhere, a primitive frond lay mummified in a salt bog awaiting Pandora's first ocean.

The second extinction was by human beings, by a human bioengineer named Jesus Lewis. The kelp was teased back to life by a few DNA miners about fifty years later. The revitalized kelp that the Mermen resurrected was developed from these early experiments. Now kelp once again filled the seas, dampening the murderous storms.