The Ascension Factor

Once again the great stands scattered scent. They grew close with the years, their fronds spoke the chemical tongue. This Immensity itself retained two and a quarter million cubic kilometers of ocean.

The One rode a kelpway that skimmed the Immensity's reach. This particular kelpway came out of a stand of blue kelp that had been known to attack its own kind, overpowering nearby stands, sucking out their beings and injecting its own. It had suffered many prunings, and was sorely in need of guidance. This the Immensity knew from snatches of terror that drifted in on torn fronds. The One could not be trusted to such a dangerous stand. At whatever cost, the One must be spared.

The kelp shifted itself slightly, against the electrical stings from Current Control, to bring the One into its outmost currents, spiraling into the safer deeps of its own stand.

***

You have been educated in judgment, which is the essence of worship. Judgment always occurs in the past. It is past-thinking. Will, free or otherwise, is concerned with the future. Thinking is the performance of the moment, out of which you use your judgment to modulate will. You are a convection center through which past prepares future.

"Course change."

Elvira's voice was emotionless as rock but Rico detected the slightest edge of worry in the flurry of her fingers across her command console. She never piloted the foil in its voice mode because she preferred to speak as seldom as possible. That Elvira had spoken at all worried him - that, and the increasing shimmy that had begun a few minutes back.

"Why?"

When working with Elvira, Rico picked up her habit of non-speech. She seemed to like that.

"Cha

"Steered?" he muttered, and checked his own instruments. They maintained their position in the kelpway, but their compass said the huge undersea corridor was ru

"Who's doing the steering?"

Elvira shrugged, still busy with her keyboard. She had taken them deep into sub train traffic to minimize tracking, and they ran without the help of sensors that would light their progress through the kelpways.

"We're out of the wild kelp sector outside Flattery's launch site," he said, "that's where the weirdness usually happens."

One-half of his screen displayed the navigation grid projected by Current Control from its command center aboard the Orbiter. The other half of the screen tracked their actual course through the grid, which now appeared to be bent.

Bending, he corrected himself. It looks like our whole end of the screen is pouring down a drain.

"Anything on the Navcom?" he asked.

Sometimes Current Control changed grids through the kelp to accommodate weather conditions further upcha

"Negative," she said. "All clear."

The ride began to get bumpy and Rico cinched himself tighter to his couch. He keyed the intercom and said, "Rough water, everybody cinch up. Ben, you'd better come up here."

Below them Rico could see another cargo train careening dangerously close to the kelp, attempting to recover from the sudden change. Their dive lights showed him that the kelp seemed to be in a struggle with itself, fluttering the cha

Ben used the hand grips along the bulkhead to work his way to his console.

"Can we get Current Control?" Ben asked. He dropped into his couch and cinched up.

"Not without giving up our position."

"We got out too easy," Ben said. "They've got a bug on this thing, anywa..."

"Had," Rico said, smiling. "I did an E-sweep when we left the harbor, thinking the same thing. Found it. Elvira here jettisoned the little devil into a netful of krill that we passed about a dozen grids back."

"Good work, both of you," Ben said. "All right, then let's try that cargo train belo..."

The Flying Fish was buffeted again by something like a huge fist. Elvira wrestled with the controls to keep them out of the kelp.

Rico knew, as they all knew, that any damage to the kelp could be construed as an attack. A lot of kelp lights were active in this sector. Besides the red and blue telltales of a waking stand, this kelp flashed its cold navigation light at random and occasionally flooded them with the brighter fiber-optic sunlight that it transported from the surface. If the stand was one that had awakened, any mistake could get the foil and themselves torn apart at the seams.

"Didn't Flattery just go on the air to tell us how safe he'd made the kelpways?"

"Just goes to show," Rico said, "you can't believe that bastard for a goddamn blink."

The cargo train passing in the opposite direction beneath them was having even more trouble than they were. A relatively tiny foil could stop in midcha

"It's bending," Rico said, watching the Navcom monitor that marked out their grid system. "The whole grid's bending."

"We'd better surface," Ben said. "Prepare for -"

"Negative," Elvira said. "If this is a surface disturbance, things will be worse up there. We need information."

Ben grunted acknowledgment.

"Cargo train identity signal is registered to the Simplicity Maru," Elvira reported, fighting the controls to maintain hover and an equidistance between walls of the kilometer-wide cha

Ben keyed for a low-frequency broadcast. He hoped he didn't have to explain the absence of their identity signal.

"Simplicity Maru, this is Quicksilver," he lied. "Do you have reports on current disruption?"

Static hissed back at them, then a microphone clicked on. The message came in badly broken. Undersea communication, especially around active kelp, was always difficult.

"Sim... Maru. Negativ... into kelp." There was the sound of shrieking metal in the background... . king up. We are preparin... ballast. Repeat, preparin..."

Elvira threw the throttles forward and in spite of a violent buffeting the foil leaped at her touch. Her lips were pressed into a tight line and her knuckles shone white on the controls.

"Wait, we can'..." Ben said. His body pressed further into his couch. "We can't go into deep kelp."

"They're blowing ballast," Elvira growled. "That whole cargo train's going to pop up into us like a cork."

Rico felt every fixture aboard rattle like his teeth.

"Ben, is the girl secure?"

"She's strapped in," Ben said.

Just then they cleared the rear cabin of the train. It blew past them toward the surface, containers and cabins tumbling like toys. A few of the containers snagged in the walls of the kelpway, walls that still vibrated with light and that same strange force.

"This is too weird," Ben said. "Let's surface and take our chances with the Director's air cover. This ride's getting much too ugly."

Elvira nodded curtly and the foil started its ascent. As though alerted by their control panel, the kelp fronds began closing above the Flying Fish. First they formed a canopy, then, a tight and impenetrable mesh. A sudden change of current lurched them to starboard and sent the foil tumbling end over end. Elvira righted them manually, her face very pale.