The Ascension Factor

He closed the circuit and stared out over the sea toward the black curtain of storm. The surface chop had increased and a wind had come up that was blowing the foil out of the center of the lagoon and closer to the i

The fuel light indicated full, so he shut down the pumps and sounded a warning klaxon to Zentz before he retracted the intakes. He felt them thump into the bay, but still there was no sign of Zentz.

This was clear water, Nevi thought. He should've been back aboard after clearing the intakes once.

He sounded the klaxon again, twice, but heard nothing. The aft hatch light remained on. Nevi secured the console and started back toward the aft hatch. The chant got louder, more distinct, and behind it a babble of voices rose on the air. The hair on his arms rose, too, and Nevi armed his lasgun before leaving the cabin.

He felt a metallic taste on his tongue, a taste he'd heard others describe as fear. He spat once on the deck, but the insidious taste remained.

***

Consciousness manifests itself indubitably in man and therefore, glimpsed in this one flash of light, it reveals itself as having a cosmic extension and consequently as being aureoled by limitless prolongations in space and time.

The Immensity smelled trouble on the waters, a great disturbance from one of the coastal stands. It had been a struggle, the debris told that tale. Currents had changed suddenly, bringing the strange scents of fear and, just as suddenly, bliss. So far, the currents hadn't changed back.

The little whiff of death that the Immensity caught on the current was human, not kelp.

Perhaps the pruner has become pruned, it thought.

It stretched its outermost fronds coastward, but still could not contact the neighboring stand. Only fragments of messages drifted in on bits of torn fronds. These were shards, frames, pieces of recordings - not the Oneness that the Immensity sought, not this "talk" that humans enjoyed and withheld from others.

Then came the humans. They set into the Immensity from above, like hylighters reversing their lives, and with them they brought splinters of dreams from the stand next door.

Yes, Her Holiness was among the kelp again at last. Her presence suddenly freed the neighboring stand of prisoner kelp, a stand that had lost her to Flattery's butchery five cycles back.

Who are these others, now, come to my stand?

Few humans fished outside their gridwork. The few organic islands left to risk a float on Pandora's seas likewise stayed to the more merciful currents of the grid. The Immensity had spared fishermen, scouts, humans fleeing humans, and it had spared entire island-cities more than once. The human in charge of humans had not shown the Immensity equal compassion.

Though humans often called them "willy-nillys," the islands floated now in predictable patterns. Current Control, the enslaver of the kelp, ensured this. But the volcanics of the past twenty-five cycles had conjured storms the like of which the Immensity had never seen in its own time, and these storms brought islands into its reach. It thought of the organic islands as Immensities of Humans, and adjusted its own greatness to let them pass.

These humans came in their flying creature, dropping pieces of kelp into the Immensity's lagoon. The Immensity unraveled a long vine from the wall of the lagoon and sniffed the human. The scents talked of fear and death, and to have the whole story the Immensity would have to read this human's tissues bit by bit.

It waited until the human finished discharging the pieces of kelp, so that the Immensity would know as much of its neighbor as it could. It knew now, by scent and touch, that this was Oddie Zentz human. As it gripped Oddie Zentz human at the waist and pulled him into the walls of the lacuna, it knew that this human had killed many humans, as many as a storm and perhaps more.

The Immensity had spent most of its awakened time trying to communicate with other kelp, to merge with other, smaller stands. More kelp was better, it thought. Closer was better. It failed to understand creatures that killed their own kind. These were, indeed, diseased individuals. If they were merciless to their own, they would certainly show no mercy to others. The Immensity concluded that it should respond in kind.

***

We Islanders understand current and flow. We understand that conditions and times change. To change, then, is normal.

Beatriz knew that it would not be in the captain's best interest to kill Mack, especially if there were links with other forces groundside. But she had also quit trying to guess what could be in Captain Brood's best interest. From what she could gather, Captain Brood was a man trying to capitalize on a bad decision, making more bad decisions to cover his tracks. He wouldn't last long at this rate, and he was the type who just might take everyone, and everything, with him.

She concentrated on the map she'd called up on the large studio display screen. It was a map of Pandora, rotatable, and at the touch of a key it highlighted populated areas, agriculture, fishing and mining. She could tell at a glance where the factories lay, both topside and undersea, and where the wretched communities lived that served them, for serve them they did.

Only today, with the murders of her crew and Ben's warnings ringing in her memory, did she realize how the people of Pandora, including herself, had become one with their chains. They were enslaved by hunger, and by the manipulation of hunger, which was a particular skill of the Director. He concentrated on food, transportation and propaganda. Before her, on Holovision's giant screen, she saw the geography of hunger spread out for her at a touch.

The largest single factory complex above or below the sea was Kalaloch, feeding the bottomless maw of Flattery's Project Voidship. It showed up on her display as a small, black bull's-eye in the center of amoebalike ripples of blue and yellow. Those ripples represented the settlement - the blue was Kalaloch proper, where all paths led to the ferry terminal or to The Line. People inside the blue lived in barrackslike tenements or in remnants of Islander bubbly stuck to the shore.

The yellow, a weak stain of sorts widening out from the blue, represented the local refugee population. Starving, unsheltered, too weak for heavy work, they were also too weak to rebel. The Director's staff rode among them daily, picking the lucky few who would be trucked to town to wash down the stone pavements, sort rock from dung in the Director's gardens, or pick through refuse for reusable materials. For this each was given a space in The Line and a few crumbs at one of a hundred food dispensaries that Flattery operated in the area. Even private markets were offshoots of the dispensaries - true black market vendors disappeared with chilling regularity."

The sphere of Kalaloch included the bay and its launch base, the factory strip, the village, Flattery's Preserve and the huddle of misshapen humanity that squeezed inside the perimeter for protection from Pandora's demons.

Outside this sphere Beatriz noted the similarities of other settlements along the coastline. These smaller dots also were ringed by the huddle of the poor, even agricultural settlements, fishing villages, the traditional sources of food. Security squads shot looters of fields, proprietors of illegal windowboxes and rooftop gardens. They shot the occasional fisherman bold enough to set an unlicensed line. All of this Ben had told her. She had seen evidence herself, and had chosen to disbelieve. Beatriz earned her food coupons fairly, ate well, felt guilty enough about the hunger around her to believe what Flattery had fed her about production meaning jobs and jobs feeding people.