The Ascension Factor

The Director knew that anything that protected itself to that extreme could be made to protect him, too. His greenskeeper had a way with animals as well as plants, and now several rob of swiftgrazers nested in vulnerable approach points to the compound. This was one such rob, stationed near the trail to the high reaches. He watched them often, particularly in the evening when their slender, rusty backs caught the sunlight and rippled among the silver wihi.

"Look there!" his guard warned, and Flattery saw the skulking back of a dasher approach the rob. The guard set his lasgun for the distance about the limit of his effective range, and raised it. Flattery motioned him to wait.

The dasher closed the final twenty meters in three blurring bounds, slapping at the little animals and stu

"Beautiful, aren't they?" he asked no one. "Just beautiful."

***

We're more than our ideas.

Twisp the Zavatan elder watched the Director watch the swiftgrazers strip an ailing hooded dasher to bone. The sight reminded him of the old days when he was a simple fisherman at sea. The last effects of blue spore-dust heightened this memory of schools of scrat that devoured maki a thousand times their size in blinks. Twisp had a healthy respect for scrat, and for swiftgrazers.

Furry little bandits, he thought. One thing about them always made him smile. Their fragile little penises detached during mating, leaving a small fleshy plug in the female that her body absorbed. It kept sperm in, and subsequent suitors out, guaranteeing the genetic survival of the first to mount. The male grew another within weeks, but not soon enough to breed twice in one cycle.

Something of a game developed among many Pandoran men at the expense of the swiftgrazers. The trick was to trap a swiftgrazer and snatch its penis. They were considered a delicacy, and it was said that the Director enjoyed them steamed atop his salads. It wasn't easy to isolate a single swiftgrazer. Many a drunk pulled back stumps where there had been fingers.

The little animals looked like a band of robbers, with their masks across their twitchy noses and their nervous way of having at least half of the rob on alert. He had never known them to attack humans unless molested, but when they attacked it was with a fury, a complete abandon that chilled him. He did not care to find out the limits of their patience.

Twisp admired swiftgrazers for the way they stuck together. There was no such thing as a hungry swiftie. If one swiftie was hungry, the whole rob was hungry. The Shadows claimed that the people of Pandora would be like swiftgrazers when the time came.

"The time is now," Twisp whispered, watching Flattery.

His whisper was swallowed in the wind. Just enough spore-dust twinkled in his veins to lend a background music to the gusts of the incoming storm.

The wind whistled back, "Yesss," here in the high reaches, as it always did at sea. Only inside, behind the plaz and dogged hatches, did he ever hear it moan, "Nooo." The first time had been nearly thirty years ago, in the company of a woman he couldn't forget. The wind had been right then, and Twisp's broad shoulders sagged a little when he realized it was right now.

The rob of swifties finished their kill. Most of them stood upright on their slender bodies, sniffing the wind and yawning. The pink of their long tongues flickered visibly as they licked their rusty snouts.

Twisp trained his monks with scrat and swiftgrazers in mind. The sequestered Zavatans, like the Shadows of every settlement, were honed and ready, prepared to fight, prepared to go hungry. Still, he desperately wanted to find another way.

He asked the wind, "How can I save the people and Flattery, too?"

A crisp lull stilled the afternoon.

Twisp had long ago noted that the Director cultivated certain rob and eliminated others. Careful observation bore fruit - Twisp knew all of the swiftgrazers' secret warrens and the myriad entrances topside. It was this kind of patience and attention to detail that he knew they all would need to turn aside the cruel momentum of Flattery and his machine.

Beyond the scene of this little death in front of him the greater deaths of charred villagers fa

New recruits for us, for the Shadows.

His smile was a grim one. Pandorans had never been a warlike lot. There had always been too few humans, too many demons. Even hungry as they were, Pandorans were reluctant to pick up arms against their fellows. Flattery paid his security force, and paid them well, to fight other humans. The disease that Twisp thought he had nipped years ago had burst into an epidemic under Flattery.

"I, too, believed in him at first," Twisp said. "Was that wrong?"

He knew what the wind would say before he heard it. He had been lazy, he had hoped someone else would take care of it. Like everyone else, he had only wanted to live his simple life quietly.

Twisp's own patience was worn threadbare as his robe. For nearly twenty-five years he had hoped that Pandora would shrug off the Director's mantle of hunger and fear. Hope, he knew, had even less substance than dreams. It implied waiting, and too many hungry Pandorans didn't have the luxury of waiting. It was a death sentence, and time was the prosecution.

When Flattery had seized power, he insinuated himself first into control of Merman Mercantile and then acquired control of all food distribution. He bought into transportation and communications worldwide. This had been accomplished by the deaths of, several of Twisp's friends, people who had owned Merman Mercantile and Current Control.

Too many accidents, too many coincidences.

He fought a familiar lump at his throat. They all had been young, naive, and none of them stood a chance against the cu

How ironic, Twisp thought, that those who can afford to wait don't have to. I wonder if there's anything left for him to hope for?

"Elder!"

Twisp cringed inwardly at the panting voice of the young Mose behind him. He felt impatience enough bursting in his breast without being nettled by Mose.

"What is it?"

The younger monk would not approach the precipitous edge of rock outcrop that Twisp occupied, this he knew. He admitted to himself that it was a little game he played with Mose.

"Why do you stand out there?" the younger asked, his voice tinged with a whine.

"Why do you stand back there?"

Still, Twisp did not turn, though he knew he would do so.

"Your presence is requested in chambers. It is urgent. There are many preparations afoot that I do not understand."

Twisp did not answer.

"Elder, can you hear me?"

Still no answer.

"Elder, please do not make me come out there again. You know that it shakes my wattles in a fearsome way."

Twisp chuckled to himself and turned to join Mose at the cavern entrance. The afternoon rains had begun, anyway, pattering like swiftgrazers in the scrub. He knew already what Operations must have decided. That it was time to stop hoping. That Flattery and his kind must go. That the people were rising up unorganized and undefended. That the Zavatans and the Shadows held the only means and position to guarantee his fall. That once again thousands would die in the greater name of life and, of course, liberty. When there was nothing else to boil down, it always boiled down to hunger.