The Ascension Factor

"When he gets back," McLi

"Well, I want five to one," he said.

"Five to what?"

"You been hit too hard in the head."

"No way."

"Shit," McLi

"Hear me out, gents," the Deathman said. "See that big rock yonder off the point? Not only will I run the P, but I'll swim out to that rock and back. For five to one."

"Stay awake, men," Hot Rocks warned, and everyone swept the area quickly. "Standing here this long we make excellent bait, remember that. OK, let's get it on. Bets or not? Run or not?"

"I'm in."

"Me, too."

"In."

"Here's mine."

Each of the men handed five of their food coupons to Hot Rocks to hold. Each coupon represented a month's rations in the civilian sector. The Deathman handed over five of his own against their twenty-five. Hot Rocks stayed out of it, and the Deathman didn't press him.

"Do me one favor," the Deathman asked.

"Name it," Hot Rocks said.

"Name that rock after me," he said. "I want something around for people to remember me by. Rocks, they're a lot more permanent than people."

"'Deathman Rock,'" McLi

Hot Rocks gave McLi

"If you're going to do it, do it," Hot Rocks said. "Myself, I'd just as soon shoot you here as see you go out there. Stick around much longer and I just might."

"Here's the paperwork," the Deathman said, handing Hot Rocks a small packet. "Back pay, retirement, insurance all go to my brother."

"Who gets the ears?"

"Fuck you."

The Deathman reached into the neck of his fatigues and showed Hot Rocks the necklace he'd made out of the brown little dried-out ears. Though human ears, they looked like seashells now, or twists of leather. He unfastened his fatigues and stepped out of them without a word. He handed Hot Rocks his lasgun and started ru

They took turns at sentry, keeping him in sight with the glasses.

"He's almost at the point," McLi

The quiet one they all called "Rainbow" took him on for a month's worth. Everyone else was quiet, sca

Nobody more surprised than the Deathman, Hot Rocks thought.

"Well, he's earned his place in history," McLi

The Deathman stood atop the offshore rock, yelling something they couldn't hear and shaking his necklace of ears at the sky like a curse.

The dasher must've been lazing in the sun on the oceanside of the rock. The impact from its leap carried the Deathman and the dasher a good ten meters into the narrow stretch of sea off the point. Some of the froth boiling up with the waves was green, so Hot Rocks knew that somehow, before he died, the Deathman had drawn dasher blood. Neither the Deathman nor the dasher ever came up.

Hot Rocks paid off the debts and pocketed the Deathman's packet of paperwork. While he packed up the fatigues, the lasgun and the rest of his brother-in-law's gear, none of his men's eyes met his own. He barked a few orders and walked flank while they finished their long sweep back to camp.

***

Reveries, mad reveries, lead life.

This was the dream Crista had endured for years, the one of her return to the arms of kelp, cradled again in a warm sea. She rubbed her eyes and images flickered across the lids like bright fishes in a lagoon: Ben, beautiful Ben beside her; Rico in a cavern beneath them. There were others, fading in and ou...

"Crista!"

Ben's voice.

"Crista, wake up. The kelp's got Rico."

She blinked, and the images didn't go away, they were just overlain with more images like a stack of wot's drawings on sheets of cellophane. Ben knelt at the center of these images, holding her shoulders tight and looking into her eyes. He looked tired, worrie... scenes from his life dripped from the aura around him and spread out on the deck beside her.

"I saw something around his waist, a tentacle," he said. "I think it pulled him into the water."

"It's all right," she whispered. "It's all right."

He held her as she got her wobbly legs under her. She breathed deep the thick scent of hylighter on the air and felt strength pulse out from the center of herself to each of her weary muscles. Everything seemed to work.

"I see Rico," she said. "The kelp has saved him. He is well."

"It's the dust," Ben muttered, and shook his head. "If the kelp has him, he's probably drowned. We need to get out of here. There are demons, Flattery's peopl..."

He doesn't believe me, she thought. He thinks I'... I'...

A vision gelled in front of her out of thin air, one of Rico wet and gasping in the cavern. Rico tipped back his head and laughed, surrounded b... friendly feelings. It was a side of him she hadn't seen. Someone approached him, a friendly someone.

"Zavatans," she said, cocking an ear, "they will be coming up from the caverns."

"It's the dust, Crista," Ben insisted, "it'll wear off. These are hallucinations. We've got to find Rico and get out of sight. Flattery's peopl..."

"...re here," she said. "They're already here. It's not hallucinatio..." she giggled, "...t's cellophane."

She had unraveled some cellophane in her mind and she saw the sinister figures looking down from the clifftop. Two of them. She reeled her vision closer and saw that she knew them both from Flattery's compound: Nevi and Zentz. Zentz's face and body were grossly misshapen. With Nevi, it was his soul. This she could see in the boiling black aura that seethed from him and sought her out. It sniffed the wind with its black snout like a dasher on the hunt.

She felt Ben pull her backward through the rip in the Flying Fish. The bright sky trailing the storm forced her to squint and focus on a double rainbow that lazed in the sky above them. She wondered whether Ben might be right about the dust. The pink of the rainbow's arch blazed brightest of all the colors and it pulsed in time with her own pulse.

"Do you see it?" she asked.

"The rainbows?" Ben said. "Yes, I do. Give me your hand, I'll help you down here."

"Don't rainbows mean something?" she asked. "A promise of some kind?"

"Supposedly God placed a rainbow in the sky as a promise that he would never destroy the world by flood again," he said. "But that was Earth, and this is Pandora. I don't know whether God's promises are transferable. Here, give me your hand."

The impatience in his voice just made her move slower.

Rico's safe, she thought. He doesn't believe me, so he's worried.

She shielded her eyes from the glare and sca

Another image of Rico, in the cavern. He reached out for the kelp frond that had brought him there and she felt him transported to the dead hylighter at their feet. He stood there, facing them, head cocked and hands on his hips. It was as if he were impatient, waiting for them to make up their minds.

"Look there," she said to Ben, "can't you see Rico?"

She pointed to his image, seating itself at the point where the hylighter touched the sea. He was smiling at her for the first time and beckoned her with a finger.

"I see the sun shining off the water," Ben said. "It's too bright to look at. You'd better be careful of your eyes."