The Ascension Factor: Pandora Sequence Page 10

  In time, the Director will be the hungry one.

  Twisp remembered Guemes Island and the refugees of twenty-five years ago, hacked and burned and stacked like dead maki in a Merman rescue station down under. Twisp and a few friends hunted down the terrorists responsible, and a hylighter executed the leader. A Chaplain/Psychiatrist had been at the bottom of the trouble that time, too.

  Flattery had burrowed as much of his compound below the rock as above it, and Twisp knew of bolt- holes that led to escape routes along the shore. Flattery wouldn’t need them this time. The older monk had seen fighting before, and knew Flattery’s strategy: lure as many of the rebels inside as possible, then kill them all. Let them think, for a time, that they might win. Blame it on the Shadows. The rest, who lost everything but their lives, would not rise so easily to anger again.

  Mose pulled at his garment, straightening the folds. He faced away from the horror below. His gaze did not meet Twisp’s, but focused in the middle distance beyond the trail. His were eyes sunken deeply for one so young, for one dwelling among the untroubled. He was attempting inner peace at breakneck speed. He shaved his head daily, customary these days with younger Zavatan monks and many nuns. Many ragged scars crisscrossed his scalp from his reconstruction surgery.

  Twisp was one of a handful of exceptions. His full head of long, graying hair was tied into a single braid at the back, mimicking the family style of an old friend, long dead. His friend, Shadow Panille, was said to have been of the blood lines that led to Crista Galli.

  “We should get the others,” Mose said. “We’ll need lasguns if we’re going dust-gathering in the valley.”

  Twisp shaded his eyes and surveyed the scene below. A blur that must be villagers spilled into the Preserve’s compound. Running the other way, like fish fighting their way upcurrent, Flattery’s precious cattle from the Preserve stampeded out the breached wall and into the unprotected valley.

  Security had kept the demon population at a minimum near the Preserve, but with the scent of blood thick on the air and cattle milling about loose dashers were sure to follow. Things were going to get nasty enough without a new hunt of hooded dashers slinking about. He grunted himself out of reverie.

  “Spore-dust goes bad,” Twisp said. “If we’re going to bring any back, we’ll have to do it now.”

  He and Mose stored the kelp fronds they’d collected in the shade of a white rock. Mose still did not look Twisp in the eye.

  “Are you afraid?” Twisp asked.

  “Of course!” Mose snapped back, “aren’t you? We could be killed down there. Dashers will smell the … the …”

  “Just moments ago you wanted to die in the arms of that hylighter,” Twisp said. “What’s the difference? There are demons up here, too. You feel safe on the trail because we say the trail is safe. You know that some have died here in the past, others will die in the future. You stick to the trail, with no cover except these scrub bushes and the rock, no weapon but your body.”

  Twisp pointed past the flames below them and out to sea.

  “Weather will kill you as dead as any demon, on or off the trail. It is a danger now, as dangerous as a dasher. It always stays alive, to kill another day. If dashers come, they will go to the blood, not to us. If anything, we are safest now. This is the present, and you are alive. Stay in the present, and you stay alive.”

  With that he shouldered his empty bag and set out in long strides for the valley and the spore- dust below. Mose stumbled along behind him, his nervous eyes too busy hunting fears to watch the trail.

  Chapter 15

  To think of a power means not only to use it, but above all to abuse it.

  —Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire

  Two old vendors hunched in a hatchway, protecting themselves and their wares from the jostlings of a mob that muscled its way toward the Preserve. One munched a smashed cake, the other nursed a bleeding nose against his sleeve.

  “Animals!” Torvin spat, and a fine spray of blood came with it. “Is there anyone left who is not an animal? Except you, my friend. You are a human being.”

  His free hand patted the other’s shoulder and found a large rip in the fabric of the older man’s coat.

  “Look, David, your coat …”

  David brushed crumbs from his chin and pulled the shoulder of his coat across his chest, closer to his good eye.

  “It will mend,” he said. “And the mob is passing. If there are dead, my friend, we should get their cards for the poor.”

  “I’m not going out there.”

  Torvin’s voice was muffled by his sleeve, but David knew he was firm on that point. It was just as well. His eyes were bad, and his feet not quick enough to outrun the security. It was a shame when the security got the cards. They sold them, or traded them. Every day Torvin and David risked their lives to give a bit of stale cake or a rind of dried fruit to a hungry one without a card. David shook his head.

  What foolishness!

  He worked beside Torvin, they were friends, yet he could not trade him a cake for a dried fruit. He had to have a marker on his card for the fruit, and Torvin would have to punch it out, and then he could have it. If Torvin didn’t have a pastry marker on his card, David could not give him a cake. For Torvin to possess a cake without a proper punched card would mean losing his next turn in The Line. Under the best of conditions, he would not have expected a turn for at least a week. Under the worst conditions, he could starve with a fistful of coupons.

  “This is craziness!” he told Torvin. “It is well I am old and ready to die, because the world makes no sense to me. Our children run about killing each other. It is permissible to have food on one table but not another. We have a leader who takes food from the mouths of babies so he can travel to the stars—good riddance, I say. But what will he leave behind? His bullies, who are also our children. Torvin, explain this to me.”

  “Bah!”

  Torvin’s faded blue sleeve was crusted with blood but the bleeding on his nose had stopped. David could tell by the way he said “Bah!” that the nose was stopped up. He remembered that time the security slapped him, the fragrant burst of blood in his nose.

  “Thinking will get you into trouble,” he heard Torvin warning him. “We are better off to keep quiet, dry our allowance of fruit, bake our allowance of cakes and be thankful that our families have something to eat.”

  “Be thankful?” David wheezed one of his silent laughs. “You are no youngster, Torvin. Who taught you to be thankful to eat when someone across the wall has nothing? There is no greater sin, my friend, than to eat a full meal when your neighbor has none.”

  “We give cards to the poor …”

  “Graverobbers!” David hissed. “That’s what they’ve made us. Graverobbers who can be shot for throwing scraps to the hungry. This is craziness, Torvin, such craziness that this mob is making sense to me. Burn it all and start over. They are hungry now …”

  “Those … animals who beat me, they are not hungry. They have cards. They work we see them here daily. Where do they get off chanting ‘We’re hungry now’ when—”

  “Listen, Torvin, to me an old man now gone crazy. Listen. We are old, you and I. Would you have given them something if you could?”

  Torvin stuck his head out the hatchway, looked up and down the street, then hunched back inside. “Of course. You know me, I’m not a greedy man. I have done such a thing.”

  “Well, listen to me, old man. The mob we saw, yes, they have cards. Yes, they bring a little food home—for a family of four. If there are six, eight, ten then the card still only feeds a family of four.”

  “No one argues with that,” Torvin said. “We can’t breed ourselves out of—”

  “When you or I get too old and have to live with our children, Ship forbid, that will be one more on a card of four. Take in a refugee who has no card, my friend. Yes, that makes it six on a card of four and the average of people who have cards is eight.

  “The ones
without cards, the stinking ones who are dying at the settlement’s edge begging for food, begging for work, sleeping in the mud—they cannot run through the streets themselves to shout ‘We’re hungry now,’ because they can barely stand. We give crumbs from our guilt, from our shame. This mob gives their bodies, their voices to the hungry. They give whatever they have.”

  David leaned heavily on his folded table and got to his feet. The mob had moved on quickly. Had his body allowed, he might have followed them. He watched Torvin test his nose gingerly with his fingertips.

  “I am afraid, David, of people like that. They might have killed us. It could have happened.” Torvin sounded as if he had corks in his nose.

  David shrugged.

  “They are afraid, too, because only the card gives them a place in The Line, and then only when their turns come around. Without a card, how long before you or I wake up in the mud downcoast? How many nights, Torvin, could you sleep in the mud and still wake in the morning?”

  Torvin tested the bridge of his nose again, wincing. “I don’t like this, David. I don’t like getting beat up …”

  “Such drama,” David said. “The man was pushed in here. You were hiding under your table and the corner hit your nose. That is not a beating. The Poet, over there, now that man took a beating.”

  David’s nod indicated a dark shape pacing the hatchway across from them. The street was nearly clear, only a few stragglers scurried about, dodging the stunsticks of security. The Line to the warehouse was reforming already as the bravest, or the hungriest, came out of hiding.

  Only one adult and one child of a card could wait in line, so the chore usually fell to the strongest unemployed member. Whoever did the shopping might have to carry out a two weeks’ supply of foodstuffs for eight people or more. Security protection was good in The Line, but spotty elsewhere, so there were actually two lines, one on one side of the street going in and one on the other going out.

  Licensed vendors like David and Torvin worked The Line, selling to those who were afraid they wouldn’t get inside today, or who wanted a little something different to take home to the wots.

  The man they called “the Poet” across the way worked his way up and down The Line each day, babbling of Ship and the return of Ship. He was careful not to speak against Flattery’s Voidship project. He had done that once, and come back a broken man. The Poet had not stood upright since, but walked in a shuffle, bent nearly double at the waist. David could hear him now, shouting after the tail-end of the mob:

  “I have been to the mountaintop! Let freedom ring!”

  “That one?” Torvin snorted, and started his nose bleeding again. “That one has been into the spore-dust once too often.”

  David smiled at his friend. He and Torvin were nearly the same age, in their sixties, but he hadn’t known Torvin long. There was much he had never told him.

  “I was taken once,” David whispered. “A security wanted cakes without a marker and I wouldn’t give them to him. I knew if I did he would be back every day. He bullied me. I would rather give them to the poor, so I did a foolish thing. I threw them into The Line, and there was a scramble. Well, I knew I would be arrested, but I forgot about the others. They rounded up everyone who had a cake without a punch on the card and took them in.”

  Torvin’s face paled. “My friend, I didn’t know … what did they do to you?”

  “They took me to a shed that had cubicles in it, separated by curtains. In each one they were doing something to someone. The screams were terrible, and the smell …”

  David took a deep breath and let it out slow. The Poet was still gesturing and railing from his hatchway.

  “He was there, in the cubicle next to me. He was an important man from down under who was the director of all of HoloVision. Flattery had taken over—I didn’t know that—and this man had commented on the air that Flattery wanted to brainwash the world.”

  “A brave man,” Torvin said. He appraised the Poet in a new light.

  “A fool,” David said. “He would’ve been better off to find a way to fight inside, or hidden out to do something like those Shadowbox people are doing. He must’ve known what would happen.”

  David dusted off his threadbare trousers, put on his cap and leaned against the hatchway, his gaze very distant and his voice low.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what happened to him. They put him in a metal barrel, bent over double, and tied a block of concrete to his testicles. There was no floor in the barrel, so he could move it around by shuffling, but he had to keep bent over, and his knees bent down, to keep the weight off his testicles. His hands were tied behind his back, and throughout the day they would beat the sides of the barrel with those sticks they carry.

  “They seldom fed him, but when they did he had to take food and water from the floor, bent over like that, an animal inside the barrel. He was a learned man. I never heard him curse. He only prayed. He prayed to every god I’ve heard of, and many that I don’t know. They made him crazy to discredit him—who would believe a madman? Particularly a madman who eats bugs and scraps and sometimes dirt to stay alive.”

  Torvin was quiet for many blinks, digesting what his friend had told him. The Poet continued his rant, and the few security patrolling nearby ignored him.

  “My friend,” Torvin said, “what did they … were you … ?”

  “They beat me,” David said. “It was nothing. I was in and out in a day for being insubordinate. I don’t think the captain cared much for the security guard who charged me. At any rate, he was never seen on this street again. Look, now. It is clear, and we should go sell what we can. I want to get home and check on my Annie. She worries about me in times like this.”

  Both men strapped on their little folding tables that fit around their waists and hurriedly neatened their wares. As they stepped into the muddy street Torvin heard the Poet’s hoarse voice exhort him, “Brother, brother, let freedom ring!”

  Chapter 16

  Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master.

  —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Vashon Literature Repository

  Spider Nevi watched Rico pull the gangway up and onto the deck of the Flying Fish, then he manipulated the sensor for a close view of Rico’s back as he turned away.

  “Lasgun there,” Nevi said, and tapped a finger against the screen. “Belt, middle of the back. Carries himself like a fighter.”

  Nevi never once glanced at the security officer watching the screen at his side. As the Flying Fish departed moorage he switched to another sensor at the mouth of the harbor, one that confirmed Crista Galli’s presence on board.

  At Nevi’s command, the sensor zoomed in on the cabin of the passing foil, revealing LaPush in the copilot’s seat and Crista Galli buckled in behind him. Ozette sat to her left, behind the pilot, and was speaking to her. Nevi recognized the pilot, Elvira, and cursed under his breath.

  “If your security launch tries an intercept, it will be outclassed,” he said. “What then?”

  “There will be a show of force,” Zentz said, “then a warning shot.”

  “And then?”

  Zentz cleared his throat, stroked the swollen area near the middle of his face that functioned as a nose.

  “Shoot to disable.”

  Nevi snorted at the ridiculousness of it. A laser cannon strike on a hydrogen-ram foil could ignite a fireball a thousand meters wide. He thought that a rather narrow definition of “disable.”

  Zentz continued, flustered at Nevi’s silence.

  “The Director declared a ‘state of security’ almost a year ago,” he said. “You know mandatory interception and search of all vessels, except company ferries, that enter Kalaloch…search of any air or ground craft entering or leaving the perimeter …”

  Nevi let Zentz go on with his tedious recital.

  Flattery’s precious Preserve was his nest
, and Nevi knew he would take no chances here. But Nevi was sure that any interception of the Flying Fish right now could easily be bungled into a disaster of the greatest proportions. Flattery had just called him to duty because Zentz had permitted such a bungle.

  “We want Shadowbox and Crista Galli,” Nevi said. “To exterminate nerve runners you have to burn their nest. This foil, intact, will lead us there.”

  Zentz, ramrod-stiff in his seat, cleared his dry throat and offered, “We suspect LaPush has been a Shadow commandant for about six years …”

  “Your crew is not to interfere with this vessel,” Nevi ordered. He keyed in the security frequency on his console. “You can give the order right here.” He flipped a switch and looked Zentz in the eyes.

  Zentz cleared his throat again, then leaned toward the microphone. “Zentz here. Thirty-four, disregard white class-three foil departing harbor.”

  “Sir,” a young voice came back, “by the Director’s orders we’re to seize any vessels sighted but not searched.”

  Zentz paused, and in that pause Nevi enjoyed the exquisite dilemma that was now added to the Security Chief’s fatigue. There was only one way out, one way to satisfy the by-the-book greenhorn officer, one way to keep the Director at bay.

  “I searched it personally at dockside,” Zentz said. “We know what’s on board.”

  Nevi switched off the connection, satisfied with the choice he’d made in Zentz. If it came right down to it, Zentz would be the perfect sacrifice in the holiest of games, survival.

  “Young officers haven’t learned their priorities yet,” Zentz said, forcing a smile.

  “They have only learned fear,” Nevi said. “They mature when they understand greed.”