DV 4 - The Ascension Factor Page 11

  Everyone, everyone is a stranger.

  She'd had this thought before, but today it didn't surround her with the loneliness that it had in the past. She'd touched Ben Ozette, and seen that he, too, had these thoughts and he'd lived among humans for his whole life.

  This is what they could learn from the kelp, she mused. We are not alone because we are elements of one being.

  She listened as Rico muttered loudly to no one in particular.

  "Operations won't like it," he said. "Under no circumstances is she to be allowed near the sea. Of course, they're welcome to drop in here and give us a hand after they promised us the airstrip . . ."

  She could tell that Rico felt more comfortable in the foil. He had smiled, finally, and though he seemed to be complaining he was complaining with a smile.

  "Ever ride a foil?" Ben asked her.

  "Never," she said, her wide eyes trying to take in everything at once. "I've watched them from the Preserve. This one is beautiful."

  "Let me point out our three-way option," he said, and indicated certain diagrams on his control panel. "We are riding Pandora's finest vehicle on, above or under the sea. The hydrofoil mode is fast on the surface, but the foil struts clog up easily in thick kelp. Except in flight, these class-one foils use the old Bangasser converter to retrieve hydrogen from seawater, a virtually infinite source of fuel. If we go to the air, we have to remember that the fuel tanks do get empty."

  He glanced over at Elvira's indifference and shrugged.

  "We're going down under," he said. "Their lasgun's no good underwater. But this guarantees we'll be tracked, all the kelpways are heavily wired --"

  "It might be something bigger than Flattery doing the tracking," Rico interrupted. "Heads up, we're going down."

  He paused and, when there was no response from Ben, he assisted Elvira with the dive checkout. While they busied themselves with tasks at their consoles, Crista watched the water close over the cabin.

  Ironically, it was probably Flattery who best understood her life among the kelp. In his hybernation, Flattery had lain nearly lifeless, his vitals monitored and maintained by several devices on and inside his body. According to Flattery's lab people, Crista Galli had lived in symbiosis with the kelp, a hundred million kelp cilia inside her, breathing for her, feeding her. They claimed that these tiny projections supported her for her first twenty years, until Flattery had this stand of kelp blown up, lobotomized to the needs of Current Control.

  "It's like being an embryo until you're twenty," she'd told Ben. "There's no other way I can explain it. You don't eat, breathe, or move around much. The only people you meet are in the dreams that Avata brings. Now I don't know what was dream and what was me, it's all confused. There was no me until . . . until that day. But Flattery knows something of how this feels. So does that Dwarf MacIntosh, and that brain that Flattery's hooking up to his ship."

  "It sounds horrible," Ben had said, and she realized that it probably did.

  In dive mode the engine shift vibrated so much that it rocked her from side to side in her seat, forcing her attention back to the present.

  Crista fought back a tear, and couldn't turn away from the green water surging ahead of the cabin.

  There are laws against touching me!

  She thought of that kiss again, the one that had lasted only a blink in real time but would replay forever in her mind. Even in the hot climate of Kalaloch, Crista wore the coverings dictated by the Director. But alone, in the privacy of her suite, she had often shucked her clothes in spite of Flattery's sensors, which she knew to be everywhere.

  Any portion of her skin left bare tingled at its awareness of breezes and light. If she noticed nothing else in a day she noticed the thousand tiny touches between humans around her. It had become difficult to think of herself as human. Now, having glimpsed the public idolatry focused on her, she felt the frayed tether weaken even more.

  A surge in cabin air pressure popped her ears, and the great plasma-glass dome of the cabin settled completely under the waves. She caught herself holding her breath and cautioned herself to relax. She heard the susurrations of voices rise and fall with the pulse of the engines.

  "Are you all right?"

  Crista felt herself rising above Ben's voice to the ceiling of the cabin, through the ceiling and higher yet, above the Preserve. She was a thousand meters above Kalaloch, and beneath her writhed a mass of brown tentacles.

  She was a hylighter, tacking her great sail across the breeze to keep the shadow of their foil in sight below. She was aware of herself, of her own being inside the foil, but felt every ripple along the hylighter's supple body as well.

  Ben Ozette was calling her name, barely audible at this distance. It seemed she shared an umbilicus from his navel to her own and he was pulling her in by it, reeling her back to the Flying Fish hand over hand.

  Ben touched her cheek and Crista snapped awake. He did not take his hand away.

  "You scared me," he said. "Your eyes were open and you quit breathing."

  As she sat forward, resisting his gentle pressure, she saw that Rico also stood over her, an open medical kit beside his feet. He was wearing gloves. What had been blue sky covering the plaz of the cabin was now the green-gray twilight of the middle deep. They were riding a kelpway, and somehow she knew that they had already cleared the harbor, heading north.

  Rico stared at Ben's hand stroking her cheek, then at Crista.

  "I was gone," she said. "Somewhere above us. I was a hylighter watching this foil and you reached out and brought me back."

  "A hylighter?" Ben laughed, but it was a tight, very nervous laugh. "That's a strange enough dream.

  ' Gasbag from the sky

  How her tentacles writhe

  for me . . .'

  Remember that song? 'Come and Gone . . .'"

  "I remember that it was some tasteless play on words, ridiculing the hylighter's spore-casting function. And this was no dream."

  She saw the snap in her voice reflected in the tightening of his lips, a closing off that she didn't know how to stop.

  Rico turned without saying anything and stowed the kit beneath his seat. Crista smelled something like anger, something like fear pulse from Rico's turned back. All of her senses washed back into her trembling body, delivering her into a state of hypersensitivity that she had never known before.

  The undersea landscape of blues and greens blurred past her like the settlement had blurred past her -- too much wonder, too little time.

  Of everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and of him to whom they have entrusted much, they will demand the more.

  -- Jesus

  Beatriz was awaiting her cue for the two-minute windup of News-break when the fully armed security detachment entered the studio, sliding from the hatchway with their backs along the walls. They hung back beyond the fringe of lights, which blazed their reflection in the squad leader's mirrored sunglasses. Her mouth was suddenly dry, her throat tightening, and she was due for the wrap-up in thirty seconds.

  Still on the air, she thought. The preempt isn't running yet.

  Her console showed her what the three cameras saw, but the monitor at the rear of the studio showed what went out on the air. Now it showed Harlan fast-talking the weather.

  It could be bypassed.

  She shuddered in her newfound paranoia and thought that the floor director would probably stop Harlan if they'd gone to tape, but she couldn't be sure anymore.

  Maybe they want to see just how much more I'd try to say.

  She had deviated from the prompter, amid the waving hands of the producer and director. She hadn't linked Ben with the Galli kidnapping, she'd just listed him as missing, along with Rico, on assignment. She noted signs of surprise and muttering among the crew when she said it. Both Ben and Rico were admired in the industry. Indeed, many of Rico's inventions and innovations made the holo industry possible.

  Harlan finished morning fishing patterns, and th
e countdown went to Beatriz. The officer of the security squad had moved up in the studio and placed a man beside each of her cameramen. She had the sudden, weighty thought that her crew might not be on the shuttle this afternoon.

  Harlan finished and smiled from the monitor, and the floor director's fingers counted her down: Three, two, one . . .

  "That's our morning Newsbreak from our launch site studios. Evening Newsbreak will be broadcast live from our Orbital Assembly Station. Our crew will have the opportunity to accompany the OMC, Organic Mental Core, and take you, the viewer, through each step of installation and testing. Other news that we will follow at that time: the abduction of Crista Galli. As you know, there is still no word from her abductors and no ransom demand. More on this and other news at eighteen. Good morning."

  Beatriz held her smile until the red light faded out, then slumped back into her chair with a sigh. The studio erupted around her in a babble of questions.

  "What's this about Ben?"

  "Rico, too? Where were they?"

  "Does the company know about this?"

  They cared. She knew they would care, that most of Pandora probably cared, and that was her power. As the mirrored sunglasses made their way through the crew toward her, she knew that there was nothing he could do. Even if they'd preempted and run the canned show, the crew knew and there would be no keeping this leak plugged.

  When the security officer reached her, the babbling in the studio fell quiet.

  "I must ask you to come with us."

  These were the words she'd been afraid she might hear. These words, "Come with us," were what Ben had tried to warn her about for the last couple of years. He had said more than once, "If they ask you to come, don't do it. They will take you away and you will disappear. They will take the people around you away. If they say this to you, make whatever happens happen in public, where they can't hide it from the world."

  "Roll cameras one, two and three," she announced. Then she turned to Gus, the floor director. "Were we preempted?"

  "No," he said, and his voice trembled. He was sweating heavily even though she was the one under the lights. "If a preempt signal was sent, I didn't see it. You went out live."

  God bless Gus! she thought.

  She turned to the security.

  "Now, Captain . . . I didn't get your name . . . what was it you wanted of me?"

  What then shall we do?

  -- Leo Tolstoy

  "Trimmed and steady," Elvira reported. "No pursuit. Course?"

  When Ben didn't answer, Rico said, "Victoria."

  Elvira grunted.

  It was obvious to Crista that Elvira trusted both Ben and Rico completely. She had seen loyalty at the Preserve, but never trust. She had manipulated the distrust rampant throughout Flattery's organization to open the hatch for her escape. That same distrust would bring Flattery down, once and for all. Of this she was certain.

  "Flattery's people hoard information like spinarettes at the web," she told Ben. "It's barter to them, a medium of exchange. So no one has the full picture and rumor guides the hand that blesses or damns. That's why Shadowbox has threatened him more than anything else."

  "There's food in the galley," Rico announced, and she saw the accompanying green indicator flash on the console at her right hand. "Ben, you two take a break. Bring me back some coffee. We're a few hours out yet. Elvira would like the usual."

  Ben led Crista to the galley behind the cabin with a hand at her elbow. Her legs seemed wobbly in spite of the even-keeled submersible run of the foil. She had been hungry now for hours. Her head ached with it, and the memory of broiled sebet on the village air charged her stomach.

  "We live in the galley," Ben told her. "When we're on a job, this room is jammed, it's where everything happens."

  She stepped from the semidim cabin into a warm yellow glow. The galley was a bright room of wood, yellowpanel and brass. She could imagine a Holovision Nightly News crew spread out over the two tables with coffee and notes in the half-hour before air time. It was a clean, well-lighted space. Holo cubes of the crew in action on various assignments sat in a rack against the inboard bulkhead. Crista sat at the first of two hexagonal tables and pulled down a couple of the cubes to look at.

  "These really stand out at you," she said, moving the holograms through different angles of light. "Nothing in Flattery's collection matches these for quality."

  "Thanks to Rico," Ben said. "He's a born inventor. He'd be a rich man today if Flattery's Merman Mercantile hadn't jumped into the middle of things. Our stuff is good because Rico makes up the equipment himself. We always roll with the best."

  "She's very pretty," Crista said, holding a scene of Ben and Beatriz with their arms around each other. "You two have worked together for a long time. Were you in love, the two of you?"

  Ben cleared his throat and pushed a few buttons. She heard the whirr of galley machinery at work.

  "Now it's hard to know whether we were truly in love or whether we'd just survived so much together that we felt no one else could understand -- except maybe Rico, of course."

  "And you made love with her?"

  "Yes."

  Ben stood with his back to her, staring at the backs of his hands on the countertop. "Yes, we made love. For several years. Given our lives, it would have been impossible that we didn't become intimates."

  "But now you're not?"

  She saw the slightest shake of the back of his head. "No."

  "Does that make you sad? Do you miss her?"

  When he turned to her she saw the consternation on his face, the struggle he seemed to be having with words. She thought perhaps he'd started out to lie to her, but with a sigh he changed his mind.

  "Yes," he said, "I miss her. Not as a lover, that's past and would be too clumsy to rekindle. I miss working with her because she's so goddamn good at getting people to talk in front of cameras. Rico handled the techno stuff, and between us she and I could get to the bottom of most anything. I think she's in love with MacIntosh up in Current Control, but I don't think she's admitted it, yet. If it's true, it should make life easier for both of us."

  "If one of you is in love, then that takes the heat off?"

  Ben laughed. "I suppose you could say that, yes."

  She lowered her gaze to the cube that her hands passed back and forth in front of her. "Could you ever be in love with me?"

  He laughed a soft laugh and gripped her shoulder.

  "I remember everything about you," he said. "That first day I saw you in Flattery's lab, when you looked at me over your shoulder and smiled . . . I had a feeling when our eyes met like I've never had before. I still get it every time I see you, think of you, dream of you. Isn't that something like love?"

  Her pale skin flushed red from the neck of her dress to the roots of her shaggy white hair at her forehead.

  "It's the same for me," she said. "But I have nothing to compare with. And how could I live up to whatever you've shared with . . . her?"

  "Love isn't a competition," he said. "It happens. There were tough times, living with B, but I don't have to bring up the bad parts to punish myself for missing the friendship, the good parts. I think she and I are both people who refuse to dislike someone we've loved. She's an exceptional person or I wouldn't have loved her. There was a lot of bliss, a lot of turmoil, no boredom at all. The bliss part she called 'our convergent lines.' Ultimately we each blamed the other for being impossible when it was our situation we couldn't bear . . ."

  "Did you take the job of interviewing me because you knew that she was working with Flattery at the Preserve?"

  He laughed again.

  "You have me pegged, don't you? That's a yes and no answer. I thought, and still think, that your story is the most exciting thing I can show the rest of Pandora. I wouldn't have tried for it otherwise. But, yes, I did hope, in a moment of wallowing in loneliness, that I'd see her again."

  "And . . . ?"

  "I did. The thrill was gone and we were g
ood friends. Good friends who still work very well together."

  "You knew that Flattery was buying us both off with those interviews, didn't you?" Crista asked.

  She set her hat beside her on the deck and peeled off her headband and mantilla. She gave her matted hair a shake. She was relieved that he smiled at this as he gathered their utensils at the sideboard.

  "I figured it out," he said. "That's why . . . this. Flattery pulled the corporate strings, denying air time before the first can was shot. But no one was told. I was paid, you were interviewed at length on five occasions -- and this was the story of the century! He paid to have it done so he could kill it."

  "Yes," she said, "with no pangs of conscience whatsoever. Look what it got him: We are here, together. I, at least, am happier. And hungry," she indicated her disguise, "in spite of how it looks."

  Ben patted the lump of clothing strapped to her belly. "And fulfilled, too," he teased. He dared to stroke her cheek again with a smile and then busied himself setting out the food.

  She watched the seascape as their foil slithered through the kelpways, her quick breaths fogging the plaz. Though the Preserve was a seaside base camp Crista never once had been allowed down to the shore. Flattery feared her relationship with the kelp, and saw to it that others around her did, too.

  Ben nudged her shoulder and pointed through the starboard port toward the skeletal remains of a kelp outpost, dimly visible in the foil's deepwater lights. The kelp itself had been burned back to knobby stumps for a thousand meters all around.

  "Report says kelp killed three families here, sixteen people," he said. "Vashon Security did their retaliatory number on the kelp, as you can see. They call it 'pruning.'"

  Though it was shadowland beneath a weak wash of light and though the engines had quieted in submersible mode, Crista focused on the tingle at her shoulder where Ben had touched her. She fought back tears of joy at his touch. How could she explain this to him, who touched people and was touched at will?