The Ascension Factor Read online

She let the breath out slow, blinked her eyes for the shine and said to the red light, “Good Morning, Pandora. I’m Beatriz Tatoosh for Newsbreak …”

  Chapter 10

  Since every object is simply the sum of its qualities, and since qualities exist only in the mind, the whole objective universe of matter and energy, atoms and stars does not exist except as a construction of the consciousness, an edifice of conventional symbols shaped by the senses of man.

  —Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein

  Alyssa Marsh lived in the past, because the past was all that Flattery could not strip from her. He had tried chemicals, laser probes, tiny implants but the person who had been Alyssa Marsh survived them all.

  He is afraid, she thought. He is afraid that my life here has made me unfit as an OMC—and he’s right.

  He had taken her body away fiber by fiber, or taken her away from her body. Her carotids and jugulars had been bypassed to a life-support system and she had been decapitated, then Flattery himself excised the remaining flesh and bone from around her unfeeling brain. The only sense she retained was the vaguest sense of being. She no longer felt much kinship with humans, and had no way of knowing how long she’d felt that way. Until someone hooked her up to her Voidship she had no means of measuring time. Time became her newest toy. Time, and the past.

  Even fog has substance, she thought.

  Logic told her that her brain still existed or she wouldn’t be entertaining herself with these thoughts. Training in her Moon-base creche hundreds of years ago had prepared her for her responsibility as an OMC—purely mental functions, making human decisions out of mechanically derived data—but Pandora had opened up other possibilities, all of them requiring a body. Having a child, something she’d never have been permitted as a Moon-base clone, changed her perspective but it didn’t change her indoctrination. She kept her child’s birth secret, especially from his father, Raja Lon Flattery number six, the Director.

  Without eyes or ears she would have thought herself a perpetual prisoner of a completely silent darkness. Without skin she expected not to feel, and without the rest she imagined she’d sniffed her last blossom, tasted her last bootleg chocolate. None of this proved to be true.

  Alyssa had expected to be cut off from her senses, but reality proved her to be free of them instead. Like the gods, she was free now to clench the folds of time and replay her life at will, mining sensory details that she’d missed when they filtered through her emotions. She did not miss her emotions much, either, but she allowed as this might be a simple denial process protecting what was left of Alyssa Marsh from the full horror of what Flattery had done to her.

  “You’ll be the Organic Mental Core,” he had announced to her. He spoke of it as privilege, honor, as the salvation of humankind. He might have been right about the salvation of humankind. At the time, even drugged as she was, she didn’t buy the first two. She recognized that she was listening to one of the oldest arguments for martyrdom known to her species.

  “Be reasonable,” he’d told her. “Accept this banner and you will live in a thousand bodies. The Voidship itself will become your bones, your skin.”

  “Spare me the speech,” she slurred, her tongue thickened by drugs. “I’m ready. If you’re not going to let me go back to my studies in the kelp, if you’re not going to kill me, then just get on with it.”

  She now felt that the major difference between herself and the kelp was that the kelp’s entire body was also its brain. The tissues were integrated and the appropriate accomplishments measurable. Flattery would hear none of this.

  He had spoken to her of an Elysium of sorts, of a pain-free and disease-free life. He reminded her that an OMC in its harness was the closest that humans came to immortality. This did nothing to comfort her. She knew the insanity record of other OMCs, the rate at which they’d turned rogue and destroyed their host ships and their expendable cargoes of clones, clones like herself, and Flattery, and Mack. Indeed, the same thing had happened aboard the Voidship Earthling, which brought them all to Pandora. Three OMCs went crazy and the crew had to fabricate an artificial intelligence to save their skins. It brought them to Pandora and abandoned them there.

  I’m understanding that more and more, she thought. I’d like to meet this Ship sometime, interface to interface.

  Words had always amused her, and a lack of flesh to laugh with did not seem to diminish that amusement. Thinking of her son was always serious, however, especially since he’d made such good headway in Flattery’s security service. She thought of him now because her one regret was not seeing him face to face before she …

  … Shucked my mortal coil, she thought. I wanted to see him with my own eyes. No … I wanted him to see me before … this.

  She had given him up to an upwardly mobile Merman couple rather than risk what would happen if Flattery found out she’d borne him a son. She had been afraid he would kill her and take the son, turning him into another ruthless Director.

  I should’ve kept him, she thought. He’s turned out like Flattery, anyway.

  The boy would know by now—she’d left the appropriate papers hidden in her cubby before Flattery reduced her to a convoluted lump of pink tissue. It had been her last act of sentimentality.

  “Your body betrays you,” Flattery growled that last day. “You’ve had a child. Where is it?”

  “I gave it up,” she said. “You know how I am about my work. I have no time for anything but the kelp. A child … well, it was only a temporary inconvenience.”

  It was the kind of argument that Flattery would make, and he bought it. He never seemed to suspect that the child was his. Their liaison had been brief enough and long enough ago that Flattery seemed not to remember it at all. He had made no further reference to it after she left his cubby for the last time more than twenty years back. He only grunted his acknowledgment, probably thinking that the child was the product of a recent indiscretion. He could not deny her passion for her work in the kelp. Only Dwarf MacIntosh shared her passion for delving into this mysterious near-consciousness that filled Pandora’s seas.

  I should have kept him with me in the kelp, she thought. Now he’s become what I’d most feared and I’ve lost his presence, too.

  In her present state, the OMC Alyssa Marsh dwelt often on that birth and those few precious moments her child had been with her. He had stopped crying immediately after birth, happy to watch the Natali as they cleaned up his mother and the room. He had a full head of black hair and seemed fully alert right from the start.

  “He was a month overdue,” the midwife said. “Looks like he wasn’t wasting his time in there.”

  After a few minutes she handed him to the couple who would give him their name. Frederick and Kazimira Brood had visited her weekly for the past few months, and they had made full arrangements for his care. It would cost Alyssa dearly, but she wanted him to have the best of chances. Flattery was determined to turn Kalaloch into a real city, the center of Pandoran thought and commerce. He had hired the young Broods—an architect and a social geographer—to build the security warehouses and garrisons for his troops. There was talk at the time that they might get the university contract. Who could have foreseen the changes in Pandora, the changes in Flattery then?

  I could, she thought. I thought development of the kelp as an ally more important than raising my son.

  If she had had her body with her, she would have let out a long, slow breath to relieve the tension that would have been brewing in her belly. She had neither belly nor breath and her reason now was relatively free of emotion.

  I did the right thing, she thought. In the grand scheme of humankind, I did the right thing.

  Chapter 11

  Even if they, with minds overcome by greed, see no evil in the destruction of a family, see no sin in the treachery to friends, shall we not, who see the evil of destruction, shall we not refrain from this terrible deed?

  —from Zavatan Conversations with the Avata, Qu
eets Twisp, elder

  Flutterby Bodeen unrolled her precious bolt of stolen muslin across the dusty attic deck. Her three young schoolmates clapped in their excitement.

  “You did it!” Jaka cheered. He was twelve, lanky, and the only boy. His father, like Flutterby’s, worked down under at the Shuttle Launch Site, or SLS. His mother also worked at Merman Hyperconductor, so their family received nearly double the usual scrip at The Line.

  “Shhh!” Flutterby warned them. “We don’t want them finding us now. Leet, did you get the paints?”

  Leet, at eleven the youngest of the four, pulled four thick tubes from under her bulky cotton blouse.

  “Here,” she said, without looking up, “I couldn’t get black.”

  “Green!” Jaka blew out an impatient breath. “You want them to think we’re Shadows? You know they all use green …”

  “Shush!” Dana emphasized her point with a finger at her lips and an exaggerated scowl. “Maybe we are Shadows now, did you ever think of that? They’ll treat us the same if we’re caught, you know.”

  “OK, OK,” Flutterby interrupted. “We’re not going to get caught unless we’re here all day. Dana, Jaka, we’re supposed to be practicing our music, so you two play awhile. Leet and I will each make a banner, then we’ll play so you can do two.”

  “Security’s all over the street this morning,” Dana warned. “It’s because of Crista Galli. Maybe they think she’s around here, somewhere …”

  “Maybe she is around here …”

  “We should have a lookout …”

  “They won’t come in while wots are practicing,” Flutterby said, and put her hand up to quiet the others. “Who wants to have anything to do with music lessons? Besides,” she sniffed, and her chin raised a fraction, “my brother’s a security. I know how they think.”

  “Yeah, and he’s up in Victoria,” Dana said. “They think different up there. You know they split them up so if they shoot somebody it won’t be family.”

  “That’s not true!” Flutterby said. “They just don’t want them working the same district as their family because—because—”

  “They’re going to walk in here if we don’t get busy,” Jaka interrupted. His voice was changing, and he tried to make it sound authoritative. Jaka lived at the edge of Kalaloch’s largest refugee camp. He was more fearful than the others of the immediacy of hunger and the reprisals of security. At twelve, he had already seen enough death from both. He uncased his well-worn flute and snapped the sections together.

  Dana shrugged, sighed and uncased her caracol. Its new strings glistened in a stray sliver of sunlight. The swirled black back of its huge shell shone with the polish of four generations of fingers.

  “Give me an A,” she said.

  Jaka obliged, and as they proceeded to tune the caracol the other two youngsters tore the cloth into four equal lengths of about three meters each.

  “Has your brother ever killed anybody?” Leet whispered.

  “Of course not,” Flutterby said. She smoothed out the wrinkles in their cloth without meeting the other girl’s eyes. “He’s not like that. You’ve met him.”

  “Yeah,” Leet said. Her brown eyes brightened and she giggled. “He’s so cute.”

  Flutterby found that she got her banner lettered with less than half a tube of green. It was dark green and would be nearly as visible as black. The large block letters read, “WE’RE HUNGRY NOW!” It had become the rallying cry of the refugees, but she’d heard it mumbled everywhere lately. As scarcity spread and rations declined, Flutterby had even heard it whispered in The Line.

  The Line, where everyone stood for hours to get into the food distribution centers, was where she chose to hang her banner. Leet’s would go over their school, which faced the concrete-and- plasteel offices of Merman Mercantile. Jaka wanted to smuggle his into Merman Hyperconductor, and Dana said she’d hang hers from the ferry dock, within easy view of HoloVision’s offices on the pier.

  Dana ran up and down the scales a few times, then she and Jaka played a fast, lilting dance piece they’d practiced at school. Flutterby thought it the best her friend had ever played. Jaka struggled, as usual, but diligently played on.

  “Do you think the Shadows kidnapped Crista Galli?” Leet asked.

  The bulky tube was difficult for her to handle, and she was going over her letters twice to make them bold enough to be read at a distance.

  “I don’t know,” Flutterby said. “I don’t know what to believe anymore. My mother grew up on Vashon, and she says that Crista Galli is some kind of god or something. My dad says she’s just another freak.”

  “Your mother?”

  “No,” Flutterby giggled, “Crista Galli, you stoop. He says that the only way to feed the world is to keep control of the currents, and that if Crista Galli helps control the kelp then the Director is right to make sure she doesn’t get away, or turn it against us. What do your parents think?”

  Leet frowned.

  “They don’t say much of anything, anymore,” she said. “They’re both working all the time, every day. Mom says she’s too tired to hear herself think. My dad won’t even watch the news anymore. He doesn’t say anything, just bites his lip and goes to bed. I think they’re afraid …”

  An explosion in the harbor startled them both. Dana set her caracol on the deck with a thump.

  “That was close,” she said. Dana had a lisp that came out when she was nervous, and it slipped out now.

  The four of them crowded the tiny plaz porthole at the far end of the attic. A smudge of black smoke blotted the sky to their right at the end of the street. Looking up the street to the left, Flutterby watched the giant cup on the Ace of Cups sign swing to and fro from the concussion. The street was packed with morning commuters and vendors at their little tables. Flutterby heard a gasp from Dana, and looked where she pointed, straight beneath them.

  “Security!” she whispered. “He’s covering the hatch. They must already be inside!”

  “We’ve got to hide this stuff,” Jaka said, his whisper cracking into its high range. “If they find this, they’ll kill us.”

  “Or worse,” Dana muttered.

  They scrambled to gather up the paints and to roll up the two wet banners, but it was too late. The flimsy hatch burst aside as a fat, no-neck security kicked it in. Another, nearly identical to him, slipped inside and waited with his back to the wall.

  “Look here,” he said, straightening the banners with the muzzle of his weapon. “A little nest of flatwings, no?”

  Without waiting for a reply he snapped two bursts from his lasgun. Jaka and Leet dropped to thedeck, dead.

  Flutterby wanted to scream, but she couldn’t catch her breath.

  “They’re wots,” his partner said. “What did you … ?”

  “Maggots make flies,” the other said. “We have orders.”

  The muzzle came up again and Flutterby didn’t even see the flash that killed her.

  Chapter 12

  Mankind owns four things

  that are no good at sea:

  rudder, anchor, oars

  and the fear of going down.

  —Antonio Machado

  Ben undogged the hatch and Rico LaPush rushed inside. Rico nodded once to the girl, who looked ghastly pale, and handed Ben the pocket messenger. Most of the briefing on it was already outdated, but Ben would want to hear it, anyway. Rico was careful to keep from touching the girl.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Ready,” Ben said.

  “Yes,” said the girl.

  Rico scratched his chin stubble and adjusted the lasgun in the back of his pants. He had been with Ben since Guemes island was sunk, more years than Crista Galli had been alive. His mistrust of people had kept them alive more than once, and he did not intend to let his guard down with Her Holiness.

  “Deja vu,” he said to Ben, nodding at her Islander dress. “She reminds me of the old days, when things were simply tough. The streets are crawling wi
th security, she’ll need a good act …”

  “You can speak to me,” Crista interrupted, her cheeks flushed with a run of anger. “I have ears to hear, mouth to answer. This sister is not a chairdog, nor a glass of water on her brother’s table.”

  Rico had to muster a smile. Her Islander accent was perfect, her phrasing perfect. She was a very quick study—of course, she had more intimate ways of getting inside people’s heads …

  “Thank you for the lesson, Sister,” he said. “You are most cheerfully dressed, my compliments.”

  Rico noted Ben’s smile, and the fact that his partner’s gaze never wavered from Crista Galli’s perfect face.

  Rico’s cameras had taped the faces of many beautiful women for HoloVision and he had to admit that everything he’d heard about Crista Galli was true. When Ben became a reporter, Rico LaPush signed on as a field triangulator with the holography crew. A well-placed lie got him the job, but his facility for learning kept it. He had filmed more pomp and more horror in any given year than most cameramen witnessed in a lifetime.

  She’s pale, but beautiful, he thought. Maybe the sun will give her some color.

  Operations said to keep her out of the sun, but Rico thought that, given their recent bad luck, this would be impossible. Operations, whoever they were, didn’t have their butts on the line.

  “We’ll be walking for a while,” Rico told them. “Don’t hurry.” He nodded at the messenger in Ben’s hand.

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “You might as well shitcan that thing. They tell us we’re going by air but the airstrip’s already locked up by Flattery’s boys. We’ll have to do it by water.”

  “But they said …”

  “I know what they said,” Rico snapped. “They said the airstrip would be secure. They said keep her away from water. Let’s move.”

  Crista Galli carried a sadness about her that Rico didn’t like. He could take fear, or anger, or even hysteria but sadness felt too much like bad luck. They’d started out with that. When she reached out a tentative hand toward Ben, Rico stopped her with a word.