The Ascension Factor by Frank Herbert
“It pleases me that you have due respect for my…abilities,” he said. “But I promised you a very special part in this drama, and your time has not come yet. I would not sacrifice you here for nothing. You know one thing about me if you know nothing else: I kill for something, not for nothing. I value human life, Mr. Zentz, this you must realize. I value it for what I can get out of it, what I can spend it on. The word ‘value’ implies ‘commodity,’ don’t you think? The pleasure of killing ranks very low, in my book, as a good reason. Much as I might like to kill you just to get rid of a certain annoyance, I’m sure someone, somewhere would make it worth my while to wait for the right price, the right trade, the right favor. Understand?”
Zentz stared straight out the cabin plaz. He was pale, appeared slightly more bloated than usual, and his pasty fingers crawled nervously over each other’s backs.
“Do you know why I kill?” Zentz asked him.
Nevi finished the final attitude adjustment and settled onto the slightly choppy sea in a spot that he judged to be relatively clear of the kelp debris. As they descended, he saw that there was no clear spot. The struggle in this stand of kelp must have been tremendous.
“Yes, I know why you kill,” Nevi said. “Like any of the lower animals, you kill to eat. It is your job, and you see no further than that. You kill by orders, to someone else’s plan, because not to kill means you yourself die. That is a difference between the two of us. I think of myself as a sculptor, a societal sculptor. The populace is my stone, and I shape it chip by chip into a form that suits me. The stone keeps growing, and my task is a relentless one. But I have time.”
In a flurry at his board Nevi set the foil up for seawater intake and hydrogen conversion. The intakes clogged within blinks. Even with Zentz out there to clear them, this would take longer than Nevi felt they could afford. He checked the fuel gauge.
Fifteen minutes, he thought, maybe twenty at the outside. Shit!
“Forget the intakes,” Nevi said. “There’s a wild stand just northwest of here. We’ll set up there to take on fuel, then I’ll see what I can learn from the Director. Don’t worry. Leaving you to the kelp would be a waste, and I’m not a wasteful man.”
The convolutions of Zentz’s brow unwrinkled somewhat. He lifted his sullen bulk out of his couch and donned a dive suit.
“Just in case,” Zentz said, “I’m ready. I’ve heard about wild kelp. People disappear out here, and the kelp doesn’t have a reason.”
Nevi throttled up and lifted them off. Much as Zentz disgusted him, Nevi intended to keep him alive until the time came when it simply wasn’t handy to do that anymore.
The run to the blue sector took only ten minutes, and all the time they were heading into the afternoon squall. A black wall pushed across the sea toward them, though when they set down in the blue kelp’s lagoon they were haloed in the magnificent afternoon sun.
Nevi deployed the intakes, but a warning light on his console told him they were still clogged. He tried retracting and redeploying them, but they stayed clogged.
“Better get out there after all,” Nevi said. “And step on it. That squall’s moving in pretty fast.”
Zentz grumbled something, but trudged aft without complaining. Nevi noted from the console display that Zentz left the aft hatch open. He chuckled to himself.
He thinks he’ll sink me if I submerge, and blow out the flight controls if I take off.
Nevi knew ways around both of those situations, the simplest being to go aft and close the hatch. He was tempted to do that now, just to give Zentz a thrill, but decided against it. They’d be refueled in fifteen or twenty minutes and with luck would lift off ahead of the storm.
Nevi set out a call for Flattery on their private frequency, and received an immediate reply.
“Mr. Nevi,” Flattery said, “time is wasting. Do you have them yet?”
Nevi was surprised at the clarity of the reception. Indeed, the clarity of reception was unlike any that he’d experienced over the years. The activity of Pandora’s two suns interfered constantly with transmissions, and lately sabotage of transmitters by the vermin made things even worse. The kelp itself often garbled radio communication, but this time it seemed to embellish it.
“No,” he said, “we don’t have them. We’re refueling before the final push. I thought we were to make the most of this, get as many of the rebels as possible.”
“Forget it,” Flattery said. “I want Crista Galli now. She’s not to talk with anyone before she sees me, understand?”
“Right,” Nevi said, “I—”
“Tonight’s news is carrying notice of Ben Ozette’s death. He’s not to be seen, but I want him for my own. Do what you want with that LaPush bastard.”
“Do you need support back there?”
“No,” Flattery said. He sounded distracted. “No, I’ve taken care of it. We’ve called some security back from the Island docking sites and from demon patrols. These bastards … there are so many of them. They’ve looted the public market and its warehouse is dry. We must’ve shot three hundred of them, but they kept on coming. I’ve given orders to blow up any warehouses that are in danger of being looted. When they see their precious food blasted all over the landscape, they’ll think twice about this kind of thing. You stick to your job, I’ll handle things here. Don’t call me again unless you have them.”
Nevi was left listening to static and to the whine of the pumps processing out their hydrogen. He reached to break the connection, but hesitated. There was a pattern to the static, something he hadn’t noticed before. It seemed as if there was a music in the background, and voices from several conversations that he couldn’t quite pick out. Over and over, faint in the distance, he could hear the rhythmic repetition of Flattery’s voice saying, “Mr. Nevi, Mr. Nevi, Mr. Nevi …”
He closed the circuit and stared out over the sea toward the black curtain of storm. The surface chop had increased and a wind had come up that was blowing the foil out of the center of the lagoon and closer to the inner edge of blue kelp. He glanced at the fuel readout and was relieved that they were nearly full. What worried him was the distinct repetition of his name that continued, chantlike, even though he’d shut off the radio.
The fuel light indicated full, so he shut down the pumps and sounded a warning klaxon to Zentz before he retracted the intakes. He felt them thump into the bay, but still there was no sign of Zentz.
This was clear water, Nevi thought. He should’ve been back aboard after clearing the intakes once.
He sounded the klaxon again, twice, but heard nothing. The aft hatch light remained on. Nevi secured the console and started back toward the aft hatch. The chant got louder, more distinct, and behind it a babble of voices rose on the air. The hair on his arms rose, too, and Nevi armed his lasgun before leaving the cabin.
He felt a metallic taste on his tongue, a taste he’d heard others describe as fear. He spat once on the deck, but the insidious taste remained.
Chapter 33
Consciousness manifests itself indubitably in man and therefore, glimpsed in this one flash of light, it reveals itself as having a cosmic extension and consequently as being aureoled by limitless prolongations in space and time.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe
The Immensity smelled trouble on the waters, a great disturbance from one of the coastal stands. The debris told a tale of struggle. Currents had changed suddenly, bringing the strange scents of fear and, just as suddenly, bliss. So far, the currents hadn’t changed back.
The little whiff of death that the Immensity caught on the current was human, not kelp. Perhaps the pruner has become pruned, it thought.
It stretched its outermost fronds coastward, but still could not contact the neighboring stand. Only fragments of messages drifted in on bits of torn fronds: Shards, frames, pieces of recordings—not the Oneness that the Immensity sought, not this “talk” that humans enjoyed and withheld from Others.
Th
Yes, Her Holiness was among the kelp again at last. Her presence suddenly freed the neighboring stand of prisoner kelp, a stand that had lost her to Flattery’s butchery five cycles back.
Who are these Others, now, come to my stand?
Few humans fished outside their gridwork. The few organic islands left to risk a float on Pandora’s seas likewise stayed to the more merciful currents of the grid. The Immensity had spared fishermen, scouts, humans fleeing humans, and it had spared entire island-cities more than once. The human in charge of humans had not shown the Immensity equal compassion.
Though humans often called them “willy-nillys,” the islands floated now in predictable patterns. Current Control, the enslaver of the kelp, ensured this. But the volcanics of the past twenty- five cycles had conjured storms the like of which the Immensity had never seen in its own time, and these storms brought islands into its reach. It thought of the organic islands as Immensities of Humans, and adjusted its own greatness to let them pass.
These humans came in their flying creature, dropping pieces of kelp into the Immensity’s lagoon. The Immensity unraveled a long vine from the wall of the lagoon and sniffed the human. The scents talked of fear and death, and to have the whole story the Immensity would have to read this human’s tissues bit by bit.
It waited until the human finished discharging the pieces of kelp, so that the Immensity would know as much of its neighbor as it could. It knew now, by scent and touch, that this was Oddie Zentz human. As it gripped Oddie Zentz human at the waist and pulled him into the walls of the lacuna, it knew that this human had killed many humans, as many as a storm and perhaps more.
The Immensity had spent most of its awakened time trying to communicate with other kelp, to merge with other, smaller stands. More kelp was better, it thought. Closer was better. It failed to understand creatures that killed their own kind. These were, indeed, diseased individuals. If they were merciless to their own, they would certainly show no mercy to others. The Immensity concluded that it should respond in kind.
Chapter 34
We Islanders understand current and flow. We understand that conditions and times change. To change, then, is normal.
—Ward Keel, The Notebooks
Beatriz knew that it would not be in the captain’s best interest to kill Mack, especially if there were links with other forces groundside. But she had also quit trying to guess what could be in Captain Brood’s best interest. From what she could gather, Captain Brood was a man trying to capitalize on a bad decision, making more bad decisions to cover his tracks. He wouldn’t last long at this rate, and he was the type who just might take everyone, and everything, with him.
She concentrated on the Pandora map she’d called up on the large studio display, rotatable, and at the touch of a key it highlighted populated areas, agriculture, fishing and mining. She could tell at a glance where the factories lay, both topside and undersea, and where the wretched communities lived that served them, for serve them they did.
Only today, with the murders of her crew and Ben’s warnings ringing in her memory, did she realize how the people of Pandora, including herself, had become one with their chains. They were enslaved by hunger, and by the manipulation of hunger, which was a particular skill of the Director. He concentrated on food, transportation and propaganda. Before her, on HoloVision’s giant screen, she saw the geography of hunger spread out for her at a touch.
The largest single factory complex above or below the sea was Kalaloch, feeding the bottomless maw of Flattery’s Project Voidship. It showed up on her display as a small, black bull’s-eye in the center of amoebalike ripples of blue and yellow. Those ripples represented the settlement—the blue was Kalaloch proper, where all paths led to the ferry terminal or to The Line. People inside the blue lived in barracks-like tenements or in remnants of Islander bubbly stuck to the shore.
The yellow, a weak stain of sorts widening out from the blue, represented the local refugee population. Starving, unsheltered, too weak for heavy work, they were also too weak to rebel. The Director’s staff rode among them daily, picking the lucky few who would be trucked to town to wash down the stone pavements, sort rock from dung in the Director’s gardens, or pick through refuse for reusable materials. For this each was given a space in The Line and a few crumbs at one of a hundred food dispensaries that Flattery operated in the area. Even private markets were offshoots of the dispensaries—true black market vendors disappeared with chilling regularity.
The sphere of Kalaloch included the bay and its launch base, the factory strip, the village, Flattery’s Preserve and the huddle of misshapen humanity that squeezed inside the perimeter for protection from Pandora’s demons.
Outside this sphere Beatriz noted the similarities of other settlements along the coastline. These smaller dots also were ringed by the huddle of the poor, even agricultural settlements, fishing villages, the traditional sources of food. Security squads shot looters of fields, proprietors of illegal windowboxes and rooftop gardens. They shot the occasional fisherman bold enough to set an unlicensed line. All of this Ben had told her. She had seen evidence herself, and had chosen to disbelieve. Beatriz earned her food coupons fairly, ate well, felt guilty enough about the hunger around her to believe what Flattery had fed her about production meaning jobs and jobs feeding people.
For almost two years her assignments had covered jobs, the people who worked them and the people who gave them out. It had been a long time since she’d walked the muddy streets of hunger.
There aren’t any new jobs lately, she thought, but there sure are a lot fewer people. Now she was above it all, trapped and converted, with nothing to offer and everything to fear.
Chapter 35
Thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
—Christian Book of the Dead
Boggs had been hungry all his twenty years, but today his hunger was different and he knew it. He woke up without pain in his bones from the ground underneath, and when he scratched his head a handful of hair came with it. This, he knew, was not hunger but the end of hunger. He looked around him at the still, wizened forms of his family huddled together under their rock ledge. Today he would get them food or die trying, because he knew he would do the dying anyway.
Boggs was born with the split lip, gaping nose slit and stump feet characteristic of his father’s family. His six brothers shared these defects but only two still lived. His father, too, was dead. Like Boggs, they had known the enemy hunger from birth. His malformed mouth had made nursing a futile noise, so most of the sucking that he did as a newborn slobbered down his chin. His mother tried to salvage what she could with her fingers, slopping it back into the cleft of his mouth. He’d watched her do this countless times with his younger brothers.
A week ago he’d watched her try to nurse the starving ten-year-old when there wasn’t even a bug to catch. She had been dry for two years, and his brother died clutching a handful of fallen orange hair. Boggs looked again at the fistful of orange hair in his hand, then weakly cast it away.
“I will take the line, Mother,” he said, in the lilting Islander way. “I will bring us back a fine muree.”
“You will not go.” Her voice was dry, hoarse, and filled the tiny space they’d dug out under the ledge. “You are not licensed to fish. They will kill you, they will take the line.”
His father had begged the local security detachment for a license. Everyone knew that many temporaries were issued every day, and that some could even pay with a share of the catch. But the Director issued a fixed number each day. “Conservation,” he called it. “Otherwise the people will outfish the resource and no one will eat.”
“Conservation,” Boggs snorted to himself. He eyed the fish l
Boggs crawled up beside his mother so that his face was even with hers. She had the wide-set eye-sockets of her mother, and the same bulging blue eyes. Now a faint film obscured the blue. Boggs pulled at his hair again, and thrust the scraggly clump where she could see it.
“You know what this means,” he said. The crawl, the effort at talk exhausted him but somehow he kept on. “I’m done for.” He tugged at her hair and it, too, came out in a clump. “You are, too. Look here.”
Her bleared eyes slowly tracked on the evidence that she didn’t need, and she nodded.
“Take it,” was all she said. She bent her knee up to her skinny chest and Boggs clumsily unwound the line from around her ankle.
He crawled out from under the ledge, and as far as he could see down to the shore others were crawling out of holes, out from under pieces of cloth and rubbish. Here and there a wisp of smoke dared to breach the air.
Boggs found his cane, propped himself upright and stumped his way slowly toward the water. He’d thought himself too skinny to sweat, but sweat poured out of him nonetheless. It was a cold sweat at first, but the effort of picking his way through the rubbish and the dying warmed him up.
A small jetty shouldered the oncoming tide. This amalgam of blasted rock, about twenty meters long and five or six meters wide, was dangerous even for the surefooted to navigate. The quartertide change tossed a few breakers over the black rock, soaking the dozen licensed fishermen who hunched against the spray.
It took Boggs over a half-hour to make it the hundred meters from the ledge to the base of the jetty. His vision was failing, but he scanned the tidelands for signs of the security patrol.