The Ascension Factor

MacIntosh steered them into a holo of sky that unfolded throughout their webwork — 360 degrees of sky and high clouds covered the latticework that cradled them in free-fall.

"I worry more about Flattery," he said. "Brood's small-time. Flattery's got big things afoot, things big enough to crush anything in his path."

"But he was a Chaplain/Psychiatrist," Beatriz insisted. "He's trained to be better than that."

"He's trained to cope with the necessary thing and to see to it that we all adjust," he reminded her. "No romantic bullshit, just the straight facts. He's programmed to see to it that we don't unleash a monster intelligence upon the universe."

"If he hasn't adjusted and he hasn't coped, why assume that he'll take us all with him?"

"Simple," MacIntosh said. When he smiled his face wrinkled all the way up his shaved head. "The number five Flattery hit the 'destruct' switch, you've read The Histories. That Flattery was a lot more likable than this one. It's just that the program had already come alive, had already anticipated his move and headed it off."

"Maybe we can do it!" Beatriz tried to shake his shoulders but all she did was set them both gyrating through air. "You're right, use the kelp to head him off!"

"Well, now that it knows Flattery's out to get it, the program's already inserted, wouldn't you think?"

"Well. "

"I have another possibility, and it's regarding Crista Galli."

She felt a curiosity about Crista Galli that went beyond her newsworthiness. Ben saw something in Crista, something in her eyes that swept him up and further away from Beatriz. Even though things were finished between Ben and Beatriz, a woman who could do that — a younger woman who could do that interested her mightily.

"What's that?"

She heard the rusty bitterness at the edge of her voice, the unnecessary snap of the words past her lips.

"I think the kelp's beat us to it," he said.

She looked up from her nestling spot at his neck to see his wide grin. "I think that Crista Galli is the kelp's experiment in artificial intelligence. I think she's manufactured, incomplete, and alive. It would be nice if we could keep her that way."

A musical tone sounded from the messenger at his belt. He did not take his arms from around her shoulders, but voice-activated the device with a simple command.

"Speak."

"Brood and two of his men sealed themselves off with the OMC. He says if you're not there in five minutes he's going to start scrambling some brains."

* * *

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.

— Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"

The Orbiter collared the Voidship's nose in a flat wide ring of plasteel. The two cylindrical bodies spun in concert on their long axes. Soon the ring would slip away to remain in orbit around Pandora while its Voidship plied the dark folds of the universe. At the helm would be an OMC, a stripped-down human brain.

The Organic Mental Cores had a definite edge over the mechanical navigators, and this had been determined clearly long ago by experimenters at Moonbase. Navigation in all planes required subtleties of discrimination and symbol-generation that hardware never achieved. The disembodied, unencumbered brain took pleasure, or so they said, in plotting the impossible course. One goad worked on OMCs that had no effect on mechanical navigators — the OMC needed this job to stay alive.

The particular OMC that the techs were preparing for installation, the Alyssa Marsh number six, felt no pain or bodily pleasure as the microlaser welded in the necessary hookups. She had been trained in astronavigation at Moonbase and had borne a child in the year after splashdown on Pandora. The story that she filtered back to Flattery had the child die in an earthquake, and Alyssa Marsh had launched herself into her kelp study project with a passion. Her body had been crushed in a kelp station accident, but Flattery saw to it that her silent brain lived on.

Soon she would be silent no more. Soon her brain would have a body that it could move — the Voidship Nietzsche. She would navigate knowing the differences between ability and desire, knowing the need for dreams. Right now she lay genderless behind a pair of locked hatches dreaming of a banquet where Flattery was the host and she was both the honored guest and the main dish.

Dwarf MacIntosh gathered his forces outside both hatches and tried once more to contact Captain Brood. There was no reply from the OMC chamber. Three of the four monitors inside were blacked out, but the one remaining showed an overhead view of the long, specialized fingers of a nerve tech probing the webwork that encased what remained of Alyssa Marsh.

"Hookup's not scheduled until next week," someone said. "What's going on in there?"

A lasgun barrel appeared on the screen, pointed at the tech. The long, spidery fingers froze, then ascended from the surface of the brain toward the screen, then backed out of view.