The Ascension Factor

Beatriz tried to remember what Mack had taught her about their hookups. He'd spent a lot of time orienting her during her trips aloft. What came to her were his philosophies and musings, the relaxing tone of his deep voice. She remembered nothing of the linkup between the two rooms. She had already tried a few electronic tricks of her own to contact him, but with no luck.

He knows I'm due, she thought. Maybe he'll come looking for me.

She hoped that it wouldn't mean walking into his own execution.

* * *

Manipulating the kelp electronically is like making a marionette out of a quadriplegic. The trick becomes keeping it a quadriplegic.

— Raja Flattery, from "Current Control from the Skies," Holovision feature

Crista felt a pressure on her whole being. It was not like the pressurized cabin, like air pressure. It was some indescribable containment of her self inside some huge envelope — like the pressure she imagined the positive pole of a magnet might feel when in the company of another positive pole.

"You don't have to be afraid of the kelp pulling this thing apart," she said. "Flattery's lab reports say it kept me alive underwater for twenty years. It can keep us alive. "

"Can is the operative word here," Ben said.

He didn't look her in the eye, but hung his head over her restraints as if staring at them would right the foil and set them on their way. "If what you say is true, it wants you alive. The rest of us are compost."

"The kelp's not like that," she said. "You've been listening to Rico. It's. I knew it before Flattery's people cut it back, remember? It kept me alive, for all we know it kept others alive the same way."

"Lots of people spend lots of time down under," he muttered. "Nobody's seen anything like what happened to you."

"Why just me?"

When Ben's gaze did meet Crista's, goosebumps clustered her forearms. Everything that she knew about his kindness, his sacrifices for others, froze inside her with the chill of that look.

"I've wondered that," he said. "Others have wondered, too."

"That's why Flattery never let me get to the sea," she said. "He said it was to protect me, but I think he was just suspicious that I'm some kind of Avatan spy, a trigger of some sort. Maybe I was raised by a plant, but I can read people fairly well. Let me. touch the kelp. It will calm down, then, I know it will."

"Not a chance. If Flattery's right, if Operations is right, your chemistry is different now. It could kill you. I don't want anything to kill you."

"I don't want anything to kill anybody," she said, "but the kelp is confused. It's just lashing out. nobody tells it anything. "

With that the foil pitched upside-down. Ben hung on tight to a handhold, his face pressed into the plasteel bulkhead.

Crista tried to speak, upside-down and against the pressure of her restraints.

"Avata needs our help," she said, "and we need Avata. You have to help me do this, Ben."

There was that strange, stunning snap in the air, the same snap that had stilled a mob for moments at the pier. It was like the discharge of some great capacitor.

Crista felt their foil slowly roll, pull her tighter into her restraints, then right itself. She watched Ben drop his hands from his ears and sit up on the deck, shaking his head. The damaged foil moaned and chattered about them like mechanical teeth, but the fist of the kelp was gone.

Crista saw the flicker of the intercom charging, then heard Rico's tight voice:

"Ben, look at the kelp."

Only one of the starboard lights still probed the dark, so the view that Crista and Ben had from the galley's plaz was gray and black, dreamlike, cold. They hadn't dared activate the kelp's luciferase, it would make tracking too easy.

A fine seawater spray wetted them both as they watched the easy dance of deepwater kelp. This was the same kelp that, moments ago, quivered with a tension so strong she thought it might uproot itself.

Crista, herself, felt a relief that was more than just calm after the storm. It was a release, like the elation she had felt at the start of their journey when she slipped skyward, hitching her consciousness to the hylighter.

"Can't really see very well," Ben said. "Look at the size of those vines! Some of them are a half-dozen meters across and we can't even see bottom yet."

"That should tell you something," she said. "It should give you an idea of what the kelp's really like."

"What do you mean?"

"You said it yourself. Some of those stalks are nearly as thick as this foil is wide. For the kelp it must've been something like handling a squawk egg with pliers to keep from crushing us."

"Maybe so," Ben muttered. "We're headed topside and the kelp's apparently floating free. We'd better see what kind of damage we took before it changes its mind."

Lights dimmed in the galley, brightened and dimmed again.

"Elvira can't get the engines to fire," Ben said. "That's going to make a lot of things tough — including our oxygen production."