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“And you do the telling?”
“Of course. First, keep it out of contact with any other kelp. That’s a must. They educate each other by touch. Make sure the kelpways are always very wide between stands—a kilometer or more. The damned stuff can learn from leaves torn off other stands. The effect dies out very quickly. A kilometer usually does it.”
“But how do you … teach it what you want?”
“I don’t teach. I manipulate. It’s very old-fashioned, Mr. Nevi. Quite simply, beings gravitate toward pleasure, flee pain.”
“How does it respond to this kind of … betrayal?”
Flattery smiled. “Ah, yes. Betrayal is your department, is it not? Well, once pruned and kept at the light-formation stage, it doesn’t remember much. Studies show that it can remember if allowed to develop to the spore-casting stage. You have just seen what the answer is to that—don’t let it get that far. Also, studies show that this spore-dust can educate an ignorant stand.”
“I thought it was just a nuisance,” Nevi said. “I didn’t realize that you believed it could think.”
“Oh, very much so. You forget, Mr. Nevi, I’m a Chaplain/Psychiatrist. That I don’t pray doesn’t mean … well, any mind interests me. Anything that stands in my way interests me. This kelp does both.”
“Do you consider it a ‘worthy adversary’?” Nevi smiled.
“Not at all,” Flattery barked a laugh, “not worthy, no. It’ll have to show me more than I’ve seen before I consider this plant a ‘worthy adversary.’ It’s merely an interesting problem, requiring interesting solutions.”
Nevi stood, and the crispness of his gray suit accentuated the fluidity of the muscles within it. “This is your business,” Nevi told him. “Mine is Ozette and the girl.”
Flattery resisted the reflex to stand and waved a limp hand, affecting a nonchalance that he did not at all feel.
“Of course, of course.” He avoided Nevi’s gaze by switching the holo back on. He keyed it to the Tatoosh woman’s upcoming Newsbreak. She would accompany the next shuttle flight to the Orbiter, a shuttle that contained the Organic Mental Core for hookup to the Voidship. Already the OMC was an “it” in his mind, rather than the “she” who used to be Alyssa Marsh.
Flattery seethed inside. He’d wanted something more from Nevi, something that now smelled distinctly of approval. He didn’t like detecting weakness in himself, but he liked even less the notion of letting it pass unbridled.
“Whatever you need …” Flattery left the obvious unsaid.
Nevi left everything unsaid, nodded, and then left the suite. Flattery felt a profound sense of relief, then checked it. Relief meant that he’d begun to rely on Spider Nevi, when he knew full well that reliance on anyone meant a blade at the throat sooner or later. He did not intend for the throat to be his own.
Chapter 14
And out of the ground made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
—Christian Book of the Dead
A trail left the beach about a kilometer beyond the limits of the Preserve. It was a Zavatan trail, used by the faithful to transport their gleanings of the kelp from the beach to their warrens in the high reaches. Because it was a Zavatan trail it was well-kept and reasonably safe. Its rest spots were ample and afforded a sweeping vista of Flattery’s huge Preserve. The jumbled, jerry-rigged tenements of Kalaloch sprawled from the downcoast side of the Preserve, covered today by a cloak of black smoke. Mazelike channels of aquafarms and jetties branched both up- and down- coast into the horizon. Distant screams and explosions echoed from the panorama below up the winding trail.
Two Zavatan monks stopped to study the clamor rising from the settlement a few klicks away. One man was tall, lanky, with very long arms. The other was small even for a Pandoran, and moved in a scuttle that kept him tucked inside the larger man’s shadow. Both were dressed in the loose, pajamalike gi of the Hylighter Lodge: durable cotton, dusky orange that represented the color of hylighters, their spirit guides.
A gith of hylighters lazed overhead, drawn to the scene by their attraction for fire, lightning and the arc of lasguns from building to building. The hylighters dragged their ballast rocks from long tentacles and circled widely, audibly valving off hydrogen and snapping their great sails in the wind. Should they contact fire or spark, the hylighters would explode, scattering their fine blue spore-dust, which the monks gathered for their most private rituals. Many of the monks had not left the high reaches, except to walk this trail, for ten years.
“It’s a shame they don’t understand,” the younger monk mused. “If we could only teach them the letting go …”
“Judgment, too, is an anchor,” the elder warned. “It is Nothing that they need to know—the No-Thing that frees the mind from noise and perfects the senses.”
He lifted his mutant arms in a long skyward reach, then turned slowly, rejoicing in the morning glow of both suns.
This elder monk, Twisp, loved the press of sunlight on his skin. He had been a fisherman and adventurer in his youth, and what drew him to the Zavatans was not so much their contemplative life as other possibilities that he saw in them. Like most of the monks, Twisp had been wooed by the romance of the new quiet earth that rose from the sea. They summarily rejected the petty squabblings of politics and money that raged across Pandora to establish an underground network of illegal farms and hideaways.
Twisp, however, had remained entrenched in Pandora’s civil struggles, something he troubled few of his fellow Zavatans about. Now, once again, all was changing, he was changing. He had more to offer Pandora than contemplation, though he refrained from telling the younger monk so. He was not religious, merely thoughtful, and he had made a good life among the Zavatans. It would pain him greatly to leave.
Two hylighters tacked toward them and Mose, the younger monk, set down his bag and began his Chant of Fulfillment. With this chant he hoped to be swept skyward by the mass of tentacles and transported to a higher level of being. Twisp had experienced the hylighter enlightenment at the first awakening of the kelp a quarter century past. That was before Flattery’s iron fist came down, and before the people he loved were killed.
Hylighters, though born from the kelp, remained indifferent to humans, treating them as a wonderful curiosity. Mose’s chant became more vigorous as the hylighters drew near, their magnificent sail membranes golden in the sunlight.
“These two want their death today,” Twisp said. “Do you really want to go with them?”
It was the fire that attracted them, and Mose should know that. The younger monk had eaten too much kelp, too much hylighter spore-dust over the years. Two humans in the open near the Preserve usually meant armed security. Hylighters wanting the-death-that-meant-life learned how to draw their fire.
Now the musty smell of their undersides filled the air. The musical flutings of their vents lilted on the breeze as they valved off hydrogen to drop closer. Mose’s chant became more tremulous.
Each hylighter carried ten tentacles in the underbelly, two of them longer than the rest. Usually these two carried rocks for ballast. Hylighters that felt the death need coming on sought out lightning, often gathering in giths to ride the afternoon thunderstorms. Sparks or fire attracted t
hem as well, setting them off in a concussive blaze of flame and blue spore-dust. Some dragged their ballast rocks to spark a grand suicide, an ultimate orgasm.
Twisp breathed easier when the two great hulks tacked back toward the Preserve. He interrupted Mose, whose eyes were closed and whose stubbled face was pale and sweaty.
“This tack will take them into range of the Preserve’s perimeter cannon,” he said. “There will be dust to take back for the others.”
Mose silenced himself and followed Twisp’s long pointing arm. The two hylighters tacked in tight formation, using all that they could capture of the slight breeze blowing up from the shore.
“Flattery’s security will wait to fire until the hylighters are over the settlement,” Twisp whispered. “That way, the hylighters become a weapon. Watch.”
It was almost as he said. Either the cannoneer was a fool or one of the Islanders got in a clear shot, but the hylighters exploded over the Preserve in a double blast that took Twisp’s breath away and stung his eyes with light. Much of the main compound aboveground was incinerated in the fireball and the great wall of the Preserve was breached for a hundred meters in either direction.
A lull in the fighting brought his ears the cacophonous screams of the charred and the dying. It was a sound that Twisp remembered all too well.
The young Mose came down this trail seldom and had been only twelve when he went to live in the high reaches. He did not have much of a life in the outside world, and knew little of the ways of human hatred and greed.
“All we can do is stay out of it,” Twisp muttered. “They will have at themselves and leave us in peace.”
The wet patter of hylighter shreds fell among the brush and rocks below them.
There will be the refugees, too, he thought. Always the homeless and the hungry. Where will we put them this time?
The Zavatans supported refugee camps all along the coastline, turning some into gardens, hydroponics ranches and fish farms. Twisp calculated that there were already more refugees both up- and downcoast than Flattery housed in Kalaloch. Though it was true everyone was hungry, only those in Kalaloch starved. This was the story he hoped Shadowbox would tell.
