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At the Director’s hand signal Goethe slunk back into the foliage. The one he called “Archangel” crouched between himself and Nevi. Archangel, unlike Goethe, was an extraordinary hybrid of a successful gene-swap between the cats in hyb and the hooded dashers of Pandora. They were faithful and wished to please their master—two traits that Flattery admired in anyone, so long as he was the master.
Archangel’s eyes watched Nevi’s every move and he bristled when Zentz, too, approached the Director. There was another backup “at ease” signal for Archangel, but Flattery didn’t give it.
Zentz is cornered, he thought, and cornered animals commit the unexpected. Since Zentz would be killed soon, Flattery spoke freely in front of him. “Mr. Director,” Nevi said, inclining his head slightly.
“Mr. Nevi.”
This was their ritual greeting. Flattery had never known Nevi to shake a hand. To Flattery’s knowledge, Nevi only touched the people he killed. He did not know Nevi’s record with women and did not intend to ask.
Flattery smiled and indicated the Greens to Zentz with a generous sweep of his hand.
“Welcome to our little secret,” he said, and strolled briskly from the docking pool toward a section of fruiting trees.
“Pity there isn’t time for a tour. Near-tropical heat, but you don’t know much about the tropics, eh? Bore deep enough into rock and you get heat. Fewer than one hundred people have seen this garden.”
And fewer than five survive.
Zentz swallowed audibly. “I—I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Flattery did not doubt him.
“One day all of Pandora will look like this.”
Zentz brightened so much that Flattery forgave himself the lie.
He turned to Nevi. “You saw the trap sprung topside?”
Nevi nodded. “Looks like we burned about three hundred. Crews are out chasing down the wounded. So far, nobody big. As we suspected, their eagerness outstripped their readiness.”
“We cannot make that same mistake,” Flattery warned. “That is why you must bide your time with Crista Galli and the others. Her abduction must be turned to our advantage in every way possible. To take them now would be easy, and foolish. Remember, from now on she’s only the bait, not the quarry.”
A pair of white butterflies tumbled the air between them and Zentz backed away.
Flattery smiled. “They aren’t dangerous,” he said. “Beautiful, don’t you think? We’ve released these topside. They drink the wihi nectar. They have already multiplied the wihi threefold in and around the Preserve. You know its value for defense—a natural booby trap. A problem, at times, with the livestock. The larvae of these beautiful creatures … well, another time. I have two specific demands of your mission.”
Flattery strolled to a plot of young trees, carefully planted in rows, in various stages of bloom and fruit production. Nearby, several hives of bees kept audibly busy. Nevi did not care for the bees, this Flattery well knew. He enjoyed Nevi’s mastery of the neutral expression. He picked each man a fruit.
“Golden Transparent,” he said. “A very hardy apple Earth-side. Since I am developing a Garden of Eden of sorts I thought them most appropriate.”
He indicated two carved stone benches under the largest of the trees and sat. Nevi was clearly impatient to be off on the chase, but Flattery could not let them go yet. Nor could he bear watching Zentz make a slobber of his magnificent fruit.
“There are objectives more important than their capture,” he emphasized. “Ozette must be discredited. He was popular on HoloVision, and his disappearance has already been aired, thanks to Beatriz Tatoosh. This only firms our resolve to expose him as a monster. He must be seen as a madman in the clutches of madmen, with the deathly ill Crista Galli as their slave. We will play on her beauty and her innocence; leave that to me and to HoloVision. That is the first thing I require of your mission.”
“And the second?” Nevi asked.
Such a question was uncharacteristic of Nevi—how much he must want to be on with it! Flattery wondered what this enthusiasm would add to Nevi’s performance.
“Crista Galli will be a problem for them shortly,” he said. “They’ll want her off their hands. We want her to be seen asking for our help. She must want the Director to save her and the people must know this. It is our only way of guaranteeing absolute control after this little action topside—our only way short of all-out extermination of these pocket villages and little Zavatan monasteries that are the breeding grounds for these Shadows.”
“Interesting,” Nevi said. “This will require some care. Maybe it’s a job for your propaganda people at HoloVision. Have you found any drugs to be useful for her … persuasion?”
“Details of her drug program are in the briefing you will receive in the foil,” Flattery said. He glanced at his timepiece. “I will say that if she has eaten, she could be catatonic any time. Instructions, precautions and drugs have been prepared and are stowed with your briefing materials. Her persuasion is completely up to you. The manner of persuasion, too, is up to you.”
Nevi smiled one of his rare smiles. That was what Flattery liked about the man … if one could call such a creature a man. He rose to a challenge.
“The Tatoosh woman, does she launch today with the drive system and your OMCs?” “Yes,” Flattery said, “as planned. Why?”
“I don’t trust her,” he said, and shrugged. “She’ll be up there with Current Control and we’re going into the kelp …”
“She will be no trouble,” Flattery said. “She’s been very helpful to us. Besides, she’s my problem, leave that to me.”
Zentz had finished gnashing down his apple and was once again gawking about the Greens. “Any of those Zavatans ever tunnel in here? They have hidey-holes all over the high reaches.”
He still has his uses, Flattery reminded himself.
“My pets love exploring,” Flattery answered, indicating Archangel. “Did you know that 90 percent of their brain tissue is dedicated to their sense of smell? No one has tunneled in yet, and whoever does will face Archangel. Then we booby-trap the tunnel for the rest.”
Zentz nodded. “A good arrangement,” he gurgled.
“You haven’t tried your apple,” Flattery said, nodding to the bright yellow fruit in Nevi’s palm.
“I’m saving it,” the assassin replied, “for Crista Galli.”
Chapter 21
Do you know how hard it is to think like a plant?
—Dwarf MacIntosh, Kelpmaster, Current Control (from HoloVision Nightly News, 3 Jueles 493)
The Immensity prickled its long, gray-green fronds and sniffed the current in its chemical way. The sniff did not detect a presence so much as the hint of a presence. It was more a prescience than proper smell or taste, but the kelp knew that something of itself passed by now in the current.
The Immensity was a convol
ution of kelp, a subtle interweave of vines that sprawled, like a muscular brain, throughout the sea. It had begun as wild kelp, an ignored planting inside a long-abandoned Merman outpost. It had barely known “self” from “other” when it first encountered the Avatalogical study team led by Alyssa Marsh. Most of what the Immensity knew of humans it had learned from Alyssa Marsh.
This stand of kelp knew slavery from the human memories that her DNA held, and it knew itself to be enslaved by Current Control. With the right tickle in its vines it raised them, lowered them, retracted or extended them. Another electrical tickle set off the luciferase in the kelp, lighting the passage of human submarine trade. There were other tricks as well, all pulsed a current through a channel—simple servility, simple stimulation-response. This was reflex, not reflection.
The Immensity had all of eternity at its disposal. It allowed this exercise because it pleased the humans and did not interfere with the stand’s extended contemplations. Thanks to Alyssa Marsh and her shipmate Dwarf MacIntosh, the kelp had learned how to follow the electrical tickle to its source. Everything that humans transmitted now flowed straight to the heart of the Immensity. Everything.
The Immensity was finally prepared to send something back. It was getting closer to a breakthrough to these humans, and that breakthrough would not be through touch or the chemical smell, but through light waves intersecting in air.
Pleasing humans was a trivial matter, displeasing them was not. Once, soon after waking, this kelp had lashed out in pain to pluck a runaway submersible from among its vines. The huge cargo train had torn a hundred-meter swath nearly a kilometer long in its path through the vines. After the kelp slapped the deadly thing and plucked it apart, Flattery’s slaves came with cutters and burners to amputate the kelp back to infancy. The Immensity knew that it had not been able to think right for some time after that, and it did not intend to give up its thinking ever again.
