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A certain stirring now in the tips of its fronds told the Immensity that “the One,” the Holomaster, was passing. The Immensity could unite fragmented stands of kelp into one will, one being, one blend of physics that humans called “soul.” Deep in its genetic memory lay a void, an absence of being that could not be teased out of the genetics labs of the Mermen. This void waited like a nest for the egg, the Holomaster who would teach the kelp how to unite fragmented stands of humans.
Twice this Immensity gave up its body but never its will. It was capable of neither sorrow nor regret, simply of thought and a kind of meditative presence that allowed it to live fully in the now while Flattery’s electrical strings at Current Control manipulated the puppet of its body.
Reflex is a speedy response made without the brain’s counsel. Reaction is a speedy response made with minimal counsel. This kelp grew up expecting to be left alone. It learned reaction only after its vines twined with domestic kelp. It learned to kill when threatened and to show no mercy. Then it learned to expect retaliation for killing.
This Immensity expected to live forever. Logic dictated that it would not live forever if it continued reacting to humans. And now, the One was passing! It knew this as surely as the blind snapperfish knows the presence of muree.
The original Immensity of kelp, Avata, encompassed all of the seas of Pandora under one consciousness, one voice, one “being.” Its first genetic extinction came early in the formation of the planet. It had been at the mercy of a fungus. A burst of ultraviolet from a huge sunstorm killed off the fungus. Somewhere, a primitive frond lay mummified in a salt bog awaiting Pandora’s first ocean.
The second extinction was by human beings, by the human bioengineer Jesus Lewis. The kelp was teased back to life by a few DNA miners about fifty years later. The revitalized kelp that the Mermen resurrected was developed from these early experiments. Now kelp once again filled the seas, dampening the murderous storms.
Once again the great stands scattered scent. They grew close with the years, their fronds spoke the chemical tongue. This Immensity itself retained two and a quarter million cubic kilometers of ocean.
The One rode a kelpway that skimmed the Immensity’s reach. This particular kelpway came out of a stand of blue kelp that had been known to attack its own kind, overpowering nearby stands, sucking out their beings and injecting its own. It had suffered many prunings, and was sorely in need of guidance. This the Immensity knew from snatches of terror that drifted in on torn fronds. The One could not be trusted to such a dangerous stand. At whatever cost, the One must be spared.
The kelp shifted itself slightly, against the electrical stings from Current Control, to bring the One into its outmost currents, spiraling into the safer deeps of its own stand.
Chapter 22
You have been educated in judgment, which is the essence of worship. Judgment always occurs in the past. It is past-thinking. Will, free or otherwise, is concerned with the future. Thinking is the performance of the moment, out of which you use your judgment to modulate will. You are a convection center through which past prepares future.
—Dwarf MacIntosh, Kelpmaster, from Conversations with the Avata
“Course change.”
Elvira’s voice was emotionless as rock but Rico detected the slightest edge of worry in the flurry of her fingers across her command console. She never piloted the foil in its voice mode because she preferred to speak as seldom as possible. That Elvira had spoken at all worried him—that, and the increasing shimmy that had begun a few minutes back.
“Why?”
When working with Elvira, Rico picked up her habit of non-speech. She seemed to like that.
“Channel change,” she said, nodding toward her display. “We’re being steered off course.”
“Steered?” he muttered, and checked his own instruments. They maintained their position in the kelpway, but their compass said the huge undersea corridor was running in the wrong direction.
“Who’s doing the steering?”
Elvira shrugged, still busy with her board. She had taken them deep into sub train traffic to minimize tracking, and they ran without the help of sensors that would light their progress through the kelpways.
“We’re out of the wild kelp sector outside Flattery’s launch site,” he said, “that’s where theweirdness usually happens.”
One-half of his screen displayed the navigation grid projected by Current Control from its command center aboard the Orbiter. The other half of the screen tracked their actual course through the grid, which now appeared to be bent.
Bending, he corrected himself. It looks like our whole end of the screen is pouring down a drain. “Anything on the Navcom?” he asked.
Sometimes Current Control changed grids through the kelp to accommodate weather conditions farther upchannel or the recent stumping of a stand of rogue kelp.
“Negative,” she said. “All clear.”
The ride began to get bumpy and Rico cinched himself tighter to his couch. He keyed the intercom and said, “Rough water, everybody cinch up. Ben, you’d better come up here.”
Below them Rico could see another cargo train careening dangerously close to the kelp, attempting to recover from the sudden change. Their dive lights showed him that the kelp seemed to be in a struggle with itself, fluttering the channel as if pressing against a great force.
Ben used the hand grips along the bulkhead to work his way to his console. “Can we get Current Control?” Ben asked. He dropped into his couch and cinched up.
“Not without giving up our position.”
“We got out too easy,” Ben said. “They’ve got a bug on this thing, anyway …”
“Had,” Rico said, smiling. “I did an E-sweep when we left the harbor, thinking the same thing. Found it. Elvira here jettisoned the little devil into a netful of krill that we passed about a dozen grids back.”
“Good work, both of you,” Ben said. “All right, then let’s try that cargo train below …”
The Flying Fish was buffeted again by something like a huge fist. Elvira wrestled with the controls to keep them out of the kelp.
Rico knew, as they all knew, that any damage to the kelp could be construed as an attack. A lot of kelp lights were active in this sector. Besides the red and blue telltales of a waking stand, this kelp flashed its cold navigation light at random and occasionally flooded them with the brighter fiber-optic sunlight that it transported from the surface. If the stand was one that had awakened, any mistake could get the foil and themselves torn apart at the seams.
“Didn’t Flattery just go on the air to tell us how safe he’d made the kelpways?”
“Just goes to show,” Rico said, “you can’t believe that bastard for a goddamn blink.”
The cargo train passing in the opposite direction beneath them was having even more trouble. A relatively tiny foil could stop in midchannel and hover if necessary, but the cargo train needed to maintain a constant speed for maneuverability. The grid system was set up so that the trains, Pandora’s lifeline, could travel the kelpways swiftly and undisturbed with minimal course changes. From what Rico could see of the bucking cargo, the crew below at both ends of the train had their hands full.
“It’s bending,” Rico said, watching the Navcom monitor that marked out their grid system. “The whole grid’s bending.”
“We’d better surface,” Ben said. “Prepare for—”
“Negative,” Elvira said. “If this is a surface disturbance, things will be worse up there. We need information.”
Ben grunted acknowledgment.
“Cargo train identity signal is registered to the Simplicity Maru,” Elvira reported, fighting the controls to maintain hover and an equidistance between walls of the kilometer-wide channel. This ordinarily simple maneuver was made nearly impossible by the ever-changing walls of their kelpway.
Rico noticed a sweat beading on Elvira’s brow and upper lip.
Ben keyed for a low-frequency broadc
ast. He hoped he didn’t have to explain the absence of their identity signal.
“Simplicity Maru, this is Quicksilver,” he lied. “Do you have reports on current disruption?”
Static hissed back at them, then a microphone clicked on. The message came in badly broken. Undersea communication, especially around active kelp, was always difficult.
“Simp … Maru. Negative … into kelp.” There was the sound of shrieking metal in the background. “ … king up. We are preparing … ballast. Repeat, preparing …”
Elvira threw the throttles forward and in spite of a violent buffeting the foil leaped at her touch. Her lips were pressed into a tight line and her knuckles shone white on the controls.
“Wait, we can’t …” Ben said. His body pressed harder into his couch. “We can’t go into deep kelp.”
“They’re blowing ballast,” Elvira growled. “That whole cargo train’s going to pop up into us like a cork.”
Rico felt every fixture aboard rattle like his teeth. “Ben, is the girl secure?”
“She’s strapped in,” Ben said.
