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Several things happened at once, any one of them enough to shake Flattery’s resolve to regroup at the launch site. He ran out of fuel less than a kilometer from the perimeter of the site. Instruments showed all fuel-filter membranes functioning normally. Before the foil stalled out and left him adrift in the kelp, Flattery saw that the CO2 in his cabin was higher than usual. The gas diffusion membranes were functioning, but seemingly in reverse.
I’m out of fuel, in the kelp, and my foil is filtering CO2 instead of O2 to the cabin.
He looked at these facts logically, hoping that logic would stave off the hysteria that bubbled at the back of his throat. He could shuttle ballast as long as his power supply lasted, but if he had to maneuver by battery he wouldn’t last long. No one responded to any of the undersea burst frequencies, and his Navcom sent back no signal. He floated in the center of a communications black hole. Everything that went out from his foil was swallowed up.
The damned kelp, he reasoned. It’s fouled up our communications before, even the histories tell us that.
He regretted his leniency with the kelp. It was something that made his life easier, so he had let the explosive growth of this reportedly dangerous species continue beyond his ability to control it.
Couldn’t herd people and kelp at the same time, he thought, and yawned. CO2’s getting me already.
The yawn frightened him into a flurry of activity, but the oxygen level in his cabin was already low enough to slow his thinking and his hands. He found that, even under electrical power, he couldn’t nose any farther through the kelp. Blowing ballast did no good, either. It simply depleted his already feeble batteries.
A damned plant is sucking the life out of me!
He stabilized the foil at fewer than twenty meters below the surface. His instruments refused to function, and visibility faded quickly as sunset tipped the scales toward night. Around him, the kelp pulled back from his foil and certain of the kelp fronds began to glow, the same cold white glow that had filled the Greens just before he dove.
“This is some kind of Shadow sabotage,” he growled. “You’ll all regret this!”
Within moments he was wrapped inside a sphere of light so bright that details inside the foil became invisible to him. The glare continued to be bright even though he shut his eyes and covered them with his hands. Voices babbled like red music at the back of his mind.
A warning buzzer droned from the overhead panel and the automatic repeated: “Cabin air unsafe, don airpacks.”
How long had it been warning him? He remembered, he remembered … Light.
This was a woman’s voice, someone he knew well. But it wasn’t the Galli woman … The buzzer exhausted itself to an electric rattle and Flattery shook his head.
“I need air!” he gasped. The sound of his own voice broke him free of the suffocation trance of the carbon dioxide.
Flattery clawed through a crew locker for his dive suit. He didn’t bother with all of the fastenings, but tightened down the faceplate and activated the air supply. The Director’s white hands trembled beyond his control, but at last he could breathe.
I’ve got to show them who’s in charge! he thought.
His training always lurked inside, but something about adrenaline slung it free. An old Islander proverb echoed in his mind: “Stir a dasher, feed a dasher.”
I am the dasher and I will strike. Flattery repeated this to himself a few times while carefully slowing his breathing.
“What do you want?” he shouted into the faceplate. “If you kill me, you’ll die. You’ll all die!”
His breath fogged the plaz in front of him but it didn’t diminish the cold white glare at all. In fact, as he looked closer at the beads of condensation on his faceplate he saw faces inside, hundreds of tiny faces suspended in translucence, one or more glittering inside each droplet.
Killing is your way, not ours.
That voice, inside his own head, chilled something deep in his belly. He could not mistake the familiar Moonbase accent of his shipmate Alyssa Marsh. She had been more than shipmate for a while, but hers had always been a cool intimacy. But it couldn’t be Alyssa Marsh because she was … well, not dead exactly …
“What … what is going on here?”
The rasping that he heard across the cabin ceiling and around the foil could only be kelp vines. They snaked across the cabin plaz without diminishing the white radiance that pierced his eyelids, his retinas, his very being. The foil lurched, then its metallic skin shrieked as the kelp began to tear it apart. Flattery hurried to seal his dive suit. He had already armed two lasguns, but he grabbed a couple of spare air packs instead.
You may fight if you wish, Alyssa’s voice told him, you will not be killed. You will not be harmed in any way.
“She had a terrible accident in the kelp” had been Flattery’s official version of her body’s demise. Now scenes from her life danced in the light around him. And he saw her great secret. Cool as Flattery was, it chilled him just the same.
Alyssa had slipped away on a long-term job in the kelp, knowing she could stretch six months of research in wild kelp beds to nine or ten months without any trouble. He’d wanted to be rid of her, she’d sensed that. If he knew she was pregnant he would destroy the child, of this she was sure. He would probably destroy her, too. Not one in ten thousand clones ever got the chance for a baby. Flattery, Alyssa and Mack were very possibly the last living members of their original crew of 3,006, each one the clone of some long-lost donor.
The Broods took him, and Yuri he was called. There were no other children at this kelp outpost, so Yuri spent his first two years undersea with fourteen adults.
Flattery closed his eyes, retreated into himself. It was just the once, his mind pleaded. Just the time …
“Do you think it’s what I expected my body to do?” she asked. The images stayed on the other side of his eyelids, but her voice came right into his mind.
How would I suspect, you didn’t stick around … your work in the kelp …
Now the scenes came inside his head. Flattery watched as he personally “dismantled” Alyssa and he himself performed the transplant to the life support surrogate and severed her brain forever from its body.
“All you have to do is consult the kelp,” he heard Mack telling Brood. “You’ll have your answer for sure, then. You can follow your genetic line back as far as you have the patience to follow.”
“I know who my father is,” Brood said. “It’s him, Raja Flattery.”
In one gigantic twist the foil ripped apart at the cabin seam and the sea burst in on Flattery. When the pieces fell away from him the sphere of light remained, and more images danced across the surface of the sphere. He saw Nevi and Zentz captured at the beach, and Brood’s attack on the Orbiter. A panorama of disaster played out for him and he watched his precious Preserve go down in plunder.
All along the coastline huge whips of kelp flung themselves skyward and lit up the sea with their pale green glow.
You have much to learn, Raja Flattery, Alyssa said. You are an intelligent man, perhaps even the genius that you believe yourself to be. Ultimately, that is what will save you.
Something grabbed at his right ankle and he spun away. It grabbed again and held, then pinned his arms when he tried to batter at it with a spare air pack. He was already exhausted, and found himself in a dreamlike state that made resistance more work than it was worth.
As I told you the night you killed me, I don’t think you understand the immensity of this being.
Beatriz watched Flattery’s memory take over, and he broadcast the entire scene of Alyssa Marsh’s separation from her body. Holo stages, viewers, kelp beds, the air and sky themselves lit up with Alyssa Marsh’s memories of her final encounter with Flattery.
You owe me a body, she said, and she said it in that same flat, emotionless tone that had made her his first pick for this crew a lifetime ago.
The kelp began to enciliate Flattery, to encapsulize him
inside a life-support pod. It had been the same with Crista Galli, as it had been with Vata and Duque before her. Beatriz felt the cilia seeking out his blood vessels to adjust his oxygen level and pH. Others would feed him, recycle his wastes and protect him from flesh-eaters. She felt this as she sensed the world through the hylighter’s skin.
Flattery had the show, and the whole world was watching.
Chapter 64
So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don’t find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do then is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time.
—Jose Ortega y Gasset
Twisp felt a moment of hysteria play flip-flop with his stomach as a sphere of cool light encompassed the young Kaleb. Twisp had sent a boy upcoast and now a man came back. He had known the boy’s father the day he changed from child to man. Suddenly that old sense of loss iced his spine, and he stood a little straighter at the poolside.
Kaleb’s a lot like his father, he thought. Obstinate, sure, outraged …
Kaleb’s father, Brett, had been outraged at the sight of thousands of fellow Islanders stacked dead in a Merman plaza, outraged that humans would murder children in their beds and parents at their prayers.
