Chapter 13

Evil is in the eye of the beholder.

—Spider Nevi, special assistant to the Director

LIGHTS HAD been suitably dimmed in the Director’s holo suite, and one tight spotlight illuminated his face from below. This effect accentuated Flattery’s height, nearly a head taller than the average Pandoran, and it added an imperiousness to his stature that pleased him.

An empty holo cassette teetered across the red armrest of his favorite recliner. One fluorescent orange sticker on the cassette read “For Eyes Only,” and under that was handwritten: “TD, S. Nevi only.” Under that was stamped in black: “Extreme Penalty.” Flattery smiled at the euphemism. At his direction, all those who violated the “Extreme Penalty” sanction became the homework of Spider Nevi’s apprentice interrogators. Messy business, security.

“Mr. Nevi,” he acknowledged, with a nod.

“Mr. Director.”

As usual, Spider Nevi’s face was unreadable, even to Flattery’s expert training as a Chaplain/Psychiatrist. Nevi had been prompt, unhurried, arriving in a snappy gray cut of a Merman lounging suit right at the first blood of dawn.

“Zentz hasn’t found them,” Flattery said. His voice was clipped, betraying more anger than he wished.

“It was Zentz who lost them,” Nevi countered.

Flattery grunted. He hadn’t needed the reminder, especially from Nevi.

“You find them,” he said, and jabbed a finger at the air between them. “Bring back the girl, wring what you can from the others. Save Ozette for a special occasion. He’s at the bottom of this Shadowbox and they’ve got to be shut down now.”

Nevi nodded, and the agreement was struck. Bounty would be worked out later, as usual. Nevi’s terms were always reasonable, even on difficult matters, because he liked his work. His was the kind of work that might go unpracticed if it weren’t for the Director.

Every art has its canvas, Flattery thought.

“The airstrip is secure,” Nevi said. “There were preparations for them there, including a half-dozen collaborators, so we have cut them off. Solid intelligence. Zentz’s men are turning the usual screws in the village. They will be forced to move the girl soon. Overland is out, that would be insane. It would have to be by water, and under diversion to get out of here. My guess would be Victoria. It would pay to wait and make as big a sweep as possible, don’t you think?”

“You have the docks under watch?”

“Of course. The HoloVision foil is bugged, a precaution. Your sensor system is now keyed into it.” Nevi glanced at the clock on Flattery’s console. “You should be able to tune them in just about any time.”

Flattery shifted slightly in his command couch, betraying his uneasiness at this loss of control. Nevi was second-guessing his moves, and he didn’t like it.

“Well,” Flattery said, splitting his face with a smile, “this is magnificent! We will have them all—and you will be rewarded for this. Zentz grumbles that you steal away his best men but, dammit, you get the job done.” He slapped his palm on the tabletop and held the smile.

Spider Nevi’s expression did not change, and he said nothing. His only response was the barest perceptible nod of his horrible head. The shape of it was more or less normal, except for the mucous slit where the nose should be. Nevi’s dark skin was shot through with a glowing web work of red veins. His dark eyes glittered, missed nothing.

“What do you want done with the Tatoosh woman?” Flattery felt his smile droop, and he tried to pick it up a bit.

“Beatriz Tatoosh is very helpful to us,” Flattery said. “She has a passion for the Voidship project that we could not buy.” He raised his hand to stop Nevi’s interruption. “I know what you’re thinking—that little tryst between her and Ozette. That’s been over for over a year—”

“It wasn’t a ‘little tryst,’” Nevi interrupted. “It lasted years. They were wounded together at the miners’ rebellion two years ago—”

“I know women,” Flattery hissed, “and she will hate him for this. Running away with a younger woman … sabotaging HoloVision and the Voidship. Didn’t she do the broadcast as written last night?”

A nod from Nevi, and silence.

“She knows as well as we do that mentioning Ozette as party to this abduction would lend it a popularity and a credence that we cannot afford. It is over between them, and as soon as he’s back in our hands everything will be over for Ben Ozette. The Tatoosh woman will be aboard the orbital assembly station this afternoon and out of our hair.”

At Nevi’s continued silence, Flattery rubbed his hands together briskly.

“Now,” he said, “let me show you how I’ve kept the kelp pruned back for the last couple of years. You know how the people resist this, it always takes a disaster to get them to go along with it. Well, the kelp’s will was breached long ago by our lab at Orcas. Too complex to explain, but suffice it to say it is not merely a matter of mechanical control—diverting currents and the like. Thanks to the neurotoxin research we tapped into its emotions. Remember that stand of kelp off Lilliwaup, the one that hid the Shadow commando team?”

Nevi nodded. “I remember. You told Zentz ‘Hands off.’”

“That’s right,” Flattery said. He drew himself upright in his recliner and snapped the backrest up to meet him. He keyed the holo and automatically the lights dimmed further. Between the two men, in the center of the room, appeared in miniature several monitor views of a Merman undersea outpost, a kelp station at the edge of a midgrowth stand. Kelp lights flickered from the depths beyond the outpost. The kelp station had been built atop the remnants of an old Oracle.

Oracles, as the Pandorans called them, were those points where the kelp rooted into the crust of the planet itself. Because of the incredible depth of these three-hundred-year-old roots, and because the Mermen of old planted them in straight lines, Pandora’s crust often fractured along root lines. It was such a series of fractures that had given birth to Pandora’s new continents and rocky island chains.

Flattery’s private garden, “the Greens,” lay underground in a cavern that had once been an Oracle. Flattery had had his people burn out the three-hundred-meter-thick root to accommodate his landscaping plans.

Three views clarified on the holo stage in front of the two men: The first was of the inside of a kelp station, with a balding Merman fretting at his control console; the second, outside the station, from the kelp perimeter, focused on the station’s main hatch; the third, also outside the station, took in the gray mass of kelp from the rear hatch. The Merman looked very, very nervous.

“His children have been swimming in the kelp,” Flattery said. “He is worried. Their airfish are due for replacement. All have been dutifully taking their antidote. The kelp, when treated with my new blend, shows an unhealthy attraction for the antidote.”

There were occasional glimpses of the children among the kelp fronds. They moved in the ultra-slow-motion of dreams, much slower than undersea movement dictated, considerably slower than the usual polliwog wriggle of children.

The Merman activated a pulsing tone that shut itself off after a few blinks.

“That’s the third time he’s sounded ‘Assembly,’” Flattery said. Anticipation made it difficult for him to sit still.

The Merman spoke to a female, dressed in a worksuit, wet from her day’s labor of wiring up the kelp stand for Current Control.

“Linna,” he said, “I can’t get them out of the kelp. Those airfish will be dry … what’s happening out there?”

She was thin and pale, much like her husband, but she appeared dreamy-eyed and unfocused. Most of those who worked the outposts did not wear their dive suits inside their living quarters. She worked the fringes of what the Mermen called “the Blue Sector.”

“Maybe it’s the touch of it,” she murmured. “The touch … special. You don’t work in it, you don’t know. Not slick and cold, like before. Now the kelp feels like, well …” She hesitated, and even on the holo Flattery could detect a blush.

“Like what?” the Merman asked.

“I … lately it feels like you when it touches me.” Her blush accented her crop of thick blonde hair. “Warm, kind of. And it makes me tingle inside. It makes my veins tingle.”

He grunted, squinted at her, and sighed. “Where are those wots?”

He glanced out the plaz beside him into the dim depths beyond the compound. Flattery could detect no flicker of children swimming, and he felt a niggling sense of glee at the Merman’s growing apprehension.

The Merman activated his console tone again and the proper systems check light winked on with it. His finger snapped the scanner screen.

“They were just there,” the man blurted. “This is crazy. I’m going code red.” He unlocked the one button on the console that Flattery knew no outpost wanted to press: Code Red. That would notify Current Control in the Orbiter overhead and Communications Central at the nearest Merman base that the entire compound was in imminent danger.

“You see?” Flattery said. “He’s getting the idea.”

“I’m going out there,” the man announced to his wife, “you stay put. Do you understand?”

No answer. She sat, still dreamy-eyed, watching the fifty-meter-long fronds of blue kelp that reached her way from the perimeter.

The Merman scooped an airfish out of the locker beside the hatch and buckled on a toolbelt. He grabbed up a long-handled laser pruner and a set of charges. As if on second thought, he picked up the whole basket of airfish, the Mermen’s symbiotic gills that filtered oxygen from the sea directly into the bloodstream.

Ghastly things, Flattery thought with a shudder. Unconsciously, he rubbed his neck where they were customarily attached.

Once outside, the Merman’s handlight barely illuminated the stand of kelp at the compound’s edge. This holo had been made at the onset of evening, and the waning light above the scene coupled with the depth darkened the holo and made it difficult to see detail of the man’s face—a small disappointment for such a good chronicle of the test itself.

As the Merman reached the compound’s perimeter within range of the kelp’s longest fronds, he whirled at the click-hiss of an opening hatch. His wife swam lazily out of it directly into deep kelp. The atmosphere from their station bubbled toward the surface in a rush. He must have realized then that everything was lost as he watched the sea rush into their quarters through the un-dogged hatch. All sensors went blank.

Flattery switched off the holo and turned up the lights. Nevi sat unmoved with the same unreadable expression on his horrible face.

“So the kelp lured them and ate them?” Nevi asked.

“Exactly.”

“On command?”

“On command—my command.”

Flattery was pleased at the trace of a smile that flickered across Spider Nevi’s lips. It must have been a luxury that he allowed himself for the moment.

“We both know what will come of the hue and cry,” the Director said, and puffed himself a little before continuing. “There will be a demand for vengeance. My men will be forced, by popular demand, to prune this stand back. You see how it’s done?”

“Very neat. I always thought …”

“Yes,” Flattery gloated, “so has everyone else. The kelp has been a very sensitive subject, as you know. Religious overtones and whatnot.” Another dismissive wave of the hand. Flattery couldn’t stop bragging.

“I had to accomplish two things: I had to get control of Current Control, and I had to find the point at which the kelp became sentient. Not necessarily smart, just sentient. By the time it sends off those damned gasbags it’s too late—the only solution there is to stump the lot. We lost a lot of good kelpways for a lot of years that way.”

“So, what’s the key?”

“The lights,” Flattery said. He pointed out his huge plaz port at the bed just off the tideline. “When the kelp starts to flicker, it’s waking up. It’s like an infant, then, and only knows what it’s told. The language it speaks is chemical, electrical.”

“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.