The Ascension Factor

"You're late getting out here if you got a license. You only get one day, can't afford to waste it."

Some rocks clacked together as the man stepped down to where Boggs sat wedged into a cleft. He was ski

"I'm an illegal, too," the old man said. "Figured it was my last chance. You?"

"Same."

He reached across Boggs, fingered the bait and put it down with a grunt.

"Same's me."

The voice was lower than illegal, it was ashamed.

Suddenly Boggs's line went tight, then tighter, then it nearly jerked his arms out of their sockets.

"You got one, boy," the old man said. In his excitement, his voice rose and his cracked lips got wet. "You sure got one, boy. I'll hel..."

"No!"

Boggs wrapped the line around his wrist and levered it in about a meter.

"No, it's mine!"

Whatever it was, it was big and strong enough that it didn't have to surface to fight. But Boggs kept making slow progress, levering the stubs of his feet against a boulder and putting his ski

The water broke with a rush in front of him, and whatever he had hooked lunged for him and caught him by the ankles. The grip was firm, and human. It laughed.

"You caught a big one, boy!" it bellowed. "Can you show me your license?" Another laugh.

"Are yo... are yo... ?"

"Security?" the voice asked, pulling him closer to the water, cutting his ski

Hand over hand the security pulled Boggs closer. Face to face, Boggs could see the breathing device dangling from his dive suit and the black hair draining over his bulging forehead.

"You ain't got one, do you?" He picked Boggs up and gave him a shake. Every bone in his dried-up body rattled. "Do you?"

"No, n... ..."

"Stealing food from people's mouths? You think you have the right to decide who'll live and who'll die? Only the Director has that right. Well, fishbait, I'll show you where the big ones are."

With that the man stuck his mouthpiece between his lips, pi

Boggs coughed once at the tickle of water in his nose, then choked as it exploded into his frail lungs. He saw nothing but light overhead where it fa

***

Kill therefore with the sword of wisdom the doubt born of ignorance that lies in your heart. Be one in self-harmony and arise, great warrior, arise.

A silent Twisp and muttering Mose gathered the spore-dust of the two fulfilled hylighters into their bags and trudged their loads to the high reaches. Twisp had spent little time with the monks lately but they were generally an unsuspicious lot who seemed accustomed to his comings and goings. Few of them knew of his work with the Shadows, though if others knew he was certain they still would not interfere.

The carnage below would not reach them, experience had taught him this. Twisp tossed back his mantle, tucked up his sleeves and enjoyed his foray into the sun. For these few hours, at least, he could put aside the messages and codes and other accoutrements of his secret life. Today he might be called on to make a decision or give an order that might change Pandora forever. Until that hour, he wanted to feel Pandora's sunlight and the feminine breezes of the high reaches.

He and Mose sweated in the spore-dust gathering, and sweat plastered the fine blue dust to their hot skins. The soul of Avata, bound up in the dust, leaked its way into his pores. Twisp's body picked its way up the trail, oblivious to the way his mind raced the kelpways of the past.

He who controls the present controls the past, a voice in his mind told him, and he who controls the past controls the future.

It was something he'd read in the histories, but he'd also heard it before from the invisible mouth of the kelp.

Avata controls the past, he thought. It maps the voyage of our past, our genetic past, which helps us to plot a true course for our future.

He watched his feet fall, one in front of the other, without the expense of thought. They stepped over sharp stones, sidestepped a flatwing, all without interference from what most people called the mind. It was as if he were a being watching another being, but from within.

Cheap entertainment, he thought, and smiled.

Mose hummed a tune behind him, one that Twisp did not recognize. He wondered where the young monk's mind voyaged, to bring him such a tune. He had too much respect for another man's reverie to ask him.

Each contact with the kelp or the spore-dust had taken Twisp deeper into the details of humanity and deeper into his own past. Yes, the loss of a love was painful and it seemed no less painful replayed. Most of these memories exhilarated him, like the one of nuzzling his mother's breast for the first time, the taste of the sweet milk and the coo of her voice over him, in the background the swish-swoosh, swish-swoosh of her Islander heart.

Twice the kelp had taken him further than that, into the past of his ancestors, into the void from which humanity itself had sprung. Twisp acquired something more than a history lesson on these voyages. He acquired wisdom, the insight of sages, a separateness from the worldly machinations of people like Flattery. This was why the Director eventually discouraged, then finally forbade the kelp ritual.

"Do you want your children to know your most secret thoughts, your desires, all those dreams you couldn't tell them?" he would ask.

This warned Twisp far more about Flattery's depth of paranoia than it did of the dangers of the kelp.

Flattery successfully discouraged most Pandorans, at least the ones dependent on his settlements and his handouts. His isolation of a kelp neurotoxin made the people even more cautious. His development of an antidote became popular, since contact with the kelp was virtually unavoidable in many traditional professions.

It could've been a placebo, Twisp thought. What people expect the kelp to do to their minds is pretty much what occurs.

The brief Pandoran ritual of giving their dead up to the kelp had been all but abandoned. Now the dead were burned, their memories dissipated with smoke to the winds. This Flattery encouraged with his simple plea for hygiene.

"Decomposing bodies wash up on the beaches," he said. "What little tideland we have stinks with the remains of our dead."

Twisp shook his head to clear it of Flattery, of the man's grating, nasal voice and supercilious ma

"Humans have enslaved humans for all time," he said to himself. "A new galaxy shouldn't require a new solution."

How had ancient humans broken the bonds of human-inflicted hunger?

With death, a voice in his mind told him. Death freed the afflicted, or death freed them from the afflictor.

Twisp wanted Pandorans to be better than that. Flattery's way was starvation, assassination, pitting cousin against cousin. The footprints Twisp sought in the dust must lead away from Flattery, not after him.