The Ascension Factor

Chapter 15

Boggs crawled up beside his mother so that his face was even with hers. She had the wide-set eyesockets of her mother, and the same bulging blue eyes. Now a faint film obscured the blue. Boggs pulled at his hair again, and thrust the scraggly clump where she could see it.
"You know what this means," he said. The crawl, the effort at talk exhausted him but somehow he kept on. "I'm done for." He tugged at her hair and it, too, came out in a clump. "You are, too. Look here."
Her bleared eyes slowly tracked on the evidence that she didn't need, and she nodded.
"Take it," was all she said. She bent her knee up to her skinny chest and Boggs clumsily unwound the line from around her ankle.
He crawled out from under the ledge, and as far as he could see down to the shore others were crawling out of holes, out from under pieces of cloth and rubbish. Here and there a wisp of smoke dared to breach the air.
Boggs found his cane, propped himself upright and stumped his way slowly toward the water. He'd thought himself too skinny to sweat, but sweat poured out of him nonetheless. It was a cold sweat at first, but the effort of picking his way through the rubbish and the dying warmed him up.
A small jetty shouldered the oncoming tide. It was an amalgam of blasted rock, about twenty meters long and five or six meters wide. The quartertide change tossed a few breakers over the black rock, soaking the dozen licensed fishermen who hunched against the spray.
It took Boggs over a half-hour to make it the hundred meters from the ledge to the base of the jetty. His vision was failing, but he scanned the tidelands for signs of the security patrol.
"Demon patrol," he muttered.
Vashon security sent regular patrols through refugee areas. Their stated purpose was to protect the people against hooded dashers and, lately, the terrifying boils of nerve runners that raced up from the south. Boggs shuddered. He had seen a boil of runners attack a family last season, entering through their eyes to clutch their slimy eggs inside their skulls. He had thought the family too weak to scream, but he was wrong. It was not a pretty sight, and the patrol took their sweet time burning them out.
Everyone knew security's real reason for patrolling the beach. It was to keep the people from feeding themselves. The Director passed rumors of black market fishing harvests that he said threatened the economy of Pandora. Boggs hadn't seen sign of these harvests yet, nor had he seen any sign of an economy. His mother's tiny radio taught him the word, but to him it would always be just a word.
A pyre smoldered to his left. Three small lumps of char lay atop a ring of rock, slightly higher than high tide. The poor couldn't even muster enough fuel to burn their dead. When enough of them accumulated, the security patrols amused themselves by flaming them with gushguns. They called it nerve runner practice.
Someone guarded the pyre on the other side of the rocks, and when Boggs edged closer he could see that it was Silva. He stopped and caught his breath. Silva was a girl his own age, and the rumors said that she had killed her younger sisters and brother while they slept. No one raised a hand against her now as she tended their pitiful fire. Boggs hoped she wouldn't see him. He needed bait, but he knew he couldn't fight for it.
He got down on all fours and crawled to the edge of the heap. He reached a hand up, felt around the hot rocks until he touched something that didn't feel like rock. He jerked, jerked harder and something came off in his hand. It was hot and peeling on one side, cold on the other. He couldn't bring himself to look, he just grabbed his cane and scuttled away. Silva hadn't seen him.
"I'll bring her a fish," he promised himself. "I'll catch fish for mother and the boys, and one for Silva."
The quartertide patrol was nowhere to be seen.
They've gone through already, he thought. They've gone through and checked the licenses and now they're up the beach checking for caches in the rocks.
Boggs stood apart from the other fishermen. They might turn him in because he was catching fish that were rightfully theirs. They might steal his fish and line, and beat him as they had beaten his father onc...
...ut they'll wait until I have the fish, he thought. That's what I'd do.
He hunkered down against the jetty so that he was barely visible from the shore, tied a rock onto his line and baited the hooks from the charred mess he clasped in his fist.
"It's bait," he reminded himself, "it's just bait."
He didn't have enough energy to plunk his bait out very far, so he left it on the bottom about a half dozen meters from the rocks. It was deep there, deep enough to take most of his line. He gave a tug now and then to make sure it was free. There was enough bait for two, possibly three more tries.
"You got a license, boy?"
The gruff voice behind him startled him, but he was too weak to move. He didn't say anything.
"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 skinny and sallow, with a wisp of a beard on his chin and no hair on his head. The skin on the top of his head was peeling and sores dotted his face.
"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 skinny back into the pull. He figured he had about two meters to go but he couldn't see anything for the black spots swimming across his eyes. He heard the old man grunt in surprise and scramble up the rocks behind him and when he had nothing left to pull with Boggs just lay there, wedged in the rock, the excess line tangled around both arms.
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 skinny buttocks on the rock. "You bet your ass, boy. Let's see that license."
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, pinned the boy's arms against his chest and fell backward with him into the sea.
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 fanned out from the surface, and the bubbles from his mouth where they joined it like a blossom to its stem.
***
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.
- from Zavatan Conversations with the Avata, Queets Twisp, elder
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 manner. This was not the voyage he wished the dust to lead him down. He sought the deeper currents of history to address the problems of Flattery and hunger.
"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.
What good does it do for me to become him? We trade a long-armed murderer for a tall one.
By the time he and Mose lay their burdens down before the monks of the hylighter clan, Twisp felt no need for the ritual. He already swam the heady seas of kelp-memories. His mind waged a reluctant struggle against the babbling current.
His people around him babbled as they prepared the dust. Twisp made his mouth beg his leave and he perched atop his favorite outcrop alone. Behind him, other elders walked a line of kneeling Zavatans and spooned little heaps of blue dust onto outstretched tongues. They proceeded with waterdrums and chants, songs from Earth, from Ship, from their centuries of voyaging across Pandora and her seas.
This was where communicants met the dead, here in the aftermath of the blue dust. They traveled backward in time, raveling up memories that had been long forgotten. Some witnessed their parents' lives, or their grandparents'. A few, one or two, branched off into the greater memory of humanity itself, and these were the ones consulted for movement toward a rightness of being.
Twisp let the syncopated waterdrum lull him back to that first day he had felt the effects of the new kelp. Twenty-five years ago he first touched land, a prisoner of GeLaar Gallow. That was the day he and a few friends defeated Gallow's vicious guerrilla movement and ended a civil war. It was the day the hyb tanks splashed down from orbit and brought them Flattery.
It all happened atop a peak that the Pandorans now called Mount Avata, in honor of the kelp's role in their salvation. He had waited there for what he had expected to be his death at the hands of Gallow, the Merman guerrilla leader. The kelp brought him a vision then of a bearded carpenter named Noah. Noah was blind, and mistook Twisp for his grandson, Abimael. He fed the hungry Twisp a sweet cake, and down all the years since then Twisp had remembered the fine taste of that sticky-sweet cake.
"Go to the records and look up the histories," Noah told him.
Twisp had done just that, and it left him in awe of Noah, the kelp and that sunny day on the Mount.
"This new ark of ours is out on dry land once and for all," Noah told him. "We're going to leave the sea."
Twisp had avoided the kelp since then, thinking only that he needed to let the affairs of Pandora go to the Pandorans and the affairs of Twisp to Twisp. Then the Director insinuated himself into the lives of the people. Their lives became Twisp's life, their pain his pain.
Twisp had studied well, read widely in the histories, and like any Islander he brought the hungry into his home. That home grew as the hunger grew into two homes, three homes, a settlement. Differences with the Director drove them to their perch in the high reaches and to secretly make fertile the rocky plains upcoast, away from Flattery's henchmen. Now, in the grip of the spore-dust, Twisp saw the intricacy of what he'd wrought, and the strength.
A small voice came to him as the dust was distributed to others. It was a voice of the world of Noah, one that he had never expected to hear, even within his own mind.
"Fight hunger with food," it told him. "Fight darkness with light, illusion with illumination." It was a tiny voice, nearly a whisper.
"Abimael," he said. "You are here at last. How did you find me?"
"The scent of the sweet cake," Abimael said. "And the strong call of a good heart."
Twisp swept past Abimael in the headlong tumble down the kelpways of his mind. He was out of the fronds, now, out of the peripheral vines and into the mainstem of kelp.
This hylighter must have come from a grandfather stand, he thought. It is a wonder that they still escape Flattery's shears.
"It is not wonder, elder, but illusion."
The voice that Twisp heard was not from inside. He turned slowly, remembering the young Mose. It was then that he noticed Mose's hand on his arm.
"You travel this vine, too, my cousin?"
"I do."
At no time did Mose move his lips. His pupils dilated and constricted wildly, and Twisp knew that his own did likewise. He'd looked into a mirror once after taking the dust, and fallen into places he'd rather not remember.
"I remember the..." Mose began.
Twisp interrupted him, concentrating only on what Mose said of illusion. This interruption, too, was spoken without lips.
"You said, 'illusion,'" Twisp reminded him. "What has the kelp shown you of illusion?"
"It is a language this hylighter spoke when it grew on the vine," Mose said. "It learned to cast illusion like a hologram. Elder, if you follow the vine of this thought to its root, you will know the power of illusion."
Suddenly Twisp's mind cartwheeled deeper into itself.
No, he thought, not deeper into my mind. Deeper into Avata's.
"Yes, this way," a soft voice coaxed.
Twisp looked back on his body as though from a great height, incurious about the shell of himself, then he turned onward into the void.
What is illusion, what is real? he asked.
"What is a map," the voice replied. "Is it illusion, or is it real?"
Both, he thought. It is both real - something that can be held and felt - and illusion, or symbol, or representation. The map is not the territory.
"You, fisherman, if you want to build a boat, what do you do first?"
Draw a plan, he thought.
"And the plan is not the boat, but it is real. It is a real plan. What do you do next?"
Visions of all the boats he had built, or fished on, or coveted floated through his mind.
Nex...
He tried to concentrate, tried to remember where it was that Avata was leading him.
"Don't think about that," the voice chided. "After the plan, what next?"
Build a model, he thought.
"It, too, is not the boat. It is a model. It is illusion, it is symbol, and it is real. If you would get a man to live a certain way, how might you do that?"
Give him a model of behavior?
"Perhaps."
Map out his life?
"Perhaps."
A moment of silence, and Twisp detected the distinct pulse of the sea in the pause. The voice went on.
"But a map, a model - these have a basic limitation. What is this limitation?"
Twisp felt his mind bursting at its seams. Avata was forcefeeding him something, something important. If he could only gras...
Size!
Whether it came to him intuitively, or whether the kelp provided him with the answer, the effect was the same.
It's size! You can never know truly from a model how it will feel because you can't live in it. You can't try it on for size!
He felt an immense sigh inside himself.
"Exactly, friend Twisp. But if you could make the illusion life-size, the lesson, too, would be life-size, would it not?"
Suddenly he was thrust back in his spore-dust memory and saw the old Pandora through the eyes of one of his bloodied ancestors fighting the Clone Wars. He saw the immensity of Ship blacken out the sky, and heard that final message ring in his mind: "Surprise me, Holy Void." Ship's voice was not the electronic monotone he'd expected. Its voice was relieved, even gleeful, as it made its farewell pass across both suns and disappeared without a sound. It sounded much like the voice he'd been hearing inside his own head.
"Ship unburdened itself of us when it headed out for the Holy Void," Twisp whispered to himself. "To live to our fullest potential we have to learn how to unburden ourselves of ourselves."
One more thing nagged at the back of his mind. He didn't know whether he said it aloud or not, but he knew that Mose, at least, heard him out.
"We have to learn to cast illusion like a spell," Twisp heard himself say. "To capture an enemy without inflicting harm will take a carefully spun illusion."