Frank Herbert, Bill Ransom by The Ascension Factor (epub)

Author:The Ascension Factor (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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