Radix, page 12
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
He understood the importance of staying calm. Not only because an anxiety-riddled mind offered no help, but especially because he knew that everything he felt and thought would be remembered by this room. In his sensex, he could still see the electric yellow glow fringed red where he had first stood upon entering the room. The rest of the place read empty of psynergy, smooth and blank, as if no one lived there.
To keep his own psynergy contained, Nefandi shifted his mind into selfscan. Waiting for the water to boil, he stood at the window beside the stove, hearing the trees that rattled in the wind, letting that sound fill him and unlitter his mind. The last of his tension drifted away, leaving him entirely what he was—so much cheese-soft flesh, so many gravity-thick bones. He watched the dim attenuation of afternoon light, dust motes rising and falling in the windowgleam. A jay flashed through the dead branches outside, and he looked out at cirrus clouds that plumed the wind, feathering over a chain of hills. Beside the crater pool, the voor child strolled off with Sumner. Before he could think to wonder, he focused on the mist rising from the soaked mudbank, rising and knotting in the shadows, dissolving in the air.
The pot on the stove clattered to life, and Nefandi turned his attention to it. He found a hard clay cup among others on the windowsill. He fingered the ruddy brown glaze, a black sea squid tangled in its own tentacles etched on the side. After putting several pinches of tea in the cup, he poured in the steaming water. The brew swirled up green and smelled spicy. He brought the cup to the table and sat down by a front window. A live cloud of flies swarmed back and forth between the scabby trees. Several of them banged against the window so viciously they dropped to the sill, small jeweled bodies rolling crazily for a moment before flying off. The rusty trees looked tormented, the earth-skin of their bark peeling off, knobby with fungi.
He sipped the tea, and the fluid warmth filled his whole chest. Thoughts tried to muscle through the sheen of sensations that occupied him. What’s happening with the fat boy? Where is he being led? What’s going to happen to me? He gave these questions no focus, and they shadowed away. The skin of the tea with its satin light caught his eye, and he studied the blend of color and scent and warmth, his face islanded in the green water. There was nothing to think about.
***
Sumner was terrified. As soon as he saw the white child’s head break the surface of the pool, his insides tightened, and he asked himself again but with more fervor than ever: What am I doing here? I must’ve been luned to come back here.
And when Nefandi suddenly lurched about and stalked off, a desperate urge to flee overwhelmed Sumner. But he stayed rooted. Corby’s black-gummed smile opened like a gash in his white face, pale eyes unsmiling, cold as fever. He slogged to shore, and an odor of muscadine rose around him. “Welcome back. I’ve missed you,” he said in his soft, sincere voice. He held out his hand, but Sumner refused to take it.
“Where’s Jeanlu?” Sumner asked.
Corby’s face, emotionless in the freckled light, turned away. “She’s dead.”
Sumner looked down at the long, soft fingers of mud reaching into the water. He searched but could find nothing to say.
“Would you like to see her?” Corby asked.
Sumner looked dismayed. “Her body?”
“Her body’s waiting. Back there.” He nodded toward a trellis overgrown with red moss and furry shafts of shagbark vine.
“Waiting?” Sumner said. “For what?”
“For you.” Corby motioned Sumner to follow. “You were the only consort she conceived by. I’ve been calling for you since she died.”
Sumner didn’t move. He jammed his hands in his pockets and furiously clenched his fingers. The wind freshened, and he breathed deeply. If he didn’t fear Corby so much, he would have hated him. Manipulating me like I was a machine—foc! He looked over his shoulder to find Nefandi, but the man was gone. A hysterical laugh coiled tightly inside him. First sign of a real voor and he tucks his tail.
“All of Jeanlu’s brood jewels are yours,” Corby said easily. “She has six or seven.”
Wog! Sumner’s heart thudded. He picked a pebble out of the mud and whipped it sidewise over the pool so that it skipped five times before sinking. A smile warmed his face, and he thought: You knew that’s what I came for, didn’t you?
Corby nodded. “I put the thought there myself. I had to get you here somehow.”
Sumner nodded back at him, both frightened and reassured. Six or seven brood jewels! What do you want me to do?
“That’s between you and Jeanlu. First, you should see her.”
Sumner toed a stubborn root in the mud. I thought you said she was dead.
“She is. But her body is waiting. You’ll be the last to see her.”
A spasm of uncertainty writhed in Sumner’s belly. I don’t understand.
“Of course not. You’re a howlie.” Corby’s mute eyes could have been mocking or indifferent or anything. The boy led him through the tamarind trees toward the trellis at the far end of the pool. Along the way, Sumner eyed the trees near the front of the cottage, their trunks and limbs swollen and mottled, an amber gum oozing over the glistening bark.
“When Jeanlu was dying,” Corby said, “I got very scared. I’ve never been without her. Fear twisted my kha and changed the land.”
Sumner’s insides tightened with anxiety, and he followed Corby silently. He wondered where Nefandi had gone and why. He had a hard time imagining fear glazing the mind within that one-eyed, split face.
The trellis, one wall of a three-walled enclosure, obliquely joined the others also vine-lashed, their stones matted with red moss. Corby stood beside a narrow entrance flanked by stone posts engraved with images of interlocking serpents. Standing before him, Sumner observed that the enclosure opened to the sky. A wedge of swans moved across the distance, and he thought he heard the long cry of their wandering.
Corby, still naked now dry, skin puffy and white as a bleached log, eyes remote, swept his child’s arm toward the entrance. Sumner pursed his lips, jaw muscles drawn. Caught between his need for the promised brood jewels and his dread, he suddenly became curious to know how Jeanlu had died. Afraid to hear the answer, he stepped past Corby.
The enclosure was small, and as soon as he entered he confronted Jeanlu. She sat in a cane chair facing the entrance. The black oystershell scabs he had first seen years ago on her abdomen crusted her face and hands. Her features, crackled and shiny, had shrunk to the bone, giving her a charred skullface. One eyelid curdled shut in the middle of its socket. The other angled open, revealing the lower half of a milky blue eyeball and the crescent of a gold iris.
Sumner stood fast. The grass around Jeanlu’s chair tufted pale and wilting over a tarry black and blistered marl. A faint rank fragrance of the sea curled in the air, and for one deranged instant he believed that the corpse, through its hooded eyes, stared at him.
He pulled his gaze away from the face. Jeanlu wore reed sandals, white, sharply creased trousers, and a bulky vest of plaited herbs and flowers, dried and glazed. Around her neck and over the vest hung an elegant necklace: coiled platinum clasps and stays fitted with a huge brood jewel and studded with six smaller ones.
Sumner involuntarily stepped closer, eyes locked on the green jewel big as his fist. A loamy stillness filled the air around him, and his mind sheered free of words and fear. Cold liquid light, as if seen through mist, gathered at the orbit of his vision and began shaping itself. He couldn’t look away. An image formed out of the sidereal reaches within the vaulted radiance of the jewel, lovely as homesickness, warmer than billowy sleep. It overwhelmed him with distant root scents, the purple of summer evenings before the monsoons, smoky starlight, the bell of a girl’s voice dissolving with distance...
An icy hand gripped his elbow. Corby edged up beside him. “It’s easy to fall into, isn’t it?”
Sumner jerked upright with a start. He had bent over the corpse, nose a few inches from the jewel. Scurrying back several paces, he suppressed a shiver of revulsion. Jeanlu’s face glinted like coal.
After backing out of the enclosure, he walked into the sunlight. The warmth penetrated him, and he began to realize how dazed he was. His ears hummed, and the pit of his stomach ached with an intense cold. Damn brood jewel. He coughed, trying to ease the icy constriction in his belly. His mind zigzagged, and his bladder urged him, charged. Something of himself seemed to have stayed behind with the corpse.
He stared up at the sky as he pissed into the dry grass. His urine smelled like smoke, and the relief of it draining out of him gradually cleared his head. When he buttoned up his pants, he was himself again.
Corby waited for him among the tamarind trees. Sumner followed the boy back along the mudbank to where a diminutive pair of pants and a shirt flapped in the wind. Corby dressed quickly and then led Sumner to a tub filled with sudsy water. “Wash your clothes,” the boy ordered. “The sun’s hot and the wind brisk. By the time you’ve washed up, they’ll be dry. Then you may go back and get your jewels. It’s wrong to touch them unclean.”
He walked off toward the cottage, and Sumner did as he was told. He worked swiftly, for as soon as Corby left, the flies whined around him and began biting.
***
Corby walked slowly to the cottage, gazing directly into the sunlight. Its bright heat provided the strongest bond he had with his mage-self. His mother lay deep in her darktime, and he had just sent his father toward her lusk. He could find no way to justify this with his howlie brain. He worked hard to remember his identity as a voor who had seen many kingdoms of sunlight. Nefandi, as much as Corby’s blood-memory despised him, had purpose, and voors loathed to kill self-aware beings. When Nefandi had arrived with Sumner he had been cautious enough not to try commanding things. Even after he had seen the raels, he didn’t use his field-inducers. Cool-nerved, Corby said to himself. Reason enough to keep him alive.
Sumner faced a different fate. He had used up his time. Within moments, he would blur away as Jeanlu filled his body. Lusk was the voor name. Sumner would anneal to Jeanlu’s will, and his body would become her new shape. Together, they would complete a broodwork: They would confront the Delph and force him to stop killing the advanced voors. Voor godminds at last would survive, and the broods would unite and begin to deploy their psynergies collectively. Certainly, Corby wanted to believe, that justifies lusk.
The voor remembered the first time he had met his father—that day when he had taken him out to Rigalu Flats. He had used his kha to look deeply into him, and what he had seen then surprised and saddened him: Sumner’s veve, the totem of his kha’s experiences, disclosed all bestial precursors—all predators. He had no human referents in his past, except what his blood could tell him of its ancestry. It would have taken him a lifetime to learn how to listen to his blood.
Sumner never had known a human body before. His kha-memories, all visceral, none noetic, linked together by bonds of instinct, hunger, and fear. Nothing of compassion or awe. Only pelagic memories of spawning grounds, fight and flight patterns crafted over aeons, and echoes of prey-scents spooling out from the dark loam. Yet—what had given the kha of animals the psynergy to be human? Sumner must surely be more than anyone had yet surmised.
Corby had believed that his father was timeloose, led by Iz. But when he probed deeply, searching through Sumner’s memories, the voor saw a thing that convinced him his father’s fate had intimately rooted in his animal past.
A childhood memory unrolled of a horse with a red ear and a white diamond on its nose. Sumner, about seven, accompanied his father to one of the riding camps on the northern fringe of McClure. The day’s outing began as an attempt to break the tedium of a long, unexpected winter—the first and last winter Sumner had ever experienced. Riding tall and brave in the saddle of the small horse, a strange thing happened. The heat of the animal and its dark, muscular odor gripped the boy and excited, in the deepest part of him, an unfamiliar urge: He wanted to hurt this shaggy, liquid-eyed thing. Leaves in its mane, the cold mist in its breath—somehow, he would make it hurt.
When they came to a frozen pond, he tried to take the horse across it. As soon as he rode it onto the pond, the ice cracked, and the horse fell...Afterward, his father and the owner of the horse took a rifle, a can of gasoline, and went out to the pond. Hearing the shot and watching smoke rise above the trees, Sumner knew what he had done, though he didn’t know why.
Corby understood. That day, as he pulled back from Sumner’s mind, the boy’s voice lingering—“I don’t know!”—he took with him an image: a memory of a child in a field among burdocks and frozen grass at dusk. Black tattered clouds blew through a gray sky above a line of cold lakes. Against a bare tree’s hanging silence, mist silvering its thin branches, he stood staring at a dark bulk on the ice. Corby shuddered, because he knew the boy would spend the rest of his life standing there.
***
Nefandi sat by the window, the cup in his hands half-drained, when Corby entered. The voor’s eyes, bright and fluent as crystal, stared at him impassively.
“You came here to kill me, ort—but I’m the stronger dream.”
Nefandi stood up, face fear-simple, hands opening. Before he could complete his gesture, a hammer of force slammed him between the eyes, and he tumbled to the floor.
Corby went over to his sagged body and whispered a chant to him in a night-tongue. Dizzy-eyed, Nefandi lurched to his feet, and the voor led him out through the stiff sunlight to the car.
To Corby, Nefandi occupied merely the backdrop of the pattern. Others would replace him until the Delph using him was destroyed. Stupidly, Nefandi believed the righteousness of his work, keeping voors and distorts off the planet—as if voors and distorts didn’t merit the intention and radiance of fate.
After Nefandi opened the door and crawled into the car, Corby touched him, and he woke.
“You’re just a weapon, ort.” Corby slammed the door, and the engine cracked to life. “You’re a shape, not a life.” The dark of the voor’s eyes glinted like night-ice. “Go back to your Delph and tell him the voors have created a shape of their own to avenge themselves.”
The car jerked into gear and rolled off. Corby stood among the fraying vapors and watched until the vehicle dipped out of sight. He inhabited a space hollowed of power. With a thought, he could break Nefandi’s mind. With two thoughts, he could unfold that mind and take the body for his own. But he was a voor—more than the blind spasm of a mind. He created the pattern, and all his thoughts, fears, and ambitions pixilated just a part of that pattern. He felt, more than knew, his purpose.
Returning to the cottage, he lay down on Jeanlu’s cot. Ornaments of sunlight hung on the walls, and he used their beauty to ease the drudge of emotions in him. Moments skipped, disjointed. One part of his being looked backward forty thousand years to the last time this planet’s magnetic field had lifted and voors had taken human form. Voors called that time Sothis: ten thousand years in which voors and howlies shared the Earth. Knowledge had passed freely from the brood to the other simians alive then. Howlies learned from the voors about the starfigures, the fruiting power of the Earth, and the abstracting strength of their own minds. But they proved more violent than the voors had dreamed. When the magnetic field returned, the voors left on Earth could not escape—all eventually stalked down by the howlies and trussed up as monsters and sorcerers. So ended Sothis.
Corby twitched, and his attention shifted from memory to perception. Sutures of sunlight tightened across his brow and cheek, and a tissue of sounds covered the window: the static of flies, the thickness of the wind, and water noise from Sumner in the pool. The pattern embodied all. Vengeance, grief, strategies subsisted simply as spaces in the pattern. Through the window, he watched the graph of blasted trees bending against the clear emptiness of the sky. Deep in his body, he was changing. The enormous power of Iz had begun unthawing the shapes of his insides, remaking him. He didn’t know what form he would assume. To be real and to be strong, the change had to be total. Even his mind molted, destined to be remade by Iz.
A cumulus of thought filled the vacancy of his awareness, and he recalled Sothis and the infinite wanderings and why the kha coursed so strongly in him: He knew himself as a voor mage, Corby Dai Bodatta, avenger of Sothis, hunter of the Delph—and he knew himself as nothing. The howlies had an unstable technological society far to the north; he had come to keep them from savaging voors—and yet, he was not here at all. The window’s pattern of consciousness showed a world of triumphant sunlight and wind-wearied trees. See how it is all that it is? he said to himself with the last of his thinking.
Nettles of violet radiance charged the air around the boy’s body, and expression lifted from his features. In a few minutes, his eyes and nostrils frothed with pink bubblings, and the clothing he wore shredded away from his glassy, swelling flesh. His bonelines softened, and gold gossamer began furring out of his pores.
***
Sumner finished bathing and dressed hurriedly in his damp clothes. The brood jewels were all he could think about. He jogged away from the flies and skipped through the tree toward the stoneposted trellis. He entered the vine-tangled enclosure without hesitating and avoided looking at the corpse’s face. Unmoving, he stood before her, hands folded, gazing down at her reed sandals. He owed her some token of respect. After a moment, eyes still averted, not wanting even so much as to glimpse that plastic-black, crushed face, he bent over her. A blunt odor of charred flesh spiked up his nostrils. He held his breath and looped his fingers through the platinum chain. Only then, as he tried to pull the necklace over her frazzled hair, did he see her eyes. They stared at him, wide open.
He jerked back, and in the same instant the crusted black hands snapped out with mechanical swiftness and grabbed him by the throat. Her grip burned like acid. He thrashed, dragging her out of the chair with the fury of his terror. Howling and tugging at her arms, twisting wildly, he tried to break free. She clung to him. Her grotesque head propped against his chest, the gold eyes screaming out of their sockets. Wheeling from wall to wall, desperately tearing at the gristled thing, he felt the strength in his muscles shriveling. Coldness so icy that it seemed to be hot coursed into him through the hands of the corpse. As it filled his chest, his knees buckled and his backbone slipped. Only horror of the withered creature kept him on his feet and struggling.
