Radix, page 28
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Bonescrolls let Sumner’s hand go, and the old one’s breathing went deeper as though he wanted to say something wordless. “You are the eth—the shadowself of a godmind to the north called the Delph.”
That name rattled in Sumner’s mind with memories of Nefandi and Corby.
Bonescrolls misread Sumner’s surprise as bafflement, and he guffawed. “Names! The history is this: Over a thousand years ago, the sun and its planets entered a stream of radiation that has no origin. The radiation comes from the axle of our galaxy where the gravity of a billion suns has opened our universe to the multiverse. There, in the galactic core, energy gushes in from an infinity of other realities. Some of that timeless energy is psynergy, modes of being that you and I would recognize as sentient. When that psynergy reaches Earth, it changes the genetic structure of humans and, in a generation or two, becomes voors, distorts, and sometimes godminds. These are beings orphaned from the worlds that originally created them. They fight hard to hold onto the patterns that anchor them to this planet, because the psynergy-stream slides away from us as our star drifts out of alignment with the galactic center. After the skyfires are gone, there will be no more new voors—no more new godminds. Those that survive will possess the Earth.”
Sumner picked up a pebble and turned it in his fingers gently, wisely. “And I am the eth, the shadowself of a godmind. What does that mean?”
“Light has built a temple in your skull, young brother.” Bonescrolls watched him with a long and quiet mind. “Many centuries ago, the Delph was a man. The scientists of his time altered his brain, hoping to widen his consciousness enough to find solutions for the puzzling changes in their world—the raga storms and distorts that were appearing everywhere. Ignorantly, they opened the man’s mind wide enough for a godmind from another universe to possess him. That’s one theory. What’s certain is, once the Delph had a physical form strong enough and specialized enough to contain his psynergy, he began to alter the energy patterns around him capriciously. He reshaped reality.”
“But who is he? Where is he from?”
“The light from the galactic center is not like the light of the sun or the stars. The energy doesn’t come from the fusion of atoms. It comes from the light of an endless number of parallel universes. An endless number! Anything can jump out of infinity!”
Sumner’s face narrowed with incredulity.
“Who is he?” Bonescrolls repeated, lifting his chin inquisitively. “A being of light. Like you are. Like everything is. But he is the light of another continuum, and when he took human form he displaced the subtle psynergies of this world. Over the centuries, those echoes of psynergy have been reflecting and interfusing through the eccentricities of biology and what we call chance. And so, chromatin patterns have shifted and humans have been born inside their luck, psychically untouchable. These are the eth. You are one of them.”
“You’re not telling me anything.”
Bonescrolls smiled benevolently. “What it means is that you are the one being on the planet the Delph cannot touch with his reality-shaping mind. You are the perfect shield for a voor assassin.”
Comprehension softened Sumner’s stare.
“Your whole life is the intention of a being bigger than your imagination,” Bonescrolls disclosed, voice tremulous with the excitement and fear he felt blazing in Sumner. “I’ve been alive over a thousand years, and all this time, it turns out, I’ve been waiting for you. And for the voor inside you. We want the same reality.”
“No,” Sumner said, almost in a cry. “I don’t want to lusk. I don’t want to be used by voors.”
Bonescrolls’ timeshaped face loosened with delight, and he laughed soundlessly for a while before saying: “You’re nothing. An ego. A ghost of memories and predilections. You don’t amount to much in the overview. Forget who you think you are. Psynergy follows thought, so become consciousness itself, not the shapes of consciousness. Selfscan isn’t enough, because it limits you to sensation. To be whole, to be One Mind, you must be the living center in you that feels, thinks, selfscans.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Become the quest you’ve already begun.”
Sumner’s voice went limp. “I’m not looking for anything.”
Bonescrolls benignly shook his head. “The eth will always look for its source. The eth is huger than you. It is me and Corby as well. It is every event that touches you. It may take your whole life, but the eth will lead you to the Delph.”
“No.” Sumner crossed both of his hands through the air. “I’m grateful for your help, magnar, but I’m undertaking no quests for a voor. I’m whole in myself. I’m not about to serve a voor.”
“That’s not for you to decide.” The magnar’s face grew somber. “Your mind gets in the way of your being. You can’t hope to understand what you are only a part of. That’s why my life has the shape it does—so that I would be here now to empty you, to free you from the limits of knowing, and to open you to One Mind.”
“What are you talking about?” Sumner looked malcontent.
“I won’t let your ego interfere with my destiny. You are still in thrall to me, Kagan. What I say, you must do.” The magnar reached over and took Sumner’s face in the splayed grip of his hand. The throb of the young man’s etheric field itched Bonescrolls’ palm as it melled with his psynergy. “And by that authority, I command you to forget this conversation.”
When Bonescrolls took his face, Sumner glimpsed the whole cavern brightening between the old man’s fingers, hazy sunlight and bluesunk shadows stirring with hemi-visible beings. Then Bonescrolls shoved Sumner onto his back with an abrupt straightening of his arm, and darkness slammed into him.
The instant he hit the ground, Sumner’s eyes fluttered open. The magnar hunched over the turtle shell finishing his omelet, morning sunlight aureoled in his white hair.
“Rest if you wish,” Bonescrolls said through a mouthful of food. “You’ve journeyed far, young brother, and I’m well pleased.”
Sleep wrestled like an inner problem in Sumner’s chest. But he couldn’t rest. Something weighed on his mind—the mischievous grin on Bonescrolls’ face piqued him. Why? Sumner looked out abstractly through a windowhole at gold stretches of dawn. Why had he worked so hard for an omelet? He in-listened, but his mind turned silent as the straws of twilight scattering across the horizon.
***
Sumner slept fitfully for several hours and then, with a satchel of dried fruit and a skin of water from Bonescrolls, left for Miramol. The magnar spent the remainder of the day trying to connect with his psychic strength again, but lacked the strength. When night arrived, he moved about, twitching with frustration.
Before the moon, a green feather low over the mesaland, Bonescrolls stood tall atop a rocktower, feet wide apart, arms spread, his body an X against the skyfires. Long and hard, he cried to the desert: “Help—me!”
The echo of his call stretched beyond itself quickly, and he dropped his arms and sagged into his stance. Time leaked from the rocks as the last warmth of day lifted into night, and foolishness chilled through him. He turned back toward his lair, mumbling to himself: “Go to sleep, old man.”
Every day for the last two months, while Sumner had wandered Skylonda Aptos, Bonescrolls had followed. With his body swaddled in blankets, lying back in his rock studio, his mindark had opened into the brightness of hawk and coyote, and he had stayed close to the eth.
The assignments, designed to frustrate Sumner, opened his weakened etheric field. And when this happened, Bonescrolls channeled psynergy into him by becoming in his mind the animals and objects around Sumner. As a snake, he had tasted Sumner’s fatigue and had projected serpent awareness. That night, in a dream, Kagan had seen the desert alive, glittering with pieces of light. The next day Bonescrolls had become the pinnacle rock where Sumner waited out the noonfire. The magnetic calmness the magnar radiated soothed Sumner’s longing for the familiarities of his life with the Rangers. The effects were subtle, but over the weeks of Sumner’s questing, his bodylight breathed brighter and stronger.
Bonescrolls, however, had become weaker. The long effort of shapeshifting and focusing psynergy had loosened his own bodylight. All day after Sumner had left for Miramol, the magnar felt depressed. A deathvision floated about him like hair, sometimes getting in his eyes with glimpses of a tall, wild man with a scar-cleaved face and one eye the color of bruised blood. Fear had wrung hard in him today, and he was glad that he had sent Sumner back to the Mothers.
A small cranny-room glowed like a flower at the end of a maze of narrow, unlit corridors. Pink tallow tapers burned in the three corners of the cell below mousehole airducts. The cubicle, crowded with pelts, amulets, folded tapestries, icons, and wicker boxes, held five hundred years of offerings from the surrounding tribes.
He threw back a coverlet of ocelot skin from a large ironwood box inlaid with sardonyx. Thumbing a secret release in the ornate fretwork, he slid a small panel aside, revealing a compartment stuffed with suede cloth. Bonescrolls gently removed the cloth and sat down cross-legged. After calming himself, he unwrapped the crinkled suede and blinked into the soft, luminiferous light of a brood jewel.
That instant in Miramol, several of the Mothers stirred restlessly in their sleep. For them, dreaming had abruptly become the single-focus clarity of trance. The magnar stood in the shadow of the world, looking a little different for each of them.
Shay, he greeted, his voice half-burning with the fear that had haunted him earlier. My ward is returning to Miramol. He has served me well in the desert, and his bodylight is stronger. But he still lives inside his days, far from spirit. Please, young sisters, teach him to mount life’s power. Show him how to lure psynergy up from the depths. Without your help, he will never change for the stronger.
The Mothers’ trance slipped back into dreaming as the magnar moved his consciousness away.
Bonescrolls hovered above the Barrow, charmed as usual by the astral view of skyfires pierced by the sharpness of snow-blue stars—until he felt himself being seen. A dog stood, tailtucked, beneath a magnolia tree, watching him with glarestruck eyes. Beside it, soaked in darkness, stood an old blind woman—one of the Mothers. Jesda, her name rose up in him as she stood and swayed in his direction.
“I see you there, shadow-of-no-one,” the crone called, edging closer. Her hands on her face and her fingers in the sockets of her skull, she intoned, “These plundered eyes see through the world, ghost. Absence is presence. You know that! Absence is!”
Jesda walked out into bright moon-air, and her hands fell away from a riven face. Bonescrolls moved closer, gripped by the intensity of feeling in those broken features—eyepits dark as wine—and, as sometimes happened when he was shadowshooting, he spun into the feelings of what he witnessed.
Laughter jerked hard in him, and his mindark rayed with musical colors. An estranged feeling—a terrifying falling away from everything-tightened through him like nausea. Jesda’s madness. Yet even though he knew what he experienced, he could not move it.
The smell of burned flesh pierced him, and like a needle stuck in his brain, a momentary reality opened: He observed the eth, Ardent Fang, and Drift squatting in the flagrant light of a bonfire—a pyre, a temple of flames with a corpse sitting up on the altar, clots of black flesh falling away from his features—his face!
Bonescrolls twisted away from the brood jewel, the strophe of a scream loud in his throat. A heartshuddering moment passed before he breathed again.
No more shadowshooting, he swore, gazing gratefully into the blue plasma of a tallow flame. The voor gem icy in his hand, he wrapped it in the suede without looking at it.
Shakily, he put the brood jewel back into its secret compartment and shrouded the ironwood box with the ocelot pelt. He walked down the black corridor to a natural balcony, where cold night air held him more securely in his body. Now that the Mothers had custody of the eth, he could rest and fortify his psynergy.
He sucked the frosty air in through his teeth, and his whole body shivered with alertness. Above a horizon burning with green skyfires, the moon floated, red and long, the shape of a serpent’s heart.
***
The Mother wore a black shift and ancient amulets, bright pieces of metal covered with the script of the kro. Cataract-blind, she moved slowly, her movements purposeful, communicating robust awareness of the world around her. Sumner sat opposite her in a room darkened with curtains made of human hair. Naked but for a blue loincloth, he gleamed from the four days he had spent in a steam shed and his flesh looked like well-oiled wood. Florets of gum acacia crowded the corners, scenting the room with the odor of mountains.
The Mother listened with her head bowed forward as Sumner whispered the sacred names of the jungle animals and plants. The names themselves were unimportant. They executed an acoustic technique for achieving the proper mindstate. Occasionally, when she sensed his attention waver, she made him repeat the odd sounds until his mind focused.
The Mothers prized Sumner. He had performed better than expected in the breeding stables, and most of the women he had mated with had conceived. To express their appreciation, the Mothers had begun to teach him the way of the hunter. For many days, he had fasted and steamed the poisons out of his flesh. Then he had sat alone among burial hills the color of rain and listened, as he had been instructed, for the deep calling.
He had felt stupid and vulnerable, sitting crosslegged in the open, mind directed inward. But he had been quick to overcome his anxiety and surprised the Mothers at how readily his bodylight responded to their guidance. One Mother, a half-blind priestess who had worked for many years with young males, came forward to teach him the sacred names and to supervise his awareness of the deep calling.
Sumner obeyed the Mothers strictly out of devotion to Bonescrolls. Their teachings seemed crude and arbitrary to him, and he counted the weeks left to his thrall. Sitting in the open with his mind indrawn, he sensed nothing but the splanchnic rhythms of his body. Several weeks later, he still spent most of every day listening to the roll of his heart and the flutterings of his digestive tract.
Late one torpid afternoon, he heard a whine—a tiny distant screaming, wringing from deep down in his bowels. His sudden alertness squelched it, and several days passed before he heard it again—a warbling thin sound wavering in the small bones of his head. This time he fixed himself solidly in selfscan, and he listened to it whistling higher than the pitch of his blood—but faint, deep in his marrow. Slowly understanding narrowed back to its center, and he realized what impossible and faraway sound it was: the tension in his genitals—the sound of his desires. He wanted a real woman.
That’s it!
Sumner thrashed alert. The blind Mother crouched beside him, her crystal white eyes lidded with satisfaction. You have to listen deep, but a man can hear his woman-hunger, the old woman’s voice rasped in his mind. Focus on that. You’re ready to begin the Rising.
Listening to the whine of blood pooling in his genitals, Sumner learned how to gather that tension into a tight packet between anus and scrotum. The delicate muscles there proved very difficult to control, but with the Mother guiding him he was soon able to move the tension past his anus to the base of his spine without clenching his sphincter muscle.
The rest happens by itself, the Mother told him as she braided his hair in the hunter’s style. For three days before you hunt you must abstain from sex. Then collect your psynergy at the base as I’ve taught you. That way, when the animals and plants come they will leave their spirit with you and slowly psynergy will accumulate. Someday it will be strong enough to climb the length of your spine and enter your skull. Then your middle eye will open.
“What about women?” Sumner asked, trying to keep the petulance out of his voice. “Don’t they have middle eyes?”
Women have other powers. This is only a man’s way.
“So why is a woman teaching me?”
Women know the ways of everything. After all, didn’t a woman make you?
Sumner kept the details of his skepticism to himself, though Drift often pressed him for information. He assured the seer that it was all nonsense and that he would break his vow of secrecy when his thrall to Bonescrolls ended. Until then, he felt bonded to comply with the strictures of his tutelage to the Mothers. He followed their orders and smoked his dugout in gopherwood when they returned it to him. He even spent an hour each dawn moving his sexual tension from his genitals to the root of his spine, though he questioned this senseless exercise.
In the dark tunnels of the cloud forest, he lived mindless of the Mothers, ecstatic and free as any animal, bounded only by the limits of his instinct. The river mist strayed in whorls around him as he slowly made his way far beyond any of the other hunters. The waters still ran very high, making food difficult to come by. But deep in the flooded forest, where the scent of people did not reach, life abounded.
Sumner slid over the shallows, cautiously picking his way through moss veils and fungal root-loops, looking for dry spits of land where tapir would feed or turtle nest. Nothing. The land offered all the animals’ life-needs, yet the animals had gone elsewhere. As silently as he transpired, as patient and cunning as he could be, only small game presented itself to him. Several times, he returned to Miramol empty-handed, and the other hunters joked that he belonged with Ardent Fang in the stables.
Slipping out at dawn on the third day, he felt desperate, and as soon as he ascertained that he had wound himself deep enough into the forest to be out of earshot of the other hunters, he used the sacred name for pig that the Mothers had taught him. Nothing. A white-faced monkey blinked at him, whooped, and somersaulted out of sight. He wished that he had brought Drift along. Even though seers hunted exclusively in time of famine, desperation drove Sumner.
