Radix, page 30
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Weirdly wonderful—he saw beauty more clearly than ever! He sensed that his eyes had been healed by the music-energy coursing through Sumner. He looked at Lotus Face as his canoe drifted into the glade and beheld rainbows spinning in the mist around him. Is this being a god or a demon-delusory?
“Don’t be afraid,” Sumner said, signaling him closer.
Ardent Fang stood up stiffly. “I’m not afraid,” he responded sharply, then realized that he still clutched his dog-crucifix. He let it go and then seized it again, rocking backward in his canoe with the more powerful realization that he had understood Lotus Face. The man had not spoken in Serbot.
Ardent Fang sat down.
“Don’t be afraid,” Sumner said again in Massel. He punted gently, and the lotus-carved gunwale of his canoe hissed across the lapse of sun-hot water. “Everything we’ve always wanted is all around us.”
The ear-tricking music unfurled with the swamp mist in the shadows of the big trees. Ardent Fang stared into the blackness of Sumner’s face with defiant apprehension. “Who are you?”
“You know me”, Sumner replied, the whorl of power flexing almost visibly between them.
“You’re a god,” Ardent Fang acknowledged, his own voice sounding strange to him.
Sumner smiled. “If I were a god, the whole world would look like this.” He spread his arms and opened his body to the water’s broken sunlight and the enormous walls of flowering trees. And something drifting, immense, and unknown moved through them.
Ardent Fang released the dog-crucifix and gazed with astoundment into the peaceful heart of the forest. Each tree stood so huge in its inturned feeling that the breeder trembled to look at them. In their shadow, he dwindled to a mere being of dew, fragilely, helplessly sparkling. Words, thoughts, dimensions—the whole mind-world appeared a realm of the dead.
He stood up and raised his arms and his heart into the upstreaming light and love.
***
Sumner wandered the riverain forest entranced by the outleap of consciousness in everything. A light greater than sunlight shone from the old trees. In their shade, thoughts and sounds came together, and the visual opened to visionary.
Everything is food! a thought voiced itself. Every sound, every odor, every thought changes us.
In Sumner’s mind, a tree generated these thoughts. His silence widened. He sensed the grass growing under him, the tree expanding into its life. Then the idea of returning, of feeling his vitality, of leaping up and screaming with joy, opened with risible insistence.
Ardent Fang sat in the high grass behind Sumner, rapt with fear and wonder. He had followed Sumner, because the psynergies featherturning in his chest had lured him. But now he fretted. An astral being floated among the heat-quiverings over the mud shoals. He could see the entity as clearly as their two beached canoes glowing with the sun’s vibrations. He thought of going back to Miramol.
Sumner suddenly leaped into the air and roared.
Ardent Fang jumped, and a heron flapped into the forest’s green shadow. The tensed air over the mudsunk trees beside their canoes shifted as the half-seen being moved toward them. Sumner stood, body arched, feeling the love soft-slipping through the wondrous emptiness that held everything together. A gust of bright air kicked the high grass and dazzled blades and seedhusks as the spirit of the swamp centered on them. Ardent Fang knelt and moaned, a sound prayerful and long.
Sumner had opened his mind to the river’s oversoul, and consciousness radiated back in psychic symbols. Sparks spun through the sunshadows around the tree, and he espied demons and archangels, a riotous torrent of otherealms. Yet fear did not touch him. The manner in which he had opened his being—mounting psynergy up the totem of his spine—had stabilized his body and well-rooted his mind. Whatever entered his etheric field harmonized with the ecstasy—the detachment—of One Mind.
Ardent Fang sidled closer to Sumner, heart and lungs weightless with lifelove, legs leaden with the fear of all that he saw. A massive razorjaw lizard thrashed wildly in a mudpool across the shallow river. Much closer, the air silverly trembled, and the breeder confronted the breeder who had come before him. Bloodbruises of the fever that had killed his teacher darkened the whole of the man’s eyes, and the features Ardent Fang had once loved grimaced, glossy and swollen with death.
Sumner didn’t know what Ardent Fang was experiencing, but he recognized the pain in the tribesman’s face.
The sky darkened, and a storm of green flies cut through the trees. Ardent Fang balled up with terror as the flies began biting. Laughter broke across Sumner’s tongue. Sumner wasn’t laughing. The swamp itself—and, deeper, One Mind—bloated him with expansive awareness. The burning flies carried the hunger of God. And hunger is holy, because everything is food, and eating is all there is.
Shrieks burst through the trees, and a flurry of birds rushed around them, devouring the flies in a confusion of feathers and flashing colors. Abruptly, silence, and the startled laugh of a monkey.
Ardent Fang rose to his knees among broken stalks of chickweed. His face a maze of emotions, he noticed the flies had gone. The air looked layered with shades of transparency, and, in midstream, a giant razorjaw lizard lashed toward them.
Sumner helped Ardent Fang to his feet. In the blue hollow behind Lotus Face, the breeder glimpsed a crowd of women—all the women he had ever sexed. The ones he had loved glowed blue-bright.
“Whatever you’re seeing,” Sumner insisted, “is inside you. The whorl is strong with us today, Fang. Whatever we feel comes back at us. Try to feel good.”
Ardent Fang trembled in Sumner’s grasp. The man’s hands on his shoulders hummed with spring-thundering, and the dark in the blue of his eyes shimmered with something like father-love. “But look!” the breeder insisted, pointing to where the wart-knobbed, mud-green bulk of the razorjaw ran to shore. Its horn-browed eyes gazed fireblind, and the long thrust of its maw glistened with many pink-skinned teeth.
Sumner’s first impulse was to bolt, but One Mind left him standing enraptured as the giant thrashing reptile rushed toward them. Ardent Fang whimpered and reached for his blade, but Sumner caught his wrist. “Face it,” Lotus Face ordered, not taking his eyes off the creature.
Ardent Fang pulled his wrist free, but he didn’t run. The razorjaw had slowed its rush. The flat, horned head of the beast, big as a man, stopped before them and swayed in its stench of river kelp and mud. Sumner put his right arm out, and the black lip of the lizard grazed his hand and stood transfixed. Ardent Fang’s head bobbed as though his blood had fermented. In the huge, damp presence of the razorjaw, sunlight delivered the coolness of the moon.
Urged by the power in him, Sumner climbed the folded scales of the colossal leg and shoulder and straddled the stumped head. Reaching down to help Ardent Fang up, he peered into the lizard’s eye, as if into the center wood-ring of a log.
He swung Ardent Fang up beside him, and the great swamp beast turned toward the water. Ardent Fang whooped, tore off the braiding cord at his shoulder, and let the smoke of his hair blow in the river wind.
Sumner laughed and lifted both arms over his head. The muddy water folded back and splashed at their sides, and they glided downstream into the misty green spell of the river.
***
The giant lizard carried the two men north all day on a riverpath of solar-blown trees and ox-colored boulders. The water that splashed them bore the bloodheat and scent of something living. Panther, wolf, bear, and deer watched from the bluffs with animal insouciance, the air sloughed with their green auras.
At night, stars and skyfires gnarled the sky, and the razorjaw continued downstream. Sumner lay against the beast’s browbone and considered the roundness of time in the crackly stars. Each mote of light that sparked in his retinal cells yielded a living being, lifefire of another sun entering and changing him. Countless stars—an endless rain of radiation penetrating him, altering his most secret self.
The next day, under a hot sky, the realization that each instant transformed him flared like the rise of an orgasm. By night, floating on the golden moonpath, he had calmed and the clairvoyance of his feelings displaced rapture.
Ardent Fang cleaved to Sumner, at first with awe, then after the second dawn on the back of the lizard giant with sheer stamina. Sleep-mauled, hearing gulls bruiting the ocean, he asked Lotus Face. “Why are we here?”
Sumner stood, absorbing the iris twilight. During the night journey, the river had broadened, and the water now was deep as their lives. Sumner jumped in headfirst, and Ardent Fang splashed after. The razorjaw followed until they reached the sandbars; then, it sank into its weight and disappeared.
On a beach of dust-fine sand facing a low-tide bay of tropic reefs, the men built a fire. “Each instant we’re changed,” Sumner marveled, as much to the spurting flames as to his companion.
Ardent Fang touched Sumner’s forearm, wanting a moment’s clarity. “Why are we here, Lotus Face?”
Sumner looked up wrenchingly from the flames, the wondrous telepathy that had possessed him tightening to the single focus of one syllable: “Why?” he asked, eyes all pupil, yet very clear, shining. He turned inward, remembering—Why are you the living center of the transparent and inflexible diamond of time?”
Ardent Fang shrugged, sea-cold and suddenly weary from the withdrawal of Sumner’s psynergy. “All of us have a destiny,” he mumbled.
Sumner jumped to his feet, scattering the fire. He stood twitching with immense emotion, staring up at the red muscles of dawn, suddenly remembering in hypnotic detail his last conversation with Bonescrolls—the talk that the magnar had made him forget. Nothing is chanced. You are the eth—the shadowself of a godmind.
Caught in boundless feeling, Sumner sank to his knees, then rolled to his back and closed his eyes. He knew now why he had come here. He traveled north to find the Delph.
A rush of luminescent feeling lifted him beyond the fitted bones of his skull, and he stared down at his body curled on the white sand, Ardent Fang crouched beside the smoldering driftwood, the two figures diminishing into the scallopings of the beach, and the whole beach and the sea glaring into the sun’s corona.
Everything stretched into darkness.
Outside his mind, he sensed the Delph. Like everything, the godmind entangled with Sumner’s being, the One Being, and a flowing love joined them. Whirling outward into the emptiness of time, Sumner rode the inchoate lifelove that swelled through him. Out of that joy-dazzled feeling, a different flesh flowered. Colors gestured into forms, and bright vibrations coagulated to sounds—a starstream of music spiraling just beyond his earbrim. Pleroma music, an inner sense told him. An animal scent, a tinge of musk, patterned the air pleasantly. A calming olfact, the voice said more solidly. A sexoid.
Sumner jolted into a body he didn’t recognize and yet knew intimately. An ort biotectured to channel your psynergy. Comfortable, muscle-gripping clothes massaged him with each move—chamois-textured, fur-colored. A slimplex garment. You are in Graal, the ice-mountain rath of the Delph.
He looked about for the source of the voice in this small oyster-colored room. Formflowing, walls chaired and lounged intelligently as he strolled about. No doors, though one wall opened glasslessly to a vista of white mountains and green splashes of jungle valleys. A prison? he wondered.
No, the voice responded, harsher, hard-edged. An elegant doorway expanded through the wall, revealing chambers brilliant with sunshafts and weird air plants.
Flechettes of rainbow light scattered across the room. “Who are you?” Sumner asked. Though he knew. A mental music rhythmed in him, auguring everything he wanted to know. The voice was a Voice—a mountain-size crystal of thought, an artificial sentience created to serve the Delph.
I am Rubeus. A six-rayed cell of white light appeared in the curveline doorway. I am an autonomous intelligence shaped to protect the Delph. And you are Sumner Kagan—the eth. The one who is metaordered to close the cycle. The Voice spoke sternly. Why are you haunting us, inwit? Speak your purpose in coming here.
“I’ve been led here.”
Ignorant spasm. The room ebbed colder and darker. You are numb with unknowing—a twitch of the world's Unconscious—a mere reflex. I don’t fear you.
“Why should you fear me?” Sumner extended his arms and opened the slender pale hands of his new body. The space around Rubeus burned hot with cold, and he had to drop his gesture. “I mean no harm.”
You don’t know what you mean. You are part of a dream vaster than the stretch of your mind. You are metaordered—destined—to end the Delph’s continuity. There have been many of you over the centuries, most with more awareness of their purpose than you. All have died. I have killed them all.
The six-rayed cell of light flared, and Sumner’s body wrinkled away. Darkness clapped around him, Ardent Fang’s voice boomed in his head, “Lotus Face!”—and he sat up into his own body.
Ardent Fang walked him through paddies of salt reeds until the psynergy began to nerve the air between them again. When Sumner’s soulight glittered in the air with the dawn facets on the water, they foraged geepa beans and strawberries in the tree-root burls at the edge of the jungle.
I have killed them all, echoed in Sumner’s mind for many days, and he had to raise a lot of lifelove to go beyond his fear. Enraptured by the psynergy, he and Ardent Fang lived on the beach, sharing consciousness with the forest, the dune dogs, and the dolphins that came in with the tide. The vision of Rubeus melted into the enormous good-feeling of Sumner’s psynergy, and for a while the two men lived joyfully free of memories.
On a morning of bison-headed white clouds, a swamp puma appeared by the river. That day, they started their journey back to Miramol. Sumner, still unable to think deeply about his psychic experiences, mused about the meaning of the eth. He had sensed awesome machine-strength in his vision of Rubeus, yet the fear he had felt then had departed. Everything was living. Even the dead things he found in the jungle showed up furred with a living light as they molted into minerals. What was there to fear?
The psynergy circuiting up Sumner’s spine continued to generate rapturous feelings. Weeks passed as the men made their way upstream back to their canoes, fishing without hooks, sharing days with trees, getting acquainted with jaguars and snakes.
In the weather of Sumner’s aura, Ardent Fang lived absentminded with love for the meadows, wildflowers, and spongy jungle nights. The base of his spine had begun to itch as his psynergy responded to Sumner’s. But with the intensification of his psychic strength came a deeper clarity that frightened him.
At the end of a small stream, in a pear grove not far from Miramol, he was gripped in his depths by an electric prescience. The scintillating energy tugged fiercely at his insides and led him out of his dugout and closer to the grove. There the air quivered like the hide of a just-dead animal, and nausea dizzied him. The grove, for one psychomimetic moment, appeared draped with bloody-green loops of intestine and mucus-bright bits of viscera. The image boiled away swiftly, leaving Ardent Fang so crooked with terror that he backstepped from the pear trees as though they were black wraiths. He turned, leaving his canoe behind, and ran hard until he reached Miramol.
Leaning in the doorway of his hut, feverish with fatigue now that he had emerged from the power-charged space around Sumner, Ardent Fang groaned inside the dullness of his senses. He lumbered to his hammock and curled into it, his mind a shadow. For three days, he slept.
***
Sumner took the long way back to the village. Light split in familiar patterns on the river where he had hunted many times. Seeing the well-known tree haunts and river slaches with his One Mind, time drew nearer and detail sharpened.
Empty of words and filled with awe, Sumner returned to Miramol. He understood now, like the old people, the secret of the Silence. The quieter he became, the more he touched. Bonescrolls had been right—the world was feeling. And he wanted to feel everything.
As he left the boathouse after shelving his dugout, he stopped to look around. His euphoria had thinned to tranquil ease: sober, calm and happy to be alive.
The sky wore away to smoky twilight. Women returned from the vegetable plots, and dogs spurted around their legs, pawing a leather ball. The animals chivvied it round and round, and the women moved gracefully among them, chatting softly. Behind them, children approached with firemoths in their loose hair. He waited until they passed, and then he followed them to the eating lodge, joy bright in him, eternal as fire.
***
Sumner lived with the né on their knoll of silverwood lodges and serene courtyards. Each morning, he sat among the cypress knees at the edge of a black, bottomless pond, joined by a dozen of the diminutive, hairless né. Most of them simply sat in a half-circle before him, legs curled beneath white robes, brown sea-spider hands palm-up in their laps, receiving the peacefulness that filled the air around him. Others in workday sarongs brought their crafts to the terraced courtyards overlooking the black cypress pond. A mystic joyance spelled the knoll, and many of the né had profound experiences on those mornings.
In the afternoon, Sumner worked for the tribe in the ragged green vegetable plots and, sometimes, in the breeding stables. Evenings after the rain, he danced with the young women or went to the swamp edge with the men to hunt with nighthawks. The ecstasy power in him calmed since he had begun sitting with the né, and he became truly satisfied with his living.
The oldest né sat close to him during his morning meditations, tiny eyes deliriously bright, voices mental and instructive: You are consciousness itself—not the objects of consciousness. They used clear-color prisms and waterdrums to help him relax. You have a body, but you are not your body. You are the awareness of your body. You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts. You have feelings, but you are not feelings. Who are you?
He existed as awareness. Being glowed through him seamless as sunlight, and his face deepened into the world.
