Radix, page 31
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Wisps of memory swirled out of his physical sensations: The rhyme of wet rock odors from the pond reminded him of legless Mauschel in his damp flatboat. The image spun into a glitter of blue and green birdcalls.
Who is hearing? the né asked. Who is remembering?
The flocculent odors of the swamp, the memories, and the kenspeckle drones from the waterdrums fell into him, becoming the color of void, the sound of nothing. Only the constant flux of sounds and sensations falling into him seemed solid.
You have touched the center of the whorl.
Like the collapsars he had seen on his scansule as a child, like stars too big for their energy, consciousness, he perceived, provided the black hole into which everything fell. Where did these noises, colors, and thoughts go?
Notes knucklerubbed off waterdrums vibrated in the air just wide enough to be heard, and the dreary afternoon he had spent mindlessly looking at scansule animations of blown-out stars brightened into an exact memory. Again he saw the three-dimensional computerline images of the collapsar at the core of the galaxy, the web of spacetime tightening through spiraling stars to a single point in the hub—the singularity where spacetime ceased to exist.
The scansule image rotated and split crosswise, revealing a complexity of seashell involutions. A droll ghostvoice explained, faster than words, that the gravitationally distorted collapsar jetted from its poles the most powerful radiation conceivable: light from a source of infinite spacetime curvature.
Infinity is Unity, the né told him, filled with the full fire of Sumner’s One Mind. All things are one thing.
Sumner’s memory of the scansule soft-focused, and a bruised light pulsed behind his lids as his insight crystallized into understanding: When the Earth came into line with the collapsar’s radiation, the universe became the multiverse, and the consciousness of the cosmos, the light of infinity, animated the thought forms and the genetic shapes that were here with an awareness older than time—voors, godminds, timeloose distorts, eth—all arrived as earthshaped starlight from the core of the galaxy.
The waterdrum music stopped suddenly, and muffled voices and the shirring cries of small birds brought Sumner back to himself. Eddying in the muscularity of his body, heat-stilled and viewless, he sensed the Delph—distant yet close, like the inside of thunder. A white mountain, sharp as glass, appeared and vanished. Graal—the ice-mountain realm of Rubeus.
There is no reason to go there except the going, the gentle né told him. The voor in you has a purpose—to kill the Delph. But you have no purpose. The eth is one of your masks. But you are not the eth. Many eth have come before you. Others will come after. Who are you?
Voices ruffled with anger intensified at the gate to the cypress court, and Sumner opened his eyes. Sunlight spiriting through the ancient trees settled like bright birds among the ivy of the round gate. Several of the small né in blue robes struggled there with a big-boned woman—Orpha.
The elders signaled to let her pass, and she straightened from her tousling with composed dignity.
“I am sorry to disturb the famous morning meditations,” she said with sardonic seriousness, “but the magnar has an urgent message for Lotus Face.” She stepped off the dragonstone path and waded through flowering ankle-high grass to where Sumner sat. Her shadow covered two né. “The magnar orders you to stop casting kha.”
No more ecstasy energy.
The Mother ignored the né and kept her heavy, shadowed stare on Sumner. “You and the magnar have an enemy. If you attract him, he will destroy Miramol. Some seers have seen this.” She squatted beside Sumner and placed a thick hand on his chest. “Your thrall ends with the next lunar turn, Lotus Face. Walk your kha into the desert. Protect the folk and the né.”
Sumner took her hand to assure her, but before he could speak, a scream bounced through the moongate, scattering né. Flapping black wings of cloth whirled into the court—a wild-haired, eyeless Mother, shouting: “There are no secrets! Our senses fit the world! What you see is seen!”
Orpha bounded upright. “Jesda—this is not your place.”
“Nor yours, sister.” The blind Mother’s hands flew over her head like startled sparrows. “The word has been fulfilled. I have witnessed it.”
Sumner looked to the elder né beside him, and the old one nodded and told him: Four centuries ago, Dog Hunger, the first seer, prophesied that Miramol would not die until the Mothers had come to the né.
“And here we are,” Jesda whispered, walking sightlessly across a moss ledge and into the pond. Her black skirts billowed in the water, and she shrieked: “What I see is seen!”
Orpha took the blind woman’s arm and led her out of the water. “We’re done here, sister. Let’s go home.”
“Wait, Mother.” Sumner rose. “May I speak with you, Jesda?”
“Speak!” Her wet sleeyes snapped in the air with her sharp gestures, and Orpha stepped back. “Babble to the Vastness!”
Sumner stepped forward, and the angry pain in Jesda’s face softened to quiescence interknit with sorrow and clarity. Sumner experienced a howl of mind-language and a dizzy lurch as his etheric field penetrated hers.
Timeloose, she reeled before him. Through a gargoyling of dissolving thoughtforms, Sumner beheld the starheart—the white luminosity from the first moment, from the origin of time—patterned like a retinal shadow over the vale of cypress and the old woman’s sunken face. He brushed a thistle of knotted gray hair from her brow, and the One Mind between them trembled into exquisite scales of color, shimmering in the shapes of their seeing.
Jesda sighed and softly took both of his hands. She had become calm as a tree, healed, her blindness infused with a violet quivering. “Heaven and Earth move through each other,” she said to him gently, “but the mind is moveless—at last.” Her grip tightened, and she bowed, touching her forehead to their clasped hands. “We are presence.” When she looked up, her blind sockets brimmed with tears. She turned to Orpha. “Come, sister.”
After the Mothers departed, the court and the surrounding terraces flurried with excited né. The eldest took Sumner’s arm. Its eyes two glistening waterpits in the stone of its face, it sent, Your One Mind is clear, Lotus Face. You’ve worked hard for this. What will you do now?
From beyond the court wall, a painstruck wail shivered loudly, then curled into Jesda’s demon laughter.
***
Ardent Fang sat in the full sunlight on the top of the breeding stables. Miramol looked like flotsam in the green wave of the rain forest, all vine-lashed timbers and reedstraw. A curve in the river flashed with sun among the dense trees, and waterbirds circled raucously overhead.
In the courtyard below, the blossom-trellised wagon that had carried Miramol’s maidens to their new home in Ladilena earlier that morning had returned. A young man helped the new women out of the wagon, joking loudly as much to calm himself as them. Strong and good-looking, he displayed puma-wide eyes and a proud mane of hair. Even so, Ardent Fang would need a full season to break him in, to pass on the sense of mission that would serve him when his lust dulled.
Ardent Fang stood and stretched, gazing beyond the green jumble of the riverain forest to where the land slurred to desert. Lotus Face had gone that way two days before to meet the magnar for the last time in his thrall, and the breeder reminisced about how thoroughly the man had changed: He moved more with the lanky ease of a tribesman now than the cautious reserve of a warrior, and he took more time with the women—
“Ardent Fang.”
The breeder turned, and his features stiffened. Orpha stood before him with a brood jewel in her hand, her body as thin and ghostly as fire.
“Come to the Barrow, breeder,” the specter said, wavering into the invisible. “Come, quickly.”
Ardent Fang bounded down the spiral stairs of the tower and sprinted through muddy back lanes. He arrived at the Barrow with his thick legs mired and his breath tattered. Drift waited outside the turquoise-studded entrance with several of the Mothers. It took the breeder’s hand, and the frenzy of his run thinned out.
“You must walk the Road again, breeder,” Orpha said. She gripped his shoulder, and her face hooked into a silent cry. “The magnar is dying.”
***
Bonescrolls gazed out at the blue night from the vantage of his cliff-cavern. Frost haze glowed along the horizon, and above it the moon moved across a night rainbow. He closed his eyes and leaned toward the west. Shadows swooped through him. He glided, the cool night air buffeting his sleek body. The stars moved in bands. The moonlit landscape with its broken contours wheeled below. Coyote tracks studded the bright sand slopes like dark blossoms. Saguaros stood solemnly along the ridgeline.
Nothing in sight moved. And yet, the raven that Bonescrolls occupied stirred with excitement. Something had aroused it, but whatever it was, no trace lingered in the gray shadings of its memory.
Bonescrolls altered his breathing, and the dreamtime shifted. He entered a coyote perched on a rock ledge, scenting the air for the heat of the living. Its blood, buoyant under the draw of the full moon, raised the fine hairs in its ears, sending urgent ripples down the curve of its spine. No end to the sky. Shifting things—dark birds, moths—slipped through the air. The moon lured everything upward. And a howl trembled in its throat, the frayed end of a song begun a long time ago and never finished.
But it stopped the cry at a growl. A hot, sticky scent flared nostrils and tightened the scruff of its neck. Man-odor. It walked a wobbly, nervous circle and caught it again, cutting across the grain of the wind. It carried up from the young sisters’ trails, the flat rock paths among the tall stones.
Bonescrolls moved the coyote down the rock ledge toward the stinging odor. It did not want to get any closer, and the urine-itch between its legs became intense and forced it to stop. But it had gone far enough. Now it could see the man following the sisters’ trail. The man’s nightshining eyes fixed on it for a moment, gauging the distance between them.
Sumner strode out of the shadows, tall and loose, the moonlight gleaming across the lotus-burn of his face. Bonescrolls smiled to himself and left the coyote to its lunar songs and its own fearless detachment.
He opened his eyes as a long, distant howl trembled among the rock towers. Sumner drew close. He had come a long way without Bonescrolls being able to find him—and the young warrior, not even trying to hide, simply extended caution in the manner of any animal that knows its predators.
Bonescrolls yawned and stretched. Frost and starlight burned snow-blue on the rock shapes. He stood up and listened to the weaving coyote song. The time had come to go down and meet his thrall for the last time.
A pulse of sadness thrummed in his chest and passed quickly. Sadness and joy and, high over the eroded desert, that old bone the moon. How many years had it taken him to see truly that they did not differ? In everything, identical forces worked: tides, currents, flows and spirals of power.
The patterns of the folded rocks held his attention—the scars of glaciers, the same flow-wear lines seen in running water or in the heart’s ventricles where blood has circled many, many years.
***
Sumner ambled over talus slopes and beneath the steep red walls of mesas the color of dried blood in the moonlight. An eddy of wind passed like a sigh, and he caught a faint sweet scent of burning juniper. He moved in that direction, sliding silently over the sand slopes, all senses alert. His perceptions had been honed by the odd signs he had seen on his night journey: a lunatic raven careening strange patterns over the dunes; and a wild-eyed coyote close enough to touch, pissing where it stood.
A Serbota coyote song echoed its rhythms through his mind:
Coyote-yapping
At the moon. Like us
Not knowing what to ask for—
Starved
For what it already has,
Like a dream of sleepiness.
Sumner followed the burn-scent beneath corroded monoliths and over hogback ridges, and soon the sapless claw of a dead juniper appeared above the dreamlit dunes. A raven roosted in the crown of the dead tree, and at the base, where tough black bark clenched stone, Bonescrolls sat. The flames of a small twig-fire danced before him.
Sumner returned the magnar’s greeting and sat down beside the fire, laying his walking stick across his knees. He stared into Bonescrolls’ gaunt face without expectation.
The old man stared back with hooded eyes. The eth’s bodylight shone yellow deeper than sunlight, and the harmony of his inner life opened into the graceful pulsing of his aura. The magnar, well pleased, tested Sumner’s One Mind and let his strong feeling rush out of him.
Sumner felt the psynergy as sudden iciness in his abdomen. A green pain cramped his stomach, and he flinched. But he didn’t resist the cold flow. The psynergy furled deeply into him, and at the moment when the hurt became more than he could hold, the psynergy sluiced up his back and dissolved in the vastness behind his eyes. Sumner blinked and sat up taller. He knew what the magnar had done, proud that he stayed clear enough for the power to pass through him. He felt open and strong as the wind.
Bonescrolls laughed and rubbed his belly. Sumner had grown so empty that the old man had almost fallen into him. He kneaded the icy feeling out of his bowels and asked through a smile: “Why are you traveling in the dark?”
Sumner grinned quizzically, then recognized the innocent question as a challenge. Instead of searching for an answer, he listened to the longing cry of the wind. The ghost of his breath glowed in the firelight. “It’s too cold to stay still.”
Bonescrolls’ grin widened, and his tough sun-scaled cheeks bulged. “It’s colder where we’re going.”
Sumner frowned, disquieted by the magnar’s allusion to death. “It won’t matter when we get there.” Sumner rolled a salty wafer of spit onto his tongue and hawked it into the flame. The fire snapped like an angry snake.
Bonescrolls’ eyes glinted with laughter, and he nailed Sumner with them. “Even the truth is a boulder that can pin a monkey down his whole life.”
Sumner smiled. The game they played amused him, but Bonescrolls was right: Thought games offered cumbersome and dangerous distraction. He listened to the scratch of the cold wind blowing across the night-smelling depths. “What do we know?”
Bonescrolls clapped his hands merrily. “That’s right. We are empty as the wind—but moving, always moving.”
“And singing.”
“Only when we rub against things that get in our way. Like the wind, without obstacles we’d never sing.”
Sumner chuckled and nodded. “We’re singing, crying, and laughing, all at the same time. But no one hears us.”
“Who knows?” The old man gestured at the blurred light above them. “We’re bigger than we can imagine.”
For hours, the two men sat feeding twigs to the fire, talking and not-talking. When dawn came, Bonescrolls stood and pointed toward a low sandstone rim. “My last command is for you to go to that shelf and sit there until the voor inside you returns. Listen to him. If you decide that you do not want to share your life with him, return to me, and I will free you. Otherwise, you don’t have to think of me again. You’ve learned not to leave tracks. Everything else is unnecessary.” The magnar put a hand over his heart and bowed low. “Shay, warrior.”
Sumner watched after Bonescrolls until he vanished behind a standing rock; then, he went over to the sandstone rim and dragged his stick through the shadows to feel out snakes and scorpions. He sat with his back to the rim and watched the frost melt to dew as the colors of the world lit up.
Sumner angled himself into the shade. He tried to keep himself in selfscan to dampen his anxiety about confronting the voor, but he was sleepy, and random thoughts flitted through his mind. He wondered if Ardent Fang still practiced the fly casting he had tried to teach him. The thought of fish reminded him of the scaly embrace of one of the distort women and the sharp, enduring stink of her body. He flinched and had to think about Drift to calm down. The observant, elegant mind behind that stiff mask constantly challenged him with the strange lyrics of its chanting:
Nothing is ever lost—
It’s only on its tiny back.
Sumner slept darkly until noon. Then he glanced at the white, radium-fierce sun, closed his eyes, and drowsed into late afternoon. He dreamt that he communed with the blind Mother again, sitting on stones shaped like hands. She whispered a sacred name in his ear, and when he voiced it a white elk shouldered out of the forest, sunlight spinning on its antlers...
Sumner woke and washed the taste of sleep out of his mouth with the tepid water in his flagon. He stuck a black twig between his teeth and sucked on the bittersweet root. The colorful desert lay before him—agatized rainbows and rock light.
A cry rose between the buttes. Llyr, the dusk star, burned cold silver over the ridgeline, wobbling in layers of air. The vague green spume of skyfires scattered and reformed in an unfelt wind. Sumner held himself in selfscan, watching bats whir and squeak among the rock spires.
Another cry went up over the desert, high and taut. It dimmed without an echo—a ghost cry. Sumner remained aloof and watchful, though he knew that was not a creature-call. Needles of crystal flashed in the parabolic sand as the last light faded. Shadow hallucinations misted over the terrain. He focused on the longhaired stars in the striated air over the world’s edge.
It wasn’t until the moon came up and its clear light enameled dunes and rocks that he heard the cry for a third time—an ululating scream. Again, no echo, and he realized that the sound happened inside him. Another call quivered through his muscles and burst open in his head as a howl: the shocking cries of the voor dead suddenly claw-ripping the air around him, wrenching and hurling him from his selfscan. Electrified, his body jumped, though his face remained slack as a rag effigy. Jolting screams flattened him and left him gazing up at the lofty nightfires.
Strong fear unwound and cracked along his spine, bursting through his mind in a rush of jigging colors—and he began to relive the deaths of voors on other planets.
