Radix, page 39
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Sumner closed his eyes and sensed the voor rising through his fatigue: Sumner, I am real. You are not ignorant. Do not ignore me. I can teach you the forgotten language of the world. The secret beast whispers in the rock. The old waters gather wrath from the bones of extinct animals, and forests are born. I can teach you the fast and still dreams of sunken things...
“No!” The word muscled through him with conviction. He was not a voor. He did not want to think these inhuman thoughts.
He stood and continued hiking. The voor continued with him, but only fatigue brought it close. He began to wonder if perhaps his climb had gone too far, when he caught sight of the ice-glens.
Small glades of mossy rocks gathered mist where hot water channels ran close to the surface. Heat and wind had carved ice and snow around the glades into pale blue pavilions. A line of ice-glens moved up the snowfields toward the summit, and Sumner climbed through them as though moving from dream to dream.
At the top, the sky glowed violet and the air felt slim and cold as a frozen song. He sat for a long time staring into the tapestries of ice around him, feeling close to the invisible power that controlled his breathing and heartbeat.
A cold shadow made him look up, and he watched a clot of dark clouds budge over the peaks. The gray scud expanded with frightening speed, and a sinister wind whined down from the icefields. Hailstones came first, sharp marbles, cracking against the stones and snapping the arabesques of ice.
Sumner moved swiftly down through the ice-glades but was still on the high snowfields when the winds gusted to a howl. He ducked under a narrow overhang and crouched in its far corner, away from the slashing wind. Hail gave way to the smoky sheets of a blizzard, and Sumner sat with limbs pulled close, mesmerized by the mysteries of snow and wind.
Snow blew in for hours, transforming the upper slopes into a deceptive world of glazed-curves and expanding white. Sumner cursed himself for getting trapped. As the burning cold began to numb him, he settled into contemplative reproach: He should have known a storm was coming. He had tracked birds flying against the bluff of the wind, and he had observed snows on the sunside of the valleys. The hot springs on the mountain had lured him beyond natural caution. Now there was nothing to do but wait.
Cold narrowed in. By night no feeling or sight remained, only the wind droning—meaningless—constant...
He slept and woke to find his cloak frozen. The world had shrunk to a fog of wind-blurred snow. Cold throbbed, slow as a burn, and he had to sink deep into his omphalos-power to stay alive.
He noted the places that burned: several fingers and one foot. He forced psynergy into the fringes of his body and held it there for as long as he could. Eventually his effort broke, and he shivered into a profound sleep.
When he came to, skyfires rippled red and yellow against the void-black. Snow sloped on all sides and blanketed most of his body. The air hovered perfectly still, a pool of silence.
Sumner tried to move, and a long, treacherous moment lapsed before his body stirred. No feeling came up from his feet. He pulled his legs under and burst thongs of agony to straighten them. Forcing his will into his back, he rose, an aching skeleton, and stagger-stooped into the night.
Skyfires illuminated snowfields and, far off, the dark nerveshapes of trees. Sumner tottered several paces and then dropped chest-deep into starlit snow. He couldn’t feel his legs or his hands now, and he knew he was dying.
He stilled his mind and closed his eyes. No fear or anger touched him—only lassitude.
***
When Sumner’s eyes opened, Corby stared out. A green fire dazzled before him, and he recognized it as a deva—one of the orts shaped out of plasma by the CIRCLE mantics and set loose in the electric ocean of the ionosphere. To human eyes, it appeared as a filament of green electricity sizzling silently over the snowfield, two meters away. It had responded to Corby’s call almost instantly, and he rewarded it. The voor remembered Unchala, and the deva gushed with warm, secret feelings: fire-throbs, mother-makings, bangles of hilarity...
He asked the deva to lead him down to the warm slopes. The rope of green light wavered over the snow, and Corby followed slowly. The deva’s bounteous psynergy gave him complete physical control over Sumner’s body, but he was in no rush to reach the bottom of the mountain. He enjoyed the beauty of the star-lustered snowfields and the delirious abandonment of having a body that fit his will.
Strange seeing the stars again through howlie eyes—wandering light lens-squeezed to glassy flecks in the black pit cold. Corby preferred the deep-sky perceptions of plants or birds or the first voors—seeing echoes of gravity-clutched light, feeling the sway of the Iz-wind as it listed on its journey out from the galactic core.
The deva understood. Like Corby, it existed as a being of energy, and its perceptions opened much wider than anything a human could imagine. The deva’s biology consisted of a sheer molecular net of magnetite high in the ion sea of the atmosphere. If it were visible, one would have seen a vast hydrozoan—a medusa fish of the high sky, living on sunlight and the planet’s magnetic flux. This being, which had saved Sumner’s life years before in Rigalu Flats, was myth-bound to Corby’s struggle against the Delph. Devas too could become godminds, and all but this one had been hunted down by the Delph’s minions.
Corby stared up at the skyfires, the bright squalls where the Iz-wind blustered against the ionosphere. That was the real soul of this world, the plasma sea that the howlies called their sky. Its immense electrical tides and intricate currents shaped the weather that shaped the continents. A vacancy expanded inside Corby.
How far he had come on that wind—wandering the starbalance across darkness and worlds of sounding light, darkness and a world of iridescent floating, darkness and darkness, and then this world of me-ness. He clenched his fists and felt the immediacy of bloodwarmth. Odd world—everything so close and warm and locked into itself. Odd.
An urge of homesickness tightened in him—a deep longing to roam free, shapeshifting in the great depth and remoteness of Iz with the harmony of the brood, to be the void and the revelation of everything, instead of one small mind, clinging for identity. But he had to cling. The brood could be annihilated here on this small world. Without godminds, the brood psynergy would dissipate and the migration back to Unchala would never be fulfilled. He had to limit his being so that he could strengthen the brood—but he would not forget how it had been in the starbalance—a dreamflash opening, full of music, visions, rumblings, and no-I.
The hot twisting cord of deva energy flared green-white in empathy with the voor’s thoughts. It understood One Mind and the enormous joy of a species sharing its psynergy. Its power buffeted stronger and focused on Corby, lifting him off his feet and into the air.
He hung motionless in the still night sky with its thin fire-shiftings. Blazing rags of light snapped around him, and he dropped down the mountain with the deva. As he glided over the wind-scalloped snow, he probed his body for the deepest cell of its damage. Both feet were dead, and the cold had hammered the feeling out of his fingers.
Corby relaxed, and radiant strength skirted through him as he tumbled over the tops of fir trees. He guided the power through the looseness of his bones to the hurt flesh. The ripped quilt of cells in the frozen skin warmed swiftly, and a frenzy of liquid heat washed turbulent healing through him. Within moments, his flesh flushed with life, nimble and full of prickly touches.
At the edge of the snowfield, in a wheeling fury of light, the deva stopped and lowered him into the snow. The firewheel blazed for a strong moment and then blinked into toppling darkness.
Corby sat in the snow, soaked with joy. He relaxed his body into the psynergy rafting through him, and he began to rise again. Tufts of blue light bristled in his hair and on the tips of his fingers and boots. He hovered over the bauchy snow, and his skin crawled with the flux.
Everywhere, voors felt him: an obscure, ghostly spell. Most dismissed it as the underglimmer of orphaned memories, the voor dead, or indigestion. But a few with strong kha who knew their bodies well recognized the call. Dai Bodatta.
An ecstatic mania quavered in him. He raised a hand and stared at it. The whole planet thrived there: the sky reflected in blue veins, a resinous mud-light glowing in the flesh, and a horizon with clouds in each fingernail. It awed him: the completeness—the unity! As long as Sumner remained unconscious, this power belonged to him.
He flexed the new strength in his hands and legs and lowered himself by invisible strings. When his feet touched the ground, he felt earthdreaming enter him, and he began to dance. The earthdreaming was the kha of the planet, and as it passed through him, it merged with the kha of the deva and made the life in him surge stronger. Sparks spluttered as his feet kicked stiff mud.
Without him, the voor knew, this body would have died. Perhaps Sumner would not acknowledge this lifedebt, but to Corby that didn’t matter. He had proven to himself his worth to this organism. He wasn’t simply a parasite. Even if he never became conscious again, this life belonged as much to him now as to Sumner, and he danced his magnificent happiness.
He swung himself into a slow, majestic spin and crouched over his gravity, legs drumming blue flames. Flashes leaped like rats, a swarm of twisting devils, spraying the night with bright lingulate flames.
Corby danced until dawn, when the ion tide in the upper atmosphere shifted with the solar wind. This body is riddled with half-souls, he told the deva, and I am the least. I am grateful you came for me.
Hearing this, the deva moved on, vanishing with the feathery skyfires. I’m caught in the liquid of this brain, Corby thought after it, mind smudged with the loss of psynergy. I have no will. I am a falling dream...
Wine light ruddied the highest peaks, and Corby sensed himself becoming vaguer as Sumner’s consciousness began to stir. Blood burns thin as air! But I must not forget...In the eighteen months since the lusk began, the starbalance had shifted. I’m becoming less, the less I act. I...Corby wavered...must not forget. I am the secret strength. I fall from shape to shape. I fall with time in its circle...
When the last of the deva’s psynergy vanished, Corby’s awareness fragmented and he collapsed into the mud of his dancing.
***
Several Serbota tribesfolk crouched at the base of a granite ridge staring at the red traces of dawn among the endless mountains. At the top of a long rubble-strewn incline, the snowfields began, an ethereal blue in the early light. Up there, Sumner’s body lay sprawled in a circle of trampled slush. A few Serbota warriors circled it charily. The day before, they had fled into the wastes of Skylonda Aptos, pursued by Massebôth hellraiders. During the night, the folk had seen ghost-lights moving down the mountain, and they had approached, seeking divine help, knowing death closed in from behind.
The women and two of the warriors remembered Sumner from Miramol, and the awe they had felt for him then had become religious after seeing the deva-dance. The women called from the rocks, urging the men to let his Power be. “He’s the magnar’s child—a sorcerer,” an old woman cried, and the warriors backed off. Finally, one of the hunters stalked over and touched Sumner’s shoulder. The body felt warm and smelled of lightning. Encouraged, a young warrior approached, took Lotus Face’s head in his hands and tried to shake him awake.
At that instant, Sumner plunged through the darkness of a whooping, gut-cramping dream. Hands lunged out of the darkness and seized him by his ears. Blue, necrotic hands with a grip severe as steel held Sumner squirming helplessly, and a voice broke through him: You’re twisting yourself to pieces, boy. He recognized his father’s voice, soft and tough as crushed leather. Sling yourself away—go ahead. Run after spirit dreams, like your mother. Send kha, shadowshoot, climb mountains. See what it gets you. A crack in time? The end of pain? Or just a masturbating flash? You know what I’m telling you. Your back is a road, boy—a road for your shadow and all the darkness of the world to cross.
A hollow-faced skull goggling with eyes of insane voltage reared out of the blackness, and Sumner lashed out with his right fist. The supernatural strength of his blow bashed through the dream, and he pulled awake to find himself standing above the fallen body of a Serbota warrior.
It had happened so swiftly—limbs slashing open like a butterfly-blade, the young warrior collapsing backward, head slung far to the side—the other tribesfolk never had a chance to move. Comprehension filled Sumner’s eyes as he stared at the fallen boy; he remembered the dream and, deeper, the long unearthly wail of the wind, the hammering of the cold—and the voor and the deva saving his life.
Sumner knelt in the slush, his body suddenly sodden. The warrior he had hit lay dead, his head knocked sideways to his shoulder. His sky-gray eyes reflected the golden snowpeaks. Mutra, I’m powerless, Sumner realized in a swell of choking grief, and then caught himself. His awareness sharpened to selfscan, and the constriction in his throat cleared. I’m powerless, all right. He let the anguish in him speak. I’m voor-crazed and luckless—powerless to live or even die my own life.
He put his hand on the boy warrior’s face and felt the last warmth wisping into the cold air. At that moment and by that last heat of flesh-fire, he took a vow: Ecstasy warrior, your death is my freedom. Foc shadowshooting. Foc selfscan. I’m not afraid of anything—and I’m not going to hold myself back anymore.
He let tears flow, and with them came forlorn anger and the hard shape of words: I’m blind strength. I destroy everything that finds me bearable. I killed Ardent Fang, and my absence killed Bonescrolls. Pain is my blood. He wept wildly, and the Serbota backed away.
As he calmed, silent words went on: I’m a voor. If I weren’t, I would have died in that mountain storm. I’m a voor, and I don’t understand or think that I can. But I fathered Corby. Though Jeanlu duped me and tried to kill me, Corby is my son—and he’s with me, in my brain. I can’t hide in my fear anymore. I have to face it: I’m a voor.
Sumner fixed his eyes on the corpse’s startled expression. I hurt and hunger. Pain is my religion. I’m just a man. But there’s more. With the Serbota, I felt happiness. I knew love. I touched the world’s soul. I want more of that. And because I fear nothing, I can face it: I want more.
The anxious whispers of the tribesfolk carried in the cold air, and Sumner got to his feet. He faced the Serbota, wanting to say something to calm them. As he moved to speak, the earth turned under him. The ground grinding on its axis moved in his feet, wrenching up his legs, slipping wrongly through his spine, and jarring out the cracks in his skull. The voor in him receiving the planet’s kha nearly knocked him unconscious. The earthdreaming passed through him, extending his senses into voor telepathy. And he espied—
A convoy of troop carriers dotted the desert floor and hundreds of brown-uniformed troopers swarmed up the slopes of this mountain, attracted by the deva’s fire. In minutes, they would throng into sight.
Sumner looked about for cover in the open terrain among clumps of alpine shrub. He stared at the tribesfolk who had gathered around the slain man. They stared back at him with nervous beseeching, knowing the soldiers were coming, not really knowing who he was except that he had wept for one of them. An ice-sheet above them groaned in the sunlight like a dreamer.
“No place to run,” he mumbled in Serbot. “Stay.” He waved them to sit. His mind, a vacant, skimpy music, floated atop the exhaustion of the voor. Corby’s kha, vitiated by the effort of healing Sumner’s ice-burned body, appeared to Sumner as swervings of sound squirreling out of the skull-dark, and he ceased in-listening. “We stay here,” he said in Massel, looking down to the treeline where the first Massebôth troopers emerged. “I won’t let them kill you.”
He stepped past the folk with clumsy heaviness, only now feeling the hollowness of his strength. With slow, blunt movements he paced among the hawkweed, waving the soldiers closer. An ocean of feeling opened in him, and his mind skated on its surface, an insect. Miramol—gone, rapt in the afterworld of memory with the other dead. Bonescrolls—in One Mind. Ardent Fang—in the whorl. Drift—back to Paseq, and the Mothers had followed. Dead, thinged. Sumner wanted to stop feeling them.
He moved without the poetry of an aware creature, and the soldiers, seeing his eel-black face and size, hesitated. Three had crouched and sighted him with their rifles.
“I’m not a distort, you jooches!” he shouted down at them. “I’m an advance-ranger.” He yelled out his code number and name, and two minutes later eight soldiers approached swiftly in arrowhead formation. Sumner signed for the Serbota to remain seated, but two bolted. They spartled upfield a short distance through shrubs before the soldiers opened fire.
“Don’t shoot,” Sumner ordered, swaying toward the riflemen. A youthful officer with a death’s-grin face and a bull’s neck grabbed his arm. CULLER stenciled in green over his heart. “Stop those men,” he told the officer. “I’m Massebôth. A ranger.”
“You’re a deserter,” Culler accused softly, pointing a machine pistol into Sumner’s face. “A convoy officer says you left his carrier against his direct command. That’s desertion.” He unclasped a set of heavy manacles from his belt and held them level with his gun. “Which hand do you want, soldier?”
Sumner stared at him with a face as flat and integral as a rock, and the brain waves that sine through striking serpents wreathed his thoughts. He wanted to kill this man, but the weakness in his muscles gulfed that thought. If the Serbota were going to survive, he had to submit.
He held out his arms, and the manacles clanged over his wrists. Behind him, rifle fire coughed.
“Don’t kill the tribesfolk.” Sumner pleaded, his eyes cold with threat.
“Folk?” Culler gruffly turned Sumner around and pointed at the squatting Serbota. “Those are distorts, mister.”
Higher up the slope, the two runaways thrashed through the brush, rifle-fire cutting the earth around them.
