Radix, page 41
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
“Aliens?” Anareta looked simple-faced.
“We may have to extend our viewpoint a little, eh?” A sardonic smile came and went on the commander’s stern lips. “All I know is what I’ve been told. The eo have requested a massive occupying force. The Black Pillar have complied. Now the Massebôth strategists have called down for a kro scholar. That’s you.”
“I don’t know. This is a lot to ponder.” Anareta stared past Gar, feeling out the implications of what he had learned. On the sill, between pots of pink fleshy flowers, a framed epigram leaned: Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust. A musical clock in another room chimed a few inches of a clever melody.
The bluntness of Gar’s features gentled almost, then hardened again. “Whose music is that?”
“Chopin,” Anareta muttered.
“Is she kro?”
Anareta sat unmoving. For years, he had contented himself with his white-card services and his research. Now he felt as though he had been living in another time. Eo. Why had no one told him? Offworlders! Rain stopped briefly, then lashed again, heavier than before.
“It’s a lot to think about,” Gar agreed, turning from Anareta’s withdrawn look. He brushed his fingers along the rows of bound books. “Tell me, what was the greatest accomplishment of the kro?”
Anareta’s distraction snapped. “What?”
The commander faced him squarely, making his jaw a fist. “You’re my aide now, Colonel. I didn’t drag my ass this far to make you an offer. That mobilization warrant is an order.”
Anareta frowned, lifted a cat out of a stuffed chair, and sat down.
“I need you to inform me,” Gar said, more relaxed. “I have to know about the kro. Was their technology strong?
“All that’s gone now,” Anareta mumbled. “The kro achievement was their thinking, their vision. You wouldn’t have seen it in their political or social functions. They were too pragmatic and utilitarian to actually live their ideals. It’s only in their art, in all their apparently pointless preoccupations, that you can glimpse their deepest thought, the soul of the kro. Sometimes they called their vision freedom, self-anarchy, the individual. Nietzsche expressed it clearly: ‘The free spirit stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism—he does not negate anymore.’ Such a—”
The studio door opened, and a tall, hipsprung woman entered. “Am I late?” she asked Anareta, rain glinting like jewels in her red hair.
Corby and Sumner rose into the molded corner of the ceiling, and the scene faded as Commander Gar bowed in exit, holding Anareta with his hawk-lidded eyes: “Oh-five hundred hours, Colonel.”
***
Atoms of sweat and breath clouded around Sumner, and in those scents he glimpsed whole lives: meals of herb cabbages and roots, nomad memories of mountains and ball-cactus deserts.
The iron grating lifted, and hooked poles hauled the Serbota out of the pit. Two hooks clicked around his manacles, and Sumner rose into the open air. Orange and flamingo clouds walled the southeast where the sun had set.
Culler’s face pressed close with a sulfurous smell of bad sweat. “A dozen men have guns on you, ghost-eyes,” he said as he unclasped the hand-and-foot manacles.
Time cornered. Movement opened round and easy. Sumner stood up effortlessly, and a sacramental feeling swelled in his legs. The stupor and ache that had thickened in him during his captivity withered, and he felt suddenly supple and smooth as a nightsnake, clear as fire. The voor had rested and strengthened his kha, and the power of Iz widened through him again. He looked at Culler and peered, deeper than the chisel bones and cave-squatter eyes, into the man’s cruel grin. The face was uxorious—married to a self-love so strong it qualified as hunger. This man lived just behind his features. His eyes rattled with hate, flesh twitching subtly with a constant flickering of thoughts.
Culler backed away, startled by the fragrant smell about Kagan and his eyes wonderful with alertness. “Watch this viper well,” he commanded his men and stalked off.
Guards nudged Sumner forward, and he followed the limping Serbota into the red night of corpse fires. Skyfires trembled like a wing above the jagged brim of the volcano. In the pit, torches flared in a wide circle around a peeler on a raised platform. Fireshadows slicked off its silver needles.
Don’t be afraid, Corby spoke from within, and the strength in his legs flushed. Deva is with us. Thunder rolled down the clear sky.
The Serbota stopped and looked to Kagan, whose braided hair sparked with blue static. The guards shoved them on. “Don’t spook, distorts. That’s cannon. We’re hitting the desert to keep your strays from gathering.”
A mist of warm, ethereal sexuality filled the space around Sumner, and the guards nearest him felt instreaming coolness and a line of force strung like a bow-hair through their bellies. The earthdreaming rose, transmuting into lifelove through Corby’s kha.
“Move!” a soldier yelled from out of the darkness, and the guards startled and took Sumner’s arms.
Cleats of fire came and went along Kagan’s legs, and his eyes shone and shone. Corby—The bliss curving into him from the ground reminded him powerfully of the psynergy he had raised in the riverain forest with Ardent Fang. Radiant—blurring the shadow of his ego.
He stepped forward, and his mind became a wilderness of awareness: both inside and outside himself. A gel of ectoplasmic kha spiraled invisibly about him, resonating with the vastly huger psynergy field of the deva. Corby became tangibly present. The pressure of the sluicing kha sharpened, and the whole mountainside moved through him; the infinite and the minute joined, and he tightened to the painful stitch! Brainbursting agony, lonely and final, as he reached upward to touch Deva—to connect his own tiny lifespark to the Sky.
Unchala’s resplendent power tore through Corby’s awareness, rocking him loose from the phantoms and disguises of memory.
Ovoid light swirled into a staggering vista of unfolding plasma, lion-drunk windshapes of white fire belting overhead in the voor’s vision to a sky-dome. Noon on Unchala.
Wheeling slowly, far, far out, the giant spirals called from beyond the golden sadsome blur at the rim of seeing. Light longer than understanding funneled out of that sun shining in the all-darkness, singing the immensurable praise of creation: birthdeath, darkness eating itself into light. Light enwombed in stone, stone green-flaming to life. Titanic colors wandered the sky, blazing at the zenith into kinetic starhair and music.
An oompah of thunder bellowed directly overhead just as the soldiers shoved Sumner into the torch-circle. Dollops of cold air splashed out of the windless sky, and the Serbota straightened from their fear-crouches and began to sway serenely. They sensed the lifelove coursing through Kagan, and it amazed Sumner to see them moving with the music of his heartseeing. He uncurled from his thoughts to join them, and the angelust pulsing through him became knowing.
He fanned into one awareness with Corby and Deva.
The vortex of psynergy around Sumner widened, seizing the torchbearers and guards in a slow-motion upflow of euphoria. All at once, everyone’s thoughts blurred together, a light-swirl swiftly gyring into one feeling, blazing as a radiant spiral of emotion. Telepathy gripped everyone, and feelings went naked for the first time in most of their lives. The torch circle narrowed to a point as the soldiers rushed to each other to confirm what they were feeling, glowing with the dreamtime of the voor’s spell.
***
On the rim of the caldera, Culler watched in stunned silence. Around him, troopers stood on tiptoe in disbelief, stretching to see what was happening. He ordered two men to accompany him, and he descended in a swift amble. Coos and trills of happiness circled him as he closed in on the crowded arena, and, obeying a deep instinct, he pulled up short. The two men with him kept going.
Like a bluerun of perch, psynergy flashed through him, cold, clear, and swift—and everything around him looked webbed in underwater light. He jumped backward and stumbled to the ground. Staring up at stars buzzing in the coldark, he experienced the beatitude of shared feeling. And for an instant, the earthdreaming passed through him, light and magnetic.
A gust of cold air chilled Culler alert, and he rolled to his feet and scrambled back up the rim. The lifelove drained out of him, and he felt water-heavy. “Keep the men out,” he shouted, swaying weakly. “It’s some kind of psy-war. Maybe gas.” His muscles hung limp, and the feeling of the spell slowed his thoughts. “Where’s the radio? We need strohlkraft up here.”
***
Around Sumner, the crowd of soldiers and distorts danced, kept from touching him by the swell of static air streaming upward. Many of the soldiers who had killed distorts wept, lovingly embracing the Serbota. Overhead, a sky-print of iridescent light began to whirlpool the skyfires. A unified gasp of awe filled the volcanic basin.
Humming stillness sealed around them, and Sumner stared upward, beginning to feel himself lifted. Light spiraled to an achebright starpoint.
Lotus Face!
The telepathic cry transfixed Sumner with its familiarity. Gentle strength turned him about; he sensed the direction of the call, but he could not allow himself to believe what he had heard. He bounded up the stairs of the platform to get a better vantage. An air current in the bone-loops of his ears guided his gaze to a line of crucified figures on the rim of the volcano, opposite from where the Mothers had been executed. He spotted, with blinding surprise, among the distorts nailed to the long boards—Drift!
Sumner leaped off the platform and into the dark. Corby’s psychic voice screamed No! He landed on squelchy ground, heaved to his feet and, struggling through a line of executioners and branders with tear-bright faces, deftly lifted a knife from one of their hilts. He sprinted up the crater wall, and the still air quaked with thunder.
Don’t move! Corby’s voice exploded in his head. Deva is focusing to lift you. It’ll kill us!
Sumner ignored the voor’s warning. Fluttersparks of blue refulgence dropped out of the deep sky, columning around the platform where he had been standing, flickering in the air just behind him. But he kept running. He owed Drift a life—for Ardent Fang.
Power welled through him, the living alembic of earth and sky. Nothing could stop him.
***
Culler eyed Kagan’s run toward the rim, and he dashed along the rock brink to intercept him. Eddies of electric light pulsed in the zenith sky and flickerflames flared off the peeler in the pit like ball lightning. Culler believed this to be a complex distort trick, a psychic maneuver. Even in the frenzy of his run he grew aware of the telepathy around Sumner. He felt the blue pulse of Kagan’s life.
“Drift!” Sumner called as he picked his way up the reef rock. Empathic pain forked his wrists and ankles when he got close enough to see the né nailed to the saltwood. The looped skyfires began to knock brighter and dimmer.
Four of the guards around the crucifying-scaffold aimed to shoot before an ache of ecstasy cramped through them. They dropped their guns, sat down, and watched the incense of the Milky Way floating over the mountains.
Culler saw this, and he crouched into his run, moving along the dark slope of the cinder cone. He took out his machine pistol and gripped it hard, deciding then that he would kill his own men if they tried to protect this demon.
With the sound of the sea heaving in his ears from the kha coursing through him, Sumner rushed to Drift. The tribesfolk on either side of it were already dead, their pain-shrunk faces glowing like white apples. Drift clung vaguely to life, its whale-small eyes blood-burned. Using the knife he had taken from a guard, he cut the bindings and pulled free the bone-spikes.
It is you, the né whisper-thought in the windy alley of its agony. Sumner cradled it, and Corby, relieved that Sumner had stopped moving, pumped kha into the distort. The seer’s pain instantly broke up into a blowing of lucent particles. A mistral of star-music, simpling a rhythm deep in its being, soothed all fear.
Drift sat up, and in its small mirror-bright eyes Sumner spied Culler coming up the slope over the snow-frosted rocks directly behind him. He spun about, his eyes a shade of ice, and the voor pushed out with his kha. The icy air splashed over Culler’s face as he brought his gun up point-blank. Several rounds went off with his startlement, tracers scything over Sumner’s shoulder and vanishing into the immense space between the mountains.
The recoil nudged Culler backward, and he stumblestepped on the ice-pebbled shale at the steep edge of the volcano, dancing to regain his footing. For several moments as he shuffled on the crumbling incline, sliding toward a sheer plunge, he faced Sumner, an arm’s length away, eyes shallow with fear, face urgent.
The lifelove brightened in Sumner’s nerves, and quick as wit, he reached out with his right arm. Culler dropped the gun and snatched the bloody hand. His grip slid away. With an amazed look and a whimper, Culler slid into the void. A long and crazy scream expanded across the mountains. A few rocks rattled after him, and the empty space where he had stood glittered with snow motes.
Sumner lifted Drift and moved to return to the pit. The deva’s light had vanished, and beneath the night the basin with its smoldering pyres and torches glowed evilly.
Don’t move, Corby advised as the air became warm and perfectly still. Wise, limber power gripped them. Thunder rolled, and the skyfires began to knock again.
Drift knew what was going to happen. In rapport with Sumner, it marveled at the stupendous calm he had attained. Through him, it felt Corby, distant and chaotic, his liquid senses churning with psychic noise.
Sun-red sparks wheeled about them in a ratcheting dance. Hot gusts flapped snow into billows, and they ascended in the night sky, faces bleared with wind.
The ground clotted with darkness below, and skyfires wisped brighter against the void. They lofted over the highest mountain, and the velocity of their flight beat like bells against the rocks, though their world held still.
Skyfires vapored into nothingness when they rocketed through them, higher than the weather, and the blackness of space yawed deep as the mindark; the eternal glide of starlight filtering through the razed dust of the galaxies provided the only illumination.
Sumner’s consciousness peaked into godmind. He endured completeness beyond time as a voor and a man—a human flying through the sky, the ancient heaven, with an androg in his arms! He bodied forth the microcosmos, the sempiternal mind. And he amounted to nothing without the voor, merely a shade—the shadow of all stars’ time. The light of the Big Bang crazed through him, and he comprehended Iz. Thousands of darktime voors had focused the psynergy of their lives through Dai Bodatta, feeling that they had died into the ecstasy of Unchala. The joy had been real, but the crossing had been only a passage to a memory of Unchala. The voors’ psynergy had really dispersed into the planet’s kha where the acausal laws of Iz would return them to Earth as the memories of future voors. The whole brood would stay here, their psynergy recycling until they blended over thousands of years into the group-soul of the human species. Five thousand years from now, after the Iz-wind had long passed, voors would be remembered as sorcerers, witches, elves. The human form, new to them, fit poorly. Only now, after thirty thousand years dormant in the howlie collective unconscious, had voors become humanwise enough to use the return of the Iz-wind to create godminds. If the brood created enough godminds, their psynergy would be strong enough to unify. As One Mind, they could disengage from the earthdreaming completely and flux once more with the Iz-wind that streamed cosmos to cosmos. Only a few centuries remained before Iz drifted too far to reach. The godminds had to be engendered now. But the Delph, jealous of his waning power, thwarted them by killing their leaders.
Sumner disengaged from the voor’s thoughts. He possessed the plenitude of Now, the dreamshaper. Three-million-year-old memories tightened through him, and the intuition of ten thousand generations flexed into a prescient vision: The zodiac-sky sparkled into the machinelight depths of a vast computer.
Rubeus, Corby thought, and the name became a chiseled, arrowfaced man swinging at him violently. The probability-ghosted fist shapechanged to a night sky and spears of white light...
Sumner’s eyes snapped open to see diamond-blue light shafts arrowing out of the night. Lynks, Corby told him, space-time corridors. We’re being netted.
Pain jagged like lightning, and a shearing radiance swept over Sumner. Within the span of a single second, Corby expanded beyond feeling, beyond godmind, into One Mind. Destiny became geometric, and he again collapsed into a shape as Sumner’s flight stalled and, with an inertial tug, his body plummeted.
For the fragment of time that Sumner hung motionless between gravity and the pull of the universe, Corby disappeared, moving beyond reality into the multiverse where infinity is annihilated and created continuously, radiating an undermusic of coincidence and accident into each of the parallel universes of eternity. Into that floating trillionth-of-a-second reality, Corby vanished.
Sumner crested with the voor, his awareness swept along by lusk. And for an instant, he too was One Mind—an awareness and a longing older than the universe—
Listen, lonely-blood, my life as a voor ends here. My destiny fulfills itself through you alone now, for I will not be with you as a mind anymore. We will never meet as knowing again. I am leaving you. But don’t despair, Father. I am more than a shape, more than just density. I am the emptiness in the grain of your bones. I am the singing nothing between the atoms of your blood. You carry me everywhere.
Layered voices filled the air, choral, wobbling through watery distances. Each voice presented a mind, some wise, others habitual, all of them filling the choirs of space that made his life: You are the transparent and inflexible center of the diamond of time.
Stay close to your breathing. That’s all you can trust.
Rubeus is a machine, thieving into your soul, feeling the glow-deep of your life. Be creative.
Teeth dreams.
His head filled with smoky light and gargoyles of screaming. Voice roared: “Wake up!”
