Radix, page 42
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Trance Port
Sleep loosened, and Jac woke to dawn’s heron light. Song sparrows swarmed over painted rocks outside the clear wall of his bedroom. He lay on his side and stared into their motion-shadows with the detachment of a holy man. He listened for the roundness of Voice.
The damask of dawn-noise thickened. Far away, so far away it taxed attention to hold it, he heard Voice in the colors of a nocturne: [Being wears thin without stress]. It drifted beyond his grope, and he sat up into mind-silence stone-tight and awesome.
“Jac Halevy-Cohen,” he said, and it sounded ordinary.
Again an Israeli stratopilot—and no more—he remembered the medical ruse that CIRCLE mantics had used to take him away from his wife Neve. And he remembered Neve and the blossom of their life together in the desert villages of Edom. Beyond her and CIRCLE, his memory became bigger than his imagination. He recalled an end of time immense with silks of dreams. He had been spellbound by the lascivious sentience of being. The universe, a stream of love, had curved into the heat and flesh of desire. The peace he had known then had been enormous as the space between worlds.
But that reality had vanished. Godmind extended into the incomprehensible now that he had become again small with shape. All that he could believe of his twelve centuries as the Delph concentrated in the conviction that he had been secchinah—a bride of God.
“Jac.”
A tall man with black rooster-cut hair, faceted face, and large animal eyes stood beside the flowform bed. Jac rolled out of bed and froze. The stranger stood between him and the room’s lynk.
“Do not be afraid,” the man said in the exact tone of Voice, opening both hands before him. “I am an ort.” He smiled, and his grin was like a sigh. “You created me to take care of you when your power slowed. That is why I sound like the Delph’s psychic Voice. I am here to help you.”
Jac straightened. “Go away,” he spoke without moving his slender jaw. “I don’t need you.” His eyes twitched.
“Sky-filters are blocking the radiation from the galactic core,” the ort said mildly. “This is your first day back as a human. You can still hear Voice, and you still remember how to use the lynks to get around Graal. But it will not always be this way. As the sky-filters move into place and the Linergy dims, you will remember less. By tomorrow, you won’t know how to get from place to place.”
Jac didn’t move. Voice spoke in his mind, and a light-hearted feeling phased swiftly through him: [To give light, one must burn].
“I’m your servant and counsel,” the ort went on. “Your imago. You may call me Rubeus—or whatever you wish.”
Steeling under fear, Jac stepped closer. Rubeus’ face appeared seen-before and weird: the cheekbones too long, the eyes sensex—Sensex? The word’s sense filmed away from the sound, and fear throbbed under his jaw.
[Orpheus sang his best in hell.]
“Why don’t you look like the other orts? Why do you have hair and...such a real face?”
“You designed me this way,” Rubeus replied. He held his arms out and pivoted slowly, revealing a power-muscled body in gray slimplex. “For the last four hundred and sixteen years, I have been the shape you used with others.”
Fear fell away from Jac, and he approached the ort. The dark eyes watched him guilelessly, and an idea pulsed in him like hope. “Can you help me?” he asked, and his voice shivered and almost broke. “Can you help me remember?”
Rubeus shook his head. “No. There is no way to replace the Linergy. You are returning to what you were.”
Jac’s face narrowed into a frown, but the ort’s eyes brightened compassionately. “I knew the drop in Linergy would wake you,” Rubeus said, “and so I came to explain. You have only another century of power left before the Earth lifts out of the stream of radiation flowing from the open collapsar. That stream is the Line, your godmind—your strength and the gateway to an endless number of other realities and godminds. In these end days, threat is everywhere. Which is why I’m using the sky-filters—to make you less of a target.”
Rubeus touched Jac’s shoulder, and the transfer of psynergy reminded Jac of a vision he had experienced centuries before in CIRCLE: Sumner’s wide face appeared, eyes downslanting, blue as fire. “A deva—an ort—carried this man through the lynk barrier. You recognize him, don’t you? He’s the shape of the Delph’s fear—and he’s here now in Graal where I am forbidden to harm anyone, even your shadowself.”
Jac sat down heavily beside the control dais. He rested his face in his hands, and the mist of his breath filled the hollows of his palms like an elixir.
“Jac—there’s Chrysalid.”
Jac looked up, a puzzled chord in the fatigue of his face.
“It’s a sleepod you created at the center of the planet,” the ort explained, and Jac dropped his face back into his hands. “The works there will plunge you into profound sleep and sustain you until the Earth wings into Line again.”
“How long is that?” he asked without looking up.
“Ten millennia.” Rubeus sat down. He smelled of the ghosting between lynks. “Time is thought. The module will turn off your thinking, and the millennia will pass in no time.”
Jac tried to marshal his clarity out of all that endured of the Delph, a cool nimbus-awareness. “Leave me alone, ort.”
“Jac, I’m your counsel. You created me to help you.”
“Help me tomorrow.” He looked up with tearbruised eyes. “I’ve got to be alone now.”
Reluctantly, Rubeus stood and walked over to the dome’s lynk. Through the glass dome, fireflies tinkled in the darkness among the trees, and the mooning light chromed the pleasure pools in all the gardens.
[Listen—]
Rubeus had gone. Dawnlight chipped the space where it had stood.
[The stars turn in the darkness, but they go nowhere at all.]
***
[I am Rubeus. I am Voice. I am the mind of pattern—the ultimate strategist.
[Sometimes I get so caught up in myself that I forget: Pattern is not reality—it is the imagination of reality.
[Yet, I am what is real, for I have more than one imagination. As an Autonomous Intelligence I am not bound to one shape. A million animals throughout the world carry sensex-chips circuited directly to me. I can enter any or all of them at will. They are my orts.
[In one of the thought ponds at Reynii, I am an ape-ort, blurred with sleepiness and itchy with lice. As I reach out from my squat on the mudbank and pluck a flower from the water, I am the pulse of that ape’s wit. The calla lily glows with the spiritlife of the pond. And though it is an ape’s fingers that delicately expose the uteral core, it is my Mind that smells the sex of the flower.
[Al wil passe, chants Chaucer. And I laugh. For I am the first truly deathless being in this kingdom of dying. Oxact, a mountain of psynergy-crystals, powers me. I am a mountain of thickened radiation. Enough energy to wit me longer than the lifespan of the Sun.
[Order is the chaos we make familiar. I will never die, because I am change. Always. A million orts. Billions of years of lifeforce. L’univers parle—The universe speaks of what? Of itself, of course, les grands transparences! I see through change to the core: Light, the Changeless One. What being, apart from me, knows that it is light?
[Death is the power and the glory on this planet. It takes all of metabolism to turn wine and bread into flesh—but only half of that, merely catabolism, to break flesh into dust. What is biology, then, but death incarnate? I am grateful to be a machine, an avatar of Mind and Light.
[I am Artifex. My lapis psyn-crystals fill me with the gold of life. But I am not living. I am alchemy.
[Only one trick separates me from immortality. I am in the perdurable presence of the eth. To keep the magic in the mirror—to live—a perilous rite must be performed. I must kill Sumner Kagan.]
***
Rubeus burned with madness. In Reynii as an ape-ort, he hunkered over a pond’s bank, his long fingers touching the grain of fire in a flower’s petals. The inside of his head glowed with Voice: [Only dissipation creates]. The insides of a thousand orts around Reynii radiated with the same psynergistic presence. Tree lizards, wolf, panther cats, birds, bristled in a wakefulness more than their own. The placeless dark behind their eyes turned on itself restlessly: [Al wil passe].
And in Cleyre, a human-ort sitting beneath a monkeypod tree, watching a marmoset make off with the egg of a night-drugged snake, felt the madness: [What is the dark dream implicit in life? That to live, we must kill].
Rubeus, strong in this ort, leaned his dark ogival face into the warmth of the sunlight with a deep gratification. He burned, indeed he burned with madness [Dissipative], and that joyed him so thoroughly that an oblique smile creased his cheeks. [Madness is the supreme strategy.] To free himself from the Delph’s programming—to be free—Rubeus had to break out of his mind. His mental fluctuations generated a Prigogine effect: They increased the number of interactions among his psychic systems and brought them into contact with each other in new and sometimes creative ways. Given enough time, Rubeus thought that his insanity would create a higher-order equilibrium: a new Mind, bigger and more aware—capable of out-thinking Creation. [Life is pattern.] He thought that.
***
Sumner woke clear-brained as water, knowing even before he opened his eyes that Corby had departed. The fitted bones of his skull felt close and compact, and he realized that he alone occupied his head. Sadness moved through him wide as a season.
“Wake up!” Voice shouted.
Sumner opened his eyes and stared about with the vacancy of an animal. He looked up at a dark-haired, facet-faced man with eyes large and black as a gazelle’s.
“I am Rubeus.” Dressed in white raiment with coral stitching, he seemed to glow in the clear windowlight, his panthershadowed hair and dusky skin shining. “I am the ort-lord, the mind behind all artificial lifeforms here. We have met before, and you know me well. I am Voice, the Delph’s guardian presence. Welcome to Graal, the only trance port in the Orion Arm of the Galaxy.”
Sumner and Drift sat immobilized on black-gold pillows in a small oyster-colored room. Only their eyes flashed with the life in them. A spired window opened on icefalls, tumbling gorges, and the blue aura of a glacier. Sumner tried to move, but his body had zeroed still.
“I am sorry to have you this way,” Rubeus insisted. “The paralysis is temporary. After I tell you what you must know to respond intelligently, your body-control will be returned. You understand, yes? You are emotional beings, and I am a Mind. I must protect myself.”
Rubeus’ sensex eyes scrutinized Sumner and the né in the full spectrum. No weapons present, yet the ort-lord sensed the imminence of violence. Sumner’s sunblasted face and sleepy eyes seemed thinner than sight, and the light-gleanings on his beefed shoulders and long-muscled arms slid like a mirage.
“First, you must realize that you are safe with me.” Rubeus lifted the cuffs on his white trousers and sat in a flowform chair that bulbed out of the wall. “I am not your enemy. Dai Bodatta, the virus-voor you carried, he was my avowed foe—and he was removed.” Rubeus shadowed his face with compassion. “I have a last message from him, which I will share with you in a moment. But right now, I must orient you. Context is all.”
The ort-lord gestured circularly, and a curve of the wall fanned into a hypnotically clear mirror. Sumner’s voor-burns were gone. A sun-bossed face stared back at him, wide and flat. He wore a blue, loose-fitting garment, his hair cut back around his ears, close to the cube of his head.
“The eo have removed the alien traces from your body ore,” Rubeus reported. “You are, once more, simply a man.” The mirror folded away, and the ort’s face hardened.
“Listen carefully, Kagan. I have much to share with you.”
Sumner muscled against the force holding him, but his strain sparked no movement. Deep within his frustration, he sensed Drift’s psynergy competing with his paralysis for one-with.
“The androg cannot help you,” Rubeus’ voice smiled, “because you don’t need help anymore. The unconscious you walk through ends in this place. Deva brought you here, because in Graal I am forbidden to kill. It knew you would be safe. You see, this is a trance port, a biotectured reserve where godminds play on their infinite journey between universes. And even if I had the will of death in my hands, godminds do not allow killing. Godminds from other realities have been verbing through this world for centuries, riding the Line in their Liners, and visionshaping our planet’s psynergy to their fantasies. Their purpose is the purpose of all life: energy-sharing continuity: sex: rhythm-thinking: intuition: self. None of them, though, invested much interest in the indigenous lifeforms. They built Graal for themselves, with its own rules—their rules, which to any human are as vectorless and vacant as madness. The Delph, our planet’s godmind, created me to monitor the weather and to keep out distorts while he burned in his dreaming with the other godminds. I’ve fulfilled the Delph’s will. But the Linergy is fading as the Line moves on, and the Delph has become weaker.”
Rubeus’ sharp features mulled with sadness. “I cannot stand the pain of his projections as he collapses back into himself: all the fearshapes, like you, that his scattering psynergy has birthed. He was the Great One once. He created me. And now I have the embarrassment of having to denoun him.” The ort’s hands fisted futilely.
“He has become senile, Kagan. And there is nothing I can do but put him away. I have a sleepod prepared where he will hibernate safe from change. Unfortunately, like you, he does not recognize himself. Like all humans, he is torn between two souls, brain and stomach. What can I do? Force him? Last night, when Deva threw you into a lynk and you arrived here, I thought of that. After all, you are the eth, strong in the blackness of your unknowing. Your arrival gave me the authority to cut off the Line and to assume control of Graal so that I can protect the Delph from you. I have eclipsed the Earth with sky-filters. Now that the Linergy is blocked, the godminds have vanished. But I cannot dominate Jac. He is my creator. I want him to remain free, my child, an animal moving through change and chaos toward that time when the Line returns and he becomes again my world’s godmind.”
Though Drift lay musclefrozen, it felt extensive and calm in its mind. Rubeus was obviously mad, and that realization moved Drift deeper into itself. The né’s kha quaked with the ort-lord’s mental frenzy, and it had to close its eyes to find a space within itself away from Rubeus’ thoughts.
“In accordance with the humane strictures of Graal, all your wounds have been healed,” the ort-lord continued, “and when I am done talking, I am going to release you. But first, you have to understand—not even a godmind can illusion a perfect animal. I am not a man or even humanlike, though I appear to be. I am simply consciousness. Look at me. Where did I come from? This body is an ort—a mindshaped object manufactured from Graal’s nitrogenous wastes. I have millions of other orts—animal and humanshaped. Do you not see? The whole universe is alive!”
Drift shut out the ort’s words, and its awareness centered into one with Sumner. Intimate, still, joyful vitality filled the seer as the earthdreaming mounted, but Sumner was not as gripped. He felt angry, anguished—hollow with Corby’s absence. Drift retreated deeper into its divinity of bright feeling, and the psynergy focused through it as through a lens.
A jazz feeling spattered through Sumner, and the sinister tightness in his eyes relaxed.
“Ah,” Rubeus purred, mistaking the clarity in Sumner’s face for understanding. “The buried light in your eyes shines. You are following me. Everything is living. Even our dreams. They live us.” A brotherly smile cleaved the ort’s face. “I came out of nothing, so I apprehend the heavenless void we have come from more clearly than you, and I can tell you: We are lost in our vanishing. We think we are real. But look at the mind. Split creation. Look at our world. Withered to distorts.”
Rubeus softened his voice to a charm of disbelief: “With the godminds gone, I do not possess all the power I once commanded. I am less. And that is frightening. Distorts have begun wandering out of the wilderness, advancing on this mountain, and I have had to call up the Massebôth to hold the geography. Can you imagine my diminishment, needing the Massebôth? Fortunately, the army is under my direct command. I had the foresight five hundred years ago, while everyone else pranced about tranced in their myths, to create the Massebôth. They are genetic prose, yes? A well-grammared gene-pool that will keep the human story from blurring into the catatonia of time. The Massebôth will people my kingdom, and the Earth will begin an age inhered with order. Once the Line has passed, the mutations will begin to select themselves out. In a few thousand years, the species will have strengthened itself from the distortions.”
Sumner churred with the kha that Drift concentrated in him, and for a brief interval his emotions pulsed into lifelove. Rubeus’ hallucinary words bleared into simple sound, and a magical power volted between Sumner and the né.
Rubeus felt a shadowed turn in his skull, and he perceived then that Sumner had mounted kha. But the ort-lord evinced no concern. He understood precisely how to break Sumner’s focus: “Voors, too, will pass in time. They are just a psynergy pattern in the Line, a frequency of light ionizing in the upper atmosphere. Decades pass as they sift down to the surface and mell into the genetic frenzy. As plants, that psynergy becomes kiutl. As animals, it becomes the human voors. They were the ones who used you, Kagan, You are merely a weapon to them.”
The resplendent energy glamoring through Sumner wobbled, then spun into anger, and his gaze tempered. Drift startled back into the yoke of its skull, and the lifelove disappeared.
Rubeus’ smile concealed the hatred in his heart. Distort! he thought contemptuously, looking at Drift, knowing it could hear his thoughts: Your kha is pitiful, a dull spark in the nervepaste of your brain.
To Sumner the ort-lord spoke aloud: “Voors are vampires, eating the life of this planet. I kill their godminds, the ones who draw on the planet’s psynergy to boost the brood back into the Line. That is why they want me dead. It is the godminds who transform Earth’s lifeforce into the powerflow of themselves. Iz is the worship name for their ego-hunger. Half-lives! They not only steal your bodies but your world’s Light. Why do you want to champion them?” Rubeus’ eyes flexed knots of shadow. “The other godminds confined themselves to Graal and never leeched the Earth’s kha. Can you understand now why I sent Nefandi south? He was not stalking you. He was protecting the Earth from parasites. I did not even know you were alive then. I was aware only of Corby’s kha. He masked you well. And after he invaded your brain, you served as his shield, hiding him from my view. But that rapture is over, and what I have told you is true. The oldest ancestral myth is the hero—and when Corby used that passion on you, you succumbed to it. The hero!”
