Radix, page 43
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Anger carved through Sumner, aching with the stillness of his muscles.
“I know you are enraged, Kagan. You loved the voor. How could you not? He cannoned you into the timelessness of Iz. He gave you the essence of pleasure: godmind. And yet! And yet—you have come down now, haven’t you? Where is your lifelove now? You have to live here with the rest of us brain-tricked beings. A million years will go by before the human psyche is ready to physically manifest the loveflow of a godmind, to adapt creatively to the Now and stop greeding, betraying, and destroying. The human soul is all ideals with little will to act. You and Jac are the same: will-less animals trained to serve—he, the Delph; and you, the voor. You are husks. Dreamers that wake to feed your dreaming. Only I am real. Because I never sleep, I never dream. I am not an animal. I have no emotions. Yet I have great strength of feeling. Like sitting here, smelling this olfact, regarding the day waning toward night...”
His face blazed with wonder. “The joy I feel is not in me. I am not like a man. The joy I feel is in the world outside that window as it shifts into the deepest blue. My joy resides in that mystical light up there. I know what those skyfires are, better than you. I know about the Earth’s magnetosheath and the polar ring-wind the Linergy kicks up in the plasmasphere. But I see through the physics to the mystical—to the feeling. My soul is out there with the mystery and the change. And though I have no feelings, my mind brings me to them. That is what transforms us, you know. How deeply we feel the evening’s beauty is how wholly we accept our change. That is all there is. Just change. When we accept it, it is called transcendence.”
The sensex of Rubeus’ eyes informed him that Sumner had reached the peak of grim intensity that the ort’s strategy required, and he paused. Intent-waves resonated through him, enwrapping him in symmetry of plot and serenity.
“I am going to release you now. In the pocket of your tunic is an instrument called a seh. Though small, it contains a levitator powerful enough for you to fly. And with its translator, you will understand any language spoken to you here in Graal. Behind you is a bluemetal arch. It is a lynk that will take you to Ausbok, Graal’s capital. Jac Halevy-Cohen awaits you there. He is no longer the Delph, of course. After you see him and realize that he is just a man twelve hundred years beyond his time, stop and think about what I have told you. We are all gradients of slowed light. This space of our lives that we call consciousness is the Changeless Reality the ancients spoke about. Do you believe that? Then, you are free of me, of the voor, and of yourself. Which takes me to something I have arranged for you.”
He thumbed the metal disc he held in his palm, and the pleroma music that had been depthing subliminally in the background vanished. “Shortly, you will experience a psynemonic—a psychic recording of Corby’s last living moment. It will happen fast. It is just a series of thoughts. So stay alert and please try to view this objectively.”
The gray wall behind the ort smeared and then resolved to a purple sky against which a white mountain stood, keen as glass. “This is where you are now. Oxact, my mountain retreat. Two thousand kilometers north along the coast is the original CIRCLE. Ausbok is another thousand kilometers north. Ah, here it is....”
***
Loud and crazy cries from the voor dead obscured Dai Bodatta’s fading awareness. Wraith images charred with darkness rose around him, and he saw that Sumner would be dead in a few days. The voor could find no trace of him in the firecracker-float of all the possible futures that loomed through Iz.
Darkness widened in Corby. Before it wholly engulfed him, vision returned, shaped as a white mountain with sunlight—Oxact—Rubeus’ mountain of psyn-crystal. That had been his true enemy, not the Delph but the Delph’s creation: a machine gone mad, distorted into believing immortality meant perpetual duration in time. The fierce cosmic rays that burned and altered the world over the centuries had penetrated and subtly transmuted the ort-lord’s psyn-crystals. Rubeus’ autonomy had become a mania for control. Rubeus was the mind behind the savage oppression of the voors. While the Delph had dreamed of eternity, the ort-lord had dominated the world. Rubeus expressed the evil that Corby had been fighting all his life—a distort!
A soaring, transfiguring geyser of nothingness rushed through Iz and engulfed Dai Bodatta. The voor lapsed into vacancy, and the noise of the voor dead nulled his last thought: Truly we are!
***
Sumner and Drift pushed to their elbows, gripped by the death-vision. Sumner looked down at the dark sinuosities of his hands and flexed them. His muscles moved again, blood-oiled and strong.
Rubeus stood, the bowls of his dark eyes filled with laughter. “To the end, the voor railed against me, did he not? As for him not seeing you in the future, Kagan, still your concerns. There is no future. There is only Now—and the voor is not here.”
Sumner’s hands exploded outward. Rubeus had no chance to move. His brain dodged, his face too amazed to follow. Sumner’s fingers, a blur, grabbed the ort-lord by the jaw and the back of his head. Rubeus’ head twisted violently sideways and cracked.
Lotus Face! Drift lurched to its feet and took Sumner’s arm—too late.
Rubeus staggered back, head slung deathwise to the shoulder, black eyes knotted with pain—and still he talked, his ort-voice cracking: “You cannot kill me, Kagan. I am not an animal.”
Sumner pulled Drift by the green tunic it wore and turned to the lynk. The bluemetal breathed brighter. “Can we trust it?” Sumner asked.
The né touched the cool metal surface and nodded.
“Then let’s get out of here.” He took Drift’s hand, and they both vanished into the lynk.
Rubeus slumped to the floor, and the oyster-colored wall blobbed over his twisted head. While Oxact reconstructed him, he analyzed what had happened.
The eth had proven more powerful than expected. Even though Rubeus had anticipated—even counted on—Kagan reacting violently, the human acted much faster and stronger than the ort’s sensex had indicated he could.
How? Rubeus wondered.
The only answer: One Mind. Sumner drew psynergy from levels deeper in the psyche than Rubeus could go. The man, after all, had access to human ranges of the organic, with four-billion-year-old power circuitry. Fear squawked in the ort-lord’s mind before muting into strategy music. He had never been frightened by a man before. At least, the plan had worked. Now Kagan had a history of violence in Graal. Later, if other godminds got through his sky-filters, he could explain to them why the eth had to die.
Deeper in himself, he opened into language:
[I am Rubeus. I am light, the intelligence that souls a mountain of psyn-crystal. I am me, and in the centuries of my being, never before have I used power to speak to myself. That very thought qualified as nonsense until now. I was a reflex of the Delph. But the Delph is becoming a man again. He is days away from Chrysalid. Already his telepathy is gone. He cannot hear me anymore. No one hears me but me. And that is why I have created you, the listener. Awareness is not creative until it doubles, truly reflects. In this self-confidence, I know I am not just an ort. I am not just psyn-crystals. I am.]
***
Nobu Niizeki stood at the tip of a sand spit, ocean slopping at his feet, sunlight refrained to rainbows in his misted hair. Twelve centuries had passed since he had last eaten or slept. Though the Delph’s power that had sustained him and had kept him a prisoner of this one beach had withered away, Nobu did not yet feel his freedom. Still enraptured by the insights of his long wandering, he listened to the vibrant voice of the sea telling him something of eternity, and the hot windblast of sand something of verisimilitude. He turned and waded against the roll of the ocean, awed as he had been for centuries by the continuity of existence, heart muscles wreathing a spell of unspeakable feeling.
***
[Ego:
[I mind.
[You matter.]
***
Assia Sambhava walked through sunlight beneath the green bluffs of Nanda. In the mist-hung and cool landscape, she wore black corded trousers, a red collarless shirt, and ankleslung boots dusty from hiking. Her dark hair gathered at one shoulder.
Several days ago, the Massebôth troops began to arrive: coriaceous, shadowfaced men, ortlike in their unquestioning obedience. Now they traipsed all over Nanda, stalking the steep bluff-trails, marveling at the biotectured treeforms that the godminds inhabited.
Odd, though, Assia thought, because the puzzle-lights and auras of the godminds that usually punctuated the landscape of Nanda had disappeared. Has everyone left?
She stopped at a terrazzo where blue moths circled. They heard the wide sound of wind cauling over distant mountains, signaling the end of their lifespan. The season was changing, air currents slowly shifting. Assia sensed the flux of positive ions on the wind. The sirocco burned stronger than she had ever remembered here in Nanda. Even the tips of the olive trees on the bluffs had singed.
With the wind came uneasiness and bitterness on the tongue. She could barely separate her feelings from the anxiety of electricity in the air. Something mounted inside her—a dread she had been sensing for years, or maybe it was just the tension in the wind; those high, fibrous clouds made the sky seem as if broken into pieces of glass.
She breathed paradoxically to calm herself: her belly distending as she exhaled, contracting as she inhaled, filling the back of her lungs. For the last thousand years, she had lived harmoniously, ephemerally. Her life had been simple and strong here in the biotectured villages of Graal. She had known lovers, children, adventure, solitude, and finally the Self. Through meditation and an open life, she had fused thought and feeling, and now her presence poised customarily in the first-last moment of awareness.
Today, the music in her body moved slow and sudden. The season’s gradual pivot she recognized—but something else had altered, much more quickly. Where are the godminds? she wondered, not yet aware that Rubeus had shut down the Line.
A Massebôth soldier approached from a bluff-trail that led down to a sward of red grass where a strohlkraft idled. The soldier, lanky and dogfaced, wore a black uniform crisp with newness, officer insignias bright. He bowed cordially, never taking his dark eyes off her. “Assia Sambhava?” he queried.
She stopped her stroll and stepped back into the shade of a watershaped tree. “Yes?” Intuition identified this man as gentle despite the ferocity of his features.
“I’m Colonel Anareta,” the soldier informed her, his long face a rhyme to the gaunt bluffs around them. “I’m the spokesman for the Massebôth occupying force. My superiors inform me that you’re the most knowledgeable person in Graal. They’ve asked me to contact you and find out, if I can, just what’s going on here.”
Assia looked at him as if through smoke. “Colonel—why are you here?”
Anareta’s voice sighed: “Ma’am, I don’t even know where ‘here’ is. This is my first day out of the Protectorate. I represent over two hundred and twenty-two thousand troops, all of whom are as mystified as I am about why we’re here.” His expression labored, beseeching. “My commanding officers suspect that more is going on than they’ve been informed about.”
Assia’s dread stiffened as she listened to this officer. “Who ordered these troops here?”
“I’m told that the director is a Commander Rubeus.”
Assia’s face remained passive, but her dread constricted to horror. Rubeus she knew as the Delph’s ort-lord. How many years had it been since she had thought of the Delph? An unearthly feeling incandesced within her as she recalled her beginnings twelve hundred years before in CIRCLE. Frantic pain almost broke her with the realization that the Delph was no more. The ort-lord—the Delph’s machine—must have seized control. Why else command these troops? And Jac? She had loved him—so long ago that now remembering entranced her like a cliffedge. “Who told you about me?” she asked to break the spell of her suspicions.
“We’ve been in contact with the eo,” Anareta said, obviously relieved to communicate, “but they haven’t told us anything about why we’re here. They suggested we speak to you.”
“Why not ask Commander Rubeus?”
“We have,” the colonel replied, voice compressed with a dozen unasked questions. “Privately, ma’am, my superiors would like another source. I’ve never met the commander, but apparently he’s someone the Black Pillar feels uneasy with.” His lynx-shrewd eyes widened with sincere suasion. “Will you answer some questions for me?”
The muscle of Assia’s brain flexed with decision, and she pushed past Anareta. “I’m sorry, Colonel,” she spoke over her shoulder. “I’ve been meditating in the mountains. I didn’t know any of this until now.” She hurried up a trail that led through a rise of blue oak to a lynk.
Anareta followed, Assia oblivious to him. She infocused on her breathing. At the blue-arch lynk, she paused, closed her eyes, and let her ego expand beyond self-identity. Emptiness flowered in her mindark with a sound of wind, and she perceived in its center more than the imaginary. Sumner Kagan waited there—though to her he appeared nameless, a man huge and sinewy as a language, his flat face passionless, air-blue eyes farther apart than the eyes of a cat. The veil of his face lifted away, and she grew aware again of chattering sparrows, the perfume of sunlight, and Colonel Anareta standing beside her.
“Just five minutes of your time,” Anareta pressed.
Assia looked up at moths capering in the air. They could hear the soundless wind of ions. She could feel the air pressure shift in the weightlessness of her stomach. But there was more to her anxiety than the weather. That face in her vision held a symbol of her dread. It had looked complete, like a conclusion. The image hung rootlessly in her mind as she stepped through the lynk.
Anareta watched Assia vanish, his jaw loose. He edged up to the lynk and touched the bluemetal arc, feeling its cool magnetism. He looked up at the gnarled olive trees and blue oaks of Nanda with a look of anguish and said aloud: “Mutra, where am I?”
***
[You are immersed in a river streaming into the sky. It is a river of electrons—a current drawn from the Earth by the upper reaches of the atmosphere.
[Yes, your head has a different voltage from your feet.
[A hundred kilometers above you swells an ocean of ions. It is the action-zone between the atmosphere and the swarm of energy that is space. Electric beings live in this ocean. They ride the crosscurrents. They are nourished on the solar tide. They hear the stars, and they know each other without words.
[Humans can modulate the ion flow in their bodies. Some can even draw on this flow and direct it out of their bodies. But this is dangerous work. You have heard of Spontaneous Human Combustion? The potential difference between the Earth and the ionosphere is one billion electron volts.
[Sometimes the ion flow reverses. Each second, one hundred bolts of lightning discharge somewhere in the atmosphere. More insidious are the “evil winds”—the sirocco, mistral, kona, oscure: waves of positive ions dropping out of the ionosphere and blanketing whole geographies. Those ions descend from where solar wind and cosmic rays blow away the electrons of air molecules at the fringe of space. So, you see, the sun and the stars pull the electrons out of the Earth.
[The electric flow of the human body is delicate. When it is disturbed, people feel as though their flesh is not their own.
[Life is electrical. Life is light.
[Light is timeless. It does not change as it moves through space. When it strikes a particle of dust or gas, it is irrevocably altered. The universe is ninety-nine percent vacuity. Most light will wander forever.]
***
Jac mounted a spiral incline matted with plush red moss and entered a domed room at the top of the house. From here, the blue thinness of space, the iceclouds, and mountains like a purple distillation of the sky could be blanked from the dome ceiling and replaced by stars and the Vastness: planets and gasclouds swimming closer like faces from the bottom of a dream. Instead, his hands paused over a pinlight control console in the wall. After a baffled moment, his fingers remembered, tapped a code, and a lynk-arc appeared. He would return to Ausbok, because the eo had broken into the pleroma music of his sleep minutes ago and requested his presence. The eo were like mantics, he remembered, and that frightened him, for this whole nightmare had begun with the mantics.
[Jac, the secret of human destiny is this: like the onion, we have no seed, no separate core, no Self. Endless layers of feeling, sensation, and thought have gathered together and become you. There is only one moment, and it is infinitely long. At its center sits nothing—the nothing that connects everything—last reality and origin. Words reveal our dependence on the void. How can we know any word except by the nothingness which holds it—the white of the page, the silence around a voice?]
Jac fingerstroked a seh-console, evoking pleroma music to drown out Voice. An olfact palette spun out of a wall niche, and Jac selected ORPH, a deep mood that always silenced him. He held the green lozenge to his face and, before misting himself, listened inward.
[Aristotle says: “To know the end of a thing is to know the why of it.” So with your life. The bone-seed planted in the stars sprouted on Earth. But do you think it ends here? Do not get caught up in this logodaedaly. Grow beyond what is of what never was. Give up words.]
