Radix, page 47
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Drift took Sumner’s hand, sinewed and warm. Can we get away?
“We have only one seh,” Assia stated, pinching back the cry in her blood. “The other was with Jac.”
Sumner peered closely at Assia, trying to feel whether he still occupied a trance. His veins felt black and caulked, but the spirit he met in her face bolstered him.
Nobu edged closer. “The sky is on fire,” he observed, awed. His eyes burned with a possessed light, and his face shone with terror as he followed the rapid blasts of energy hacking the sky. Deeper, far within the hostility of his fear, Nobu watched, not participating. He felt disembodied, numbed by the horror around him.
Sumner released Drift’s hand and mounted a pebbled winze to see where they were. A childshaped moon sat low on the sky where laser arcs crisscrossed, and the skirting breeze vented a chimney of sounds: toads, insects, and the approaching siren of burning rock...He glimpsed a mirror-eyed fox; then, the pinecove clapped into exploding radiance, and a long-tailed scream sirened louder than hearing.
Sumner scrambled over to the others. Nobu squatted, dazed and feverish. Assia had her seh out and slowly and purposefully moved her fingers over the control lights. Drift cowered at her side. “There’s a lynk three kilometers south of here. My seh won’t lift all of us. We’re going to have to run.”
“What was that?” Sumner asked, voice quavering with the vibrations in his chest.
“An ort fired a particle beam at us,” Assia told him. “The seh—”
Another white burst of energy haloed overhead and a gale of deafness. “Hurry!” she cried. “Rubeus has weapons that can smash a seh-field!”
Sumner lifted Drift onto his shoulder, and they took Nobu by his arms and urged him into a run. The pinecove burned, and by that staggering light they thrashed through ferns to where the land sloped down into chasmal darkness. Opal smoke glowed on the horizon like milky acid. Overhead, stars fell.
***
By the brightness of the firefight, Assia noted the thunder in Sumner’s stare and the terror in Nobu’s. They weren’t going to make it. She understood they would all die. Karma.
Sudden brightness bleached the night, and she stared out upon the whole forest ahead of them moving. Orts—millions of them—walled the woods. They moved as one—hordes of rats, wolves and panthers, ice-eyed and eerily synchronized. If only a handful had energy disruptors, the seh field would collapse in moments.
She hesitated, and Sumner ran past her with Nobu. Didn’t he see? She screamed after him, though hearing had been hewn away under the shrieking sky. Darkness folded in as she dashed up to him and pointed ahead.
Sumner gazed at her wildly, and she thought his mind had gone adrift in his blood. An ax of light split vision. When it jarred back, Sumner pushed her forward, pointing with his face to their right. Then, in the iridescent shadow of the dying world, she saw.
The deva—a rubylight tornado—exploded through the forest. Fiery arcs blazed starhot, burning through the pockets of their sight. They glanced aside, and when they looked back, half the forest was gone. The deva leaned to their left, herding away the army of orts.
Assia led the way over the churned earth. The plain of blasted trees seemed to stretch ahead of them long as time. The tremendous incline of the sky darkened for a moment, deep and serene as the circle of the soul. Then sunfire ensphered everything, and with a furious wind-cry, the deva flared out.
The broken wall of orts, a squirming darkness, began to reassemble. Globes of unearth colors swept with windy motions among the creatures and united them into a sprawling thing. Their squalid howl bleated against the knives of the sky.
Time opened then for Assia. Alone, running hard as she could ahead of Sumner, she moved in a rapture of terror and heightened feeling. She was going to die. After so very long, time once more had become fated. Why run, except that she was running, fast, toward the wildest edge of the universe. A foundry of feeling banged inside her, shaping the irony of her last world, breaking the chains to her old life. Life? The word no longer sounded sacred. A millennium of worshiping life in meditation gardens and thoughtpools amounted to no more than a tumbling leaf. The deva had died—killed by Rubeus. Whole cities destroyed! Up ahead, the plain loped to a far horizon where killing-light wailed its odd music and whirled like the ecstatic angel in an afterlife. What is life? The spiral echo of a dream.
***
Sumner heard Assia’s thoughts. The one-with tangled inside him like the bright threads of a dream. Drift shivered on his back, and Nobu leaned heavily into him with the exhaustion of his run. He knew that if he dropped them all, he could make it to the lynk. He envisioned the location internally: beyond the stab-light of the broken field and over a granite-hooded hill.
The sky lit up with swirling energy. Superlight, he felt Assia thinking. Rubeus is moving the war closer.
Fear went naked at his heart, and it wasn’t possible to go on. The world had transformed to a tabernacle of fire. He would have stopped there, dropping his burden to die tall beneath an open sky, if he hadn’t turned his head and seen what moved behind him. Orts swarmed over the field, devilfaces strained with motion-teeth and eyes glass splinters flashing beneath the spinning night.
Sumner hurried on, lunging alongside Assia before daring to twist another backward glance. The orts advanced as one beast. They slid and curved closer in a deepwater glide that made his blood knock hard as iron in his head.
Assia spun about, the seh in both of her hands, ready to kick all of its power into the orts. Spikes of energy cut across the sky, and above the tide of slavering beasts, raels came into view. A thousand of them circled in from the nearby hills, invisible in the darkness, lizard-frilled, tendriled and bulb-glistening with sporadic blastlight.
The onslaught of orts staggered and broke up beneath the lash of poison-darts the raels flailed. A brute cry whined beneath the fury of sky-echoes, and the runners’ distance from the orts widened.
A rock-mantled hill silhouetted ahead. Vapor-scabbed fire wrung the horizon to crazed colors beyond it. Rubeus closed in. The ground trembled, and they stopped running to stay on their feet. A bellowing corona blasted sight and flung them to the ground.
The air sizzled. Even with their faces in the ripped earth, vision dazed to a flame-shaken halo. Colors winced apart, and with screaming slowness, sight returned.
They sprawled at the foot of the hill. Dazzling sheets of flame crackled above, lighting the blown-away forest with the intensity of the sun. The raels had vanished. Several translucent corpses burned with crawling worm-fires in the field, then disappeared beneath the renewed advance of the orts.
Sumner rolled to his feet, Drift with him. They helped Assia up and turned to Nobu. He sat against a slant rock, face floating in the muddled luminance, enormously serene. Sumner stooped to lift him, and Nobu pushed him away. “Go,” he mouthed against the deafening noise, pointing up the hill and then at the assault of orts.
Assia crouched, waiting for the last moment to drain all the power of her seh into one blast. She glanced across her shoulder and caught the starpoints in Nobu’s eyes—and she knew. The man was One Mind.
Nobu looked away from them. The orts thronged very close, a gigantic heaving of spasming jaws and rabid cries. Individually, they charged wild, void-possessed, flying forward convulsively. Yet as a pack, they muscled an ultimate beast, a seethe of destroying. With evil intelligence, they balked the instant before Assia fired her seh. The roaring energy blew orts into a scattering of sparking bones and whipping entrails. Others tumbled forward, dying hard beneath the frantic attack of still others.
Assia clambered up the hill in a mad sprint. Sumner, beside her, scooped up Drift in one stride, not daring to look back.
***
Nobu sat facing into the wave of orts, timelessly smiling, free of the world and of himself. While he had been sitting, one with Sumner and Assia, terror had visioned in him. He had seen billions of people plummeting into a silence like thunder. Billions! All whoever lived. Horror nullified thought, so that when he had woken here, he had sunk into his deepest self. The looming situation focused within him: He was the situation, vision-bonded at the core of his being.
No future lay ahead, and that reality gave him supernatural strength. The power of the sky sharked in his bones. His flesh crawled tighter with it, and as the power mounted, his awareness widened and shone. He heard Assia’s thought vibrating back through time: What is life? And he knew, of course, because he had been awake and aware for twelve centuries, dancing in the pit of hunger, hungerless. But that knowledge was nothing—a tumbling leaf from the heaventree of his being. He was the tree: his roots in the emptiness, his peak the zero of space.
The ki of the Earth flowed upward, lifting him to his feet with infinite strength and gentleness. The moment burst around him. Demons fell out of the wind—beasts slashing with frenzied rage, eyes electric screams. They couldn’t touch him. The enormous force enveloping his body pressed back, impervious. Alone at the heart, he watched the orts scattering, even the largest ones backlashing from the sudden and intense glorylight that blazed through him.
***
Assia, Sumner, and Drift watched from the top of the hill. The twisting bolt of lightning blazing from around Nobu writhed into the skyfires so intensely they had to squint. Scorpion bursts of white fire whipped at the orts trying to outflank him.
Assia pulled Sumner and Drift away. The lynk waited at the bottom of the slope beneath an apple tree ferned over with tiny blossoms of ivray and darnel. At first, the lynk didn’t respond. The jumplines had shut down, and Assia had to open the lynk’s panel and fingerpunch a signal to Ausbok. They were still waiting for the jump to open when the hill exploded.
The lynk’s field blocked the shock of the blast, and they watched with dumb wonder as a vortex of earth and rock dissolved into light. The lynk activated as the landscape cleared, revealing the stone-vapored crater where Nobu had sat.
***
Sumner, Drift, and Assia stepped into a transparent maze of gold glass. Crystalight corridors and luminous mirrorlines radiated on all sides. They hung suspended beneath a goliath arena of glinting hexagons, most of them kinetic with the movements of people. Sumner gazed around perplexedly at the askew and upside-down figures in surrounding cubicles.
“Open gravity,” Assia explained.
“Yes,” an eo greeted them. “We are in a freefall corridor below Ausbok.” The eo wore purple raiment, and his mask-face displayed tight and dark feeling.
“Nobu—” Sumner began.
“An excellent death,” the eo finished for him. “Rubeus’ particle beam hit him directly. He is pure light now.” He reached into the purple billow of his sleeve and removed a long silver seh. A wall went screen-blank and depthed to a view of the burning underside of night. The blast-pit where Nobu had held off the orts jangled with lunatic colors of prisming superlight.
The depth-image in the screen unfolded to an aerial view of white incandescence cooling to blue heat at the fringes. “Reynii,” the ort announced. Collapsing light patterned to another skyview: a seacoast glaring with the astral burn of hundreds of white-hot fires. “Nanda.”
The screen unshaped as Assia took the eo’s arm. “I’ve seen enough,” she said. “Nothing’s left, is it?”
The eo shook its head, once.
“The Massebôth cities?” Sumner asked, and Drift looked at him with a glint of surprise.
“Rubeus has not touched them, yet. His power, like ours, is limited. He is concentrating on priorities.”
“And Jac?” Assia asked without breathing.
A soothing green glow in the walls and ceiling replaced the screen. “Rubeus is a lot more evolved than we thought. He developed a molecular-pattern lynk for Jac and used it to lift him right out of our hands. But we have knocked out Rubeus’ skyfilters. Since you have arrived, the Linergy has been mounting around Jac Halevy-Cohen. The psyn-echoes are gathering into a tight focus on him. Within minutes—regardless of his body limits—he will become, again, the Delph.”
Assia, who had been sitting silently, eyes closed, startled alert. “No—the Line has passed.”
“The sky is focusing echoes,” the eo told her patiently. “The psynergy is crude though intense.”
“But he’s a man again—not a godmind.”
“Jac’s body is the fulcrum of the change.” The ort held her stare. “He will suffer.”
Sumner leaned forward. “The Delph’s returning?”
“Not the Delph,” the eo answered, manipulating its seh, “but the Delph’s power compressed into Jac’s body. Rubeus does not yet know what transpires—but once he realizes, he will use all his power to dominate Jac and deploy the godmind against us.” The seh’s color motes shifted rapidly and blinked out. The eo looked up with dilated eyes. “Our chances are dwindling quickly. Sumner, you wanted to serve us. Now is the time, eth. We need you for a death mission. There is only a small chance you will succeed. No chance at all you will survive. But this is the shape of our fate. Is it not?”
Drift watched Sumner and Assia closely, feeling the vigor of horror mounting in its brain-muscles. It empathized with their suffering, its telepathy holding it in the sway of a deep power, aware of a primal pattern, the molecular differentiation between woman and man. Aware deeper than molecules. And though it couldn’t possibly visualize this, it felt the underlying shapes that project into the macroworld as distinct genders.
The feminine moves inward, Drift thought. At the Source, you are at Death. They are the same. The interval between is but a dream.
***
Rubeus stood at the brink of a rock pinnacle in his human-ort form. From his vantage, the desert beyond Oxact raised a clatter of long shadows against the lewd, molting colors of the sky. The fight moved off. Something like time swept across the night—clouds, hovers of blackness, wing-balancing over mesas.
[I’m winning.] Rubeus’ heart pulsed, both jubilant and pensive. He had Jac. He thought the eo would sway to his demands. But a dark knowledge rivered just beyond mindreach, too slow and vast to access, like the unknowing that tells itself through our lives.
He stepped back from the edge and moved through light fretting from the burning sky to where Jac crouched. Jac’s head leaned back against a curved, gentle stone, his face fevered, eyes aimless. The sky lapsed green and silver, and Rubeus noticed that the man had entered a trance.
Jac slid deep into the accepting spirit of the Delph’s power: Linergy. All within utter stillness, the waves of psynergy floated around him like the thin heat of a feeling. Rubeus called his name loudly, and Jac’s eyes focused. In the cleft of a moment, his consciousness lifted clear, and he realized how narrow he had been. Why was he letting himself be used? A stratopilot—a warrior—he lurched forward, thinking to strike out and be killed quickly. His bloated movements swung him toward the ort, who pushed him back hard. He fell into the bright revolving smoke of his body.
When his eyes opened, pure void stared out. Linergy tuned its frequencies in him. But Rubeus thought fear had hollowed that empty gaze, living as he did in his imagination. How else could he live? A half-soul, a nimiety of the Delph’s own strength, Rubeus interpreted the lights crawling in Jac’s eyes as sky-reflections, fear caught on the cornea.
“On your feet. Get up.” Rubeus lifted Jac and leaned him back against the stone. Black tattered clouds flew across the sky. Rubeus held Jac’s face in the grip of one hand and spoke his name sharply.
Jac heard his name nowhere near him and not in Rubeus’ voice. He started awake and faced the world burning in petrified colors, clouds swarming like beasts, and Rubeus glass-eyed and fixated as an insect. His hands closed on the ort’s arm, and in that instant, the mounting Linergy broke into awareness. His face seemed to disassemble, and then a howl flared through him so violently Rubeus staggered back.
“NO!” Jac convulsed, a scream muffled by a body. The body retched like lightning and broke into another sleep. Rubeus cautiously approached, stooping over him where he slumped. He lifted Jac’s head and perceived an acid light rippling in the eyeholes, behind, beyond. Still, he did not understand.
He lifted Jac and propped his back against the rock. The sky had begun to breathe on him. Through his sensex eyes, in the ultraviolet, the ort could see the ether light fuzzing and vaporing on the man’s skull. Jac’s breath fell back suddenly into a scream, and Rubeus’ heart broke into a sweat.
Jac knew what was happening now. The Linergy spilled into him, making him feel like the shrunken head of a former life. All at once, and too fast for his flesh to hold, the Delph expanded, exploding his cells, bursting his bones. He had gone rigid and clutched at Rubeus screaming: “Kill me! Kill me!” The power flowed in from everywhere, and his screams weirded into long wails. Abruptly, the rush of clouds closed over the skyfires, and darkness drowned the rock spire. In that blackness, Jac’s cries reverberated, huge and directionless.
Rubeus swung at him, short and stiff. The blow caught Jac at the side of his head and shook into a thunderblow of blinding light. In the glare, Jac’s face masked a terror of something beyond his life. Fleshfire streaked greasy-blue over his face, dripping off in fiery clots.
The pain sundered him. In the golden shadow of his glow, Jac watched Rubeus cowering between two bobs of rock. The pain unfolded to a movement of mirrors, tricking through all the hidden parts of him.
Don’t be afraid. You know what lies behind this hurt. Hold this thought until it shines: In the beginning was the agony.
Teeth blurred, flesh sparked, and he cried out. A tremendous vertical radiance blazed through him, and shape gave way. Rubeus whimpered to behold the change. Jac’s face burned like a flesh-rag, flapping into the sky and leaving his body a fireblown sack. Three-dimensional colors limbed out and swayed, caught up in unheard music, and the last wisps of flesh vapored into nothing as a fury of brilliance blazoned to the clouds.
