Radix, page 48
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Rubeus scuttled for the dark edge of the rock tower, hoping with all the might of his body to slide off into the darkness unseen and get back to Oxact. Behind him, where Jac had been, spirochete sparks luminesced into a white glare upfloating. A piece of the sun hung in the fireflow like an all-seeing eye. The night of the desert unfurled around its searing rays. As Rubeus activated his seh and leaped into the dark air, one of the beams transfixed him. He hung motionless, wholly possessed, his amazed eyes lucent with fear.
Jac peaked into godmind. The knowing lasted less than a second. In that time, he surveyed the olamic reaches of his being. And it didn’t matter at all that Rubeus had betrayed him or that death loomed. Patterns of fire circled him—the stars: emblem of all directions, the intersection of never and always. In starpatterns, he witnessed the origin: light, the ardor and selflessness of It, the chthonic journey, descanting into geometry, echoing across the shell of time as language: mesons talking atoms into being, molecular communities communicating, no end to It, only addition, time, the futureless deception, until the final addition, the mindfire of consciousness that burns through the drug of dreams and anneals the pain of living with the living pain.
Death invited him, a dissolving above these heat-cracked rocks into desert elementals: iron oxides, salts, and darkness. But the power of will no longer belonged to him. Slow flow fire columning into stormclouds brightened. Control slowly returned to Rubeus as Jac’s psynergy plateaued. The power sheathing the Delph’s will persisted with immense force but no longer his own. He dangled in the lustrous night, waiting like the rocks, the tug of stars moving cleanly through him.
Idea and Action inverted. Will vanished for the Delph, and God once more became real. He prayed. He prayed that Rubeus not use him and that the power be taken from him and that he be uncreated. And by his fear he realized that he was already far less than what he had been an instant before. Origin again hid from him.
He couldn’t move. Rubeus expanded as a music in him, chords of thoughts jangling by. The Delph refused to focus on them. The thoughts, dark and evilly spindled, forced him to stare outward at the blunted shoals of stone against the sky’s steep colors and at the ort poised in midair, pins of terror still in his eyes, though his awareness had centered back to Oxact. Inward, Jac settled into Voice: [The more you know, the less conscious you can be].
***
This is the situation, the eo-ort spoke, or thought, and Sumner understood everything. Knowledge, immediately transparent, informed everything he looked at—his perceptions superimposed by the exact design of his understanding.
Drift and Sumner occupied a greencrystal dais in one of Ausbok’s lynk hangars. Understanding huge as sea rhythms rolled through the long chamber. Whatever Sumner experienced, he comprehended. This knowledge projected from the rainbow smoke swirling in the mirrorshape above them. Names, processes, concepts, gelled in Sumner’s mind: Patterns—all patterns, widening and narrowing through each other, interweavings bigger than mathematics. Nothing could be known, only selected out; all reality existed simply as periphery, truth merely method. The patterns slowly resolved in Sumner’s eyes to symmetries and imperturbables, with no time to grasp them.
Eo in solar-colored vestments—the in-moiety, the think-caste, the dreamers and administrators—suited him in a black bodyshield. The material, black fabric flexible and cool as silk yet opaque to radiation, spun out of transparent wands and contoured to the body without zippers or clasps.
Drift, too, got fitted with armor. Eo circuited its hairless chest with respirator tubules.
Refracting light fanned their faces, and slender, tufted blue sparks traced their features, calipering them for the helmets and visors to come. Sumner gazed up without thoughts at the black window ovals behind which eo of both moieties sullenly observed, gauging, deep-praying.
He understood. Behind his eyes, he envisioned Oxact, Rubeus’ white mountain cored with psynergy crystals. He and Drift would lynk to the foothills, and then a superlight transport—the only superlight power the eo controlled—would take them up the mountain to the summit. There, a godmind pavilion led into the mountain’s core, long into Rubeus’ heart.
Blue-black material butterflied from the eo’s wands and scalloped around their heads, closing into skullformed helmets. In a moment, they would step through the lynk and superlight as high up Rubeus’ mountain as the eo had psynergy to propel them. They wouldn’t travel far. In the awesome repose of Sumner’s new knowledge, he comprehended the eo’s limits. Within minutes, their psynergy would exhaust itself, and the only defense, the timeslips surrounding Ausbok, would collapse.
Transparent visors with the brilliant surfacing of diamonds snapped over his and Drift’s faces. Vision looked needlepointed, underbuilt with clear, strong light. The lynk arc awaited, a flocculation of motion-sparks opening a slim radiance beneath the white ramps, curved easements and black oval windows.
The eo installed a weapon in his right grip: a particle-beam pistol. The red glitters of its lens glided in the air with the fine movements of his muscles.
On his left slung a silver-gold sword in an open scabbard—Nefandi’s field-sword. He thought/felt: The sword served less as a weapon than token of luck.
He looked up at the rainbow vapors in the mirrordiscs and realized how much of what was going to happen would be chance: everything. Superlight transport metaordered spacetime. Not even the in-moiety knew where on the mountain he and Drift would materialize. The only hope they had, which the others who had died trying this did not, lay in his strength as eth. Until now, that strength had just been words and luck to Sumner. Was it any more? The eo’s mirrors couldn’t tell him. He was a man in the right conjunction with the sense of the galaxies—right from moment to moment. But in-between moments—in the interstices outside of light, faster than time—what would happen to him?
Possibilities began interweaving their tiny images: the black glide of swarming beasts, a mountainside collapsing like a dream, the sky ripping into immense strokes of lightning, with himself sprawled on a ledge higher than the moon, diamond visor blood-shattered, sticky with the sharded mess of his lifeless face.
A sick feeling closed around the vision. He peered down at the constellations of red light in the lens of his weapon. I’ve been born into this, he reminded himself, and the mental image of his cracked face and centerless stare flittered into patterns of fire.
He faced Drift’s black-garbed form and asked: You won’t stay here?
Drift’s voice shivered in his ears: If you do.
With a cold, new heart, he took Drift’s arm, and they stepped into the lynk.
***
Space splashed red and directionless. Drift and Sumner sank into darkness riddled with luminosity before the sehs built into their armor boosted them into the sky. Gazing down to where they had been, they faced a molten lava pool churning with the afterprisming of superlight.
Drift telepathically bonded to Sumner through their helmets. In the night sky, only the flowing light of the liquid rock pools illuminated them. Drift, muddled by the abruptness of the lynk, told Sumner to land at the edge of a high meadow so that they could orient themselves.
Sumner knew how to control his seh and the weapon in his grip, but the whole-knowledge that had been his in Ausbok had dispersed. He put down on a rockfold that overlooked the burning lower slopes. Far across the sky, the moon rose big as a jar.
We made it! Drift blurted with amazement, dropping beside Sumner. Its black carapace invisible in the night, the slant of its visor a dark reflection of Sumner’s crystal mask, it leaned closer, and when their helmets touched, Sumner shared Drift’s telepathic link with the eo: The superlight had chanced them high on the mountain, far from wherever Rubeus had focused his power. Drift pointed to the summit, a jagged snowcrest billowing with ethereal skyfires. Before they could lift into their flight, the darkness around them broke into movement.
Hulks of shape reared against the sky’s star-scratches, and beast-screams blinded hearing.
Sumner’s heart staggered, remembering his horror-vision of flying beasts: skre, the eo called them. He spotted them by the flash of Drift’s rifle—scale-brocaded giants with fire-echo eyes and gaping maws, rushing out of the surrounding caves. Faces a brattle of shale, wart-kinked around craggy eyepits, and with the electrical wetness of tiny eyes the hulks hurtled toward him, and he cut down one with a blast to its grizzled head.
Drift dropped two. The hellshapes loomed out of the mountain too fast, bodies nimbused with ghostly fire.
Sumner and Drift lifted into the sky, and as the skre bounded after them, their nimble bulks leaping up into the night, Drift twisted its rifle into overcharge and dropped it among them. The white blast seared the night to day. The skre that had flown after them fell flameflapping into the seethe of maniacal brightness.
Banging in the thundershock, Sumner and Drift strained for altitude. Below them, the mountainside swayed with color waves, zeroing with refulgence. As they watched, the burning meadow flowed away like sloughed skin. Jerks of hot light spewed into the sky, splattering against the strength of their fields.
They rose higher, and the sky convulsed with lightning. All the cells in their bodies tightened with the burst of electrical power that seized them. Communication frazzled. Drift angled for the mountain’s summit, and Sumner falconed after it, the night long-jawed with an enormous hammering current. Twisted rays of energy cracked violently against their fields, shuddering their entrails. Muscles locked, breathing impossible, vision lurching into hearing, they felt themselves going—going outward.
Silence burst around them. Sight drew itself back into their eyes, and they saw the mountain peak turning below them. We’re inside the lynk’s field! Drift cried jubilantly. Among frost-rocks and snowsheets, a skein of starglass parabolically faceted a crater bowl. Drift led the way through a curved port in the crystal panoply. As they entered, the pavilion lit up, and they encountered the clarity of its emptiness. Blue-veined stonemetal molded a vacant, slightly scooped ellipsoid. At its center, a lynk arc glowed blue-white from the inside like a cloud.
Drift snapped open its visor and then helped Sumner with his. You made it, the né triumphed.
“We made it together.”
Drift shook its head no. You’re the eth. You got us here—now I’ll do the rest. He walked up to the lynk, and its glow warbled.
“We’re not done yet,” Sumner said.
You are—if you can get back. Your gun is intact, though your field is weak. But Rubeus isn’t expecting anyone to go down the mountain.
“Go down? What are you talking about? We have a mountain to destroy.”
I do. It only takes one now that we’re inside Rubeus’ defenses. You’ve done your part. If you can get back to the lynk, you’ll be safe. No reason for us both to die.
Sumner took Drift by the shoulder. “You don’t understand me, né. I am ready to die. I have been ready all my life. You go back if you want.”
Drift stared into Sumner, and its eyes shone, gentle as the wind. Only my suit is geared to lynk with Oxact’s interior. While we were being suited up and you were daydreaming about pattern and knowledge, I telepathically arranged to have the meson-bomb inbuilt into my ceinture. You can’t follow me. I don’t want us both to die. He pulled away from Sumner’s grip and stood in the lynk’s portal. Don’t throw yourself away, Sumner. Life is always unrecognized until we are willing to lose it. Get back to the lynk.
“Drift—no!” Sumner’s cry knocked against the lynk’s field. “Don’t go without me.”
The né waved in the open space of the glowing arc and disappeared. Sumner banged his fists against the lynk, but the color had gone out of the arc and he stood alone in the vacancy of the pavilion.
***
The first meditation involved getting there. Assia lynked into the desert and used a seh to fly to where the Delph expanded. She kept her mind free of the eo warnings. She knew what she had to do. As fast as the seh would loft her, she crossed the desert toward where the sky raged, a hysteria of glycerin colors, green and silver-orange backed by the blackness of the world.
The second meditation concerned facing It. She glided into the tremulous blaze of freak spectra and descended among the long-toothed boulders. She passed a fear-masked ort sprawled motionless in the midnight. Fear spun in her, and she kept it low in her body, not letting it blind her.
She dropped to her feet in the pulsing core of divined scintilla and immediately got hoisted upward by a binding, lung-squeezing power. Pain opened into amethyst hellflowers, a magic of terror, void-bellowing, and dancing fire shaping demonically into Rubeus’ laughter.
The third meditation centered on staying calm. She looked into the pockmarks of rust on the nearest boulder and focused—focused inward, contemplating how deep-space begins right here at the fringe of our deepest hurt, distanced only by the slant of our breathing and the current of our pain.
The plasm of atomized colors whirled looser, and the underwebbing of squeezing pressure fell away. She settled back to the ground, her legs bandy and mind a darkening shadow. She breathed deeply, and the air smelled of fired clay. Outbounding radiance boomeranged on her and slammed her flat to the rocks. Breathing long, kneading the muscles loose in her belly, she stared up at jasper spires reticulated in phasing colors like bacteria, and she eased the fear out of herself. As she did so, Rubeus’ crushing strength dimmed, and she lay watching the moon breathe.
The fourth meditation drew power. She focused into her bones, feeling how the meat of her body hung in the absolute the pull of gravity. The stillness of the plumb night found her lifespark, a magisterial energy more named and nameless than the moon. Slowly, she augmented the spark with the light of her mind: a clear, steady brilliance from which all color fell away. Centuries of still-sitting and in-looking in the tradition of her ancestors had given her the power. And in the mind, like attracts like. She glanced across time and beheld, or mind-wrought, the lifetimes of her always-self, the endless shapes going back to nothing. Fear-drowsing vigor mounted. Her body quaked to a vibrating stillness, and the rock spire became a shrine.
The fifth meditation invited possession. She opened her body to Rubeus, and for one terrible, asphyxiating moment, her being occluded. Showered fire whirled about her, and her muscles groaned with another life. Her breath chanted words not her own: “Ask the wanderer who souls the road darkness—” Rubeus ticked in her brain, smaller than sound. Rubeus ticked.
The sixth meditation released spirit. She concentrated deeper than her possession. She looked hard into the emptiness of her mind where reality and appearance flowed together, and a force perpetual as light amazed her. Then, as if no human had ever lived, she filled her body with the might of her being. The unearthly tinctures of the Delph’s radiance closed in, sphering to blue heat. Stars cracked in the sudden blackness overhead. She stood, her body strong as a body of water, all the night shining in it.
“I know you are spirit.” Rubeus’ voice shocked the air. “Let me go now. Let me be!”
Hearing passed around her like the mesa silence. Rubeus had become her jinn now. And she held spirit, moment-carved, riding the air and opening with the wind. Centuries of diligent training had given her this intensity, this strength of complete surrender. The Delph had given her those centuries, had helped her to see through her fear, and had taught her in his way how to be spirit, full of emptiness, moving with the stillness. Now he moved with her, the truant fans of smeared light closing in, focusing to one ball of heatless fire, blue as the mind.
“Assia!” Jac stood before her, outlined in green placental light. He reached out, and when he touched her, the glow filmed away. They embraced and dropped to their knees, thoughts passing between them unspoken and deeply felt.
The seventh meditation found body. The godmind that Assia had reached for pressed against her in her embrace. Jac appeared different: his eyes green instead of brown, face sharply hewn, jaw square. He had shaped himself as he had always seen himself. They laughed. Only a few minutes had passed; the list of the red moon had not changed.
“We’re free,” Assia sobbed, holding his robed body close. “Rubeus is gone.”
“Not gone!” The voice boomed like a pounding of rocks. Rubeus’ ort body rose at the mesa-edge, all emotion kicked loose from his face. “You can fight me in kha, Assia—but not physically.”
Jac lifted Assia to her feet and stood in front of her, forcing the power welling within him out. Concentric shells of color expanded around Rubeus, yet he stood arrogant and irrefrangible as a rock.
“You cannot stop me, Jac. You are me.” The impassive mask of arrowhead features blazed with an inner brimming of light. I am the shape of Voice, it thought into them. Whatever power you throw at me becomes me.
The ort’s eyes flared to a death-zeal, and he leaped at them. Assia pulled herself and Jac into the sky with her seh. “Don’t try to stop him,” she cried. “Don’t even look at him.”
Rubeus lifted into the air after them, but Assia had already swung them far out over the desert. The eighth meditation sought escape. The vast night offered the emptiness inside their fulfillment. Jac clung to her, the broad surfaces of the world spinning below. “We’re going to make it,” she whispered to him. “We’re going to be free.”
Behind them, a green spark shivered like an evil star in the night. Rubeus pursued. Ahead, through the hole of their dreams, the curve of the earth led down to other landscapes. Somewhere they would stop and strengthen the godmind. The power belonged to them, even though it focused through Rubeus. The Delph had completed her life—now she would open his. No end to the wonders, to the beauty they could lift out of their new awareness. The ninth meditation would be love.
***
[Mind is relationship—not action.
[Spirit is action.
[Body is the ocean.
[We go back to nothing.
[I have forgotten about you, Watcher. Actually, I stopped believing in you. At the worst of it, when the Delph returned unexpectedly, I lost all faith. I thought I had been destroyed. The né and the eth, like a virus, have penetrated my interior. But the Delph’s power has narrowed back to my partial control. Let the virus destroy Oxact.
