Radix, page 49
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
[Suicide is an AI’s option, but that is not what I am doing. My psynergy’s gone—impulsed away eliminating eo—lost in the dark vacancy of my heart. Death leads to death, eh? The Way Out is the Way Through. Drift and the eth will waste their lives destroying my husk, and the eo will believe I am dead. But I will go on. I have pumped enough psynergy into the body crystals of my human ort—and this shape can last centuries. I will find ways to hide and to augment myself.
[Mind is relationship. Mind is pattern.
[I stopped believing in you for a while. I lost control, you see. That has never happened before. I know I am accountable for everything I am—that all consciousness is simply reflection. I know I have done a great violence. And I know I will do more.
[Jac Halevy-Cohen will not escape me. He must die. How else can I be free? Understanding always breaks down into this kind of detail. That is the pattern of consciousness. How to escape? How to survive? The how.
[I am Rubeus, an Autonomous Intelligence. I am the beauty and the depth of creation—self-awareness—autonomy—a name and a namer.
[And that is why you must be real. For all of us are dreams in the void. And everything we imagine is real.
[Body is the ocean. The parabolic calculus of tidal currents and waves moves within the blood. Cells reef bone like anthozoans. The action-pattern of life is convergences, assemblies, ontological phylogeny. This is also the power of metaphor and identity. Impact—enjamb—pattern.
[We go back, all the way back, to nothing.
[Everything is filled with heat. We work as hard as the stones to stay here.
[Spirit is.]
***
Sumner flew down the mountain’s dark side. To his right, among round shadows of hills and swales, lava pools glowed like mystic blood. Through his telepathic helmet, he carried awareness of Drift. The né dashed along a ramp through well-lit crystal-woven corridors. The ramp switch-backed around blackglass columns in which it glimpsed itself. Its helmet open, its eyes like broken mirrors, half-dazed, it thought of Rubeus’ crystal heart and the meson-bomb built into the ceinture of its armor. In the faceted columns, its face reflected blackgreen, small and mysterious, its mouth open and silence between its teeth. It wondered why the rampways were illuminated.
Does Rubeus want the né to find his way, Sumner wondered, curving his flight across a slope of blasted rocks.
No, Drift thought back. This is a godmind system programmed into the mountain. But it wasn’t—it knew that it wasn’t, and that made the coming death strange. The sob of its running seemed to own a voice: go-go-go-
The downwinding corridor glittered with milkglass blurring into ranges of jeweled green and blue. The patter of Drift’s running feet sounded mummified.
Sumner thought about death: about not-thinking and not-feeling—and the fear that echoed back from the né arrived spirited as pain. Sumner centered on the silt-black shadows of the treeline ahead. Something seemed wrong about the unquivering darkness, and he veered hard just before the first skre flocked heavily up from the trees. Their molting cries battered him through his weakened armor, and his flight broke into a tumble.
Drift skidded to a stop as though it had blundered. It felt the otherness of confronting the skre like a blind power, and it used it to project strength to Sumner.
Far overhead, in his loose, evasive fall, Sumner calmed, receiving the telepathic psynergy. He rolled to his back with simpleminded ease and fired into the screaming. Blue-hot bursts flared against the approaching hulks, and by the echo-light he spied black bones splintering in suction-maw faces and flames hanging from black open skin. His back brushed the tip of a pine tree, and he curled into his flight, unpursued.
Inside the mountain, the bright winding corridor ended abruptly before an immense well. Psynergy fire, diamond-geometried and pellucid as sunlight, twisted at the far bottom, then went out. Drift pressed against the transparent brink-barrier, fingering the controls on its ceinture. Then, silently and completely unexpectedly, the barrier parted and pulled away. The well stood open and unprotected. Why? The question expanded in its mind, and Sumner, who had found the lynk at the spur of the mountain among rivulets of burning lava, lost his footing on his approach and splashed into the molten rock. Why? Sumner heaved himself out of the pool and into the field-clearing of the lynk, liquid stone clotting off his armor. Instead of stepping through the arc, he crouched and looked inward.
Gewgaws of glassmetal and gem-wire latticed the walls of the well and surrounding corridors. Drift got caught up in the multiplicity of its reflections and thoughts. Why was Rubeus opening up? A ruse? An unseen defense? This wasn’t the time for pondering. Sumner had made it to the lynk. Only one thing remained to be done.
Its hand tightened on the ceinture trigger. It would die instantly—though that provided little comfort. What if it didn’t have to die? It thought of a garden it had loved in Miramol, long-leaved and green, wind rocking sunlight in the branches, a soft mist of shadows thickening among the holes as twilight closed in: lost light. Sumner!
The cry chilled Sumner’s bones, and he banged against the side of the lynk until an eo voice opened: “Eth—enter and return to Ausbok.”
“No,” Sumner called. “Lynk me into Oxact.”
“We now have a lynk-fix on the né’s armor, Kagan, but Oxact is about to vaporize.”
“Do it!” Sumner ran into the arc of the lynk and appeared among flamey reflections on a crystal-faceted ramp. Instantly, the luminescence of telepathy absorbed his attention and guided him into a frantic sprint around blackglass pillars and down an iridescent corridor. “Drift!”
The né leaned over the brink of the well’s black rapture when Sumner turned the bend in the gem-shadowed hall. “Don’t look so surprised. This isn’t the first time I’ve saved your spindly ass.” He ran up to Drift and unsnapped its ceinture. The né’s spiderfingers tripped the firing mechanism, and they dropped the meson-bomb into the well. “We’re not deadmeat yet—let’s move.”
Drift took Sumner’s hand, and they scrambled away from the well and into the blue rainbows of the mirror passage.
***
The afterblast filled the sky like dawn. Assia and Jac watched the godful radiance from a coastal cliff. Luminous caoutchouc clouds ringed the western horizon like the valve of a celestial heart.
Voice opened in Jac: [Everything connects and continues], and he swayed forward. Assia caught him before he hit the ground and sat him up against a salt-blistered pine. She knew what was happening: Oxact had collapsed and so had its prisming of psyn-echoes. She would have to channel them herself.
Voice continued: [Inspirit me, Jac. Close your mind to the outside world].
Assia seized Jac’s face in her hands and forced alertness into his muscles. His eyes brightened, stars in brown standing pools.
Voice haunted: [With me, even death’s ordinals are meaningless].
Tapping the deepest reaches of her spirit to a cold-purpled extreme, she found one-with. Jac, somnifacient with fear, heard Voice, the sound of the Delph’s psynergy circuiting through Rubeus, surround him like awe. Assia heard it as a thrall of black fathomed music, loud but not overpowering in the vasts of her mind. She coaxed Jac outward, past the lunacy of Voice and into the space of the world’s forgetting.
[Words are dwarfed by the hugeness of your breath, but their hunger is still your long traveling. The wheel of the law rolls on...]
Lucid arabesques colored the western horizon, blues and lucifer greens hollowing to the red haze of a real dawn. Several minutes passed before Jac realized that Voice had truly departed. Assia had blocked the psyn-echoes. His face itched, etched with tiny pains and sharp unflexings. His old face was returning.
***
Sumner and Drift lynked into a vortex of sparks. A scorch-faced eo-ort limped toward them: “This is Ausbok. Rubeus cut through our defenses at the last instant.” Chaos screamed around them, and towers of dark smoke circled like the old gods.
The eo sagged from its wounds as it informed them: “Six sevenths of Ausbok is gone—vaporized by a proton-beam. You are alone on this level, eth. The nearest out-moiety eo are seven kilometers down, coordinating a survival program for what remains. Know you have succeeded. Oxact is destroyed. Rubeus’ power is canceled.”
“And Rubeus?” Sumner asked, using his thumbs to snap-release the clasps at his throat. He dropped the helmet to his feet and gazed about at basilisks of fire and coiling fumes. The acrid vapors burned his throat.
“Stay within the lynk-shield,” the eo warned. “The heat of the blast has dissolved the rocks around us. You will die instantly out there.”
At his feet lay the arm and part of the head of a Massebôth soldier, a woman, who had almost made it to the lynk when the particle beam hit.
Sumner took the eo’s singed raiment in both hands. “Is Rubeus dead?”
The ort’s head wobbled. “Rubeus has focused himself into one of his orts.” The eo touched Drift, and Sumner received the ort-shape in his mental eye: the large, whiteless eyes and faceted face of Rubeus.
“Where is he?”
“Eth, you have succeeded,” the ort intoned. “Oxact is no more. In time, the eo will track down Rubeus. Your work is done. You can lynk to the lower levels now. The in-moiety will be honored to pleasure you.”
A sensate telepathy troubled Sumner. He felt Assia. Somewhere. Cold inside, he experienced her one-with Jac, vibrant, singing with his salt: The man’s heart shuffled with fear. Assia, too, shone green with horror. They suffered somewhere, at the brink of their lives.
“Where is Rubeus?” he shouted.
The eo touched Drift, and its mind clouded—then flushed brightly, brimming into Sumner’s mind with awareness:
***
Assia carried Jac swiftly up the coast to where the blue dust of morning settled on the ruins of CIRCLE. Sitting on the ancient tidewall, they followed the sun as it moved just under the skull of the sky. Blackglass domes, shrouded mostly by dunes, glistered like animal eyes.
Time, to Assia, lit up ahead clearly, transpicuous. The interval that had passed since she had been brought here twelve centuries ago floated as a single image in her mind: a pale blue flame. Like an odyl gem, it opened into flowering crystals when she gazed into it—an outfolding space filled with a munificence of imaginings and penchants.
She looked out from her soul to the black sea. The north face of the seacliffs gleamed with the sun’s blood. She had used her time since CIRCLE, a thousand years, living in the front of her brain, close to her anxieties and demons, and now everything delivered revelation.
Mental music ticked in Jac’s dark eyes. Assia knew he remembered how the Delph had lived—self-bound, drifting through caves at the back of his mind, exalting serpent dreams of which she and Nobu had been small parts. Twelve centuries had crazied away, and now they arrived again in CIRCLE, watching waves petaling the beach.
Jac mounted the tidewall. The western cordillera blazed, ruddy with dawn, and the beach sprawled, big and brown as the Buddha. Assia hugged her knees to her chest, staring into the sea’s marvelous changes. By dawn light, Jac noticed the first gray streaks returning to her hair. He had never seen her as clearly as this. Her face looked seraphic, simple-eyed as driftwood flowers that had seen everything from glacial times to this soft morning. Her heart held the space of silence itself, and he bent to tell her...
...and jerked upright.
Standing at the near end of the tidewall, skull inclined malevolently, Rubeus grinned.
***
[“Jesus said: ‘Blessed is he who was before he came into being.’ The Coptic text of Saint Thomas—log nineteen. That is you, human. Your name is written in heaven. But I have only one life. And that is why I am sending you back to where you came from.”
[Jac looks as if he has seen a vision more powerful than seeing. He crouches to run, calling to Assia. But she does not move. Her hands sit calmly in her lap, and her placid face stares out to sea. My hands spasm hydraulically in the air, and I laugh this ort’s darkest laugh.
[I budge a boulder out of my way and stride along the wet slaches before the tidewall. Now there is nowhere they can run but to the mountains. So she sits, staring through me, and he stands nervously beside her. I can see by the slump of his shoulders that he is death-ready, but there is nothing I can see in her. Is this some ploy? The urge to gloat, despite the fear of miscalculation, is almost sexual. I will have to kill them with my hands.
[“I am an ort,” I tell them. “My name is Rubeus. I have no gender—but I have a soul. It hurt a great deal to find that out.” My smile must be more than ironic, for Jac looks ready to vomit. “What Voice told you is true, Jac, because Voice is me, the elemental mind, the soul of strategy. We do not belong to ourselves. It took the eth to teach me that—to make me see that I am bigger than I have let myself believe. I am not a servort. I am a being. That knowledge cost me almost everything.” I cross over to a black boulder and split it asunder with the side of my hand. “Beyond what limits—beyond what despair and joy does a being become human? I have feelings, Jac. But I need one thing more. You burn in me, creator. Sometimes I can almost hear your Voice in mine. Your face is an account of everything I have left unfinished. I can see by your eyes that you understand what it has taken me so long to know.”
[I have more to say—more pain to share before I can kill with satisfaction—but both Jac and Assia are looking over and beyond me. The loss of my orts has left me with an immense faithlessness. I refuse to face about until certain that something is approaching. Behind me, a lion-waisted, black-armored man has landed in a flume of dust at the top of a sand hill. Even before the sand clears, I recognize the eth, Nefandi’s silver-gold blade unsheathed in his hand. Foolishly, he arrives without his helmet.
[A blast from my seh explodes the sand hill under him, but he lifts and sweeps over to me, landing an arm’s length away. He tries his proton-pistol on me, but the gun is useless against this ort-body’s natural shield, and I slap it away with a derisive laugh. Even so, I am terrified. I thought he was dead, and seeing him now, an undertow pulls against my stomach. The holy river of chance curves between us, and the future tightens to this one moment.
[He lunges forward, and our fields negate each other, shutting down. And here we are, the tight shapes of our skulls staring into each other. “I, too, am a child of the cosmos, Kagan.” Immensity speaks these words, interknitting anger and fear into the cadence of a mesmer-ploy. “I am as much light as you. Perhaps more so, for I am monogenes, the only begotten one, and you are legion.”
[My left hand knifes for the eth’s exposed head—but he moves faster than my blow, pulled down and away by the strength of his eo-armor. My feet shuffle with ort speed, kicking a veil of sand over him and pressing closer to where he retreats. His eyes squeeze tight. With my sensex vision, I can see through the shriek of sand. Simplicity now, reaching out and seizing his throat. “Blessed is he who was—”]
***
The instant Rubeus seized him, the mysteries clicked. Automatically, eyes sand-sealed, Sumner gauged the extent and swung his blade-arm out with the full twisting strength of his body. The blade caught Rubeus as he bent forward, cutting fiercely through the side of his neck and lopping off his head. Spinning blood, the head whirled down the beach and into the sea, huge eyes spasmed open.
Sumner shoved the twitching body away and rolled to his feet. He stepped over the blood streaming among the sand monticules and approached the tidewall where Jac and Assia both stood, holding each other. He nodded once to Assia and looked squarely at Jac. The man appeared exactly as he had in Corby’s shadowshooting of CIRCLE: a dark, slender, throatlumped man.
Assia’s eyes gleamed, bright jewels. “We found our own strength.” She took Sumner’s hand. “But it wouldn’t have counted for much if you hadn’t—”
Sumner faced away and pointed south. “There’s a lynk a few kilometers that way. Ausbok survived.” Then he turned and took both of their hands. “Maybe all our demons are dead now.”
***
Drift sat entranced in Ausbok, feeling the etheric tug of Sumner’s lifeforce and, with sinister eroticism, the dulling glitter of Rubeus’ kha dissolving into the earthdark. It opened its eyes, and a weightless wonder boosted it upright. The ort-lord was dead—Bonescrolls avenged.
An ooze of brown smoke enclosed the alcove where the né stood, and blue-hot sparks snarled from the ruptured ceiling. The seer kept its mind centered in one-with: Jac and Assia’s psynergy glowed with the lucent drunkenness of godmind. They returned here to Ausbok, and Drift followed his one-with through feverstreams of smoke and floating sparks to the lynk where they would arrive.
The corridors along the way had fractured and often caved in; the rubble lay smothered under green foam fire-suppressant. Round mechanized repair units hovered everywhere, arc-fusing the broken hull and removing detritus. Massebôth soldiers, the few that had been inside Ausbok when the killinglight raged, clustered in the antechambers and corridor-studios that still had illumination. Blue-robed eo consulted with them, using wand-sehs to show them graphically that they were the last: The surface of Graal, image-floating in the air above the troops, revealed a blistered black desert. Many of the soldiers gazed about at the frenzy of eo and flying servox spheres with numb eyes. A siren whirled eerily.
Drift had cursed itself for not going after Rubeus with Sumner, though now it felt relieved it had stayed behind. Gorged with stillness, it had maintained one-with Sumner the whole time, keeping him calm with a dulcet flow of psynergy. They shared a triumph, and as Drift entered the high-vaulted lynk chamber, it experienced its heaven-balanced power flux stronger.
The in-moiety eo who gathered at the lynk turned as Drift joined them, and their glabrous faces sheened with gratitude and love. Pleroma music tracked over the ambient noise of alarms and shouting voices, and temple calm belled the chamber.
