Radix, page 52
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Kro: the term designating the people who dominated the Earth before the Line exerted its influence; protected by a magnetic field around Earth and a clement sun, they thrived on their self-absorption and paid only cursory attention to the cosmos that surrounded them.
Lami: originally, the yawp designation for the divine embodiment of the kiutl plant; later, incorporated into the Mutric mythos as the Sister of Night.
Lifelove (the lifeforce): a psychic and organic integration; nous and physis harmoniously melled.
Line: hypertube; the timelike geodesics that connect the spacefree internal domain of a naked Kerr-singularity (a rotating black hole that is “open” to our universe); CIRCLE mantics first identified the ray of metafrequency energy jetstreaming from the massive black hole at the galactic hub as the Line; Earth migrated into the flux of the Line fully in 2113 kro, though the transmuting effects of this atypical energy had been altering the planet for over a century by then. (See Linergy.)
Liner: a craft that uses Linergy to power itself through the timelike hypertube of the Line, traveling the Kaluza-Klein Continuum between and through open black holes.
Linergy: quantized energy of the Line; the energy emerges as pure photons of hyperfrequencies, which swiftly geometrize into nucleons of lower energy; very few of the original photons reach Earth; those that do contain information from the domain of an infinite Field outside our open, expanding Lobatchevskian world.
Llyr: kro Venus.
Lune: an insane person.
Lusk: voor possession; voor dominance of another physical form.
Lynk: an opening into an internal spacetime system with a direct time-arrow; two lynks with the same time-arrow create a space corridor; a device for crossing any distance within the local curvature of spacetime.
Macheoe: kro Mercury.
Mage: a voor with strong timeloose powers.
Magnar: spiritual leader of the Serbota; Bonescrolls. (See Profiles.)
Mantic: a human brain coupled to an ATP-pump; CIRCLE devised and deployed this mechanical means of extending intelligence; because of mantic insistence on dialectical schema, most did not survive on the planet long after Earth entered into the emergent, pluralistic reality of the multiverse.
Massebôth (literally, the Pillars): a human society aided by the eo and disdainful of distorts; founded by the eo seven hundred years after the collapse of CIRCLE; the eo intended to create a stable, self-sustaining gene pool; Rubeus also helped to preserve this society, and over the five hundred years of its history he insinuated his influence into the government and proved instrumental in shaping its politics.
Massel: language spoken by the Massebôth.
Mentis: reed grass with black, red-veined stalks, the juice of which is a potent stimulant.
Metaorder: degrees of coherency and relation on subquantal levels.
Mindark: the psychic space of consciousness.
Mounting kha: See Earthdreaming.
Muckel: Massel slang for kiutl.
Multiverse: the subquantal Field; the “internal” structure of the universe outside of time where all possible universes exist; this nth-dimensional domain is a reality at the core of all black holes; in some rotating, assymetrically collapsed black holes, this core is not shielded by an event horizon and information from the multiverse enters the Einstein-space of our universe. (See Line.)
Mutra: chief deity worshipped in the Massebôth Protectorate, Mother of Fragments; a revival of the Mother-cults from pre-kro times.
Nadjille: kro Uranus.
Né: androgynous distorts of the Serbota tribe: usually telepathic and tactilely deft.
Né-futhorc: a runic alphabet employed among androgynous distorts tribally separated but culturally one-with.
No-face: featureless humanoid ort.
Odyl gem: hypnotic induction device perfected by the eo.
Olfact: inhalant, mood changer.
One Mind: individual awareness intuitively bonded to the synergism of group awareness across time; telepathic unity with All; the ultimate and continually expanding Prigogine effect of consciousness open to all the contradictory and hieratic contents of existence.
One-with: psychic enjambment; telepathic union.
Orph: a soporific olfact.
Ort (servort): a mindless, biologically human artifact; also, any animal neuro-altered to respond to unprogrammed directives.
Oxact: a mountain of psyn-crystals, power source of Rubeus.
Paseq (the Divider): tribal deity incorporated into the Mutric mythos as the ultimate arbitrator and spirit of harmony.
Peeler: a slow death that lathes the living skin off victims; utilized by the Massebôth.
Pleroma music: subliminal sonics psycho-engineered for ultimate aesthetic pleasure.
Psiberant: a substance that acts directly on the brain’s third ventricle, the pineal gland, and the Fissure of Rolando; it dramatically increases empathic response in the user.
Psyn-crystal: six-dimensional matrices with orthonormal surfaces capable of storing psynergy.
Psyn-echoes: Linergy resonances; a multi-space hyperbolic that, in a time-boundary like our universe, gives rise to gravitational interaction, actually changing the geometry of space itself and creating gravity waves; such a gravity wave rocked the Earth in 2074 kro, disturbing the spin of the planet’s nickel-iron core and shutting down the shield-force of the magnetic field.
Psynergy: the field that surrounds any thing: psynergy is pervasive; in humans it is kha; the kro identified it as chi, ki, prana, and ka.
Radix: a mantic term for the root of existence, the void, or isostasis embedding the infinite-dimensional space of the multiverse; within this void, everything exists; the kro called it wu, ain soth, and sunyata. Emptiness as form.
Rael: an artificial intelligence first created by the late mantics to protect their territories from encroaching distorts; raels are airborne entities, deriving power from the sun and the potential difference between the surface of the Earth and the ionosphere.
Raga storms: immense cyclones initially generated by the gravity wave from the psyn-echoes that wobbled the Earth and shut down the planet’s magnetic field; the intensity of the storms have been decreasing since, but a raga wind of five hundred kilometers an hour is not unusual at the time of Sumner Kagan.
Rangers: the Massebôth elite guerrilla force.
Realityshaping: the conscious ability of godminds to reshape physical reality in the subquantal Field; because the godmind alters subquantum fluctuations which are time-free, the resulting quantum mechanical changes (the realityshaping) contain timeloose elements; in other words, a godmind does not always consciously know what it does or why; realityshaping is always a process greater than the individual that appears to initiate it.
Road: the Serbota concept of the planet’s kha-channels that lead directly to the magnar; also, in the generic sense, the Future.
Rubeus: the AI created to administer Graal’s maintenance while the Delph explored timeloose realities with other godminds. (See Profiles.)
Rundi: brown-gold furred simian, notable for its plush pelage and frenetic viciousness.
Savant: a Massebôth priest of the Mutric cult.
Scansule: in Massebôth society, an audiovisual information device; in eo culture, an information crystal.
Scry crystal: see Brood jewel.
Seer: Serbota name for a deep; a natural empath with the ability to “send” thoughts.
Seh: a multifunction hand-sized instrument capable of shielding its owner from projectiles and all ranges of radiation; also designed for levitation and sonic cleansing.
Selfscan: open, intuitive awareness; nonconceptual and clear, accessible through breath control and internal flex-routines.
Sensex: a kha-detector directly connected with the optic nerve and the visual cortex.
Serbota: distort tribe living on the fringe of Skylonda Aptos.
Shadowself: a psynergy echo of repressed psychic contents that constellates into an autonomous complex with a body, mind, and will of its own; the eth, originally the Delph’s fear of oblivion.
Shadowshooting: voor technique in which the kha or kha-remnants of an individual trace back across time with the consciousness of a voor in Iz; only the most powerful voors are capable of shadowshooting.
Skre: a killing-being bioshaped by Rubeus.
Skyfires: auroras generated by the interaction of Linergy and Linergy nucleons with the ionosphere.
Sothis: voor name for a period of time forty thousand years prior to kro-culture when the Line last intersected the path of the solar system and voors interacted for the first time with humans.
Stalk charm: geometric design that uses the kha-properties of plants to influence the kha of its wearer.
Strohlkraft: Massebôth vertical-ascent fighter plane.
Subquantal Field: the metageometric domain from which the universe emerged 14 x 109 years ago and from which virtual particles continue to emerge; specifically, the internal five-dimensional curved Riemannian manifold whose isometry boundary is the external, gravitational universe.
Superlight: actually not light but hypercharged bosons displaced subquantally and directed through internal spacetime; Rubeus and the eo used these powerful timeloose particles as a weapon of formidable destructiveness.
Timeloose: acausal; sometimes telepathic awareness.
Timeslip: collected Linergy, redirected to shape new, transient realities.
Tropiform: eo-crafted furniture that conforms to the shape of the user.
Unchala: the voors’ place of origin, a planet positioned within the directional beam of Linergy from an open collapsar.
Vertical: physically leaving the universe through a hypertube. (See Liner.)
Veve: voor system of notation recording memories from lifetimes experienced in other lifeforms.
Voice: auditory manifestation of Jac Halevy-Cohen’s acausal self, the Delph; also, that sensibility as mimicked by Rubeus.
Voor: a being from Unchala who has evolved into the Line and who spontaneously and creatively usurps the physical forms of species on whatever life-worlds the Line reaches.
Wangol: kha-strength: the spirit-power of a being.
White card: highest level of the Massebôth notation system signifying the genetic status of its possessor; a white card denotes genetic integrity; other cards range from the blue card of damaged-yet-functional genes to the brown card of terminally ill people.
Yawps: bio-engineered simians, originally designed by mantics to serve as a labor force; later, yawps self-evolved into a separate species.
Zaned: insane.
Zord: unit of Massebôth currency equivalent to the kro pound sterling, circa 1901 kro
Author’s Note to the 2nd Edition
30 years after writing this contemporary Milesian fable, the same pelt of stars drapes our night, while of course I’m not the same at all. Biology’s spiral clock counts down—watchworks we all have in common, our intimacy with some of nature’s master designs: the heart itself is one such astonishing scheme, providing chambers for blood and dreams! Radix began there, as a proto-novel called Emblems and Rites, picaresque science fiction whose largeness of heart and shamanic marvels would break the enchantments of fear. That was the original idea. The exquisite torment of creative writing, however, worked that over pretty good. Knowing the lure of fantasy, how it radiates out of and calls us into weariness, how it hides or reveals itself in physical pain or captures echoes of the dead, you can figure the rest. The novel wrote me. Ancient philosophers believed it’s good for the World Soul when an individual endures this commitment, as shaper of fantasy, as writer—even more so as reader. Only the transposing presence of the reader justifies a writer’s consuming passion and stark egoism. So, I thank those of you who read this novel and, for those who found merit in my effort, we are true. The act (and art) of fiction proves we love the truth even when we choose not to tell it. That’s as human as it gets.
A. A. Attanasio
Table of Contents
Radix
Foreword to the Second Edition
>DISTORTS<
Firstness
Pictures of the Real Universe
Teeth Dreams
>VOORS<
The Mysteries
The Emptying
The Blood’s Horizon
>GODMIND<
Destiny as Density
Trance Port
The Untelling
Epilog
>APPENDIX<
Worldline
Profiles
Argot
Author’s Note to the 2nd Edition
A. A. Attanasio, Radix
