Radix, page 6
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Then the hut door opened, and he glimpsed a completely vacant interior out of which stepped a small boy in white baggy pants and a green collarless shirt. With a face pallid as wax and colorless eyes, he approached, and Sumner thought he heard sighing in his ears like the tide’s whispering draw. Closer now, the boy’s small features seemed luminous. His white-gold hair was tousled in a similar way to Sumner’s, but unlike Sumner he was slender, a mere sliver of life.
When an arm’s length away, he focused eyes pale as glass on the visitor and spoke in a voice soft and almost deep: “I’m glad you’re here, Father. I have a lot to show you. And”—His small features moved with a gentle, scarcely perceptible smile—“there’s so much more I want you to show me.”
Sumner shuffled from foot to foot, hands jammed in his pockets. The dim noise he had heard gone, all his attention fixed on the calm, seemingly mindless face before him—the skin marble-white.
Sumner tried to force a smile. It wavered on his face only an instant before slipping off. A long awkward silence ensued during which the boy simply stared at him blankly. An ugly feeling squeezed down Sumner’s throat and into his stomach, and he wanted to scream in his mind: You stink-pissy little distort. What do you want me to do? Fart? But he remembered the brood jewel and the kiutl waiting for him back in the cottage, and he throttled his inner voice.
The boy’s eyes glittered, cold as stone. “My name’s Corby.”
Sumner nodded and looked to Jeanlu for some kind of cue. A smile flicked at the corners of her mouth. “Why don’t you show your father who you are.”
A sense of alarm trilled through Sumner. “What do you mean?” he asked, hands squirming in his pockets.
“Don’t worry,” the boy said stepping closer. “I’m going to show you wonderful things. That will be easier to do out there, because it’s so open.” He nodded toward the tract of broken ground that started near the cottage and limped off into the Flats. “It’s empty, so we can fill it.”
Sumner’s confusion clouded his eyes.
Jeanlu laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Just go with him,” she urged. “Everything will be all right.”
“Looks dangerous out there,” he said, wanting to kick himself for having said it.
“There’s always danger,” she replied. “Everywhere. But here there’s no threat.”
Sumner swallowed his anxiety. He turned to face his son, who reached out to him. Overriding his fear, he took the boy’s six-fingered hand. It jolted him, radiantly cold, almost electric, and he pulled away with a ridiculous whoop and careened clumsily into Jeanlu.
“Easy.” Jeanlu steadied him, then gently veered him toward Corby, who watched emotionlessly.
“I’m sorry—I’m different,” the boy said in a bruised voice. He led Sumner toward the desert. “I don’t want to frighten you.”
“I’m okay.” Sumner tried to swallow in a tacky throat. “It’s my fault. I’m edgy. We’re family, right?” His words sounded frail, and he tried to swallow again.
“No, you’re not to blame. You can’t feel—I mean, not the way a voor does. So you really don’t know if I’m going to hurt you. I understand.”
Sumner had both hands in his pockets, afraid to touch the boy again. He gazed at the sky to calm himself and watched a strong wind fanning a sheet of stratus clouds across the east. “Why do we have to go out there?” he asked, looking ahead to where the gray shattered rocks ended and green sand began. On the other side of a rise a few hundred meters off, a steep incline dropped into the Flats.
“Because there’s no life there,” Corby answered. “It’s hard for me to feel you with all this going on.” He waved at the clumps of sparse scrag-grass withering among the ashy gravel.
“Oh.” Sumner kicked a dried clump of dirt out of his way.
“When you first got here, I tried to reach you, but it was impossible with all the stalk charms Jeanlu’s got racked in her house. Then, just now by the pool, I tried again. It was better but not clear enough, because I want you to see me as well.”
“I see you.”
“No, you don’t. But you wouldn’t know.”
They came to the rise, and Corby reached out for Sumner’s hand. Sumner took it reluctantly and felt his skin crawl and his insides jump when the bright iciness coursed through him. Corby guided him up a footpath that curled along the curve of the rise toward the top. At the ridge-peak, Sumner glanced back toward the cottage. Jeanlu still stood where they had left her, watching after them. The wind dropped down to nothing, and the leaf-shadows of the tamarind trees smoothed out to sheets of blue haze at her feet. Turning about, Sumner could see the weird expanse of Rigalu Flats—a huge, tumbling plain rising here and there to clumps of withered ruins, wind-eaten husks of stone—all of it glimmering a hysterical green in the sunlight. Mutra, it’s hell, he thought, feeling his dread turning inside him. He wanted to dash back to his car, and it took all his strength to stand still and listen to what the boy was saying.
“It was hell for the people who lived here at the end.”
Corby started down a couloir that sliced through the steep incline of the rise and descended abruptly to the basin below. This proved a cumbersome descent for Sumner, and he got to the bottom sweat-washed, hands nastily scratched from braking the backside tumbles he had taken.
Corby leaned into a sandwalk, moving toward a jumble of rock that had once been buildings. Sumner exerted himself to stay in stride. When they slogged into the ruins, Corby went over to a jut of speckled green concrete and sat down. His features looked malevolent: eyes too large and flat, nose and mouth too small, almost fetal, compressed beneath that unreal curve of brow, and skin like a glaze, like a dead child.
Sumner’s dread thickened, and he knew he was going to collapse unless he started his mind moving again. Get ahold of yourself, twitch. He ran a shuddering hand over his face. “I’m going back.”
The boy’s eyes frosted and seemed to change color. He smiled vaguely. “Why are you so scared of me?” He leaned forward and looked deeply at him, a shadow moving in his face. “Don’t try to get ahold of yourself. Let yourself go. Selfishness and fear are the same thing.”
Sumner clenched his fists to master his dread. He looked out over the stretch of sand they had just crossed and watched dust devils whirling in heated air currents. When the trembling stopped, he looked back at the boy.
“That’s good,” the child said. “You’re stronger than I thought.”
The compliment washed over Sumner like a cool breeze, and he unclenched his fists.
“Look.” Corby held up a hand white as winter and seized Sumner in an icy nervelock. Eyes bulging, Sumner experienced emptiness spinning out of the pores of his vision. Darkness loomed through him with a deaf-and-dumbness dense as stone, and time parsed into nothingness and an awesomely still I. An aeon sifted by.
Sumner snapped alert, abruptly free of his paralyzing vision. Corby sat casually, as if nothing had happened. The cloud patterns behind him cut the sky as before. Only an instant had passed.
“You went deep,” Corby said, the wide glow of his eyes watching emotionlessly. “Remember what you can.”
Those chatoyant eyes fixated Sumner. Light stood naked in them, still as ice, unverbed. No way to know what the brain behind that gaze knew. Sumner backed off, then turned and started walking toward the cottage, willing himself not to break into a mad scramble.
Surprisingly, his anger matched his terror. Sure that he would lose his mind if he stayed, and he was furious that Jeanlu had duped him. Voor rauk! He stoked his rage, needing it to keep himself above the bog of his fear.
Before he got very far Corby stepped out in front of him, and Sumner staggered into a backstep.
“What’s wrong with you?” Corby snapped. “I didn’t hurt you. I was just trying to show you another way of looking at things.”
“I’m not interested.” Sumner waved his hand, motioning the boy aside.
Corby frowned and stepped closer, six-fingered hands reaching out for him. Sumner tried to turn and run, but he couldn’t move. A winter breeze streamed through him, and he froze, abruptly aware of standing outside himself. For a prolonged moment, he floated, immersed in a pounding deafness. Then reality squeezed tighter around him.
He peered at Corby, ears humming slightly with the trembling warmth of his blood. The vertigo had passed, somehow shaking him loose from his dread and leaving him calm as a matchflame. Everything had slowed, and for the briefest instant he wondered why he had been so frantic when obviously, if you just stood still, things returned to their places, seconds creaked by, the silence gathered.
Sumner finally could look closely at Corby without trembling. He focused on the hairline, so much like his own, and the wide calm jaw that was his father’s. He wondered about what kind of brain floated beneath the ice of that face.
Corby went over to his concrete perch and sat down. The telepathic bond between them thickened. Sumner paid him no attention. The experience of time passing slowly caught him up. Like a growing crystal, his life gradually took shape in the rocks around him. He could make whatever he wanted of himself.
Energized by the voor, everything he saw became different. The sunlight, he decided, was turtlelight, moving slow and green. The ruins were a river in which the turtlelight was immersed: a river of time, the silt of centuries gathering on the desert floor. Bending, he saw himself in the river. He was the shattered rocks, the jade sand, the turtlelight. No other life existed here but him and—his son. In the river of time, they themselves persisted as a current, a continuous stream of life flowing from—where? He didn’t know where life began, but he knew that with this new voor-power he could remember if he tried.
He closed his eyes and imagined himself looking back to the hairy and slobbery jungle lives of his first human ancestors, back to when language was still shut in behind bars of teeth. But that wasn’t where the lifestream began. He had to go further back, past the scurrying lemur lives and the slimy and raw slug lives, feeling back millions of years to the eyeless, mouthless beginnings of the cell. Instinctively, he knew that wasn’t the stream source either. To find the beginning, he had to dream back far beyond the steaming swamp-ferns, even further, past the burning seas, back to when the whole planet swelled vaster but less dense, back to the world as a hanging garden of gases and plasma: a phosphorescent cloud swirling in on itself, neither alive nor dead, turning slowly around the star that was dreaming it.
That was the source, he thought to himself, feeling Corby’s astral energy turning in him. Or was it? Where did the gases come from that condensed to these rocks? Other stars. And they? Where did the first stars come from? Was there a living origin beyond beginning and end? Or was that the first myth? The first to be taken up and the last to be put down?
“That’s very impressive,” Corby said. “But none of it is true. You’ve made it all up.”
Sumner turned to face the boy. He swayed under a mild spell of dizziness.
“Evolution’s a fascination,” the voor said. “It’s all constraint. Who are you really? Where are you really from?”
Sumner shivered at the tone of his voice. “I don’t know.”
Corby clapped his hands like a schoolmaster. “Of course you do. Don’t you remember? These were your lives before you had this shape—”
Again, an icy breeze chilled Sumner. This time, he sensed the psychic energy’s direction. The power streamed directly out of Corby. He could almost see the iridescent tracings of the current as they swirled from a point below the boy’s navel and curled through the air toward him. All the warmth of Sumner’s body smoked away, vision wobbled like bucketwater, and suddenly he plummeted again, caught up in the voor’s telepathy. The visible world melted into the darkness of a bottomless plunge. He opened his mouth to scream, and the vast emptiness around him absorbed whatever pitiful sound he made.
When he came alert again, a greasy odor smudged the air. Something to eat. He followed the dark taint on the breeze through a brake of river reeds, over a rotten stump, past trees and shrubs, and down a leaf-strewn slope. There he met other scents, sticky plant odors, frayed animal spoors, sealed out by his hunger. For him, only one odor endured, an oily smell of something living, something small, and not too far away. His skullrooted teeth clamped and unclamped in rhythm with his loping cadence. Then he saw it. That dark brown smallthing, white in its ears and underneath, gladdening itself on bright green, serried grass.
Watching the smallthing perched in the tall grass, eyes alert and wily, ears pricked, Sumner’s mouth widened in adoration, and a spindly thread of saliva drooled to the ground. Then he was off, and the smallthing bolted. A long chase unfurled under the grasshead-waves and the tranquil hills and the clouds like mountains. When it ended, it ended quickly. Skullrooted teeth ripped flesh, releasing a hot, sticky smell of blood and a squeal that jarred the air for a moment.
Sumner tried to get ahold of himself. What’s happening to me? he bawled, his cry lost in a glare of light. The glare splintered to an aerial view, valleyward—a straggle of trees, the curled ribbon of a river. He flew, the air’s buoyancy and the wind’s force bending joint and tendon, lifting him up, widening the arc of his circular flight. One eye soft and swivel-searching the clouds for others like himself, the other keen and downward gazing, feeling the textures of leaf-dapples and grass shadows far below, hunger gave him clarity. The sun behind him, hooked feet pulled in, hooked head turning, searching. Grasses wavered and hid. He watched his shadow trawling the green rumpled earth. Nothing stirred. But he went on looking. Watching. Watching. A wryneck sailed out of a tree and swooped low over the bent grass. He spotted the movement immediately, folded his wings in on themselves and dropped for the kill.
Sumner tried to shrug himself awake but couldn’t break the fall. He plunged from one dream into the next. He became a shark slendering up toward a glassy-grained surface where smaller fish glittered like stars. Suddenly he soared into a cloud-feathered gull eyeing a fish’s hidden light among the rocks. Then he swooped as an owl living by the claws of his brain. Then a spider watching a fly tangled in mouth-glue, whining its wings.
Of all the dreams that blurred through him, one jumped forth particularly vivid. He whiskered through stalks of tall plants, trailing a food scent. Only this time, he loped, unusually tired and hungry and alone. He willingly ventured where he had never gone before—across stubble fields thick with strange scents. Far ahead rose a farmhouse, though he didn’t recognize it as such. At the time, it appeared as a mysterious break in the horizon, filled with watery lights and unfamiliar sounds. Nearer emerged another such thing but more familiar, heavy with the smell of birds.
He approached slowly, gutsack hugging the ground, nostrils flared for danger scents. He avoided a tall opening hot with the spoor of something he didn’t recognize. So he circled the nest area until he found a small crawlspace. The birds already sensed him, and they clucked nervously as he dragged himself through. He pounced on the nearest, snapping its neck, shaking the life out of it. He pulled his kill after him, out through the crawlspace, hurried by the squall of the other birds and a distant barking. Outside, he stalled for an instant. A tall creature had spotted him and made a thin, incomprehensible sound, waving a stick too far away to be a threat. So he picked up his kill and jaunted off. But not far. The stick flared brightly, and a crushing blow swamped his eyes with darkness.
Darkness.
Sumner snapped awake and squinted against the turtlelight. With a hand to his face, he tried to clear his mind. What’s happening to me?
A voice reached him: “You’ll be all right.” It was Corby. Sumner’s mind unclenched, and he saw that he was standing. Only a few seconds had passed.
Sumner sat down in the dust and rested his head in his hands. Only after several long minutes could he look up again. He sat still and rooted his feet and fingers in the sand as if the slightest movement might shatter his delicate hold on sense.
“It’s over now,” Corby said. But it wasn’t over for Sumner. Every rock, every twisted bolt of steel, every dust mote stood out clear and strong. Even the sunlight and its green reflectant haze shimmered in the air distinct, detached from the ruins and the sky. He understood. “I’m alive,” he whispered to himself. “Alive!”
Overwhelmed by mingled awe and fear, euphoric with the cosmic energy that the voor had channeled through him, Sumner rolled to his stomach and began to crawl through the sand. Drifts of sunlight wavered over his body, the heat flowing from the warmed rocks into his whole being. Creation caressed him, and he writhed in the sand trying to embrace all of it.
When he looked up again, night had descended. Skyfires, vibrant auroras, streamed, and by their brilliant light he could see his clothes and hands thick with dirt. Around him, the ruins glowed, effusing a dim green pallor. His head felt wide and clear as the sky, sparking with lights. And he realized he was looking at the sky—he was the sky!
No—this voor-dreaming had gone far enough. He stopped himself.
Corby sat on the same jut of concrete he had gone to hours before. Remarkably, Sumner felt no fear of the boy, not a strand of anxiety.
Corby hopped off his perch and took him by the arm. No spasm of energy, no jolt, just the meager grip of a child. “Let’s go home,” he said, sounding tired.
They picked their way among the ruins and dragged through the sand toward the rock escarpment hiding Jeanlu’s cottage. Looking at the stars echoing through the coronal lacings of the skyfires, Sumner sought out a particular pattern: the ancient, swayback Lion. When he had found its fierce eye and inferred its tussling mane and low-hung, cold belly, a small voice opened in him: A wind blows through the Lion’s belly. Corby’s voice, diminutive, distant, arising from somewhere in the back of his head. Sumner shook his head, amazed at first, but what he heard swiftly overwhelmed his surprise:
