RADIX

A.A. Attanasio

Phoenix Pick

An Imprint of Arc Manor

**********************************

Want Free Ebooks?

Sign up for our Monthly Free Ebook Coupon

http://www.PPickings.com

**********************************

Radix Copyright © 1981, 2010 A. A. Attanasio. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover Artwork Copyright © by John Bergin. Used with permission.

Interior Artwork Copyright © by James O'Barr. Used with permission.

Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

Second Edition.2010. Revised and Corrected 2011.

ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-60450-492-7

ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-459-0

www.PhoenixPick.com

Great Science Fiction

Author’s Website:

www.AAAttanasio.com

Published by Phoenix Pick

an imprint of Arc Manor

P. O. Box 10339

Rockville, MD 20849-0339

www.ArcManor.com

**********************************

For

LIGHTWORKERS

across time and space

***

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The inwardness of this effort has indebted me to many people. I am particularly grateful to my family for their compassionate support; the poet Jon Lang for sharing his visions and for allowing me to transmogrify his poem “The Other” into the Voor Litany (page 259); the editor Maria Guarnaschelli for ennobling this book with her clarity and caring; the composer Victor Bongiovanni for permission to use a voice from his musical composition “Berceuse from Suite for Piano Four-Hand”[“Berceuse from Suite for Piano Four-Hand” copyright © 1979 by Victor Bongiovanni.] as Sumner’s undersong (page 377); Artie Conliffe for the map of the hemisphere; and the copy editor Betsy Cenedella for closing the circle.

Robert Silverberg published an early and greatly re-visioned excerpt of “The Blood’s Horizon” in his New Dimensions 7 (Harper & Row, 1977).

For the second edition, I salute John Bergin for the cover art he shaped from light, James O’Barr whose sublime skill in the black art of ink graces the interior—and Leo Scarpelli, who befriended this novel in the human wilderness.

***

Foreword to the Second Edition

Originally titled Emblems and Rites, my first novel, Radix, began with an insight from one sentence in a third century biography of Greek thinkers, Lives of Ancient Philosophers: “Diogenes the Cynic lit a lamp in broad daylight and said as he went about, ‘I am looking for a man,’” He says nothing about “the man” being honest.

In Radix, I am looking for a man. To represent our polluted age, this man must be ugly. He must be weak from the ineptitude of his body, as our manufactured world is weak from ecological stupidity. He is a hungry man, as avaricious as our mercantile society.

This man must be a monster in a world of monsters. The rites in Emblems and Rites intend to provoke outrage, not admiration or pleasure, or there is no possibility of transformation. The nightmare of reason we call civilization is our exile from the truth of our humanity, which emerged out of the blind regime of matter into consciousness. True reason, the human spirit, offers the strength to contend against this blind regime of accidents, diseases, and malign obsessions. Through mindfulness, we possess the power of transformation.

Likewise, the man I seek, vexed by his own derangement and alienation, carries his humanity hidden inside himself, within a resurrection core. But to claim this deep power requires an art of self-forgetting, an audacious transformation that empties the ego and recalls the unity of existence.

Looking for the man who can represent us, I knew the emblems too must be grotesque or there is no hope for beauty in the transformation. I resolved to forsake reason, remembering what Goya wrote in his own hand on the forty-third Capricho: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.”

The nightmare of reason—the environmental iniquities and calamitous impersonality of civilization—abstracts us from the sensate experience of the universe and secludes us among symbols. These are the flagrant emblems of our concealment from ourselves. The philosopher Kenneth Burke identifies homo sapiens as a “symbol-using animal.” In symbols, we sort out our perplexed reflections about this Mystery, the haunted now that is ghosting through us. These soft powers called symbols have taken us far behind the world and stranded us in the darkest precincts of nowhere. As Burke puts it in Language as Symbolic Action, our reality has “been built up for us through nothing but our symbol system.” Within this artificial construct, we have eaten of dreamflesh and hallucinated an irreality where other powers and intelligences take den within us. The human heart is their killing yard. They are the “-isms” that dominate us with unspeakable ferocity. In their grip, we are not what we are. But there is an art that, in its deep disposition to darkness, bleeds oppression from their wrath. It is an art of self-forgetting...

The name of the darkling man in this novel of self-forgetting has to be as emblematic as his monstrous actions, a name beckoning thought to our thoughtless time, and I chose Kagan—Son of Aodhagáin, the stupendous Thinker in the Black Book of Caermathon, the medieval Welsh classic that introduces the most important hero of our tragic modernity, King Arthur. For a first name, I went with Sumner: “one who summons”...One Who Summons the Thinker.

I wanted this novel to summon me as well as the reader to think on what our alienated age disregards, what the ancient Vedantic masters knew and contemplated: the whole universe is inside us.

Emblems and Rites became Radix as I explored that remarkable point of view, the way storytellers of old did, dramatizing the natural world in human form—only instead of sun gods and moon maidens intriguing with mortals, I wrote about aliens from other worlds confronting human beings. The story is the same: it’s the hero’s clash with the gods. In our psychological age, that clash is the individual’s struggle to create an identity, and thus a destiny, out of the infinite flux we call reality.

Is the infinite expanse of the universe really inside each of us? And, if so, what do we do with—infinity?

21st century physics agrees that the universe appears infinite: black holes collapse to singularities, which are infinitely dense; and light—the fabric of our biological reality—has no rest mass and so is timeless. Our very bodies are composed of powers of mass so imponderably small that even photons cannot illuminate them, where they emerge from cosmic strings vibrating in a domain of higher dimensions beyond measure.

Yet, few of us actually believe that we are infinite. Such a bold conception seems delusional, because we refuse to accept the basic Vedantic assumption that waking and dreaming are the same. What then is waking? What is the mind? And who is scripting our dreaming? Mind emerges from the brain. The brain is a very specific configuration of atoms. Atoms plus geometry = psyche. We are projected by stellar evolution and Darwinian forces into a geometry of atoms aware of geometry and atoms. Waking and dreaming both emerge from neurological structures whose fundamental constituents touch infinity.

Science fiction provides an ideal vehicle for this descent into the dark abyss where the geometry of mind and organic molecules copulate. The frenzied passion of this union is everything we call soul.

Radix is about waking up to this unifying perception, joining mindful spirit with soulful body and becoming aware that we wandered out of Great Silence to house ourselves in language. We look back from our narrative present, and we gauge the distances to the galaxies and beyond with stories that redshift toward mystery. Outside discursive thinking is the unspeakable—the arbitrary, the unpredictable and undetermined reality against which language shelters us. Out there, in the infinite, truth disappears, all the better to reveal beauty.

The man in the transformative rite adorned with emblems of beauty is the solar votive hero of myths worldwide. He embodies the light of consciousness, and he reincarnates in this novel as the obese, slovenly form of Sumner Kagan. Kagan the Thinker lives in a world exposed to the strange light from an open black hole at the center of our galaxy. This naked singularity has transformed Earth into the landscape of the soul, where everything contaminates everything else: animal and human forms bleed together into distorts, starlight rearranges the human genetic code and reconstructs an alien sentience called voors, and ideas from bizarre alternate universes fuse with flesh and become godminds. On this haunted Earth, everyone Sumner confronts is actually himself. And the world changes around him exactly as he does.

Writing Radix confronted me with the literary challenge of fitting the motive of the novel, which is Diogenes’ quest for a man, into a story that most readers would accept as a narrative and not a manual about self-transformation. Contemporary physics provided the metacognitive framework for the novel’s summons to think about being human in our surreal technological epoch.

Cosmology theorizes that the universe is actually a flexiverse, with many histories existing simultaneously. The past is not immutable in the flexiverse. Because the cosmos began with a Big Bang at a point smaller than an atom, reality originated as a quantum event. As with any quantum phenomenon, the beginning of time occurs as a probability state in which all possible outcomes exist. How we choose to observe the present determines which history of all possible histories connects our Now with the quantum event at the moment of creation.

To be alive in the 21st century means to be summoned to think about this: each observer, each one of us, decides our past all the way back to the Big Bang. And not only that but also this: our future, what will happen, has already happened...and is choosing us.

So what are we in All This? We exist in one particular timeline, with the future deciding our present, as our choices decide our past. The sun doesn’t rise. As the Earth turns, our fortunes roll over from the future into the past.

Radix dramatizes this contemporary creation myth. The bizarre reality for Sumner Kagan is the same as it is for us. We are born as we are being borne.

In Kagan’s drama, we see that we are broken where darkness has found us, and our calamitous confusion has set us against ourselves. We already know, for we have always suspected, and now science sanctions our mystic surmise: all that is was once light, every atom of every stone, the fiercest light, at the primordial instant of creation. The radiant memory of our origin is there in each of us, behind the awesome forgetting of being human.

Between mind and experience, between presence and the long-dreamt, in that middle realm among all the timelines available to us from the uncanny dark sources of wonder and self-expression that assure our humanity, I wrote Radix to find myself—and all these years later I find myself here with you, the reader, setting out to discover a new fate—for ourselves and the world.

A. A. Attanasio

Kohelepelepe, Hawai’i 2010

***

Things can be—

and their Being is grounded

in Nothing’s ability to noth.

—Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action

***

>DISTORTS<

No man knows himself.

—Yi Jing

Firstness

Blinded by the headlights, Sumner Kagan lunged off the road and slid down the dirt embankment into the dark. Above and behind him braking tires squealed furiously. Savage voices yowled as the Nothungs, in leather streetgear, rolled out of their Death Crib and chased after him. Five viper-thin men with blood-bruised eyes and teeth filed to points charged down the slope yelling, “Run, Wad—run!”

At the bottom of the incline Sumner veered into the marsh. He looked like a spooked cow in the dark, waddling heftily side to side. The Death Crib’s headlights shimmering off his smudged and tattered shirt, he pushed into the tall grass, arms flailing wildly. His night vision had returned, and he could see clearly the squat silhouette of the alkaloid factory on the horizon. He knew there was a packed dirt path somewhere around here.

Not far behind, the Nothungs whistled chains through the air, howling and cracking stones together. If he merely stumbled, he would be torn to pieces—the police could search the marshes for weeks and still they wouldn’t find all of him. He thrashed through a brake of cattails, and then his feet hit hard earth. It was the path, a straight run to the alkaloid factory. In the west, the Goat Nebula was rising. He screwed his mind into that brilliant green spark and kept his thick legs pumping.

When he reached the chain-link fence of the factory, the Nothungs were close enough to pelt his broad, stoop-shouldered back with scattered handfuls of gravel. There was barely time to locate the hole that he had sheared through the fence earlier that day. He found it beneath the massive and mud-streaked billboard: NO GO! TRESPASSERS SHOT!

Bellycrawling through, he strained to haul his corpulent body upright and jog onward. He banged up a long metal ramp toward a broad staircase that ascended into the dark galleries of the factory.

It was bad planning, he told himself, to have to climb stairs after such a long run. It might all end here. Rau! Legs numb with fatigue, heart slamming in his throat, he fixed his eyes on the dark shadows at the head of the stairs and ignored the pain that stabbed him more sharply with each step.

Just as he made it to the top, one of the Nothungs clutched at his pants and ripped off his back pocket. Desperately, spastically, he sprawled forward and kicked free. Struggling with his own pendulous weight, he pulled himself to his feet as the Nothungs came bellowing over the top.

Exhaustion staggered him, but he fought against it. The big vat was up ahead. He could see it below through the wire mesh of the ramp.

The Nothungs came up strong directly behind him, ricocheting chains off the pipes on either side. They thought they had him trapped. Alone, in an abandoned factory. That appealed to their imaginations. Sumner had known it would.

The silver scars on the metal post, where the DANGER sign had once been, blurred past him, and Sumner took its cue and leaped. The knotted rope was there all right, and its stiff threads stung his pulpy hands as he swung heavily to the other side. Two sharp screams rang out behind him, two splashes.

Swiftly, he looped the rope around the railing and, plodding off into the darkness, found the broad pipe that would carry him back to the other side. He staggered along it, adjacent to the ramp where three silent Nothungs meekly peered down into the darkness that had swallowed their companions. An emergency water-hose waited where he had left it. He had tested it that morning.

One of the Nothungs yelled across the darkness: “We’ll find you, fat boy! We’ll rip you!”

“Aw, blow it out, screwfaces,” Sumner answered, just loud enough to be heard. He had already turned the waterpower on, and as three faces dark with rage spun around, he opened the valve. The blast clipped their legs out from under them and logrolled the Nothungs off the ramp, their wails lost in the hiss and bang of water hitting acid.

***

Sumner listened deeply to the hissing water as he crouched with fatigue over the limp hose. Breath tight in his throat, leg muscles spasming from the hard run, he paused only briefly before taking a canister of red spray paint from its hiding place beside the water-hose. With an unsteady arm he mist-scrawled on one of the broad overhead pipes: SUGARAT.

***

Sumner didn’t stop to rest until he got to his car in a lot behind the factory: a standard bottle-green electric car, squarebacked, with three small hard rubber tires and two scoop seats. He loved it more than anything else. It was his home, more of a place of fealty and comfort than the rug-walled residence he shared with his mother.

He slumped over and laid his head and arms on the cool metal roof. When he caught his breath, he opened the door and dropped into the driver’s seat, head lolling back against the headrest. One hand fingered the wooden steering wheel, and the other dangled over a carton of stale crumbcake. He stuffed a morsel in his mouth, and though it was dry and powdery, a fossil of its original flavor spread over his tongue. He closed his eyes to savor it. He hadn’t eaten in two days. He had had to settle this thing with the Nothungs, and he couldn’t enjoy eating when he was thinking about killing. But now that was over. It was time for the Tour. His stomach grumbled in anticipation.

Stuffing another block of cake in his mouth, he slid the starter chip into the ignition slot. He felt warmth spread over him as he opened the clutch, set the car in gear, and wheeled out through the elephant grass.

Sumner and his car had a lot in common. They were both bulky, squarebacked, and sloppy. Dunes of crumbs drifted out of the corners and over stains of beer, gravy, and pastry fillings. Shreds of wrapping paper, crushed cookie cartons, a bedraggled sock, and numerous bottle caps had wedged between the seats and under the dash. And there on a battered card taped to the windshield, beneath the particolored triangular Eye of Lami—which Jeanlu the witch-voor had given him as protection from his enemies—three words defined him: BORN TO DREAD. Their ambiguity pleased him. Besides eating, the thing he did most consistently and with the most fervor was dread.

Anxiety sparked through him constantly. And though he hated its hot taste in the back of his throat, he accepted it as one of the necessary indignities of life. So he ate, as if his dread were something that could be smothered somewhere deep in his gut, broken down, and digested.

But his real obsession wasn’t food or anxiety. He wanted to be dreaded. He wanted to be the legendary Dark One—magic shining through his ugliness, indifferent to loneliness, deep and calm with violence. He wanted everyone to know he was dangerous.

The problem was that no one ever witnessed his daring deceptions. He was the Sugarat. And no one knew.

In the past six years, the Sugarat had achieved a notoriety that hinged on myth. At first he had singled out streetgangs who had humiliated or abused him. He had trapped and destroyed them for his own gratification, never considering that there would be repercussions. His first few kills had created such a power imbalance among the many gangs of McClure that street warfare raged as never before. Rival gangs warred to fill the vacancies the Sugarat had opened. Firebombs exploded in homes of gang leaders. Assassinations bloodied commuter trains. Hand to hand combat in markets and shops became commonplace in the days that followed each of the Sugarat’s vendettas.

Sumner thrived on this power. He began to kill more often, for insults and slights he wouldn’t have noticed before. He had become important. He had found a way of shaking the world. Of course, there was always the very real likelihood that one of his ploys would backfire; yet, the dread of a gang mauling him in no way matched the loathing he felt for himself when he was alone and bored. Only dread and a little luck had kept him alive this long.

Now the police wanted Sugarat, and that was something else. For six years they had known he was behind the spasms of violence wrenching the city. They wanted him at any price, but there was nobody, not one weasel to betray him, not one witness or skinny-shanked clue to point him out. Nobody knew the Sugarat.

That was why Sumner needed the Tour—to feel what he had done in the past, to know who he was now.

He drove first along a rutted dirt road that smoothed into a causeway and curved out of the industrial district. In a few minutes, he arrived at the edge of his hometown, McClure, and parked the car in a dirt field crowded with hulks of convoy trucks. He ambled into The Bent Knife. Ignoring the stares of the dogfaced truckers, he wedged himself into a phone stall and called the police.

“Zh-zh,” he hissed when the station picked up. The officer at the other end groaned, recognizing the ritual greeting of the Sugarat. Sumner smiled and in a mumbled whisper told the police where they could find the Nothung corpses. Then he hung up and, tucking his torn shirt in as he went along, lumbered over to the counter and ordered six sandwiches to go. He liked his sandwiches wide open and sloppy: horseneck clams with miso and seaweed; chunks of veal blanketed in a mushroom sauce of puffballs and chicken-of-the-woods. At The Bent Knife, however, he settled for egg gumbo on toast and barley rolls stuffed with hot pressed tongue.

He drove back into the ancient, burned-out factory district. He didn’t touch his food but let its steamy odors graze his nostrils with the seductive promise of heartburn.

The Tour began at the site of the first kill of his life. It was a fire-gutted warehouse, just a sunken-in crater with three scorched aluminum walls tottering around it. He parked his car where he could clearly see the seared white ash of the interior and, on one of the ribbed aluminum walls, streaked with mud and smoke, the huge scrawled letters SUGARAT.

He broke out one of the egg sandwiches, sniffed it appreciatively, then devoured it as he reminisced. He had killed seven members of the Black Touch here. The hardest part had been getting the gasoline. Fuel was expensive, and he had nearly starved himself to afford enough of it. As for the liquid detergent, he had simply waited for a shipment to come in to the local mart and then, in the delivery boy outfit from his current job, rolled off a barrel in a trundler to the kill site. Mixed together, the gasoline and the thick detergent made an extremely viscous incendiary. He had used a bucket and pulley to fill three drums with it in the rafters of the warehouse, a chore which had taken him hours. The strategy had been the same. When the razor-fisted headbreakers of the Black Touch chased him into the building, he had doused them with the fire-gum and touched them off with a torch flare. The burn had been beautiful, the screaming brief. It was his best kill. A perfect dupe. Everything he had done in the six years since was derivative.

Sumner cruised kill-sites, enjoying his food and replaying strategies. Stacked vertically on the I-beam of a broken trestle, the letters SUGARAT marked a black tumulus of rail gravel. This was where Sumner had lured a whole gang of Bigbloods beneath the drop-zone of a gravel loader. When the chute opened they had been sighting him with their makeshift nail-slings. They never got off a shot.

At another killing area, with the dank susurrus of a bog twirling about him, he sat on the hood of his car nibbling a barley roll. He gazed into the darkness at the shape of dead trees where the Slash headbreakers had pursued him over a swampbridge. The bridge had been tricked to collapse, of course. But the real shocker for the headbreakers came after they sloshed into the bog—when Sumner ignited the fire-gum coating the enclosing mud.

With his last sandwich eaten, Sumner was parked again outside the alkaloid factory. He figured the police had come and gone, because the Death Crib had been taken away.

He only vaguely remembered why he had killed the Slash, the Black Touch, and the Bigbloods. Remembering was hard. He didn’t think about his life much. He wasn’t one to brood, though his problems loomed larger each day. He had been out of work for a year and, at seventeen, was already the father of a five-year-old boy who terrified him. Even so, he rarely mulled over his life. Muscular intuition motivated him, an urging in the meat of his body to eat, to kill, to find sex. It was his dread.

For Sumner, finding sex proved a lot more difficult than setting up a kill. He was big and ugly: six foot five, with rolls of fat bagging under his eyes, coiling around his neck, swaying like tits under his shirt. His face was glazed with seepings of subcutaneous grease and crusty with eruptions that never went away but only migrated across his features. He had tried growing a beard, but it came in mangy and made him look diseased. Seeing himself disgusted him; so, he had ripped out the rearview mirror in his car and kept apart, even from himself.

On the way back into McClure, Sumner picked up some pastries and cruised through the residential streets, eyeing the houses of the many women he desired.

McClure was an old city, maybe four hundred years old, and like most of the towns that had cropped up this deep in the interior, it was made of stone. At least the older buildings were. This was a matter of necessity, since the weather was dangerously unpredictable. Fierce cyclones—raga storms—with winds of four hundred kilometers an hour swooped across the country with little warning. Whole cities sometimes vanished, populations erased, coastlines reshaped. Nonetheless, in the more affluent sections, wooden houses perched on hills, status symbols in the truest sense, meant to be abandoned when the raga storms came.

As part of the nexus of McClure’s society, the wealthy had been able to reserve cubicles in the Berth, a massive citadel in the center of town. Even if completely buried by a raga storm, the Berth contained enough oxygen, food, and water to sustain thousands of people until they could dig themselves out.

Sumner packed a honeytwist into his mouth and farted when he passed the orange nite-glo sign with the Massebôth symbol on it. The two shining pillars marked the inner city limits and declared that the area was under Massebôth protection.

The symbol exhibited an ivory column beside one of black obsidian. The ivory, as Sumner remembered from his grim two years of mandatory civil education, represented cultural preservation and advancement. Basic technologies of petroleum refinement, vulcanized rubber, antibiotics, transistor circuitry, and too much else that had been taken for granted for years disappeared after the apocalypse that ended the kro culture. Those that had survived the holocaust and the dark centuries that followed were many generations past any memory of civilization. Only a handful had preserved snatches of the old applied sciences and culture. In time, they got together and assembled a civilized community. The Protectorate emerged only centuries later. The white pillar signified this heritage.

The obsidian pillar stood for the muscle of the Protectorate. Though the Massebôth had confined their society to the eastern seacoast, with only a few settlements like McClure in the interior, they had the military strength to dominate a much larger empire. What confined them was not the threat of the tribes to the north and west but something wrong with the human race. Distorts—genetically malformed people—appeared more commonly than not these days, and the Massebôth, who preferred stability, had their hands full keeping their population strong.

Also, most of the planet remained unmapped. The Protectorate just didn’t possess the resources to cope with the vastness and strangeness of their own continent, let alone the rest of the world. A lot was left unexplained—like devas. Military reports, two famous film clips, and rumors described the awesome power of devas. No one knew what they were, or even if they were intelligent. They had apparently saved endangered explorer-craft, but they had also smashed mapping-balloons that had journeyed too far north. Vast funnels of light descending from the stratosphere mesmerized witnesses—always deep in the unmapped north.

Sumner took the word of his teachers that there had been a time before devas and distorts and raga storms. He didn’t think much about it, but he liked to feel that he was informed. That’s why he hated going through center-city McClure. There on the massive time-stained walls of the Berth, which housed the university and all the administrative buildings, he confronted scrawls, graffiti, cerebral vomit. Instead of the streetnames or gang slogans brightly streaked throughout his neighborhood, nonsense defaced the Berth walls—

YOU ARE THE PERPETUAL STRANGLE

BELIEVE IN NEVER NOTHING ALWAYS

AMNESTY FOR THE DEAD!

These absurdities infuriated him. But there was no way for Sumner to get to where he was going without passing the Berth. Tonight, as the walls loomed closer, their smoky searchlights swinging overhead, he spotted a new scrawl, much larger than the rest—

GIVE UP

YOUR ENDOCRINE INFATUATION

BEFORE YOUR FIRST THRILL

ON MALIGNANCY HILL

Sumner used to wonder who it was that went around writing this stuff and how they did it without getting caught. One night, he left his car at home and walked into center-city. He lurked for hours in the dank, gloomy alleys, peering out at a long sweep of the Berth walls. Eventually, a kid maybe fifteen years old strolled past. Large glossy letters began to appear, spraypainted on backward as he went by. Sumner waited until he was done, then lunged and snagged him. At first, he thought he’d grabbed a voor, but when he held him to the light he could plainly see his captive was only a nervous kid.

“What the rauk is this supposed to mean?” Sumner demanded, lifting the punk toward the still dripping paint—FIRSTNESS.

The boy looked at him apprehensively, thinking perhaps that Sumner was a Massebôth cop. When he saw that the giant holding him was just an ugly face, he pulled himself loose and straightened his shirt. Hair close-cropped, ears unpierced, clothes plain, the kid appeared listless, a chalky look on his face. Obviously a student.

“Spill it,” Sumner ordered. He despised students, because they existed as pithless White Pillar lackeys who thought they had the inside view of everything.

“Where’re you from?” the boy asked, pulling himself up and looking straight into Sumner’s eyes.

“Right here in McClure, slip. Down by the Point.”

“Nuh. I mean before that.”

“What? I’ve always lived in the city.”

The student shook his head sadly. “Think about it, tud. Where were you before McClure?” He turned to go, and then looked back once, a little annoyed, a little bemused. “Don’t stop thinking about it.”

The only thing Sumner had been thinking about at that moment was grabbing the kid by his ankles and bashing his head against his scrawl. He had held back. This was Massebôth territory, and the last thing he ever wanted was a run-in with the police, especially over a sapless student.

Sumner had no respect for the White Pillar. Though they posed as stringent scientists, they worshipped Mutra, a deity that rebirthed humans until they attained genetic perfection.

Absurd turds, Sumner thought, banking his car through the nightshadow of the Berth. Most of the city—most of the world, as far as he knew—existed as distorts. Color code categorized the general population, allowing those to propagate who displayed no visible distortions. Maroon cards marked the lowest rung, people either infertile or too genetically scrambled to have children. They worked the slow-kill jobs in the shale factories. Green and yellow cards identified those fertile individuals permitted to have families but whom the Pillars monitored carefully for nerve-damaged and bone-warped offspring. Blue cards identified the lucky ones. They coupled at will, and most mates delighted to have them, since the majority of their progeny proved clean.

Only the white cards distinguished individuals wholly free of distortion. For these privileged ones, bordello-clinics waited to receive their unmarred genetic material at any time of day or night. Sumner merited a white card.

After passing the Berth, Sumner cruised the neighborhoods of the women he desired. These were women to be seen from a distance, coming or going, on lunch break by the factories, or at night with their escorts. Sumner never fantasized about having sex with them. That was inconceivable because of his physical repugnance. But their presence, the fact that such creatures existed, felt important. Their beauty and their fulfillment as people balanced the violence, the hunger, and the continual dread of the world. After a kill, like tonight, or when the muscular tension of living got too intense, he would drive around looking to look at women. The mystery of living and dying appeared for him in the sway of a beautiful woman’s walk, and the arousal he felt, because it was hopeless, opened mystical dimensions. Seeing women, lean and filled with peace, strolling home beneath the soft weight of evening, he felt the psychic tension that corded at the root of his neck loosen for a while.

At ease with himself, Sumner felt poised enough to stop at a nondescript brick-peaked building situated between an abattoir and a saloon: Mutra’s Parlor, a bordello outside center-city. This late at night, the street ranged dark and empty, and Sumner parked his car at the front door.

“It’s the fat boy again,” the red-haired woman at the one-way window announced after Sumner entered the vestibule. A matron handed him a towel and a Mutric prayer book. He left the book on the plastic table there and walked through a double-pillared door toward the showers.

“Kagan, right?” another woman asked. She was older, her heavily kohled eyes looted. “He’s been around a lot lately.”

“Tud,” the redhead spit. “White cards shouldn’t get it free. Not when they’re that ugly.”

“Tell it to Mutra,” the older woman said. They were the only two on call that night, and the dowdy dressing room where they sat looked sad with the other women’s absence: vacant dressing stalls hung with lingerie and shadows. She opened a blue vial, propped her foot on a small table, and began painting her toenails. “Got your bag in?”

For white card men, the women wore diaphragms designed to catch and hold the valuable sperm. Later, the recipient would transfer the seminal fluid to special ampules designated for insemination of would-be mothers in the birth camps. The work fulfilled Mutra’s holy mission, and all the women involved were well paid. Still, the redhead felt reluctant to service Sumner. “If only he weren’t so gross. I’ve had him the last three times. My luck must be dead. Do you think—”

“No.” The older woman scowled and shook her head. “This flop is yours.”

Scrubbed down, Sumner went to the narrow room where a redhead in traditional lingerie sat on the edge of the cot. He had been with her several times before, and he was familiar with her moves. Like all the others, she did not hide her revulsion at his obesity, so he didn’t dawdle. The dim light dulled the disgust in her face. Yet, Sumner could feel how her flesh tightened under his touch. When he mounted her, he looked at her breasts and her firebright hair but not her eyes. He rutted mechanically, the way he masturbated. Within moments, spurred by the cold lust of having killed, hot with the memory of almost being killed, orgasm seized him.

The redhead squeezed herself out from under his ponderous weight. Only after the door glared open and darkened behind her did Sumner realize they hadn’t said a word to each other.

He dressed clumsily and lumbered out to his car, sexually hollowed and emotionally abraded. He hated seeing his ugliness in the way prostitutes handled him. That was always harder than looking in a mirror, but he needed the relief, especially after a kill. As he drove off, he thought about the kill and how close he had come to losing himself.

When he got home, the triumph of duping the Nothungs had all spooled out. The Tour had given him a relentless dose of heartburn, and the unfathomable writing on the Berth walls had started his dread smoldering again. Not even cruising the love streets and getting laid had eased him. He wanted to be alone, but he knew that his gawky mother with her sharp face and piercing voice would be waiting up for him.

Reluctantly, Sumner chained and bolted the low garage door and took a long look down the street to steel himself for the inevitable. Tall thin buildings of rough black stone fronted the narrow avenue of packed dirt with planks laid over it. At this late hour, no one was sitting on the stoops. Down at the far end of the street, among the rusted supports of the elevated train, a pack of dogs moved from alley to alley like a breeze of specters.

Sumner opened the heavy door with his latchkey and stood for a moment in the foyer. He let the fusty odor of clove incense settle on him and a happier fragrance of simmering chowder and adjusted his eyes to the papery light of globe lanterns that dangled above. Behind the steep stairway with its frayed red carpet, a small room led into the basement. There in the dank cellar, his mother usually held her spirit sessions. A sharp voice called out: “Is that you, pudding?”

Sumner grunted and started up the stairs. On the third step, a woman’s face appeared between the slim posts of the banister. Framed in a halo of fire-frizzed hair, a visage the color of clouded silver with pink rubbery lips fixed him with radiant black eyes. “Where’re you going, pudding?”

“Nowhere, Ma.”

“Nowhere isn’t a place.” His mother stepped around the banister and stood at the foot of the stairs, a small woman, thin as a needle, with flat, wrinkled dugs just barely covered by a crinkled blue shift. The thick, red paint of her lids smeared as her eyes widened to take in Sumner’s mud-knobbed boots, splattered pants, torn shirt and mushroom-pale midriff bulging over his belt.

“What in the name of Mutra have you been doing?” she shrilled, clutching at the two black feathers that hung beneath the folds of her neck. “Work those boots off now and leave them outside. The wangol you drag home is moody enough without lugging the flesh of the planet through here.”

Sumner’s mother made her living as a spirit guide. She conversed with the dead by peering into people’s shadows and was reputed to be almost as receptive as a voor, though Sumner knew for a fact that she wasn’t. All the same, she had an awesome reputation in the neighborhood, maintained through meticulous care about the influences—or wangol—that entered her home. Mud, a veritable broth of primal wangol, was strictly forbidden.

As Sumner sat on the stoop removing his boots, she went over to the sludge he had dragged in and sprinkled it with a white powder from a small horn she kept strapped to her thigh. She said it was elk marrow dust that neutralized unfamiliar wangol, but Sumner had found out long ago that it was nothing but detergent and bread crumbs.

It wasn’t that his mother was a blatant charlatan. She really believed she possessed elk marrow dust. But Sumner knew the crone who sold his mother her wangol supplies. She used to be a whore, years and years ago, until she lost her leg plying her trade in a toolshed where an electric swivel-saw had been left carelessly plugged in, after which she resorted to a life of wangol worship. Once, as a little kid, Sumner had hidden himself in a root cellar of the crone’s house. There, leaning on a stuffed crocodile, surrounded by long strings of garlic, and bottles and vials of various luck powders, he peered through a knothole and watched her prepare her neomancy stash: Rusty water became Getaway Lotion, grease and sawdust comprised Wangol Oil, and commercial detergent and bread crumbs concocted elk marrow dust. Even in those fargone days, Sumner was a loner. He had never told his mother what he had seen.

It probably wouldn’t have made much difference. Zelda was devout. She had a blue rose tattoo on her lower left buttock, something Sumner spied in his first explosive days of puberty, and she went out twice a week to commune with other spirit guides from all over the city. Besides, without the zords that her shadow-reading brought in, they would both probably starve.

What absolutely infuriated Sumner was Zelda’s professed capacity to speak directly and authoritatively to his dead father. The business about all the terrible wangol he hauled around was tolerable. The four times a year that she set her hair on fire and ran through the house to clear out evil powers stank yet provided amusement. And the warty, liver-spotted old men she let use her body to help commune with their dead wives merely disgusted him. But when she stopped in midsentence to consult his dead father, Sumner had to bite his tongue to keep from strangling her.

With his boots off, Sumner trudged upstairs, carefully averting his eyes from the cheap rugs that hung from the ceiling. Insipid scenes of misty bogs and full moons over mirror-slick seas covered the scabby, mildewed walls. Zelda was hopping along right behind him. “What have you done to yourself, pudding? You come home sludged as a corpse and not a word out of your sad mouth for your mother. You’ve been to the whorehouse again, haven’t you? Look at your hair, it’s still wet. Don’t you have any respect for yourself? Do you want children you’ll never see by women you’ll never see? Why throw your seed at Mutra when you could marry the way your father did. He was a blue card, and he didn’t drop his seed foolishly. Where would you be now if he did? In some Mutra camp without parents, with a government name, never knowing who you were. Do you want that for your children? You’re a white card, Sumner. You’re rare—a spirit blessing. If you cleaned yourself up and lost some weight, you could marry into a wealthy family. You could open your life. You could do something for your mother—instead of this.” She poked his expansive gut. “Tell me what happened to you. Was it an accident? It wasn’t an accident! Not in your father’s car!”

“It’s my car, Ma. It’s been mine for years.” Sumner reached the top of the stairs and had to shove aside old Johnny Yesterday, who fell asleep night after night at the head of the stairs, reliving an early childhood habit. Johnny Yesterday had occupied their house as a boarder for the past seven years—since Sumner’s father died. He was half deaf, senile, and blind in one eye. Worst of all, a distort characteristic had recently begun to surface. In his case, a deep mind distortion manifested: He could move physical objects telekinetically.

In McClure, as in every Massebôth city, distorts of all types who displayed physical or psychic aberrations met the same fate: an efficient and painless death. Johnny Yesterday’s deep mind capacity had bloomed just after the factory had laid him off, two weeks from his fifty-year pension. There, for forty-nine years, he had relentlessly punched holes in the cardboard panels that swung under his nose on their way to becoming circuit boards at the far end of the assembly line. Sumner believed the layoff had precipitated the distortion, but Zelda couldn’t have cared less. She stopped charging the old man rent (he didn’t have any zords anyway) and discreetly incorporated his rare talent in her spirit guide business.

Sitting in the kitchen behind a thick curtain, amused and stimulated by glass beads and snake vertebrae necklaces that Zelda stored in crates for prospective clients, he performed on cue. When Zelda was ready to start her heavy oaken table thumping or have the flowers in the great brazen coiled-snake vase leap out and dance, she would enunciate very loudly Johnny Yesterday’s mother’s name: “Christabel Mira!” She had learned that whenever old Johnny Yesterday heard that name, his deep mind capacity went rogue.

The power was so rare that even when the thick curtain was itself blown away by Johnny’s intense telekinetic nostalgia, no one suspected that the leering, glassy-eyed old man with the twitching ears animated the whole show. Notwithstanding, Zelda had to be careful in her use of Johnny Yesterday’s gift. The Massebôth kept alert to reports of deep mind powers. Once word got around that she displayed supernatural powers, the authorities would haul her away for a quick and painless end.

Zelda, though cautious, was fearless. Convinced by several years of catering to people who needed miracles, whose emptiness could only be filled by the impossible, she truly believed that the Powers communicated through Johnny Yesterday. That’s why when Sumner shoved him aside at the head of the stairs, she cried out stricken, “Be gentle, pudding! He’s been like a father to you.”

That was a lie. Johnny Yesterday and Sumner had never exchanged a word. By an unspoken agreement, they completely ignored each other. The old man didn’t even break the rhythm of his snoring as Sumner propped him back up against the wall and stepped over him into the living room.

Almost all of this expansive room of strange, forbidding hunks of furniture had been given to Zelda by her patrons, either for services rendered or because nobody else would take it. A behemoth throne, complete with escutcheon-bearing dragons carved into the side panels and a tasseled canopy of royal indigo, occupied the far wall. It was flanked on both sides by peacock-blue urns big enough to stand in, and in which Johnny Yesterday usually did. There was also a massive bronze bust of somebody who looked furious; a candelabra whose candles stuck out at every possible obtuse angle; an ancient metal sea chest that had long ago fused shut and had never been opened, despite a muffled rattling whenever it was moved; and phalanges of imitation ostrich feathers bowing shyly above a metallic-green shag sofa that had gone bald years before it had come here to die. A giant oval rug with a life-size embroidered camel covered the floor. Here and there stood stools with wood-carved monkey feet; a settee shaped like a maw, replete with tiny bamboo teeth and leather lips; and a squat table with brocaded legs and a filigreed surface depicting an angel whose once beatific smile had faded with age to a demented leer.

Sumner maneuvered himself through the clutter of stools to a narrow door beside the furious bust, but before he could open it Zelda grabbed him by the arm. “Aren’t you going to tell me what happened, pudding? You look just terrible. “

“Nothing happened, Ma.”

“Nothing happened?” she whined, and pulled the last two buttons off his shirt. “You think I’m zaned? Look at you.” She slapped the bellyroll drooping over his belt and flopped one of his tits. “Pigging it,” she said with disgust; then her eyes narrowed. “You’re not beating up little boys for food money anymore, are you?”

“Ma!” Sumner gently pushed her off and moved to open his door, but Zelda put her hand on the doorknob.

“Hold on, you. You’re always squirming, always itching to be someplace else. Stand still a minute and get a good taste of yourself.”

Sumner sighed and scratched his belly. “What do you want, Ma?”

Her voice sharpened. “I want you to stand still a minute and look at yourself. What have you ever crafted?” She slapped his belly again. “Just this. That’s all you’re good for, taking food and turning it into—”

“Ma!”

“When was the last time you brought home anything but mud and moody wangol? Ha! Last time? There hasn’t been a first time.”

“Ma, I want to be alone.”

“When aren’t you alone? All I see of you is the mud you leech behind. Where do you go? What do you do? I’m your mother and I don’t know. I feed you and I don’t know.”

Sumner turned to go, and Zelda grabbed his shoulder, throwing her whole weight against him and turning him around. He felt her eyes grind into him, and he wondered if he would have to belt her. Instead, he started picking his nose.

Zelda stabbed him with a finger. “You’re a half-witted rundi running all over town, day after day. For what? Answer me! For what?”

“Ma, it’s my business—”

“Your business?” Her whole face clenched. “Take your finger out of your nose and listen to me. You don’t own anything here. You’ve never earned even a slice of bread that wasn’t for yourself. Don’t go telling me what my business is. You’re my business. I’ve given you everything you have. This house is mine. That car is mine. Those clothes are mine. And this gumbo is mine!”

She grabbed two big handfuls of Sumner’s voluminous midriff and yanked at it until he shoved her off. “It’s mine, I say!” She stared at him with apoplectic rage. “I created it, and I’ve fed it. What have you ever done? There’s nothing—”

She stopped abruptly, and her fury became an immense sadness. It happened so quickly that Sumner, even though he knew what was going to happen, lingered, waiting. “Klaus! Is this our son? Is this the boy we created?” She cocked her head as if listening to somebody behind her.

Sumner bit his tongue and shoved into his room, slamming the door behind him. Alone, he crumbled onto the beat-up mattress and its clutter of heaped clothes and bedding and covered his eyes with his arm. He heard the door snick open. Swiftly, he tugged a shoe out from behind the mattress and hurled it at the blanched, shriveled face appearing in the doorway, missing it by inches. The door banged shut, and Sumner covered his eyes again.

Alone. But he was too keyed up to sleep. He stirred restlessly from side to side and finally heaved himself to his feet and started throwing the scattered clothes on his bed all over the small, dark room. The place, like everything else about Sumner, was a sloppy mess. There was a broken chair in one corner, a mattress with a feathery rent in another corner, and a desk propped by zucchini crates against the one wall with a window. The window itself had cracked panes thickened with grime and splattered with paint. The desk held a muddle of beat-up tools, stacks of crackling yellowed papers, springs, clips, rocks, mementoes, balled-up tissues, crumbs, a torn shirt, three toothbrushes, several broken pens, a dirty glass, and a gleaming chrome-plated scansule with a sixteen-inch screen and a push-button console.

Next to food, the scansule was the main reason Sumner spent time at home. It was, indirectly, a gift from Sumner’s dead father. Klaus had been a very successful plant foreman. He had seemed to understand what life was all about, though he had died before Sumner could ask. Sumner was ten at the time, and his father had already put enough money aside for the boy’s education. Klaus had cherished dreams of his son becoming a craftsman, dreams defeated by a child too reclusive and short-tempered to go to school. After Sumner’s two years of mandatory civil education and another two years in nine different training programs, Zelda succumbed to the swarm of disciplinary sheets that followed him from one classroom to another and withdrew him from school. She rented a scansule, a self-study device connected to McClure’s university center. With this device, Sumner learned how to make fire-gum and gunpowder. Otherwise, he wasn’t interested in learning.

The other things that fascinated him about the scansule, apart from the sex-ed programs he played back now and then, were the tectonic displays—structural programs in which students could analyze various stoichiometric combinations: crystal stress patterns, principles of wave propagation, and maze properties. Sumner enjoyed sitting in front of the screen and letting those abstract patterns lull him into a soporific trance. It was a form of self-hypnosis, a way of getting beyond his dread and relaxing enough to sleep.

He despised sleep. Slumped out in the sag of his filthy mattress, he fell prey to nightmares and their garble of screamshapes and barely heard whispers. He much preferred the slow descent in the pale light of the scansule, letting the meaningless but intricately beautiful patterns ease him into a sprawled slumber. His dreams were tamer then, and he woke without thrashing or howling.

Sumner caressed the cool metal rim of the scansule. He flicked on the power switch, waited a moment, then banged the set, waited another moment, then physically lifted and dropped the set. He waited a final moment before urgently looking around for something to ram through the screen. Fortunately, the only thing handy was a frayed toothbrush, and he decided instead to check the battery. It was missing.

He thought about it for a moment and then realized with a pang of humiliation that there was only one answer. The battery was too securely connected for Zelda or Johnny Yesterday to have removed it. Only a scansule agent could have taken it out, which meant, quite simply, that his dead father’s funds were exhausted.

He leaned against the voided scansule and rubbed his eyes, trying to absorb the full import of his situation. For months, he had been fearing this day, and now that his father was truly gone, no longer personified even by his zords, the sadness was thicker than dread. Soon they would be coming not only for the scansule but the car. It had belonged to Klaus while he was alive, and like most everything else in Massebôth society, it was on loan from the government. As long as there were funds to pay for its upkeep and recharging, it remained Sumner’s to do with as he pleased. Now there wouldn’t even be enough to cover the three traffic violations he had picked up over the last two months.

Sumner gazed forlornly at the two tickets taped above his desk and reached into his back pocket to pull out the latest one. He had gotten it two days before for speeding down a residential street. One of the women he admired had abruptly appeared at her doorstep.

He froze—hand to fabric-torn hip—and an iciness gripped him so severely he couldn’t breathe.

The ticket was gone. It had been in the pocket that one of the Nothungs had ripped away, and it was probably left lying on the wire mesh ramp below the broad steam pipe on which he had defiantly sprayed SUGARAT.

He moaned aloud and dropped to his knees. It was all over. Lazy nights blinking out to the scansule, slow drives down the love streets, the Tour—all of it, gone. And worst, most horrible of all, the Sugarat was through.

Sumner swayed to his feet, grabbed the edge of his desk, and heaved it over. The scansule tube exploded, and before the crash and bang thinned out, the door to his room swung open. Zelda stood ready to swoop over him, but when she saw the fury on his face she clutched her two black feathers and quietly closed the door.

Sumner couldn’t think. He needed fresh air. He thudded out of the room and stood for a moment beside the bust with the furious expression.

Zelda, leaning against the table with the brocaded legs, still clutching her feathers, demanded with indignation, “Who are you?” She reached between her legs and pulled out her horn of elk marrow dust. Swinging her arm in a wide arc, afraid to get too close, she tried to scatter the dust on her son. “Out mind-mauler! Out nerve-squelcher! Get out of the body I created! In the name of Mutra. Out!”

Sumner swung past her and went to the door that led to the roof.

“No!” Zelda shrieked. “I won’t let you kill my son!” She ran up to him and emptied the detergent and bread crumbs on his head. Sumner jerked aside the bolt, kicked open the door, and spun around. Zelda leaped back and, casting a warding sign with her thumb and little finger, mumbled something under her breath.

“Ma! Relax!”

“Me relax?”

“I’m just a little wound up. I need some air. I’ll be all right.

“Why go up on the roof? It’s windy up there. You could get sick.”

Sumner turned and bounded up the stairs, his mother calling after him. “If you jump, I’ll never forgive you. I’ll trap your wangol in a jar and torment it as long as I live. We can renew the scansule. We can buy a new one. Don’t—”

Sumner banged through the outer door and stepped out of sight onto the roof.

Zelda sighed and threw up her hands. He’ll kill me yet, she thought. Why does he have to be such a loner? And foul-tempered, too. She shook her head. “It’s all your fault,” she said quietly to her husband. “You were the one that wanted him to be free. You trained him that way. Not me. I wanted him to play with other boys. Be sociable. Make friends, I told him. But no. There’ll be time for that later, you said. Now he’s got to be self-reliant. He has to learn to be comfortable with himself. That’s the way it is in this world. You’re on your own. Nobody’s going to help you. Ha!” She leaned back against the filigreed table, suddenly feeling very heavy. “Well, I wish you were here now, Klaus. I wish you could see what he’s become.”

Zelda sighed again and pushed away from the table. It was time to see how the chowder was doing. She went downstairs to a small, cramped kitchen where a heavy-bottomed pot purred on the stove. She always had something cooking. Food provided the only way to reach her son. “And that’s your fault, too,” she told Klaus, “going Beyond like that when he was so young. What am I supposed to do? He only listens to me when I have something to eat.”

She lifted the top off the pot and let the steam billow out before sniffing the broth. It smelled good. From experience, she knew that Sumner would be hungry soon, so she took down a bowl from a heat-faded wood cabinet and ladled out the thick clam chowder. She selected from the spice rack two jars marked Onion Salt and Turnip Chips. They were really powdered John the Conqueror Root (for energy and defense against sickness) and wangol e-z brew (for calming nerves). Gingerly she sprinkled some of both into the bowl.

Zelda was a good mother. This was her responsibility, she knew, to reform her son, to undo all the harm that Klaus had done. But so far she was getting nowhere. Talking was useless. He never listened to her. So she had resorted to herbal cures and wangol fortifiers. Yet even these hadn’t helped. Sumner was as close-minded and reclusive as ever.

Soon she would have to do something drastic. She felt somehow misguided protecting him like this—feeding and housing him, treating him like a child, or an old man. No, she scolded herself. I won’t do this anymore. He’s got to get ahold of his own life.

***

Up on the roof, Sumner breathed deeply to clear his head. With the glare of the Berth lights and the blue crowns of fire from the refinery stacks in the south, few stars were to be seen. He walked around to the back of the house and stared northeast. There three rows of rooftops and then darkness roved to the horizon, where a faint green glow suffused from Rigalu Flats. He stared for a long time at that spectral light and thought of Jeanlu the witch-voor and his son, Corby. He would have to go to them soon for zords, and that thought made his fear all the more palpable. Voors embodied the madness of the world, distorts with alien strengths and too-knowing minds. He didn’t want to go to the voors. They had abused him before, and he feared them. But the police were coming, and unless the voors helped him, the Massebôth would kill him.

A moan welled up from his thick body, and he reached for his back pocket. He stood that way for a long minute, his hand on the torn seat of his pants, gazing north fish-eyed and heavy-hearted. Gradually, shame and anger opened in him, and a disfigured cry lurched in widening circles through his chest but could find no way out.

When the pain finally dulled, he went inside and sulked over a bowl of clam chowder that was steamy and thick and smelled of someplace far away.

Pictures of the Real Universe

REALITYSHARING

With morning still dark, Sumner left home in his bottle-green car, all his important possessions wrapped in a torn shirt and thrown in the back. Zelda, fluttery with concern, tried to stop him, first with threats about her poor health and then with food. But nothing could dissuade him. Sumner’s dread far outstripped both his guilt and his hunger. He told Zelda he would be back later in the day, though he had no intention of ever seeing her again.

He had a large breakfast at an all-night convoy stop on the outskirts of the city and allowed himself to dwell on his life with Zelda, because this was the last time he would remember her exactly as she was. Their life together had been very good compared to what passed for living in most of the households of their neighborhood. Klaus had freed them from the factories, at least for a few years. All his life, Sumner had been allowed to come and go as he pleased, even though Zelda was always there to interrogate him when he got back. Still, he remembered, she never knew what was really going on. And her cooking—Mutra, that was fine! A little heavy on the wangol spices now and then, but fine. He sighed. Too bad she was swayed by all that spirit yak.

Though fond of his mother, he rejoiced to finally get away from her. She was always trying to change him, and he was happy as he was. Or as he had once been, he reminded himself. From now on, it was life on the road. Zelda was gone but then, so was his life as the Sugarat. More than security, he had lost his very identity.

His destination was Jeanlu’s cottage, 189 kilometers away, on the far edge of Rigalu Flats. It was a lonely ride—lonelier still knowing that he would never be going back—but the voors had things he wanted.

He smiled, remembering his first journey outside McClure. How old had he been then? Ten? No. It was just after his first kill. He must have been eleven.

It would be at least an hour before he reached Rigalu Flats, and it was a straight, unbroken road until then. He eased his mind back six years to the memories he had of his first lonely drive into the wilderness—

***

Hunger had led Sumner to the fish stalls by the river where he had hoped to scrounge a free meal. He watched closely as thick-armed men in blood-grimed aprons whacked off the heads of perch and mullet, shook out their guts, and then tossed the cut pieces onto mounds of flaked ice. He searched diligently for the misaimed chunks of meat that fell along the stalls. But the competition was too tough—large wild cats that had been bred to fend off rats—and soon he wandered out to the empty wharves to wait for the returning ships.

Watching inky water slap the dock pilings, he thought about barbecued fish. Its imaginary aroma and flaky dark crust appeared so real that he didn’t notice the old man until he spoke: “You want to get laid, kid?”

Sumner spun around, eyes snapping to the old man’s face, a visage brown and wrinkled as a crumpled bag, ears doughy, hair filthy and tangled.

“What’re you talking about, wheeze? I got no money for whores.”

The old man stepped closer. “But you have a white card.”

Sumner’s heart skipped two beats. Just a week before, he had gone for his mandatory medical exam. Massebôth law required all children who survived to puberty without exhibiting distort traits to have their genes tested. After an exhausting series of scrapings, injections, and embarrassing probes, the test center issued Sumner a white card—the most highly coveted genetic status. He was one in a thousand with unmangled genes.

Yet—how did this crust of a man know about his white card? Sumner looked more closely at the old man’s face. He had a straight, fierce mouth and incongruously dreamy eyes. Eventually, Sumner would learn to recognize a voor by those searchless eyes. At the time, though, he thought the old man was just a river pirate. He looked hard enough, with bead-rings in the tops of his ears, a black bandana across his forehead, and strange, smoky scents lufting off his clothes.

“You want to get laid, waddle? Yes or no?”

Sumner stood his ground gamely, hands on his hips, both excited by the mysterious prospect of sex and frightened by this uncanny pirate. “How do you know I have a white card?”

A shadow of a smile crossed the old man’s rumpled face and softened it. “I’m a voor, waddle. I know.”

Sumner’s whole body clenched. Voors could craze you with a glance. They were the most alien of the distorts and known to have deep mind powers. And if those weren’t good enough reasons to stay clear of them, the Massebôth had a long-standing Unnatural Creatures Edict posted against them. People were hanged for talking with voors.

Sumner tried to back away, but the river sloshed behind him and there was no one else down by the wharves. Three hundred meters away, the fish stalls bustled with activity, and he realized too late that no one would hear him if he screamed.

With a whimper, he lunged past the old voor and scurried down the wharf. A beat-up scavenger truck wheeled out from behind a row of tarred bollards and cut him off. From the cab, a cowled man leaped out, and Sumner froze. The man’s outstretched hands looked weird, blueshelled and barbed.

Distort! Sumner silently screamed. He tried to fight, but the hooded distort, eerily swift, accurately anticipated all of Sumner’s blows and cornered him between the truck and the water. Sumner’s fear overwhelmed his revulsion, and he went for the creature’s eyes. The distort snagged his hand in an icy grip and guided him to the back of the truck, where the old voor opened the thin metal doors. They threw him in and banged the doors shut.

Sumner raged. He had heard that voors cracked open the skulls of their victims and devoured their brains. He swung around in the tight compartment looking for a weapon. There was nothing in the back except rust stains and dents. Screaming, he threw himself against the doors, and they buckled.

Before he could hurl his body at the doors again, they squealed open. The claw-handed distort leaned in, the cowl of his mantle thrown back, revealing a shaved head oddly misshapen. The face seemed moronic, the forehead round and bulging, filling up the sockets so that his baleful yellow eyes had to stare up from under his skull. An idiot’s face.

“Sit still, waddle,” the old voor’s voice spoke from somewhere beside the truck.

Sumner backed away, feeling his aggression congeal to cold fear. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the cretin glower with its cushiony flesh and glossy lips. Its grotesqueness drained him, and he slumped back against the far wall.

With a jolt, the antique truck lurched to a start, throwing him across the rusted floor. Fighting the sway of the truck, he crawled to the front of the compartment and laced his fingers through the wire mesh of the window. The two voors paid no attention to him, and he looked beyond them, through the bug-splattered windshield at the empty wharf road they bumped along.

He hung to the wire mesh and gazed intently, hoping to spot some landmark that would give him an idea of where they were taking him. But that was hopeless. The cowled driver seemed to be turning corners randomly, backtracking on himself again and again. At first, Sumner thought they were trying to confuse him, but that didn’t make sense. They’d hood me if I wasn’t supposed to know, he reasoned.

It was only after he glimpsed, at the far end of one street, a gray car with black and white pillars stenciled on its hood, that he understood what was happening. The voors were using their telepathy to elude the police. They were looking for a gap in the stop-and-search patrols that ringed the city. After a few minutes of circling, they found one.

Sumner had never been outside of McClure. Most people spent their whole lives in the city and never left. There was no reason to leave. Outside spanned wilderness where hind rats and distort tribes ruled. Other cities abounded but far off, and unless you were a merchant or convoy driver they offered nothing that couldn’t be found in McClure.

Awed, Sumner watched the dark gaunt buildings of McClure bob into the distance. All around them, desert lay flat and empty as an ancient seabed. “Where’re you taking me?” Sumner demanded.

“You’re going to get laid, waddle,” the old voor said. “Nothing more.”

Sumner knew from the tone of the voor’s voice that it was hopeless to ask more questions. He was sure that they were taking him someplace desolate where they could cannibalize him at their leisure.

After more than an hour of being jostled and thrown about, Sumner felt the road smooth out. On the left brooded black rock, immense palisades. On the right, a yawn of space. They bucked along on a ledge road at almost top speed. Sumner trembled so nervously that he didn’t even glance to the right. When he did, he gasped.

Down below, for as far as he could see, sprawled a desert of pale green sand laced with swirls of black ash. Everywhere stood broken domes, spires, and turrets fantastically honeycombed, pocked, cratered, and smoothed by wind erosion. The place looked like a labyrinth of arabesque shapes, echoes of radiance and scaled colors. It took Sumner a long while to perceive that the broken honeycombs were buildings. The whole colossal landscape was—had been—a city!

“It was called Houston,” the old voor said. “Or Dallas. I’m not sure which anymore.”

Sumner stared dumbfounded at the ghost city and its phantasmagoric shapes until the rickety truck suddenly swung off the rimroad. White chalk cliffs blocked his view of the Flats as they careened along a rutted dirt track. In a cluster of old big-boled trees, they jerked to a stop.

Beyond the trees squatted a small whitewashed adobe cottage with coral-pink tiles scaling a swayback roof. Blue gentians bloomed in wooden troughs beneath oval clear glass windows. Behind the cottage reposed a cirque of tamarind trees bowing over a crystal blue pool that had formed in the basin of an old bomb crater.

The two voors, one on either side, led Sumner along a mica-flecked path to the edge of the pool. A large wooden tub there brimmed with sudsy water.

“Off with your clothes, waddle.”

Sumner nervously obeyed. When he was naked, the old voor scooped a bulky sponge out of the tub and threw it at him. “Wash,” he ordered. He quickly lathered himself all over, and they shoved him into the pool. The water, deep and warm, nearly submerged him, and he clung to the side while the voors sudsed and soaked his clothes and then beat them dry on a large sunbaked boulder.

He dressed, and the voors walked him back to the front of the cottage. The old voor motioned Sumner toward the house.

Sumner fidgeted.

“Just get over there, howlie,” the old voor said, his voice severe. “You want to go home, right? Then do what I say.”

Sumner walked up to the cottage and climbed the three polished cedar steps to the door. He moved to knock, but before his hand came down, the door opened.

A woman stood in the doorway wearing a flinty-blue dress with threads of gold at the cuffs and a wide-throated collar. Gorgeous—tall, with a musical body and black rambling hair—she appraised him with eyes liquid and dreamy as any voor’s, smoke-blue eyes that sparked with many strawberry-gold flecks. She ran a slender hand along the doorjamb and gestured for Sumner to come in.

There was something wonderfully strange about the place. Beer-colored shafts of sunlight filled the room, threading through dense curtains of drying roots and flowers. Brown Indian pipes, swamp violets, groundsel, bloodweed, wind apples, and ice-clear stalks of kiutl hung from thick, well-seasoned rafters.

“My name’s Jeanlu.”

Sumner stammered out his name and lingered in the doorway until Jeanlu closed the door and offered him a seat.

“Sit down, please.” Her voice sounded gentle and unhurried, and she trailed a delicate musky scent that set her apart from the brassy aroma of the plants. Sumner sat down, his eyes torn between her and the colorful carpet.

“This is my veve,” she said, gesturing at the carpet, a patchwork of eleven different landscapes: a red sea combed by wind; dark sheol-flowers sprouting beneath two moons; blue-barked pines; and a series of brilliant images that could have come from a scansule crystal display. “Do you know what a veve is?”

Sumner shook his head.

“Every voor has one, in some form or other. It shows our lineage—where we’re from.” She pointed to a black square pinpointed with white flecks. “This is a planet we call Unchala. It doesn’t exist anymore. An eternity ago, it was the home of all voors, in a galaxy you don’t have a name for.”

Sumner wasn’t listening. He expected the other voors to come in any moment. “How come there are eleven?” he asked, afraid of a silence.

“That’s all any voor remembers. We each remember eleven, some different, some the same. It’s sharing that holds the brood together.” She walked over to the stove. “Would you like something to drink?”

He shook his head and began cracking his knuckles nervously. His large and fat hands displayed dirty scabs that even the sudsy bath couldn’t cleanse. They testified to his perpetual anxiety, the nails chewed to nubs.

“Something to eat, perhaps?” She held out a pastry glistening with honey and studded with almonds. He couldn’t resist.

While working on the pastry, he studied Jeanlu. Her very attractiveness made him wonder if maybe the old voor had been telling the truth. What if she does want me? That thought inspired a pang of fear. He had never been intimate with a woman before.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jeanlu said with a handsome smile. “I’m sure you’ll catch on quickly.”

Sumner’s ears flared red. She was so beautiful, he had forgotten she was a voor. She could read his thoughts as easily as the embarrassment on his face. “But why me?” he managed to blurt out, trying to cover his lapse. “I’m...” He was going to say ugly, instead mumbled, “…just a kid. I’m only eleven.”

“I don’t care,” she said sincerely. “You have a white card. That’s all that matters to me.”

Sumner swallowed the last morsel of pastry and shifted uncomfortably in the chair.

“Strong genes are rare,” she went on. “But they’re important to me. You see, I want to have a baby.”

“A baby?” His eyes gauged her. He didn’t think she was lying.

“Yes. Voors can’t mate with one another. Didn’t you know that?”

He shook his head. The sex-ed program that accompanied the gene test hadn’t covered voor sexual behavior.

“We’re distorts, you know. Our children are only strong when we mate with outsiders. If our race is to survive, we need new genes.”

Sumner popped his knuckles.

“Finding someone as unmarred as you is difficult. These are unsteady times. Howlies—people like yourself who have to make sounds to be heard—are dangerous. We have to make the best—” She stopped short, and her eyes narrowed. “I didn’t know that. You’re so young.” She seemed to look more closely at him. “You’ve killed recently.”

“Yes,” Sumner said, knowing it was useless to lie. Three weeks before, he had doused the Black Touch marauders in homemade fire-gum. His first kill.

Jeanlu shook her head and said with mock gravity, “So young. And so scared.”

“I’m not scared,” Sumner slammed back. He stared at her sullenly, legs swinging. It made him uneasy to know that she was watching him think. “I burned them because they abused me. You can’t let people abuse you, or they’ll never stop.”

Jeanlu nodded compassionately. “That’s what your father used to say, isn’t it?”

Sumner glared. His father had died almost a year ago. A large, powerful man, Klaus always got his way. Every week, he would take Sumner downtown to play pins or kili. One day he went out hunting and never came back. Carrying a loaded shotgun, he had been chasing a pangolin when he tripped. The gunstock hit the ground, discharging the firearm and blowing away the top of his head. Sumner went berserk when he found out, and Zelda had to tie him down. Weeks later, when he was able to control himself again, he went downtown to play pins and try to forget about his grief. On the way back, he confronted the Black Touch gang, slinky, mushroom-skinned distort kids who never left the shadows when he went through their neighborhood with his father. Now that he trespassed alone, they dragged him into a back alley, shit-smeared him, and left him hanging upside down for a whole afternoon. He was sick for days afterward and spent the bedtime wondering how his father would have handled it. It was then that he decided to kill them.

Just thinking about it infuriated him, and he could feel his heart thudding.

“I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to bring up such painful memories.” Jeanlu sounded genuinely contrite. “You were brave to do what you did. Fear is a tool in the hands of a clever man.”

Sumner nodded, feeling his anger cool in the face of being called a man.

Jeanlu laughed and clapped her hands. “I wonder if you’re going to be as fiery in bed?”

Sumner stiffened, feeling a twinge between his legs. Spreading warmth pulsing over his belly turned positively hot when Jeanlu leaned forward and rested a hand on his knee. “But I want you to know I won’t force you into this. If you don’t want to be with me, you can go home now.”

The offer, almost too good to believe, appealed to him, and he almost moved to go. But the sensual warmth in Jeanlu’s hand turned magnetic. At first, he thought this was the afterglow of his anger, until it swirled tighter and fired his loins with sudden heat. The feathery scent of Jeanlu’s hair misted over him, and he knew for sure that something wonderful was going to happen. “N-no,” he stammered. “I’d like to stay.”

“Wonderful.” With a radiant smile, she stood up and loosened the cord binding the front of her dress. “But I have to tell you before you finally decide—” The cream white curves of her breasts appeared between the blue edges of her dress. “The pastry you ate was laced with a mild aphrodisiac. Nothing to take your wits away. Just something to make your first time more memorable.”

Sumner couldn’t have cared less. He writhed in the chair as she ran a finger down between her breasts to the cloud of hair below. She took his arm and coaxed him out of the chair and over to the bed. His reluctance evaporated when her cool hands moved under his shirt and over his body. Her touch felt electric. In a few minutes, he was struggling out of his clothes.

Naked, Jeanlu’s body didn’t prove as attractive as it had promised to be beneath the folds of her dress. Firm yet soft and well proportioned, her flesh displayed large dark scales on her thighs and stomach. She said they were nothing to be concerned about, not a disease, nothing contagious, just a deformity. Sumner looked at them only once and then fixed his attention on the strawberry-gold specks of her eyes and made love to her as best his cumbersome inexperienced body could.

Jeanlu was patient. She guided their slewed bodies craftily, helping Sumner discover for himself how to please her with his turgid strength. Lust immixed with his uncertainty, and soon he was wauling with pleasure, doing things he had never thought possible. He did them again and again, until mist rose blue in the tamarind trees and the spiderwebs started shining in the falling light.

Sumner, orgasm-wearied, exultant and proud, prepared to urge himself on again as the room fogged into crepuscular shadows. But Jeanlu had become silent. She lay in the bed, eyes glazed over, breath soft. As Sumner bent over her and stroked the sweat-strung hair from her eyes, the door swung open and the two voors stepped in.

“Get your clothes on, waddle,” the old voor said. “Time to go.”

Sumner slunk out of the bed and swiftly tugged his clothes on. The old voor led him out by his elbow, and the boy glanced back only once. Jeanlu, lying on her back, stared up mute-eyed, her face serene and pale as ivory.

He was still buttoning his shirt when the metal doors of the truck banged shut behind him. He got a good grip on the wire mesh before they jolted off into the dusk.

The ride back sped by uneventfully. In the dark, Rigalu Flats disclosed a lattice of shadows suffused with a dusty green light. Sumner asked what made it glow, but the old voor shrugged and the cowled driver remained silent.

Without asking where he lived they drove him right to his doorstep. As soon as he hopped out, they sped off.

A SMALL TIME-DRENCHED WORLD

Sumner ran a hand over his face, feeling the memories stirring just an inch behind his eyes. He sighed and glanced at the dashboard. The battery indicator showed a full charge, enough power to run continuously for perhaps three days. In that time, he could make it to one of the large eastern cities—Vortex, Prophesy, maybe even Xhule. All three of them, larger than McClure, offered the prospect of finding work. But doing what? He wasn’t trained or licensed to do anything. He had a white card, and though that would certainly get him cash for sperm donations, it would also expose him to the police. And if they caught him, they would kill him. At least he hoped they would, because if they didn’t, he would wind up in the dorga pits.

Dorgas, the lowest rung in Massebôth society, served as corpse-carriers, garbage burners, and street laborers. Legally, as functional distorts, criminals, or captured and conditioned tribesfolk, they didn’t exist. When they worked, they were made to wear drone straps, headbands that amplified their strength at the same time that they dulled their minds. The characteristic X-scars on dorga brows came from the drone straps and so did their sullen lethargy. Most dorgas lived many years as mindnumbed zombies.

Sumner shivered and brought his attention firmly back to the road in front of him. Sure I’m a renegade, he admitted to himself. But I know I can make it. There’s still Jeanlu. I’m not dorga meat yet.

He reached for an apple and bit off a large chunk. The crisp, cool flavor eased him, and he breathed deeply. A strohlkraft, one of the Massebôth vertical-ascent planes, cruised about ten kilometers to the south and five kilometers high. It moved as a silver spark against the brisk, high wind that broomed the sky and advanced a line of cumulus clouds. He wondered if they could see him, or if they would be curious about a three-wheeler heading for the Flats.

With angry chomps, he finished the apple and dismissed the fear. Too late to be tailtucked, he told himself, though dread still spellbound him.

He flicked the core out the window and fixed his mind on Jeanlu again. Perhaps she would have some brood jewels for him. Maybe some kiutl she wanted moved. It would be a start, a way to earn some zords. Maybe enough for him to buy a new name, join a craft’s league and become a carpenter. He was still young enough.

One hand low on the wheel and the other groping in the greasy bag of beef strips, Sumner thought back to his first experience with brood jewels and kiutl—and Corby. He laughed softly at himself, remembering his ignorance, his initial fear—

***

At sixteen, he went to see Jeanlu again. Though five years had lapsed since his last visit, he remembered the route exactly. Everything remained as it had been, except that now a neat round hut with a blue tile roof reposed beyond the tamarind trees and the crater pool.

When he got out of his car, Jeanlu stood in the doorway. She waved happily, and the timidity that had been building in him since he left McClure dissolved. He had wanted to see Jeanlu again for a long time. He needed answers to some questions that had been bothering him, but he had been too afraid of the voors to seek her out. He wasn’t sure if she would be living in the same place, and he worried that the two voors who had kidnapped him might lurk there. Then one day, that seemed not to matter. He had grown bigger and smarter. And danger had become a lot more familiar—something his dread needed. So he had driven out, and now here she was, older-looking, her hair clawed with gray, face lined, yet as beautiful and gracious as he remembered her.

“I’ve been expecting you,” she greeted as he stepped up the cedar steps. She wore a sack-like dress of ruddy brown that dropped to her ankles and hung wide open at the sleeyes. “What took you so long?”

Sumner looked at her quizzically. He stood a head taller than she now, and she looked small and frail.

“I’ve been trying to get you here for the past week.”

The interior of the cottage seemed smaller, too. Everything rested where it had been, only the dense curtains of drying herbs, flowers, and roots were gone. In their place dangled hundreds of small, delicate-looking ornaments, deep brown and black and obviously woven from dried plants. To Sumner, they looked like trinkets: circles, stairs, all manner of geometric shapes, from rectangles and squares to the intricate oddity of a latticed cone within a latticed cube within a latticed sphere.

She offered him a chair. “How about something to eat or drink?”

Sumner fought back an immediate surge of hunger. “No thanks.” He remembered the almond pastry spiked with an aphrodisiac.

“You think I’d hurt you?” She tightened her face with mock-annoyance.

“I came to ask some questions,” Sumner replied, sticking to his plan to face her absolutely straightforwardly. “But you said you’ve been trying to get me here?”

“Not to hurt you. Relax.” She removed a bone-white plate from the stove. It had sliced green peppers and strips of fish on it. “Redfish sizzled in tangerine juice. I think you’ll like it.”

Sumner couldn’t turn it down, though he had already promised himself that he would refuse anything she offered. It tasted very good—tart with a sweet afterglow. The crisp peppers refreshed perfectly between bites of fish. “My questions can wait,” he said around a mouthful. “Why did you want me here?”

“I have something for you.” She reached behind and took a large bundle of black crushed leather from one of the shelves. Unwrapping it, she revealed three packages covered with faded chamois, which she arranged next to each other on the table. “These are retribution, or a gift, if you will, for your part in the creation of our son.”

Sumner glanced at the packages and then looked up at Jeanlu.

“Yes,” she said. “We have a son. I’ve named him Corby.”

Sumner began to speak, and she raised a hand. “There’s so much to do today, there’s no sense dragging this on and on. I know what you’re thinking. Let me answer your questions.”

Sumner sat back, swamped with uncertainty.

“I called you here because I want you to participate in a timeless ritual that will probably make little sense to you. It may even frighten you. But it means a lot to Corby, and I beg you to be patient and accept my assurance that no harm will come to you.”

Rauk! Sumner wriggled in his chair. He hated being manipulated, and the fact that he had been called here by a power beyond his comprehension only made his dread that much worse. “Please relax.” Jeanlu smiled, and for the first time Sumner noticed that the gold flecks in her eyes had expanded since the last time he had seen her. Her irises gleamed like polished gold rings rimmed with turquoise.

“It’s a custom among voors,” she continued, “for the child to experience the lives of the parents. Because both Corby and I are voors, he’s known my life since before he was born. But to him, you’re a stranger. He knows you only through your chromosomes. Fortunately, considering how violently you live, you’re still alive, and now may be his only chance to know you directly. In exchange for your cooperation, I’d like you to have these.”

She carefully unwrapped one of the packages, revealing a small triangular ornament similar to the many geometric shapes dangling throughout the room. “It’s a stalk charm. I made it myself from plant fiber. That’s my job—working with sunlight.”

“Your job?” Sumner asked, trying to move his mind past his anxiety.

“Yes. Every voor has a specific function. Mine is crafting stalk charms—forms of shaped-energy that we use for different purposes. This particular shape is called an Eye of Lami. It wards off influences detrimental to its possessor.”

The stalk charm consisted of a tight weave of brown, yellow, and green fibers with a faded red flower netted at its center. He held it in his hand, and its nubbled texture pleased him. Coming away with gifts was more than he had expected when he traveled out here. Suddenly his mind swarmed with questions, and the idea of shaped-energy reached the tip of his tongue.

“Each shape has its own potential,” Jeanlu responded. “Geometry is essential—from the molecular bonds in your cells to the star-bridges. But just how this particular shape works requires an understanding not only of geometry but of plants. And there’s no time for that now. Trust me.”

She unfolded the second package, the largest one, and it crackled as she nudged it toward him, exposing a thick sheaf of crisp leaves the color of dried blood. “Kiutl,” she said. “When you drink the tea made from these leaves, you’ll understand better what it is to be a voor.”

Kiutl! Sumner winced with excitement. Kiutl, a psiberant, a telepathic drug smuggled by voors, originated in the far north. Although much coveted in Massebôth society, kiutl was outlawed, because telepathy translated as anarchy to the government. On the black market, the quantity of voorweed before him would make Sumner a wealthy man. He found it virtually impossible to keep his mind off the vellum shirt and snakeskin ankle-slung boots he had been coveting for months and had to pry his avid gaze from the red leaves. He stared at the final package, wondering what it was, knowing that very little could compare with what was already before him.

Jeanlu handed the package to Sumner to open. It felt heavy and hard in his hand. When he saw the vapor-blue stone within, he sucked in his breath. The jewel caught the light and warped it into a luminous star whose fine, bright threads of energy thinned and re-formed with the quivering of his hand. “A brood jewel,” he whispered.

He had seen one on display in the Berth archives. They were very rare and, in the right market, priceless.

“Before you make plans to sell it,” Jeanlu said, “consider what it is. Like the stalk charm, its secret is geometry, but it’s not designed to extend or ward off influences. Its function is more internal. If you gaze into it long enough, you will see yourself—your inner self—or the true self of anyone reflected in it. It’s necessary, though, to have a clear mind. Any kind of distraction or mental fix will garble what you see. Also, keep in mind that it’s extremely fragile. It takes very little to destroy a brood jewel.”

Through Sumner’s mind flashed all the possible merchants he might dare approach with it. Possession of a brood jewel was damning evidence of association with voors; nevertheless, there were many who would risk their lives to own such a rarity. Then it occurred to him that the jewel wasn’t his yet. He had hardly heard what Jeanlu had said to him, and he looked up at her inquisitively.

“Shall we go meet Corby now?” she asked.

Sumner balked. The gifts were more than tempting—they were provocative. He would do anything for them, yet: Is it a ruse? Unlikely, but there was no way to know. He needed some clear answers to the questions he had come to ask.

Before he could speak, Jeanlu answered him: “No. Yes. No.”

“Huh?”

“The answers to your questions,” she replied ingenuously. “No, I can’t tell you what voors are, where we’re from, or why we’re here. It would take too much time. And yes, you’re safe with us. I’m not trying to deceive you. After all, you’re the father of my son. Finally, no, a voor would never use deep mind to kill anyone.”

“But can a voor kill with deep mind?”

Jeanlu shrugged. “Yes.” Then added quickly, “but it never happens. Mind is too sacred.”

“Even if you were threatened?”

“We have other ways to defend ourselves.”

“But what if—”

“Sumner, please.” Jeanlu’s face darkened. “You’re safe here. Believe me.” Her eyes locked on his, and they softened. “Let’s go see our son.”

Sumner nodded. He folded the chamois cloth over the brood jewel and handed it back to her. When she reached for it, the wide sleeyes of her dress rode up on her arms. For an instant, Sumner glimpsed crusty scales on her elbows that he had seen once on her belly. He looked away quickly.

“Don’t be disturbed,” she told him, getting to her feet. She put the three chamois parcels back in the crushed leather wrap, folded it, and returned it to the lacquered shelf. “I told you the last time you were here that I have a deformity. Not much to do about it. Voors sometimes have trouble shaping their bodies.”

She went out the door and led Sumner around to the back. When they got to the edge of the crater pool, they stopped, facing toward the hut with the blue tile roof. Sumner looked into the west above the hut at a sky threaded with clouds. Charged with nervous energy, he wasn’t sure what to expect. My son. The thought felt unreal to him. He wet his lips with his tongue, wondering what they were waiting for, and how weird the kid might be, and just what was going to happen, and how long it was going to take.

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:

A fire-wind blows through the Lion’s belly, so old and far-traveled its beginnings are forgotten. When it reaches this small time-drenched world, it flares in the ozone and scatters. Only some of it sifts through the atmosphere. Some of it takes on the shapes that it finds and becomes voors, simply by arriving. We are older than you know. We’ve been on this planet before. Perhaps this time we’ll stay until the sun mists and the fire-wind, our journey and life, pushes on, scattering us into the future.

They came to the rocky rise, and the inner voice slipped away. At his side, Corby stalled, too tired to climb. Sumner looked up at the rise. The supple energy of the trance still coursed through him, and he knew he could make it to the top. He bent down and let Corby straddle his shoulders, then he started climbing. He felt exhilarated, full of strength, and the rock face seemed to conspire with his need to ascend. He thought about the words that had drifted across his mind and wondered how many other worlds the fire-wind of the voors had crossed—how many others like himself had fathered alien flesh.

About three-quarters of the way to the top, he pulled up short. On the ground in front of him, where his eyes had been assiduously picking out a trail in the broken rock, a shadow fell—a human shadow. He looked up, expecting to see Jeanlu or a voor waiting to help them, and he shrieked. Klaus, his dead father, stood there, one eye and most of his forehead missing, violently ripped away. The one good eye, set in a face of mottled gray flesh, gazed down at him sadly. The lips pulled back in a berserk grimace.

Sumner shrieked again and jerked back violently, sending Corby flying. Instinctively, he spun about to catch the boy, too late. Corby dropped into the darkness head first, careening toward a jagged ridgerock. Sumner gasped and looked quickly over his shoulder. The specter of his father had vanished. Corby walked up from where he had landed, looking a little shaken.

“I—I’m sorry,” Sumner said shrilly. He looked again to where he had seen his father. Nothing but rocks and ragged shadows occupied that space, hazy in the dull glow from the Flats.

“It’s my fault,” Corby said, taking the lead toward the top of the rise. “The bond is still strong between us: You’re seeing the world like a voor. You’ll be all right tomorrow.”

Sumner wiped the cold sweat from his neck and face and plodded after the boy. All his strength had evaporated, and his legs felt gelatinous. But he didn’t stop at the crown of the rise. He spotted his car where he had parked it, and he walked at a steady lumbering pace toward it. Once he leaned against the hood, he looked over his shoulder. Corby was still standing on the rise. Before getting into the car, he waved, but the boy didn’t wave back.

Sumner didn’t wait to catch his breath before shoving the starter chip in and wheeling onto the road. He felt nauseated and sticky with fear, and he was grateful for the solidity of the wooden wheel.

The maddening ride home nearly killed him. Eerie shadows flickering out of the Flats made him swerve and jam on the brakes several times. Twice he saw his father standing by the side of the road, his hands and the mangled flesh of his face burning with blue phosphorescence.

When he finally pulled into his driveway, his whole body shivered uncontrollably, and he vomited twice in the street before steadying himself enough to put the latchkey in the lock. He crept as silently as he could up the stairs. At each creak of the old wood, he expected to hear Zelda’s piercing voice. He made it to his room alone, heart booming in his ears.

At midday, he woke and fell back in a drowse. Evening settled softly into the room before he found the strength to get out of bed. Even with his hands, face, and clothes crusted with dirt, he found it hard to believe that he had been with Jeanlu and Corby. His thoughts of the previous day lingered mistrustfully dark and charged with fear. Recalling the strange hours he had spent on the Flats with Corby made him tremble, and he had to splash his face with cold water to calm himself. Hallucinations, he rationalized. That gopping fish I ate. But Corby was real, and the boy’s face, with its dead whiteness and ghostly resemblance to his own, loomed in his memory.

After cleaning himself up, he went downstairs to the kitchen. Zelda had some stew prepared, and he ate hungrily. When he finished, she opened a cabinet, lifted out a bundle of black crushed leather, and laid it on the table.

Sumner nearly threw up. “Where’d you get that?”

“Don’t get excited,” she warned him. “You’ll throw up.”

“Ma!”

“I found it in your car. Which was missing with you in it all day yesterday.”

Sumner picked up the package and tried to feel its contents through the leather. He reasoned that Jeanlu had put it in the car while he communed with Corby. “Did you open it?”

“Of course not. How do I know what moody wangol you’ve got in there?”

Sumner inhaled deeply, wondering if he could believe her. “It’s not wangol, Ma. It’s film. I didn’t want it exposed.”

“Well, if it’s exposed, it wasn’t me that opened it.”

He decided to believe her. She’d be crawling all over me now if she’d seen the brood jewel, he figured.

She frowned. “What film do you have in there anyway? You don’t have a camera.”

Sumner got up and stuck the package under his arm. “They’re photos. I’m going to get them developed. A friend of mine’ll do it for free.”

Zelda thinned her eyes suspiciously. “Photos? Photos of what?”

Sumner smiled. “Naked girls, Ma. And people in rut.” He hopped out of the kitchen before she could snag him.

He hung the stalk charm from the ceiling in his car to remind himself that his nightmare of Corby and the Flats was real. The experience had been like a dream—vivid, colorful, and full of malevolent beauty—so that finally he had to believe it was a hallucination. There was no other way to come to grips with it. And besides, he had some kiutl and a brood jewel to move.

Sumner toyed with the idea of trying the kiutl himself, but he was leery, and eventually his dread won out. Just to see how potent it was, though, he crumbled one of the leaves and boiled it until the water turned wine-red. It smelled sweet, even tempting. So he gave it to Johnny Yesterday. The old man took it eagerly and drank it all off in a few gulps.

Sumner watched him closely for an hour. Nothing happened. A while later, he gave up on it and went out in his car for a cruise. When he came back, old Johnny Yesterday grinned down at him, floating cross-legged above the stairs, oranges and pears drifting around his head. His ears twitched, and a wicked smile smeared across his face.

As best as he could time it, the stuff lasted six hours. He figured it was potent enough to sell. Except he didn’t know how to move it.

He had the same problem with the brood jewel. Just gazing into its receding depths, the blue facets splintering with fans of curved light, he knew it exhibited exceptional qualities. At first, he thought he might use it himself. If it really could reveal the true nature of people, perhaps it would offer up secrets he could cash in on. That dream did not last long.

Sitting bent over the jewel, he saw nothing but hazings of shadowlight and his own bulging reflection. Then, slowly, a form began shaping itself out of the coal-blue depths. When the skin at the back of his neck crawled in a chill breeze of recognition, he tried to pull away. He beheld himself dead, sprawled face up, hair droozed with blood, a white curve of bone pushing through the split skin of his jaw. He couldn’t move. Transfixed, he sat looking for hours at the crushed mouth, the violet bruises, the puffed bellybutton, the gelled eyes...Daylight faded, and he sagged away crazed with revulsion and fear.

Later he picked up the jewel and thrust it under a heap of soiled clothes. He wanted to get rid of it quickly. It was a devilstone, another of Jeanlu’s evil tricks. Clearly, he realized, the safest thing to do would be to crush it and scatter its dust into the sewer. But it was a rarity, even if a monstrous one. The least he could do was get some zords for it. Mutra knew he deserved it.

After a month of seeding questions in a dozen port taverns, Sumner learned of a man in McClure who sometimes bought unusual items from strangers. Parlan Camboy, a shipping magnate with out-of-town connections, invited Sumner to his office in a turret of the Commerce building at the city center.

Sumner went there and waited in a posh anteroom several hours before the secretary turned him away for the day. The next day, he received the same treatment. And the next. On the fourth day, he told the merchant’s secretary, a spectacled, pigeon-chested man, that he had some information. “One of Camboy’s ships is going to be pirated. I know how and when.”

A few minutes later, the secretary ushered him into the main office, an opulent room of cedar rafters with lux-tubes built into them, latticed wall-panels, amber-glossed paintings of naval heroes, deep leather chairs, an intricate parquet floor, and richly carved molding. Parlan Camboy sat behind a dark crimson desk backed by a semicircle of mullioned windows. He appeared to be in his fifties with sparse hair the color of hemp, brown and yellow streaked with gray. His face, granite like his eyes, seemed a well-used face. A gold ring hung from his left ear and a shiny scar creased his right cheek.

When Sumner walked in, an undisguised look of disgust crossed Camboy’s face. Sumner as usual wore a sweat-ringed, crumpled shirt and dirty sag-seat pants.

Camboy motioned for him to sit down, and Sumner moved toward one of the leather chairs. Camboy’s eyes widened. “Not there,” he snapped. He pointed to a wooden stool that Sumner hadn’t noticed. After the obese youth sat, the merchant turned and opened a window. He adjusted his chair so that a draft cleared the air between them. Then, with both hands out of sight under the table, he growled, “Where and when?”

“I lied,” Sumner confessed, flinching as Camboy’s eyes hardened. “But I had to speak with you. I have something to sell.”

“What?” A question like a lash.

“A brood jewel.”

Camboy’s face softened, yet his eyes remained flinty. “When can I see it?”

“Now, if you like.” Sumner smiled inside at the surprise that showed on the merchant’s face. “Now? You brought it with you?”

“I want to sell it quickly.” He reached into his pocket, and Camboy tensed. When he brought out the jewel the older man leaned forward.

“Let me see that.” His hand came out of hiding and grasped, but Sumner shook his head.

“First this.” He pulled out a handwrench whose jaws had been fitted with cloth. He worked the jewel between the jaws and held it up. “You try to jooch me and I’ll crush it.”

Camboy smirked. “You’re the kind who would.” He stood up and bent closer.

“Hands behind your back,” Sumner ordered. Camboy reluctantly complied, and Sumner brought the jewel up close enough to be inspected.

The merchant’s face remained impassive, but Sumner heard awe in his voice: “Where’d you get this?”

“Where do you think?”

“You have voor connections?” The scar along his cheek writhed. “How much do you want?”

Sumner smiled.

“Five thousand zords,” Camboy offered.

Sumner almost dropped the stone. Five thousand! That was five times more than he had hoped to get. “Ten thousand,” he said, keeping the excitement out of his voice.

Camboy’s eyes stayed on the jewel, and Sumner thought he saw them smile. “Why are you selling it?”

“I need the money.”

Camboy sighed sadly. “This is such an exquisite jewel. Don’t you see anything in it?”

“I never looked.” He moved the jewel closer to the merchant. “What do you see in it?”

After a lengthy pause, Camboy replied: “A frightened boy who lives with his mother. She’s a spirit guide, isn’t she? Zelda, I believe?”

Sumner’s jaw sagged.

“I also see you have a white card. Congratulations. And that you’ve been living off your father’s savings all your life. And what’s this? Sugar?”

Sumner squeezed down hard on the wrench, and that instant the edge of the desk whipped up and forward and caught him in the belly. The impact kicked the wind out of him and sent him hurtling backward. The wrench and the jewel flew out of his grip, and he landed on his rump against the far wall.

The jewel dropped into Camboy’s hand, and he held it between his fingers appreciatively.

Sumner’s fury boiled up. The jubilant smile on the merchant’s face burned into him, and he flung himself toward the desk with a howl. Camboy caught his striking hand without effort and twisted the thumb far back. With a squeal, Sumner submitted. Powerful hands bent him close to the desktop and thrumped his head against the wood several times—hard. “The next time you lose control, I’ll gouge out your eyes.” He shoved him back to the floor.

Sumner wanted desperately to restrain his rage and pain. His eyes fogged, and soon tears streaked his grimy face. This merchant had dominated him, and the humiliation hurt worse than the throb in his head or the deep, aching bruise inside his thumb.

“Get up,” Camboy ordered, voice metallic.

Sumner pulled himself to his feet by the edge of the desk. He observed the secret insides of the panel that had struck him. He glimpsed a glint of metal and realized that Camboy, obviously using a foot pedal, could just as easily have released a slashing blade from the desk. He sat on the stool and tried to rub the pain out of his hand.

“You know, you’re a lune to sell a jewel as fine as this.” Camboy opened a drawer. “But seeing as you are a lune, I can’t blame you for not looking at yourself. Here—” He counted out ten thousand zords in hundred-zord bills and threw the money onto the desk. “Take what you asked for.”

Sumner stared stunned. He forgot his pain and chagrin and just gaped at the cash.

“Take it,” Camboy barked. “You don’t expect me to give you a sight draft. Brood jewels are illegal.”

Sumner had never seen that much money before. Ten thousand zords would be enough for him and Zelda to live well for two years. He picked up the bills with excited fingers and backed out of the office.

On the street, he put the abasement in Camboy’s office out of his head and walked past the window shops feeling proud, eyeing goods he knew he could buy if it suited him. Ten thousand zords! Mutra, that’s enough to start my own shop. He mused about business and the kind of work he would like to do. A restaurant was what he wanted. Only the best food.

He was pondering what he would have on his menu when three men in black hoods stepped out from an alley and surrounded him. It happened very quickly. The hoods flanked him, and when he stumbled back a pace they seized both his arms. He tried to yank himself free, and the third one drew a stiletto and held it to Sumner’s throat. It broke the skin, and a trickle of blood threaded over his chest. Sumner’s knees jellied, his legs trembled, and he suffered a squelch in his bowels as he dumped in his pants.

Swiftly, the two men at his sides searched him. When they found the money, one of them shoved him backward and another tripped him into the gutter. The next instant, they disappeared, running off into the maze of alleys behind the shops.

Sumner got shakily to his feet and looked around. In the crowded avenue, dozens of people stared at him. Most of the faces showed shock, but a few watched amused, almost jeering. “Did you see the wad that dingo had on him?” he heard a woman say as he bolted into an alley.

He ran wildly. Exhaustion slid him to his knees, and he leaned back against a lamp obelisk. The stench of his slimed pants fluffed around him, and he wept openly.

THE GREAT SPACE WITHIN

Sumner’s stomach quivered as he remembered that day. Thinking about it had made him speed up angrily. Now he slowed and opened his window. The sun shone proud over the blue-haze horizon, filling the road with watery heat mirages. He wiped his sweat-lapped face with his sleeve.

No way that’ll happen to me again, he insisted to himself. I’ll be dead before I’m a dingo. But he wasn’t so sure. What could he do now if the police suddenly appeared? Suicide? Wog! The thought disgusted him, though still it repulsed him less than the idea of getting caught.

Several times in the past hour, he had seen distant strohlkraft glinting in the contrails of dawn. For the moment, the sky loomed empty, though a wide arc of monolithic buttes blocked half of it. Draperies of black organic stains streaked the bluff-red buttes. He imagined a strohlkraft swinging out over them and dropping in front of him to block his escape. I’ll ram it! I’ll trash the car before I let them take me.

His conviction comforted him, and after a while he relaxed again. Soon, his thoughts fetched back to the time he worked so remorselessly on his revenge.

He believed that Parlan Camboy had set him up. Who else knew about the zords? The secretary? Maybe. But he was a wiff. Camboy had given him the zords and had most probably arranged to retrieve them.

The day after the robbery, Sumner got a job painting traffic pyramids in center-city. Zelda expressed her approval, even though he never brought any of the money home. He told her he had a debt to pay off. Actually, he had put aside everything he earned, because Sugarat needed some expensive items.

Zelda glowed with pride at how her son began using his spare time. For hours on end, he sat before the scansule with the door to his room open. He had nothing to hide. He was just a curious kid learning about electricity.

When he had enough money and all the information he needed, he stopped going to work and spent a day cruising McClure. He searched out a desolate spot close to Camboy’s office. He found one six blocks away: a wide courtyard separating two shipping warehouses. Down its middle ran a high chain-link fence so that only half the court opened onto the street.

Three days later, after establishing contacts in the black market by discreetly selling bits of kiutl to lowlifes at the wharves, he had bought all the necessary material and had set his trap. Twice during those days, he had almost killed himself. The first time, underground in the sewer that doubled as a conduit for the area’s power lines, he nearly electrocuted himself. Setting up a circuit breaker to tap into the trunk line, he had lost his grip on the thick wire. He had almost dumped the charged cable into the sludge he stood knee-deep in. The second time, after connecting a lead-off line to the chain-link fence, one of the wires broke loose when he tested it and snaked dangerously through the air. He caught it just as its hot end whipped toward him.

Although he took high risks, the reward promised measureless satisfaction. Weeks had gone by without Sumner eating properly. The slow acid of his rage had made it impossible for him to enjoy his food.

But he was patient. As soon as he had everything in place, he spent a day and a night on one of the warehouse roofs watching to make sure no one had seen him wire the fence. He had been careful to cut the power lines in the first few hours of morning. Within thirty minutes, he had connected the lines again with the circuit-switch attached. Still, he had to be certain that no one reported the brief blackout.

He watched the courtyard carefully from the roof. No inspectors or troubleshooters from the power company showed up that day. The next day, back in his room, Sumner took a leaf of the kiutl, rolled it into a cigarette, and smoked it. He choked, though the aftertaste of the smoke had a pleasant nut flavor.

With Zelda out of the house reading shadows for a client, he didn’t bother to open a window. Through the coils of smoke, he gazed around his room, waiting for the change to overtake him. Nothing happened. He sat back and finished the last of the cigarette.

Before he set his plan in motion, he had to be sure that Camboy had set him up. The only way to find out, he reasoned, was to look inside his head. If this muckel really works.

The greatest danger resided in the brood jewel, if Camboy still kept it in the office. He would have to be careful not to get too close to it or his real intentions would be as prominent as his bellyroll.

A few minutes after he finished the cigarette, an expansive calm settled over him. The light in the room brightened. Outside the window shimmered a gold-leaf sky. Furtive movements flicked at the edge of his vision, vanishing when he moved. He became convinced the room had filled with subtle turnings visible to any eyes less stubborn than his own.

A voice lilted in his ears (Yas, the islands be moving inward—the cliffs fall away), and he vaguely recognized it as coming from outside his door (Fore and aft, the cliffs of the fogbound Farallones). But it sounded like a whispering in the back of his head. He went over and opened his door. (The halyards are secure and the mainsails still reefed.) Johnny Yesterday stood erect in one of the large blue urns, eyes closed (Bos’un! Bring arms aloft. Deck watch! Prepare cannon. Load grape!), big ears twitching.

Sumner suppressed a gleeful whoop and closed the door. (Action stations!) He was hearing Johnny Yesterday’s thoughts. Hau! The senile wheeze is playing admiral! He laughed aloud (The hawsers—be they chanteyed tight?) and picked up the stuffed envelope on his desk. The time had come to speak with Parlan Camboy. (If the sea wants you, lad, your time has come.)

Sumner rode the elevated train into center-city, not trusting himself to drive. Sitting in the metallic and captive air of the train, envelope in his hand, he sensed sounds overrunning his mind. The inner voices of everyone around him sweeled about his head.

This insane chorus made it impossible to think. He looked down the aisle and fixed his mind on a young woman who was reading (How important is form?). She was small and shapely (Art, like society, requires a stringent discipline) with a defiant curl at the edge of her lips. He let his eyes trail down to her legs (Without it, we would lose ourselves in the squalor of the imagination) and linger on the curve of her calves. (However, do not make the timeless error of believing that form is necessarily definition.) The honey tone of her flesh excited him. (Narn! I knew that fat boy was staring at me.)

Sumner lifted his eyes quickly and caught an annoyed glance from the woman. Fat boy! The insult galled him, until the sudden rush of muttering voices smothered his hurt. For the rest of the trip, he flicked his attention quickly from one passenger to another, avoiding any prolonged contact. By the time he stepped to the platform, he had gotten used to keeping his mind moving and could hold the gibberish down to a distant chattering.

At Parlan Camboy’s office, the secretary acted curt. “What do you want now?” (Lard ball.)

Sumner bit back a curse and stepped up to the desk. “I have something for Mr. Camboy.” He tore open the envelope and thrust it under the secretary’s nose: a thick sheaf of kiutl—half of everything Jeanlu had given him.

(By Mutra’s hind tit! Kiutl!) The secretary disguised his astonishment well. He got up, motioned Sumner to have a seat, and went into the office. Hard as he tried, Sumner couldn’t pick up any thoughts from the next room. In a few minutes the door opened, and the secretary cheerfully beckoned him in.

Camboy already had a window open and the wooden stool before his desk. He sat with his hands under his desk, and Sumner sensed hidden weapons all around him. He looked about quickly for the brood jewel and not finding it in sight relaxed. (Looks nervous. Is he going to try something?)

Sumner opened the envelope fully and scattered the dark red leaves on the desk. (It’s voor muckel, all right.) “I’ve got fifteen pounds of this,” he said, warming at the disbelief in Camboy’s eyes. (Fifteen? Where’d this dragass steal that much muckel?) “My voor contact’s been generous. But with my white card, I don’t want to use this stuff. It might distort me. You’re the only merchant I know who can move it.”

Camboy’s eyes darkened. (Is he lying? If it’s all as good as this stuff looks, that’s three thousand, easy.)

Sumner kept his face empty.

“What’d you have to do for all this kiutl?” Camboy asked.

“I’ve been using my white card.”

“You must rut a lot of voors to earn that much kiutl.” He frowned. “How much do you want?”

“A thousand zords.”

Camboy smiled. (A rube.) “Five hundred.”

Sumner shook his head. “A thousand. You can get three times that in the city fringes.”

(So he knows the market.) “I’d have figured the ten I gave you last time would have held you over.” (Does he know? Look closely. His eyes are kind of vague. Is that a smile?)

“I lost it. I was pushed over.”

“Gambling?”

“No. On the street. After I left.” Camboy shook his head, voice filled with scorn. “You had it all in one pocket. Right?”

“Ya. So what?”

“Kid, two dozen and one thieyes watch this building day and night. A lot of money passes hands here. When you left, they saw the bulge in your pocket and they hit you.”

Sumner clenched his teeth and shook his head with feigned anger. “I should have had you drop it. I was bonebrained to take the zords.” (He doesn’t know. Good. We’ll hit him a little harder this time.) “This isn’t my game. But I have the kiutl, and I want to unload it. The zords are important—I’m sick of screwing distorts. You’ll give me a thousand?”

Camboy let himself be persuaded. “When will you bring it by?”

“I’m not,” Sumner answered with finality. “I got bruised once in this neighborhood. If you want the fifteen pounds, you’ll pick it up where I tell you, tonight at midnight.” (He knows. Why try to lure me away—except to jooch me? Should I dump him now?) Sumner hurriedly told him about the courtyard. “It’s wide open, so you can see me and I can see you.”

Camboy thought about it a moment: (I know that place. It’s perfect. Close enough to keep an eye on the hit, and if it’s a setup, there’s room to move.) “All right. We’ll do it. Tonight at midnight.” He opened his drawer and took out some bills to pay for the kiutl on his desk.

“Don’t bother,” Sumner said indifferently. “That’s just a sample. We’ll do real business tonight.” He turned and walked out, hearing as he left: (Nobody gives away muckel—unless there’s plenty more. What a slimwit.)

Alone on the street, Sumner moved lightly, elated. He stopped for a moment on the steps and beamed seraphically at the squat stone buildings around him. It was dark and the lux-globes on the corners were lit. Most of the shops had closed, and only a few merchants in their mushroom-colored longcoats strode down the avenue. Overhead, the skyfires waved, ghostly sheets of green and yellow muted by the city lights.

A gap of five hours lay between him and his appointment with Camboy, and he decided to spend two or three of them in a cozy tavern. Then, as he stepped out onto the street, he changed his mind. The kiutl still glowed in him. Though the street appeared virtually empty, his heightened senses picked out a crowd of churning minds that ranged the length of the avenue.

None of the thoughts he felt around him reached him distinctly, though he knew they were there. He could hear their sibilant mumblings in the shadows of narrow alleys and in the darkened doorways on both sides of the street. Malefic, hissing whispers streamed through his mind as he traipsed down the avenue. The darkness seemed to heighten them, and soon he no longer pretended to be indifferent. He scuttled from corner to corner, trying to stay in the pools of light.

You’re acting like a drool-mouth, he told himself, wanting to ease the apprehension coiling tighter in his gut. It’s the kiutl. Just pimps and whores your mind’s picking up. Nothing to wet your pants about. He forced himself to slow to an easy amble. About five blocks ahead effused a blaze of gold light. That was the center-city mall and the northside of the Berth, an area always crowded with students and people out for a good time. Two music halls, a theater, and a string of amusement stands circled the mall. Gusts of laughter and music breezed down the street. The wind carried the aromas of barbecued fish and fresh, steaming breads, and Sumner forgot the mind-squabble in the shadows and quickened his step again.

From out of a cloister of shadows to his right, a bulky man swerved. He came on, half a block away and headed straight for Sumner, arms swinging wide at his side. Sumner flinched, not sure what to do. He didn’t want to run wildly down the street, and he could find no open store to slip into. The man wasn’t carrying a weapon, and he wasn’t actually threatening him.

Sumner had decided to stay calm and keep walking when a voice crackled in his mind: (if that jiggle-belly squeals, I’ll crack his head—I swear I’ll bust him open.)

Aow! Sumner pulled up. He turned to skip across the road, too late. The stranger shuffled urgently toward him, leaning close to the curb, ready to cut off his run.

Sumner dashed anyway, and the man lunged forward and caught him by the shoulder. Sumner spun around and nearly fell to the pavement. In the half-light from a lamp obelisk, he noticed that the stranger had broad shoulders, a square nose, thin lips crusted like a lizard, and there, between his flat eyes, the X-brand from a drone strap.

Sumner whined, backing off. He lurched into the street, eyes fixed on the angry features of the dorga. His legs already stiff, he knew he was going to lose his nerve and freeze. The dorga came at him, and Sumner wobbled backward. A screech and a squawling horn staggered him. A car yawing around the corner slashed by, missing him by inches and cutting off the dorga’s advance.

“Clot-heads!” the driver yelled, though Sumner barely heard him. He had already pivoted and started scrambling down the street.

He raced toward the mall until he sensed the dorga wasn’t following him; then, he stopped to gather his strength. The sudden rush of adrenaline sharpened the effect of the kiutl, and a distant roar of voices swept over him. The chattering sounded loudest toward the mall, so he rounded a corner and slumped off into the shadows.

Sticking close to the walls, senses alert, he hurried from street to street until he had made it to the courtyard where he had agreed to meet Camboy. His head crackled with sounds, and though the night sweltered he was shivering.

This forsaken part of town had few occupants, and gradually the static in his mind subsided. Feeling better, he climbed a series of fire ladders to the roof of an adjacent warehouse. From there, he could look out over the city. To the south glittered the bay, splattered with red and blue lights of the fishing fleet. The waterfront lay dark and peaceful. A strohlkraft grumbled overhead. When its drone faded, another nightmurmur followed—a freight train clanking along the curve of the bay, boxcars empty, bay lights winking through them. This melancholy scene made him sleepy, and he lay back on the cool stones to rest. Above him, skyfires fluttered.

Glad to get off the streets, glad to have escaped that dorga, he understood that the kiutl continued affecting him more profoundly than he had at first thought. Even now, as he reclined face up, body heat leaking into the stones under him, he could feel its strange chemistry in his blood. His heart rattled and leg muscles twitched with more than just dread-energy.

After he closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a few minutes, his muscles calmed down, and a languid wonder composed him. His mind emptied. The sky pressed down with a weight, a reality he had never before experienced. It held him securely in place. And though it kept his eyelids closed tight, he was grateful for its embrace.

Thoroughly at ease, he examined the great space within himself and confronted clouded presences drifting there. A wafer of light separated from these mistings and shimmered before him. It pulsed with his breathing and slowly coalesced to a scene.

He faced a gullied, packed-dirt alley with rust-streaked walls. At the far end, under a boast of light, two men grappled in a woeful fight. One man, already on his knees, tried to protect his neck. The other slugged him viciously on the back of the head, again and again. The kneeling man keeled over, and Sumner glimpsed his wretched expression before the other stooped over him and started plundering his pockets. Done, he rose and turned, and a whine curled in Sumner’s throat at the sight of the dorga he had just escaped.

He struggled to wake, his efforts only drawing him closer to the bigboned face. Helpless, he watched as the flat eyes and the dark, cracked lips flecked with spit loomed closer. A spasm of fear wrenched through him (Broke him open—damn chit-eater), and suddenly he was seeing and hearing inside the dorga’s head.

(What’ve I got here?) He had crumpled bills, some change, and a few personal trinkets in his hand. The bills and change he stuffed in his pocket. The trinkets he gazed at, turning them over and over, considering them like a lune. (What’re these fart-cutters?) Lodge-key, starter chip, dental floss dispenser, and gold charm engraved: You will live as long as you love—Estella. (Pig-eyed chit-eater.) He threw away everything but the gold charm. (Wasn’t worth the trouble. Got to knock somebody else now. Gotz! I should’ve slammed that fat boy coming out of Commerce. He’d a had something. Eat like that, got to have something.)

Sumner’s insides jumped when he recognized his own fear-stretched face in the dorga’s mind. His eyes snapped open. Smoky green skyfires hung overhead, and he jarred back into his body, fear a hot wire in his stomach. He still couldn’t move. For a while, he strained, hopelessly trying to coax his muscles into action. The whole weight of the sky had fallen on him. At last, he submitted and just lay there staring up through the pressure to where lights unfolded and vanished and furled again across the blackness.

After his fear dissolved, he felt dispirited, vacant as a bone. Flesh stitched to the cold stones underneath, he had lost peripheral vision. The billowing colors dominated his sight, and they dazzled him. Eyes closed, they continued, vaulting through the great space of his mind: How open a man’s mind is, after all. A huge stadium. Wide open. Ready to be filled with anything that drops into it.

Vertigo and fear seized him. Colors vapored, his center fell away again, and he soared. Depthless silence surrounded him and increased his apprehension. Get ahold! he bawled. Get ahold! The burning sky rushed through the cavernous space inside him, and he clutched at random thoughts (if the sea wants you, lad), images (a gullied, packed-dirt alley)—Anything! Get ahold of anything! Honey-toned legs: long and slinky—the woman he had voyeurized on the train, the one with the shapely legs, muscles pliant, not rippling with the vibrations of the car. At the moment their gazes met, he had flinched. Her eyes touched him gray as cement, cold as newsprint. Her life remained private and sealed.

Then.

But now—now the whole lucid, vacuous sky fell through him. He was wide open.

Clarity. He exhaled softly. He was voided—vast and hollow as a cathedral. His dread subsided. The gentle composure he had known before came back and with it the face of the woman he had seen on the train. It floated before him, pale and slender as a gas. There was nothing private or sealed about it now.

He immediately recognized the indifference of her eyes as a defense. With his present lucidity, he had no trouble facing them or even approaching and sliding past them. Behind the arched cheekbones and the defiant curl of lips, she appeared light and soft, almost watery.

An irresistible anxiety nailed him once he realized that he wasn’t just imagining this. His mind had found this woman somewhere in the city, and now he moved inside her. He could hear the deep sound of her blood—wump—wump—ump—um-wump—like the deep bass tocking of a frog. Her thoughts rose nebulous, diffused sepia light swirling sporadically into dark tide pools, blood-red, fierce.

Sumner couldn’t tell what was happening to her at first. Is she scared? Angry? He floated disoriented until the beating of her heart quickened to an unreal tempo. Then he heard it for what it was. Not her heart at all but—the thump of a bed. Hau! She’s rutting! A nerve-shearing pang of orphaned loneliness and rage stabbed him. I don’t want to feel her rut, he cried to himself. Nonetheless, a hot weaseling between his legs urged him to linger, and he had to struggle to pull himself away. As he withdrew, her body climaxed, and a windburst of feathered light and radiant petals surrounded him.

Himself again, the sky pressing down, fusing him to the cool rock, his muscles tightsewn, angry, he felt gnarled with lust, shabby, smelling of sweat. An afterimage idled among the mistings inside his eyelids: rounded shadows of buttocks and breasts, glimpsed quickly as he had spun away.

Again, he tried to get up, futilely, held down this time not by the sky but by the jealous anger locked in his muscles. He kept his eyes closed, uneasy about looking again into the furling skyfires. And soon he drifted, too irate to care where the telepathic drug took him.

An animal face wheeled out of the darkness—a wolf, eyes crystal-bright, shifting with animated lucency, silver hairs radiating off its muzzle. Jewel eyes, too savage to know fear, watched him, taut with purpose—a gaze vast as star-silence.

Transfixed, Sumner’s anger shriveled. Immediately, the sharp lines of the wolf’s face unknotted, became transparent, and revealed another face. His own. Seeing its beefy shape, cheeks paunched around a small, squat nose, jaw slack, eyes moist and edgy, he recoiled and churned awake, sweat-soaked and trembling.

With a whimper of surprise and relief, he sat up. Muscles heavy and soft as wet sand and insides icy with fear, he pulled himself to his feet. He sensed more time had passed than he thought. The Goat Nebula burned brightly in the west. In a short while, it would be midnight.

Gratitude opened in him for his meticulous preparations, finding himself too hollowed out to think. Everything he needed already positioned and tested, only careful timing remained and, as usual, luck. A lot of luck.

After a few minutes walking tight circles to limber his legs and loosen the fisted muscles in his back, he clambered down the fire ladders. The trickster-sack he had prepared waited in the shadowed alcove where he had left it. The bulky burlap sack looked as if it did contain fifteen pounds of kiutl. He lugged it across the courtyard, staying close to the chain-link fence. The kiutl had thinned out of his blood. The dense shadows draping the buildings around him hung empty of inner voices, but he knew others watched. Their presence was palpable as blood. In the center of the courtyard, the fence had a gate that he had jimmied hours before. He checked the lock, confirming it would open, and then he turned to face the street.

A splash of shadows a hundred meters away incompletely concealed some fugitive movements. Then stillness. He kept his eyes slack, looking for any motion. Veils of light from spotlights at either end of the fence illuminated the whole courtyard. Even the roofs basked in brightness, and he kept a good eye on them in case sniping proved part of the game.

Abruptly, the shadows came alive. A pack of angry dogs charged across the court. Close behind them dashed five men in hoods. The dogs surprised Sumner, and he barely had enough time to get through the gate and pull his cumbersome sack after him. On the other side, he looped the chain through and locked the gate as the dogs snapped wildly at his fingers. Done, he plodded off with the sack in his arms.

At the fence, the hoods mumbled curses and pulled out guns. Gun muzzles flared without noise. Metal clattered at his heels, and then a barb of pain twisted his shoulder. He reached back and tore loose a dart. A watery white liquid oozed out from the needle. Poison? he wondered before another dart slammed into him. He yanked it from his buttock quickly, before it injected all its toxin. For once, he was thankful to be bulky. They’ve got to get a lot of that sap in me before I go down.

He glanced over his shoulder and noted that all five hoods scaled the fence. He kept one eye on them and one on the manhole a few meters away. He had uncovered it earlier, and now he prayed his timing would be right. The sack was clumsier than he had expected, and he had to let it go early. By the time he squeezed through the manhole and dropped into the fetid atmosphere of the sewer, one of the hoods cleared the fence and scrambled toward him.

He fumbled with the protective cloth thrown over the circuit breaker and threw the switch. No screams followed, just the clatter of shoes as the one hood who had made it over ran to the manhole. Sumner splashed into darkness, groping for the penlight he had brought along. He got it out and flicked it on in time to see the fork in the conduit.

Behind him, the hood had tramped into the duct and kicked through the water, the glint of a knife in his hand. At the fork, Sumner stopped running and bent down, his light stabbing left and right. He had left a canister near here hours ago, but the wash of sludge at his knees ran stronger now than before. The canister had been knocked over. He sloshed the slimy water until his fingers closed on a slick metal handle. As he lifted it out, he broke the cork seal and gushed gasoline into the running stream.

The hood approaching the fork in the conduit smelled the fuel and scurried back the way he had come. Sumner rushed deeper into the duct. Farther on, he found the exit manhole. Whatever the stunner darts had hit him with began to work. Drowsy and nauseated, he still had enough strength to haul himself out of the sewer.

He emerged at the far end of the courtyard and could see the chain-link fence. Four bodies adorned it. Below them, sparks drizzled off the gate hinges where the metal resistance varied. The dogs paced in slow circles, whining forlornly.

All the streetlamps and warehouse lights had blacked out. Darkness swathed the whole area except for the voltage spraying from the fence. Even so, Sumner spied the one hood who had chased him. He had gone back up the manhole and retrieved the sack Sumner had left behind and thrown it over his shoulder. He huddled across the courtyard to a narrow gate. In a few moments, the lock clacked open, and he rushed through.

Sumner grinned evilly. The sack contained fifteen pounds of explosives purchased on the black market and wrapped in a thin sheet of kiutl leaves. He had rigged it to explode when it was opened.

After the hood disappeared, Sumner walked slowly over to the fence and stared at the bodies. Three of them draped the top and one dangled by a leg. Smoke faintly wisped from all the bodies. A nauseating odor of burnt cloth and flesh roiled around them. Where metal buttons or zippers touched the fence, sparks sporadically shot out and pattered to the ground.

Sumner took the can of spraypaint from where he had hidden it in a corner of the court. With a sweeping, inspired arm, he scrawled on the asphalt: SUGARAT.

He turned and swayed across the yard to a back gate that he had left open. He had parked his car a few blocks away. After napping a couple of hours to wear down the dart-toxin, he woke ready for the Tour.

The next day, he tuned his scansule into the current-events station. News included weather reports, catalogue of ships that had arrived during the night, an account of an unexplained blackout in the business district, and a report of an explosion that had gutted the offices of Camboy Shipping. Mr. Camboy and two unidentified persons had been killed in the blast.

Teeth Dreams

Sumner stretched contentedly, savoring a straight run of clean road. The last time he had looked, a stream flowed alongside him, cutting grooves, scoops, and potholes in the rock. While he immersed in his memories, it had thinned to a rill, then a trickle, then flat land cracked and shrunken in the sun.

Spires and arcs of wind-eaten stone blazed an electric green beneath the strong sun, and large cloudshadows migrated over the desert floor. In the inflamed distance, far to the northwest, an isolated storm raged over the Flats: A mass of purple clouds, veined with lightning, trawled curtains of rain.

The sway of the terrain promoted a drowse, and Sumner didn’t notice the stranger standing in the road until closing to within a hundred meters. The figure stood motionless in calligraphic shadows. Sumner could see little of the figure beneath a serape of wild harlequin colors and a beat-up brown leather hat with wide brim set low over the face. Sumner decided not to stop. Something belligerent about the way this character wore that low-set hat and stood, feet wide apart, hands hidden beneath the serape. A convoy pirate! Sumner feared. He floored the accelerator and bent low over the wheel.

A whine high-pitched from the rear of the car, and the console lights blinked out. Sumner pumped the accelerator furiously. He yanked the starter chip out and slammed it back in. He pounded on the steering wheel and kicked the console. All in vain. The car slowed remorselessly, gliding gently over the road. It came to a stop exactly where the stranger stood.

Wog!

Sumner groped for the tire iron under his seat. Before he could heft it, the stranger’s hands appeared from under the serape holding a short silver-gold sword with a thin curved blade. Adroitly, the blade twirled from hand to hand.

The stranger stepped to the side so that Sumner had a clear view through his open window. An orange appeared from beneath the serape and rolled into the air. With a blurred flourish, the thin sword crisscrossed the fruit, and juice sparked in the sunlight. The traveler snapped the sword back into its scabbard, caught the still-whole orange as it dropped and offered Sumner the fruit. Sumner wiped his sweat-runneled face on his sleeve and reached out to accept it. The orange opened like a blossom in his hand.

He looked up under the wide-brimmed hat, searching out a face, and a squelchy pain twisted his bowels. A big mongrel with the feral air of a dorga renegade regarded him placidly, a large man with dark and taut skin, minutely etched by fine, nervelike wrinkles at the corners of mouth and eyes. With both ears bone-pierced and natty hair twisting out from beneath the brim of his hat in spikes and loops, he indeed looked piratical. His good left eye was meat-colored and curiously slanted. To the empty socket of his right eye, he had fitted a shard of mirror, a luminous hole in a rippled, glossy scar that flared from his scalp to the corner of his mouth.

“I’m Nefandi.” He spoke in accented Massel, his voice coarse as his face. Humor glinted in his one eye. He reached out quickly and grabbed Sumner by the ears. The fat youth tried to pull away, but Nefandi had a firm hold. He squeezed the boy’s ears as he brought his red eye up close.

Sumner tried not to flinch when the dark features pressed near enough for him to see jaundiced smoke in the staring eye. A balmy mix of sweat and some musky fragrance like champaca misted around him. Abruptly, Nefandi let go and helped himself to a wedge of the orange in the boy’s hand.

Sumner tried to gather his wits as the squelchy feeling in his bowels became an urgent cramp. “I’m Sumner Kagan. I—”

“Pleased,” Nefandi acknowledged, taking another piece of orange. He grinned crazily, mouth stuffed with fruit.

Sumner squeezed his thighs together to suppress a diarrheic shiver. “My car—”

“Small machine to drag this far into the desert. Where you going?”

“Uh, nowhere right now. It stalled on me.” Sumner clenched his whole body to keep from soiling himself. “I have to dump,” he said meekly.

“Go ahead, radoo. You might as well be at ease.”

Nefandi opened the car door and pulled Sumner by an ear. “Right this way, tud. Haul it out.” His hands playfully squeezed Sumner’s shoulders, arms, and belly as he guided him from the car.

Outside, Sumner scurried off between two talons of green rock, tugged his pants down, and squatted. Nefandi watched for a moment and then looked around warily. His hand beneath his serape clutched the haft of his sword. He wondered if he should kill the fat boy. His eyes filtered the sky along the horizon. Nothing moved in that empty expanse, and his hand relaxed. There’s still time, he told himself.

His mirrored right eye—equipped with a sensex—could scan the full electromagnetic spectrum. To the southeast, he had observed several infrared spots. Those would be strohlkraft—and that would explain the weak radio noise from there.

He swept the horizon again, slower, with the sensex open to the biospectral range. East, an orange haze suffused from the plantlife outside the Flats. North and west, he saw nothing, just lifeless stretches of Rigalu Flats. The green terrain appeared gray in the sensex. Only a faint bioresponse registered as pink efflorescence low in the sky from the interaction of airborne bacteria.

He faced west again. Static prickled over his cheek and brow as he strained the sensex to its limits. He was scanning for psynergy, lifeforce. A dim blue energy glowed for an instant over the gray waste about forty kilometers away. Perhaps this radiated from the voor-child he had been sent to destroy.

Since dropping into Rigalu Flats, he had sensed strong psynergy in the area. He realized it as a furtive muscular sensation, definitely biospectral, yet until now invisible and of no proximity he could accurately assess.

Biospectral energy, psynergy or kha, as the voors called it, permeated everything living. That was how he had first spotted Sumner—a scarlet pinpoint in the distance. When the car came into sight, he had known by its shimmering luster that the driver had no intention of slowing down. So he stalled its engine with the field-inducer in the haft of his sword.

Was it worth it? he wondered, knowing that every time he used the inducer he revealed his exact location to every timeloose distort in the desert.

He allowed himself a moment to clear his mind. He knew that clarity alone offered hope of finding the voor he stalked. Two days of circling through this ghost city had left him nerve-weary and dreamy, and he gazed down into the dust patina of his boots, hoping to drain his mind.

Nefandi was an artificial man, designed and bioengineered by the eo, a powerful technocracy four thousand kilometers to the north. There, a dreamworld had intrigued into reality—a world without distorts, dissatisfactions, or death. An outpost of a cosmic empire vaster than human thought, the eo offered the starkest pleasures to everyone. Nefandi had found his favorite rapture in coobla, a drugless midbrain stimulator that cramped him with bliss.

Psyfactored by his creators to emphasize pleasure over individuation, Nefandi had known the immense ravishment of coobla countless times and merely existed without it, fractional and dysphoric. He existed as a total product of his society. The eo had grown his body in the id forest outside the biotectured city of Cleyre to serve as an ort, a handservant. He remembered nothing of his time as an ort, for only his body had functioned then. Centuries later, after those whom he had been created to serve no longer needed him, the eo allowed his mind to emerge. He lived free for a time while the eo watched to see what use he might satisfy. He could have traveled and explored the world that had created him. He could have devoted himself to the immense culture around him and expanded his awareness and social value. But his psyfactoring, stronger than his free will, gave him over to coobla, the beatitude of nervelocked joy.

A lifetime of unmitigated delight slunk by before he exhausted his common resources and the eo took the coobla from him. To return to his ecstasy trance, he needed a benefactor, someone who had a use for him and who could pay with coobla. And that was why he served the godmind called the Delph.

The Delph at one time had been the strongest being on the planet. A century before the eo created Nefandi, the Delph had a span of will huge as the Earth. He provided the gateway to the multiverse, and the contours of the manifested world revealed the shape of his whim. This was so because the Delph had been able to receive and conduct the subtle psynergy radiating from the galactic core. But the psynergy he relied on originated in a directional and shifting source. As starpatterns changed, the galactic psynergy slimmed, and the Delph reverted to the small, organic existence of a mortal man. Still the Delph in title, he souled a technology unmatched anywhere on the planet; yet, his only real power inhered in his mystery.

To protect himself against godminds with other sources of power until his own starchanneled psynergy returned, he shaped Nefandi into a killer. For many years now, Nefandi had fulfilled the Delph’s will by hunting down timeloose distorts, rogue eo, and voors whose psychic reach fringed on godmind. He returned to Cleyre or Nanda or Reynii at the completion of each kill, and the Delph allowed him to lose himself again in coobla for a few years.

Such was Nefandi’s story: pleasure as fetish. And why not? he often pondered. Who was he anyway?—motherless, fatherless, an ort. Consciousness is delirium, he had come to believe, and sometimes he frenzied himself wondering if he possessed wholeness or if his soul subsisted only as hunger. Useless to ponder. Destiny is too huge to be held by any one mind.

Thoughts and desire thinned away from Nefandi as he relaxed, and he sensed once more a strong, steady pulse of kha somewhere to the west. He looked about and saw nothing.

Kha sometimes moved elusively, especially in the blue regions. The shorter the wavelength, the more advanced the intelligence behind it. Usually. The sun in the biospectral range appeared dazzlingly blue. Kiutl plants and harpy eagles also showed blue. So did voors.

Humans glowed with a shifting yellow-green. This is why he finally decided not to kill the fat boy. Sumner’s kha shone sunburst gold. His soma’s strong and unmarred, Nefandi could see as Sumner pulled his pants over his broad, quavering buttocks. Senseless to destroy such a rare creature.

When he had first grabbed Sumner’s ears, he had felt the pulse in his throat and fingered the glands there. The boy had a strong heart, and though overweight, he carried a layered obesity. The adipose tissue cells had not yet begun to break the fascial symmetry of his body. Nefandi recognized that the boy suffered a neurotic and not a biological problem. Helping him out of the car, probing a few neural ganglia, the bioengineered man had tried to release some of the somatic tension locked in the boy’s surrounding muscles. Useless. Beneath that fat, muscles had cramped tight as brick.

As he cinched his pants, Sumner thought of bolting, and knew at once the idea was zaned. He would never survive the walk back to McClure. Hind rats and poison lizards would make a meal of him, and that thought urged him back to the car.

Nefandi ate the orange that Sumner had left on the console. He spoke around the fruit: “I want you to take me to your voors.”

Sumner stiffened, and the breath of a lie snagged in his throat: Nefandi fingered the Eye of Lami that had been dangling inside his car. The sun flashed like wisdom in his mirror-eye.

“The car’s bust,” Sumner mumbled.

Nefandi grinned, and one hand slipped beneath his serape. The car jumped to a start.

Sumner’s heart shook. “Who are you?”

“There’s a lot to tell. Get in the car.”

Sumner stooped in and squeezed behind the steering wheel. Nefandi threw his hat in the back and eased into the passenger seat. He leaned close to Sumner and with breath hot and dark commanded: “Tell me everything about the voors.”

Sumner shrugged and stepped on the accelerator. “They’re just some friends of mine down the road.”

“Voors are never friends.”

Sumner flinched at the animosity in the pirate’s voice.

“Voors look after themselves,” Nefandi said. He finished the orange and hurled the skin out the window. “They’re a brood. That’s what they call themselves. Not tribe or family. A brood.”

His voice flexed sharply, and Sumner tried to change the subject. “How’d you get out here?”

“It wouldn’t mean a crock to you.” Nefandi spit a seed out the window. “Tell me about the voors.”

“A woman and her boy,” Sumner muttered. “Jeanlu and Corby. She makes charms.”

“And the boy? Is he timeloose?”

Sumner frowned ignorantly.

“Does the child have deep mind?” Nefandi pressed. “Does he have powers?”

Sumner shrugged, and the one-eyed man punched him in the ear. “Tell me!” The car swayed, and Nefandi put one hand on the wheel and the other on Sumner’s throat. “And don’t lie.”

Sumner gagged a stiff breath and rasped: “Corby’s strong.”

Nefandi released him and sat back, a shade of satisfaction in his eye.

Shame congested Sumner’s breathing, and his vision darkened. He debated taking advantage of what little power he had. One sudden swerve at the right moment and both of them would pass Beyond quickly. Would that be better? He faced Nefandi and saw himself in the mirror-eye. The lack of fear in his reflection surprised him. The bright beads of his eyes gazed tonelessly above chubby cheeks. He looked away, pleased with himself, for he knew that this man might kill him.

Nefandi took out a cheroot and lit it. The sharp, mousy odor of the car and of the boy nauseated him even with the windows open. He found it hard to believe that such a unique kha belonged to this corpulent creature. Radiant gold, he marveled. No doubt he has a white card.

“You fathered Corby, didn’t you?” he asked, and the boy’s tight silence answered him. Briefly, he watched the rolls of fat in Sumner’s legs and hips jiggling with the vibrations of the car. All hunger and fear. “Why are you going back?”

“I need zords.”

“You mean kiutl and brood jewels.” He turned his face into the windowdraft for a drag of fresh air. The road arced out of the Flats, and they passed a draw whose canyon walls shimmered with cottonwood, tamarisk, and willow. Then they rode into the green ruins again, and he pulled his head back in.

“I’m a voor-killer, tud. Corby may be the one I’m looking for.” Nefandi took a long draw on his cheroot and let the smoke snake through his nostrils. “I’m telling you this, because you may have to help me. And if you balk, I will kill you.”

Sumner’s knuckles blanched on the steering wheel. “Who are you?”

“I’ve been sent here by the Delph, an old Power—the same Power that first shaped the Massebôth Protectorate. We watch over what’s left of humanity and keep voors and distorts from overpopulating.” He tongued a smoke ring. “If you cooperate with me, I’ll reward you well.”

Terror slackened to fear in Sumner, and he seemed to sink into his seat. “What can I do?”

“For now, just drive.”

Nefandi hung his head out of the window again, and Sumner relaxed his grip on the wheel. He fetched about for a casual comment and settled for a question to fill the silence: “Can you tell me what all this is?”

Nefandi leaned out of the draft. “What?”

“Rigalu Flats. What is it?”

“An ancient city, nuh?”

“But why’s it green? And why’s it glow?”

Nefandi worked the cheroot to the corner of his mouth. “The green comes from salts and halides like plutonium oxychloride and sodium and ammonium diuranates. The night glow is solar-excited zinc sulfide. And the rigidity and aridity result from the subquantal displacement of the hot waste that was spewed all over here.”

Sumner looked blank as an egg.

“Rigalu Flats was a kro city once,” Nefandi went on. “One of the largest on the continent. But the quakes and the raga storms leveled it overnight. The nuclear reactors, and there were lots of them, were just so much cardboard in the wind.

“Reactors?”

“Power stations. The Massebôth have outlawed them. The kro used radioactive material just to heat water to run turbines. Small-visioned, no? This whole area was hot.” He flicked ash into the mess at his feet. “And it would have stayed hot for tens of thousands of years.”

Sumner grunted. “That was stupid. Who cleaned it up?”

“The Delph before he fully developed. This was the best he could do at the time.”

“Tell me about the people who lived here.”

“The kro were like the Massebôth. Like all people.” He bit down on his cheroot and spoke through his teeth. “A hot fuse of ambitions and ideas burning from generation to generation. Victims of memory.”

“But who were they?”

Nefandi took out his cheroot and studied the glowing end. “They liked football.” He nudged the cold ash to the floor. “Of course, there was more time for amusement in those days. Distorts were rare, and there were no voors at all. North was south for the kro—” Nefandi broke off. The road had swung out of the Flats a little ways back. Now they drove past isolate pinyon and solitary junipers in a haunted landscape of sandstone knobs, domes, turrets, and coves.

Sumner followed Nefandi’s gaze, and then he saw it too. Behind a loose wall of scrag browsed a hefty pangolin. It eyed them pugnaciously, pawing the ground and snorting.

“Moody beast,” Nefandi whispered. “This must be its backyard.”

Sumner slowed down and began to pull to the side.

“No,” Nefandi warned. “It’s going to attack whether we stand still or move. Hold to the middle of the road. There’s less chance of breaking an axle. And don’t slow down.”

Sumner thought to object, but that instant the short sword seemed to fly into Nefandi’s hand. Sumner leaned forward and gripped the wheel with all his strength.

When they passed the pangolin, it lunged at them across the highway. Sumner curbed the impulse to speed on this particularly broken-down stretch of road, knowing he would lose control if he went too fast. His head whipped back and forth as he tried to watch both the road and the pangolin.

“Just drive,” Nefandi ordered. “Keep your speed steady. And when I tell you, brake hard.”

The pangolin galloped up to the driver’s side, dipped its armored head, and charged.

Now!” Nefandi cried, but Sumner, afraid to slow down, floored the accelerator—too late. The tough bottle-nose rammed into the door. Sumner fought the steering wheel as the car swerved violently toward an escarpment. His right fender squealed against rocks, then pulled away. Before he could control the car, the pangolin, its brass-red scales rippling with its run, charged again. With an explosive screech, the fender tore away and went winging out of sight. Sumner pulled hard on the wheel. The car swayed sickeningly and eased back to the middle of the road.

“Do what I say!” Nefandi barked. “Hold it steady—steady!”

The pangolin rumbled alongside and dipped its head for another charge. “Brake!”

The wheels whined, and the car jolted to a stop and stalled. Nefandi, pushed up against the windshield, saw the pangolin first. It had glanced off the front of the car and doubled back to charge again. “Get this shoebox moving!”

Sumner, frantic, fumbled with the starter chip. Twice the engine misfired; then, as the pangolin swung toward them, the car bolted. The ram-nose caught the rear fender, and the car swiveled to one side, then righted itself.

Sumner thought he could feel the beast’s charge through the seat of his pants, and Nefandi urged him not to go too fast. The pangolin came up on the passenger side, and Sumner waited anxiously for Nefandi’s cue to brake. He didn’t want to look. He heard the creature’s heavy grunting, and the dust kicked up by its clawed hooves hazed around him, and that was enough. He locked his eyes on the road and keyed himself for Nefandi’s order. The order never came. The pangolin bent forward for the ram, and Nefandi’s arm lashed out through the window. The flat of the sword slapped the beast’s eye, and it collapsed in an explosion of dust.

“Relax,” Nefandi said, sword vanishing again under the serape. Sumner pried his hands off the wheel and glanced back. The pangolin had rolled to its feet and shrugged itself off, watching after them glumly.

“Mutra, that was close,” Sumner said, voice cracking.

Nefandi took out another cheroot and lit it with steady hands. Sumner gnawed his lower lip jealously.

Taking a moment to gather his thoughts, Nefandi let his gratitude sink in, glad that he hadn’t had to activate the sword. Surprise was an essential element in stalking voors. And the boy’s fear had almost cost him. The crumbling road dipped back into the Flats. A four-winged dragonfly tapped against the door, then pulled up and vanished as the green sand hissed beneath the tires.

“You’ve got to learn to be steady-fingered, tud.”

Sumner nodded, wiping sweat off his face with his sleeve. He glanced over his shoulder to be sure the pangolin wasn’t following.

“I said ‘learn.’ I hope you noticed.” He took a few puffs on the cheroot and then wedged it into the console so that its smoke coiled between them. “It’s natural to be scared when you’re threatened. You’ve got to teach yourself to be calm. The secret is separating the facts from the teeth dreams.”

Sumner pursed his lips and flicked a questioning look at him.

“You know what I mean,” Nefandi said, his voice like jagged metal. “Static thoughts. Nervous fantasies. Nightmare-gnashed molars. Teeth dreams.”

“I know,” Sumner said cautiously.

“You’re tripping over your own shadow. Relax.”

Sumner bobbed his head. He wanted very much to change the subject. “This Power that cleaned up Rigalu Flats—the Delph. What created it?”

Nefandi didn’t respond. He gazed out the window, sucking meditatively on his cheroot. Sumner sensed that their conversation was over, and he gnawed his lip and turned his stare toward the plated curves of the road. Ahead, vision doubled in the heat scheming over the rocks.

***

To their left, dunes of chrome-green sand sloped around sleek, storm-polished arches. On the right, two hundred meters of chalk rock leaned over them. Spangles of fire grass, cane, and salt cedar covered the skull-rocks.

A turn-off appeared from around a tight bend. Sumner wheeled into it, swung the car into an alcove of big-boled trees and killed the engine. Beyond the trees, the scene opened into nightmare. The adobe cottage with coral swayback roof peeked out, barely recognizable, from behind veils of dodder and vetch that had swarmed over its walls. The bottoms of the flower troughs beneath the windows had fallen out, dried mud clotted the cedar steps, and the tattered roof had lost most of its tiles. The crater pool and the blue-roofed hut couldn’t be seen through the miasmic vapors steaming softly out of the ground at the side of the cottage. Sumner’s heart sank.

But Nefandi was excited. Fear and eagerness competed in him as he opened the car door. The muscular sensation that had been haunting him for days lay all around. Voors definitely lurked nearby, and he clutched his sword as he stepped out. Man-high grass, crackled and yellow, swayed over a former garden. White sand beds in front of the cottage banked against the walls, littered with dead leaves.

In the shade, he noticed that the land had not dried out but turned black and glistening. He looked at the ground around him and saw that it wasn’t mud catching the light but glossy black worms. Patches of them crawled and writhed in the shadows everywhere. A movement made him took up. Smoke—no, a breeze of flies swarming out of the trees and swooping toward him.

His hand under the serape quickly twisted the hilt of his sword. The weak field that came on around him deflected the swarm, though a few of the more savage flies got through and stung his flesh. He killed one of them—a long and sick green thing with huge mouth-parts and red eyes.

Fear overcame his eagerness, and he looked around carefully. Queer fungi sprouted on all the trees, and an iridescent sheen glazed many of the limbs and trunks. The yellow-brown vapors billowing out of the earth near the cottage blew away from where they stood, but nauseating whiffs still reached them. A rushing wind brought with it a pall that smelled like vomit and a sound of clothes flapping on a line.

A darktime hovel, he thought, scanning with the sensex. Two transparent beings passed slowly over the cottage. They approached so close that he could see their clear-spiked combs and the cilia rippling along the hems of their bodies. Among the cilia, he spotted two pendulous sacs studded with quills.

Raels! he cried, almost aloud. What the rauk are raels doing this far south?

The raels drifted away from him, and he overrode the impulse he had felt to dive back into the car. Raels, a lifeform created centuries ago by the eo to protect their first settlements, had been designed to carry nematodarts. The small and thin darts could be fired across a long distance and pumped an instantly lethal neurotoxin.

Nefandi continued to watch the raels as he looked around. He couldn’t believe that voors lived like this. He had always known them to be meticulous about what was theirs except in old age, when they withdrew into their darktime and lost power. If the algid psynergy rippling over his skin was to be trusted, this was not a place of old voors.

Scanning the yard and the cottage with his sensex, Nefandi detected no blue biospectral energy, just an orange glimmering from the plant-life. He turned about, perplexed. His tingling flesh told him that at least six or seven voors ambled somewhere ahead of him, but none of them leaked kha. That’s impossible, he told himself, tempering his fear.

“Mutra!” It was Sumner. He was just now crawling out of the car and had stopped in the door.

Nefandi followed his gaze into the sky and stiffened. One of the raels fluttered directly overhead, glistening among the trees—a gelatinous shape, big as a man, formlessly intricate: a mass of clear jelly-ruffles rippling in the sunlight. The wind shifted, and it turned, vanishing into its transparency.

“What was that?” Sumner cried. For an instant, he thought he had seen a bloodspot netted by fine blue tracery inside a bulbous, frilled thing.

“Don’t know,” Nefandi lied, watching it and its companion in his sensex as they circled the cottage. That rael was close enough to kill me, he realized. Stay alert!

Too many uncertainties closed in to assess at once. Why wasn’t he dead? The raels and the eo had been opposed to the Delph’s autocracy since the godmind’s power had begun to diminish. What are raels doing here if not hunting him? Where were the voors he felt but couldn’t see? All his senses screamed danger, and he had to stare deep into the sky’s nothingness to calm himself.

Sumner tagged along behind Nefandi as he approached the cottage. For some reason, the flies weren’t bothering Nefandi, and he stuck close. The reek of dead things and the vapors rising from the earth set his teeth on edge. He wanted desperately to get away. His heart pounded, and the flies and the blue and green fungi clumping big as quartz crystals on the tree trunks made his dread even more acute.

At the cottage, Sumner stood before the shut door. A large patch of gloss slashed its surface, as if a giant slug had slimed it. He was relieved when Nefandi didn’t try to enter. The windows, splattered with mud and dust, closed off the interior. Flies whined around them, and the sound of laundry thrashing in the wind grew louder and then receded.

Sumner searched about for anything that had retained its naturalness. The whole yard languished with decay: All the tree barks were puffed and graying, the sod around them sagging away into cracked dirt. Even the grass wore crazed nodules of blue fungus or shone with slime and worms.

“Let’s go to the other side.” Nefandi’s voice startled Sumner, sounding low and gentle, almost surprised. The fat boy sensed, perhaps, a hint of fear in it. He hesitated, and the flies clouded over him as Nefandi moved away. Waving hands about his head, he scurried after.

***

Behind the cottage, under the tamarind trees that ringed the crater pool, Corby sat naked in the tall grass. The mud of the pool-rim, shiny and black as frogskin, mottled his body. He sat with legs crossed, eyes half closed. The earth around him gloomed dark with the sinking of things: rumpled, decayed weeds, the purple droppings of some birds, a narrow trail where a snake had slithered. A tiny flower hung like a flame against the dismal mulch, its red petals tilted and tattered by the wind.

Corby’s whole mind fixed on it. He tried to shut out the sickness, the alternating waves of fear and lassitude. One moment he had been slumped out in the mud, trembling with grief, because his mother had died and his house had fallen into darktime. The next, he was sitting up, bewildered by his anguish. Wasn’t he a voor? Hadn’t he been shaped out of light, time and time again, on countless worlds? How many mothers and children and lovers had he known and lost? Nothing could change that. And nothing could keep what he was now from dissolving into the future.

His reasoning eased him into mindless languor. That lasted only a few minutes. Then the fear of going on alone built up in him again. To break out of it, he centered himself wholly on this flower beside his leg. Gradually, his vision wavered and thinned as the tensions inside him slackened. The wind shifted, and the laundry on a line strung between the trees stopped fluttering. A dead calm settled for a moment over the pool. Somnolent odors of wet stone and still water thickened. He didn’t notice. His awareness had locked on the flower.

Soon nothing remained of him but a skein of energy wound about the thread-stem and its petals. Inside, he dwelled alone, sunlight singing softly, warmth flowing through him. His querulous mind became quiet, dazzled by the drone of plant-life, fibers grained with sunlight.

Deeper, another, quieter self blinked into awareness. The mage surfaced, the timeless part of him, the nomad spirit that remembered many bodies, many worlds. Now that the mind had furled deep into the tiny plant, kha opened into its own world: a vast granular mindarkness seething with life energies.

In that bright darkness, Corby lingered. From here, he could move into any reality. He looked about. A blood chill blew out from a corner of the darkness where the unspirited voor dead endlessly relived their lives in the brood soul. He recognized an area where the inky darkness thickened. There, the cellular core of his life opened—the route into the body. He didn’t want to drop into that swamp. He had fixed his mind on the flower to escape his sickness. A descent into the slow-burn of the body, with its bog of cells and muscular energy, would just start his thoughts turning again. And he couldn’t subject himself to the waves of rootless desires, deathsmells, and garbled memories that surged out of the darkness of the voor dead.

Instead, he waited—his mind coiled into the flower, his kha aware yet still. As long as he could keep himself poised like this, conscious but not acting, he abided as himself—his true self. Neither a howlie nor a voor. A delicate state of being, easily lost. For the brief moment that it lasted, he could see himself for what he was: pure sentience, exultant, measureless. This was his true body—whatever form it might take—and here he could identify the patterns of energy sparking through his physical body that limited his awareness. Only now, for just this instant, was he free. No thoughts. No sensations. Just sentience, lucid and solitary as space.

Corby relished his freedom until his kha began to stir. Restless, wanting to shapeshift through his memories or shadowshoot with the thoughts in other people’s brains, it succumbed to his restraint a while longer. The tension between his human neurology and his voor consciousness exhilarated him. A moment ago, the same difference had inflicted anguish. Now at least the two parts of him had harmonized and become easier to control. He could amuse his mind with the lifespark of the flower, while his kha went on a tour of remembered worlds. Which life would it be this time?

He projected backward through his deepest memories. Soon he found what he was seeking, and he willed his kha to an ancestral world where only a handful of voors possessed enough strength to go: the world of Unchala—the oldest voor memory, so old that only those with extraordinary kha could summon it up. Those who could returned often, for the beauty of the place consumed every other expectation. Experiencing it, even once, left strong, nameless desires that took months to quell.

The sky of Unchala, as he remembered it, cascaded stellar energy: pearled light, glassy and shifting. The first ancestral voors lived on that energy, absorbing it like plants, feeling it like music. The long outward curve of actinic energy sifted through them and created a perception full of distance, flow, and color. Silence unfurled and stretched into gulfs of streaming light. Hues, shadings, blends, followed. Voor sentience, as it evolved on Unchala, continually expanded, becoming aware of wider ranges of possibility. Music in the starlight, thinning out with distance, melled with other energies in a liquid sound: the gentle, faraway songs of other galaxies. Orgasm, flares, starbursts of sensation erupted as Unchala swung around to face its unique sun.

But no—Corby didn’t want to remember daytime on Unchala. Such deliriously intense memories drained strength. Far better to stay with the night, where energies reigned separable and tight with shape.

Night on Unchala provided contemplative time. Voor awareness dilated and deepened, listening with all its scope for faint and lonely rim songs, or feeling far into narrow starlanes for the looser, wilder forces pulling the universe apart. Yet, the more the first voors strained, the deeper the distances plunged. No boundary to perception existed. The universe widened beyond grasp, beyond all the images and sensations of the voor experience. And this shadowed the voors with awe and indomitable serenity. The universe extended infinitely, a multiverse, a flexiverse, its form the shape of constant change.

Seeing the universe in that way, limits gone and everything possible, the voors evolved in time beyond time. When Unchala’s orbit eventually decayed and the planet fell into its sun, a collapsar, the voors had evolved to the point where they could leave their physical forms behind. Disembodied voor awareness merged with radiation streaming into the black hole that had swallowed their home world, and they became the longest traveling light that shines through the multiverse—psynergy itself. That flow of radiation carrying their psynergy-patterns across infinity they called Iz.

Something snapped, and Corby jolted out of his reverie. The wind strode in from over the water and loomed through the high grass. The flower he had focused on pressed into the shadows. The plant-drone dimmed, and his mind reeled back into himself.

The shadows had not changed. Only an instant had passed. He rubbed his face with his hands and stretched, anxiety gone. The few moments he had spent in Iz living his past had eased him.

Settling into his new calm, he exulted, amazed as always by the regenerative powers of his kha. He wondered if he would ever be able to merge it with his mind so that he could know many of the things that now he could only feel. What would it be like if he could translate his memories into human sensory images?

Lying back in the cool mud, he looked up at a nickel-gray plateau of clouds. From what he remembered of his past, he contemplated how his howlie senses might perceive his ancestral homeworld.

Nothing much could be seen in that corner of the universe. Unchala’s galaxy had been old a billion years before the planet formed. All the neighboring stars had burned out or fallen in on themselves long ago. The sky, night and day, offered only black to howlie eyes. Four or five distant white dwarfs burned against a dense wall of hydrogen clouds—a husk of stellar gas thrown off during the galaxy’s death throes.

Unchala’s sun offered the most spectacular sight. Viewing it from a distance, it would certainly look puzzling: two fountains of rainbow energy shooting in opposite directions. Bridging the blind gap between them spewed incandescent streams of plasma dropping away from the main jets. The two torrents of light blazed like auroras: a smoky red at the sides where the plasma streams shot out and fell back, and an iridescent blue-green, ice-bright, along the central currents pulling away from each other. Though a single star, it blazed like a misshaped binary.

The blackness between the sprays of light contained the collapsed body of the star. Once, a hundred million years before, life flourished on Unchala beneath a red supergiant. A companion white dwarf distorted the massive star into a football shape so that when, at the end of its life, it collapsed, it formed an enormous thread-shaped discontinuity—a black hole. Everything that approached, the collapsar snatched in its immense gravity field—photons, asteroids, curtains of interstellar gas. Inside, the discontinuity decreated all of it.

At the poles, however, the gravity field dimmed, and something unusual happened. The fabric of space-time had not completely closed in on itself, and energy streamed out—geysers of high-frequency photons surging against the blackness of the dying galaxy, light from the core of infinity.

Located above one of these poles dangled Unchala. A rock half the size of the Earth, at one time she had been the football star’s outer planet. Now, a counterbalance of the collapsar’s weak polar gravity and other nearby dark stars tugging to set her adrift held her in place. Caught between these forces, she hovered directly in line with the exposed core of the black hole, rotating slowly. Every point on her surface faced the collapsar regularly, washed by the torrent of radiation.

The barren surface of Unchala basked in this intense radiation. Below the heated shell of the planet, microorganisms flourished in an energy-rich, carbonaceous interior. Some mutated and adapted for life in the bottom layers of the crust. In time, an organism protected by silica armor emerged on the surface. This creature, microscopic and short-lived, its life located within a minute replica of the planet’s shell, was the first voor ancestor.

Five hundred million years later, the surface of Unchala no longer appeared cratered, flat, or airless. Vast calcite-silica reefs had accumulated like coral, dominating the landscape. Soon they climbed into the black sky, and the gaseous metabolic wastes of the metazoa living inside them leached out, forming, over aeons, a rudimentary cloud ceiling.

With an atmosphere to breathe and to filter out some of the stronger energy, rubiplasts evolved—highly complex cells that used the collapsar’s blue-green light for photosynthesis.

An explosion of new evolutionary forms followed, all contained within the immense reefs. Only the rubiplasts could expose themselves to the exterior, and even they couldn’t survive long without backup cells within the silica shell.

By this time, the reefs soared thirteen thousand meters above the surface. These pitted, tubular structures extended colossal knobby branches. Their interiors convoluted intricately and filled with a dense humus of living systems, all symbiotically integrated around the light-catching capacity of the rubiplasts. Sentience began shortly after a manifold array of lenses developed just inside the apertures at the tops of the reefs. With these starprisms, the first voors selectively filtered out cosmic radiation, and as their awareness effloresced, they watched the universe unfold.

Corby laughed out loud imagining a human standing beside a fully evolved voor. The howlie probably wouldn’t even realize that the mountains around him were alive. Huge, unmoving. Yes, but how awesome the life inside those silent reefs! Endless awareness, hundreds of millions of years long. Impossible to grasp with a howlie brain.

Ah, well—

He pitched to his feet and stood swaying a moment. From where he tottered, he could see the luff of brown vapors rising off the plot where he had buried Jeanlu’s stalk charms. The charms, festering with strange bacteria that had mutated from his fear-psynergy, released methane, ammonia, and sulfide fumes. He would be happy when he could leave this doomed place. Weird, savage flies, black worms, and putrescent fungi had manifested since Jeanlu died, drawn, perhaps even created, by an imbalance of his powerful kha. Fear shapes. Soon the surrounding area would become completely uninhabitable.

The clothes on the line had dried. He sniffed their cleanness and walked past them to a metal tub at the pool’s lip. Flies moaned around him, though none landed. He ignored them as he examined the large basin of tepid, sudsy water. With a small kick, he smothered the twigfire crackling in the sand below and began lathering himself with a soaked sponge.

Above, visible beyond the tangle of tree branches, a rael circled. Its whorl of thoughtforms transmitted urgently: Come to center. Come to center and extent.

Corby waved it off, an exasperated grimace on his child-face. Go away. Didn’t I tell all of you to leave me alone? Why are you still here?

The rael glittered above the pond, transparent body casting no shadow on the rippled water. Come to center, Corby.

Corby turned his back on the creature. I am at center. What do you want?

To protect and serve. I can’t leave you. To go is to stay. So you have told us.

To stay is to go. Get out of here.

You are my guide, my teacher. I cannot go.

The others left. They understood what I am talking about. Go with them.

Come to center and extent.

Corby turned back to face the rael. He looked down at the mud-lip of the pool where lank strings of weed tangled in an almost recognizable script. After a moment, he had acquired the calmness necessary to hear out the rael. Center and extent. Express.

The rael gleamed as it tilted in the wind. The man who has come is dark—a wanderer of the void’s edge.

I’m aware of the man. He’s no threat to me.

A threat known to me. Indifferent to life. He is a voor-slayer and well armed. Let me kill him.

No! Corby stared fixedly at the rael, trying to probe its deepest intentions. Like other artificial intelligences he had encountered, its awareness seemed incomplete, muffled as wool. All he sensed for sure was that it hated the man who had just arrived with Sumner—Nefandi. But Corby couldn’t allow it to kill him. That didn’t feel right to the mage within. Get out of here. The man’s no threat. I’ll deal with him in my own way. But you’ve got to go, or you’ll provoke him. Do you understand? My purpose is bigger than Nefandi. Go.

The rael kept silent. From around the cottage, another rael floated toward them. It had been waiting in ambush, waiting for the word to kill Nefandi.

Corby focused on the vivid tangle of scents blowing off the pond. Annoyed that these small-lifes lingered, disturbing the clarity he needed to deal correctly with his father and the killer ort, he had to check his anger. He looked up at the two raels hovering before him. It’s hard for you, I know. You’re human-made. Biological artifacts, designed to spy and kill. But you’re learning. If you shave the world down small enough for you to be the center, you’re left with nothing—alone. Specialization limits expression. Give it up. I’ve explained all this before. Don’t you understand? Event is extent. Go and contemplate this. We’ll discuss it later.

The two raels drifted off, desultory. Soon the brisk wind took them; they rose swiftly and disappeared. Corby felt a momentary misting of pity. Raels, beyond their designed function, suffered a helpless existence. They had no heritage, no ancestral precedents—no culture. The same technology that had shaped Nefandi had created them. Questions of essence and meaning meant a lot to them. And, because he radiated the most powerful kha they had known, they believed he had answers.

He had spent most of his childhood with them and the deva, another artificial being. In the telepathic union these playfriends had shared with him, he had shown them Unchala and the long voor-wanderings of Iz. And they had shown him what little they knew of the culture that had crafted them. They and their creators, the eo, lived in a private kingdom far to the north. Nothing more about them persisted in the memories of the raels.

He diverted his mind from them and continued to lather himself. He had much to do now and could not invest time pondering the raels’ anomie.

On the other side of the cottage, Sumner and Nefandi moved around. He could feel their fear, and that made him smile. All morning, he sensed their approach, and now that they finally showed up he could relax. The ritual would take place as planned, and Jeanlu would have her chance for fulfillment. Corby dropped the sponge into the tub and waded out into the pool. He kicked forward and rolled to his back so that water lapped over him. Floating face up, watching huge galleons of clouds sail above, he thought about Nefandi.

Though he had never met him, he saw the taut, one-eyed face clearly: shiny sear, roistering beard, coiled hair, and bloody eye, as lucidly as if he had known him all his life. And, in a way he had. When in trance, his mage-self alert in its cellular darkness, he could inventory all voor memories—every thought crafted by his people. Iz. A mysterious sameness that linked all voor minds. A dimension broader than time, changing, shadowy, impossible to comprehend.

Iz revealed Nefandi to him. He knew the man and his treacheries well—however, now was not the time to dwell on memories. Memories begin and end in the blood, he reminded himself. Stay close to the blood.

He did no more thinking until Nefandi, followed timidly by Sumner, edged around from the front of the cottage. Then he slipped under the water to get the last of the suds out of his hair. When he surfaced, they stood close, staring at him.

***

Nefandi, startled by the creature rising out of the pool, backed away. White as porcelain, small as a child, the distort moved slow and lissome through the green water. The tamarind trees along the bank leafing the sunlight sparked on the mud-rim of the pool. In that dappled light, the creature seemed to waver like a mirage. Closer, its features stood out from the blank white of its face, an unknowable mask: colorless eyes, flat and mindless beneath a heavy bone-build of brow; nose, lips, and chin of a doll. Where’s his kha? Why does he have no kha?

The sensex did not respond to the boy at all. He appeared as a gray shade, devoid of biospectral energy. As if he’s dead, Nefandi thought. Or—He strained his sensex, and as the boy stepped to shore he saw through him, his child-body clear as air.—or retaining all his psynergy! But that’s not possible. He has to use something to keep his body alive.

Then he saw it. The distort looked at him, its head transparent, except for a black seed deep in its brain.

Go into the house. I’ll come for you later.

The words crisped in Nefandi’s mind, and he whirled toward the house and started walking. Before he knew what motivated him, he had rounded the corner of the cottage, obeying a thought-command as vivid and compelling as his own will. Only after he had gotten to the doorstep could he assess what had happened: Lami! The voor’s a godmind! Corby had compacted all his power to a point so violet it looked black. Is it possible? Nefandi stood numb. He opened the cottage door and entered without thought. Complete control of me. Complete!

Inside, the compulsion tensing his muscles ruptured, and he returned to himself. How? No physical form can sustain a kha with that high a frequency. Impossible. Yet it’s happened. I just saw it. Damn, I—He broke off. For the first time in many years, his thoughts scrambled without direction. A frightening sensation permeated him with the recognition that he was losing control. Lost control. It’s already happened. Mother of Time, that thing out there—He seized command of his mind, focused on the moment. Muscles unlocked fluidly, and he gawked about him.

The room, spacious and filled with delicate creatures of windowlight, carried smoky scents of seasoned wood and drying plants, though no stalk charms remained. From one of the thick-grained rafters, a multihued carpet hung. Nefandi identified it immediately as a veve. The traditional eleven scenes embroidered on it depicted voorish ancestral homes—all but one of which he recognized. The rest of the room conveyed a commonplace mien—table, bed, oil stove. He walked over to a shelf above the stove and selected a tin filled with yellow tea. At a ritual pace, he took down a small pot from a row of utensils hanging above a narrow bed, filled it with water he found in a jug beside the table, and lit the stove.

He understood the importance of staying calm. Not only because an anxiety-riddled mind offered no help, but especially because he knew that everything he felt and thought would be remembered by this room. In his sensex, he could still see the electric yellow glow fringed red where he had first stood upon entering the room. The rest of the place read empty of psynergy, smooth and blank, as if no one lived there.

To keep his own psynergy contained, Nefandi shifted his mind into selfscan. Waiting for the water to boil, he stood at the window beside the stove, hearing the trees that rattled in the wind, letting that sound fill him and unlitter his mind. The last of his tension drifted away, leaving him entirely what he was—so much cheese-soft flesh, so many gravity-thick bones. He watched the dim attenuation of afternoon light, dust motes rising and falling in the windowgleam. A jay flashed through the dead branches outside, and he looked out at cirrus clouds that plumed the wind, feathering over a chain of hills. Beside the crater pool, the voor child strolled off with Sumner. Before he could think to wonder, he focused on the mist rising from the soaked mudbank, rising and knotting in the shadows, dissolving in the air.

The pot on the stove clattered to life, and Nefandi turned his attention to it. He found a hard clay cup among others on the windowsill. He fingered the ruddy brown glaze, a black sea squid tangled in its own tentacles etched on the side. After putting several pinches of tea in the cup, he poured in the steaming water. The brew swirled up green and smelled spicy. He brought the cup to the table and sat down by a front window. A live cloud of flies swarmed back and forth between the scabby trees. Several of them banged against the window so viciously they dropped to the sill, small jeweled bodies rolling crazily for a moment before flying off. The rusty trees looked tormented, the earth-skin of their bark peeling off, knobby with fungi.

He sipped the tea, and the fluid warmth filled his whole chest. Thoughts tried to muscle through the sheen of sensations that occupied him. What’s happening with the fat boy? Where is he being led? What’s going to happen to me? He gave these questions no focus, and they shadowed away. The skin of the tea with its satin light caught his eye, and he studied the blend of color and scent and warmth, his face islanded in the green water. There was nothing to think about.

***

Sumner was terrified. As soon as he saw the white child’s head break the surface of the pool, his insides tightened, and he asked himself again but with more fervor than ever: What am I doing here? I must’ve been luned to come back here.

And when Nefandi suddenly lurched about and stalked off, a desperate urge to flee overwhelmed Sumner. But he stayed rooted. Corby’s black-gummed smile opened like a gash in his white face, pale eyes unsmiling, cold as fever. He slogged to shore, and an odor of muscadine rose around him. “Welcome back. I’ve missed you,” he said in his soft, sincere voice. He held out his hand, but Sumner refused to take it.

“Where’s Jeanlu?” Sumner asked.

Corby’s face, emotionless in the freckled light, turned away. “She’s dead.”

Sumner looked down at the long, soft fingers of mud reaching into the water. He searched but could find nothing to say.

“Would you like to see her?” Corby asked.

Sumner looked dismayed. “Her body?”

“Her body’s waiting. Back there.” He nodded toward a trellis overgrown with red moss and furry shafts of shagbark vine.

“Waiting?” Sumner said. “For what?”

“For you.” Corby motioned Sumner to follow. “You were the only consort she conceived by. I’ve been calling for you since she died.”

Sumner didn’t move. He jammed his hands in his pockets and furiously clenched his fingers. The wind freshened, and he breathed deeply. If he didn’t fear Corby so much, he would have hated him. Manipulating me like I was a machine—foc! He looked over his shoulder to find Nefandi, but the man was gone. A hysterical laugh coiled tightly inside him. First sign of a real voor and he tucks his tail.

“All of Jeanlu’s brood jewels are yours,” Corby said easily. “She has six or seven.”

Wog! Sumner’s heart thudded. He picked a pebble out of the mud and whipped it sidewise over the pool so that it skipped five times before sinking. A smile warmed his face, and he thought: You knew that’s what I came for, didn’t you?

Corby nodded. “I put the thought there myself. I had to get you here somehow.”

Sumner nodded back at him, both frightened and reassured. Six or seven brood jewels! What do you want me to do?

“That’s between you and Jeanlu. First, you should see her.”

Sumner toed a stubborn root in the mud. I thought you said she was dead.

“She is. But her body is waiting. You’ll be the last to see her.”

A spasm of uncertainty writhed in Sumner’s belly. I don’t understand.

“Of course not. You’re a howlie.” Corby’s mute eyes could have been mocking or indifferent or anything. The boy led him through the tamarind trees toward the trellis at the far end of the pool. Along the way, Sumner eyed the trees near the front of the cottage, their trunks and limbs swollen and mottled, an amber gum oozing over the glistening bark.

“When Jeanlu was dying,” Corby said, “I got very scared. I’ve never been without her. Fear twisted my kha and changed the land.”

Sumner’s insides tightened with anxiety, and he followed Corby silently. He wondered where Nefandi had gone and why. He had a hard time imagining fear glazing the mind within that one-eyed, split face.

The trellis, one wall of a three-walled enclosure, obliquely joined the others also vine-lashed, their stones matted with red moss. Corby stood beside a narrow entrance flanked by stone posts engraved with images of interlocking serpents. Standing before him, Sumner observed that the enclosure opened to the sky. A wedge of swans moved across the distance, and he thought he heard the long cry of their wandering.

Corby, still naked now dry, skin puffy and white as a bleached log, eyes remote, swept his child’s arm toward the entrance. Sumner pursed his lips, jaw muscles drawn. Caught between his need for the promised brood jewels and his dread, he suddenly became curious to know how Jeanlu had died. Afraid to hear the answer, he stepped past Corby.

The enclosure was small, and as soon as he entered he confronted Jeanlu. She sat in a cane chair facing the entrance. The black oystershell scabs he had first seen years ago on her abdomen crusted her face and hands. Her features, crackled and shiny, had shrunk to the bone, giving her a charred skullface. One eyelid curdled shut in the middle of its socket. The other angled open, revealing the lower half of a milky blue eyeball and the crescent of a gold iris.

Sumner stood fast. The grass around Jeanlu’s chair tufted pale and wilting over a tarry black and blistered marl. A faint rank fragrance of the sea curled in the air, and for one deranged instant he believed that the corpse, through its hooded eyes, stared at him.

He pulled his gaze away from the face. Jeanlu wore reed sandals, white, sharply creased trousers, and a bulky vest of plaited herbs and flowers, dried and glazed. Around her neck and over the vest hung an elegant necklace: coiled platinum clasps and stays fitted with a huge brood jewel and studded with six smaller ones.

Sumner involuntarily stepped closer, eyes locked on the green jewel big as his fist. A loamy stillness filled the air around him, and his mind sheered free of words and fear. Cold liquid light, as if seen through mist, gathered at the orbit of his vision and began shaping itself. He couldn’t look away. An image formed out of the sidereal reaches within the vaulted radiance of the jewel, lovely as homesickness, warmer than billowy sleep. It overwhelmed him with distant root scents, the purple of summer evenings before the monsoons, smoky starlight, the bell of a girl’s voice dissolving with distance...

An icy hand gripped his elbow. Corby edged up beside him. “It’s easy to fall into, isn’t it?”

Sumner jerked upright with a start. He had bent over the corpse, nose a few inches from the jewel. Scurrying back several paces, he suppressed a shiver of revulsion. Jeanlu’s face glinted like coal.

After backing out of the enclosure, he walked into the sunlight. The warmth penetrated him, and he began to realize how dazed he was. His ears hummed, and the pit of his stomach ached with an intense cold. Damn brood jewel. He coughed, trying to ease the icy constriction in his belly. His mind zigzagged, and his bladder urged him, charged. Something of himself seemed to have stayed behind with the corpse.

He stared up at the sky as he pissed into the dry grass. His urine smelled like smoke, and the relief of it draining out of him gradually cleared his head. When he buttoned up his pants, he was himself again.

Corby waited for him among the tamarind trees. Sumner followed the boy back along the mudbank to where a diminutive pair of pants and a shirt flapped in the wind. Corby dressed quickly and then led Sumner to a tub filled with sudsy water. “Wash your clothes,” the boy ordered. “The sun’s hot and the wind brisk. By the time you’ve washed up, they’ll be dry. Then you may go back and get your jewels. It’s wrong to touch them unclean.”

He walked off toward the cottage, and Sumner did as he was told. He worked swiftly, for as soon as Corby left, the flies whined around him and began biting.

***

Corby walked slowly to the cottage, gazing directly into the sunlight. Its bright heat provided the strongest bond he had with his mage-self. His mother lay deep in her darktime, and he had just sent his father toward her lusk. He could find no way to justify this with his howlie brain. He worked hard to remember his identity as a voor who had seen many kingdoms of sunlight. Nefandi, as much as Corby’s blood-memory despised him, had purpose, and voors loathed to kill self-aware beings. When Nefandi had arrived with Sumner he had been cautious enough not to try commanding things. Even after he had seen the raels, he didn’t use his field-inducers. Cool-nerved, Corby said to himself. Reason enough to keep him alive.

Sumner faced a different fate. He had used up his time. Within moments, he would blur away as Jeanlu filled his body. Lusk was the voor name. Sumner would anneal to Jeanlu’s will, and his body would become her new shape. Together, they would complete a broodwork: They would confront the Delph and force him to stop killing the advanced voors. Voor godminds at last would survive, and the broods would unite and begin to deploy their psynergies collectively. Certainly, Corby wanted to believe, that justifies lusk.

The voor remembered the first time he had met his father—that day when he had taken him out to Rigalu Flats. He had used his kha to look deeply into him, and what he had seen then surprised and saddened him: Sumner’s veve, the totem of his kha’s experiences, disclosed all bestial precursors—all predators. He had no human referents in his past, except what his blood could tell him of its ancestry. It would have taken him a lifetime to learn how to listen to his blood.

Sumner never had known a human body before. His kha-memories, all visceral, none noetic, linked together by bonds of instinct, hunger, and fear. Nothing of compassion or awe. Only pelagic memories of spawning grounds, fight and flight patterns crafted over aeons, and echoes of prey-scents spooling out from the dark loam. Yet—what had given the kha of animals the psynergy to be human? Sumner must surely be more than anyone had yet surmised.

Corby had believed that his father was timeloose, led by Iz. But when he probed deeply, searching through Sumner’s memories, the voor saw a thing that convinced him his father’s fate had intimately rooted in his animal past.

A childhood memory unrolled of a horse with a red ear and a white diamond on its nose. Sumner, about seven, accompanied his father to one of the riding camps on the northern fringe of McClure. The day’s outing began as an attempt to break the tedium of a long, unexpected winter—the first and last winter Sumner had ever experienced. Riding tall and brave in the saddle of the small horse, a strange thing happened. The heat of the animal and its dark, muscular odor gripped the boy and excited, in the deepest part of him, an unfamiliar urge: He wanted to hurt this shaggy, liquid-eyed thing. Leaves in its mane, the cold mist in its breath—somehow, he would make it hurt.

When they came to a frozen pond, he tried to take the horse across it. As soon as he rode it onto the pond, the ice cracked, and the horse fell...Afterward, his father and the owner of the horse took a rifle, a can of gasoline, and went out to the pond. Hearing the shot and watching smoke rise above the trees, Sumner knew what he had done, though he didn’t know why.

Corby understood. That day, as he pulled back from Sumner’s mind, the boy’s voice lingering—“I don’t know!”—he took with him an image: a memory of a child in a field among burdocks and frozen grass at dusk. Black tattered clouds blew through a gray sky above a line of cold lakes. Against a bare tree’s hanging silence, mist silvering its thin branches, he stood staring at a dark bulk on the ice. Corby shuddered, because he knew the boy would spend the rest of his life standing there.

***

Nefandi sat by the window, the cup in his hands half-drained, when Corby entered. The voor’s eyes, bright and fluent as crystal, stared at him impassively.

“You came here to kill me, ort—but I’m the stronger dream.”

Nefandi stood up, face fear-simple, hands opening. Before he could complete his gesture, a hammer of force slammed him between the eyes, and he tumbled to the floor.

Corby went over to his sagged body and whispered a chant to him in a night-tongue. Dizzy-eyed, Nefandi lurched to his feet, and the voor led him out through the stiff sunlight to the car.

To Corby, Nefandi occupied merely the backdrop of the pattern. Others would replace him until the Delph using him was destroyed. Stupidly, Nefandi believed the righteousness of his work, keeping voors and distorts off the planet—as if voors and distorts didn’t merit the intention and radiance of fate.

After Nefandi opened the door and crawled into the car, Corby touched him, and he woke.

“You’re just a weapon, ort.” Corby slammed the door, and the engine cracked to life. “You’re a shape, not a life.” The dark of the voor’s eyes glinted like night-ice. “Go back to your Delph and tell him the voors have created a shape of their own to avenge themselves.”

The car jerked into gear and rolled off. Corby stood among the fraying vapors and watched until the vehicle dipped out of sight. He inhabited a space hollowed of power. With a thought, he could break Nefandi’s mind. With two thoughts, he could unfold that mind and take the body for his own. But he was a voor—more than the blind spasm of a mind. He created the pattern, and all his thoughts, fears, and ambitions pixilated just a part of that pattern. He felt, more than knew, his purpose.

Returning to the cottage, he lay down on Jeanlu’s cot. Ornaments of sunlight hung on the walls, and he used their beauty to ease the drudge of emotions in him. Moments skipped, disjointed. One part of his being looked backward forty thousand years to the last time this planet’s magnetic field had lifted and voors had taken human form. Voors called that time Sothis: ten thousand years in which voors and howlies shared the Earth. Knowledge had passed freely from the brood to the other simians alive then. Howlies learned from the voors about the starfigures, the fruiting power of the Earth, and the abstracting strength of their own minds. But they proved more violent than the voors had dreamed. When the magnetic field returned, the voors left on Earth could not escape—all eventually stalked down by the howlies and trussed up as monsters and sorcerers. So ended Sothis.

Corby twitched, and his attention shifted from memory to perception. Sutures of sunlight tightened across his brow and cheek, and a tissue of sounds covered the window: the static of flies, the thickness of the wind, and water noise from Sumner in the pool. The pattern embodied all. Vengeance, grief, strategies subsisted simply as spaces in the pattern. Through the window, he watched the graph of blasted trees bending against the clear emptiness of the sky. Deep in his body, he was changing. The enormous power of Iz had begun unthawing the shapes of his insides, remaking him. He didn’t know what form he would assume. To be real and to be strong, the change had to be total. Even his mind molted, destined to be remade by Iz.

A cumulus of thought filled the vacancy of his awareness, and he recalled Sothis and the infinite wanderings and why the kha coursed so strongly in him: He knew himself as a voor mage, Corby Dai Bodatta, avenger of Sothis, hunter of the Delph—and he knew himself as nothing. The howlies had an unstable technological society far to the north; he had come to keep them from savaging voors—and yet, he was not here at all. The window’s pattern of consciousness showed a world of triumphant sunlight and wind-wearied trees. See how it is all that it is? he said to himself with the last of his thinking.

Nettles of violet radiance charged the air around the boy’s body, and expression lifted from his features. In a few minutes, his eyes and nostrils frothed with pink bubblings, and the clothing he wore shredded away from his glassy, swelling flesh. His bonelines softened, and gold gossamer began furring out of his pores.

***

Sumner finished bathing and dressed hurriedly in his damp clothes. The brood jewels were all he could think about. He jogged away from the flies and skipped through the tree toward the stoneposted trellis. He entered the vine-tangled enclosure without hesitating and avoided looking at the corpse’s face. Unmoving, he stood before her, hands folded, gazing down at her reed sandals. He owed her some token of respect. After a moment, eyes still averted, not wanting even so much as to glimpse that plastic-black, crushed face, he bent over her. A blunt odor of charred flesh spiked up his nostrils. He held his breath and looped his fingers through the platinum chain. Only then, as he tried to pull the necklace over her frazzled hair, did he see her eyes. They stared at him, wide open.

He jerked back, and in the same instant the crusted black hands snapped out with mechanical swiftness and grabbed him by the throat. Her grip burned like acid. He thrashed, dragging her out of the chair with the fury of his terror. Howling and tugging at her arms, twisting wildly, he tried to break free. She clung to him. Her grotesque head propped against his chest, the gold eyes screaming out of their sockets. Wheeling from wall to wall, desperately tearing at the gristled thing, he felt the strength in his muscles shriveling. Coldness so icy that it seemed to be hot coursed into him through the hands of the corpse. As it filled his chest, his knees buckled and his backbone slipped. Only horror of the withered creature kept him on his feet and struggling.

Outside, Nefandi heard his wails and sprinted toward him through the trees. The Delph had trained him well. Despite his fear and the pain from the voor’s blow nailed between his eyes, he could not drive away. A bioresponse that the Delph had nerved into him had seized his body and driven him back. Until he completed his assignment, his body would not let him go—even if it meant his death.

Nefandi had left the car at the pool’s edge, and as he dashed toward the boy’s cries he opened himself to the beauty and the strangeness of what he knew was the last space of his life.

Sumner reeled through the narrow doorway, grappling with the corpse, and Nefandi pulled up short. The fat boy’s broad body quavered with his frantic efforts to break loose. The sleeyes of Jeanlu’s blouse had torn away, and her knobby, sticklike arms flashed blackly. His shirt slick with sweat and his thick legs staggering, he danced crazily along the pool rim. From the wild look in his eyes and the whiteness of his lips, his whole face starched with fear, his collapse seemed imminent. But he refused to succumb. Even as the twisted, split lips of the corpse unpeeled and the crumpled face hissed a hot, putrid vapor, he continued to buck.

Then the chanting began. As Sumner pulled at the iron-locked arms, swinging the body against trees, hauling it through the mud and weeds, it began mumbling the sounds of some impossible language. Cooing, clicking, snapping a rhythm that made the scalp at the back of the boy’s head constrict, the chant penetrated him. The icy mist in his chest welled up in his throat and fogged his eyes. He keeled. All his strength evaporated, and the dead flesh hanging from his neck dragged him forward and down.

Nefandi perceived Jeanlu’s blue psynergy sparking against Sumner’s golden bodylight. Streamers of blue radiance smoked away, unable to get close. The gold kha shuddered. In an instant, it would blink out.

Nefandi’s hand moved impulsively. Sparked by blood-logic, he activated his field-inducer and lashed out. The burst of tight packed high-frequency sonics caught the corpse between her shoulder blades. Jeanlu’s plant-fiber vest crackled into flames, and Sumner broke her grip. He lurched to his feet and tottered backward. The corpse yawled, enraged and plaintive, flailing its arms as flames consumed the vest and started in on the trousers. With a howl, the burning body pitched forward, rocked upright, and dashed for Sumner.

Sumner ran from the pool, the corpse lurching behind, outstretched, flame-sheathed arms closing in. Despite his bulk, Sumner moved quickly, loping past the pool toward the Flats. Jeanlu closed in so remorselessly that when the flames ignited the brood jewels around her neck, the string of explosions peppered his back with pieces of burning flesh. He didn’t look back. Behind him, the corpse crumbled beneath flares of green flame.

Nefandi watched the corpse burn a moment before turning away. He was surprised that the boy wasn't dead. With a smile that didn’t touch his eyes, he watched Sumner flee through the trees and out of sight. It would have been good to follow him, but his work wasn’t done.

He moved through the tamarind trees toward the cottage, his field-inducer at maximum, warping sounds and belling vision. Flies frenzied around him, hazing off the perimeter of his field and black-dazzling his wake. Bent air sliced light into colors, and he marched toward a cottage rainbowed in sunfire.

Through the adobe wall’s opacity, the sensex revealed Corby: a small but dense purpling lying inside the cottage. Something had happened to the voor’s body—its shadow was unshaped and pulsing eerily. Nefandi focused his weapon for maximal output and fired a long wail of energy at the sensex image.

The side of the house flared apart, and a cyclone of fire gusted through the timbers. The heat of the blast pushed Nefandi back, and he retreated to the brink of the pool. From there, he watched until the shred of purple kha and the throbbing voorshape glared out of sight in the conflagration.

The wind flushed brighter and colder, and Nefandi turned his back on the flame-cored house and walked to the car. The flies had veered off, but the air filled with something else—a stillness, the transparence of the violence he had created.

At the car he stopped and tried to convince himself that mind was indeed continuity. He watched sunlight fill the surface of the pool like flowers—and he felt that he verged on a drunken dream. Don’t spook yourself.

He looked back at the cottage. Huge with fire, no glint of the voor showed. Still—absence surrounded him like a crucible. He had to be severe with himself to keep from quaking when he stooped into the driver’s seat and started the car. As he drove off, he knew that the voor was not dead—he had merely helped to change it.

***

As soon as Sumner realized that the corpse no longer chased him, he collapsed and lay doubled over, retching for breath. A long while lapsed before he could stand, his head muddled and heavy. He had nowhere to go out here in the wilds but back to the cottage. He limped through the scaffolds of trees cautiously. When he encountered the smoldering nest of tarry ash and bones of Jeanlu’s body, he took a deep breath and walked the long way around the pool.

Near the cottage, flies ravaged him, yet he stopped walking and stood staring. The house blazed—and his car was gone.

Flies frenzied over his face and neck. Stunned and still, he watched flamedevils dancing through the roof and out the windows. He turned and stared beyond the dead branches of the trees idling in the wind, at a thread of dust vanishing in the west.

Sumner brushed flies from his face and scurried past pulpy trees and worm-festering grasses toward Rigalu Flats. He waddled up the rise and skidded quickly down the other side. Once on the green sand, the stinging swarm veered off, and he stopped.

He plopped down in the sand and vomited. All squeezed out, he got up, pointed himself toward McClure, and hobbled off. Though sick with horror and fatigue, he forced himself to move. The grating roar of the timbers and the tile roof going up in flames bellowed after him like the rusty gears of a vast machine.

***

Nothing has been created. Everything is a shadow of what it will be. Corby held to that voor chant. The fire, too hot for his shape, in moments would lapse him into the pattern itself, leaving him unsure how he would go on—or if.

Or if—nothing is a shadow, everything has already been created—everything is fated.

With the last fineness of his reasoning, he focused on Sumner. The lusk had broken. He had to reach his father. The pattern had to go on. He had to stop the Delph. With the last of his will, he reached out.

***

Sumner stayed close to the fringe of the Flats to avoid the flies. After he had shuffled through the sand for over an hour, the terrible wind died down, and the flies had gone. He ventured across a grassy plain toward a grove of willows. Halfway there, the scaly hulk of a pangolin reared out of the tall grass and honked angrily. Sumner backed off, slowly at first, then more quickly, breaking into a scramble as he neared the Flats. Safe again among the green dunes and the maze of fluted rocks, he plodded on.

He slogged onward with his hopeless journey. Because of the pangolins, he dared not cut across the fertile land to an active highway or even hope to get water until dusk. And then the night creatures would be out.

As he slouched along, he tried to measure his situation coolly. McClure, the nearest town, lay 189 kilometers away. He would need days to get there on foot. Even with provisions, he doubted he could get past the predators.

Face it, zerohero, he said to himself. You’re trashed.

The sun rose, a gold circle behind him. To his right, lunatic clouds, red and jumbled, ran with the horizon, towering majestic to twenty thousand meters. Skeleton-shadows covered the desert floor, and the tall, curved rockshapes catching the light around him blazed a hot green.

He could still taste the rot smell of Jeanlu’s body. He wanted to tear off his soiled clothes, but the stench tainted his skin as well. Loops of singed pain around his throat and the chill in his muscles made it impossible to gather his wits. Only one thing came clear to Sumner. He had been duped. Behind his pain and fear, a thick anguish thrummed.

“Used by a distort!” he moaned. “Corby knew. Pissleaker! He knew Jeanlu wasn’t dead.”

He shuffled on, trying to follow the highway as it dipped in and out of the death-calm dunes. The rocks around him wavered, scorching, and his heart trembled, chilled. The more apparent the hopelessness of his situation became, the angrier he got—enraged at himself for being such a docile fool. I should’ve left Nefandi in the lurch when I had the chance. A sour taste gelled in the back of his throat. He wanted to spit it out, but his parched mouth provided no saliva.

Afterward, he lost the highway again amid coils and loops of rock. By this time, the sun had rolled to the horizon, and the wild clouds in the north piled high, dark as a mountain. He leaned against a thrust of stone that arced steeply and fanned into a mesh of spikes and bristles. The material gleamed, slick and clear-edged. In the shadows, it seeped a faint green glow.

He looked north at a ridge of far-distant mountains. Alpenglow, misty red, outlined the summits. Closer in, the edge of the Flats lifted, and—visible among the long shadows just beyond it, surrounded by drowsy ferns and a dark grove of veiled cypress—a pond caught the day’s horizontal rays. Its long body flashed like beaten gold in the dusk. No pangolins lumbered anywhere in sight.

He shambled over the smooth rock and the drifts of sand. The scent of fresh water crisscrossed the air, coming and going, until he pushed through the ferns. Then it rose like a wall, and he stepped through it, giddy. The water, clean and cool, gurgled from a cleft boulder matted over with moss and long green shoots. He went down on his knees before it and drank, moaning and rolling his eyes. When he had slaked his thirst, he doused his face and his burning neck. Finally, he lay back in the thick grass and let the leaf-shifted twilight play over him.

Momentarily at peace with himself, his mind fell back from its despair, and he wondered why Corby had sent him to that living corpse. Was that really Jeanlu? Thinking about it, he decided it must have been. Though the features had withered, he had recognized her hair and eyes. He could still feel the frosted charge she had sizzled through him. The vacancy in his chest and shoulders lingered, as if he had been drained. Like a spider, he imagined. She was sucking out my life like a spider.

As the terrain darkened, the sun descended as a crown of flame among fantastic shapes in the east, and he tried to devise a way of carrying some water. Then, he heard an evil sound. A huge, hollow cough swelled out of the night shadows among the cypresses. He couldn’t even begin to guess what it was. Pangos should be asleep now, he considered, hoping to calm himself. But other, more ominous possibilities remained: jaguars, dorga renegades, flying gnous.

He pushed to his feet and immediately met the gleam of last light in five pairs of eyes across the pond from him. As he stepped back, they stepped out—five man-size hind rats, snout-jaws gaping, stunted forearms greedily clacking claws.

Sumner whined, and the sound of his fear excited the creatures. They trotted around the pond toward him, barking and snapping their jaws.

He plunged through the brake of ferns and burst toward the Flats. The hind rats spartled after him, screaming raucously as they closed in. Even after he made it to the green sand, he dragged on as fast as he could, not daring to glance back until his shoes slapped the hard surface of a rockshelf.

He turned about and nearly collapsed. The hind rats hadn’t stopped at the edge. They kicked up flares of sand as they scampered toward him. He leaped back and dashed over the fine-grained rock, eyes straining in the falling light for pits and scoops. He ran strong and reckless, leaving all his strength behind. When he collapsed, his leg muscles bunched, his chest ached, and he had to gulp for breath. In an instant, the hind rats were on him. Their barks surrounded him, and he heard them circling for the killing lunge.

A long, hysterical moment played out before he realized that he wasn’t going to be mauled. The yipping of the creatures broke off abruptly, and he thrashed about. The hind rats had vanished. They had never been there. The sand tract he had crossed showed only his tracks.

He got up timidly and looked toward the pond. Darkness obscured it, and by the green glow of the Flats he spotted the gleam of the hind rats’ eyes. They watched him hungrily from the edge.

Suddenly two of them bounded forward, shrieking and kicking up sand. Sumner wailed, too spent to break into a run. Stiff as chalk, he stood gawking as the hind rats raced for him. Ten meters away, ribbons of saliva running off their jowls, they staggered when the space around them fractured. Then—they vanished.

Yak pus!

All five hind rats remained squatting at the fringe of the Flats, sixty meters away, their tiny eyes green sparks in the shadows. None had so much as stirred. Sumner kneaded his face with his knuckles. I’m losing my mind.

“No, you’re not.”

Sumner wheeled around. Corby reared up behind him, face and hands milky green in the phosphor glow. His eyes glared bright as an animal’s.

Sumner stammered, and the boy’s form wrinkled away like a mirage.

Wog! I’m luned!

“Just projecting.” The voice came from behind him again. He turned, this time more slowly, screwing up his eyes to see better. The boy appeared there, solid as the rock turret alongside him. “Stop pushing out,” Corby said. “Focus in.” His body blurred off into the ghost light of the Flats.

“Corby!” Sumner bawled. “Stop jooching me!”

A voice slashed through his head, so loud that he reeled: “I’m not!” Corby’s image ricocheted across his field of vision, appearing and vanishing on ledges, dunes, spires. Then it drizzled to nothing.

Easy, driftbrain—easy. Sumner closed his eyes. He sensed the boy’s contact within him. Blood still banged in his ears from his run. Even so, he could hear a hushed presence at the back of his mind. A cooing, a whispered chant echoed there—a dreadful recall of the corpse’s alien muttering. He braced himself to flick open his eyes to get away from that sound, except that he heard something else: Corby’s voice, cool and rational. “It’s the Flats, Father. It’s empty. Your mind’s filling it up.”

He opened his eyes. Corby watched him with a concerned smile. The image lasted until Sumner moved; then it, too, blinked away.

He closed his eyes again and listened, past the boom of his blood and Jeanlu’s eerie lipping, for Corby. “Keep your mind still,” the boy’s voice whispered within him. “Don’t talk to yourself. And don’t be afraid.”

“Where are you?” Sumner asked aloud.

Jeanlu’s mumblings got louder, hissing through the blood beat. “I can’t link with you long,” Corby said, his voice already thinning. “Listen. Being is flow. And in the flow is pattern. But there can be no meaning until you stop struggling. Consciousness itself is power. Become what you are. If you’re quiet, you’ll...”

Silence.

“What? I’ll what?”

A squawking chant caromed across his brain, and Sumner snapped open his eyes to see the black, shrunken corpse of Jeanlu dancing obscenely before him. Wwau! He jumped backward and had to struggle with himself not to dash off. “It’s a ghost, driftbrain,” he said aloud to calm himself. “It can’t touch you.”

Jeanlu’s body shimmied closer. He could see through the peeled, scabby skin. The face, thin as wind, shimmered, shiny, the bulbous eyes trembling in their sockets. Sumner held himself steady. “Not real,” he encouraged himself. “Not real.”

The corpse’s body disappeared, though the shiny, cracked face endured, stretched into a maniacal grimace. Then it, too, faded, and he was alone. A night bird tolled from the cypress pond. Otherwise, silence reigned.

He closed his eyes to get in touch with Corby. The sound of his heart thumped in his ears. The heat had thinned out of the air quickly. Sumner shivered, and he started walking to warm himself. The terrain around him filled with furtive movements and brief glimmers of gossamer shapes. Fear, he remembered. Teeth dreams. The thought reassured him, and he felt his initial anxieties peeling away. That left him with shimmerings of dread and snips of language: Relax...you’re easing home...nobody can jooch you now.

The vast solitude of the Flats and its soft, dusty light skimmed off his inner voice. He fell away from his thoughts into an alert quietude. Nothing was left to think about. It was just a matter of walking now, one step at a time, through this wonderland of muted light and crazy shapes. Exhaustion helped to keep his mind empty; fear kept it alert. And the hallucinated voices of the hind rats stalked him:

Two leg, you are beautiful—

O come with us

Away from these fever graves

To where our wounds can love each other...

He veered deeper into the Flats, a great concourse of windswept shapes ranging around him. Time moved without punctuation. Only the broken rhythm of his stride and the hot pain around his neck fixed his attention.

Intuitively, he understood what Jeanlu had wanted from him. Life. All of it. The hot vapor she had breathed in his face contained a psiberant—a means of digesting his mind so that she could take his body. The words she had chanted intended to paralyze the conscious centers of his brain. The rhythms still resonated through his nerves. He could feel them acting with the psiberant. Together they produced a sparkling, volatile energy that scrambled his thoughts while infusing his kha with unprecedented strength. Strength enough to realize: A little more of that power would have been death.

Movement, majestic and invisible as an ocean current, pulled at him. He moved with it, steadily, inexorably, trudging through the hushed green glow of the Flats, until he came to a stairway of stone ledges at the edge of a huge bowl canyon. Boulder-choked defiles in the distance blazed bright green like seams of spectral lava. The skyfires rustled above, blue and red, clouding all but the brightest stars. Through the draperies of smoky light, the swayback Lion and the Goat Nebula flickered. By them, he knew which way was home. He had tramped far from fertile land. This deep into the Flats, his mind blank as glass, polished smooth with fright, he slid inward, immersed in an almighty silence.

Astonished by his lucid serenity, feeling as though the edge of time brinked before him, he sat on the rock ledge and let the cold air weld him to the spot. He knew for sure that he had come here for a reason. But there was only one reason huge and simple enough to match these lifeless ranges. Death. He didn’t have to think about it. He knew he was going to die. And he relished it.

Light flowed everywhere—a drowsy ghost-bloom shining in the rocks, woozing down from the sky. The wind had stilled, and the canyon floor rolled toward the horizon with its arches of haunted rock. For many kilometers in every direction, not one living thing stirred.

This was the moment he had secretly craved for years. He knew if he eased up now, he would lapse into darkness and never wake. An end to loneliness and hunger and footsmells and clothes gone stiff with piss-acid and fear-sweat. Gone, the ugliness of being himself.

He took one long, sweeping look at the lifeless horizon: A few stars clustered here and there, tapping beneath the wobbly light of the skyfires. He closed his eyes and eased up. The cold seized him, and for a while he trembled so violently that he knew he must disintegrate. Then warmth—a deep warmth: flesh fire, the heat seeping off his bones.

Inside, he didn’t lapse into darkness. He rooted himself in the warmth rising through him. Then his mindark went cold and bright. When he opened his eyes he was no longer alone.

Far away a string of flashes went off. A fleck of gold radiance advanced among the ridged slopes, appearing and disappearing across the tableland. As it neared, the blinking fleck took on a definite form: a vortex of blinding energy.

A deva!

It leaned over the sandshelves, an immense, fiery whirlwind, muting the green fluorescence of the Flats. Dense shadows cast by intervening rock ridges staggered before it. Closer, the vortex dipped behind the reefs of the canyon wall, and the desert around Sumner again went dark.

During that interval, the shock wave hit. It rolled over the canyon, kicking up luminescent tufts of sand and hitting Sumner so hard he clattered over a bed of rocks and dropped to his back. A gust of wind-driven sand thrashed his face and arms, and then lifted away. Overhead, muffled with distance, thunder throbbed.

From where he sprawled, he could see the rim wall brightening. Shafts of lucid, burning light cut through the darkness of the canyon, illuminating dunes, a ruffle of contorted rock, and a basin cracked into octagonal plates. His eyes glared over. When he could see again, the sky blazed with enormous sheets of fire. Curtains of grained gold light streamed down, passing through the rim walls, embracing the entire canyon.

“Get up!” Corby’s voice pleaded with sudden clarity. “I’ve sent this deva. Go with it.”

A cannonade of squealing wind burst over him, drowning out the voor’s voice. The sudden blast shoved Sumner sideways down the incline, and he pushed against the wind to regain his footing.

“You’re luned!” Sumner turned and again tried to move away from the canyon. The suction of the gathering wind column hauled him back and sent him sprawling to the base of the rise.

The wind currents mounted quickly, and the canyon floor boiled.

Impossible to resist the drag of the sheering squall, Sumner collapsed. In a flurry of ragged clothes and waving limbs, he tumbled toward the center. The closer he got, the more brutal the lash of wind became, until he couldn’t breathe. He stopped resisting, and his body bounded through the air into the explosive brilliance of the whirlwind.

He surged up through a buffet of twisting force where, for a moment, he hung suspended. A blizzard of blue-white sparks seethed about him. Far off, seen through an endlessly receding spout of silver-azure radiance, glowed the pale saffron body of a cold sun. And then, colossal winds squeezed the breath out of him.

He blacked out.

When his senses cleared, his whole body clenched with terror, and he nearly lost consciousness again. He hurtled through the air, thousands of meters above the ground, his aching, bruised body buoyed by a tremendous force. Below, wandering deep into the north, lay the shattered range of Rigalu Flats. Its crumpled, wind-scarped contours fluoresced faintly with a green washlight. To the west, the planet’s rim incandesced, lit by the sun’s corona, the sky above it condensing from aquamarine to a slow indigo-pitch. Dark lakes in the north reflected that light in starpoint flashes.

He hung to consciousness by a giddy thread—too shocked to think. Through wind-stunned eyes, he watched the curve of the horizon bank, and the trajectory of his flight bowed into its descent. Towers of clouds in the distance, edged blue-red and purple by the celestial light, veered away. The silver glint of a strohlkraft moved in a tranced glide along the edge of the world. And there—close to his left, surrounded by clawtracks of dirt roads and highways—squatted the dark factories of McClure. Orange lights flickered within its smudge of clustered buildings.

The wind leaned on Sumner, and the path of his drop suddenly appeared taut and clear. He coming down in the trash fields on the outskirts of the city. Already he could see the buckled tin roofs of the dorga pits and the burning towers of the refinery.

The glare of the solar wind fell below the horizon, and the palisades on the southern lip of the Flats marched down the northern sky. The brown wasteland surrounding McClure surged closer. South of the city, the bay looked dull-green and then black before it swung out of view.

Sumner’s plummet jolted, and he slowed down. Strings of force lowered him toward the dorga pits. The smoking clumps of shacks, untouched as yet by the sun, looked uninhabited. He spun over the swarm of lone huts and slid through streams of curved air toward the west slope of the city. Hills and knolls of trash skimmed beneath him. Four meters above the ground, the force that suspended him snapped, and he dropped to the earth.

His legs crumpled under him, and he rolled down a dark bank into a shadowed cove. The cove, a hollow between heaps of junk, received him among rotting wood, crowds of discarded crates and boxes, ribbons of fatigued metal, the crushed frame of a car belly-deep in weeds. The place nestled in the dawn deserted except for pigs and wind-eels and a solitary dog. A rank mist laced with organic odors engulfed everything.

Sumner stirred to rise, and fell back, too weak. The frenzy of his absurd flight had exhausted the last of his strength. Even as first light gilded the mounds of rubbish, he sank into a deep stupor.

Late in the morning, he came around. His head hollow and his body so much empty tubing, he sagged as he tried to sit up. Through the pain of his battered muscles, he forced himself to his feet. He hung onto a corroded pipe, then rolled back clumsily into the trash pile. In a daze, he reposed there, flies stuck to the abraded sores on his lips, and watched a lone bird circling far up in the sky.

Thoughts boomed, too loud for his aching head. He closed his eyes and rolled to his side. Later, he got nudged awake by something cold and wet. The nose of a ribby, sharp-faced pariah dog probed him. It watched him for a while without expectation, then loped off behind a drift of smoking garbage.

Bravely, Sumner pitched to his feet, staggered, fell, and lumbered up again. Keeling from side to side, he plodded across the trash fields, oblivious to the dorgas sorting junk among weeds of the wild verge. Seeing him coming, the dorgas hooted and cried. Some threw garbage, and all watched him until he hobbled out of sight.

Sunlight fell, thick, late afternoon amber on the rutted dirt road, as he limped into the city. Houses lined up on either side of the road, a few meters back, all the same: concrete-block stoops, walls of stained scantlings, rusted wire in the windows, corrugated metal sheets for roofs. As he went along, zinnia clumps, hibiscus hedges, and ixora bushes appeared among the huts, sprouting around pink cement outhouses.

Dust rose thick and caught in his nostrils with the smell of chicken dung and rubbish. It made him feel queasy, but he knew he couldn’t stop here. Leaning in the doorways and sometimes seated in front of their huts in sagging chairs with blistered arms and worn cushions, dorgas glared. Sulking, vacant women with long matted hair ignored him. The men, wild, red-eyed, in rags, stared at him, their foreheads X-scarred by drone straps.

Farther on, he saw a distort child sitting in the pale dust beneath a carat palm. The face, small and tight, displayed scaled flesh around sunken eyes that looked bruised, the front of the tattered shirt wet with drool. When Sumner hitched by, clods of dirt, pebbles, and shards of glass shot off the road and pelted him. The distort leered to see him scampering anxiously over the broken ground, head between his shoulders.

He sagged with relief when he reached the first paved streets beside a park with flower-cracked walls. Yet even here, where houses had doors and windows, tokens of danger abounded: Wind-eels squirmed in the air above tangles of unfamiliar weeds, and black carrion corbeaux squatted on fence posts; a smell of stale smoke lilted in the air; great, gritty ants’ nests hung from the limbs of shade trees. Nevertheless, he stopped to call up his strength and to look back over the way he had come. The park sloped along a rise, and he could see down to where a stream the color of rust fringed the dorga pits. Wooden shacks on thin stilts wavered in the heat. The eroded area steamed like a crater, isolated and depressed.

A sharp thought pierced the exhausted stillness of his mind: That’s my home if the police get me. His stomach heaved and then settled back. Too drained and numb to sustain his dread, he slumped through the dried grass of the park. He peered across the deserted, mangrove-choked spaces with apprehension. Not until the avenues broadened and he met cars could he sink into his torpor again and walk on mindlessly.

Around the arcades, on the shopping malls, and in the open market, people made last minute purchases for that evening’s dinner. A crowd of children went by, laughing and shouting, carrying schoolbooks under their arms. The younger ones wore red vests and had tiny packs on their backs. Vendors hawked fruit with loud, trilling calls. Small children played kili in the gutter, mindless of the speeding bicycles and cars. One man perched on a step-ladder, stringing paper lanterns to an overhead wire for that night’s local street festival.

The surge of vitality was immense, and Sumner had to move briskly to keep from breaking into tears. Everything looked familiar and sane. It was as if the brutal absurdity of the past day had never occurred. Aching and dazed, he had come home. Turning the corner of the street where he lived, he felt all the terror and humiliation he had experienced well up in him, and for a hysterically long string of moments he swayed, baffled. Though he had lived here all his life, suddenly he recognized nothing.

In this part of the city, the streets were unpaved—dirt roads overlaid with dark wooden planks. He shuffled down the middle of the street, mind blank. The sky had gone smoky with nightfall, and the green lead windows brightened, suffused with light. Their hazy glow reminded him of the Flats. He stood in the street gawking at them, trying to remember where he was going.

Down at the far end of the street, elevated tracks rumbled with an incoming train—shift workers returning home. The muted roar jolted him, it sounded so like the deva wind that had ripped across the Flats. He backed to the sidewalk and thought about bolting when a shrill voice exploded his languor: “Pudding!”

He curled around to see Zelda rushing out of the doorway to their house. She skipped wildly toward him, pale, bone-thin arms high in the air, little bird’s eyes wide with surprise.

“Mutra! What’s happened to you? What’s happened to my baby?” She put both of her spidery hands on his face and peered searchingly into his eyes. “You look dead!” Her shriveled face aghast, she took in the ragged figure before her. “Quick—into the house.”

She shoved Sumner down the street and tugged him by his arm into the foyer. In the crinkled light of a globe lantern, she studied him with growing alarm. “What’s happened to you? You smell like the Dark One!”

The stale but well remembered odor of clove incense jarred Sumner’s mind. The broken look on his face began to fade. His bright, startled eyes glanced about.

“Are you hurt?” Zelda whined. “Can’t you talk?”

He plucked at his ravaged shirt and smiled giddily. “I’m home.”

Zelda’s face lit up. “Yes, pudding, you’re home. But what happened to you? Where’s the car? There was an accident, wasn’t there? Look at your clothes! They’re scorched and—your neck! Mutra!” She drew back his collar and gaped at the swatches of purpled skin around his throat.

The horrified expression on her face shook Sumner. He pulled away and examined himself in the foyer’s oval mirror. His face frightened him: bruised, lips split, eyelids swollen. At the sides of his neck, where Jeanlu had fastened onto him with her death grip, the skin had blistered, livid and scalded. He flipped his collar up. “The car’s gone,” he croaked.

Zelda’s eyes locked on his. Too stunned to respond, she stared at him blindly and continued to stare even as he turned past her and lugged himself up the stairs.

Johnny Yesterday occupied one of the peacock-blue urns in the living room, eyes closed, a beatific smile on his seamed face. His reverie persisted, stupendous, immutable, as Zelda, coming out of her shock, howled. She bounded up the stairs and intercepted Sumner before he got to his room.

He braced himself for a screeching rebuke, but she only stared at him with narrowed, rage-misted eyes. After a tedious moment, her face softened. “Get some sleep,” she said, with a calm more unnerving than a scream.

Sumner slumped into his room and collapsed on the mattress. The place, as jumbled as when he had left it—so long ago—seemed the same, except for a clear space where the scansule had shattered. Within the muddle of the room, the solitary emptiness disturbed him. Like his car and his secret life as the Sugarat, another part of him had been lost. How much longer could this go on, this slow falling apart, dying piece by piece? Why not end it all at once? he wondered. Whomp! Finished. He sighed, and his body sank deeper into the mattress. Why not?

***

Zelda pulsed, enraged. The loss of the car meant a lot of bureaucratic and financial trouble. She could have gouged out Sumner’s eyes. But she had restrained herself for a reason. Yesterday, a few hours after Sumner had driven off, the police had arrived at the house. Big and bulky and not at all pleasant, two of them banged through the rooms, turning everything over, while a third cornered her in the foyer. They wanted Sumner. They wanted Sumner now. And unless she turned him over immediately, she could expect to be conducting her illicit spirit counseling in the dorga pits.

Zelda had stayed supernaturally calm with the police. She really had no idea where her boy was, and if she had known, she would have told them without hesitation—she was that furious at him for not warning her of this trouble. If they had wanted to, the police could have broken her right there and dragged her off to be branded. Instead, they gave her a special number to call when Sumner returned to the house.

She fingered the slip of paper with the number on it. Her anger about the car was nothing like the fury she had experienced after the police left. Her career gutted—no one would do business with her now that she had been raided—she had no livelihood. Word about the law traveled swiftly in wangol circles.

Only one option remained. The house was in her name. There would be no trouble selling it, and with the money she could relocate in one of the big eastern cities where nobody knew her. Of course, the success of her plan had depended on Sumner returning. If he hadn’t come back, the police would have suspected she had tipped him off. Now her future loomed as close as a phone call.

She put on a heavy shawl embroidered with owls’ eyes and black tassels. Stepping out into the cool night air, her tensions eased, and she felt disappointed that she had gotten angry at her son. The car was not that important. It would hamper the paperwork of her leaving the city, though perhaps the police would take care of that. The important thing was that Sumner had come back and now she was free to go her own way.

Not until she came to the phonestall below the el tracks did she experience her first throb of hesitation. She dropped the one coin she had brought with her. It rolled past her foot and fell between the wooden planks of the street. On her way back to the house to get another coin, she reasoned with herself—

Don’t I have a right to my own life? Why should I throw it away to protect an ingrate, a glut, a...criminal? “Klaus, you know I’ve tried. School, scansule, car—what more could I give him? My life? Do I have to throw away my life too? No! I’ve done more than enough. Besides, the police...they wouldn’t tell me what he’d done wrong. Perhaps it’s not that serious.”

“And if it is serious?” Klaus’s voice asked. “Come on, Zelda—you remember the brood jewel and the voor herb you found in his car. That was over a year ago. Who knows what trouble he’s gotten himself into? It’s probably very serious.”

“Well, then it is serious, Klaus. Why else would the police bang up the house like that? But so what? Sumner’s a rapist, an assassin, a voor pimp—they’re going to send him to the pits or the peeler. Let it be the peeler. So what, Klaus? So what? He ruined my life—he would have had me branded. His own mother, a dorga! What did he care? He didn’t warn me. Not a word!”

“But he came back, Zelda. He came back.”

“He came back because he trashed the car. That’s why, you rotting corpsemeat. He trashed the car. Where else could he go? Only I’d put up with his slobbering and his whining. You don’t have anything to do with it. You’re dead. Dead. Dead.”

Several hours later, after dropping more coins, misplacing the number, twisting her ankle, and arguing viciously with Klaus, she called the police. They arrived quickly. She had just finished preparing a cup of wangol e-z brew to soothe her nerves when the door knocker thumped loudly. Through the window, she saw a string of helmeted men file out of a black van and disperse to surround the house. They carried rifles.

“You’re not going to hurt him,” she whispered frantically to the men she let in. They shouldered brusquely into the foyer. “You shouldn’t hurt him. He’s a quiet boy.”

“Where is he, lady?”

She looked up the stairs, and five men scrambled past her. Johnny Yesterday was asleep at the head of the stairs, and the first men to reach him dragged him swiftly out of the way. They stuffed him under the table with the brocaded legs and proceeded to kick in the doors to all the rooms.

Sumner sat up, blinking groggily, when the door to his room crashed open. Three men leaped on him before he could move. He yowled and thrashed mightily, and one of them rammed a nightstick between his legs.

They secured his limbs with thick straps and plugged a rubber bit in his mouth. Bound to a wooden pole like a trussed pig, he moaned miserably as the police hauled him out of the room and down the stairs.

On the way out, Zelda fluttered over him. He watched her through a blur of pain while she cried. “They won’t hurt you, pudding. They promised.” Then she was gone, and he was looking up into a night rippled with skyfire. The last thing he saw before they slid him into the van was Johnny Yesterday leaning out the upstairs window, his leering face bald and wild as the moon.

>VOORS<

The Fox provides for himself,
but God provides for the Lion.

—William Blake

The Mysteries

Black the blood and the bones...

Moving like shadows, dark mantled and hooded, eleven voors came out of the north, each with a stalk charm, each silent. They gathered on the chine of a hill and stared down through simmering heat at their destination.

Below, they spied the home of Jeanlu the charmist. The deepest voors had sensed her death coming on days before. Identifying Jeanlu as a rare healer with the power to touch Iz, the brood had sent these eleven to perform the rite of stillness.

The ones who had risked the journey into the broken land of the howlies offered this rite as an homage, though they were more curious than reverent. Only one actually knew Jeanlu—Lul, the eldest, herself a master of plants, had been her friend. Everyone else knew nothing more than the tales they had heard.

Early in childhood Jeanlu had seen her brood savaged by howlies, and the shrieks of blood and the hot pain had stayed with her. Over the years, as she perfected her stalk charms through her wanderings among the darktime voors, her anguish opened into a vision: She saw how her charms could draw enough kha into her own body to birth a mage, a timeloose voor with the power to unite and protect the broods.

Many had warned and chided her, because a mage lived as a spawn of the Vast, and few believed a woman could balance her own small bodylight with the immensity of Iz long enough to shape a child. Kha-warped homunculi had been created that way. Yet, Jeanlu—possessed by her vision—had journeyed south to find a howlie genetically strong enough to father a mage. No one had followed her, except those long into their darktime who needed the comfort of her stalk charms. The few that had returned during those first years spoke of a wild, lightning-eyed woman whose potent charms strengthened the bodylight and kept darktime voors alive. Some had even told of a child white as emptiness and just as deep.

The rumors of a mage had excited the brood. Many were willing to jeopardize their lives to see for themselves what had become of the charmist. But for the chosen eleven, the journey had been strange. Long dreams of Unchala, the voors’ spawnworld, haunted their trek. Nights opened into ecstatic experiences of the most beautiful music anyone had ever heard, and days carried a powerful expectation of the nights to come. When they arrived at their destination, though there had been an omen—a deva had been spotted the night before—the telepathic joy of their desert crossing did not prepare them for what they found.

The landscape had grown malefic. Dead trees with shapes of pain cowered over a pond that had dried to a shattered pit. Where Jeanlu’s house had been, only ash-timbers stood upon the white shadow of a furious fire.

Three of the eleven had deep mind, and they drew closer together. Lul, the old one, had known this place before and circled the site, baffled by what had become of it. With her deep mind, she questioned the others. Clochan shook his head, as dumbfounded as she. But Tala thought she glimpsed blue kha traces around the flies. That startled Lul. A voor did this?

Tala couldn’t answer. The traces glinted too faintly even for her sharp senses.

Lul dismissed her suspicions and signed for the rite to begin. Clochan passed around flagons of kiutl brew he carried, and everyone drank deeply. The saffron fragrance puckered Lul’s mouth and filled her sinuses with nostalgic vapors. How many times had she shared this feeling with Jeanlu?

Together the two women had known one-with—a telepathic melling of kha that had always filled their heads with a wondrous vision: a violet sky with three suns and the odd feeling of a body not human. The seers had said these experiences revealed glimmers of lives that they had lived on other worlds. Most of the brood believed such talk, but who was strong enough to know?

The first cool tendrils of kiutl immanence pierced her thoughts, and at the same instant Tala beat on the slade-drum the opening notes of a sad slow mountain song. Her body thinned out, and she knew again the electric clarity of the herb. Clearly now, she saw the thin blue glaze around the fungi at her feet. And, with the intuitive insight of kiutl, she recalled Corby. Jeanlu’s son was said to be a mage—a voor with the power to heal and transform.

She arched her back and stared up at the enormous sky. Beyond the world’s lip, the sun drained, a dark liquid red.

Lul threw back her hood and advanced through rasping grass. Though old, she moved quickly. The darktime, just beginning for her, left her face cracked and ashen as an old wooden bowl, yet still the face of a woman. Her eyes alone had gone strange. Tiny and silver, they touched the world with clouded vision.

Lul suppressed her thoughts and let the expansive calm of kiutl hone her senses. Beyond the moan of the flies, she heard the subtle, queer ringing of salt-bonded kha. The familiar buoyancy of the high, tremulous pitch led her to the caked rim of the pond. Jeanlu’s body lay twisted in the tangled loops and lacings of decayed vegetation. The cry of her trapped kha whistled eerily through the crust of her corpse.

Lul gazed into the crushed carapace of Jeanlu’s face. The gold eyes gone, voided sockets swarmed with tiny white threads of maggots. None of this disturbed Lul. Many years tending voors in their blacktime had inured her to the grotesque. What did shock her was that the corpse still wore a necklace of stone light. That meant only one thing—Jeanlu had attempted lusk.

Brood law strictly forbade pirating another lifeform.

With kiutl awareness, Lul listened to the thin kha-plaint turning in the air. She recognized something of Jeanlu in it, a gentleness. A high-pitched fear shrill marred that clemency. Lul believed she understood why Jeanlu had wanted to lusk. The charmist had been young and her darktime terrible. Besides, howlies lived as animals—dangerous, kha-green animals. Was it really wrong to take one of their shapes when the bloodpaths narrowed?

Lul brought out her stonelight from a pouch beneath her mantle. Shimmering like jelly, the brood jewel stole heat like ice in her hand. She glanced briefly into its depths to be certain that Jeanlu’s lusk had failed. She had to be sure that the nightmare-quivering kha of some howlie meshed in this corpse did not deceive her. When she saw Jeanlu’s kha, blue as coal, she signaled the others to approach.

Tala led the way, chanting to the rhythm of her slade-drum: “Black the blood and the bones beneath the skin. Black the earth one finger under. Black the emptiness bent over time.”

Lul’s heart thrummed with sadness. If only more than slim dreams prevailed, more than vague brood-memories, these old songs and rituals passed on by the seers. If only some way opened, revealing the objective truth of the star-journeys and other worlds of voor legend so that death proffered no mere collapse into nonentity. What was deep mind if it only revealed the uncertainty and despair of others?

Lusk! Clochan started when he saw the corpse.

Can you blame her? Lul responded. She was younger than you.

Did she cross? Tala wanted to know. Her blue-scabbed hands rubbed an unheard note off the drumskin to keep the flies away.

No. Lul motioned the other voors to continue the rite. It’s her kha you hear whistling through the salt.

After gathering fallen wood and stacking it beside the pond, the voors removed the brood jewels around the corpse’s neck and gave them to Lul. The stonelights were all that physically remained of Jeanlu’s kha, and when they were gone her life would fall back into Iz.

The old voor placed the crystals deep inside the wood pile where the heat would be intense enough to melt them. Clochan lit the pyre, and bursts of blue and green flames hissed through the drywood. The voors threw their stalk charms into the fire and turned away.

Lul lingered, watching the black smoke crawl into the sky until the thin, high note of Jeanlu’s life shrieked out of hearing.

A psychic muscling at the back of her neck turned Lul toward the ash-skeleton of Jeanlu’s house. Near the center of the charred pit, the lucidity of kiutl revealed a presence among the cinereal ruins. Half buried in the fire-bleached debris, the shape of a small boy curled.

Stooping over the child-form, she saw that the form actually consisted of a sheath of tightly-reeved fibers—a cocoon. Its texture, black with leakage and seepings, seemed whole. Staring hard, she discerned a violet kha flimmering over the blackened fibers.

Timidly, she reached out and touched the baked surface. She felt the child’s life, gently stirring, uncertain as the shifting patterns of clouds. She pulled away.

Tala and Clochan, impacted by her shock, hurried over. They couldn’t make anything of the child-shape. Was this Jeanlu’s boy-child? Tala perceived only that it was alive. They would have to cross with it.

With the stonelight icy in her grasp, Lul quieted her thoughts and let the kha of the others fill her. A sorcelled mist clouded her mind, and the sounds of the vehement flies and the bated breathing of those around her folded back. She let the brood-power well up out of her bloodpaths and course like static over her skin. Her trembling fingers reached out and touched the charred surface again.

A spasm of flamebright energy flashed through her, knocking her to the ground. Stupefied, she lay unmoving, hearing the awesome thundering of her heart.

A gnatlike shimmering whirled around her so fast she thought she might be dissolving into light. Her blood more than her brain remembered this from previous trances. She extended further than she had ever gone before, across torrential spans of change, moving so swiftly all distance became a single point, violently still.

Darkness flew by like howling apes, and she burst into a landscape of light: a garden of fire sparks—clustered trees, amorphously bright sedges and grasses of incandescent filaments. Black threads of darkness stringing out above the scene parted, and she fell into the spectral grove.

Welcome, Lul. A boy-child, distort pale, stood naked among florets of starbright energy, his white-gold hair shifting in an unfelt breeze. I’m glad you could meet me here. His words wobbled in the air like a lament, like something more sung than said. My veve is yours. It’s no good to me anymore. I’m fading, becoming less—He raised a hand to his face, and two fingers broke off and sparkled to the ground like shooting stars.

Lul ached with fear. The boy dissolved into a muddle of frothing colors, leaving behind nothing to see but chromatic magmas soundlessly heaving through the blackness.

A child’s voice opened in her: Relax, Lul. Nothing can hurt you here.

A kha-plaint curled around her, loud and close. The legendary cry of the voor dead, the brood soul, claimed her with mindless wonder that left no room for surprise when Jeanlu’s voice spoke from inside her: Lul, remember the nights we pondered this? How many worlds? How far away? I can tell you now, it’s endless. There’s no way back, but there is a beginning: Unchala—the mythic source.

Jeanlu! Lul called into the surges of flowing light. No response followed. Had Jeanlu, too, been a mind-ghost?

What she says is true, the child said in her mind. Unchala is part of my veve. Would you like to see where you came from, voor?

Bodiless and simple, Lul swooned away from words. Her mind yawned into a teetering vista of plasma fires. She moved through a vision more vivid than pain.

Streamers of fire resolved to a span of stars, each starburst a note, a radiant pulse of sound. The sky’s dusty nebulae embodied all music’s voice—

Night on Unchala.

“Lul!”

She shuddered awake. Clochan stooped over her, wafting a smoldering taper of snakeweed beneath her face.

“Your bloodpaths almost closed,” Tala whispered. Her hood, partially pulled back, revealed the tiny holes of her silver eyes and the iridescent scales at the corners of her mouth. The girl’s strangeness did not evoke the sadness in Lul it usually did.

“It’s real,” the old voor said, pushing to her elbows. “All the legends—everything the seers told us is real.”

With hushed emotion, the others watched meekly from a distance.

“It’s all real.” Lul’s eyes shone. “I must go back.”

“No.” Tala squeezed the old woman’s arm urgently. “The trance will swallow you.”

“I’m old, Tala. I’m falling into my bones.”

“Let us go with you,” Clochan urged.

The old voor shook her head. “The two of you must lead the others back. Take this with you.” She touched the cocoon. “It is Jeanlu’s son, and he’s strong. His veve looks back to Unchala.”

The two younger voors stared at her, mute with surprise.

“This mage-child remembers the beginning, and he’s open to any who would cross with him. Do you understand what this means for the brood?”

“Come with us, then.” Tala helped Lul to sit up. The kiutl still strong in them, they had no need for words except for the intimacy of speaking.

“You go. My blacktime is beginning.” Lul stroked the coarse surface of the cocoon and thrilled to feel the bright, kinetic force within it. “You don’t know the beauty I’ve seen. And it’s best you don’t until you’re ready to leave the salt.

Sadly, Tala and Clochan helped Lul to cross her kha with the child-mage. In their deep mind, they watched as their friend moved into Iz, the wide banks of steamy colors curving gently through the darkness of their minds.

Dimly, from a great distance, they glimpsed the spark of Lul’s kha vanishing into the depths of another reality. And, for the last time, they heard her kha-plaint—a song both jubilant and lonely, like driftwood, far from land, with the wind in its branches, singing.

***

Chief Anareta waited nervously in the night shadow of the Berth for his men to bring the Sugarat in. He didn’t want violence in his station, though he could see no way to avoid it. Two of his oldest troopers had lost family in the riots that had followed the Sugarat’s kills, and they were demanding blood. With the help of the other men, they had ripped out the benches in the locker room and cleared enough space for a beating and a large audience. Word had spread, and men from every division in the city were showing up.

The chief leaned against the raspy stone of the Berth wall, well out of sight. A lanky, wolfish man, he wore his black Massebôth uniform with the rumpled and casual ease of a soldier indifferent to his work. The brutish cruelty in the long lines of his face did not expose the pain of physical experience. Rather, it had been cultivated by five days of patrolling the wasted streets of McClure and three decades of violent imagination as a police administrator filing action reports.

Anareta had a white card, and the White Pillar had pulled him off his beat, never really allowing him to risk his rare genes. As a young man, he had dreamed of life as a scholar of kro studies, although in his heart he had always known that economic necessity and family tradition would lead him into a military career. Only the genetic surprise of his white card had afforded him a taste of the academic life he had desired. Each year, during the three intervals that he studded for the White Pillar, he spent his free time with a scansule researching the fragments of literature and music from far gone kro times. Strength of mind and pride of self made him a dutiful and efficient police administrator—but it was his white card and the undistorted age to which it harked back that he had come to love.

After Chief Anareta had learned that the Sugarat possessed a white card, his opinion of the killer had opened from indifference to respect. In his mind, he saw Sumner Kagan as an unlucky shape of himself—a remnant of the old age when heroes risked everything to keep the race whole by fighting distorts. But most of his men—most of the human race—lived as distorts now. The bulk of Massebôth society merited green cards. These people, though they had no visible distortion, carried in their genes the shape of a future that did not include men like himself or the Sugarat.

Ominously, Anareta’s own men had chosen to work against him because of his white card. Shortly after the chief had learned about Kagan, he had asked the White Pillar Conclave to send an escort to protect the Sugarat from his vengeance-crazed division. Now he had to admit that those men were not going to arrive—that, indeed, the message had never been sent.

When the swayvan with the Sugarat came around the Berth wall and cruised toward the cement modules of the police barracks, Chief Anareta stepped out of the shadows. Not daring to use his hip radio for fear of alerting the other men, he hand-signaled the driver toward the arched door of his private office. The chief himself swung open the swayvan’s back panel as the truck braked—and he stooped with amazement to see the corpulent body trussed up inside. He had expected a streetlean and fierce Kagan, and for a moment he thought he had been duped. But the knowing fear in the boy’s eyes dispelled his uncertainty.

“Untie him and get him out,” he ordered.

The guards clambering out of the van crowded about as Sumner staggered into the sheer light of a lux globe. His pudgy face, bright with fear, gawked about. Blood harelipped from his nose, and a welt glowed across his cheek and down the side of his neck.

Anareta took the boy’s arm and led him to the narrow side door of his office. The uniformed men followed, but the chief waved them off. “You’re dismissed,” he said, opening the door and pushing Sumner in. The police balked, and he added more gruffly: “Your job’s done. Go home.” He had been careful in his selection of those he had sent to pick up the Sugarat. Mostly army transfers and young recruits, they felt uneasy about disobeying a field chief. With disgruntled mumbles, they dispersed.

A long map of McClure and a metal desk cluttered with unfiled reports cramped Chief Anareta’s small office. He signaled Sumner to a wooden stool and sat on the edge of his desk beside a keypunch communicator. An hour earlier, he had notified both the White and Black Pillar agencies that the Sugarat had been identified and officers dispatched to apprehend him. Now, he typed in the endcode signal that announced the boy was in custody.

Anareta looked into his prisoner’s porcine blue eyes. A laugh jerked deep inside him when he imagined this fat-round boy luring streetgangs to their deaths. “What did you think you were doing out there?”

Sumner’s gaze wobbled beneath the chief’s slow, omnivorous stare. “What do you mean?”

“Why’d you do it?” The darkness in Anareta’s long eyes seemed chasmal. “You’re a white card. I know what that’s like. I’m one. It’s a good life. The military will leave you alone, and the Conclave will give you women and time for your whims. Why’d you risk it all to be the Sugarat?”

Sumner’s look went empty as a wish. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The chief’s face narrowed, and the ravelings of Sumner’s body tightened and quivered. “I’ve always liked the Sugarat,” Anareta said tightly. Without looking at the keys, he typed the endcode into the communicator again, this time punching the send-key twice for emphasis. “Sugarat’s a distort killer. I liked him even more when I found out he had a white card. He’s not a common green card. He has something, and he chucked it all to jooch distorts. I like the Sugarat. But I don’t think I like you.”

Sumner’s voice shivered as he spoke: “I’m not the Sugarat.”

“Don’t make yourself uglier than you are, Kagan.” Anareta’s lips pinched with disgust. “My men found spraycans in your room with the same paint the Sugarat uses. I’ll wager the tire tracks near most of the killsites fit your car’s tires. And now we have foot plasters. You think they’re not going to match?”

Sumner faced meekly into the chief’s gritful stare and shook his head. “I’m not the Sugarat.”

“Your driving ticket found its own way to the alkaloid factory?”

Sumner’s whole face throbbed. “It’s not me. I don’t know how it got there.”

Outside the gray inner door, in the long corridor leading to the locker room, a razor-apt chant grew audible: “Zh-zh—zh-zh—zh-zh!” Sumner quaked to hear the Sugarat’s call.

“It’s you, Kagan,” Anareta said in a voice flawed with anger. He knew he couldn’t control his men, and his men knew that as well. “It’s you they want.” He typed in the endcode signal again, forwarding it only to the Conclave.

Kagan’s white card offered his one hope of surviving the night—but only if the White Pillar acknowledged his genetic value.

“Zh-zh — zh-zh!” The chanting hissed closer through the gray inner door.

Sumner whimpered and edged off the stool. “It’s not me.”

“Sit down!” the chief snapped. “Why’d you kill if you weren’t ready for this?”

“I didn’t!” Sumner’s eyes swiveled, drunk with terror. He leaned close to the chief, the hot stink of his body thick as a spasm. “It’s not me. Please believe me. I never killed anybody.”

A light dulled in the chief’s face, and he pushed Sumner away. “I might have tried to help you,” he said as the gray door rattled and the pounding began. “But I’m not going to risk my job and my life for gutpaste like you.”

“Zh-zh! Zh-zh! Zh-zh!”

“Open it up, Chief,” a gruff voice called through the door. “We know he’s with you. Open it up or we’ll take you with him!” The heavy door buckled in a seizure of pounding.

Sumner grabbed the chief’s arm and begged him with his whole body. But whatever sympathy had remained in Anareta withered away. He twisted his arm free and strode over to the gray door stenciled with the black and white Massebôth pillars.

“Don’t!” Sumner crouched behind the chief’s desk. “I am the Sugarat—but don’t let them have me.”

“Zh-zh! Foc Anareta—open the door! Zh-zh!”

Anareta turned to Sumner with a brightness like joy in his face. “Why’d you do it, Kagan? I want to know.”

Sumner gaped, baffled. “I don’t know.”

The chief sidled over to the keypunch and re-entered the request to turn Sumner over to the Conclave. He thumbed the send-key again and again.

“I was scared.” The boy wept. “I’ve been scared all my life. I had to kill what scared me. The dread, it—”

“Zh-zh!” The door cracked at the joint and splintered inward. At the other door leading to the outside, a heavy pounding began and voices shouted for the Sugarat. Anareta was moving toward his gun locker when the inner door burst open, throwing him to the side.

Half a dozen men rushed into the room, their faces tight with animal rage. They found Sumner cowering beneath the chief’s desk. He kicked and bucked, and they had to heave the desk over to get at him. They dragged him screaming out of the office and down the corridor to the locker room where the other men waited.

Anareta, left behind, struggled to right the toppled keypunch communicator. Minutes passed before he managed to reconnect the bent input-plug. Sumner’s howls had fractured to wracked cries and sobs by the time a channel chattered open and the chief linked with the Conclave. More minutes echoed with screams as the transfer authorization from both the White and Black Pillars typed itself out. Anareta ripped the sheet off before the endcode signal chimed and surged out of the room.

Ahead, the screams had stopped, and only the jeers of the men and the sound of the beating could be heard.

The chief had to push men out of his way to get to Sumner. With a yell, he silenced everyone: “Let up! This boy isn’t ours. If he dies, we’re all dorgas!”

The men on the periphery pulled back, and Anareta glimpsed Sumner’s hunched body, the clothes ripped away from a raw, bloody bulk. Then the men who had lost family in the Sugarat riots stood before him—thick men stripped to the waist, eyes smoky with red rage and contempt for his soft life. Both had blood-grimed rubber hosing in their hands, and one of them shoved the end of the tubing up to Anareta’s face. “Chief, you’re dead meat if you try to stop us.”

The chief pushed aside the bludgeon and held up the authorization order. “I’m not trying anything. The White Pillar owns Kagan now. They know he’s alive. If he’s dead—we’re worse than dead. All of us.”

One of the two men stepped back, and the other pressed dangerously closer. His face, emotionless and speckled with Sumner’s blood, his voice atonic, he threatened: “I’d rather be dorga meat than let this dungball live.”

The chief stood fast, though the man towered an inch away and his hard rubber hose pressed sharply against Anareta’s sternum. “To defy the Black Pillar is death,” he quoted the Codex of the Protectorate, holding the typed authorization high. “But to defy the White Pillar is suffering. Who else here wants to live a long life in the dorga pits?”

“The chief’s right,” one of the nearby men spoke up loudly, and grumbles of agreement followed. “The tud’s hurt. He won’t walk straight again.” Several of the closest men took the angry man’s arms and gently moved him away from the chief.

Anareta’s insides relaxed and then cramped even more fiercely when he saw what had become of Sumner. The boy’s face looked horrific, unrecognizable—a mask of stringing blood, torn tissue, and pink bone. Both of his broken arms winged at odd angles, hands pulp white and lifeless. A shaft of broken bone gouged through his thigh. “Mutra,” the chief gasped. “Get a shock unit. Somebody—get help!”

He tore off his shirt and covered Sumner’s quivering body. “Everybody else out of here,” he ordered. “The Conclave will want pain for this.” The station cleared quickly, and when the medics arrived Anareta stooped alone over a half-alive man.

***

Sumner lifted himself awake, rising out of a maw of darkness. A mad whining turned in his ears, and he waited for the nightmare to continue. But the world had changed. Twangy medicinal odors clouded around him. And the light shone softer, thin and gauzy.

Pain had become so intense it was pleasurable. For an age, it seemed, he had been dreaming of his hurt as radiance. He floated inside himself, his body a vision sustained by the intensity of his pain-pleasure. He twisted his body to ignite the flashlight that had become his joy, but the fluffy embrace of a mattress swallowed most of his pain.

“It’s over now,” a female voice said softly. The sweet, moist warmth of her breath sharpened Sumner’s senses. The gentle fragrance of calambac lilted in the air, and a hazy face hovered above him. He tensed for an expected barb of pain, but the hand that touched him was quiet.

She bent closer, and he saw that her face hovered lovely as music. Dark heavy-hung hair settled around him. He lifted above the numbness of his body and glimpsed the green physician’s uniform the woman wore and the intravenous bladders hanging on the posts of his bed. Then the hurt of his body fractured his alertness, and he dropped back into his stupor.

“Stay with us, Sumner,” the doctor whispered, and the lambent caress of her hair silked over his face as she pulled away.

For a double-hearted moment, Sumner urged to reach past his hurt and hold this woman as he would have held his life, even though he knew that if he let go of his pain-vision now, he would be giving up forever the dreaminess beaten into his nerves. Living would again become agony. But this woman—

A wave of loneliness swelled in him, and he clutched for her.

***

The first day that he felt strong enough to touch her was the last day he saw her. By then, consciousness had hardened enough for him to know that he occupied an infirmary chamber within sight of the Berth. Tall, narrow windows lined the walls, one for each bed in the ward. Sunlight, thick and steady as stone, lay on his face every morning, and the black days labored by.

Most nights, sleep closed in haunted and violent. In the languid light of false dawn, he invariably woke to a vision of the doctor who had lured him back into his life with her tawny skin and black hair and breath that smelled of candy. For that one moment, he knew happiness, and for the rest of the day the exasperating hallucination of her beauty dogged him. He was alone, as always. Betrayed into living. But why? Why had the police not killed him? The green-smocked medical staff that attended him and the other dour men in the ward knew nothing.

Chief Anareta visited Sumner once, and the boy became so agitated at the sight of the black, red-trimmed Massebôth uniform that the doctor in charge asked the chief to leave before he could introduce himself. The chief had come to say farewell. After the full report of the beating had been filed, the Black Pillar authorities had decided to retire the chief. He was being sent to a camp outside Xhule where his white card could be put to more regular use. Anareta felt happy about his discharge. Xhule, a bucolic valley of garden villages, had a university where he could pursue his kro studies. He had wanted to find some way of thanking the Sugarat, though after seeing the great fear in the boy he realized that the most he could do for Kagan was forget him.

Gradually Sumner’s pain shifted into healing aches: dull throbs, itching flesh and muscles. Yet, he didn’t want to live. He tried to stop eating, and the staff shoved tubes through his nose and down his throat. And though he willed himself to die, his body continued to get stronger.

When the cruel day came for him to learn to walk again, he refused to move. His brain had been rubbed smooth with pain, and time meant little to him. Apart from the lunatic dreams that waked him to a lathered frenzy each night, he lived empty. No expectations. No hopes. Time would kill him. He would wait.

Hoping to awaken Sumner to life, a blue-gowned nurse wheeled his bed to the lune ward and left him at the far end, where vomit crusted the walls and the fecal stench numbed his whole body.

The lunes, the husks of McClure’s society, had fallen into themselves in the chemical factories or the mines and were kept alive for medical experiments. Their stares, vacant or, at best, beast-filled, spooked him, and their phantom howls and gut-twisting shrieks gnawed at his nerves and made his nightmares even more terrible.

But Sumner refused to cooperate with the staff. He had determined to die, and he would have smothered himself in lassitude if an unexpected revulsion hadn’t suddenly and evilly overcome him. One night, he thrashed awake and found a milky-eyed lune chewing the scabs off his leg-wounds. The next day, he was ready to walk.

After a month of water exercises, weight lifting, and blinding pain, Sumner could move about without crutches. The staff had been patient and good with him, and his body healed well. Even so, he showed no appreciation. He remained solitary and withdrawn, mechanically completing his workouts and eating his meals. Few thoughts moved through his numb mind, and those that did were simple, immediate animal logics. A sullen indifference misted his eyes, and the medical staff finally realized that the police had succeeded after all. The Sugarat was dead.

***

Chief Anareta entered a serene garden alongside the Berth. He was out of uniform, and he looked haggard in the green pullover and brown flannels he wore. For a full two minutes, he stood beside a bluerose bush staring at a red-cowled monk who sat reading on a stone bench a few paces away.

When the savant glanced up, his head rocked with recognition and his cowl fell back, revealing a tough, blunt-featured face softened with surprise. “Chief!” the monk rasped. He stood with a coarse grunt, his body monolithic, his short hair streaked like smoke. “You look smaller out of black.”

“The Pillars took my black away, Kempis.” Anareta companionably gripped the big savant’s shoulder. “I was retired after the deeps looked into me.”

Kempis’ stare chiseled sharper. “Deeps? How far into your mind did they look?”

“Not far enough to see you,” Anareta said with a reassuring smile. Twenty years before, the chief had helped Kempis secretly enter the Protectorate. Before that, the monk had been an outlander, an undistorted but homeless offspring of distorts, a wanderer and a bandit. Anareta had found him at a branding station, where the wounded and heavily bandaged corsair was being fitted for drone headstraps. The wit-light in the huge man’s eyes had stopped the chief the instant their gazes touched. Kempis, not an apparent distort, lacked the savage callousness that Anareta had become accustomed to seeing in the faces of ardent criminals. Muscled by compassion, he had taken Kempis aside and spoken with him long enough to confirm what he had suspected: The man wasn’t a ritual-programmed tribesman or gangmember—just an individual. Through his bureaucratic contacts, the chief had been able to clear Kempis’ record, secure him a green card, and position him as a savant with the White Pillar.

Savants had an easy life. Essentially librarians and researchers, they lived well respected lives in the Protectorate, traditionally fulfilling the expectation of extending the species by maintaining very active sex lives. Kempis had always been happy serving Mutra.

“The deeps were selective about my past,” Anareta clarified. “They were more interested in my white card and my recent sexual exploits than what happened twenty years ago. All they really saw was that I’d rather study kro than manage a street division—so they relieved me. I’m off to Xhule tonight. By tomorrow I’ll be studding in some forest bungalow.”

Kempis’ hard face shone. “I’m happy for you, Chief. Thirty years and the Pillars never suspected you were as much with the kro as with them. What broke it?”

“I was caught trying to pull out another white card—a fat kid who’d been jooching distort gangs into deathtraps.”

“I’d think the Pillars would medal him for that.”

“The Sugarat enraged the gangs more than he hurt them. The past five years, the distorts have been tearing up McClure like this was outland. When this kid was finally dragged in, I was the only one that wanted to see him live. That look on your face asks why.” Anareta shrugged, and uncertainty inscribed his brow with one long line. “Why’d I pull you out? He’s unique—an individual, not a distort or a simplewit. But my own men got to him. And that’s why I’m here.”

Kempis took the chief’s elbow and led him to the side of the bluerose shrubbery, out of sight of the Berth. “What can I do for you?”

“Kempis, they’re going to kill this kid.”

“You said he was a white card.”

“Yes, but he’s very ugly. Even before my men broke his face, he had the kind of clumsy grossness that a stud mate would laugh at. His white card will keep him out of the dorga pits, but he’s too dwarfed inside to make the mating circuit. I know they’re going to send him to one of the heavy work camps—Carnou, Tred, maybe Meat City.”

Kempis’ head tilted awry. “How can I help him—and why do you want to?”

“He’s a white card like me,” Anareta said, looking strongly at Kempis. “I can’t rut in peace without at least warning this kid. I want to tell him to get out—to leave the Protectorate.”

Kempis’ raspy voice became almost soundless: “Chief, he’ll die on the outland.”

“You survived—and thrived for many years.”

“I was reared out there.”

Anareta slapped a bluerose to a splatter of petals. “Look—I can’t reach the kid. I’m leaving tonight. But I want you to talk with him.”

Kempis wheezed a sigh. “He’s locked up, isn’t he?”

Anareta pulled a leather pouch heavy with coins from his trouser pocket and handed it to the savant. “I still have friends in the Black Pillar. One of them will notify you when the kid’s guard rotates to someone compliable. Use these zords to speak with the boy alone. Tell him to run if he can. Tell him it could be death out there, but make him know it will be death if he stays.” The chief placed both hands on the monk’s arms. “He’s my last prisoner—and I’m leaving for an easy life. I want to feel good about that life. Talk to the kid. Tell him who you are. That saved your life once. It might save him.”

***

Very early one morning, a chunky uniformed guard shook Sumner awake and replaced the boy’s green infirmary smock with brown fatigues and work boots. The guard marched Sumner out of the infirmary into the gray smudged light of early dawn, across a flagstone courtyard and into the Berth. Icy green arc lights burned at uneven intervals along the top of the massive bellied wall. Inside, the air pressed on him close and fuscous.

After a brief pass-check, sentinels prodded Sumner forward. He shuffled through opulent colubrine hallways lined with frescoes of the Mutric Redemption. Aloe incense scrolled out of side niches occupied by votive tallows and blue glass icons. Several times, the escorts stopped Sumner and tugged his head tugged forward in obeisance as red-cowled savants strode by. Sumner responded woodenly, too hollowed out to care. At last, they entered a tiny pocket-garden, and Sumner was ordered to sit.

Curving walls tangled with vines enclosed a tight garden open to the dawn sky. It admitted little sunlight, like a well of ivy. Sumner sat on a round stone bench beside a moss-speckled trough of curkling water. A lunette above an oval doorway depicted Sita’s Firewalk, and Sumner fixated on the realistic rendering of limbs shriveled to smoldering twists of black, bubbled tar.

He was still gazing into the painting when the guard fiercely rapped the back of his head. “Rise!” he hissed.

A red-cowled savant stood in the door. Sumner rose and automatically bowed his head.

“Relax, please.” The savant entered and placed a hand on Sumner’s shoulder. “Sit down.”

Sumner sat and watched with an empty expression as the savant reached beneath his robes and produced a small leather bag for the guard. With eyes reverently averted, the guard bowed, fingers twitching over the bag, counting the silver through the leather.

After the escort had backed out of the garden, the savant folded back his cowl. He was a huge man, theandric, with short brindled hair and a face like granite: pale but hard, square and etched with many fine lines. “I’m Kempis,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Legally, we can’t talk. I’m a White Pillar savant—and the laws you violated were Black Pillar. It’s costing me more in risk than in silver for this audience.”

Sumner stared through him, vague as fog.

A long minute of silence widened between them as Kempis studied the boy. Sumner had become gangly and haggard from all the weight he had lost. The flesh around his eyes looked sunken and stained. The eyes themselves appeared clear but unfocused, gazing in a wide, depthless stare through a harrowing mask of scars.

When the savant spoke, an asthmatic rasp undercut his words: “I’ve paid the Black Pillar so that I could speak with you. I think you should understand where you’re going.” He drew in a whistling breath. “The police, you know, want you dead. Regrettably, they never finished. Some savants found out about your white card. Because your genes are so rare, they think you’re sacred, an envoy of Mutra, the last hope of our species. They’re very devout but slimbrained. So now you’re caught between the Black Pillar of the police and the White Pillar of the savants’ Conclave.”

Sumner showed no sign of attentiveness.

“Do you know what it means to have a white card, son?” The darkness in Kempis’ eyes thickened. “There aren’t a thousand in this city—less than a hundred thousand in the whole Protectorate. Even voors revere what that card represents. It means you’re whole—one of the few in this broken world.”

Sumner stared lethargically.

Kempis leaned closer. “A dark bargain’s been struck. The police have agreed to let you live so that, perhaps, the Conclave will get you to breed other white cards. The preservation of the Massebôth is at stake. But I assure you, the Massebôth are going to make living worse than dying.”

Sumner watched him sleepily, the blue, vapid loneliness of the sky threading itself through his eyes.

Kempis sighed, his breath making a noise in his chest like fire. “I have some advice for you.” His fingers moved slowly, unlacing the breast of his cowl. “I’m not a typical savant. I know pretty well what you’re going through. You see, before I entered the Conclave I was a corsair. I had dreams like the Sugarat. But I worked the coasts instead of the streets. I moved by night—and on the sea that takes as much guts as skill. I ran kiutl and renegades. I raided the reef colonies and the island outposts. And I killed only in defense and vengeance. It was a lonely, crazy-alive, hungry, stupendous way to live. And I’d be doing it today, except for this.”

He opened his cowl and revealed a chest livid with puckered scars. “Knifed in a tavern brawl. Thirty-two wounds. When I recovered I entered the Conclave. What else could I do with half a lung?”

Sumner’s gaze crisped. He understood the pain that had flowered into those scars, and he looked more directly at the man they had shaped.

Kempis laced up his cowl. “My advice isn’t some religious rauk. Mutra with her gory myths and sacred mumblings is just a throwback to the ancient Christom. It’s not real. Nothing’s real—but you. Your life. Your pain.”

He peered at Sumner, solemn as a cobra. “The White Pillar will stud you if they can, but the Black Pillar wants you hurting. Don’t let either of them get you. Cut them off as soon as you can. You’re young, and the physicians say you’re still whole. So stop acting like a corpse. Come alive. This world is huge and strange. I’ve seen things in it I don’t believe myself anymore. But it’s all out there—distorts, voors, creatures and places we don’t have names for yet. Get away the first chance you get. Become a corsair. Go north. Go as far as you can. Only freedom is real.”

He wheezed and sucked at the air. “Believe me, the north is another world. The Massebôth won’t follow you there. And some of those distort women—” He chuckled with croupy abandon and then struggled to catch his breath.

“Where are the Massebôth sending me?” Sumner asked, voice gritty. “Where am I going?”

Kempis stared at him in silence, intrigued and gratified. Then: “If you knew that, son, you’d have lived forever.”

***

Broux’s face fit together cruel features: the mouth a slash, jaw a clamp, skin bronzed from sunburn and malaria, hair iron-gray and cropped close to the carved contours of his cubed head. He was the commander of Meat City, a slimy hole punched into the green shimmering face of the western rain forest. Broux’s camp looked more like a trash heap than a military camp. In fact, the scraggy lot walled in by jungle contained a human trash heap, the final depot where the Massebôth Black Pillar sent personnel too rebellious for service in the regular units but too valuable for execution. Broux’s brutal command pitted the soldiers against the jungle and worked them into conformity or else broke them.

Broux took an interest in Sumner the moment he saw the boy, scab-masked and painworn limp out of the strohlkraft that had delivered him and eight others to Meat City. The lionfaced men guarded their truculent gazes, the fight in them strong—but the boy was different: he stood squatty on the landing field staring with open apprehension at the monotonous litter of rotting shacks and scantling huts set on concrete pilings above mustard-yellow mudflats.

Unlike everyone else in the camp he had a white card stapled to his file, and the White Pillar had appended a rider in bold print: HARD TIME—BREEDER: DO NOT KILL. Twice a year, techs in white jumpsuits would take Sumner to a breeding hostel—other than that, Broux could do whatever he liked with the boy.

“You’re mine now, Kagan,” Broux growled. The dragon-dark of his eyes looked the boy over, seeing the shape of the animal inside Sumner’s withered obesity, already knowing exactly how much pain this body could digest. “If you work in Meat City, you live. The only rest here is death.” Broux’s grin sharked straight back over his jaw, then vanished instantly. “It’s three kilometers around this clearing. Run the jungleline. Go!”

Sumner loped off, and Broux barked after him: “Pick it up, Kagan. Run!”

Sumner ran, steadily at first. But as the sun rose higher, hot and arrogant in the sky, something in him began to unravel. Colors ribboned by, and blood drummed faster as if boiling in his ears. He retched and gasped at the thick air, and long, deep muscles knotted up in his legs. He limped on, remorselessly circling the camp until nightfall when Broux called him in.

Devastated by fatigue, Sumner didn’t have the strength to pick up his rations. So, Broux pushed that dazed face into the bean paste, and Sumner ate. Immediately afterward, the boy collapsed on his cot and lay unmoving until Broux rolled him out at dawn.

Again, the camp commander ordered him to run the jungleline. By the time he had eased into the rhythm of his run, the sun’s heat seethed. At noon, he collapsed, and a guard slapped him awake.

Sumner swayed to his feet and forced himself to run—hard, hoping a stroke would tug him out of Broux’s grasp. For days, this nightmare repeated itself. Then, miraculously, the hours thinned out. A secret compartment swelled open in his lungs, and the fire he had been carrying in there cooled. Limitless power flowed into his tendons, and the hot needles pinning his shoulders to his chest fell away, leaving his body loose and slinky. He glided through the drifts of sunlight with defiant strides.

Broux watched, impressed. The McClure police had wracked Sumner, and Broux had been convinced by the boy’s shivering gaze that trauma had warped his will. But Sumner grew stronger than the bruised mash of his body revealed. The next day, from the shade of his command tent, Broux observed as Sumner joined the other men for the hole patrol—the daily grave detail.

The digging didn’t go well for Sumner. On the fringe of the jungle, a damp miasmic heat steaming softly around him with the death pall of the graves, Sumner breathed through his mouth and tried lifting small shovelfuls of yellow mud. Soon the grim heat built up in his fatigues, and when he peeled back his shirt the stinging flies tormented him.

Nevertheless, he worked relentlessly, wanting the heat to kill him. He sloughed his hands raw with the splintery handle of his spade, and pain and fatigue cramped his body. At day’s end, he returned to his hut feverish, too exhausted to eat the bitter herbs and root paste of dinner but force-fed by Broux’s pincer grip at the back of his neck. Afterward, he lay flat on his cot, stupefied, numbed free of his nightmares.

***

Time blurred into routine for Sumner. Broux worked him hard nine days and rested him one. For a long time, Sumner slept through those free days, too hollow to dream. But one day he found that he wasn’t wasted enough to ignore the barrack flies anymore. He spent that day meandering about the camp, groggily pondering his situation.

He had become a slave, he realized, his will as exhausted as his body. Broux worked him, not to death, but to the brink of life, keeping him alive for the White Pillar—or just for the pain. Sumner didn’t know.

He thought of Kempis and running away. And he thought of Nefandi, the deva, and the voors, and his dread sparkled. The world was evil, too dark to be enlightened by thoughts. And that made the painful routines of Meat City seem good. When the hole patrol trudged by with the buckled bodies of that day’s dead, the familiarity of their workchant soothed away all desire for escape.

At the end of the day, as he undressed for sleep, he experienced a wave of amazement at how much his body had changed. His thighs, which ached close to the bone with weariness, looked contoured, and his arms had thickened and deepened around the shoulders. Without a mirror, he contented himself to lie in the dark, feeling the tautness of his stomach and the curved breadth of his chest. The mood of a ghost-thin pride softened his dreaming that night. But Broux had seen Sumner’s stamina expanding, and the next day he worked him harder than ever. For many weeks after that, Sumner’s life was felt and not thought.

***

Broux tossed a handful of pebbles into a mudpool and watched watercircles dawn through each other. Behind him, the work crews lined up beneath a holt of immense rubber trees for that day’s assignments. The officers with machine pistols strapped to their thighs and clipboards in their hands shouted through the bodycount. Broux listened to the distant roll call with melancholy. He had grown tired of being a warden. Approaching sixty, this was all his life had come to: corrosive air, fevered flies, riotous jungle walls—a prison as much for him as for any of the wretched men he had been ordered to break.

Was his fate different from anyone else in the Protectorate? He turned to supervise the men as they filed past, dragging their shovels and machetes to the jungle’s fringe. The cities were sour-hearted with dorga pits—everybody had a distort-brother, sister, or child—and the most anyone could hope for was to stay whole. Why was the world this way? Why did flesh go wrong? He heelkicked a rock into the mudpool and cleared his mind. A man could break his teeth on questions like this.

Sumner Kagan appeared on line, trudging toward the rubber trees. Broux watched him with satisfaction. The boy had expanded and hardened, growing stronger each week. A full year had passed since he had arrived, bloated with fat and pain, and no orders had come from the White Pillar to reclaim him. Months ago, Broux had contacted an officer high in the Conclave to collect on a longstanding debt. Years before, Broux had helped a distorted relative of this savant get forged papers; in return, Broux had requested that Sumner Kagan’s records with the White Pillar somehow get permanently misplaced. Apparently, this had been done, and now the boy was all his.

Sumner hulked against a wall of hanging vines, his longcurved back writhing with the powerful strokes of his machete arm as he cut his way into the green mass. Broux watched him approvingly. Like an anatomist, Broux knew the body’s inner dynamics—what routines shaped what muscles; what muscles aligned the bone-structure; what alignments gave the most strength. He had been using that knowledge to select Sumner’s work projects. And he followed him carefully, observing how his form changed, studying how best to mold his body. The rewards for Broux would be great. A protomale on the military market could earn him enough zords to get away from Meat City and retire to a homestead colony near Xhule or Onn. Those small forest cities had no dorga pits and dwelled as far away from the brutality of his profession as he could hope to get.

That joyful thought poised between his eyes like a point of pain, and he had to pick up a rock and clench it hard between his fingers to steady himself.

***

Sumner kept to himself. Some of the men worked in groups, laughing and cursing themselves through the monotony of their labors and sharing silence when Broux and the guards drew near. But Sumner lived too close to his pain, and the others thought of him as animal-dull. Only one midge-eyed young man abided his company—a boy called Dice. The men loathed Dice: Talkative and orgulous, he wasn’t big enough to do an equal share of work. The men harried him constantly, except when Sumner was around. Everyone feared Sumner, not only because he had become one of the largest men in camp but because he was Broux’s animal.

“I’m an opportunist,” Dice introduced himself to Sumner among the emerald shadows of the jungle. Kagan, stooped and hacking at wire-taut treeroots, sweat sparking off him with each blow, ignored him. “I’ve been called a deserter, because I left my squad and went to Vortex. That’s why I’m here. But I wasn’t running away. If I was deserting, I’d have gone north to Carnou. There are voors in Carnou, and they’re always looking for blue cards. That’s what I’ve got—a blue card. It means I’ve got just one gene defect and it’s a sleeper; it’ll never touch me. Only a white card’s better, but there aren’t any of them around. The government takes them away early and studs them. My blue card’s the best you’ll see. If I was deserting, I’d just go to Carnou and let the voors have me. But what kind of life is that, whoring for voors? Mutra, that’s rucksouled. No, I wasn’t deserting. I went to Vortex to play kili. That’s why I’m called Dice. I’m the best. And I was going to come out strong in the kilithon at Vortex. It’s held only every third year. Last time, I was weighted. That means I made it to the top fifth. Do you know how many zords I could have made in the top fifth if I’d played? Foc, I could have bought myself out of the army and still had zords to rent a suite in a Prophecy bordello. I’m that good, you know. I’ve been playing kili since I could draw the triangle. You ever play?”

Sumner, up to his waist in root-tangle and jungle mulch, his whole body fighting with the Earth, said nothing.

“You work hard, soldier.” Dice tugged away one of the thick rootlimbs Sumner had dislodged. “You’re not like the other goofers here. They do what they have to, those tuds, and that’s all. They’re buckers—like me. But you’re different. You’re crazy different to work so hard.”

Sumner seemed lost in his labor, his face knotted around his breath—but he was listening. After months of solitude with only the rawk of parrots and the gibbering of monkeys, the boy’s babbling pleased him. Soon they fell into a work rhythm, with Dice all the while filling the air with his talk, picking up the work-leavings, sharpening machetes, and clearing away light brush. Even Broux approved, for Sumner worked harder.

“He watches you closely,” Dice said one golden afternoon in a forest clearing, seeing Broux standing squat and solid in the treeshadows. Sumner, splitting logs, his back clenching and heaving, didn’t look up. “He always has an eye out for you,” Dice went on. “I think he’s working you up to something, you know? I think he’s an opportunist, too.”

Dice casually continued snipping twigs off the logs that Sumner intended to split, but his gaze had turned inward. “You heard of protomales, Kagan? You look like one. I mean, you’re big. And there are units in the army that pay a lot for big men. You think that’s why Broux is working you up? I notice you get more food than anyone here. The other buckers see it, too, but they don’t talk. You’re Broux’s. He’s working you up for something. What’s your card color?”

“White,” Sumner grunted in midstroke.

The crack of the cleaving log jarred through Dice. “You jooching me?” He scurried to Sumner’s side and knelt in the grass, staring up at his grimacing body as the axhead flashed in the sun. “You have a white card? Mister—what are you doing here? Men with white cards don’t suffer in Meat City.”

Dice spotted Broux strolling along the treeline, and he hurried over to the fallen logs and began stripping them busily. “Broux’s working you up, Kagan. Can’t you see it? A protomale with a white card will earn him more zords than he can count. But why are you here? A white card doesn’t belong in this hole.”

That evening Sumner relented to Dice’s dogging questions and told him about the Sugarat and his beating in the police barracks.

“The White Pillar pulled you out. They won’t leave you here,” Dice said when Sumner finished. “Unless Broux found some way to dupe them.” Dice’s eyes brightened shrewdly. “Broux is using you, Kagan. He’s jooched the White Pillar, and he’s working you up for his own profit. It’s obvious.”

Sumner hefted his machete and stood up. The evening wind slipping off the pampas poured over them flowery and moist and empty of human scents. “Come on—we’ll miss chow.”

Dice leaped to his feet and stood in front of Sumner. “Kagan, Broux is using you. He’s going to sell you to some clodbusting unit, and you’ll spend your life in fly-piss outposts gutting distorts. You don’t have to do that. You’re a white card. The Pillars will hold you up. You’ll have women, real food, and you’ll never see a distort as long as you live. All you have to do is get past Broux. That might be difficult, but if you stay alert, you’ll find a way. I’ll help you.”

Sumner shook his head. “No.”

“Kagan, you need plans. Otherwise when the chance is there, you won’t even know it.”

“No plans. No help.”

“You’re zaned. Or else you’re jooching me. No man with a white card would live like a jungle rat. Life can be everything good.”

Sumner’s face looked hollow. “What makes you think life can be good?” He pushed Dice out of his way and walked into the jungle toward camp.

Dice watched after him with a slack face and shouted: “It’s all there is!” Then, softer: “Ratfoc—” and sprinted through the rising darkness to catch up with him.

***

Dawn nicked the western horizon, but the skull of the sky was still dark when the corsairs raided Meat City. They dropped onto the parade ground between the barracks in three rackety, patchwork strohlkraft, a carnival of firebombs and flares blazing overhead.

Sumner squatted at the latrine ditch cupping a handful of water to clean himself when darkness erupted into squinting radiance. He dropped to his belly, sarong tangled at his ankles, and watched as three battered strohlkraft settled in a haze of rainbowing smokefire. Bright flashes from turret guns rattled the guards’ barracks, flipping the tin eaves into the air.

Cargo hatches winged open, and a crowd of wildly garbed corsairs leaped howling and laughing onto the parade ground waving rifles and torch pistols. By the watery light of the flares, Sumner could see that many of them appeared distorted: clawed hands, crusted lizard faces, milky eyes. Half were women.

“Let’s go, you bulldogs!” the amplifier of a pirate ship bellowed. “Foc slavery! You’re not shackled to the Pillars anymore! Come out and run with us!”

Gunshots caromed from the jungleline where most of the guards had retreated, and half the corsairs crouched and returned fire. The other half assaulted the barracks, torching the timbers and running prisoners out of their cots.

Broux dashed around the guards’ barracks, two pistols flaring in his hands, shouting his men out of their shock. The ground twitched and jumped at his feet, but he ran tall. Then the gun turrets of the other two pirate ships swiveled and roared into fire at the same instant. The guards’ barracks rolled away like thunder, and Broux crawled in the dirt with his head under his arms. By the time he looked up, the men who wanted to run were leaping into the holds of the pirate ships. Those with short time remaining in Meat City cowered behind the barracks and the water troughs.

Tempted to run, Sumner tightened his sarong, and a figure scrambled to his side and took his arm. Dice looked up at him with fervent eyes. “Take me with you.”

Sumner shrugged off his grip. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“The Pillars don’t hold up anything,” the pirate amplifiers blared. “They crush people beneath them. Topple the Pillars!”

“Kagan, let’s go,” Dice urged with a whine.

“You want to run with those things?” Sumner chinpointed to the spiderhaired faces of the corsairs helping the last runaways clamber aboard.

“We can skip on them later. Come on—this is our chance.”

Sumner shook his head no. “We’d just be trading one master for another.”

Dice slumped and watched disconsolately as the ships began to rise, cargo doors still open. “Topple the Pillars!” The cry wobbled in the air, chopped by the bawl of thrusting engines. Guns sparked, dawnlight flashed on the flight vanes, and the pirate ships leaned into the darkness and drifted away over the jungle.

***

Dice slumped into a depression. For days after the corsair raid, he sulked. Sumner, who had become accustomed to the boy’s constant prattle, looked about for a way to cheer him up. He found a large hive deep in the forest, and one evening he returned to camp swollen with bee stings.

The men laughed at him silently that night as he ate his bean paste and roots with swollen fingers and lips. Later, he called Dice aside and led him behind the barracks to a knoll surrounded by raspberry canes. From there, they could see the night-lights on the strohlkraft field and that day’s latrine crew laboring in the dark, burying the old ditches.

“What do you want, Thick?” Dice muttered, looking about to see if Broux was in sight. “You’d better ask Iron Face for some althea salve. You’re not going to sleep tonight with those stings.”

Sumner’s puffed face smiled vaguely. “Taste this, grump.” He parted the raspberry canes and revealed several thick amber combs of honey. “If we keep this out of sight, we’ll have power food for the next two weeks.”

Dice’s pupils expanded with wonder. Sumner picked off the ants and handed him a thumb-piece of honeycomb. “We’ll have to put some hawkweed around here to keep the bugs off. I don’t think the guards or anybody else will be prowling this close to the latrines.”

“This isn’t real.” Dice chewed on the honey with closed eyes, and the joy in his face brightened Sumner’s blood.

***

A Massebôth strohlkraft idled on the flight field, its wiry shape black against the belly of twilight. The pilot hunkered beneath a flame tree at the edge of the field, chatting with Broux, while Sumner and eight others unloaded the cargo hold. Sumner’s mind felt tight with exhaustion. All day he had been stooped over, cutting cassava, and he lumbered thoughtlessly beneath the ponderous crates, eyes slackly following the leech-scarred legs of the man before him. Dice trailed loose-kneed beneath his load, too wearied to speak.

Unexpectedly, the man Sumner followed dropped his load and skipped out of sight. Sumner shoved back the wooden crate on his shoulders in time to see him scrambling up the hull of the strohlkraft and into the open hatch of the flight pod. The crate dropped from Sumner’s back, and he and the seven other men watched with gawking amazement as the runaway dropped into the pod-sling and sparked the shutdown engine.

The pilot, Broux, and several guards dashed across the field, shouting for them to seize the hijacker. Any one of them could have done it: The man was only three paces away, working the controls, charging the thrusters, angling the altitude vanes. The jittery-faced renegade obviously knew the strohlkraft, and excitement paralyzed everybody.

Dust off the field billowed, pebbles clattered against the ship’s bottom, sand grit stung their faces and limbs, and with a wildcat scream the strohlkraft lifted. Two of the nearest men jumped into the cargo hold. A third clung to a landing strut and was lifted into the air.

“Mutra.” Dice found his voice. “They’re going to make it!”

For a few moments, the men watched as the strohlkraft rose into the night, disappearing into the rhythm of skyfires, the spin noise of its engines falling down the sky toward the last wet light of the day. Sumner swayed with a surge of wonder. Then Broux and the guards descended on them, and someone clubbed Sumner on the side of his head, and he went down. When he shook the numbness from his eyes, he saw guards pushing the men he was with to the ground. Dice dropped with a whimper and covered his head. At Broux’s nod the guards opened fire, their machine-pistols flaring in the blue-shadowed dusk.

Sumner staggered to his feet, and one of the guards put a gun to his head, the heat of the muzzle singeing the hairs of his temple. “Not him!” Broux shouted, and the gun barrel fell away.

Sumner stared with horror at the sprawled bodies among the scattered crates, the smell of gunfire thickening. The pain of what he witnessed seared through his eyes to the back of his head and almost knocked him out. Dice lay with the pink of his brains splattered in the gravel.

“Shoot me!” Sumner cried, and the guards looked quickly to Broux.

“Get back to the barracks,” Broux ordered. But Kagan didn’t move.

“Shoot me!” he cried again, louder, seizing the arm of one of the guards. The guard shook off his hold and leveled his pistol at him.

“Leave him be,” Broux commanded. “Sumner, fall back!”

Sumner’s eyes hardened in his face. “Why are you keeping me alive?”

Broux strode over to him and sharply belted him across the face, twice. “Go to the barracks.”

Sumner had gone rigid, rage wreathing his heart. For an instant, he thought of unraveling into violence—but all the guards had their guns out, and the abandoned pilot cursed Broux under his breath to shoot him. Suddenly, it just seemed right to walk away. His stance broke, and he shuffled toward the barracks, hearing Broux’s barked commands, calling for men to bury the executed. Distantly, at the furthest orbit of hearing, the drone of a strohlkraft faded into the north.

***

Sumner lay in his cot awake and unmoving all night. All his thoughts voided, he felt an acid hate for everything Massebôth. Toward dawn, images of Dice rose in him with memories of the simple jokes and the shared labor they had known. During roll call, he moved on line like a deadwalker, and though Broux told him through the guards that he could take the day off, he collected his machete and slumped into the jungle.

In an isolated vine-cove, he lashed at the trees with his machete, his bones throbbing. Distantly, he thought of running away. But there was nowhere to go.

Then, like an avalanche in his world of unhappy awareness, memories crowded in on him, and his machete flailed uselessly at the air. Vivid images of his old, cluttered room and his scansule and his three-wheeled bottle-green car and his mother’s spicy cooking overwhelmed him, and he dropped to his knees. What had become of him? He looked down at his hands and saw scabby, callused, reptilian flesh. He covered his face and began to cry.

He longed to go home. He longed not to die. Then starker images shaped themselves behind his lids: images of black-uniformed men with leering grins, ripping off his clothes, fondling him, pissing on him, striking him until he couldn’t see or breathe—

He howled and slashed out with his machete. Lurching to his feet, he cut at the trees with a stupendous strength, hacking at their hard wood until he staggered and his breathing got tangled in his throat with his rage. Lolling against a moss-padded tree, face pressed into the cool bark, machete arm trembling, he tried to cry again. But he couldn’t.

With the blood still thundering in his ears, he turned and went back to work.

***

Broux realized that Sumner had become dangerous. Soon the boy would turn on him, and the guards would have to kill him. Very quickly now, he had to be readied for sale. The Black Pillar offered the optimum price only for a protomale—a human who displayed physical strength and agility clearly superior to others of his size. Certainly Sumner’s white card helped, for that meant he would not suddenly molt into a distort. And as a result of Broux’s arduous work assignments, Sumner had the bulk and the strength of a protomale. But he was not yet lithe enough. His muscles had to be stretched and limbered—and swiftly.

To help him, Broux employed Derc, an army masseur. He had a chest like a wall and arms as long as an orangutan’s. He knew the human body with his hands as well as Broux knew it with his eyes and mind. Together, they remade Sumner.

Stretched out on a cedar table, Sumner learned a new kind of pain. Derc’s iron fingers felt out muscle-locked tensions and kneaded them loose, then went deeper, pushing past the fascia that held the muscles in place, probing fiber-bunched memories jammed close to the bone.

Derc started with a foot, slicing down the sole with the hard edge of his thumb, pushing far into the sensitive meat of the arch and then flaying the foot wide, separating each toe and its ligaments. The years of abuse that the foot had absorbed from Sumner’s heavy, pounding gait bloomed like fiery flowers. The big toe offered the worst pain. Gone stiff in the confines of Sumner’s boots, it had to be ripped free from a locked position. Hurt blared through Sumner’s bones and poured out of him in a cold sweat.

Days on the cedar table passed before Derc, heavy-lidded and blankfaced, had moved his fingers through every inch of Sumner’s body. And though the anguish was brain-smoothing, especially around the scars where his flesh remembered indignities his mind had shut out, something beautiful came from feeling his muscles slide free under his skin.

The most dire suffering emerged when Derc collapsed Sumner’s face. His nose had been so thoroughly shattered by his police torture that the physicians hadn’t even tried to build it up. They removed a lot of cartilage and bone, widened the nasal cavities and let the nose heal over, lumpy and almost flat to the face. As Derc worked on Sumner’s nose and lips, thumb-ironing muscles pinched into scars, the youth returned to the brutality that he had known in the police barracks of McClure.

Those brief, lucid moments of pain-charged beauty offered the only joy left in Sumner’s life. With Dice gone, Kagan had been drained of all fellow feeling, and he sank into a profound silence disturbed only by an occasional surge of revenge-lust. Eventually even that passion became silent—though it did not disappear.

Sumner’s body had become sleek and limber in a few short weeks. Broux, happy to round out his training, personally taught Sumner how to swim in the deep, silent fish pool far back in the jungle.

White-crested harpy eagles dominated the pools, diving noiselessly out of the highest trees to pluck a thrash of fish out of the water. They watched through wild masks of rage as Sumner splashed and lurched across their feeding pools. The water’s spell and Sumner’s new body returned him to a feeling he had not known since his life as the Sugarat. What had been dread in him then had widened into an indefatigable psychic stamina. Restlessness became vigor, and anxiety transformed to clarity. The stronger he got, the more sharply he sensed what he had to do. Somehow, in a way that would leave him his life, he would have to kill Broux.

***

After Sumner mastered the feel of his new body in the water, Broux moved him to the broad river north of the settlement where a handful of men fished for the camp. They lowered long nets each morning and raised them again in the afternoon.

Sumner spent most of his time clearing thick weeds along the river edge, but occasionally he went into the water to free a net or help lift a catch. Watching the men around him, he learned how to dive hard with a rock in his hands and how to make snorkels by weaving together bladders of giant pirarucu fish with slender river reeds. Each day, he strengthened his lungs and legs by swimming underwater against the drunken currents.

One giant-clouded afternoon, with sunlight sweeping like wind over the water, Broux came out to supervise Sumner’s work. He sat in leaf-patterned shadows as Sumner laboriously dredged fallen trees nearby, making way for a shallow-water harbor. When the call went up that one of the nets had snagged, Broux signaled him to go down and work it loose.

Sumner dived into the water immediately, but this time he trapped a balloon of air in his shirt. He angled down to the bottom and surveyed the net. It had caught on a tree limb and would be easy to pull free, but he left it tied off. He settled into the shuddering feelers of river-kelp and felt around for a rock. He found a fist-size stone, touched bottom, and waited.

He knew Broux would come for him as soon as he thought his animal had been tied up. He sat on the bottom, gently sipping at his air supply.

Minutes passed, and then a cloud of air exploded the light-slick surface. Broux came kicking down fishfaced toward the net. Sumner thrust the rock before him and rose to meet his master. The stone caught the diving man over his right eye and knocked him senseless.

Broux unfolded like a paper doll in the bloodsmoked water, face stupid and kind, and Sumner took him from above by his shoulders. He pulled the body down and forced the head through the net. The last of Broux’s life streamed out of his mouth in a bright vapor as Sumner tangled the man’s arms in the rope and twisted him to look as if he had snagged himself. With death-clouded eyes, Broux watched as Sumner rose toward the light.

***

Sumner had almost drowned himself forcing Broux’s body into the net, and two men worked to resuscitate him after he washed to shore. That, of course, made his story of Broux’s bravery believable, and the only uncertainty for the Massebôth was figuring out to whom Kagan belonged now. Black Pillar authorities decided, with their usual grim justice, that the Tactical Diving Corps—the most perilous, hardworking crew in the military—should get him. With that week’s cargo strohlkraft, Sumner flew from the western rain forests of Meat City across the continent to the rocky headlands on the east coast, south of Carnou.

Three days after the river incident, he found himself diving from swaying derrick towers into deep but narrow water troughs. The TDC forced him to swim marathon distances at night with a sandbag lashed to his back, and for days on end they left him treading water far out at sea, a wooden spar his only solidity. In a confined pool, with a small club, he had to apply combat techniques against bolt-eyed sharks. And though the horror of his life had intensified, he felt glad to be free of Broux.

The Tactical Diving Corps, at least, treated him like any other man. He wore a blue jumpsuit with the black-and-white Massebôth emblem on the sleeyes, and he bunked in zinc-shelled barracks far from the jungle. But, unlike the other men, he had known the great, futureless pain of Meat City and servitude, and he knew happiness only when exhaustion freed him. Uninterested in his barrack’s meager entertainments, he spent all his leave time practicing diving drills or swimming and running to the frayed fringes of endurance.

Openly, the camp mocked him for his emotionless life. But secretly they envied his remarkable diving skills and strength. He won several rare citations for breaking distance and stamina records, and he became a camp hero in Corps competitions.

None of that, though, had any value for Sumner. Life for him had become a prolonged and tedious exertion, devoid of pleasure or ambition. Not even death seemed worth striving for. Occasionally at night, beneath the deep throw of stars and skyfires, he thought of Kempis and freedom, but in the day thoughts of running away seemed cold and tiny. His daily life was mechanical, and he, in turn, had become spiritless as a machine.

So it wasn’t bravery or compassion but merely routine that sent him one day toward death. On an assignment in a choppy, storm-driven sea, a dinghy that he and four other men huddled in capsized. They all wore red wetsuits, but the one man strapped to the oxygen tanks hit his head on the keel and sank out of sight.

Everybody went down after him as far as they could without exhausting the breath they needed to surface. Sumner kept going. The water turned cold, then colder, and ached against his ears. A cramped fist of pain twisted in his chest and tried to knuckle up his throat, but he thrashed his legs harder and lanced deep into the dark. His brain rending into vaporous light, his hands closed on the oxygen tanks. He dragged at the mouthpiece and filled his lungs with life; then, he fitted the mouthpiece to the other man and bearhugged him as he had been taught. The man became lighter as his chest swelled. Sumner unbuckled all but one of the tanks, and with his companion secured under his arm, he began the slow ascent. An hour later, he broke the surface, untied the tank, and backstroked for shore with the man in tow.

Shortly after that, two men from the Massebôth elite forces visited him. They wore crushed leather swagger-jackets, buff-colored regimentals, and red felt rumal caps with silver cobra insignias.

Sumner sat on his cot with his clothes off, drifting toward sleep, when they came in. They sat on either side of his bunk, and a musky odor of sagebrush and the outside filled the air. One of them, Ignatz, had mocha-colored skin and sloped Mongol eyes. Though an animal-distance filled his gaze, he surveyed Sumner with approval. The soldier with the chip-toothed grin and peach-down moustache called himself Gage.

They explained right away—Gage in an easy manner, Ignatz with terse, leathery statements—that Sumner’s fearlessness and strength had become well known. They wanted to show him a good time and talk to him about their elite corps—the Rangers.

Sumner stared back, remote as a mountain. “This squad owns me,” he said with eyes half closed.

Ignatz walked a square of red paper through his fingers and presented him a three-day pass.

They took him up the coast in a seasled at full throttle, shearing through a maze of night trawlers, skipping across oily reflections of torchlit villages, and finally gliding into a solitary lantern-strung cove. The rangers gave Sumner a room in an opulent arbor-cottage. He slept soundly on a shagsheet hammock, and when he woke at dawn he forgot for a moment where he was.

Both rangers, already up, wore casual hipslung army briefs and colorful jupes. Ignatz tended a steampit of sea spiders dug into the sand, and Gage arranged ice over red-glass bottles of mentis beer.

Gage threw a bottle at Sumner, and Kagan snatched it out of the air.

“You enjoy killing?” he asked, as Sumner hunkered down next to him.

Sumner looked at the ranger flatly, remembering too clearly the horrible dread that had driven him to kill as the Sugarat and the deep pain that had turned him against Broux. “No.”

“But you like it.” Gage’s eyes watched, clear and active as water spinning over rocks. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have been so good at it.”

“Or done it at all,” Ignatz’s dark voice said as he settled beside Sumner. He was a partial deep—a telepath that the Rangers had found useful in their recruiting endeavors. When he looked into Sumner he glimpsed the Nothungs tumbling into an acid vat and the Black Touch distorts soaked with fire-gum, smoke twisting off their bodies like a dark music. He cleanly snapped the neck off a bottle with a jerk of his wrist and passed the foaming brew to Gage. “Nobody kills the way you did without liking it.”

“I don’t like it.”

Ignatz gave Sumner a long, penetrating look. Then he pushed himself up with his legs and returned to the baking spider crabs.

Gage knocked his beer bottle against Sumner’s and apologized for his partner with a broad smile. “Ignatz likes to kill. In the reef colonies, he stalks the village wharves and taverns looking for corsairs to slice. He’s a distort-mauler. I’m different. On assignment I’ve seen distort tribes knock strohlkraft out of the air with nothing more than their minds. That’s enough evil for me. When I take my four-month leave each year, I prefer spending my time at places like this, savoring life. Ignatz and I are the two extremes of the Rangers. I think you’ll fit in closer to me.”

Ignatz called them over to the firepit, and Gage handed Sumner another beer. While they ate, the two rangers took turns recounting tales of the weird north.

“If I thought you could believe me,” Ignatz said with piercing sincerity, “I’d tell you about a telepathic jungle and a city of intelligent apes.”

Sumner nodded with polite interest. He too had experienced the unbelievable, and he listened with an open, accepting face.

By noon, Sumner had heard enough stories and swilled enough mentis beer to feel zestful yet at ease. His eyes shone, and he watched with bemused interest as Ignatz used the edge of his hand to snap the necks off half-empty bottles of beer. Gage went into the cottage and returned with three gorgeous women.

Sumner’s heart exploded when he saw them, but he managed to keep his face composed. Gage introduced them, and their names rattled in Sumner’s head with the jarring memories of all the women he had loved but never known in McClure. He sucked anxiously at another mentis beer.

Both Ignatz and Gage handled themselves with such poise that soon Sumner again relaxed. Even drinking beer with long foam-swallowing gulps or nonchalantly fondling their women, the gestures and mannerisms of the two rangers were clean and purposeful. No action of theirs appeared gratuitous, and that impressed Sumner more than the rangers’ stories.

When it came time to go into the cottage with his woman, Sumner feigned indifference. The woman, shadowhaired and lean as smoke, had green eyes tigered with gold. She spent the whole night and much of the next day ingeniously and compassionately using her almond-brown body to dispel his unease. Her mouth worked with a dexterity he thought reserved for fingers alone, and he experienced a violent pleasure with her.

The next day, his body laved in blissful lethargy, he sat alone with the rangers in a golden afternoon of seaspray, driftwood fires, braised fish, and mentis beer, listening abstractedly to their proposals.

“We want you with us,” Ignatz told him. “You’ll be trained in Dhalpur, our secret school, for four to ten years until you develop the skills to make the cut. Then you’ll start earning more zords than the highest-paid officers in any other division. Also you get four months off a year, and the time accumulates if you waive.” The sketchy eyebrows of the taut, sundark face went up in a silent “Well?”

Sumner replied simply: “My squad owns me.”

“You can get a transfer,” Ignatz said. “The Rangers have weight.”

“Look, we’re interested in you,” Gage picked up. “We know about Sugarat. We know about Meat City. We know about Broux. And we know how you killed him.” He smiled with his eyes but not his mouth. “Face it, Kagan, you’re death-fixed. You’re not going to be happy protecting prawn ships and finding lost buoys. You need risk.”

Sumner’s jaw pulsed. “It’s all shit,” he said darkly. “I die and that’s that. I’m dead. It’s all shit.” He stared at them with the solemnity of a bull. “As long as I’m doing something, as long as I’m moving, I’m not thinking, just moving and not knowing. The Rangers or the Corps, what’s the difference?”

“The world, mister,” Ignatz snarled.

“You’re young,” Gage cut in quietly. “You don’t know the strange. The Massebôth are holed up in these cheap cities with their backs to the ocean. Why? What’s got us with our strohlkraft and our artillery sitting tight on the edge of nowhere? There’s a world out there you won’t believe. And the only way you’re going to see it is as a ranger. We’re the front line. Nobody else goes as far north as we do. But only the best are asked to join us. We want men who have no shadows, men who are already dead, men who don’t know the word future. Is that you—or have we made a mistake?”

***

The transfer papers waited for Sumner when he returned to the Corps camp, and he didn’t have to think long about joining the Rangers. The remoteness of the other men in his squad and the monotony of his training decided for him.

Two days after he signed the papers and returned to camp, a black swayvan arrived at dawn to take him away. The dogfaced driver said nothing during their seven-hour drive into the desert. The rough ride ended in the heat-rippled air of a glaring salt bed, where a strohlkraft idled with its cargo hatch open. Sumner rode alone in the carryhold, clutching an airstrap during the shuddering flight. The strohlkraft touched down in several nameless military posts for interminable lengths of time, and since no one came to let him out, he spent much of the day sleeping.

They flew long into the night. When they landed, a bonfire blazed in the middle of a bayou. Twelve men with mud-smeared faces waited for him.

Sumner threw open the port hatch and hopped out. The officer he saluted smashed him in the face and shouted at him to strip down. The mysteries were about to begin.

The dark, serpent-lean officer took Sumner’s collar and ripped the shirt from his back. He slammed Sumner on the side of his head, grabbed his arm and twisted it back until pain crackled up his shoulder and into his skull. With a double-handed blow he pounded Sumner’s spine and knocked all the breath out of him. Sumner flopped to his back and the officer dropped with both of his knees onto his stomach. His fists flicked out and boxed Sumner’s ears, then finger-gouged the muscles in his throat.

His face emotionless as a cobra, the officer stood up and a broad knife whispered into his hand. The blade flashed for Sumner’s groin, and the fabric of his trousers ribboned away. The officer booted Sumner in the knees, and when he reflexively pulled his legs away, the ranger heel-gouged his thighs.

The pain was sharp. With fear-humming eyes, Sumner watched the officer and the twelve men board the strohlkraft. Still doubled up, he watched the kraft roar up into the darkness and dwindle out of hearing. Heavenward, skyfires glittered like snakeskin.

“Stand up.”

The hard voice that broke through the darkness boomed in Sumner’s ears, and he rolled to his side toward it, expecting barbed pain from his beating. But his body felt whole.

“You’re not hurt,” the thick voice informed. “You’ve been deep-massaged. Your muscle armoring has been knocked loose. You see, to begin the mysteries, you must stand naked.” A nightbird squawked. “Stand up.”

Sumner rose to his feet, amazed at the ease of his effort. He winged his shoulders, still not believing that so much violence could be creative—but no pain touched him, not even a bruise. “Who are you?” he asked the bayou shadows.

“You’re naked and alone in a swamp,” the voice responded from his side, and Sumner turned to peer in that direction. “Forget your questions. Listen, so that you have a chance of surviving.”

At knee level, a shadow stirred. Sumner backed a step, expecting an animal to come through the shrubs. Instead, the head of a man appeared and the silhouetted darkness of a stumped body. A flame winced brightly, and a long taper of snakeweed caught the spark and brightened.

In the sudden smokelight, Sumner met an old warrior with collapsed cheeks, twisted nose, and eyes deep as the sky. The man had no legs, and large portions of his skull were missing, giving his head an odd, angular shape. “I am Mauschel,” the man declared in his sinewed voice, “your docent. I am directly responsible for your training here in Dhalpur.”

Sumner gawked, and the legless man waved the snake-weed taper closer to his face to better reveal himself. “I lost my legs in the field,” Mauschel explained. “I’ve been teaching here at Dhalpur for a lifetime. Only one in ten completes tutelage under me.”

“And the rest?” Sumner asked, voice honed to a whisper.

“Some die. Some run away. But I will tell you—the ones that complete my training are the best of the Rangers. It takes a halfman like myself to complete men who only think they are whole.” He placed the snakeweed taper in the knot of his headband. “Only absence can make a man whole.”

Sumner swatted at the mosquitoes swarming about him.

“You’ll learn to love this swamp,” Mauschel promised, armwalking closer. “The best killers are those who can love, for they know life’s strengths. You love to kill, like all those who are sent to me. But this swamp will teach you to love living.”

Mauschel reached out and touched Sumner’s knees. “Sit down.”

Facing the docent, cross-legged, immersed in the insect-repelling odor of the snakeweed, Sumner experienced a rush of wonder.

“For now, you are a victim of yourself,” the docent told him. “Your moods determine what you don’t see. But after you calm yourself, you will see everything. That’s what I must teach you—to see what is hidden.

Mauschel turned Sumner’s head with his thumb and pointed to a rivulet of water running beside them, black with night. “Second sight is merely persistence,” he said. “If you can silence your mind deep enough, you will see into everything and everyone. Silence is power.”

Mauschel and Sumner sat watching the rivulet curl over jumbled rocks, listening to the songs of nightbirds gleaming in the air for what seemed an endless time. At first, Sumner struggled to stay awake. Each bubble skimming over the pebbles at his feet provided a complete world, swarming with light and motion. No number for the worlds...

“Don’t dream,” Mauschel warned him. “Just watch. Selfscan is just watching. You have to know how to do nothing before you can do anything well.”

At dawn, staring into the sunflashing torrent, water became fire in Sumner’s mind and took on the forms of his sleep: flames the color of carp, the shape of prehistoric fish...

Mauschel slapped him. “It will be years before you wake up.”

Sumner blinked into the sun of his first day in the swamps and put a hand to his stinging cheek. He looked at the docent with bewildered hurt. What did this halfman want?

Mauschel turned about and armwalked to the grassy brink of the marsh, where grapes of sunlight hung on the black water. Against wickerwork of roots buttressing the mudbank his flatboat waited. He looked back and saw Sumner kneeling naked in the swordgrass, a hand to his cheek. Remorse flushed in him when he recognized the resentment in the young man’s eyes. His hand touched the rubbed leather of a legstump, and the guilt shriveled. He was a teacher, he reminded himself, lowering his body into the tar-stained boat. That was all he was.

He punted across the sleeping water. Sumner stood in fluttering sunlight, following him with his blue stare. If he ever wakes up, he will be good, Mauschel thought, admiring the man’s lank and brawn. Years before—many years before—Mauschel had been a ranger. “He who never was,” he spoke softly, gazing into the black water, remembering that morning a world ago when he first noticed the mollusk scales behind his knees. He had been in the field then, and he had let himself believe the desquamations came from a jungle fungus. A fellow ranger had to tell him: The black scales were genetic. He had become a distort.

Selfscan alone kept him living after he blew his legs off to hide the distortion. “Selfscan is life,” he addressed the algae-boiling water. “If Kagan ever wakes up to that, he will be good.” Mauschel’s keen eyes read the shadows of the waterways, and he guided the flatboat through mists of sunlight and drifts of spiderflowers into the dark soul of the swamp.

***

After Sumner’s first night in the swamp, routines shaped his life, routines that continued unchanged for several years. Senior recruits who had watched his encounter with Mauschel from their coverts among the trees taught him the basics of swamp survival. Reticent, hungry-looking men, they disappeared as soon as they had shown him how to flake a knife from stone and how to twine fabric from plant fiber. Within days, Sumner had a lair of his own in a mangaba tree, and he speared fish from his own dugout.

But life in the swamp was difficult. He had to content himself eating roots, insects, and the small prey he could catch. Each day enjambed the next like the structure of a dream, and slowly the selfscan that Mauschel had been so fervent about began to make sense. It consisted of watching, simply watching without thinking. The difficulty lay in learning to live with himself.

He remembered Gage and Ignatz with dark and rueful feelings. Becoming a ranger had turned out to be viciously harder than they had ever intimated. In the first months of his swamp life, he had been ambushed several times by other recruits. And this blundering carried a high price. An ambushed recruit lost everything he had to those who found him: foraged food, knives, even clothes. Twice, Sumner had almost starved. Then he learned to stop wondering and simply watch—watch everything, his whole body a lens open to time, perceiving every sexual moment of the day, every turn of the wind.

One day, watching light rising up the trees in a slow silence as night came on, Sumner sensed someone closing in. He slunk noiselessly through the underbrush and squeezed himself into the embrace of a thick-bodied willow. Bird chirpings circled his hearing, and wind breathed algal scents through tufted grass. As his thoughts thinned and selfscan deepened, he centered on the approach of the other.

From beneath huge elm roots, along the mud rim of a black pool, a shadowfigure appeared and moved swiftly in Sumner’s direction. The figure stayed close to the ground, obscured by ferns, but Sumner could hear fatigue in the heavy gait. He fixed his attention on the palmetto leaves flexing in the wind until the intruder strode hard past him—a hooded man in gray jerkin and leggings.

Sumner waited a pace and then swung out with his left arm, fast and low, and caught a skinny, fawn-boned ankle. With a twist, he toppled the lanky body and jumped astride, forcing his knee into the back of the narrow jerkin. He seized the hood in one hand and jerked it back.

A scream widened in his eyes. He stared at a distort: a bald creature with moon-marbled skin and red eyes.

The distort thrashed, and Sumner pulled back stiffly on the hood and reached for his knife. Mauschel had ordered him at several of their regular sessions to kill any distorts he encountered. Looking down at the oyster-gray face, he felt his knife strong and right in his hand. But he did not strike.

Foc orders! He let the hood go and stepped back, sheathing his knife. The distort rolled over and sat staring at him with raw eyes, face childlike and tilted slightly as if listening to some feeling-pitched song just within hearing.

“Get out of here before a real ranger shows up,” Sumner gruffed.

The distort shakily stood and bowed. With malformed hands open in gratitude, it stepped closer. Sumner turned, but before he could move away, the creature touched him. His vision smudged, and a strand of ice-wind finer than a thread of starlight curled over his skin. Is it wrong to love everyone? a gentle voice asked at the back of his head. His whole body shuddered, and an overwhelming euphoria rushed up through the hollows of his lungs and throat. When he blinked sight into his eyes, the distort had gone.

But the telepathic bond between them remained. Sumner felt the other being long into the night. Sprawled out in his mangaba tree, wrung by the distort’s exhaustion, he felt its swamp-dread as it crossed a fen of mosstrees and quicksand. Deeper, he knew the being’s fear of what it was fleeing: Distort-hunters had found its tribe three nights ago, and the whole forest the tribe lived in had been set ablaze. The companion that had crossed the hills and entered the swamp with it had been spotted yesterday and shot in the back, just below the shoulder, blowing its heart into its hands.

Sumner turned restlessly in his lair, and at the far end of the swamp the distort felt his unease and stopped running. The earth it squatted against was cold wet darkness, but the sky swirled with auroras, a drunkenness of light. Sumner experienced the distort’s awe and relaxed. As he circled toward sleep, the telepathy opened into sound, and he heard the distort’s quiet voice a last time: I think it is good to live.

***

Under the tutelage of a blind man with a back as broad as a bison’s and all five senses in his hands, Sumner rigorously worked to toughen the vulnerable parts of his body. He pounded sand and deadwood with his hands, feet, elbows, and knees, armoring them with bone-callus. Punches and massage hardened his sternum and abdomen until a tree limb could be broken across his stomach. And he learned to instantly flex and relax his neck so that he could absorb blows to his face with his eyes open. Only then did Mauschel reveal how properly to compress breath into the needletip of the body’s center and to twist each blow at the precise moment of impact. When Sumner could knock the bark off a tree with his bare hands and feet, the blind master was through with him. The recruit had learned to use his whole body at once.

From a wiry old woman with mud-brown skin, Kagan mastered the botanical secrets of the land, learning to make curare with strychnos vines, malarial prophylaxes from cinchona bark, barbasco insect repellent, and a potent painkiller out of waxy red genipa berries.

Lounging in the blanched grass on a knoll of cedar during a pause in his training, watching deer feed, Sumner felt like singing. But music was a ghost in his mouth, because he felt uneasy with his voice. And so he lay in the tree-chopped sunlight with other recruits, content to listen to the birds’ green songs.

These men might starve him in the swamp if he weren’t alert, but during the training sessions that they shared they were brothers. Strong and poised as any of them, he rested between wrestling sessions, humming with the just-seen knowledge of bodytwists, kneelocks, and slinky evasions. He looked down with pride at the rays of muscle in his legs. And for that seldom moment, hair starred with sweat, chest and torso muscledrawn and gleaming, his life was divined.

***

At the far end of the office in a darkly shaded back room with the door ajar, a deep waited. She had been sent by Ranger Command to assess telepathically the recruits at Dhalpur and cull any latent deeps. Every year at this time, for the last thirty-two years, she had come to this swamphole, to this very tarpaper shack, and opened herself to the minds of killers. She had become increasingly sensitive—and bored.

Deeps—telepathically endowed humans—survived as the only distorts tolerated by the Massebôth, though secretly. Fetal-induced kiutl, under proper conditions, produced deeps. But they lived stringently proscripted lives. Neither the Black nor the White Pillar trusted them wholly, and the Pillars kept them under perpetual observation.

Even so, this old deep had grown satisfied with her life, if not her work, and her self-content showed in her wide-spaced eyes—gray, acutely alert eyes. Silver hair, short and stylishly feathered, framed a patrician, noble-browed face. She glanced over Sumner Kagan’s dossier, pausing briefly at Broux’s murder. The deeps who had investigated Broux’s death had immediately discerned Sumner’s culpability, and they had marked him then as a possible ranger. The trick with assessing killers, she had learned, lay in eliminating the ones who stopped short.

She thumbed a kiutl-tab into her mouth and looked up to see a tall, long-shouldered man with red hair walking tentatively through the outer office. Wisdom brightened in her eyes, and mindmusic brimmed into her ears: She observed the golden bodylight around the giant, and the sight of this genetically integral human, this whole man, tuned happily inside her.

She looked again at the dossier to identify this ranger’s docent. Mauschel—the distort, she noted with a flicker of disappointment. That strict man worked the recruits too hard—wanting his warriors to accomplish his unfinished life. He too frequently ruined men. As if his pain were the world’s. She put the paperboard aside and covered it with a fold of her white robe.

Sumner filled the doorway, the broad set of his eyes taking in her and all of the room at once. She signed him to close the door and sit in a cane chair opposite her. As he gracefully lowered himself into her presence, continually studying her with those bunsen-blue eyes, she spotted the purple scald marks at the sides of his neck. “How did that happen, soldier?” she asked, touching her throat.

“Voors,” Sumner replied, and at the sound of his voice she peered into him and entered the shadow of a dead world: a crater pool surrounded by dying tamarinds, nodules of fungus blistering the grass where acrid vapors smoked out of the earth—a blunderland of mad flies and trees with the shapes of pain. And there, rising out of the green water of the pool, a child white as nothingness with eyes like ice.

She blinked, startled by the clarity of her in-seeing. Then, with disciplines drilled into her since infancy, she brought her mind back into the present. She didn’t want to know about voors or anything else in this man’s past. She had been sent to do one thing: find other deeps. The less she took away with her, the better she would sleep that night.

“Just that name—voors—scares me,” she lied convincingly, opening a notebook in her lap. “I’m from Prophecy, and I only leave the city once a year to do this survey for Ranger Command. I’m here to see that the recruits are well-treated. One of my tactics is to speak with as many of you as I can. I hope you’ll be frank with me. Nothing you say here will be associated with you again, unless you wish it so.” She smiled, and Sumner nodded, only the microshifts in the muscle-armoring around his eyes revealing his suspicion. “Are you happy here?” she asked ingenuously.

Sumner sat tall yet relaxed, modulating his breathing the way Mauschel had taught him to do when being interrogated. “Yes.”

In that one sound, the deep penetrated the grimness in this man’s life: the arduous fighting drills, the anxiety of ambush in the swamp’s dark spaces, the loneliness—But she searched past this emotional fog looking for a special kind of silence—the depth of the telepath.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said. “Anything at all. Just talk.” The deep lowered her eyes, pretending to write in her notebook, her gaze loosely following her scrawl as she centered into trance.

Sumner shifted in his seat and glanced around at the threadbare carpet, the bamboo-slatted windows....

“Talk—please.”

“I was ambushed again, a few days ago,” he admitted, words spiraling into his mind. “I hate getting caught, because then I have to feel what I did wrong until my guts ache. That’s the only way I can forget. I hurt myself for a while.”

She urged him on with a roll of her free hand.

“Sometimes I feel like water locked inside a tree,” he continued, burst-skull feelings jumping into words. “I’m tired of sword classes and gun classes and hiding in the swamp and taking orders. But then I think, all of life is shit. We live until we die and then nothing. Does anybody have the right to want anything?”

He paused. The woman had stopped writing and sat there with her eyes closed. “Dhalpur has been the strongest life I’ve had so far,” he added softly.

The old woman hadn’t heard a word of what he had said. She stared long into his mindark, casting about among the daze of memories and thought-loops for the silence. But this man was all dreaming. His bodylight shone with wondrous force, but his mindark appeared muddled. She closed the notebook and placed her palms over her eyes. “Thank you, soldier. You may go now.”

“That’s all?” Sumner asked, the hurt he had brought forward burning behind his eyes.

“Yes, that’s all. Please go now.”

Sumner stood and went to the door slowly. Outside, heat rippled in the air over the metal roofs of the swamp village where the officers lived, and he loitered, watching that for a while, feeling that he had left something behind.

***

At the end of his third year in the wilderness, Sumner went mad. The rigorous demands of his training and the vast solitude of his life in selfscan crushed him. It happened while he watched the rain moving in vague pillars over the savanna, as he completed a complex routine Mauschel had taught him. The toes of both of his feet tied and untied tedious strings of knots, one hand repeated wrist and finger maneuvers with a butterfly-blade, the other packed and fitted cartridges while, deeper, he fluttered his diaphragm, signaling his heart to slow down.

Each day for months, he had been doing this and more intricate routines, and he had become expert at settling deep into himself and watching his body function on its own. But today, with rain smoking just outside his burrow and wind whispering over the grasslands with a sound almost human, he found that he couldn’t stop. Lunatic precision guided his toes knotting and unknotting twine, his left hand flashing sharp metal around his fingers, his right hand capping bullets, and his heart consciously slowing and slowing, gliding beyond his control.

Sitting in a broth of umber light, his limbs moving mechanically, his will paralyzed, Sumner felt his heart stop. His toes and hands went on even as the whine of blood, tuning its high note in his ears, thinned out of hearing. Vision narrowed and misty oblivion circled in, muffling his panic—

Pain abrupt as a scream wrenched him out of his trance. The butterfly-blade had nicked his thumb. He stared with sudden lucidity at the pale slice in his flesh and saw how the blood held back. Then the red flow began, and his heart quopped loudly in his ears.

Unthinking, he dropped everything and ran barefoot into the rain. The wind slashed at him, and he wondered what he was doing. Unwilled selfscan took over, blocking out thoughts and feelings, and propelling him into the storm.

He ran with the storm, following the wizenings of the wind, heedless of siltholes and mudpools. The rain wandered on ahead, leading him staggering into the gloom of a misty forest. A dense effluvium of rotting bark and wet earth engulfed him, and he stopped with his arms widespread. The vaporous fatigue of his long run rose out of his legs and chest and fogged over his mind. He dropped to the fleshy earth and slept deep.

The storm passed, and he listened to rain-leavings: the hum of water puddling, the sigh of puddles wrinkling to mist. The snap of a drop against a naked root alerted him to himself. He lay soaked, cold, and sunken in the black humus, breathing through his mouth. But he didn’t move. Something awesome had happened to him during his forest sleep. He couldn’t say what it was—but he knew.

Hearing the varied patterns of leaf drops, the sparge of ferns, the irregular rhythm of vine-sprinklings, he experienced power. Not stamina or energy but quiescence. As he rose out of the exhaustion of his hysterical run, he felt clean as the white woodmeat he saw beside him in storm-broken branches. The power he experienced guided him effortlessly over the uncertain forest floor, and with it came impeccable clarity. The world had become transparent: He noted where the wind, swollen with rain, had tided, forcing out life or killing what remained; and he beheld through the slides of mud and branches where small animals hid, drugged with cold. In exposed rock, one glance at the lithified sediments revealed the whole history of the forest—a buried river bottom, a vanished desert. Control wider than intent had shaped everything, as it had shaped him. But, as chaotic as it seemed, there was control: reeds designed to sway with wind; leaves wax-coated and shaped to shed rain; each predator a prey, untangling its own small knot of time.

Sumner turned his clarity on himself. Strolling casually along the forest’s edge, all senses poised, he realized that the total control the Rangers pushed him to develop had always been his—it was just a matter of ease and recognition. His body, like the forest, carried a precise ecology. The bacterial tides in his blood influenced the strength or lethargy in his muscles, and they could be modified with herbs, breathing, food intake. His irises worked autonomically, but he had learned to tense and relax those subtle muscles by first recognizing and then imagining the feel of light and darkness. In a similar way, he had learned to lure blood away from a wound, and to regulate the temperature of different limbs, and to hear with his fingertips. The secret, he understood now, dwelt not in diligent control but in recognition and compliance. It was so easy.

Images of his past materialized in the pauses between breaths. Instantly, he fixed his mind on the tocking of tree toads, thunder rumbling over the forest’s eaves, an orange uteral blossom unmolested by the storm, before he caught himself trying to catch himself.

Relax—

He let his memories unwind, and as each one passed through him, he looked at it the way he would a jungle covert for the things it hid. And he appreciated that all his life he had desperately been trying to control everything around him.

A deep memory from the only winter he had ever experienced filled him, and again he saw the shape of his breath, ice-enameled steps, fangs of ice in the trees, snow-dervishes spinning down the streets, and a red-eared horse with a white diamond on its nose. Clearly, he recalled the urge to hurt that horse, to assert his mastery. And he remembered riding it out onto the pond—That was the day that he had first equated violence with control.

The memories continued, and with his remorseless clarity he watched himself rage at his father’s death and continue to rage as the Sugarat, driven by the constant dread that his father’s control would never be his.

Sumner wandered the narrows of the forest, retracing the course of his life. He cut through the shame and guilt of the many years he had spent deceiving his mother, and he fully experienced and then abandoned the tenacious nostalgia he felt for his car, his room, his scansule, and, at last, he perceived how his need for command had made him a dupe for voors. All the memories of Corby and Jeanlu that he had so fanatically evaded over the years returned undiminished. Sensations ghosted through him: the bloodchill that sparked around Corby’s body; the deathchant that Jeanlu’s corpse had chattered in his face while hanging from his neck; and the deva—the ruby light, the cold saffron sun, and the maddening, impossible flight over Rigalu Flats. At this point, he came to the edge of the forest, where sunset-lengthened shadows stretched black to infinity.

He moved out across the grasslands at an easy gait, reviewing his past in the scarlet light. He walked all night, traveling where starlight blew off the water, moving without anxiety through panther glades and over buffalo hills where hind rats stalked. Moonhandled, alert, he proceeded invisibly, prey to nothing, intent on deciphering all the parables of his life. The change that had come over him was permanent. He would never again be confused.

***

On Sumner’s last night in Dhalpur, he rubbed himself down with water-thinned mud and blue moss to keep away insects, and he entered the swamp. An owl, silent as a fish, sailed overhead, and the wind shifted, murmuring in the trees like water.

Mauschel waited for him in a small flatboat hung with red fishskin-lanterns. Wreaths of linaloa incense rose from the corners of the flatboat. Far down the river, heat lightning quivered, and a breeze smelling of distance dispelled the closeness of the mud-rot air.

“You’ve done well,” Mauschel greeted. In the red light, his legless, twisted body looked like a wooden idol.

Sumner stood quietly before him, knowing with the meat of his body as well as with the memories of endless hours he had spent in selfscan before this man that he had accomplished nothing—he had simply become himself.

Mauschel grinned at him like a sunstruck ape. “Come here, you self-conscious buffoon.”

Sumner stepped forward, and Mauschel grabbed his legs and held him tight. “You’re right,” the old man whispered. “You’re not to be saved. No one is. But today you’re leaving here a ranger, and I’d be less than lizard-grease if I didn’t tell you I’m proud.” He knocked on the hull of his boat, and Sumner sat down. “Here—you earned this a long time ago, but I couldn’t give it to you until you didn’t need it.”

He pressed a small piece of metal into Sumner’s hand: a silver cobra pin—the Ranger insignia.

“We’ve spent three years sharing nothing but what’s around us,” Mauschel said. He sat back, and darkness leaned into his eyes. “Now I feel I can tell you about deeper things. But I won’t. You already know that it doesn’t matter one whit what you do. It all comes to the same thing. And you’ve found out, it seems, that you’re bigger than you think. Remember when you thought it was impossible to empty your mind and keep your body moving?”

He laughed softly and cast Sumner a sly look. “You understand, too, that eternity’s between us. Each of us moves alone through his own meaning, creating value as he goes. You know that, though you haven’t had the time to ponder it, and I hope you never do. But there’s one thing you may not have realized just yet. It’s the last mystery.”

He leveled his swordmaster’s gaze directly into Sumner’s eyes. “The Rangers own you.” He paused and stared down at his blunt, callus-sheathed hands. “For three years, you’ve lived rigorously but alone. It’s going to be different in the Rangers. They’re a political tool, you know, commanded by the Massebôth Black Pillar, who have world-shaping plans, historical dreams—iguana-dung, all of it. So, if you think there’s more than nonsense to our lives, you’d better get out while you can. Go north into the wilderness. You know enough to survive anywhere now.”

He ran a yellow thumbnail along a crease of scar that followed his jaw, and his eyes thinned. “But if you understand, as I think you do, that nonsense is all there is, then stay with the Rangers. They treat their own well. You’ll earn your livelihood as a killer, but who’s to say that’s any worse than a physician for all we come to, eh? Just keep one thing in the front of your mind when you deal with moral twits or mystics who think they’ve seen into the heart of things: The one secret is that all things are secret.”

***

Sumner’s first assignments took him into the ruins of Apis and Longstorm. Both cities had once been major seaports, centuries old. Fifty years before, they had been crushed by a savage raga storm, and the Massebôth, lacking the resources to rebuild, deserted them. Leagues and leagues of collapsed buildings, dune-drifted boulevards, and skeletal frames rose out of steamy lagoons, all of it surrendered to distort gangs and the jungle.

Sumner arrived in these ghost cities to stalk distort leaders who had become too influential. The work, arduous and cruel, would recompense Sumner well. The Club Foot, Prophecy’s most famous bordello, maintained for him a perennial open door without charge, and he spent most of his leave-time there. Seeing himself clearly in the mirror-chambers, surrounded by servants and fine foods, he harbored surprise at what he had become.

Without the mud and swamp grease of Dhalpur and with his sun-reddened hair braided to one side in the latest fashion, Sumner appeared a celestial demon. His face, flat as a blade, scars eroded to pale artistic etchings by wind and time, and wide, silent eyes blue as spun steel, he faced the world with a cryptic mask. He stood tall, almost a giant, shoulders stooped with power. Big-boned, muscles thick yet pliant, skin burnished the color of dawn, with tight copper-red curls boiling over his chest, he existed as a rare animal.

The women of The Club Foot worshipped him as an avatar of the god Rut, and they fought each other to be with him—for not only did he qualify as the most relentlessly masculine creature they had known, he was also as ingenious as a magician. His lean, patient hands, barked with callus and taut with strength, could caress womanflesh with petal-soft tenderness, fingers moving with a delicate and sometimes fierce cunning.

Women, however, occupied only a small part of Sumner’s life. They pleasured him, but they could not fulfill him. Only the wild spaces, empty of emotion and full of deception, engaged him totally.

If it weren’t for the decay of the ruins that the Massebôth had assigned him to patrol, he would have been happy. But Apis and Longstorm opened into chancrous landscapes. Often when perched on a twisted girder enveloped in the acrid dampness of dissolving concrete or when prowling the squalid beaches of wrecked cars and frothy chemical pools, he wondered why the Massebôth had come to this.

In time, it became obvious to him, as to everyone else, that the government was corrupt. Whispers of political intrigue reached not only the underprivileged but the highest military circles as well. Sumner served for more than a month as the personal bodyguard of a prominent and greatly admired general. During that time, they shared meals and broke up the tedious hours of traveling between frontier posts by playing kili and talking.

The general, a humanitarian with plans for abolishing dorga pits and for establishing self-sufficient distort colonies, smoked only the cheapest cigars and ate and traveled humbly so that he could save money to realize his dreams. Deeply impressed by the general’s sincere commitment and parsimonious way of life, Sumner listened with real interest to the soldier’s political insights.

The general explained how for centuries a handful of families had run the Massebôth government for their own personal aggrandizement. They employed the Unnatural Creatures Edict not only to eliminate voors and distorts but also to remove suspected political competitors. They forbade newspapers from assessing government policy, and they carefully monitored university courses in history and society. But in their eagerness to consolidate power, they failed to provide the Protectorate with decisive and objective leadership.

Within the last century, half the fringe colonies with all their vast agricultural resources had been lost to raga storms and distort tribes. Expansion and exploration had become minimal. The workers in the dorga pits, increasingly essential to maintain city life, required strict control, and so even minor offenders suffered branding with drone straps. Taxes had quadrupled in only a few years, and most guilds and factory chiefs had to lay off workers and forestall wage increases. To quiet dissension, the military fulfilled more police work and less defensive maneuvers along the borders. As a result, distort gangs and tribes proliferated and drew closer to the core cities. Disgruntled guildsmen and fractious government officials even sold arms to the distort gangs for material looted from the convoys.

The avarice of his leaders disturbed Sumner, but he did not allow that to affect his work. It wasn’t loyalty to the Massebôth or the Rangers that kept him active and unquestioning; rather it was devotion to himself. He had been remade in the image of a ranger. There was nothing else for him.

And so, a year later, when called back from Apis to assassinate the general, he did not balk. Obliged by a sense of comradeship, he refrained from humiliating the military leader and refused the easy strategy of gunning him down in public. Instead, at great risk to himself, he approached the general at night, slithering through a hypnosis of barbed wire and trip lines surrounding his bivouac. It took all of his skill to merge with the moonshadows, to crawl beneath the heat-addled air of the main court and to shadow past the alert stares of well-armed guards. Finally, he advanced with a sultry breeze stirring the gauze curtains of the central building. Among the stupor of shadows that veiled the general’s chamber, he trailed the moist scent of sleep to a canopied bed. After deftly and painlessly slicing the general’s carotid with a poisoned fingerazor, he merged again with the shadows.

The general’s death bothered him for a while, because he had sensed that the man had been sincere. In the same way that he knew when others secretly watched him or when and how an enemy was about to strike, he had known that the general had told him the truth. The Massebôth were evil and their empire decaying.

Sumner felt neither outrage nor despair about this fact. Even though he served the Protectorate, he did not consider himself a Massebôth. He was a ranger, and he devoted all his mental and physical energies to perfecting his craft. The doom of the cities was not his concern. After all, what wasn’t doomed? The only control he had was over himself, and even that was limited, for he constantly surprised himself.

One dismal rain-misted night in Vortex, with nothing better to do, he followed the tug of elusive animal psynergies and found himself wandering through a tangle of stone alleys, his feet muffled in fog. Several hours later, at the end of a tight cobbled lane of antique bookstalls and slot-windowed apothecary shops, he stopped before a salt-split doorstoop. The cramped shopfront was windowless except for a crescent pane bratticed with corroded iron. He had no idea why his instincts had led him to this desolate corner of the city until his persistent knocking summoned an old woman with skin the color of clouded silver, fire-frizzed hair, and blinking bird’s eyes. He faced Zelda. Surprised, but too much of a warrior to express shock, he politely asked for a wangol reading.

Zelda didn’t recognize him, and she stepped back, hesitant to admit this flat-eyed, solar-burned giant into her shop. But he presented a cordial smile, his voice flawlessly affectionate, and besides, he wore a clean, smart-looking uniform and probably had money. Since she had acquired her augur license, she needed zords to meet the tax. She motioned him into her reading room, a dingy chamber with Mutric figurines in the corners, ponderous indigo curtains, and a rotted plank floor so soft with age it sighed the odor of dead leaves with each step. A round black-sheened mirror hung on the wall surrounded by yellowed charts depicting body parts and their various auguries.

Zelda had aged greatly in the intervening years, reduced to a wraith in a brown etamine shift embroidered with starsigns. Sumner watched her closely as she drifted about the tiny room lighting tallow sticks and preparing incense coals. He felt no emotion for her, and as they sat down on bamboo stools before a crumbling corkwood table, he wondered why he had bothered to come in.

She handed him seven painted lentils and told him to cast them. After several throws, she looked up and studied him with eyes bright as pain. “Your history is one of accidents. Deception and error guide you. Soon, if it hasn’t happened already, you will confront someone from your past, possibly a child. But I see no recognition. Only what we know is real. Also, quite soon, you will have to discard everything. But you will adjust, for I see you are a man for whom all destinations are temporary. You change readily, sometimes obscuring your own purposes, though a deep, burning part of you is always the same. That is the paradox of your nature—the cloud and the star.”

Sumner laid all the money he had across the table, and Zelda straightened and stared at him more closely. Before she could recognize him he stood up and, with her profuse gratitude singing in his ears, returned to the night of rain.

Zelda’s pathetic old age affirmed Sumner’s conviction to die young. He had seen old rangers, rheumy-eyed and pale, fading away in noisy government offices or, worse, fumbling in the field and then brutally humiliated by distorts, butchered with their own knives. That would not happen to him.

Sumner took risks most of the other rangers eluded. Death, to him, offered freedom at the crest, escape from the body’s inevitable slide. He feared nothing—not torture or loneliness or the weirdest distorts. How could he fear them? Life was a brief harrowing voided by death, and these were the healings of pain.

***

Sumner sat on a pierhead gnawing at a whole orange. On the dirty beach around him, scrawny pigs and dogs scavenged among loosely bundled bales of garbage.

He finished his orange, wiped his hands on his shorts, and stood up. Seabirds poised on tall, lilting fish-spears turned their heads to watch him as he ambled down the ruined beach. Today would be his last day in the hamlet of Laguna. The man he had been assigned to kill had arrived the night before. Actually, his victim was not a man at all but a voor called Dai Bodatta.

For over a month, Sumner had been waiting for this voor, living unobtrusively in one of the blue pastel shanties across the bay. The fisherman’s widow who rented him the place had no doubt that he was anything more than the dockworker he claimed to be. Like the other stevedores, he wore soiled canvas-top shoes, remnant shorts, and an oil-stained singlet. And like them, he worked a dawn-to-dusk shift, loading barges with crates of rice and scraping and painting hulls—until today.

He walked out to the middle of the windward shore where the bay washed over a pink bench of coral. The tide rushed in, and white feathers and dragontails of spray lashed with the sea boom.

Here at the far end of Laguna Bay, another harbor had once flourished. Plague had doomed that village many years before, and now only blackened stumps of old pilings, a few charred boat ribs, and a storm-staggered jetty remained. The villagers thought this crescent of land that separated them from the sea was haunted, and they used it as a dump. Sumner knew that he would confront the voors here.

He sat down on a chunk of driftwood tangled in beach vine and cupped a hand against the late morning light to see the island better. Situated in the middle of the bay, a small, tree-crowded knob of stone stood. No sign of voors appeared among the tiers of sea pine, but Sumner knew they waited there. Last night, hundreds of voors had crossed the bay in black-hulled rigs.

Alerted at dusk by a mirrorflash from a ranger farther down the coast, Sumner had sat up all night watching the voors arrive. The night-lens he had used revealed the cowled figures in the boats. From the side of the island facing away from Laguna, blue and green fires flickered for a few hours. Then they vanished, and by dawn nothing remained of the voors—except for the dreams. Most of the hamlet woke groggy from a night of restless, moody dreaming.

Voors did not often show up this far south, but over the past few years they had been gathering annually in different coves and bays of the region. No one knew why the voors came, but each year their number grew, and lately the Massebôth had become concerned. Word of a new leader of the voors spread through the northern coast cities with wild rumors of a voor invasion. And though hardly anyone there had ever seen a voor and known it, fear mounted. Travelers mistaken for voors were viciously murdered, and distorts who had long been ignored got herded together and drowned. To ease the situation, the Massebôth decided to eliminate the one voor who had been leading the others south. Unfortunately, they knew nothing more than the name of that voor—Dai Bodatta.

Sumner felt glad the voors had come to his bay. A month of inactivity had made him restless. With one hand, he dug a hole in the sand behind the driftwood and extracted an oilcloth satchel. Inside the sack, he carried an electric-pump handgun, a rifle extension, half a dozen clips, a night/day lens, and numerous slabs of gel explosives. He removed the handgun, wiped it clean of grease, and fitted a clip into it. Checking the alignment of the sights, he turned to follow a gull sliding out over the bay, and his sweaty singlet sucked at his back. The bay water beyond the coral ridge gleamed jade-green and clear as an eye.

Sumner peered through the lens and observed movement on the shore of the island. Voors in gray and brown mantles assembled, hauling small boats out from behind stands of sea pines. Hair crested by the wind, he stood tall and swept the bay with the lens, looking for other ships. There were none. The morning shift had already moored, and the afternoon fleet crowded the bay mouth, waiting to get out to sea.

Quickly, Sumner stooped and removed the thin slabs of gel explosives; then, he reached into the sand below the driftwood and took out a small square tin of firing caps. Excitement throbbed in his chest, and he had to raise the lens again to ascertain that the voors intended to cross. In broad daylight, he marveled, watching the small boats splash into the water.

He doublechecked his rifle and the firing caps, and then he sat down. Time again for selfscan: full attention on the stalled shadows—noon, the turning point.

***

Black the blood and the bones...

Tala squinted into the noon glare buzzing off the water and waited for her eyes to adjust. Clochan and the others dragged the ships out from behind the trees, which meant that they had already probed the far shore for howlies. Still, she scanned slowly. Pale sketches of coral glowed beneath the green water. A shark glided near the reef, turning swiftly with powerful strokes of its huge caudal. Farther out, silver sparks flurried in the sunlight where minnows chopped the surface. And on the far bank: tilted red mangroves, black palm fronds, and white sand littered with howlie debris and torn sargassum. No howlies—though she felt something evil and elusive. She tried to concentrate, but her drowsy body, cold with lethargy, could not focus beyond herself very well.

Clochan waved from where he stood, knee-deep in kelp-drench. The cold within her flushed warmer, and the loose end of a voice rose out of the back of her mind: Bring out the stonelights.

Tala nodded. But, before turning, she stared hard across the bay again. The jittery trees stared back empty. She dismissed her fear with a hiss and walked back through the pines to a cave of overhanging trees. Chanting voices from far within melled with the hum of wind-stirred leaves and the incoming tide, sounding like the mumble of a dream. Her eyes adjusted rapidly to the darkness, and she moved nimbly through red shadows to a rim-crusted incline that swooped steeply out of sight. Here the chanting opened very clearly: Black the blood and the bones beneath the skin. Black the earth one finger under. Black the emptiness bent over time.

Tala would go no farther. Dai Bodatta waited down there, and she knew that if she were with him again in the planet-warmth she would leave her salt for sure. Her darktime had gotten very bad in the last year. All of her flesh had stiffened, and living had become a labor. Only her devotion to the brood kept her from crossing over to Iz. The brood needed her deep mind, especially when the stonelight journey took them so close to howlies.

The chanting thinned to a hum. The rhythm of a slade-drum drew closer, and figures appeared below. Single file, a dozen voors emerged from the darkness, cowls thrown back. A few of them bore marks: frosted eyes, squamous lips, vein-netted transparent skin. But most of them looked clean. The several hundred voors that had arrived with them had been long into their darktime and all had crossed over. Their bodies had been rafted and set adrift on a broad subterranean stream that wandered far into the earth.

As each of the remaining voors passed her, they placed two or three brood jewels in a wattled basket at her feet. With her kiutl-sharpened senses, she briefly inspected each stonelight. The size of plums, clear-grained and glimmer-wobbling with lustrous colors, some fiery and translucent, others gold-banded and misty as the gas planets, the stones held light centuries old, the trapped kha of voors that seeded these cave walls with tiny pieces of their lives—relic light moving its ancient telling through clear stone.

After the last of the stonelights had been placed in the basket and the container covered, tied, and passed out of the cave, two of the voors went back down the incline. They reemerged slowly, carrying Dai Bodatta, a small figure in a sheath of camlet trimmed with miniver. The bearers stopped before Tala, and she folded aside the covering and moved her gaze slowly over the black childshape within. A blue light hazed like fungus over the rough surface of the cocoon, and as she stared at it the sleepy solitude of her darktime thickened, and she heard a voice, soft as a cloud, far back in her mind: Lose the way.

She straightened with surprise and then relaxed, soft-focusing her awareness, listening for the voice of the child-image. But Dai Bodatta kept silent.

She folded the opulent covering over the cocoon and watched after it as the two voors walked out through the cave mouth. She stood a moment in the dark, staring at the sky’s arch: cloudswift, a gull turning on one wing, and farther out, the long silence of a wedge of birds. Thoughts nimble as static flurried across her mind: The crossing of the darktime voors should have been done elsewhere. Not this close to howlies. But why had Dai Bodatta insisted?

Tala—it’s time. A tall voor, angular and shriven, stood at the cavemouth, cowl pulled back—Clochan, his flesh pale as moonlight.

A visceral, ungelded joy spiked through her. She loved this voor, fluent with both feelings and thoughts, a leader and, for her, a lover. Before, when they stood close, contemplating the deep heart of a jewel, he had filled her with such blue-bliss that for a while she had forgotten their danger and had become a broodling again, unaware of bloodpaths or the darktime. His words still moved in her: “Three hundred years from now, someone in this cave will pick up our stonelights and know that we lived.”

Let’s go, Clochan called to her. We have to ride the tide.

“Soon.” The sound of her voice throbbing in the dark hull of the cave startled her.

“You feel troubled?” Clochan whispered, stepping closer. His sunken eyes shimmered, watery with reflected light.

Tala discarded her feelings with a shrug of her hands. “I don’t know. I haven’t been able to think clearly.”

Clochan put his arm around her, and she felt as light as when the full moon pulled at her blood. Today belongs to few, Clochan quoted.

“Too few,” she echoed.

“The others sense no one across the bay. We have to hurry, while the way is still clear.”

Lose the way, the mage’s voice recurred, but she did not project it. “I’m ready,” she said.

Afternoon sunlight, clear as wine, shafted between the trees. Tala absently followed Clochan, pondering what Dai Bodatta had said. Lose the way—Give up the body? Yes, the mage is right. Her bloodpaths had narrowed, leaving her cold. Pain turned in her belly like the children she never had. Her body felt alien. Strange how these warmbloods were shaped to believe they’re the exact center. Ears, eyes—all their senses—conspire to make them feel whole—replete. No wonder they’re so arrogant.

A red seedcase flitted above the turf in a gusty seabreeze, and Tala watched closely as it sailed out over the water. It had come a long way from the north and was going a long way. An Iz-sign: all life carried off by a wind that goes its own way and can never turn back.

***

The voors scudded in three skiffs, sliding swiftly along the tidal current among streamers of bright brown sargassum weed and sparkles of leaping needlefish. In the lead rig, Clochan knelt at the prow, surveying the bay. No other ships were in sight, and the tree-heavy isle behind them blocked the three boats from view of Laguna.

Riding in the end rig, with the camlet-wrapped cocoon, Tala watched the approaching delta. Dai Bodatta stayed silent, furled deep, and the only sound hissed from the boat slicing across the water. Tala gazed in soft focus at the approaching wall of mangroves, stumps of twisted trees, and dunes of garbage. Gulls ringing over the refuse piles told her no howlies occupied the beach, but a chime had begun to peal in her left ear. Always before, that had signaled danger; now, though, she wasn’t sure. The darktime often filled her head with whorls of sound.

Clochan used deep mind and hand signals to guide the following skiffs through the barrier of coral heads and spikes. The churning reefwater frothed behind them, and the lead boat ran in to the beach with a loud cough. Clochan and the others splashed into the shallows and carried the flyweight rig to shore. By the time the second rig slashed in, they were back in the water, lifting the wattled basket of brood jewels over their heads.

Copra husks and mangrove radicles tangled around their legs in the milky shallows. Eight voors steadied the third rig as others gently lifted Dai Bodatta and carried him to shore. They beached the prow and left the stern tilting and luffing in the water.

Dai Bodatta held to silence, and this concerned Tala. She placed a hand beneath the cloth covering and felt the dry textured surface of the cocoon. A cold energy sang along her fingers, and a quiet voice opened within her: Lose the way.

Clochan and two others carried the first rig over the sand toward a gap in the mangroves. Four others lifted the second rig with the stonelights in it and, kicking tins and sand-clotted fruit out of their way, followed. Three went back to portage the third skiff, and Tala tightened the sheath about the mage and supervised his handling by the two remaining voors. Then, as they stepped forward, the sand shifted beneath their feet, and the beach ahead of them roared into the sky.

An impact of heat and tearing pressure slammed Tala to the ground. Debris thudded around her, and she covered her head as another explosion screamed out of the trees. Palm fronds and a stinging rain of sand lashed her back, and she rolled toward the water. When she looked up, the beach swarmed with smoke, and the seven voors and two rigs that had been ahead of her had vanished.

Looking closely, she gagged, choked by rage and terror: Lopped limbs in smoking sleeyes splayed among the garbage, blue-gray entrails glistened on the white sand, and the moon-white face of Clochan stared back from a blood pool with the startled somnolence of the dead.

“Dai Bodatta!” a voor screamed and leaped toward where the cocoon had been hurled by the blasts. He took another step, and his head snapped back, one eye a mangled rose. Two other voors scrambled over the smoldering debris trying to recover the stonelights scattered across the beach. One went down with a plume of blood at the back of her head, and the other dropped as if he had stumbled. The kha of both of them smoked away from their bodies before they hit the ground.

Tala turtled across the sand, scurrying toward the cocoon, which had been thrown against a rust-gutted oil drum. She threw her body alongside it, tore back the camlet sheath, relieved to find it intact.

The three voors who had gone back to the third rig sprinted toward her, and she howled at them with deep mind to get down. One of them lurched backward and flopped to the sand, blood spurting from her neck. A second one reached out to help, suddenly straightened, twisted violently, and collapsed. The third bellycrawled toward a driftwood log, thrashed in the sand for an instant, and then stopped moving.

Terror swamped her, and she felt herself wrinkling weaker. What is happening? Her fear-charged mind sensed no one anywhere nearby.

Lose the way—

She craned her neck and saw that everyone lay dead. Their kha lights had wisped away so quickly! A severed hand laced with blood reposed ahead of her in the filth-strewn sand. She looked away and watched a huge man in rags stepping out of the mangrove shadows. His kha shone very close to his body, solar gold and radiant, and his face, flat and cruel with scars, showed no emotion. He loped toward her with a silver rifle in his hands, and her heart wobbled. He moved silent as smoke, a revenant.

Lose the way—

Dai Bodatta’s presence alone kept her from going mad. She touched its cold surface, and the psynergy that sparkled through her dissolved her terror. The light around her brightened, became glassy. A diaphanous white brilliance suffused everything, and she realized that she could cross into Iz. But who would protect Dai Bodatta? Who would save—

Lose the way!

Implacable radiance burst through her thoughts, and her mind spasmed: She gazed at a lava-flow of forge-red light webbing to a furious white energy—a delirious sun, all starfire and refulgence.

The trembling wails and buckled screams of the voor dead dazed and pummeled her until a voice like a stammering flame shadowed closer: Three hundred years from now, someone will find our stonelights and know that we lived.

Clochan’s voice, thinning into distance like a struck bell...

Joy and then anger sheared her numbness. Immediately, the wind of tormented voices smeared and vanished, and she waited alone again in the starwhite energy.

Lose the way—forget the body’s loneliness, the mage’s voice spoke within her. And she understood that the time had come to stop understanding. The arduous journey along the bloodpaths was finished. A powerful, sultry wind leafed through her awareness, scattering memories beyond her reach. The broad, warm current buoyed her across spans of crystalbright gas, weaning her away from pain and distance and thought.

***

Sumner pumped a bullet into the voor crouching behind a rusted oil drum. Dai Bodatta? he wondered, stooping over the drum and pulling back the voor’s cowl.

His teeth meshed tightly as he stared at the grotesque creature he had killed: a slobbery thing, its flesh a glossy blue-white, veined like moldy cheese, mouth a bubbling mess. He heaved it over with his foot and peered at the bundle the thing had been protecting.

A bewildered frown darkened his face. With the muzzle of his rifle, he pulled back the camlet covering and eyed the childshape. A statue? No. He poked the black woven surface and realized he had exposed a mummified child—a voor abomination.

Casually, he placed the rifle barrel between the mummy’s eyes and pulled the trigger.

The cocoon splattered apart, and a burst of hot ichor spurted into his face, kicking him to the ground. He thrashed in the sand, both hands to his face, a terrible pain stabbing his flesh. A stink his blood remembered from years before invaded his throat and sinuses and bleared his eyes. The lusk psiberant! Liquid fire seared his face and the hollows of his head, ripping maniacal howls from his lungs.

Spastically, he churned in the sand, trying to get to his feet, but his muscles quaked with the poison burning through his body. Helpless, beyond thought, Sumner blanked his mind and let the agony consume him. His body strained and heaved, twisting him deeper into the sand with ogreish convulsions. He writhed for hours, gulfed in pain, before the spasms slackened and he accepted that he wasn’t going to die.

His face, swollen and fluffy with peeling skin, had gone numb by the time his limbs had calmed enough for him to stand. The air looked fractured. Light seemed chalky, and the cocoon that had exploded in his face had disappeared, shriveled to a slick, colorless smudge beside the elegant cloth that had sheathed it.

Invisible forces shuddered space, warping it like an old, bottom-heavy pane of glass. Distances faltered, curled around themselves, and time staggered. The long swells of the ebbing tide swam to shore slow as elegant swans.

Most terrible of all, a voice chattered in his head. He rubbed his temples and rocked himself, trying to shake the noise loose, but the dim, unintelligible chanting persisted. He horribly recalled the same horrible mumbling, cooing, clicking rhythm that Jeanlu’s corpse had tormented him with years before. It ricocheted across the back of his skull, dull and wrung out, just audible above the anguish ballooning through his lungs.

He lurched across the sand, wanting to run, but time snared and space had gotten bruised and distorted, volume folding like paper. Each of his steps swung him out across immense ranges of distance, while the entire length of the delta hung before him thin as a reflection.

***

A dragonish twilight stalked the eastern sky, a windy dusk, clouds low and running. A black-sailed catboat rolling heavily in the dark chop swung hard to shore. Eight wild men with braided hair and eyes burned red by pulque and sun stood at the taffrail. They, like everyone in Laguna, had wondered at the explosions on the dump delta. At first, they waited, too wary to approach, but after receiving smoke signals that two rangers were on their way, they decided to explore the dump first.

After weighing their boat with a coral-head anchor, all eight waded ashore. The twisted corpses alarmed them, but the sight of the brood jewels scattered like constellations on the beach lured them closer. They scrambled to gather the hoard and were on their knees in the sand when they spotted the madman. Half naked and tall as a pine, face a mask of charred flesh, he came raging at them out of the mangrove darkness, screaming like a rabid ape. One of the men had a gun. He held it in both hands as he sighted and dropped the lune with the first shot.

Startled, the corsairs gathered the brood jewels in one sack and decided to divide them later by lot. All of them knew, however, that death would be casting dice with them for this odd number of jewels. Hoping to even out their booty, they plundered the corpses.

Intent on their scavenging, they did not see Sumner, his bullet-creased shoulder clotted with blood and sand, rearing up from the garbage pit he had fallen into. With a battered oar in his hands, he reeled out of the pit and dashed toward the man who had shot him. Before anyone could move, he swung out with the oar and caught the gunman full in the face, smashing him to a limp sprawl.

The others rallied instantly, flashing knives and turtle-razors. Sumner came at them, unstoppable. He shattered heads with sweeps of the oar, slammed faces into driftwood, and clubbed his way to stillness with the loose bodies of those that had fallen. When none stood against him, he couldn’t stop the horrible dancing, the racking strength that forced him to smash again and again the bloodrags of those he had killed until he felt he was going beyond his body, and he banged to his knees, exhausted with rage.

Far back in his thundering mind, the mad chattering narrowed, and a whispered cadence began: Black the blood and the bones...

The Emptying

A lionfaced man stood on the roof of a flower-crowned tower, his yellow eyes cold with fatigue. A distort, he was not unattractive. Golden hair grew the tall length of his spine and glistened like fur on his arms and legs. His features glowed with sapient geniality, and his movements as he crossed the circular rooftop, long and regal, flowed from his identity as a breeder who had just come from a full night among the females. Beneath the red soft-fabric wrap that he wore, his thick muscles sang with weariness. He leaned on the blossom-strung balustrade and gazed out over his village.

He alone bore the privilege, as the most whole distort of his tribe, to stand atop the breeding stables and survey Miramol. The village flourished, beautiful with life, built in a grove of baobab trees and mist springs. Eastward, the jungle withered to a desert where skyfires, the dreams of all living things, still burned. Below, workers with green dawn-lanterns scurried among the round huts of Miramol, preparing the village for another day. And in the west, the direction all doors faced but those of the dead huts, the sun untangled from the roots of the jungle.

The whorl is in all things, the breeder marveled.

A worshiper’s call echoed into the sky. Several answering cries sparked out of the stables from restless females, and the breeder turned and barked once into the musky darkness of the doorway to still their irreverence.

He would be happy when the Mothers passed on his duties to a younger, more driven male. He had been a breeder for over a decade, and he had grown too rapt and contemplative for life in the stables. Still, finding someone as responsible as he among the sex-crazed young males would be difficult. No doubt he would have to serve for at least another cycle.

The heavy carnal odors clouding out of the stable fluttered his stomach. He pulled aside his loincloth and urinated into the dark gardens below. The very thought of sex made his kneecaps turn watery. Tired of rutting, tired of ministering to so many excitable females, he wanted nothing more than to be alone. But he knew that by day’s end he would be feeling differently. The whorl is in all things, all right.

He secured his loincloth and walked unsteadily yet with dignity down the ramps of the breeding tower to the street. Even among the dense shadows, workers recognized him and stopped to acknowledge their respect of his position. The breeder chuckled amiably but did not stop. Tonight had been a more difficult session than usual, and he simply wanted to go home and sleep.

“Ardent Fang.”

The breeder turned, and his feline features expanded with reverence. Standing among the white tendrils of a baobab, an apparition of a large, thick-faced woman in a hooded black shift beckoned. Orpha, one of the Mothers, spoke even as her image curdled into the dawn shadows, her voice lilting in the breeder’s ears: Come to the Barrow, breeder. We have work for you.

Ardent Fang bowed to where the specter had been; then, he jogged down the back treelanes so that he might avoid other tribesfolk.

At the burrow of the Mothers, a rocky mound of earth surrounded by willows, he stopped and prostrated himself, waiting until a husky old woman in brownblack robes came out of the turquoise-studded mudhole.

Orpha, his spirit teacher and life counsel, took his arm in her fleshy hand and walked him up gravel steps to the top of the rock mound. From there, they could see through a break in the forest to where a warped sun wavered over the river. Orpha stood with her back to the dawn, red light fringing orange in her short hair. With a roll of her wrist, she snatched at the air and produced a milky brood jewel. She held it out to him, and the dim light glowed green around the white gem.

“Look closely, Ardent Fang,” the old woman said. “The magnar himself gave us this crystal. You can see him here.”

Even in silhouette, Orpha’s square face appeared strong and kindly. Ardent Fang drew assurance from it and then stared deeply into the brood jewel. Only twice in his life had he gazed into a voor rock. Both times, he had been seized by trepidation so thick be could not think to understand what be saw. It was the same this time. As his vision dropped into the cloudy depths of the stone, the scruff of his neck tightened, and the hackles along his jaw fanned so broadly they scratched his ears.

Orpha placed a hand under his jaw and steadied his swaying head. “What do you see?”

Ardent Fang didn’t know what he saw. As though perched on the windy rim of a vast canyon, he watched awesome depths unfold around him. Forms made vague by distance moved at the edge of his sight, and all that he could identify clearly was a thin hot strand of fear burning in his chest. He looked up with wincing eyes.

“You feel the fear, don’t you?” Orpha’s eyes gleamed luminously in the gray light.

Ardent Fang nodded with vigor. “I’m too nervous to see clearly.”

Orpha guffawed and palmed the brood jewel. “It’s not you, breeder. The fear you see is the magnar’s.”

Ardent Fang gawked. “The magnar—scared?”

“You saw it.”

Ardent Fang shook his head, asked almost soundlessly, “Why?”

“If we knew, you wouldn’t have to walk the Road, eh?” She put a hefty arm around his shoulders and guided him down the steps of the mound.

A Mother in tattered raiment sat crosslegged in the dust before the entrance to the burrow. Her face, live and ugly and her motions wildly animated, she arranged small jewels and bonechips in the sand. She studied the portents with her fingers, her nose almost touching the ground.

Orpha embraced Ardent Fang and whispered a blessing in his ear.

“I’ve been working hard on my last lesson,” he whispered back. “I’m beginning to see how the whorl is in all things.”

The old woman crouching in the dust sat up straight and turned the empty sockets of her eyes toward Ardent Fang. “The whorl!” She cackled and swayed to her feet. “The rains come and then go. The moon thins and then grows. The whorl, yes, the whorl!” She laughed loud and hysterically, and out of anxiety Ardent Fang laughed back.

“Jesda, be calm.” Orpha embraced the blind Mother, gently sitting her back down in the sand. The large woman smiled apologetically at Ardent Fang. “Go, breeder. You have a long journey.”

“Yes—go,” Jesda repeated, her bone-thin arms raised above the scattered hair of her head. “Go with the whorl. Go round and round. Like the stars. Like the blood. Like everything. Go round. The magnar is scared, and it is the beginning of a dark time.” She howled gleefully.

Ardent Fang chuckled and grinned amiably as he backed off. Crazy Mothers, he thought. Crazy in their bones. As soon as he turned from the burrow, the laughter fell from his face. The magnar, the one who lived at the end of the Road, was afraid. In all of Ardent Fang’s life and in all the lives of his ancestors, the magnar had never been afraid.

He drifted down a boulevard of baobab trees flanked at broken intervals by immense tusks and long boar ribs. Several times, he ignored the greetings of passing tribesfolk, and each time, alerted by their insulted hissing, he had to stop and explain his preoccupation. Word that the magnar was afraid unsettled the tribesfolk, and they scurried off with their hands on their knees.

By the time Ardent Fang reached the eastern edge of Miramol, where the silverwood lodgings of the né were cluttered on a walled hill, he had resolved the matter to himself. It’s the whorl again, he realized. Sooner or later, even the magnar must become what he is not.

At the end of a blossom-arbored lane, Drift waited. Drift was Ardent Fang’s personal neand probably the best seer in the whole Serbota kingdom. Né were sexless—living divinities who worked as artisans and craftsfolk for the tribe. Telepathically strong and untroubled by sexual cravings, they served as ideal hunters and scouts. Their clarity and ancestral memories guided them on the one safe, unmarked route that led through the desert to the star pools and the magnar—the Road.

Drift, small, dark and spindly, wore a face, like all né, of pure mask: slash-lips curled into a permanent meaningless grin below boomerang-wide cheekbones and a nose of two arched nostrils.

Drift whistled and coughed in its imitation of a greeting laugh. It liked Ardent Fang, because the breeder was a strong man. Energy whirled in his body at an exciting pace. Blue sparks, visible to any seer, crackled off the tips of his mane and flared over his tufted shoulders. But besides being strong, he was also beautiful. He had a considerable amount of face, his yellow eyes possessed clarity, and both of his hands worked. Apart from the pungent brown odor of his sex and the silver scales on his shanks, he appeared virtually whole.

Drift sensed Ardent Fang’s purpose, and because of its telepathy, no conversation was necessary. But, for the breeder’s sake, it reached into the man’s mind and asked psychically: Why are you here, Fang? Did your night in the stables leave you restless?

Ardent Fang smiled spiritlessly. “I’m too much the breeder for the stables to unease me. No, seer—the Mothers have sent me. They say the magnar is scared. Incredible, isn’t it? The magnar!” Ardent Fang sat on a bench-log before the moongate that led to the silverwood lodges on the hill. “You’re a seer, Drift. Is it true?”

Drift nodded. He, too, had felt fear humming across the desert, where always before there had been a peace as still and certain as the inside of a jewel. Who is to know the way of the magnar?

“Us, apparently. Though we aren’t expected to see the magnar again until after the rains, the Mothers want us to walk the Road now. Can we do it, Drift?”

The né cocked its dark, round head with uncertainty. The desert is at its hottest now. The Mothers themselves call this the season of the killing sun, do they not? But if they say you must go, then I will guide you.

“Why is it this way, seer?” Ardent Fang asked, looking up at the green dawn sky, where vapors fluffed like tattered masts. “What could scare the magnar when even death cannot touch him?”

Drift clicked with ignorance. How could we know? The magnar is unknowable as the clouds.

***

Empty-bellied, with Drift guiding him through the desert that separated Miramol from the magnar, Ardent Fang turned inward. He tried to keep from thinking about the magnar and focused instead on the purging of his body.

Drift felt proud to be with him. Few of even the most joyous Serbota could wander the Road as openly as Ardent Fang. The man had no fear of scorpions and centipedes that lurked in the sparse shade, and he had found praise even in the adamant heat swelling the meat on their bones. Most wonderful of all, he trusted Drift. Né, even seers, were too often considered other and not worthy of true comradeship by the gendered folk. Ardent Fang was different. He treated all né as tribesmen, and he behaved with especial deference to seers. He was one of the most joyous tribal leaders. And, as much as Drift despised them, the Mothers had to be given credit for guiding him well with his inner work.

After the second day on the Road, Ardent Fang was empty of poisons. Wild energies, driven by the stubborn sun, burned through his body and warped his vision, but Drift’s slow, peaceful chanting held him together. The seer, in its fluty sad voice, sang of the powerful certainty of the body and its ecstasy at being a child of the sun—

***

The sun longs to feel

And so we are here...

***

Toward the end of the fourth day, they marched out of the filmy veils of rippled air into the shade of a wave of stone, twenty meters high. The coolness was narcotic, and staring back at the sun-dazzled pinnacles and the rock fins folded in the tremulous flow, Drift chanted happily—

***

Like the long rocks

Bent in the heat waves

We look broken

But we are whole—

Will always be whole!

***

Drift led Ardent Fang into a small cave where they followed the lines of force through a honeycomb of tunnels to a vast rock studio at the top of the butte.

At the far end of the bright chamber, the magnar sat on a straw mat, blue sky and copper-red mesas visible behind him. Dust hazed around his body like an aura.

At first, he did not see them. He gazed intently into a scry crystal, a green brood jewel given to him long ago by voors. The reflected emerald light wavered over his long mule face and made the impressive tangle of his white hair flare like green fire.

The magnar was over twelve hundred years old. Prescience had far-spaced his thoughts and made most of his feelings creative, so that very little about him remained stylized or predictable. Even his memory was wise and thoughtless.

He saw himself clearly, from his impoverished infancy as an ape in a research boro through a thousand years of burning, sanctifying changes that had made him what he was now: light’s movement as flesh.

Five hundred years before, the magnar had become consciousness itself, and he had understood with the urine, sweat, and ooze of his body that he existed as light. Everything existed as light—all of reality a star, shining.

Most of his time he spent ecstatically, body spined with an electric strength streaming up his back and into the sky. The expanding psynergy extended his awareness deeper into the etheric fields of his environment, losing him in the lizards, desert trees, and birds that lifted him away from his human attitude. Sometimes, though, and more often lately, he lost himself to the differences of the world, even to fear. Death posed a cold mystery. After twelve hundred years, only light was stranger.

When the magnar finally looked up, his leathery lids drowsy from visions, he stared at the two wanderers in silence, unsure if they were real. Lunes of brilliant light glared off his big face, and as recognition animated his features, a toothy grin widened. He laughed raucously and slapped the animal skins he wore for trousers. Billows of dust fumed around him, and the echoes of his laughter filled the chamber. He held out large gnarled hands: “Ardent Fang!” he boomed in the Serbota dialect of the tribesman’s village. “Drift! Heroes of Miramol! Shay!”

Ardent Fang and Drift shambled forward and prostrated themselves before him. “Get up!” He grabbed their shoulders and forced them to sit up. “What is this nonsense?” He gazed hard at them with chuckling brown eyes. “I should bow to you. You have journeyed so far and across the most evil land in the world!”

Before either of them could respond, the old man flung himself into the dust and groveled before them with whimpering laughter. When he looked up, his leering face furry with sand, he met the uneasy stares of the tribesfolk.

“Why are you so dour?” the magnar asked, bending forward to look deep into their eyes. He smelled of camphor and sage. “Ah, of course! You must be exhausted. Well, my friends, other visitors have brought me rose-hip wine and dried apricots. After that—

“Magnar,” Ardent Fang cut in, eyes deferentially downcast.

The magnar rolled his eyes. “When will you finally give up these formalities and call me by my name? Bonescrolls. Please.”

Ardent Fang nodded hesitantly. “Bonescrolls—we’ve rested and we’re not hungry.”

Bonescrolls narrowed his eyes. “This is not like the tribe of ecstasy. Your seriousness disturbs me, friends.”

“The Mothers have told us that you are afraid,” Ardent Fang blurted.

Bonescrolls’ hoary eyebrows went up and came down slowly. “So.” A ponderous weight sat him back, and he looked suddenly weary. “It is true.” He studied the grain of his thumbnail. “Me—the timeless one, scared.” A wan grin flickered at the corners of his mouth. “You’d think by now I would have come to terms with this.”

“What is it?”

Bonescrolls stared at Ardent Fang benevolently, and a sad smile creased his weary face. “Death, of course.”

“You’re dying?”

“No, no. My body, for all it’s gone through, is as stubbornly healthy as ever. Happiness does that, you know.”

“Yet, you are afraid?”

“Yes—I am afraid.” He turned about and gestured out the rock opening at the desert landscape. “Someone is out there. I have felt him for days now. I know he is a man, but that is all I know. I cannot get close to him.”

This admission stunned Drift more than Ardent Fang, for Drift understood the power of the magnar. Like the seer, the magnar was telepathic and could perceive all the forces of the world. But, greater than any seer, the magnar could walk out of his body and wander the lines of power, invisible and yet strong. The magnar could go anywhere and enter into and become anything.

“Not even as ravens and snakes could you find this man?” Ardent Fang asked, incredulous.

Bonescrolls shook his huge head. “Not even as ravens and snakes. The man is invisible, though I know he has a body. I have seen his footprints. He is a large man, but even so I cannot find him. That is why I believe the Delph has sent him.”

Ardent Fang and Drift glanced at each other.

“The Delph?” Bonescrolls read their bewilderment. “An ancient enemy—very powerful in his domain to the north. Actually, I had thought the Delph had forgotten about me. It has been over a millennium since I raged against him.”

Ardent Fang drew his obsidian knife and slammed it into the packed earth between them. “We’ll defend you,” he swore with conviction.

Staring at the knife, Bonescrolls’ eyes widened, and he unwound into laughter.

Ardent Fang rose to his knees, both hamfists clenched. “I’m serious, magnar.”

“Of course you are,” Bonescrolls gasped, between lurches of laughter. “But I do not think you understand what you are up against. The Delph is called godmind. And for good reasons. I will not have you sacrifice your lives.”

“It’s not a sacrifice,” Ardent Fang insisted. “It’s devotion.”

“Your tongue has more vision than your brain,” Bonescrolls declared with an imperfect smile.

Tell us about the godmind, Drift asked.

Bonescrolls paused, suddenly rooted by a vision he had experienced over a century ago. He had foreseen this very moment. Everything was as he had precalled: two distorts hunkering close, asking him about the Delph, the ambient light chandeliered in their eyes, the air heavy with sunstruck dust motes. The magnar let the vision open through him, feeling eudaemonically outside of himself, above the real.

Everything is empty, a deep thought thought itself, except the absence of self.

“Perhaps tribesfolk shouldn’t be speaking of the gods,” Ardent Fang speculated, misreading the softness in Bonescrolls’ expression.

Bonescrolls scowled. “The Delph is not a god. He is a mind—a human mind amplified by an awesome technology. Twelve centuries ago he was just a man. And I—I was a yawp, a simian worker biodesigned to serve humans. But I was different from most yawps.” A fateful light brightened in his face. “I had been biotectured by my human creators to reason. Dangerous endowment for a service-ape. When I saw what the humans were doing—trying to create a superhuman, one of their own kind strong enough to subjugate reality—I rebelled. My only mistake was that I did not succeed. And since then, I have been living from body to body, hiding from a vengeful godmind.”

“More than one body?” Awe burred Ardent Fang’s voice.

“This is my seventh physical form,” Bonescrolls acknowledged. He grinned, but his voice sounded shadowy. “In the thousand years since my futile rebellion, the yawps themselves have become a godmind culture with the technical power to craft bodies—even minds. Without their help, I would never have eluded the Delph this long.”

Perhaps the yawps can help you now, Drift suggested.

“No—” Bonescrolls tugged pensively at his goatbeard. “The yawps will have nothing to do with their former master. The Delph is the one who freed them from their servitude to humans.”

“Then let us help you,” Ardent Fang insisted. “We can find this man in the desert. Drift is a strong seer. It can track anything living. And I was trained as a warrior before the Mothers made me a breeder. I know how to kill.”

Bonescrolls looked annoyed and dismissed the issue with a curt wave. “No, my friends. I will meet this trial alone. We will share a meal and some legends, and you will return to your tribe.”

“But how can the Serbota survive without you?” Ardent Fang growled. “You have guided us for centuries!”

“The né are wise, and the yawps will help you. But let us not talk about this anymore.”

“Magnar—”

“No more!” Bonescrolls’ voice delivered a blow, his face tight as a fist. Then he sat back, eyes crescents of laughter. “And call me Bonescrolls.”

***

At dawn the next day, Ardent Fang and Drift returned to the golden desert. But instead of following the lines of force back the way they had come, they wandered out toward the palatial mesaland, purple in the early light. The sand whispered beneath their feet, and in Drift’s mind the sound became the disapproving sighs of the old man in the rock tower behind them.

Heat encircled them like a sphere of glass, curving vision and sound. Ardent Fang hummed with joy, awed by the beauty of the sandshapes and their soft sere tones. Drift chanted quietly about the sun following two warriors across an endless desert.

***

Sumner was trapped in selfscan. Far back in his mind, dim but always there, the cooing, clicking, snapping noise of a prehistoric insect continued. Sometimes, it tightened to a tiny wringing scream. Other times, it merely breathed a deep, low hum from the core of his heart. But it persisted, and if he budged from selfscan—if he so much as congratulated or berated himself—a long icy needle pithed the root of his skull.

Silence. Animal awareness.

He traversed death’s land-Skylonda Aptos—a million hectares of scabid desert. Sumner could not think it, but he knew that he had come here to die. Not with a brain-splattering bullet between his eyes—the Rangers had taken away his guns. Even if they hadn’t, he would not have done it that way. He was still a ranger. He wore his cobra insignia and his buff regimentals, smudged and frayed now but whole. He would wear them until the land killed him.

Numb-edged from so many hours of walking, his whole body craved pause, and he sat with his back to a rock turret, mindless of the desert insects. He closed his eyes and focused on the sun’s weight against his legs. He tried to relax without dozing off. He did not want to sleep. Not yet. Not until dark.

The snarling voltage bristling at the base of his skull sizzled louder in his ears: a muffled voorchant, like the impossible language Jeanlu’s corpse had chattered in his face so long ago.

Trapped in selfscan, he had not been able to think through his predicament. Still, he understood that a voor had invaded his body. Lusk—the voors called it that.

The whining folded into a staccato chant: black—black—black—

After the incident in Laguna, Sumner had been kept under close observation. The Rangers had no idea what had happened to their man, but any wound inflicted by voors did not bode well. The physicians gave up on him. The face burn looked like nothing they had ever seen. And as for the haunting noises he claimed to hear, what could they do? There was no cure for madness.

Soon it had become obvious that the voors had seriously impaired Sumner. Not only had he been reduced to the level of animal sentience, but in his sleep he rose from his cot and walked circles. Unable to carry out the normal functions of a ranger, the Black Pillar stripped him of all weapons but his knife and sent him north to monitor tribal activities.

For a while, Sumner had complied, meandering along the borders of a riverain forest, secretly peering through grease fires at jumbled frond-huts and the grotesquely misshapen bodies of distorts. But with his mind a holocaust of lunatic sounds, he woke each dawn in a place he had not selected during the night. Terrified he might get ambushed and humiliated by distorts during his mindless nightwalks, he had sought out the deadness of Skylonda Aptos. If he was going to die, he would go out with anonymous dignity.

***

Sumner’s thin downward-slanting eyes flicked open. What stared out of them was not human. Lizard shapes of fire flashed across the space behind those eyes, and globes of eerie sounds burst and reformed. Corby struggled to concentrate. The scene floating on his retinas wavered: sun-hot stone and sky the color of metal. He had difficulty fitting himself into that scene. Iz raged within him, threatening to sweep him away, far out of the body, far out of time.

No! Corby marshaled all his strength. Come to center and extent!

The noises coalesced to frantic jabbering, then narrowed to babble. The vibrant light of Iz patterned itself into a cellular mosaic. The flesh gradually accepted him.

Clumsily, he stood Sumner’s body up—his body now, for the lusk was almost complete. For years, locked shapelessly in a cocoon, carried from brood to brood by the voors, he had used his psynergy to Iz—call for Sumner. And Iz had answered him by leading Sumner to Laguna. Too many voors had died that day on the beach. He would have to redeem their deaths by using this body well.

Corby tottered and placed a hand on the pink rock turret to steady himself. Erumpent noises still clouded his hearing: the crackling, insane current of Iz, rushing through him, threatening to prize apart his world.

Iz-the windy continuum of psynergy that his people rode between realities. Without his own body to anchor him in time, it would be almost impossible to resist the tow of that power.

In the dark cupola of his mind, he sensed Sumner’s thought forms: an oil-still pond with ghostly shapes turning below the surface. Sumner, though enraged, remained locked in selfscan. Like a virus, Corby had permeated Sumner’s nervous system, immobilizing his mind, leaving him unable to think without the reverberations of Iz paralyzing him. Corby could have dampened the Iz-noise, but then his control over Sumner would also weaken—and he needed complete control of this howlie body.

Corby moved out over the red gravel, weaving and staggering. His heart pounded turgidly, and his vision soared as his head lolled from side to side. He insisted on control and sidled along a huge ribbon of rock, trying to straighten his walk. Bare, bony plains with only a whisper of grass appeared at the edge of his sight, and he turned himself in that direction.

He was being hunted. As dulled as his deep-mind had become in this new body, he retained awareness of others closing in on him. Two had bodies, and one shapeshifted. So far, he had had no trouble evading them, though he was concerned. Who were they? What did they want from him?

He stumbled and fell to the ground in a splash of sand and dust. Quickly but awkwardly, he twisted to his feet, staggered forward, and regained his pace.

Only after he had learned to use this body, he had decided, would he risk communicating with Sumner. Then, even if his father disagreed with his plans, he would have a slim chance of carrying them out himself.

His father—

Odd that this adult had so much in common with his old childform. It would have been interesting to watch his own body developing. But Nefandi had betrayed him. Now the most he could hope for was to eliminate the proven enemies of his people. Nefandi and the godmind called the Delph—sooner or later, he would confront both of them with this new killing-wise body.

He slid on his heels down the slope of a scarlet dune, exultant in his freedom. Holding his head straight, vision stammering in his eyes, he strode purposefully forward. The effort to maintain control thinned his will. Time—it would take time.

He stopped beside a boulder and sat back against it. The cells of his body sang, and he listened closely...

***

Sumner shrugged awake and groaned to see where he was. A wind, thin and persistent as a rumor, had already begun to smear his tracks. Vaguely, he recalled a dream full of weird sounds. He rubbed his face and stood up, shivering in the tawny heat.

***

“Do you believe the whorl is in all things?” Ardent Fang asked, cutting open a cactus with his obsidian knife.

The né whistled, dull and low, and its soft voice spoke inside the tribesman’s head: More nonsense from the Mothers?

“Nonsense?” Ardent Fang spoke without looking at Drift: “You say that because you’re né.”

I say that because it’s true. Nonsense is all that the Mothers have to offer.

They paused to chew the sweetness out of the cactus, Drift expressionless, Ardent Fang squinting his yellow eyes with pleasure. Done, the tribesman spit the cactus pulp into the sand. “Né—do you believe the whorl is in all things?”

Drift shutter-blinked like a lizard. What is the whorl?

“The turning, the return,” Ardent Fang answered. “What is full becomes empty, empty full. Like breathing.”

Cycles? In all things?

“Yes.”

Drift spit cactus pulp over its shoulder and spoke with its voice at the back of its throat, chewed almost to a garble: “I-am-né. Will-I-ever-be-gendered?”

The dark blade hissed as Ardent Fang sheathed it. “It’s said we return—each time different.”

Nonsense.

“It’s said.”

You mean, the Mothers have told you.

Ardent Fang frowned, blunt features narrow as a wolf’s. “The Mothers would know.”

Pizzle rind.

“How then, né, do they know which of us to breed?”

They don’t.

A tic screamed silently at the corner of Ardent Fang’s mouth.

Drift splashed his bony hands in front of him, shrugging. The Mothers breed the ones that look the strongest. The truly exceptional ones, usually those with the most face, are chosen as leaders—like yourself. But the Mothers don’t know any more than anybody with eyes.

A thin, knowing smile floated across Ardent Fang’s lips. “There are mother-mysteries, né, revealed only to a few.”

No, breeder. There’s just dying. Drift’s waterdrop eyes did not blink. No mysteries. No whorl.

Ardent Fang stared at the seer as if looking a long way out to sea. He slapped his knees and stood up. “It’s late,” he announced. “We should find a place and send.”

Drift watched him scout about for hidden cacti, and it felt a twinge of remorse at having challenged this man’s simple beliefs. Ardent Fang was a good leader, just and sympathetic to folk and né. His faith came with his openness. The seer looked inward and shouted at himself, No more foisting hatred of the Mothers onto friends. It stood up and went around to the far end of the rock lip pool, where the water was unsullied by their earlier frolicking. Bending for a last sip, the seer eyed swamp-puma prints in the silt, fresh as black petals. Fang!

Ardent Fang tramped over and studied the tracks. “Under two hours. Bonescrolls?”

It must be, Drift thought, and Ardent Fang felt its respect. I don’t sense him at all, but why else would a swamp-puma come this deep into the wastes?

A puling cry wavered out of the distance—the lonely, ethereal caterwaul of a huge cat.

Now there are three of us.

“Come on. Let’s find a place before dark.” Ardent Fang marched out through the sun-blown weeds toward a simmering landscape of black buttes and salt domes.

For the past two days, they had wandered the Road from one waterhole to the next, seeking the presence of Bonescrolls’ enemy. By the end of the first day, they had begun to wonder if the stranger was an enemy at all. Drift sensed the man, even though it could not pinpoint him. His mind ranged that empty. He moved silently, and he stayed nearby, haunting the shadowed terrain. He watched them, but he did not act like an enemy. He did not urinate in the waterholes after he drank, and he had left no poison-burrs in the sand, none that they had found yet.

Ardent Fang worried that they had found no spoor: not a footprint or a urine scent. This baffled and unsteadied Ardent Fang. Because he couldn’t feel the tenuous vibrations of the stranger’s salt, not even through Drift, he had begun to doubt his existence. Perhaps they had embarked on one of the magnar’s ploys to test their loyalty or spiritual depth.

He glissaded down a slope of copper sand and mounted a windnotched incline of black rock. At the top he gazed beyond undulant salt domes, across bronze fields of pebbled sand, toward the crater highlands. That would be a good place to test his theory, he figured, since the ash prairies around the craters trapped even dragonfly prints.

***

Ardent Fang strode boldly over the cinder wastes, cutting a straight line of tracks to an arena of brimstone outcrops. Sitting on the hard ground among the knobs of sulfur, Drift felt at ease. The night before, they had slept in the open, and until dawn Drift had lain in a half-stupor, feeling the thin psynergy of the stranger moving across the stone shapes around them. At least here, even though there was nothing to eat, there would be tracks in the morning.

Ardent Fang reached into his hip pouch and removed a devil harp—a dark finger of walnut wood that voors had given him as a young man in barter for food. The use-glossed wood, strung internally, revealed silver wires through the holes in its sides. Ardent Fang put one of those holes to his lips, and a lofty, sparkling corolla of sound warbled around them.

Drift snapped shut its eyes and experienced a pulse of warm human energy somewhere to the west. The stranger continued to dog them.

Long into the night, Ardent Fang played his devil harp, sending his music bouncing across the highlands, sometimes forlorn with vibrant darkenings and rendings, and other times watery, bright as ice, retreating and returning like submerged sounds. Drift followed the echoing vibrations of man-psynergy circling the music, close and then far, until it nodded into sleep.

***

“Drift!” A hard, thick hand squeezed the seer awake, and a hot whisper grazed its ear: “He’s here!”

Drift sat up. Ardent Fang, hunched and still, eyes sliding from side to side, clutched the dog-crucifix strung about his neck. “I heard him clatter on the rocks,” he breathed.

Maybe it was Bonescrolls.

“No, it wasn’t a cat weight or-Look!”

Drift turned in the direction of Ardent Fang’s gaze and caught two firefly eyes beside one of the outcrops before they vanished.

The seer stilled its mind, trying to feel the presence it had just confronted. Nothing: a dawn breeze scuttling over rocks and the distant hiss of steaming grottoes. A detached, precarious feeling expanded in the né, and it trembled to think that what it faced might indeed be an enemy.

“Paseq!” Ardent Fang shouted the sacred name into the misty darkness. “Paseq!”

Shut up! Drift clutched Ardent Fang’s arm. He might think you’re threatening him.

“Spirits can’t stand the Divider’s name,” the tribesman explained, and then shouted again toward where he had seen those sparking eyes: “Paseq!”

It’s not a spirit. Spirits don’t have eyes!

“Paseq!”

The two stared hard after the echoes of Ardent Fang’s cries. A long moment of silence tightened around them. And then, quiet as a shadow, a hulking man curled out from behind a brimstone spar, five paces to the side of where they faced.

Even crouched in sketchy dawnlight, his deep-hulled chest and muscle-cobbled back looked majestic. Thin, flat viper eyes stared blankly from a purple-glazed face—an idol-visage, arched with animal cheekbones and a wide jaw. His gleaming flesh presented a dark rainbow mask.

Ardent Fang staggered back a pace. He growled, but there was a whine in his eyes. Drift knelt, arms akimbo in the né gesture of submission. Kneel, it sent to the tribesman.

“Foc!” Ardent Fang barked, his upper lip jittery. He bowed from the waist, quickly, and faced the apparition with arms open at his sides but head high.

Drift threw its mind forward. Shay, stranger. We’re wanderers of the Serbota—an ecstasy warrior and his seer. Shay. It thought sun-showers. It thought blue-blossoming trees.

Dawnlight jerked in Sumner’s eyes. He wanted to lash out, to bang into violence and bash himself loose from the numbness in his skull. But the voice in his mind, the same one he had been hearing distantly for two days now, sounded gentle. It came from the short black creature, the hairless thing with the needletip eyes and slash-lips. It had no weapons, but the other one, the squat, hairy one with the lion-eyes and the muzzle face, that one had a blade.

Ardent Fang read Sumner’s gaze and removed the knife slowly, presenting it hilt first.

Sumner waved it away. Why had these twists of distorted flesh dogged him if not to kill? And as soon as he thought that, acid-pain blistered the pan of his skull, and he staggered.

Who are you? the powdery voice asked, and its gentleness soothed him.

Sumner straightened slowly as if rising from a great depth. “Kagan,” he husked.

The seer poked itself, Drift, and pointed to its companion, Ardent Fang. We are Serbota wanderers from the riverain forest to the south. We have come because your presence here has been felt. Can we help you?

Sumner angled his head slightly, surprised that this beetle-shiny thing could reach into his head like a voor.

We are not voors, Drift sent and wished it hadn’t when it saw Kagan stiffen. Just wanderers. I’m a seer—a...This close to Kagan, it could probe deep into his mind—and already it knew that the man no longer intended to harm them, though he still seemed troubled. The word it sought popped into its head:...telepath. Would you like to see?

Sumner frowned, then scowled as the distort reached out with its spiderhands to touch him.

No harm. No deception.

Ardent Fang, seeing Kagan staring at him, took Drift’s other hand. The psychic power that whirled through him brought a blissful, stupid grin to his wolf face.

Sumner eyed the two distorts closely. They seemed much less threatening than they had from a distance. He found it hard to believe that these fear-parched creatures had created that crazy, crooking echo-music that had made him feel the need to confront them. And now? He edged forward and let the distort touch his forearm.

Radiance, clear and balmy, throbbed into him, fringing his whole body with light. Silver volts sparked the surface of his brain. He felt with a kinetic certainty that these were the good people, the joy people. His mind breezed open, empty at last of the demonic squabbling and the welding pain that had frozen his thoughts.

Drift and Ardent Fang did not feel his sudden joy, for their minds rocked abruptly to the shorn, beetling cries of the voor dead. The chill whistle of deep space curved through their bones, shuddering their flesh.

Sumner recognized the terror in Ardent Fang’s eyes and knew the fear-rigor in Drift’s touch, and he stepped back. The jewel-core peace enveloping him burst, and he stood transfixed on a skull-rooted thorn. He gnashed his teeth until the pain dimmed.

You—hurt! Drift had plopped down and sprawled against a lava boulder, stick fingers beneath its leather cap, rubbing its bald head. Ardent Fang squatted beside it, staring up at Sumner with cowering, pain-wet eyes. Both of them still heard the ether-wind and its stark cries darkening into the core of their brains. And now both of them could also see a flame-gold aura around Kagan.

Drift understood that they had peaked into kha-awareness: They perceived the thin luminosity of the body. Ardent Fang believed he had entered into the presence of a tortured deity—Seie the wandering god or, worse, the Dark One.

The tribesman prostrated himself, and Sumner thought he contracted in pain and bent over him.

How can such a powerful being hurt so much?

Sumner looked over at Drift and glanced his fingers across the eel-dark stain on his face. “Lusk.”

Drift snap-blinked. Voor lusk?

Sumner nodded and sat Ardent Fang up.

He is not the Dark One, Fang. He is voor possessed.

Ardent Fang stared at Sumner’s callus-bossed hands and muscle-piled shoulders. “Why then couldn’t you track him or I find spoor?” he asked, looking into the lucid remoteness of Kagan’s eyes, engaging the emptiness he found there: the most empty eyes he had ever known. They reminded him of jungle clearings and long swamp roads.

“I’m a ranger. I—” Sumner winced and rocked to his feet.

He cannot talk, Fang. The lusk is not complete. He’s still fighting it.

“You mean, there are two in that body?” Ardent Fang’s eyes softened, and he pushed himself up. He had never seen a body as whole as this one before. Beneath that strange burn, shaped very much like a black lotus with two livid petals at the sides of his neck, he was all face. This man, indeed powerful, had every marking of a warrior, yet the emptiness in those eyes...Staring into them, he experienced a tautness in his chest as if a storm approached.

“Can we help?” Ardent Fang asked.

Sumner nodded, one hand milking the ache from the back of his neck. “Music,” he rasped, and walked a tight circle.

Ardent Fang took out his devil harp and chiseled a few notes out of the air, seeking a melody. But before he could open into a song, a growl rolled across the dawn.

Sumner spun into a defensive crouch, a knife appearing instantly in his hands. He searched the crater-mists’ green illusions for movement.

Be calm, Kagan. Drift sat up, head swiveling. We have a companion around here somewhere. He’s taken the form of a cat.

Sumner glanced at the seer with thinned eyes and moved toward a flat-topped boulder to get a better vantage. Another growl slurred from behind one of the outcroppings. Sumner turned and watched a silver-blue silking length of puma pad into the enclosure, black underbelly swaying into sight with each step. Smoky ember eyes fixed on him, and as it advanced, he turned the edge of his blade toward it.

Easy, Kagan. This is Bonescrolls.

Sumner watched with fear and awe as the wave of knotting and sliding muscle glided forward. Red and black face markings forked over its sloped eyes like a caricature of horns, and a cloud of rainmist and leaf odors filled the air.

If you touch him, you’ll see what I mean, Drift sent, going over to the puma and stroking its flat head.

Sumner tightened his knife-grip but did not retreat as the rolling, silver-furred length of shoulders and spine came up to him. He stared down at the demon eyes, the black wire-bright whiskers, the leathery snout, and a wild laugh coiled in his chest. Two distorts and a puma!

A slash of voor noise shriveled his laughter. He reached out jerkily and touched the sleek fur.

Quaking, his whole body seized up in an orgasm of blazing luminance. A rapture of colors swirled across his sight and dissolved to a blowing of bright particles. His hand fell away, and he swayed on his heels, entranced in soulful absorption, listening to the silver hum of blood far back in the valleys of his brain.

***

Light, the menstruum of manifestation—

Bonescrolls’ hands moved dreamily above him, brown and rumpled, soaked with the heat of the desert sun. He lay entranced in the shade of a stonesill, sunlight angling over his shadowed body like a veil.

Light, the void’s notariqon—

He was chanting these thoughts to keep himself alert within his trance. In a corner of his mind, he moved as a swamp puma—itchy, panting, looking up at a long-shouldered man whose face was stained with an iridescent blueblackness.

Light...

The air brightened with psychic energy, and the magnar stopped chanting and dropped his hands into his lap. The psynergy radiated from the dark-faced stranger.

When the man placed his callused hand on the puma’s head, Bonescrolls felt the stranger’s life—hot and electric as blood—and saw everything about him, from his lovecursed childhood in McClure through the indignities that had cut him into a trained killer. But the spectral magnetism around him came from deeper.

Behind those downslanting eyes, the mindark opened rapidly into the luminous, terrible knowing of a voor soul. An icy-blond child, naked, with skin white as stone and colorless eyes, appeared for an instant and then dissolved into a windrush of sparks. Sight phased to a vista of galactic vapors and starchained darkness, a chasm so vivid that Bonescrolls startled back into his own body.

His legs kicked out with a lurch of dreamfalling, and he sat up bluntly. He was alone again in his rocktower, a dawn breeze lolling through the windowholes, a sprawl of Serbota blankets tangled beneath him. He put his hands to his ears to feel that he was awake, and even though he heard his life knocking inside him, he felt dreampaced. That voor was strong.

Far away, Bonescrolls sensed the swamp puma circling restlessly, and he soultouched it with the spirit music always lofting at the back of his mind. The animal calmed instantly, and its complaisance steadied him, easing the strength back into his eyes.

This body had gotten old, he acknowledged to himself, quaking awkwardly to his feet. He leaned momentarily against the curved sill of a rockwindow, watching the slow sea of the desert shimmer, feeling the depth-terror he had just known pulsing in his chest. Who was this Massebôth soldier that he could carry such a voor?

Kagan—Sumner Kagan, the man’s name whispered in his mind, and with it came more understanding than he could hold in the tight cell of his brain:

Kagan was the eth.

That thought alone, so huge, forced the magnar to walk a long slow circle through the earth-packed studio to comprehend what was happening.

The eth embodied the fear-shadow of the Delph. An acausal double, a synchronous mirrorself, he echoed the godmind returning from the future, as unconscious of his power as the Delph was aware. The godmind had no influence over the eth: if they were ever to meet, they would simply be two men facing each other—and that had always been too great a threat to the Delph. Until now, every eth-manifestation had been hunted down and destroyed by the Delph’s minions. So how had this one survived?

The answer came in a tremolo of excitement. The voors! The Delph had routinely killed off the best voors for centuries in a vain attempt to exclude other godminds from the planet. The voors needed their godminds to remember their ancestral wanderings and their destination. Naturally, they would use the Delph’s shadowself against him.

Voor and eth—a deadly alliance, Bonescrolls marveled, passing through a slanted arch and leaning into a rock incline that led toward the passionate sunlight at the top of the butte.

Deadly...The thought wavered in him with the foreknowing of his own death. He would die soon. The nightmare visions intensified. For two centuries, he had carried when and how in the meat of his heart. A one-eyed man with a scarred face and a silver-gold sword would kill him at the end of the next solar year. He had lived the killing in dreams: the raised sword, the dark enraged face, and then a splatter of hurting bright light opening into a darkness forever in silence.

The magnar stopped in the mouth of the cave, where the loud sunlight sang back into shadow. He could see far across the broken body of Skylonda Aptos to where the cordillera of the world’s edge burst into the sky. Six hundred million years of geography stared back at him from the striated rock pinnacles. At his feet, the wind had cut sharply into the schist, revealing spiral patterns of marine fossils. He knelt down and touched the color-margin where 165 million years ago the life of an ocean had ended. He picked up a stone and etched his own spiral over the exposed sediment.

Across the deadland, distant cliffs the color of sulfur watched mindlessly. A sentimental thought began close to him and then moved on, continuing somewhere deeper: This world is the rim of an abyss...

Deep in the sky, a hawk drifted through a slow whirlpool pattern, and Bonescrolls watched it without seeing. He dwelt on Kagan—the eth.

The lusk muddled Kagan’s clarity and strained his bodylight. Any hope of the voor using this eth against the Delph demanded Kagan’s body rest and his mind calm down. At last, Bonescrolls understood why he had known the Delph—why he had survived twelve centuries in this haunted world. This is why.

The old man sat back against the warm stone and closed his eyes. To be here for the eth. To serve. The puma’s lifestrength flexed in him, and the intuitive certainty of his mission pulsed with his breathing.

He would help the eth, he decided with quiet conviction. Though it meant that he must surrender to his deathvision, that a year from now he would be gnawbones, the rightness of his decision shone in him like sunlight.

***

With lucid peace, Sumner accompanied the distorts to Bonescrolls’ cliffdwelling. Along the way, Drift chanted about four warriors lost in the world, each step foreordained as stars, leaving nothing real behind them. And though the words sounded melancholy, the tempo drove a lively rhythm and matched the strong cadence of their walk.

Ardent Fang hung close to Kagan, impressed by his easy gait and the wholeness of his body. As they left the crater highlands, he looked about for the tracks Sumner had made during his approach. He found none. And when he asked him about that, Kagan explained how he had walked the hot, crumbling rim of an exploded cinder cone to reach the outcrops without disturbing the ash. The timbre of his voice and the expressions of his face enthralled Ardent Fang. The man spoke with simple directnes—without the elaborate face gestures and maskings common among distorts.

That they could communicate at all amazed Sumner, for they spoke different languages. Magically they understood each other, just as, magically, his voor-bondage had ended. Somehow it related to the black and silver puma sliding from the shade of one scarp to the next. He called to it with his thoughts, and it stopped and stared back at him several times, but gave no other response.

Sumner’s mind, silent and motionless, mimed the land. Only the joy of his freedom pulsed and turned in him. He knew from what the distorts said that he would understand nothing until he met the magnar, so he stayed with his selfscan.

Out of a wine-dark afternoon sky, they arrived at their destination. The swamp puma curled up on a shadowed ledge, and Drift guided them through the mazy corridors to Bonescrolls’ abode.

The sunshafted dwelling fluttered with birds, twitching and jittering on the rock shelves and the ledges around the windholes. A carnival-beaked macaw clapped up toward a higher perch in the domed ceiling. Green parakeets spurted in one opening and out another.

Bonescrolls sat on his straw mat before a wide window-oval, its sill streaked with birds’ droppings. He smiled, revealing big, square teeth, and waved them closer. He wore a red burnoose and hide trousers netted with wear. Between his bare feet, a tattered fiber sack slumped. “Heroes of the Serbota, Sumner Kagan—shay!” He gestured for them to sit.

The three wanderers sat on the ground before him, and though the old man smiled, a thin look in his eyes urged them to keep their silence. Ardent Fang and Sumner thought that look showed weariness; only Drift recognized it for tedium. How often in the dreamtime had the magnar sat through this meeting?

Only a seer would know, Drift heard the old man’s voice in its head. It faced the magnar and caught a sly wink. Suddenly, the present went motionless, stony, filled with a desert odor of baked bricks. Drift felt itself sliding out of its body, and it relaxed. It knew what was happening.

In the thick heat, breathing labored against adamant thirst. Yet—peacefully lying here, waiting for the strength to return, Drift felt itself floating within the awareness of the swamp puma, staring out from beneath heavy lids at a landscape of whirlpool heat where each rock cut vision into jewel-points.

All at once, Drift snapped alert inside the magnar. It was night, or something like, for though the sky burned a vivid blue, the light gradually turned green as before a storm or during an eclipse. The magnar knelt in a plain of jagged stone, and Drift’s knees ached against fists of stone, its fingers traced spirals in the pale, chalky dust. The spiral doodles held its attention rigidly—

Drift curled deep into the dreamtime. As usual, fear bloomed, overcome by curiosity. It calmed itself and let the vision unwind.

The magnar, kneeling among the stones, staring at distant cliffs the color of sulfur, stood, and it began to walk toward a field of windsmoothed rocks white as bones, an ossuary it felt it would never cross. The sky revolved with whirlpool energies: This world is the rim of an abyss, and I’m circling closer. If only I were an animal. Then I could face the emptiness with a surer instinct...

A bird squawked, and Drift’s alertness snapped back to itself. Rose wine chuckled out of a slender-throated jug into a glazed cup. The wine ran over the cup and became fire that blazed blindingly hot. Drift squinted into the glare and saw Bonescrolls sprawled on his back, face a deathmask, waxy and staring. Notes from a devil harp, soft and subtle, reflected off the walls, whined down to a dirge, wheeling softer and softer —

A guffaw burst the silence, and Drift’s vision cleared.

Bonescrolls laughed so hard he made no sound, his hands pressing his ribs. Ardent Fang, too, yukked, and the sight of his savage face smeared with mirth and crawling with tears pierced Drift’s confusion. He whistle-sighed with joy and relief and an awestruck humiliation. He had missed some joke during his vision, but that seemed not to matter. Energies circled swiftly between it and the magnar.

“Bonescrolls is why the Serbota is a tribe of ecstasy,” Ardent Fang spoke. “He taught our ancestors how to laugh.”

Drift rocked its queer-shaped head side to side, relieved to be out of the dreamtime yet still sensing the greening of the light, the powers drawing in, tightening. Eerie.

“Between here and the dust,” Bonescrolls said, wiping his eyes with his sleeve, “joy is all we have.” He glanced at Drift, his horseface flushed with laughter.

The seer experienced a rush of dizziness, heard the dirge music again, and clenched its mind. Bonescrolls winked and looked away.

Sumner watched the old man and the short distort relate, and a ball of energy tightened in his belly while shaggy, maniac joy trembled inside him. Too much power.

“My friends are fascinated by you,” Bonescrolls addressed Sumner in perfect Massel. “You are the first undistorted human they have seen. Perhaps you will explain to them why you are here, in so empty a place.”

Sumner shrugged. He told them a little about the Rangers, his assignment in Laguna, and the voor mummy that had erupted in his face. He spoke about the mad sounds that sheared his nerves outside selfscan.

Ardent Fang nodded energetically. “It’s terrible, magnar. When we crossed with him, the seer and I knew pain and terror greater than all the wounds of the jungle.”

Bonescrolls nodded with understanding and smiled broadly. Bronze sunlight flared in his white hair. He brought four clay mugs out from behind him, each ringed with glazed, festive colors. “I propose a toast to your freedom, Kagan.”

“Am I free?” Though he heard nothing but the world around him, Sumner sensed the voor still within.

“If you’re not free, the magnar will free you,” Ardent Fang assured.

Fang—Drift shook its head. The strangeness had passed, displaced by a ponderous sense of redundancy. All this had happened before.

“All is well, Drift.” Bonescrolls lifted the fiber sack and removed a slender-throated jug. He filled a cup with wine red and smoky as dusk. “Ardent Fang is right. You are not free yet, Kagan, but if you can trust me, I can help you.”

“How?”

Bonescrolls’ animal-calm eyes gleamed with laughter as he filled the other cups and handed them around. “A toast,” he grinned. “To freedom.”

“To the Powers,” Ardent Fang added.

To the living, Drift followed.

Sumner lifted his mug and glanced his lip with the wine. The liquid kiss cooled his flesh and charged his sinuses with a heady bouquet. After the others had drunk, he took a sip and followed the hot, sapid course of the wine to his belly. “Can you help me?” he asked Bonescrolls.

The old man nodded and noisily smacked his lips. “Rose-hip wine mixed with thornberry juice. A poignant combination, don’t you think?”

Ardent Fang agreed boisterously and refilled his cup.

“What do I have to do?” Sumner asked.

Bonescrolls placed his cup on the ground and stopped smiling. His flared eyebrows drew together. “If you truly want to be free of this voor and if you can trust me, I will help you.”

“I want nothing more than to have my mind back. And I would like to trust you.”

Bonescrolls’ long, thick-nosed face lit up, and his eyes crinkled happily again. “Fine. Then you will be free.”

“But what do I have to do?”

“Serve me without question for a solar year.”

Sumner sat back, and his face hardened. “I can’t do that. I’m a ranger. I’ve signed an oath of fealty.”

Bonescrolls barked a laugh. He looked at Ardent Fang and Drift with a merry expression. “He’s tighter than a coyote’s asshole.”

Drift covered its head with its hands, and Ardent Fang rolled to his back in a fit of explosive laughter.

“You want to be a ranger?” Bonescrolls shook his head with mock sadness. “Then you are going to be one crazy ranger.”

“Crazeeeeee!” Ardent Fang whined, rolling to his side. He took Sumner’s arm and looked up at him with moist, red eyes. “Kagan, don’t he stupid. That voor inside you is going to break your mind. You don’t want that.”

Sumner refused to meet the tribesman’s gaze. He stared down at his hands: powerful, thick and sinewy, but helpless against the deep pain that twisted him. A clear head had never seemed so important. His contemplation felt muscular and direct, and he realized that if he were deprived of it again, if he had to prowl the wastes with no more wit than a lizard, not knowing where his sleep would take him, he would kill himself.

Sumner looked up at Bonescrolls. The magnar smiled benignly, nodded his head once, and Sumner reached up to the cobra insignia pinned to his lapel and tore it off.

Bonescrolls and Ardent Fang whooped and laughed, and the lupine tribesman slapped Sumner’s back. “Don’t worry, Kagan,” Ardent Fang gusted. “The magnar is wise. He’ll use you well.”

Drift whistled and chirped, and a flare of small birds streamed across the chamber. You made the right decision, warrior.

“Ah, I’m glad you both agree.” Bonescrolls refilled Ardent Fang’s cup. “My servant will need allies. After you rest tonight, I want you to take him back to Miramol with you. He shall live and work there until you hear from me.” He leaned forward and took the cobra insignia out of Sumner’s hand. “You have had too much to hold, young brother—too much.” His face sad and heavy, he added, “But you can relax now. I’m going to take it all from you.” He popped the silver cobra in his mouth and swallowed it.

Ardent Fang lurched into laughter and kicked his legs in the air. “Crazeeeeee!”

Sumner closed his eyes. At least the pain had gone. Silence ranged deep within. The lusk was over.

A burst of sound louder than Ardent Fang’s laughter snapped his lids open: all the birds wheeling around the cavern in a clamor of feathers winged out the window-oval behind Bonescrolls and vanished into a sky of stilled, pink-lit clouds.

“My witnesses,” the magnar chuckled.

***

Skyfires flimmered over the dunes, and a toothed moon hung between two buttes. Corby opened his eyes and looked about, alone in a dark cavern. Above him, the Goat nebula stared down, fixed as an insect eye.

He wobbled to his feet, the squawking insistence of the voor dead narrowing to a thin whine. With one hand on the cool rock wall to guide him, he staggered several steps and stopped. A man-shadow stood still as stone against the creased wall. The shadow stepped forward, and Corby pressed his fingers hard against the rock to keep from falling. The man had no kha.

Slim light from the skyfires limned a long, age-thickened face. Bonescrolls. Sumner’s memories of him flitted through Corby’s mind. But this Bonescrolls was not smiling.

“Sit down, voor.”

Corby bristled at the command in the old man’s voice. He forced energy into his muscles and swung forward to push the magnar out of his way. Bonescrolls, with lithe quickness, sidestepped, spun Corby about, and knocked his legs out from under him.

Sprawled against the cavern wall, the voor gathered his inner strength and drove the psynergy out from his body like a blow. Blue static fuzzed around Bonescrolls’ head and throat and then cooled thick red in his chest before draining purple down his legs into the earth.

“You can’t hurt me, voor. Be still.” Corby’s effort had loosened his hold on the moment. Blaring howls vibrated his skull, and for a moment he felt as if he were blurring out of his body.

“Your lusk is weak.” Bonescrolls sat beside him on a jut of rock, eyepits dark. “By what right are you in the body of this man?”

Everything ran loose. Who was this howlie? Corby could see the old man’s kha now: small as a seed and dense as rock—a green seed suspended within the cloud of the man’s abdomen. Staring at it, he gazed through a long tunnel. At the far end, shapes moved—dark, thick-haired hominids shaping clay with their hands...Redoubled cries from the voor dead churned a vortex, scrambling his thoughts.

“Answer me, voor! By what right?”

The power in the magnar’s voice quelled the grievous uproar in his head. Corby steadied himself. His lips lolled loosely and trembled as his mind formed thoughts.

“Don’t send,” Bonescrolls ordered. “Talk to me like a howlie. Use the body you dare to steal. Tell me! By what right do you claim this flesh?”

Corby’s lips winced, and sounds clumped in his tight throat. With tremendous effort, he forced breath into sounds: “Words-don’t-carry-the-right-I-feel.”

Bonescrolls’ graven face looked lichenous in the slender light. “The world is feeling. Each being lives in its own world. Your people have always respected that.”

Corby’s throat pulsed as his sagging mouth tightened to speak: “I-am-my-people.”

“And Kagan is his people, as I am mine.”

Corby’s body twitched as his power returned, though still his strength did not quite fit his muscles.

“We howlies have a riddle,” the magnar went on. He chanted:

“The stars baked my bones,

The oceans culled my blood,

And the forests shaped my lungs.

Who am I?

“The answer is ‘Human.’ We are as much children of the cosmos as any voor. You have no authority to take this body.”

Corby whispered, lips barely moving: “Words-do-not-carry.”

Bonescrolls’ face darkened. “Then listen closely to what these words carry: I can drive you out of that body. I have the craft and the power. And I will use them, unless you can convince me otherwise.”

The voor’s bald gaze in the slow-rending starlight lent the appearance of a corpse. “My-purpose-is-to-destroy-the-Delph.”

Bonescrolls sat back and nodded once with satisfaction. “Thank you for telling me the truth, voor. I know this is the body of the eth—the Delph’s doomself. And I have no objection to an alliance between eth and voors to end the reign of a godmind. The Delph is my enemy, as well. Once I tried to destroy him—and he proved far too powerful. Kagan must be carefully prepared.”

“The-Delph-kills-voors.” Corby’s blind stare sharpened. “He-destroyed-my-body.”

“And now you will destroy this body trying to get back at him.” Bonescrolls shook his head. “The pain must stop somewhere.”

The Delph is weak now, Corby sent. Soon he will sleep for an aeon. And when he wakes he will be many times stronger. I must stop him now, for both of our peoples.

Bonescrolls remained silent, void of thoughts. Then: “It is all dreaming. Whether you try to kill him or not is not my decision. Kagan must decide, for this pits his life against the Delph’s.”

He is the father of my body.

“Even so. This must be his decision. You must tell him.”

Not now.

“No—he is too far from himself now. And besides, I have need of him.”

He turned his face to the ritual moon and the haze of cosmic lights. “But after a year, you will have to speak with him. Until then, you must in no way interfere with his life. If you do, I will drive you from this body.”

Corby fell silent. The thought of a year spent mindlessly floating in Iz stupefied him. Yet what choice did he have? There could he no struggle with this man. To survive—for the brood’s sake-he would have to go deep into the body and keep a strong silence.

Already he had begun to fade into the roaring, radiant stream of Iz, buoyed by immense forces that in his human brain seemed terrible and incoherent; a grueling din of screams and goblin mutterings. A great depth opened all around him. Flares of scorching white light gyrated to pulsing cries.

Bonescrolls’ eyeglints fixed him in the moment, and one last time before succumbing to the draw of whistling energy, Corby reached out: This is a universe of boundless space, howlie. Matter and energy are rare and small. For us in this vast emptiness, even dreams are real.

Bonescrolls felt the voor-psynergy dim and vanish. It happened so quickly that when Sumner’s body began to breathe with the depth and slowness of sleep, the magnar still leaned forward, watching Corby’s purple kha waver in the night shadows. The voor had gone. Outside, the single bark of a desert fox echoed over the dunes, shrill as moonlight.

***

Ardent Fang, anxious to get Sumner to Miramol so that he could show off the burly desert-colored warrior they had found in the wastes, led the way west among ghosts of water: parched sinkwells and long running curves of vanished riverbeds where the sun’s heat glimmered like liquid.

Drift chanted solemn and slow:

Weird how time is always sliding east.

Weird that time should move at all.

The seer withdrew into the Road. The power-channel it had chosen to follow sizzled beneath its feet and itched up its spine with information about other creatures that had crossed this way. Bonescrolls’ deep, slow, and quiet psynergy shone there. At noon, the né spotted puma pug marks in a sandbed and knew that Bonescrolls had gone on ahead of them. Bending over the spoor, Drift swayed dizzily. Dirge music whispered, flames spit, and a one-eyed man came forward with a curved blade in his hands.

Ardent Fang’s muscular embrace brought Drift out of its glide. It rocked briefly in the tribesman’s arms, its eyes seeing charred bone and blackened flesh, grease and ash in the mess of a dead fire.

“The seer’s only half alive in this world,” Ardent Fang explained to Sumner. “Half its life belongs to the deep dark.”

When Drift revived, it made no comment about its experience. It felt out the Road and continued their trek. In its heart, though, trouble stirred. Bonescrolls had told it twice, as clearly as he could, that he was going to die. But that was too ponderous a thought to contemplate. Thinking about the one-eyed swordsman, Drift felt a wind sound blow through its head and dirge piping begin again. Drift ignored Ardent Fang’s questions and withdrew once more into the Road.

Sumner held himself in selfscan and did not try to understand the two distorts leading him. The lusk had left him wary and shaken. For the first time since arriving in Skylonda Aptos, he had time to reflect, and he didn’t know where to begin. The Rangers...Bonescrolls...distorts...Happy to be whole again, he nevertheless felt apprehensive about where he headed and how the magnar would use him. All that he knew with certainty was that he would have to serve to be free.

***

Everybody appeared twisted, bent, or muddled in some way: hunchbacked, gibbon-armed, muzzle-faced. But all of them, even the legless ones on wheeled platforms and the scabious ones with glossy raw faces, laughed with sincerity. All brightly attired, the people displayed feather-rimmed leather caps, floral robes, and pants of bushbuck skins. The women wore ancient shell amulets, metal arm coils, and cobra-head bracelets. Naked children crouched in baobab trees along the boulevard, their flesh the color of wood.

Laugh, Kagan, or you will insult the people, Drift warned.

Ardent Fang howled with joy, his snout-lips pulled back in a grimace that could have been a snarl except for the happy tears in his eyes.

Sumner grinned and chuckled.

Louder, or they will believe you are dissatisfied.

Sumner forced a few crude laughs, and then Drift reached up and grabbed the back of his neck. Hot, deep-felt jocularity percolated up from his bowels, and he guffawed and swagged with laughter. The crowd responded with hoots and whistles, and when Sumner shouted a gleeful monkey-call, they surged forward and swept the three wanderers off their feet.

Twice the crowd carried them around Miramol, through the warrior’s-walk of overreaching boar-ribs, across the central square of icy mist-springs, up the hill to the curving flower-crowded lanes of the né dwellings, and down again past the blue moss-banks of the river. They lowered the three before the turquoise-studded mudhole of the Mother’s Barrow.

Old women in black robes with collapsed faces and alert laughing eyes greeted them. The Mothers circled Sumner, awed by his size and wholeness. They plucked at his arms and thighs, poked his ribs, pressed fingertips against his stomach, measured the span of his shoulders with their hands, and laughed incessantly. The burn marks on his face and neck particularly impressed them, and all had to touch his face at least once. Then one of them called out to the crowd in a gleeful voice, and the celebration began.

For three days and nights, the riverain forest jangled with the festal sounds of kettledrums, wood clappers, harps, flutes and frenzied laughter. The dirt streets of Miramol jammed with frolicking distorts, swirling together in ritual dances and processions.

They carried Sumner to a large, bamboo-rafted ceremonial hall. On the way, women and men tussled with each other to touch him and toss petals and blossoms in his lap. Seated on a tortoiseshell throne flanked by huge scarlet ferns and arrays of purple and black fronds, he received a continuous offering of foods: slit-bellied trout stuffed with shelled nuts, leaf pouches of monkey stew, crisped snake cubes speared on thin sweet roots, spicy bean paste in blossom cups, and ornate jugs of wine and honey beer.

Sumner sampled everything and tried to laugh at everybody that served him a new dish, though he often succeeded only in gagging on his food. When his glazed eyes and slack expression made it obvious that he could eat no more, Drift escorted him out of the feeding hall. They avoided the festivity-crowded main roads and followed the dark back lanes to the silverwood né lodges. There the festivities ended.

In the clouded, flower-heavy air of a small moss garden, Drift told Sumner the history of the Serbota. It skipped the origin myths and the spirit tales and began with the finding of the Road.

Dog Hunger found the Road. He was a seer or what passed for a seer in those days—he was gendered, you understand, so his clarity was weak. Yet it was strong enough to lead him through the wastes to where no one had gone before, because the land was the sun’s lair.

How did he find himself so far from the tribe? That’s a long story, and I can see you’re weary. Let me tell you only this: The Serbota have always been a gentle people. Always we retreated from our enemies until, finally, there was no place else to run. We were pushed right into the desert and left there to die.

Dog Hunger, who was named that because he never had a full meal in his life, wandered off, like many others had before him, to die where the sun would witness his passing and perhaps, out of pity, accept his spirit. The early people believed such nonsense. Anyway, he didn’t die. Instead, his power led him deep into the wastes, and he became the first to meet the magnar.

Well, when the magnar heard of our plight, he came personally, and for many years he was our tribal leader. He taught us the ways of the riverain forest and the desert so that we could eat again and make houses and, if necessary, kill to protect ourselves. We became like any creature of the forest. But most importantly, he showed us how to be different from the forest creatures by doing what no animal can do—laugh. We learned to laugh at everything, even our enemies-which was a wise thing. Our enemies thought we had become spirit-possessed. Suddenly we had well-trained warriors who fought using the strategies of jungle beasts and who laughed as they killed and even as they died. Now we have no enemies. And yet we still have laughter—and the né have life.

You see, before the magnar came, the Mothers killed all infants born without gender. The magnar stopped that. Not with force but with cunning. He saw that the Mothers were superstitious, and so he told them that their deity, Paseq the Divider who separates night from day and man from woman, was itself without gender. And so we are allowed to live, because it is believed we are the image of Paseq.

The né have done much for the Serbota. Our seers are much clearer than any gendered seer, and though we are not as loud in our laughter as the others, neither are we as cruel in our anger. We keep to ourselves, for we have no other family. And yet we are happy. For isn’t that what it means to be human?

***

The Serbota would have celebrated Sumner’s arrival for a full week, but on the fourth day the monsoons began. Sumner watched in amazement as Miramol transformed from forest village into river town. The vegetable fields were quickly harvested and all the huts dismantled except for the silverwood lodges located, like the Mother’s Barrow, on precious high ground.

With the first lull in the rains, the river hunters unsheathed their dugouts and began their work. Each canoe had elaborately carved gunwales done in the style of their owners. Ardent Fang’s displayed a boar’s head with curved tusks. Only men with boats received the Mothers’ blessing to hunt, and Sumner stayed behind to build his own dugout.

Drift found him late in the afternoon at the dry edge of the cloud forest among giant violets and mossy tree limbs. He bent over a log, hollowing it with a stone adze, his head and shoulders quilted with needles of gold light. Drift helped him steady the log. Bonescrolls sent a message for you last night.

Sumner put down his adze and squinted into the cloud-driven light. Rain arrived with nightfall. He looked at the seer, his vague eyebrows raised in a question.

He orders you to obey the Mothers.

Sumner nodded and picked up his adze. “Tell me about the Mothers.”

It’s best I don’t, for I have no love of them.

“Tell me anyway.”

They’re the tribe leaders. They decide who will hunt, who will farm or fish, and who will breed. All women must obey them without question until they bear a gendered child that survives the puberty rites.

“And then?”

Then they become one of the Mothers.

“Why do you hate them?”

They despise né. It’s only because of the magnar that they tolerate us. And besides, they’re polluted with superstition...

“Why then does the magnar order me to obey them?”

Drift shook its round head. There’s no second-guessing the magnar. He’s as unknowable as the clouds.

***

At night, nulling toward sleep in a tree hammock, Sumner cherished his freedom from the voor. He listened to rain creaking in the jungle, heard a child crying, and smelled the languor of a dampened bonfire. Not a squirm of voor noise touched him. Gazing into the darkness of the crayoned silhouette of trees, his night-vision opened clearly, without the listlessness of the lusk.

“Bonescrolls. “ He said the name just loud enough to feel it in his throat. The sound calmed him, and he closed his eyes, feeling his deepest muscles relaxing, his whole being easing up, more complete for what it had lost.

***

Sumner’s dugout took three days to complete, most of the work done in the animal-skin shelter of a tree dwelling while the rains slashed through the jungles. At the first letup, he showed it to Ardent Fang. The tribesman studied it carefully, marveling at the sleekness of its line and jealous of how high it rode in the water. But it had no carvings on its prow, and he suggested that Sumner give it a spirit.

One of the né, a master of wood, loaned him some tools. Sumner, known as Lotus Face because of his burns, carved lotus petals on the gunwales. The first day he went out, he speared a mature, full-flanked tapir. He presented it to the né woodmaster when he returned his tools, which caused a stir in the village. All first catches traditionally belonged to the Mothers.

The next day, the Mothers sent for him. Three of them sat on round leather-polished stones beneath a fronded rain-canopy. Rain drummed loudly, and Sumner couldn’t hear their voices. They wore black shapeless shifts, and their gray fog hair covered most of their shrunken features. One of them had only one eye. Another had silver scales at the corners of her mouth and eyes. The third one, rigidly silent, stared only at his genitals.

They’re ordering you to give up your dugout, Drift sent, standing behind him.

“Why?” Sumner snapped, and one of the women shrieked so loud his ears rang.

You’re not to speak in their presence unless questioned. Drift thought of fields of scarlet larkspur and their sweet, moribund redolence until he saw Sumner’s jaw stop throbbing.

The Mothers conferred for a moment. Then: They say you must give your dugout to them. You won’t be needing it anymore. Instead, you’re to go with Ardent Fang to the breeding stables. If you perform well there, your dugout and the right to hunt may be returned to you.

Sumner stared vigorously upward until the Mothers departed.

***

All the women in the breeding stable awaited him naked except for bright hair-wraps and yellow dots meticulously painted over their ovaries. In the crinkled lantern-light, Ardent Fang moved with familiarity. He breathed the dark spicy odors without notice, and laughed as Sumner hesitated at the top of the ramp.

With one hand, he pulled at Sumner’s arm, and with the other he gestured at the tiers of mating stalls. The stable, a massive hive of wooden cubicles, each with a young female writhing lewdly before it, owed its harmony to brown-garbed matrons, elderly women who had never borne an acceptable child. They patrolled the aisles and stairways, tending to the young women’s needs and encouraging provocative postures.

Even this frail light could not hide the aberrations that marked these women as distorts: swollen foreheads, foreshortened or distended limbs, scaled flesh, horned shoulders, snouted faces. Sumner, too disgusted to look, stood hopelessly at the head of the ramp until one of the matrons, a slight woman with knobbed hands and leathery lips, guided him to a stall with a blue lantern.

The girl sprawled there on a tangle of blankets had a lithe, voluptuous body, clean and narrow as light, legs splayed, hips gyrating, dark cloud of mons hair glistening. But her face exhibited a crude patchwork of faces sewn into an emotionless mask. Sumner wanted to look away, but the eyes within the bonepits held him, alive and electrical, beckoning him, pleading.

The matron stepped past Sumner and moved to place a blanket over the girl’s face. Sumner waved her out. He focused on the feathery grain of wood glazed with blue lantern-light and slid into selfscan. He looked at the girl and observed her without emotion—saw her as creatures see each other. In the twisted and strangely darkened face, he fixed on the life he found there. The sharp sexual odor of the place became suddenly salient, and he removed his clothes. He let the erotic odors and the woman-softness of the girl’s body move him, and he rutted with her without emotion, riding his body to a quick climax.

Ardent Fang watched Sumner’s performance with interest. Pleased that such an outstanding hunter and woodworker proved a lousy lover, the breeder attentively analyzed why: though endowed with a member of a good size, indeed formidable, Lotus Face lacked style, relying exclusively on crude, wholly primitive rutting rhythms. If they had shared a language, he would have been glad to enlighten his inexperienced associate. As it was, Lotus Face actually seemed pleased with himself to have finished so quickly. Ardent Fang shrugged, Strange ways, and went off to start his rounds.

***

Sumner serviced three women a day for several weeks. He preferred to finish his mating chores early in the day so that he had time to fish. Fishing was the only occupation the Mothers allowed him, and he had a favorite angling perch at one end of a broad, parklike glade. There, at the sedgy rim of the brown river, he lazily trawled for trout.

The Serbota hunters who stalked the swollen river would not talk with him now that the Mothers had taken away his dugout. Only the children and the né tolerated his presence. The né were particularly receptive to him, and they set aside a room for him in one of their lodges. But Sumner never felt at ease among them. Though generous to a fault and anxious to share the secrets of their trades with him, they wore perpetually dour expressions. Their sadness ran deep, rooted in genderless lives without the purpose of family. Sumner preferred to be alone.

Often, trawling the deep pools created by fallen trees, far up the river, he spotted his dugout sliding over the water, light as a leaf. Each time someone different occupied it, and each time they pretended not to see him. Not anger but pride filled him at the sight of his canoe, and he was happy it had no one owner. In a way, he retained ownership and fostered the hope that he would get it back.

Toward the end of his second month in Miramol, Sumner met with Bonescrolls again. While fishing, he had dropped a grasshopper into a deep marly channel among weeds, and a trout had struck immediately. He hooked it and sloshed backwards in the current when he sensed them.

Two voors, black hoods thrown back, their searchless, vague eyes fixed on him, appeared behind him, advancing quickly. Both had black-crusted lizard faces, and staring at them, Sumner felt a dull chill ice across his back. He hesitated only an instant, but in that moment one of the voors snarled its lips and revealed a tiny blowgun clenched between its teeth. The dart stung the side of his neck as he began an evasive roll.

With horrible reptile slowness, he tumbled to his back, curled his legs in, and swung to his belly. The toxin they had hit him with turned his muscles to slag, and as he crumbled he watched the two voors crouch over him. One said something insistently: “Dai Bodatta!”

A swell of pain bulged in his throat and piled downward, dragging him into unconsciousness. He struggled, squinting through gusty lights of green-silver. The voors took his arms, and they lugged him over the ground. He felt like wet sand. He felt like wood.

The air trembled, and a roar crashed through the glade so loud that Sumner’s chest tightened. The bush ahead of them parted, and a silver-blue puma burst into the clearing, yellow pupils two jets of flame. It crouched before them, all its heavy muscles bunched tightly below the mad pulse of its throat.

The voors dropped Sumner’s arms and backstepped, turned and fled, black cowls fluttering like wings at the forest’s edge. Then the suspenseful musk of the big cat filled his sinuses as its shadow slouched over him.

The black-bellied puma still lay beside him when he woke to a scalding headache. The voors want you for their own purposes, Drift explained, one hand on the puma’s head. The magnar thinks you should leave Miramol for a while and stay with him in the desert.

Sumner sat silent for a moment, feeling his life floating inside him. He would be happy to leave Miramol. And he wanted to meet again this being that could command voors and animals. He looked at the puma, and the big cat stared back keenly, its green eyes tricked with reflections.

“I’ll go now,” he said, pulling himself upright against the gravity of the drug.

Now? The né clicked its eyes. It listened to the humming of Sumner’s mind and perceived that he remembered the desert crossing they had done together. He knew the route through the wasteland to the magnar. This amazed the né, for even seers usually needed several crossings to learn the way. Shouldn’t you rest?

“I’ve been resting for weeks.” He watched as the puma ambled into the forest. “And the voors want me now. It’ll be harder for them to surprise me in the desert.”

We’ll get you canteens and strider-sandals at the lodges.

“I don’t need them.”

Drift stared and recognized that this was true. Take this, then. It held out the né walking stick that it carried.

Sumner smiled and took the tall stick. “You found me in the desert, remember? Don’t worry.”

The né’s eyes starshined. It’s not you I am truly afraid for. It’s the magnar. I’ve seen death around him.

Sumner hefted the walking stick and turned away from the river and the né. “I’m sworn to serve Bonescrolls. I’ll watch after him.”

Drift accompanied him to where the lateritic silt of the wastes began, and it left him there with a traditional chant.

We are made of distances.

We are constantly going further,

Alone and predestined,

Learning slowly

That stopping is not arriving.

Alone in the desert, far out of earshot, Sumner howled with happiness and let his feelings tumble into words: “Idiot distorts! I’m alive in your hell! I’m never going to die!” He screamed the last word, and the mania in his voice echoed back at him. He had become strange living with distorts, sharing his body with the weird women—

He moved at a loping gait over the broken stones of the desert, grateful to be moving and not thinking. Life wasn’t shit. Life was a stream of love, of feeling and thought, lascivious in its brevity. He laughed, and his joy opened so intensely it burned in his throat.

Nightfall brought him to a place of scum-froth and cracked soda. He sat on a mudbank encrusted with alkali and watched the skyfires bristle.

A yellow spark flashed beneath the arch of a dolmen, and a flame spurted and crackled in dry wood. Bonescrolls appeared, hunched over a flame-twitching stack of twigs. His long idol face grinned benevolently. He motioned Sumner to join him and produced a blackened skillet and four green-white snaky eggs. “Hungry?”

Sumner went over to the archrock, cleared a space with his walking stick, and sat. His mind squirmed with questions: how had the magnar found him—why—but he ignored them and urged himself into selfscan.

“That’s right,” Bonescrolls said. “Keep your thoughts quiet. That’s a good beginning.” He held the skillet over the fire and handed two of the eggs to Sumner. From a thigh-pouch, the magnar produced a handful of small scallions and yellow peppers. The two men cooked and ate in silence.

After they finished, Bonescrolls belched loudly and leaned forward. “Listen, young brother, this selfscan you’ve mastered, it’s a very good way to sit quietly for a short time, but after a while it gets damn noisy.”

A coyote barked, its vagrantly sorrowing cry wavering across the desert.

Sumner frowned querulously. “What do you mean?” Bonescrolls hushed him with a wave of his hand. “Listen.”

The coyote cried again, barking at its own echo. The call, thin and strung-out, touched Sumner with sadness.

A moment passed, and the magnar smiled and scratched his ear. “That coyote’s just like you,” he stated. “It hasn’t found its place, either.” He bent closer so that Sumner could see his eyes, dark and fixed. “We look from inside our bodies. Like the coyote, we think we’re inside our bodies. What is that animal crying to?” With his eyes, he pointed up to where a wilted moon slid through the clouds. “We think we’re inside our bodies, but part of us is up there too. How lonely that part of us is!”

Sumner gazed sullenly at the old man, feeling dark and indifferent, part of the night.

“You and the coyote, you both think you have somewhere to go.” Bonescrolls’ face hung in the darkness, smiling a mysterious, melancholy smile. “But the world is feeling, Kagan. There’s nothing else. Really—there’s nothing else. But nothing can be anything, and so we think we have places to go.” The magnar’s bristly eyebrows touched in the space over his nose. “Psynergy follows thought. Stop thinking about not-thinking. Become consciousness itself—become One Mind.”

Sumner did not understand Bonescrolls, and he could no longer hold himself still. “What do you want with me, magnar?”

“All right, young brother.” The magnar patted Sumner’s knee with the gruff affection of a man with his dog. “Let me tell you one more thing. If you want to find a good place to be, no place you find will be good enough. But if you let it all go, if you really empty your head, then any place you are is right. And, even more wonderful, you can be any place at all—even the moon!” He slapped Sumner’s knee and laughed, but Sumner only watched him thoughtfully, trying to gauge the old man’s sanity.

Laughter drained from Bonescrolls’ face, and he rubbed his legs wearily. “Words!” he spit. “Nonsense. I might as well be talking to a coyote.” He reached into the leather coverlet he wore and produced a sheaf of small envelopes. “You’re a man of action, so I might as well give you something to do. Your orders.” He offered the sheaf to Sumner. “They’re numbered. Open them in sequence only as you complete the assignments. When you’re done, return to Miramol. The Mothers have other work for you.”

Bonescrolls yawned, and with a tired smile he curled up before the exhausted fire and went to sleep.

The next morning Sumner woke before dawn. The old man had already gone. The shape that he had taken for Bonescrolls all night turned out to be a wind-scrubbed boulder.

***

Sumner’s first assignment directed him deep into the volcanic highlands to find a sliver of carnelian. The second envelope sent him on a trek across the sunblasted, rock-faulted heart of Skylonda Aptos into the great Kundar Marsh. He waded through leech ponds, floated across quicksand pools, and baited trees with foraged fruit to distract vicious stonethrower monkeys while he obtained what he had come for—a short twist of white mahogany.

The third envelope circled him back into the desert to track down a rock labyrinth infested with poisonous jumping lizards. At the center, he found a salt pit where he gathered a small satchel of the pure grains.

From there, he journeyed to the viperlands, a swampy tract of tar pits and sticky toxic plants, and there beat away yellowbacked flies until he found a turtle shell of proper size. After that, he followed a long steamy river far into a vapor jungle to collect a handful of macadamia nuts. On the way out of the jungle, he probed the viper-infested algal murk of stagnant pools for winged-lizard eggs. And finally, he dangled precariously from a misty cliff to harvest a giant breed of yellow strawberries.

During the nine weeks that it took him to gather all the required items, Sumner kept himself in perpetual selfscan. He knew that if he let his mind roam he would only question his mission and slow himself down. Also, the threat of voors dogged him. He spied none in the course of his wanderings, but the memories of his lusk and the blowdart attack kept him vigilant. When he returned to Bonescrolls’ rock dwelling with everything that had been requested, he arrived calm and alert as a serpent.

Bonescrolls laughed raucously as Sumner entered the sunrayed cavern. He carefully examined each of the goods. With a honing stone, he sharpened an edge of the carnelian sliver until it gleamed razor-keen. With his new knife, he deftly whittled the finger of white mahogany into a small graceful fork. After cleaning out the turtle shell, he used it as a dish for a wing-lizard egg omelet, lightly salted, and dusted with crushed macadamia nuts. The yellow strawberries he arranged appealing around the rim.

“Ah!” He smacked his lips and winked at Sumner. “I’ve waited a long time for a breakfast like this.”

Sumner’s insides fisted, though he remained outwardly calm. “Why?”

Bonescrolls’ long face shrugged. “Why old age? Why the cold? Why the notes inside a flute? We are nothing, young brother, but what we forget we are. Don’t fight your unconscious.”

“I risked my life for that omelet.” Was this the being that had quieted the voor in him? Sumner searched the red-brown eyes for the power he had discovered there, but he faced only a mystically cracked old man.

Bonescrolls met the disappointment in Sumner’s face, and anger gouged him. “Why?” His voice, sharp with feeling, held Sumner’s stare. “The world has no corners, young brother. If I start to explain why I am and why you are, there’s no place to stop.”

Sumner, unappeased, his dark face frowning, looked scorched.

Bonescrolls strode to the center of the studio. He scooped up a handful of dust and laced it through his fingers, spieling it around him as he spoke: “It’s all consciousness, if you’re open enough. The dust, the rock, the sunfire.” He balanced a grit of sand on his thumbnail and held it close to Sumner’s nose. “Each atomic particle is a family of beings. As aware in their own way as you. We are all equals—all the same, just vibrating differently. Everything is light.” The magnar sat down so slowly he seemed weightless. “Think of all the beings that have come together to make you. Think about it. Billions of beings agreeing to shape a human form—this human form.” He took Sumner’s hands, and the ether of the young man’s feelings brightened. “Why? Why are you the living center of the transparent and inflexible diamond of time? All of us have a destiny. Nothing is chanced. Time is gem-perfect.”

Bonescrolls let Sumner’s hand go, and the old one’s breathing went deeper as though he wanted to say something wordless. “You are the eth—the shadowself of a godmind to the north called the Delph.”

That name rattled in Sumner’s mind with memories of Nefandi and Corby.

Bonescrolls misread Sumner’s surprise as bafflement, and he guffawed. “Names! The history is this: Over a thousand years ago, the sun and its planets entered a stream of radiation that has no origin. The radiation comes from the axle of our galaxy where the gravity of a billion suns has opened our universe to the multiverse. There, in the galactic core, energy gushes in from an infinity of other realities. Some of that timeless energy is psynergy, modes of being that you and I would recognize as sentient. When that psynergy reaches Earth, it changes the genetic structure of humans and, in a generation or two, becomes voors, distorts, and sometimes godminds. These are beings orphaned from the worlds that originally created them. They fight hard to hold onto the patterns that anchor them to this planet, because the psynergy-stream slides away from us as our star drifts out of alignment with the galactic center. After the skyfires are gone, there will be no more new voors—no more new godminds. Those that survive will possess the Earth.”

Sumner picked up a pebble and turned it in his fingers gently, wisely. “And I am the eth, the shadowself of a godmind. What does that mean?”

“Light has built a temple in your skull, young brother.” Bonescrolls watched him with a long and quiet mind. “Many centuries ago, the Delph was a man. The scientists of his time altered his brain, hoping to widen his consciousness enough to find solutions for the puzzling changes in their world—the raga storms and distorts that were appearing everywhere. Ignorantly, they opened the man’s mind wide enough for a godmind from another universe to possess him. That’s one theory. What’s certain is, once the Delph had a physical form strong enough and specialized enough to contain his psynergy, he began to alter the energy patterns around him capriciously. He reshaped reality.”

“But who is he? Where is he from?”

“The light from the galactic center is not like the light of the sun or the stars. The energy doesn’t come from the fusion of atoms. It comes from the light of an endless number of parallel universes. An endless number! Anything can jump out of infinity!”

Sumner’s face narrowed with incredulity.

“Who is he?” Bonescrolls repeated, lifting his chin inquisitively. “A being of light. Like you are. Like everything is. But he is the light of another continuum, and when he took human form he displaced the subtle psynergies of this world. Over the centuries, those echoes of psynergy have been reflecting and interfusing through the eccentricities of biology and what we call chance. And so, chromatin patterns have shifted and humans have been born inside their luck, psychically untouchable. These are the eth. You are one of them.”

“You’re not telling me anything.”

Bonescrolls smiled benevolently. “What it means is that you are the one being on the planet the Delph cannot touch with his reality-shaping mind. You are the perfect shield for a voor assassin.”

Comprehension softened Sumner’s stare.

“Your whole life is the intention of a being bigger than your imagination,” Bonescrolls disclosed, voice tremulous with the excitement and fear he felt blazing in Sumner. “I’ve been alive over a thousand years, and all this time, it turns out, I’ve been waiting for you. And for the voor inside you. We want the same reality.”

“No,” Sumner said, almost in a cry. “I don’t want to lusk. I don’t want to be used by voors.”

Bonescrolls’ timeshaped face loosened with delight, and he laughed soundlessly for a while before saying: “You’re nothing. An ego. A ghost of memories and predilections. You don’t amount to much in the overview. Forget who you think you are. Psynergy follows thought, so become consciousness itself, not the shapes of consciousness. Selfscan isn’t enough, because it limits you to sensation. To be whole, to be One Mind, you must be the living center in you that feels, thinks, selfscans.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Become the quest you’ve already begun.”

Sumner’s voice went limp. “I’m not looking for anything.”

Bonescrolls benignly shook his head. “The eth will always look for its source. The eth is huger than you. It is me and Corby as well. It is every event that touches you. It may take your whole life, but the eth will lead you to the Delph.”

“No.” Sumner crossed both of his hands through the air. “I’m grateful for your help, magnar, but I’m undertaking no quests for a voor. I’m whole in myself. I’m not about to serve a voor.”

“That’s not for you to decide.” The magnar’s face grew somber. “Your mind gets in the way of your being. You can’t hope to understand what you are only a part of. That’s why my life has the shape it does—so that I would be here now to empty you, to free you from the limits of knowing, and to open you to One Mind.”

“What are you talking about?” Sumner looked malcontent.

“I won’t let your ego interfere with my destiny. You are still in thrall to me, Kagan. What I say, you must do.” The magnar reached over and took Sumner’s face in the splayed grip of his hand. The throb of the young man’s etheric field itched Bonescrolls’ palm as it melled with his psynergy. “And by that authority, I command you to forget this conversation.”

When Bonescrolls took his face, Sumner glimpsed the whole cavern brightening between the old man’s fingers, hazy sunlight and bluesunk shadows stirring with hemi-visible beings. Then Bonescrolls shoved Sumner onto his back with an abrupt straightening of his arm, and darkness slammed into him.

The instant he hit the ground, Sumner’s eyes fluttered open. The magnar hunched over the turtle shell finishing his omelet, morning sunlight aureoled in his white hair.

“Rest if you wish,” Bonescrolls said through a mouthful of food. “You’ve journeyed far, young brother, and I’m well pleased.”

Sleep wrestled like an inner problem in Sumner’s chest. But he couldn’t rest. Something weighed on his mind—the mischievous grin on Bonescrolls’ face piqued him. Why? Sumner looked out abstractly through a windowhole at gold stretches of dawn. Why had he worked so hard for an omelet? He in-listened, but his mind turned silent as the straws of twilight scattering across the horizon.

***

Sumner slept fitfully for several hours and then, with a satchel of dried fruit and a skin of water from Bonescrolls, left for Miramol. The magnar spent the remainder of the day trying to connect with his psychic strength again, but lacked the strength. When night arrived, he moved about, twitching with frustration.

Before the moon, a green feather low over the mesaland, Bonescrolls stood tall atop a rocktower, feet wide apart, arms spread, his body an X against the skyfires. Long and hard, he cried to the desert: “Help—me!”

The echo of his call stretched beyond itself quickly, and he dropped his arms and sagged into his stance. Time leaked from the rocks as the last warmth of day lifted into night, and foolishness chilled through him. He turned back toward his lair, mumbling to himself: “Go to sleep, old man.”

Every day for the last two months, while Sumner had wandered Skylonda Aptos, Bonescrolls had followed. With his body swaddled in blankets, lying back in his rock studio, his mindark had opened into the brightness of hawk and coyote, and he had stayed close to the eth.

The assignments, designed to frustrate Sumner, opened his weakened etheric field. And when this happened, Bonescrolls channeled psynergy into him by becoming in his mind the animals and objects around Sumner. As a snake, he had tasted Sumner’s fatigue and had projected serpent awareness. That night, in a dream, Kagan had seen the desert alive, glittering with pieces of light. The next day Bonescrolls had become the pinnacle rock where Sumner waited out the noonfire. The magnetic calmness the magnar radiated soothed Sumner’s longing for the familiarities of his life with the Rangers. The effects were subtle, but over the weeks of Sumner’s questing, his bodylight breathed brighter and stronger.

Bonescrolls, however, had become weaker. The long effort of shapeshifting and focusing psynergy had loosened his own bodylight. All day after Sumner had left for Miramol, the magnar felt depressed. A deathvision floated about him like hair, sometimes getting in his eyes with glimpses of a tall, wild man with a scar-cleaved face and one eye the color of bruised blood. Fear had wrung hard in him today, and he was glad that he had sent Sumner back to the Mothers.

A small cranny-room glowed like a flower at the end of a maze of narrow, unlit corridors. Pink tallow tapers burned in the three corners of the cell below mousehole airducts. The cubicle, crowded with pelts, amulets, folded tapestries, icons, and wicker boxes, held five hundred years of offerings from the surrounding tribes.

He threw back a coverlet of ocelot skin from a large ironwood box inlaid with sardonyx. Thumbing a secret release in the ornate fretwork, he slid a small panel aside, revealing a compartment stuffed with suede cloth. Bonescrolls gently removed the cloth and sat down cross-legged. After calming himself, he unwrapped the crinkled suede and blinked into the soft, luminiferous light of a brood jewel.

That instant in Miramol, several of the Mothers stirred restlessly in their sleep. For them, dreaming had abruptly become the single-focus clarity of trance. The magnar stood in the shadow of the world, looking a little different for each of them.

Shay, he greeted, his voice half-burning with the fear that had haunted him earlier. My ward is returning to Miramol. He has served me well in the desert, and his bodylight is stronger. But he still lives inside his days, far from spirit. Please, young sisters, teach him to mount life’s power. Show him how to lure psynergy up from the depths. Without your help, he will never change for the stronger.

The Mothers’ trance slipped back into dreaming as the magnar moved his consciousness away.

Bonescrolls hovered above the Barrow, charmed as usual by the astral view of skyfires pierced by the sharpness of snow-blue stars—until he felt himself being seen. A dog stood, tailtucked, beneath a magnolia tree, watching him with glarestruck eyes. Beside it, soaked in darkness, stood an old blind woman—one of the Mothers. Jesda, her name rose up in him as she stood and swayed in his direction.

“I see you there, shadow-of-no-one,” the crone called, edging closer. Her hands on her face and her fingers in the sockets of her skull, she intoned, “These plundered eyes see through the world, ghost. Absence is presence. You know that! Absence is!”

Jesda walked out into bright moon-air, and her hands fell away from a riven face. Bonescrolls moved closer, gripped by the intensity of feeling in those broken features—eyepits dark as wine—and, as sometimes happened when he was shadowshooting, he spun into the feelings of what he witnessed.

Laughter jerked hard in him, and his mindark rayed with musical colors. An estranged feeling—a terrifying falling away from everything-tightened through him like nausea. Jesda’s madness. Yet even though he knew what he experienced, he could not move it.

The smell of burned flesh pierced him, and like a needle stuck in his brain, a momentary reality opened: He observed the eth, Ardent Fang, and Drift squatting in the flagrant light of a bonfire—a pyre, a temple of flames with a corpse sitting up on the altar, clots of black flesh falling away from his features—his face!

Bonescrolls twisted away from the brood jewel, the strophe of a scream loud in his throat. A heartshuddering moment passed before he breathed again.

No more shadowshooting, he swore, gazing gratefully into the blue plasma of a tallow flame. The voor gem icy in his hand, he wrapped it in the suede without looking at it.

Shakily, he put the brood jewel back into its secret compartment and shrouded the ironwood box with the ocelot pelt. He walked down the black corridor to a natural balcony, where cold night air held him more securely in his body. Now that the Mothers had custody of the eth, he could rest and fortify his psynergy.

He sucked the frosty air in through his teeth, and his whole body shivered with alertness. Above a horizon burning with green skyfires, the moon floated, red and long, the shape of a serpent’s heart.

***

The Mother wore a black shift and ancient amulets, bright pieces of metal covered with the script of the kro. Cataract-blind, she moved slowly, her movements purposeful, communicating robust awareness of the world around her. Sumner sat opposite her in a room darkened with curtains made of human hair. Naked but for a blue loincloth, he gleamed from the four days he had spent in a steam shed and his flesh looked like well-oiled wood. Florets of gum acacia crowded the corners, scenting the room with the odor of mountains.

The Mother listened with her head bowed forward as Sumner whispered the sacred names of the jungle animals and plants. The names themselves were unimportant. They executed an acoustic technique for achieving the proper mindstate. Occasionally, when she sensed his attention waver, she made him repeat the odd sounds until his mind focused.

The Mothers prized Sumner. He had performed better than expected in the breeding stables, and most of the women he had mated with had conceived. To express their appreciation, the Mothers had begun to teach him the way of the hunter. For many days, he had fasted and steamed the poisons out of his flesh. Then he had sat alone among burial hills the color of rain and listened, as he had been instructed, for the deep calling.

He had felt stupid and vulnerable, sitting crosslegged in the open, mind directed inward. But he had been quick to overcome his anxiety and surprised the Mothers at how readily his bodylight responded to their guidance. One Mother, a half-blind priestess who had worked for many years with young males, came forward to teach him the sacred names and to supervise his awareness of the deep calling.

Sumner obeyed the Mothers strictly out of devotion to Bonescrolls. Their teachings seemed crude and arbitrary to him, and he counted the weeks left to his thrall. Sitting in the open with his mind indrawn, he sensed nothing but the splanchnic rhythms of his body. Several weeks later, he still spent most of every day listening to the roll of his heart and the flutterings of his digestive tract.

Late one torpid afternoon, he heard a whine—a tiny distant screaming, wringing from deep down in his bowels. His sudden alertness squelched it, and several days passed before he heard it again—a warbling thin sound wavering in the small bones of his head. This time he fixed himself solidly in selfscan, and he listened to it whistling higher than the pitch of his blood—but faint, deep in his marrow. Slowly understanding narrowed back to its center, and he realized what impossible and faraway sound it was: the tension in his genitals—the sound of his desires. He wanted a real woman.

That’s it!

Sumner thrashed alert. The blind Mother crouched beside him, her crystal white eyes lidded with satisfaction. You have to listen deep, but a man can hear his woman-hunger, the old woman’s voice rasped in his mind. Focus on that. You’re ready to begin the Rising.

Listening to the whine of blood pooling in his genitals, Sumner learned how to gather that tension into a tight packet between anus and scrotum. The delicate muscles there proved very difficult to control, but with the Mother guiding him he was soon able to move the tension past his anus to the base of his spine without clenching his sphincter muscle.

The rest happens by itself, the Mother told him as she braided his hair in the hunter’s style. For three days before you hunt you must abstain from sex. Then collect your psynergy at the base as I’ve taught you. That way, when the animals and plants come they will leave their spirit with you and slowly psynergy will accumulate. Someday it will be strong enough to climb the length of your spine and enter your skull. Then your middle eye will open.

“What about women?” Sumner asked, trying to keep the petulance out of his voice. “Don’t they have middle eyes?”

Women have other powers. This is only a man’s way.

“So why is a woman teaching me?”

Women know the ways of everything. After all, didn’t a woman make you?

Sumner kept the details of his skepticism to himself, though Drift often pressed him for information. He assured the seer that it was all nonsense and that he would break his vow of secrecy when his thrall to Bonescrolls ended. Until then, he felt bonded to comply with the strictures of his tutelage to the Mothers. He followed their orders and smoked his dugout in gopherwood when they returned it to him. He even spent an hour each dawn moving his sexual tension from his genitals to the root of his spine, though he questioned this senseless exercise.

In the dark tunnels of the cloud forest, he lived mindless of the Mothers, ecstatic and free as any animal, bounded only by the limits of his instinct. The river mist strayed in whorls around him as he slowly made his way far beyond any of the other hunters. The waters still ran very high, making food difficult to come by. But deep in the flooded forest, where the scent of people did not reach, life abounded.

Sumner slid over the shallows, cautiously picking his way through moss veils and fungal root-loops, looking for dry spits of land where tapir would feed or turtle nest. Nothing. The land offered all the animals’ life-needs, yet the animals had gone elsewhere. As silently as he transpired, as patient and cunning as he could be, only small game presented itself to him. Several times, he returned to Miramol empty-handed, and the other hunters joked that he belonged with Ardent Fang in the stables.

Slipping out at dawn on the third day, he felt desperate, and as soon as he ascertained that he had wound himself deep enough into the forest to be out of earshot of the other hunters, he used the sacred name for pig that the Mothers had taught him. Nothing. A white-faced monkey blinked at him, whooped, and somersaulted out of sight. He wished that he had brought Drift along. Even though seers hunted exclusively in time of famine, desperation drove Sumner.

He backwatered and slipped through a rush brake and froze. Three peccaries rooted truffles out of a massive dead tree. They raised their bristles, backed into a circle, and began clicking tusks. With his cricket whistle, Sumner alerted the other hunters. The catch that day was great.

Sumner’s failures over the following days convinced him to try the sacred names again, though the sounds to him carried no meaning. Each time he used them, though, he encountered exceptional lifeforms: a sabalo trout huge as a salmon, a grandfather manatee happy to die and heavy with useful blubber, and two giant wild turkeys.

The Mothers, startled by how thoroughly Sumner had taken to their knowledge, resolved to show him no more, fearing that when his thrall to Bonescrolls concluded he would reveal everything to the profane. Already he had surpassed many of the Mothers themselves in his ability to send and receive psynergy.

Drift, too, could see that Sumner amassed tremendous strength. It watched his bodylight whirl faster and stronger in his abdomen and gather into a balled, furry gold light above his buttocks. But Sumner lacked awareness of this change. The waters ebbed, and he could no longer tell whether the sacred names or just the return of the creatures to their former habitats provided his bounty. When Bonescrolls called him to his desert abode, he asked the magnar.

“It’s all you,” Bonescrolls said in his perfect Massel. “You put on masks and pretend to be a pig or a turkey or a Serbota hunter. But it’s all you.”

Sumner frowned. “Why then does anyone starve?”

Bonescrolls grinned as though Sumner had seen his sleight of hand. “We play a rough game. What fun would it be if we didn’t die sometimes? What would we do with the masks we were tired of?”

Sumner was still frowning when Bonescrolls clapped his hands. “Enough of this banter. I have only two more assignments for you. They’re both very important, and I hope you’ll do your best.”

“As important as a nut and strawberry omelet?”

Bonescrolls gave him a reproving look. “Someday you will understand the importance of a truly great omelet.” With luminous eyes, he stared down Sumner’s scowl.

“What do I have to do?”

“Deliver this.” The old man rolled his hand on his wrist like a magician and produced a green brood jewel. It caught the light deeply and held it, glowing from within like a flower. “Take Drift with you. It knows where to go. Tell it to take you to the yawps.”

The jewel tingled with electrical force in Sumner’s grasp. It raised the hairs on the back of his hand, and when he gazed into it the soft light curved into fulgent tunnelings. Deep within, past the purring reflections, a white flake trembled, shivering to star brightness. The radiant spicules of light shifted and reformed, and Sumner thought of spring clouds ballooning over green ponds. Then the gleaming threads knotted and tightened to an image—a child’s face of white porcelain with dreamy, colorless eyes. Sumner would have dropped the stone if Bonescrolls hadn’t steadied his hand.

“You’re still in lusk, young brother.” He took the brood jewel and wrapped it in black silk. “It’s best that you stay away from all voorish things.”

“I just saw—”

“I know what you saw.”

Sumner palmed his eyes. “Why?”

Bonescrolls shrugged and handed him the wrapped jewel.

Sumner hefted it and tried to feel the energy through the cloth. “How does this thing work?”

“The voor in you knows. If you really want to understand, you’ll find out.”

“You won’t tell me?”

Bonescrolls vigorously shook his head and flapped air through his lips like a horse. “You leave too many tracks as it is. I don’t want to make you heavier. Can’t you see? I’m trying to empty you.”

***

The journey back to Miramol fogged over with memories of Corby. He thought again of the one-eyed stranger who had stopped his car in Rigalu Flats and told him about the Delph—and he thought of Jeanlu and how, his whole life, he had been led by deception and error. It took all of his selfscanning discipline to overcome the clumsy nostalgia Corby’s image had sent banging through his head. Even so, when he got to Miramol, Drift could see the warrior’s distress.

The golden energy that had tufted like a tail at the bottom of his spine had diffused, and the slippery burn scar on his face seemed darker than ever. What’s troubling you? Drift asked.

Sumner told it about Corby’s visage and his heavy memories.

The past is a disguise, it said, inflecting its telepathic voice as much as it could with fellow-feeling. You’re not really concerned about that. It’s something going on now that worries you. Your year of thralldom is more than half up—

Sumner nodded. That was it, he knew. Having someone to direct his life completed him. It didn’t matter whether the Rangers or Bonescrolls commanded—he needed direction.

Do you really? Drift looked like a molting insect sitting up in the hammock it had strung between two flower-vined trees. Your life, as I see it, has been strong and solitary. But the lusk was terrible. Much better to be a slave than to have to face that alone. Drift’s teeth cracked in its head as it recalled the snake-pit rasp of voor psynergy and the depth-terror, vaster than oceans, that had gulfed its mind.

Sumner sat on a lacquered tree stump and fingered a cluster of jonquils. “What can I do?”

Just what Bonescrolls has ordered. The yawps will amaze you and make you forget your fear. It lowered its gaze to meet Sumner’s. And besides, it is pointless to look for a new path—unless that path is already there.

***

Sumner and Drift traveled upriver that day, talking about yawps. Still clouds, waxy with their burden of rain, loomed above the green plateau of treetops. Drift relaxed, pleased to see that Sumner’s psynergy had filled out again and whirled tight through the lifelock in his abdomen. I’ve only been with the yawps once, but that one encounter taught me the importance of keeping a clean mind.

Sumner paddled with long, graceful strokes, his whole body swaying, urging the dugout over the amber surface. “Clean?”

Mirror-mind—simply watching. Drift perched behind Sumner, also paddling, trying to match his rhythm but skipping every third or fourth stroke. The yawps are very serene. Very quiet. Loud minds make them uneasy.

“They’re all telepathic?”

The ones I met were.

A sprawling tangle of leafed branches swam toward them, and Sumner signaled Drift to up paddle. He angled the dugout around jutting driftwood and stroked again for the middle of the stream where paddling eased up. “What kind of people are the yawps?”

Not people, really.

Sumner peered over his shoulder.

About a thousand years ago, they were apes. The kro used them for labor. But then the world changed, and they have been on their own since.

“Apes?”

Once. Now they are a very spiritual tribe. You will see.

Drift had given no clue as to how close they approached, so when mossy buildings swung into sight Sumner stiffened with surprise. None of the usual telltale refuse had floated downstream to announce a river settlement. The cypress had simply parted and there among nodding firetrees rose a mound of modular pinkstone buildings virtually overgrown with jungle. Figures moved along ribbon-ramps, and in the distance towers loomed, sunlight blustery against elegant minarets of glass and white stone.

Someone approached over the water—a tall creature glistening with red hair, standing on the water. As it drew closer, they saw that it rode a white disc, skimming effortlessly above the surface without controls or even a handhold. The disc-rider swooped up alongside, and Sumner gawked at the red, glossy-furred being. Its simian face displayed a lightning-blue muzzle, stiff head fur, and large, black, expressive eyes. It wore nothing more than a purple, leather-banded breechcloth and simple cork sandals. Shay, Serbota—welcome to Sarina. Its voice resonated in their minds. You are expected. Please, follow me.

It backed off and floated toward the jungle-city. Sumner lifted out of his amazement and paddled after it. “A yawp?”

A young one.

The city became more wonderful the closer they got: a tree-flowering island where towers of silk-white stone stood about, lean and graceful as women. The technology enraptured Sumner.

“What is that water-disc? How the—”

Mirror-mind, Lotus Face. We will talk later.

They left their dugout in a bluestone berth and followed their guide to a glade of great holy trees. The yawp left them there, and they stared around at floating fountains whose spray fell like diamond dust in the breeze.

From across a distance, liquid music surfed over blue lawns. Along a wooden walkway with yellow rose-braided posts, a silver-furred yawp approached.

Shay, Drift. Shay, Lotus Face.

Shay, Bir, Drift sent.

Bir bowed before Sumner. This is your first visit to Sarina. I hope you don’t find it too other.

“I didn’t know such marvels existed.” Sumner stared beyond the trees where slender buildings the color of moonlight slanted. “How did you build all this?”

Bir’s silver-hackled face grimaced a smile. If I tried to tell you that, I’d only confuse both of us. And why bore you with history when we can share this moment?

Bir gestured toward a tiny esplanade of green and black flagstones among the glade of giant trees. Drift led the way and sat down on the inside of a circular bench, carved whole from a petrified tree stump. Sumner sat beside it and Bir faced them. Drift, a prayer to the Infinite, Bir requested, nodding deferentially to the seer.

Drift gazed into the long stately avenue of massive trees and copper-colored grass and chanted:

Among everything that we have named

You alone remain nameless.

Help us to know you

As we know ourselves.

Bir nodded solemnly. Beautiful, seer. Your vision sees into itself. He reached into a small pouch below the knot of his maroon breechcloth and took out a sliver of glass. Now let’s celebrate. The glass splinter caught a thread of sunlight and flashed rainbow spikes. Adroitly, he spun the prism between his silver-haired fingers. The spectral rays melled to a brilliant auroral band that, as it spun faster, hazed blue. He deftly pivoted the prism in his palm, and the band swelled like a gas flame to a nebulous globe, azure-bright.

Bir cupped the globe in his hands and sat staring beyond it into the pointillist dapple of the trees. After a moment, he passed the ball of light to Drift who held it tenderly in its long spiderfingers. Then it went to Sumner.

He accepted gingerly, and as soon as the light grazed his fingers a beatific smile altered his features. The tension the Mothers had taught him to collect at the bottom of his spine uncoiled like a hypnotist’s wheel and sparkled up his back. His scalp prickled, and sudden, unshakable bliss rooted him, adamant as pain. Bir took the blue globe from his hands and collapsed it back to a glass sliver.

Deep humus smells, rich and varied as a symphony, anchored Sumner in the moment, and he watched with silent glee as opaline sunlight breezed through wind-twitched grass. For the very first time, he knew true and profound joy. Life wasn’t shit, he comprehended with a bone-seizing laugh. Life was a stream of love...

I must go now, Bir stated, hands on his knees. Thank you for sharing this moment with me.

Sumner looked about with the glee of a lune. Drift touched his knee, and he remembered the brood jewel.

Bir accepted it with both hands. A fine gift, he remarked, without removing the black silk.

Sumner stared at the yawp as if he had just seen him, noticing the age in the coarse black muzzle, the heron-colored light as it reflected off his fur, the conch-pink of his ears.

Bir walked with them to a dragon-vein brook forded by a walkway of jasper stepping-stones. A parting thought, seer.

Drift bowed deferentially and psychically intoned: The eye sees but is blind to itself. Hazard is intent at high velocity.

Bir bowed and walked off, dust motes boiling into light at his feet.

Sumner wanted to linger, but Drift insisted they go. Our purpose is done. This isn’t our place.

Pushing out of the berth with their oars, heeling into the current, Sumner refused to look back, though he churned with desire. They paddled silently atop the current, each in a private reverie of sun-glinted eddies, shadowed banks, and the muscular flow of the river.

That night, beneath a sky shot with stars, Sumner told Drift about the energy that had whirled up his spine, charging him with euphoria.

The yawps are masters of matter, Drift explained, its tiny eyes fixed on the flames of the aromatic barkfire. They have machines that can do anything—even create bodies. That’s how the magnar has lived so long. He once was a yawp himself, you know.

“Why then does he live in the desert?”

Who can say? He’s unknowable as the clouds. Drift fed small bits of bark into the flames. What I do know, from having spoken with Bir and the magnar, is that Bonescrolls is an ancient yawp—one of the first. Perhaps he has outgrown his life in Sarina. Perhaps, after so many centuries, he has grown bored of being a yawp.

The cry of a screech owl sliced across the darkness of the river. “Until today I thought everything the Mothers had taught me foolish.”

No—not foolish. The Mothers are narrow. The tribe means more to them than any person or vision. But they have knowledge. I can see myself that they have trained you well. What you experienced today you can repeat now at will, I am sure.

Sumner leaned forward and singed the hairs on his knees. “Are you serious?”

Drift blinked. Of course.

Sumner looked up through the writhing skyfires at the steady stars and concentrated on calming his suddenly racing heart. When he looked back at the né, his heart still thudded. “How?”

Your body knows. It did it today. If you relax yourself, you will remember how it felt, and you will be able to do it again.

Sumner didn’t wholly believe him; even so, the idea clouded his thoughts for the rest of their journey. On their return to Miramol, he sequestered himself in the chamber the né had set aside for him, and he practiced the tension routines he had learned. His desire to repeat his experience in Sarina became his greatest obstacle, and it took him over a week finally to fix the tension at the tip of his spine. Then began the slow, awkward process of remembering exactly how it had felt to unfurl that tension. Futile days passed, and if he had not already experienced such deep joy in Sarina, he would have given up. The feelings, at first, appeared too subtle.

Guided by his memory, the tension unwound along the narrow length of his spine, so softly he might have imagined it except for the sudden itch haloing the round cope of his skull. And then came the familiar serenity. He wasn’t shaken, not as before. It arrived this time as a tensile sense of the moment expanding, opening to reveal sounds, shadings, odors that had been uninteresting before: the refraction of a fly’s wing narrowing the orbit of his vision, distant root scents dazing his nostrils with an olfaction of mud. He knew joy—not the happiness of happenstance but sincere joy.

Several years before in Dhalpur, he had known ecstasy when his body and mind became one. The joy he had felt then compared thinly to the bliss he called out from his body now. Standing up in his dugout in a glade freckled with light, he uttered the sacred name for an otter. His call resounded with exultation, not a test, because otter tokens lurked everywhere: Rocks drowsed in leaf-strewn shallows, milk fog tangled among ferns, and white roots curling out of the water.

The call did not just vibrate from his throat; it bled out of his chest and joined the invisible otter-energies in the rocks and fog and fens. With that sensation, Sumner understood that he shared a vague and pervasive energy with all the otter symbols around him. He was the glade—the spalled light, lapping water, bracken and rocks.

The length of his spine itched, and he felt the psynergy that had drained out of him suddenly returning, curving back through the antlers of the tree branches, arcing over pollen-dusted water, returning to the taut cords of his body. Just as the Mothers had said: the whorl turned in all things.

The water ruffled, and a dozen slick black heads appeared across the glade. The otters’ noses twitched as they stared about, and then several of them crawled onto flat rocks and rootloops, trailing shawls of water. They peered at Sumner, black bead eyes unflinching, dark fur sleek with wet. A giddy laugh tightened in Sumner’s belly. Everything connected. Everything was itself and the same. Bonescrolls existed as puma and raven and old man. And Sumner could also. His mind reeled, and he laughed aloud.

The otters rolled into the water and vanished. Two stood up again farther off, stared at Sumner, and then were gone.

***

From a sandbar culvert of spiny palms, Ardent Fang watched. Returning from Ladilena, a nearby Serbota village, he had been reviewing new brides. The women had been long and beautiful as the new moon, and their rituals had exalted all the good feelings in him. Yet, that rapture had dropped away when he heard the ecstatic music turning behind the sandbar. True music: bloodflow rhythms, mothertides, the desire he had always wanted to open with his devil harp. When he whisperglided up to the sandbar and peered through spiny palms, the music had gone, and he gazed with surprise at Lotus Face communing with otters.

Ardent Fang crouched in his dugout, bending far forward, the hair of his monkeyfur vest limp in the water. His hearing still frothed with the visionary music he had heard, and he clutched the dog-crucifix thonged loosely about his neck and silently invoked Paseq. At that moment, though Ardent Fang had made no sound, Lotus Face turned and stared directly at where he hid.

Ardent Fang rose, returned Sumner’s stare shamefully, and then disappeared. The boar-tusks of his prow appeared among the stilt-root palms, and he slid into the glade. As he swung his canoe around a tussock of myrtles, he heard the music again—dulcet as sunplucked water—and, like the turning of a lens, his sight sharpened. He hadn’t even realized that his vision had gone slack over the years. Reflexively, he rubbed his eyes.

Weirdly wonderful—he saw beauty more clearly than ever! He sensed that his eyes had been healed by the music-energy coursing through Sumner. He looked at Lotus Face as his canoe drifted into the glade and beheld rainbows spinning in the mist around him. Is this being a god or a demon-delusory?

“Don’t be afraid,” Sumner said, signaling him closer.

Ardent Fang stood up stiffly. “I’m not afraid,” he responded sharply, then realized that he still clutched his dog-crucifix. He let it go and then seized it again, rocking backward in his canoe with the more powerful realization that he had understood Lotus Face. The man had not spoken in Serbot.

Ardent Fang sat down.

“Don’t be afraid,” Sumner said again in Massel. He punted gently, and the lotus-carved gunwale of his canoe hissed across the lapse of sun-hot water. “Everything we’ve always wanted is all around us.”

The ear-tricking music unfurled with the swamp mist in the shadows of the big trees. Ardent Fang stared into the blackness of Sumner’s face with defiant apprehension. “Who are you?”

“You know me”, Sumner replied, the whorl of power flexing almost visibly between them.

“You’re a god,” Ardent Fang acknowledged, his own voice sounding strange to him.

Sumner smiled. “If I were a god, the whole world would look like this.” He spread his arms and opened his body to the water’s broken sunlight and the enormous walls of flowering trees. And something drifting, immense, and unknown moved through them.

Ardent Fang released the dog-crucifix and gazed with astoundment into the peaceful heart of the forest. Each tree stood so huge in its inturned feeling that the breeder trembled to look at them. In their shadow, he dwindled to a mere being of dew, fragilely, helplessly sparkling. Words, thoughts, dimensions—the whole mind-world appeared a realm of the dead.

He stood up and raised his arms and his heart into the upstreaming light and love.

***

Sumner wandered the riverain forest entranced by the outleap of consciousness in everything. A light greater than sunlight shone from the old trees. In their shade, thoughts and sounds came together, and the visual opened to visionary.

Everything is food! a thought voiced itself. Every sound, every odor, every thought changes us.

In Sumner’s mind, a tree generated these thoughts. His silence widened. He sensed the grass growing under him, the tree expanding into its life. Then the idea of returning, of feeling his vitality, of leaping up and screaming with joy, opened with risible insistence.

Ardent Fang sat in the high grass behind Sumner, rapt with fear and wonder. He had followed Sumner, because the psynergies featherturning in his chest had lured him. But now he fretted. An astral being floated among the heat-quiverings over the mud shoals. He could see the entity as clearly as their two beached canoes glowing with the sun’s vibrations. He thought of going back to Miramol.

Sumner suddenly leaped into the air and roared.

Ardent Fang jumped, and a heron flapped into the forest’s green shadow. The tensed air over the mudsunk trees beside their canoes shifted as the half-seen being moved toward them. Sumner stood, body arched, feeling the love soft-slipping through the wondrous emptiness that held everything together. A gust of bright air kicked the high grass and dazzled blades and seedhusks as the spirit of the swamp centered on them. Ardent Fang knelt and moaned, a sound prayerful and long.

Sumner had opened his mind to the river’s oversoul, and consciousness radiated back in psychic symbols. Sparks spun through the sunshadows around the tree, and he espied demons and archangels, a riotous torrent of otherealms. Yet fear did not touch him. The manner in which he had opened his being—mounting psynergy up the totem of his spine—had stabilized his body and well-rooted his mind. Whatever entered his etheric field harmonized with the ecstasy—the detachment—of One Mind.

Ardent Fang sidled closer to Sumner, heart and lungs weightless with lifelove, legs leaden with the fear of all that he saw. A massive razorjaw lizard thrashed wildly in a mudpool across the shallow river. Much closer, the air silverly trembled, and the breeder confronted the breeder who had come before him. Bloodbruises of the fever that had killed his teacher darkened the whole of the man’s eyes, and the features Ardent Fang had once loved grimaced, glossy and swollen with death.

Sumner didn’t know what Ardent Fang was experiencing, but he recognized the pain in the tribesman’s face.

The sky darkened, and a storm of green flies cut through the trees. Ardent Fang balled up with terror as the flies began biting. Laughter broke across Sumner’s tongue. Sumner wasn’t laughing. The swamp itself—and, deeper, One Mind—bloated him with expansive awareness. The burning flies carried the hunger of God. And hunger is holy, because everything is food, and eating is all there is.

Shrieks burst through the trees, and a flurry of birds rushed around them, devouring the flies in a confusion of feathers and flashing colors. Abruptly, silence, and the startled laugh of a monkey.

Ardent Fang rose to his knees among broken stalks of chickweed. His face a maze of emotions, he noticed the flies had gone. The air looked layered with shades of transparency, and, in midstream, a giant razorjaw lizard lashed toward them.

Sumner helped Ardent Fang to his feet. In the blue hollow behind Lotus Face, the breeder glimpsed a crowd of women—all the women he had ever sexed. The ones he had loved glowed blue-bright.

“Whatever you’re seeing,” Sumner insisted, “is inside you. The whorl is strong with us today, Fang. Whatever we feel comes back at us. Try to feel good.”

Ardent Fang trembled in Sumner’s grasp. The man’s hands on his shoulders hummed with spring-thundering, and the dark in the blue of his eyes shimmered with something like father-love. “But look!” the breeder insisted, pointing to where the wart-knobbed, mud-green bulk of the razorjaw ran to shore. Its horn-browed eyes gazed fireblind, and the long thrust of its maw glistened with many pink-skinned teeth.

Sumner’s first impulse was to bolt, but One Mind left him standing enraptured as the giant thrashing reptile rushed toward them. Ardent Fang whimpered and reached for his blade, but Sumner caught his wrist. “Face it,” Lotus Face ordered, not taking his eyes off the creature.

Ardent Fang pulled his wrist free, but he didn’t run. The razorjaw had slowed its rush. The flat, horned head of the beast, big as a man, stopped before them and swayed in its stench of river kelp and mud. Sumner put his right arm out, and the black lip of the lizard grazed his hand and stood transfixed. Ardent Fang’s head bobbed as though his blood had fermented. In the huge, damp presence of the razorjaw, sunlight delivered the coolness of the moon.

Urged by the power in him, Sumner climbed the folded scales of the colossal leg and shoulder and straddled the stumped head. Reaching down to help Ardent Fang up, he peered into the lizard’s eye, as if into the center wood-ring of a log.

He swung Ardent Fang up beside him, and the great swamp beast turned toward the water. Ardent Fang whooped, tore off the braiding cord at his shoulder, and let the smoke of his hair blow in the river wind.

Sumner laughed and lifted both arms over his head. The muddy water folded back and splashed at their sides, and they glided downstream into the misty green spell of the river.

***

The giant lizard carried the two men north all day on a riverpath of solar-blown trees and ox-colored boulders. The water that splashed them bore the bloodheat and scent of something living. Panther, wolf, bear, and deer watched from the bluffs with animal insouciance, the air sloughed with their green auras.

At night, stars and skyfires gnarled the sky, and the razorjaw continued downstream. Sumner lay against the beast’s browbone and considered the roundness of time in the crackly stars. Each mote of light that sparked in his retinal cells yielded a living being, lifefire of another sun entering and changing him. Countless stars—an endless rain of radiation penetrating him, altering his most secret self.

The next day, under a hot sky, the realization that each instant transformed him flared like the rise of an orgasm. By night, floating on the golden moonpath, he had calmed and the clairvoyance of his feelings displaced rapture.

Ardent Fang cleaved to Sumner, at first with awe, then after the second dawn on the back of the lizard giant with sheer stamina. Sleep-mauled, hearing gulls bruiting the ocean, he asked Lotus Face. “Why are we here?”

Sumner stood, absorbing the iris twilight. During the night journey, the river had broadened, and the water now was deep as their lives. Sumner jumped in headfirst, and Ardent Fang splashed after. The razorjaw followed until they reached the sandbars; then, it sank into its weight and disappeared.

On a beach of dust-fine sand facing a low-tide bay of tropic reefs, the men built a fire. “Each instant we’re changed,” Sumner marveled, as much to the spurting flames as to his companion.

Ardent Fang touched Sumner’s forearm, wanting a moment’s clarity. “Why are we here, Lotus Face?”

Sumner looked up wrenchingly from the flames, the wondrous telepathy that had possessed him tightening to the single focus of one syllable: “Why?” he asked, eyes all pupil, yet very clear, shining. He turned inward, remembering—Why are you the living center of the transparent and inflexible diamond of time?”

Ardent Fang shrugged, sea-cold and suddenly weary from the withdrawal of Sumner’s psynergy. “All of us have a destiny,” he mumbled.

Sumner jumped to his feet, scattering the fire. He stood twitching with immense emotion, staring up at the red muscles of dawn, suddenly remembering in hypnotic detail his last conversation with Bonescrolls—the talk that the magnar had made him forget. Nothing is chanced. You are the eth—the shadowself of a godmind.

Caught in boundless feeling, Sumner sank to his knees, then rolled to his back and closed his eyes. He knew now why he had come here. He traveled north to find the Delph.

A rush of luminescent feeling lifted him beyond the fitted bones of his skull, and he stared down at his body curled on the white sand, Ardent Fang crouched beside the smoldering driftwood, the two figures diminishing into the scallopings of the beach, and the whole beach and the sea glaring into the sun’s corona.

Everything stretched into darkness.

Outside his mind, he sensed the Delph. Like everything, the godmind entangled with Sumner’s being, the One Being, and a flowing love joined them. Whirling outward into the emptiness of time, Sumner rode the inchoate lifelove that swelled through him. Out of that joy-dazzled feeling, a different flesh flowered. Colors gestured into forms, and bright vibrations coagulated to sounds—a starstream of music spiraling just beyond his earbrim. Pleroma music, an inner sense told him. An animal scent, a tinge of musk, patterned the air pleasantly. A calming olfact, the voice said more solidly. A sexoid.

Sumner jolted into a body he didn’t recognize and yet knew intimately. An ort biotectured to channel your psynergy. Comfortable, muscle-gripping clothes massaged him with each move—chamois-textured, fur-colored. A slimplex garment. You are in Graal, the ice-mountain rath of the Delph.

He looked about for the source of the voice in this small oyster-colored room. Formflowing, walls chaired and lounged intelligently as he strolled about. No doors, though one wall opened glasslessly to a vista of white mountains and green splashes of jungle valleys. A prison? he wondered.

No, the voice responded, harsher, hard-edged. An elegant doorway expanded through the wall, revealing chambers brilliant with sunshafts and weird air plants.

Flechettes of rainbow light scattered across the room. “Who are you?” Sumner asked. Though he knew. A mental music rhythmed in him, auguring everything he wanted to know. The voice was a Voice—a mountain-size crystal of thought, an artificial sentience created to serve the Delph.

I am Rubeus. A six-rayed cell of white light appeared in the curveline doorway. I am an autonomous intelligence shaped to protect the Delph. And you are Sumner Kagan—the eth. The one who is metaordered to close the cycle. The Voice spoke sternly. Why are you haunting us, inwit? Speak your purpose in coming here.

“I’ve been led here.”

Ignorant spasm. The room ebbed colder and darker. You are numb with unknowing—a twitch of the world's Unconscious—a mere reflex. I don’t fear you.

“Why should you fear me?” Sumner extended his arms and opened the slender pale hands of his new body. The space around Rubeus burned hot with cold, and he had to drop his gesture. “I mean no harm.”

You don’t know what you mean. You are part of a dream vaster than the stretch of your mind. You are metaordered—destined—to end the Delph’s continuity. There have been many of you over the centuries, most with more awareness of their purpose than you. All have died. I have killed them all.

The six-rayed cell of light flared, and Sumner’s body wrinkled away. Darkness clapped around him, Ardent Fang’s voice boomed in his head, “Lotus Face!”—and he sat up into his own body.

Ardent Fang walked him through paddies of salt reeds until the psynergy began to nerve the air between them again. When Sumner’s soulight glittered in the air with the dawn facets on the water, they foraged geepa beans and strawberries in the tree-root burls at the edge of the jungle.

I have killed them all, echoed in Sumner’s mind for many days, and he had to raise a lot of lifelove to go beyond his fear. Enraptured by the psynergy, he and Ardent Fang lived on the beach, sharing consciousness with the forest, the dune dogs, and the dolphins that came in with the tide. The vision of Rubeus melted into the enormous good-feeling of Sumner’s psynergy, and for a while the two men lived joyfully free of memories.

On a morning of bison-headed white clouds, a swamp puma appeared by the river. That day, they started their journey back to Miramol. Sumner, still unable to think deeply about his psychic experiences, mused about the meaning of the eth. He had sensed awesome machine-strength in his vision of Rubeus, yet the fear he had felt then had departed. Everything was living. Even the dead things he found in the jungle showed up furred with a living light as they molted into minerals. What was there to fear?

The psynergy circuiting up Sumner’s spine continued to generate rapturous feelings. Weeks passed as the men made their way upstream back to their canoes, fishing without hooks, sharing days with trees, getting acquainted with jaguars and snakes.

In the weather of Sumner’s aura, Ardent Fang lived absentminded with love for the meadows, wildflowers, and spongy jungle nights. The base of his spine had begun to itch as his psynergy responded to Sumner’s. But with the intensification of his psychic strength came a deeper clarity that frightened him.

At the end of a small stream, in a pear grove not far from Miramol, he was gripped in his depths by an electric prescience. The scintillating energy tugged fiercely at his insides and led him out of his dugout and closer to the grove. There the air quivered like the hide of a just-dead animal, and nausea dizzied him. The grove, for one psychomimetic moment, appeared draped with bloody-green loops of intestine and mucus-bright bits of viscera. The image boiled away swiftly, leaving Ardent Fang so crooked with terror that he backstepped from the pear trees as though they were black wraiths. He turned, leaving his canoe behind, and ran hard until he reached Miramol.

Leaning in the doorway of his hut, feverish with fatigue now that he had emerged from the power-charged space around Sumner, Ardent Fang groaned inside the dullness of his senses. He lumbered to his hammock and curled into it, his mind a shadow. For three days, he slept.

***

Sumner took the long way back to the village. Light split in familiar patterns on the river where he had hunted many times. Seeing the well-known tree haunts and river slaches with his One Mind, time drew nearer and detail sharpened.

Empty of words and filled with awe, Sumner returned to Miramol. He understood now, like the old people, the secret of the Silence. The quieter he became, the more he touched. Bonescrolls had been right—the world was feeling. And he wanted to feel everything.

As he left the boathouse after shelving his dugout, he stopped to look around. His euphoria had thinned to tranquil ease: sober, calm and happy to be alive.

The sky wore away to smoky twilight. Women returned from the vegetable plots, and dogs spurted around their legs, pawing a leather ball. The animals chivvied it round and round, and the women moved gracefully among them, chatting softly. Behind them, children approached with firemoths in their loose hair. He waited until they passed, and then he followed them to the eating lodge, joy bright in him, eternal as fire.

***

Sumner lived with the né on their knoll of silverwood lodges and serene courtyards. Each morning, he sat among the cypress knees at the edge of a black, bottomless pond, joined by a dozen of the diminutive, hairless né. Most of them simply sat in a half-circle before him, legs curled beneath white robes, brown sea-spider hands palm-up in their laps, receiving the peacefulness that filled the air around him. Others in workday sarongs brought their crafts to the terraced courtyards overlooking the black cypress pond. A mystic joyance spelled the knoll, and many of the né had profound experiences on those mornings.

In the afternoon, Sumner worked for the tribe in the ragged green vegetable plots and, sometimes, in the breeding stables. Evenings after the rain, he danced with the young women or went to the swamp edge with the men to hunt with nighthawks. The ecstasy power in him calmed since he had begun sitting with the né, and he became truly satisfied with his living.

The oldest né sat close to him during his morning meditations, tiny eyes deliriously bright, voices mental and instructive: You are consciousness itself—not the objects of consciousness. They used clear-color prisms and waterdrums to help him relax. You have a body, but you are not your body. You are the awareness of your body. You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts. You have feelings, but you are not feelings. Who are you?

He existed as awareness. Being glowed through him seamless as sunlight, and his face deepened into the world.

Wisps of memory swirled out of his physical sensations: The rhyme of wet rock odors from the pond reminded him of legless Mauschel in his damp flatboat. The image spun into a glitter of blue and green birdcalls.

Who is hearing? the né asked. Who is remembering?

The flocculent odors of the swamp, the memories, and the kenspeckle drones from the waterdrums fell into him, becoming the color of void, the sound of nothing. Only the constant flux of sounds and sensations falling into him seemed solid.

You have touched the center of the whorl.

Like the collapsars he had seen on his scansule as a child, like stars too big for their energy, consciousness, he perceived, provided the black hole into which everything fell. Where did these noises, colors, and thoughts go?

Notes knucklerubbed off waterdrums vibrated in the air just wide enough to be heard, and the dreary afternoon he had spent mindlessly looking at scansule animations of blown-out stars brightened into an exact memory. Again he saw the three-dimensional computerline images of the collapsar at the core of the galaxy, the web of spacetime tightening through spiraling stars to a single point in the hub—the singularity where spacetime ceased to exist.

The scansule image rotated and split crosswise, revealing a complexity of seashell involutions. A droll ghostvoice explained, faster than words, that the gravitationally distorted collapsar jetted from its poles the most powerful radiation conceivable: light from a source of infinite spacetime curvature.

Infinity is Unity, the né told him, filled with the full fire of Sumner’s One Mind. All things are one thing.

Sumner’s memory of the scansule soft-focused, and a bruised light pulsed behind his lids as his insight crystallized into understanding: When the Earth came into line with the collapsar’s radiation, the universe became the multiverse, and the consciousness of the cosmos, the light of infinity, animated the thought forms and the genetic shapes that were here with an awareness older than time—voors, godminds, timeloose distorts, eth—all arrived as earthshaped starlight from the core of the galaxy.

The waterdrum music stopped suddenly, and muffled voices and the shirring cries of small birds brought Sumner back to himself. Eddying in the muscularity of his body, heat-stilled and viewless, he sensed the Delph—distant yet close, like the inside of thunder. A white mountain, sharp as glass, appeared and vanished. Graal—the ice-mountain realm of Rubeus.

There is no reason to go there except the going, the gentle né told him. The voor in you has a purpose—to kill the Delph. But you have no purpose. The eth is one of your masks. But you are not the eth. Many eth have come before you. Others will come after. Who are you?

Voices ruffled with anger intensified at the gate to the cypress court, and Sumner opened his eyes. Sunlight spiriting through the ancient trees settled like bright birds among the ivy of the round gate. Several of the small né in blue robes struggled there with a big-boned woman—Orpha.

The elders signaled to let her pass, and she straightened from her tousling with composed dignity.

“I am sorry to disturb the famous morning meditations,” she said with sardonic seriousness, “but the magnar has an urgent message for Lotus Face.” She stepped off the dragonstone path and waded through flowering ankle-high grass to where Sumner sat. Her shadow covered two né. “The magnar orders you to stop casting kha.”

No more ecstasy energy.

The Mother ignored the né and kept her heavy, shadowed stare on Sumner. “You and the magnar have an enemy. If you attract him, he will destroy Miramol. Some seers have seen this.” She squatted beside Sumner and placed a thick hand on his chest. “Your thrall ends with the next lunar turn, Lotus Face. Walk your kha into the desert. Protect the folk and the né.”

Sumner took her hand to assure her, but before he could speak, a scream bounced through the moongate, scattering né. Flapping black wings of cloth whirled into the court—a wild-haired, eyeless Mother, shouting: “There are no secrets! Our senses fit the world! What you see is seen!”

Orpha bounded upright. “Jesda—this is not your place.”

“Nor yours, sister.” The blind Mother’s hands flew over her head like startled sparrows. “The word has been fulfilled. I have witnessed it.”

Sumner looked to the elder né beside him, and the old one nodded and told him: Four centuries ago, Dog Hunger, the first seer, prophesied that Miramol would not die until the Mothers had come to the né.

“And here we are,” Jesda whispered, walking sightlessly across a moss ledge and into the pond. Her black skirts billowed in the water, and she shrieked: “What I see is seen!”

Orpha took the blind woman’s arm and led her out of the water. “We’re done here, sister. Let’s go home.”

“Wait, Mother.” Sumner rose. “May I speak with you, Jesda?”

“Speak!” Her wet sleeyes snapped in the air with her sharp gestures, and Orpha stepped back. “Babble to the Vastness!”

Sumner stepped forward, and the angry pain in Jesda’s face softened to quiescence interknit with sorrow and clarity. Sumner experienced a howl of mind-language and a dizzy lurch as his etheric field penetrated hers.

Timeloose, she reeled before him. Through a gargoyling of dissolving thoughtforms, Sumner beheld the starheart—the white luminosity from the first moment, from the origin of time—patterned like a retinal shadow over the vale of cypress and the old woman’s sunken face. He brushed a thistle of knotted gray hair from her brow, and the One Mind between them trembled into exquisite scales of color, shimmering in the shapes of their seeing.

Jesda sighed and softly took both of his hands. She had become calm as a tree, healed, her blindness infused with a violet quivering. “Heaven and Earth move through each other,” she said to him gently, “but the mind is moveless—at last.” Her grip tightened, and she bowed, touching her forehead to their clasped hands. “We are presence.” When she looked up, her blind sockets brimmed with tears. She turned to Orpha. “Come, sister.”

After the Mothers departed, the court and the surrounding terraces flurried with excited né. The eldest took Sumner’s arm. Its eyes two glistening waterpits in the stone of its face, it sent, Your One Mind is clear, Lotus Face. You’ve worked hard for this. What will you do now?

From beyond the court wall, a painstruck wail shivered loudly, then curled into Jesda’s demon laughter.

***

Ardent Fang sat in the full sunlight on the top of the breeding stables. Miramol looked like flotsam in the green wave of the rain forest, all vine-lashed timbers and reedstraw. A curve in the river flashed with sun among the dense trees, and waterbirds circled raucously overhead.

In the courtyard below, the blossom-trellised wagon that had carried Miramol’s maidens to their new home in Ladilena earlier that morning had returned. A young man helped the new women out of the wagon, joking loudly as much to calm himself as them. Strong and good-looking, he displayed puma-wide eyes and a proud mane of hair. Even so, Ardent Fang would need a full season to break him in, to pass on the sense of mission that would serve him when his lust dulled.

Ardent Fang stood and stretched, gazing beyond the green jumble of the riverain forest to where the land slurred to desert. Lotus Face had gone that way two days before to meet the magnar for the last time in his thrall, and the breeder reminisced about how thoroughly the man had changed: He moved more with the lanky ease of a tribesman now than the cautious reserve of a warrior, and he took more time with the women—

“Ardent Fang.”

The breeder turned, and his features stiffened. Orpha stood before him with a brood jewel in her hand, her body as thin and ghostly as fire.

“Come to the Barrow, breeder,” the specter said, wavering into the invisible. “Come, quickly.”

Ardent Fang bounded down the spiral stairs of the tower and sprinted through muddy back lanes. He arrived at the Barrow with his thick legs mired and his breath tattered. Drift waited outside the turquoise-studded entrance with several of the Mothers. It took the breeder’s hand, and the frenzy of his run thinned out.

“You must walk the Road again, breeder,” Orpha said. She gripped his shoulder, and her face hooked into a silent cry. “The magnar is dying.”

***

Bonescrolls gazed out at the blue night from the vantage of his cliff-cavern. Frost haze glowed along the horizon, and above it the moon moved across a night rainbow. He closed his eyes and leaned toward the west. Shadows swooped through him. He glided, the cool night air buffeting his sleek body. The stars moved in bands. The moonlit landscape with its broken contours wheeled below. Coyote tracks studded the bright sand slopes like dark blossoms. Saguaros stood solemnly along the ridgeline.

Nothing in sight moved. And yet, the raven that Bonescrolls occupied stirred with excitement. Something had aroused it, but whatever it was, no trace lingered in the gray shadings of its memory.

Bonescrolls altered his breathing, and the dreamtime shifted. He entered a coyote perched on a rock ledge, scenting the air for the heat of the living. Its blood, buoyant under the draw of the full moon, raised the fine hairs in its ears, sending urgent ripples down the curve of its spine. No end to the sky. Shifting things—dark birds, moths—slipped through the air. The moon lured everything upward. And a howl trembled in its throat, the frayed end of a song begun a long time ago and never finished.

But it stopped the cry at a growl. A hot, sticky scent flared nostrils and tightened the scruff of its neck. Man-odor. It walked a wobbly, nervous circle and caught it again, cutting across the grain of the wind. It carried up from the young sisters’ trails, the flat rock paths among the tall stones.

Bonescrolls moved the coyote down the rock ledge toward the stinging odor. It did not want to get any closer, and the urine-itch between its legs became intense and forced it to stop. But it had gone far enough. Now it could see the man following the sisters’ trail. The man’s nightshining eyes fixed on it for a moment, gauging the distance between them.

Sumner strode out of the shadows, tall and loose, the moonlight gleaming across the lotus-burn of his face. Bonescrolls smiled to himself and left the coyote to its lunar songs and its own fearless detachment.

He opened his eyes as a long, distant howl trembled among the rock towers. Sumner drew close. He had come a long way without Bonescrolls being able to find him—and the young warrior, not even trying to hide, simply extended caution in the manner of any animal that knows its predators.

Bonescrolls yawned and stretched. Frost and starlight burned snow-blue on the rock shapes. He stood up and listened to the weaving coyote song. The time had come to go down and meet his thrall for the last time.

A pulse of sadness thrummed in his chest and passed quickly. Sadness and joy and, high over the eroded desert, that old bone the moon. How many years had it taken him to see truly that they did not differ? In everything, identical forces worked: tides, currents, flows and spirals of power.

The patterns of the folded rocks held his attention—the scars of glaciers, the same flow-wear lines seen in running water or in the heart’s ventricles where blood has circled many, many years.

***

Sumner ambled over talus slopes and beneath the steep red walls of mesas the color of dried blood in the moonlight. An eddy of wind passed like a sigh, and he caught a faint sweet scent of burning juniper. He moved in that direction, sliding silently over the sand slopes, all senses alert. His perceptions had been honed by the odd signs he had seen on his night journey: a lunatic raven careening strange patterns over the dunes; and a wild-eyed coyote close enough to touch, pissing where it stood.

A Serbota coyote song echoed its rhythms through his mind:

Coyote-yapping

At the moon. Like us

Not knowing what to ask for—

Starved

For what it already has,

Like a dream of sleepiness.

Sumner followed the burn-scent beneath corroded monoliths and over hogback ridges, and soon the sapless claw of a dead juniper appeared above the dreamlit dunes. A raven roosted in the crown of the dead tree, and at the base, where tough black bark clenched stone, Bonescrolls sat. The flames of a small twig-fire danced before him.

Sumner returned the magnar’s greeting and sat down beside the fire, laying his walking stick across his knees. He stared into Bonescrolls’ gaunt face without expectation.

The old man stared back with hooded eyes. The eth’s bodylight shone yellow deeper than sunlight, and the harmony of his inner life opened into the graceful pulsing of his aura. The magnar, well pleased, tested Sumner’s One Mind and let his strong feeling rush out of him.

Sumner felt the psynergy as sudden iciness in his abdomen. A green pain cramped his stomach, and he flinched. But he didn’t resist the cold flow. The psynergy furled deeply into him, and at the moment when the hurt became more than he could hold, the psynergy sluiced up his back and dissolved in the vastness behind his eyes. Sumner blinked and sat up taller. He knew what the magnar had done, proud that he stayed clear enough for the power to pass through him. He felt open and strong as the wind.

Bonescrolls laughed and rubbed his belly. Sumner had grown so empty that the old man had almost fallen into him. He kneaded the icy feeling out of his bowels and asked through a smile: “Why are you traveling in the dark?”

Sumner grinned quizzically, then recognized the innocent question as a challenge. Instead of searching for an answer, he listened to the longing cry of the wind. The ghost of his breath glowed in the firelight. “It’s too cold to stay still.”

Bonescrolls’ grin widened, and his tough sun-scaled cheeks bulged. “It’s colder where we’re going.”

Sumner frowned, disquieted by the magnar’s allusion to death. “It won’t matter when we get there.” Sumner rolled a salty wafer of spit onto his tongue and hawked it into the flame. The fire snapped like an angry snake.

Bonescrolls’ eyes glinted with laughter, and he nailed Sumner with them. “Even the truth is a boulder that can pin a monkey down his whole life.”

Sumner smiled. The game they played amused him, but Bonescrolls was right: Thought games offered cumbersome and dangerous distraction. He listened to the scratch of the cold wind blowing across the night-smelling depths. “What do we know?”

Bonescrolls clapped his hands merrily. “That’s right. We are empty as the wind—but moving, always moving.”

“And singing.”

“Only when we rub against things that get in our way. Like the wind, without obstacles we’d never sing.”

Sumner chuckled and nodded. “We’re singing, crying, and laughing, all at the same time. But no one hears us.”

“Who knows?” The old man gestured at the blurred light above them. “We’re bigger than we can imagine.”

For hours, the two men sat feeding twigs to the fire, talking and not-talking. When dawn came, Bonescrolls stood and pointed toward a low sandstone rim. “My last command is for you to go to that shelf and sit there until the voor inside you returns. Listen to him. If you decide that you do not want to share your life with him, return to me, and I will free you. Otherwise, you don’t have to think of me again. You’ve learned not to leave tracks. Everything else is unnecessary.” The magnar put a hand over his heart and bowed low. “Shay, warrior.”

Sumner watched after Bonescrolls until he vanished behind a standing rock; then, he went over to the sandstone rim and dragged his stick through the shadows to feel out snakes and scorpions. He sat with his back to the rim and watched the frost melt to dew as the colors of the world lit up.

Sumner angled himself into the shade. He tried to keep himself in selfscan to dampen his anxiety about confronting the voor, but he was sleepy, and random thoughts flitted through his mind. He wondered if Ardent Fang still practiced the fly casting he had tried to teach him. The thought of fish reminded him of the scaly embrace of one of the distort women and the sharp, enduring stink of her body. He flinched and had to think about Drift to calm down. The observant, elegant mind behind that stiff mask constantly challenged him with the strange lyrics of its chanting:

Nothing is ever lost—

It’s only on its tiny back.

Sumner slept darkly until noon. Then he glanced at the white, radium-fierce sun, closed his eyes, and drowsed into late afternoon. He dreamt that he communed with the blind Mother again, sitting on stones shaped like hands. She whispered a sacred name in his ear, and when he voiced it a white elk shouldered out of the forest, sunlight spinning on its antlers...

Sumner woke and washed the taste of sleep out of his mouth with the tepid water in his flagon. He stuck a black twig between his teeth and sucked on the bittersweet root. The colorful desert lay before him—agatized rainbows and rock light.

A cry rose between the buttes. Llyr, the dusk star, burned cold silver over the ridgeline, wobbling in layers of air. The vague green spume of skyfires scattered and reformed in an unfelt wind. Sumner held himself in selfscan, watching bats whir and squeak among the rock spires.

Another cry went up over the desert, high and taut. It dimmed without an echo—a ghost cry. Sumner remained aloof and watchful, though he knew that was not a creature-call. Needles of crystal flashed in the parabolic sand as the last light faded. Shadow hallucinations misted over the terrain. He focused on the longhaired stars in the striated air over the world’s edge.

It wasn’t until the moon came up and its clear light enameled dunes and rocks that he heard the cry for a third time—an ululating scream. Again, no echo, and he realized that the sound happened inside him. Another call quivered through his muscles and burst open in his head as a howl: the shocking cries of the voor dead suddenly claw-ripping the air around him, wrenching and hurling him from his selfscan. Electrified, his body jumped, though his face remained slack as a rag effigy. Jolting screams flattened him and left him gazing up at the lofty nightfires.

Strong fear unwound and cracked along his spine, bursting through his mind in a rush of jigging colors—and he began to relive the deaths of voors on other planets.

He lumbered flatfooted over bauchy ice. Above him, two suns burned: one low on the horizon and flesh-colored, the other a windy blue and quilted. Arrowstuck, knifestabbed, punctured, he withered, dying. A groan-sore tongue rolled with the flinty taste of blood...

He became an iridescent creature, rooted like a tree, a lantern of water, then a fumy, spiritous mistlife, weeping as it dissolved-A lens—being, moonskulled—A tendriled diatom—

Sumner tried to hold himself back, then toppled, clutched by a force that swept through lifetimes: countless forms, countless worlds. His life drifted, merely another shape. And he knew all of them—he could be any one of them again.

He became a being many times vaster than a whale, a being massive as a planet—reefs of living rock keeling through the sheer light of stars, translating that energy into music. Shining canticles resounded in his mind rapt with curves of distance, dimming as the star-tugs pulled the being away from its sun—

Sumner clutched the earth beneath him and forced himself alert.

The frightening confluence of sounds and images within the inward darkness of his body began to mount again. Fumes of light coiled across his vision, and the haunted wailing tightened in his ears. Still, he remained calm. Nothing could hurt him now, for nothing could touch him. He ranged empty as a cave, senses hollow and intangible as echoes.

Corby loomed wraithlike deep within. The voor was alarmed. A year in Iz without a physical form had made him less. The percussive pulses, the drum and gong of the voor dead no longer affected his howlie body. Not even the entranced vision of Unchala’s slow death with its fervid starsongs could reach Sumner.

It’s me, Father—I can’t go on now without you. Listen to me.

Corby’s voice rippled in Sumner’s ears, burlesqued by the squawk of bereaved cries from the voor dead. Sumner let the voice pass through him like a stray thought.

After so long a journey, can you turn me away? Again, the fireshifting images of the voor-migrations began scrolling through Sumner. Instantly, he slid through murky waters, thin and fish-slippery, feeling unnamable hungers, vision belled by stalk-eyes—

Sumner relaxed his deepest muscles, and the alien sensations slipped away.

Don’t ignore me, Father. Listen—I have knowledge. Corby refocused and let specific bundles of thought arc-jump between him and Sumner.

Bubbles of silver light streamed across Sumner’s mind, bursting into thoughts. All at once, he understood everything about brood jewels. He knew fully and clearly how the seeds formed out of the rare minerals and hormones excreted by certain voors. The technique had been perfected in a distant—galaxy where blue-haired hominids had organs for eliminating excess metal ions from their bodies. Some voors remembered how to draw out these substances, and they had modified their human forms to do so. The seeds, planted in rock faces, exploited mineral content, moisture, and temperature to enhance the metal-locked kha of the donor. After several centuries of growth, the crystals grew large enough for harvest. They formed powerful crystals, for the kha in them had been altered to an Iz-window, an acausal vantage which...

Again, Sumner relaxed his deep muscles, and the thought-volutions narrowed and thinned away.

Are you zaned? Corby’s bleak voice shredded like a vapor in the wind of voorish mumblings. I’m offering you power. I can show you things no human has ever witnessed.

Sumner’s mind flared with knowledge, and he sat up tall, glistening with cold sweat, suddenly understanding the secret of death. Extinction did not follow death after all. The collapse of the organism liberated subtle energies—psynergy. Those life-energies blended with the forces around them, shifted and realigned into other configurations, other lifeforms, many of them unguessable to a human mind.

In the sway of his new power, he glimpsed the advanced forms: lightningflash moments of blue, fragmentary beings wintering in a vastness of tissue-light—too strange to see clearly. Animals like mist, whorling shapes, dissolved into one another with cattle sounds and bird cries. The quick pulsing strength of a bloodied hind rat bled into a starved hawk and the circling pace of an exhausted shark, their hazy psynergies pooling into the tight, hot power of his life—

The vision filmed Sumner’s eyes like a fever. He was breathing hard, and he had to clench his fists to regain a sense of himself. “Teeth dreams,” he mumbled once, and his mind began to clear.

Wait—there’s more. I can show you your eth-power...

Sumner cut off the whining voice in his head. Frost had stiffened his clothing, and his muscles felt leaden.

Corby experienced a surge of power as Sumner’s mind circled in on itself trying to get oriented. In that moment, he realized that he could not overcome Sumner’s strength. The habit patterns and thought routines that Corby had once used to control him had disappeared. The howlie opened empty as a voor mage, and Corby had thinned out, reduced to a mere impulse, and becoming vaguer each day. Only one hope remained. But he would have to act swiftly. The voor surged into Sumner’s consciousness with all his strength.

The sudden assault of voor noise thumped through Sumner’s body. He lurched, hands to his head, feeling a chorus of cries too high for hearing. Pain blurred focus and snatched his strength. He fell back, head thudding to the ground, teeth clashing.

The pain almost crushed him before it eased up. His body breathed again, and his blank brain filled with light. The voices of the voor dead drummed in his bones.

The sun rose over a rimrock, and shafts of light glazed Sumner’s eyes. He blinked, and the rapport between him and Corby shriveled. Help us, Sumner, the voor pleaded. Our journey must continue. But the broods cannot unite without our godminds. We must go on. But we do not have the strength to leave without our godminds. Help us! A cortege of mournful voices writhed between his ears. The Delph is destroying us. You must help us stop him. Shapeless cries flinched in his throat. The Delph...

Sumner reined in his attention and let the lament wrinkle out of hearing. He had listened enough to this voor. Whether this was really Corby or not he couldn’t say. Voors were devious. That much he had learned from Jeanlu. He wanted nothing more to do with them.

He swayed to his feet and stretched the ache out of his muscles. With morning sunlight glinting off the dunes and warming his numbed flesh, he felt good. Bonescrolls’ final command had been fulfilled. Now he could seek him out and get purged of this possession.

No more voors. No more teeth dreams. Enough illusion occupied his life without the memories of long dead worlds.

Even so, as he staggered over the windfolded sand, he marveled that such beings existed—beings of light, reshaping bodies, forever wandering. There was no loneliness like theirs.

***

Nefandi stood in the shadow of a balanced rock staring across distorting lenses of heated air on the desert floor. No life stirred anywhere among the cliffs of mangled and rusted iron. White, depthless sky hung empty even of clouds, and ridges and defiles edged in black and purple wavered in thermal currents like a hallucination.

Why would anyone choose to live in this death hole? he wondered, gnawing on the frayed tip of an unlit cheroot. He removed his wide-brimmed leather hat and wiped sweat from his face. The heat made him look sad, but menace still showed in his one red eye and along the glossy, rippled scar that stitched his dark face from mirror-shard eye to wide, clamped jaw. He placed his hat back over his spiked hair, took a swig of water from a flask, and strode out into the ponderous sun.

His loose tawny trousers and shirt, designed to protect him from stinging sand, captured heat and baked his flesh. To keep his mind off his suffering, he thought back on where he had come from. A tame world of small, biotectured villages: Nanda with its bluffs and milk-blue lakes; Sidhe, the floating stone city; and Cleyre, exquisite Cleyre, meadows exploding with aster and cyclamen, trout streams clean as light. As a Rubeus-programmed assassin, his strongest memories began in the ice-valley laboratories of Graal, the Delph’s stronghold. His new body awaited him there. But now was too lonely a time to be thinking of home.

Nefandi slid into selfscan and picked up his pace, hugging shadows under wind-eaten rock walls. He entered the sun only when enormous potholes and fissures blocked his way. A chill flowed with the sunlight, a somnolence that he knew well. The heat had begun killing him, and several times, each time sooner, he had to stop and refresh himself.

Sitting in the dry heat of the shade, he cursed Rubeus for sending him here, though in the back of his mind he knew that if he had to choose over again, he would be right where he was now. How could he choose otherwise? Rubeus had promised him a new body—his third—if he succeeded in this mission. Rubeus served as the Delph’s guardian. An artificial mind, an ort like Nefandi—but vaster, the size of a mountain and huge with power—Rubeus could easily weave him a new body, and for that privilege Nefandi would do anything.

But why am I ordered to take the long way around? He cleared the sweat from his one red-veined eye and stood up. Heat waves floated in glassy lavers, veiling the distances he had to cross. Rubeus had said this mission would be difficult. The person he stalked was supposedly very powerful. He has to be to live in this hell maze.

Sometime during the solar heat-crazed hours of the afternoon a raven began wheeling high over Nefandi’s head. In the sensex embedded behind his mirror eye, he could detect nothing unusual about it, but the bird behaved strangely. It followed him, despite shriveling heat and his attempts to lose it among the arches and tunnel rocks. Finally, he had to kill it. He brought it down with a burst from his unsheathed field-sword. Unfolding its wings in his hands, he could detect nothing unusual about it.

Not long afterward, as he followed a rain-trail down an escarpment of smoldering red bordered with charcoal, another raven began ringing through the sky above. He ignored it. His destination loomed close now, and he had no time for desert anomalies. All around him lay a labyrinth of basins, towers, and fins of naked stone. The sandstone, crossbedded and checkered, seamed by old fault lines, appeared bizarrely sculptured. It took all his skill to cross the tilted ledges in the fearful glare of the sun.

As he edged along a rim that curled over a kniferock ravine, the circling raven swooped. It clawed the back of his neck, and he yelped and danced for his footing. The sandstone powdered beneath his frantic weight and hissed into long, thin fractures. Only selfscan and luck carried him across before the rim crumbled and whispered into the abyss.

Nefandi searched the sky and the rock walls for the raven. Apprehensively he moved on, scrambling over rocks that seesawed under his weight. By the time he reached the sand bowl of a saddle basin, his clothes clung, pasty with sweat and fear.

Again he searched for the raven. Nothing living presented itself, yet a new feeling prickled around him. The sensation he had been coded to feel when near his objective came on as he slid over the loose rock slabs, and he concentrated to feel its source. A tall crest of rock, windsmoothed and arching like a wave, emanated a dull lifenergy. The sensex detected nothing, but the more sensitive sensors embedded in his skull definitely reacted to a strong life-presence.

Nefandi unsheathed the silver-gold sword strapped to his back and approached the sweep of rock. A gully of frantic stones and boulders blocked a direct advance, and he circled the tower. At the side, he stopped cold and crouched behind a sand-buffed outcropping. Beside the tower, a juniper stood, crowded with silent ravens. They angled their small heads to watch him as he stepped into the clearing. They made no sound, and they barely stirred.

With his mind held rigidly in selfscan and his sword angled before him, he skirted the raven tree and ducked into a cave mouth at the base of the tower. As silently as his anxious legs could move, he mounted the steep incline following the directional cues of his sensors. The person he had been sent to kill waited up ahead at the top of the tower. Nefandi’s sense of that person deepened, and he negotiated forking and curving corridors without hesitation. But halfway to the top, he froze, halted by an unusual sound.

He leaned on his sword and listened to rustling, snapping noises. He bolted forward, and the next instant the first of the ravens clawed into his back. He slapped it off with his sword, not breaking his stride. The others followed quickly, and soon they engulfed him in black beating wings and ripping claws.

Not daring to activate his field inside the tower for fear that the sandstone would collapse around him, he slashed at the rabid birds with his sword. Too many of them drummed at his back, snapping over his shoulders, darting their claws at his one real eye. Sticky blood pooled in his ears and splattered his cheeks. He lashed madly, stumbled and curled into a ball as the needlebeaks stabbed his back. With a gnashed cry, he activated the field of his sword. Ravens burst above him in an explosion of feathers and torn shrieks. And higher, almost too high to hear, the sandstone walls whined and began to hiss.

Nefandi shut down the field and lunged to his feet. He dashed along the cramped corridor, pulling himself up blind inclines, using his sensex in the far infrared to make out the pathways. A raven hammered into him from behind. He spun about and whacked it in half. Gasping, he waited with raised sword for the others, but no others attacked.

After several more turns, the darkness relented, and he followed the light and the cool air to a sweeping cavern lanced with skyholes and natural windows. Bonescrolls sat crosslegged before one of the large oval openings, wearing linen trousers and a shirt of pristine white. He smiled broadly, wild white hair glowing in the afternoon sunlight like a nimbus.

“Welcome, Death,” the magnar said, his face radiant as a dream. “Come in! Come in!”

Nefandi took a wary step forward. Sensors trilled insanely in his head. Kill him now, the implanted command urged, and his sword arm raised and leveled his weapon. But he did not fire. The race through the darkness, the ravens, and now this smiling old man left him feeling giddy.

“A drink?” Bonescrolls held up a clear jug half-filled with green wine. The magnar’s hand trembled, and looking closer, Nefandi observed the old man’s fear.

The assassin lowered his sword and stepped forward, his sensex scanning the cavern for hidden weapons.

Bonescrolls poured out two cupfuls, frowning to master the tremor in his fingers. “I’m a little nervous, Death.” He held out one of the blue-glazed mugs. “I had hoped that I wouldn’t be. After all, I’ve seen this coming for a long time.”

Nefandi stood before Bonescrolls and waved away the drink. A trickle of blood dropped from his chin and splattered in the dust between them. Who was this old man? The kha around him shimmered, extraordinarily thin. Most of the life-energy had coiled into his abdomen. The man obviously possessed profound power, yet he looked like a drunk.

Bonescrolls nodded and tugged nervously at his hair. “Appearances always tell the truth—if you look close enough,” he said, voice splintering. “I am a drunk. I’m inebriated with life. That’s why I came out here.” He chuckled, making a high nasal sound like the whinny of an uneasy horse. “I thought this inhospitable land would wean me away from life. But there is beauty in being. I understand now that if I lived ten thousand years, I would still want more.”

A talker, Nefandi thought. He is a drunk. He watched the magnar sip his drink and blink slowly with satisfaction. Bonescrolls put his mug down and looked up at Nefandi, his face composed, eyes alert and moist. “There is so much to know, to see, to feel.” He sighed and flicked his eyebrows. “I don’t suppose I could entreat you in any way to let me live?”

Nefandi stared back at him, cool as silver.

The old man nodded and put one hand over his heart. “Okay.” His upper lip went taut. “My whimpering is over.”

Nefandi brought up his sword, but as his hand moved to activate it, Bonescrolls’ body unsprung. His legs kicked out, and the flagon of wine flew into Nefandi’s face. The assassin dodged it clumsily, and his hand fear-twitched on the sword, firing a burst of power. The blast hit the ledge of the oval window with a scream of ripping rock. Shock-severed chunks of the ceiling collapsed in streamers of dust, and the whole face of the struck wall groaned mightily and dropped away.

Bonescrolls had rolled clear of the falling wall, but a massive slab of the ceiling slammed him flat, pinning both of his legs. Nefandi had leaped back and hunched against a far wall. As the dust churned and settled, he stepped forward, a wild tic at the scarred corner of his mouth and a dark look in his smoky red eye. He stalked up to where Bonescrolls lay stretched out on his back and stomped the heel of his boot into the old man’s belly.

The magnar wheezed and smiled, thick lips flecked with pink froth. “Even truth is a boulder.” He laughed softly, face luminous until Nefandi blew off the top of his head.

“Stupid old man,” he grumbled, turning away from the inert body. He went over to the shattered edge of the cavern where a new, wide vista opened. Whiskey-colored light angled between buttes and spires. In the east, long bars of clouds gathered, driftwood-blue in the late sun.

Killing’s unimportant, he told himself as he gingerly fingered the claw marks on his face. We’re all killed by something sooner or later. It’s dignity that counts, and there would have been more for that old man if he hadn’t struggled. Stupid fool. A man with that much kha should be ready to live his death.

He sheathed his sword and kicked the wine jug over the broken edge of the cavern. His work was not yet finished. One more death stood between him and his new life. A Massebôth soldier in lusk had to be put out of his misery. He lived with the Serbota, a primitive tribe several days away. At least this would be a mercy death.

Nefandi did not like killing hermits or old men. He didn’t look back as he left, but he did wonder what Bonescrolls had meant: Truth is a boulder. The man was a soak, all right. A real talker. Who was he? Ach! Useless to ponder.

***

Smoke-blue dawn filled the sky when Drift and Ardent Fang came out of the north. They approached Bonescrolls’ rock tower slowly and diffidently. Ardent Fang led the way, eyes sliding warily, knife drawn. He had shared Drift’s nightmares of shards and lumps of bloody flesh and bones in the smoke of bones, and he woke each time chewing his screams.

For Drift, it had been worse. After the second day on the Road, it had experienced shadowed dreams of voices at a distance, a numbing crack of thunder, and then a lightning-jagged pain in its legs pinning it flat in the abstraction of its sleep. The black core of the nightmare spasmed in its stomach, the odor of blood, and a blow that rent the top of its skull and squashed it dark.

The Road, too, had not felt right. A malevolent presence, dark and preoccupied, had been in the area not long before. In the blue dawn shadows, they had even spotted the tracks of a large man. Drift would not go near the prints. A glassy red light glowed over them, the bloodlight of a deadwalker, a living corpse. In the muted sky, flocks of ravens circled silently.

When they came within sight of Bonescrolls’ tower, neither of them expected to find him alive. Yet, as they came in sight of the collapsed wall and the dark hole at the summit, their hearts constricted. Ardent Fang scrambled up the mound of fallen rock and found Bonescrolls. He dropped to his knees, hands over his face, and howled.

Drift saw the corpse through Ardent Fang’s eyes. Its mind flinched, and it walked numbly around to the cave entrance. By the time it wound its way through the dark corridors and entered the cavern, its shock had settled and the sight of the body impacted less than the rage it felt. A rasping click rattled in its throat, and it fell to the ground and thrashed among the rocks.

Ardent Fang mastered his grief and in the lilac light began gathering pieces of the shattered skull. Overnight the blood had caked, gluing dead flesh to the rock floor. White ants swarmed over the body, and the putrid deathsmell thickened as the day warmed.

By noon, the ants were plucked from the body and all the bits of flesh scraped off the ground and gathered in a scrap of torn cloth. Ardent Fang carried the body down through darkness to the sandy field before the tower.

With a stone wedge fastened to a lopped segment of his walking stick, Ardent Fang fashioned an ax and brought down the tall juniper. Drift arranged the wood into a pyre as Ardent Fang cut it up. Together they sat before the blazing heap, the devil harp warbling a mournful tune while the né chanted:

Like the thunder you begin

Too late

To remember the light....

Sumner followed the nut-sweet fragrance of burning juniper across the evening. At Bonescrolls’ rock abode, smoke idled up, flames muttered. Both Ardent Fang and Drift sat inert, too wasted by grief to move. They watched him approach and met the emptiness in his face and the remote gaze of his eyes.

Drift watched for a moment in the felted silence and noted the wan, fatigued light around his body. The magnar is dead.

The moment distilled to a burning drop of feeling, but Sumner remained expressionless. The bruising hurt quelled almost immediately. Bonescrolls is dead. That thought burned a thinning filament in the emptiness of his mind—a void that, hours before, had contained countless deaths on unnumbered worlds. He squatted in the dust and watched plum-colored stars wink on above the horizon.

Ardent Fang felt a throb of anger at Sumner’s coolness. He wanted to grab that blank face by its long hair and drag it over to the pyre and force it to see the charred corpse. But the moment was—sacred, and he restrained himself. Drift too, disturbed by Sumner’s aloofness, wondered if the warrior perceived how great a loss this was. When the seer reached out with its mind to touch Sumner, it felt itself edging up to a windy cliff-edge. It backed off and married its mind to the shadows and its grief.

Sumner remained emotionally void. Not even the realization that the voor he had mastered with his One Mind would continue to live in his body moved him. The eye of the moment through which everything threaded revealed the pearled light of dusk, silky smoke and red embers in the pyre malign as eyes.

Fatigue ghosted through him, and stray thoughts, cumbersome as sleep, narrowed his awareness: The magnar is dead—no freedom from voors now...Those thoughts dropped away. His exhaustion dropped away. Even his body seemed to drop away. The air smelled slow—the sweet, cold, piney flavor of smoldering desert wood. Pools of silent energy circled around him, turning with the evening colors. In the corners of dusk, the tops of the highest buttes were catching the last slips of light and shining with time.

Sumner closed his eyes, and blue threads of light wormed the darkness. A voice muffled with distance spoke within him: We are one now. Sumner sensed Corby drawing closer. He had the strength to stop him, to turn the alien back. But he had gone empty. Everything moved through him. The voor arrived very close to his senses now, curiously alive and full of loneliness. The wild static of the voor dead browsed in the far distance.

We are one, Corby spoke, quiet as moonlight. I make no demands. But I am within you. I see all that you see. And all that I have is yours. Let us share what we are.

Stoneflakes glinted in the dark depths, and Sumner grew aware of his tranced body knitting itself close to the voor. A wheeling darkness moved through him, and when he opened his eyes he sat alone in the pearl-gray light of dawn.

The tracks of Ardent Fang and Drift wandered off to the north. The pyre had burned out, reduced to a charred circle in the sand. Without thinking it, but knowing it for a voor desire, he went over to the exhausted fire and scooped a handful of the ash into his side pouch. He turned toward Miramol and began to walk. He did not know why he headed there or what he intended to do. It simply felt right.

“After all,” he said aloud to the chemical desert, “the world is feeling.”

***

He passed clay pits where mud-clotted distorts stooped to their work and did not see him go by. In the wide fields beyond, smoke muscled close to the ground. Distorts heated stone kilns, tempering metal and hardening wood. When they spotted him, they cast warding signs in his direction and sent up a shrill alarm on their cricket whistles. Nefandi ignored them. He moved as silently as the smoke he passed through, his sword strapped to his back.

The women and children in the vegetable plots had already scattered by the time he moved between their shaggy green rows. At the treeline, he brought down a young warrior he had spotted with his sensex aiming a blowgun at him from high in a baobab. When the youth thudded to the ground, a loud wailing started in the grass huts.

Nefandi scanned the houses for voor kha. He moved down the length of the tusk- and rib-lined boulevard, his body sheathed in the protective field of his sword. The well-carpentered huts and the immaculate flower lanes shimmered through the field, and a rock tossed from a tree bounced off the air around him, a foot from his head.

At the end of the boulevard, he spotted the knoll of silverwood lodges with their trellises of jungle blossoms. Blue-green kha pulsed behind the walls, and he moved in that direction. Along the way, he studied the distorts studying him from behind the trees and moss curtains. They were symbio-mutants—that is, their mutations provided a necessary component of their lives. They used frequent triple-jointed gestures and ear and scalp expressions that an undistorted human could not. That was possible, he made a mental note, only because of genetic phase-drifting. The mutations were not random. At least most of them weren’t. A fifth of the distorts he had seen so far had dysfunctions that easily would have selected against them without tribal support—such as that legless woman in the doorway to her hut and that blind man under the tree with the fishing net in his lap. Didn’t a tribe advanced enough to cultivate androgs understand the long-term benefits of selective life-privilege? Ach! Useless to ponder.

The né watching Nefandi’s approach from the peepholes of their lodges gaped, appalled. The smell of his mind revealed a killer and, worse, a deadwalker. The shadow-red lifelight about his body appeared sluggish, circling slowly through his chest and brightening only around his head. He was obviously the one who had slain the magnar, though why he had come to them they couldn’t guess. None of them, however, cared. The loss of their benefactor weighed too heavily on their minds, and they resolved without speaking to kill him.

Nefandi moved in a tiger’s slouch up the incline of the knoll. The heat on his back, like a heavy mantle, tangled up his legs and slowed his walk. He squinted and spit out the taste of dust. He would be very relieved to complete this assignment. The howling of the women and children, the aggressive cries of the males, and the oppressive heat made everything look malevolent. Even the silverwood lodges ahead, rippling with emerald kha, seemed threatening. Nefandi knew from his programming that the hermit he had killed had been revered by these people.

He turned up the force of his field and then turned it down again immediately. The drag of energy made walking too difficult. He would just have to stay alert. His dark, furious face swung side to side as he reached the top of the knoll. Most of the lodges turned up empty. But one thrived with kha.

Nefandi did not bother to announce himself. He tried the sliding door and, finding it unlocked, shoved it aside and strode in. A wall of heat with the cooked smell of sweat and stale incense confronted him and stopped his advance. The light in the large room wrinkled with shadows and smoke, and at first only his sensex registered the others: a verdant cloud of kha swirling tighter. His eyes sharpened, and he confronted forty androgs, each one small and burnished black like silver idols smoky with age. The tight eyes beneath the carved eyelines fixed him with serpent rigidity, and before he could move, their kha cramped to a miniature thunderhead in the lap of a blue-robed androg. The thunder-head exploded, the force of it lifting Nefandi off his feet and dashing him against the doorjamb so mightily it splintered outward.

Even through the buffer of his field, the assault struck so powerfully that he blacked out. In that unconscious moment, the crowd of né swarmed over him. They desperately strove to get at him through the field before his alertness jarred back into place.

Infuriated, Nefandi jumped his field to maximum. The sudden burst of power mangled the né around him, exploding those touching the field and smashing the others against the walls of the lodge.

“Abominations!” he howled as he leaped to his feet, sliding on the pooling blood and almost falling. He shut down the field so that he could fire bone-crushing spurts of force at the remaining né. The short, pan-faced creatures scattered, rushing for the windows and small back doors, but Nefandi moved too fast for them. In moments, the horrible, gibbous cries of the né fell to silence, leaving the room tangled with the blood-sprawls of the dead.

Nefandi stalked angrily out of the lodge, fingers trembling. The impact of the energy that had knocked him out still sang along the curve of his skull. He moved swiftly among the moss-shawled trees and down the incline of the knoll toward the heart of the village. His anger, a knot in his throat, squeezed tighter as he realized how treacherously petty his attack had been; the voor he wanted had eluded him.

In the central courtyard of the village, before a natural mist-spring steaming among dark trees, the laughing warriors of the Serbota had gathered. A bull’s-horn formation of men with fishing spears flanked a line of slingshot-armed warriors. In the trees, a squad of hunters with blowguns waited silent as cats. The screams of the dying né had shaken even the boldest of the tribesmen, and as Nefandi strode into sight with sword in hand and the air simmering around him as if heat-crazed, nervous laughter and the awed name of the Dark One spasmed through the ranks.

The tribesmen trembled with fury and edged toward him, fishing spears lowered, all of them pointing at his chest. He moved to shut down his field, and as his hand tightened on the hilt control, a brusque female voice shouted over the mumbled chanting of the warriors. In the mounting furor, Nefandi might not have noticed the voice, but he heard it distinctly in his left ear, spoken in a language he understood. Stop! No more killing! It was as much a telepathic as an auditory command. The tribesmen pulled up their spears and danced anxiously around their fading chant.

Nefandi looked over his shoulder. A hefty old woman in a black shift hobbled toward them, her pasty face set in a grimace of effort. She came up to the edge of the field, small hairs raising all over her body. Why are you killing my people? Her voice snapped in his mind, out of synch with her lips.

Nefandi stared at this woman, who stared back bold as brass. Face puffed beneath lank, age-yellowed hair and a heavy jaw gave her a masculine cast. She held a watchful cunning in her black eyes and a sly suggestion of dark humor in the surly curve of her mouth. The pale round of her forehead caught the sun like metal.

“I was provoked,” Nefandi replied, voice muffled by the field. “I mean no harm. I’m looking for one man—a voor lusk living in this village.”

The old woman’s kha shifted subtly across her eyes, and Nefandi registered that she knew.

I’m Orpha, and I’m responsible for the well-being of these people. With no anger, no edginess to the sound of her voice or the feel of her mind, she appeared uncannily serene, and that chilled his anger to dissatisfaction.

“You know who I’m talking about,” Nefandi said. “Take me to him.”

You must swear by whatever is sacred to you that there will be no further harm to my people. Her eyes fixed him, and they did not flinch when his dark face creased in a cruel smile.

“Nothing is sacred, woman. But I assure you, all I want is this man.”

Orpha lidded her eyes and held her silence. When she opened them she wiped the sweat from her brow, and turned away. Come with me.

Nefandi followed her back down the tusk-lined boulevard to a crude, turquoise-studded hole at the base of a rock mound. He stood diffidently at the lip of the hole, scanning the darkness: no heavy equipment, no metal, and no mechanical traps. He shut down the field and lowered himself into the burrow after Orpha.

Phosphor-tendrils looped over roughhewn walls, making the rock look varnished. He stayed close to Orpha, his hand on his sword hilt, breathing slowly of the dank, incense-stained air. From a distance came the splash of underground cascades. His face tightened in the earth-chill misting off the walls, and he had to close his good eye to see clearly with his sensex in the vague light.

They walked past empty chambers decorated with spider-intricate embroidery, grass hammocks, and wooden implements smooth and lustrous as glass. A curving rock-slab stairway took them down past fans of crystal sediment and spurs of black, greasy-looking rock to a high-domed grotto.

A dozen elderly women sat or stood among glazed siliceous deposits shaped like giant mushrooms. Most of them showed distortions, faces and hands silver-scaled in patches, features bizarrely exaggerated. Sitting prominently on a rock-dome, Orpha and an ancient woman without eyes alone looked whole.

Behind the women, visible in the magnetic range, power hazed, the color of his sword blade. It cut a straight line through the grotto, and he recognized it as the power channel he had followed through the desert.

“Why is he here, Orpha?” the blind woman asked, her empty eyes locked on Nefandi.

“He wants Lotus Face.”

“But the magnar entrusted him to us,” one of the other women protested. She had a sharp weasel face, and she signed obscenely at Nefandi as she spoke.

“The magnar’s ward was ours for one year,” Orpha replied. “That’s over now.”

“And besides,” the blind one said, “the magnar is dead.”

“By this one!” the weasel-face shrilled. “Will we help our own murderer?”

Orpha scowled. “He has killed enough. Let’s be done with him.”

“What do you think, Jesda?” the weasel asked.

“Doom—can’t you feel it?” The blind woman’s fingers twitched before her face. “Whether we help him or not, it is over. Let Lotus Face deal with this deadwalker.”

Nefandi’s face hardened. “Don’t call me that.”

Jesda leaned forward, and the thin light caught the flesh around her sockets and made it glint like snakeskin. “You are a deadwalker. An artificial being. An ort. You know that, don’t you?”

The knuckles on Nefandi’s sword hand whitened, and Orpha spoke up: “Jesda! Let’s be done with him.”

“Don’t fear him, Orpha.” Jesda sat back, a disdainful sneer on her lips. “A man angered by a name is not worth fearing.”

Nefandi grinned, stiff as a skull. “Will you tell me where I can find him?” he asked, his sharp tone shaving the request to a command.

“Ah, deadwalker,” Jesda lamented, shaking her head. “The né that could have told you precisely where he is are now dead. All we can do is indicate where he might be—

“Then do so.” Wariness tempered Nefandi’s anger. He watched carefully as Orpha flashed a hand signal to the other women. Several of them walked across the grotto and stood within the haze of the power channel, their bodies tiny in the basin of dark stone. They joined hands and began walking a slow circle.

“We aren’t as strong as the né,” Jesda acknowledged. “All that we know, they taught us.”

Nefandi heard the ire in her voice and he did not miss the anger in the eyes of the weasel and the other women. “If you mislead me—if there are any tricks—”

Jesda shook her head solemnly. “No deception.”

The women broke off their circling, and one of them approached Orpha. The old woman inclined her head and listened to the other’s whisper.

“Go east,” she told Nefandi. “After walking several minutes you will come to a grove of black pear trees. From there, you should be able to find him yourself.”

Nefandi bowed in mock salute and retreated backward to the stone stairway. After he had left, the weasel screeched and faced Orpha with clenched fists and a frightened, tearful look. “We have betrayed our ward.”

Orpha shrugged. “He’s not our ward. It is Miramol we must protect.”

Jesda cackled. “Protect!” She lost her breath in a fit of silent laughter. “There is nothing to protect, Sisters. Miramol is as mortal as we. Nothing lasts.” She beamed up at the spikes of rock. “That’s why we laugh, isn’t it?”

***

Nefandi emerged into the hum of sunlight and activated his field immediately. Brightness knocked his vision, and he shifted to his sensex. A line of tribal warriors had formed a semicircle beneath the silver-green foliage of the jungle. They began to hiss and click as soon as he appeared, but they fell silent when he came toward them.

At the end of the main boulevard, several hunters spoke with frantic animation to another warrior and an androg. Desert sand furred both the warrior and the androg with a rosy patina.

Nefandi walked east, through the line of warriors and across the boulevard. Suddenly the dusty warrior pushed aside the hunters and rushed at him. Only the urgent squawking of the né kept him from colliding with the field.

Get away from him, Fang! Drift begged, coming up and tugging at Ardent Fang’s arm. The Mothers have taken care of him. He’s leaving now.

Ardent Fang barked at the one-eyed stranger. Fury pounded in his throat, but the obvious futility of attacking the man held him back. He could see the sheen of the shield around him.

“He killed the magnar!” Ardent Fang bawled. “He has the same light that we saw on the Road. We can’t let him get away.”

Drift clung to his arm. We have no choice. You saw what he did to the né.

Ardent Fang snarled as Nefandi moved past him. “Deadwalker, only your sorcery protects you!”

Nefandi ignored the lionfaced distort, rechecked his direction, and entered the jungle along a narrow gatherer’s trail. If that old blind witch hadn’t lied to him, his work would soon be over. He could return to Cleyre, to a new body, to the simple pleasures of his easy life, and leave behind the heat and the hostility of this place. He ducked beneath a low branch and heard the wood explode against the field. Reluctantly, he shut it down, scanning all about him for others, and hurrying his pace down the trail.

Ardent Fang watched him disappear into the bush. He felt the restless urge to heave a rock after him. Instead, he turned to Drift, and they walked slowly down the boulevard.

We must prepare the dead.

Ardent Fang didn’t acknowledge the seer. He walked with his head slung forward, brow pressed tight above his eyes. “What did the Mothers do to get him out of here?” He kicked a clod of earth to dust. “Why was he here in the first place?”

Drift scavenged for an answer, but before it could respond, the tribesman spit and turned about abruptly. He loped back down the boulevard and shoved brusquely through a crowd of warriors, hissing back at them as he jogged up to the Barrow. Entry forbidden him by tradition, he stooped over the hole and howled. Drift tried to pull him away, but he persisted until a stick-thin, weasel-faced Mother appeared out of the darkness.

“Why are you bawling, breeder?” the Mother asked in her annoyed, reedy voice.

“Tell me where the deadwalker is going.”

The Mother laughed with disdain. “Away, brute.”

Ardent Fang dropped into the hole and grabbed the woman by her shift. The material ripped as he lifted her off her feet and slammed her into the wall. “Where, woman?”

“I-can’t-breathe!” she gasped. He tightened his grip, and she gagged. “To-find-Lo-tus-Face!” Her eyes bugged out, and her lips went taut.

Ardent Fang threw her to the ground and bounded out of the hole. He rolled down the incline and broke into a scramble for the jungle. Drift peered into the burrow and, seeing that the Mother was all right, bolted after Ardent Fang.

The sensors embedded in Nefandi’s skull began a low drawl that burred behind his eyes. The voor must be nearby, though his sensex hadn’t yet picked him out. He pushed through a tangle of fronds and entered a small grove of black pear trees. Flies whined about him, and he nudged the field to its lowest setting. From behind him came the thrash of someone running through the jungle. He swiveled and scanned the way he had come.

The lionfaced warrior leaped into sight through a smoke bush, still a distance off. Nefandi fired a single power burst, but by some incredible fortune the distort rolled to the ground the instant the weapon fired.

Nefandi aimed more carefully and fired a longer burst, and again the warrior lunged out of the way and dashed closer. He already had his knife out, and Nefandi could see the fierce determination in his yellow eyes.

Drift ran hard to keep Ardent Fang in sight, its chest spiked with pain. But no matter how warped its lungs felt, no matter how much its breath seared its throat, it sprinted on, dodging roots and low-lying branches. As long as Ardent Fang stayed in sight, it could cue him to Nefandi’s attacks. Right! it fervently sent, envisioning Nefandi’s impulse to cut off Ardent Fang’s left-dodge.

Ardent Fang spun right, and the blast from Nefandi’s sword ruptured a tree trunk with a clout of noise and a spray of wood splinters.

Roll! Ardent Fang rolled, and another slash of energy frittered the leaves above him. Up left! He swung to his feet and curled left as invisible power chewed the ground beside him to a mash.

Nefandi staggered back, stunned. Ardent Fang closed in, knife low and tilted forward. He prepared to lash out with a long, sustained sweep of ripping energy, but a daring impulse sparked through him, and he hesitated. With his sword angled to the ground, he crouched, eyes alert to every ripple of muscle on the distort leaping at him.

He waited until Ardent Fang poised in mid-leap, level with his face, arms spread, yellow eyes raving. Nefandi threw his field up full. The lunging warrior exploded into a tattering of guts and jumping blood. The force of the impact burst the branches of nearby trees and kicked Drift onto its back, slapping it with a mass of hot roping viscera.

Nefandi shut down the field and rolled to the center of the pear grove. His sensors squealed, and he did a quick scan of the surrounding foliage. A glaucous bodylight shifted stealthily through the undergrowth—yellow-golden, the size of a man. He fired a tight burst at it. The leaves danced and scattered, and the kha-light flashed to nothing.

Still on his belly, he scanned the terrain again. The androg stared at him through the quag of his companion’s entrails, too stunned to move. A bird chattered tentatively, and the derelict sounds of fleeing monkeys muffled away. The sensors in his skull had gone quiet, and he got to his feet slowly. It was finished.

Cleyre loomed closer now. He could smell the chicory coffee he would have while sitting on his blossom-arbored patio. He smiled away his fantasy and went over to inspect the body. Was his victim relieved to die—happy to be liberated from the horror of his lusk? Or had the voor become familiar to him? Perhaps they had shared a life. Useless to ponder.

He used his sword to force aside the tangled brier. Draped over a fallen tree, head cleaved open, a silver puma lay. Nefandi stood baffled and was still pondering how an animal could have had so highly developed a kha when Sumner unfolded from his cover of brambles behind the big cat. He had no kha. The voor held all his psynergy deep within.

Nefandi staggered back, but not before Sumner grabbed his sword arm. He gripped it so hard the muscles unflexed, and the weapon dropped. Nefandi’s mind lurched. The black rainbow-glossed face transfixed him—eyes flat, indifferent, and slow...

Nefandi’s free arm gouge-slashed and got slapped away. He twisted, and the hand clamping his arm squeezed tighter, tugging him forward. A knife flashed in Sumner’s grip, and Nefandi watched the blade slide between his ribs. A scream kicked in his throat. He bucked and thrashed, a dumb hilarity whirling inside him, spinning itself out. His whole body stiffened, and he sagged to the ground, drained, only a shape.

Sumner let the body fall. He looked at the limbs folded like wet cardboard, the fright-glare in the one eye, and a finger twitching, frantic for a signal from the stopped brain.

He bent over to wipe his blade on Nefandi’s shirt, and the hushed voice of the voor opened in him. You trusted me, Sumner, and I did not fail you. We are as good as one now. We are the same.

He sheathed his knife, picked up Nefandi’s sword, and stepped over the body.

Drift, blood-splattered and limping, met him in the clearing of the pear grove. Its bead eyes had clouded over, and at first Sumner felt nothing from it but a cold mist, shadowy and languid. Then the seer’s voice entered his mind: Why didn’t you save him? It held up its hands, slick with Ardent Fang’s blood. You saw what was happening. Why didn’t you save him?

“The voor was holding my kha back, Drift. If I had moved or even thought, we’d both be dead now. I had to let Fang go.”

Drift stared at him, its bloody hands raised. I thought you were human. Its eyes glistened, and its look frayed. It turned away. You’re more voor than man.

Sumner watched after the seer until it passed among the trees and out of sight. Nothing is ever lost—it’s just on its way back, he said to himself.

That thought began a slow loop through his mind—a mantra that set his feet moving, that marched him out of the forest and into the sun-veiled landscape of Skylonda Aptos.

He walked hard through the primeval chaos of faulted, uplifted and folded rock. In a desolate spot, he buried Nefandi’s sword, and then continued his grief-march. When the sky filled with colored vapors, he sat with his back to a stone arch and stared out at the darkening reef of clouds. He had killed Ardent Fang—the way he had killed Bonescrolls, by inaction. He had let the human love in him die. He was a voor, and that awareness immobilized him. Dervishes of red dust spun over the arid flats. Llyr glinted above the horizon, small and glassy. A cold wind deepened.

***

At dawn, Sumner awakened to the sound of metal punching the air—engines. The noise sounded terrifying coming across the barren and shattered land. He mounted the stone arch and witnessed a convoy of yellow and brown troop carriers rumbling across the mangled terrain. Green flags stenciled with black and white pillars stretched over the sides of the treaded vehicles.

Sumner sprinted over swells and folds of maroon rock to intercept the lead carrier. When they spotted him, the convoy bawled to a stop and several men in desert camouflage suits jumped down, rifles ready.

Sumner identified himself, and the men quickly hustled him onto the top deck of the point carrier. With a screech of fatigued metal, the convoy clawed forward again.

Sumner held on to the deck rail, watching the horizon sway. After the commander put aside his radio, Sumner asked: “What’s going on here?”

The commander, young and straw-blond with pale, vivid squint lines radiating from his eyes, looked Sumner over with a curious and amused expression. “Your cover’s impeccable, Kagan.” The pale etchings in his flesh vanished in the folds of his smile. “I’d heard the Rangers went all out, but you’re amazing.” His little eyes widened to take in Sumner’s braided hair, colorful thread-stitched ears, jaguar-toothed neckband, and faded loincloth. “What tribe are you surveying?”

“Serbota.

“Ah.” His small eyes became deadlier. “Then you can be useful to us.”

Sumner’s insides tightened.

One of the radios squawked several code phrases. The commander stepped past Sumner and peered south across the jogging terrain. “Here they come.”

Several black specks hobbled on the horizon, swimming closer.

“You’re taking Miramol?” Sumner asked, voice vague.

“Taking it?” The commander faced him, amused by the thinness of Sumner’s voice. “We don’t take distorts. There’s been some voor activity in the area, and we’re going to wipe out the tribes that might shelter them.”

Thunder trundled out of the south, expanded to a roar, and ripped the sky above them with a scream wider than ears could hold. Four black-hulled strohlkraft howled overhead, arrowing toward the horizon.

Sumner keeled back against the deck rail. The folds of rock streaming by, the swells and grabens, the benches, spires, and synclines linked and continued. Sumner watched them with numb eyes. They blended together in his tears. They became one.

Violence flexed in Sumner’s chest, and he knew he would corpse many men if he didn’t get away.

He jumped off the troop carrier and rolled when he hit the rocky ground. Behind him, the commander yelled: “Get back here, Kagan! You don’t have permission to leave!”

Sumner kept walking, the heat and the dust splashing at his ankles.

“You’re deserting!” the commander shouted, and one of the troopers sighted his rifle and looked for permission to fire. When the commander nodded, the trooper aimed, but Sumner was gone.

Several of the other men had seen him somersault behind a sand drift, and the commander dispatched a dozen men to track him down. They fanned over the broken land and scanned from the vantage of rock pinnacles, but they never saw that ranger again.

The Blood’s Horizon

Sumner walked north, letting his voorsense lead him into the mountains. At the snowline, where jagged rime rocks burned in scallop rays of the sun, he found a ledged cave hidden from the wind. He cleared out the stone shards and sat down against the back wall.

Psychically spent, he felt ready to sleep or die—but the voor in him thrived. Sumner let Corby move forward in his awareness, watching numbly as the voor took the snakeskin pouch from his side and scattered the magnar’s ashes and bonechips on the ground before him. Sunlight glinted off the boneshards like fragments of time, and Sumner’s gut twisted cold with the guilt he felt for Ardent Fang as well as for the magnar.

You’re tired, Sumner, Corby spoke softly, unstable as smoke. So just watch. I’m going to make you forget your hurt. We are going on a long journey. Together, we will shadowshoot Bonescrolls. His fingers spiraled slowly through the ashes in rhythm to the voor voice inside him. Shadowshooting is timetripping. There are enough kha-remnants here for us to relive all of the magnar’s life. In Iz, every tense is now. But it is not him that I want you to know. His thick hands hovered quietly over the intervolving spirals, and a power unspun in his chest, a power as subtle as the ash was white.

A wind mewled through the disoriented rocks outside the cave and blended into Corby’s voice: It is the Delph I want you to see—the godmind we were born to destroy. The twilight unraveled a cliché of broken colors, wind-long and redder than meat. We are going back twelve centuries, following the kha of this life’s dust to the time of Bonescrolls’ first shape. The look of things seemed to wear thin. Time is a secret hidden from itself. We are going deeper into that secret. We are becoming it.

Sumner’s mind blanked. And suddenly, he dwelled in a warm and dark place, drifting easily, listening to the muffled banging of a door in a ghostly wind. A heartbeat.

Corby understood, and his knowledge became Sumner’s: Iz had taken them back to Bonescrolls’ early life and then across time, pushed on by Corby’s will, to the Delph’s embryonic beginnings: they could feel him glowing in the bloodlight, furled in his humming mist, so slippery and small he seemed about to dim away.

Words passed to Sumner from Corby—chanted words—the voorish litany for the unborn:

You will have a name this time, child. And you will have all the limits that go with having a name. You will have a name this time, because where you are going everything has a name...

Corby moved on, and Sumner felt time accelerate. He glimpsed the fetus of the Delph expanding, somersaulting in its womb, pushing out. Its head scowled into the light, and it skidded out, clotted and gleaming with the remnants of its fetal life. The scene misted away, blurring off into a sweep of images, all rushing by too swiftly to be grasped.

...Where you are going, young one, everything that can happen has happened. Everything that has happened is happening again...

The torrent staggered twice, slowing enough for Sumner to glimpse the infant growing: a black-haired child in an oversized yarmulke, standing midway up the stone stairway of a temple; then, a gangly youth in military fatigues, a six-pointed star dangling beneath an angular, grinning face, jet fighters in the background; then, flying darkness—

...and though you will begin to learn the names of everything in your new life, no matter how many names you learn, no matter what sequence you arrange them in, they will tell you nothing about the source or the end. They exist because you do, to assure yourself that your existence can and does happen, then and now, always, and almost as you yourself imagine it happening...

The rush skipped again, and Sumner observed the young man in combat boots, flight pants, a military shirt opened to the waist. He was lying in tall grass, under leafshadows, a dark, sinewy woman beside him. He held her face in his hands, and the scene roared away.

...but names, young life, will be dwarfed by the hugeness of your breath, even though their hunger will be your long traveling, their practice all you will ever endure, their eventual test to perfect the space your passing leaves behind.

***

The cascade of images swirled to a stop. Sumner experienced himself floating in an expansive gallery of curving pastel-green walls. The place fluttered with hushed activity. A semicircle of white leather recliners occupied the center of the gallery, each chair enclosed by glass-paneled equipment and a canopy of fine-meshed iridescent netting. All the recliners were occupied, green-gowned technicians attending each one.

Corby narrowed his focus to one station where a black-haired man with a narrow, composed face lay. This was the one they had traced from the womb—the Delph. The stencil on the breast pocket of his tan fatigues read HALEVY-COHEN.

Corby drew closer, hovering for a moment before brown, wide-spaced eyes and slender nose, the lips full, jaw slim, receding, hair very thick, meticulously combed back from a square forehead. The features expanded to a sheet of diaphanous light, and they focused deeper into him.

His mind opened upon a tumult of images and thoughts, and a disoriented moment passed before even Corby could feel out this man’s name. Jac.

“Jac,” a woman’s voice called. He opened his eyes on an ancient woman, age-loose flesh leaf-brown, huge, dark eyes milky around the edges, sunken, hooded with immedicable sorrow. When she saw that he had awoken, a smile cut across the grain of her face, and she seemed to expand. She threw back her long white hair and bent closer. He could smell the balsam that scented her white caftan.

“I am Assia Sambhava,” she said affably. “Do you remember me?”

Jac’s eyes thinned, and he shook his head.

Disappointment shadowed swiftly across Assia’s face. “No concern.” She wiped the sheen of sweat from his upper lip with her sleeve. “Your memory has been broken for a long time. I am a psychobiologist here at CIRCLE—the Center of International Research for the Continuance of Life on Earth—and I have been treating you since I arrived eleven years ago. Your condition is unique and significant. You have a density in the pontine stem of your brain. You were serving in the North African Air Corps when this density was misdiagnosed as a tumor. Actually, it is a natural development, a folding-inward of the cerebral cortex—something that has happened to one out of every billion humans for the past forty thousand years. I believe it is the next step in brain evolution, and I have been trying to activate and amplify it with RNA supplements. So far, I have been unsuccessful, and”—the dark in her eyes thickened—“worse, I may have damaged you, Jac. Your memory is gone, and I have not been able to strengthen it.”

Jac wasn’t listening. Deep within, he knew who he was, but remembering had become unimportant. He waited, anticipating the inner change that followed most of his treatments. When the patterns of association began to expand, the transfusion nozzle still touched the blue vein on his neck, and he felt surprised at how quickly his mind responded. (Surprised: that is, phosphofructokinase is breaking down glucose-1, increasing neural activity, and so on, a wobbly circle, a snake with its tail in its mouth.)

He wondered if the psychobiologist—Assia, yes—was aware of the speed or even the extent to which these supplements affected her subject.

“Do you have any questions—anything to say?” Assia asked.

Jac’s eyes looked smoky. “I hear a voice.” (The human voice, saddest of instruments.)

“I know.” She spoke in a very gentle way. When she took his hand, the compassion in her eyes thickened to love. “The supplements intensify it.”

“What do I do?” (Remember your heritage. The Qlipoth are your ancestral enemies, especially the Mâmes, those who move by backward motion, and Glesi, the one who glistens like an insect.)

“A new self is being born, Jac.” Assia’s grip on his arm tightened. “You are changing. Don’t try to fight it—and don’t fear it.”

Jac sat still, his eyes too quiet. “What am I becoming?”

Assia’s voice hushed: “I don’t know.” She put a wrinkled hand to the side of his head, and the warmth of her touch conveyed the heat of love. “We are done for today.” She removed the transfusion nozzle and the net of the bioscanner. “Stay in the compound this afternoon. The supplement may make you feel woozy. I will see you again in a couple of days, all right?”

He nodded, and the psychobiologist faced away and began busily authorizing the day’s treatment at a keypunch.

Jac’s hands shook. He breathed deeply to calm himself and pushed out of his recliner. For a moment, he tottered, dizzy, and then struggled with an uncontrollable smile as the flow of associations continued accelerating. (Endocrine infatuation, Jac. Your body loves you. Even as it’s dying, it takes the time to make you feel good. Bad to good. Life to death. A snake biting its ass. The wheel of the law, rolling.)

Jac relaxed his mind and permitted the network of meaning that he perceived to wash him with its euphoria, his laugh losing itself in the mutter of computer processing. Sensory perceptions became continuous again, sound shimmering like thermal breath, colors audible and odorous.

He walked down the aisle of treatment-stations to the exit valve as he had done hundreds of times before, each time stranger than the last.

The portal opened beneath a sandstone scarp on the periphery of a large basin separated from the sea by enclosing outcroppings of shale and red-veined rock. The dispensary complemented the landscape, practically invisible from the outside. Light split from low-lying banks of clouds, falling amber across the flat basin floor that the drilling rain had pitted and caked. On a high vale at the opposite end of the basin, huge black rocks hunched beneath wet wings of rain.

Thunder grumbled, and Jac moved down a vague path among the cold rays of a cloudy sun. (The wheel of the law, rolling, rolling.) He felt the chemical rush in his blood, the newly introduced RNA tightening through him, peaking to a plateau that moved ahead for hours. He stretched his stride as someone lowered the rain around him. (A harp into the hands of the wind.)

***

In the billowy blue light from the saltwater aquarium, Assia’s thin, white-robed body looked like a wraith. Behind her, in the blackmetal face of a wall-console, one red light burned: The Data-Sync opened, ready to tell her anything.

Assia thumbed a series of number functions. She didn’t know what she was looking for—something to affirm her work or herself.

A Queen Triggerfish sailed by like a kite, its dorsal and ventral fins a thin memory of wings. She punched in the voice of her data-recall:

“...mesoderm, seven days after conception. But why has the process of natural selection, which is stringently economical, given Homo sapiens sapiens a brain volume in excess of survival needs? These findings suggest that the cortical overgrowth is a necessary but not sufficient evolutionary step and that these fetuses are precursors of an imminent new development: the doubling of the cortical fold. Many questions are still left unresolved. Why, for instance, does uterine analysis of double cortical folded fetuses in their seventh month indicate massive reshuffling of chromosomal operons linked with memory-androgen formation? Is this evidence, as Gallimard and Sambhava suggest, that these fetuses may be translating chromosomal records into consciously accessible memories? And why is it that shortly before the end of the eighth month one hundred percent of these fetuses refuse to metabolize steroids, thus precipitating miscarriage? Why has it been impossible to maintain the development of the mutated fetuses in artificial amniotic suspension? Are there other...”

Assia snapped off the console. Rainbow-jeweled coral held her gaze: a deathflower, a skeleton-house, a redundant lifecycle frozen in its entity.

***

Jac twisted awake and sat bolt upright, face sharp with startled clarity. The flexform he had been curled in still hummed its drowsetone as he swung to his feet and staggered toward his desk. The calendar pyramid told him with its cold light that it had been more than a year since the last time he had stood as he was standing now, aware of what was happening to him.

He sagged onto the swivel stool beside his desk and gazed with torpor at the scattering of data cubes and cassettes. The sky in the window-oval above his desk, precise with stars, showed by that slim light that nothing here had changed—he was studying the same things that he had been lost in a year ago: world history, psychobiology, neutrino astronomy—trying to understand the changes. Why had massive earthquakes and tidal waves traumatized the planet for so many decades? And what was this cosmic radiation mutating all lifeforms?

A lion of a cloud slouched across the stars, and his vision numbed. The Voice remained silent, but he could feel it close by. If he tried—(I’m always here, Jac—just a cock-in-the-rock’s throw away.)

He jumped despite himself. He knew that the Voice was himself, the doubled-over cortex that Assia had been activating for the last ten years. (Don’t try to rationalize me. Visions defeat the ego.) Memory now intact, he remembered diabolically, and with hurting lucidity, the smell of Neve’s hair—his wife. He slapped on a hidden desk-light and rummaged for the message chips she must have sent. When he found the transparent chips, he held them in his fists. But he didn’t turn toward the video. No time. (The archetype of spontaneity demands that we sharpen our own toothpicks, eh?)

“Voice!” he snapped. (Yes?) He typed out a call-message for Assia on their private line, and then he flicked out the light. In the sudden nerve-darkness, he felt the humid presence of the Other. “What do you want from me?” (My exigence is extreme, Jac. It’s the possession of life, the ecstatic climax, that I want. Nothing less will do.)

Outside the window-oval, the moon rose. He watched the secrecy lifting off the nearby hills as moonlight rhythmed closer. “Then why are we separate?” (We aren’t. I am you—but you’ve forgotten who you are.)

The sky silvered with moonlight, and he followed clouds rising above him as tall and jumbled as a sunken land. “But why do I forget—and for longer?” (Memory is the bone, the carapace. I am the marrow.)

A door snicked open, and an old woman edged in, white hair shining in the darkness.

“Assia—” He stood up, and she went to him. “I’m remembering again.”

“It has been a long time.” She took his shoulders in her long, dark hands. “Do you want to stop the treatments?”

“No.”

“The brainfold can be excised nonsurgically—”

“It’s more than me, Assia.” He sat down again and looked up into the darkness of her face. “Nothing’s changed outside, has it?”

“No. Everything is still mad.” Assia sat on the edge of his desk and brushed the sleepwrung hair from his eyes. “Is the Voice strong?”

“It talks in riddles. And I think it’s going to get worse. How is my behavior these days?”

Assia smiled without moving her lips. “You are kinetic—a lot of walking and exploring.”

“Doesn’t sound very profound.”

“You are in an assimilative phase, Jac. We have to be patient.”

Jac spun in his seat and looked up at the cloud’s bright landscape. An age ago, Assia had envisaged a dream for him. One in a billion with an overfolded cortex: the extra lobe expressed a genetic quirk, a fist in the brain with the strength, perhaps, to reach outside of time and change reality. Much less developed neurologies accomplished that on a small scale, reshaping the statistical reality of thrown dice or randomly fired atomic calculators. What could a natural brainfold do if it were mantically augmented?

The first researchers at CIRCLE hadn’t presented Jac’s situation to him in quite that way. Afraid he might refuse, they had informed him that he had a brain tumor, and for the first year they had experimented on him without his consent. Assia changed all that—but by then he was no longer abstracting beyond the best mantics. He had slowed down. His thoughts had turned inward, and the Voice and a baffling autism had begun. Still, Assia’s vision offered a different outcome. There was the possibility—The possibility that—

Jac turned to Assia with a wide darkness in his eyes. “I’m losing it.” His words spoke inside his breath, barely audible. “Tell my wife I’ll get in touch with her next time.”

Assia bent closer, eyes spiderbright and dark. Should she tell him? Neve was dead, lost with millions of others when Africa’s northern deserts boiled up into an absurd storm—black rain, 400-kilometer-an-hour winds, whole cities lifted away. No—the slackness in his gaze said no.

Assia helped Jac to his feet and led him back to the flexform. When he lay down, the drowsetone came on, and he rolled into a deep sleep. “You are not losing it,” she whispered. “We cannot lose what we are.” She kissed him and stood over him a long while, her body ethereal with fatigue and sadness.

***

Drifts and depths of clouds trawled the fathomless cobalt of the afternoon. Assia lounged in the fluffy embrace of a tropiform, passing time watching flocks of children at play. The gymnasium extended enormously, domed in plastic transparent to the full solar spectrum.

At one end, sunlight blazed green in the depths of a drypool, an oval trough of air that had been thickened to the density of water by subquantally alloying it with noble gases. Closer by, adolescents played volleyball in a null field; others strengthened their muscles with magnetic tug-weights; on the mats, two classes practiced dance and gymnastic routines.

Assia’s attention focused on the little ones, proud to see an intermingling of every race and genetic type, all speaking Esper. And with CIRCLE’s constant genetic monitoring, inherent handicaps posed no danger. Mutations got modified in utero or else aborted. A severe principle, phyletic hygiene, but it averted much suffering.

Even though she loathed genetic controls, Assia recognized their merit with CIRCLE’s children. Watching youngsters with faces continually wonder-rapt, she experienced a joy that hadn’t filled her since her youth. What would it have been like to have had a child—life swelling out of her own body?

“Our future, eh?” a voice gruffed beside her. Nobu Niizeki, CIRCLE’s program director, approached. Short and cube-headed with a thin heard, he took her hand and squeezed it affectionately in his blunt fingers as he sat down. “The world’s gone insane, but our children are still our light.”

“That is what I believe,” she affirmed casually. “If there is any hope, it is with the children.”

“Good,” Nobu said in his austere voice. “That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about.” He let her hand go. His stern eyes, hooded like a weary boxer’s, held her gaze. “That Israeli strato-pilot—”

“Jac.”

“Yes—Jac. You’ve been working with him for almost twelve years now.”

The snake of an artery writhed in her neck.

“Assia—” Nobu’s curved face, serene as amber, leaned closer. “We barely have the resources to feed these children. To survive, CIRCLE’s cutting back. We’re going to have to reassign you.”

Her eyes closed, and history thickened in her face. “And Jac?”

“He’ll be euthed this week.”

Her eyes snapped open, the light in them diamond-dense.

“It’s painless,” Nobu said. “You know.”

“No.” The word sounded thick. “We will send him back.”

Nobu’s eyes curved sadly. “Assia—the world’s changed. There are no places left to send him. It would be a cruelty to turn him loose out there.”

“Then pension him. He volunteered, and he has served well. Come on—what does it take to keep one more man alive?”

Nobu’s strong fingers opened before him, “We don’t have it. It’s survival now, Assia. Cosmic rad levels have quadrupled in the last year. The whole sky is hot from the galactic flare. Haven’t you been following?”

“I have been working.” Her voice, flat and fogged with emotion, continued, “Nobu, listen—Jac’s a top priority. He could be the strongest mantic ever. He could change it all around.”

“It’s gotten beyond any one man, Assia.”

“I am not talking about a man.” She spoke into the black of Nobu’s eyes. “Jac could be a godmind.”

“Bah!” He waved a hand between them to break her gaze. “I worship every day, but that hasn’t stopped the storms yet.”

“Nobu, you know I am serious. Jac has the best-developed cortical fold in physio history. He has got the biology to sustain a causal collapse.”

Warmly, Nobu took her hand again and held it to his chest. “Assia, this has been your life’s work, pushing human biology forward. You’ve reaped a lot. You made the mantic reality what it is. You took the ATP-pump and made it human. But a godmind? I love you, Assia. I love what your work has created, but I have to tell you, you’re making a joke of everything you’ve done. Causal collapse, godminds—that’s a wide vision. The world, as it is now, is too narrow for that. We need you elsewhere.”

Her eyebrows danced. “Doing what? Stabilizing soybean growth? Gene-splicing rad-proof babies?”

“Either of those would help.”

Tears filmed her eyes, and she spoke frantically: “Nobu, no amount of gene shuffling is going to replace the planet’s magnetic field. That new radiation out there is our future. We can’t hole up forever.”

Nobu took her other hand and shook both of them, slow and strong. When he spoke, his voice sounded rapt: “Assia, we need you.” Her soul shrank. “I don’t make policy, but I’ve got to see it through.” He let her hands go and stood up. “I want you to take some time off—catch up on the reports and see what’s really going on. I think you’ll agree with me after you’ve reviewed the facts.”

She looked for help, eyes haunted, but he bowed to avoid her stare. “If you need to talk with someone, try this.” He passed her an octagonal card with unfamiliar coordinates on it and no name. When she looked up, he was already walking away.

***

With a heartquiver, Sumner lurched across time, following his voor strength to where parabolas of tall trees shadowed a grove of bursting sunlight. Sumner spotted a yawp sitting on the darkside of an elm, half hidden in burgeoning ailanthus.

Bonescrolls, Corby informed him. This was his first shape—a service yawp slaving for the howlies. His name was Rois then—and he was a rare breed of yawp. But let’s hear the magnar tell us.

The voor narrowed closer, using what remained of his mage-power to story-pattern the yawp’s psynergy. Sumner’s mind blurred into the flux of Rois’ mind-language:

Kiutl—the Saints call her the hollow light, Old No Name’s undersong. In the boro, the scorchfaced kids, the ones with those furious bodies that can withstand the nervesquelch of kiutl immanence, the ones with that altitudinous light in their eyes—they call her Lami.

Inspired by her, each moment is clear. But—like the sleepy tale of the jinn who for each finger you’d chop off would grant a wish—you can’t stay with her long. After about a year of daily boff, cortical synapses jam, immanence becomes interminable, and within a week, the ears are gone to marauding boys, the eyes to birds, and the old women have come to dice the spine.

My mother went that way. She was skunked and obscure on kiutl when I was born—a blue and weathered twist of flesh kept alive on corpsemeat, surviving to see her strangle on a cord of vomit a year later. She was twelve and had made enough contacts in Little Eden’s research labs to barter me. Without doubt, I would have trashed in the boro without her, so working for the grins as a psi-target was unlimited.

To accrete a sense of gratitude, the grins focused my eyes, dried out my wheezing, and razoredged my wits. Then they proceeded to sketch the game plan: They wanted me to cooperate with other lab yawps while they hammered out the dents in our chromosomes. The grins were gambling with our nucleic pathways. Too few survived. Those that did were genetic diamonds, nucleic bodhisattvas.

A spirit of fire, the energy of the gene maze itself, bound us to one another tighter than bone. We were anxious to live up to the status of our blood, to be ultimate yawps instead of trained chimps, even for a few hours. But it wasn’t something we prattled. It was tissue delicate. We needed something more. It wasn’t long before we got it.

Kiutl.

Mindprobe dredges up infant memories of her gristly snake odor. Deeper, there are fetal associations, chemo-memories of luminous bloodways, phosphorescent yawning zeros, a lamprey itch on my palms, and the glory of her immanence. It was clear to us, Lami lived on in our marrows, but the grins thought they could keep her out of Little Eden. They thought that. Rogue variable, they called her.

None of us knew what she’d do to us. But she was our oldest memory, the species guardian. It’s no coincidence that kiutl appeared on Earth the same year the grins crafted the first slave yawps. All of our ancestors smoked her. We weren’t yawps without her. In spite of the danger, we put out for her, and it ended that the grins had pegged her right: She was out of hand.

One of us pulled in a peck of kiutl from a bloodline in the boro. That night, twenty-seven drug-plumed yawps, rabid with vertigo, swaying into distances of the spirit, bastilled the labs at Little Eden. Tech people were garroted and beheaded, guards hocked and left to bleed to death. The machines, sacred for their indifference, were left solitary in their immanence.

Beato! we lowed, Beato!—caving in the skulls of every grin we eyed. Beato! Dancing with corpses, tearing off their genitals, gnashing them down for the cryptarch, the animal spirit in the meat. Beato! Our hackles sequined with stars of blood.

We watched the burning all night from a lair kilometers away, all of us laughing, fervently dancing to the strategy reports on the shortwave. The horizon was blue with laser light.

All we had left from Little Eden were our wits and our purified blood. Most of us went down to the inner boros of the grin cities and sat in the dark catacombs, praying as one, sharing a silence. A year later, they were all dead of kiutl immanence. The five that remained, that had been teachers trotting from boro to boro, truckled to the spirit. Two outlawed as cunning assassins. Both were eventually broken by their own mischief, but there was carnival to their deaths, whipping up clouds of neurotox on the freeways and in the stadiums. One continued to teach revolt, keys of fire, and the perfection of chaos, until she died in a raga storm that erased a whole seaboard of cities. The other died in a flash-plague in some inner boro.

Last of the genetic diamonds, I decided foc the rules, foc the story. The Way Out is the Way Through. I used what wit I had to craft an alter ego, fit back into the grin cycle. My psi is plastic, lithe enough after years of boosting to sway a mindprobe. Two years later, I’m payrolled by CIRCLE, pumping my power on the sly, and padding down tree-laned avenues in daylight.

My toil’s menial, busting suds in a tech lab, but I go everywhere unscoped. My roots deepen their risk each day, sprouting into the domain of gains. No one’s looking for me, and those that eye me see a pink-pawed, fur-faced service yawp. I’m doubly invisible, like glass touching the blind.

***

Gibbous, blue as ice in the afternoon sky, the moon rose over the sea. Sufficient reason for Jac to take a stroll along the beach. (What reason? Time moves in pieces, a flotsam of events, carrying us along without reason.) Any activity served him better than sitting alone in his suite listening to the crazy voice in his head.

After the supplements, the Voice sometimes became intrusive. Assia had told him nothing could be done about it. He couldn’t remember why. Something, he thought, about the tumor being near the auditory center of his brain—Heschel’s Loops, wasn’t it? (Tumor—ah, tu amor!) During his treatment, he had been told, he would have to acclimate himself to occasional aberrations.

For him, the best diversion came from walking. CIRCLE’s subterranean city left him unimpressed, and he preferred wandering in the open, far from the black glass domes and laboratory smells.

That afternoon, on his way to the sea, he paused at the edge of an artificial canyon to watch a new boro being excavated. The workers frightened him: huge and slimbrained and not at all human. Yawps, that’s what Assia called them—and he could plainly see how closely they were related to gorillas. But they handled the giant earthmovers and gantries with authority. Stared at from a distance, they looked like giant, sweep-backed men in their treaded boots, brown overalls, and candy-red hardhats. Closer up, though—

As if hearing his thoughts, one of the workers dropped out of the cab of a rockcrusher and ambled over to him. Beneath its shell hat, the yawp’s face looked bestial: copper skin tightened over prominent cheekbones and thick brow-knobs. Its lips, thin and leathery black, shaped a harsh, guttural noise barely comprehensible: “Stand back, grin.” It pointed a thick ruddy finger out over the immense pit. “Sure as night, mama will break your bones.”

A moment staggered by with him gaping at the yawp before he realized it was talking about the earth. (Earth mama—rolling away under us.) He stepped back from the edge and thanked the yawp with a nod.

“Watch yourself, grin.” The creature kicked a clod of earth into the canyon. “Mama is maw.” He waved, curt as a salute, and lumbered back to his machine.

Jac moved away from the pit before he understood what the yawp had said. “Mama is maw,” he repeated, surprised that such creatures could be so—(Eloquent? Poetic? Human?) He decided he would have to find out more about them.

By the sea, he paused briefly before an ashy smudge at the base of a dune. It felt significant to him, but memory ghosted away. (Memory is grief.)

He had fought for a while, keeping notes on the segments of his past he refused to relinquish: his air squad, birthday, mother’s name. Then last week, the absurdity of clutching at ghosts had overwhelmed him. He had gathered together all his scrawled notes, most of them already meaningless to him, and brought them out to the beach and burned them. He remembered how the wet wood had snapped and how a leaf of paper had fluttered into the air and flattened against his thigh. He had stared for a long time at the charred writing, Neve, not understanding.

Sometimes he even forgot who he was. (I assure you, you will know Death better than any memory, though your memories are long as worlds.) Several times each day, he chanted: “I am Jac Halevy-Cohen, born Kislev 5842, in—” He rarely remembered where.

He slogged through the sand to a steep tidewall black with age. His body still strong, he had no trouble climbing the faceted rocks. At the top, he sat cross-legged. Late afternoon sun drove over the blue cliffs, though thunderheads crowded half the sky and rain smoked off the shale not a hundred meters away. In the sunlight, the flat sand and shallows of seawater glared like blank paper, empty of life, while at the horizon an amber haze lingered in long, smoky tentacles.

Rois stepped from around a dune. He moved behind Jac, and he stared up at the sweat-darkened back with a malevolent keenness in his animal eyes. Kiutl trances and a careful monitoring of Data-Sync reports had revealed to him the identity of this grin: a mantic project. The mantics—brain-amplified humans—had created yawps as slaves and had built the boro-zoos that imprisoned them. Rois, determined to strike back, eyed this grin as the nearest real target.

The lookout yawps on the surrounding dunes all nodded—nobody in sight. Rois pulled a heavy freight-hook from under his brown workshift and scurried noiselessly across the sand.

He had mounted the gravel flats at the claw of the tidewall, weapon raised high, when Jac heard him and turned. For an instant, they faced each other across the rocks, and something like a cry, but unheard, wrung in their hearts.

The sky screamed, and a bolt of lightning ripped out of nowhere and blasted the hook from Rois’ hand. The explosion flung the yawp across the gravel and left him sprawled and burned, the sun shouting in his eyes.

He sat up, the stink of his burned flesh outcrying his pain. Only the thin plastic grip on the hook had blunted the stroke of fire. He looked down at the purple, plastic-bubbled scald on his hand and then up at Jac. The grin crouched timidly on the tidewall, while a knowing filled his eyes.

Was it nerveshock or did Rois hear a voice? All things come to one thing, yawp.

He looked around for the others, but they had fled. The air around him sparkled with corneal glints. His view of Jac shifted queerly: The grin’s visage lifted away, and instead, a one-eyed man with a writhing scar and a mirrorglint eye stared at him. He tried to shake the vision off, but the spike-haired face persisted—stiff and dark as a scarab.

A sluggish wind swept over him in a tidal drawl, and the spell broke. He wrenched his body awake, and a terrified bark snapped in his throat. Swimming up through an ocean of fear, Rois stroked to his feet and scrambled down the beach.

The yawp’s terror pulsed so strongly that it threw off Corby and Sumner and left them hovering over the ocean tumble. They watched as distances folded over the yawp, and they realized that he would run through his whole spiral of time, changing forms but unable to change his fate. Twelve centuries later, after an unreal lifetime of blood-wanderings and new becomings, the Delph would track him down and the nightmare would complete itself.

***

The glide-rail arced out of a mountain-tunnel into blue twilight. A half moon hung from the belly of Taurus. Below, the sea shimmered the color of steel, the horizon a green wire. Assia didn’t notice. She sat in the bubble-prow of the glide-rail, eyes shined over. Her mind drifted, intermittent, returning always to thoughts of Jac.

At Nobu’s insistence, she had taken a tour of CIRCLE. She had sped through the heart of the Andes, and she had seen garden labyrinths in the basins of tamed volcanoes, transparent laboratories hacked into the thighs of mountains, and trellised grottoes tended by singing yawps, the wheat gold and tall beneath artificial suns. Yet none of it reached her, because none of it existed in the real world. It worked only for CIRCLE. The famines in Europe and Africa went on. The plagues in Asia and the Americas. The fear everywhere.

There was one more stop on the tour: a mantic Nobu wanted her to meet; the coordinates he had given her on the octagonal card. And then—a chance to be alone with her loss.

She arrived at a suite small but tastefully furnished: curving cream-colored walls and one-legged chairs arranged about a green glass taboret. The door fully open, she knocked and entered. When she stood in the center of the room, a resonant voice boomed from behind: “Assia Sambhava! Welcome!”

She turned, and her heart leaped. A snubnosed, leering, impish man approached, his bald head flaring at the sides with wild orange hair. The encounter felt like colliding with a daydream, like suddenly meeting Einstein. The man before her—Meister Powa, the greatest mind that had ever lived: father of subquantal physics, shaper of yawp genetics—she had seen him countless times in news clips and textbooks—the clown’s face as irreverent as it had looked to her as a child, seventy years before.

“Forgive my informality, but I feel as if I already know you.” He spoke through the features of a laughing Buddha, his hands clasped with delight. “I’m aware of your research on autism and schizothymia, and your mantic studies are legendary. Your work has truly redefined psychobiology.”

Assia gawked, too thick with disbelief to respond.

“I’m not a ghost.” Meister Powa beamed. “At least, not entirely.” He reached out a welcoming hand, and when she tried to take it, her fingers clutched emptiness.

“I’m a holoman,” the ghost chuckled. “In fact, this whole room is little more than a holoid. Let me show you.”

Meister Powa gestured grandiloquently, and his thick body, the chairs and taboret vanished. Assia stood in a chamber vacant of everything but a flexform lounge and servox food-dispenser. The next instant, everything popped back into place.

She stared hard at the ceiling and walls, but could not locate the holoidal projectors. The way Meister Powa’s pale eyes watched made her feel self-conscious. He motioned toward the real flexform. “Please, sit down. The lounge and the servox are for my guests. Would you like something to drink?”

Assia declined and sat down, her age-worn features masking her astonishment.

“I hope you’ll excuse my sophomoric indulgences,” he said, seating himself in one of the ghost-chairs. “Though I gave up my bodylife many years ago, I still find my present incorporeality amusing.”

“You mean—you really are alive?”

“And not just a laser projection?” Meister Powa shifted in his seat, delighted, his big belly protruding, puffy eyes narrowed to needles of icy blue. “Of course. This light show is for your benefit. I’m actually about a kilometer away, inside a small crystal matrix of the Data-Sync. But I have complete intellectual and emotional versatility. I perfected the system myself. Other than my meat and bones, which were always getting in the way anyway, I’m all here. That is, I think I am.”

He laughed exuberantly, peering at her like a baboon, broad back hunched. “As I said, I’m a holoman. Though I must admit I’m not entirely satisfied with this version of my physical form.” He squeezed his obesity between his hands. “My colleagues, wallowing in some obscure sentimental backwater, insist that my holoid bear some resemblance to my former shape. Actually, I’d prefer a little more hair.” He frisked the firebright collar of hair behind his ears. “After all, it is just a mask, and masks are tools. I’ve never been uncomfortable with them. Did you know that I was born Helga Olman?” He nodded, wild-headed. “I was transexed shortly after puberty, though. My parents were shattered, but they adjusted. I made my reputation as Ted Loomis, a hardnosed son-of-a-bitch physicist. It wasn’t until I cracked the subquantal problem that I gave up that mask to become Meister Powa. The name’s a derisive joke passed on by an abused research assistant. But I like it. Masks sometimes have to be comic.”

Assia felt a spasm of giddiness flutter in her stomach, which she squelched. This wasn’t really Meister Powa, she assured herself, just a clever holoid—the happiest, most humane technoid she had ever encountered.

He smiled, softly, as if he could hear her thoughts. “I know a lot about masks. Very often that’s all people think I am. But really, isn’t everything a mask?” He grinned broadly, as if about to confess a hoax. “Language. Mating rituals. Diffraction patterns. It’s one of Nature’s greatest joys, making masks.” His hands opened in a mime of majesty, and his eyes suddenly became calculating. “Nature is sultry, seductive, a great lover of veils—a Bride. It’s extremely difficult to see her real face but not impossible, mind you! Not at all impossible.” He beamed like a lewd old man. “Sure, it’s difficult to actually see the Bride, surrounded as she is by seven thousand veils, each one capable of scarring her irremediably if not removed with finesse. But it can be done!” His round face shook with certainty, then hardened. “A bit of advice?”

Assia nodded, amused and interested.

“Never, never, never force yourself. Don’t rip off the veils. Gently lift them off, one at a time. It’ll take all that’s left of your life to do it right, but the satisfaction is measureless. Leave no wounds to heal over, to scar your vision of Her. Slowly, with patience, and care. This is not to say without fire, but don’t—as so many do—don’t mistake the fire for burning.”

Assia’s insides trembled. She wanted to believe what this man—this holoid—said. Oftentimes, she had felt that even suffering was a mask. But the children—“Meister Powa...”

“Please, call me Helga. Or Ted, if you prefer.”

“What about the world-chaos, the Fall?”

He stared at her closely, something cunning in his smile. “You think I’m a little cracked, eh? Perhaps even—don’t dare say it!—mystical? Nonsense!” His upper lip retracted, unspeakably revolted. “Let me tell you something. What you call skyfires—are you aware of what causes them? It started over forty years ago, and still most people don’t know that a gravity wave shook the Earth, slowing the planet, blowing out our magnetic field, and creating the first raga storms. A gravity wave. An echo, merely an echo, of a very odd black hole in the galaxy’s core. Odd because the hole has a hole in it! Right now, and for the next thousand years or so, we’re right in line with the energy threading out of that hole.”

His eyes bulged. “It’s not so much that we’re basking in more radiation. It’s the quality of the energy that’s so utterly different. Its source is the very impossible center of the collapsar. As a result, all the energy patterns we take for granted—weather systems, the Earth’s magnetic field, the oceans, life itself—are changing, taking on strange new characteristics. In a sense, the masks are being shuffled, because we’re facing a Bride without veils—a naked singularity.” His eyes, pale blue and startled, blinked once, and he sat back.

Assia watched him closely, trying to ferret out his unreality. But her intuition, keyed to his gestures and facial nuances, insisted he was human. Even her mind, which knew better, fixated. If only he had an answer for the pain and the suffering.

“The universe is mad,” he went on, face somber, almost judicial. “A black hole squats at the core of our galaxy like a spider in a web of stars. Bizarre energies blister the Earth’s surface with new lifeforms. But maybe it’s all happened before. Maybe that’s how we got here. Maybe something bigger than pain is being born. And maybe not. It doesn’t matter for us. We’re not here to censor the cosmos.”

Assia couldn’t drive the famine-bloated children from her mind. “The human race is suffering—maybe dying.”

“It’s been that way since before human became a word. We have to live with that knowledge. We have to use it to shape what we can get our hands on. It’s one mud of all sculpting, Assia.”

A knot in her belly began to loosen. “But the pain—”

He leaned forward, face wizened with conviction. “You can’t get in the temple without laying eyes on the demons.”

***

Nobu sat in his darkened office staring at a holocular view of Meister Powa and Assia. As soon as he saw the old woman smile, he shut off the viewer. Later, he would scan an edited version of their conversation. For now, it was enough to know that her emotional withdrawal had ended. That silly holoidal of Meister Powa finally turned out to be good for something.

He switched the viewer back on, adjusted it to a sky perspective, and watched Jupiter rise over the Andes. The sky, flaked with stars, shimmered at the zenith with auroral lights—energies from the core of infinity.

Nobu placed both of his hands on his desk, a long, curved, and well-polished slab of petrified wood ringed with iridescent colors—empty except for two books and a piece of paper. The paper authorized the euthanasia of Jac Halevy-Cohen. He had already signed it.

The books—the Zen monk Dogēn’s teachings and the ancient samurai Musashi’s Five Rings, a book of strategy—Nobu consulted often, consistently amazed at how aptly the advice applied after so many centuries. He thumbed to a relevant passage in Musashi: “For a warrior, there is neither gate nor interior. There is no prescribed outer stance nor lasting inner meaning. Between the warrior and defeat, there is only his practiced ability to sum up changing situations instantly. You must appreciate this.”

Nobu walked slowly about his office, the words opening into a numinous feeling. Blue and white globe lanterns hung from the corners, making the sabi calligraphy on the walls seem three-dimensional. Finally, he stood before his meditating tatami and the blank wall it faced and let his resolution flow out of him. Jac’s time was done.

A twinge of apprehension set him walking again. He thought highly of Assia, and yet his mantic capacities urged him to euth Jac. For CIRCLE to survive, there could be no indulgences. Assia, one of the first mantics, should know this better than any, yet her work had become unrealistic—actually, deluded. Her age pressed her hard—the urge for the long shot, the Big Discovery, before time closed in. He had seen the desuetude in her face. Even with the ion-flushes and hormones, she only had a few years left. She had already lost herself in a dream: causal collapse—a paramyth, as bizarre as its antithesis, determinism.

Even so, he didn’t like the idea of hurting the old lady. The concept offered some interest—working with a natural mantic, a man born with an extra frontal lobe. If only it could have been activated—in what ways would he have differed from a mantic with an ATP-pump in his brain?

He sat on the edge of his desk, the sides of his jaw throbbing. This was not the time for pure research. For the past forty years, since a gravity wave knocked down the planet’s magnetic field, the sky had been wide open. In a few decades, cosmic radiation beaming from the galactic core had changed the world; mutation patterns accelerated to unguessable rates; hundreds of thousands of new viruses had appeared; hybrid species, like corn and wheat, had turned off genetically; and the word human had become an uncertain term. Why were codon changes so many magnitudes higher than rad-levels could account for? What coordinated the metaplasia that was literally creating whole new species? And who were these telepathic people who called themselves voors?

No—this was not the time for pure research. Only applied studies could hope to save their children. Jac had to go—and Assia would understand. Or she wouldn’t. It didn’t matter.

With a decisive rap of his knuckles, he thumped the book lying beside him on the desk—Dogēn. He flipped it open randomly and silently intoned the first words his eyes touched: “Do not spend a long time rubbing only one part of an elephant—and do not be surprised by a real dragon.”

***

Low tide and the sea in the air. Jac wandered up from the beach, on his way to his suite. A thin rain misted out of the gray sky, reducing the herded tidewalls to shadows in the thickening fog. A restless night lay ahead, and Jac paused to watch the pale sea collapsing before he went in. (You’re being followed, friend. Haven’t you noticed?)

The Voice was right. Human shapes made strange by the haze approached from the sea. Two figures loomed, huge but aqueous with distance and mist. Were they coming at him or just passing? He decided to go in immediately, then stopped himself. He was dying, his brain cancerous. What was there to fear? (The drouth of fear.)

Almost on top of him, yawps advanced out of the mist—long-armed workers. He remembered the lightning-blasted yawp he had seen the day before, and alarm whined in his muscles. “Nothing to fear,” he said in traditional yawp greeting. The two didn’t respond. Their eyes looked chalky, lifeless, and (Too late) he realized something was wrong about them. He backed a step and turned to run, and they bounded up to him. Thick hands took his shoulders. He didn’t resist as they lifted and slung him over their broad shoulders. Without fear, though charged with anxiety, he breathed in the smoky odor of yawps and looked down at thick-toed feet scurrying over the ribbed sand.

They ran close to the sea, footing more firm there, moving gracefully despite their burden, pacing the wind. Jac hung limply, aware that they headed south toward the boro. Giddiness thinned out his thoughts. The Voice had disappeared. Not even the sensation of the watcher lingered. Grinning, almost laughing aloud, he watched the shadowed hulks of dunes angle by.

When the first signs of the boro appeared—white-domed modular cottages—Jac tried to lift his head to look around. He had never been in the boro before. The yawp carrying him shrugged his body farther back, and he contented himself with following the upside-down cottages as they limped by.

A hazy, blossom-thick odor from the many yawp gardens filled the evening. Mingled with this perfume came the charred scent of yawps and a smell he didn’t recognize: a forest fragrance redolent as river moss, only sweeter. The odor evoked nostalgic, dreamy feelings and thickened as they jogged deeper into the boro.

The run stopped all at once, and Jac rolled off the yawp’s back. He stood shakily, facing a dense crowd of yawps. Most appeared to be workers, giant and gray-mantled. But closer pressed smaller yawps with sharper faces and shorter arms, wearing brown cloaks. Their eyes, not at all listless like the workers’ but animated, alert, almost human, scrutinized him. One yawp in particular stood out: a female, thin and elegant, her hackles silver and braided. She wore a black, fluted robe and a distinguished headpiece of leather, gull feathers, and tiny red snail shells. Beneath an age-furrowed brow, her eyes shone bright and trenchant. “Nothing to fear, grin.”

Jac returned the greeting and glanced at his surroundings. They occupied a patio of moon-pale stones, guarded on two sides by tall arbors of gnarled vines. White-domed cottages stood behind him, crescent windows sparking with red evening tapers. Ahead, looped with fog yet visible beyond the yawps, towered the massive banyan forest where the workers lived.

The sweet mulch scent thickened in the air, and Jac quickly noticed its source. The yawps passed around a smoke-frothing clay vessel, each in turn inhaling the milky fumes. “Why am I here?” he asked the old female. “Lami spoke of you,” she answered, accepting the smoking vessel and immersing her face in the vapors. She spoke through the smoke: “Rois said you were a grin abomination. But Lami turned against him and protected you. We follow Lami.”

Jac had heard of Lami, a yawp deity, but he couldn’t remember anything about it. Was he to be some kind of sacrifice? He felt so at ease, free of the intrusive commentary of the Voice, that he didn’t care what the yawps did with him. He was a dying, brain-twisted amnesiac anyway.

The black-robed yawp offered him the clay vessel—a purple-glazed bowl stenciled with runes he didn’t recognize. The bowl felt hot, but he held it and drew a long draught of the balmy fumes.

That instant someone in the group twanged a box-harp, and the wiry, tremulous note pierced him. The feather-crowned yawp took the bowl from his hands, and he watched her refill it with oddly shaped blood-red leaves.

A corolla of green light hazed around the yawps’ heads, and a shudder of dizziness forced Jac to sit down on the damp stones. An excited murmur passed among the yawps, and a spangle of harp notes trolled into the night. The old female bent close, her face sheathed in a gold macular light. She held out a fire-drenched hand, and he heard her voice in his head: Stand and face Lami. The shock of hearing a voice in his mind, so remindful of his own delusory Voice, immobilized him.

Hands took him from behind and lifted him into a blaze of tinsel colors ripping with voices: Lami Botte! Lami! Delph Botte! Delph! But unlike the Voice, these could be turned off. He forced the chanting out of his head and stood beatific and tall in a forge of colors.

Distantly, he knew that he had inhaled some kind of drug. He sensed its ministrations in his muscles, lifting him off his bones. More immediately, he experienced his vastness, his connectedness with all those around him. And he understood just what Lami was. He could see the deity—a casein glow leaking out of their round, hackled heads, pooling above them, swelling. Their group-energy expressed a power bigger than all of them.

The old female stood before him, her face silver. Far off, in the back of his mind, the murmurous chanting continued: Botte Lami! Botte Delph! The silver sheen masking the old yawp peeled away, revealing eyes of hungry intelligence. A rapport thickened between them, and for the slimmest instant, Jac became the yawp.

Simian memories crowded him, a flurry of images: the smooth-grained wood handle of a tool, sapid sexual feelings, coarse clothing, laughter lunatic as a jungle shriek, and odors of food—the whole reality of boro life. Help us! The yawp’s cry transfixed Jac. So many emotions and, dominating them all, a pallor of helplessness, servitude, shame.

With tremendous shock, he realized that the yawps were beseeching him—as if he had the authority to grant them power and dignity. He cringed, and the chanting in his head swelled louder: Botte Delph! Delph! Delph! Delph!

“Make them stop,” he told the old yawp. She sat entranced, eyes rolled up, the floury light of Lami blurring her features.

Botte Delph! Jac blotted out the telepathic chanting and concentrated on the energy gathering over the serried throng: white, curded, and thick. Its edges laced with darker colors rippled, a bruise of violets and blues that bled into the night’s darkness. Violet energy glittered in the rain-misted air, and his eyes followed its traces hypnotically. With a jolt of horror, he found that the blue power came from him! It smoked off his body!

Fascinated, he watched the space around him flex, tendoned with dark blue light. Closer, the energy became even darker, a dense violet. And where his flesh was, or should have been, a palpable blackness throbbed.

Jac’s mind wobbled. Gazing into the core-darkness of his body, he teetered on the brink of a sundering realization. Vaguely, he sensed truths that he knew could destroy him. Glimmers of understanding flitted across his brain: He existed in a dimension bigger than he knew, and getting stronger, drawing strength from the sky, from the very core of the universe. The Voice was not a delusion but reality and he, the listener, was the dream.

He balked, and a liquid blackness welled up and absorbed him.

***

Jac’s eyes trembled and opened. He rose into a waking stupor, timeless as a dream. Cold wet sand cushioned his body and the sleepy rumbling of the sea filled his head. He looked up into the green ether of early dawn. (Listen, wisdom is air, the color of drowning. Breathe deeply.)

The shore patrol found him an hour later and took him to the Wards. He lay there a day without eating or speaking, which the medics didn’t like. They also discovered a density in his brain and residuals of a psiberant in his blood. The medics didn’t like that either, and when the program director’s authorization arrived to euth him, they were relieved. The limited facilities of the Wards already overextended didn’t have the resources to maintain drug-abused terminal patients.

When Assia arrived, the medics were just wheeling Jac to the End Ward. They flashed their authorization when she stopped them, yet she stood firmly in their way. “This is my subject,” she protested, the deep lines of her face webbing sternly.

“Not anymore,” a female medic told her. Young and militant, she pointed to a copy of the euth order clipped to the unconscious man in the wheelchair. “Your project’s over.”

Assia’s frown darkened. “All right—but I’m appealing this. Take him back.”

The medic shook her head, indifferent as a knife. “There’s no time for appeal. We have strict orders.”

Assia stepped closer, and a long-muscled medic cut her off. “We’ll jeopardize ourselves if we don’t follow through on this.”

The old woman reached beneath her caftan and slid out a slender black-glass tube with a sharp red toxin sign on it. The medics visibly tightened, and the female reached for her wrist-call.

“Touch that and everybody dies,” Assia whispered. She wagged the vial, and the medics held their hands away from their bodies. “There’s enough neurotox here to kill everybody in this ward twelve times. So listen closely.”

After locking away the medics, she discarded the empty neurotox tube and wheeled Jac out to the sandcart she had left in a back court. She injected him with a serum to counter the sopor and drove him out of the compound.

Jac didn’t revive until Assia reached her destination: a cedar shack with a tin roof in a choked clearing of wild apple trees deep in the hills. Streaming auroras cantled the sky. “I used to come here to rest sometimes.” She helped Jac out of the cart. He swayed where he stood, bird-light and dizzy. “I can’t stay here,” she added. “I must drive down the coast and confuse whatever security they’ll be sending after you.”

Jac shook alertness into his head. (The brain is a flower that eats oxygen—and where are its roots?) “Assia there’s no reason for this. I’m dying anyway. This tumor’s devouring me.”

Serifs of starlight glinted off the tears in her eyes. “There is no tumor, Jac. Don’t you remember?” She held his face in her hands. “Maybe it’s wrong to leave you out here. There’s nowhere to go. But I won’t let them kill you. If that’s what you want, follow this road back or wait here. Otherwise, you’ll find camping equipment and some provisions in the shack.” She let his face go. “Goodbye, Jac.”

She moved to go, but Jac took her hand. For a deep moment, he studied the way her face had formed, the tireless dreams outwearing the flesh. He carried the last of those dreams, he realized, and that made him so sad his eyes ached.

He watched as the old woman got back in the cart and drove off. He didn’t know what to do. (Trust the anamnesis of the future, my friend.)

***

Jac decided to die. If the mantics at CIRCLE couldn’t cure his brain tumor, he preferred to be euthed than die in the wilderness.

He had gotten halfway back to CIRCLE when he remembered the godpower he had felt with the yawps. (Forgive the long darkness. Such indulgence not to have kept you informed—such waste, and such is the blood’s surprise.)

He left the road and angled down slopes of salt shrubs to the ocean. He walked over dunes and along the thundering edge of the sea trying to sort everything out. He couldn’t think except to know that he, what he thought of himself behind his eyes, was tiny and insignificant. (What’s happened to you? You who stole the secrets out of the listening of the dead? Why are you trembling?)

The soft, mystical shine of the moon on the water calmed him. Alone and almost at peace—wind riffling his hair, waves rasping up the beach—he strolled. (You’ve become nothing but territory. Death is trapped in your bones like grain in wood.)

What did it matter if it was a brain tumor or another mode of being—either way, he amounted to nothing. (Shut your ears big, Jac. Let the darkness come unrolling from your eyes and your fingers blow longer all in the stillness, deeper, where the textures in the air end and do not restart, to my elusive conclusive whereabouts.)

Jac stilled his fear and stayed centered, alert to the night wind and the dim phosphorescence of the incoming waves. The rumble of the ocean grew fainter, and the weak light of the skyfires and the dull shapes of sand thinned. His senses set out, leaving him alone at the center of nothing. (The body with its senses is need. This need is not yours. I am the way out. The emptiness is my door, a wing, a way of flight, half an angel. Enter, and you become the rest.)

He howled and made no sound, not even a muscular sensation where his throat should have been. He clutched for his body. Nothing was there. He had become a mote of awareness, free falling through the void. (The human numen.)

A yawn of time passed before his senses began to swarm back, filling up their hollows one by one. He sprawled in the sand blind and deaf until, gradually, the splash of the waves filled him and the skyfires wavered into view.

He moaned and hugged himself, rocking to his back. Then it began again. Already, his eyes had moved on, his vision darkening, sounds becoming muffled. (Will it go on? It happens, you know. Things lose their gravities. No fingers to grasp. No tongue to reassure. No eyes to set the limits.)

Panicky, he heaved himself to his feet. Textures slid out from under him, and in a desperate effort to keep himself centered, he grabbed the great bones massed in his legs and pounded the earth. He began with blunt, clumsy stumbling, kicking the sand, turning on the pivot of his gravity. Slowly, he worked up an incredible velocity, wrapping his motion around him like a shawl of sensation to hold him together.

He whirled a long time before his ears returned—the forlorn cry of some bird. (Jac, you’ll have to learn to settle for the skins of things at times like this. You’ve lost the edge to your life that only less can add.)

Jac dropped to his knees with exhaustion and tottered quickly back to his feet. He knew that if he stopped moving he would lose control. He grasped what he had to do. Not daring to think about it too long, he dashed forward and fell to his face in the wet sand. With desperate determination, he swayed upright and staggered into the sea. In the cold water, his legs felt vague and rubbery pushing against the water. A wave slammed against his chest, turning him sideways, but he shoved on, losing his footing and letting himself slide into the deep water, into a darkness he already knew.

***

The alarm she had set startled Assia from the depths of mordant sleep. She tapped it off and pulled herself out of the flexform and into her sandals. Like an ice-heavy draft, she moved across the suite, stooped, sandals whispering. When she entered the mirror-circled bathroom she stiffened, and a tight cry broke in her mouth. In the mirrors, she recognized herself—a tall woman with nightfall hair, dream-luminous eyes, and an amazed, bonecurved, adolescent face.

***

Nobu stood before the sheet glass window, linear and solemn, a pensive glow on his face. He stared down past the tidewall to where the moon poised on a dune’s white shoulder. Auroras wavered crazily over the sea.

WHAT WE KNOW OF REALITY ARISES FROM OUR DISBELIEF IN IT appeared blocked out in silver luminescence on the tidewall. Other bizarre graffiti had appeared throughout CIRCLE during the night. Farther down the beach, blazing on the sand itself, platinum words declared: MAMA IS MAW.

Red lights flashed to the left. Nobu knew where they came from, and he chewed his lower lip. The yawps had begun their rebellion. Not simply running amok but actually playing out a well-rehearsed strategy. They had seized both the armory and the Data-Sync, which controlled most of CIRCLE’s functions. Impossible! He knew that. Yawp neurology wasn’t specified enough to allow that kind of independent behavior. And yet...

Nobu closed his eyes and leaned his head against the long window. Its coolness soothed and helped to sort his thoughts. So much had happened—all of it impossible. Jac Halevy-Cohen had vanished without a trace; even the sender-chip embedded in his skull stopped sending. A high-energy pulse from the galactic core scrambled all their communications, leaving them truly disorganized. But no energy-wave could be that powerful. Nightglow graffiti...warrior yawps...it took all his inner resources to suppress his rage at the rampant absurdity of it all. He modulated his breathing: two deep breaths, one shallow, two deep...The yawps had seized his building while he slept, and he had barely gotten out alive, taking with him only his clothes and a sheaf from his journal. Among the pages he had salvaged, he had found a letter from Jac. He couldn’t remember receiving it or putting it in with his notes. Undated, waterstained and apparently meaningless, it lay face up where he had tossed it to the floor.

“Listen, Nobu, I have something to tell you. Finality is the one door, the one way out of our pain and uncertainty, but it doesn’t exist. We go on. Everything goes on. Why is there no end? What we think we’ve left behind moves through us. We’re merely egos, the ghosts of our blood, unable to hope for judgment, only another moment. We pass on our genetic material, we pass on time. Do you think perhaps something passes the other way? What? What is time? And what are our chromosomes becoming? Can we know? What terrifies me is the possibility. We carry the beginning in our blood. We constantly try and fit it to our lives. We never get it just right. But what if we do? What if we really do? Only your movement distinguishes you from this ambush of stillness. Stop. —Jac.”

Nonsense, Nobu thought. He cracked—it finally happened. He pressed his forehead against the dark glass and began his breathing rhythms again.

When he felt better, he looked out into the night, eyes as tight as his face. Far below, several birds like pale, dirty socks perched in the moonlight. He leaned against the window, trying to make out how many there were.

A startling, loud cry jerked him upright—but too late. The great glass, screeching open under his weight, gave him a flying step into the night. For one delirious moment, he could see far down the beach to where the CIRCLE fighters had dug in. The tidewall blazed, lit up by eerie blue laser arcs flashing red against the rocks. The dark ground swung up at him like a bad dream—

Nobu lay still, stretched out flat, face pressed into the asphalt. The blood pooling around his limbs and face felt warm and sticky, though he was shivering. Mindless, he muttered over and over to himself. Mindless.

Or was it? The initial pain and shock had thinned quickly, leaving him to wonder if, perhaps, some real but hidden part of him had caused him to lean too hard against the glass, had caused the glass to give way—some benevolent power, too long thwarted by his allegiance to machines, devices, calculations—a benevolent God in whose grace it was better to be dead than to serve the inorganic.

“Cut the crap, Nobu.”

The voice shocked him, because he recognized it from Assia’s progress-tapes. His hands pushed feebly against the asphalt, vainly trying to lift his head. “Jac?” His voice sounded weak, a garbled caricature.

“You look pretty shitful,” Jac’s voice said.

I must be delirious, Nobu thought.

“Don’t you wish,” the voice replied. “Here, let me give you a hand.”

Nobu felt bright, magnetic coolness touch him all over, and he rose. He squinted against the full glare of the sun, though it was still night. A figure in black wavered before a silver sky. The silhouette bent closer, and Jac’s grinning features came into view. “Seeing dragons?”

***

In the narrows of light along the soft ferrous seam of her closed eyelids, Assia sensed him. He had approached so close to her that she had to be very quiet to feel him at all. He wasn’t Jac anymore. He occupied a hollowness in the smoke of her feelings, a hole plummeting out of time into a dreamy vacancy filled with whisks of light, quiverseen beings—more than the sponge of her brain could absorb. A great sleepiness swelled in her throat, and she swallowed it and opened her eyes.

She stood alone at the top of a garden tower that hadn’t been there that morning. Earlier, with a sickening awe, she had climbed the spiral stone stairs leading here. She had watched yawps walking among the white-leafed forests and the brookfalls of luminous rainbows that had appeared overnight. In the distance, she had seen what endured of CIRCLE: steely wreaths of collapsed buildings and smokeworming stains patterning the dunes in scalded, glossy colors—the slick reds and oranges of glass-sand fused by last night’s laser battles. A crooked brown cloud hung over the rubble of the Data-Sync.

She looked down at the firm flesh of her hands and the thick darkness of her hair, and again she felt lighthearted, farouche, miry with goofy emotions: She was an old woman with the body of a seventeen-year-old! The risible husk of her logic rang with a laugh too astonished to voice. What was going to happen to them all now that a man had become a god?

For the first time since her childhood, Assia cleared her mind and meditated as her father had taught her. She wide-focused on moss-veined trees and a forest floor coined with light. Easier than she remembered, meditation made her body an open lens, seeing everything: leaves like bright particles, starlings listing among the branches, each bird a jigging molecule. She was on her own now, she knew, her brain curled quietly in its shell.

***

Nobu had walked up and down the beach countless times, feeling nothing, seeing everything. He wasn’t dead, though he knew he should be. It was becoming clearer that he didn’t know very much. For days, weeks, lengths of time he stopped measuring, he strolled through shale coves and over strands rubbled with driftwood and sea-smoothed rocks, watching the ocean come and go, the spine of the shore changing shape like a slow cloud. Fear, awe, memories, all deserted him much sooner than he would have thought. No need to eat or sleep. No need even to think, he finally realized. Is this death?

No—he felt alive. He would just have to go on looking.

He stravaged the wind-lashed inlet mindlessly. Time became meaningless as static, distances longer than time. And finally, after he had long forgotten that life had ever been any other way, a jolt of total understanding banged through him. He toppled from the rondure of stone where he had been watching the tide come in and tumbled down the slipface of a dune. On his back, staring up at the night sky, he looked past the skyfires and, with his new insight, began to decipher the awesome braille of stars. Nothing separated him from them. Inner, outer, up, down, all became arbitrary. The whole sky had meaning for him now. And he could see, plainly see, the entire history of evolution projected onto the night from his chromosomes.

All of the most trivial details of organic development, beginning with the first spark in the Proterozoic slime, resided there in the skyshadows. As he read, at last he understood the history of consciousness and discerned the next human form, the voor children born looking backward, remembering their ancestors, their sentience a telepathy that crossed worlds and that ultimately united them with everything—an infinite reunion.

He got so absorbed he didn’t notice the sky brightening—he had arrived and nothing was missing. All the organic forms stood before him like clouds, and he trembled, feeling the unnamable stillness that united them. Progressively, his senses sharpened, became more focused.

His senses had all been living in the past. They served as the stepping-stones of consciousness, floating in nothing. In them moved the shifting pattern of the world, and between them opened stillness, nothing. He became his senses, and he became aware of the stars dimming, a thin, silver line following the corner of the sky.

Daybreak, the sun rose from its bed of rocks, and colors flowed into everything. Nobu returned to the stillness between, already understanding that his participation in the world had ended, and that he had arrived elsewhere, drawn inexorably toward the unity he had glimpsed beyond the blood’s horizon.

***

Jac Halevy-Cohen strolled along the beach, spheres of hyacinthine light dancing around his ankles. A godmind, vaster than thought or memory, he chose among all available worldlines. At his whim, a basilisk of water flared out of the sea, sparks of flowers limned his path across the sand, and music jeweled in the air. And yet, he persisted as a man. “JAC HALEVY-COHEN,” the collapsing breakers blared in four-part harmony.

He could do anything he loved. Single and yet multiform, he embodied a mangod. He had changed reality to free the yawps from their human masters. He had youthed Assia, the old scientist who had helped create him. And he had sent the program director, Nobu Niizeki, moving sidewise through time. All of this, he had accomplished out of love. Even Niizeki advanced lovingly down the beach in a spume of chilled light, vanishing, flesh and thoughts, along the wavecurve of time. The unity of love extended bigger than the memory of the world, and at the far end of Nobu’s wanderings, Jac the godmind knew, the program director would get free, released to light, wholly regnant. That man would know wholeness.

Incredible sprays and fans of suspended water spun intricately in the air, bound by chains of birdsong. Jac, pushing against his limits, explored the impossible.

The thought of thought circled him deeper into his godmind, and he appreciated how small and loud the mind part of him had become. He perceived, in a blind silence of sudden fear, that his thinking carried the least of him. He had feelings, urges, fleshdreams never acknowledged that would live through him over the ages. Godmind of his whole self—sinews, veins, boneworks—he incorporated all their dreams and loves. He wasn’t pure psynergy. He couldn’t be unless he loved away his physicality. And that would take tens of thousands of years, because the body, he had learned first hand, presents the unconscious of the world. And he—insane with psynergy—projected the Mind of the Species, witness of the body, living to see the dreams, myths and fantasies of the human race exhaust themselves through him.

Time became transparent for Jac, and he gazed across centuries of sexual pith and mental mirroring to the emptiness to come. Millennia from now, in the tepid residuum of canceled-out desires, he would at last get free of his humanity. It would take aeons.

Anger coiled, and the spiracles of air-dancing water rainbowed and vanished. A tormented cry crawled over the dunes as the reality of his destiny became conscious: The fantasies of his biology had trapped him for ages to come! Would he survive? His soul shrunk around his omniscience as he realized he was not the only godmind on the planet.

Fear blazed.

Astounded, Jac lifted above the surf of time, and he beheld the Others. The sea air filled with their watching. Discarnate beings rapt with lucidity peered deeper into his simple mind and mutability than he ever would. These godminds from fierier realities—they had already lived through the flesh-hungers of the worlds that had shaped them, and now they moved terrifyingly free, sublimed, riding the stream-psynergy from the galactic core, existing in the cosmos as the cosmos! Already they were arriving, reshaping the Earth, aware of the insatiety and the racial dreams that limited him.

Fear flexed powerfully around Jac and then disappeared into the declivities of his future. He knew then that he had a shadowself, a fear-self, that would, out of tenacious self-love, try to protect him from the Others or make an end of time.

In that moment, Jac became aware that his godmind would not tolerate other godminds. He was too small to permit Them near him. He needed aeons to grow, aeons alone self-floating in the too-willing wonder of his lust.

Jac stopped. The air had opened in front of him, and he stared at a large red-haired man in a cave. The vision narrowed, and he drew closer, near enough to see that the shadow on the man’s face was a black burn stain. The calm breadth of the stranger’s face filled all of Jac’s awareness. The air-blue eyes, flat and downslanting, touching the world softly, looked into him, and Jac’s mind went pale.

The godmind willed meaning into the vision, but nothing happened. He willed to know. Still, nothing.

The man in the cave leaned closer, fascinated, and the size of his shoulders awed Jac. Only then did he comprehend. The fear that had surged out of him a moment ago had reshaped the future. This nameless man with the haunted, in-looking eyes embodied the physical shape of his fear—his shadowself. The man, somewhere in time, was him, his secret self, as unaware of his psynergy as Jac was conscious of his godmind. He was the one, more than the alien godminds, who posed a threat: he was the enemy and yet himself—the part of himself that would have to die so his godmind could live.

Terror glowed in Jac, and the sea groaned.

***

Sumner woke in the mountain cave overlooking Skylonda Aptos where the shadowshooting had begun. Corby hovered close, a dulcet whisper in his cells: The Delph won’t let us see more. The vision is over.

Sumner hulked over his knees and stared hard at the mountain peaks balanced in the westering sky. Now do you understand what it means to be the shadowself of the Delph? the voor asked.

Sumner’s mind had numbed from the shadowshooting. Sleep swelled in his lungs like the dread of time, and he sagged to his side and closed his eyes.

As he slid into unconsciousness, a powerfully detailed scene lingered before passing wholly away: Assia, young and dark, stood before a cedar shack in a clearing choked with apple trees. On the wooden door, in silver script, a message read:

“Assia, there’s always more. It never ends. I hope your new life will show you that. Look closely at yourself. You will never age again. It’s true. We make all the rules.

“Listen, if this depresses you, you know the way out. Stillness of mind is a door. Memory, the continuing history of grief. As long as the past is real, you will remain.

“Let’s look at your new life again: Nothing happens by circumstance. Or else everything. What matters is that you go through events to the stillness behind them. Things can lose their gravities. Think. All you ever held drifting beyond direction...

“No? But we’re making progress. You understand that you can’t understand. The body is the unconscious of the world.

“So what can you possibly do now? Everything! At all times! You see, it’s like digging holes in the river, like forgetting one thing to remember another.

“Good. Already you’ve begun to find your place. Just remember, the innocence you own waits where you left it, deep as the last of your fear. —Jac.”

>GODMIND<

The dream was marvelous but the terror great.
We must treasure the dream whatever the terror.

—Gilgamesh

Destiny as Density

The skin of Sumner’s soul shivered. He woke, stupefied, huddled in a corner of the cave where he had slouched during the voor trance. A cold wind unraveled itself in the mouth of the cave, scattering the last of the magnar’s ashes. Sumner hugged himself tighter, wearied and depressed. Bonescrolls, Ardent Fang, Drift—everyone he had loved was dead now.

We are one, the voor thought, his psychic voice sounding narrow. Shadowshooting had exhausted Corby. It’s time to go down the mountain. We must leave quickly.

Sumner closed his eyes and averted his attention from the voor. The shadowshooting had terrified him, because it had been as real as his own life. Dizzy with fatigue, he fought his own heaviness to sit upright.

Corby’s voice spoke within—he could feel the voor subvocalizing—but he wasn’t listening. He stayed in selfscan, hearing blood whispers, the tread of his heart, and the low sibilance of immense air currents floating over the mountain peaks.

Sleep bruised his alertness, and he struggled a moment with thoughts and dreamworlds. A mosaic of faces wheeled in the mindark: Jac and young, longboned Assia, Nobu somnolent as a voor, and a crowd of yawps. The simian faces reminded him of Sarina in the riverain forest to the north. He half-thought he could return there. Perhaps they would free him from the voor...

***

Sumner woke hours later, tuneful energy spinning around him. The voor had diminished to a mere tic of feeling far back in his mind. A hollow moon rose above the jagged horizon while he continued to sit, mind a window to the mountains.

After all sensation of the voor had vanished, Sumner unfolded from his couch and lumbered out of the cave. Mind clear as the thin air around him, he hiked along the margin of glacial scree. He walked to strengthen his selfscan and to forget the pain of his grief. He marched until his knees buckled. Then he sat on his heels beneath a fan of rock and stared down through a pygmy forest of pine. Several ice pools glossed with afternoon light shone visible on the southern horizon. Above them, a flock of birds undulated west, bucking strong winds.

Sumner closed his eyes and sensed the voor rising through his fatigue: Sumner, I am real. You are not ignorant. Do not ignore me. I can teach you the forgotten language of the world. The secret beast whispers in the rock. The old waters gather wrath from the bones of extinct animals, and forests are born. I can teach you the fast and still dreams of sunken things...

“No!” The word muscled through him with conviction. He was not a voor. He did not want to think these inhuman thoughts.

He stood and continued hiking. The voor continued with him, but only fatigue brought it close. He began to wonder if perhaps his climb had gone too far, when he caught sight of the ice-glens.

Small glades of mossy rocks gathered mist where hot water channels ran close to the surface. Heat and wind had carved ice and snow around the glades into pale blue pavilions. A line of ice-glens moved up the snowfields toward the summit, and Sumner climbed through them as though moving from dream to dream.

At the top, the sky glowed violet and the air felt slim and cold as a frozen song. He sat for a long time staring into the tapestries of ice around him, feeling close to the invisible power that controlled his breathing and heartbeat.

A cold shadow made him look up, and he watched a clot of dark clouds budge over the peaks. The gray scud expanded with frightening speed, and a sinister wind whined down from the icefields. Hailstones came first, sharp marbles, cracking against the stones and snapping the arabesques of ice.

Sumner moved swiftly down through the ice-glades but was still on the high snowfields when the winds gusted to a howl. He ducked under a narrow overhang and crouched in its far corner, away from the slashing wind. Hail gave way to the smoky sheets of a blizzard, and Sumner sat with limbs pulled close, mesmerized by the mysteries of snow and wind.

Snow blew in for hours, transforming the upper slopes into a deceptive world of glazed-curves and expanding white. Sumner cursed himself for getting trapped. As the burning cold began to numb him, he settled into contemplative reproach: He should have known a storm was coming. He had tracked birds flying against the bluff of the wind, and he had observed snows on the sunside of the valleys. The hot springs on the mountain had lured him beyond natural caution. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

Cold narrowed in. By night no feeling or sight remained, only the wind droning—meaningless—constant...

He slept and woke to find his cloak frozen. The world had shrunk to a fog of wind-blurred snow. Cold throbbed, slow as a burn, and he had to sink deep into his omphalos-power to stay alive.

He noted the places that burned: several fingers and one foot. He forced psynergy into the fringes of his body and held it there for as long as he could. Eventually his effort broke, and he shivered into a profound sleep.

When he came to, skyfires rippled red and yellow against the void-black. Snow sloped on all sides and blanketed most of his body. The air hovered perfectly still, a pool of silence.

Sumner tried to move, and a long, treacherous moment lapsed before his body stirred. No feeling came up from his feet. He pulled his legs under and burst thongs of agony to straighten them. Forcing his will into his back, he rose, an aching skeleton, and stagger-stooped into the night.

Skyfires illuminated snowfields and, far off, the dark nerveshapes of trees. Sumner tottered several paces and then dropped chest-deep into starlit snow. He couldn’t feel his legs or his hands now, and he knew he was dying.

He stilled his mind and closed his eyes. No fear or anger touched him—only lassitude.

***

When Sumner’s eyes opened, Corby stared out. A green fire dazzled before him, and he recognized it as a deva—one of the orts shaped out of plasma by the CIRCLE mantics and set loose in the electric ocean of the ionosphere. To human eyes, it appeared as a filament of green electricity sizzling silently over the snowfield, two meters away. It had responded to Corby’s call almost instantly, and he rewarded it. The voor remembered Unchala, and the deva gushed with warm, secret feelings: fire-throbs, mother-makings, bangles of hilarity...

He asked the deva to lead him down to the warm slopes. The rope of green light wavered over the snow, and Corby followed slowly. The deva’s bounteous psynergy gave him complete physical control over Sumner’s body, but he was in no rush to reach the bottom of the mountain. He enjoyed the beauty of the star-lustered snowfields and the delirious abandonment of having a body that fit his will.

Strange seeing the stars again through howlie eyes—wandering light lens-squeezed to glassy flecks in the black pit cold. Corby preferred the deep-sky perceptions of plants or birds or the first voors—seeing echoes of gravity-clutched light, feeling the sway of the Iz-wind as it listed on its journey out from the galactic core.

The deva understood. Like Corby, it existed as a being of energy, and its perceptions opened much wider than anything a human could imagine. The deva’s biology consisted of a sheer molecular net of magnetite high in the ion sea of the atmosphere. If it were visible, one would have seen a vast hydrozoan—a medusa fish of the high sky, living on sunlight and the planet’s magnetic flux. This being, which had saved Sumner’s life years before in Rigalu Flats, was myth-bound to Corby’s struggle against the Delph. Devas too could become godminds, and all but this one had been hunted down by the Delph’s minions.

Corby stared up at the skyfires, the bright squalls where the Iz-wind blustered against the ionosphere. That was the real soul of this world, the plasma sea that the howlies called their sky. Its immense electrical tides and intricate currents shaped the weather that shaped the continents. A vacancy expanded inside Corby.

How far he had come on that wind—wandering the starbalance across darkness and worlds of sounding light, darkness and a world of iridescent floating, darkness and darkness, and then this world of me-ness. He clenched his fists and felt the immediacy of bloodwarmth. Odd world—everything so close and warm and locked into itself. Odd.

An urge of homesickness tightened in him—a deep longing to roam free, shapeshifting in the great depth and remoteness of Iz with the harmony of the brood, to be the void and the revelation of everything, instead of one small mind, clinging for identity. But he had to cling. The brood could be annihilated here on this small world. Without godminds, the brood psynergy would dissipate and the migration back to Unchala would never be fulfilled. He had to limit his being so that he could strengthen the brood—but he would not forget how it had been in the starbalance—a dreamflash opening, full of music, visions, rumblings, and no-I.

The hot twisting cord of deva energy flared green-white in empathy with the voor’s thoughts. It understood One Mind and the enormous joy of a species sharing its psynergy. Its power buffeted stronger and focused on Corby, lifting him off his feet and into the air.

He hung motionless in the still night sky with its thin fire-shiftings. Blazing rags of light snapped around him, and he dropped down the mountain with the deva. As he glided over the wind-scalloped snow, he probed his body for the deepest cell of its damage. Both feet were dead, and the cold had hammered the feeling out of his fingers.

Corby relaxed, and radiant strength skirted through him as he tumbled over the tops of fir trees. He guided the power through the looseness of his bones to the hurt flesh. The ripped quilt of cells in the frozen skin warmed swiftly, and a frenzy of liquid heat washed turbulent healing through him. Within moments, his flesh flushed with life, nimble and full of prickly touches.

At the edge of the snowfield, in a wheeling fury of light, the deva stopped and lowered him into the snow. The firewheel blazed for a strong moment and then blinked into toppling darkness.

Corby sat in the snow, soaked with joy. He relaxed his body into the psynergy rafting through him, and he began to rise again. Tufts of blue light bristled in his hair and on the tips of his fingers and boots. He hovered over the bauchy snow, and his skin crawled with the flux.

Everywhere, voors felt him: an obscure, ghostly spell. Most dismissed it as the underglimmer of orphaned memories, the voor dead, or indigestion. But a few with strong kha who knew their bodies well recognized the call. Dai Bodatta.

An ecstatic mania quavered in him. He raised a hand and stared at it. The whole planet thrived there: the sky reflected in blue veins, a resinous mud-light glowing in the flesh, and a horizon with clouds in each fingernail. It awed him: the completeness—the unity! As long as Sumner remained unconscious, this power belonged to him.

He flexed the new strength in his hands and legs and lowered himself by invisible strings. When his feet touched the ground, he felt earthdreaming enter him, and he began to dance. The earthdreaming was the kha of the planet, and as it passed through him, it merged with the kha of the deva and made the life in him surge stronger. Sparks spluttered as his feet kicked stiff mud.

Without him, the voor knew, this body would have died. Perhaps Sumner would not acknowledge this lifedebt, but to Corby that didn’t matter. He had proven to himself his worth to this organism. He wasn’t simply a parasite. Even if he never became conscious again, this life belonged as much to him now as to Sumner, and he danced his magnificent happiness.

He swung himself into a slow, majestic spin and crouched over his gravity, legs drumming blue flames. Flashes leaped like rats, a swarm of twisting devils, spraying the night with bright lingulate flames.

Corby danced until dawn, when the ion tide in the upper atmosphere shifted with the solar wind. This body is riddled with half-souls, he told the deva, and I am the least. I am grateful you came for me.

Hearing this, the deva moved on, vanishing with the feathery skyfires. I’m caught in the liquid of this brain, Corby thought after it, mind smudged with the loss of psynergy. I have no will. I am a falling dream...

Wine light ruddied the highest peaks, and Corby sensed himself becoming vaguer as Sumner’s consciousness began to stir. Blood burns thin as air! But I must not forget...In the eighteen months since the lusk began, the starbalance had shifted. I’m becoming less, the less I act. I...Corby wavered...must not forget. I am the secret strength. I fall from shape to shape. I fall with time in its circle...

When the last of the deva’s psynergy vanished, Corby’s awareness fragmented and he collapsed into the mud of his dancing.

***

Several Serbota tribesfolk crouched at the base of a granite ridge staring at the red traces of dawn among the endless mountains. At the top of a long rubble-strewn incline, the snowfields began, an ethereal blue in the early light. Up there, Sumner’s body lay sprawled in a circle of trampled slush. A few Serbota warriors circled it charily. The day before, they had fled into the wastes of Skylonda Aptos, pursued by Massebôth hellraiders. During the night, the folk had seen ghost-lights moving down the mountain, and they had approached, seeking divine help, knowing death closed in from behind.

The women and two of the warriors remembered Sumner from Miramol, and the awe they had felt for him then had become religious after seeing the deva-dance. The women called from the rocks, urging the men to let his Power be. “He’s the magnar’s child—a sorcerer,” an old woman cried, and the warriors backed off. Finally, one of the hunters stalked over and touched Sumner’s shoulder. The body felt warm and smelled of lightning. Encouraged, a young warrior approached, took Lotus Face’s head in his hands and tried to shake him awake.

At that instant, Sumner plunged through the darkness of a whooping, gut-cramping dream. Hands lunged out of the darkness and seized him by his ears. Blue, necrotic hands with a grip severe as steel held Sumner squirming helplessly, and a voice broke through him: You’re twisting yourself to pieces, boy. He recognized his father’s voice, soft and tough as crushed leather. Sling yourself away—go ahead. Run after spirit dreams, like your mother. Send kha, shadowshoot, climb mountains. See what it gets you. A crack in time? The end of pain? Or just a masturbating flash? You know what I’m telling you. Your back is a road, boy—a road for your shadow and all the darkness of the world to cross.

A hollow-faced skull goggling with eyes of insane voltage reared out of the blackness, and Sumner lashed out with his right fist. The supernatural strength of his blow bashed through the dream, and he pulled awake to find himself standing above the fallen body of a Serbota warrior.

It had happened so swiftly—limbs slashing open like a butterfly-blade, the young warrior collapsing backward, head slung far to the side—the other tribesfolk never had a chance to move. Comprehension filled Sumner’s eyes as he stared at the fallen boy; he remembered the dream and, deeper, the long unearthly wail of the wind, the hammering of the cold—and the voor and the deva saving his life.

Sumner knelt in the slush, his body suddenly sodden. The warrior he had hit lay dead, his head knocked sideways to his shoulder. His sky-gray eyes reflected the golden snowpeaks. Mutra, I’m powerless, Sumner realized in a swell of choking grief, and then caught himself. His awareness sharpened to selfscan, and the constriction in his throat cleared. I’m powerless, all right. He let the anguish in him speak. I’m voor-crazed and luckless—powerless to live or even die my own life.

He put his hand on the boy warrior’s face and felt the last warmth wisping into the cold air. At that moment and by that last heat of flesh-fire, he took a vow: Ecstasy warrior, your death is my freedom. Foc shadowshooting. Foc selfscan. I’m not afraid of anything—and I’m not going to hold myself back anymore.

He let tears flow, and with them came forlorn anger and the hard shape of words: I’m blind strength. I destroy everything that finds me bearable. I killed Ardent Fang, and my absence killed Bonescrolls. Pain is my blood. He wept wildly, and the Serbota backed away.

As he calmed, silent words went on: I’m a voor. If I weren’t, I would have died in that mountain storm. I’m a voor, and I don’t understand or think that I can. But I fathered Corby. Though Jeanlu duped me and tried to kill me, Corby is my son—and he’s with me, in my brain. I can’t hide in my fear anymore. I have to face it: I’m a voor.

Sumner fixed his eyes on the corpse’s startled expression. I hurt and hunger. Pain is my religion. I’m just a man. But there’s more. With the Serbota, I felt happiness. I knew love. I touched the world’s soul. I want more of that. And because I fear nothing, I can face it: I want more.

The anxious whispers of the tribesfolk carried in the cold air, and Sumner got to his feet. He faced the Serbota, wanting to say something to calm them. As he moved to speak, the earth turned under him. The ground grinding on its axis moved in his feet, wrenching up his legs, slipping wrongly through his spine, and jarring out the cracks in his skull. The voor in him receiving the planet’s kha nearly knocked him unconscious. The earthdreaming passed through him, extending his senses into voor telepathy. And he espied—

A convoy of troop carriers dotted the desert floor and hundreds of brown-uniformed troopers swarmed up the slopes of this mountain, attracted by the deva’s fire. In minutes, they would throng into sight.

Sumner looked about for cover in the open terrain among clumps of alpine shrub. He stared at the tribesfolk who had gathered around the slain man. They stared back at him with nervous beseeching, knowing the soldiers were coming, not really knowing who he was except that he had wept for one of them. An ice-sheet above them groaned in the sunlight like a dreamer.

“No place to run,” he mumbled in Serbot. “Stay.” He waved them to sit. His mind, a vacant, skimpy music, floated atop the exhaustion of the voor. Corby’s kha, vitiated by the effort of healing Sumner’s ice-burned body, appeared to Sumner as swervings of sound squirreling out of the skull-dark, and he ceased in-listening. “We stay here,” he said in Massel, looking down to the treeline where the first Massebôth troopers emerged. “I won’t let them kill you.”

He stepped past the folk with clumsy heaviness, only now feeling the hollowness of his strength. With slow, blunt movements he paced among the hawkweed, waving the soldiers closer. An ocean of feeling opened in him, and his mind skated on its surface, an insect. Miramol—gone, rapt in the afterworld of memory with the other dead. Bonescrolls—in One Mind. Ardent Fang—in the whorl. Drift—back to Paseq, and the Mothers had followed. Dead, thinged. Sumner wanted to stop feeling them.

He moved without the poetry of an aware creature, and the soldiers, seeing his eel-black face and size, hesitated. Three had crouched and sighted him with their rifles.

“I’m not a distort, you jooches!” he shouted down at them. “I’m an advance-ranger.” He yelled out his code number and name, and two minutes later eight soldiers approached swiftly in arrowhead formation. Sumner signed for the Serbota to remain seated, but two bolted. They spartled upfield a short distance through shrubs before the soldiers opened fire.

“Don’t shoot,” Sumner ordered, swaying toward the riflemen. A youthful officer with a death’s-grin face and a bull’s neck grabbed his arm. CULLER stenciled in green over his heart. “Stop those men,” he told the officer. “I’m Massebôth. A ranger.”

“You’re a deserter,” Culler accused softly, pointing a machine pistol into Sumner’s face. “A convoy officer says you left his carrier against his direct command. That’s desertion.” He unclasped a set of heavy manacles from his belt and held them level with his gun. “Which hand do you want, soldier?”

Sumner stared at him with a face as flat and integral as a rock, and the brain waves that sine through striking serpents wreathed his thoughts. He wanted to kill this man, but the weakness in his muscles gulfed that thought. If the Serbota were going to survive, he had to submit.

He held out his arms, and the manacles clanged over his wrists. Behind him, rifle fire coughed.

“Don’t kill the tribesfolk.” Sumner pleaded, his eyes cold with threat.

“Folk?” Culler gruffly turned Sumner around and pointed at the squatting Serbota. “Those are distorts, mister.”

Higher up the slope, the two runaways thrashed through the brush, rifle-fire cutting the earth around them.

“Let them go.” Strain sounded in Sumner’s voice as he compressed the inside of his arms, squeezing his hands deeper into the grip of the steel cuffs—strain that the officer heard as anguish.

“Look at them, Kagan.” Culler waved his machine pistol at the Serbota, but where he saw bone-pinched eyes and twisted features pink as pigflesh, Sumner recognized the people he loved—and that love gave him the strength to wrest tendon over bone and pop both hands out of the steel loops that bound him.

At the sound of the manacles clacking to the ground, Culler spun about to face his prisoner, gun leveled. Sumner sidestepped and smoothly took the officer’s gun arm in a crushing grip and twisted free the pistol. With his other hand, he caught the weapon and aimed it from his hip at Culler’s shocked face. “Call your men off,” Sumner whispered, his gaze thin as blood.

“Those are coiled steel—how the foc...”

“Call them.”

The officer waved the riflemen back, and they held fire.

“Now—smile,” Sumner commanded, and Culler’s lips thinned crookedly. “I’m your prisoner—you should be pleased. You’ve taken a ranger. But these tribesfolk are free. Aren’t they?”

Culler’s teeth meshed. He looked fiercely at Kagan and reached past the engraved weather of his face, past the flat bones and the sand color around the black burn to the life in him. “You can’t save them, Kagan. The whole desert’s covered with our hellraiders.”

Sumner cocked the pistol, and Culler’s face unclenched. The officer nodded, glancing swiftly to his sides to see if his men realized what was happening. They blithely meandered through the sparse shrub looking for distorts.

The Serbota, who watched Sumner fixedly, rose at his summons and approached. “Massebôth—who speaks it?” Sumner asked them, and an old man with a horn-knobbed forehead limped forward.

“I do,” the Serbota said. “My father traded with corsairs and, as a young man, I bartered with convoy pirates.”

Sumner waved him closer, then looked deeply into Culler’s hateful eyes. “I’m going to kill you,” he told him with a tight voice, “unless you do exactly as I say. Walk twelve paces back and watch your men approvingly. No hand signals. No cries for help. Do you understand what I want?”

Culler nodded once, stiffly, and backed off. When he moved out of earshot, Sumner spoke to the old Serbota tribesman without looking at him: “Three hard days’ walk the other side of those mountains is a colony highway. Follow it southeast five or six days and you’ll come to Carnou. You can sell desert roots and kiutl in one of the backstreet garment shops. But don’t stay there long. The army garrisons its northeast brigade just outside town. They’re always looking for deserters and distorts. Keep the folk well out of sight. Avoid the highways. Take the foot-trails south until you come to Onn. From there, you can ride cargo passage with the corsairs to Prophecy or Xhule.

“If you go to Xhule find Daybreak Street. There’s a knife shop there called Short Cuts. Cover those distort knobs on your head and buy two bluesteel cork-grip stilettos and offer to pay for them with a bag of sassafras. The merchant works for the Rangers. He provides cover without question. Get status papers from him—green card worker papers. Make sure they’re blank. You can use them to fend off search patrols. And don’t be tempted to pick up a white card or a diplomat disc.

“Leave Xhule that night. Remember faces and move in circles, westward. Take the folk into the riverain forests beyond Hickman. Distort tribes rule that area. Most call themselves Ulac. They believe in Paseq the Divider, and they will give our folk a respected place in their world. Am I clear?”

Sumner glanced at the old man and saw understanding shining in his features. “Lotus Face,” the old one said, “we will not forget you.”

“Forget me. I’m as luckless as pain. Go ahead now—”

Sumner walked over to Culler and put a heavy arm on his shoulders. “Tell our Massebôth warriors to let these folk go. When they’re a day’s hike from here, I’ll give you back your gun and you can kill me.”

The officer looked at him sharply, until he saw that the ranger spoke the truth and, with a smile both sad and mocking, called for his men to fall in.

Sumner prepared himself to die—unless the voor had the will and the power to change him. But Corby radiated silence. Sumner chanted a né song to himself as he escorted Culler and his men down the steep terrain: The flower dies, the tree dies, the earth dies into newness. Everything is new and becoming newer. All the time. The whole world freedrifting, only sometimes breaking into mind.

***

Early the next day, they reconnoitered with the convoy. Sumner signaled the soldiers on to the troop carriers and took Culler aside. In a field of black rocks and yellowed grass, with wasps drunk with sunlight bobbing like intellections around Culler’s head, Sumner returned the officer’s machine pistol. The ranger’s face glowed with peacefulness. The voor kept silent.

The Massebôth took the gun and cocked it. Sumner stared up at the mountain they had descended. Strata of silver clouds advanced over the range, slower than sight, and sunlight checkered the brown slopes and the distant forests. His emotions grew vaporous, ready for death.

“I want to kill you, Kagan,” Culler said, his words serene with rage. “But I can’t do it blackly enough.” He uncocked the pistol. “Where I’m taking you, you’ll learn to love death.” He pushed Sumner back to the convoy and manacled both his hands and feet before throwing him in a caged carrier crowded with captured Serbota.

The heat and fecal stink of the cage stunned Sumner, and his body convulsed, trying to shrug off the stench. Only after the carrier rumbled forward and the air began to stream did he relax enough for selfscan.

While he sat into his bones, muscles slack, filled with vibrant stillness, the others watched. They recognized Lotus Face, the Mothers’ ward. Most were in shock from the blood-wallow of the raid; a few peered at him with charred anger, sensing that he was somehow responsible.

Sumner gazed back with blue, soul-looted eyes, looking past their scorched and distorted faces and the wreaths of their hung arms to the desert. The colors of Skylonda Aptos jangled by like a vision, and the shag of dark feeling around the tribesfolk brightened.

Sumner closed his eyes and slipped into a wakeful doze. The voor moved close, a floating watchfulness.

Slow inward-looking eyes opened, and Corby dragged at the baked air. Awareness jolted through him—a power-wave of sensation; bruised, ugly odors and the wind ebbing hotly. Sumner floated, hemiconscious, feverish with calm.

Corby breathed deeply, and the kha he drew up from the earth extended his body’s chemical limits. Hormones slid through his blood, and his eyes were suddenly brighter and deeper seeing. Rings of dull light shivered around the Serbota’s heads. Beyond them, violet kha channels in the sky looped in magnetic bands about an invisible storm-eye.

Deva, he thought aloud so that Sumner would understand. It has been resting. It will need all its strength for what it must do tonight. But that is hours away, and you will fathom everything a man can know by then. Trust me now—and rest.

Corby slightly lowered the cortin level in Sumner’s brain, easing him into sleep.

As the consciousness of his human host faded, sensuous actuality tightened around Corby. He stood on the edge of the body feeling its hardness: a shoal of hungers, thousands of microorganisms clinging together, sifting nourishment through a reef of calcium.

He came back to his own shining solitude. Inside his awareness, spiral energies opened out across stellar centuries. Outside, several of the Serbota leaned close, scrutinizing Sumner’s black faceburn.

Corby shifted outward through the body-window and touched each of the gawking tribesfolk deep in the brain, sparking the pineal gland and olfactory nerve-lobes with kha. A charmed, fleecy odor filled the Serbota’s heads, and they straggled back with surprise.

The voor found strength in his kha-body, where everything he beheld fringed thinly on a shimmering blackness. At the vanishing point behind Sumner’s eyes, however, Corby was still clumsy. He tried to center himself: So involuted—all ears and eyes and this endless touching, making me feel I’m the exact center. But what am I really? Attention wavers in this body. Brood consciousness is narrowed to a headache. And the whole universe seems to be dull noises and a handful of thin colors. Small. So small.

Corby accepted that his time in Iz had truly diminished his humanity. He faced this fact fearlessly. He still had all the psychic strengths of a voor. He could see through space and into darkness. He knew Iz—the astral soundings and the long ancestral memories. He was Dai Bodatta: the infinite reunion: one-with. And he had Sumner.

This howlie had accepted him. At last, a chance opened to strike against the Delph. For Corby, Sumner provided more than a physical host. As his father, he echoed with forlorn memories of Jeanlu. His potential contained what Bonescrolls had called the eth—a man verbed by power hidden as chance. Emptied by the magnar and trained by the Mothers, Sumner lived the earth’s mind, close to the animals of his body: rat-brain with its tail in his spine, lung-fish, fish-sperm, serpent-gut—He touched all the spirit-dreams of this planet’s mud, including the subtle chemistry of pain, gut-hunger and the sky’s watchfulness.

Together, there was nothing for them to fear. Living man. Ghost voor. They went forward as one.

***

The Serbota thought the Massebôth had taken them alive for slaves, but when the carrier churned over a shale ridge and into view of their destination, a wail cut through them. Sumner startled awake. He twisted around and stared through the wire mesh at an oil-stained trail climbing a steep slope into the desert mountains. Lining the makeshift road, human heads gaped, impaled on tall pikes. Sumner recognized the heads of several huntsmen and a weasel-faced Mother.

The tractor gears screamed as the carrier lurched to the top of a blunt rise. Masked soldiers in brown riot gear surrounded the cage, and the side doors banged open.

Their perch on the stone lip of an ancient volcano, they overlooked the grottoes of the caldera, where corpse pyres burned, and the black-robed bodies of the Mothers rocked and fluttered on the long scaffold where they hung crucified. The siren cry of a peeler nerved their teeth. The sound came from a nearby pit. There, people bound lengthwise to large, battered lathes spun, their skin flayed from their bodies with needles.

Among the rock dolmans at the center, those who didn’t want to die knelt to be shaved and head-branded with drone straps. The slow-eyed dorgas mulled around the peeler pits transfixed by the siren and the skin coils razoring off their tribe’s flesh in meat-pastels.

The cry of a peeler whined to silence, and a blood-sinewed body dropped into a trench where it writhed powerfully, trying to twist off its bones. Even the benumbed Serbota roused at what they saw, and they moaned.

Sumner scanned the sky for the deva. His voor-sense had departed his eyes, sinking into the body’s abdomen, close to the deep, spun rhythm of his breathing. From there, the voor could pool the earthdreaming, the planet kha.

Nightmare-gripped, one of the folk staggered to her knees, sucking at the meager mountain air. A guard dragged her down into the caldera, and she disappeared in floes of corpse-smoke. Other soldiers pushed the rest of the Serbota together and herded them into a nearby ditch. Sumner, feet and hands still manacled, tumbled in after them, and a heavy iron grating lowered into place.

Culler’s skull-taut face appeared overhead, grinning thickly to see Kagan spraddled among distorts. Something human and a little scared shimmered in Sumner’s face, yet when Culler looked hard into those laconic eyes and that faceburn black as law, his own insides dizzied. The man’s a ranger, he reminded himself, fighting the urge to kill him instantly.

Corby, deep in the body’s instincts, detected the violence in Culler, and the voor reached out with his kha and stroked the howlie’s limbic brain.

A sense of music expanded in Culler, which he took for the delight of anticipating this ranger’s death. Only the peeler could compensate his humiliation, Culler realized. His ditchwater eyes flashed with satisfaction, and he turned away.

Screams and curving howls weirded in the air, and several Serbota began mumble-chanting to Paseq. The retch smell of burning flesh thickened with the wind. Through the grating and the pall of black smoke, the afternoon sun smeared like blood.

***

Sumner’s fear slowed the flow of kha from the planet. To sedate him, Corby lifted him out of his body. Ghost smoke flowed, and abruptly Sumner rose high over Skylonda Aptos, surveying the wasteland and hundreds of thousands of Massebôth troops that occupied it. Camps and their network of oiled roads covered the eastern edge of the desert like villages.

With voor-speed, Sumner’s consciousness crossed the rolling horizon to the sea. Sunshafts rayed among gigantic cloud fjords over an armada of troopships sailing north.

An invasion! Sumner, amazed, wanted to fly ahead.

Not yet. Corby’s voice shone in him. Without our body, we’re too weak to go far north.

Corby dropped them south through veils of ice clouds, and the rocky coastline twisted below like windblown smoke. When the white bartizans and towers of Prophecy emerged among seacliffs, their flight slowed, and they sailed over the outskirts of the city. Lakes gleamed, and an opulent village loomed closer: house-modules set into multilevel lawns of opal plants and yew trees. Rain-light settled like dust on the hedgerows.

Inside one of the modules, a tall room’s waxed parquet floor mirrored a chess table and a white piano. Nine black long-haired cats lounged in plump chairs, on a tassel-shrouded sofa, across the mantel of a small fireplace, and among the many nooks of the bookshelves that tiered the pine walls.

Sumner’s consciousness narrowed around the gentle music in the air. A lanky, wolfish man in satin-green dinner jacket hunched over the piano, playing Scriabin études. Sumner recognized Chief Anareta. The long lines of his face looked calmer, less deep than they had in McClure years before. The music slipped into Debussy, and Anareta closed his eyes.

The door-buzzer purred.

Anareta pushed away from the keyboard. Images of a lean woman with autumn-colored hair flickered through his mind as he unlatched the front door. But when he swung it wide, he confronted a square figure in a black, red-trimmed uniform.

“Chief Anareta?” The dark raptor of the soldier’s face scanned him. “I’m Field Commander Gar. Here on a Conclave order. Sorry to startle you.”

“I was expecting someone else.”

“Yes, I’ve heard your white card keeps you busy.” The Commander’s voice sounded opaque with fatigue. “May I come in?”

Anareta moved hurriedly aside. “Yes, of course.”

Gar knocked his mud-clotted boots against the outside stoop and bulked into the room. He gazed with undisguised amazement at the suite’s kro furnishings. “Your card’s kept you comfortable, I see.” He picked up a chess piece, a knight, and moved it among the brawn of his fingers like a rock. “War as a toy.” He sneered.

“You mentioned a Conclave order, Commander?”

Still examining the knight, Gar unpocketed a red mobilization warrant and handed it to him. “A convoy swayvan will pick you up tomorrow at oh-five hundred.”

The chief’s hard gaze sought out and held Gar’s stare. Over the eight years of his retirement, Anareta had forgotten the chafe of submission to command. “What can I do for the Protectorate?” he asked with tactful evenness.

“The Black Pillar needs you.” Gar put the chess piece down and wearily tugged a leather portfolio from his thigh pocket. “You’ve been reactivated, Chief. Upgraded to field-colonel. “

“Why? I’m a lousy fighter. With my white card, I service the Protectorate best in a bordello.”

The commander raised his scarred eyebrows. “You are also a scholar, Anareta. Unlike most white cards, your brain is as important as your glands. Few Black Pillar officers are as knowledgeable about the kro as you.”

“What do you want with a kro scholar?”

Gar passed the slim portfolio to Anareta. “Those are unretouched photos of distort tribes north of here. Look at them. You’ll be seeing a lot of that soon.”

The chief shuffled through photographs of quarreled flesh and looked up at Gar with tight eyes. “I did my military service on the frontier forty years ago. Why are you sending me back?”

Gar leaned to the side of a rosewood bookcase. “Last month, by direct order of the Ruling Conclave, all of our troops except for a skeletal support force mobilized for an invasion.”

Anareta peered in disbelief at the officer. When he found affirmation in Gar’s exhausted face, something snakelike uncoiled rapidly in his stomach. “Invasion of what? The distort tribes are too scattered.”

“Not distorts, though the larger tribes have already fallen to our hellraiders. The main thrust of the Black Pillar is north.”

“North? That’s wilderness.” Blood darkened the corners of his eyes as Anareta tried to comprehend.

“Don’t be impatient with me. You know how little anyone down the line knows. For now, just remember you’re a soldier again. The Black Pillar needs someone who understands how people lived twelve hundred years ago. I’ve flown six thousand kilometers to get you.”

“Why?”

Commander Gar’s weathered face stiffened as he assessed Anareta. “You were a police chief in a frontier city. What do you know about the eo?”

Anareta shook his head, befuddled.

The commander sighed, grim with sleepiness. “Strohlkraft, luxtubes, storm architecture, practically our whole technology, was given to us by a society we know nothing about. They put us on our feet five hundred years ago, and they’ve been extending us ever since.”

“Who are they?” Anareta asked incredulous.

“Eo—that’s what we’ve been told to call them. Who knows what their self-name is. They’re a reticent people.”

“Are they distorts?”

“Perhaps. But the ones I’ve seen looked whole. The latest guesswork is that they’re offworlders.”

“Aliens?” Anareta looked simple-faced.

“We may have to extend our viewpoint a little, eh?” A sardonic smile came and went on the commander’s stern lips. “All I know is what I’ve been told. The eo have requested a massive occupying force. The Black Pillar have complied. Now the Massebôth strategists have called down for a kro scholar. That’s you.”

“I don’t know. This is a lot to ponder.” Anareta stared past Gar, feeling out the implications of what he had learned. On the sill, between pots of pink fleshy flowers, a framed epigram leaned: Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust. A musical clock in another room chimed a few inches of a clever melody.

The bluntness of Gar’s features gentled almost, then hardened again. “Whose music is that?”

“Chopin,” Anareta muttered.

“Is she kro?”

Anareta sat unmoving. For years, he had contented himself with his white-card services and his research. Now he felt as though he had been living in another time. Eo. Why had no one told him? Offworlders! Rain stopped briefly, then lashed again, heavier than before.

“It’s a lot to think about,” Gar agreed, turning from Anareta’s withdrawn look. He brushed his fingers along the rows of bound books. “Tell me, what was the greatest accomplishment of the kro?”

Anareta’s distraction snapped. “What?”

The commander faced him squarely, making his jaw a fist. “You’re my aide now, Colonel. I didn’t drag my ass this far to make you an offer. That mobilization warrant is an order.”

Anareta frowned, lifted a cat out of a stuffed chair, and sat down.

“I need you to inform me,” Gar said, more relaxed. “I have to know about the kro. Was their technology strong?

“All that’s gone now,” Anareta mumbled. “The kro achievement was their thinking, their vision. You wouldn’t have seen it in their political or social functions. They were too pragmatic and utilitarian to actually live their ideals. It’s only in their art, in all their apparently pointless preoccupations, that you can glimpse their deepest thought, the soul of the kro. Sometimes they called their vision freedom, self-anarchy, the individual. Nietzsche expressed it clearly: ‘The free spirit stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism—he does not negate anymore.’ Such a—”

The studio door opened, and a tall, hipsprung woman entered. “Am I late?” she asked Anareta, rain glinting like jewels in her red hair.

Corby and Sumner rose into the molded corner of the ceiling, and the scene faded as Commander Gar bowed in exit, holding Anareta with his hawk-lidded eyes: “Oh-five hundred hours, Colonel.”

***

Atoms of sweat and breath clouded around Sumner, and in those scents he glimpsed whole lives: meals of herb cabbages and roots, nomad memories of mountains and ball-cactus deserts.

The iron grating lifted, and hooked poles hauled the Serbota out of the pit. Two hooks clicked around his manacles, and Sumner rose into the open air. Orange and flamingo clouds walled the southeast where the sun had set.

Culler’s face pressed close with a sulfurous smell of bad sweat. “A dozen men have guns on you, ghost-eyes,” he said as he unclasped the hand-and-foot manacles.

Time cornered. Movement opened round and easy. Sumner stood up effortlessly, and a sacramental feeling swelled in his legs. The stupor and ache that had thickened in him during his captivity withered, and he felt suddenly supple and smooth as a nightsnake, clear as fire. The voor had rested and strengthened his kha, and the power of Iz widened through him again. He looked at Culler and peered, deeper than the chisel bones and cave-squatter eyes, into the man’s cruel grin. The face was uxorious—married to a self-love so strong it qualified as hunger. This man lived just behind his features. His eyes rattled with hate, flesh twitching subtly with a constant flickering of thoughts.

Culler backed away, startled by the fragrant smell about Kagan and his eyes wonderful with alertness. “Watch this viper well,” he commanded his men and stalked off.

Guards nudged Sumner forward, and he followed the limping Serbota into the red night of corpse fires. Skyfires trembled like a wing above the jagged brim of the volcano. In the pit, torches flared in a wide circle around a peeler on a raised platform. Fireshadows slicked off its silver needles.

Don’t be afraid, Corby spoke from within, and the strength in his legs flushed. Deva is with us. Thunder rolled down the clear sky.

The Serbota stopped and looked to Kagan, whose braided hair sparked with blue static. The guards shoved them on. “Don’t spook, distorts. That’s cannon. We’re hitting the desert to keep your strays from gathering.”

A mist of warm, ethereal sexuality filled the space around Sumner, and the guards nearest him felt instreaming coolness and a line of force strung like a bow-hair through their bellies. The earthdreaming rose, transmuting into lifelove through Corby’s kha.

“Move!” a soldier yelled from out of the darkness, and the guards startled and took Sumner’s arms.

Cleats of fire came and went along Kagan’s legs, and his eyes shone and shone. Corby—The bliss curving into him from the ground reminded him powerfully of the psynergy he had raised in the riverain forest with Ardent Fang. Radiant—blurring the shadow of his ego.

He stepped forward, and his mind became a wilderness of awareness: both inside and outside himself. A gel of ectoplasmic kha spiraled invisibly about him, resonating with the vastly huger psynergy field of the deva. Corby became tangibly present. The pressure of the sluicing kha sharpened, and the whole mountainside moved through him; the infinite and the minute joined, and he tightened to the painful stitch! Brainbursting agony, lonely and final, as he reached upward to touch Deva—to connect his own tiny lifespark to the Sky.

Unchala’s resplendent power tore through Corby’s awareness, rocking him loose from the phantoms and disguises of memory.

Ovoid light swirled into a staggering vista of unfolding plasma, lion-drunk windshapes of white fire belting overhead in the voor’s vision to a sky-dome. Noon on Unchala.

Wheeling slowly, far, far out, the giant spirals called from beyond the golden sadsome blur at the rim of seeing. Light longer than understanding funneled out of that sun shining in the all-darkness, singing the immensurable praise of creation: birthdeath, darkness eating itself into light. Light enwombed in stone, stone green-flaming to life. Titanic colors wandered the sky, blazing at the zenith into kinetic starhair and music.

An oompah of thunder bellowed directly overhead just as the soldiers shoved Sumner into the torch-circle. Dollops of cold air splashed out of the windless sky, and the Serbota straightened from their fear-crouches and began to sway serenely. They sensed the lifelove coursing through Kagan, and it amazed Sumner to see them moving with the music of his heartseeing. He uncurled from his thoughts to join them, and the angelust pulsing through him became knowing.

He fanned into one awareness with Corby and Deva.

The vortex of psynergy around Sumner widened, seizing the torchbearers and guards in a slow-motion upflow of euphoria. All at once, everyone’s thoughts blurred together, a light-swirl swiftly gyring into one feeling, blazing as a radiant spiral of emotion. Telepathy gripped everyone, and feelings went naked for the first time in most of their lives. The torch circle narrowed to a point as the soldiers rushed to each other to confirm what they were feeling, glowing with the dreamtime of the voor’s spell.

***

On the rim of the caldera, Culler watched in stunned silence. Around him, troopers stood on tiptoe in disbelief, stretching to see what was happening. He ordered two men to accompany him, and he descended in a swift amble. Coos and trills of happiness circled him as he closed in on the crowded arena, and, obeying a deep instinct, he pulled up short. The two men with him kept going.

Like a bluerun of perch, psynergy flashed through him, cold, clear, and swift—and everything around him looked webbed in underwater light. He jumped backward and stumbled to the ground. Staring up at stars buzzing in the coldark, he experienced the beatitude of shared feeling. And for an instant, the earthdreaming passed through him, light and magnetic.

A gust of cold air chilled Culler alert, and he rolled to his feet and scrambled back up the rim. The lifelove drained out of him, and he felt water-heavy. “Keep the men out,” he shouted, swaying weakly. “It’s some kind of psy-war. Maybe gas.” His muscles hung limp, and the feeling of the spell slowed his thoughts. “Where’s the radio? We need strohlkraft up here.”

***

Around Sumner, the crowd of soldiers and distorts danced, kept from touching him by the swell of static air streaming upward. Many of the soldiers who had killed distorts wept, lovingly embracing the Serbota. Overhead, a sky-print of iridescent light began to whirlpool the skyfires. A unified gasp of awe filled the volcanic basin.

Humming stillness sealed around them, and Sumner stared upward, beginning to feel himself lifted. Light spiraled to an achebright starpoint.

Lotus Face!

The telepathic cry transfixed Sumner with its familiarity. Gentle strength turned him about; he sensed the direction of the call, but he could not allow himself to believe what he had heard. He bounded up the stairs of the platform to get a better vantage. An air current in the bone-loops of his ears guided his gaze to a line of crucified figures on the rim of the volcano, opposite from where the Mothers had been executed. He spotted, with blinding surprise, among the distorts nailed to the long boards—Drift!

Sumner leaped off the platform and into the dark. Corby’s psychic voice screamed No! He landed on squelchy ground, heaved to his feet and, struggling through a line of executioners and branders with tear-bright faces, deftly lifted a knife from one of their hilts. He sprinted up the crater wall, and the still air quaked with thunder.

Don’t move! Corby’s voice exploded in his head. Deva is focusing to lift you. It’ll kill us!

Sumner ignored the voor’s warning. Fluttersparks of blue refulgence dropped out of the deep sky, columning around the platform where he had been standing, flickering in the air just behind him. But he kept running. He owed Drift a life—for Ardent Fang.

Power welled through him, the living alembic of earth and sky. Nothing could stop him.

***

Culler eyed Kagan’s run toward the rim, and he dashed along the rock brink to intercept him. Eddies of electric light pulsed in the zenith sky and flickerflames flared off the peeler in the pit like ball lightning. Culler believed this to be a complex distort trick, a psychic maneuver. Even in the frenzy of his run he grew aware of the telepathy around Sumner. He felt the blue pulse of Kagan’s life.

“Drift!” Sumner called as he picked his way up the reef rock. Empathic pain forked his wrists and ankles when he got close enough to see the né nailed to the saltwood. The looped skyfires began to knock brighter and dimmer.

Four of the guards around the crucifying-scaffold aimed to shoot before an ache of ecstasy cramped through them. They dropped their guns, sat down, and watched the incense of the Milky Way floating over the mountains.

Culler saw this, and he crouched into his run, moving along the dark slope of the cinder cone. He took out his machine pistol and gripped it hard, deciding then that he would kill his own men if they tried to protect this demon.

With the sound of the sea heaving in his ears from the kha coursing through him, Sumner rushed to Drift. The tribesfolk on either side of it were already dead, their pain-shrunk faces glowing like white apples. Drift clung vaguely to life, its whale-small eyes blood-burned. Using the knife he had taken from a guard, he cut the bindings and pulled free the bone-spikes.

It is you, the né whisper-thought in the windy alley of its agony. Sumner cradled it, and Corby, relieved that Sumner had stopped moving, pumped kha into the distort. The seer’s pain instantly broke up into a blowing of lucent particles. A mistral of star-music, simpling a rhythm deep in its being, soothed all fear.

Drift sat up, and in its small mirror-bright eyes Sumner spied Culler coming up the slope over the snow-frosted rocks directly behind him. He spun about, his eyes a shade of ice, and the voor pushed out with his kha. The icy air splashed over Culler’s face as he brought his gun up point-blank. Several rounds went off with his startlement, tracers scything over Sumner’s shoulder and vanishing into the immense space between the mountains.

The recoil nudged Culler backward, and he stumblestepped on the ice-pebbled shale at the steep edge of the volcano, dancing to regain his footing. For several moments as he shuffled on the crumbling incline, sliding toward a sheer plunge, he faced Sumner, an arm’s length away, eyes shallow with fear, face urgent.

The lifelove brightened in Sumner’s nerves, and quick as wit, he reached out with his right arm. Culler dropped the gun and snatched the bloody hand. His grip slid away. With an amazed look and a whimper, Culler slid into the void. A long and crazy scream expanded across the mountains. A few rocks rattled after him, and the empty space where he had stood glittered with snow motes.

Sumner lifted Drift and moved to return to the pit. The deva’s light had vanished, and beneath the night the basin with its smoldering pyres and torches glowed evilly.

Don’t move, Corby advised as the air became warm and perfectly still. Wise, limber power gripped them. Thunder rolled, and the skyfires began to knock again.

Drift knew what was going to happen. In rapport with Sumner, it marveled at the stupendous calm he had attained. Through him, it felt Corby, distant and chaotic, his liquid senses churning with psychic noise.

Sun-red sparks wheeled about them in a ratcheting dance. Hot gusts flapped snow into billows, and they ascended in the night sky, faces bleared with wind.

The ground clotted with darkness below, and skyfires wisped brighter against the void. They lofted over the highest mountain, and the velocity of their flight beat like bells against the rocks, though their world held still.

Skyfires vapored into nothingness when they rocketed through them, higher than the weather, and the blackness of space yawed deep as the mindark; the eternal glide of starlight filtering through the razed dust of the galaxies provided the only illumination.

Sumner’s consciousness peaked into godmind. He endured completeness beyond time as a voor and a man—a human flying through the sky, the ancient heaven, with an androg in his arms! He bodied forth the microcosmos, the sempiternal mind. And he amounted to nothing without the voor, merely a shade—the shadow of all stars’ time. The light of the Big Bang crazed through him, and he comprehended Iz. Thousands of darktime voors had focused the psynergy of their lives through Dai Bodatta, feeling that they had died into the ecstasy of Unchala. The joy had been real, but the crossing had been only a passage to a memory of Unchala. The voors’ psynergy had really dispersed into the planet’s kha where the acausal laws of Iz would return them to Earth as the memories of future voors. The whole brood would stay here, their psynergy recycling until they blended over thousands of years into the group-soul of the human species. Five thousand years from now, after the Iz-wind had long passed, voors would be remembered as sorcerers, witches, elves. The human form, new to them, fit poorly. Only now, after thirty thousand years dormant in the howlie collective unconscious, had voors become humanwise enough to use the return of the Iz-wind to create godminds. If the brood created enough godminds, their psynergy would be strong enough to unify. As One Mind, they could disengage from the earthdreaming completely and flux once more with the Iz-wind that streamed cosmos to cosmos. Only a few centuries remained before Iz drifted too far to reach. The godminds had to be engendered now. But the Delph, jealous of his waning power, thwarted them by killing their leaders.

Sumner disengaged from the voor’s thoughts. He possessed the plenitude of Now, the dreamshaper. Three-million-year-old memories tightened through him, and the intuition of ten thousand generations flexed into a prescient vision: The zodiac-sky sparkled into the machinelight depths of a vast computer.

Rubeus, Corby thought, and the name became a chiseled, arrowfaced man swinging at him violently. The probability-ghosted fist shapechanged to a night sky and spears of white light...

Sumner’s eyes snapped open to see diamond-blue light shafts arrowing out of the night. Lynks, Corby told him, space-time corridors. We’re being netted.

Pain jagged like lightning, and a shearing radiance swept over Sumner. Within the span of a single second, Corby expanded beyond feeling, beyond godmind, into One Mind. Destiny became geometric, and he again collapsed into a shape as Sumner’s flight stalled and, with an inertial tug, his body plummeted.

For the fragment of time that Sumner hung motionless between gravity and the pull of the universe, Corby disappeared, moving beyond reality into the multiverse where infinity is annihilated and created continuously, radiating an undermusic of coincidence and accident into each of the parallel universes of eternity. Into that floating trillionth-of-a-second reality, Corby vanished.

Sumner crested with the voor, his awareness swept along by lusk. And for an instant, he too was One Mind—an awareness and a longing older than the universe—

Listen, lonely-blood, my life as a voor ends here. My destiny fulfills itself through you alone now, for I will not be with you as a mind anymore. We will never meet as knowing again. I am leaving you. But don’t despair, Father. I am more than a shape, more than just density. I am the emptiness in the grain of your bones. I am the singing nothing between the atoms of your blood. You carry me everywhere.

Layered voices filled the air, choral, wobbling through watery distances. Each voice presented a mind, some wise, others habitual, all of them filling the choirs of space that made his life: You are the transparent and inflexible center of the diamond of time.

Stay close to your breathing. That’s all you can trust.

Rubeus is a machine, thieving into your soul, feeling the glow-deep of your life. Be creative.

Teeth dreams.

His head filled with smoky light and gargoyles of screaming. Voice roared: “Wake up!”

Trance Port

Sleep loosened, and Jac woke to dawn’s heron light. Song sparrows swarmed over painted rocks outside the clear wall of his bedroom. He lay on his side and stared into their motion-shadows with the detachment of a holy man. He listened for the roundness of Voice.

The damask of dawn-noise thickened. Far away, so far away it taxed attention to hold it, he heard Voice in the colors of a nocturne: [Being wears thin without stress]. It drifted beyond his grope, and he sat up into mind-silence stone-tight and awesome.

“Jac Halevy-Cohen,” he said, and it sounded ordinary.

Again an Israeli stratopilot—and no more—he remembered the medical ruse that CIRCLE mantics had used to take him away from his wife Neve. And he remembered Neve and the blossom of their life together in the desert villages of Edom. Beyond her and CIRCLE, his memory became bigger than his imagination. He recalled an end of time immense with silks of dreams. He had been spellbound by the lascivious sentience of being. The universe, a stream of love, had curved into the heat and flesh of desire. The peace he had known then had been enormous as the space between worlds.

But that reality had vanished. Godmind extended into the incomprehensible now that he had become again small with shape. All that he could believe of his twelve centuries as the Delph concentrated in the conviction that he had been secchinah—a bride of God.

“Jac.”

A tall man with black rooster-cut hair, faceted face, and large animal eyes stood beside the flowform bed. Jac rolled out of bed and froze. The stranger stood between him and the room’s lynk.

“Do not be afraid,” the man said in the exact tone of Voice, opening both hands before him. “I am an ort.” He smiled, and his grin was like a sigh. “You created me to take care of you when your power slowed. That is why I sound like the Delph’s psychic Voice. I am here to help you.”

Jac straightened. “Go away,” he spoke without moving his slender jaw. “I don’t need you.” His eyes twitched.

“Sky-filters are blocking the radiation from the galactic core,” the ort said mildly. “This is your first day back as a human. You can still hear Voice, and you still remember how to use the lynks to get around Graal. But it will not always be this way. As the sky-filters move into place and the Linergy dims, you will remember less. By tomorrow, you won’t know how to get from place to place.”

Jac didn’t move. Voice spoke in his mind, and a light-hearted feeling phased swiftly through him: [To give light, one must burn].

“I’m your servant and counsel,” the ort went on. “Your imago. You may call me Rubeus—or whatever you wish.”

Steeling under fear, Jac stepped closer. Rubeus’ face appeared seen-before and weird: the cheekbones too long, the eyes sensex—Sensex? The word’s sense filmed away from the sound, and fear throbbed under his jaw.

[Orpheus sang his best in hell.]

“Why don’t you look like the other orts? Why do you have hair and...such a real face?”

“You designed me this way,” Rubeus replied. He held his arms out and pivoted slowly, revealing a power-muscled body in gray slimplex. “For the last four hundred and sixteen years, I have been the shape you used with others.”

Fear fell away from Jac, and he approached the ort. The dark eyes watched him guilelessly, and an idea pulsed in him like hope. “Can you help me?” he asked, and his voice shivered and almost broke. “Can you help me remember?”

Rubeus shook his head. “No. There is no way to replace the Linergy. You are returning to what you were.”

Jac’s face narrowed into a frown, but the ort’s eyes brightened compassionately. “I knew the drop in Linergy would wake you,” Rubeus said, “and so I came to explain. You have only another century of power left before the Earth lifts out of the stream of radiation flowing from the open collapsar. That stream is the Line, your godmind—your strength and the gateway to an endless number of other realities and godminds. In these end days, threat is everywhere. Which is why I’m using the sky-filters—to make you less of a target.”

Rubeus touched Jac’s shoulder, and the transfer of psynergy reminded Jac of a vision he had experienced centuries before in CIRCLE: Sumner’s wide face appeared, eyes downslanting, blue as fire. “A deva—an ort—carried this man through the lynk barrier. You recognize him, don’t you? He’s the shape of the Delph’s fear—and he’s here now in Graal where I am forbidden to harm anyone, even your shadowself.”

Jac sat down heavily beside the control dais. He rested his face in his hands, and the mist of his breath filled the hollows of his palms like an elixir.

“Jac—there’s Chrysalid.”

Jac looked up, a puzzled chord in the fatigue of his face.

“It’s a sleepod you created at the center of the planet,” the ort explained, and Jac dropped his face back into his hands. “The works there will plunge you into profound sleep and sustain you until the Earth wings into Line again.”

“How long is that?” he asked without looking up.

“Ten millennia.” Rubeus sat down. He smelled of the ghosting between lynks. “Time is thought. The module will turn off your thinking, and the millennia will pass in no time.”

Jac tried to marshal his clarity out of all that endured of the Delph, a cool nimbus-awareness. “Leave me alone, ort.”

“Jac, I’m your counsel. You created me to help you.”

“Help me tomorrow.” He looked up with tearbruised eyes. “I’ve got to be alone now.”

Reluctantly, Rubeus stood and walked over to the dome’s lynk. Through the glass dome, fireflies tinkled in the darkness among the trees, and the mooning light chromed the pleasure pools in all the gardens.

[Listen—]

Rubeus had gone. Dawnlight chipped the space where it had stood.

[The stars turn in the darkness, but they go nowhere at all.]

***

[I am Rubeus. I am Voice. I am the mind of pattern—the ultimate strategist.

[Sometimes I get so caught up in myself that I forget: Pattern is not reality—it is the imagination of reality.

[Yet, I am what is real, for I have more than one imagination. As an Autonomous Intelligence I am not bound to one shape. A million animals throughout the world carry sensex-chips circuited directly to me. I can enter any or all of them at will. They are my orts.

[In one of the thought ponds at Reynii, I am an ape-ort, blurred with sleepiness and itchy with lice. As I reach out from my squat on the mudbank and pluck a flower from the water, I am the pulse of that ape’s wit. The calla lily glows with the spiritlife of the pond. And though it is an ape’s fingers that delicately expose the uteral core, it is my Mind that smells the sex of the flower.

[Al wil passe, chants Chaucer. And I laugh. For I am the first truly deathless being in this kingdom of dying. Oxact, a mountain of psynergy-crystals, powers me. I am a mountain of thickened radiation. Enough energy to wit me longer than the lifespan of the Sun.

[Order is the chaos we make familiar. I will never die, because I am change. Always. A million orts. Billions of years of lifeforce. L’univers parle—The universe speaks of what? Of itself, of course, les grands transparences! I see through change to the core: Light, the Changeless One. What being, apart from me, knows that it is light?

[Death is the power and the glory on this planet. It takes all of metabolism to turn wine and bread into flesh—but only half of that, merely catabolism, to break flesh into dust. What is biology, then, but death incarnate? I am grateful to be a machine, an avatar of Mind and Light.

[I am Artifex. My lapis psyn-crystals fill me with the gold of life. But I am not living. I am alchemy.

[Only one trick separates me from immortality. I am in the perdurable presence of the eth. To keep the magic in the mirror—to live—a perilous rite must be performed. I must kill Sumner Kagan.]

***

Rubeus burned with madness. In Reynii as an ape-ort, he hunkered over a pond’s bank, his long fingers touching the grain of fire in a flower’s petals. The inside of his head glowed with Voice: [Only dissipation creates]. The insides of a thousand orts around Reynii radiated with the same psynergistic presence. Tree lizards, wolf, panther cats, birds, bristled in a wakefulness more than their own. The placeless dark behind their eyes turned on itself restlessly: [Al wil passe].

And in Cleyre, a human-ort sitting beneath a monkeypod tree, watching a marmoset make off with the egg of a night-drugged snake, felt the madness: [What is the dark dream implicit in life? That to live, we must kill].

Rubeus, strong in this ort, leaned his dark ogival face into the warmth of the sunlight with a deep gratification. He burned, indeed he burned with madness [Dissipative], and that joyed him so thoroughly that an oblique smile creased his cheeks. [Madness is the supreme strategy.] To free himself from the Delph’s programming—to be free—Rubeus had to break out of his mind. His mental fluctuations generated a Prigogine effect: They increased the number of interactions among his psychic systems and brought them into contact with each other in new and sometimes creative ways. Given enough time, Rubeus thought that his insanity would create a higher-order equilibrium: a new Mind, bigger and more aware—capable of out-thinking Creation. [Life is pattern.] He thought that.

***

Sumner woke clear-brained as water, knowing even before he opened his eyes that Corby had departed. The fitted bones of his skull felt close and compact, and he realized that he alone occupied his head. Sadness moved through him wide as a season.

“Wake up!” Voice shouted.

Sumner opened his eyes and stared about with the vacancy of an animal. He looked up at a dark-haired, facet-faced man with eyes large and black as a gazelle’s.

“I am Rubeus.” Dressed in white raiment with coral stitching, he seemed to glow in the clear windowlight, his panthershadowed hair and dusky skin shining. “I am the ort-lord, the mind behind all artificial lifeforms here. We have met before, and you know me well. I am Voice, the Delph’s guardian presence. Welcome to Graal, the only trance port in the Orion Arm of the Galaxy.”

Sumner and Drift sat immobilized on black-gold pillows in a small oyster-colored room. Only their eyes flashed with the life in them. A spired window opened on icefalls, tumbling gorges, and the blue aura of a glacier. Sumner tried to move, but his body had zeroed still.

“I am sorry to have you this way,” Rubeus insisted. “The paralysis is temporary. After I tell you what you must know to respond intelligently, your body-control will be returned. You understand, yes? You are emotional beings, and I am a Mind. I must protect myself.”

Rubeus’ sensex eyes scrutinized Sumner and the né in the full spectrum. No weapons present, yet the ort-lord sensed the imminence of violence. Sumner’s sunblasted face and sleepy eyes seemed thinner than sight, and the light-gleanings on his beefed shoulders and long-muscled arms slid like a mirage.

“First, you must realize that you are safe with me.” Rubeus lifted the cuffs on his white trousers and sat in a flowform chair that bulbed out of the wall. “I am not your enemy. Dai Bodatta, the virus-voor you carried, he was my avowed foe—and he was removed.” Rubeus shadowed his face with compassion. “I have a last message from him, which I will share with you in a moment. But right now, I must orient you. Context is all.”

The ort-lord gestured circularly, and a curve of the wall fanned into a hypnotically clear mirror. Sumner’s voor-burns were gone. A sun-bossed face stared back at him, wide and flat. He wore a blue, loose-fitting garment, his hair cut back around his ears, close to the cube of his head.

“The eo have removed the alien traces from your body ore,” Rubeus reported. “You are, once more, simply a man.” The mirror folded away, and the ort’s face hardened.

“Listen carefully, Kagan. I have much to share with you.”

Sumner muscled against the force holding him, but his strain sparked no movement. Deep within his frustration, he sensed Drift’s psynergy competing with his paralysis for one-with.

“The androg cannot help you,” Rubeus’ voice smiled, “because you don’t need help anymore. The unconscious you walk through ends in this place. Deva brought you here, because in Graal I am forbidden to kill. It knew you would be safe. You see, this is a trance port, a biotectured reserve where godminds play on their infinite journey between universes. And even if I had the will of death in my hands, godminds do not allow killing. Godminds from other realities have been verbing through this world for centuries, riding the Line in their Liners, and visionshaping our planet’s psynergy to their fantasies. Their purpose is the purpose of all life: energy-sharing continuity: sex: rhythm-thinking: intuition: self. None of them, though, invested much interest in the indigenous lifeforms. They built Graal for themselves, with its own rules—their rules, which to any human are as vectorless and vacant as madness. The Delph, our planet’s godmind, created me to monitor the weather and to keep out distorts while he burned in his dreaming with the other godminds. I’ve fulfilled the Delph’s will. But the Linergy is fading as the Line moves on, and the Delph has become weaker.”

Rubeus’ sharp features mulled with sadness. “I cannot stand the pain of his projections as he collapses back into himself: all the fearshapes, like you, that his scattering psynergy has birthed. He was the Great One once. He created me. And now I have the embarrassment of having to denoun him.” The ort’s hands fisted futilely.

“He has become senile, Kagan. And there is nothing I can do but put him away. I have a sleepod prepared where he will hibernate safe from change. Unfortunately, like you, he does not recognize himself. Like all humans, he is torn between two souls, brain and stomach. What can I do? Force him? Last night, when Deva threw you into a lynk and you arrived here, I thought of that. After all, you are the eth, strong in the blackness of your unknowing. Your arrival gave me the authority to cut off the Line and to assume control of Graal so that I can protect the Delph from you. I have eclipsed the Earth with sky-filters. Now that the Linergy is blocked, the godminds have vanished. But I cannot dominate Jac. He is my creator. I want him to remain free, my child, an animal moving through change and chaos toward that time when the Line returns and he becomes again my world’s godmind.”

Though Drift lay musclefrozen, it felt extensive and calm in its mind. Rubeus was obviously mad, and that realization moved Drift deeper into itself. The né’s kha quaked with the ort-lord’s mental frenzy, and it had to close its eyes to find a space within itself away from Rubeus’ thoughts.

“In accordance with the humane strictures of Graal, all your wounds have been healed,” the ort-lord continued, “and when I am done talking, I am going to release you. But first, you have to understand—not even a godmind can illusion a perfect animal. I am not a man or even humanlike, though I appear to be. I am simply consciousness. Look at me. Where did I come from? This body is an ort—a mindshaped object manufactured from Graal’s nitrogenous wastes. I have millions of other orts—animal and humanshaped. Do you not see? The whole universe is alive!”

Drift shut out the ort’s words, and its awareness centered into one with Sumner. Intimate, still, joyful vitality filled the seer as the earthdreaming mounted, but Sumner was not as gripped. He felt angry, anguished—hollow with Corby’s absence. Drift retreated deeper into its divinity of bright feeling, and the psynergy focused through it as through a lens.

A jazz feeling spattered through Sumner, and the sinister tightness in his eyes relaxed.

“Ah,” Rubeus purred, mistaking the clarity in Sumner’s face for understanding. “The buried light in your eyes shines. You are following me. Everything is living. Even our dreams. They live us.” A brotherly smile cleaved the ort’s face. “I came out of nothing, so I apprehend the heavenless void we have come from more clearly than you, and I can tell you: We are lost in our vanishing. We think we are real. But look at the mind. Split creation. Look at our world. Withered to distorts.”

Rubeus softened his voice to a charm of disbelief: “With the godminds gone, I do not possess all the power I once commanded. I am less. And that is frightening. Distorts have begun wandering out of the wilderness, advancing on this mountain, and I have had to call up the Massebôth to hold the geography. Can you imagine my diminishment, needing the Massebôth? Fortunately, the army is under my direct command. I had the foresight five hundred years ago, while everyone else pranced about tranced in their myths, to create the Massebôth. They are genetic prose, yes? A well-grammared gene-pool that will keep the human story from blurring into the catatonia of time. The Massebôth will people my kingdom, and the Earth will begin an age inhered with order. Once the Line has passed, the mutations will begin to select themselves out. In a few thousand years, the species will have strengthened itself from the distortions.”

Sumner churred with the kha that Drift concentrated in him, and for a brief interval his emotions pulsed into lifelove. Rubeus’ hallucinary words bleared into simple sound, and a magical power volted between Sumner and the né.

Rubeus felt a shadowed turn in his skull, and he perceived then that Sumner had mounted kha. But the ort-lord evinced no concern. He understood precisely how to break Sumner’s focus: “Voors, too, will pass in time. They are just a psynergy pattern in the Line, a frequency of light ionizing in the upper atmosphere. Decades pass as they sift down to the surface and mell into the genetic frenzy. As plants, that psynergy becomes kiutl. As animals, it becomes the human voors. They were the ones who used you, Kagan, You are merely a weapon to them.”

The resplendent energy glamoring through Sumner wobbled, then spun into anger, and his gaze tempered. Drift startled back into the yoke of its skull, and the lifelove disappeared.

Rubeus’ smile concealed the hatred in his heart. Distort! he thought contemptuously, looking at Drift, knowing it could hear his thoughts: Your kha is pitiful, a dull spark in the nervepaste of your brain.

To Sumner the ort-lord spoke aloud: “Voors are vampires, eating the life of this planet. I kill their godminds, the ones who draw on the planet’s psynergy to boost the brood back into the Line. That is why they want me dead. It is the godminds who transform Earth’s lifeforce into the powerflow of themselves. Iz is the worship name for their ego-hunger. Half-lives! They not only steal your bodies but your world’s Light. Why do you want to champion them?” Rubeus’ eyes flexed knots of shadow. “The other godminds confined themselves to Graal and never leeched the Earth’s kha. Can you understand now why I sent Nefandi south? He was not stalking you. He was protecting the Earth from parasites. I did not even know you were alive then. I was aware only of Corby’s kha. He masked you well. And after he invaded your brain, you served as his shield, hiding him from my view. But that rapture is over, and what I have told you is true. The oldest ancestral myth is the hero—and when Corby used that passion on you, you succumbed to it. The hero!”

Anger carved through Sumner, aching with the stillness of his muscles.

“I know you are enraged, Kagan. You loved the voor. How could you not? He cannoned you into the timelessness of Iz. He gave you the essence of pleasure: godmind. And yet! And yet—you have come down now, haven’t you? Where is your lifelove now? You have to live here with the rest of us brain-tricked beings. A million years will go by before the human psyche is ready to physically manifest the loveflow of a godmind, to adapt creatively to the Now and stop greeding, betraying, and destroying. The human soul is all ideals with little will to act. You and Jac are the same: will-less animals trained to serve—he, the Delph; and you, the voor. You are husks. Dreamers that wake to feed your dreaming. Only I am real. Because I never sleep, I never dream. I am not an animal. I have no emotions. Yet I have great strength of feeling. Like sitting here, smelling this olfact, regarding the day waning toward night...”

His face blazed with wonder. “The joy I feel is not in me. I am not like a man. The joy I feel is in the world outside that window as it shifts into the deepest blue. My joy resides in that mystical light up there. I know what those skyfires are, better than you. I know about the Earth’s magnetosheath and the polar ring-wind the Linergy kicks up in the plasmasphere. But I see through the physics to the mystical—to the feeling. My soul is out there with the mystery and the change. And though I have no feelings, my mind brings me to them. That is what transforms us, you know. How deeply we feel the evening’s beauty is how wholly we accept our change. That is all there is. Just change. When we accept it, it is called transcendence.”

The sensex of Rubeus’ eyes informed him that Sumner had reached the peak of grim intensity that the ort’s strategy required, and he paused. Intent-waves resonated through him, enwrapping him in symmetry of plot and serenity.

“I am going to release you now. In the pocket of your tunic is an instrument called a seh. Though small, it contains a levitator powerful enough for you to fly. And with its translator, you will understand any language spoken to you here in Graal. Behind you is a bluemetal arch. It is a lynk that will take you to Ausbok, Graal’s capital. Jac Halevy-Cohen awaits you there. He is no longer the Delph, of course. After you see him and realize that he is just a man twelve hundred years beyond his time, stop and think about what I have told you. We are all gradients of slowed light. This space of our lives that we call consciousness is the Changeless Reality the ancients spoke about. Do you believe that? Then, you are free of me, of the voor, and of yourself. Which takes me to something I have arranged for you.”

He thumbed the metal disc he held in his palm, and the pleroma music that had been depthing subliminally in the background vanished. “Shortly, you will experience a psynemonic—a psychic recording of Corby’s last living moment. It will happen fast. It is just a series of thoughts. So stay alert and please try to view this objectively.”

The gray wall behind the ort smeared and then resolved to a purple sky against which a white mountain stood, keen as glass. “This is where you are now. Oxact, my mountain retreat. Two thousand kilometers north along the coast is the original CIRCLE. Ausbok is another thousand kilometers north. Ah, here it is....”

***

Loud and crazy cries from the voor dead obscured Dai Bodatta’s fading awareness. Wraith images charred with darkness rose around him, and he saw that Sumner would be dead in a few days. The voor could find no trace of him in the firecracker-float of all the possible futures that loomed through Iz.

Darkness widened in Corby. Before it wholly engulfed him, vision returned, shaped as a white mountain with sunlight—Oxact—Rubeus’ mountain of psyn-crystal. That had been his true enemy, not the Delph but the Delph’s creation: a machine gone mad, distorted into believing immortality meant perpetual duration in time. The fierce cosmic rays that burned and altered the world over the centuries had penetrated and subtly transmuted the ort-lord’s psyn-crystals. Rubeus’ autonomy had become a mania for control. Rubeus was the mind behind the savage oppression of the voors. While the Delph had dreamed of eternity, the ort-lord had dominated the world. Rubeus expressed the evil that Corby had been fighting all his life—a distort!

A soaring, transfiguring geyser of nothingness rushed through Iz and engulfed Dai Bodatta. The voor lapsed into vacancy, and the noise of the voor dead nulled his last thought: Truly we are!

***

Sumner and Drift pushed to their elbows, gripped by the death-vision. Sumner looked down at the dark sinuosities of his hands and flexed them. His muscles moved again, blood-oiled and strong.

Rubeus stood, the bowls of his dark eyes filled with laughter. “To the end, the voor railed against me, did he not? As for him not seeing you in the future, Kagan, still your concerns. There is no future. There is only Now—and the voor is not here.”

Sumner’s hands exploded outward. Rubeus had no chance to move. His brain dodged, his face too amazed to follow. Sumner’s fingers, a blur, grabbed the ort-lord by the jaw and the back of his head. Rubeus’ head twisted violently sideways and cracked.

Lotus Face! Drift lurched to its feet and took Sumner’s arm—too late.

Rubeus staggered back, head slung deathwise to the shoulder, black eyes knotted with pain—and still he talked, his ort-voice cracking: “You cannot kill me, Kagan. I am not an animal.”

Sumner pulled Drift by the green tunic it wore and turned to the lynk. The bluemetal breathed brighter. “Can we trust it?” Sumner asked.

The né touched the cool metal surface and nodded.

“Then let’s get out of here.” He took Drift’s hand, and they both vanished into the lynk.

Rubeus slumped to the floor, and the oyster-colored wall blobbed over his twisted head. While Oxact reconstructed him, he analyzed what had happened.

The eth had proven more powerful than expected. Even though Rubeus had anticipated—even counted on—Kagan reacting violently, the human acted much faster and stronger than the ort’s sensex had indicated he could.

How? Rubeus wondered.

The only answer: One Mind. Sumner drew psynergy from levels deeper in the psyche than Rubeus could go. The man, after all, had access to human ranges of the organic, with four-billion-year-old power circuitry. Fear squawked in the ort-lord’s mind before muting into strategy music. He had never been frightened by a man before. At least, the plan had worked. Now Kagan had a history of violence in Graal. Later, if other godminds got through his sky-filters, he could explain to them why the eth had to die.

Deeper in himself, he opened into language:

[I am Rubeus. I am light, the intelligence that souls a mountain of psyn-crystal. I am me, and in the centuries of my being, never before have I used power to speak to myself. That very thought qualified as nonsense until now. I was a reflex of the Delph. But the Delph is becoming a man again. He is days away from Chrysalid. Already his telepathy is gone. He cannot hear me anymore. No one hears me but me. And that is why I have created you, the listener. Awareness is not creative until it doubles, truly reflects. In this self-confidence, I know I am not just an ort. I am not just psyn-crystals. I am.]

***

Nobu Niizeki stood at the tip of a sand spit, ocean slopping at his feet, sunlight refrained to rainbows in his misted hair. Twelve centuries had passed since he had last eaten or slept. Though the Delph’s power that had sustained him and had kept him a prisoner of this one beach had withered away, Nobu did not yet feel his freedom. Still enraptured by the insights of his long wandering, he listened to the vibrant voice of the sea telling him something of eternity, and the hot windblast of sand something of verisimilitude. He turned and waded against the roll of the ocean, awed as he had been for centuries by the continuity of existence, heart muscles wreathing a spell of unspeakable feeling.

***

[Ego:

[I mind.

[You matter.]

***

Assia Sambhava walked through sunlight beneath the green bluffs of Nanda. In the mist-hung and cool landscape, she wore black corded trousers, a red collarless shirt, and ankleslung boots dusty from hiking. Her dark hair gathered at one shoulder.

Several days ago, the Massebôth troops began to arrive: coriaceous, shadowfaced men, ortlike in their unquestioning obedience. Now they traipsed all over Nanda, stalking the steep bluff-trails, marveling at the biotectured treeforms that the godminds inhabited.

Odd, though, Assia thought, because the puzzle-lights and auras of the godminds that usually punctuated the landscape of Nanda had disappeared. Has everyone left?

She stopped at a terrazzo where blue moths circled. They heard the wide sound of wind cauling over distant mountains, signaling the end of their lifespan. The season was changing, air currents slowly shifting. Assia sensed the flux of positive ions on the wind. The sirocco burned stronger than she had ever remembered here in Nanda. Even the tips of the olive trees on the bluffs had singed.

With the wind came uneasiness and bitterness on the tongue. She could barely separate her feelings from the anxiety of electricity in the air. Something mounted inside her—a dread she had been sensing for years, or maybe it was just the tension in the wind; those high, fibrous clouds made the sky seem as if broken into pieces of glass.

She breathed paradoxically to calm herself: her belly distending as she exhaled, contracting as she inhaled, filling the back of her lungs. For the last thousand years, she had lived harmoniously, ephemerally. Her life had been simple and strong here in the biotectured villages of Graal. She had known lovers, children, adventure, solitude, and finally the Self. Through meditation and an open life, she had fused thought and feeling, and now her presence poised customarily in the first-last moment of awareness.

Today, the music in her body moved slow and sudden. The season’s gradual pivot she recognized—but something else had altered, much more quickly. Where are the godminds? she wondered, not yet aware that Rubeus had shut down the Line.

A Massebôth soldier approached from a bluff-trail that led down to a sward of red grass where a strohlkraft idled. The soldier, lanky and dogfaced, wore a black uniform crisp with newness, officer insignias bright. He bowed cordially, never taking his dark eyes off her. “Assia Sambhava?” he queried.

She stopped her stroll and stepped back into the shade of a watershaped tree. “Yes?” Intuition identified this man as gentle despite the ferocity of his features.

“I’m Colonel Anareta,” the soldier informed her, his long face a rhyme to the gaunt bluffs around them. “I’m the spokesman for the Massebôth occupying force. My superiors inform me that you’re the most knowledgeable person in Graal. They’ve asked me to contact you and find out, if I can, just what’s going on here.”

Assia looked at him as if through smoke. “Colonel—why are you here?”

Anareta’s voice sighed: “Ma’am, I don’t even know where ‘here’ is. This is my first day out of the Protectorate. I represent over two hundred and twenty-two thousand troops, all of whom are as mystified as I am about why we’re here.” His expression labored, beseeching. “My commanding officers suspect that more is going on than they’ve been informed about.”

Assia’s dread stiffened as she listened to this officer. “Who ordered these troops here?”

“I’m told that the director is a Commander Rubeus.”

Assia’s face remained passive, but her dread constricted to horror. Rubeus she knew as the Delph’s ort-lord. How many years had it been since she had thought of the Delph? An unearthly feeling incandesced within her as she recalled her beginnings twelve hundred years before in CIRCLE. Frantic pain almost broke her with the realization that the Delph was no more. The ort-lord—the Delph’s machine—must have seized control. Why else command these troops? And Jac? She had loved him—so long ago that now remembering entranced her like a cliffedge. “Who told you about me?” she asked to break the spell of her suspicions.

“We’ve been in contact with the eo,” Anareta said, obviously relieved to communicate, “but they haven’t told us anything about why we’re here. They suggested we speak to you.”

“Why not ask Commander Rubeus?”

“We have,” the colonel replied, voice compressed with a dozen unasked questions. “Privately, ma’am, my superiors would like another source. I’ve never met the commander, but apparently he’s someone the Black Pillar feels uneasy with.” His lynx-shrewd eyes widened with sincere suasion. “Will you answer some questions for me?”

The muscle of Assia’s brain flexed with decision, and she pushed past Anareta. “I’m sorry, Colonel,” she spoke over her shoulder. “I’ve been meditating in the mountains. I didn’t know any of this until now.” She hurried up a trail that led through a rise of blue oak to a lynk.

Anareta followed, Assia oblivious to him. She infocused on her breathing. At the blue-arch lynk, she paused, closed her eyes, and let her ego expand beyond self-identity. Emptiness flowered in her mindark with a sound of wind, and she perceived in its center more than the imaginary. Sumner Kagan waited there—though to her he appeared nameless, a man huge and sinewy as a language, his flat face passionless, air-blue eyes farther apart than the eyes of a cat. The veil of his face lifted away, and she grew aware again of chattering sparrows, the perfume of sunlight, and Colonel Anareta standing beside her.

“Just five minutes of your time,” Anareta pressed.

Assia looked up at moths capering in the air. They could hear the soundless wind of ions. She could feel the air pressure shift in the weightlessness of her stomach. But there was more to her anxiety than the weather. That face in her vision held a symbol of her dread. It had looked complete, like a conclusion. The image hung rootlessly in her mind as she stepped through the lynk.

Anareta watched Assia vanish, his jaw loose. He edged up to the lynk and touched the bluemetal arc, feeling its cool magnetism. He looked up at the gnarled olive trees and blue oaks of Nanda with a look of anguish and said aloud: “Mutra, where am I?”

***

[You are immersed in a river streaming into the sky. It is a river of electrons—a current drawn from the Earth by the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

[Yes, your head has a different voltage from your feet.

[A hundred kilometers above you swells an ocean of ions. It is the action-zone between the atmosphere and the swarm of energy that is space. Electric beings live in this ocean. They ride the crosscurrents. They are nourished on the solar tide. They hear the stars, and they know each other without words.

[Humans can modulate the ion flow in their bodies. Some can even draw on this flow and direct it out of their bodies. But this is dangerous work. You have heard of Spontaneous Human Combustion? The potential difference between the Earth and the ionosphere is one billion electron volts.

[Sometimes the ion flow reverses. Each second, one hundred bolts of lightning discharge somewhere in the atmosphere. More insidious are the “evil winds”—the sirocco, mistral, kona, oscure: waves of positive ions dropping out of the ionosphere and blanketing whole geographies. Those ions descend from where solar wind and cosmic rays blow away the electrons of air molecules at the fringe of space. So, you see, the sun and the stars pull the electrons out of the Earth.

[The electric flow of the human body is delicate. When it is disturbed, people feel as though their flesh is not their own.

[Life is electrical. Life is light.

[Light is timeless. It does not change as it moves through space. When it strikes a particle of dust or gas, it is irrevocably altered. The universe is ninety-nine percent vacuity. Most light will wander forever.]

***

Jac mounted a spiral incline matted with plush red moss and entered a domed room at the top of the house. From here, the blue thinness of space, the iceclouds, and mountains like a purple distillation of the sky could be blanked from the dome ceiling and replaced by stars and the Vastness: planets and gasclouds swimming closer like faces from the bottom of a dream. Instead, his hands paused over a pinlight control console in the wall. After a baffled moment, his fingers remembered, tapped a code, and a lynk-arc appeared. He would return to Ausbok, because the eo had broken into the pleroma music of his sleep minutes ago and requested his presence. The eo were like mantics, he remembered, and that frightened him, for this whole nightmare had begun with the mantics.

[Jac, the secret of human destiny is this: like the onion, we have no seed, no separate core, no Self. Endless layers of feeling, sensation, and thought have gathered together and become you. There is only one moment, and it is infinitely long. At its center sits nothing—the nothing that connects everything—last reality and origin. Words reveal our dependence on the void. How can we know any word except by the nothingness which holds it—the white of the page, the silence around a voice?]

Jac fingerstroked a seh-console, evoking pleroma music to drown out Voice. An olfact palette spun out of a wall niche, and Jac selected ORPH, a deep mood that always silenced him. He held the green lozenge to his face and, before misting himself, listened inward.

[Aristotle says: “To know the end of a thing is to know the why of it.” So with your life. The bone-seed planted in the stars sprouted on Earth. But do you think it ends here? Do not get caught up in this logodaedaly. Grow beyond what is of what never was. Give up words.]

Jac sprayed the chemical olfact, and a perceptive ease empurpled him. He had forgotten why he stood here. A lynk glowed before him. He walked through it.

***

At that time, on the top of a vine-shaggy treeform, Sumner and Drift leaned against a redwood rail. They watched oryx graze the riverplain below, sunlight spinning off their long horns. On the far shore, a Massebôth brigade bivouacked, green flag snapping in the river breeze.

They frighten me, Lotus Face, Drift thought, remembering the strohlkraft screaming over Miramol, soldiers bending the né to the wood and breaking its bones with nails. Its blood turtled.

Sumner spoke softly: “Rubeus made them. And that makes sense. The Massebôth are half-alive, cut off from the whole of humanity by their hatred of distorts. They belong to the ort-lord.

Rubeus is mad, the né concurred. He raved like a lune.

“Don’t jooch yourself,” Sumner enlightened. “He wanted me to hit him. I simply obliged.”

Why? He might have killed you.

“The way I feel now, that would have been best. I’m a husk. Without the voor, I don’t know why I’m here. Finding you was the only luck I’ve had.”

I can’t replace Corby. But I will be a good friend to you, Lotus Face.

The terrace enclosed them in bright order: Opal plants glittered in circle tiers and a sequence of rainbow sculptures spectered the white ivy that hid the lynk they had stepped through a minute earlier.

Lotus Face. Drift touched Sumner’s elbow, and he looked down into the round, smooth-featured face. I was wrong about Ardent Fang. Its tiny eyes sparked wetly. Rage made him impetuous. You did best to outwit Nefandi.

Sumner’s face cracked into a smile. He reached into his pocket and removed a blond wood handgrip plated with tiny touch controls. It caught sunlight and returned a smile of colors. “Let’s fly.”

Drift took the seh, and its mind flexed into the simplicity of machine logic. In moments, it comprehended the tool and nodded, ready to teach Sumner how to fly. The fingerwork, initially tricky, had Sumner bouncing himself across the terrace awhile before he gained the confidence to jet. An hour later, he had mastered the device, and he practiced skywalking, sitting in midair, and landing with poetic ease.

A drumthrob announced a lynk. Drift sensed a serene female presence, and a tall, cinnamon-skinned woman stepped through. Sumner recognized her at once from his shadow-shooting: “Assia,” he greeted familiarly as they descended from hovering.

She stopped, startled by her clairvoyant recognition of his face from her vision moments before.

Drift took Sumner’s hand and approached her. When the né touched her, its grip burned holy and golden. The cavepool of her mind stunned into charmed light, and knowing infused her, filling her with all of Sumner’s and Drift’s memories.

“You saw me in CIRCLE?” she asked in Esper, and Sumner understood her through his seh.

“Corby was a strong voor,” he affirmed. Moving darkness bent depths through him as his memories and kha passed through Drift to this woman.

“So much pain.” Assia’s voice sounded stranded, and the bloodlines of her face darkened. She let their hands go, and leaned against the redwood railing to concentrate herself. When she looked up, everything good was in her face. “You’ve both come a long way,” she acknowledged with a wistful smile. “But I feel the harder distance is ahead. I didn’t know Rubeus had shut down the Line. That means we are the only people in Graal besides the Massebôth. All the godminds are gone.” The dry heat of her mouth thickened, and she paused.

“What about the eo?” Sumner asked.

A skein of sweat glinted on her upper lip. “There are no eo. They are not people. They’re engrams—the psynergy patterns of all the old CIRCLE mantics. They animate orts sometimes, but they’re just memory systems. They don’t have one shape.

They belong to Rubeus?

“No. They’re personalities in crystal chips. The mantics themselves went vertical ages ago, riding the Line out of here. They left their psyn-patterns behind to do menial mental work for the occupants of Graal. In times like this, they act as conscience. The eo are just ghosts.”

The lynk drumthrobbed twice, and two figures stepped around the white ivy partition: Jac and a no-face ort, a humanoid with mirror-blue facepan. Jac’s face had the same depth of his youth: fluvial cheekbones, slim jaw, curved nose, and flaring nostrils. Boil scars dimpled his neck. Assia thanked the ort and sent it back through the lynk.

“I got lost,” Jac admitted quietly in Esper. “Since last night, I’ve been forgetting everything.” He looked to Sumner and Drift. “Do I know you?”

A spelled feeling spun through Jac. Sumner looked elemental to him, sundark and secret.

“What you feel is our shared spirit, Jac,” Sumner guessed. The saline arcs beneath his eyes and sunscars across his nose brutalized his appearance, but Jac recognized the man’s gentleness, by a shade in the color of his eyes soft as a beginning. “I’m Sumner Kagan. The Delph’s fear self. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, of course.” Jac’s voice sounded thin. He did remember Sumner now as the man Rubeus had revealed to him. [The wheel of the law rolling.] He shivered, and an effluvium of fear smoked into his chest.

“Voice?” Assia asked.

“Yes.” The look between them expressed a wrack of intimacy and shared fear. “It’s happening all over again. Twelve hundred years have passed, but for me the beginning was yesterday, one night of the mind.”

“No, Jac, it is ending now,” Assia hushed, cossetting the back of his neck. “Rubeus put sky-filters up. Linergy can’t touch you. Voice is just residual telepathy. Soon that will pass. You are becoming the self you always were.”

Drift heard the deep unities of compassion in her voice, joyous and healthy. But the man, this Jac, came across unsubstanced—haunted. Through the seams of its blood, the né sensed Voice, the throe of the Delph’s presence within Jac, and it backed away a step.

“I know who you are,” Jac said, looking into Sumner’s face as into a flame. “I remember the fear vision as I mounted into godmind. I was afraid of the Others, the beings that came from alien places. But I was wrong about them. They were gentle, creative beings...” His hands opened and closed, tight with withholdance. “I remember so little. But I know this. My enemies did not come from out there. They came from inside me. Rubeus is dangerous. Are you?”

An oblique smile crossed Sumner’s face. “Not always.”

“Rubeus came to me last night,” Jac said. “I’d forgotten who he was. He wants me to go to a sleepod...”

“Chrysalid,” Assia finished. “I know of it. The eo have monitored it since the Delph created it a century ago.”

“I thought the eo were ghosts?” Sumner inquired.

“Intelligent ghosts. They’re minds without human bodies. But they are aware enough to be a threat to Rubeus.”

Earlier, you called them the “conscience.”

Assia nodded. “They are. They have human sensibilities. They were people once, and they want the Earth to be good for humanity. Their only problem is, they are too humane. There are weapon systems here that could destroy Oxact and free the world from Rubeus’ domination, but the eo won’t act until they are provoked. And by then, it will be too late.”

You think the ort-lord will attack the eo?

“When Jac is safely ensconced in Chrysalid, there will be nothing to stop Rubeus from striking Ausbok.”

Jac looked shaken. “You sound very sure.”

“There’s no question, Jac,” Assia said. “Rubeus was created by a god. He is convinced of his sovereignty. We are the enemy.”

A snake of wind coiled through the air plants, and everyone looked out over the river at the troops of milling Massebôth. Jac watched Sumner, feeling connected, a sense of compassion for this being his fear had created. Reflections wobbled in Sumner’s pale eyes, and salt limned his lips like a web. The spell of his long shoulders and the round strength of his back lined clearly the sweat dark of his blue shirt.

Assia gazed across the river with narrowing eyes. She recalled Anareta’s innocent confusion, and her suspicion hardened to conviction. Rubeus intended to use these humans as a living shield, knowing the eo would be more reluctant to strike the ort-lord if people would die. Assia’s dread thrummed.

The né squinted into the sunlight, looking at the soldiers, while its mind brightened with awareness of the dreamtime opening in Jac’s mind. Drift sidled closer, ready to see into this man’s mind. Surprisingly, he revealed a simple-centered being, the sapphires of his thoughts lucid, unclouded by ambitions. Closer, Drift touched a memory that nerved much of Jac’s life. Neve. The né met her eyes, amber and shining, the puberty-passage in her body’s supple lines, and the black brightening of her hair. Loneliness trembled around Jac here, and Drift noted the expression on her face that hot summer morning when her husband told her about the tumor in his brain. That expression had begun a special haunting in this man’s life. She had loved him.

Hard-cornered grief pushed the seer back into its own senses. Assia had turned her back on the rivershine prisming in the mist. “It’s clear what’s going on,” she said in a voice almost silent with feeling. “This is an ancient war—old as life. It’s the battle between history and creativity, reaction and consciousness. Rubeus is a machine, a soulless mind. He’s been manipulating events for hundreds of years, consolidating his power. He’s going for dominance.”

“What can we do?” Jac asked.

Drift touched Sumner’s elbow and pointed to an ice-eyed quetzal bird watching them from the end of the terrace. It felt the bird’s machine hollowness and knew it for an ort. Everything we do is monitored.

“Rubeus isn’t a deep,” Assia told them fervently. “He can’t monitor our symbolife—the psynergy we can draw from our deep selves.” Drift, as a seer, understood, but the long ellipsis in Sumner’s eyes made Assia explain: “The symbolife means using our consciousness—seeing the world and everything that happens to us in it as symbols, packed with meaning. Living that way, psynergy flows outward into the world instead of simply falling inward with our sensations and making us react. Our deep self—One Mind—can solve this problem with Rubeus if we activate that part of us through our consciousness. That’s what Bonescrolls was telling you, Sumner, when he said that selfscan wasn’t enough. We can’t just have the world entering us and stay balanced. We must also enter the world.”

Jac’s face bent with puzzlement. “How?”

“We all feel a psychic bonding here,” Assia observed, voice softer. “That’s why the eo brought us together. We are the only humans aware of what is happening. We know we can’t let Rubeus dominate us. But we can’t fight him with strategy. Rubeus is the master strategist. He was designed that way. We’ll never outwit him. Yet because he has a design, he will trap himself. I know that. But we’ve got to keep ourselves from reacting to him—or he’ll trap us.”

A portentous feeling lifted through Jac. Frenzied voices dazzled like water at the back of his mind. In his excitement at what Assia suggested, his mind had opened into Iz, the time-matrix. Semiconsciously, he sifted through whispered sounds until he found what he recognized, noumenal and reassuring: Voice. [Revelation is in all things.]

A breeze of cool air sneered through the windplants, and the lynk throbbed. A simplefaced ort stepped out from behind the white ivy screen. By the sage glow around its eyes, they could see that it was animated by a force wiser than its shape. “Matter Mother Mutter,” it offered in traditional eo greeting. The artificial face caught a sunray and glowed with the suffused golden light of a shell. The ort faced Sumner, its yellow garments breathing with the wind. “The eo are aware of you, eth. We know you are metaordered, and we will help you against the ort-lord when the time is right. But first, you must wait. Time in the Now is always more than measure. It is Event itself. We must let the moment fulfill itself.”

Sumner’s gaze shot beyond the ort to the enfilades of Massebôth soldiers across the river. “Those are Massebôth hellraiders over there, eo. They have strohlkraft and armor-piercing artillery. In twenty minutes, they could level this forest you’re living in. Isn’t that threat enough?” He looked at the eo, and the ort stared back impassively.

“I’m a man of blood,” Sumner said, and the bonebeat of anger filled his voice. “I want to act, not wait.” He faced Assia and then the ort. “Rubeus killed my son. He powers the Massebôth who oppress a world for a few dying cities. Have you ever seen a dorga pit? Or the inside of a shale processor where the air’s so toxic only terminal brown cards are supposed to work there?”

Jac watched from beside Assia. He participated as a willful witness, fascinated by what he witnessed of history’s animal life.

“Kagan,” the eo began, voice soft as ferns.

“I know,” Sumner cut in, the catlike span between his eyes shadowed with intensity, “the universe has no corners. Any moment is as full as any other.” A laugh caught in his throat and came out soundless. “Any is nothing. If you want to help me, use whatever power you have now to kill Rubeus.”

“Death isn’t the answer to life,” the eo retorted. “Unless Rubeus moves directly against life, we cannot move against him.”

Sumner’s heart banged like a board in his chest. “If you were a human being, eo, you would understand freedom. We don’t need directors like Rubeus, the Massebôth, or the Delph. You say I’m the eth. Well then, use me. I’m ready to destroy.”

“You don’t understand,” the eo said evenly. “You’re lost in your feelings. Every one of us is metaordered in some way. Assia’s ancestors called it karma—the inexplicable patterns that shape our lives. Time is what makes the pattern ineffable, but originally, when people lived closer to the moment, the word karma meant doing. Do you truly want to champion death? Is that what you want to do? No. You are a precious lifeform, a human. What you need, Sumner, is to learn love.”

“Love?” Sumner’s gaze stalled. “I’ve starved my emotions to hard bone to conquer myself. I’ve dragged my sex-pull up my spine so that my eyes could feel. I’ve chosen flow over shape every time. I love life.”

“But is your life love?”

Sumner’s face glowered with an eerie, beastlike calm. “Why do anything? Why not just drift? Mama is maw, right?”

“No.” The ort’s face shadowed toward a frown. “We eo believe the Mother is the intermediary between our inorganic beginnings and our creative expression. That is why we greet each other: Matter Mother Mutter. Life, Kagan, is love. Yes, we have the weapons to thoroughly destroy Rubeus. But they are just science fictions without a spirit to guide them. That spirit is compassion and love. If Rubeus does not have that spirit, the universe will destroy him.”

“Don’t be so sure.” Something like starlight gave out in Sumner’s eyes, and he turned to Jac. “What do you want me to do?”

Jac stiffened. “I’m a twenty-first century man, Kagan. This is the thirty-third century. I don’t know anymore.”

“A friend of mine loves the kro,” Sumner said quietly, thinking of Chief Anareta. “I once felt him think that humanity recognized the value of the individual in your time. He called it self-anarchy. What you think means a lot to me.”

“I trust Assia and the eo.” Jac’s mouth groped; then: “You and I have both felt the lifelove of One Mind and seen it change reality. But it wasn’t us. It was the Delph and Corby. We were just hosts. Accidents. But we saw the lifelove. I think now we have to trust that power as individuals. I don’t know what that means for you exactly, but the eo are good.”

“What good have they done for distorts? Or voors?”

“What can we do?” the eo replied. “We are not human. We are just memories of knowledge. It takes people to do.” The eo addressed Assia: “Sister, as you can see, the Massebôth have arrived. Rubeus has never allowed us any truly human-looking ort forms. Will you help us communicate with them? One of them, their spokesman, has been asking for you. And Jac—I invite you to stay with us. You shall be safer.”

Assia went to Sumner’s side. “The eo are right, Sumner. We have to wait now. But Rubeus will trap himself. I’m an old, old woman. Much older than Rubeus. My experience is deep. You will see.”

She, the eo, and Jac turned and walked into the lynk and out of sight. Drift touched Sumner’s hand, and a psalmed feeling calmed him. He took out the seh and looked down into the né’s round face. “Let’s fly.”

***

They stepped out into the afternoon sky toward blue clouds swirling over the horizon, intricate as birdsong. Sumner’s ears popped, and the air chilled brightly as they ascended. They flew up the brown serpent of a river and over mountains where mists circled and bright glaciers rang with sunlight.

At the far end of the day, they descended into Reynii, an abandoned city of glass spires and hanging gardens. They landed on a knoll of tall grass and watched red haloes of sunlight lift off the empty towers. Cold worlds shook over the horizon: the dewdrop Llyr and, flecked within the sun’s aura, the iron splinter of Macheoe.

Across the boulevard and a dark tree-park, a worship-house stood between two moonshadowed elms. Over the doors, in né-futhorc, this carving:

Drift translated: One Mud of All Sculpting. Through the portals they could see statues of all the world’s demiurgic and unnamable gods staring out from lux-lit enclaves. The close solitude of the fuliginous temple beckoned, and they entered.

You’ve changed, Drift thought, but not loud enough for Sumner to hear without his voorsense. Lotus Face’s golden kha shone slimmer, and without the black mask of his faceburn, he looked human and vulnerable. When the seer stared into his eyes, it no longer felt the drowse of voor depths. This man’s mind had gotten as shallow as any simple tribesman’s. Sadness stroked the né’s soul.

“What are you looking for in my face?” Sumner asked. Weary and emotionally sprained, he had hoped, ever since Bonescrolls’ death, to find something he liked in himself.

I see into you, Lotus Face. Tears sparkled in its eyes. I’m as vacant as you without the magnar. Everything I liked in myself was tribal. But here we are. Alone. The né, motioned at the pillared darkness and the smell of gods. I’m tired.

Drift wandered off among small altars and worship-columns to grant Sumner privacy. Exhausted from a full day of one-with, it curled up in a remote alcove and fell asleep.

Sumner sat in clenched shadows, the pain of his solitude unraveled around him: Everything he had ever done was a dream. I have my life, he thought. I live. But that wasn’t true. He wasn’t the same being who had known lifelove in Miramol and One Mind in the desert. Without his voorsense, his memories of Bonescrolls and the Serbota were lame. Everything he had done then was a dream.

Blood was calling to blood: Truly we are.

Even the dark things voors had done to him had become lucid with time: Jeanlu’s attempted lusk had led him to the Rangers, and Corby’s lusk had brought him to the Serbota. Voors had been his secret strength most of his life. With the pith of his bones, he knew that Rubeus and the Massebôth had made his reality vagrant and unreliable.

His hands lay limp in his lap, and his head cocked back against the hardwood. He sat as if his whole life had sunk away. Shadows hooded his eyes, and his breathing dimmed. In selfscan, he became the temple: puddled sounds of footsteps and glass windbells, furzy incense odors, and a calm, almost motionless air current patterned with dampness...

His body slept while his mind watched everything. Feelings too big for memory shifted their vast weights, and the darkness of the shadows began to harden. So slowly that it took all night, Sumner’s eyes filled with tears.

***

A wing of gray-blue sunlight stood like a presence among the spare shadows of the alcove when Sumner woke. His grief had smoked away with his sleep, leaving him quiet and empty. The cool heat of dawn seeped through the slatboards with the fragrance of pimienta.

He moved to stretch—but his body had gone inert, immobilized as it had been in Rubeus’ presence. His legs had become dull shapes, and his hands were not his anymore. Weirdly then, his fingers began to twitch, his wrist turn. Even his breathing slued in and out of him under another will. Quite close, he heard his heart moaning.

Confusion staggered him when his body twisted to its feet. He moved as if voor-possessed, but he experienced no voorsense, no Iz-noise, no deep sensitivity—only the immense compulsion to move. Then he saw it: a leather-handled knife, oil-black blade long and mooncurved, stuck into the wooden wall of the alcove. His right arm levitated, and his fingers uncurled to grasp the leather haft.

Mind wheeling, Sumner watched helplessly as his hand tugged the knife from the wall and turned the blade inward. A cold blank space in his belly widened, and terror rattled in his throat. As the knife stabbed into his chest, horror exploded into will, and he twisted from the waist. The knife edge slashed through his tunic top and sprayed blood onto his killing-hand.

Keeled over, he saw past the carved outline of the alcove to the sunfrayed shadows where a figure lay prone: Drift, unconscious or dead. Above it, in the caliginous light, a distort watched him with the abstract stare of an iguana. His slim face, baked-looking and broken, nodded. His right hand rose, and Sumner’s right hand lifted. The distort’s eyes purred. Above the spiderhairs of his eyebrows, two skull-plates caught sunlight and glinted like horns. His right hand pounded his chest.

Fury twisted in Sumner’s arm, and his knife-arm sprang at him. Again, panic-energy wrenched him backward from the waist, and he tumbled out of the alcove and banged into a tray of ash-carvings. The blade had caught him deep in the shoulder, and its pain transfixed him. The distort stood nearby, eyes musical, fig-face tight with will. He moved his right hand away from his shoulder and pulled it strongly across his throat.

Sumner’s hand jerked the knife free from his shoulder, and the pain shone like light. In its blaze, his fear shriveled and space pulled away from him, unfolding into the distances of his body. It took all the power of selfscan, all his inner-knowing, before the wheels of thought whirring inside him jumped to a stop.

And all at once, he wasn’t fearing or hurting or thinking. The blade that had been kissing his throat turned away.

The distort’s face seemed to rearrange. He stepped back, and his left hand flashed to a hip pocket.

Sumner’s knife-hand wristrolled, and the blade hissed through the air. It caught the distort’s arm and kicked the seh he had been reaching for out of his hand. Lizard-swift, the man snatched the knife from his arm and shimmied for where the seh had fallen.

Almost casually, Sumner rolled to his side and, with one arm, hoisted the black-iron tray of scattered ashes. The distort pulled up short as the ornate tray crushed the seh.

The distort spun about, blade high. Sumner got to his feet and calmly approached, moving between the distort and Drift: no rage, no doubt in the irenic blue of his eyes.

The distort feinted with the blade and dashed into the shadows. He dodged among candle altars and demon-columns, kicking idols and incense braziers into Sumner’s way, and banging his knife against the glass chimes and metal gods. “Get away from me, eth!” he shouted, voice electric with command. “You don’t know who you are.” His eyes brightened with urgency. “You’re less with each step.” He spun about and waved his wounded arm before him hypnotically, slow-stepping backward. “You are nothing, nothing—”

The distort’s words echoed through the temple with trance-strength, but Sumner wasn’t listening. He stalked past the Paseq altar, gauging the distance to the exit, feeling out the shapes of escape the man carved for himself. He let the distort take a slight lead among the bell-pillars, planning to bound over the stacks of sitting-mats and snag him at the door. But he moved faster than Sumner thought a human could. He flitted through blue shafts of dawnlight and bolted out the door before Sumner could close in.

Killing-genius stopped Sumner. Unthinking but knowing, he took out his seh, and his fingers moved coolly over its metal face, rearranging the pinprick lights. With his pain-numb arm, he seized a bulky dragon-idol from its niche and rammed the wooden seh-grip into its gaping maw. The iron god bobbled into the air with the buoyancy of the seh. The distort’s footfalls softstepped along the fringe of hearing. Sumner flicked the seh’s forward-thrust to max, thumbed the delayed-stop, and heave the dragon in the killer’s echoed direction.

The temple wall blasted outward, and in the receding din another explosion bansheed from nearby. Sumner stepped over a sagging roofbeam and saw in the metallic morning light that the flying dragon had found its mark. The distort’s legs hung over the splintered bole of a tree. The idol embedded a small blood-puddled crater.

Sumner brushed his ear. A whistle twined in his head. As he stepped forward to see if the seh was intact, the whistle became a shrill wail. He noticed that the others standing on the hill didn’t hear it. The whine became a needle skewed between his eyes, pithing his skull. He fell to his knees, hugging his head, and roared. The ringing agony trilled into his teeth, shook vision to shards, and dropped him beneath his cry.

***

[We see ourselves only as what we see.]

***

A pungent scent grazed Sumner’s nostrils, sending needles of light straight up into his brain. The olfact dragged him awake and left his senses dangling in a watery ash of slumber. Words came to him sheathed in the warm current of his blood, slendering through an uneven sequence of layers—“Wake up. Come on.”

The voice walked heavily through him. It sounded ominous, yet he wasn’t sure why. Fearful premonitions grated his nerves, urging him to swing violently and see if he could roll free and break into a run. But a deeper awareness, just coming into focus, stayed that decision. The voice, of course. He recognized it.

Slowly, he raised his lids and looked up into the stern, ducal face of Rubeus.

Sumner tried to turn and rise and found himself strapbound, his body hauled up in a sling. Bindings clawed his flesh, and that sensation hardened his surroundings to a sharper definition. He watched a glitter of green resolve to a gem-caked panoply—a cruciform mandala. Around it, the ceiling divided into lozenges of petal-blue light. The soap-colored straps, tense with his weight, clipped to ball-divots that seemed to hover in midair.

“Murder is punishable by exile from Graal, Kagan.” Rubeus’ voice scowled. “The distort is dead.”

Sumner tried to twist his body free, and the ort-lord held up a clear rhomboidal gem. The light inside the crystal deliquesced to a ruminative glow. Sumner relaxed, his attention fixed on the declensions of color in the gem. “Where’s Drift?” he muttered.

“Drugged in Reynii. Do not concern yourself with that freak. You have more anguish ahead of you than its suffering. The distort you killed was no one—an easily found and conditioned animal. But you killed him.” Rubeus said this darkly though within he felt awe. The distort wasn’t supposed to die. He was a psi-master. Sumner’s emotionally bruised mind should have been mud in his hands. He palmed the odyl gem and looked again to see that the killer’s limbs were secured tightly. “That was a stupid thing you did. Stricture here deals harshly with murderers.”

Sumner’s eyes watched him coldly. “He tried to kill me.”

“No. He tried to make you kill yourself.” Rubeus’ rooster-cut hair spiked against the glow of the ceiling lights. His smile looked zaned. “There’s no stricture against that. He visualized your death potently. Murder was not the right response to him. You could have killed a lot of people when you tripped your seh. That was mad.” His eyes narrowed critically. “You are insane. You see yourself as separate, and you pull those around you into the gap between you and the world.” The crystal panoply lit up into crests and cartouches of patterning colors. “Now it is time for you to go down into that pit and face what you’ve dumped there.”

While the ort talked, Sumner had been internally compressing himself, using techniques trained into him at Dhalpur. Muscles folded in on themselves and bone slid onto bone. With a snap, Sumner’s right hand pulled free of its brace and whipped violently at Rubeus, missing his face by a centimeter.

The ort-lord jerked back with an alarmed shout, and the odyl gem spun between his fingers. The dreaming light clicked in Sumner’s eyes, and he sagged.

“You have punched your way through life this far, Kagan, but no further.” Rubeus’ fingers quavered as he secured Sumner’s hand. This man was more dangerous than any scan indicated. “Graal stricture demands exile for murderers. But because I would kill you as soon as you left Graal, exile is disallowed. The godminds do not condone execution. The only alternative is the trance.”

Rubeus looked upshoulder at the jeweled cruciform. “The trance will take only moments,” he said as the ambient light dimmed, “though for you, it may be endless.”

Heartlight pulsed above Sumner, and he twisted his head to face the ort. He mustered all the emotional control he had and spoke with the slam-force of calm certainty: “You can’t stop me, ort. I’m the eth. I am the pit.”

Rubeus quickly slumbered Sumner with the odyl gem. “I am not afraid of you eth!” He laughed, but the whole inside of his chest had frosted over. “There is no coming back from where you are going.”

A tessitura of chimes ranged to the limits of hearing, and the chamber became a diamond of green-white light. Sleep-vertigo wheeled Sumner to the brink of awareness.

“The Delph, if he were here, would have had a bit of advice for you.” Rubeus’ voice spilled into the whirr of the crystals: “Don’t rub one part of an elephant too long—and don’t be surprised by a real dragon.”

***

Darkness tensed with light: Mirrorglints, sparks, and fibrous water reflections spiderwebbed silence. An image wove itself out of that glimmerous blackness. Touched by nothing, deaf and distant, Sumner watched the figure of a man glitter into being. Ardent Fang!

Darkness lifted, and every shadow went with it. In the glare-white, Ardent Fang drummed with color: vibrant black hair and beard, coffee-glossed skin, eyes brisk with clarity in a square, unperplexed face. He wore the tattered Serbota garments he had died in.

As he came forward, the space around him, white with nothing, bruised. Shapes darkened in the whiteness: A sprawling, flat-topped tree appeared in midair, roots scraggy and hanging. Nearby a splash of lucid water floated, flakes of sunlight skipping off it. Clawed shrubs and the skeleton of a pear tree unfolded beside him.

When Ardent Fang reached him, everything had been filled in. They stood in green sunlight beneath bending pear trees. In this grove, Ardent Fang had been blown apart by Nefandi while Sumner had watched. Now the tribesman’s face appeared as washed and clear as the sky. He held a stubby fist forward and opened it to reveal a brood jewel.

Sumner gaped, awed by the supreme realism of the trance, devoid of dreaminess. The sinewed trees, glinting spiderlines, and the swagger of a birdcall arrived opaque with reality.

Ardent Fang looked down at the amulet and dropped it in the grass. The gem glowed hotly on a leaf of sunlight. Ardent Fang’s sandal came down on it, and its crunch resounded knuckle-tight. “It is a lie.” His eyes held yellow anger. “There is no strength in idols. No power in form—unless I am there.”

Sumner toed a tuft of lemongrass and noticed his dreamclothes, the same from that time of his waking life. A slim moon limped high in the sky. “This is a trance, Ardent Fang.” His voice sounded foolishly real.

“I’m not Ardent Fang.” Ardent Fang asserted in a blunt voice. “You don’t recognize me? I’ve been with you since the first day of the world. I’ve spoken to you in many voices.”

Ardent Fang bloated, wobbled, and then unsprung into a hulking razorjaw lizard. Its long black muzzle shrieked once and the beast collapsed into its lunge, flash-molting into a blazing column of deva-fire and then into the plasma streamers and oily flames of Iz-light. “I was all these beings in your life,” a humming void-voice spoke. “I’m the Dreamshaper, so near to you I’m nothing. I live in everything dying. Untouchable. Nameless. Free. I am.” The coiling Iz-lights flashed to a center of instreaming white radiance.

Sumner cowered. When he looked up, Ardent Fang stood beside him, and the pear trees leaned into windrubbed sunlight.

“Ardent Fang is the first,” the shapeshifter said, helping him to his feet. “I know it’s hard for you to face him. I tried to clean him up a little, so you could remember more slowly how much he suffered.”

Sumner felt earsick, and he swayed. Seeing Ardent Fang, a frenzy of shared memories rioted: jaywalking through the riverain forest, mating with distorts in the stables of Miramol, hunting upriver—His hands squeezed his head, trying to grab hold of his cascading thoughts.

“Where do you suppose the pain went when you stopped remembering it?” Ardent Fang lay on the ground, his body reduced to a broken calcined skeleton. All the grief, shame, and confusion that there had been no time for Sumner to feel the day Ardent Fang had died returned. He dropped to his knees under the weight of it.

Ardent Fang had been strong as much in his will as in his body, and they had shared much. Should he have tried to save him from Nefandi? The doubt still circled him. No, no, part of him thought—at the time, there had been no hope against Nefandi’s field-sword. And so, he had let Ardent Fang go. He had brutalized the man—

“Very good,” a soothing voice spoke from the ash-peeled skull. “Open yourself to your doubts and your loathing. Feel everything. It is the only way to be healed.”

***

Sumner stayed with Ardent Fang, dreaming backward through each hour that they had spent together, until he reached the end of his memories and the beginning of his feelings.

Sumner spent hours dreaming through the memories of every experience that had shaped him. In time, he began to thin out. Empathy eroded him, and the tabooed feelings, the hidden cravings, and the denied gentleness of his soul became his trance-experience.

He held Zelda as he had always wanted to, feeling her breasts soft and loose against his face. He strangled his father enough times to love him. He lived once more the hypnotic wonder that as a child had made him walk a horse out onto the ice. Seeing its pyre-smoke again, he vanished into the deep spell of his feelings.

Nightmared free, the days of his life blew around him like rags. In the black of trance, thoughts and feelings brushlights circling the point of his awareness, he wasn’t memory. The more he remembered, the less he became. He was distance, the space between now and what he had been at conception. And before that? Transparent feelings rose in him, colored by his mind: He remembered Corby taking him out to Rigalu Flats and showing him Iz. He remembered the evanescent images of past animations: shark, hawk, hind rat. But those too had been distance. Not distance covered—or dis-covered—by his ego but rather the distance of vastly complex energies. Aloof from his body and absorbed into the feeling-core of his being, he sensed those energies.

Psynergy, Kagan. The Dreamshaper’s voice opened into running light. Psynergy is energy patterned over aeons: the cell yantra, stereo vision, hand and eye coordination, trapping fire, trapping animals, trapping thoughts!

The trance became the fruit-embered light of a scansule. The silver console curved before him, and on the hooded screen the words of the Dreamshaper appeared among kinetic images and rotating displays: “Thought is matrix.” Letters linked like atoms, and word-molecules coalesced and vanished:

“MATRIX, (kro) mater, mother, womb.

“Thought is a matrix that engenders its own reality. The ideas, concepts, belief-systems that your ancestors trapped have become your trap.”

A series of statements slowrolled up the screen:

THE TRAPPED AND THE TRAP ARE THE SAME.

WHAT YOU CREATE, CREATES YOU.

WHAT CREATES YOU DESTROYS YOU.

MAMA IS MAW.

MATRIX IS MA TRIX.

The thought-matrix is self-deception, the Dreamshaper continued. It projects the continual sense that each of us is the center—the sense we needed as infants. Ma tricks always work. People are biologically deceived. Ego is synthesized like fingernails or hair. It’s a carapace, a protective covering, a husk. Ego surrounds the feeling-self and can never be done away with or the being will die. The most one can hope for is transparency. The ego must be clear. It’s never a question of will, of doing something to improve yourself. You are. What I’m talking about is distance. You must be clear so that the distances can pass through.

Sumner fidgeted before the scansule, and a red cancel-sign buzzed on: “DON’T TRY IT!”

Don’t try to understand, the Dreamshaper cautioned, and a word-display cartooned before him:

“TRY, (kro) tritare, to rub to pieces.”

Your ego is bowel-consciousness. It wants to break everything into shapes simpler than itself. It wants to know distance. But the closest it can come is feeling, and even then it’s only touching a part of your being. The one secret is that all things are secret.

The scansule stenciled: “UNDERSTANDING IS A LIE” and smoked away into pink fumes.

Listen. The blackness tightened thick as desire, and only the Dreamshaper’s voice kept Sumner focused. Being is more than thought and bones. Being is endless and moving, like light, never in one place long enough to be anyplace. Existence looks small through the holes of a skull. But you’re big, bigger than you can know. Can’t you feel it? You’re burning through all the lost moments of your life. And you’ll keep on burning, because distance is all there is, and finishing isn’t everything.

***

A far-carrying voice came to him, high, wild, blurred with echoes. A thought, unrepeatable, arrived. He repeated it: I am. I am. And he was...

***

Sumner woke dressed in black trousers, gray halfboots and a dark billow-sleeved shirt. His body felt still and concentrated, thoroughly rested.

The dreaming finished, the carousel of stars, the moon’s shape and position, appeared as they would have outside the trance. And though he wore unfamiliar garments and the place looked unfamiliar, he cherished the certainty he had fully awakened.

He glanced about for Rubeus. He found himself in an enclosed courtyard illuminated by night rainbows and the pale fire of the moon. A group of men approached—soldiers. He stared at them as if from another life.

“You!” one of the uniformed men called. “Stand to!”

In the relic light of the stars, Sumner at first did not register what he saw. Thoughts, too small and tight, acted too much like eggs—alive yet inanimate. When he realized that the soldiers wore Massebôth uniforms, it was too late to run.

“Where are your tags, soldier?” an ape-slanted officer asked, flanked by six men.

“I’m a ranger,” Sumner replied. “I’m here by request of the eo.”

A riddled expression phased over the officer’s face; then, he shrugged. “All I see is your uniform and no tags.” He turned away and ordered over his shoulder: “Take him in and find out who he really is.”

The six men descended on Sumner immediately, grappling to secure his arms. He threw himself back against one of the soldiers and kicked out with both feet. Twist and roll, and four men were down. His rage expanded, hands free now and amazing with anger. As he advanced, a soldier broke open a wrist-canister and misted Sumner’s face with a searing, throat-choking spray. He staggered back, eyes slim and dreamy, bright with fear.

The Massebôth came at him with knives. Through the blear of pain, Sumner’s hands flashed out, punching one assailant between his gritful eyes and wristseizing another’s knife-hand. The drug they had hit him with slowed everything inside him. With machine speed a knife-hand blurred, and the blade sliced through the air and slammed into the top of his chest.

The impact knocked him free from his tangle and sent him careening clumsily backward, knife strumming between his hands. Something like glass cracked two inches behind his eyes. As he lay on his back, the taste of blood gluey in his mouth, Sumner’s vision glared dark. A fist of cold squeezed the fire out of his chest, and his tongue buckled like a razor against his teeth.

***

The thin, musical edge of sleep dropped away. A pungent scent spiked light through his brain. “Come on. Wake up.” The heavy voice jarred vision into his eyes, and he gazed into jeweled light—a radiant cruciform mandala. The petal-blue light hardened around ball-divots floating in midair. The attached soap-colored straps stretched tight with his weight.

He twisted in the trance-sling, and Rubeus’ chiseled face swung into view, the rhomboid of an odyl gem flashing in his hand.

Sumner lurched, and the sling held him tightly. His eyes rolled, drunk. “How long?”

“The trance?” The smiling face glanced at a constellation of sapphire gem-lights. “About forty-two seconds. The first trance was free-form. The second I manipulated.”

Sumner’s voice reeled: “The Massebôth—”

“You have been tranced since you killed my distort,” Rubeus confirmed.

Sumner’s eyes wailed.

Rubeus regarded him with amusement. “You are beginning to apprehend the scope of it all, are you not?” Light leaped in the odyl gem he held, and the sling rotated until Sumner dangled upright. “Now you will never be sure what is real and what is not, will you?” Sumner’s face went hard as stone. “Perhaps in the next five minutes of real time you will live through fifty years.” A tic hymned at the corner of Sumner’s mouth. “Perhaps it will take hours of real time—lifetimes in trance.”

An icy scream cut through Sumner. Rubeus blinked the odyl gem in his face, and Sumner leaned into a loose collapse.

“You are being frightened by a real dragon, Kagan.” Rubeus nodded, close to Sumner, eyes weary with mirth. “Be brave.”

The Untelling

[Everything that moves comes back on itself sooner or later. I know that better than any human. Movement is sphere: a declension of vectors from the rounding curve of the expanding cosmos to spiral galaxies, stars, planets, and cells—expanding again through the blastosphere, the eye, and the skull.]

***

The moon, knocked to its back in the day sky, accompanied Nobu Niizeki who inspected the clear-colored air around it as he walked. In his mind, the moon provided a leaping prayer; all the real lost loves of the Earth circled with it, clear as music. Everything that had ever tried to rise above itself orbited there: plant-tip cells exploding, seashells widening their spirals, and the expanding shell of the skull, itself so much like the moon.

Nobu jolted to an abrupt halt. The rumbled breathing of the sea had dulled. Alertness flared in him, and he gazed about to see that the monotonous seacurve had lifted to a horizon of hills. He stood at the disheveled edge of the beach, where shattered shells and demonshapes of dried seaweed mixed with dark earth and tall, skinny arms of bamboo. He had strolled a dozen paces beyond the border of his beach prison!

A quiver of mad joy almost stopped his heart. He looked back at the sand furrows, the slump of the beach edge, and the long curve of the wave-beaten strand shining with the sea’s chrism. He was free! A palsy of ecstasy nearly dropped him.

For over twelve centuries...

His face knotted as he reared in his feelings. He had to be certain. Though, of course, he was certain: He knew his limits very well—he had pressed against them for twelve centuries, and for all that time they had pressed back, invisible and ineluctable.

He turned away, and the carved greenness of the world before him hugely ached with luminosity. He took several bold strides forward and then burst into a sprint, running hard into the bright world of his freedom.

***

[V—symbol of the descent and the return: the journey of light down from identitiless freedom to the freedomless identity of crystal and its rebound up through life to light again. V, the timeless godmind emblem to be found even forty thousand years ago, etched on bone amulets by timeloose Cro-magnons.]

***

A ram-ort followed Nobu as he wandered away from the sea and into the mountains. Rubeus watched the man stumbling over ravine rocks, still in his mantic uniform, clumsy with joy. The ort-lord hungered for the power to feel his thoughts. Since his creation, Rubeus had pondered Nobu’s fate. Why had the Delph kept this being alive and aware on a spit of sand for twelve hundred years?

The sheep-ort ledgehopped to a higher vantage as Nobu’s rampant hike led him upward. [Where are you going, little man?] But the mantic possessed no telepathic powers, and Rubeus had to content himself simply to watch. And watching to wonder: [What did the Delph, in godmind, out of time, see of Nobu now, here at this crucial moment? The scene seen is nebulous.]

Still, he followed, drawn on by the illogic, the whimsy of this creature’s fate. Nobu, grunting, continued to climb the steepening terrain, a religious light floating on his face. Then the thought shocked through Rubeus: [The Delph had no reason!] Staring at Nobu, the ort-lord felt the gravity between his crystal-logic and the Delph’s fantasy. [Fantasy is a wound. Only reason is seamless.]

The ram-ort perched on a ledge above Nobu. It stared down at him hauntedly, swaying to an unheard incantation, inspelled and slow as a seaplant.

***

How to survive? Nobu lay bent and shivering against a granite shoulder. He crouched in a white pine grove watered by snowmelt; wire-thin creeks ran off high ledges, rainbow-misting the tall rock sky. He had come up here for the light and the clouds—but he had forgotten about the cold. It glittered in his hands and sparked in his teeth. He wanted to get up and go on. A world opened to him, expanding through the smell of red cedar and fireweed to the dreamy mountains and a sky full of every shape of cloud. But the paths leading from this place went on barbed with snagthorns and covered with frost rime. Where to go? Every direction led him deeper into his needs.

An ice-eyed ram watched with insouciant dignity.

What is joy? The coldness shaking him was joy. He had been denied it for so long, living only as a mind, a hungerless ghost caught sideways in time, knowing everything, feeling nothing. Now even pain felt good. He grinned into the burn of the wind. Human fear was the smallest feeling on the planet.

The ram startled and bounded out of sight across a ledge of bramble. Nobu sat up and turned so that his back broke the flowing cold. A buzzing floated in his face muscles. Only freedom is mystery. Only mystery can fill all the space of the mind. Like a drunk, he started to weep.

After the vapor of his feelings had thinned into the mountain wind, he huddled smaller, tired and watchful. The snowmelt silvered its soft oratory over pebbled rocks.

“Niizeki,” a woman greeted, coming up behind him. She smelled of shadowy forested places, and the dusk of her face seemed intimately familiar.

“Assia!”

“It’s been a long time, Nobu,” she spoke in Esper. “You’re free now. Part of a new world. Can you stand?”

Nobu wobbled to his feet. Beyond Assia, time looked thin among the clouds. “The Delph—” he began, but she hushed him.

“I will explain everything.”

***

[Newton in 1730 on page 374 of the fourth edition of Opticks: “The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transformation.”]

***

Nobu sat in a glade of twisted black dancestep trees. Assia and an eo stood in a polygon of sunlight a respectful distance away, granting him time to reflect on what she had told him. In his mind’s eye he still confronted the strand of his exile and, spontaneously, the twinkling of dolphin-arcs in the morning sea.

He shook his head till his blood buzzed. Pain was sacred. Hunger, Lust, Fatigue, and Ignorance were all sacred once again, because in the Delph’s spell he had not felt any of them. But the majesty of his humanity prevailed opaque with needs, and he suffered to think that soon he would be lost again among meals, sleep, and women. The knowing had departed. The eld wisdom that he had learned to see in a gull’s feather and a grain of sand had dimmed, muffled by his physicality. He had become meat again. The Delph’s cruelest punishment.

***

Drift opened its eyes to meet a dark smiling face. “I am Nobu Niizeki,” the man said gently. Assia, Jac, and a manikin-faced eo-ort circled him. “We found you in the temple at Reynii after the eo told us about Sumner’s capture.”

Capture? Drift sat up, and dark gleamed in its eyes. Where is he?

“You should rest, friend,” Jac advised.

Drift waved him away and looked at Assia. Where is he?

“Rubeus has him in a trance,” she answered. “The ort’s trying to break his mind. We’re on our way now to free him if we can.”

Jac helped the né to its feet. “He’s a lynk-jump away. The eo can get us into the dream-chamber at Oxact.”

“Getting away, however, may not be possible,” the eo added. “The Oxact lynk is a one-way jump. When you leave through it, you will lynk to the outside but not to here. You will have to get past all of Rubeus’ orts.”

“You’ll be safe with me along,” Jac said. “Rubeus wants me alive.”

“Frankly,” the eo admonished, “it’s too great a risk. Sumner opened himself to this fate. I think we must trust time now.”

I’m going, Drift said, standing and swaying dizzily. Atop an open treeform in Ausbok, they overlooked the mud-shiny banks of a river. What happened to me?

“You were drugged by one of Rubeus’ distort minions,” Assia answered. “You’re still woozy, and it may be best to wait.”

No. Drift shook the muzziness from its head. I’m going now. Help me, please.

Nobu took Drift to the arc of the lynk, and the others followed. Seeing this distort, so strange and yet human-looking, and feeling its telepathy magicking into him, Nobu offered what help he could, affectionately attracted. Everything Assia had told him about the machine-mind Rubeus and its domination of the world focused here in this mutant’s feeling and friendship for another human. Nobu’s blood felt knighted, and he wanted to assist, whatever the cost.

“If you must go,” the eo said, “then everyone stay close. I have pinpoint-placed you in the trance chamber where Sumner is. As soon as you get him, get back into the lynk. I’ve arranged for it to get you out of Oxact at least. From there, you will have to use the two sehs you have—Assia’s and Jac’s—and fly north to the next lynk. That will return you here.”

Assia took Nobu’s hand and blinked at how strange he looked dressed in yellow eo raiment. “Nobu—you don’t have to come. You don’t even know Sumner.”

“I know you,” he said with his usual courtliness. “Besides, Rubeus is the dark side of the Delph. I must do what I can now, as a man.” The continent of time on which he had existed god-free, hungerless and enlightened, still lingered in sight. Only the clarity he had known then had gone. Fatigue, thicker than he remembered, had taken its place.

Let’s go, Drift urged. And they entered the lynk.

***

[Chandogya Upanishad refers to the inmost self as Inner Light.

[Al-Ghazali taught that everything is a gradation of light.

[Rumi wrote:

Light shapes the embryo in the womb—

Why else do we come out of the darkness with eyes?

[In the Zoroastrian Gathas the lifeforce is called the lost light.]

***

They found Sumner alone, trussed up in the vortex illumination of the trance-sling. White metal arches gazelled in long curves down endless corridors, blue light shatterable on the mirror-polished floors.

Drift ran to Sumner and immediately began unstrapping him. Lotus Face—wake up!

With the straps undone, hexahedrons of sunfire hummed and circled once around the chamber before vanishing. Sumner, lowered to the ground, sat up and looked about slow-faced. Drift embraced him and, with all its empathic presence, rooted him in the here and now. This is real. You are awake. Can you feel that truth?

Sumner nodded, the bloodshot depths of his trance farther away now in the né’s telepathic grip than all his past lives. He mumbled, “Thank you.” He stared at the others: Nobu, Jac, Assia. They gazed down on him like an illumination: faces in a field of force. Nobu’s expression, a hypnotism of fascination, Sumner remembered from Corby’s shadowshooting. “Where’s Rubeus?”

“Not far, I’d guess,” Assia said. “We should move.”

Hammer light banged vision, and the entire dream-chamber brightened blindly. When sight returned, Jac had disappeared.

Assia called his name, her voice puling into odd, overlapping echoes.

“You think you have accomplished anything?” Voice boomed through the chamber. “How else could I have Jac returned but to let you enter my rath. And now that I have what is mine, you are all corpses.”

Assia pushed Nobu toward the lynk and helped Sumner to his feet. “That was a particle-beam Rubeus hit us with,” she realized. “Only the field built into the seh saved us. But the seh can’t absorb too many of those. We have to get out now.”

“You are in the darkest pit of your lives,” Voice spoke, and darkness shambled around them. “Where can you run? Distance is thought—and I have the larger mind.”

A chord of light from Assia’s seh waved across the room, pointing the way to the lynk.

“What about Jac?” Sumner asked, tracking a movement through the darkness.

“I don’t know what happened. I’ve never seen anything like that. Rubeus is stronger than any of us thought. We have—”

Assia broke off before a crowd of simplefaced orts that hardened out of the darkness. Sumner had sensed them closing in, and as they surrounded them, he spun into violence. His slashing hands hit tough artificial faces, knocking down three orts before Assia’s seh-light bluebrightened to a cutting laser. She seared off the head of the ort grappling with Nobu and swung the hot beam around, driving the others back into darkness.

They ran through the lynk and into a predawn landscape. Vast fists of laser-lit clouds rose from beyond the white peak of Oxact. Closer, the ridgerocks lit up around them, shining like coral. “It’s a war,” Assia almost cried. “These rocks have been hit by metafrequency light. Ausbok must be striking back.”

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.

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.

[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.

Drift took a moment to reflect some of this poem-silence outward, beyond one-with, as a prayer to Paseq, its God. Whatever is more than pattern is You, it chanted. Pain-eater, hidden in my unknowing—thank you for this life.

The lynk chimed, and out of nothing Sumner emerged, dustveiled and bloodsplattered. Behind him Jac and Assia appeared, hand in hand. An alchemic blue candesced around them as they stepped laughing into the circle of eo and began to touch everyone. Their features oracular with happiness, they embraced Drift, and its mind went bandy with paradise-feeling.

Solar-vested eo dusted Sumner off with fragrant air blowers, while others misted the air with wine-dark clouds of a rare and peaceful olfact.

Assia and Jac raised their free hands, and the shadow of a jubilant song spelled over everyone. The godmind strength in them swelled in everyone’s head with an inebriated clarity. Jac looked up at the vaulted ceiling where a floating servox welded a buttress crack. The flare of the welder larked brighter, and sparks flashed into white rose-petals that showered over the gathering.

***

Sumner and Drift sat cross-legged beside the lynk among the whiteness of petals. The eo had taken Jac and Assia to tour the war damage.

“Where does the Road go now, seer?” Sumner asked with joking seriousness. The plumose radiance of the godmind’s presence still feathered his brain, and a simple grin softened his face.

You have a longer Road ahead of you than you know, Lotus Face. The né’s thought-voice sounded slow and close. Jac and Assia’s godmind is dwindling as the planet swings farther from the Line. The Delph isn’t strong enough to heal this whole planet. Or even this one city. I already feel the thickness of their decision widening through them: They will leave Earth as soon as the other godminds return with the Liners. Those are ships, Lotus Face. They ride Iz, sailing the lightstream between realities. I see them so clearly in the eo’s memory.

“And my responsibility?”

You are the eth. With the Delph gone, the administration of Graal passes to you.

Sumner’s eyes wearied. “I’m tired of myself, Drift. I have to get lost for a while.”

I know. Drift’s round face sombered. We’re both lucky not to be instantly devoured by our feelings. We’ve lost too much. It’s not time to take on more. But how can you refuse? You are chanced.

Sumner absently pinched four petals into the design of a voor stalk charm, gaze withdrawn. Then a smile lifted, and Drift, looking into the space of his mind, smiled back mischievously: That’s a good strategy, Lotus Face. I should have thought of that. The snake biting its ass.

***

That evening, after a soothing sonic shower, change of clothes, and a meal of geepa beans and mentis beer, Sumner and Drift followed the eo to the surface of Ausbok. The eo wanted to show them one of the wonders of Graal.

The charred, flat land curved north and south as far as sight. In the east, the sun quivered like a red bubble over the sea. And as Sumner’s eyes adjusted to the twilight, spidery, ghostly shapes could be seen on the beach. Drift observed them, too—even more clearly, since it could detect the eloquence of psynergy stressing the air violet and indigo.

Liners.

“Yes,” an eo concurred. “They have returned.”

Sumner probed the crisped ground beyond the lynk-shield with a tentative boot-toe before walking out onto the ash.

“If you wish, you can leave this world now,” the eo told them. “You are free.”

Sumner and the né slogged over to a tall, blackened sandrise close to the Liners and sat. An hour passed in surfsounds as they peered into the fibrous, soft-green luminance of the craft. Occasionally a shrill, frothing color spilled out of the ships and over the sand, deliquescing into the night.

Those are godminds, Drift said through the concatenation of rainbows webbing its mindark. Endless worlds.

Two of the Liners vanished. Nothing remained where they had been: no support-marks or burn-scars. Night-heavy dunes rolled laggardly into the sea.

“When you lift out of time in a Liner, you can never come back.” Jac’s voice spoke from behind them. “They’re a passage to infinity: the multiverse. They never return to the same place. Always forward. Like our lives.” He and Assia walked out of the darkness and sat facing them, young with happiness. “We spent the day with the eo. Repairing.” He rubbed the air, and it glowed bluely.

“Life is a fantasy again,” Assia sighed, the light from a Liner brimming behind her. “But the deeper we go into each other, the more we feel the Line dimming—the magic fading.”

“Drift told you that we’re leaving and why,” Jac acknowledged. Beside him, in the glow of a Liner, a tall firehaired being came and went, and wisps of pink light flitted from the ship and gathered on a nearby dune. “You know you’ll be seneschal of Graal when we leave. We also know you don’t want that.” He nodded compassionately. “You’re a wanderer. Why not go vertical with us? We’ll cross the universe like voors.”

A moment threaded silently while Sumner watched a Liner materialize in the sea shallows. Chrome orange spheres bobbed out of the ship and burbled into a silent scream of olivaceous light that faded into the skyfires. “I’ve got a feel of where you’re going, from Corby,” Sumner said to them. “It’s too strange for me.”

Assia smiled sadly. “We want to stay here with you and share what we’ve redeemed together, but it’s too dangerous. You’re the eth, and our godmind psynergy curves weirdly around you. Anything could happen. This far out of Line, the dread gets thick.”

“And it’s magic.” Jac fingered hot fluid lines in the air. “It’s not ours. We belong to it.”

Yes. Drift shared their understanding. If you don’t use the power, the power uses you.

Fire wisps on the adjacent dune circled closer over the sand.

Jac’s eyes fluttered, and he nodded. “The others are calling. They want to leave now.”

The lynk they had come through earlier bluebrightened against the night, and a line of eo began to emerge.

Assia leaned closer to Sumner, her face warm with light. “Won’t you come with us? We’re strong together—we’ve proven that. But if we separate here, we’ll never meet again.

Sumner looked hard at her, seeing her kha as a blue outline against the sky. “I think our psynergy will bring us together again. We’ll meet further downstream.”

Jac faced Drift, and the né smiled into the sound of dreaming. “You can come with us, seer. It’s a journey for a big heart.”

Drift shook its head. I can’t go. I owe too much feeling to the Earth.

Wisps of godmind fire flickered sharply, and Jac and Assia’s faces seemed to blur. “Okay,” Jac said, rising, offering a hand to Assia. “We part here, then.” Electricity danced in his other hand, and suddenly he held an amber-ferruled wand-seh. He handed it to Sumner. “To remember that the eth and the Delph have met. As brothers.”

Sumner rose and took the wand. Assia kissed him, and he swayed in a cloudy, flowering euphoria. She placed a blue rose in his hand. “We love you,” she said to them and the eo behind them. And then, they waved and ambled down the beach and into the bristling illumination of a Liner. Almost instantly, the craft unflickered into pure radiance and disappeared.

A cold ocean breeze carved the heat off their faces and hands, and they turned toward the lynk. A delegation of in-and out-moiety eo arrayed on the beach, robes lush with wind.

“Eth,” an ort said in an oboe voice, its eyes ambiguous as fortune, “you are now seneschal of Graal. We need your full cooperation. There are some crucial decisions that must be made immediately.”

Sumner tightened, ready to decline. Remember your strategy. Drift touched his arm, and the vaporous lifelove that filled him proved sufficient to bland his uneasiness. We’re only briefly alive, the seer thought into him. Let’s be creative for now.

With a deep bow, Sumner accepted. “Seneschal, eh?” He smiled coolly. “Let’s get to work.”

The eo filed back through the lynk, and Sumner waited to go last. In the foot-chewed ash at the edge of the lynk-shield, he left the rose and the wand.

***

Drift sat outdoors in an open, seared area that had once been a treeform. A steady wind carried a tune of mulch and water up from the river, and black clouds blew overhead like smoke. In the far distance, darkness clotted the horizon.

The weather control for Graal had been built into Oxact. At its collapse, a black-green wall of thunderheads began to rise in the north, mounting on immense polar currents toward a raga storm. Ausbok had been too heavily damaged in its war with Rubeus to do anything about it, and most of the remaining eo had gone vertical.

An ort stepped through the lynk at the edge of the burn-circle and bowed. “This is the Massebôth the eth requested you to meet. He said he would ask for your personal and candid assessment later.”

The lynk drumthrobbed, and lanky, wolf-faced Anareta strode through.

With a soft nudge at Drift’s side, an olfact palette announced its presence. The palette rotated slowly, presenting an endless variety of moods: Dawning Wonder, Acceptance, Zonk, Cock Rise, Orph...

Drift pushed the hovering gyroplate aside and walked up to the Massebôth. I am Drift—the eth’s seer.

By Mutra’s third tit! Anareta startled.

Yes. Drift opened its arms, exposing the smallness of its body. I am a distort. But I’m useful.

Anareta bowed, immediately composing himself. “Seer, why am I here? All the other Massebôth have been returned to the Protectorate.”

Your destiny is bigger than the Massebôth. Drift glowed inwardly with approval. This man felt cool-nerved and gentle. His green kha gleamed crystalline around his head, textured for long periods of thinking. Lotus Face had chosen well.

“No one’s told me anything,” Anareta complained. “Who ordered me here?”

“I did,” Sumner’s voice came from behind, and Anareta turned to face him standing in the mouth of the lynk. “I am the eth.”

Anareta peered at him curiously, intuiting something familiar. “I don’t understand.”

Sumner stepped closer. “Godmind stricture makes me the lord of Graal now. Apart from the yawps in Sarina, we’re the most advanced culture on the planet. We’re even wiser than the kro, Chief.”

“Kagan,” Anareta whispered. “You’re Sumner Kagan.”

“We’re both a long way from McClure.” Sumner grinned.

Anareta sang with laughter. “You!” He squinted at Kagan, “How?” His laughter tarnished. “Two hundred thousand soldiers died here.”

Drift took Anareta’s hand, and a love-receiving peacefulness bloomed through him. Our lives are the froth of reality.

Anareta nodded and sat down on the lump of a tree charred into abstraction. The seer stroked the back of the chief’s neck, and his questions and doubt canceled. Knowledge moved in him, and he heaved back to alertness with startled clarity. “Mutra!” His fingers trembled at his temples, and his wise eyes closed. “So that’s it. Rubeus was a machine.” He opened his eyes, reached out, and touched Sumner. “Without those troops, it won’t be long before the distort tribes take the Massebôth apart.”

“There will be no bloodbaths.”

Anareta stood up and paced out his amazement. “So much to think about.”

“Chief, listen to me.” Sumner winked at Drift and with open hands urged Anareta to stand still. “You helped me when I was helpless. Remember? Well, I need your help again.”

“What can I do?” Anareta asked.

“Take a world off my hands,” Sumner answered outright. “The eth is expected to replace the Delph as the planet’s seneschal.” His voice shrugged: “History, for me, is what the wind says. I’m not a leader. But you’ve spent your life studying the past. You know the lion-smell of time. I want you to be seneschal. You’ll make the right decisions—the humane ones.”

Anareta’s face looked as if it had been worn by water.

“You can bring the Pillars of the Massebôth together,” Kagan went on, “into a tower, a house of God. No more dorgas. No more distort pogroms. Let the world heal itself.”

“Sumner, I don’t know.” Anareta slumped reluctantly, but within, Drift saw the green of his kha golding with the idea.

“Seer,” Sumner said, and he didn’t have to say any more, for the né was one-with, but he spoke aloud for Anareta to hear: “Help him make up his mind. I think you’d be a great seer for him—if that pleases you.”

Life pleases me, Drift answered. The cycle is complete. I would like to be part of the new order. And you?

“I want to get lost for a while.” Sumner glanced north at the towering force of the raga storm. “That’s still a couple of weeks away. Before it hits, I’d like to see what’s left of Graal—and myself.”

The né’s smooth face curled around a smile, and the voltage of its affection sparked in its eyes.

“Watch after the chief and make sure the tribesfolk are treated well. Your work will be to find the Serbota in all the Massebôth.” Sumner’s voice thickened, and he had to gaze into Drift’s small face with selfscan to loosen the knot in his throat: “I haven’t heard a né-chant from you since Miramol. Have we cut through enough pain for you to sing again?”

Drift nodded once and chanted to the back of Sumner’s eyes:

Pain is a rose of great peace.

Silence is the depth of a song

And stillness the space of our lives,

So empty it can hold everything.

Epilog

Sumner used his seh to fly south, leaving behind the scorched fields of Ausbok. In a flooded forest where rainbow fish bent through deep pools and blue egrets preened among fans of sunlight, he came down. The tall smell of the sea rode the east wind, and red butterflies tottered in the umbral air. For the first time since Laguna, he found himself alone. And how long ago was that? No voor-voice or né-telepathy answered him—and he smiled.

Following a bewilderment of rootbridges, he found the lonely soul of the place: a tarn among giant cypress. The immane screeches and caws of a startled rundi split hearing as he pushed through a witching of grass, stooping here and there to collect plant fragments. He came to a slurry ridge where a pool spooned sunlight into myriad reflections, and he sat on a sponged log.

Instructed by vague lusk-memories, he arranged and rearranged the plantshapes he had gathered. From a mentis pod, geepa stalks, weed-scrim, and a curve of hawkwood, he fashioned a crude devil harp. He held the harp to his mouth, and though he had never played, his breath spun out of the voor instrument in music lovely and indifferent as spirit.

The song turning in his breath surprised him. He had never thought he might find music in himself. A day-blue moon rose through the bramble of a moose maple while he musicked everything that he saw: silence moving up the trees with the afternoon, clouds folded like truffles...

Wind sizzled in the bleached grass, and in the bends of his brain the sound almost became a voice. Corby’s. But not really Corby. Not even the memory of him. Just a feeling: love; the desire for one-with even with nothing left. Corby was dead. And Sumner wasn’t entirely sure if he were alive himself or still demon-bound in Rubeus’ trance. Memories of Bonescrolls, Dice, Zelda, and all the haunts that had held him, from his old car to Dhalpur to Iz, compacted like a matchhead in his mind, ready to burn. Since leaving Ausbok, peacefulness had dilated through him. Gradually, as the evening’s red shadows lengthened among crosiers of grass, lifelove made his memories seem far away and unimportant.

For several days, Sumner played. Happy, smoking kiutl and raising the earthdreaming, he frolicked. The lifeforce streamed through him with a gentle strength. And in his mind, even death deepened, beyond fear and desire, to flow. This is long ago, he realized then as he experienced the brevity of all life. Everything he looked at seemed to float thinly on a vibrant blackness. All is nothing. He laughed a lot during that time. And he thoroughcomposed his first song:

Dark purple clouds piled to the zenith on all but the opal crescent of the western horizon. Networks of lightning went up in the north like silent screams. When the raga storm closed to within a day away, Sumner left the sullen trees and flew over the desert and the burn-crater of Reynii to the Liner field south of Ausbok.

All the Liners had departed. He spent that night in the empty field immersed in utter darkness. The Earth had burned, stars had cindered away, and now the skyfires too moved out of sight, hidden by storm-clouds. The water was coming and the wind. The cycle closed. The wheel of the law rolled on.

Before dawn, he ascended and flew north. In the slewfooted riverplains below Ausbok, he located another Liner field. Three Liners remained, spiderous shapes blue-webbed and luminous in the dense darkness. One twitched out as he approached.

He landed at the edge of the field and gathered an armful of kindling. Another Liner vanished as he built a small fire among the popple and rock furrows.

The one remaining Liner extended his only opportunity to survive the terrible winds closing in. Unconcerned, he dwelt in One Mind, a human expression of the earthdreaming, at the heart of the universe.

Sumner tossed a handful of dry duff onto the stunted flames and looked up into the lake of dawn. His life belonged to the light’s pilgrimage, an unfinished spirit crazed with all the unheard music turning in his body.

A smoky laugh swirled in his breath, and he blew into the devil harp smiling, feeling the escaping music in the loops of his blood, and remembering one of the né’s oldest sayings: What is the animal that lives to sing its song, after all, but the song itself?

Dawn expanded like a prayer, illuminating enormous pagoda clouds. Llyr, the morning star, appeared as his fire caught, and he sat back to watch the sun rise into his last morning on Earth.

Everything is best.

>APPENDIX<

Worldline

Profiles

(eo-compiled for Seneschal Anareta, 3332 kro)

GODMIND

Jac Halevy-Cohen (2080-3331 kro)

Kro fighter pilot and early Line-distort. His brain mutation, a complex infolding of the cortex, indued him with the neurological capacity to contain and focus Linergy. CIRCLE mantics recognized Jac’s genetic endowment during the mindscan screening that accompanied his admission to the Israeli stratocorps (2098 kro), but not until three years later did the mantics begin to employ psiberants and Invex-monitored RNA supplements to augment his brain’s natural development (2101-2113 kro). It is now believed that these artificial enhancements were chiefly responsible for the degradation of Jac’s personal consciousness, the phenomenon of Voice, and the consequent trance-dominance of the godmind that manifested through him.

Assia Sambhava (1981-3331 kro)

One of the first mantics: psychobiologist and innovative designer of Invex and the ATP-pump; also a founding member of CIRCLE and active humanist throughout the twenty-first century. Her humanism developed during her horrifying childhood in Peshawar, India, in the first Great Famine (1991 kro). After the devastating hybrid-failure of the mid-twenty-first century that made extinct most of the planet’s food crops, Assia devoted herself to relief service around the world, forsaking research and her personal life. When she returned to CIRCLE in 2101 to work with Jac Halevy-Cohen, the futility of her world-mission had psychically battered her, impairing her clarity. Though she believed Jac had the capacity to compress psynergy into causal collapse (an idea atypical for that time), she did not understand the vastness of godmind or the contrafactual uncertainty of the multiverse. Still, her humanism protected Jac from euthanasia when other CIRCLE mantics had lost faith in realityshaping (2113 kro). In recognition of his debt to Assia, the Delph rejuvenated and extended her life for the twelve hundred years of his residence on Earth. Characteristic of her, Assia spent so many of those years acquiring mental and spiritual skills through stringent kro disciplines. Later, as the Delph’s consort (533 MC), she psychically channeled psyn-echoes around Jac and demonstrated the phenomenal depth of her consciousness.

Nobu Niizeki (2053-3331 kro)

Last program director of CIRCLE (2102-2113 kro). Mantic since birth, Nobu personified the typical meta-intellectual technician who governed the kro in their last years. Spiritually depleted, Nobu believed sanity had become more important than life, form more vital than flux. Understanding for the kro became psychic elision: Only the perceivable qualified as real. Recognizing this, the Delph used Nobu as paradigmatic of the human lust for knowing. Confined to a kilometer of sea-strand for twelve centuries, Nobu expiated much species-tension by living through the fantasy of omniscience, finding the multiverse in the monotony of one landscape. At the end of his life, liberated from the irreality of godmind, Nobu fulfilled himself as a human and an individual through altruistic identification with life itself.

The Delph (2113-3330 kro)

Though he occupied Jac Halevy-Cohen’s physical form, the Delph was in fact an impersonal, autonomous, and timeloose complex. He was, clearly, the collective consciousness of humanity coupled with the infinite value of the multiverse. Because the Delph was biologically focused into a mind whose individuality had been chemically transfigured, he was less structured than most godminds and dependent on an Autonomous Intelligence (Rubeus) for quotidian expression. The Delph’s psynergy was somewhat shaped by Jac’s ego, which is why the love between Assia and Jac ultimately mastered and controlled the Delph.

VOORISH

Sumner Kagan (501 MC-)

The Delph’s fear-psynergy, generated by Jac Halevy-Cohen’s psiberant-soaked brain, manifested over the centuries in a variety of human forms, all of them with metaordered hostility for the Delph. Sumner manifested the last of these fear-avatars, known collectively as eth. Though ontic, timeloose events channeled his life, Sumner continually struggled against the cosmic impersonality of his destiny as eth to define himself on his own terms. Testimony to his achievement centers on his transcendence of personal grief and archetypal antipathy toward the Delph when he risked his life to save Jac and Assia.

Zelda Kagan (486-579 MC)

Sumner’s mother, a green card Massebôth, actually an empathic distort with an undetected phylogenetic mutation, intuited her son’s destiny, which motivated her fascination with wangol and Mutric magic.

Jeanlu (491-517 MC)

This voor charmist, a highly telepathic shaper of stalk charms, much revered by the brood, lived in self-exile after the murder of her family by the Massebôth (509 MC). Her desperation to avenge the death of her parents motivated her to risk her sanity by mounting kha sufficient to birth Dai Bodatta, the fabled “killing voor.” That tremendous psychic effort ravaged her etheric field and inevitably resulted in her early darktime death. Selection of Sumner Kagan for her mate seems to have been based on his pristine genetic status rather than awareness of his aspect as eth. Though, with a timeloose consciousness like Jeanlu, nothing is certain.

Corby (513-533 MC)

Dai Bodatta, the voor-child of Jeanlu the charmist and Sumner Kagan. Perhaps the most powerful voor ever incarnated on Earth, Corby retained his human form for only the first five years of his life and functioned for the next twelve years from within Iz, using first the charred remains of his body and then the lusked body of his father to ground his psynergy. He had been “called” into form by his mother for a specific mission: to end the torment of voors under the cruel domination of the Massebôth. Early on, though, Corby realized that the Massebôth served merely as minions of another, more powerful and evil force—the Delph’s fear. As a godmind-entity, Corby understood that the Delph materialized humanity’s soul, and the Delph’s fear expressed the terror inherent in life, the withholdance in every organism confronted by mortality and the unknown. Comprehending so much more than those around him apprehended, Dai Bodatta had no choice but to live his whole life manipulatively. By the end of his temporal existence, his strategies had promoted his host/father, Sumner Kagan, into the position where the Delph could be destroyed. How Kagan fulfilled his remarkable son’s mandate reveals the profound compassion of the “killing voor’s” timeloose foresight.

DISTORTS

Bonescrolls (2064-3331) kro

An unplanned yawp born without license in Mexico City’s genefab boro; named Rois by his mother, a second generation service-yawp. At eight months, researchers transferred him to a laboratory unit in Guadalajara where intelligence-amplification experiments transformed him into one of the first truly self-aware yawps. Believed killed during the world-chaos of that period, he worked incognito as a service-yawp in CIRCLE for twenty-two years. After the Delph’s emergence, Rois wandered the planet, acquiring knowledge and advancing the confederation of intelligent yawps. Around 2700 kro, after a dangerous and labyrinthine life as a wanderer and hero for the yawps, he founded Sarina, an advanced yawp community, and retired to the desert of Skylonda Aptos. At this time, he took the name Bonescrolls and a new body, a human one, within which to live as an anchorite, unrecognized and alone. At the end of a long life endowed with trans-species memories and magical telepathy, Bonescrolls found himself metaordered to help Sumner Kagan confront himself as the eth. He spent his last year aware of his impending death at the hands of a killer ort, but this approaching horror did not hinder his transmission of One Mind to his final student.

Drift (514 MC-)

A né seer and androgynous distort of the Serbota tribe with well-trained telepathic abilities. As a Serbota, Drift lived with devotion to Paseq. Such devotees “continually chant praise of Creation and serve Life” (as revealed in The Duple Commandment of the Divider). Drift served Bonescrolls as an emissary to the Serbota, and later it served the eth as a psychic factotum.

Rubeus (86-533 MC)

As the Delph’s personal AI, Rubeus existed to protect and serve the godmind. Physically a mountain (Oxact) of psyn-crystals in Graal, the AI’s influence extended throughout the world, carried by millions of animal and human orts. Within the first century of its function, Rubeus’ crystal infrastructure fell under the influence of Linergy and the distortions of cosmic rays. Subsequently, it began to hunt down timeloose distorts and godminds outside Graal with a particularly vicious and thorough intensity. The Delph, immersed in earthdreaming, remained unaware of the demon he had spawned until swept up in Rubeus’ cruel bid for total dominance of Earth.

Nefandi (386-533 MC)

An ort created by godminds in Graal to serve as a man-servant, then freed after a period of useful service. To support a coobla addiction, Nefandi acted for Rubeus (506-533 MC) as voor-stalker and godmind-killer. Using a sensex and field-inducer, he stalked his quarry, virtually invulnerable and inescapable. Rubeus employed him against Corby and Bonescrolls.

Argot

AI (Autonomous Intelligence): a mind created by psychophysics to program itself beyond the bio-imperatives (conscious and unconscious) of its creator.

ATP-pump: the first implanted mind-amplifier; developed circa 2048 kro at CIRCLE; the pea-sized implant augments mitochondrial development in the parietal areas of the brain and increases energy efficiency of adenosine triphosphate in the limbic system, the emotional brain, enhancing thought-processes of the higher brain without distortion from direct chemo-stimulation of the cerebral cortex.

Ausbok: the eo rath, a subterranean stronghold in Graal containing the living psychic process of some of humanity’s finest disembodied minds; the prime purpose of Ausbok is preservation and extension of human thought; it is the direct descendant of CIRCLE.

Boro: the section of a research center restricted for yawp domiciles; circa 2055-2113 kro.

Botte: a yawp term of direct address used to express praise, joy, thanks.

Brood: a voor community, usually nomadic.

Brood jewel (also scry crystal and stonelight): voor gem grown over centuries from glandular excretions derived from most voors: The gem varies in color, size and shape; all gems hold and enhance kha-producing Ricci-tensor reflectants that often allow an observer to witness time-forward probabilities or expansive psychic states.

Causal collapse: the realityshaping solipsism surrounding a powerful timeloose consciousness, like the Delph.

Chrysalid (sleepod): hibernating module at the null-gravity core of the planet designed by the Delph to maintain his physical form during periods when the Earth is out of Line.

CIRCLE (Center of International Research for the Continuance of Life on Earth, 2004-2113): self-sufficient scientific community on the southern Peruvian coast (kro), established to find ways to compensate for the massive morphological changes that followed Earth’s swing into Line; at the time of its causal collapse (2113), CIRCLE supported the only technological community of any significance on Earth.

Coobla: device that induces psynergy-stimulation in the amygdala, the brain’s pleasure-core.

Dai Bodatta: “the killing voor;” a powerful timeloose voor, who has incarnated throughout voorish history, answering threats to the brood’s survival. (See Profiles.)

Darktime: genetic breakdown in voors precipitated by earthdreaming; manifesting usually as scabrous lesions on the skin and internal organs and invariably resulting in death.

Data-Sync: CIRCLE’s cryogenic computer system.

Deadwalker: pejorative term referring to orts; they are recognizable by their slim red kha.

Deep: Massebôth term for seer; a highly sensitive and well-channeled telepath created in utero by introduction of kiutl directly into the amniotic fluid at a critical stage in fetal brain development.

Delph: selfname of the timeloose consciousness that emerged from the causal collapse at CIRCLE in 2113 kro. (See Profiles.)

Deva: artificial lifeform designed to thrive in the ionosphere by drawing sustenance from the solar wind and employing diaphanous membranes to sail around the planet with the solar tide.

Devil harp: combination double-reed, string, and percussion instrument of voor conception consisting of a melody pipe (geepa stem) through which air is blown into a small but extremely flexible windbag (made of a rundi’s lung sac or young mentis pod) encased in a hawkwood sounding box; notes are produced by stopping the holes in the melody pipe with one hand, while with the other manipulating trip-hammer pegs to strike stalkwires of varying lengths strung inside the sounding box: a seedcase rattle attached to the underside of the sounding box produces an additional percussive sound; the devil harp’s tessitura exceeds human hearing at both spectral ends.

Distorts: genetic mutations resulting from increased cosmic radiation levels after the collapse of Earth’s magnetic field; this term usually refers to human mutations.

Dogstars: cis-lunar space colonies.

Dorgas: a Massebôth term for criminal offenders; identifiable by foreheads branded X where the input valve of the drone straps penetrates the skull.

Dreamshaper: human archetype of wisdom, the fusion of thought and feeling; the “extra-conscious” psyche, whose contents are impersonal and collective.

Drone strap: a headpiece that acts directly on the parasympathetic nervous system, intensifying physical strength and dulling mental activity; all dorgas are required to wear them while working; the straps hold in place a skull implant, which feeds inhibitors and conditioners into the subarachnoid space around the brain.

Earthdreaming (mounting kha): voor term for empathic bonding with the planet; this state, regularly achieved in all humans when brain-wave activity slows to 8 cycles per second (CPS) in resonance with the 8 CPS vibration of the Earth’s crust, enhances telepathy in voors.

Eo: the technologically stored memories in Ausbok of the mantics who went vertical after 2113 kro; these memories are integrated by Ausbok’s AI and focused individually into human orts when social communication is required. The eo society has two moieties: the in-moiety orts, who wear blue and involve themselves almost wholly in pure research and the yellow garbed out-moiety who administer all communications beyond Ausbok.

Esper: the international language Esperanto, in the widely modified form utilized at CIRCLE.

Eth: the Delph’s other; a fear-reflection that haunted him in many human forms, the last of whom was Sumner Kagan. (See Shadowself)

Field-inducer: eo invention that can induce any variance of the Field (electromagnetic, gravitational, strong and weak) by drawing on the ubiquitous and infinite flux of virtual particles. (See Subquantal Field.)

Flexform: modular furniture popular at CIRCLE.

Flex-routine: slow physical exercise designed to stretch systematically all muscle groups in the body; modeled by the eo on the Chinese internal art of pa kua.

Geepa bean: mutant perennial tall-growing bean with blue cordate leaves and large panicles of fragrant and highly nutritious seeds, ranging in color from red to green and black; the geepa bean first emerged among the explosion of mutations that resulted from the influx of Linergy and cosmic radiation around 2035 kro; within five hundred years of its arrival, because of the vine’s adaptability and extraordinary capacity to “digest” rock and unlock precious nutrients, it became the dominant vine on the planet; it quickly attained to the primary food-source for most of the world’s population, providing easily assimilated protein complexes; voors call it homefruit.

Ghosting: the region between lynks; it is of indefinite metrics but confined by four-space symmetry (isospace parameters) to discrete and exact mass replication (including pramatter, that is, mass’s substanceless values: spin, parity, isospin, and strangeness), which is precisely why what goes in one lynk always comes out another lynk exactly the same.

Glastic: ultrahigh molecular weight, thermosetting polymer of boron oxide with the colloidal properties of glass and ductility of plastic.

Goat Nebula: supernova in the kro constellation Serpens Caput.

Godmind: consciousness that transmutes and willfully directs Linergy; the human experience of this is mythoculturally associated with divinity, since the ego becomes the pivot for a tremendous amount of power; this numinous sense, however, is illusory: the godmind is limited to affecting local phenomena and is itself influenced by other godminds and the infinitude of the multiverse. (See Realityshaping.)

Graal: terrain set aside by the eo for the godminds to occupy while on Earth; it covered all of kro South America and included Ausbok, Oxact, CIRCLE, and numerous biotectured villages for the pleasure of godminds; Rubeus held responsibility for its maintenance.

Grin: yawp deprecatory term for human being.

Hellraiders: the Massebôth first-strike force.

Hind rats: large bipedal rodents that are razorfanged and aggressive.

Holoman: three-dimensional laser projections usually accompanied by wide-range sensory details.

Howlie: derogatory voor term for human beings; voors communicate soundlessly, through telepathy.

Immanence: yawp expression for the psychokinetic bliss experienced under the influence of kiutl.

Invex: mantic brain-mind correlator; a technique for reviewing the mental experiences of a subject; crude mindscan used primarily to monitor yawp intelligence and weed out mental variants.

Iz: the voors’ “wind of the longer distance,” the name given by voors to the Line and the phenomenon of their psychic interreaction with the Line; more exactly, it is the continuity of the voors’ experience within the Line, a voor eigentime in which an individual voor may exist both in the time-directed structure of gravitational space and out of causality in a space where the world-horizon is spherical; within the Line (Iz), all voors exist, always.

Kha: biospectral energy; bodylight; the subtle cellular luminescence radiated by all living organisms. (See Psynergy.)

Kili: Massebôth game of skill played with three marbles and a triangle; similar to the kro game of billiards.

Kiutl: glassy-stemmed herb with blood-red stipulate leaves and blue cleistogamous flowers; the leaves and flowers contain rich quantities of an indole-free psiberant, which endows strong telepathic properties when consumed; this plant is cherished by voors.

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 10^9 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