Radix

Assia's dread stiffened as she listened to this man. "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, was 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 countenance 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 it was as entrancing as 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, obvi-ously 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 said, his 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 said 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, but Assia was oblivious to him. She was infocusing 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 saw in its center more than the imaginary. Sumner Kagan was there—though to her he was nameless, a man huge and sinewy as a language, his flat face passionless, his air-blue eyes farther apart than the eyes of a cat. The veil of his face lifted away, and she was aware again of a chittering of sparrows, the perfume of sunlight, and Colonel Anareta standing beside her.
"Just five minutes of your time," Anareta was saying.
Assia looked up at the 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 was 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 the blue oaks of Nanda with a look of anguish and said aloud: "Mutra, where am I?"
[You are immersed in a river that is streaming up into the sky. It's 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 is an ocean of ions. It's 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're 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've heard of Sponta-neous 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 are discharging somewhere in the atmosphere. More insidious are the "evil winds"—the si-rocco, the mistral, the kona, the oscure: huge waves of posi-tive ions dropping out of the ionosphere and blanketing whole geographies. Those ions are created as the solar wind and the cosmic rays blow away the electrons of the air molecules at the fringe of space. So, it is the sun and the stars that pull the electrons out of the earth.
[The electric flow of the human body is delicate. When it's disturbed, people feel as though their flesh is not their own.
[Factoids: life is electrical. Life is light.
note 16
Jac mounted a spiral incline matted with plush red moss and entered the domed room at the top of the house. From here, the blue thinness of space, the iceclouds, and the mountains like a purple distillation of the sky could be blanked from the dome ceiling and replaced by the 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 ap-peared. He was going to Ausbok because the eo had broken into the pleroma music of his sleep minutes ago and re-quested his presence. The eo were like mantics, he remem-bered, and that frightened him, for this whole nightmare had begun with the mantics.
note 17
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 which always silenced him. He held the green lozenge to his face, but before misting himself, he listened inward.
note 18
Jac sprayed the chemical olfact, and a perceptive ease empurpled him. He had forgotten why he was standing here, but a lynk was glowing before him, and he walked through it.
At that time, on the top of a vine-shaggy treeform, Sumner and Drift leaned against a redwood rail. They were watching oryx graze on the riverplain below, sunlight spin-ning on their long horns. On the far shore, a Masseboth brigade was bivouacked, their green flag swaying in the river breeze.
They frighten me, Lotus Face, Drift thought, remember-ing the strohlkraft screaming over Miramol, the soldiers bending the ne to the wood and breaking its bones with nails. Its blood turtled.
Sumner spoke softly; "Rubeus made them. That makes sense. The Masseboth are half-alive, cut off from the whole of humanity by their unlove of distorts. They belong to the ort-lord."
Rubeus is mad, the ne concurred. He raved like a lune. "Don't jooch yourself," Sumner said. "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 where they were standing was bright with order: Opal plants glittered in circle tiers, air vines knotted each other, 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. He was impetuous with his rage. 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 the 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 was ready to teach Sumner how to fly. The fingerwork was initially tricky, and Sumner spent some time bouncing him-self across the terrace before he felt confident enough to jet. Within an hour he was skywalking, sitting in midair, and landing with poetic ease.

Note16

Light is timeless. It doesn't change as it moves through space. When it strikes a particle of dust or gas, it's irrevo-cably altered. But the universe is ninety-nine percent vacu-ity. Most light will wander forever.

Note17

Jac, the secret of human destiny is this: like the onion, we have no seed, no separate core, no Self. Endless layers of feelings, sensations, and ideas have gathered together and become you. There is only one moment, and it is infinitely long. At its center is nothing—the nothingness that connects everything—the last reality and the 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?

Note18

Aristotle says: "To know the end of a thing is to know the why of it." So with your life. The bone-seed was planted in the stars—it sprouted on earth—but do you think it ends here? Don't get caught up in this logodaedaly. Grow beyond what is of what never was. Give up your words.