Radix

have tried to save him from Nefandi? The doubt was still circling in him. No, no, part of him was thinking—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 up to your doubts and
your loathing. Feel everything. It is the only way to be healed."
* * *
Sumner stayed with Ardent Fang, dreaming backwards 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 be-came 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. He was in the black of the trance, his thoughts and feelings brushlights circling the point of his awareness. He wasn't memory. The more he remembered, the less he be-came. He was distance, the space between what he was now and what he had been at conception. And before that? Trans-parent feelings rose in him, colored by his mind: He remem-bered Corby taking him out to Rigalu Flats and showing him Iz. He remembered the evanescent images of past anima-tions: 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, trap-ping 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 ki-netic images and rotating displays: "Thought is matrix." Let-ters linked like atoms, and word-molecules coalesced and vanished: "MATRIX, (kro) mater, mother, womb.
"Thought is a matrix which 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. mmatrix is matrix.
The thought-matrix is self-deception, the Dreamshaper continued. It's 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. It surrounds the feeling-self and can never be done away with or the being will die. The most one can hope for is transpar-ency. 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 you.
Sumner fidgeted before the scansule, and a red cancel-sign buzzed on: "DON'T TRY IT!" Don't try to understand, the Dreamshaper said, and a word-display cartooned before him: "TRY, (kro) tritare, to rub to pieces."
Your ego is bowel-consciousness. It wants to break ev-erything 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 was 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. Exis-tence 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. It was a thought, unrepeatable, arrived. He repeated it: I am. I am. And he was. . . .
Sumner woke. He was dressed in black trousers, gray-buffed halfboots and a dark billow-sleeved shirt. His body felt still and concentrated, thoroughly rested.
The dreaming was over. The carousel of stars, the moon's shape and position, were as they would have been outside the trance. And though he was dressed differently and in an unfamiliar place, he was certain that he was awake.
He looked about for Rubeus. He was in an enclosed courtyard illuminated by the night rainbows and the pale fire of the moon. A group of men was approaching—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 was seeing. Thoughts were too small and tight, too much like eggs—alive but inanimate. When he realized that the soldiers approaching were Masseboth, it was too late to run.
"Where are your tags, soldier?" an ape-slanted officer asked. He was 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 were on Sumner immediately, grappling to secure his arms. But 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, his hands free now and amazing with anger. But as he advanced, a soldier broke open a wrist-canister and misted Sumner's face with a sear-ing, throat-choking spray. He staggered back, his eyes slim and dreamy, bright with fear.
The Masseboth 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. But the drug they had hit him with slowed every-thing inside him. With machine speed a knife-hand appeared, 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, the knife strumming be-tween 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 was squeezing the fire out of his chest, and his tongue buck-led like a razor against his teeth.
The thin, musical edge of sleep dropped away. A pun-gent scent spiked light through his brain. "Come on. Wake up." The heavy voice jarred vision into his eyes, and he gazed into a panoply ofjeweled light—a radiant cruciform mandala. The petal-blue light hardened around ball-divots floating in midair. The attached soap-colored straps were 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, but the sling held him tightly. His eyes were 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 Masseboth—"
"You've been tranced since you killed my distort," Rubeus confirmed.