Radix

Sumner's eyes wailed.
Rubeus regarded him with amusement. "You're begin-ning to apprehend the scope of it all, aren't you?" Light leaped in the odyl gem he was holding, and the sling rotated until Sumner was upright. "Now you'll never be sure what's real and what isn't, will you?" Sumner's face went hard as stone. "Perhaps in the next five minutes of real time you'll 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're being frightened by a real dragon, Kagan." Rubeus nodded his face close to Sumner, his eyes weary with mirth. "Be brave." the untelling note 22
The moon was knocked to its back in the day sky, and Nobu Niizeki was looking at the clear-colored air around it as he walked. In his mind the moon was 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 was 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 looked around to see that the monotonous seacurve had lifted to a horizon of hills. He was standing 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 was standing 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, but 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, invisi-ble 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.
note 23
A ram-ort followed Nobu as he wandered away from the sea and into the mountains. Rubeus watched the man stum-bling over the ravine rocks, still in his mantic uniform, clumsy with joy. The ortlord 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. note 24 But the mantic wasn't telepathic, and Rubeus had to content himself simply to watch. And watching to wonder: note 25
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: note 26 Staring at Nobu, the ort-lord felt the gravity of the vastness between his crystal-logic and the Delph's fantasy. note 27
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 huddled and shivering against a granite shoulder. He was in a white pine grove watered by snowmelt; wire-thin creeks ran off the 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 was his, 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 were barbed with snagthorns and covered with frost rime. Where to go? Every direction led him deeper into his needs.
An ice-eyed ram watched him 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 was left tired and watchful. The snowmelt silvered its soft oratory over the pebbled rocks.
"Niizeki," a woman said, coming up behind him. She smelled of shadowy forested places, and the dusk of her face was intimately familiar.
"Assia!"
"It's been a long time, Nobu," she said 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."
* * *
note 28
Nobu sat in a glade of twisted black dancestep trees. Assia and an eo were standing 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 saw 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 was opaque with needs, and he suffered to think that soon he would be lost again among meals, sleep, and women. The knowing was gone. 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 was meat again. That was the Delph's crudest punishment.
Drift opened its eyes to see a dark smiling face. "I'm 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 said. "The ort's trying to break his mind. We're on our way now to free him if we can."
Jac helped the ne to its feet. "He's a lynk-jump away. The eo can get us into the dream-chamber at Oxact."
"Getting away, however, may be impossible," the eo added. "The Oxact lynk is a one-way jump. When you leave through it, you'll lynk to the outside but not to here. You'll 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 up and swaying dizzily. They were on top of the open treeform in Ausbok, overlook-ing the mud-shiny banks of a river. What happened to me?
"You were drugged by one of Rubeus' distort minions," Assia said. "You're still woozy, and it may be best to wait."

Note22

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.

Note23

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.

Note24

Where are you going, little man?

Note25

What did the Delph, in godmind, out of time, see of Nobu now, here at this crucial moment? The scene seen is nebulous.

Note26

The Delph had no reason!

Note27

Fantasy is a wound. Only reason is seamless.

Note28

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."