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 Masseboth cities?" Sumner asked, and Drift looked at him with a glint of surprise."Rubeus hasn't touched them, yet. His power, like ours, is limited. He's concentrating on priorities.""And Jac?" Assia inquired without breathing.The screen was gone, replaced by a soothing green glow in the walls and ceiling. "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've knocked out Rubeus' skyfilters. Since you've 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's passed.""The sky is focusing echoes," the eo told her patiently. "The psynergy is crude but 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'll suffer."Sumner was leaning 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 doesn't know yet what's happening—but when he realizes, he will use all his power to dominate Jac and use the godmind against us." The seh's color motes shifted rapidly and were gone. The eo looked up with dilated eyes. "Our chances are dwindling quickly. Sumner, you wanted us to use you. Now is the time, eth. We need you for a death mission. There's only a small chance you'll succeed. No chance at all you'll survive. But this is the shape of your fate. Isn't it?"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: It was aware of a primal pattern, the molecular differentiation between woman and man. Aware deeper than the molecules. And though it couldn't possibly visualize what it was feeling, it felt the underlying shapes that, like the atomic matrix projecting the crystal, radiate into the macroworld as distinct genders. Assia's femininity was strong. It had been refined over the centuries from the active humanism of her early life in India to the meditative spirit of her open-Being in Nanda. But now Nanda was as much a ghost as India.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 was a clatter of long shadows against the lewd, molting colors of the sky. The fight was moving off. Something like time swept across the night—clouds, hovers of blackness, wing-balancing over the mesas.note 30 Rubeus' heart was both jubilant and pen-sive. He had Jac. He thought the eo would sway to his demands. But a dark knowledge was rivering just beyond his mindreach, too slow and vast to be accessible, like the un-knowing that tells itself through our lives.He stepped back from the edge and moved through the light fretting from the burning sky to where Jac was crouched. Jac's head leaned back against a curved, gentle stone, and his face was fevered, his eyes aimless. The sky lapsed green and silver, and Rubeus saw that the man was tranced.Jac was 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. He was a stratopilot—a warrior. Why was he letting himself be used? He lurched forward, thinking to strike out and be killed quickly, but his movements were bloated. The ort pushed him back hard, and he fell into the bright revolving smoke of his body.When his eyes opened, what stared out of them was pure void. That was all the warning Rubeus would get. Now was his only chance to destroy Jac, for the Linergy was still attuning itself. But Rubeus saw only fear, living as he did in his imagination. How else could he live? He was but a half-soul, a nimiety of the Delph's own strength. The lights crawling in Jac's eyes were sky-reflections to Rubeus, fear caught on the cornea."On your feet. Get up." Rubeus lifted Jac and leaned him back against the stone. Black tattered clouds were flying across the sky. Rubeus held Jac's face in the grip of one hand and spoke his name sharply.But Jac heard his name nowhere near him and not in Rubeus' voice. He started awake and saw the world burning in petrified colors, the 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 was a scream muffled by a body. The body retched like lightning and broke into another sleep. Rubeus cautiously approached, stooping over him where he was slumped. He lifted Jac's head and saw an acid light rippling in the eyeholes, behind, beyond. Still, he didn't 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 was spilling 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 was expanding, exploding his cells, bursting his bones. He had gone rigid and was clutching at Rubeus and scream-ing: "Kill me! Kill me!" The power was flowing in from everywhere, and his screams were weirding into long wails. Abruptly, the rush of clouds swirled in on the skyfires, and darkness drowned the rock spire. In the blackness, Jac's cries were so huge they were 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 was masked with a terror of something beyond his life. Fleshfire streaked greasy-blue over his face, dripping off in radiant clots.The pain was awesome. In the golden shadow of his glow, Jac saw Rubeus cowering between two bobs of rock.The pain was 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 tre-mendous vertical radiance blazed through him, and shape gave way. Rubeus whimpered to see 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-glared upfloating. A piece of the sun hung in the fireflow like an all-seeing eye. The night of the desert unfurled around the searing rays spiking from it. 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.