Jac peaked into godmind. The knowing lasted less than a second. But in that time, he saw the olamic reaches of his being. And it didn't matter at all that Rubeus had betrayed him or that he was going to die. Patterns of fire circled him—the stars: emblems of all directions, the intersections of never and always. In the starpatterns he saw the origin: light, the ardor and selflessness of It, the chthonic journey, des-canting into geometry, echoing across the shell of time as language: mesons talking atoms into being, molecular com-munities 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 was all he wanted now, a dissolving above these heat-cracked rocks into the desert elementals: iron oxides, salts, and darkness. But the power of will was no longer his. Slow flow fire columning into the stormclouds brightened. Control was slowly returning to Rubeus as Jac's psynergy plateaued. The power sheathing the Delph's will was still immense but no longer his own. He dangled in the bright night, waiting like the rocks, the tug of stars moving cleanly through him.Idea and Action were inverted. Will was gone for the Delph, and God once more was 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 less than what he had been an instant before. Origin was againsenseless to him.He couldn't move. Rubeus was a music in him, chords of thoughts jangling by. The Delph refused to focus on them. The thoughts were dark and evilly spindled. He looked out-ward at the blunted shoals of stone against the steep colors in the sky and at the ort poised in midair, pins of terror still in his eyes, though his awareness had centered back to Oxact. Inward, Jac was settling into Voice: note 31.This is the situation, the eo-ort said, or thought, and Sumner understood everything. Knowledge was immediately transparent, and everything he looked at was superimposed by the exact design of his understanding.Drift and Sumner were standing on a greencrystal dais in one of Ausbok's lynk hangars. Understanding huge as sea rhythms rolled through the long chamber. Whatever Sumner looked at, he comprehended. That rainbow smoke swirling in the mirrorshape above them was where the knowledge origi-nated. Names, processes, concepts, began to gel in Sumner's mind: Patterns—it was all patterns, widening and narrowing through each other, interweavings bigger than mathematics. Nothing could be known, only selected out; all reality was simply periphery, truth merely method. The patterns were slowly resolving in Sumner's eyes to symmetries and imper-turbables, but there was no time to grasp them.Eo in solar-colored vestments—the in-moiety, the think-caste, the dreamers and administrators—were suiting him up in a black bodyshield. The material was flexible and cool as silk, but Sumner understood that it was opaque to radiation. No zippers or clasps—the black sheets spun out of transpar-ent wands and contoured themselves to the body.Drift, too, was being armored. They were circuiting its hairless, almost-female chest with respirator tubules.Refracting light fanned their faces, and slender, tufted blue sparks traced their features, fitting them for the helmets and visors to come. Sumner gazed up without thoughts at the black window ovals behind which eo of both moieties were sullenly watching, gauging, deep-praying. He understood. Behind his eyes he saw Oxact, Rubeus' white mountain cored with psynergy crystals. He and Drift would lynk to the foot-hills, and then a superlight transport—the only superlight power the eo had—would take them up the mountain. The objective was the summit. There, a godmind pavilion was situated. It 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 hel-mets. In a moment, they would step through the lynk and superlight as high up Rubeus' mountain as the eo had psynergy to propel them. It wouldn't be far. In the awesome repose of Sumner's new knowledge, he saw how limited the eo's power was. Within minutes their psynergy would be exhausted, and the only defense, the timeslips surrounding Ausbok, would collapse.Transparent visors with the brilliant surfacing of dia-monds snapped over his and Drift's faces. Vision was needle-pointed, underbuilt with clear, strong light. The lynk arc they stepped toward was a flocculation of metal-sharp radi-ance, a stillness of motion-sparks beneath the whitemetal ramps, the curved easements, and the black oval windows.The eo fitted a weapon into his right grip: a particle-beam pistol. The red-rimmed glitters of its lens glided in the air with the fine movements of his muscles.On his left side, a silver-gold sword was slung—Nefandi's fieldsword. He thought/felt: The sword was more than a weapon; it was meant as a luck token.He looked up at the rainbow vapors in the mirrordiscs and saw how much of what was going to happen was chance: everything. Superlight transport was metaordered. 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 didn't, was 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, and himself sprawled on a ledge higher than the moon, the diamond visor blood-shattered, sticky with the sharded mess of his lifeless face. A sick feeling closed around the vision. He looked 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: 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 a darkness riddled with luminosity before the sehs built into their armor boosted them into the sky. Looking down to where they had been, they saw a molten lava pool churning with the afterprisming of superlight.Drift was telepathically bonded to Sumner through their helmets. In the night sky, only the flowing light of the liquid rock pools illuminated them. Drift was muddled by the abrupt-ness of the lynk, and he 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 was gone. He put down on a rockfold that overlooked the burning lower slopes. Far across the sky, the moon was big as a jar.We made it! Drift said with amazement, dropping beside Sumner. In the night light, its black carapace was invisible, and the slant of its visor was 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 up to the summit, a jagged snowcrest billowing with the ethereal green glow of skyfires, but before they could lift into their flight, the darkness around them broke into movement.