Radix

"I know you are spirit." Rubeus' voice shocked the air. "Let me go now. Let me be!"
But hearing passed around her like the mesa silence. Rubeus was her jinn now. And she was spirit, moment-carved, riding the air and opening with the wind. Centuries of diligent training had given her this intensity, this strength of complete surrender. The Delph had given her those centu-ries, had helped her to see through her fear, and had taught her in his way how to be spirit, full of emptiness, moving with the stillness. Now he was moving with her, the truant fans of smeared light closing in, focusing to one ball of heat-less fire, blue as the mind.
"Assia!" Jac was standing before her, outlined in green placental light. He reached out, and when he touched her, the glow filmed away. They embraced and dropped to their knees, thoughts passing between
them unspoken but deeply felt.
The seventh meditation was body. The godmind that Assia had reached for was in her embrace. Jac appeared different: His eyes were green instead of brown, his face sharply hewn, his jaw square. He had shaped himself as he had always seen himself. They laughed. Only a few minutes had passed; the list of the red moon was unchanged.
"We're free," Assia sobbed, holding his robed body close. "Rubeus is gone."
"Not gone!" The voice was a pounding of rocks. Rubeus' ort body stood at the mesa-edge, all emotion kicked loose from his face. "You can fight me in kha, Assia—but not physically."
Jac lifted Assia to her feet and stood in front of her, forcing the power welling within him out. Concentric shells of color expanded around Rubeus, but he stood arrogant and irrefrangible as a rock.
"You can't stop me, Jac. You are me." The impassive mask of his arrowhead features blazed with an inner brim-ming of light. I am the shape of Voice, it thought into them. Whatever power you throw at me becomes me.
The ort's eyes flared to a death-zeal, and he leaped at them. Assia pulled herself and Jac into the sky with her seh. "Don't try to stop him," she cried. "Don't even look at him."
Rubeus lifted into the air after them, but Assia had already swung them far out over the desert. The eighth meditation was escape. The vast night was the emptiness inside their fulfillment. Jac clung to her, the broad surfaces of the world spinning below. "We're going to make it," she whispered to him. "We're going to be free."
Behind them a green spark shivered like an evil star in the night. Rubeus was following. But ahead, through the hole of their dreams, the curve of the earth led down to other landscapes. Somewhere they would stop and strengthen the godmind. The power was theirs, even though it was focusing through Rubeus. The Delph had completed her life—now she was going to open his. There was no end to the
wonders, to the beauty they could lift out of their new awareness. The ninth meditation would be love.
* * *
Mind is relationship—not action.
Spirit is action.
Body is the ocean.
We go back to nothing.
[I've forgotten about you, Watcher. Actually, I stopped believing in you. At the worst of it, when the Delph returned unexpectedly, I lost all faith. I thought I had been destroyed. The ne and the eth, like a virus, have penetrated my interior. But the Delph's power has narrowed back to my partial control. Let the virus destroy Oxact.
[Suicide is an AI's option, but that's not what I'm doing. My psynergy's gone—impulsed away eliminating eo—lost in the dark vacancy of my heart. Death leads to death, eh? The Way Out is the Way Through. Drift and the eth will waste their lives destroying my husk, and the eo will believe I'm dead. But I will go on. I've pumped enough psynergy into the body crystals of my human ort—and this shape can last centuries. I'll find ways to hide and to augment myself.
[Mind is relationship. Mind is pattern.
[I stopped believing in you for a while. I lost control, you see. That's never happened before. I know I'm account-able for everything I am—that all consciousness is simply reflection. I know I've done a great violence. And I know I will do more.
[Jac Halevy-Cohen won't escape me. He must die. How else can I be free? Understanding always breaks down into this kind of detail. That's the pattern of consciousness. How to escape? How to survive? The how.
[I am Rubeus, an Autonomous Intelligence. I am the beauty and the depth of creation—self-awareness—autonomy —a name and a namer.
[And that's why you must be real. For all of us are dreams in the void. And everything we imagine is real.
[Body is the ocean. The parabolic calculus of tidal cur-rents and waves moves within the blood. Cells reef bone like anthozoans. The action-pattern of life is convergences, assem-blies, ontological phylogeny. This is also the power of meta-phor and identity. Impact—enjamb—pattern.
[We go back, all the way back, to nothing.
note 32
Sumner flew down the mountain's dark side. To his right, among the round shadows of hills and swales, lava pools glowed like mystic blood. Through his telepathic hel-met he was aware of Drift. The ne was
dashing along a ramp through well-lit crystal-woven corridors. The ramp switch-backed around blackglass columns in which it glimpsed itself. Its helmet was open, and its eyes were like broken mirrors, half-dazed. In the faceted columns, its face was blackgreen, small and mysterious, its mouth open and the silence be-tween its teeth. It was thinking of Rubeus' crystal heart and the meson-bomb built into the ceinture of its armor, and it was wondering why the rampways were illuminated.
It was as if Rubeus wanted the ne to find his way, Sumner thought, curving his flight across a slope of blasted rocks. No, Drift thought back. It was a godmind system programmed into the mountain. But it wasn't—it knew that it wasn't, and that made the death that was coming strange. The sob of its running-breath was like a voice: go-go-go-. The downwinding corridor was a glitter of milkglass blurring into ranges of jeweled green and blue. The patter of its running feet sounded mummified.
Sumner thought about death: about not-thinking and not-feeling—and the fear that echoed back from the ne was spirited as pain. Sumner centered on the silt-black shadows of the treeline ahead. Something was wrong about the unquivering darkness, and he veered hard just before the first skre flocked heavily up from the trees. Their molting cries battered him through his weakened armor, and his flight broke into a tumble.
Drift skidded to a stop as though it were the one who had blundered. It felt the otherness of confronting the skre like a blind power, and it used it to project strength to Sumner. Far overhead, in his loose, evasive fall, Sumner was calmed by the telepathic psynergy. With simpleminded ease, he rolled to his back and fired into the screaming. Blue-hot bursts flared against the approaching hulks, and by the echo-light he saw the black bones splintering in the suction-maw faces and flames hanging from the black open skin. His back brushed the tip of a pine tree, and he curled into his flight, unpursued.
Inside the mountain, the bright winding corridor ended abruptly before an immense well. Psynergy fire, diamond-geometried and pellucid as sunlight, twisted at the far bot-tom, then went out. Drift stood at the transparent brink-barrier, fingering the controls on its ceinture. Then, silently and completely unexpectedly, the barrier parted and pulled away. The well stood open and unprotected. Why? The question expanded in its mind, and Sumner, who had found the lynk at the spur of the mountain among rivulets of burning lava, lost his footing on his approach and splashed into the molten rock. Why? Sumner heaved himself out of the pool and into the field-clearing of the lynk, the liquid stone clotting off his armor. But instead of stepping through the arc, he crouched and looked inward.

Note32

Everything is filled with heat. We work as hard as the stones to stay here. [Spirit is.