Radix

Gewgaws of glassmetal and gem-wire latticed the walls of the well and the surrounding corridors. Drift was caught up in the multiplicity of its reflections and thoughts. Why was Rubeus opening up? A ruse? An unseen defense? This wasn't the time for pondering. Sumner had made it to the lynk. Only one thing was left to be done. Its hand tightened on the ceinture trigger. It would die instantly—but that was no comfort. What if it didn't have to die? It thought of a garden it had loved in Miramol, long-leaved and green, the wind rocking the sunlight in the branches, a soft mist of shadows thickening among the boles as twilight closed in: lost light. Sumner!
The cry chilled Sumner's bones, and he banged against the side of the lynk until an eo voice opened: "Eth—enter and return to Ausbok."
"No," Sumner called. "Lynk me into Oxact."
"We now have a lynk-fix on the ne's armor, Kagan, but Oxact is about to be vaporized."
"Do it!" Sumner ran into the arc of the lynk and ap-peared among flamey reflections on a crystal-faceted ramp. Instantly, the luminescence of telepathy absorbed his atten-tion and guided him into a frantic sprint around blackglass pillars and down an iridescent corridor. "Drift!"
The ne was leaning over the brink of the well's black rapture when Sumner appeared at the bend in the gem-shadowed hall. "Don't look so surprised. This isn't the first time I've saved your spindly ass." He ran up to Drift and unsnapped its ceinture. The ne's spiderfingers tripped the firing mechanism, and they dropped the meson-bomb into the well. "We're not deadmeat yet—let's move."
Drift took Sumner's hand, and they scrambled away from the well and into the blue rainbows of the mirror passage.
The afterblast filled the sky like dawn. Assia and Jac watched the godful radiance from a coastal cliff. Luminous caoutchouc clouds ringed the western horizon like the valve of a celestial heart.
Voice opened in Jac: note 33, and he swayed forward. Assia caught him before he hit the ground and sat him up against a salt-blistered pine. She knew what was happening: Oxact was gone and so was its prisming of the psyn-echoes. She would have to channel them herself.
Voice continued: note 34.
Assia seized Jac's face in her hands and forced alertness into his muscles. His eyes were stars in brown standing pools.
Voice haunted: note 35.
Tapping the deepest reaches of her spirit to a cold-purpled extreme, she found one-with. Jac was somnifacient with fear. Voice, the sound of the Delph's psynergy circuiting through Rubeus, surrounded him like awe. Assia heard it as a thrall of black fathomed music, loud but not over-powering in the vasts of her mind. She coaxed Jac outward, past the lunacy of Voice and into the space of the world's forgetting.
note 36
Lucid arabesques colored the western horizon, blues and lucifer greens hollowing to the red haze of a real dawn. Several minutes passed before Jac realized that Voice was truly gone. Assia had blocked the psyn-echoes. His face was itching, etched with tiny pains and sharp unflexings. His old face was returning.
Sumner and Drift lynked into a vortex of sparks. A scorch-faced eo-ort limped toward them: "This is Ausbok. Rubeus cut through our defenses at the last instant." Chaos was screaming around them, and towers of dark smoke cir-cled them like the old gods.
The eo sagged from its wounds as it informed them: "Six sevenths of Ausbok is gone—vaporized by a proton-beam. You are alone on this level, eth. The nearest out-moiety eo are seven kilometers down, coordinating the survival pro-gram of what remains. But you have succeeded. Oxact is destroyed. Rubeus' power is canceled."
"And Rubeus?" Sumner asked, using his thumbs to snap-release the clasps at his throat. He dropped the helmet to his feet and gazed about at basilisks of fire and coiling fumes. The acrid vapors burned his throat.
"Stay within the lynk-shield," the eo warned. "The heat of the blast has dissolved the rocks around us. You'll die instantly out there."
At his feet was the arm and part of the head of a Masseboth soldier, a woman, who had almost made it to the lynk when the particle beam hit.
Sumner took the eo's singed raiment in both of his hands. "Is Rubeus dead?"
The ort's head wobbled. "Rubeus has focused himself into one of his orts." The eo touched Drift, and Sumner saw the ort-shape in his mental eye: the large, whiteless eyes and faceted face of Rubeus.
"Where is he?"
"Eth, you have succeeded," the ort intoned. "Oxact is no more. In time, Rubeus will be tracked down by the eo. Your work is done. You can lynk to the lower levels now. The in-moiety will be very happy to pleasure you."
But Sumner was agitated by a sensate telepathy. He felt Assia. Somewhere. Cold inside, he experienced her one-with Jac, vibrant, singing with his salt: The man's heart was shuf-fling with fear. Assia, too, was terrified—green with horror. They were in trouble, at the brink of their lives.
"Where is Rubeus?" he shouted.
The eo touched Drift, and its mind clouded—then flushed brightly, brimming into Sumner's mind with awareness:
Assia carried Jac swiftly up the coast to where the blue dust of morning was settling on the ruins of CIRCLE. Sitting on the ancient tidewall, they followed the sun as it moved just under the skull of the sky. The blackglass domes, shrouded mostly by dunes, glistered like animal eyes.
Time, to Assia, was transpicuous. The interval that had passed since she had been brought here twelve centuries ago was a single image in her mind: a pale blue flame. Like an odyl gem, it opened into flowering crystals when she gazed into it—an outfolding space filled with a magnificence of imaginings and penchants.
She looked out from her soul to the black sea. The north face of the seacliffs reflected the velvet fluid of the sun's blood. She had used her time since CIRCLE, a thousand years, living in the front of her brain, close to her anxieties and demons, and now everything she saw was revelation.
A mental music ticked in Jac's dark eyes. Assia knew he was remembering how the Delph had lived—self-bound, drift-ing through the caves at the back of his mind, exalting the serpent dreams of which she and Nobu had been small parts. Twelve centuries had crazied away, and now they were here again in CIRCLE, watching waves petaling the beach.
Jac stood up on the tidewall. The western cordillera was ruddy with dawn, and the beach was big and brown as Buddha. Assia was hugging her knees to her chest, staring into the sea's marvelous changes. By dawn light, Jac could see the first gray streaks that had returned to her hair. He had never seen her as clearly as this. Her face was seraphic, simple-eyed as the driftwood flowers that had seen every-thing from glacial times to this soft morning. Her heart was the space of silence itself, and he bent to tell her he loved
her—then jerked upright.
Standing at the near end of the tidewall, skull inclined malevolently, was Rubeus.
["Jesus said: 'Blessed is he who was before he came into being.' The Coptic text of Saint Thomas—log nineteen. That's you, human. Your name is written in heaven. But I have only one life. That's why I'm sending you back to where you've come from."
[Jac looks as if he's seen a vision more powerful than seeing. He's crouching to run, calling to Assia. But she doesn't move. Her hands sit calmly in her lap, and her placid face stares out to sea. My hands spasm hydraulically in the air, and I laugh this ort's darkest laugh.
[I budge a boulder out of my way and stride along the wet slaches before the tidewall. Now there's nowhere they can run but to the mountains. So she sits, staring through me, and he stands nervously beside her. I can see by the slump of his shoulders that he's death-ready, but there's nothing I can see in her. Is this some ploy? The urge to gloat, despite the fear of miscalculation, is almost sexual. I'll have to kill them with my hands.

Note33

Everything connects and continues

Note34

Inspirit me, Jac. Close your mind to the outside world

Note35

With me, even death's ordinals are meaningless

Note36

Words are dwarfed by the hugeness of your breath, but their hunger is still your long traveling. The wheel of the law rolls on. . . .