Radix

"Kagan," Anareta whispered. "You're Sumner Kagan."
"We're both a long way from McClure." Sumner grinned.
Anareta sang with laughter. "You!" He squinted at Kagan. "How?" His laughter tarnished. "Two hundred thousand sol-diers were killed here."
Drift took Anareta's hand, and a love-receiving peaceful-ness bloomed through him. Our lives are the froth of reality.
Anareta nodded and sat down on the lump of a tree charred into abstraction. The seer stroked the back of the chief's neck, and his questions and doubt canceled. Knowl-edge moved in him, and he heaved back to alertness with a startled clarity. "Mutra!" His fingers trembled at his temples, and his wise eyes closed. "So that's it. Rubeus was a ma-chine." He opened his eyes, reached out, and touched Sum-ner. "Without those troops, it won't be long before the distorts take the Masseboth apart."
"There'll be no bloodbaths."
Anareta stood up and paced out his amazement. "So much to think about."
"Chief, listen to me." Sumner winked at Drift and with his open hands urged Anareta to stand still. "You helped me when I was helpless. Remember? Well, I need your help again."
"What can I do?" Anareta asked.
"Take a world off my hands," Sumner answered outright. "The eth is expected to replace the Delph as the planet's seneschal." His voice shrugged: "History, for me, is what the wind says. I'm not a leader. But you've spent your life study-ing the past. You know the lion-smell of time. I want you to be seneschal. You'll make the right decisions—the humane ones."
Anareta's face looked as if it had been worn by water.
"You can bring the Pillars of the Masseboth together,"
Kagan went on, "into a tower, a house of God. No more dorgas. No more distort pogroms. Let the world heal itself."
"Sumner, I don't know." Anareta slumped reluctantly, but within him, Drift saw the green of his kha golding with the idea.
"Seer," Sumner said, and he didn't have to say any more, for the ne was one-with, but he spoke aloud for Anareta to hear: "Help him make up his mind. I think you'd be a great seer for him—if that pleases you."
Life pleases me, Drift answered. The cycle is complete. I would like to be part of the new order. And you?
"I want to get lost for a while." Sumner glanced north at the towering force of the raga storm. "That's still a couple of weeks away. Before it hits, I'd like to see what's left of Graal—and myself."
The ne's smooth face curled around a smile, and the voltage of its affection sparked in its eyes.
"Watch after the chief and make sure the tribesfolk are treated well. Your work will be to find the Serbota in all the Masseboth." Sumner's voice thickened, and he had to gaze into Drift's small face with selfscan to loosen the knot in his throat: "I haven't heard a ne chant from you since Miramol. Have we cut through enough pain for you to sing again?"
Drift nodded once and chanted to the back of Sumner's eyes:
Pain is a rose of great peace.
Silence is the depth of a song.
And stillness is the space of our lives,
So empty it can hold everything.
epilogue
Sumner used his seh to fly south, leaving behind the scorched fields of Ausbok. In a flooded forest where rainbow fish bent through deep pools and blue egrets preened among fans of sunlight, he came down. The tall smell of the sea was in the east wind, and red butterflies tottered in the umbral air. This was the first time he had been alone since Laguna. And how long ago was that? No voor-voice or ne-telepathy answered him—and he smiled.
Following a bewilderment of rootbridges, he found the lonely soul of the place: a tarn among giant cypress. The immane screeches and caws of a startled rundi split his hear-ing as he pushed through a witching of grass, stooping here and there to collect plant fragments. He came to a slurry ridge where a pool spooned sunlight into myriad reflections, and he sat on a sponged log.
Instructed by vague lusk-memories, he arranged and rearranged the plantshapes he had gathered. From a mentis pod, geepa stalks, weed-scrim, and a curve of hawkwood, he fashioned a crude devil harp. He held the harp to his mouth, and though he had never played, his breath spun out of the voor instrument in music lovely and indifferent as spirit.
The song turning in his breath surprised him. He had never thought that there was music in him. A day-blue moon rose through the bramble of a moose maple while he musicked everything that he saw: silence moving up the trees with the afternoon, clouds folded like truffles. . . .
The wind sizzled in the bleached grass, and in the bends of his brain the sound was almost a voice. Corby's. But not really Corby. Not even the memory of him. Just a feeling: love; the desire for one-with even with nothing left. Corby was dead. And Sumner wasn't sure if he was alive himself or still demon-bound in Rubeus' trance. Memories of Bonescrolls, Dice, Zelda, and all the haunts that had held him, from his old car to Dhalpur to Iz, were compacted like a matchhead in his mind, ready to burn. But since leaving Ausbok, a peace-fulness had dilated through him. Gradually, as the evening's red shadows lengthened among the crosiers of grass, lifelove was making his memories seem far away and unimportant.
For several days, Sumner played. He was happy, smok-ing kiutl and raising the earthdreaming. The lifeforce streamed through him with a gentle strength. And in his mind, even death deepened, beyond fear and desire, to flow. This is long ago, he realized then, feeling the brevity of all life. Every-thing he looked at seemed to be floating thinly on a vibrant blackness. All is nothing. He laughed a lot during that time. And he thoroughcomposed his first song:
Dark purple clouds piled to the zenith on all but the opal crescent of the western horizon. Networks of lightning went up in the north like silent screams. When it was clear that the raga storm was only a day away, Sumner left the sullen trees and flew over the desert and the burn-crater of Reynii to the Liner field south of Ausbok.
All the Liners were gone. He spent that night in the empty field immersed in the utter darkness. The earth had burned, stars had cindered away, and now the skyfires were gone, hidden by storm-clouds. The water was coming and the wind. The cycle was closing. The wheel of the law was rolling on.
Before dawn, he rose and flew north. In the slewfooted riverplains below Ausbok, he found another Liner field. Three Liners remained, their spiderous shapes blue-webbed and luminous in the dense darkness. One twitched out as he approached.
He landed at the edge of the field and gathered an armful of kindling. Another Liner vanished as he built a small fire among the popple and rock furrows.
The one remaining Liner was his only opportunity to survive the terrible winds that were coming. But he was unconcerned. He was One Mind, a human expression of the earthdreaming, at the heart of the universe.
Sumner tossed a handful of dry duff onto the stunted flames and looked up into the lake of dawn. His life was the light's pilgrimage, an unfinished spirit crazed with all the unheard music turning in his body.
A smoky laugh swirled in his breath, and he blew into the devil harp smiling, feeling the escaping music in the loops of his blood, and remembering one of the ne's oldest sayings: What is the animal that lives to sing its song, after all, but the song itself?
Dawn expanded like a prayer, illuminating enormous pagoda clouds. Llyr, the morning star, appeared as his fire caught, and he sat back to watch the sun rise into his last morning on earth.
Everything is best.
APPENDIX
worldlini
A Line-node (psyn-echo) sweeps throi mental activity among humans frenzie
Assia Sambhava born.