Radix

He looked west again. Static prickled over his cheek and brow as he strained the sensex to its limits. He was looking for psynergy, the lifeforce. A dim blue energy glowed for an instant over the gray waste. It was about forty kilometers away. Perhaps it was the voor-child he had been sent to destroy.
Since he had been dropped into Rigalu Flats, he had been sensing a strong psynergy in the area. He felt it as a furtive muscular sensation, definitely biospectral in nature, but until now he hadn't been able to see it or accurately assess its proximity.
Biospectral energy, psynergy or kha, as the voors called it, permeated everything. That was how he had first spotted Sumner—a scarlet pinpoint in the distance. When the car was in sight he had known by its shimmering luster that it wasn't going to slow down. So he stalled its engine with the field-inducer in the haft of his sword.
Was it worth it? he wondered, knowing that every time he used the inducer he revealed his exact location to every timeloose distort in the desert.
He allowed himself a moment to clear his mind. Clarity, he knew, was his only hope of finding the voor he was stalking. After two days of circling through this ghost city he was nerve-weary and dreamy, and he gazed down into the dust patina of his boots, hoping to drain his mind.
Nefandi was an artificial man, designed and bioengineered by the eo, a powerful technocracy four thousand kilometers to the north. There, a dreamworld had intrigued into reality—a world without distorts, dissatisfactions, or death. It was an outpost of a cosmic empire vaster than human thought, where the starkest pleasures were open to everyone. Nefandi's fa-vorite rapture was coobla, a drugless midbrain stimulator that cramped him with bliss.
Psyfactored by his creators to emphasize pleasure over individuation, Nefandi had known the immense ravishment of coobla countless times and was always irreplete without it. He was a total product of his society. His body had been grown by the eo in the id forest outside the biotectured city of Cleyre to serve as an ort, a handservant. He remembered nothing of his time as an ort, for only his body had existed then. Centuries later, after those whom he had been created to serve no longer needed him, the eo allowed his mind to emerge. He lived free for a time while the eo watched to see what he would be useful for. He could have traveled and explored the world that had created him. He could have devoted himself to the immense culture around him and expanded his awareness and his social value. But his psy-factoring was stronger than his free will, and he gave himself over to coobla, the beatitude of nervelocked joy.
A lifetime of unmitigated delight slunk by before his common resources were spent and the eo took the coobla from him. To return to his ecstasy trance he needed a bene-factor, someone who had a use for him and who could pay with coobla. And that was why he served the godmind called the Delph.
The Delph at one time had been the strongest being on the planet. A century before Nefandi was created, the Delph had a span of will huge as the earth. He was the gateway to the multiverse, and the contours of the manifested world were the shape of his whim. This was so because the Delph had been able to receive and conduct the subtle psynergy radiating from the galactic core. But the psynergy he relied on was directional and shifting. As starpatterns changed, the galactic psynergy slimmed, and the Delph had become again no more than a man. He was still the Delph in title, and he souled a technology unmatched anywhere on the planet, yet his only real power was his mystery.
To protect himself against godminds with other sources of power until his own starchanneled psynergy returned, he shaped Nefandi into a killer. For many years now, Nefandi had been fulfilling the Delph's will by stalking timeloose distorts, rogue eo, and voors whose psychic reach fringed on godmind. At the completion of each kill he returned to Cleyre or Nanda or Reynii and was allowed to lose himself again in coobla for a few years.
That was Nefandi's story: pleasure as fetish. And why not? he often pondered. Who was he anyway?—a motherless, fatherless ort. Consciousness was delirium, he had come to believe, and sometimes he frenzied himself wondering if he was whole or if his soul was just hunger. Useless to ponder. Destiny is too huge to be held by any one mind.
Thoughts and hunger thinned away from Nefandi as he relaxed himself, and he sensed once more a strong, steady pulse of kha somewhere to the west. He looked about, but there was nothing to see.
Kha sometimes was elusive, especially in the blue re-gions. The shorter the wavelength, the more advanced the intelligence behind it. Usually. The sun in the biospectral range looked dazzlingly blue. Kiutl plants and harpy eagles were also blue. So were voors.
Humans glowed with a shifting yellow-green. Which is why he finally decided not to kill the fat boy. Sumner's kha was sunburst gold. His soma, 's strong and unmarred, Nefandi could see as Sumner pulled his pants over his broad, quaver-ing buttocks. Senseless to destroy such a rare creature.
When he had first grabbed Sumner's ears, he had felt the pulse in his throat and fingered the glands there. The boy had a strong heart, and though he was overweight, it was a layered obesity. The adipose tissue cells had not yet begun to break the fascial symmetry of his body. So it was clear that it was a neurotic and not a biological problem. Helping him out of the car, Nefandi had probed a few neural ganglia and had tried to release some of the somatic tension locked in the surrounding muscles. It was useless. Beneath the fat, the boy was tight as brick.
As he cinched his pants, Sumner thought of bolting, but the idea was zaned. He would never survive the walk back to McClure. He would be easy prey for the hind rats and the poison lizards, and that thought urged him back to the car.
Nefandi was eating the orange that Sumner had left on the console. He spoke around the fruit: "I want you to take me to your voors."
Sumner stiffened, and the breath of a lie snagged in his throat: Nefandi was fingering the Eye of Lami that had been dangling inside his car, the sun flashing like wisdom in his mirror-eye.
"The car's bust," Sumner mumbled.
Nefandi grinned, and one hand slipped beneath his serape. The car jumped to a start.
Sumner's heart shook. "Who are you?"
"There's a lot to tell. Get in the car."
Sumner stooped in and squeezed behind the steering wheel. Nefandi threw his hat in the back and eased into the passenger seat. He leaned close to Sumner, and his breath was hot and dark: "Tell me everything about the voors."
Sumner shrugged and stepped on the accelerator. "They're just some friends I have down the road."
"Voors are never friends."
Sumner flinched at the animosity in Nefandi's voice.
"Voors look after themselves." Nefandi finished the or-ange and hurled the skin out the window. "They're a brood. That's what they call themselves. Not tribe or family. A brood."
His voice was sharp, and Sumner tried to change the subject. "How'd you get out here?"
"It wouldn't mean a croc to you." Nefandi spit a seed out the window. "Tell me about the voors."
"A woman and her boy," Sumner muttered. "Jeanlu and Corby. She makes charms."
"And the boy? Is he timeloose?"
Sumner frowned ignorantly.
"Does the child have deep mind?" Nefandi pressed. "Does he have powers?"
Sumner shrugged, and the one-eyed man punched him in the ear. "Tell me!" The car swayed, and Nefandi put one hand on the wheel and the other on Sumner's throat. "And don't lie."
Sumner gagged a stiff breath and rasped: "Corby's strong."
Nefandi released him and sat back, a shade of satisfaction in his eye.
Shame congested Sumner's breathing, and his vision darkened. He debated taking advantage of what little power he had. One sudden swerve at the right moment and both of them would pass Beyond quickly. Would that be better? He faced Nefandi and saw himself in the mirror-eye. He was surprised to see that there was no fear in his reflection. The bright beads that were his eyes gazed tonelessly above his chubby cheeks. He was pleased with himself, for he knew that this man might kill him.