Radix

"I said 'learn'. I hope you noticed." He took a few puffs on the cheroot and then wedged it into the console so that its smoke coiled between them. "It's natural to be scared when you're threatened. You've got to teach yourself to be calm. The secret is separating the facts from the teeth dreams."
Sumner pursed his lips and flicked a questioning look at him.
"You know what I mean," Nefandi said, his voice like jagged metal. "Static thoughts. Nervous fantasies. Nightmare-gnashed molars. Teeth dreams."
"I know," Sumner said cautiously.
"You're tripping over your own shadow. Relax."
Sumner bobbed his head. He wanted very much to change the subject. "This Power that cleaned up Rigalu Flats— the Delph. What created it?"
Nefandi didn't respond. He gazed out the window, suck-ing meditatively on his cheroot. Sumner sensed that their conversation was over, and he gnawed his lip and turned his stare toward the plated curves of the road. Ahead, vision doubled in the heat scheming over the rocks.
To their left, dunes of chrome-green sand sloped around sleek, storm-polished arches. On the right, two hundred meters of chalk rock leaned over them. Spangles of fire grass, cane, and salt cedar covered the skull-rocks.
The turn-off appeared from around a tight bend. Sumner wheeled into it, swung the car into an alcove of big-boled trees and killed the engine. The scene beyond the trees was nightmared. The adobe cottage with the coral swayback roof was barely recognizable behind veils of dodder and vetch that had swarmed over its walls. The bottoms of the flower troughs beneath the windows had fallen out, dried mud clotted the cedar steps, and the roof was tattered, missing most of its tiles. The crater pool and the blue-roofed hut couldn't be seen through the miasmic vapors that were steaming softly out of the ground at the side of the cottage. Sumner's heart sank.
But Nefandi was excited. Fear and eagerness competed in him as he opened the car door. The muscular sensation that had been haunting him for days lay all around him. There were definitely voors nearby, and he clutched his sword as he stepped out. Man-high grass, crackled and yel-low, swayed over what was once a garden. The white sand beds in front of the cottage were banked against the walls and littered with dead leaves.
In the shade, he noticed, the land was not dried out but was black and glistening. He looked at the ground around him and saw that it wasn't mud that was catching the light but glossy black worms. Patches of them were everywhere, crawling and writhing in the shadows. A movement made him look up. It was smoke—no, it was a breeze of flies swarming out of the trees and swooping toward him.
His hand under the serape quickly twisted the hilt of his sword. The weak field that came on around him deflected the swarm, but a few of the more savage flies got through and stung his flesh. He killed one of them. It was long and sick green with huge mouth-parts and red eyes.
The fear in him overcame his eagerness, and he looked around carefully. Queer fungi sprouted on all the trees, and an iridescent sheen glazed many of the limbs and trunks. The yellow-brown vapors billowing out of the earth near the cot-tage were blowing away, but nauseating whiffs still reached them. A rushing wind brought with it a pall that smelled like vomit and a sound of clothes flapping on a line.
A darktime hovel, he thought, scanning with the sensex. Two transparent beings passed slowly over the cottage. They were so close that he could see their clear-spiked combs and the cilia rippling along the hems of their bodies. Among the cilia, he spotted two pendulous sacs studded with quills.
Raels! he cried, almost aloud. What the rauk are raels doing this far south?
The raels drifted away from him, and he overrode the impulse he had felt to dive back into the car. Raels were a lifeform created centuries ago by the eo to protect their first settlements. They had been designed to carry nematodarts. The darts were small and thin, but they could be fired across a long distance, and they pumped a neurotoxin that was instantly lethal.
Nefandi continued to watch the raels as he looked around. He couldn't believe that voors were living like this. He had always known them to be meticulous about what was theirs except in old age, when they withdrew into their darktime and lost power. But if the algid psynergy rippling over his skin was to be trusted, this was not a place of old voors.
Scanning the yard and the cottage with his sensex, Nefandi detected no blue biospectral energy, just an orange glimmer-ing from the plant-life. He was perplexed. His tingling flesh told him there were at least six or seven voors ahead of him, but none of them were leaking kha. That's impossible, he told himself, tempering his fear.
"Mutra!" It was Sumner. He was just crawling out of the car and had stopped in the door.
Nefandi followed his gaze into the sky and stiffened. One of the raels was directly overhead, glistening among the trees—a gelatinous shape, big as a man. It was formlessly intricate: a mass of clear jelly-ruffles rippling in the sunlight. The wind shifted, and it turned, vanishing into its transparency.
"What was that ?" Sumner cried. For just an instant, he thought he had seen a bloodspot netted by a fine blue tracery inside a bulbous, frilled thing.
"Don't know," Nefandi lied, watching it and its compan-ion in his sensex as they circled the cottage. That rael was close enough to kill me, he realized. Stay alert!
But there were too many uncertainties to assess at once. Why wasn't he dead? The raels and the eo had been opposed to the Delph's autocracy since the godmind's power had begun to diminish. What were those raels doing here if not hunting him? Where were the voors he felt but couldn't see? All his senses screamed danger, and he had to stare deep into the sky's nothingness to calm himself.
Sumner tagged along behind Nefandi as he approached the cottage. For some reason the flies weren't bothering Nefandi, and he stuck close. The reek of dead things and the vapors rising from the earth set his teeth on edge. He wanted desperately to get away. His heart was pounding, and the flies and the blue and green fungi clumped big as quartz crystals on the tree trunks made his dread even more acute.
At the cottage Sumner saw that the door was shut. It was slashed with a large patch of gloss, as if a giant slug had slimed across it. He was relieved when Nefandi didn't try to enter. The windows were splattered with mud and dust, closing off the interior. Flies whined around them, and the sound of laundry thrashing in the wind grew louder and then receded.
Sumner searched about for anything that had retained its naturalness. But the whole yard was languishing with decay: All the tree barks were puffed and graying, the sod around them sagging away into cracked dirt. Even the grass was crazed with nodules of blue fungus or shining with slime and worms.
"Let's go to the other side." Nefandi's voice startled Sumner. It sounded low and gentle, almost surprised. There seemed, perhaps, to be a hint of fear in it. Sumner hesitated, but the flies clouded over him as Nefandi moved away. Waving his hands about his head, he scurried after him.
Behind the cottage, under the tamarind trees that ringed the crater pool, Corby sat naked in the tall grass. The mud of the pool-rim, shiny and black as frogskin, mottled his body. He sat with his legs crossed, his eyes half closed. The earth around him was dark with the sinking of things: rumpled, decayed weeds, the purple droppings of some birds, a narrow trail where a snake had slithered. A tiny flower hung like a flame against the dark mulch, its red petals tilted and tattered by the wind.
Corby's whole mind was on it. He was trying to shut out the sickness, the alternating waves of fear and lassitude. One moment he had been slumped out in the mud, trembling with grief because his mother was dead and his house was in darktime. The next, he was sitting up, bewildered by his anguish. Wasn't he a voor? Hadn't he been shaped out of light, time and time again, on countless worlds? How many mothers and children and lovers had he known and lost? Nothing could change that. And nothing could keep what he was now from dissolving into the future.