Radix

His reasoning eased him into a mindless languor. But it would last only a few minutes. Then the fear of going on alone would build up in him again. To break out of it, he centered himself wholly on this flower beside his leg. Grad-ually his vision wavered and thinned as the tensions inside him slackened. The wind shifted, and the laundry on a line strung between the trees stopped fluttering. A dead calm settled for a moment over the pool. Somnolent odors of wet stone and still water thickened, but he didn't notice. His awareness was fixed on the flower.
Soon nothing was left of him but a skein of energy wound about the thread-stem and its petals. Inside, he was alone, the sunlight singing softly, the warmth flowing through him. His querulous mind was quiet, dazzled by the drone of the plant-life, fibers grained with sunlight.
Deeper, another, quieter self blinked into awareness. It was the mage, the timeless part of him, the nomad spirit that remembered many bodies, many worlds. Now that the mind was fixed, furled deep into the tiny plant, kha opened into its own world: a vast granular mindarkness seething with life energies.
In that bright darkness, Corby lingered. From here he could move into any reality. He looked about. A blood chill was blowing out from a corner of the darkness where the unspirited voor dead endlessly relived their lives as the brood soul. He recognized an area where the darkness was inky thick. That was the cellular core of his life, the route into the body. But he didn't want to drop into that swamp. He had fixed his mind on the flower to escape his sickness. A descent into the slow-burn of the body, with its bog of cells and its muscular energy, would just start his thoughts turning again. And he couldn't subject himself to the waves of rootless desires, deathsmells, and garbled memories that surged out of the darkness of the voor dead.
Instead, he waited—his mind coiled into the flower, his kha aware but still. As long as he could keep himself poised like this, conscious but not acting, he was himself—his true self. Neither a howlie nor a voor. It was a delicate state of being, easily lost. But for the brief moment that it lasted, he was able to see himself for what he was: pure sentience, exultant, measureless. It was his body—whatever form it might have—and the patterns of energy sparking through his body that limited his awareness. Only now, for just this instant, was he free. No thoughts. No sensations. Just sen-tience, lucid and solitary as space.
Corby relished his freedom until his kha began to stir. It was restless. It wanted to shapeshift through his memories or shadowshoot with the thoughts in other people's brains. But he restrained it a while longer. The tension between his human neurology and his voor consciousness was exhilarat-ing. A moment ago the same difference had been an anguish. Now at least the two parts of him were easier to control. He could amuse his mind with the lifespark of the flower, while his kha went on a tour of remembered worlds. Which life would it be this time?
He projected backwards through his deepest memories. Soon he found what he was seeking, and he willed his kha to an ancestral world where only a handful of voors were strong enough to go.
The world was called Unchala. It was the oldest voor memory. So old that only those with extraordinary kha could summon it up. Those who could returned often, for the beauty of the place was consuming. Experiencing it, even once, left strong, nameless desires that took months to quell.
The sky of Unchala, as he remembered it, was a cascade of stellar energy: pearled light, glassy and shifting. The first ancestral voors lived on that energy, absorbing it like plants, feeling it like music. The long outward curve of actinic en-ergy sifted through them and created a perception full of distance, flow, and color. Silence unfurled and stretched into gulfs of streaming light. Hues, shadings, blends, followed. Voor sentience, as it evolved on Unchala, was continually opening up, becoming aware of wider ranges of possibility. There was music in the starlight, thinning out with distance, melling with other energies in a liquid sound: the gentle, faraway songs of other galaxies. And there was orgasm, flares, starbursts of sensation, as Unchala swung around to face its unique sun.
But no— Corby didn't want to remember daytime on Unchala. Such memories were deliriously intense, draining. Far better to stay with the night, where energies were sepa-rable and tight with shape.
Night on Unchala was a contemplative time. Voor aware-ness expanded and deepened, listening with all its scope for the faint and lonely rim songs, or feeling far into the narrow starlanes for the looser, wilder forces pulling the universe apart. Yet, the more the first voors strained, the deeper the distances plunged. There was no boundary to perception—it widened beyond grasp, beyond all the images and sensations of
the voor experience. And it possessed the voors with awe and an indomitable serenity. The universe was infinite, a multiverse, its form the shape of constant change.
Seeing the universe in that way, limits were gone and everything was possible. In time, the voors evolved beyond time. When Unchala's orbit eventually decayed and the planet fell into the collapsar that was its sun, the voors had evolved to the point where they could leave their physical forms behind. Disembodied, the voor awareness merged with the radiation that was streaming into the black hole, and they became the longest traveling light that shines through the multiverse—psynergy itself. That flow of radiation which car-ried their psynergy-patterns across infinity, they called Iz.
Something snapped, and Corby was yanked out of his reverie. The wind strode in from over the water and loomed through the high grass. The flower he had been focused on was pressed into the shadows. The plant-drone dimmed, and his mind reeled back into himself.
The shadows were the same. Only an instant had passed. He rubbed his face with his hands and stretched. His anxiety was gone. The few moments he had spent in Iz living his past had eased him.
Settling into his new calm, he was amazed as always by the regenerative powers of his kha. He wondered if he would ever be able to merge it with his mind so that he could know many of the things that now he could only feel. What would it be like if he could translate his memories into human sensory images?
He lay back in the cool mud and looked up at a nickel-gray plateau of clouds. From what he remembered of his past, he contemplated how his howlie senses would perceive his ancestral homeworld.
Nothing much was to be seen in that corner of the universe. Unchala's galaxy had been old a billion years before the planet formed. All the neighboring stars had fallen in on themselves long ago. The sky, night and day, would be black to howlie eyes. Four or five distant white dwarfs were all that burned against a dense wall of hydrogen clouds—a husk of stellar gas thrown off during the galaxy's death throes.
The most spectacular sight would be Unchala's sun. Seeing it from a distance, it would certainly look puzzling: two fountains of rainbow energy shooting in opposite directions. Bridging the blind gap between them were incandescent arcs of plasma dropping away from the main jets. The two torrents of light blazed like auroras: a smoky red at the sides where the plasma streams shot out and fell back, and an iridescent blue-green, ice-bright, along the central currents pulling away from each other. It looked like a misshaped binary, but it was actually a single star.
The blackness between the sprays of light was the col-lapsed body of the star. Once, a hundred million years before there was life on Unchala, the dark star had been a red supergiant. A companion white dwarf distorted it into a foot-ball shape so that when, at the end of its life, it collapsed, it formed an enormous thread-shaped discontinuity—a black hole. Everything that approached was snatched by the collapsar's immense gravity field—photons, asteroids, cur-tains of interstellar gas. Inside, the discontinuity decreated all of it.