Radix

At the poles, however, the gravity field was weakest, and an unusual thing had happened. The fabric of space-time had not completely closed in on itself, and energy streamed out— geysers of high-frequency photons surging against the black-ness of the dying galaxy, light from the core of infinity.
Located above one of these poles was Unchala. She was a rock half the size of the Earth. At one time she had been the football star's outer planet. Now she was held in place by a counterbalance of the collapsar's weak polar gravity and other nearby dark stars tugging to set her adrift. Caught between these forces, she hovered directly in line with the exposed core of the black hole, rotating slowly. Every point on her surface faced the collapsar regularly and was washed by the torrent of radiation.
The surface of Unchala was barren. Nothing could sur-vive the intense radiation. But below the heated shell of the planet, microorganisms flourished in the energy-rich, carbo-naceous interior. Some of them mutated and adapted for life in the hotter layers of the crust. In time, an organism pro-tected by silica armor appeared on the surface. The creature was the first voor ancestor. It was microscopic and short-lived, its life locked within a minute replica of the planet's shell.
Five hundred million years later, the surface of Unchala was no longer crater, flat, or airless. Vast calcite-silica reefs had accumulated like coral, dominating the landscape. Soon they began to climb into the black sky, and the gaseous metabolic wastes of the metazoa living inside them leached out, forming, over aeons, a rudimentary cloud ceiling.
With an atmosphere to breathe and to filter out some of the stronger energy, rubiplasts evolved—highly complex cells that used the collapsar's blue-green light for photosynthesis.
An explosion of new evolutionary forms followed, all of it contained within the immense reefs. Only the rubiplasts could expose themselves to the exterior, and even they couldn't survive long without backup cells within the silica shell.
By this time the reefs soared thirteen thousand meters above the surface. They were pitted, tubular structures with colossal knobby branches. The interiors were intricately con-voluted and filled with a dense humus of living systems, all symbiotically integrated around the light-catching capacity of the rubiplasts. Sentience began shortly after a manifold array of lenses developed just inside the apertures at the tops of the reefs. With these starprisms, the first voors selectively filtered out cosmic radiation, and as their awareness opened, they watched the universe unfold.
Corby laughed out loud imagining a human standing beside a fully evolved voor. The howlie probably wouldn't even realize that the mountains around him were alive. Huge, unmoving. Yes, but how awesome life was inside those silent reefs. Endless awareness, hundreds of millions of years long. Impossible to grasp with a howlie brain.
Ah, well—
He pitched to his feet and stood there swaying a mo-ment. From where he was, he could see the luff of brown vapors rising from the plot where he had buried Jeanlu's stalk charms. The charms, festering with a strange bacteria that had mutated from his fear-psynergy, were releasing methane, ammonia, and sulphide fumes. He would be happy when he could leave this doomed place. Weird, savage flies, black worms, and putrescent fungi had appeared since Jeanlu died, drawn, perhaps even created, by an imbalance of his power-ful kha. Fear shapes. Soon the surrounding area would be completely uninhabitable.
The clothes on the line were dry. He sniffed their clean-ness and walked past them to a metal tub at the pool's lip. Flies moaned around him, but none landed. He ignored them as he examined the large basin of water. It was tepid and sudsy. With a small kick he smothered the twigfire that was crackling in the sand below and began lathering himself with a soaked sponge.
Above, visible beyond the tangle of tree branches, a rael was circling. Its whorl of thoughtforms was urgent: Come to center. Come to center and extent.
Corby waved it off, an exasperated grimace on his child-face. Go away. Didn 't I tell all of you to leave me alone? Why are you still here?
The rael glittered above the pond, its transparent body casting no shadow on the rippled water. Come to center, Corby.
Corby turned his back on the creature. I am at center. What do you want?
To protect and serve. I can't leave you. To go's to stay. So you ve told us.
To stay is to go. Get out of here.
You are my guide, my teacher. I can't go.
The others left. They understood what I was talking about. Go with them.
Come to center and extent.
Corby turned back to face the rael. He looked down at the mud-lip of the pool where lank strings of weed were tangled in an almost recognizable script. After a moment, he had acquired the calmness necessary to hear out the rael. Center and extent. Express.
The rael gleamed as it tilted in the wind. The man who's come is dark— a wanderer of the void's edge.
I'm aware of the man. He's no threat to me.
A threat known to me. Indifferent to life. He's a voor-slayer and well armed. Let me kill him.
No! Corby stared fixedly at the rael, trying to probe its deepest intentions. But, like other artificial intelligences he had encountered, its awareness was incomplete, muffled as wool. All he sensed for sure was that it hated the man who had just arrived with Sumner—Nefandi. But Corby couldn't allow it to kill him. That didn't feel right to the mage within him. Get out of here. The man's no threat. I'll deal with him in my own way. But you've got to go, or you'll provoke him. Do you understand? My purpose is bigger than Nefandi. Go.
The rael was silent. From around the cottage another rael floated toward them. It had been waiting in ambush, waiting for the word to kill Nefandi.
Corby focused on the vivid tangle of scents blowing in off the pond. He was annoyed that these small-lifes were linger-ing, disturbing the clarity he needed to deal correctly with his father and the killer ort. When he had his anger in check, he looked up at the two raels hovering before him. It's hard for you, I know. You're human-made. Biological artifacts, designed to spy and kill. But you're learning. If you shave the world down small enough for you to be the center, you're left with nothing— alone. Specialization limits expression. Give it up. I've explained all this before. Don't you understand? Event is extent. Go and contemplate this. We'll discuss it later.
The two raels drifted off, desultory. Soon the brisk wind took them; they rose swiftly and were gone. Corby felt a momentary misting of pity. Raels, beyond their designed function, were helpless. They had no
heritage, no ancestral precedents—no culture. They had been created by the same technology that had shaped Nefandi. Questions of essence and meaning meant a lot to them. And, because his was the most powerful kha they had known, they believed he had answers.
Most of his childhood he had spent with them and the deva, another artificial being. They had been his playfriends, and in the telepathic union they had shared with him, he had shown them Unchala and the long voor-wanderings of Iz. And they had shown him what little they knew of the culture that had crafted them. Eo, their creators were called, and they lived in a private kingdom of their own far to the north. Nothing more about them had been left extant in the memo-ries of the raels.