Radix

Corby had believed that his father was timeloose, led by Iz. But when he probed deeply, searching through Sumner's memories, he saw a thing that convinced him his father's fate was intimately rooted in his animal past.
It was a childhood memory of a horse with a red ear and a white diamond on its nose. Sumner was about seven, and his father had taken him to one of the riding camps on the northern fringe of McClure. It was a day's outing, meant to break the tedium of a long, unexpected winter—the first and last winter Sumner had ever experienced. Riding tall and brave in the saddle of the small horse, a strange thing hap-pened. The heat of the animal and its dark, muscular odor gripped the boy and excited, in the deepest part of him, an unfamiliar urge: He wanted to hurt this shaggy, liquid-eyed thing. Leaves in its mane, the cold mist in its breath— somehow, he would make it hurt.
When they came to a frozen pond, he tried to take the horse across it. As soon as he rode it onto the pond, the ice cracked, and the horse fell. . . . Afterwards, his father and the owner of the horse took a rifle, a can of gasoline, and went out to the pond. Hearing the shot and watching the smoke rise above the trees, Sumner knew what he had done— but he didn't know why.
Corby understood. That day, as he pulled back from Sumner's mind, the boy's voice lingering—"I don't know"—he took with him an image: a memory of a child in a field among burdocks and frozen grass. It was dusk, and black tattered clouds were blowing through a gray sky above a line of cold lakes. Against a bare tree's hanging silence, mist silvering its thin branches, he stood staring at a dark bulk on the ice. Corby shuddered, because he knew the boy would spend the rest of his life standing there.
Nefandi was seated by the window, the cup in his hands half-drained, when Corby entered the cottage. The voor's eyes were bright and fluent as crystal.
"You came here to kill me, ort—but I'm the stronger dream."
Nefandi stood up, his face fear-simple, his hands open-ing. Before he could complete his gesture, a hammer of force slammed him between the eyes, and he was thrown to the floor.
Corby went over to his sagged body and whispered a chant to him in a night-tongue. Dizzy-eyed, Nefandi lurched to his feet, and the voor led him out through the stiff sunlight to the car.
To Corby, Nefandi was merely the backdrop of the pat-tern. Others would replace him until the Delph that was using him was destroyed. Stupidly, Nefandi believed his work was righteous, keeping voors and distorts off the planet—as if voors and distorts didn't have the intention and radiance of fate.
After Nefandi opened the door and crawled into the car, Corby touched him, and he woke.
"You're just a weapon, ort." Corby slammed the door, and the engine cracked to life. "You're a shape, not a life." The dark of the voor's eyes glinted like night-ice. "Go back to your Delph and tell him the voors have created a shape of their own to avenge themselves."
The car jerked into gear and rolled off. Corby stood among the fraying vapors and watched until the vehicle dipped out of sight. He was in a space hollowed of power. With a thought he could break Nefandi's mind. With two thoughts he could unfold that mind and take the body for his own. But he was a voor—he was more than the blind spasm of a mind. He was the pattern, and all his thoughts, fears, and ambitions were just a part of that pattern. He felt, more than knew, his purpose.
He returned to the cottage and lay down on Jeanlu's cot. Ornaments of sunlight hung on the walls, and he used their beauty to ease the moil of emotions in him. Moments were disjointed. One part of his being was looking backward forty thousand years to the last time this planet's magnetic field had lifted and voors had taken human form. Voors called that time Sothis: ten thousand years in which voors and howlies shared the earth. Knowledge had passed freely from the brood to the other simians that were alive then. Howlies learned from the voors about the starfigures, the fruiting power of the earth, and the abstracting strength of their own minds. But they were more violent than the voors had dreamed. When the magnetic field returned, the voors that were left on earth were all eventually stalked down by the howlies and trussed up as monsters and sorcerers. So ended Sothis.
Corby twitched, and his attention shifted from memory to perception. Sutures of sunlight tightened across his brow and cheek, and a tissue of sounds covered the window: the static of flies, the thickness of the wind, and the water noise of Sumner in the pool. The pattern was all. Vengeance, grief, strategies, were just the spaces in the pattern. Through the window he watched the graph of blasted trees bending against the clear emptiness of the sky.
Deep in his body he was changing. The enormous power of Iz was unthawing the shapes of his insides, remaking him. He didn't know what form he was taking. To be real and to be strong, the change had to be total. Even his mind was going to be remade by Iz.
A cumulus of thoughts filled the vacancy of his aware-ness, and he recalled Sothis and the infinite wanderings and why the kha was coursing so strongly in him: He was a voor mage, Corby Dai Bodatta, avenger of Sothis, hunter of the Delph—and he was nothing. The howlies had an unstable technological society far to the north; he was here to keep them from savaging voors—and he was not here at all. The window's pattern of consciousness showed a world of trium-phant sunlight and wind-wearied trees. See how it is all that it is? he said to himself with the last of his thinking.
Nettles of violet radiance charged the air around the boy's body, and expression lifted from his features. In a few minutes his eyes and nostrils were frothed with a pink bub-bling, and the clothing he was wearing had shredded away from his glassy, swelling flesh. His bonelines softened, and gold gossamer began furring out of his pores.
Sumner finished bathing and dressed hurriedly in his damp clothes. The brood jewels were all he could think about. He jogged away from the flies and skipped through the tree toward the stoneposted trellis. He entered the vine-tangled enclosure without hesitating, but he didn't look at the corpse's face. He stood unmoving before her, hands folded, gazing down at her reed sandals. He felt he owed her some token of respect. After a moment, eyes still averted, not wanting even so much as to glimpse that plastic-black, crushed face, he bent over her. A blunt odor of charred flesh spiked up his nostrils. He held his breath and looped his fingers through the platinum chain. It was only then, as he was trying to pull the necklace over her frazzled hair, that he saw her eyes. They were wide open and staring at him.
He jerked back, but in the same instant the crusted black hands snapped out with mechanical swiftness and grabbed him by the throat. Her grip burned like acid. He thrashed, dragging her out of the chair with the fury of his terror. Howling and tugging at her arms, twisting wildly, he tried to break free. But she clung to him. Her grotesque head was propped on his chest, the gold eyes screaming out of their sockets. Wheeling from wall to wall, desperately tearing at the gristled thing, he felt the strength in his muscles shrivel-ing. A coldness so icy that it seemed to be hot coursed into him through the hands of the corpse. As it filled up his chest, his knees buckled and his backbone slipped. Only his horror of the withered creature kept him on his feet and struggling.
Outside, Nefandi heard his wails and sprinted toward him through the trees. The Delph had trained him well. Despite his fear and the pain from the voor's blow nailed between his eyes, he had been unable to drive away. A bioresponse that the Delph had nerved into him had seized his body and driven him back. Until he completed his assign-ment his body would not let him go—even if it meant his death.