Radix

He closed his eyes to get in touch with Corby. Only the sound of his heart thumped in his ears.
The heat had thinned out of the air quickly. Sumner was quivering, and he started walking to warm himself. The ter-rain around him was filled with furtive movements and brief glimmers of gossamer shapes. Fear, he remembered. Teeth dreams. The thought reassured him and he felt his initial anxieties peeling away. He was left with shimmerings of dread and snips of language: Relax. . . you're easing home . . . nobody can jooch you now.
The vast solitude of the Flats and its soft, dusty light skimmed off his inner voice. He fell away from his thoughts into an alert quietude. Nothing was left to think about. It was just a matter of walking now, one step at a time, through this wonderland of muted light and crazy shapes. Exhaustion helped to keep his mind empty; fear kept it alert. And the hallucinated voices of the hind rats stalked him:
Two leg, you are beautiful—
O come with us
Away from these fever graves
To where our wounds can love each other. . . .
He veered deeper into the Flats, a great concourse of windswept shapes ranging around him. Time was without punctuation. Only the broken rhythm of his stride and the hot pain around his neck fixed his attention.
Intuitively he understood what Jeanlu had wanted from him. Life. All of it. The hot vapor she had breathed in his face was a psiberant—a means of digesting his mind so that she could take his body. The words she had chanted were intended to paralyze the conscious centers of his brain. The rhythms were still resonating through his nerves. He could feel them acting with the psiberant. Together they produced a sparkling, volatile energy that scrambled his thoughts while infusing his kha with unprecedented strength. Strength enough to realize: A little more of that power would have been death.
Movement, majestic and invisible as an ocean current, pulled at him. He moved with it, steadily, inexorably, trudg-ing through the hushed green glow of the Flats, until he came to a stairway of stone ledges at the edge of a huge bowl canyon. Boulder-choked defiles in the distance blazed bright seen like seams of spectral lava. The skyfires rustled above, blue and red, clouding all but the brightest stars. Through the draperies of smoky light the swayback Lion and the Goat Nebula flickered. By them he knew which way was home. He had tramped far from fertile land. This deep into the Flats, his mind blank as glass, polished smooth with fright, he was immersed in an almighty silence.
Astonished by his lucid serenity, feeling as though the edge of time were before him, he sat down on the rock ledge and let the cold air weld him to the spot. He was sure that he had come here for a reason. But there was only one reason huge and simple enough to match these lifeless ranges. Death. He didn't have to think about it. He knew he was going to die. And he relished it.
Light was everywhere—a drowsy ghost-bloom shining in the rocks, woozing down from the sky. The wind had stilled, and the canyon floor rolled toward the horizon with its arches of haunted rock. For many kilometers in every direction there was not one living thing.
This was the moment he had secretly craved for years. He knew if he eased up now, he would lapse into darkness and never wake. An end to loneliness and hunger and footsmells and clothes gone stiff with piss-acid and fear-sweat. Gone, the ugliness of being himself.
He took one long, sweeping look at the lifeless horizon: A few stars were tapping beneath the wobbly light of the skyfires. He closed his eyes and eased up. The cold seized him, and for a while he trembled so
violently that he knew he must disintegrate. Then warmth—a deep warmth: flesh fire, the heat seeping off his bones.
Inside, he didn't lapse into darkness. He was rooted in the warmth rising through him. Then his mindark went cold and bright. When he opened his eyes he was no longer alone.
Far away a string of flashes went off. A fleck of gold radiance was advancing among the ridged slopes, appearing and disappearing across the tableland. As it neared, the blink-ing fleck took on a definite form: a vortex of blinding energy.
A deva!
It leaned over the sandshelves, an immense, fiery whirl-wind, muting the green fluorescence of the Flats. Dense shadows cast by intervening rock ridges staggered before it. Closer, the vortex dipped behind the reefs of the canyon wall, and the desert around Sumner was again dark.
During the interval the shock wave hit. It rolled over the canyon, kicking up luminescent tufts of sand and hitting Sumner so hard he clattered over a bed of rocks and dropped to his back. A gust of wind-driven sand thrashed his face and arms, and then was gone. Overhead, muffled with distance, thunder throbbed.
From where he was sprawled he could see the rim wall brightening. Shafts of lucid, burning light cut through the darkness of the canyon, illuminating dunes, a ruffle of con-torted rock, and a basin cracked into octagonal plates. His eyes glared over. When he could see again, the sky was blazing with enormous sheets of fire. Curtains of grained gold light streamed down, passing through the rim walls, embrac-ing the entire canyon.
"Get up!" Corby's voice pleaded with sudden clarity. "I've sent this deva. Go with it."
A cannonade of squealing wind burst over him, drowning out the voor's voice. The sudden blast shoved Sumner side-ways down the incline, and he pushed against the wind to regain his footing.
"You're luned!" Sumner turned and again tried to move away from the canyon. But the suction of the gathering wind column hauled him back and sent him sprawling to the base of the rise.
The wind currents were mounting quickly, and the can-yon floor was boiling.
It was impossible to resist the drag of the sheering squall. In a flurry of ragged clothes and waving limbs, he tumbled toward the center. The closer he got, the more brutal the lash of wind became, until it was impossible to breathe. He stopped resisting, and his body bounded through the air into the explosive brilliance of the whirlwind.
He surged up through a buffet of twisting force where, for a moment, he hung suspended. A blizzard of blue-white sparks seethed about him. Far off, seen through an endlessly receding spout of silver-azure radiance, was the pale saffron body of a cold sun. And then, the colossal winds squeezed the breath out of him.
He blacked out.
When his senses cleared, his whole body clenched with terror and he nearly lost consciousness again. He was hur-tling through the air, thousands of meters above the ground, his aching, bruised body buoyed by a tremendous force. Below, wandering deep into the north, lay the shattered range of Rigalu Flats. Its crumpled, wind-scarped contours glowed faintly with a green washlight. To the west, the planet's rim was lit by the sun's corona, the sky above it condensing from aquamarine to a slow indigo-pitch. Dark lakes in the north reflected that light in starpoint flashes.
He hung to consciousness by a giddy thread—too shocked to think. Through wind-stunned eyes he watched the curve of the horizon bank, as the trajectory of his flight bowed into its descent. Towers of clouds in the distance, edged blue-red and purple by the celestial light, veered away. The silver glint of a strohlkraft moved in a tranced glide along the edge of the world. And there—close to his left, surrounded by the clawtracks of dirt roads and highways—squatted the dark fac-tories of McClure. Orange lights flickered within its smudge of clustered buildings.
The wind leaned on Sumner, and the path of his drop suddenly appeared taut and clear. He was going to come down in the trash fields on the outskirts of the city. Already he could see the buckled tin roofs of the dorga pits and the burning towers of the refinery.
The glare of the solar wind fell below the horizon, and the palisades on the southern lip of the Flats marched down the northern sky. The brown wasteland surrounding McClure surged closer. South of the city the bay looked dull-green and then black before it swung out of view.