Radix

A gnatlike shimmering whirled around her so fast she felt as if she were dissolving into light. Her blood
more than her brain remembered this from previous trances. But she was going further than she had ever gone before, across torrential spans of change, moving so swiftly all distance was a single point, violently still.
Darkness flew by like howling apes, and she burst into a landscape of light: a garden of fire—spark-clustered trees, amorphously bright sedges and grasses of incandescent fila-ments. Black threads of darkness stringing out above the scene parted, and she fell into the spectral grove.
Welcome, Lul. It was a boy-child, distort pale, standing naked among florets of starbright energy, his white-gold hair shifting in an unfelt breeze. I'm glad you could meet me here. His words wobbled in the air like a lament, like something more sung than said. My veve is yours. It's no good to me anymore. I'm fading, becoming less— He raised a hand to his face, and two fingers broke off and sparkled to the ground like shooting stars.
Lul ached with fear. The boy dissolved into a muddle of frothing colors, and there was nothing left to see but chro-matic magmas soundlessly heaving through the blackness.
A child's voice opened in her: Relax, Lul. Nothing can hurt you here.
A kha-plaint curled around her, loud and close. It was the legendary cry of the voor dead, the brood soul. She was mindless with wonder and not at all surprised when Jeanlu's voice spoke from inside her: Lul, remember the nights we pondered this? How many worlds? How far away? I can tell you now, it's endless. There's no way back, but there is a beginning: Unchala—the mythic source.
Jeanlu! Lul called into the surges of moiling light. But there was no response. Had she, too, been a mind-ghost?
What she says is true, the child said in her mind. Unchala is part of my veve. Would you like to see where you came from, voor?
Bodiless and simple, Lul swooned away from words. Her mind yawned into a teetering vista of plasma fires. She moved through a vision more vivid than pain.
Streamers of fire resolved to a span of stars, each starburst a note, a radiant pulse of sound. The sky's dusty nebulae were all music's voice—
Night on Unchala.
"Lul!"
She shuddered awake. Clochan was stooped over her, wafting a smoldering taper of snakeweed beneath her face.
"Your bloodpaths almost closed," Tala whispered. Her hood was partially pulled back, revealing the tiny holes of her silver eyes and the iridescent scales at the corners of her mouth. But the girl's strangeness did not evoke the sadness in Lul it usually did.
"It's real," the old voor said, pushing to her elbows. "All the legends—everything the seers told us is real."
With hushed emotion, the others watched meekly from a distance.
"It's all real." Lul's eyes were shining. "I must go back."
"No." Tala squeezed the old woman's arm urgently. "The trance will swallow you."
"I'm old, Tala. I'm falling into my bones."
"Let us go with you," Clochan urged.
The old voor shook her head. "The two of you must lead the others back. Take this with you." She touched the co-coon. "It is Jeanlu's son, and he's strong. His veve looks back to Unchala."
The two younger voors stared at her, mute with surprise.
"This mage-child remembers the beginning, and he's open to any who would cross with him. Do you understand what this means for the brood?"
"Come with us, then." Tala helped Lul to sit up. The kiutl was still strong in them, and there was no need for words except for the intimacy of speaking.
"You go. My blacktime is beginning." Lul stroked the coarse surface of the cocoon and thrilled to feel the bright, kinetic force within it. "You don't know the beauty I've seen. And it's best you don't until you're ready to leave the salt."
Sadly, Tala and Clochan helped Lul to cross her kha with the child-mage. In their deep mind, they watched as their friend moved into Iz, the wide banks of steamy colors curving gently through the darkness of their minds.
Dimly, from a great distance, they glimpsed the spark of Lul's kha vanishing into the depths of another reality. And, for the last time, they heard her kha-plaint—a song both jubilant and lonely, like driftwood, far from land, with the wind in its branches, singing.
Chief Anareta waited in the night shadow of the Berth for his men to bring the Sugarat in. He was nervous. He didn't want violence in his station, but it was inevitable. Two of his oldest troopers had lost family in the riots that had followed the Sugarat's kills, and they were demanding blood. With the help of the other men they had ripped out the benches in the locker room and cleared enough space for a beating and a large audience. Word had been passed on, and men from every division in the city were showing up.
The chief leaned against the raspy stone of the Berth wall, well out of sight. He was a lanky, wolfish man who wore his black Masseboth uniform with the rumpled and casual ease of a soldier indifferent to his work. The brutish cruelty in the long lines of his face was not the pain of physical experience. Rather, it had been cultivated by five days of patrolling the wasted streets of McClure and three decades of violent imagination as a police administrator filing action reports.
Anareta had a white card, and the White Pillar had pulled him off his beat and had never really allowed him to risk his rare genes. As a young man he had dreamed of being a scholar of kro studies, although in his heart he had always known that economic necessity and family tradition would lead him into a military career. Only the genetic surprise of his white card had afforded him a taste of the academic life he had desired. Each year, during the three intervals that he studded for the White Pillar, he spent his free time with a scansule studying the fragments of literature and music from the fargone kro times. Strength of mind and pride of self made him a dutiful and efficient police administrator—but it was his white card and the undistorted age to which it harked back that he had come to love.
After Chief Anareta had learned that the Sugarat was a white card, his opinion of the killer had opened from indiffer-ence to respect. In his mind he saw Sumner Kagan as an unlucky shape of himself—a remnant of the old age when heroes risked everything to keep the race whole by fighting distorts. But most of his men—most of the human race— were distorts now. The bulk of Masseboth society were green cards, people who, though they had no visible distortion, carried in their genes the shape of a future that did not include men like himself or the Sugarat.
Ominously, Anareta's own men were working against him because of his white card. Shortly after the chief had learned about Kagan, he had asked the White Pillar Conclave to send an escort to protect the Sugarat from his vengeance-crazed division. Now it was obvious that those men were not going to arrive—that, indeed, the message had never been sent.
When the swayvan with the Sugarat came around the Berth wall and cruised toward the cement modules of the police barracks, Chief Anareta stepped out of the shadows. Not daring to use his hip radio for fear of alerting the other men, he hand-signaled the driver toward the arched door of his private office. The chief himself swung open the swayvan's back panel as the truck braked—and he stooped with amaze-ment to see the corpulent body trussed up inside. He had expected Kagan to be streetlean and fierce, and for a moment he thought he had been duped. But the knowing fear in the boy's eyes dispelled his uncertainty.
"Untie him and get him out," he ordered.
The guards clambering out of the van crowded about as Sumner staggered into the sheer light of a lux globe. His pudgy face was bright with fear. Blood harelipped from his nose, and a welt glowed across his cheek and down the side of his neck.