Radix

The storm passed, and he listened to rain-leavings: the hum of water puddling; the sigh of puddles wrinkling to mist. The snap of a drop against a naked root alerted him to himself: He was lying soaked, cold, and sunken in the black humus, breathing through his mouth. But he didn't move. Something awesome had happened to him during his forest sleep. He couldn't say what it was—but he knew.
Hearing the varied patterns of leaf drops, the sparge of ferns, the irregular rhythm of vine-sprinklings, he experi-enced power. Not stamina or energy but quiescence. As he rose out of the exhaustion of his hysterical run, he felt clean as the white woodmeat he saw beside him in storm-broken branches. The power he was experiencing guided him effort-lessly over the uncertain forest floor, and with it came an impeccable clarity. The world had become transparent: He saw where the wind, swollen with rain, had tided, forcing out life or killing what remained; and he saw through the slides of mud and branches where small animals were hidden, drugged with cold. In exposed rock, one glance at the lithified sedi-ments revealed the whole history of the forest—a buried river bottom, a vanished desert. Control wider than intent had shaped everything, as it had shaped him. But, as chaotic as it seemed, there was controclass="underline" reeds designed to sway with wind; leaves wax-coated and shaped to shed rain; each preda-tor a prey, untangling its own small knot of time.
Sumner turned his clarity on himself. Strolling casually along the forest's edge, all his senses poised, he realized that the total control the Rangers were pushing him to develop had always been his—it was just a matter of ease and recogni-tion. His body, like the forest, was a precise ecology. The bacterial tides in his blood could be felt by the strength or lethargy in his muscles, and they could be modified with herbs, breathing, food intake. His irises worked autonomi-cally, but he had learned to tense and relax those subtle muscles by first recognizing and then imagining the feel of light and darkness. In a similar way, he had learned to lure blood away from a wound, and to regulate the temperature of different limbs, and to hear with his fingertips. But the secret, he understood now, was not in diligent control but in recognition and compliance. It was so easy.
Images of his past materialized in the pauses between his breathing. Instantly he fixed his mind on the tocking of tree toads, thunder rumbling over the forest's eaves, an orange uteral blossom unmolested by the storm, before he caught himself trying to catch himself. Relax— He let his memories unwind, and as each
one passed through him, he looked at it the way he would a jungle covert for the things it hid. And he saw that all his life he had desperately been trying to control everything around him.
A deep memory from the only winter he had ever expe-rienced filled him, and again he saw the shape of his breath, ice-enameled steps, fangs of ice in the trees, snow-dervishes spinning down the streets, and a red-eared horse with a white diamond on its nose. Clearly he recalled the urge to hurt that horse, to assert his mastery. And he remembered riding it out onto the pond— It was then that he had first equated violence with control.
The memories continued, and with his remorseless clarity he watched himself rage at his father's death and continue to rage as the Sugarat, driven by the constant dread that his father's control would never be his.
Sumner wandered through the narrows of the forest, retracing the course of his life. He cut through the shame and guilt of the many years he had spent deceiving his mother, and he fully experienced and then abandoned the tenacious nostalgia he felt for his car, his room, his scansule, and, at last, he perceived how his need for command had made him a dupe for voors. All the memories of Corby and Jeanlu that he had so fanatically evaded over the years returned undi-minished. Sensations ghosted through him: the bloodchill that sparked around Corby's body; the deathchant that Jeanlu's corpse had chattered in his face while hanging from his neck; and the deva—the ruby light, the cold saffron sun, and the maddening, impossible flight over Rigalu Flats. At this point he came to the edge of the forest, where sunset-lengthened shadows stretched black into infinity.
He moved out across the grasslands at an easy gait, reviewing his past in the scarlet light. He walked all night, traveling where starlight blew off the water, moving without anxiety through panther glades and over buffalo hills where hind rats stalked. Moonhandled, alert, he was invisible, prey to nothing, intent on deciphering all the parables of his life. The change that had come over him was permanent. He would never again be confused.
On Sumner's last night in Dhalpur, he rubbed himself down with water-thinned mud and blue moss to keep away the insects, and he entered the swamp. An owl, silent as a fish, sailed overhead, and the wind shifted, murmuring in the trees like water.
Mauschel was waiting for him in a small flatboat hung with red fishskin-lanterns. Wreaths of linaloa incense rose from the corners of the flatboat. Far down the river, heat lightning quivered, and a breeze smelling of distance dis-pelled the closeness of the mud-rot air.
"You've done well," Mauschel said in greeting. In the red light his legless, twisted body looked like a wooden idol.
Sumner stood quietly before him, knowing with the meat of his body as well as with the memories of endless hours he had spent in selfscan before this man that he had accomplished nothing—he had simply become himself.
Mauschel grinned at him like a sunstruck ape. "Come here, you self-conscious buffoon."
Sumner stepped forward, and Mauschel grabbed his legs and held him tight. "You're right," the old man whispered. "You're not to be saved. No one is. But today you're leaving here as a ranger, and I'd be less than lizard-grease if I didn't tell you I'm proud." He knocked on the hull of his boat, and Sumner sat down. "Here—you earned this a long time ago, but I couldn't give it to you until you didn't need it."
He pressed a small piece of metal into Sumner's hand. It was a silver cobra pin—the Ranger insignia.
"We've spent three years sharing nothing but what's around us," Mauschel said. He sat back, and the darkness leaned into his eyes. "Now I feel I can tell you about deeper things. But I won't. You already know that it doesn't matter one whit what you do. It all comes to the same thing. And you've found out, it seems, that you're bigger than you think. Remember when you thought it was impossible to empty your mind and keep your body moving?"
He laughed softly and cast Sumner a sly look. "You understand, too, that eternity's between us. Each of us moves alone through his own meaning, creating value as he goes along. You know that, though you haven't had the time to ponder it, and I hope you never do. But there's one thing you may not have realized just yet. It's the last mystery."
He leveled his swordmaster's gaze directly into Sumner's eyes. "The Rangers own you." He paused and stared down at his blunt, callus-sheathed hands. "For three years you've lived rigorously but alone. It's going to be different in the Rangers. They're a political tool, you know, commanded by the Masseboth Black Pillar, who have world-shaping plans, historical dreams—iguana-dung, all of it. So, if you think there's more than nonsense to our lives, you'd better get out while you can. Go north into the wilderness. You know enough to survive anywhere now."
He ran a yellow thumbnail along a crease of scar that followed his jaw, and his eyes thinned. "But if you