Radix

Alone in the desert, far out of earshot, Sumner howled with happiness and let his feelings tumble into words: "Idiot distorts! I'm alive in your hell! I'm never going to die!" He screamed the last word, and the mania in his voice echoed back at him. He had become strange living with the distorts, sharing his body with the weird women— He moved at a loping gait over the broken stones of the desert, grateful to be moving and not thinking. Life wasn't shit. Life was a stream of love, of feeling and thought, lascivious in its brev-ity. He laughed, and his joy was so intense it burned in his throat.
Nightfall brought him to a place of scum-froth and cracked soda. He sat on a mudbank encrusted with alkali and watched the skyfires bristle.
A yellow spark flashed beneath the arch of a dolmen, and a flame spurted and crackled in dry wood. Bonescrolls ap-peared, hunched over a flame-twitching stack of twigs. His long idol face grinned benevolently. He motioned Sumner to join him and produced a blackened skillet and four green-white snake eggs. "Hungry?"
Sumner went over to the archrock, cleared a space with his walking stick, and sat. His mind squirmed with questions— how had the magnar found him—why—but he ignored them and urged himself into selfscan.
"That's right," Bonescrolls said. "Keep your thoughts quiet. That's a good beginning." He held the skillet over the fire and handed two of the eggs to Sumner. From a thigh-pouch he produced a handful of small scallions and yellow peppers. The two men cooked and ate in silence.
After they were done, Bonescrolls belched loudly and leaned forward. "Listen, young brother, this selfscan you've mastered, it's a very good way to sit quietly for a short time, but after a while it gets damn
noisy."
A coyote barked, its vagrantly sorrowing cry wavering across the desert.
Sumner frowned querulously. "What do you mean?"
Bonescrolls hushed him with a wave of his hand. "Listen."
The coyote cried again, barking at its own echo. The call was thin and strung-out, and the sound of it touched Sumner with sadness.
After a moment the magnar smiled and scratched his ear. "That coyote's just like you," he said. "It hasn't found its place, either." He bent closer so that Sumner could see his eyes, dark and fixed. "We look from inside our bodies. Like the coyote, we think we're inside our bodies. What is that animal crying to?" With his eyes he pointed up to where a wilted moon was sliding through the clouds. "We think we're inside our bodies, but part of us is up there too. How lonely that part of us is!"
Sumner gazed sullenly at the old man, feeling dark and indifferent, a part of the night.
"You and the coyote, you both think you have some-where to go." Bonescrolls' face hung in the darkness, smiling a mysterious, melancholy smile. "But the world is feeling, Kagan. There's nothing else. Really—there's nothing else. But nothing can be anything, and so we think we have places to go." The magnar's bristly eyebrows touched in the space over his nose. "Psynergy follows thought. Stop thinking about not-thinking. Become consciousness itself—become One Mind."
Sumner didn't understand Bonescrolls, and he could no longer hold himself still. "What do you want with me, magnar?"
"All right, young brother." The magnar patted Sumner's knee with the gruff affection of a man with his dog. "Let me tell you one more thing. If you want to find a good place to be, no place you find will be good enough. But if you let it all go, if you really empty your head, then any place you are is right. And, even more wonderful, you can be any place at all—even the moon!" He slapped Sumner's knee and laughed, but Sumner only watched him thoughtfully, trying to gauge the old man's sanity.
The laughter drained from Bonescrolls' face, and he rubbed his legs wearily. "Words!" he spit. "Nonsense. I might as well be talking to a coyote." He reached into the leather coverlet he was wearing and produced a sheaf of small envelopes. "You're a man of action, so I might as well give you some-thing to do. Your orders." He offered the sheaf to Sumner. "They're numbered. Open them in sequence only as you complete the assignments. When you're done, return to Miramol. The Mothers have other work for you."
Bonescrolls yawned, and with a tired smile he curled up before the exhausted fire and went to sleep.
The next morning Sumner woke before dawn. But the old man was gone. The shape that he had thought was Bonescrolls all night was a wind-scrubbed boulder.
Sumner's first assignment sent him deep into the vol-canic highlands to find a sliver of carnelian. The second envelope sent him on a trek across the sunblasted, rock-faulted heart of Skylonda Aptos into the great Kundar Marsh. He waded through leech ponds, floated across quicksand pools, and baited trees with foraged fruit to distract vicious rockthrower monkeys while he obtained what he had come for—a short twist of white mahogany.
The third envelope circled him back into the desert to track down a rock labyrinth infested with poisonous jumping lizards. At the center was a salt pit where he gathered a small satchel of the pure grains.
From there he journeyed to the viperlands, a swampy tract of tar pits and sticky toxic plants, where he beat off yellowbacked flies until he found a turtle shell of proper size. After that he followed a long steamy river far into a vapor jungle to collect a handful of macadamia nuts. On the way out of the jungle, he probed the viper-infested algal murk of stagnant pools for winged-lizard eggs. And finally he dangled precariously from a misty cliff to harvest a giant breed of yellow strawberries.
During the nine weeks that it took him to gather all the required items, Sumner kept himself in perpetual selfscan. He knew that if he let his mind roam he would only question what he was doing and slow himself down. Also, there was the threat of voors. He saw none in the course of his wander-ings, but the memories of his lusk and the blowdart attack kept him vigilant. When he arrived at Bonescrolls' rock dwell-ing with everything that had been requested, he was calm and alert as a serpent.
Bonescrolls laughed raucously as Sumner entered the sunrayed cavern. He carefully examined each of the goods. With a honing stone he sharpened an edge of the carnelian sliver until it was razor-keen. With his new knife he deftly whittled the finger of white mahogany into a small graceful fork. After cleaning out the turtle shell he used it as a dish for a wing-lizard egg omelette, lightly salted, and dusted with crushed macadamia nuts. The yellow strawberries he arranged appealing around the rim.
"Ah!" He smacked his lips and winked at Sumner. "I've waited a long time for a breakfast like this."
Sumner's insides fisted, but he remained outwardly calm. "Why?"
Bonescrolls' long face shrugged. "Why old age? Why the cold? Why the notes inside a flute? We're nothing, young brother, but what we forget we are. Don't fight your unconscious."
"I risked my life for that omelette." Was this the being that had quieted the voor in him? Sumner searched the red-brown eyes for the power he knew was there, but he saw only a mystically cracked old man.
Bonescrolls recognized the disappointment in Sumner's face, and anger gouged him. "Why?" His voice was sharp with feeling, holding Sumner's stare. "The world has no corners, young brother. If I start to explain why I am and why you are, there's no place to stop."
Sumner was unappeased, and his dark, frowning face looked scorched.
Bonescrolls strode to the center of the studio. He scooped up a handful of dust and laced it through his fingers, spieling it around him as he spoke: "It's all consciousness, if you're open enough. The dust, the rock, the sunfire." He balanced a grit of sand on his thumbnail and held it close to Sumner's nose. "Each atomic particle is a family of beings. As aware in their own way as you are. We're all equals—all the same, just vibrating differently. Everything is light."