Radix

Everything is food! a thought voiced itself. Every sound, every odor, every thought changes us.
In Sumner's mind it was a tree that was thinking these thoughts. His silence widened. He could feel the grass grow-ing under him, the tree expanding into its life. Then the idea of returning, of feeling his own body, of leaping up and screaming with joy, opened in him with risible insistence.
Ardent Fang sat in the high grass behind Sumner. He was rapt with fear and wonder. He had followed Sumner because the psynergies featherturning in his chest had lured him. But now he was nervous. An astral being floated among the heat-quiverings over the mud shoals. He could see the entity as clearly as he saw their two beached canoes glowing with the sun's vibrations. He thought of going back to Miramol.
Sumner suddenly leaped into the air and roared.
Ardent Fang jumped, and a heron flapped into the for-est's green shadow. The tensed air over the mudsunk trees beside their canoes shifted as the half-seen being moved toward them. Sumner was standing, body arched, feeling the love that was soft-slipping through the wondrous emptiness that held everything together. A gust of bright air kicked through the high grass and dazzled the blades and seedhusks as the spirit of the swamp centered on them. Ardent Fang knelt and moaned, and the sound he made was prayerful and long.
Sumner had opened his mind to the river's oversoul, and consciousness was radiating back to him in psychic symbols. Sparks spun through the sunshadows around the tree, and he saw demons and archangels, a riotous torrent of all the otherealms the human mind had ever created. Yet he was unafraid. The manner in which he had opened his being— mounting psynergy up the totem of his spine—had stabilized his body, and he was well-rooted. Whatever entered his etheric field was harmonized by the ecstasy of his One Mind.
Ardent Fang sidled closer to Sumner, his heart and lungs weightless with lifelove, his legs leaden with
the fear of all that he was seeing. A massive razorjaw lizard was thrash-ing wildly in a mudpool across the shallow river. Much closer, the air silverly trembled, and the breeder saw the breeder that had come before him. The bloodbruises of the fever that had killed his teacher darkened the whole of the man's eyes, and the features Ardent Fang had once loved were swollen with death.
Sumner didn't know what Ardent Fang was experienc-ing, but he saw the pain in the tribesman's face.
The sky darkened, and a storm of green flies cut through the trees. Ardent Fang balled up with terror as the flies began biting.
Laughter broke across Sumner's tongue. It wasn't Sum-ner laughing. It was the swamp itself—and, deeper, it was One Mind, bloating him with awareness. The flies burning him were the hunger of God. And hunger is holy, because everything is food, and eating is all there is.
Shrieks burst through the trees, and a flurry of birds rushed around them, devouring the flies. The air was a confusion of feathers and flashing colors. Abruptly, silence, and the startled laugh of a monkey.
Ardent Fang rose to his knees among broken stalks of chickweed. His face was a maze of emotions, seeing the flies gone, the air layered with shades of transparency, and, in midstream, a giant razorjaw lizard lashing toward them.
Sumner helped Ardent Fang to his feet. In the blue hollow behind Lotus Face, the breeder glimpsed a crowd of women—all the women he had ever sexed. The ones he had loved glowed blue-bright.
"Whatever you're seeing," Sumner said to him, "is in-side you. But the whorl is strong with us today, Fang. What-ever we feel is coming back at us. Try to feel good."
Ardent Fang trembled in Sumner's grasp. The man's hands on his shoulders hummed with spring-thundering, and the dark in the blue of his eyes was shimmering with some-thing like father-love. "But look!" the breeder insisted, point-ing to where the wart-knobbed, mud-green hulk of the razorjaw was running to shore. Its horn-browed eyes looked fireblind, and the long thrust of its maw glistened with many pink-skinned teeth.
Sumner's first impulse was to bolt, but the worldlove he had joined himself with was far bigger than he was. He stood enraptured as the giant thrash-tailed reptile rushed toward them. Ardent Fang whimpered and reached for his blade, but Sumner caught his wrist. "Love it," Lotus Face said, not taking his eyes off the creature.
Ardent Fang pulled his wrist free, but he didn't run. The razorjaw had slowed its rush. The flat, horned head of the beast, big as a man, stopped before them and swayed in its stench of river kelp and mud. Sumner put his right arm out, and the black lip of the lizard grazed his hand and stood transfixed.
Ardent Fang's head bobbed as though his blood had fermented. In the huge, damp presence of the razorjaw, sunlight had the coolness of the moon.
Urged by the power in him, Sumner climbed the folded scales of the colossal leg and shoulder and straddled the stumped head. Reaching down to help Ardent Fang up, he saw into the lizard's eye, and it was like staring into the center wood-ring of a log.
He swung Ardent Fang up beside him, and the great swamp beast turned toward the water. Ardent Fang whooped, tore off the braiding cord at his shoulder, and let the smoke of his hair blow in the river wind.
Sumner laughed and lifted both of his arms over his head. The muddy water folded back and splashed at their sides, and they glided downstream into the misty green spell of the river.
The giant lizard carried the two men north all day down a riverpath of solar-blown trees and ox-colored boulders. The water that splashed them had the bloodheat and the smell of something living. Panther, wolf, bear, and deer watched them from the bluffs with animal insouciance, the air sloughed with their green auras.
At night, the sky gnarled with stars and skyfires, the razorjaw continued downstream. Sumner lay against the beast's browbone and saw the roundness of time in the crackly stars. Each mote of light that sparked in his retinal cells was a living being, the lifefire of another sun entering and changing him. Countless stars—an endless rain of radiation penetrating him, altering his most secret self. The next day, under a hot sky, the realization that each instant he was transformed still burned like the rise of an orgasm.
Ardent Fang stayed close to Lotus Face, content beyond dreaming in that man's golden halo. Hearing Sumner talk of stars, consciousness, and the whorl, Ardent Fang's ears ached with listening, trying to find again the foreign color in the man's voice. But the magic between them was seamless. At night, gliding down the golden moonpath, the breeder stopped trying to understand and let the clairvoyance of his feelings displace his wondering.
However, by dawn Ardent Fang was once again baffled. Sleep-mauled on the back of the lizard giant, hearing gulls bruiting the ocean, he looked to Lotus Face. "Why are we here?"
Sumner was standing, absorbing the iris twilight. During the night journey the river had broadened, and the water was now as deep as their lives. Sumner jumped in headfirst, and Ardent Fang splashed after him. The razorjaw followed until they reached the sandbars; then it sank into its weight and was gone.
On a beach of dust-fine sand facing a low-tide bay of tropic reefs, the men built a fire. "Each instant we're changed," Sumner said, as much to the spurting flames as to his companion.
Ardent Fang touched Sumner's forearm, wanting a mo-ment's clarity. "Why are we here, Lotus Face?"
Sumner looked up wrenchingly from the flames, the wondrous telepathy that had possessed him tightening to the single focus of one syllable: "Why?" he asked, his eyes all pupil, yet very clear, shining. He was looking inward, remembering— "Why are you the living center of the trans-parent and inflexible diamond of time?"