Radix

Ardent Fang shrugged, sea-cold and suddenly weary from the withdrawal of Sumner's psynergy. "All of us have a destiny," he mumbled.
Sumner jumped to his feet, scattering the fire. He stood twitching with immense emotion, staring up at the red mus-cles of dawn, suddenly remembering in hypnotic detail his last conversation with Bonescrolls—the talk that the magnar had made him forget. Nothing is chanced. You are the eth — the shadowself of a godmind.
Caught in a boundless feeling, Sumner sank to his knees, then rolled to his back and closed his eyes. He knew now why he had come here. He was traveling north—to find the Delph.
A rush of luminescent feeling lifted him beyond the fitted bones of his skull, and he saw his body curled on the white sand, Ardent Fang crouched beside the smoldering driftwood, the two figures diminishing into the scallopings of the beach, and the whole beach and the sea glaring into the sun's corona.
Everything stretched into darkness.
Outside his mind, he sensed the Delph. Like every-thing, the godmind was a part of Sumner's being, the One Being, and a flowing love joined them. Whirling outward into the emptiness of time, he was poised only by the inchoate lifelove that swelled in him. Out of that joy-dazzled feeling, a different flesh began flowering around him. Colors gestured into forms, and bright vibrations coagulated to sounds—a starstream of music spiraling just beyond his earbrim. Pleroma music, an inner sense told him. An animal scent, a tinge of musk, patterned the air pleasantly. A calming olfact, the voice said more solidly. A sexoid.
Sumner jolted into a body he didn't recognize and yet knew intimately. An ort biotectured to channel your psynergy. Comfortable, muscle-gripping clothes massaged him with each move—chamois-textured, fur-colored. A slimplex garment. You are in Graal, the ice-mountain rath of the Delph.
He looked about for the voice he was hearing, but he was alone in a small oyster-colored room. In a formflow fashion, walls chaired and lounged intelligently as he strolled about. No doors, though one wall opened glasslessly to a vista of white mountains and green splashes ofjungle valleys. A prison? he wondered.
No, the voice responded, harsher, hard-edged. An ele-gant doorway expanded through the wall, revealing chambers brilliant with sunshafts and weird airplants.
Flechettes of rainbow light scattered through the room. "Who are you?" Sumner asked. Though he knew. A mental music was rhythming in him, auguring everything he wanted to know. The voice was a Voice—a mountain-size crystal of thought, an artificial sentience created to serve the Delph.
I am Rubeus. A six-rayed cell of white light appeared in the curveline doorway. I am an autonomous intelligence shaped to protect the Delph. And you are Sumner Kagan—the eth. The one who is metaordered to close the cycle. The Voice was stern. Why are you haunting us, inwit? Speak your purpose in coming here.
"I've been led here."
Ignorant spasm. The room ebbed colder and darker. You are numb with unknowing—a twitch of the world's Uncon-scious—a mere reflex. I don't fear you.
"Why should you fear me?" Sumner extended his two arms and opened the slender pale hands of his new body. But the space around Rubeus was hot with cold, and he had to drop his gesture. "I mean no harm."
You don't know what you mean. You're part of a dream vaster than the stretch of your mind. You are metaordered— destined— to end the Delph's continuity. But there have been many of you over the centuries, most with more awareness of their purpose than you. All have died. I have killed them all.
The six-rayed cell of light flared, and Sumner's body wrinkled away. Darkness clapped around him, Ardent Fang's voice boomed in his head, "Lotus Face!"—and he sat up into his own body.
Ardent Fang walked him through paddies of salt reeds until the psynergy began to nerve the air between
them again. When Sumner's soulight glittered in the air with the dawnlight on the water, they foraged geepa beans and straw-berries in the tree-root burls at the edge of the jungle.
I have killed them all, echoed in Sumner's mind for many days, and he had to raise a lot of lifelove to go beyond his fear. Enraptured by the psynergy, he and Ardent Fang lived on the beach, sharing consciousness with the forest, the dune dogs, and the dolphins that came in with the tide. The vision of Rubeus melled into the enormous good-feeling of Sumner's psynergy, and for a while the two men lived joy-fully free of memories.
On a morning of bison-headed white clouds, a swamp puma appeared by the river. That day they started their journey back to Miramol. Sumner, still unable to think deeply about his psychic experiences, was uncertain what being the eth meant. He had sensed awesome machine-strength in his vision of Rubeus, yet the fear he had felt then was gone. Everything was living. Even the dead things he saw in the jungle were furred with a living light as they molted into minerals. What was there to fear?
The psynergy circuiting up Sumner's spine continued to generate powerful ecstasy feelings. Weeks passed as the men made their way upstream back to their canoes, fishing with-out hooks, sharing days with trees, getting acquainted with jaguars and snakes.
In the weather of Sumner's aura, Ardent Fang was ab-sentminded with love for the meadows, the wildflowers, and the spongy jungle nights. The base of his spine had begun to itch as his psynergy responded to Sumner's. But with the intensification of his psychic strength came a deeper clarity which frightened him.
At the end of a small stream, in a pear grove not far from Miramol, he was gripped in his bowels by an electric pre-science. The scintillating energy tugged fiercely at his insides and led him out of his dugout and closer to the grove. There the air quivered like the hide of a just-dead animal, and nausea dizzied him. The grove, for one psychomimetic mo-ment, was draped with bloody-green loops of intestine and mucus-bright bits of viscera. The image boiled away swiftly, leaving Ardent Fang so crooked with terror that he backstepped from the pear trees as though they were black wraiths. He turned, leaving his canoe behind, and ran hard until he reached Miramol.
Leaning in the doorway of his hut, feverish with fatigue now that he was out of the power-charged space around Sumner, Ardent Fang groaned inside the dullness of his senses. He lumbered to his hammock and curled into it, his mind a shadow. For three days, he slept.
Sumner took the long way back to the village. Light split in familiar patterns on the river where he had hunted many times. Seeing the well-known tree haunts and river slaches with his One Mind, time drew nearer and detail sharpened.
Empty of words and filled with awe, Sumner returned to Miramol. He understood now, like the old people, the secret of the Silence. The quieter he became, the more he touched. Bonescrolls had been right—the world was feeling. And he wanted to feel everything.
As he left the boathouse after shelving his dugout, he stopped to look around. His euphoria had thinned to a peace-ful easiness. He felt sober and calm and happy to be alive.
The sky was wearing away to a smoky twilight. Women were returning from the vegetable plots, and dogs spurted around their legs, pawing a leather ball. The animals chivvied it round and round, and the women moved gracefully among them, chatting softly. Behind them, children approached with firemoths in their loose hair. He waited until they passed, and then he followed them to the eating lodge, joy hot in him, eternal as fire.
Sumner lived with the ne on their knoll of silverwood lodges and serene courtyards. Each morning he sat among the cypress knees at the edge of a black, bottomless pond and was joined by a dozen of the diminutive, hairless ne. Most of them simply sat in a half-circle before him, legs curled be-neath their white robes, brown sea-spider hands palm-up in their laps, receiving the peacefulness that filled the air around him. Others in workday sarongs brought their crafts to the terraced courtyards overlooking the black cypress pond. A mystic joyance spelled the knoll, and many of the ne had profound experiences on those mornings.