Radix

In the afternoon Sumner worked for the tribe in the ragged green vegetable plots and, sometimes, in the breed-ing stables. Evenings after the rain, he danced with the young women or went to the swamp edge with the men to hunt with nighthawks. The ecstasy power in him was calmer since he had begun sitting with the ne, and he was truly satisfied with his living.
The oldest ne sat close to him during his morning medi-tations, their tiny eyes deliriously bright, their voices mental and instructive: You are consciousness itself—not the objects of consciousness. They used clear-color prisms and waterdrums to help him relax. You have a body, but you are not your body.
You are the awareness of your body. You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts. You have feelings, but you are not they. Who are you?
He was awareness. Being glowed through him seamless as sunlight, and his face deepened into the world.
Wisps of memory swirled out of his physical sensations: The rhyme of the wet rock odors from the pond reminded him of legless Mauschel in his damp flatboat. The image spun into a glitter of blue and green birdcalls.
Who is hearing? the ne asked. Who is remembering?
The flocculent odors of the swamp, the memories, and the kenspeckle drones from the waterdrums were falling into him, becoming the color of void, the sound of nothingness. Only the constant flux of sounds and sensations falling into him seemed solid.
You have touched the center of the whorl.
Like the collapsars he had seen on his scansule as a child, like stars too big for their energy, consciousness, he perceived, was the black hole into which everything fell. Where did these noises, colors, and thoughts go?
Notes knucklerubbed off waterdrums vibrated in the air just wide enough to be heard, and the dreary afternoon he had spent mindlessly looking at scansule animations of blown-out stars brightened into an exact memory. Again he saw the three-dimensional computerline images of the collapsar at the core of the galaxy, the web of space-time tightening through the spiral of stars to a single point in the hub—the singularity where space-time ceased to exist.
The scansule image rotated and split crosswise, revealing a complexity of seashell involutions. A droll ghostvoice ex-plained, faster than words, that the collapsar was gravitation-ally distorted, and that out of its poles rayed the most powerful radiation conceivable—light from a source of infinite space-time curvature.
Infinity is Unity, the ne told him, filled with the full fire of Sumner's One Mind. All things are one thing.
Sumner's memory of the scansule soft-focused, and a bruised light pulsed behind his lids as his insight crystallized into understanding: When the earth came into line with the collapsar's radiation, the universe became the multiverse, and the consciousness of the cosmos, the light of infinity, animated the thought forms and the genetic shapes that were here with an awareness older than time—voors, godminds, timeloose distorts, eth—all were earthshaped starlight from the core of the galaxy.
The waterdrum music stopped suddenly, and muffled voices and the shirring cries of small birds brought Sumner back to himself. Eddying in the muscularity of his body, heat-stilled and viewless, he sensed the Delph—distant yet close, like the inside of thunder. A white mountain, sharp as glass, appeared and vanished. Graal— the ice-mountain realm of Rubeus.
There is no reason to go there except the going, the gentle ne told him. The voor in you has a purpose—to kill the Delph. But you have no purpose. The eth is one of your masks. But you are not the eth. Many eth have come before you. Others will come after. Who are you?
Voices ruffled with anger intensified at the gate to the cypress court, and Sumner opened his eyes. Sunlight spirit-ing through the ancient trees settled like bright birds among the ivy of the round gate. Several of the small ne in blue robes were struggling there with a big-boned woman—Orpha.
The elders signaled to let her pass, and she straightened from her tousling with composed dignity.
"I am sorry to disturb the famous morning meditations," she said with sardonic seriousness, "but the magnar has an urgent message for Lotus Face." She stepped off the dragon-stone path and waded through the flowering ankle-high grass to where Sumner was sitting. Her shadow covered two ne. "The magnar orders you to stop casting kha."
No more ecstasy energy.
The Mother ignored the ne and kept her heavy, shad-owed stare on Sumner. "You and the magnar have an enemy. If you attract him, he will destroy Miramol. Some seers have seen this." She squatted beside Sumner and placed a thick hand on his chest. "Your thrall ends with the next lunar turn, Lotus Face. Walk your kha into the desert. Protect the folk and the ne."
Sumner took her hand to assure her, but before he could speak, a scream bounced through the moongate, scattering ne. Flapping black wings of cloth whirled into the court—a wild-haired, eyeless Mother, shouting: "There are no secrets! Our senses fit the world! What you see is seen!"
Orpha bounded upright. "Jesda—this is not your place."
"Nor yours, sister." The blind Mother's hands flew over her head like startled sparrows. "The word has been fulfilled. I have witnessed it."
Sumner looked to the elder ne beside him, and the old one nodded and told him: Four centuries ago,
Dog Hunger, the first seer, prophesied that Miramol would not die until the Mothers had come to the n6.
"And we are here," Jesda whispered, walking sightlessly across a moss ledge and into the pond. Her black skirts billowed in the water around her hips, and she shrieked: "What I see is seen!"
Orpha took the blind woman's arm and led her out of the water. "We're done here, sister. Let's go home."
"Wait, Mother." Sumner rose. "May I speak with you, Jesda?"
"Speak!" Her wet sleeves snapped in the air with her sharp gestures, and Orpha stepped back. "Babble to the Vastness!"
Sumner stepped forward, and the angry pain in Jesda's face softened to a quiescence interknit with sorrow and clar-ity. Sumner experienced a howl of mind-language and a dizzy lurch as his etheric field penetrated hers.
She was timeloose. Through a gargoyling of dissolving thoughtforms, Sumner saw the starheart—the white luminos-ity from the first moment, from the origin of time—patterned like a retinal shadow over the vale of cypress and the old woman's sunken face. He brushed a thistle of knotted gray hair from her brow, and the One Mind between them trem-bled into exquisite scales of color, shimmering in the shapes of their seeing.
Jesda sighed and softly took both of his hands. She was calm as a tree, healed, her blindness infused with a violet quivering. "Heaven and earth move through each other," she said to him gently, "but the mind is moveless—at last." Her grip tightened, and she bowed, touching her forehead to their clasped hands. "We are presence." When she looked up, her blind sockets were rimmed with tears. She turned to Orpha. "Come, sister."
After the Mothers departed, the court and the surround-ing terraces flurried with excited ne. The eldest took Sum-ner's arm. Its eyes were two glistening waterpits in the stone of its face. Your One Mind is clear, Lotus Face. You've worked hard for this. What will you do now?
From beyond the court wall, a painstruck wail shivered loudly, then curled into Jesda's demon laughter.
Ardent Fang sat in the full sunlight on the top of the breeding stables. Miramol looked like flotsam in the green wave of the rain forest, all vine-lashed timbers and reedstraw. A curve in the river flashed with sun among the dense trees, and waterbirds circled raucously overhead.