Bonescrolls clapped his hands merrily. "That's right. We're empty as the wind—but moving, always moving.""And singing.""Only when we rub against things that get in our way. Like the wind, without obstacles we'd never sing."Sumner chuckled and nodded. "We're singing, crying, and laughing, all at the same time. But no one hears us.""Who knows?" The old man gestured at the blurred light above them. "We're bigger than we can imagine."For hours the two men sat feeding twigs to the fire, talking and not-talking. When dawn came Bonescrolls stood up and pointed toward a low sandstone rim. "My last com-mand is for you to go to that shelf and sit there until the voor inside you returns. Listen to him. If you decide that you don't want to share your life with him, return to me, and I'll free you. Otherwise, you don't have to think of me again. You've learned not to leave tracks. Everything else is unnec-essary." The magnar put a hand over his heart and bowed low. "Shay, warrior."Sumner watched after Bonescrolls until he vanished be-hind a standing rock; then he went over to the sandstone rim and dragged his stick through the shadows to feel out snakes and scorpions. He sat with his back to the rim and watched the frost melt to dew as the colors of the world lit up.Sumner angled himself into the shade. He tried to keep himself in selfscan to dampen his anxiety about confronting the voor, but he was sleepy, and random thoughts flitted through his mind. He wondered if Ardent Fang was practic-ing the fly casting he had tried to teach him. The thought of fish reminded him of the scaly embrace of one of the distort women and the sharp, enduring stink of her body. He flinched and had to think about Drift to ease himself: The observant, elegant mind behind that stiff mask was constantly challeng-ing him with the strange lyrics of its chanting:Nothing is ever lost—It's only on its way back.Sumner slept darkly until noon. Then he glanced at the white, radium-fierce sun, closed his eyes, and drowsed into late afternoon. He dreamt that he was with the blind Mother again, sitting on stones shaped like hands. She whispered a sacred name in his ear, and when he voiced it a white elk shouldered out of the forest, the sunlight spinning on its antlers. . . .Sumner woke and washed the taste of sleep out of his mouth with the tepid water in his flagon. He stuck a black twig between his teeth and sucked on the bittersweet root flavor. The painted desert lay before him—agatized rainbows and rock light.A cry rose between the buttes. Llyr, the dusk star, burned cold silver over the ridgeline, wobbling in the layers of air. The vague green spume of the skyfires scattered and re-formed in an unfelt wind. Sumner held himself in selfscan, watching bats whir and squeak among the rock spires.Another cry went up over the desert, high and taut. It dimmed without an echo—a ghost cry. Sumner remained aloof and watchful, though he knew that wasn't a creature-call. Needles of crystal flashed in the parabolic sand as the last light faded. Shadow hallucinations misted over the ter-rain. He focused on the longhaired stars in the striated air over the world's edge.It wasn't until the moon came up and its clear light enameled the dunes and rocks that he heard the cry for a third time—a ululating scream. Again, no echo, and he real-ized that the sound was happening insidehim. Another call quivered through his muscles and burst open in his head as a howclass="underline" the shocking cries of the voor dead suddenly claw-ripping the air around him, wrenching and hurling him from his selfscan. Electrified, his body jumped, though his face remained slack as a rag effigy. Jolting screams flattened him and left him gazing up at the lofty nightfires.The strong fear unwound and cracked up his spine, bursting through his mind in a rush ofjigging colors—and he began to relive the deaths of voors on other planets.He was lumbering flatfooted over bauchy ice. Above him two suns burned: one low on the horizon and flesh-colored, the other a windy blue and quilled. Arrowstuck, knifestabbed, punctured, he was dying. A groan-sore tongue rolled with the flinty taste of blood. . . .He became an iridescent creature, rooted like a tree, a lantern of water, then a fumy, spiritous mistlife, weeping as it dissolved— A lens-being, moonskulled— A tendriled diatom—Sumner tried to hold himself back, but he was falling, clutched by a force that swept through lifetimes: countless forms, countless worlds. His own life was merely another shape. And he was all of them—he could be any one of them again.He became a being many times vaster than a whale—a being massive as a planet—reefs of living rock keeling through the sheer light of stars, translating the energy into music. Shining canticles resounded in his mind rapt with curves of distance, dimming as the star-tugs pulled the being away from its sun—Sumner clutched the earth beneath him and squeezed himself alert.The frightening confluence of sounds and images within the inward darkness of his body began to mount again. Fumes of light coiled across his vision, and the haunted wailing tightened in his ears. Still, he was calm. Nothing could hurt him now, for nothing could touch him. He was empty as a cave, his senses hollow and intangible as echoes.Corby loomed wraithlike deep within him. The voor was alarmed. A year in Iz without a physical form had made him less. The percussive pulses, the drum and gong of the voor dead no longer affected his howlie body. Not even the en-tranced vision of Unchala's slow death with its fervid starsongs could reach Sumner.It's me, Father— I can't go on now without you. Listen to me.Corby's voice rippled in Sumner's ears, burlesqued by the squawk of bereaved cries from the voor dead. Sumner let the voice pass through him like a stray thought.After so long a journey, can you turn me away? Again the fireshifting images of the voor-migrations began spurting through Sumner. Instantly he was in murky waters, thin and fish-slippery, feeling unnamable hungers, his vision belled by stalk-eyes—Sumner relaxed his deepest muscles, and the alien sen-sations slipped away.Don't ignore me, Father. Listen—I have knowledge. Corby refocused himself and let specific bundles of thought arc-jump between him and Sumner.Bubbles of silver light streamed across Sumner's mind, bursting into thoughts. All at once he understood everything about brood jewels. He knew fully and clearly how the seeds were shaped out of the rare minerals and hormones excreted by certain voors. The technique had been perfected in a distant galaxy where blue-haired hominids had organs for eliminating excess metal ions from their bodies. Some voors remembered how to draw out these substances, and they had modified their human forms to do so. The seeds were planted in rock faces where the mineral content, moisture, and tem-perature permitted enhancement of the metal-locked kha of the donor. After several centuries of growth, the crystals were harvested. And they were powerful crystals, for the kha in them had been altered to an Iz-window, an acausal vantage which . . .Again Sumner relaxed his deep muscles, and the thought-volutions narrowed and thinned away.Are you zaned? Corby's voice was bleak, a vapor shred-ded by the wind of voorish mumblings. I'm offering you power. I can show you things no human has ever witnessed.Sumner's mind flared with knowledge, and he sat up tall, glistening with a cold sweat, suddenly understanding the secret of death. It wasn't extinction after all. The collapse of the organism liberated subtle energies—psynergy. Those life-energies blended with the forces around them, shifted and realigned into other configurations, other lifeforms, many of them unguessable to a human mind.