Radix

He was psychically spent, ready to sleep or die—but the voor in him was kinetic. Sumner let Corby move through him, watching numbly as the voor took the snakeskin pouch from his side and scattered the magnar's ashes and bonechips on the ground before him. Sunlight glinted off the boneshards like fragments of time, and Sumner's gut twisted cold with the guilt he felt for Ardent Fang as well as the magnar.
You're tired, Sumner, Corby spoke softly, unstable as smoke. So Just watch. I'm going to make you forget your hurt. We're going on a long Journey. Together, we'll shadow-shoot Bonescrolls. His fingers spiraled slowly through the ashes in rhythm to the voor voice inside him. Shadowshooting is timetripping. There are enough kha-remnants here for us to relive all of the magnar's life. In Iz, every tense is now. But it's not him that I want you to know. His thick hands hovered quietly over the intervolving spirals, and a power unspun in his chest, a power as subtle as the ash was white.
A wind mewled through the disoriented rocks outside the cave and blended into Corby's voice: It's the Delph I want you to see—the godmind we were born to destroy. The twilight was a cliche of broken colors, wind-long and redder than meat. We are going back twelve centuries, following the kha of this life's dust to the time of Bonescrolls' first shape. The look of things seemed to wear thin. Time is a secret hidden from itself. We 're going deeper into that secret—we 're becoming it.
Sumner's mind blanked. And suddenly he was in a warm and dark place, drifting easily, listening to the muffled bang-ing of a door in a ghostly wind. It was a heartbeat.
Corby understood, and his knowledge became Sumner's: Iz had taken them back to Bonescrolls' early life and then across time, pushed on by Corby's will, to the Delph's em-bryonic beginnings: they could feel him glowing in the bloodlight, furled in his humming mist, so slippery and small he seemed about to dim away.
Words passed to Sumner from Corby—chanted words— the voorish litany for the unborn:
You will have a name this time, child. And you will have all the limits that go with having a name. You will have a name this time because where you are going everything has a name. . . .
Corby moved on, and Sumner felt time accelerate. He glimpsed the fetus of the Delph expanding, somersaulting in its womb, pushing out. Its head scowled into the light, and it skidded out, clotted and gleaming with the remnants of its fetal life. The scene misted away, blurring off into a sweep of images, all rushing by too swiftly to be grasped.
. . . Where you are going, young one, everything that can happen has happened. Everything that has happened is happening again . . .
The torrent staggered twice, slowing enough for Sumner to glimpse the infant growing: a black-haired child in an oversized yarmulke, standing midway up the stone stairway of a temple; then a gangly youth in military fatigues, a six-pointed star dangling beneath an angular, grinning face, jet fighters in the background; then, flying darkness—
. . . and though you will begin to learn the names of everything in your new life, no matter how many names you learn, no matter what sequence you arrange them in, they will tell you nothing about the source or the end. They exist because you do, to assure yourself that your existence can and does happen, then and now, always, and almost as you yourself imagine it happening . . .
The rush skipped again, and Sumner saw the young man in combat boots, flight pants, a military shirt opened to the waist. He was lying in the tall grass, under leafshadows, a dark, sinewy woman beside him. He held her face in his hands, and the scene roared away.
. . . but names, young life, will be dwarfed by the hugeness of your breath, even though their hunger will be your long traveling, their practice all you will ever endure, their eventual test to perfect the space your passing leaves behind.
The cascade of images swirled to a stop. Sumner experi-enced himself floating in an expansive gallery of curving pastel-green walls. The place was fluttery with hushed activ-ity. A semicircle of white leather recliners occupied the cen-ter of the gallery. Each chair was surrounded by glass-paneled equipment and a canopy of fine-meshed iridescent netting. All the recliners were occupied, green-gowned technicians at-tending each one.
Corby narrowed his focus to one station where a black-haired man with a narrow, composed face lay. It
was the one they had traced from the womb—the Delph. Above the breast pocket of his tan fatigues was stenciled halevy-COHEN.
Corby drew closer, hovering for a moment before the brown, wide-spaced eyes and the slender nose. The lips were full, the jaw slim, receding, the hair very thick, meticulously combed back from a square forehead. The features expanded to a sheet of diaphanous light, and they slipped into him.
His mind was a tumult of images and thoughts, and it was a moment before even Corby could feel out his name. It was Jac. And as soon as they found this center, everything else fell into place.
"Jac," a woman's voice called. He opened his eyes and saw her: She was ancient, her age-loose flesh leaf-brown, her huge, dark eyes milky around the edges, sunken, hooded with immedicable sorrow. But when she saw that he was alert a smile cut across the grain of her face, and she seemed to expand. She threw back her long smoke-white hair and bent closer. He could smell the balsam that was misted over her white caftan.
"I'm Assia Sambhava," she said affably. "Do you remem-ber me?"
Jac's eye thinned, and he shook his head.
Disappointment shadowed swiftly across Assia's face. "No concern." She wiped off the sheen of sweat from his upper lip with her sleeve. "Your memory's been broken for a long time. I'm a psychobiologist here at CIRCLE—the Center of International Research for the Continuance of Life on Earth— and I've been treating you since I arrived eleven years ago. Your condition is unique and significant. You have a density in the pontine stem of your brain. While you were in the North African Air Corps it was misdiagnosed as a tumor. Actually, it's a natural development, a folding-inward of the cerebral cortex—something that's happened to one out of every billion humans for the past forty thousand years. I believe it's the next step in brain evolution, and I've been trying to activate and amplify it with RNA supplements. So far I've been unsuccessful, and"—the dark in her eyes thickened—"worse, I may have damaged you, Jac. Your mem-ory's gone, and I haven't been able to strengthen it."
Jac wasn't listening. Deep within, he knew who he was, but remembering was unimportant. He was waiting, antici-pating the inner change that followed most of his treatments. When the patterns of association began to expand, the trans-fusion nozzle was still touching the blue vein on his neck, and he was surprised at how quickly his mind was responding. (Surprised: that is, phosphofructokinase is breaking down glucose-1, increasing neural activity, and so on, a wobbly circle, a snake with its tail in its mouth.)
He wondered if the psychobiologist—Assia, yes—was aware of the speed or even the extent to which these supple-ments were affecting her subject.
"Do you have any questions—anything to say?" Assia asked.
Jac's eyes looked smoky. "I hear a voice" (The human voice, saddest of instruments.)
"I know." She was very gentle. She took his hand, and the compassion in her eyes was thick as love. "The supple-ments intensify it."
"What do I do?" (Remember your heritage. The Qlipoth are your ancestral enemies, especially the Mames, those who move by backward motion, and Glesi, the one who glistens like an insect.)
"A new self is being born, Jac." Assia's grip on his arm was strong. "You're changing. Don't try to fight it—and don't fear it."
Jac sat still, his eyes too quiet. "What am I becoming?"
Assia's voice was hushed: "I don't know." She put a wrinkled hand to the side of his head, and the warmth of her touch was the heat of love. "We're done for today." She removed the transfusion nozzle and the net of the bioscanner. "Stay in the compound this afternoon. The supplement may make you feel woozy. I'll see you again in a couple of days, all right?"