Radix

The officer looked at him sharply, saw he was speaking the truth, and, with a smile both sad and mocking, called for his men to fall in.
Sumner was ready to die—unless the voor had the will and the power to change him. But Corby was silent, truly not-there. Sumner chanted a ne song to himself as he es-corted Culler and his men down the steep terrain: The flower dies, the tree dies, the earth dies into newness. Everything is new and becoming newer. All the time. The whole world freedrifting, only sometimes breaking into mind.
Early the next day they reconnoitered with the convoy. Sumner signaled the soldiers on to the troop carriers and took Culler aside. In a field of black rocks and yellowed grass, with wasps drunk with sunlight bobbing like intellections around Culler's head, he returned the officer's machine pistol. Sum-ner's face glowed with peacefulness. The voor was silent.
The Masseboth took the gun and cocked it. Sumner stared up at the mountain they had descended. Strata of silver clouds were advancing over the range, slower than sight, and sunlight checkered the brown slopes and the dis-tant forest maze. His emotions were vaporous, ready for death.
"I want to kill you, Kagan," Culler said, his words serene with rage. "But I can't do it blackly enough." He uncocked the pistol. "Where I'm taking you, you'll learn to love death." He pushed Sumner back to the convoy and manacled both his hands and feet before throwing him in a caged carrier crowded with captured Serbota.
The heat and the fecal stink of the cage stunned Sumner, and his body convulsed, trying to shrug off the stench. Only after the carrier rumbled forward and the air began to stream did he relax enough for selfscan.
While he sat into his bones, his muscles slack, filled with a vibrant stillness, the others watched him. They recognized him as Lotus Face, the Mothers' ward. Most were in shock from the blood-wallow of the raid; a few peered at him with charred anger, sensing that he was somehow responsible.
Sumner gazed back with blue, soul-looted eyes, seeing past their scorched and distorted faces and the wreaths of their hung arms to the desert. The colors of Skylonda Aptos jangled by like a vision, and the shag of dark feeling around the tribesfolk brightened.
Sumner closed his eyes and slipped into a wakeful doze. The voor was close, a floating watchfulness.
Slow inward-looking eyes opened, and Corby dragged at the baked air. Awareness jolted through him—a power-wave of sensation; bruised, ugly odors and the wind ebbing hotly. Sumner was hemiconscious, feverish with calm.
Corby breathed deeply, and the kha he drew up from the earth extended his body's chemical limits. Hormones slid through his blood, and his eyes were suddenly brighter and deeper seeing. Rings of dull light shivered around the Serbota's heads. Beyond them, violet kha channels in the sky looped in magnetic bands about an invisible storm-eye.
Deva, he thought aloud so that Sumner would under-stand. It has been resting. It will need all its strength for what it must do tonight. But that is hours away, and you will understand everything a man can know by then. Trust me now— and rest.
Corby slightly lowered the cortin level in Sumner's brain, easing him into sleep.
As the consciousness of his human host faded, sensuous actuality tightened around Corby. He stood on the edge of the body, feeling its hardness: a shoal of hungers, thousands of microorganisms clinging together, sifting nourishment through a reef of calcium.
He came back to his own shining solitude. Inside his awareness, spiral energies opened out across stellar centu-ries. Outside, several of the Serbota were leaning close, scrutinizing Sumner's black faceburn.
Corby moved outward through the body-window and touched each of the gawking tribesfolk deep in the brain, sparking the pineal gland and the olfactory nerve-lobes with kha. A charmed, fleecy odor filled the Serbota's heads, and they straggled back with surprise.
The voor felt strong in his kha-body, where everything he saw fringed thinly on a shimmering blackness. But at the vanishing point behind Sumner's eyes, Corby was still clumsy. He tried to center himself: So involuted— all ears and eyes and this endless touching, making me feel I'm the exact center. But what am I really? Attention wavers in this body. Brood consciousness is narrowed to a headache. And the whole universe seems to be dull noises and a handful of thin colors. Small. So small.
Corby saw that his time in Iz had truly diminished his humanity. But he was not afraid. He still had all the psychic-strengths of a voor. He could see through space and into darkness. He knew Iz—the astral soundings and the long ancestral memories. He was Dai Bodatta: the infinite re-union: the one-with. And he was with Sumner.
This howlie had accepted him. And at last there was a chance against the Delph. For Corby, Sumner was more than a physical host. He was his father with the full craze of howlie psychology that went with that reality—incest-echoes and forlorn memories of Jeanlu. Sumner was also what Bonescrolls had called the eth—a man verbed by a power hidden as chance. Emptied by the magnar and trained by the Mothers, Sumner was the earth's mind, close to the animals of his body: the rat-brain with its tail in his spine, the lung-fish, the fish-sperm, the serpent-gut— He was all the spirit-dreams of this planet's mud. He was the subtle chemistry of pain, and he was gut-hunger and the sky's watchfulness.
Together, there was nothing for them to fear. Living man. Ghost voor. They were one.
The Serbota thought they were being taken alive for slaves, but when the carrier churned over a shale ridge and into view of their destination, a wail cut through them. Sum-ner startled awake. He twisted around and stared through the wire mesh at a trail of oil droppings climbing a steep slope into the desert mountains. Lining the makeshift road were human heads impaled on tall pikes. Sumner recognized the heads of a weasel-faced Mother and several huntsmen.
The tractor gears screamed as the carrier lurched to the top of a blunt rise. Masked soldiers in brown riot gear sur-rounded the cage, and the side doors banged open.
They were on the stone lip of an ancient volcano. In the grottoes of the caldera, corpse pyres burned, and the black-robed bodies of the Mothers rocked and fluttered on the long scaffold where they were crucified. The siren cry of a peeler nerved their teeth. The sound came from a nearby pit where people were bound lengthwise to large, battered lathes. As their bodies spun, the skin was stripped off with needles.
Among the rock dolmens at the center, those who didn't want to die were shaved and head-branded with drone straps. The slow-eyed dorgas mulled around the peeler pits transfixed by the siren and the skin coils razoring off their tribe's flesh in meat-pastels.
The cry of a peeler whined to silence, and a blood-sinewed body was dropped into a trench where it writhed powerfully, trying to twist off its bones. Even the shocked Serbota were roused by what they saw, and they moaned.
Sumner scanned the sky for the deva, but his voor-sense was not in his eyes anymore. Corby was in the body's abdo-men, close to the deep, spun rhythm of his breathing. From there, the voor could pool the earthdreaming, the planet kha.
Nightmare-gripped, one of the folk staggered to her knees, sucking at the meager mountain air. A guard dragged her down into the caldera, and she disappeared in the floes of corpse-smoke. The other soldiers pushed the rest of the Serbota together and herded them into a nearby ditch. Sum-ner, feet and hands still manacled, was thrown in after them, and a heavy iron grating was lowered into place.
Culler's skull-taut face appeared overhead, grinning thickly to see Kagan spraddled among the distorts. There was some-thing human and a little scared in Sumner's face, yet when Culler looked hard into those laconic eyes and that faceburn black as law, his own insides dizzied. The man's a ranger, he reminded himself, fighting the urge to kill him instantly.