Radix

Anareta's distraction snapped. "What?"
The commander faced him squarely, making his jaw a fist. "You're my aide now, Colonel. I didn't drag my ass this far to make you an offer. That mobilization warrant is an order."
Anareta frowned, lifted a cat out of a stuffed chair, and sat down.
"I need you to inform me," Gar said, his voice more relaxed. "I have to know about the kro. Was their technology strong?"
"All that's gone now," Anareta mumbled. "The kro achievement was their thinking, the vision they aspired toward. You wouldn't have seen it in their political or social functions. They were too pragmatic and utilitarian a people to actually live out their ideals. It's only in their art, in all their appar-ently pointless preoccupations, that you can glimpse their deepest thought, the soul of the kro. Sometimes they called their vision freedom, self-anarchy, the individual. Nietzsche expressed it clearly: 'The free spirit stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism— he does not negate any more.' Such a—"
The studio door opened, and a tall, hipsprung woman entered. "Am I late?" she asked Anareta, the rain glinting like jewels in her red hair.
Corby and Sumner rose up into the molded corner of the ceiling, and the last they saw of that scene was Com-mander Gar bowing in exit, holding Anareta with his hawk-lidded eyes: "Oh-five hundred hours, Colonel."
Atoms of sweat and breath clouded around Sumner, and in those scents he glimpsed whole lives: meals of herb cab-bages and roots, nomad memories of mountains and ball-cactus deserts.
The iron grating was lifted, and the Serbota were hauled out of the pit with hooked poles. Two hooks clicked around his manacles, and Sumner was lifted into the open air. It was night. Orange and flamingo clouds walled the southeast where the sun had set.
Culler's face pressed close with the sulfurous smell of bad sweat. "A dozen men have guns on you, ghost-eyes," he said, as he unclasped the hand-and-foot manacles.
Time was cornered. Movement was round and easy. Sumner stood up effortlessly, and a sacramental feeling swelled in his legs. The stupor and ache that had thickened in him during his captivity withered, and he was suddenly supple and smooth as a nightsnake, clear as fire. The voor had rested and strengthened his kha, and the power of Iz was his again. He looked at Culler and saw, deeper than the chisel bones and the cave-squatter eyes, into the man's cruel grin. The face was uxorious—married to a self-love so strong it
was virtually a hunger. This man lived just behind his face. His eyes were rattling with hate, his face-flesh twitching with a constant flickering of thoughts.
Culler backed away, startled by the sweet, fragrant smell about Kagan and his eyes wonderful with alertness. "Watch this viper well," he commanded his men as he stalked off.
Guards nudged Sumner forward, and he followed the limping Serbota into the red night of corpse fires. Skyfires trembled like a wing above the jagged brim of the volcano. In the pit, torches flared in a wide circle around a platform-raised peeler. Fireshadows scintillated off its silver needles.
Don't be afraid, Corby said from within him, and the strength in his legs flushed. Deva is with us. Thunder rolled down the sky, but there were no clouds in sight.
The Serbota stopped and looked to Kagan, whose braided hair was sparking with blue static. The guards shoved them on. "Don't spook, distorts. That's cannon. We're hitting the desert to keep your strays from gathering."
A mist of warm, ethereal sexuality filled the space around Sumner, and the guards nearest him felt an instreaming coolness and a line of force strung like a bow-hair through their bellies. That was the earthdreaming rising, transmuting into lifelove through Corby's kha.
"Move!" a soldier yelled from out of the darkness, and the guards startled and took Sumner's arms.
Cleats of fire came and went along Kagan's legs, and his eyes shone and shone. Corby—I feel your power! The bliss curving into him from the ground reminded him powerfully of the psynergy he had raised in the riverain forest with Ardent Fang. Radiant—blurring the shadow of his ego.
He stepped forward, and his mind became a wilderness of awareness: He was both inside and outside himself. A gel of ectoplasmic kha spiraled invisibly about him, resonating with the vastly huger psynergy field of the deva. Corby was tangi-bly present. The pressure of the sluicing kha was sharpening, and the whole mountainside was moving through him; the infinite and the minute were joining, and he was the stitch— the pain! Brainbursting agony, lonely and final, as he reached upward to touch Deva—to connect his own tiny lifespark to the Sky.
Unchala's resplendent power tore through Corby's aware-ness, rocking him loose from the phantoms and disguises of memory.
Ovoid light swirled into a staggering vista of unfolding plasma, lion-drunk windshapes of white fire belling overhead in the voor's vision to a sky-dome. Noon on Unchala.
Wheeling slowly, far, far out, were the giant spirals calling from beyond the golden sadsome blur at the rim of seeing. Light longer than understanding funneled out of that sun shining in the all-darkness, singing the immensurable praise of creation: birthdeath, darkness eating itself into light. Light enwombed in stone, stone green-flaming to life. Titanic colors wandered the sky, blazing at the zenith into kinetic starhair and music.
An oompah of thunder bellowed directly overhead just as the soldiers shoved Sumner into the torch-circle. Dollops of cold air splashed out of the windless sky, and the Serbota straightened from their fear-crouches and began to sway se-renely. They sensed the lifelove coursing through Kagan, and it amazed Sumner to see them moving with the music of his heartseeing. He uncurled from his thoughts to join them, and the angelust pulsing through him became knowing.
He was one with Corby and Deva.
The vortex of psynergy around Sumner widened, and the torchbearers and guards were seized in a slow-motion upflow of euphoria. All at once, everyone's thoughts were blurring together, bleeding into a light-swirl, and swiftly gyring into one feeling, blazing as a radiant sphere of emo-tion. Telepathy gripped everyone, and feelings went naked for the first time in most of their lives. The torch circle narrowed to a point as the soldiers rushed to each other to confirm what they were feeling, glowing with the dreamtime of the voor's spell.
On the rim of the caldera, Culler watched in stunned silence. Around him, troopers stood on tiptoe in disbelief, stretching to see what was happening. He ordered two men to accompany him, and he descended in a swift amble. Coos and trills of happiness circled him as he closed in on the crowded arena, and, obeying a deep instinct, he pulled up short. But the two men with him kept going.
Like a bluerun of perch, psynergy flashed through him, cold, clear, and swift—and everything he saw was webbed in an underwater light. He jumped backwards and stumbled to the ground. Staring upward at the stars buzzing in the coldark, he experienced the beatitude of shared feeling. And for an instant the earthdreaming passed through him, light and magnetic.
A gust of cold air chilled Culler alert, and he rolled to his feet and scrambled back up the rim. The lifelove drained out of him, and he felt water-heavy. "Keep the men out," he shouted, swaying weakly. "It's
some kind of psy-war. Maybe gas." His muscles were limp, and the feeling of the spell slowed his thoughts. "Where's the radio? We need strohlkraft up here."
Around Sumner the crowd of soldiers and distorts was dancing, kept from touching him by the swell of static air streaming upward about him. Many of the soldiers who had killed were weeping, lovingly embracing the Serbota. Over-head, a sky-print of iridescent light began to whirlpool the skyfires. A unified gasp of awe filled the volcanic basin.