Radix

Humming stillness sealed around them, and Sumner stared upward, beginning to feel himself lifted. Light spiraled to an achebright starpoint.
Lotus Face!
The telepathic cry transfixed Sumner with its familiarity. Gentle strength turned him about; he sensed the direction of the call, but he could not allow himself to believe what he had heard. He bounded up the stairs of the platform to get a better vantage. An air current in the bone-loops of his ears guided his gaze to a line of crucified figures on the rim of the volcano, opposite from where the Mothers had been exe-cuted. He saw, with blinding surprise, that one of the distorts nailed to the long boards was Drift.
Sumner leaped off the platform and into the dark. Corby's psychic voice screamed No! He landed on squelchy ground, heaved to his feet and, struggling through a line of execution-ers and branders with tear-bright faces, deftly lifted a knife from one of their hilts. As he sprinted up the crater wall, the still air quaked with thunder.
Don't move! Corby's voice exploded in his head. Deva is focusing to lift you. It'll kill us!
Sumner ignored the voor's warning. Fluttersparks of blue refulgence were dropping out of the deep sky, columning around the platform where he had been standing, flickering in the air just behind him. But he kept running. He owed Drift a life—for Ardent Fang.
Power welled through him. He was the living alembic of earth and sky now. Nothing could stop him.
Culler saw Kagan's run toward the rim, and he dashed along the rock brink to intercept him. Eddies of electric light pulsed in the zenith sky and flickerflames flared off the peeler in the pit like ball lightning. Culler believed this was a complex distort trick, a psychic maneuver. Even in the frenzy of his run he was aware of the telepathy around Sumner. He felt the blue pulse of Kagan's life.
"Drift!" Sumner called as he picked his way up the reef rock. Empathic pain forked his wrists and ankles when he got close enough to see the ne nailed to the saltwood. The looped skyfires began to knock brighter and dimmer.
Four of the guards around the crucifying-scaffold aimed to shoot, but an ache of ecstasy cramped through them, and they dropped their guns, sat down, and watched the incense of the milky way floating over the mountains.
Culler saw, and he crouched into his run, moving along the dark slope of the cinder cone. He took out his machine pistol and gripped it hard, deciding then that he would kill his own men if they tried to protect this demon.
With the sound of the sea heaving in his ears from the kha coursing through him, Sumner rushed to Drift. The tribesfolk on either side of it were already dead, their pain-shrunk faces glowing like white apples. Drift was vaguely alive, its whale-small eyes blood-burned. Using the knife he had taken from a guard, he cut the bindings and pulled free the bone-spikes.
It is you, the ne whisper-thought in the windy alley of its agony. Sumner cradled it, and Corby, relieved that Sumner had stopped moving, pumped kha into the distort. The seer's pain instantly broke up into a blowing of lucent particles. A mistral of star-music, simpling a rhythm deep in its being, soothed all fear.
Drift sat up, and in its small mirror-bright eyes Sumner saw Culler coming up the slope over the snow-frosted rocks directly behind him. He spun about, his eyes a shade of ice, and the voor pushed out with his kha. The icy air splashed over Culler's face as he brought his gun up point-blank. Several rounds went off with his startlement, the tracers scything over Sumner's shoulder and vanishing into the im-mense space between the mountains.
The recoil nudged Culler backwards, and he stumble-stepped on the ice-pebbled shale at the steep edge of the volcano, dancing to regain his footing. For several moments as he shuffled on the crumbling incline, sliding toward the sheer plunge, he faced Sumner, an arm's length away, his eyes shallow with fear, his face urgent.
The lifelove was luminous in Sumner's nerves, and quick as wit, he reached out with his right arm. Culler dropped the gun and snatched the hand. But it was slippery with Drift's blood, and his grip slid away. With an amazed look and a whimper, Culler slid into the void. A long and crazy scream expanded across the
mountains. A few rocks rattled after him, and the empty space where he had been glittered with snow motes.
Sumner lifted Drift and moved to return to the pit. The deva's light had vanished, and beneath the night the basin with its smoldering pyres and torches glowed evilly.
Don't move, Corby advised, as the air became warm and perfectly still. Wise, limber power gripped them. Thunder rolled, and the skyfires began to knock again.
Drift knew what was going to happen. It was in rapport with Sumner, and it marveled at the stupendous calm he had attained. Through him it felt Corby, distant and chaotic, his liquid senses churning with psychic noise.
Sun-red sparks wheeled about them in a ratcheting dance. Hot gusts flapped snow into billows, and they were hoisted, faces bleared with wind, into the night sky.
The ground clotted with darkness below them, and the skyfires wisped brighter against the void. They lofted over the highest mountain, and the velocity of their flight beat like bells against the rocks, though their world was still.
The skyfires vapored into nothingness as they rocketed through them, higher than the weather, and the blackness of space was deep as the mindark; the eternal glide of starlight filtering through the razed dust of the galaxies was all the light there was.
Sumner's consciousness peaked into godmind. He was complete beyond time as a voor and a man. He was a human flying through the sky, the ancient heaven, with an androg in his arms. He was the microcosmos, the sempiternal mind. And he was nothing without the voor: He was merely a shade—the shadow of all stars' time. The light of the Big Bang crazed through him, and he comprehended Iz. Thou-sands of darktime voors had channeled the psynergy of their lives through Dai Bodatta, feeling that they were dying into the ecstasy of Unchala. The joy had been real, but the crossing had been only a passage to a memory of Unchala. The voors' psynergy had really dispersed into the planet's kha where the acausal laws of Iz would return them to earth as the memo-ries of future voors. The whole brood would stay here, their psynergy recycling until they blended over thousands of years into the group-soul of the human species. Five thousand years from now, after the Iz-wind had long passed, voors would be remembered as sorcerers, witches, elves. The hu-man form was new to them. Only now, after thirty thousand years dormant in the howlie collective unconscious, were voors humanwise enough to use the return of the Iz-wind to create godminds. If the brood created enough godminds, their psynergy would be strong enough to unify. As One Mind, they could disengage from the earthdreaming com-pletely and flux once more with the Iz-wind that streamed through collapsed stars from cosmos to cosmos. Only a few centuries remained before Iz was too far to reach. The god-minds had to be engendered now. But the Delph, jealous of his waning power, was holding them back by killing their leaders.
Sumner disengaged from the voor's thoughts. He was the plenitude of Now, the dreamshaper. Three-million-year-old memories tightened through him, and the intuition of ten thousand generations flexed into a prescient vision: The zodiac-sky sparkled into the machinelight depths of a vast computer.
Rubeus, Corby thought, and the name became a chis-eled, arrowfaced man swinging at him violently. The proba-bility-ghosted fist shapechanged to a night sky and spears of white light. . . .
Sumner's eyes snapped open, and he saw diamond-blue light shafts arrowing out of the night. Lynks, Corby told him, space-time corridors. We 're being netted.
Pain jagged like lightning, and a shearing radiance swept over Sumner. Within the span of a single second, Corby expanded beyond feeling, beyond godmind, into One Mind. Destiny became geometric, and he again became a shape as Sumner's flight stalled, and with an inertial tug, his body plummeted.