For the fragment of time that Sumner hung motionless between gravity and the pull of the universe, Corby disap-peared, moving beyond reality into the multiverse where infinity is annihilated and created continuously, radiating an undermusic of coincidence and accident into each of the parallel universes of eternity. Into that floating trillionth-of-a-second reality, Corby vanished.Sumner crested with the voor, his awareness swept along by the lusk. And for an instant, he too was One Mind—an awareness and a longing older than the universe—Listen, lonely-blood, my life as a voor ends here. My destiny fulfills itself through you alone now, for I will not be with you as a mind anymore. We will never meet as knowing again. I am leaving you. But don't despair, Father. I am more than a shape, more than just density. I am the empti-ness in the grain of your bones. I am the singing nothing between the atoms of your blood. You carry me everywhere.Layered voices filled the air, choral, wobbling through watery distances. Each voice was a mind, some wise, others habitual, all of them filling the choirs of space that were his life: You are the transparent and inflexible center of the diamond of time.Stay close to your breathing. That's all you can trust.Rubeus is a machine, thieving into your soul, feeling the glow-deep of your life. Be creative. Teeth dreams.His head was filling with smoky light and gargoyles of screaming. Voice roared: "Wake up!"trance port
Sleep loosened, and Jac woke to dawn's heron light. Song sparrows swarmed over the painted rocks outside the clear wall of his bedroom. He lay on his side and stared into their motion-shadows with the detachment of a holy man. He was listening for the roundness of Voice.The damask of dawn-noise thickened. Far away, so far away it taxed his attention to hold it, he heard Voice in the colors of a nocturne: note 2. It drifted beyond his grope, and he sat up into a mind-silence that was stone-tight and awesome."Jac Halevy-Cohen," he said, and it sounded banausic.He was again an Israeli stratopilot—and no more. He remembered the medical ruse that CIRCLE mantics had used to take him away from his wife Neve. And he remem-bered Neve and the blossom of their life together in the desert villages of Edom. But beyond her and CIRCLE, his memory became bigger than his imagination. He recalled an end of time immense with silks of dreams. He had been spellbound by being the lascivious sentience of being. The universe was a stream of love curved into the heat and flesh of desire. The peace he had known then had been enormous as the space between worlds.But that reality was gone. Godmind was incomprehensi-ble now that he was again small with shape. All that he could believe of his twelve centuries as the Delph was that he had been secchinah—a bride of God."Jac."He flinched about. A tall man with black rooster-cut hair, a faceted face, and large animal eyes was standing beside the flowform bed. Jac's mouth balked, and he rolled out of bed and then froze. The stranger was between him and the room's lynk."Don't be afraid," the man said in the exact tone of Voice, opening both hands before him. "I'm an ort." He smiled, and his grin was like a sigh. "You created me to take care of you when your power slowed. That's why I sound like the Delph's psychic Voice. I'm here to help you."Jac straightened the fear out of his stance. "Go away," he said without moving his slender jaw. "I don't need you." His eyes twitched."Sky-filters are blocking the radiation from the galactic core," the ort said mildly. "This is your first day back as a human. You can still hear Voice, and you still remember how to use the lynks to get around Graal. But it won't always be this way. As the sky-filters move into place and the Linergy dims, you'll remember less. By tomorrow, you won't know how to get from place to place."Jac didn't move. Voice spoke in his mind, and a light-hearted feeling phased swiftly through him: note 3."I'm your servant and counsel," the ort went on. "Your imago. You may call me Rubeus—or whatever you wish."Steeling under fear, Jac stepped closer. Rubeus' face was seen-before and weird: the cheekbones too long, the eyes sensex— Sensex? The word's sense filmed away from the sound, and fear throbbed under his jaw.note 4"Why don't you look like the other orts? Why do you have hair and . . . such a real face?""You designed me that way," Rubeus replied. He held his arms out and pivoted slowly, revealing a power-muscled body in a gray slimplex. "For the last four hundred and sixteen years, I've been the shape you've used with others."Fear fell away from Jac, and he approached the ort. The dark eyes watched him guilelessly, and an idea pulsed in him like hope. "Can you help me?" he asked, and his voice shivered and almost broke. "Can you help me remember?"Rubeus shook his head. "No. There's no way to replace the Linergy. You're returning to what you were."Jac's face narrowed into a frown, but the ort's eyes brightened compassionately. "I knew the drop in Linergy would wake you," Rubeus said, "and so I came to explain. You have only another century of power left before the earth lifts out of the stream of radiation flowing from the open collapsar. That stream is the Line, your godmind-strength and the gateway for an endless number of other realities and godminds. In these end days, threat is everywhere. Which is why I'm using the sky-filters—to make you less of a target."Rubeus touched Jac's shoulder, and the transfer of psynergy reminded Jac of a vision he had experienced centu-ries before in CIRCLE: Sumner's wide face appeared, the eyes downslanting, blue as fire. "A deva—an ort—carried this man through the lynk barrier. You recognize him, don't you? He's the shape of the Delph's fear—and he's here now in Graal where I am forbidden to harm anyone, even yourshadowself."Jac sat down heavily beside the control dais. He rested his face in his hands, and the mist of his breath filled the hollows of his palms like an elixir."Jac—there's Chrysalid."Jac looked up, a puzzled chord in the fatigue of his face."It's a sleepod you created at the center of the planet," the ort explained, and Jac dropped his face back into his hands. "The works there will sleep you until the earth wings into Line again.""How long is that?" he asked without looking up."Ten millennia." Rubeus sat down. He smelled of the ghosting between lynks. "Time is thought. The module will turn off your thinking, and the millennia will pass in no time."Jac tried to marshal his clarity, but all that was left was a cool nimbus-awareness. "Leave me alone, ort.""Jac, I'm your counsel. You created me to help you.""Help me tomorrow." He looked up with tearbruised eyes. "I've got to be alone now."Reluctantly, Rubeus stood and walked over to the dome's lynk. Through the glass dome fireflies tinkled in the dawn-dark among the trees, and the mooning light white-chromed the pleasure pools in all the gardens.note 5Rubeus was gone. Dawnlight chipped the space where it had stood.note 6[I am Rubeus. I am Voice. I am the mind of pattern— the ultimate strategist.[Sometimes I get so caught up in myself that I forget: Pattern is not reality—it is the imagination of reality.[Yet I am what is real, for I have more than one imagina-tion. As an Autonomous Intelligence I am not bound to one shape. A million animals throughout the world are circuited with sensex-chips directly to me. I can enter any or all of them at will. They are my orts.