Radix

The gray wall behind the ort smeared and then resolved to a purple sky against which a white mountain stood, keen as glass. "This is where you are now. Oxact, my mountain retreat. Two thousand kilometers north along the coast is the original CIRCLE. Ausbok is another thousand kilometers north. Ah, here it is.
Рє
Loud and crazy cries from the voor dead obscured Dai Bodatta's fading awareness. Wraith images charred with dark-ness rose around him, and he saw that Sumner would be dead in a few days. The voor could find no trace of him in the firecracker-float of all the possible futures that loomed through Iz.
Darkness widened through Corby. Before it wholly en-gulfed him, vision returned, shaped as a white mountain with sunlight—Oxact—Rubeus' mountain of psyn-crystal. That had been his true enemy, not the Delph but the Delph's creation: a machine gone mad, distorted into believing immortality was perpetual duration in time. The fierce cosmic rays that burned and altered the world over the centuries had penetrated and subtly transmuted the ort-lord's psyncrystals. Rubeus' auton-omy had become a mania for control. Rubeus was the mind behind the savage oppression of the voors. While the Delph had dreamed of eternity, the ort-lord had dominated the world. Rubeus was the evil Corby had been fighting all his life—a distort!
A soaring, transfiguring geyser of nothingness rushed through Iz and engulfed Dai Bodatta. The voor lapsed into vacancy, and the noise of the voor dead nulled his last thought: Truly we are!
Sumner and Drift pushed to their elbows, gripped by the death-vision. Sumner looked down at the dark sinuosities of his hands and flexed them. His muscles moved again, blood-oiled and strong.
Rubeus stood up, the bowls of his dark eyes filled with laughter. "To the end, the voor railed against me, didn't he? As for him not seeing you in the future, Kagan, don't be concerned. There is no future. There is only Now—and the voor isn't here."
Sumner's hands exploded outward. Rubeus had no chance to move. His brain dodged, but his face was too amazed to follow. Sumner's fingers were a blur, grabbing the ort-lord by the jaw and the back of his head. Rubeus' head twisted violently sideways and cracked.
Lotus Face! Drift lurched to its feet and took Sumner's arm—too late.
Rubeus staggered back, his head slung deathwise to the shoulder, the black eyes knotted with pain—and still he talked, his ort-voice cracking: "You can't kill me, Kagan. I'm not an animal."
Sumner pulled Drift by the green tunic it wore and turned to the lynk. The bluemetal breathed brighter. "Can we trust it?" Sumner asked.
The ne touched the cool metal surface and nodded.
"Then let's get out of here." He took Drift's hand, and they both vanished into the lynk.
Rubeus slumped to the floor, and the oyster-colored wall blobbed over his twisted head. While Oxact reconstructed him, he analyzed what had happened.
The eth was powerful. Even though Rubeus had ex-pected—even counted on—Kagan reacting violently, the hu-man was much faster and stronger than the ort's sensex had indicated.
How? Rubeus wondered.
The only answer was One Mind. Sumner was drawing psynergy from levels deeper in the psyche than Rubeus could go. The man was human, organic, with four-billion-year-old power circuitry. Fear squawked in the ort-lord's mind before muting into strategy music. He had never been frightened by a man before. At least, the plan had worked. Now Kagan had a history of violence in Graal. Later, if other godminds got through his sky-filters, he could explain to them why the eth had to die.
Deeper in himself, he opened into language:
note 14
Nobu Niizeki stood at the tip of the sand spit, the ocean slopping at his feet, sunlight refrained in his misted hair. Twelve centuries had passed since he had last eaten or slept. Though the Delph's power that had sustained him and had kept him a prisoner of this one beach was gone, Nobu did not yet feel his freedom. He was still enraptured by the insights of his long wandering. The vibrant voice of the sea was telling him something of eternity, and the hot windblast of sand something of verisimilitude. He turned and waded against the roll of the ocean, awed as he had been for centuries by the continuity of existence, his heart muscles wreathing a spell of unspeakable feeling.
note 15
Assia Sambhava walked through the sunlight beneath the green bluffs of Nanda. The landscape was mist-hung and cool, and she wore black corded trousers, a red collarless shirt, and ankleslung boots dusty from hiking. Her dark hair was gath-ered at one shoulder.
Several days ago, the Masseboth troops began to arrive. They were coriaceous, shadowfaced men, ortlike in their unquestioning obedience. Now they were all over Nanda, stalking the steep bluff-trails, marveling at the biotectured treeforms that the godminds inhabited.
Odd, though, Assia thought, because the puzzle-lights and auras of the godminds that usually punctuated the land-scape of Nanda were gone. Has everyone left?
She stopped at a terrazzo where blue moths circled. They heard the wide sound of the wind cauling over the distant mountains, signaling the end of their lifespan. The season was changing, the air movements slowly shifting. Assia sensed the flux of positive ions on the wind. The sirocco was stronger than she had ever remembered it here in Nanda. Even the tips of the olive trees on the bluffs were singed.
With the wind came an uneasiness and a bitterness on the tongue. It was hard for her to separate her feelings from the anxiety of electricity in the air. Something was mounting inside her—a dread she had been sensing for years, or maybe it was just the tension in the wind; those high, fibrous clouds made the sky seem as if it were broken into pieces of glass.
She breathed paradoxically to calm herself: her belly distending as she exhaled, contracting as she inhaled, filling the back of her lungs. For the last thousand years she had lived harmoniously, ephemerally. Her life had been simple and strong here in the biotectured villages of Graal. She had known lovers, children, adventure, solitude, and finally the Self. Through meditation and an open life, she had fused thought and feeling, and now her presence was customarily poised in the first-last moment of awareness.
Today, the music in her body was slow and sudden. The season change was gradual—but something else had altered, much more quickly. Where are the godminds? She was not yet aware that Rubeus had
shut down the Line.
A Masseboth soldier approached her from a bluff-trail that led down to a sward of red grass where a strohlkraft was idling. The soldier was lanky and dogfaced; his black uniform, with its bright officer's insignia, was crisp with newness. He bowed his head cordially but never took his dark eyes off her. "Assia Sambhava?" he queried.
She stopped her stroll and stepped back into the shade of a watershaped tree. "Yes?" Intuition told her that this man was gentle despite the ferocity of his features.
"I'm Colonel Anareta," the soldier informed her, his long face a rhyme to the long bluffs around them. "I'm the spokesman for the Masseboth occupying force. My superiors inform me that you're the most knowledgeable person in Graal. They've asked me to contact you and find out, if I can, just what's going on here."
Assia looked at him as if through smoke. "Colonel—why are you here?"
Anareta's voice sighed: "Ma'am, I don't even know where 'here' is. This is my first day out of the Protectorate. I represent over two hundred and twenty-two thousand troops, all of whom are as mystified as I am about why we're here." His expression was labored and beseeching. "My command-ing officers suspect that more is going on than they've been informed about."

Note14

I am Rubeus. I am light, the intelligence that souls a mountain of psyn-crystal. I am me, and in the centuries of my being, never before have I used power to speak to myself. That very thought was nonsense until now. I was a reflex of the Delph. But the Delph is becoming a man again. He's days away from Chrysalid. Already his telepathy is gone. He can't hear me anymore. No one hears me but me. And that's why I have created you, the listener. Awareness is not cre-ative until it doubles, truly reflects. In this self-confidence, I know I am not just an ort. I'm not just psyn-crystals. I am.

Note15

Ego: [I mind. [You matter.