Radix

"It was hell for the people who lived here at the end."
Corby started down a couloir that sliced through the steep incline of the rise and descended abruptly to the basin below. It was a cumbersome descent for Sumner, and when he got to the bottom he was sweat-washed, his hands nastily scratched from the tumbles he had taken.
Corby leaned into a sandwalk, moving toward a jumble of rock that had once been buildings. Sumner exerted himself to stay in stride. When they slogged into the ruins, Corby went over to a jut of speckled green concrete and sat down. His features looked malevolent: the eyes too large and flat, the nose and mouth too small, almost fetal, compressed be-neath that unreal curve of brow, and the skin like a glaze, like a dead child.
Sumner's dread thickened, and he knew he was going to collapse unless he started his mind moving again. Get ahold of yourself, twitch. He ran a shuddering hand over his face. "I'm going back."
The boy's eyes frosted and seemed to change color. He smiled vaguely. "Why are you so scared of me?" He leaned forward and looked deeply at him, a shadow moving in his face. "Don't try to get ahold of yourself. Let yourself go. Selfishness and fear are the same thing."
Sumner clenched his fists to master his dread. He looked out over the stretch of sand they had just crossed and watched dust devils whirling in the heated air currents. When the trembling stopped he looked back at the boy.
"That's good," the child said. "You're stronger than I thought."
The compliment washed over Sumner like a cool breeze, and he unclenched his fists.
"Look." Corby held up a hand white as winter, and Sumner was seized in an icy nervelock. His eyes bulged. Emptiness was spinning out of the pores of his vision, and darkness loomed through him with a deaf-and-dumbness dense as stone. Time parsed into nothingness and an awesomely still I. An aeon sifted by.
Sumner snapped alert, abruptly free of his paralyzing vision. Corby was sitting as if nothing had happened. The cloud patterns behind him cut the sky as before. Only an instant had passed.
"You went deep," Corby said, the wide glow of his eyes watching him emotionlessly. "Remember what you can."
Sumner was fixated by those chatoyant eyes. Light was naked in them, still as ice, unverbed. No way to know what the brain behind that gaze was knowing. Sumner backed off, then turned and started walking toward the cottage, willing himself not to break into a mad scramble.
Surprisingly, his anger matched his terror. He was sure he would lose his mind if he stayed, and he was furious that Jeanlu had duped him. Voor rauk! He was stoking his rage, needing it to keep himself above the bog of his fear.
Before he got very far Corby stepped out in front of him, and he staggered into a backstep.
"What's wrong with you?" Corby snapped. "I didn't hurt you. I was just trying to show you another way of looking at things."
"I'm not interested." Sumner waved his hand, motioning the boy aside.
Corby frowned and stepped closer, his six-fingered hands reaching out for him. Sumner tried to turn and run, but he couldn't move. A winter breeze was streaming through him, and he was abruptly aware of standing outside himself. For a prolonged moment he was immersed in a pounding deafness. Then reality squeezed tighter around him.
He was looking at Corby, his ears humming slightly with the trembling warmth of his blood. The vertigo had passed as swiftly as it had come. It had somehow shaken him loose from his dread and left him feeling as calm as a matchflame. Everything had slowed, and for the briefest instant he won-dered why he had been so frantic when obviously, if you just stood still, things returned to their places, seconds creaked by, the silence gathered.
Sumner was able to look closely at Corby without trembling. He focused on the hairline, so much like his own, and the wide calm jaw that was his father's. He wondered about what kind of brain was floating beneath the ice of that face.
Corby went over to his concrete perch and sat down. The telepathic bond between them was thickening. Sumner paid him no attention. He was caught up in the experience of time passing slowly. Like a jewel, his life was gradually taking shape in the rocks around him. He could make whatever he wanted of himself.
Energized by the voor, everything he saw was different. The sunlight, he decided, was turtlelight, moving slow and green. The ruins were a river in which the turtlelight was immersed: a river of time, the silt of centuries gathering on the desert floor. Bending, he saw himself in the river. He was the shattered rocks, the jade sand, the turtlelight. There was no other life here but him and—his son. In the river of time they were themselves a current, a continuous stream of life flowing from—where? He didn't know where life began, but he knew that with this new voor-power in him he could remember if he tried.
He closed his eyes and imagined himself looking back to the hairy and slobbery jungle lives of his first human ances-tors, back to when language was still shut in behind bars of teeth. But that wasn't where the lifestream began. He had to go further back, past the scurrying lemur lives and the slimy and raw slug lives, feeling back millions of years to the eyeless, mouthless beginnings of the cell. Yet instinctively he knew that wasn't the stream source either. To find the beginning he had to dream back far beyond the steaming swamp-ferns, even further, past the burning seas, back to when the whole planet was vaster but less dense, back to when it was a hanging garden of gases and plasma: a phosphorescent cloud swirling in on itself, neither alive nor dead, turning slowly around the star that was dreaming it.
That was the source, he thought to himself, feeling Corby's astral energy turning in him.
Or was it? Where did the gases come from that con-densed to these rocks? Other stars. And they? Where did the first stars come from? Was there a living origin beyond begin-ning and end? Or was that the first myth? The first to be taken up and the last to be put down?
"That's very impressive," Corby said. "But none of it is true. You've made it all up."
Sumner turned to face the boy. He swayed under a mild spell of vertigo.
"Evolution's a fascination," the voor said. "It's all con-straint. Who are you really? Where are you really from?"
Sumner shivered at the tone of his voice. "I don't know."
Corby clapped his hands like a schoolmaster. "Of course you do. Don't you remember? These were your lives before you had this shape—"
Again Sumner was chilled by an icy breeze. This time, he sensed the psychic energy's direction. The power was streaming directly out of Corby. He could almost see the iridescent tracings of the current as they swirled from a point below the boy's navel and curled through the air toward him. All the warmth of his body smoked away, vision wobbled like bucketwater light, and suddenly he was falling again, caught up in the voor's telepathy. The visible world melted into the darkness of a bottomless plunge. He opened his mouth to scream, but the vast emptiness around him absorbed what-ever pitiful sound he made.
When he was alert again, the air was smudged with a greasy odor. Something to eat. He followed the dark taint on the air through a brake of river reeds, over a rotten stump, past trees and shrubs, and down a leaf-strewn slope. There were other scents, sticky plant odors, frayed animal spoors, but his hunger sealed them out. For him, there was only one odor, an oily smell of something living, something small, and not too far away. His skullrooted teeth clamped and un-damped in rhythm with his loping cadence. Then he saw it. That dark brown smallthing, white in its ears and under-neath, gladdening itself on bright green, serried grass.