Radix

Watching the smallthing perched in the tall grass, eyes alert and wily, ears pricked, Sumner's mouth widened in adoration and a spindly thread of saliva drooled to the ground. Then he was off, and the smallthing bolted. There was a long chase under the grasshead-waves and the tranquil hills and the clouds like mountains. When it ended, it ended quickly. The skullrooted teeth ripped flesh, and there was a hot, sticky smell of blood, and a squeal that jarred the air for a moment.
Sumner tried to get ahold of himself. What's happening to me? he bawled, but his cry was lost in a glare of light. The glare splintered to an aerial view, valleyward—a straggle of trees, the curled ribbon of a river. He was flying, the air's buoyancy and the wind's force bending joint and tendon, lifting him up, widening the arc of his circular flight. One eye was soft and swivel-searching the clouds for others like him-self. The other eye was keen and downward gazing, feeling the textures of the leaf-dapples and grass shadows far below, hunger giving it clarity. The sun was behind him, the hooked feet pulled in, the hooked head turning, searching. Grasses wavered and hid. He watched his shadow trawling the green rumpled earth. Nothing stirred. But he went on looking. Watching. Watching. A wryneck sailed out of a tree and swooped low over the bent grass. The movement was spotted immediately, and he folded his wings in on themselves and dropped for the kill.
Sumner tried to shrug himself awake, but he couldn't break the fall. He plunged from one dream into the next. He was a shark slendering up toward a glassy-grained surface where smaller fish glittered like stars. Suddenly he was a cloud-feathered gull eyeing a fish's hidden light among the rocks. Then he was an owl living by the claws of his brain. Then a spider watching a fly tangled in mouth-glue, whining its wings.
Of all the dreams that blurred through him, one was particularly vivid. He was whiskering through the stalks of tall plants, trailing a foodscent. Only this time, he was unusually tired and hungry and alone. He was willing to go where he had never gone before—across stubble fields thick with strange scents. Far ahead was a farmhouse, though he didn't recognize it as such. At the time, it was just a mysterious break in the horizon, filled with watery lights and unfamiliar sounds. Nearer was another such thing but more familiar, heavy with the smell of birds.
He approached slowly, gutsack hugging the ground, nos-trils flared for danger scents. There was a tall opening, but it was hot with the spoor of something he didn't recognize. So he circled the nest area until he found a small crawlspace. The birds already sensed him, and they were clucking ner-vously as he dragged himself through. He pounced on the nearest bird, snapping its neck, shaking the life out of it. He pulled his kill after him, out through the crawlspace, hurried by the squall of the other birds and a distant barking. Outside he stalled for an instant. A tall creature had spotted him and was making a thin, incomprehensible sound, waving a stick at him. It was too far away to be a threat, so he picked up his kill and jaunted off. But not far. The stick flared brightly, and a crushing blow swamped his eyes with darkness.
Darkness.
Sumner snapped his eyes open and squinted against the turtlelight. With a hand to his face, he tried to clear his mind. What's happening to me?
A voice reached him: "You'll be all right." It was Corby. His mind unclenched, and he saw that he was standing. Only a few seconds had passed.
Sumner sat down in the dust and rested his head in his hands. Only after several long minutes was he able to look up again. He sat still and rooted his feet and fingers in the sand as if the slightest movement might shatter his delicate hold on sense.
"It's over now," Corby said. But it wasn't over for Sum-ner. Every rock, every twisted bolt of steel, every dust mote stood out clear and strong. Even the sunlight and its green reflectant haze shimmering in the air was distinct, detached from the ruins and the sky. He understood. "I'm alive," he whispered to himself. "Alive!"
Overwhelmed by a mingling of awe and fear, euphoric with the cosmic energy that the voor had channeled through him, he rolled to his stomach and began to crawl through the sand. Drifts of sunlight wavered over his body, the heat flowing from the warmed rocks into his whole being. Cre-ation was caressing him, and he writhed in the sand trying to embrace all of it.
When he looked up again, it was night. The skyfires, vibrant auroras, were streaming above him, and by their brilliant light he could see that his clothes and hands were thick with dirt. Around him the ruins were glowing, effusing a dim green pallor. His head felt wide and clear as the sky, sparking with lights. And he realized he was looking at the sky—he was the sky!
No—this voor-dreaming had gone far enough. He stopped himself.
Corby was sitting on the same jut of concrete he had gone to hours before. Remarkably, he felt no fear of the boy, not a strand of anxiety.
Corby hopped off his perch and took him by the arm. There was no spasm of energy, no jolt. Just the meager grip of a child. "Let's go home," he said, sounding tired.
They picked their way among the ruins and dragged through the sand toward the rock escarpment hiding Jeanlu's cottage. Looking at the stars echoing through the coronal lacings of the skyfires, he sought out a particular pattern: the ancient, swayback Lion. When he had found its fierce eye and inferred its tussling mane and low-hung, cold belly, a small voice opened in him: A wind blows through the Lion's belly. It was Corby's voice, diminutive, distant, arising from somewhere in the back of his head. Sumner was amazed at first, but what he was hearing swiftly overwhelmed his sur-prise:
A fire-wind blows through the Lion's belly, so old and far-traveled its beginnings are forgotten. When it reaches this small time-drenched world, it flares in the ozone and scat-ters. But some of it sifts through the atmosphere. Some of it takes on the shapes that it finds and becomes voors, simply by arriving. We are older than you know. We ve been on this planet before. Perhaps this time we'll stay until the sun mists over and the fire-wind, our journey and life, pushes on, scattering us into the future.
They came to the rocky rise, and the inner voice slipped away. At his side, Corby was stalling, too tired to climb. Sumner looked up at the rise. The supple energy of the trance was still coursing through him, and he knew he could make it to the top. He bent down and let Corby straddle his shoulders, then he started climbing. He felt exhilarated, full of strength, and the rock face seemed to conspire with his need to ascend. He thought about the words that had drifted across his mind and wondered how many other worlds the fire-wind of the voors had crossed—how many others like himself had fathered alien flesh.
About three-quarters of the way to the top he pulled up short. On the ground in front of him, where his eyes had been assiduously picking out a trail in the broken rock, was a shadow—a human shadow. He looked up, expecting to see Jeanlu or a voor waiting to help them, and he shrieked. Klaus, his dead father, was standing there, one eye and most of his forehead missing, violently ripped away. The one good eye, set in a face of mottled gray flesh, gazed down at him sadly. The lips were pulled back in a berserk grimace.
Sumner shrieked again and jerked back violently, send-ing Corby flying off his shoulders. Instinctively he spun about to catch the boy, but it was too late. Corby dropped into the darkness head first, careening toward a jagged ridgerock. Sumner gasped and looked quickly over his shoulder. The specter of his father was gone. Corby walked up from where he had landed, looking a little shaken.