Radix, page 35
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
“I am Assia Sambhava,” she said affably. “Do you remember me?”
Jac’s eyes thinned, and he shook his head.
Disappointment shadowed swiftly across Assia’s face. “No concern.” She wiped the sheen of sweat from his upper lip with her sleeve. “Your memory has been broken for a long time. I am a psychobiologist here at CIRCLE—the Center of International Research for the Continuance of Life on Earth—and I have been treating you since I arrived eleven years ago. Your condition is unique and significant. You have a density in the pontine stem of your brain. You were serving in the North African Air Corps when this density was misdiagnosed as a tumor. Actually, it is a natural development, a folding-inward of the cerebral cortex—something that has happened to one out of every billion humans for the past forty thousand years. I believe it is the next step in brain evolution, and I have been trying to activate and amplify it with RNA supplements. So far, I have been unsuccessful, and”—the dark in her eyes thickened—“worse, I may have damaged you, Jac. Your memory is gone, and I have not been able to strengthen it.”
Jac wasn’t listening. Deep within, he knew who he was, but remembering had become unimportant. He waited, anticipating the inner change that followed most of his treatments. When the patterns of association began to expand, the transfusion nozzle still touched the blue vein on his neck, and he felt surprised at how quickly his mind responded. (Surprised: that is, phosphofructokinase is breaking down glucose-1, increasing neural activity, and so on, a wobbly circle, a snake with its tail in its mouth.)
He wondered if the psychobiologist—Assia, yes—was aware of the speed or even the extent to which these supplements affected her subject.
“Do you have any questions—anything to say?” Assia asked.
Jac’s eyes looked smoky. “I hear a voice.” (The human voice, saddest of instruments.)
“I know.” She spoke in a very gentle way. When she took his hand, the compassion in her eyes thickened to love. “The supplements intensify it.”
“What do I do?” (Remember your heritage. The Qlipoth are your ancestral enemies, especially the Mâmes, those who move by backward motion, and Glesi, the one who glistens like an insect.)
“A new self is being born, Jac.” Assia’s grip on his arm tightened. “You are changing. Don’t try to fight it—and don’t fear it.”
Jac sat still, his eyes too quiet. “What am I becoming?”
Assia’s voice hushed: “I don’t know.” She put a wrinkled hand to the side of his head, and the warmth of her touch conveyed the heat of love. “We are done for today.” She removed the transfusion nozzle and the net of the bioscanner. “Stay in the compound this afternoon. The supplement may make you feel woozy. I will see you again in a couple of days, all right?”
He nodded, and the psychobiologist faced away and began busily authorizing the day’s treatment at a keypunch.
Jac’s hands shook. He breathed deeply to calm himself and pushed out of his recliner. For a moment, he tottered, dizzy, and then struggled with an uncontrollable smile as the flow of associations continued accelerating. (Endocrine infatuation, Jac. Your body loves you. Even as it’s dying, it takes the time to make you feel good. Bad to good. Life to death. A snake biting its ass. The wheel of the law, rolling.)
Jac relaxed his mind and permitted the network of meaning that he perceived to wash him with its euphoria, his laugh losing itself in the mutter of computer processing. Sensory perceptions became continuous again, sound shimmering like thermal breath, colors audible and odorous.
He walked down the aisle of treatment-stations to the exit valve as he had done hundreds of times before, each time stranger than the last.
The portal opened beneath a sandstone scarp on the periphery of a large basin separated from the sea by enclosing outcroppings of shale and red-veined rock. The dispensary complemented the landscape, practically invisible from the outside. Light split from low-lying banks of clouds, falling amber across the flat basin floor that the drilling rain had pitted and caked. On a high vale at the opposite end of the basin, huge black rocks hunched beneath wet wings of rain.
Thunder grumbled, and Jac moved down a vague path among the cold rays of a cloudy sun. (The wheel of the law, rolling, rolling.) He felt the chemical rush in his blood, the newly introduced RNA tightening through him, peaking to a plateau that moved ahead for hours. He stretched his stride as someone lowered the rain around him. (A harp into the hands of the wind.)
***
In the billowy blue light from the saltwater aquarium, Assia’s thin, white-robed body looked like a wraith. Behind her, in the blackmetal face of a wall-console, one red light burned: The Data-Sync opened, ready to tell her anything.
Assia thumbed a series of number functions. She didn’t know what she was looking for—something to affirm her work or herself.
A Queen Triggerfish sailed by like a kite, its dorsal and ventral fins a thin memory of wings. She punched in the voice of her data-recall:
“...mesoderm, seven days after conception. But why has the process of natural selection, which is stringently economical, given Homo sapiens sapiens a brain volume in excess of survival needs? These findings suggest that the cortical overgrowth is a necessary but not sufficient evolutionary step and that these fetuses are precursors of an imminent new development: the doubling of the cortical fold. Many questions are still left unresolved. Why, for instance, does uterine analysis of double cortical folded fetuses in their seventh month indicate massive reshuffling of chromosomal operons linked with memory-androgen formation? Is this evidence, as Gallimard and Sambhava suggest, that these fetuses may be translating chromosomal records into consciously accessible memories? And why is it that shortly before the end of the eighth month one hundred percent of these fetuses refuse to metabolize steroids, thus precipitating miscarriage? Why has it been impossible to maintain the development of the mutated fetuses in artificial amniotic suspension? Are there other...”
Assia snapped off the console. Rainbow-jeweled coral held her gaze: a deathflower, a skeleton-house, a redundant lifecycle frozen in its entity.
***
Jac twisted awake and sat bolt upright, face sharp with startled clarity. The flexform he had been curled in still hummed its drowsetone as he swung to his feet and staggered toward his desk. The calendar pyramid told him with its cold light that it had been more than a year since the last time he had stood as he was standing now, aware of what was happening to him.
He sagged onto the swivel stool beside his desk and gazed with torpor at the scattering of data cubes and cassettes. The sky in the window-oval above his desk, precise with stars, showed by that slim light that nothing here had changed—he was studying the same things that he had been lost in a year ago: world history, psychobiology, neutrino astronomy—trying to understand the changes. Why had massive earthquakes and tidal waves traumatized the planet for so many decades? And what was this cosmic radiation mutating all lifeforms?
A lion of a cloud slouched across the stars, and his vision numbed. The Voice remained silent, but he could feel it close by. If he tried—(I’m always here, Jac—just a cock-in-the-rock’s throw away.)
He jumped despite himself. He knew that the Voice was himself, the doubled-over cortex that Assia had been activating for the last ten years. (Don’t try to rationalize me. Visions defeat the ego.) Memory now intact, he remembered diabolically, and with hurting lucidity, the smell of Neve’s hair—his wife. He slapped on a hidden desk-light and rummaged for the message chips she must have sent. When he found the transparent chips, he held them in his fists. But he didn’t turn toward the video. No time. (The archetype of spontaneity demands that we sharpen our own toothpicks, eh?)
“Voice!” he snapped. (Yes?) He typed out a call-message for Assia on their private line, and then he flicked out the light. In the sudden nerve-darkness, he felt the humid presence of the Other. “What do you want from me?” (My exigence is extreme, Jac. It’s the possession of life, the ecstatic climax, that I want. Nothing less will do.)
Outside the window-oval, the moon rose. He watched the secrecy lifting off the nearby hills as moonlight rhythmed closer. “Then why are we separate?” (We aren’t. I am you—but you’ve forgotten who you are.)
The sky silvered with moonlight, and he followed clouds rising above him as tall and jumbled as a sunken land. “But why do I forget—and for longer?” (Memory is the bone, the carapace. I am the marrow.)
A door snicked open, and an old woman edged in, white hair shining in the darkness.
“Assia—” He stood up, and she went to him. “I’m remembering again.”
“It has been a long time.” She took his shoulders in her long, dark hands. “Do you want to stop the treatments?”
“No.”
“The brainfold can be excised nonsurgically—”
“It’s more than me, Assia.” He sat down again and looked up into the darkness of her face. “Nothing’s changed outside, has it?”
“No. Everything is still mad.” Assia sat on the edge of his desk and brushed the sleepwrung hair from his eyes. “Is the Voice strong?”
“It talks in riddles. And I think it’s going to get worse. How is my behavior these days?”
Assia smiled without moving her lips. “You are kinetic—a lot of walking and exploring.”
“Doesn’t sound very profound.”
“You are in an assimilative phase, Jac. We have to be patient.”
Jac spun in his seat and looked up at the cloud’s bright landscape. An age ago, Assia had envisaged a dream for him. One in a billion with an overfolded cortex: the extra lobe expressed a genetic quirk, a fist in the brain with the strength, perhaps, to reach outside of time and change reality. Much less developed neurologies accomplished that on a small scale, reshaping the statistical reality of thrown dice or randomly fired atomic calculators. What could a natural brainfold do if it were mantically augmented?
The first researchers at CIRCLE hadn’t presented Jac’s situation to him in quite that way. Afraid he might refuse, they had informed him that he had a brain tumor, and for the first year they had experimented on him without his consent. Assia changed all that—but by then he was no longer abstracting beyond the best mantics. He had slowed down. His thoughts had turned inward, and the Voice and a baffling autism had begun. Still, Assia’s vision offered a different outcome. There was the possibility—The possibility that—
Jac turned to Assia with a wide darkness in his eyes. “I’m losing it.” His words spoke inside his breath, barely audible. “Tell my wife I’ll get in touch with her next time.”
Assia bent closer, eyes spiderbright and dark. Should she tell him? Neve was dead, lost with millions of others when Africa’s northern deserts boiled up into an absurd storm—black rain, 400-kilometer-an-hour winds, whole cities lifted away. No—the slackness in his gaze said no.
Assia helped Jac to his feet and led him back to the flexform. When he lay down, the drowsetone came on, and he rolled into a deep sleep. “You are not losing it,” she whispered. “We cannot lose what we are.” She kissed him and stood over him a long while, her body ethereal with fatigue and sadness.
***
Drifts and depths of clouds trawled the fathomless cobalt of the afternoon. Assia lounged in the fluffy embrace of a tropiform, passing time watching flocks of children at play. The gymnasium extended enormously, domed in plastic transparent to the full solar spectrum.
At one end, sunlight blazed green in the depths of a drypool, an oval trough of air that had been thickened to the density of water by subquantally alloying it with noble gases. Closer by, adolescents played volleyball in a null field; others strengthened their muscles with magnetic tug-weights; on the mats, two classes practiced dance and gymnastic routines.
Assia’s attention focused on the little ones, proud to see an intermingling of every race and genetic type, all speaking Esper. And with CIRCLE’s constant genetic monitoring, inherent handicaps posed no danger. Mutations got modified in utero or else aborted. A severe principle, phyletic hygiene, but it averted much suffering.
Even though she loathed genetic controls, Assia recognized their merit with CIRCLE’s children. Watching youngsters with faces continually wonder-rapt, she experienced a joy that hadn’t filled her since her youth. What would it have been like to have had a child—life swelling out of her own body?
“Our future, eh?” a voice gruffed beside her. Nobu Niizeki, CIRCLE’s program director, approached. Short and cube-headed with a thin heard, he took her hand and squeezed it affectionately in his blunt fingers as he sat down. “The world’s gone insane, but our children are still our light.”
“That is what I believe,” she affirmed casually. “If there is any hope, it is with the children.”
“Good,” Nobu said in his austere voice. “That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about.” He let her hand go. His stern eyes, hooded like a weary boxer’s, held her gaze. “That Israeli strato-pilot—”
“Jac.”
“Yes—Jac. You’ve been working with him for almost twelve years now.”
The snake of an artery writhed in her neck.
“Assia—” Nobu’s curved face, serene as amber, leaned closer. “We barely have the resources to feed these children. To survive, CIRCLE’s cutting back. We’re going to have to reassign you.”
Her eyes closed, and history thickened in her face. “And Jac?”
“He’ll be euthed this week.”
Her eyes snapped open, the light in them diamond-dense.
“It’s painless,” Nobu said. “You know.”
“No.” The word sounded thick. “We will send him back.”
Nobu’s eyes curved sadly. “Assia—the world’s changed. There are no places left to send him. It would be a cruelty to turn him loose out there.”
“Then pension him. He volunteered, and he has served well. Come on—what does it take to keep one more man alive?”
Nobu’s strong fingers opened before him, “We don’t have it. It’s survival now, Assia. Cosmic rad levels have quadrupled in the last year. The whole sky is hot from the galactic flare. Haven’t you been following?”
“I have been working.” Her voice, flat and fogged with emotion, continued, “Nobu, listen—Jac’s a top priority. He could be the strongest mantic ever. He could change it all around.”
“It’s gotten beyond any one man, Assia.”
“I am not talking about a man.” She spoke into the black of Nobu’s eyes. “Jac could be a godmind.”
“Bah!” He waved a hand between them to break her gaze. “I worship every day, but that hasn’t stopped the storms yet.”
“Nobu, you know I am serious. Jac has the best-developed cortical fold in physio history. He has got the biology to sustain a causal collapse.”
Warmly, Nobu took her hand again and held it to his chest. “Assia, this has been your life’s work, pushing human biology forward. You’ve reaped a lot. You made the mantic reality what it is. You took the ATP-pump and made it human. But a godmind? I love you, Assia. I love what your work has created, but I have to tell you, you’re making a joke of everything you’ve done. Causal collapse, godminds—that’s a wide vision. The world, as it is now, is too narrow for that. We need you elsewhere.”
Her eyebrows danced. “Doing what? Stabilizing soybean growth? Gene-splicing rad-proof babies?”
“Either of those would help.”
Tears filmed her eyes, and she spoke frantically: “Nobu, no amount of gene shuffling is going to replace the planet’s magnetic field. That new radiation out there is our future. We can’t hole up forever.”
Nobu took her other hand and shook both of them, slow and strong. When he spoke, his voice sounded rapt: “Assia, we need you.” Her soul shrank. “I don’t make policy, but I’ve got to see it through.” He let her hands go and stood up. “I want you to take some time off—catch up on the reports and see what’s really going on. I think you’ll agree with me after you’ve reviewed the facts.”
She looked for help, eyes haunted, but he bowed to avoid her stare. “If you need to talk with someone, try this.” He passed her an octagonal card with unfamiliar coordinates on it and no name. When she looked up, he was already walking away.
***
With a heartquiver, Sumner lurched across time, following his voor strength to where parabolas of tall trees shadowed a grove of bursting sunlight. Sumner spotted a yawp sitting on the darkside of an elm, half hidden in burgeoning ailanthus.
Bonescrolls, Corby informed him. This was his first shape—a service yawp slaving for the howlies. His name was Rois then—and he was a rare breed of yawp. But let’s hear the magnar tell us.
The voor narrowed closer, using what remained of his mage-power to story-pattern the yawp’s psynergy. Sumner’s mind blurred into the flux of Rois’ mind-language:
Kiutl—the Saints call her the hollow light, Old No Name’s undersong. In the boro, the scorchfaced kids, the ones with those furious bodies that can withstand the nervesquelch of kiutl immanence, the ones with that altitudinous light in their eyes—they call her Lami.
Inspired by her, each moment is clear. But—like the sleepy tale of the jinn who for each finger you’d chop off would grant a wish—you can’t stay with her long. After about a year of daily boff, cortical synapses jam, immanence becomes interminable, and within a week, the ears are gone to marauding boys, the eyes to birds, and the old women have come to dice the spine.
My mother went that way. She was skunked and obscure on kiutl when I was born—a blue and weathered twist of flesh kept alive on corpsemeat, surviving to see her strangle on a cord of vomit a year later. She was twelve and had made enough contacts in Little Eden’s research labs to barter me. Without doubt, I would have trashed in the boro without her, so working for the grins as a psi-target was unlimited.
To accrete a sense of gratitude, the grins focused my eyes, dried out my wheezing, and razoredged my wits. Then they proceeded to sketch the game plan: They wanted me to cooperate with other lab yawps while they hammered out the dents in our chromosomes. The grins were gambling with our nucleic pathways. Too few survived. Those that did were genetic diamonds, nucleic bodhisattvas.
