Radix, page 37
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
***
Nobu sat in his darkened office staring at a holocular view of Meister Powa and Assia. As soon as he saw the old woman smile, he shut off the viewer. Later, he would scan an edited version of their conversation. For now, it was enough to know that her emotional withdrawal had ended. That silly holoidal of Meister Powa finally turned out to be good for something.
He switched the viewer back on, adjusted it to a sky perspective, and watched Jupiter rise over the Andes. The sky, flaked with stars, shimmered at the zenith with auroral lights—energies from the core of infinity.
Nobu placed both of his hands on his desk, a long, curved, and well-polished slab of petrified wood ringed with iridescent colors—empty except for two books and a piece of paper. The paper authorized the euthanasia of Jac Halevy-Cohen. He had already signed it.
The books—the Zen monk Dogēn’s teachings and the ancient samurai Musashi’s Five Rings, a book of strategy—Nobu consulted often, consistently amazed at how aptly the advice applied after so many centuries. He thumbed to a relevant passage in Musashi: “For a warrior, there is neither gate nor interior. There is no prescribed outer stance nor lasting inner meaning. Between the warrior and defeat, there is only his practiced ability to sum up changing situations instantly. You must appreciate this.”
Nobu walked slowly about his office, the words opening into a numinous feeling. Blue and white globe lanterns hung from the corners, making the sabi calligraphy on the walls seem three-dimensional. Finally, he stood before his meditating tatami and the blank wall it faced and let his resolution flow out of him. Jac’s time was done.
A twinge of apprehension set him walking again. He thought highly of Assia, and yet his mantic capacities urged him to euth Jac. For CIRCLE to survive, there could be no indulgences. Assia, one of the first mantics, should know this better than any, yet her work had become unrealistic—actually, deluded. Her age pressed her hard—the urge for the long shot, the Big Discovery, before time closed in. He had seen the desuetude in her face. Even with the ion-flushes and hormones, she only had a few years left. She had already lost herself in a dream: causal collapse—a paramyth, as bizarre as its antithesis, determinism.
Even so, he didn’t like the idea of hurting the old lady. The concept offered some interest—working with a natural mantic, a man born with an extra frontal lobe. If only it could have been activated—in what ways would he have differed from a mantic with an ATP-pump in his brain?
He sat on the edge of his desk, the sides of his jaw throbbing. This was not the time for pure research. For the past forty years, since a gravity wave knocked down the planet’s magnetic field, the sky had been wide open. In a few decades, cosmic radiation beaming from the galactic core had changed the world; mutation patterns accelerated to unguessable rates; hundreds of thousands of new viruses had appeared; hybrid species, like corn and wheat, had turned off genetically; and the word human had become an uncertain term. Why were codon changes so many magnitudes higher than rad-levels could account for? What coordinated the metaplasia that was literally creating whole new species? And who were these telepathic people who called themselves voors?
No—this was not the time for pure research. Only applied studies could hope to save their children. Jac had to go—and Assia would understand. Or she wouldn’t. It didn’t matter.
With a decisive rap of his knuckles, he thumped the book lying beside him on the desk—Dogēn. He flipped it open randomly and silently intoned the first words his eyes touched: “Do not spend a long time rubbing only one part of an elephant—and do not be surprised by a real dragon.”
***
Low tide and the sea in the air. Jac wandered up from the beach, on his way to his suite. A thin rain misted out of the gray sky, reducing the herded tidewalls to shadows in the thickening fog. A restless night lay ahead, and Jac paused to watch the pale sea collapsing before he went in. (You’re being followed, friend. Haven’t you noticed?)
The Voice was right. Human shapes made strange by the haze approached from the sea. Two figures loomed, huge but aqueous with distance and mist. Were they coming at him or just passing? He decided to go in immediately, then stopped himself. He was dying, his brain cancerous. What was there to fear? (The drouth of fear.)
Almost on top of him, yawps advanced out of the mist—long-armed workers. He remembered the lightning-blasted yawp he had seen the day before, and alarm whined in his muscles. “Nothing to fear,” he said in traditional yawp greeting. The two didn’t respond. Their eyes looked chalky, lifeless, and (Too late) he realized something was wrong about them. He backed a step and turned to run, and they bounded up to him. Thick hands took his shoulders. He didn’t resist as they lifted and slung him over their broad shoulders. Without fear, though charged with anxiety, he breathed in the smoky odor of yawps and looked down at thick-toed feet scurrying over the ribbed sand.
They ran close to the sea, footing more firm there, moving gracefully despite their burden, pacing the wind. Jac hung limply, aware that they headed south toward the boro. Giddiness thinned out his thoughts. The Voice had disappeared. Not even the sensation of the watcher lingered. Grinning, almost laughing aloud, he watched the shadowed hulks of dunes angle by.
When the first signs of the boro appeared—white-domed modular cottages—Jac tried to lift his head to look around. He had never been in the boro before. The yawp carrying him shrugged his body farther back, and he contented himself with following the upside-down cottages as they limped by.
A hazy, blossom-thick odor from the many yawp gardens filled the evening. Mingled with this perfume came the charred scent of yawps and a smell he didn’t recognize: a forest fragrance redolent as river moss, only sweeter. The odor evoked nostalgic, dreamy feelings and thickened as they jogged deeper into the boro.
The run stopped all at once, and Jac rolled off the yawp’s back. He stood shakily, facing a dense crowd of yawps. Most appeared to be workers, giant and gray-mantled. But closer pressed smaller yawps with sharper faces and shorter arms, wearing brown cloaks. Their eyes, not at all listless like the workers’ but animated, alert, almost human, scrutinized him. One yawp in particular stood out: a female, thin and elegant, her hackles silver and braided. She wore a black, fluted robe and a distinguished headpiece of leather, gull feathers, and tiny red snail shells. Beneath an age-furrowed brow, her eyes shone bright and trenchant. “Nothing to fear, grin.”
Jac returned the greeting and glanced at his surroundings. They occupied a patio of moon-pale stones, guarded on two sides by tall arbors of gnarled vines. White-domed cottages stood behind him, crescent windows sparking with red evening tapers. Ahead, looped with fog yet visible beyond the yawps, towered the massive banyan forest where the workers lived.
The sweet mulch scent thickened in the air, and Jac quickly noticed its source. The yawps passed around a smoke-frothing clay vessel, each in turn inhaling the milky fumes. “Why am I here?” he asked the old female. “Lami spoke of you,” she answered, accepting the smoking vessel and immersing her face in the vapors. She spoke through the smoke: “Rois said you were a grin abomination. But Lami turned against him and protected you. We follow Lami.”
Jac had heard of Lami, a yawp deity, but he couldn’t remember anything about it. Was he to be some kind of sacrifice? He felt so at ease, free of the intrusive commentary of the Voice, that he didn’t care what the yawps did with him. He was a dying, brain-twisted amnesiac anyway.
The black-robed yawp offered him the clay vessel—a purple-glazed bowl stenciled with runes he didn’t recognize. The bowl felt hot, but he held it and drew a long draught of the balmy fumes.
That instant someone in the group twanged a box-harp, and the wiry, tremulous note pierced him. The feather-crowned yawp took the bowl from his hands, and he watched her refill it with oddly shaped blood-red leaves.
A corolla of green light hazed around the yawps’ heads, and a shudder of dizziness forced Jac to sit down on the damp stones. An excited murmur passed among the yawps, and a spangle of harp notes trolled into the night. The old female bent close, her face sheathed in a gold macular light. She held out a fire-drenched hand, and he heard her voice in his head: Stand and face Lami. The shock of hearing a voice in his mind, so remindful of his own delusory Voice, immobilized him.
Hands took him from behind and lifted him into a blaze of tinsel colors ripping with voices: Lami Botte! Lami! Delph Botte! Delph! But unlike the Voice, these could be turned off. He forced the chanting out of his head and stood beatific and tall in a forge of colors.
Distantly, he knew that he had inhaled some kind of drug. He sensed its ministrations in his muscles, lifting him off his bones. More immediately, he experienced his vastness, his connectedness with all those around him. And he understood just what Lami was. He could see the deity—a casein glow leaking out of their round, hackled heads, pooling above them, swelling. Their group-energy expressed a power bigger than all of them.
The old female stood before him, her face silver. Far off, in the back of his mind, the murmurous chanting continued: Botte Lami! Botte Delph! The silver sheen masking the old yawp peeled away, revealing eyes of hungry intelligence. A rapport thickened between them, and for the slimmest instant, Jac became the yawp.
Simian memories crowded him, a flurry of images: the smooth-grained wood handle of a tool, sapid sexual feelings, coarse clothing, laughter lunatic as a jungle shriek, and odors of food—the whole reality of boro life. Help us! The yawp’s cry transfixed Jac. So many emotions and, dominating them all, a pallor of helplessness, servitude, shame.
With tremendous shock, he realized that the yawps were beseeching him—as if he had the authority to grant them power and dignity. He cringed, and the chanting in his head swelled louder: Botte Delph! Delph! Delph! Delph!
“Make them stop,” he told the old yawp. She sat entranced, eyes rolled up, the floury light of Lami blurring her features.
Botte Delph! Jac blotted out the telepathic chanting and concentrated on the energy gathering over the serried throng: white, curded, and thick. Its edges laced with darker colors rippled, a bruise of violets and blues that bled into the night’s darkness. Violet energy glittered in the rain-misted air, and his eyes followed its traces hypnotically. With a jolt of horror, he found that the blue power came from him! It smoked off his body!
Fascinated, he watched the space around him flex, tendoned with dark blue light. Closer, the energy became even darker, a dense violet. And where his flesh was, or should have been, a palpable blackness throbbed.
Jac’s mind wobbled. Gazing into the core-darkness of his body, he teetered on the brink of a sundering realization. Vaguely, he sensed truths that he knew could destroy him. Glimmers of understanding flitted across his brain: He existed in a dimension bigger than he knew, and getting stronger, drawing strength from the sky, from the very core of the universe. The Voice was not a delusion but reality and he, the listener, was the dream.
He balked, and a liquid blackness welled up and absorbed him.
***
Jac’s eyes trembled and opened. He rose into a waking stupor, timeless as a dream. Cold wet sand cushioned his body and the sleepy rumbling of the sea filled his head. He looked up into the green ether of early dawn. (Listen, wisdom is air, the color of drowning. Breathe deeply.)
The shore patrol found him an hour later and took him to the Wards. He lay there a day without eating or speaking, which the medics didn’t like. They also discovered a density in his brain and residuals of a psiberant in his blood. The medics didn’t like that either, and when the program director’s authorization arrived to euth him, they were relieved. The limited facilities of the Wards already overextended didn’t have the resources to maintain drug-abused terminal patients.
When Assia arrived, the medics were just wheeling Jac to the End Ward. They flashed their authorization when she stopped them, yet she stood firmly in their way. “This is my subject,” she protested, the deep lines of her face webbing sternly.
“Not anymore,” a female medic told her. Young and militant, she pointed to a copy of the euth order clipped to the unconscious man in the wheelchair. “Your project’s over.”
Assia’s frown darkened. “All right—but I’m appealing this. Take him back.”
The medic shook her head, indifferent as a knife. “There’s no time for appeal. We have strict orders.”
Assia stepped closer, and a long-muscled medic cut her off. “We’ll jeopardize ourselves if we don’t follow through on this.”
The old woman reached beneath her caftan and slid out a slender black-glass tube with a sharp red toxin sign on it. The medics visibly tightened, and the female reached for her wrist-call.
“Touch that and everybody dies,” Assia whispered. She wagged the vial, and the medics held their hands away from their bodies. “There’s enough neurotox here to kill everybody in this ward twelve times. So listen closely.”
After locking away the medics, she discarded the empty neurotox tube and wheeled Jac out to the sandcart she had left in a back court. She injected him with a serum to counter the sopor and drove him out of the compound.
Jac didn’t revive until Assia reached her destination: a cedar shack with a tin roof in a choked clearing of wild apple trees deep in the hills. Streaming auroras cantled the sky. “I used to come here to rest sometimes.” She helped Jac out of the cart. He swayed where he stood, bird-light and dizzy. “I can’t stay here,” she added. “I must drive down the coast and confuse whatever security they’ll be sending after you.”
Jac shook alertness into his head. (The brain is a flower that eats oxygen—and where are its roots?) “Assia there’s no reason for this. I’m dying anyway. This tumor’s devouring me.”
Serifs of starlight glinted off the tears in her eyes. “There is no tumor, Jac. Don’t you remember?” She held his face in her hands. “Maybe it’s wrong to leave you out here. There’s nowhere to go. But I won’t let them kill you. If that’s what you want, follow this road back or wait here. Otherwise, you’ll find camping equipment and some provisions in the shack.” She let his face go. “Goodbye, Jac.”
She moved to go, but Jac took her hand. For a deep moment, he studied the way her face had formed, the tireless dreams outwearing the flesh. He carried the last of those dreams, he realized, and that made him so sad his eyes ached.
He watched as the old woman got back in the cart and drove off. He didn’t know what to do. (Trust the anamnesis of the future, my friend.)
***
Jac decided to die. If the mantics at CIRCLE couldn’t cure his brain tumor, he preferred to be euthed than die in the wilderness.
He had gotten halfway back to CIRCLE when he remembered the godpower he had felt with the yawps. (Forgive the long darkness. Such indulgence not to have kept you informed—such waste, and such is the blood’s surprise.)
He left the road and angled down slopes of salt shrubs to the ocean. He walked over dunes and along the thundering edge of the sea trying to sort everything out. He couldn’t think except to know that he, what he thought of himself behind his eyes, was tiny and insignificant. (What’s happened to you? You who stole the secrets out of the listening of the dead? Why are you trembling?)
The soft, mystical shine of the moon on the water calmed him. Alone and almost at peace—wind riffling his hair, waves rasping up the beach—he strolled. (You’ve become nothing but territory. Death is trapped in your bones like grain in wood.)
What did it matter if it was a brain tumor or another mode of being—either way, he amounted to nothing. (Shut your ears big, Jac. Let the darkness come unrolling from your eyes and your fingers blow longer all in the stillness, deeper, where the textures in the air end and do not restart, to my elusive conclusive whereabouts.)
Jac stilled his fear and stayed centered, alert to the night wind and the dim phosphorescence of the incoming waves. The rumble of the ocean grew fainter, and the weak light of the skyfires and the dull shapes of sand thinned. His senses set out, leaving him alone at the center of nothing. (The body with its senses is need. This need is not yours. I am the way out. The emptiness is my door, a wing, a way of flight, half an angel. Enter, and you become the rest.)
He howled and made no sound, not even a muscular sensation where his throat should have been. He clutched for his body. Nothing was there. He had become a mote of awareness, free falling through the void. (The human numen.)
A yawn of time passed before his senses began to swarm back, filling up their hollows one by one. He sprawled in the sand blind and deaf until, gradually, the splash of the waves filled him and the skyfires wavered into view.
He moaned and hugged himself, rocking to his back. Then it began again. Already, his eyes had moved on, his vision darkening, sounds becoming muffled. (Will it go on? It happens, you know. Things lose their gravities. No fingers to grasp. No tongue to reassure. No eyes to set the limits.)
Panicky, he heaved himself to his feet. Textures slid out from under him, and in a desperate effort to keep himself centered, he grabbed the great bones massed in his legs and pounded the earth. He began with blunt, clumsy stumbling, kicking the sand, turning on the pivot of his gravity. Slowly, he worked up an incredible velocity, wrapping his motion around him like a shawl of sensation to hold him together.
He whirled a long time before his ears returned—the forlorn cry of some bird. (Jac, you’ll have to learn to settle for the skins of things at times like this. You’ve lost the edge to your life that only less can add.)
Jac dropped to his knees with exhaustion and tottered quickly back to his feet. He knew that if he stopped moving he would lose control. He grasped what he had to do. Not daring to think about it too long, he dashed forward and fell to his face in the wet sand. With desperate determination, he swayed upright and staggered into the sea. In the cold water, his legs felt vague and rubbery pushing against the water. A wave slammed against his chest, turning him sideways, but he shoved on, losing his footing and letting himself slide into the deep water, into a darkness he already knew.
