Radix, page 38
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
***
The alarm she had set startled Assia from the depths of mordant sleep. She tapped it off and pulled herself out of the flexform and into her sandals. Like an ice-heavy draft, she moved across the suite, stooped, sandals whispering. When she entered the mirror-circled bathroom she stiffened, and a tight cry broke in her mouth. In the mirrors, she recognized herself—a tall woman with nightfall hair, dream-luminous eyes, and an amazed, bonecurved, adolescent face.
***
Nobu stood before the sheet glass window, linear and solemn, a pensive glow on his face. He stared down past the tidewall to where the moon poised on a dune’s white shoulder. Auroras wavered crazily over the sea.
WHAT WE KNOW OF REALITY ARISES FROM OUR DISBELIEF IN IT appeared blocked out in silver luminescence on the tidewall. Other bizarre graffiti had appeared throughout CIRCLE during the night. Farther down the beach, blazing on the sand itself, platinum words declared: MAMA IS MAW.
Red lights flashed to the left. Nobu knew where they came from, and he chewed his lower lip. The yawps had begun their rebellion. Not simply running amok but actually playing out a well-rehearsed strategy. They had seized both the armory and the Data-Sync, which controlled most of CIRCLE’s functions. Impossible! He knew that. Yawp neurology wasn’t specified enough to allow that kind of independent behavior. And yet...
Nobu closed his eyes and leaned his head against the long window. Its coolness soothed and helped to sort his thoughts. So much had happened—all of it impossible. Jac Halevy-Cohen had vanished without a trace; even the sender-chip embedded in his skull stopped sending. A high-energy pulse from the galactic core scrambled all their communications, leaving them truly disorganized. But no energy-wave could be that powerful. Nightglow graffiti...warrior yawps...it took all his inner resources to suppress his rage at the rampant absurdity of it all. He modulated his breathing: two deep breaths, one shallow, two deep...The yawps had seized his building while he slept, and he had barely gotten out alive, taking with him only his clothes and a sheaf from his journal. Among the pages he had salvaged, he had found a letter from Jac. He couldn’t remember receiving it or putting it in with his notes. Undated, waterstained and apparently meaningless, it lay face up where he had tossed it to the floor.
“Listen, Nobu, I have something to tell you. Finality is the one door, the one way out of our pain and uncertainty, but it doesn’t exist. We go on. Everything goes on. Why is there no end? What we think we’ve left behind moves through us. We’re merely egos, the ghosts of our blood, unable to hope for judgment, only another moment. We pass on our genetic material, we pass on time. Do you think perhaps something passes the other way? What? What is time? And what are our chromosomes becoming? Can we know? What terrifies me is the possibility. We carry the beginning in our blood. We constantly try and fit it to our lives. We never get it just right. But what if we do? What if we really do? Only your movement distinguishes you from this ambush of stillness. Stop. —Jac.”
Nonsense, Nobu thought. He cracked—it finally happened. He pressed his forehead against the dark glass and began his breathing rhythms again.
When he felt better, he looked out into the night, eyes as tight as his face. Far below, several birds like pale, dirty socks perched in the moonlight. He leaned against the window, trying to make out how many there were.
A startling, loud cry jerked him upright—but too late. The great glass, screeching open under his weight, gave him a flying step into the night. For one delirious moment, he could see far down the beach to where the CIRCLE fighters had dug in. The tidewall blazed, lit up by eerie blue laser arcs flashing red against the rocks. The dark ground swung up at him like a bad dream—
Nobu lay still, stretched out flat, face pressed into the asphalt. The blood pooling around his limbs and face felt warm and sticky, though he was shivering. Mindless, he muttered over and over to himself. Mindless.
Or was it? The initial pain and shock had thinned quickly, leaving him to wonder if, perhaps, some real but hidden part of him had caused him to lean too hard against the glass, had caused the glass to give way—some benevolent power, too long thwarted by his allegiance to machines, devices, calculations—a benevolent God in whose grace it was better to be dead than to serve the inorganic.
“Cut the crap, Nobu.”
The voice shocked him, because he recognized it from Assia’s progress-tapes. His hands pushed feebly against the asphalt, vainly trying to lift his head. “Jac?” His voice sounded weak, a garbled caricature.
“You look pretty shitful,” Jac’s voice said.
I must be delirious, Nobu thought.
“Don’t you wish,” the voice replied. “Here, let me give you a hand.”
Nobu felt bright, magnetic coolness touch him all over, and he rose. He squinted against the full glare of the sun, though it was still night. A figure in black wavered before a silver sky. The silhouette bent closer, and Jac’s grinning features came into view. “Seeing dragons?”
***
In the narrows of light along the soft ferrous seam of her closed eyelids, Assia sensed him. He had approached so close to her that she had to be very quiet to feel him at all. He wasn’t Jac anymore. He occupied a hollowness in the smoke of her feelings, a hole plummeting out of time into a dreamy vacancy filled with whisks of light, quiverseen beings—more than the sponge of her brain could absorb. A great sleepiness swelled in her throat, and she swallowed it and opened her eyes.
She stood alone at the top of a garden tower that hadn’t been there that morning. Earlier, with a sickening awe, she had climbed the spiral stone stairs leading here. She had watched yawps walking among the white-leafed forests and the brookfalls of luminous rainbows that had appeared overnight. In the distance, she had seen what endured of CIRCLE: steely wreaths of collapsed buildings and smokeworming stains patterning the dunes in scalded, glossy colors—the slick reds and oranges of glass-sand fused by last night’s laser battles. A crooked brown cloud hung over the rubble of the Data-Sync.
She looked down at the firm flesh of her hands and the thick darkness of her hair, and again she felt lighthearted, farouche, miry with goofy emotions: She was an old woman with the body of a seventeen-year-old! The risible husk of her logic rang with a laugh too astonished to voice. What was going to happen to them all now that a man had become a god?
For the first time since her childhood, Assia cleared her mind and meditated as her father had taught her. She wide-focused on moss-veined trees and a forest floor coined with light. Easier than she remembered, meditation made her body an open lens, seeing everything: leaves like bright particles, starlings listing among the branches, each bird a jigging molecule. She was on her own now, she knew, her brain curled quietly in its shell.
***
Nobu had walked up and down the beach countless times, feeling nothing, seeing everything. He wasn’t dead, though he knew he should be. It was becoming clearer that he didn’t know very much. For days, weeks, lengths of time he stopped measuring, he strolled through shale coves and over strands rubbled with driftwood and sea-smoothed rocks, watching the ocean come and go, the spine of the shore changing shape like a slow cloud. Fear, awe, memories, all deserted him much sooner than he would have thought. No need to eat or sleep. No need even to think, he finally realized. Is this death?
No—he felt alive. He would just have to go on looking.
He stravaged the wind-lashed inlet mindlessly. Time became meaningless as static, distances longer than time. And finally, after he had long forgotten that life had ever been any other way, a jolt of total understanding banged through him. He toppled from the rondure of stone where he had been watching the tide come in and tumbled down the slipface of a dune. On his back, staring up at the night sky, he looked past the skyfires and, with his new insight, began to decipher the awesome braille of stars. Nothing separated him from them. Inner, outer, up, down, all became arbitrary. The whole sky had meaning for him now. And he could see, plainly see, the entire history of evolution projected onto the night from his chromosomes.
All of the most trivial details of organic development, beginning with the first spark in the Proterozoic slime, resided there in the skyshadows. As he read, at last he understood the history of consciousness and discerned the next human form, the voor children born looking backward, remembering their ancestors, their sentience a telepathy that crossed worlds and that ultimately united them with everything—an infinite reunion.
He got so absorbed he didn’t notice the sky brightening—he had arrived and nothing was missing. All the organic forms stood before him like clouds, and he trembled, feeling the unnamable stillness that united them. Progressively, his senses sharpened, became more focused.
His senses had all been living in the past. They served as the stepping-stones of consciousness, floating in nothing. In them moved the shifting pattern of the world, and between them opened stillness, nothing. He became his senses, and he became aware of the stars dimming, a thin, silver line following the corner of the sky.
Daybreak, the sun rose from its bed of rocks, and colors flowed into everything. Nobu returned to the stillness between, already understanding that his participation in the world had ended, and that he had arrived elsewhere, drawn inexorably toward the unity he had glimpsed beyond the blood’s horizon.
***
Jac Halevy-Cohen strolled along the beach, spheres of hyacinthine light dancing around his ankles. A godmind, vaster than thought or memory, he chose among all available worldlines. At his whim, a basilisk of water flared out of the sea, sparks of flowers limned his path across the sand, and music jeweled in the air. And yet, he persisted as a man. “JAC HALEVY-COHEN,” the collapsing breakers blared in four-part harmony.
He could do anything he loved. Single and yet multiform, he embodied a mangod. He had changed reality to free the yawps from their human masters. He had youthed Assia, the old scientist who had helped create him. And he had sent the program director, Nobu Niizeki, moving sidewise through time. All of this, he had accomplished out of love. Even Niizeki advanced lovingly down the beach in a spume of chilled light, vanishing, flesh and thoughts, along the wavecurve of time. The unity of love extended bigger than the memory of the world, and at the far end of Nobu’s wanderings, Jac the godmind knew, the program director would get free, released to light, wholly regnant. That man would know wholeness.
Incredible sprays and fans of suspended water spun intricately in the air, bound by chains of birdsong. Jac, pushing against his limits, explored the impossible.
The thought of thought circled him deeper into his godmind, and he appreciated how small and loud the mind part of him had become. He perceived, in a blind silence of sudden fear, that his thinking carried the least of him. He had feelings, urges, fleshdreams never acknowledged that would live through him over the ages. Godmind of his whole self—sinews, veins, boneworks—he incorporated all their dreams and loves. He wasn’t pure psynergy. He couldn’t be unless he loved away his physicality. And that would take tens of thousands of years, because the body, he had learned first hand, presents the unconscious of the world. And he—insane with psynergy—projected the Mind of the Species, witness of the body, living to see the dreams, myths and fantasies of the human race exhaust themselves through him.
Time became transparent for Jac, and he gazed across centuries of sexual pith and mental mirroring to the emptiness to come. Millennia from now, in the tepid residuum of canceled-out desires, he would at last get free of his humanity. It would take aeons.
Anger coiled, and the spiracles of air-dancing water rainbowed and vanished. A tormented cry crawled over the dunes as the reality of his destiny became conscious: The fantasies of his biology had trapped him for ages to come! Would he survive? His soul shrunk around his omniscience as he realized he was not the only godmind on the planet.
Fear blazed.
Astounded, Jac lifted above the surf of time, and he beheld the Others. The sea air filled with their watching. Discarnate beings rapt with lucidity peered deeper into his simple mind and mutability than he ever would. These godminds from fierier realities—they had already lived through the flesh-hungers of the worlds that had shaped them, and now they moved terrifyingly free, sublimed, riding the stream-psynergy from the galactic core, existing in the cosmos as the cosmos! Already they were arriving, reshaping the Earth, aware of the insatiety and the racial dreams that limited him.
Fear flexed powerfully around Jac and then disappeared into the declivities of his future. He knew then that he had a shadowself, a fear-self, that would, out of tenacious self-love, try to protect him from the Others or make an end of time.
In that moment, Jac became aware that his godmind would not tolerate other godminds. He was too small to permit Them near him. He needed aeons to grow, aeons alone self-floating in the too-willing wonder of his lust.
Jac stopped. The air had opened in front of him, and he stared at a large red-haired man in a cave. The vision narrowed, and he drew closer, near enough to see that the shadow on the man’s face was a black burn stain. The calm breadth of the stranger’s face filled all of Jac’s awareness. The air-blue eyes, flat and downslanting, touching the world softly, looked into him, and Jac’s mind went pale.
The godmind willed meaning into the vision, but nothing happened. He willed to know. Still, nothing.
The man in the cave leaned closer, fascinated, and the size of his shoulders awed Jac. Only then did he comprehend. The fear that had surged out of him a moment ago had reshaped the future. This nameless man with the haunted, in-looking eyes embodied the physical shape of his fear—his shadowself. The man, somewhere in time, was him, his secret self, as unaware of his psynergy as Jac was conscious of his godmind. He was the one, more than the alien godminds, who posed a threat: he was the enemy and yet himself—the part of himself that would have to die so his godmind could live.
Terror glowed in Jac, and the sea groaned.
***
Sumner woke in the mountain cave overlooking Skylonda Aptos where the shadowshooting had begun. Corby hovered close, a dulcet whisper in his cells: The Delph won’t let us see more. The vision is over.
Sumner hulked over his knees and stared hard at the mountain peaks balanced in the westering sky. Now do you understand what it means to be the shadowself of the Delph? the voor asked.
Sumner’s mind had numbed from the shadowshooting. Sleep swelled in his lungs like the dread of time, and he sagged to his side and closed his eyes.
As he slid into unconsciousness, a powerfully detailed scene lingered before passing wholly away: Assia, young and dark, stood before a cedar shack in a clearing choked with apple trees. On the wooden door, in silver script, a message read:
“Assia, there’s always more. It never ends. I hope your new life will show you that. Look closely at yourself. You will never age again. It’s true. We make all the rules.
“Listen, if this depresses you, you know the way out. Stillness of mind is a door. Memory, the continuing history of grief. As long as the past is real, you will remain.
“Let’s look at your new life again: Nothing happens by circumstance. Or else everything. What matters is that you go through events to the stillness behind them. Things can lose their gravities. Think. All you ever held drifting beyond direction...
“No? But we’re making progress. You understand that you can’t understand. The body is the unconscious of the world.
“So what can you possibly do now? Everything! At all times! You see, it’s like digging holes in the river, like forgetting one thing to remember another.
“Good. Already you’ve begun to find your place. Just remember, the innocence you own waits where you left it, deep as the last of your fear. —Jac.”
>GODMIND<
The dream was marvelous but the terror great.
We must treasure the dream whatever the terror.
—Gilgamesh
Destiny as Density
The skin of Sumner’s soul shivered. He woke, stupefied, huddled in a corner of the cave where he had slouched during the voor trance. A cold wind unraveled itself in the mouth of the cave, scattering the last of the magnar’s ashes. Sumner hugged himself tighter, wearied and depressed. Bonescrolls, Ardent Fang, Drift—everyone he had loved was dead now.
We are one, the voor thought, his psychic voice sounding narrow. Shadowshooting had exhausted Corby. It’s time to go down the mountain. We must leave quickly.
Sumner closed his eyes and averted his attention from the voor. The shadowshooting had terrified him, because it had been as real as his own life. Dizzy with fatigue, he fought his own heaviness to sit upright.
Corby’s voice spoke within—he could feel the voor subvocalizing—but he wasn’t listening. He stayed in selfscan, hearing blood whispers, the tread of his heart, and the low sibilance of immense air currents floating over the mountain peaks.
Sleep bruised his alertness, and he struggled a moment with thoughts and dreamworlds. A mosaic of faces wheeled in the mindark: Jac and young, longboned Assia, Nobu somnolent as a voor, and a crowd of yawps. The simian faces reminded him of Sarina in the riverain forest to the north. He half-thought he could return there. Perhaps they would free him from the voor...
***
Sumner woke hours later, tuneful energy spinning around him. The voor had diminished to a mere tic of feeling far back in his mind. A hollow moon rose above the jagged horizon while he continued to sit, mind a window to the mountains.
After all sensation of the voor had vanished, Sumner unfolded from his couch and lumbered out of the cave. Mind clear as the thin air around him, he hiked along the margin of glacial scree. He walked to strengthen his selfscan and to forget the pain of his grief. He marched until his knees buckled. Then he sat on his heels beneath a fan of rock and stared down through a pygmy forest of pine. Several ice pools glossed with afternoon light shone visible on the southern horizon. Above them, a flock of birds undulated west, bucking strong winds.
