Radix

He nodded, and the psychobiologist faced away and began busily authorizing the day's treatment at a keypunch.
Jac's hands were shaky. He breathed deeply to calm himself and pushed out of his recliner. For a moment he was dizzy, and then struggled with an uncontrollable smile as the flow of associations continued accelerating. (Endocrine infatu-ation, 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 mean-ing that he perceived to wash him with its euphoria, his laugh losing itself in the mutter of computer processing. His sen-sory perceptions were becoming continuous again, sound shim-mering like thermal breath, colors audible and odorous.
He walked down the aisle of the 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 and
was practically invisible from the outside. Light was splitting from low-lying banks of clouds, falling amber across the flat basin floor that the dril-ling rain had pitted and caked. On a high vale at the opposite end of the basin, huge black rocks were 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 was open, 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-recalclass="underline"
". . . 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 evolution-ary step and that these fetuses are the 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 evi-dence, as Gallimard and Sambhava suggest, that these fetuses may be translating chromosomal records into consciously ac-cessible 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 amnionic 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, his face sharp with startled clarity. The flexform he had been curled in was still humming 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 cas-settes. The sky in the window-oval above his desk was precise with stars, and by that slim light he saw that nothing here had changed—he was studying the same things that he had been lost in a year ago: world history, psychobiology, neu-trino 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 was 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 activat-ing for the last ten years. (Don't try to rationalize me. Visions defeat the ego.) His memory was intact now, and diabolically, the first thing he remembered, with a hurting lucidity, was 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. There was 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 pres-ence 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 was rising. He watched the secrecy lifting off the nearby hills as the 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 saw 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, her white hair shining in the darkness.
"Assia—" He stood up, and she went to him. "I'm re-membering again."
"It's 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're kinetic—a lot of walking and exploring."
"Doesn't sound very profound."
"You're 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. He was one in a billion with an overfolded cortex. The extra lobe was a genetic quirk, a fist in the brain with the strength, perhaps, to reach outside of time and change reality. Much less developed neurologies were doing 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. It was Assia who changed all that—but by then he was no longer abstracting beyond the best mantics. He had slowed down. His thoughts had turned in on themselves, and the Voice and a baffling autism had begun. Still, there was Assia's vision. There was the possibility— The possibility that—