Radix

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, her 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're not losing it, she whis-pered. "We can't lose what we are." She kissed him and stood over him for 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 was enormous, domed in plastic that was transparent to the full solar spectrum.
At one end the 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.
But Assia's attention was on the little ones. She was proud to see that they were an intermingling of every race and genetic type, all of them speaking Esper. And with CIRCLE'S constant genetic monitoring, there was no danger of inherent handicaps. Mutations were modified in utero or else aborted. It was a severe principle, phyletic hygiene, but it averted much suffering.
Even though she loathed genetic controls, Assia was very pleased with CIRCLE'S children. Watching youngsters with faces continually wonder-rapt, she experienced a joy that hadn't filled her since she was a young woman. 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. It was Nobu Niizeki, CIRCLE'S program director. He was short and cube-headed with a thin beard. 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's what I believe," she said. "If there's any hope, it's 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 were hooded like a weary boxer's. "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 was serene as amber. "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 was thick. "We'll 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's served well. Come on—what's 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've been working." Her voice was flat and fogged with emotion. "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'm 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'm serious. Jac has the best-developed cortical fold in physio history. He's 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 was 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 seen the facts."
She looked for help, her eyes haunted, but he bowed to avoid her gaze. "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, follow-ing his voorstrength to where parabolas of tall trees shadowed a grove of bursting sunlight. Sumner saw 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 was left 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 a year of daily boff, cortical synapses jam, immanence becomes interminable, and within a week, the ears are gone to ma-rauding 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.