Radix

A spirit of fire, the energy of the gene maze itself, bound us to one another tighter than bone. We were anxious to live up to the status of our blood, to be ultimate yawps instead of trained chimps, even for a few hours. But it wasn 't something we prattled. It was tissue delicate. We needed something more. It wasn't long before we got it.
Kiutl.
Mindprobe dredges up infant memories of her gristly snake odor. Deeper, there are fetal associations, chemo-memories of luminous bloodways, phosphorescent yawning zeros, a lamprey itch on my palms, and the glory of her immanence. It was clear to us, Lami lived on in our mar-rows, but the grins thought they could keep her out of Little Eden. They thought that. Rogue variable, they called her.
None of us knew what she'd do to us. But she was our oldest memory, the species guardian. It's no coincidence that kiutl appeared on earth the same year the grins crafted the first slave yawps. All of our ancestors smoked her. We weren't yawps without her. In spite of the danger, we put out for her, and it ended that the grins had pegged her right: She was out of hand.
One of us pulled in a peck of kiutl from a bloodline in the boro. That night, twenty-seven drug-plumed yawps, ra-bid with vertigo, swaying into distances of the spirit, bastilled the labs at Little Eden Tech; people were garrotted and beheaded, guards hocked and left to bleed to death. The machines, sacred for their indifference, were left solitary in their immanence.
Beato! we lowed, Beato!, caving in the skulls of every grin we eyed. Beato! Dancing with corpses, tearing off their genitals, gnashing them down for the cryptarch, the animal spirit in the meat. Beato! Our hackles sequined with stars of blood.
We watched the burning all night from a lair kilometers away, all of us laughing, fervently dancing to the strategy reports on the shortwave. The horizon was blue with laser light.
All we had left from Little Eden were our wits and our purified blood. Most of us went down to the inner boros of the grin cities and sat in the dark catacombs, praying as one, sharing a silence. A year later, they were all dead of kiutl immanence. The five that remained, that had been teachers trotting from boro to boro, truckled to the spirit. Two out-lawed as cunning assassins. Both were eventually broken by their own mischief, but there was carnival to their deaths, whipping up clouds of neuratox on the freeways and in the stadiums. One continued to teach revolt, keys of fire, the perfection of chaos, until she died in a raga storm that erased a whole starboard of cities. The other died in a flash-plague in some inner boro.
Last of the genetic diamonds, I decided foc the rules, foc the story. The Way Out is the Way Through. I used what wit I had to craft an alter ego, fit back into the grin cycle. My psi is plastic, lithe enough after years of boosting to sway a mindprobe. Two years later, I'm payrolled by CIRCLE, pumping my power on the sly, and padding down tree-laned avenues in daylight.
My toil's menial, busting suds in a tech lab, but I go everywhere unscoped. My roots deepen their risk each day, sprouting into the domain of grins. No one's looking for me, and those that eye me see a pink-palmed, fur-faced service yawp. I'm doubly invisible, like glass touching the blind.
Gibbous, blue as ice in the afternoon sky, the moon was rising over the sea. It was reason enough for Jac to take a stroll along the beach. (What reason? Time moves in pieces, a flotsam of events, carrying us along without reason.) Any activity was better than sitting alone in his suite listening to the crazy voice in his head.
After the supplements, the Voice sometimes became intrusive. Assia had told him there was nothing that could be done about it. He couldn't remember why. Something, he thought, about the tumor being near the auditory center of his brain—Heschel's Loops, wasn't it? (Tumor—ah, tu amor!) During his treatment, he had been told, he would have to acclimate himself to occasional aberrations.
For him, the best diversion was walking. He was unim-pressed by CIRCLE'S subterranean city and preferred wan-dering in the open, far from the black glass domes and the laboratory smells.
That afternoon, on his way to the sea, he paused at the edge of a man-made canyon to watch a new boro being excavated. The workers frightened him. They were huge and slimbrained and not at all human. He knew they were called yawps, and he could plainly see how closely they were re-lated to gorillas. But
they handled the giant earthmovers and gantries with authority. Stared at from a distance, they looked like giant, sweep-backed men in their treaded boots, brown overalls, and candy-red hardhats. Closer up, though—
As if hearing his thoughts, one of the workers dropped out of the cab of a rockcrusher and ambled over to him. Beneath its shell hat, the yawp's face was bestiaclass="underline" copper skin tightened over prominent cheekbones and thick brow-knobs. Its lips were thin and leathery black. "Stand back, grin." The harsh, guttural noise it made was barely comprehensible. It pointed a thick ruddy finger out over the immense pit. "Sure as night, mama will break your bones."
A moment staggered by with him gaping at the yawp before he realized it was talking about the earth. (Earth mama—rolling away under us.) He stepped back from the edge and thanked the yawp with a nod.
"Watch yourself, grin." The creature kicked a clod of earth into the canyon. "Mama is maw." He waved, curt as a salute, and lumbered back to his machine.
Jac moved away from the pit and was far out of sight before he understood what the yawp had said. "Mama is maw," he repeated, surprised that such creatures could be so— (Eloquent? Poetic? Human?) He decided he would have to find out more about them.
By the sea he paused briefly before an ashy smudge at the base of a dune. It was significant to him, he knew, but his memory was ghosting away. (Memory is grief.)
He had fought for a while, keeping notes on the seg-ments of his past he refused to relinquish: his air squad, his birthday, his mother's name. Then last week the absurdity of clutching at ghosts had overwhelmed him. He had gathered together all his scrawled notes, most of them already mean-ingless to him, and brought them out to the beach and burned them. He remembered how the wet wood had snapped and how a leaf of paper had fluttered into the air and flat-tened against his thigh. He had stared for a long time at the charred writing, Neve, not understanding.
Sometimes he even forgot who he was. (I assure you, you will know Death better than any memory, though your memories are long as worlds.) Several times each day he chanted: "I am Jac Halevy-Cohen, born Kislev 5842, in—" He rarely remembered where he had been born.
He slogged through the sand to a steep tidewall black with age. His body was still strong, and he had no trouble climbing the faceted rocks. At the top, he sat cross-legged.
Late afternoon sun was driving over the blue cliffs, though half the sky was crowded with thunderheads and rain was smoking off the shale not a hundred meters away. In the sunlight the flat sand and the shallows of seawater glared like blank paper, empty of life, while at the rim of sea and sky an amber haze lingered in long, smoky tentacles.
Rois stepped from around a dune. He was behind Jac, and he stared up at the sweat-darkened back with a malevo-lent keenness in his animal eyes. Kiutl trances and a careful monitoring of Data-Sync reports had revealed to him who this grin was: a mantic project. The mantics—brain-amplified humans—had created yawps as slaves and had built the boro-zoos that imprisoned them. Rois was determined to strike back, and this grin was the nearest real target.
The lookout yawps on the surrounding dunes were all nodding—nobody was in sight. Rois pulled a heavy freight-hook from under his brown workshift and scurried noiselessly across the sand.