Radix

He was on the gravel flats at the claw of the tidewall, weapon raised high, when Jac heard him and turned. For an instant they faced each other across the rocks, and something like a cry, but unheard, wrung in their hearts.
The sky screamed, and a bolt of lightning ripped out of nowhere and blasted the hook from Rois' hand. The explosion flung the yawp across the gravel and left him sprawled and burned, the sun shouting in his eyes.
He sat up, the stink of his burned flesh outcrying his pain. Only the thin plastic grip on the hook had blunted the stroke of fire. He looked down at the purple, plastic-bubbled scald on his hand and then up at Jac. The grin was crouched timidly on the tidewall, but a knowing filled his eyes.
Was it nerveshock or did he hear a voice? All things come to one thing, yawp.
He looked around for the others, but they were gone. The air around him was sparkling with corneal glints. His view of Jac shifted queerly: The grin's visage lifted away, and instead, a one-eyed man with a writhing scar and a mirrorglint eye was staring at him. He tried to shake the vision off, but the spike-haired face was real—stiff and dark as a scarab.
A sluggish wind swept over him in a tidal drawl, and the spell was broken. He wrenched his body awake, and a terrified bark snapped in his throat. Swimming up through an ocean of fear, Rois stroked to his feet and scrambled down the beach.
The yawp's terror was so strong that Corby and Sumner were thrown off him and left hovering over the
ocean tumble. They watched as the distances folded over him, and they saw that he would run through his whole spiral of time, changing forms but unable to change his fate. Twelve centuries later, after an unreal lifetime of blood-wanderings and new becom-ings, the Delph would track him down and the nightmare would complete itself.
The glide-rail arced out of a mountain-tunnel into the blue twilight. A half moon hung from the belly of Taurus. Below, the sea was the color of steel, the horizon a green wire. But Assia didn't notice. She was sitting in the bubble-eye of the glide-rail, her eyes shined over. Awake in a dream mode, her mind was intermittent, returning always to thoughts of Jac.
At Nobu's insistence, she had taken a tour of CIRCLE. She had sped through the heart of the Andes, and she had seen garden labyrinths in the basins of tamed volcanoes, transparent laboratories hacked into the thighs of mountains, and trellised grottoes tended by singing yawps, the wheat gold and tall beneath artificial suns. Yet none of it reached her, because none of it was real. It worked only for CIRCLE. The famines in Europe and Africa went on. The plagues in Asia and the Americas. The fear everywhere.
There was one more stop on the tour: a mantic Nobu wanted her to meet; the coordinates he had given her on the octagonal card. And then—a chance to be alone with her loss.
The suite she was sent to was small but tastefully fur-nished: curving cream-colored walls and one-legged chairs arranged about a green glass taboret. The door was fully open, so she knocked and entered. When she was standing in the center of the room, a resonant voice boomed from behind her: "Assia Sambhava! Welcome!"
She turned, and her heart leaped. Standing before her was a snubnosed, leering, impish man, his bald head flaring at the sides with wild orange hair. It was like colliding with a daydream, like suddenly meeting Einstein. The man before her was Meister Powa, the greatest mind that had ever lived: the father of subquantal physics—the shaper of yawp genet-ics. It was the same Meister Powa she had seen countless times in news clips and textbooks—the clown's face as irrev-erent as it had looked to her as a child, seventy years before.
"Forgive my informality, but I feel as if I already know you." He spoke through the features of a laughing Buddha, his hands clasped with delight. "I'm aware of your research on autism and schizothymia, and your mantic studies are legendary. Your work has truly redefined psychobiology."
Assia was too thick with disbelief to respond.
"I'm not a ghost." Meister Powa beamed. "At least, not entirely." He reached out a welcoming hand, but when she tried to take it, her fingers clutched emptiness.
"I'm a holoman," the ghost chuckled. "In fact, this whole room is little more than a holoid. Let me show you."
Meister Powa gestured grandiloquently, and his thick body, the chairs and taboret vanished. Assia was left standing in a chamber vacant of everything but a flexform lounge and servox food-dispenser. The next instant, everything popped back into place.
She stared hard at the ceiling and walls, but the holoidal projectors were well concealed. And well designed: Meister Powa was realistic to the last detail. The way his pale eyes watched made her feel self-conscious. He motioned toward the real flexform. "Please, sit down. The lounge and the servox are for my guests. Would you like something to drink?"
Assia declined and sat down, her age-worn features mask-ing her bemusement.
"I hope you'll excuse my sophomoric indulgences," he said, seating himself in one of the ghost-chairs. "I gave up my bodylife many years ago, but I still find my present incorpo-reality amusing."
"You mean—you really are alive?"
"And not just a laser projection?" Meister Powa shifted in his seat, delighted, his big belly protruding, his puffy eyes narrowed to needles of icy blue. "Of course. This light show is for your benefit. I'm actually about a kilometer away, inside a small crystal matrix of the Data-Sync. But I have complete intellectual and emotional versatility. I perfected the system myself. Other than my meat and bones, which were always getting in the way anyway, I'm all here. That is, I think I am."
He laughed exuberantly, peering at her like a baboon, broad back hunched. "As I said, I'm a holoman. Though I must admit I'm not entirely satisfied with this version of my physical form." He squeezed his obesity between his hands. "But my colleagues, wallowing in some obscure sentimental backwater, insist that my holoid bear some resemblance to my old shape. Actually, I'd prefer a little more hair." He frisked the firebright collar of hair behind his ears. "After all, it is just a mask, and masks are tools. I've never been uncomfortable with them. Did you know that I was born Helga Olman?" He nodded, wild-headed. "I was transexed shortly after puberty, though. My parents were shattered, but they adjusted. I made my
reputation as Ted Loomis, a hardnosed son-of-a-bitch physicist. It wasn't until I cracked the subquantal problem that I gave up that mask to become Meister Powa. The name's a derisive joke passed on by an abused research assistant. But I like it. Masks sometimes have to be comic."
Assia felt a spasm of giddiness flutter in her stomach, but she quenched it. This wasn't really Meister Powa, she as-sured herself. Just a clever holoid—the happiest, most hu-mane technoid she had ever encountered.
He smiled, softly, as if he could hear her thoughts. "I know a lot about masks. Very often that's all people think I am. But really, isn't everything a mask?" He grinned broadly, as if about to confess a hoax. "Language. Mating rituals. Diffraction patterns. It's one of Nature's greatest joys, making masks." His hands opened in a mime of majesty, and his eyes suddenly became calculating. "Nature is sultry, seductive, a great lover of veils—a Bride. It's extremely difficult to see her real face—but not impossible, mind you! Not at all im-possible." He beamed like a lewd old man. "Sure, it's diffi-cult to actually see the Bride, surrounded as she is by seven thousand veils, each one capable of scarring her irremediably if it's removed without finesse. But it can be done!" His round face shook with certainty, then hardened. "A bit of advice?"
Assia nodded, amused and interested.
"Never, never, never force yourself. Don't rip off the veils. Gently lift them off, one at a time. It'll take all that's left of your life to do it right, but the satisfaction is measure-less. Leave no wounds to heal over, to scar your vision of Her. Slowly, with patience and ease. This is not to say without fire, but don't—as so many do—don't mistake the fire for burning."