Radix

Assia's insides were trembling. She wanted to believe what this man—this holoid—was saying. Oftentimes she had felt that even suffering was a mask. But the children— "Meister Powa …"
"Please, call me Helga. Or Ted, if you prefer."
"What about the world-chaos, the Fall?"
He stared at her closely, and there was something cun-ning in his smile. "You think I'm a little cracked, eh? Perhaps even—don't dare say it!—mystical? Nonsense!" His upper lip retracted, unspeakably revolted. "Let me tell you something. What you call skyfires—are you aware of what causes them? It started over forty years ago, and still most people don't know that a gravity wave shook the earth, slowing the planet, blowing out our magnetic field, and creating the first raga storms. A gravity wave. An echo, merely an echo, of a very odd black hole in the galaxy's core. Odd because the hole has a hole in it! Right now, and for the next thousand years or so, we're right in line with the energy threading out of that hole."
His eyes bulged. "It's not so much that we're basking in more radiation. It's the quality of the energy that's so utterly different. Its source is the very impossible center of the collapsar. As a result, all the energy patterns we take for granted—weather systems, the earth's magnetic field, the oceans, life itself—are changing, taking on strange, new char-acteristics. In a sense, the masks are being shuffled, because we're facing a Bride without veils—a naked singularity." His eyes, pale blue and startled, blinked once, and he sat back.
Assia watched him closely, trying to ferret out his unre-ality. But her intuition, keyed to his gestures and facial nuances, insisted he was human. Even her mind, which knew better, was fascinated. If only he had an answer for the pain and the suffering.
"The universe is mad," he went on, his face somber, almost judicial. "A black hole squats at the core of our galaxy like a spider in a web of stars. Bizarre energies blister the earth's surface with new lifeforms. But maybe it's all hap-pened before. Maybe that's how we got here. Maybe some-thing bigger than pain is being born. And maybe not. It doesn't matter for us. We're not here to censor the cosmos."
Assia couldn't drive the famine-bloated children from her mind. "The human race is suffering—maybe dying."
"It's been that way since before human became a word. We have to live with that knowledge. We have to use it to shape what we can get our hands on. It's one mud of all sculpting, Assia."
A knot in her belly was beginning to loosen. "But the pain—"
He leaned forward, his face wizened with conviction. "You can't get in the temple without laying eyes on the demons."
Nobu sat in his darkened office staring at a holocular view of Meister Powa and Assia. As soon as he saw the old woman smile, he shut off the viewer. Later, he would scan an edited version of the rest of their conversation. For now, it was enough to know that her emotional withdrawal was over. That silly holoidal of Meister Powa finally turned out to be good for something.
He switched the viewer back on, adjusted it to a sky perspective, and watched Jupiter rise over the Andes. The sky was flaked with stars, shimmering at the zenith with auroral lights—energies from the core
of infinity.
Nobu placed both of his hands on his desk, a long, curved, and well-polished slab of petrified wood ringed with iridescent colors. The desk was empty except for two books and a piece of paper. The paper was authorization to euth Jac Halevy-Cohen. He had already signed it.
One book was the Zen monk Dogen's teachings; the other was a copy of the ancient samurai Musashi's Five Rings, a book of strategy. Nobu consulted both often, consistently amazed at how apt the advice was after so many centuries. He thumbed to a passage in Musashi that he felt was rele-vant: "For a warrior, there is neither gate nor interior. There is no prescribed outer stance nor lasting inner meaning. Between the warrior and defeat, there is only his practiced ability to sum up changing situations instantly. You must appreciate this."
Nobu walked slowly about his office, the words opening into a numinous feeling. Blue and white globe lanterns hung from the corners, making the sabi calligraphy on the walls seem three-dimensional. Finally, he stood before his meditat-ing tatami and the blank wall it faced and let his resolution flow out of him. Jac's time was done.
A twinge of apprehension set him walking again. He thought highly of Assia, and yet his mantic capacities urged him to euth Jac. If CIRCLE was going to survive, there could be no indulgences. Assia was one of the first mantics, but her work had become unrealistic—actually, deluded. It was her age—the urge for the long shot, the Big Discovery, before time closed in. He had seen the desuetude in her face. Even with the ion-flushes and the hormones, she only had a few years left. She was already lost in a dream: causal collapse—a paramyth, as bizarre as its antithesis, determinism.
Even so, he didn't like the idea of hurting the old lady. The concept was interesting—working with a natural mantic, a man who was born with an extra frontal lobe. If only it could have been activated—in what ways would he have differed from a mantic with an ATP-pump in his brain?
He sat on the edge of his desk, the sides of his jaw throbbing. This was not the time for pure research. For the past forty years, since the planet's magnetic field was knocked down by the gravity wave, the sky had been wide open. In a few decades, the cosmic radiation beaming from the galactic core had changed the world; mutation patterns were unguess-able; hundreds of thousands of new viruses had appeared; hybrid species, like corn and wheat, had turned off geneti-cally; and the word human had become an uncertain term— Why were codon changes so many magnitudes higher than rad-levels could account for? What was coordinating the meta-plasia that was literally creating whole new species? And who were these telepathic people who called themselves voors?
No—this was not the time for pure research. Only ap-plied studies could hope to save their children. Jac had to go—and Assia would understand. Or she wouldn't. It didn't matter.
With a decisive rap of his knuckles, he thumped the book lying beside him on the desk—Dogen. He flipped it open randomly and silently intoned the first words his eyes touched: "Do not spend a long time rubbing only one part of an elephant—and do not be surprised by a real dragon."
Low tide and the sea in the air. Jac wandered up from the beach, on his way to his suite. A thin rain was misting out of the gray sky, and the herded tidewalls were reduced to shadows in the thickening fog. It was going to be a restless night, and Jac paused to watch the pale sea collapsing before he went in. (You're being followed, friend. Haven't you no-ticed?)
The Voice was right. Human shapes made strange by the haze were approaching him from the sea. There were two figures, huge but aqueous with distance and mist. It was hard to tell if they were coming at him or just passing. He decided to go in immediately but then stopped himself. He was dying, his brain cancerous. What was there to fear? (The drouth of fear.)
Not until they were almost on top of him did he see that they were yawps—long-armed workers. He remembered the lightning-blasted yawp he had seen the day before, and alarm whined in his muscles. "Nothing to fear," he said in tradi-tional yawp greeting, but the two didn't respond. Their eyes looked chalky, lifeless, and (Too late) he realized something was wrong about them. He backed a step and turned to run, but they bounded up to him, and thick hands took his shoul-ders. He didn't resist as he was lifted and slung over broad shoulders. Without fear, though charged with anxiety, he breathed in the smoky odor of yawps and looked down at thick-toed feet scurrying over the ribbed sand.