Radix

They ran close to the sea where their footing was firm, moving gracefully despite their burden, pacing the wind. Jac hung limply, aware that they were heading south toward the boro. A giddiness thinned out his thoughts. The Voice had disappeared. Not even the sensation of the watcher lingered. Grinning, almost laughing aloud, he watched the shadowed hulks of dunes angle by.
When the first signs of the boro appeared—white-domed modular cottages—Jac tried to lift his head to
look around. He had never been in the boro before. But the yawp carrying him shrugged his body farther back, and he contented him-self with following the upside-down cottages as they limped by.
A hazy, blossom-thick odor from the many yawp gardens filled the evening. Mingled with it was the charred yawp scent and a smell he didn't recognize: a forest fragrance, redolent as river moss, only sweeter. The odor was nostalgic, dreamy, and it thickened as they jogged deeper into the boro.
The running stopped all at once, and Jac rolled off the yawp's back. He stood shakily, facing a dense crowd of yawps. Most were workers, giant and gray-mantled. But closer were smaller yawps with sharper faces and shorter arms, wearing brown cloaks. Their eyes were not listless like the workers' but animated, alert, almost human. One yawp in particular stood out. It was a female, thin and elegant, her hackles silver and braided. She was wearing a black, fluted robe and a distinguished headpiece of leather, gull feathers, and tiny red snail shells. Beneath an age-furrowed brow, her eyes were bright and trenchant. "Nothing to fear, grin."
Jac returned the greeting and glanced at his surround-ings. They were on a patio of moon-pale stones, guarded on two sides by tall arbors of gnarled vines. White-domed cot-tages were behind him, the crescent windows sparking with red evening tapers. Ahead of him, looped with fog but visible beyond the yawps, was the massive banyan forest where the workers lived.
The sweet mulch scent was thick in the air, and Jac quickly noticed where it was coming from. The yawps were passing around a smoke-frothing clay vessel, each in turn in-haling the milky fumes.
"Why am I here?" he asked the old female.
"Lami spoke of you," she answered, accepting the smok-ing vessel and immersing her face in the vapors. She spoke through the smoke: "Rois said you were a grin abomination. But Lami turned against him and protected you. We follow Lami."
Jac had heard of Lami, a yawp deity, but he couldn't remember anything about it. Was he to be some kind of sacrifice? He felt so at ease, free of the intrusive commentary of the Voice, that he didn't care what the yawps did with him. He was a dying, brain-twisted amnesiac anyway.
The black-robed yawp offered him the clay vessel—a purple-glazed bowl stenciled with runes he didn't recognize. The bowl was hot, but he held it and drew a long draught of the balmy fumes.
That instant someone in the group twanged a box-harp, and the wiry, tremulous note pierced him. The feather-crowned yawp took the bowl from his hands, and he saw her refill it with oddly shaped blood-red leaves.
A corolla of green light hazed around the yawps' heads, and a shudder of dizziness forced Jac to sit down on the damp stones. An excited murmur passed among the yawps, and a spangle of harp notes trolled into the night. The old female bent close, her face sheathed in a gold macular light. She held out a fire-drenched hand, and he heard her voice in his head: Stand and face Lami. The shock of hearing a voice in his mind, so remindful of his own delusory Voice, immobi-lized him.
Hands took him from behind and lifted him into a blaze of tinsel colors ripping with voices: Lami Botte! Lami! Delph Botte! Delph! But unlike the Voice, these could be turned off. He forced the chanting out of his head and stood beatific and tall in a forge of colors.
Distantly, he was aware that he had inhaled some kind of drug. He sensed its ministrations in his muscles, lifting him off his bones. But more immediately, he felt his vastness, his connectedness with all those around him. And he understood just what Lami was. He could see the deity—a casein glow leaking out of their round, hackled heads, pooling above them, swelling. It was their group-energy—a power bigger than all of them.
The old female stood before him, her face silver. Far off, in the back of his mind, the murmurous chanting continued: Botte Lami! Botte Delph! The silver sheen masking the old yawp peeled away, revealing eyes of hungry intelligence. A rapport thickened between them, and for the slimmest in-stant, Jac became the yawp.
Simian memories crowded him, a flurry of images: the smooth-grained wood handle of a tool, sapid sexual feelings, coarse clothing, laughter lunatic as a jungle shriek, and odors of food—the whole reality of boro life. Help us! The yawp's cry transfixed Jac. So many emotions and, dominating them all, a pallor of helplessness, servitude, shame.
With a tremendous shock he realized that the yawps were beseeching him—as if he had the authority to grant them power and dignity. He cringed, and the chanting in his head swelled louder: Botte Delph! Delph! Delph! Delph!
"Make them stop," he told the old yawp. But she was entranced, her eyes rolled up, the floury light of Lami blur-ring her features.
Botte Delph! Jac blotted out the telepathic chanting and concentrated on the energy that was gathering
over the ser-ried throng: white, curded, and thick. Its edges were laced with darker colors, a bruise of violets and blues that bled into the night's darkness. The violet energy glittered in the rain-misted air, and his eyes followed its traces hypnotically. Until he saw, with a jolt of horror, that the blue power was coming from him! It was smoking off his body!
Fascinated, he watched the space around him flex, tendoned with dark blue light. Closer, the energy became even darker, a dense violet. And where his flesh was, or should have been, a palpable blackness throbbed.
Jac's mind wobbled. Gazing into the core-darkness of his body, he felt himself teetering on the brink of a sundering realization. Vaguely, he sensed truths that he knew could destroy him. Glimmers of understanding flitted across his brain: He was bigger than he knew, and getting stronger, drawing strength from the sky, from the very core of the universe. The Voice was not a delusion. It was real and he, the listener, was the dream—
He balked, and a liquid blackness welled up and ab-sorbed him.
Jac's eyes trembled open. He was in a waking stupor, timeless as a dream. Cold wet sand cushioned his body, and the sleepy rumbling of the sea filled his head. He was looking up into the green ether of early dawn. (Listen, wisdom is air, the color of drowning. Breathe deeply.)
The shore patrol found him an hour later and took him to the Wards. He lay there all day without eating or speaking, which the medics didn't like. He also had a density in his brain and residuals of a psiberant in his blood. The medics didn't like that either, and when the program director's au-thorization arrived to euth him, they were relieved. The facilities of the Wards were limited and overextended—there just weren't enough resources to maintain drug-abused termi-nal patients.
When Assia arrived, the medics were wheeling Jac to the End Ward. They flashed her the authorization when she stopped them, but she stood firmly in their way. "This is my subject," she protested, the deep lines of her face webbing sternly.
"Not anymore," a female medic told her. She was young and militant, her hand on a copy of the euth order clipped to the unconscious man in the wheelchair. She tapped the or-der. "Your project's over."
Assia's frown darkened. "All right—but I'm appealing this. Take him back."