Radix

The medic shook her head, indifferent as a knife. "There's no time for appeal. We have strict orders."
Assia stepped closer, and a long-muscled medic cut her off. "We'll jeopardize ourselves if we don't follow through on this."
The old woman reached beneath her caftan and slid out a slender black-glass tube with a sharp red toxin sign on it. The medics visibly tightened, and the female reached for her wrist-call.
"Touch that and everybody dies," Assia whispered. She wagged the vial, and the medics held their hands away from their bodies. "There's enough neurotox here to kill everybody in this ward twelve times. So listen closely."
After locking away the medics, she discarded the empty neurotox tube and wheeled Jac out to the sandcart she had left in a back court. She injected him with a serum to counter the sopor and drove him out of the compound.
Jac didn't revive until Assia reached her destination: a cedar shack with a tin roof in a choked clearing of wild apple trees. They were deep into the hills, the sky cantled with streaming auroras. "I used to come here to rest sometimes." She helped Jac out of the cart. He was bird-light and dizzy. "I can't stay here," she added. "I want to drive down the coast and confuse whatever security they'll be sending after you."
Jac shook alertness into his head. (The brain is a flower that eats oxygen—and where are its roots?) "Assia—there's no reason for this. I'm dying anyway. This tumor's devouring me."
Serifs of starlight glinted off the tears in her eyes. "There is no tumor, Jac. Don't you remember?" She held his face in her hands. "Maybe it's wrong to leave you out here. There's nowhere to go. But I won't let them kill you. If that's what you want, follow this road back or wait here. Otherwise, you'll find camping equipment and some provisions in the shack." She let his face go. "Goodbye, Jac."
She moved to go, but Jac took her hand. For a deep moment he studied the way her face had formed, the tireless dreams outwearing the flesh. He was the last of those dreams, he saw, and that made him so sad his eyes ached.
He watched as the old woman got back in the cart and drove off. He didn't know what to do. (Trust the anamnesis of the future, my friend.)
Jac decided to die. If the mantics at CIRCLE couldn't cure his brain tumor, he preferred to be euthed than die in the wilderness.
He was halfway back to CIRCLE when he remembered the godpower he had felt with the yawps. (Forgive the long darkness. Such indulgence not to have kept you informed— such waste, and such is the
blood's surprise.)
He left the road and angled down slopes of salt shrubs to the ocean. He walked over the dunes and along the thunder-ing edge of the sea trying to sort everything out. But he couldn't think—except to know that he, what he thought he was behind his eyes, was tiny and insignificant. (What's hap-pened to you? You who stole the secrets out of the listening of the dead? Why are you trembling?)
The soft, mystical shine of the moon on the water calmed him. He was alone and almost at peace—the wind riffling his hair, waves rasping up the beach. (You've become nothing but territory. Death is trapped in your bones like grain in wood.)
What did it matter if it was a brain tumor or another mode of being—either way, he was nothing. (Shut your ears big, Jac. Let the darkness come unrolling from your eyes and your fingers blow longer all in the stillness, deeper, where the textures in the air end and do not restart, to my elusive conclusive whereabouts.)
Jac stilled his fear, held himself centered, alert to the night wind and the dim phosphorescence of the incoming waves. But the rumble of the ocean was growing fainter, and the weak light of the skyfires and the dull shapes of sand were thinning. His senses were setting out, leaving him alone at the center of nothing. (The body with its senses is need. This need is not yours. I am the way out. The emptiness is my door, a wing, a way of flight, half an angel. Enter, and you become the rest.)
He howled, but there was no sound, not even a muscu-lar sensation where his throat should have been. He clutched for his body. Nothing was there. He was a mote of awareness, free falling through the void. (The human numen.)
A yawn of time passed before his senses began to swarm back, filling up their hollows one by one. He was sprawled in the sand, blind and deaf, until, gradually, the splash of the waves filled him and the skyfires wavered into view.
He moaned and hugged himself, rocking to his back. But then it began again. Already, his eyes were moving on, his vision darkening, sounds becoming muffled. (Will it go on? It happens, you know. Things lose their gravities. No fingers to grasp. No tongue to reassure. No eyes to set the limits.)
Panicky, he heaved himself to his feet. Textures were sliding out from under him, and in a desperate effort to keep himself centered, he grabbed the great bones massed in his legs and pounded the earth. He began with blunt, clumsy stumbling, kicking the sand, turning on the pivot of his gravity. Slowly, he worked up an incredible velocity, wrap-ping his motion around him like a shawl of sensation to hold him together.
He whirled a long time before his ears returned—the forlorn cry of some bird. (Jac, you'll have to learn to settle for the skins of things at times like this. You've lost the edge to your life that only less can add.)
Jac dropped to his knees with exhaustion and tottered quickly back to his feet. He knew that if he stopped moving he would lose control. It was very clear now what he had to do. Not daring to think about it too long, he dashed forward and fell to his face in the wet sand. With desperate determi-nation, he swayed upright and staggered into the sea. It was cold, and his legs felt vague and rubbery pushing against the water. A wave slammed against his chest, turning him side-ways, but he shoved on, losing his footing and letting himself slide into the deep water, into a darkness he already knew.
The alarm she had set startled Assia from the depths of a mordant sleep. She tapped it off and pulled herself out of the flexform and into her sandals. Like an ice-heavy draft, she moved across the suite, stooped, her sandals whispering. When she entered the mirror-circled bathroom she stiffened, and a tight cry broke in her mouth. In the mirrors she saw herself—a tall woman with nightfall hair, dream-luminous eyes, and an amazed, bonecurved, adolescent face.
Nobu stood before the sheet glass window, linear and solemn, with a pensive glow on his face. He was staring down past the tidewall to where the moon was poised on a dune's white shoulder. Auroras wavered crazily over the sea.
WHAT WE KNOW OF REALITY ARISES FROM OUR DISBELIEF IN IT was blocked out in silver luminescence on the tidewall. It was one of many bizarre graffiti that had appeared throughout CIRCLE during the night. Farther down the beach, blazing on the sand itself, were the platinum words MAMA IS MAW.
Red lights flashed to the left. Nobu knew where they were coming from, and he chewed his lower lip. The yawps were rebelling. Not simply running amok but actually playing out a well-rehearsed strategy. They had seized both the ar-mory and the Data-Sync which controlled most of CIRCLE'S functions. It was impossible, he knew that. Yawp neurology wasn't specified enough to allow that kind of independent behavior, but they were doing it.
Nobu closed his eyes and leaned his head against the long window. Its coolness was soothing and helped to sort his thoughts. So much had happened—all of it impossible. Jac Halevy-Cohen had vanished without a trace; not even the sender-chip embedded in his skull could be tracked. A high-energy pulse from the galactic core was scrambling all their communications, leaving them truly disorganized. But no energy-wave could be that powerful. Nightglow graffiti . . . warrior yawps … It took all his inner resources to suppress his rage at the rampant absurdity of it all. He modulated his breathing: two deep breaths, one shallow, two deep… .