Radix

The yawps had seized his building while he was sleep-ing, and he had barely gotten out alive, taking with him only his clothes and a sheaf from his journal. Among the pages he had salvaged, he had found a letter from Jac. He couldn't remember receiving it or putting it in with his notes. It was undated, waterstained and apparently meaningless. It lay face up where he had tossed it to the floor.
"Listen, Nobu, I have something to tell you. Finality is the one door, the one way out of our pain and uncertainty, but it doesn't exist. We go on. Everything goes on. Why is there no end? What we think we've left behind moves through us. We're merely egos, the ghosts of our blood, unable to hope for judgment, only another moment. We pass on our genetic material, we pass on time. Do you think perhaps something passes the other way? What? What is time? And what are our chromosomes becoming? Can we know? What terrifies me is the possibility. We carry the beginning in our blood. We constantly try and fit it to our lives. We never get it just right. But what if we do? What if we really do? Only your movement distinguishes you from this ambush of still-ness. Stop.— Jac."
Nonsense, Nobu thought. He cracked— it finally happened. He pressed his forehead against the dark glass and began his breathing rhythms again.
When he felt better, he looked out into the night, his eyes as tight as his face. Far below him, several birds like pale, dirty socks were perched in the moonlight. He leaned against the window, trying to make out how many there were.
A startlingly loud cry jerked him upright—but too late. The great glass, screeching open under his weight, gave him a flying step into the night. For one delirious moment he could see far down the beach to where the CIRCLE fighters were entrenched. The tidewall there was blazing, lit up by eerie blue laser arcs flashing red against the rocks. The dark ground swung up at him like a bad dream—
Nobu lay still, stretched out flat, his face pressed into the asphalt. The blood pooling around his limbs and face felt warm and sticky, though he was shivering. Mindless, he muttered over and over to himself. Mindless.
Or was it? The initial pain and shock had thinned quickly, leaving him to wonder if, perhaps, some real but hidden part of him had caused him to lean too hard against the glass, had caused the glass to give way—some benevolent power, too long thwarted by his allegiance to machines, devices, calcula-tions—a benevolent God in whose grace it was better to be dead than to serve the inorganic.
"Cut the crap, Nobu."
The voice shocked him, because he recognized it from Assia's progress-tapes. His hands pushed feebly against the asphalt, vainly trying to lift his head. "Jac?" His voice was a weak, garbled caricature of his own.
"You look pretty shitful," Jac's voice said.
I must be delirious, Nobu thought.
"Don't you wish," the voice said. "Here, let me give you a hand."
Nobu felt a bright, magnetic coolness touch him all over his body, and he was lifted. He squinted against the full glare of the sun, though it was still night. A figure in black was wavering before a silvery sky. It bent closer, and Jac's grin-ning features came into view. "Seeing dragons?"
In the narrows of light along the soft ferrous seam of her closed eyelids, Assia sensed him. He was so close to her that she had to be very quiet to feel him at all. He wasn't Jac anymore. He was a hollowness in the smoke of her feelings, a hole plummeting out of time into a dreamy vacancy filled with whisks of light, quiverseen beings—more than the sponge of her brain could absorb. A great sleepiness swelled in her throat, and she swallowed it and opened her eyes.
She was alone at the top of a garden tower that hadn't been there that morning. Earlier, with a sickening awe, she had climbed the spiral stone stairways leading here. She had watched yawps walking among the white-leafed forests and the brookfalls of luminous rainbows that had appeared overnight. In the distance she had seen what was left of CIRCLE: the steely wreaths of collapsed buildings and the smoke-worming stains patterning the dunes in scalded, glossy colors— the slick reds and oranges of glass-sand fused by last night's laser battles. A crooked brown cloud hung over the rubble of the Data-Sync.
She looked down at the firm flesh of her hands and the thick darkness of her hair, and again she felt lightheaded, farouche, miry with goofy emotions: She was an old woman with the body of a seventeen-year-old! The risible husk of her logic rang with a laugh she was too scared to voice. What was going to happen to them all now that a man had become a god?
For the first time since she was a child, Assia cleared her mind and meditated as her father had taught her. She wide-focused on the moss-veined trees and the forest floor coined with light. It was easier than she remembered. Her body was an open lens, seeing everything: leaves like bright particles, the starlings listing among the branches, each bird a jigging molecule. She was on her own now, she knew, her brain curled quietly in its shell.
Nobu had walked up and down the beach countless times, feeling nothing, seeing everything. He wasn't dead, though he knew he should be. It was becoming clearer that he didn't know very much. For days, weeks, lengths of time he stopped measuring, he strolled through shale coves and over strands rubbled with driftwood and sea-smoothed rocks, watching the ocean come and go, the spine of the shore changing shape like a slow cloud. Fear, awe, memories, all deserted him much sooner than he would have thought. No need to eat or sleep. No need even to think, he finally realized. Is this death?
No—he was aware. He would just have to go on looking.
He stravaged the wind-lashed inlet mindlessly. Time became meaningless as static, distances longer than time. And finally, after he had long forgotten that life had ever been any other way, a jolt of total understanding banged through him. He toppled from the rondure of stone where he had been watching the tide come in and tumbled down the slipface of a dune. On his back, staring up at the night sky, he looked past the skyfires and, with his new insight, began to decipher the awesome braille of stars. There was nothing separating him from them. Inner, outer, up, down, were all arbitrary. The whole sky had meaning for him now. And he could see, plainly see, the entire history of evolution pro-jected onto the night from his chromosomes.
All of the most trivial details of organic development, beginning with the first spark in the Proterozoic slime, were there in the skyshadows. As he read, at last he understood the history of consciousness and saw the next human form, the voor children born looking backward, remembering their ancestors, their sentience a telepathy that crossed worlds and that ultimately united them with everything—an infinite reunion.
He was so absorbed that he didn't notice the sky brightening—he had arrived and nothing was missing. All the organic forms stood before him like clouds, and he trembled, feeling the unnamable stillness that united them. Progres-sively, his senses sharpened, became more focused.
His senses had all been living in the past. They were the stepping-stones of consciousness, floating in nothing. In them was the shifting pattern of the world, and between them was stillness, nothing. He became his senses, and he was aware of the stars dimming, a thin, silver line following the corner of the sky.
Daybreak, the sun rose from its bed of rocks, and colors flowed into everything. Nobu returned to the stillness be-tween, already understanding that his participation in the world was over, and that he was being drawn inexorably toward the unity he had glimpsed beyond the blood's horizon.
Jac Halevy-Cohen strolled along the beach, spheres of hyacinthine light dancing around his ankles. He was a godmind, vaster than thought or memory. At his whim, a basilisk of water flared out of the sea, sparks of flowers limned his path across the sand, and music jeweled in the air. And yet, he was a man. "JAC HALEVY-COHEN," the collapsing break-ers blared in four-part harmony.