Radix, page 10
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Sumner’s heart shook. “Who are you?”
“There’s a lot to tell. Get in the car.”
Sumner stooped in and squeezed behind the steering wheel. Nefandi threw his hat in the back and eased into the passenger seat. He leaned close to Sumner and with breath hot and dark commanded: “Tell me everything about the voors.”
Sumner shrugged and stepped on the accelerator. “They’re just some friends of mine down the road.”
“Voors are never friends.”
Sumner flinched at the animosity in the pirate’s voice.
“Voors look after themselves,” Nefandi said. He finished the orange and hurled the skin out the window. “They’re a brood. That’s what they call themselves. Not tribe or family. A brood.”
His voice flexed sharply, and Sumner tried to change the subject. “How’d you get out here?”
“It wouldn’t mean a crock to you.” Nefandi spit a seed out the window. “Tell me about the voors.”
“A woman and her boy,” Sumner muttered. “Jeanlu and Corby. She makes charms.”
“And the boy? Is he timeloose?”
Sumner frowned ignorantly.
“Does the child have deep mind?” Nefandi pressed. “Does he have powers?”
Sumner shrugged, and the one-eyed man punched him in the ear. “Tell me!” The car swayed, and Nefandi put one hand on the wheel and the other on Sumner’s throat. “And don’t lie.”
Sumner gagged a stiff breath and rasped: “Corby’s strong.”
Nefandi released him and sat back, a shade of satisfaction in his eye.
Shame congested Sumner’s breathing, and his vision darkened. He debated taking advantage of what little power he had. One sudden swerve at the right moment and both of them would pass Beyond quickly. Would that be better? He faced Nefandi and saw himself in the mirror-eye. The lack of fear in his reflection surprised him. The bright beads of his eyes gazed tonelessly above chubby cheeks. He looked away, pleased with himself, for he knew that this man might kill him.
Nefandi took out a cheroot and lit it. The sharp, mousy odor of the car and of the boy nauseated him even with the windows open. He found it hard to believe that such a unique kha belonged to this corpulent creature. Radiant gold, he marveled. No doubt he has a white card.
“You fathered Corby, didn’t you?” he asked, and the boy’s tight silence answered him. Briefly, he watched the rolls of fat in Sumner’s legs and hips jiggling with the vibrations of the car. All hunger and fear. “Why are you going back?”
“I need zords.”
“You mean kiutl and brood jewels.” He turned his face into the windowdraft for a drag of fresh air. The road arced out of the Flats, and they passed a draw whose canyon walls shimmered with cottonwood, tamarisk, and willow. Then they rode into the green ruins again, and he pulled his head back in.
“I’m a voor-killer, tud. Corby may be the one I’m looking for.” Nefandi took a long draw on his cheroot and let the smoke snake through his nostrils. “I’m telling you this, because you may have to help me. And if you balk, I will kill you.”
Sumner’s knuckles blanched on the steering wheel. “Who are you?”
“I’ve been sent here by the Delph, an old Power—the same Power that first shaped the Massebôth Protectorate. We watch over what’s left of humanity and keep voors and distorts from overpopulating.” He tongued a smoke ring. “If you cooperate with me, I’ll reward you well.”
Terror slackened to fear in Sumner, and he seemed to sink into his seat. “What can I do?”
“For now, just drive.”
Nefandi hung his head out of the window again, and Sumner relaxed his grip on the wheel. He fetched about for a casual comment and settled for a question to fill the silence: “Can you tell me what all this is?”
Nefandi leaned out of the draft. “What?”
“Rigalu Flats. What is it?”
“An ancient city, nuh?”
“But why’s it green? And why’s it glow?”
Nefandi worked the cheroot to the corner of his mouth. “The green comes from salts and halides like plutonium oxychloride and sodium and ammonium diuranates. The night glow is solar-excited zinc sulfide. And the rigidity and aridity result from the subquantal displacement of the hot waste that was spewed all over here.”
Sumner looked blank as an egg.
“Rigalu Flats was a kro city once,” Nefandi went on. “One of the largest on the continent. But the quakes and the raga storms leveled it overnight. The nuclear reactors, and there were lots of them, were just so much cardboard in the wind.
“Reactors?”
“Power stations. The Massebôth have outlawed them. The kro used radioactive material just to heat water to run turbines. Small-visioned, no? This whole area was hot.” He flicked ash into the mess at his feet. “And it would have stayed hot for tens of thousands of years.”
Sumner grunted. “That was stupid. Who cleaned it up?”
“The Delph before he fully developed. This was the best he could do at the time.”
“Tell me about the people who lived here.”
“The kro were like the Massebôth. Like all people.” He bit down on his cheroot and spoke through his teeth. “A hot fuse of ambitions and ideas burning from generation to generation. Victims of memory.”
“But who were they?”
Nefandi took out his cheroot and studied the glowing end. “They liked football.” He nudged the cold ash to the floor. “Of course, there was more time for amusement in those days. Distorts were rare, and there were no voors at all. North was south for the kro—” Nefandi broke off. The road had swung out of the Flats a little ways back. Now they drove past isolate pinyon and solitary junipers in a haunted landscape of sandstone knobs, domes, turrets, and coves.
Sumner followed Nefandi’s gaze, and then he saw it too. Behind a loose wall of scrag browsed a hefty pangolin. It eyed them pugnaciously, pawing the ground and snorting.
“Moody beast,” Nefandi whispered. “This must be its backyard.”
Sumner slowed down and began to pull to the side.
“No,” Nefandi warned. “It’s going to attack whether we stand still or move. Hold to the middle of the road. There’s less chance of breaking an axle. And don’t slow down.”
Sumner thought to object, but that instant the short sword seemed to fly into Nefandi’s hand. Sumner leaned forward and gripped the wheel with all his strength.
When they passed the pangolin, it lunged at them across the highway. Sumner curbed the impulse to speed on this particularly broken-down stretch of road, knowing he would lose control if he went too fast. His head whipped back and forth as he tried to watch both the road and the pangolin.
“Just drive,” Nefandi ordered. “Keep your speed steady. And when I tell you, brake hard.”
The pangolin galloped up to the driver’s side, dipped its armored head, and charged.
Now!” Nefandi cried, but Sumner, afraid to slow down, floored the accelerator—too late. The tough bottle-nose rammed into the door. Sumner fought the steering wheel as the car swerved violently toward an escarpment. His right fender squealed against rocks, then pulled away. Before he could control the car, the pangolin, its brass-red scales rippling with its run, charged again. With an explosive screech, the fender tore away and went winging out of sight. Sumner pulled hard on the wheel. The car swayed sickeningly and eased back to the middle of the road.
“Do what I say!” Nefandi barked. “Hold it steady—steady!”
The pangolin rumbled alongside and dipped its head for another charge. “Brake!”
The wheels whined, and the car jolted to a stop and stalled. Nefandi, pushed up against the windshield, saw the pangolin first. It had glanced off the front of the car and doubled back to charge again. “Get this shoebox moving!”
Sumner, frantic, fumbled with the starter chip. Twice the engine misfired; then, as the pangolin swung toward them, the car bolted. The ram-nose caught the rear fender, and the car swiveled to one side, then righted itself.
Sumner thought he could feel the beast’s charge through the seat of his pants, and Nefandi urged him not to go too fast. The pangolin came up on the passenger side, and Sumner waited anxiously for Nefandi’s cue to brake. He didn’t want to look. He heard the creature’s heavy grunting, and the dust kicked up by its clawed hooves hazed around him, and that was enough. He locked his eyes on the road and keyed himself for Nefandi’s order. The order never came. The pangolin bent forward for the ram, and Nefandi’s arm lashed out through the window. The flat of the sword slapped the beast’s eye, and it collapsed in an explosion of dust.
“Relax,” Nefandi said, sword vanishing again under the serape. Sumner pried his hands off the wheel and glanced back. The pangolin had rolled to its feet and shrugged itself off, watching after them glumly.
“Mutra, that was close,” Sumner said, voice cracking.
Nefandi took out another cheroot and lit it with steady hands. Sumner gnawed his lower lip jealously.
Taking a moment to gather his thoughts, Nefandi let his gratitude sink in, glad that he hadn’t had to activate the sword. Surprise was an essential element in stalking voors. And the boy’s fear had almost cost him. The crumbling road dipped back into the Flats. A four-winged dragonfly tapped against the door, then pulled up and vanished as the green sand hissed beneath the tires.
“You’ve got to learn to be steady-fingered, tud.”
Sumner nodded, wiping sweat off his face with his sleeve. He glanced over his shoulder to be sure the pangolin wasn’t following.
“I said ‘learn.’ I hope you noticed.” He took a few puffs on the cheroot and then wedged it into the console so that its smoke coiled between them. “It’s natural to be scared when you’re threatened. You’ve got to teach yourself to be calm. The secret is separating the facts from the teeth dreams.”
Sumner pursed his lips and flicked a questioning look at him.
“You know what I mean,” Nefandi said, his voice like jagged metal. “Static thoughts. Nervous fantasies. Nightmare-gnashed molars. Teeth dreams.”
“I know,” Sumner said cautiously.
“You’re tripping over your own shadow. Relax.”
Sumner bobbed his head. He wanted very much to change the subject. “This Power that cleaned up Rigalu Flats—the Delph. What created it?”
Nefandi didn’t respond. He gazed out the window, sucking meditatively on his cheroot. Sumner sensed that their conversation was over, and he gnawed his lip and turned his stare toward the plated curves of the road. Ahead, vision doubled in the heat scheming over the rocks.
***
To their left, dunes of chrome-green sand sloped around sleek, storm-polished arches. On the right, two hundred meters of chalk rock leaned over them. Spangles of fire grass, cane, and salt cedar covered the skull-rocks.
A turn-off appeared from around a tight bend. Sumner wheeled into it, swung the car into an alcove of big-boled trees and killed the engine. Beyond the trees, the scene opened into nightmare. The adobe cottage with coral swayback roof peeked out, barely recognizable, from behind veils of dodder and vetch that had swarmed over its walls. The bottoms of the flower troughs beneath the windows had fallen out, dried mud clotted the cedar steps, and the tattered roof had lost most of its tiles. The crater pool and the blue-roofed hut couldn’t be seen through the miasmic vapors steaming softly out of the ground at the side of the cottage. Sumner’s heart sank.
But Nefandi was excited. Fear and eagerness competed in him as he opened the car door. The muscular sensation that had been haunting him for days lay all around. Voors definitely lurked nearby, and he clutched his sword as he stepped out. Man-high grass, crackled and yellow, swayed over a former garden. White sand beds in front of the cottage banked against the walls, littered with dead leaves.
In the shade, he noticed that the land had not dried out but turned black and glistening. He looked at the ground around him and saw that it wasn’t mud catching the light but glossy black worms. Patches of them crawled and writhed in the shadows everywhere. A movement made him took up. Smoke—no, a breeze of flies swarming out of the trees and swooping toward him.
His hand under the serape quickly twisted the hilt of his sword. The weak field that came on around him deflected the swarm, though a few of the more savage flies got through and stung his flesh. He killed one of them—a long and sick green thing with huge mouth-parts and red eyes.
Fear overcame his eagerness, and he looked around carefully. Queer fungi sprouted on all the trees, and an iridescent sheen glazed many of the limbs and trunks. The yellow-brown vapors billowing out of the earth near the cottage blew away from where they stood, but nauseating whiffs still reached them. A rushing wind brought with it a pall that smelled like vomit and a sound of clothes flapping on a line.
A darktime hovel, he thought, scanning with the sensex. Two transparent beings passed slowly over the cottage. They approached so close that he could see their clear-spiked combs and the cilia rippling along the hems of their bodies. Among the cilia, he spotted two pendulous sacs studded with quills.
Raels! he cried, almost aloud. What the rauk are raels doing this far south?
The raels drifted away from him, and he overrode the impulse he had felt to dive back into the car. Raels, a lifeform created centuries ago by the eo to protect their first settlements, had been designed to carry nematodarts. The small and thin darts could be fired across a long distance and pumped an instantly lethal neurotoxin.
Nefandi continued to watch the raels as he looked around. He couldn’t believe that voors lived like this. He had always known them to be meticulous about what was theirs except in old age, when they withdrew into their darktime and lost power. If the algid psynergy rippling over his skin was to be trusted, this was not a place of old voors.
Scanning the yard and the cottage with his sensex, Nefandi detected no blue biospectral energy, just an orange glimmering from the plant-life. He turned about, perplexed. His tingling flesh told him that at least six or seven voors ambled somewhere ahead of him, but none of them leaked kha. That’s impossible, he told himself, tempering his fear.
“Mutra!” It was Sumner. He was just now crawling out of the car and had stopped in the door.
Nefandi followed his gaze into the sky and stiffened. One of the raels fluttered directly overhead, glistening among the trees—a gelatinous shape, big as a man, formlessly intricate: a mass of clear jelly-ruffles rippling in the sunlight. The wind shifted, and it turned, vanishing into its transparency.
“What was that?” Sumner cried. For an instant, he thought he had seen a bloodspot netted by fine blue tracery inside a bulbous, frilled thing.
“Don’t know,” Nefandi lied, watching it and its companion in his sensex as they circled the cottage. That rael was close enough to kill me, he realized. Stay alert!
Too many uncertainties closed in to assess at once. Why wasn’t he dead? The raels and the eo had been opposed to the Delph’s autocracy since the godmind’s power had begun to diminish. What are raels doing here if not hunting him? Where were the voors he felt but couldn’t see? All his senses screamed danger, and he had to stare deep into the sky’s nothingness to calm himself.
Sumner tagged along behind Nefandi as he approached the cottage. For some reason, the flies weren’t bothering Nefandi, and he stuck close. The reek of dead things and the vapors rising from the earth set his teeth on edge. He wanted desperately to get away. His heart pounded, and the flies and the blue and green fungi clumping big as quartz crystals on the tree trunks made his dread even more acute.
At the cottage, Sumner stood before the shut door. A large patch of gloss slashed its surface, as if a giant slug had slimed it. He was relieved when Nefandi didn’t try to enter. The windows, splattered with mud and dust, closed off the interior. Flies whined around them, and the sound of laundry thrashing in the wind grew louder and then receded.
Sumner searched about for anything that had retained its naturalness. The whole yard languished with decay: All the tree barks were puffed and graying, the sod around them sagging away into cracked dirt. Even the grass wore crazed nodules of blue fungus or shone with slime and worms.
“Let’s go to the other side.” Nefandi’s voice startled Sumner, sounding low and gentle, almost surprised. The fat boy sensed, perhaps, a hint of fear in it. He hesitated, and the flies clouded over him as Nefandi moved away. Waving hands about his head, he scurried after.
***
Behind the cottage, under the tamarind trees that ringed the crater pool, Corby sat naked in the tall grass. The mud of the pool-rim, shiny and black as frogskin, mottled his body. He sat with legs crossed, eyes half closed. The earth around him gloomed dark with the sinking of things: rumpled, decayed weeds, the purple droppings of some birds, a narrow trail where a snake had slithered. A tiny flower hung like a flame against the dismal mulch, its red petals tilted and tattered by the wind.
Corby’s whole mind fixed on it. He tried to shut out the sickness, the alternating waves of fear and lassitude. One moment he had been slumped out in the mud, trembling with grief, because his mother had died and his house had fallen into darktime. The next, he was sitting up, bewildered by his anguish. Wasn’t he a voor? Hadn’t he been shaped out of light, time and time again, on countless worlds? How many mothers and children and lovers had he known and lost? Nothing could change that. And nothing could keep what he was now from dissolving into the future.
His reasoning eased him into mindless languor. That lasted only a few minutes. Then the fear of going on alone built up in him again. To break out of it, he centered himself wholly on this flower beside his leg. Gradually, his vision wavered and thinned as the tensions inside him slackened. The wind shifted, and the laundry on a line strung between the trees stopped fluttering. A dead calm settled for a moment over the pool. Somnolent odors of wet stone and still water thickened. He didn’t notice. His awareness had locked on the flower.
Soon nothing remained of him but a skein of energy wound about the thread-stem and its petals. Inside, he dwelled alone, sunlight singing softly, warmth flowing through him. His querulous mind became quiet, dazzled by the drone of plant-life, fibers grained with sunlight.
