Radix, page 13
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Outside, Nefandi heard his wails and sprinted toward him through the trees. The Delph had trained him well. Despite his fear and the pain from the voor’s blow nailed between his eyes, he could not drive away. A bioresponse that the Delph had nerved into him had seized his body and driven him back. Until he completed his assignment, his body would not let him go—even if it meant his death.
Nefandi had left the car at the pool’s edge, and as he dashed toward the boy’s cries he opened himself to the beauty and the strangeness of what he knew was the last space of his life.
Sumner reeled through the narrow doorway, grappling with the corpse, and Nefandi pulled up short. The fat boy’s broad body quavered with his frantic efforts to break loose. The sleeyes of Jeanlu’s blouse had torn away, and her knobby, sticklike arms flashed blackly. His shirt slick with sweat and his thick legs staggering, he danced crazily along the pool rim. From the wild look in his eyes and the whiteness of his lips, his whole face starched with fear, his collapse seemed imminent. But he refused to succumb. Even as the twisted, split lips of the corpse unpeeled and the crumpled face hissed a hot, putrid vapor, he continued to buck.
Then the chanting began. As Sumner pulled at the iron-locked arms, swinging the body against trees, hauling it through the mud and weeds, it began mumbling the sounds of some impossible language. Cooing, clicking, snapping a rhythm that made the scalp at the back of the boy’s head constrict, the chant penetrated him. The icy mist in his chest welled up in his throat and fogged his eyes. He keeled. All his strength evaporated, and the dead flesh hanging from his neck dragged him forward and down.
Nefandi perceived Jeanlu’s blue psynergy sparking against Sumner’s golden bodylight. Streamers of blue radiance smoked away, unable to get close. The gold kha shuddered. In an instant, it would blink out.
Nefandi’s hand moved impulsively. Sparked by blood-logic, he activated his field-inducer and lashed out. The burst of tight packed high-frequency sonics caught the corpse between her shoulder blades. Jeanlu’s plant-fiber vest crackled into flames, and Sumner broke her grip. He lurched to his feet and tottered backward. The corpse yawled, enraged and plaintive, flailing its arms as flames consumed the vest and started in on the trousers. With a howl, the burning body pitched forward, rocked upright, and dashed for Sumner.
Sumner ran from the pool, the corpse lurching behind, outstretched, flame-sheathed arms closing in. Despite his bulk, Sumner moved quickly, loping past the pool toward the Flats. Jeanlu closed in so remorselessly that when the flames ignited the brood jewels around her neck, the string of explosions peppered his back with pieces of burning flesh. He didn’t look back. Behind him, the corpse crumbled beneath flares of green flame.
Nefandi watched the corpse burn a moment before turning away. He was surprised that the boy wasn't dead. With a smile that didn’t touch his eyes, he watched Sumner flee through the trees and out of sight. It would have been good to follow him, but his work wasn’t done.
He moved through the tamarind trees toward the cottage, his field-inducer at maximum, warping sounds and belling vision. Flies frenzied around him, hazing off the perimeter of his field and black-dazzling his wake. Bent air sliced light into colors, and he marched toward a cottage rainbowed in sunfire.
Through the adobe wall’s opacity, the sensex revealed Corby: a small but dense purpling lying inside the cottage. Something had happened to the voor’s body—its shadow was unshaped and pulsing eerily. Nefandi focused his weapon for maximal output and fired a long wail of energy at the sensex image.
The side of the house flared apart, and a cyclone of fire gusted through the timbers. The heat of the blast pushed Nefandi back, and he retreated to the brink of the pool. From there, he watched until the shred of purple kha and the throbbing voorshape glared out of sight in the conflagration.
The wind flushed brighter and colder, and Nefandi turned his back on the flame-cored house and walked to the car. The flies had veered off, but the air filled with something else—a stillness, the transparence of the violence he had created.
At the car he stopped and tried to convince himself that mind was indeed continuity. He watched sunlight fill the surface of the pool like flowers—and he felt that he verged on a drunken dream. Don’t spook yourself.
He looked back at the cottage. Huge with fire, no glint of the voor showed. Still—absence surrounded him like a crucible. He had to be severe with himself to keep from quaking when he stooped into the driver’s seat and started the car. As he drove off, he knew that the voor was not dead—he had merely helped to change it.
***
As soon as Sumner realized that the corpse no longer chased him, he collapsed and lay doubled over, retching for breath. A long while lapsed before he could stand, his head muddled and heavy. He had nowhere to go out here in the wilds but back to the cottage. He limped through the scaffolds of trees cautiously. When he encountered the smoldering nest of tarry ash and bones of Jeanlu’s body, he took a deep breath and walked the long way around the pool.
Near the cottage, flies ravaged him, yet he stopped walking and stood staring. The house blazed—and his car was gone.
Flies frenzied over his face and neck. Stunned and still, he watched flamedevils dancing through the roof and out the windows. He turned and stared beyond the dead branches of the trees idling in the wind, at a thread of dust vanishing in the west.
Sumner brushed flies from his face and scurried past pulpy trees and worm-festering grasses toward Rigalu Flats. He waddled up the rise and skidded quickly down the other side. Once on the green sand, the stinging swarm veered off, and he stopped.
He plopped down in the sand and vomited. All squeezed out, he got up, pointed himself toward McClure, and hobbled off. Though sick with horror and fatigue, he forced himself to move. The grating roar of the timbers and the tile roof going up in flames bellowed after him like the rusty gears of a vast machine.
***
Nothing has been created. Everything is a shadow of what it will be. Corby held to that voor chant. The fire, too hot for his shape, in moments would lapse him into the pattern itself, leaving him unsure how he would go on—or if.
Or if—nothing is a shadow, everything has already been created—everything is fated.
With the last fineness of his reasoning, he focused on Sumner. The lusk had broken. He had to reach his father. The pattern had to go on. He had to stop the Delph. With the last of his will, he reached out.
***
Sumner stayed close to the fringe of the Flats to avoid the flies. After he had shuffled through the sand for over an hour, the terrible wind died down, and the flies had gone. He ventured across a grassy plain toward a grove of willows. Halfway there, the scaly hulk of a pangolin reared out of the tall grass and honked angrily. Sumner backed off, slowly at first, then more quickly, breaking into a scramble as he neared the Flats. Safe again among the green dunes and the maze of fluted rocks, he plodded on.
He slogged onward with his hopeless journey. Because of the pangolins, he dared not cut across the fertile land to an active highway or even hope to get water until dusk. And then the night creatures would be out.
As he slouched along, he tried to measure his situation coolly. McClure, the nearest town, lay 189 kilometers away. He would need days to get there on foot. Even with provisions, he doubted he could get past the predators.
Face it, zerohero, he said to himself. You’re trashed.
The sun rose, a gold circle behind him. To his right, lunatic clouds, red and jumbled, ran with the horizon, towering majestic to twenty thousand meters. Skeleton-shadows covered the desert floor, and the tall, curved rockshapes catching the light around him blazed a hot green.
He could still taste the rot smell of Jeanlu’s body. He wanted to tear off his soiled clothes, but the stench tainted his skin as well. Loops of singed pain around his throat and the chill in his muscles made it impossible to gather his wits. Only one thing came clear to Sumner. He had been duped. Behind his pain and fear, a thick anguish thrummed.
“Used by a distort!” he moaned. “Corby knew. Pissleaker! He knew Jeanlu wasn’t dead.”
He shuffled on, trying to follow the highway as it dipped in and out of the death-calm dunes. The rocks around him wavered, scorching, and his heart trembled, chilled. The more apparent the hopelessness of his situation became, the angrier he got—enraged at himself for being such a docile fool. I should’ve left Nefandi in the lurch when I had the chance. A sour taste gelled in the back of his throat. He wanted to spit it out, but his parched mouth provided no saliva.
Afterward, he lost the highway again amid coils and loops of rock. By this time, the sun had rolled to the horizon, and the wild clouds in the north piled high, dark as a mountain. He leaned against a thrust of stone that arced steeply and fanned into a mesh of spikes and bristles. The material gleamed, slick and clear-edged. In the shadows, it seeped a faint green glow.
He looked north at a ridge of far-distant mountains. Alpenglow, misty red, outlined the summits. Closer in, the edge of the Flats lifted, and—visible among the long shadows just beyond it, surrounded by drowsy ferns and a dark grove of veiled cypress—a pond caught the day’s horizontal rays. Its long body flashed like beaten gold in the dusk. No pangolins lumbered anywhere in sight.
He shambled over the smooth rock and the drifts of sand. The scent of fresh water crisscrossed the air, coming and going, until he pushed through the ferns. Then it rose like a wall, and he stepped through it, giddy. The water, clean and cool, gurgled from a cleft boulder matted over with moss and long green shoots. He went down on his knees before it and drank, moaning and rolling his eyes. When he had slaked his thirst, he doused his face and his burning neck. Finally, he lay back in the thick grass and let the leaf-shifted twilight play over him.
Momentarily at peace with himself, his mind fell back from its despair, and he wondered why Corby had sent him to that living corpse. Was that really Jeanlu? Thinking about it, he decided it must have been. Though the features had withered, he had recognized her hair and eyes. He could still feel the frosted charge she had sizzled through him. The vacancy in his chest and shoulders lingered, as if he had been drained. Like a spider, he imagined. She was sucking out my life like a spider.
As the terrain darkened, the sun descended as a crown of flame among fantastic shapes in the east, and he tried to devise a way of carrying some water. Then, he heard an evil sound. A huge, hollow cough swelled out of the night shadows among the cypresses. He couldn’t even begin to guess what it was. Pangos should be asleep now, he considered, hoping to calm himself. But other, more ominous possibilities remained: jaguars, dorga renegades, flying gnous.
He pushed to his feet and immediately met the gleam of last light in five pairs of eyes across the pond from him. As he stepped back, they stepped out—five man-size hind rats, snout-jaws gaping, stunted forearms greedily clacking claws.
Sumner whined, and the sound of his fear excited the creatures. They trotted around the pond toward him, barking and snapping their jaws.
He plunged through the brake of ferns and burst toward the Flats. The hind rats spartled after him, screaming raucously as they closed in. Even after he made it to the green sand, he dragged on as fast as he could, not daring to glance back until his shoes slapped the hard surface of a rockshelf.
He turned about and nearly collapsed. The hind rats hadn’t stopped at the edge. They kicked up flares of sand as they scampered toward him. He leaped back and dashed over the fine-grained rock, eyes straining in the falling light for pits and scoops. He ran strong and reckless, leaving all his strength behind. When he collapsed, his leg muscles bunched, his chest ached, and he had to gulp for breath. In an instant, the hind rats were on him. Their barks surrounded him, and he heard them circling for the killing lunge.
A long, hysterical moment played out before he realized that he wasn’t going to be mauled. The yipping of the creatures broke off abruptly, and he thrashed about. The hind rats had vanished. They had never been there. The sand tract he had crossed showed only his tracks.
He got up timidly and looked toward the pond. Darkness obscured it, and by the green glow of the Flats he spotted the gleam of the hind rats’ eyes. They watched him hungrily from the edge.
Suddenly two of them bounded forward, shrieking and kicking up sand. Sumner wailed, too spent to break into a run. Stiff as chalk, he stood gawking as the hind rats raced for him. Ten meters away, ribbons of saliva running off their jowls, they staggered when the space around them fractured. Then—they vanished.
Yak pus!
All five hind rats remained squatting at the fringe of the Flats, sixty meters away, their tiny eyes green sparks in the shadows. None had so much as stirred. Sumner kneaded his face with his knuckles. I’m losing my mind.
“No, you’re not.”
Sumner wheeled around. Corby reared up behind him, face and hands milky green in the phosphor glow. His eyes glared bright as an animal’s.
Sumner stammered, and the boy’s form wrinkled away like a mirage.
Wog! I’m luned!
“Just projecting.” The voice came from behind him again. He turned, this time more slowly, screwing up his eyes to see better. The boy appeared there, solid as the rock turret alongside him. “Stop pushing out,” Corby said. “Focus in.” His body blurred off into the ghost light of the Flats.
“Corby!” Sumner bawled. “Stop jooching me!”
A voice slashed through his head, so loud that he reeled: “I’m not!” Corby’s image ricocheted across his field of vision, appearing and vanishing on ledges, dunes, spires. Then it drizzled to nothing.
Easy, driftbrain—easy. Sumner closed his eyes. He sensed the boy’s contact within him. Blood still banged in his ears from his run. Even so, he could hear a hushed presence at the back of his mind. A cooing, a whispered chant echoed there—a dreadful recall of the corpse’s alien muttering. He braced himself to flick open his eyes to get away from that sound, except that he heard something else: Corby’s voice, cool and rational. “It’s the Flats, Father. It’s empty. Your mind’s filling it up.”
He opened his eyes. Corby watched him with a concerned smile. The image lasted until Sumner moved; then it, too, blinked away.
He closed his eyes again and listened, past the boom of his blood and Jeanlu’s eerie lipping, for Corby. “Keep your mind still,” the boy’s voice whispered within him. “Don’t talk to yourself. And don’t be afraid.”
“Where are you?” Sumner asked aloud.
Jeanlu’s mumblings got louder, hissing through the blood beat. “I can’t link with you long,” Corby said, his voice already thinning. “Listen. Being is flow. And in the flow is pattern. But there can be no meaning until you stop struggling. Consciousness itself is power. Become what you are. If you’re quiet, you’ll...”
Silence.
“What? I’ll what?”
A squawking chant caromed across his brain, and Sumner snapped open his eyes to see the black, shrunken corpse of Jeanlu dancing obscenely before him. Wwau! He jumped backward and had to struggle with himself not to dash off. “It’s a ghost, driftbrain,” he said aloud to calm himself. “It can’t touch you.”
Jeanlu’s body shimmied closer. He could see through the peeled, scabby skin. The face, thin as wind, shimmered, shiny, the bulbous eyes trembling in their sockets. Sumner held himself steady. “Not real,” he encouraged himself. “Not real.”
The corpse’s body disappeared, though the shiny, cracked face endured, stretched into a maniacal grimace. Then it, too, faded, and he was alone. A night bird tolled from the cypress pond. Otherwise, silence reigned.
He closed his eyes to get in touch with Corby. The sound of his heart thumped in his ears. The heat had thinned out of the air quickly. Sumner shivered, and he started walking to warm himself. The terrain around him filled with furtive movements and brief glimmers of gossamer shapes. Fear, he remembered. Teeth dreams. The thought reassured him, and he felt his initial anxieties peeling away. That left him with shimmerings of dread and snips of language: Relax...you’re easing home...nobody can jooch you now.
The vast solitude of the Flats and its soft, dusty light skimmed off his inner voice. He fell away from his thoughts into an alert quietude. Nothing was left to think about. It was just a matter of walking now, one step at a time, through this wonderland of muted light and crazy shapes. Exhaustion helped to keep his mind empty; fear kept it alert. And the hallucinated voices of the hind rats stalked him:
Two leg, you are beautiful—
O come with us
Away from these fever graves
To where our wounds can love each other...
He veered deeper into the Flats, a great concourse of windswept shapes ranging around him. Time moved without punctuation. Only the broken rhythm of his stride and the hot pain around his neck fixed his attention.
Intuitively, he understood what Jeanlu had wanted from him. Life. All of it. The hot vapor she had breathed in his face contained a psiberant—a means of digesting his mind so that she could take his body. The words she had chanted intended to paralyze the conscious centers of his brain. The rhythms still resonated through his nerves. He could feel them acting with the psiberant. Together they produced a sparkling, volatile energy that scrambled his thoughts while infusing his kha with unprecedented strength. Strength enough to realize: A little more of that power would have been death.
