Radix, page 16
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
“Untie him and get him out,” he ordered.
The guards clambering out of the van crowded about as Sumner staggered into the sheer light of a lux globe. His pudgy face, bright with fear, gawked about. Blood harelipped from his nose, and a welt glowed across his cheek and down the side of his neck.
Anareta took the boy’s arm and led him to the narrow side door of his office. The uniformed men followed, but the chief waved them off. “You’re dismissed,” he said, opening the door and pushing Sumner in. The police balked, and he added more gruffly: “Your job’s done. Go home.” He had been careful in his selection of those he had sent to pick up the Sugarat. Mostly army transfers and young recruits, they felt uneasy about disobeying a field chief. With disgruntled mumbles, they dispersed.
A long map of McClure and a metal desk cluttered with unfiled reports cramped Chief Anareta’s small office. He signaled Sumner to a wooden stool and sat on the edge of his desk beside a keypunch communicator. An hour earlier, he had notified both the White and Black Pillar agencies that the Sugarat had been identified and officers dispatched to apprehend him. Now, he typed in the endcode signal that announced the boy was in custody.
Anareta looked into his prisoner’s porcine blue eyes. A laugh jerked deep inside him when he imagined this fat-round boy luring streetgangs to their deaths. “What did you think you were doing out there?”
Sumner’s gaze wobbled beneath the chief’s slow, omnivorous stare. “What do you mean?”
“Why’d you do it?” The darkness in Anareta’s long eyes seemed chasmal. “You’re a white card. I know what that’s like. I’m one. It’s a good life. The military will leave you alone, and the Conclave will give you women and time for your whims. Why’d you risk it all to be the Sugarat?”
Sumner’s look went empty as a wish. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The chief’s face narrowed, and the ravelings of Sumner’s body tightened and quivered. “I’ve always liked the Sugarat,” Anareta said tightly. Without looking at the keys, he typed the endcode into the communicator again, this time punching the send-key twice for emphasis. “Sugarat’s a distort killer. I liked him even more when I found out he had a white card. He’s not a common green card. He has something, and he chucked it all to jooch distorts. I like the Sugarat. But I don’t think I like you.”
Sumner’s voice shivered as he spoke: “I’m not the Sugarat.”
“Don’t make yourself uglier than you are, Kagan.” Anareta’s lips pinched with disgust. “My men found spraycans in your room with the same paint the Sugarat uses. I’ll wager the tire tracks near most of the killsites fit your car’s tires. And now we have foot plasters. You think they’re not going to match?”
Sumner faced meekly into the chief’s gritful stare and shook his head. “I’m not the Sugarat.”
“Your driving ticket found its own way to the alkaloid factory?”
Sumner’s whole face throbbed. “It’s not me. I don’t know how it got there.”
Outside the gray inner door, in the long corridor leading to the locker room, a razor-apt chant grew audible: “Zh-zh—zh-zh—zh-zh!” Sumner quaked to hear the Sugarat’s call.
“It’s you, Kagan,” Anareta said in a voice flawed with anger. He knew he couldn’t control his men, and his men knew that as well. “It’s you they want.” He typed in the endcode signal again, forwarding it only to the Conclave.
Kagan’s white card offered his one hope of surviving the night—but only if the White Pillar acknowledged his genetic value.
“Zh-zh — zh-zh!” The chanting hissed closer through the gray inner door.
Sumner whimpered and edged off the stool. “It’s not me.”
“Sit down!” the chief snapped. “Why’d you kill if you weren’t ready for this?”
“I didn’t!” Sumner’s eyes swiveled, drunk with terror. He leaned close to the chief, the hot stink of his body thick as a spasm. “It’s not me. Please believe me. I never killed anybody.”
A light dulled in the chief’s face, and he pushed Sumner away. “I might have tried to help you,” he said as the gray door rattled and the pounding began. “But I’m not going to risk my job and my life for gutpaste like you.”
“Zh-zh! Zh-zh! Zh-zh!”
“Open it up, Chief,” a gruff voice called through the door. “We know he’s with you. Open it up or we’ll take you with him!” The heavy door buckled in a seizure of pounding.
Sumner grabbed the chief’s arm and begged him with his whole body. But whatever sympathy had remained in Anareta withered away. He twisted his arm free and strode over to the gray door stenciled with the black and white Massebôth pillars.
“Don’t!” Sumner crouched behind the chief’s desk. “I am the Sugarat—but don’t let them have me.”
“Zh-zh! Foc Anareta—open the door! Zh-zh!”
Anareta turned to Sumner with a brightness like joy in his face. “Why’d you do it, Kagan? I want to know.”
Sumner gaped, baffled. “I don’t know.”
The chief sidled over to the keypunch and re-entered the request to turn Sumner over to the Conclave. He thumbed the send-key again and again.
“I was scared.” The boy wept. “I’ve been scared all my life. I had to kill what scared me. The dread, it—”
“Zh-zh!” The door cracked at the joint and splintered inward. At the other door leading to the outside, a heavy pounding began and voices shouted for the Sugarat. Anareta was moving toward his gun locker when the inner door burst open, throwing him to the side.
Half a dozen men rushed into the room, their faces tight with animal rage. They found Sumner cowering beneath the chief’s desk. He kicked and bucked, and they had to heave the desk over to get at him. They dragged him screaming out of the office and down the corridor to the locker room where the other men waited.
Anareta, left behind, struggled to right the toppled keypunch communicator. Minutes passed before he managed to reconnect the bent input-plug. Sumner’s howls had fractured to wracked cries and sobs by the time a channel chattered open and the chief linked with the Conclave. More minutes echoed with screams as the transfer authorization from both the White and Black Pillars typed itself out. Anareta ripped the sheet off before the endcode signal chimed and surged out of the room.
Ahead, the screams had stopped, and only the jeers of the men and the sound of the beating could be heard.
The chief had to push men out of his way to get to Sumner. With a yell, he silenced everyone: “Let up! This boy isn’t ours. If he dies, we’re all dorgas!”
The men on the periphery pulled back, and Anareta glimpsed Sumner’s hunched body, the clothes ripped away from a raw, bloody bulk. Then the men who had lost family in the Sugarat riots stood before him—thick men stripped to the waist, eyes smoky with red rage and contempt for his soft life. Both had blood-grimed rubber hosing in their hands, and one of them shoved the end of the tubing up to Anareta’s face. “Chief, you’re dead meat if you try to stop us.”
The chief pushed aside the bludgeon and held up the authorization order. “I’m not trying anything. The White Pillar owns Kagan now. They know he’s alive. If he’s dead—we’re worse than dead. All of us.”
One of the two men stepped back, and the other pressed dangerously closer. His face, emotionless and speckled with Sumner’s blood, his voice atonic, he threatened: “I’d rather be dorga meat than let this dungball live.”
The chief stood fast, though the man towered an inch away and his hard rubber hose pressed sharply against Anareta’s sternum. “To defy the Black Pillar is death,” he quoted the Codex of the Protectorate, holding the typed authorization high. “But to defy the White Pillar is suffering. Who else here wants to live a long life in the dorga pits?”
“The chief’s right,” one of the nearby men spoke up loudly, and grumbles of agreement followed. “The tud’s hurt. He won’t walk straight again.” Several of the closest men took the angry man’s arms and gently moved him away from the chief.
Anareta’s insides relaxed and then cramped even more fiercely when he saw what had become of Sumner. The boy’s face looked horrific, unrecognizable—a mask of stringing blood, torn tissue, and pink bone. Both of his broken arms winged at odd angles, hands pulp white and lifeless. A shaft of broken bone gouged through his thigh. “Mutra,” the chief gasped. “Get a shock unit. Somebody—get help!”
He tore off his shirt and covered Sumner’s quivering body. “Everybody else out of here,” he ordered. “The Conclave will want pain for this.” The station cleared quickly, and when the medics arrived Anareta stooped alone over a half-alive man.
***
Sumner lifted himself awake, rising out of a maw of darkness. A mad whining turned in his ears, and he waited for the nightmare to continue. But the world had changed. Twangy medicinal odors clouded around him. And the light shone softer, thin and gauzy.
Pain had become so intense it was pleasurable. For an age, it seemed, he had been dreaming of his hurt as radiance. He floated inside himself, his body a vision sustained by the intensity of his pain-pleasure. He twisted his body to ignite the flashlight that had become his joy, but the fluffy embrace of a mattress swallowed most of his pain.
“It’s over now,” a female voice said softly. The sweet, moist warmth of her breath sharpened Sumner’s senses. The gentle fragrance of calambac lilted in the air, and a hazy face hovered above him. He tensed for an expected barb of pain, but the hand that touched him was quiet.
She bent closer, and he saw that her face hovered lovely as music. Dark heavy-hung hair settled around him. He lifted above the numbness of his body and glimpsed the green physician’s uniform the woman wore and the intravenous bladders hanging on the posts of his bed. Then the hurt of his body fractured his alertness, and he dropped back into his stupor.
“Stay with us, Sumner,” the doctor whispered, and the lambent caress of her hair silked over his face as she pulled away.
For a double-hearted moment, Sumner urged to reach past his hurt and hold this woman as he would have held his life, even though he knew that if he let go of his pain-vision now, he would be giving up forever the dreaminess beaten into his nerves. Living would again become agony. But this woman—
A wave of loneliness swelled in him, and he clutched for her.
***
The first day that he felt strong enough to touch her was the last day he saw her. By then, consciousness had hardened enough for him to know that he occupied an infirmary chamber within sight of the Berth. Tall, narrow windows lined the walls, one for each bed in the ward. Sunlight, thick and steady as stone, lay on his face every morning, and the black days labored by.
Most nights, sleep closed in haunted and violent. In the languid light of false dawn, he invariably woke to a vision of the doctor who had lured him back into his life with her tawny skin and black hair and breath that smelled of candy. For that one moment, he knew happiness, and for the rest of the day the exasperating hallucination of her beauty dogged him. He was alone, as always. Betrayed into living. But why? Why had the police not killed him? The green-smocked medical staff that attended him and the other dour men in the ward knew nothing.
Chief Anareta visited Sumner once, and the boy became so agitated at the sight of the black, red-trimmed Massebôth uniform that the doctor in charge asked the chief to leave before he could introduce himself. The chief had come to say farewell. After the full report of the beating had been filed, the Black Pillar authorities had decided to retire the chief. He was being sent to a camp outside Xhule where his white card could be put to more regular use. Anareta felt happy about his discharge. Xhule, a bucolic valley of garden villages, had a university where he could pursue his kro studies. He had wanted to find some way of thanking the Sugarat, though after seeing the great fear in the boy he realized that the most he could do for Kagan was forget him.
Gradually Sumner’s pain shifted into healing aches: dull throbs, itching flesh and muscles. Yet, he didn’t want to live. He tried to stop eating, and the staff shoved tubes through his nose and down his throat. And though he willed himself to die, his body continued to get stronger.
When the cruel day came for him to learn to walk again, he refused to move. His brain had been rubbed smooth with pain, and time meant little to him. Apart from the lunatic dreams that waked him to a lathered frenzy each night, he lived empty. No expectations. No hopes. Time would kill him. He would wait.
Hoping to awaken Sumner to life, a blue-gowned nurse wheeled his bed to the lune ward and left him at the far end, where vomit crusted the walls and the fecal stench numbed his whole body.
The lunes, the husks of McClure’s society, had fallen into themselves in the chemical factories or the mines and were kept alive for medical experiments. Their stares, vacant or, at best, beast-filled, spooked him, and their phantom howls and gut-twisting shrieks gnawed at his nerves and made his nightmares even more terrible.
But Sumner refused to cooperate with the staff. He had determined to die, and he would have smothered himself in lassitude if an unexpected revulsion hadn’t suddenly and evilly overcome him. One night, he thrashed awake and found a milky-eyed lune chewing the scabs off his leg-wounds. The next day, he was ready to walk.
After a month of water exercises, weight lifting, and blinding pain, Sumner could move about without crutches. The staff had been patient and good with him, and his body healed well. Even so, he showed no appreciation. He remained solitary and withdrawn, mechanically completing his workouts and eating his meals. Few thoughts moved through his numb mind, and those that did were simple, immediate animal logics. A sullen indifference misted his eyes, and the medical staff finally realized that the police had succeeded after all. The Sugarat was dead.
***
Chief Anareta entered a serene garden alongside the Berth. He was out of uniform, and he looked haggard in the green pullover and brown flannels he wore. For a full two minutes, he stood beside a bluerose bush staring at a red-cowled monk who sat reading on a stone bench a few paces away.
When the savant glanced up, his head rocked with recognition and his cowl fell back, revealing a tough, blunt-featured face softened with surprise. “Chief!” the monk rasped. He stood with a coarse grunt, his body monolithic, his short hair streaked like smoke. “You look smaller out of black.”
“The Pillars took my black away, Kempis.” Anareta companionably gripped the big savant’s shoulder. “I was retired after the deeps looked into me.”
Kempis’ stare chiseled sharper. “Deeps? How far into your mind did they look?”
“Not far enough to see you,” Anareta said with a reassuring smile. Twenty years before, the chief had helped Kempis secretly enter the Protectorate. Before that, the monk had been an outlander, an undistorted but homeless offspring of distorts, a wanderer and a bandit. Anareta had found him at a branding station, where the wounded and heavily bandaged corsair was being fitted for drone headstraps. The wit-light in the huge man’s eyes had stopped the chief the instant their gazes touched. Kempis, not an apparent distort, lacked the savage callousness that Anareta had become accustomed to seeing in the faces of ardent criminals. Muscled by compassion, he had taken Kempis aside and spoken with him long enough to confirm what he had suspected: The man wasn’t a ritual-programmed tribesman or gangmember—just an individual. Through his bureaucratic contacts, the chief had been able to clear Kempis’ record, secure him a green card, and position him as a savant with the White Pillar.
Savants had an easy life. Essentially librarians and researchers, they lived well respected lives in the Protectorate, traditionally fulfilling the expectation of extending the species by maintaining very active sex lives. Kempis had always been happy serving Mutra.
“The deeps were selective about my past,” Anareta clarified. “They were more interested in my white card and my recent sexual exploits than what happened twenty years ago. All they really saw was that I’d rather study kro than manage a street division—so they relieved me. I’m off to Xhule tonight. By tomorrow I’ll be studding in some forest bungalow.”
Kempis’ hard face shone. “I’m happy for you, Chief. Thirty years and the Pillars never suspected you were as much with the kro as with them. What broke it?”
“I was caught trying to pull out another white card—a fat kid who’d been jooching distort gangs into deathtraps.”
“I’d think the Pillars would medal him for that.”
“The Sugarat enraged the gangs more than he hurt them. The past five years, the distorts have been tearing up McClure like this was outland. When this kid was finally dragged in, I was the only one that wanted to see him live. That look on your face asks why.” Anareta shrugged, and uncertainty inscribed his brow with one long line. “Why’d I pull you out? He’s unique—an individual, not a distort or a simplewit. But my own men got to him. And that’s why I’m here.”
Kempis took the chief’s elbow and led him to the side of the bluerose shrubbery, out of sight of the Berth. “What can I do for you?”
“Kempis, they’re going to kill this kid.”
“You said he was a white card.”
“Yes, but he’s very ugly. Even before my men broke his face, he had the kind of clumsy grossness that a stud mate would laugh at. His white card will keep him out of the dorga pits, but he’s too dwarfed inside to make the mating circuit. I know they’re going to send him to one of the heavy work camps—Carnou, Tred, maybe Meat City.”
Kempis’ head tilted awry. “How can I help him—and why do you want to?”
“He’s a white card like me,” Anareta said, looking strongly at Kempis. “I can’t rut in peace without at least warning this kid. I want to tell him to get out—to leave the Protectorate.”
