Radix, page 17
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Kempis’ raspy voice became almost soundless: “Chief, he’ll die on the outland.”
“You survived—and thrived for many years.”
“I was reared out there.”
Anareta slapped a bluerose to a splatter of petals. “Look—I can’t reach the kid. I’m leaving tonight. But I want you to talk with him.”
Kempis wheezed a sigh. “He’s locked up, isn’t he?”
Anareta pulled a leather pouch heavy with coins from his trouser pocket and handed it to the savant. “I still have friends in the Black Pillar. One of them will notify you when the kid’s guard rotates to someone compliable. Use these zords to speak with the boy alone. Tell him to run if he can. Tell him it could be death out there, but make him know it will be death if he stays.” The chief placed both hands on the monk’s arms. “He’s my last prisoner—and I’m leaving for an easy life. I want to feel good about that life. Talk to the kid. Tell him who you are. That saved your life once. It might save him.”
***
Very early one morning, a chunky uniformed guard shook Sumner awake and replaced the boy’s green infirmary smock with brown fatigues and work boots. The guard marched Sumner out of the infirmary into the gray smudged light of early dawn, across a flagstone courtyard and into the Berth. Icy green arc lights burned at uneven intervals along the top of the massive bellied wall. Inside, the air pressed on him close and fuscous.
After a brief pass-check, sentinels prodded Sumner forward. He shuffled through opulent colubrine hallways lined with frescoes of the Mutric Redemption. Aloe incense scrolled out of side niches occupied by votive tallows and blue glass icons. Several times, the escorts stopped Sumner and tugged his head tugged forward in obeisance as red-cowled savants strode by. Sumner responded woodenly, too hollowed out to care. At last, they entered a tiny pocket-garden, and Sumner was ordered to sit.
Curving walls tangled with vines enclosed a tight garden open to the dawn sky. It admitted little sunlight, like a well of ivy. Sumner sat on a round stone bench beside a moss-speckled trough of curkling water. A lunette above an oval doorway depicted Sita’s Firewalk, and Sumner fixated on the realistic rendering of limbs shriveled to smoldering twists of black, bubbled tar.
He was still gazing into the painting when the guard fiercely rapped the back of his head. “Rise!” he hissed.
A red-cowled savant stood in the door. Sumner rose and automatically bowed his head.
“Relax, please.” The savant entered and placed a hand on Sumner’s shoulder. “Sit down.”
Sumner sat and watched with an empty expression as the savant reached beneath his robes and produced a small leather bag for the guard. With eyes reverently averted, the guard bowed, fingers twitching over the bag, counting the silver through the leather.
After the escort had backed out of the garden, the savant folded back his cowl. He was a huge man, theandric, with short brindled hair and a face like granite: pale but hard, square and etched with many fine lines. “I’m Kempis,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Legally, we can’t talk. I’m a White Pillar savant—and the laws you violated were Black Pillar. It’s costing me more in risk than in silver for this audience.”
Sumner stared through him, vague as fog.
A long minute of silence widened between them as Kempis studied the boy. Sumner had become gangly and haggard from all the weight he had lost. The flesh around his eyes looked sunken and stained. The eyes themselves appeared clear but unfocused, gazing in a wide, depthless stare through a harrowing mask of scars.
When the savant spoke, an asthmatic rasp undercut his words: “I’ve paid the Black Pillar so that I could speak with you. I think you should understand where you’re going.” He drew in a whistling breath. “The police, you know, want you dead. Regrettably, they never finished. Some savants found out about your white card. Because your genes are so rare, they think you’re sacred, an envoy of Mutra, the last hope of our species. They’re very devout but slimbrained. So now you’re caught between the Black Pillar of the police and the White Pillar of the savants’ Conclave.”
Sumner showed no sign of attentiveness.
“Do you know what it means to have a white card, son?” The darkness in Kempis’ eyes thickened. “There aren’t a thousand in this city—less than a hundred thousand in the whole Protectorate. Even voors revere what that card represents. It means you’re whole—one of the few in this broken world.”
Sumner stared lethargically.
Kempis leaned closer. “A dark bargain’s been struck. The police have agreed to let you live so that, perhaps, the Conclave will get you to breed other white cards. The preservation of the Massebôth is at stake. But I assure you, the Massebôth are going to make living worse than dying.”
Sumner watched him sleepily, the blue, vapid loneliness of the sky threading itself through his eyes.
Kempis sighed, his breath making a noise in his chest like fire. “I have some advice for you.” His fingers moved slowly, unlacing the breast of his cowl. “I’m not a typical savant. I know pretty well what you’re going through. You see, before I entered the Conclave I was a corsair. I had dreams like the Sugarat. But I worked the coasts instead of the streets. I moved by night—and on the sea that takes as much guts as skill. I ran kiutl and renegades. I raided the reef colonies and the island outposts. And I killed only in defense and vengeance. It was a lonely, crazy-alive, hungry, stupendous way to live. And I’d be doing it today, except for this.”
He opened his cowl and revealed a chest livid with puckered scars. “Knifed in a tavern brawl. Thirty-two wounds. When I recovered I entered the Conclave. What else could I do with half a lung?”
Sumner’s gaze crisped. He understood the pain that had flowered into those scars, and he looked more directly at the man they had shaped.
Kempis laced up his cowl. “My advice isn’t some religious rauk. Mutra with her gory myths and sacred mumblings is just a throwback to the ancient Christom. It’s not real. Nothing’s real—but you. Your life. Your pain.”
He peered at Sumner, solemn as a cobra. “The White Pillar will stud you if they can, but the Black Pillar wants you hurting. Don’t let either of them get you. Cut them off as soon as you can. You’re young, and the physicians say you’re still whole. So stop acting like a corpse. Come alive. This world is huge and strange. I’ve seen things in it I don’t believe myself anymore. But it’s all out there—distorts, voors, creatures and places we don’t have names for yet. Get away the first chance you get. Become a corsair. Go north. Go as far as you can. Only freedom is real.”
He wheezed and sucked at the air. “Believe me, the north is another world. The Massebôth won’t follow you there. And some of those distort women—” He chuckled with croupy abandon and then struggled to catch his breath.
“Where are the Massebôth sending me?” Sumner asked, voice gritty. “Where am I going?”
Kempis stared at him in silence, intrigued and gratified. Then: “If you knew that, son, you’d have lived forever.”
***
Broux’s face fit together cruel features: the mouth a slash, jaw a clamp, skin bronzed from sunburn and malaria, hair iron-gray and cropped close to the carved contours of his cubed head. He was the commander of Meat City, a slimy hole punched into the green shimmering face of the western rain forest. Broux’s camp looked more like a trash heap than a military camp. In fact, the scraggy lot walled in by jungle contained a human trash heap, the final depot where the Massebôth Black Pillar sent personnel too rebellious for service in the regular units but too valuable for execution. Broux’s brutal command pitted the soldiers against the jungle and worked them into conformity or else broke them.
Broux took an interest in Sumner the moment he saw the boy, scab-masked and painworn limp out of the strohlkraft that had delivered him and eight others to Meat City. The lionfaced men guarded their truculent gazes, the fight in them strong—but the boy was different: he stood squatty on the landing field staring with open apprehension at the monotonous litter of rotting shacks and scantling huts set on concrete pilings above mustard-yellow mudflats.
Unlike everyone else in the camp he had a white card stapled to his file, and the White Pillar had appended a rider in bold print: HARD TIME—BREEDER: DO NOT KILL. Twice a year, techs in white jumpsuits would take Sumner to a breeding hostel—other than that, Broux could do whatever he liked with the boy.
“You’re mine now, Kagan,” Broux growled. The dragon-dark of his eyes looked the boy over, seeing the shape of the animal inside Sumner’s withered obesity, already knowing exactly how much pain this body could digest. “If you work in Meat City, you live. The only rest here is death.” Broux’s grin sharked straight back over his jaw, then vanished instantly. “It’s three kilometers around this clearing. Run the jungleline. Go!”
Sumner loped off, and Broux barked after him: “Pick it up, Kagan. Run!”
Sumner ran, steadily at first. But as the sun rose higher, hot and arrogant in the sky, something in him began to unravel. Colors ribboned by, and blood drummed faster as if boiling in his ears. He retched and gasped at the thick air, and long, deep muscles knotted up in his legs. He limped on, remorselessly circling the camp until nightfall when Broux called him in.
Devastated by fatigue, Sumner didn’t have the strength to pick up his rations. So, Broux pushed that dazed face into the bean paste, and Sumner ate. Immediately afterward, the boy collapsed on his cot and lay unmoving until Broux rolled him out at dawn.
Again, the camp commander ordered him to run the jungleline. By the time he had eased into the rhythm of his run, the sun’s heat seethed. At noon, he collapsed, and a guard slapped him awake.
Sumner swayed to his feet and forced himself to run—hard, hoping a stroke would tug him out of Broux’s grasp. For days, this nightmare repeated itself. Then, miraculously, the hours thinned out. A secret compartment swelled open in his lungs, and the fire he had been carrying in there cooled. Limitless power flowed into his tendons, and the hot needles pinning his shoulders to his chest fell away, leaving his body loose and slinky. He glided through the drifts of sunlight with defiant strides.
Broux watched, impressed. The McClure police had wracked Sumner, and Broux had been convinced by the boy’s shivering gaze that trauma had warped his will. But Sumner grew stronger than the bruised mash of his body revealed. The next day, from the shade of his command tent, Broux observed as Sumner joined the other men for the hole patrol—the daily grave detail.
The digging didn’t go well for Sumner. On the fringe of the jungle, a damp miasmic heat steaming softly around him with the death pall of the graves, Sumner breathed through his mouth and tried lifting small shovelfuls of yellow mud. Soon the grim heat built up in his fatigues, and when he peeled back his shirt the stinging flies tormented him.
Nevertheless, he worked relentlessly, wanting the heat to kill him. He sloughed his hands raw with the splintery handle of his spade, and pain and fatigue cramped his body. At day’s end, he returned to his hut feverish, too exhausted to eat the bitter herbs and root paste of dinner but force-fed by Broux’s pincer grip at the back of his neck. Afterward, he lay flat on his cot, stupefied, numbed free of his nightmares.
***
Time blurred into routine for Sumner. Broux worked him hard nine days and rested him one. For a long time, Sumner slept through those free days, too hollow to dream. But one day he found that he wasn’t wasted enough to ignore the barrack flies anymore. He spent that day meandering about the camp, groggily pondering his situation.
He had become a slave, he realized, his will as exhausted as his body. Broux worked him, not to death, but to the brink of life, keeping him alive for the White Pillar—or just for the pain. Sumner didn’t know.
He thought of Kempis and running away. And he thought of Nefandi, the deva, and the voors, and his dread sparkled. The world was evil, too dark to be enlightened by thoughts. And that made the painful routines of Meat City seem good. When the hole patrol trudged by with the buckled bodies of that day’s dead, the familiarity of their workchant soothed away all desire for escape.
At the end of the day, as he undressed for sleep, he experienced a wave of amazement at how much his body had changed. His thighs, which ached close to the bone with weariness, looked contoured, and his arms had thickened and deepened around the shoulders. Without a mirror, he contented himself to lie in the dark, feeling the tautness of his stomach and the curved breadth of his chest. The mood of a ghost-thin pride softened his dreaming that night. But Broux had seen Sumner’s stamina expanding, and the next day he worked him harder than ever. For many weeks after that, Sumner’s life was felt and not thought.
***
Broux tossed a handful of pebbles into a mudpool and watched watercircles dawn through each other. Behind him, the work crews lined up beneath a holt of immense rubber trees for that day’s assignments. The officers with machine pistols strapped to their thighs and clipboards in their hands shouted through the bodycount. Broux listened to the distant roll call with melancholy. He had grown tired of being a warden. Approaching sixty, this was all his life had come to: corrosive air, fevered flies, riotous jungle walls—a prison as much for him as for any of the wretched men he had been ordered to break.
Was his fate different from anyone else in the Protectorate? He turned to supervise the men as they filed past, dragging their shovels and machetes to the jungle’s fringe. The cities were sour-hearted with dorga pits—everybody had a distort-brother, sister, or child—and the most anyone could hope for was to stay whole. Why was the world this way? Why did flesh go wrong? He heelkicked a rock into the mudpool and cleared his mind. A man could break his teeth on questions like this.
Sumner Kagan appeared on line, trudging toward the rubber trees. Broux watched him with satisfaction. The boy had expanded and hardened, growing stronger each week. A full year had passed since he had arrived, bloated with fat and pain, and no orders had come from the White Pillar to reclaim him. Months ago, Broux had contacted an officer high in the Conclave to collect on a longstanding debt. Years before, Broux had helped a distorted relative of this savant get forged papers; in return, Broux had requested that Sumner Kagan’s records with the White Pillar somehow get permanently misplaced. Apparently, this had been done, and now the boy was all his.
Sumner hulked against a wall of hanging vines, his longcurved back writhing with the powerful strokes of his machete arm as he cut his way into the green mass. Broux watched him approvingly. Like an anatomist, Broux knew the body’s inner dynamics—what routines shaped what muscles; what muscles aligned the bone-structure; what alignments gave the most strength. He had been using that knowledge to select Sumner’s work projects. And he followed him carefully, observing how his form changed, studying how best to mold his body. The rewards for Broux would be great. A protomale on the military market could earn him enough zords to get away from Meat City and retire to a homestead colony near Xhule or Onn. Those small forest cities had no dorga pits and dwelled as far away from the brutality of his profession as he could hope to get.
That joyful thought poised between his eyes like a point of pain, and he had to pick up a rock and clench it hard between his fingers to steady himself.
***
Sumner kept to himself. Some of the men worked in groups, laughing and cursing themselves through the monotony of their labors and sharing silence when Broux and the guards drew near. But Sumner lived too close to his pain, and the others thought of him as animal-dull. Only one midge-eyed young man abided his company—a boy called Dice. The men loathed Dice: Talkative and orgulous, he wasn’t big enough to do an equal share of work. The men harried him constantly, except when Sumner was around. Everyone feared Sumner, not only because he had become one of the largest men in camp but because he was Broux’s animal.
“I’m an opportunist,” Dice introduced himself to Sumner among the emerald shadows of the jungle. Kagan, stooped and hacking at wire-taut treeroots, sweat sparking off him with each blow, ignored him. “I’ve been called a deserter, because I left my squad and went to Vortex. That’s why I’m here. But I wasn’t running away. If I was deserting, I’d have gone north to Carnou. There are voors in Carnou, and they’re always looking for blue cards. That’s what I’ve got—a blue card. It means I’ve got just one gene defect and it’s a sleeper; it’ll never touch me. Only a white card’s better, but there aren’t any of them around. The government takes them away early and studs them. My blue card’s the best you’ll see. If I was deserting, I’d just go to Carnou and let the voors have me. But what kind of life is that, whoring for voors? Mutra, that’s rucksouled. No, I wasn’t deserting. I went to Vortex to play kili. That’s why I’m called Dice. I’m the best. And I was going to come out strong in the kilithon at Vortex. It’s held only every third year. Last time, I was weighted. That means I made it to the top fifth. Do you know how many zords I could have made in the top fifth if I’d played? Foc, I could have bought myself out of the army and still had zords to rent a suite in a Prophecy bordello. I’m that good, you know. I’ve been playing kili since I could draw the triangle. You ever play?”
Sumner, up to his waist in root-tangle and jungle mulch, his whole body fighting with the Earth, said nothing.
“You work hard, soldier.” Dice tugged away one of the thick rootlimbs Sumner had dislodged. “You’re not like the other goofers here. They do what they have to, those tuds, and that’s all. They’re buckers—like me. But you’re different. You’re crazy different to work so hard.”
Sumner seemed lost in his labor, his face knotted around his breath—but he was listening. After months of solitude with only the rawk of parrots and the gibbering of monkeys, the boy’s babbling pleased him. Soon they fell into a work rhythm, with Dice all the while filling the air with his talk, picking up the work-leavings, sharpening machetes, and clearing away light brush. Even Broux approved, for Sumner worked harder.
