Radix, page 18
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
“He watches you closely,” Dice said one golden afternoon in a forest clearing, seeing Broux standing squat and solid in the treeshadows. Sumner, splitting logs, his back clenching and heaving, didn’t look up. “He always has an eye out for you,” Dice went on. “I think he’s working you up to something, you know? I think he’s an opportunist, too.”
Dice casually continued snipping twigs off the logs that Sumner intended to split, but his gaze had turned inward. “You heard of protomales, Kagan? You look like one. I mean, you’re big. And there are units in the army that pay a lot for big men. You think that’s why Broux is working you up? I notice you get more food than anyone here. The other buckers see it, too, but they don’t talk. You’re Broux’s. He’s working you up for something. What’s your card color?”
“White,” Sumner grunted in midstroke.
The crack of the cleaving log jarred through Dice. “You jooching me?” He scurried to Sumner’s side and knelt in the grass, staring up at his grimacing body as the axhead flashed in the sun. “You have a white card? Mister—what are you doing here? Men with white cards don’t suffer in Meat City.”
Dice spotted Broux strolling along the treeline, and he hurried over to the fallen logs and began stripping them busily. “Broux’s working you up, Kagan. Can’t you see it? A protomale with a white card will earn him more zords than he can count. But why are you here? A white card doesn’t belong in this hole.”
That evening Sumner relented to Dice’s dogging questions and told him about the Sugarat and his beating in the police barracks.
“The White Pillar pulled you out. They won’t leave you here,” Dice said when Sumner finished. “Unless Broux found some way to dupe them.” Dice’s eyes brightened shrewdly. “Broux is using you, Kagan. He’s jooched the White Pillar, and he’s working you up for his own profit. It’s obvious.”
Sumner hefted his machete and stood up. The evening wind slipping off the pampas poured over them flowery and moist and empty of human scents. “Come on—we’ll miss chow.”
Dice leaped to his feet and stood in front of Sumner. “Kagan, Broux is using you. He’s going to sell you to some clodbusting unit, and you’ll spend your life in fly-piss outposts gutting distorts. You don’t have to do that. You’re a white card. The Pillars will hold you up. You’ll have women, real food, and you’ll never see a distort as long as you live. All you have to do is get past Broux. That might be difficult, but if you stay alert, you’ll find a way. I’ll help you.”
Sumner shook his head. “No.”
“Kagan, you need plans. Otherwise when the chance is there, you won’t even know it.”
“No plans. No help.”
“You’re zaned. Or else you’re jooching me. No man with a white card would live like a jungle rat. Life can be everything good.”
Sumner’s face looked hollow. “What makes you think life can be good?” He pushed Dice out of his way and walked into the jungle toward camp.
Dice watched after him with a slack face and shouted: “It’s all there is!” Then, softer: “Ratfoc—” and sprinted through the rising darkness to catch up with him.
***
Dawn nicked the western horizon, but the skull of the sky was still dark when the corsairs raided Meat City. They dropped onto the parade ground between the barracks in three rackety, patchwork strohlkraft, a carnival of firebombs and flares blazing overhead.
Sumner squatted at the latrine ditch cupping a handful of water to clean himself when darkness erupted into squinting radiance. He dropped to his belly, sarong tangled at his ankles, and watched as three battered strohlkraft settled in a haze of rainbowing smokefire. Bright flashes from turret guns rattled the guards’ barracks, flipping the tin eaves into the air.
Cargo hatches winged open, and a crowd of wildly garbed corsairs leaped howling and laughing onto the parade ground waving rifles and torch pistols. By the watery light of the flares, Sumner could see that many of them appeared distorted: clawed hands, crusted lizard faces, milky eyes. Half were women.
“Let’s go, you bulldogs!” the amplifier of a pirate ship bellowed. “Foc slavery! You’re not shackled to the Pillars anymore! Come out and run with us!”
Gunshots caromed from the jungleline where most of the guards had retreated, and half the corsairs crouched and returned fire. The other half assaulted the barracks, torching the timbers and running prisoners out of their cots.
Broux dashed around the guards’ barracks, two pistols flaring in his hands, shouting his men out of their shock. The ground twitched and jumped at his feet, but he ran tall. Then the gun turrets of the other two pirate ships swiveled and roared into fire at the same instant. The guards’ barracks rolled away like thunder, and Broux crawled in the dirt with his head under his arms. By the time he looked up, the men who wanted to run were leaping into the holds of the pirate ships. Those with short time remaining in Meat City cowered behind the barracks and the water troughs.
Tempted to run, Sumner tightened his sarong, and a figure scrambled to his side and took his arm. Dice looked up at him with fervent eyes. “Take me with you.”
Sumner shrugged off his grip. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“The Pillars don’t hold up anything,” the pirate amplifiers blared. “They crush people beneath them. Topple the Pillars!”
“Kagan, let’s go,” Dice urged with a whine.
“You want to run with those things?” Sumner chinpointed to the spiderhaired faces of the corsairs helping the last runaways clamber aboard.
“We can skip on them later. Come on—this is our chance.”
Sumner shook his head no. “We’d just be trading one master for another.”
Dice slumped and watched disconsolately as the ships began to rise, cargo doors still open. “Topple the Pillars!” The cry wobbled in the air, chopped by the bawl of thrusting engines. Guns sparked, dawnlight flashed on the flight vanes, and the pirate ships leaned into the darkness and drifted away over the jungle.
***
Dice slumped into a depression. For days after the corsair raid, he sulked. Sumner, who had become accustomed to the boy’s constant prattle, looked about for a way to cheer him up. He found a large hive deep in the forest, and one evening he returned to camp swollen with bee stings.
The men laughed at him silently that night as he ate his bean paste and roots with swollen fingers and lips. Later, he called Dice aside and led him behind the barracks to a knoll surrounded by raspberry canes. From there, they could see the night-lights on the strohlkraft field and that day’s latrine crew laboring in the dark, burying the old ditches.
“What do you want, Thick?” Dice muttered, looking about to see if Broux was in sight. “You’d better ask Iron Face for some althea salve. You’re not going to sleep tonight with those stings.”
Sumner’s puffed face smiled vaguely. “Taste this, grump.” He parted the raspberry canes and revealed several thick amber combs of honey. “If we keep this out of sight, we’ll have power food for the next two weeks.”
Dice’s pupils expanded with wonder. Sumner picked off the ants and handed him a thumb-piece of honeycomb. “We’ll have to put some hawkweed around here to keep the bugs off. I don’t think the guards or anybody else will be prowling this close to the latrines.”
“This isn’t real.” Dice chewed on the honey with closed eyes, and the joy in his face brightened Sumner’s blood.
***
A Massebôth strohlkraft idled on the flight field, its wiry shape black against the belly of twilight. The pilot hunkered beneath a flame tree at the edge of the field, chatting with Broux, while Sumner and eight others unloaded the cargo hold. Sumner’s mind felt tight with exhaustion. All day he had been stooped over, cutting cassava, and he lumbered thoughtlessly beneath the ponderous crates, eyes slackly following the leech-scarred legs of the man before him. Dice trailed loose-kneed beneath his load, too wearied to speak.
Unexpectedly, the man Sumner followed dropped his load and skipped out of sight. Sumner shoved back the wooden crate on his shoulders in time to see him scrambling up the hull of the strohlkraft and into the open hatch of the flight pod. The crate dropped from Sumner’s back, and he and the seven other men watched with gawking amazement as the runaway dropped into the pod-sling and sparked the shutdown engine.
The pilot, Broux, and several guards dashed across the field, shouting for them to seize the hijacker. Any one of them could have done it: The man was only three paces away, working the controls, charging the thrusters, angling the altitude vanes. The jittery-faced renegade obviously knew the strohlkraft, and excitement paralyzed everybody.
Dust off the field billowed, pebbles clattered against the ship’s bottom, sand grit stung their faces and limbs, and with a wildcat scream the strohlkraft lifted. Two of the nearest men jumped into the cargo hold. A third clung to a landing strut and was lifted into the air.
“Mutra.” Dice found his voice. “They’re going to make it!”
For a few moments, the men watched as the strohlkraft rose into the night, disappearing into the rhythm of skyfires, the spin noise of its engines falling down the sky toward the last wet light of the day. Sumner swayed with a surge of wonder. Then Broux and the guards descended on them, and someone clubbed Sumner on the side of his head, and he went down. When he shook the numbness from his eyes, he saw guards pushing the men he was with to the ground. Dice dropped with a whimper and covered his head. At Broux’s nod the guards opened fire, their machine-pistols flaring in the blue-shadowed dusk.
Sumner staggered to his feet, and one of the guards put a gun to his head, the heat of the muzzle singeing the hairs of his temple. “Not him!” Broux shouted, and the gun barrel fell away.
Sumner stared with horror at the sprawled bodies among the scattered crates, the smell of gunfire thickening. The pain of what he witnessed seared through his eyes to the back of his head and almost knocked him out. Dice lay with the pink of his brains splattered in the gravel.
“Shoot me!” Sumner cried, and the guards looked quickly to Broux.
“Get back to the barracks,” Broux ordered. But Kagan didn’t move.
“Shoot me!” he cried again, louder, seizing the arm of one of the guards. The guard shook off his hold and leveled his pistol at him.
“Leave him be,” Broux commanded. “Sumner, fall back!”
Sumner’s eyes hardened in his face. “Why are you keeping me alive?”
Broux strode over to him and sharply belted him across the face, twice. “Go to the barracks.”
Sumner had gone rigid, rage wreathing his heart. For an instant, he thought of unraveling into violence—but all the guards had their guns out, and the abandoned pilot cursed Broux under his breath to shoot him. Suddenly, it just seemed right to walk away. His stance broke, and he shuffled toward the barracks, hearing Broux’s barked commands, calling for men to bury the executed. Distantly, at the furthest orbit of hearing, the drone of a strohlkraft faded into the north.
***
Sumner lay in his cot awake and unmoving all night. All his thoughts voided, he felt an acid hate for everything Massebôth. Toward dawn, images of Dice rose in him with memories of the simple jokes and the shared labor they had known. During roll call, he moved on line like a deadwalker, and though Broux told him through the guards that he could take the day off, he collected his machete and slumped into the jungle.
In an isolated vine-cove, he lashed at the trees with his machete, his bones throbbing. Distantly, he thought of running away. But there was nowhere to go.
Then, like an avalanche in his world of unhappy awareness, memories crowded in on him, and his machete flailed uselessly at the air. Vivid images of his old, cluttered room and his scansule and his three-wheeled bottle-green car and his mother’s spicy cooking overwhelmed him, and he dropped to his knees. What had become of him? He looked down at his hands and saw scabby, callused, reptilian flesh. He covered his face and began to cry.
He longed to go home. He longed not to die. Then starker images shaped themselves behind his lids: images of black-uniformed men with leering grins, ripping off his clothes, fondling him, pissing on him, striking him until he couldn’t see or breathe—
He howled and slashed out with his machete. Lurching to his feet, he cut at the trees with a stupendous strength, hacking at their hard wood until he staggered and his breathing got tangled in his throat with his rage. Lolling against a moss-padded tree, face pressed into the cool bark, machete arm trembling, he tried to cry again. But he couldn’t.
With the blood still thundering in his ears, he turned and went back to work.
***
Broux realized that Sumner had become dangerous. Soon the boy would turn on him, and the guards would have to kill him. Very quickly now, he had to be readied for sale. The Black Pillar offered the optimum price only for a protomale—a human who displayed physical strength and agility clearly superior to others of his size. Certainly Sumner’s white card helped, for that meant he would not suddenly molt into a distort. And as a result of Broux’s arduous work assignments, Sumner had the bulk and the strength of a protomale. But he was not yet lithe enough. His muscles had to be stretched and limbered—and swiftly.
To help him, Broux employed Derc, an army masseur. He had a chest like a wall and arms as long as an orangutan’s. He knew the human body with his hands as well as Broux knew it with his eyes and mind. Together, they remade Sumner.
Stretched out on a cedar table, Sumner learned a new kind of pain. Derc’s iron fingers felt out muscle-locked tensions and kneaded them loose, then went deeper, pushing past the fascia that held the muscles in place, probing fiber-bunched memories jammed close to the bone.
Derc started with a foot, slicing down the sole with the hard edge of his thumb, pushing far into the sensitive meat of the arch and then flaying the foot wide, separating each toe and its ligaments. The years of abuse that the foot had absorbed from Sumner’s heavy, pounding gait bloomed like fiery flowers. The big toe offered the worst pain. Gone stiff in the confines of Sumner’s boots, it had to be ripped free from a locked position. Hurt blared through Sumner’s bones and poured out of him in a cold sweat.
Days on the cedar table passed before Derc, heavy-lidded and blankfaced, had moved his fingers through every inch of Sumner’s body. And though the anguish was brain-smoothing, especially around the scars where his flesh remembered indignities his mind had shut out, something beautiful came from feeling his muscles slide free under his skin.
The most dire suffering emerged when Derc collapsed Sumner’s face. His nose had been so thoroughly shattered by his police torture that the physicians hadn’t even tried to build it up. They removed a lot of cartilage and bone, widened the nasal cavities and let the nose heal over, lumpy and almost flat to the face. As Derc worked on Sumner’s nose and lips, thumb-ironing muscles pinched into scars, the youth returned to the brutality that he had known in the police barracks of McClure.
Those brief, lucid moments of pain-charged beauty offered the only joy left in Sumner’s life. With Dice gone, Kagan had been drained of all fellow feeling, and he sank into a profound silence disturbed only by an occasional surge of revenge-lust. Eventually even that passion became silent—though it did not disappear.
Sumner’s body had become sleek and limber in a few short weeks. Broux, happy to round out his training, personally taught Sumner how to swim in the deep, silent fish pool far back in the jungle.
White-crested harpy eagles dominated the pools, diving noiselessly out of the highest trees to pluck a thrash of fish out of the water. They watched through wild masks of rage as Sumner splashed and lurched across their feeding pools. The water’s spell and Sumner’s new body returned him to a feeling he had not known since his life as the Sugarat. What had been dread in him then had widened into an indefatigable psychic stamina. Restlessness became vigor, and anxiety transformed to clarity. The stronger he got, the more sharply he sensed what he had to do. Somehow, in a way that would leave him his life, he would have to kill Broux.
***
After Sumner mastered the feel of his new body in the water, Broux moved him to the broad river north of the settlement where a handful of men fished for the camp. They lowered long nets each morning and raised them again in the afternoon.
Sumner spent most of his time clearing thick weeds along the river edge, but occasionally he went into the water to free a net or help lift a catch. Watching the men around him, he learned how to dive hard with a rock in his hands and how to make snorkels by weaving together bladders of giant pirarucu fish with slender river reeds. Each day, he strengthened his lungs and legs by swimming underwater against the drunken currents.
One giant-clouded afternoon, with sunlight sweeping like wind over the water, Broux came out to supervise Sumner’s work. He sat in leaf-patterned shadows as Sumner laboriously dredged fallen trees nearby, making way for a shallow-water harbor. When the call went up that one of the nets had snagged, Broux signaled him to go down and work it loose.
Sumner dived into the water immediately, but this time he trapped a balloon of air in his shirt. He angled down to the bottom and surveyed the net. It had caught on a tree limb and would be easy to pull free, but he left it tied off. He settled into the shuddering feelers of river-kelp and felt around for a rock. He found a fist-size stone, touched bottom, and waited.
He knew Broux would come for him as soon as he thought his animal had been tied up. He sat on the bottom, gently sipping at his air supply.
Minutes passed, and then a cloud of air exploded the light-slick surface. Broux came kicking down fishfaced toward the net. Sumner thrust the rock before him and rose to meet his master. The stone caught the diving man over his right eye and knocked him senseless.
Broux unfolded like a paper doll in the bloodsmoked water, face stupid and kind, and Sumner took him from above by his shoulders. He pulled the body down and forced the head through the net. The last of Broux’s life streamed out of his mouth in a bright vapor as Sumner tangled the man’s arms in the rope and twisted him to look as if he had snagged himself. With death-clouded eyes, Broux watched as Sumner rose toward the light.
