Radix, page 4
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
“I’m just a little wound up. I need some air. I’ll be all right.
“Why go up on the roof? It’s windy up there. You could get sick.”
Sumner turned and bounded up the stairs, his mother calling after him. “If you jump, I’ll never forgive you. I’ll trap your wangol in a jar and torment it as long as I live. We can renew the scansule. We can buy a new one. Don’t—”
Sumner banged through the outer door and stepped out of sight onto the roof.
Zelda sighed and threw up her hands. He’ll kill me yet, she thought. Why does he have to be such a loner? And foul-tempered, too. She shook her head. “It’s all your fault,” she said quietly to her husband. “You were the one that wanted him to be free. You trained him that way. Not me. I wanted him to play with other boys. Be sociable. Make friends, I told him. But no. There’ll be time for that later, you said. Now he’s got to be self-reliant. He has to learn to be comfortable with himself. That’s the way it is in this world. You’re on your own. Nobody’s going to help you. Ha!” She leaned back against the filigreed table, suddenly feeling very heavy. “Well, I wish you were here now, Klaus. I wish you could see what he’s become.”
Zelda sighed again and pushed away from the table. It was time to see how the chowder was doing. She went downstairs to a small, cramped kitchen where a heavy-bottomed pot purred on the stove. She always had something cooking. Food provided the only way to reach her son. “And that’s your fault, too,” she told Klaus, “going Beyond like that when he was so young. What am I supposed to do? He only listens to me when I have something to eat.”
She lifted the top off the pot and let the steam billow out before sniffing the broth. It smelled good. From experience, she knew that Sumner would be hungry soon, so she took down a bowl from a heat-faded wood cabinet and ladled out the thick clam chowder. She selected from the spice rack two jars marked Onion Salt and Turnip Chips. They were really powdered John the Conqueror Root (for energy and defense against sickness) and wangol e-z brew (for calming nerves). Gingerly she sprinkled some of both into the bowl.
Zelda was a good mother. This was her responsibility, she knew, to reform her son, to undo all the harm that Klaus had done. But so far she was getting nowhere. Talking was useless. He never listened to her. So she had resorted to herbal cures and wangol fortifiers. Yet even these hadn’t helped. Sumner was as close-minded and reclusive as ever.
Soon she would have to do something drastic. She felt somehow misguided protecting him like this—feeding and housing him, treating him like a child, or an old man. No, she scolded herself. I won’t do this anymore. He’s got to get ahold of his own life.
***
Up on the roof, Sumner breathed deeply to clear his head. With the glare of the Berth lights and the blue crowns of fire from the refinery stacks in the south, few stars were to be seen. He walked around to the back of the house and stared northeast. There three rows of rooftops and then darkness roved to the horizon, where a faint green glow suffused from Rigalu Flats. He stared for a long time at that spectral light and thought of Jeanlu the witch-voor and his son, Corby. He would have to go to them soon for zords, and that thought made his fear all the more palpable. Voors embodied the madness of the world, distorts with alien strengths and too-knowing minds. He didn’t want to go to the voors. They had abused him before, and he feared them. But the police were coming, and unless the voors helped him, the Massebôth would kill him.
A moan welled up from his thick body, and he reached for his back pocket. He stood that way for a long minute, his hand on the torn seat of his pants, gazing north fish-eyed and heavy-hearted. Gradually, shame and anger opened in him, and a disfigured cry lurched in widening circles through his chest but could find no way out.
When the pain finally dulled, he went inside and sulked over a bowl of clam chowder that was steamy and thick and smelled of someplace far away.
Pictures of the Real Universe
REALITYSHARING
With morning still dark, Sumner left home in his bottle-green car, all his important possessions wrapped in a torn shirt and thrown in the back. Zelda, fluttery with concern, tried to stop him, first with threats about her poor health and then with food. But nothing could dissuade him. Sumner’s dread far outstripped both his guilt and his hunger. He told Zelda he would be back later in the day, though he had no intention of ever seeing her again.
He had a large breakfast at an all-night convoy stop on the outskirts of the city and allowed himself to dwell on his life with Zelda, because this was the last time he would remember her exactly as she was. Their life together had been very good compared to what passed for living in most of the households of their neighborhood. Klaus had freed them from the factories, at least for a few years. All his life, Sumner had been allowed to come and go as he pleased, even though Zelda was always there to interrogate him when he got back. Still, he remembered, she never knew what was really going on. And her cooking—Mutra, that was fine! A little heavy on the wangol spices now and then, but fine. He sighed. Too bad she was swayed by all that spirit yak.
Though fond of his mother, he rejoiced to finally get away from her. She was always trying to change him, and he was happy as he was. Or as he had once been, he reminded himself. From now on, it was life on the road. Zelda was gone but then, so was his life as the Sugarat. More than security, he had lost his very identity.
His destination was Jeanlu’s cottage, 189 kilometers away, on the far edge of Rigalu Flats. It was a lonely ride—lonelier still knowing that he would never be going back—but the voors had things he wanted.
He smiled, remembering his first journey outside McClure. How old had he been then? Ten? No. It was just after his first kill. He must have been eleven.
It would be at least an hour before he reached Rigalu Flats, and it was a straight, unbroken road until then. He eased his mind back six years to the memories he had of his first lonely drive into the wilderness—
***
Hunger had led Sumner to the fish stalls by the river where he had hoped to scrounge a free meal. He watched closely as thick-armed men in blood-grimed aprons whacked off the heads of perch and mullet, shook out their guts, and then tossed the cut pieces onto mounds of flaked ice. He searched diligently for the misaimed chunks of meat that fell along the stalls. But the competition was too tough—large wild cats that had been bred to fend off rats—and soon he wandered out to the empty wharves to wait for the returning ships.
Watching inky water slap the dock pilings, he thought about barbecued fish. Its imaginary aroma and flaky dark crust appeared so real that he didn’t notice the old man until he spoke: “You want to get laid, kid?”
Sumner spun around, eyes snapping to the old man’s face, a visage brown and wrinkled as a crumpled bag, ears doughy, hair filthy and tangled.
“What’re you talking about, wheeze? I got no money for whores.”
The old man stepped closer. “But you have a white card.”
Sumner’s heart skipped two beats. Just a week before, he had gone for his mandatory medical exam. Massebôth law required all children who survived to puberty without exhibiting distort traits to have their genes tested. After an exhausting series of scrapings, injections, and embarrassing probes, the test center issued Sumner a white card—the most highly coveted genetic status. He was one in a thousand with unmangled genes.
Yet—how did this crust of a man know about his white card? Sumner looked more closely at the old man’s face. He had a straight, fierce mouth and incongruously dreamy eyes. Eventually, Sumner would learn to recognize a voor by those searchless eyes. At the time, though, he thought the old man was just a river pirate. He looked hard enough, with bead-rings in the tops of his ears, a black bandana across his forehead, and strange, smoky scents lufting off his clothes.
“You want to get laid, waddle? Yes or no?”
Sumner stood his ground gamely, hands on his hips, both excited by the mysterious prospect of sex and frightened by this uncanny pirate. “How do you know I have a white card?”
A shadow of a smile crossed the old man’s rumpled face and softened it. “I’m a voor, waddle. I know.”
Sumner’s whole body clenched. Voors could craze you with a glance. They were the most alien of the distorts and known to have deep mind powers. And if those weren’t good enough reasons to stay clear of them, the Massebôth had a long-standing Unnatural Creatures Edict posted against them. People were hanged for talking with voors.
Sumner tried to back away, but the river sloshed behind him and there was no one else down by the wharves. Three hundred meters away, the fish stalls bustled with activity, and he realized too late that no one would hear him if he screamed.
With a whimper, he lunged past the old voor and scurried down the wharf. A beat-up scavenger truck wheeled out from behind a row of tarred bollards and cut him off. From the cab, a cowled man leaped out, and Sumner froze. The man’s outstretched hands looked weird, blueshelled and barbed.
Distort! Sumner silently screamed. He tried to fight, but the hooded distort, eerily swift, accurately anticipated all of Sumner’s blows and cornered him between the truck and the water. Sumner’s fear overwhelmed his revulsion, and he went for the creature’s eyes. The distort snagged his hand in an icy grip and guided him to the back of the truck, where the old voor opened the thin metal doors. They threw him in and banged the doors shut.
Sumner raged. He had heard that voors cracked open the skulls of their victims and devoured their brains. He swung around in the tight compartment looking for a weapon. There was nothing in the back except rust stains and dents. Screaming, he threw himself against the doors, and they buckled.
Before he could hurl his body at the doors again, they squealed open. The claw-handed distort leaned in, the cowl of his mantle thrown back, revealing a shaved head oddly misshapen. The face seemed moronic, the forehead round and bulging, filling up the sockets so that his baleful yellow eyes had to stare up from under his skull. An idiot’s face.
“Sit still, waddle,” the old voor’s voice spoke from somewhere beside the truck.
Sumner backed away, feeling his aggression congeal to cold fear. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the cretin glower with its cushiony flesh and glossy lips. Its grotesqueness drained him, and he slumped back against the far wall.
With a jolt, the antique truck lurched to a start, throwing him across the rusted floor. Fighting the sway of the truck, he crawled to the front of the compartment and laced his fingers through the wire mesh of the window. The two voors paid no attention to him, and he looked beyond them, through the bug-splattered windshield at the empty wharf road they bumped along.
He hung to the wire mesh and gazed intently, hoping to spot some landmark that would give him an idea of where they were taking him. But that was hopeless. The cowled driver seemed to be turning corners randomly, backtracking on himself again and again. At first, Sumner thought they were trying to confuse him, but that didn’t make sense. They’d hood me if I wasn’t supposed to know, he reasoned.
It was only after he glimpsed, at the far end of one street, a gray car with black and white pillars stenciled on its hood, that he understood what was happening. The voors were using their telepathy to elude the police. They were looking for a gap in the stop-and-search patrols that ringed the city. After a few minutes of circling, they found one.
Sumner had never been outside of McClure. Most people spent their whole lives in the city and never left. There was no reason to leave. Outside spanned wilderness where hind rats and distort tribes ruled. Other cities abounded but far off, and unless you were a merchant or convoy driver they offered nothing that couldn’t be found in McClure.
Awed, Sumner watched the dark gaunt buildings of McClure bob into the distance. All around them, desert lay flat and empty as an ancient seabed. “Where’re you taking me?” Sumner demanded.
“You’re going to get laid, waddle,” the old voor said. “Nothing more.”
Sumner knew from the tone of the voor’s voice that it was hopeless to ask more questions. He was sure that they were taking him someplace desolate where they could cannibalize him at their leisure.
After more than an hour of being jostled and thrown about, Sumner felt the road smooth out. On the left brooded black rock, immense palisades. On the right, a yawn of space. They bucked along on a ledge road at almost top speed. Sumner trembled so nervously that he didn’t even glance to the right. When he did, he gasped.
Down below, for as far as he could see, sprawled a desert of pale green sand laced with swirls of black ash. Everywhere stood broken domes, spires, and turrets fantastically honeycombed, pocked, cratered, and smoothed by wind erosion. The place looked like a labyrinth of arabesque shapes, echoes of radiance and scaled colors. It took Sumner a long while to perceive that the broken honeycombs were buildings. The whole colossal landscape was—had been—a city!
“It was called Houston,” the old voor said. “Or Dallas. I’m not sure which anymore.”
Sumner stared dumbfounded at the ghost city and its phantasmagoric shapes until the rickety truck suddenly swung off the rimroad. White chalk cliffs blocked his view of the Flats as they careened along a rutted dirt track. In a cluster of old big-boled trees, they jerked to a stop.
Beyond the trees squatted a small whitewashed adobe cottage with coral-pink tiles scaling a swayback roof. Blue gentians bloomed in wooden troughs beneath oval clear glass windows. Behind the cottage reposed a cirque of tamarind trees bowing over a crystal blue pool that had formed in the basin of an old bomb crater.
The two voors, one on either side, led Sumner along a mica-flecked path to the edge of the pool. A large wooden tub there brimmed with sudsy water.
“Off with your clothes, waddle.”
Sumner nervously obeyed. When he was naked, the old voor scooped a bulky sponge out of the tub and threw it at him. “Wash,” he ordered. He quickly lathered himself all over, and they shoved him into the pool. The water, deep and warm, nearly submerged him, and he clung to the side while the voors sudsed and soaked his clothes and then beat them dry on a large sunbaked boulder.
He dressed, and the voors walked him back to the front of the cottage. The old voor motioned Sumner toward the house.
Sumner fidgeted.
“Just get over there, howlie,” the old voor said, his voice severe. “You want to go home, right? Then do what I say.”
Sumner walked up to the cottage and climbed the three polished cedar steps to the door. He moved to knock, but before his hand came down, the door opened.
A woman stood in the doorway wearing a flinty-blue dress with threads of gold at the cuffs and a wide-throated collar. Gorgeous—tall, with a musical body and black rambling hair—she appraised him with eyes liquid and dreamy as any voor’s, smoke-blue eyes that sparked with many strawberry-gold flecks. She ran a slender hand along the doorjamb and gestured for Sumner to come in.
There was something wonderfully strange about the place. Beer-colored shafts of sunlight filled the room, threading through dense curtains of drying roots and flowers. Brown Indian pipes, swamp violets, groundsel, bloodweed, wind apples, and ice-clear stalks of kiutl hung from thick, well-seasoned rafters.
“My name’s Jeanlu.”
Sumner stammered out his name and lingered in the doorway until Jeanlu closed the door and offered him a seat.
“Sit down, please.” Her voice sounded gentle and unhurried, and she trailed a delicate musky scent that set her apart from the brassy aroma of the plants. Sumner sat down, his eyes torn between her and the colorful carpet.
“This is my veve,” she said, gesturing at the carpet, a patchwork of eleven different landscapes: a red sea combed by wind; dark sheol-flowers sprouting beneath two moons; blue-barked pines; and a series of brilliant images that could have come from a scansule crystal display. “Do you know what a veve is?”
Sumner shook his head.
“Every voor has one, in some form or other. It shows our lineage—where we’re from.” She pointed to a black square pinpointed with white flecks. “This is a planet we call Unchala. It doesn’t exist anymore. An eternity ago, it was the home of all voors, in a galaxy you don’t have a name for.”
Sumner wasn’t listening. He expected the other voors to come in any moment. “How come there are eleven?” he asked, afraid of a silence.
“That’s all any voor remembers. We each remember eleven, some different, some the same. It’s sharing that holds the brood together.” She walked over to the stove. “Would you like something to drink?”
He shook his head and began cracking his knuckles nervously. His large and fat hands displayed dirty scabs that even the sudsy bath couldn’t cleanse. They testified to his perpetual anxiety, the nails chewed to nubs.
“Something to eat, perhaps?” She held out a pastry glistening with honey and studded with almonds. He couldn’t resist.
While working on the pastry, he studied Jeanlu. Her very attractiveness made him wonder if maybe the old voor had been telling the truth. What if she does want me? That thought inspired a pang of fear. He had never been intimate with a woman before.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jeanlu said with a handsome smile. “I’m sure you’ll catch on quickly.”
Sumner’s ears flared red. She was so beautiful, he had forgotten she was a voor. She could read his thoughts as easily as the embarrassment on his face. “But why me?” he managed to blurt out, trying to cover his lapse. “I’m...” He was going to say ugly, instead mumbled, “…just a kid. I’m only eleven.”
“I don’t care,” she said sincerely. “You have a white card. That’s all that matters to me.”
Sumner swallowed the last morsel of pastry and shifted uncomfortably in the chair.
“Strong genes are rare,” she went on. “But they’re important to me. You see, I want to have a baby.”
“A baby?” His eyes gauged her. He didn’t think she was lying.
“Yes. Voors can’t mate with one another. Didn’t you know that?”
