Radix, page 40
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
“Let them go.” Strain sounded in Sumner’s voice as he compressed the inside of his arms, squeezing his hands deeper into the grip of the steel cuffs—strain that the officer heard as anguish.
“Look at them, Kagan.” Culler waved his machine pistol at the Serbota, but where he saw bone-pinched eyes and twisted features pink as pigflesh, Sumner recognized the people he loved—and that love gave him the strength to wrest tendon over bone and pop both hands out of the steel loops that bound him.
At the sound of the manacles clacking to the ground, Culler spun about to face his prisoner, gun leveled. Sumner sidestepped and smoothly took the officer’s gun arm in a crushing grip and twisted free the pistol. With his other hand, he caught the weapon and aimed it from his hip at Culler’s shocked face. “Call your men off,” Sumner whispered, his gaze thin as blood.
“Those are coiled steel—how the foc...”
“Call them.”
The officer waved the riflemen back, and they held fire.
“Now—smile,” Sumner commanded, and Culler’s lips thinned crookedly. “I’m your prisoner—you should be pleased. You’ve taken a ranger. But these tribesfolk are free. Aren’t they?”
Culler’s teeth meshed. He looked fiercely at Kagan and reached past the engraved weather of his face, past the flat bones and the sand color around the black burn to the life in him. “You can’t save them, Kagan. The whole desert’s covered with our hellraiders.”
Sumner cocked the pistol, and Culler’s face unclenched. The officer nodded, glancing swiftly to his sides to see if his men realized what was happening. They blithely meandered through the sparse shrub looking for distorts.
The Serbota, who watched Sumner fixedly, rose at his summons and approached. “Massebôth—who speaks it?” Sumner asked them, and an old man with a horn-knobbed forehead limped forward.
“I do,” the Serbota said. “My father traded with corsairs and, as a young man, I bartered with convoy pirates.”
Sumner waved him closer, then looked deeply into Culler’s hateful eyes. “I’m going to kill you,” he told him with a tight voice, “unless you do exactly as I say. Walk twelve paces back and watch your men approvingly. No hand signals. No cries for help. Do you understand what I want?”
Culler nodded once, stiffly, and backed off. When he moved out of earshot, Sumner spoke to the old Serbota tribesman without looking at him: “Three hard days’ walk the other side of those mountains is a colony highway. Follow it southeast five or six days and you’ll come to Carnou. You can sell desert roots and kiutl in one of the backstreet garment shops. But don’t stay there long. The army garrisons its northeast brigade just outside town. They’re always looking for deserters and distorts. Keep the folk well out of sight. Avoid the highways. Take the foot-trails south until you come to Onn. From there, you can ride cargo passage with the corsairs to Prophecy or Xhule.
“If you go to Xhule find Daybreak Street. There’s a knife shop there called Short Cuts. Cover those distort knobs on your head and buy two bluesteel cork-grip stilettos and offer to pay for them with a bag of sassafras. The merchant works for the Rangers. He provides cover without question. Get status papers from him—green card worker papers. Make sure they’re blank. You can use them to fend off search patrols. And don’t be tempted to pick up a white card or a diplomat disc.
“Leave Xhule that night. Remember faces and move in circles, westward. Take the folk into the riverain forests beyond Hickman. Distort tribes rule that area. Most call themselves Ulac. They believe in Paseq the Divider, and they will give our folk a respected place in their world. Am I clear?”
Sumner glanced at the old man and saw understanding shining in his features. “Lotus Face,” the old one said, “we will not forget you.”
“Forget me. I’m as luckless as pain. Go ahead now—”
Sumner walked over to Culler and put a heavy arm on his shoulders. “Tell our Massebôth warriors to let these folk go. When they’re a day’s hike from here, I’ll give you back your gun and you can kill me.”
The officer looked at him sharply, until he saw that the ranger spoke the truth and, with a smile both sad and mocking, called for his men to fall in.
Sumner prepared himself to die—unless the voor had the will and the power to change him. But Corby radiated silence. Sumner chanted a né song to himself as he escorted Culler and his men down the steep terrain: The flower dies, the tree dies, the earth dies into newness. Everything is new and becoming newer. All the time. The whole world freedrifting, only sometimes breaking into mind.
***
Early the next day, they reconnoitered with the convoy. Sumner signaled the soldiers on to the troop carriers and took Culler aside. In a field of black rocks and yellowed grass, with wasps drunk with sunlight bobbing like intellections around Culler’s head, Sumner returned the officer’s machine pistol. The ranger’s face glowed with peacefulness. The voor kept silent.
The Massebôth took the gun and cocked it. Sumner stared up at the mountain they had descended. Strata of silver clouds advanced over the range, slower than sight, and sunlight checkered the brown slopes and the distant forests. His emotions grew vaporous, ready for death.
“I want to kill you, Kagan,” Culler said, his words serene with rage. “But I can’t do it blackly enough.” He uncocked the pistol. “Where I’m taking you, you’ll learn to love death.” He pushed Sumner back to the convoy and manacled both his hands and feet before throwing him in a caged carrier crowded with captured Serbota.
The heat and fecal stink of the cage stunned Sumner, and his body convulsed, trying to shrug off the stench. Only after the carrier rumbled forward and the air began to stream did he relax enough for selfscan.
While he sat into his bones, muscles slack, filled with vibrant stillness, the others watched. They recognized Lotus Face, the Mothers’ ward. Most were in shock from the blood-wallow of the raid; a few peered at him with charred anger, sensing that he was somehow responsible.
Sumner gazed back with blue, soul-looted eyes, looking past their scorched and distorted faces and the wreaths of their hung arms to the desert. The colors of Skylonda Aptos jangled by like a vision, and the shag of dark feeling around the tribesfolk brightened.
Sumner closed his eyes and slipped into a wakeful doze. The voor moved close, a floating watchfulness.
Slow inward-looking eyes opened, and Corby dragged at the baked air. Awareness jolted through him—a power-wave of sensation; bruised, ugly odors and the wind ebbing hotly. Sumner floated, hemiconscious, feverish with calm.
Corby breathed deeply, and the kha he drew up from the earth extended his body’s chemical limits. Hormones slid through his blood, and his eyes were suddenly brighter and deeper seeing. Rings of dull light shivered around the Serbota’s heads. Beyond them, violet kha channels in the sky looped in magnetic bands about an invisible storm-eye.
Deva, he thought aloud so that Sumner would understand. It has been resting. It will need all its strength for what it must do tonight. But that is hours away, and you will fathom everything a man can know by then. Trust me now—and rest.
Corby slightly lowered the cortin level in Sumner’s brain, easing him into sleep.
As the consciousness of his human host faded, sensuous actuality tightened around Corby. He stood on the edge of the body feeling its hardness: a shoal of hungers, thousands of microorganisms clinging together, sifting nourishment through a reef of calcium.
He came back to his own shining solitude. Inside his awareness, spiral energies opened out across stellar centuries. Outside, several of the Serbota leaned close, scrutinizing Sumner’s black faceburn.
Corby shifted outward through the body-window and touched each of the gawking tribesfolk deep in the brain, sparking the pineal gland and olfactory nerve-lobes with kha. A charmed, fleecy odor filled the Serbota’s heads, and they straggled back with surprise.
The voor found strength in his kha-body, where everything he beheld fringed thinly on a shimmering blackness. At the vanishing point behind Sumner’s eyes, however, Corby was still clumsy. He tried to center himself: So involuted—all ears and eyes and this endless touching, making me feel I’m the exact center. But what am I really? Attention wavers in this body. Brood consciousness is narrowed to a headache. And the whole universe seems to be dull noises and a handful of thin colors. Small. So small.
Corby accepted that his time in Iz had truly diminished his humanity. He faced this fact fearlessly. He still had all the psychic strengths of a voor. He could see through space and into darkness. He knew Iz—the astral soundings and the long ancestral memories. He was Dai Bodatta: the infinite reunion: one-with. And he had Sumner.
This howlie had accepted him. At last, a chance opened to strike against the Delph. For Corby, Sumner provided more than a physical host. As his father, he echoed with forlorn memories of Jeanlu. His potential contained what Bonescrolls had called the eth—a man verbed by power hidden as chance. Emptied by the magnar and trained by the Mothers, Sumner lived the earth’s mind, close to the animals of his body: rat-brain with its tail in his spine, lung-fish, fish-sperm, serpent-gut—He touched all the spirit-dreams of this planet’s mud, including the subtle chemistry of pain, gut-hunger and the sky’s watchfulness.
Together, there was nothing for them to fear. Living man. Ghost voor. They went forward as one.
***
The Serbota thought the Massebôth had taken them alive for slaves, but when the carrier churned over a shale ridge and into view of their destination, a wail cut through them. Sumner startled awake. He twisted around and stared through the wire mesh at an oil-stained trail climbing a steep slope into the desert mountains. Lining the makeshift road, human heads gaped, impaled on tall pikes. Sumner recognized the heads of several huntsmen and a weasel-faced Mother.
The tractor gears screamed as the carrier lurched to the top of a blunt rise. Masked soldiers in brown riot gear surrounded the cage, and the side doors banged open.
Their perch on the stone lip of an ancient volcano, they overlooked the grottoes of the caldera, where corpse pyres burned, and the black-robed bodies of the Mothers rocked and fluttered on the long scaffold where they hung crucified. The siren cry of a peeler nerved their teeth. The sound came from a nearby pit. There, people bound lengthwise to large, battered lathes spun, their skin flayed from their bodies with needles.
Among the rock dolmans at the center, those who didn’t want to die knelt to be shaved and head-branded with drone straps. The slow-eyed dorgas mulled around the peeler pits transfixed by the siren and the skin coils razoring off their tribe’s flesh in meat-pastels.
The cry of a peeler whined to silence, and a blood-sinewed body dropped into a trench where it writhed powerfully, trying to twist off its bones. Even the benumbed Serbota roused at what they saw, and they moaned.
Sumner scanned the sky for the deva. His voor-sense had departed his eyes, sinking into the body’s abdomen, close to the deep, spun rhythm of his breathing. From there, the voor could pool the earthdreaming, the planet kha.
Nightmare-gripped, one of the folk staggered to her knees, sucking at the meager mountain air. A guard dragged her down into the caldera, and she disappeared in floes of corpse-smoke. Other soldiers pushed the rest of the Serbota together and herded them into a nearby ditch. Sumner, feet and hands still manacled, tumbled in after them, and a heavy iron grating lowered into place.
Culler’s skull-taut face appeared overhead, grinning thickly to see Kagan spraddled among distorts. Something human and a little scared shimmered in Sumner’s face, yet when Culler looked hard into those laconic eyes and that faceburn black as law, his own insides dizzied. The man’s a ranger, he reminded himself, fighting the urge to kill him instantly.
Corby, deep in the body’s instincts, detected the violence in Culler, and the voor reached out with his kha and stroked the howlie’s limbic brain.
A sense of music expanded in Culler, which he took for the delight of anticipating this ranger’s death. Only the peeler could compensate his humiliation, Culler realized. His ditchwater eyes flashed with satisfaction, and he turned away.
Screams and curving howls weirded in the air, and several Serbota began mumble-chanting to Paseq. The retch smell of burning flesh thickened with the wind. Through the grating and the pall of black smoke, the afternoon sun smeared like blood.
***
Sumner’s fear slowed the flow of kha from the planet. To sedate him, Corby lifted him out of his body. Ghost smoke flowed, and abruptly Sumner rose high over Skylonda Aptos, surveying the wasteland and hundreds of thousands of Massebôth troops that occupied it. Camps and their network of oiled roads covered the eastern edge of the desert like villages.
With voor-speed, Sumner’s consciousness crossed the rolling horizon to the sea. Sunshafts rayed among gigantic cloud fjords over an armada of troopships sailing north.
An invasion! Sumner, amazed, wanted to fly ahead.
Not yet. Corby’s voice shone in him. Without our body, we’re too weak to go far north.
Corby dropped them south through veils of ice clouds, and the rocky coastline twisted below like windblown smoke. When the white bartizans and towers of Prophecy emerged among seacliffs, their flight slowed, and they sailed over the outskirts of the city. Lakes gleamed, and an opulent village loomed closer: house-modules set into multilevel lawns of opal plants and yew trees. Rain-light settled like dust on the hedgerows.
Inside one of the modules, a tall room’s waxed parquet floor mirrored a chess table and a white piano. Nine black long-haired cats lounged in plump chairs, on a tassel-shrouded sofa, across the mantel of a small fireplace, and among the many nooks of the bookshelves that tiered the pine walls.
Sumner’s consciousness narrowed around the gentle music in the air. A lanky, wolfish man in satin-green dinner jacket hunched over the piano, playing Scriabin études. Sumner recognized Chief Anareta. The long lines of his face looked calmer, less deep than they had in McClure years before. The music slipped into Debussy, and Anareta closed his eyes.
The door-buzzer purred.
Anareta pushed away from the keyboard. Images of a lean woman with autumn-colored hair flickered through his mind as he unlatched the front door. But when he swung it wide, he confronted a square figure in a black, red-trimmed uniform.
“Chief Anareta?” The dark raptor of the soldier’s face scanned him. “I’m Field Commander Gar. Here on a Conclave order. Sorry to startle you.”
“I was expecting someone else.”
“Yes, I’ve heard your white card keeps you busy.” The Commander’s voice sounded opaque with fatigue. “May I come in?”
Anareta moved hurriedly aside. “Yes, of course.”
Gar knocked his mud-clotted boots against the outside stoop and bulked into the room. He gazed with undisguised amazement at the suite’s kro furnishings. “Your card’s kept you comfortable, I see.” He picked up a chess piece, a knight, and moved it among the brawn of his fingers like a rock. “War as a toy.” He sneered.
“You mentioned a Conclave order, Commander?”
Still examining the knight, Gar unpocketed a red mobilization warrant and handed it to him. “A convoy swayvan will pick you up tomorrow at oh-five hundred.”
The chief’s hard gaze sought out and held Gar’s stare. Over the eight years of his retirement, Anareta had forgotten the chafe of submission to command. “What can I do for the Protectorate?” he asked with tactful evenness.
“The Black Pillar needs you.” Gar put the chess piece down and wearily tugged a leather portfolio from his thigh pocket. “You’ve been reactivated, Chief. Upgraded to field-colonel. “
“Why? I’m a lousy fighter. With my white card, I service the Protectorate best in a bordello.”
The commander raised his scarred eyebrows. “You are also a scholar, Anareta. Unlike most white cards, your brain is as important as your glands. Few Black Pillar officers are as knowledgeable about the kro as you.”
“What do you want with a kro scholar?”
Gar passed the slim portfolio to Anareta. “Those are unretouched photos of distort tribes north of here. Look at them. You’ll be seeing a lot of that soon.”
The chief shuffled through photographs of quarreled flesh and looked up at Gar with tight eyes. “I did my military service on the frontier forty years ago. Why are you sending me back?”
Gar leaned to the side of a rosewood bookcase. “Last month, by direct order of the Ruling Conclave, all of our troops except for a skeletal support force mobilized for an invasion.”
Anareta peered in disbelief at the officer. When he found affirmation in Gar’s exhausted face, something snakelike uncoiled rapidly in his stomach. “Invasion of what? The distort tribes are too scattered.”
“Not distorts, though the larger tribes have already fallen to our hellraiders. The main thrust of the Black Pillar is north.”
“North? That’s wilderness.” Blood darkened the corners of his eyes as Anareta tried to comprehend.
“Don’t be impatient with me. You know how little anyone down the line knows. For now, just remember you’re a soldier again. The Black Pillar needs someone who understands how people lived twelve hundred years ago. I’ve flown six thousand kilometers to get you.”
“Why?”
Commander Gar’s weathered face stiffened as he assessed Anareta. “You were a police chief in a frontier city. What do you know about the eo?”
Anareta shook his head, befuddled.
The commander sighed, grim with sleepiness. “Strohlkraft, luxtubes, storm architecture, practically our whole technology, was given to us by a society we know nothing about. They put us on our feet five hundred years ago, and they’ve been extending us ever since.”
“Who are they?” Anareta asked incredulous.
“Eo—that’s what we’ve been told to call them. Who knows what their self-name is. They’re a reticent people.”
“Are they distorts?”
“Perhaps. But the ones I’ve seen looked whole. The latest guesswork is that they’re offworlders.”
