Radix, page 9
part #1 of Radix Tetrad Series
Again, he tried to get up, futilely, held down this time not by the sky but by the jealous anger locked in his muscles. He kept his eyes closed, uneasy about looking again into the furling skyfires. And soon he drifted, too irate to care where the telepathic drug took him.
An animal face wheeled out of the darkness—a wolf, eyes crystal-bright, shifting with animated lucency, silver hairs radiating off its muzzle. Jewel eyes, too savage to know fear, watched him, taut with purpose—a gaze vast as star-silence.
Transfixed, Sumner’s anger shriveled. Immediately, the sharp lines of the wolf’s face unknotted, became transparent, and revealed another face. His own. Seeing its beefy shape, cheeks paunched around a small, squat nose, jaw slack, eyes moist and edgy, he recoiled and churned awake, sweat-soaked and trembling.
With a whimper of surprise and relief, he sat up. Muscles heavy and soft as wet sand and insides icy with fear, he pulled himself to his feet. He sensed more time had passed than he thought. The Goat Nebula burned brightly in the west. In a short while, it would be midnight.
Gratitude opened in him for his meticulous preparations, finding himself too hollowed out to think. Everything he needed already positioned and tested, only careful timing remained and, as usual, luck. A lot of luck.
After a few minutes walking tight circles to limber his legs and loosen the fisted muscles in his back, he clambered down the fire ladders. The trickster-sack he had prepared waited in the shadowed alcove where he had left it. The bulky burlap sack looked as if it did contain fifteen pounds of kiutl. He lugged it across the courtyard, staying close to the chain-link fence. The kiutl had thinned out of his blood. The dense shadows draping the buildings around him hung empty of inner voices, but he knew others watched. Their presence was palpable as blood. In the center of the courtyard, the fence had a gate that he had jimmied hours before. He checked the lock, confirming it would open, and then he turned to face the street.
A splash of shadows a hundred meters away incompletely concealed some fugitive movements. Then stillness. He kept his eyes slack, looking for any motion. Veils of light from spotlights at either end of the fence illuminated the whole courtyard. Even the roofs basked in brightness, and he kept a good eye on them in case sniping proved part of the game.
Abruptly, the shadows came alive. A pack of angry dogs charged across the court. Close behind them dashed five men in hoods. The dogs surprised Sumner, and he barely had enough time to get through the gate and pull his cumbersome sack after him. On the other side, he looped the chain through and locked the gate as the dogs snapped wildly at his fingers. Done, he plodded off with the sack in his arms.
At the fence, the hoods mumbled curses and pulled out guns. Gun muzzles flared without noise. Metal clattered at his heels, and then a barb of pain twisted his shoulder. He reached back and tore loose a dart. A watery white liquid oozed out from the needle. Poison? he wondered before another dart slammed into him. He yanked it from his buttock quickly, before it injected all its toxin. For once, he was thankful to be bulky. They’ve got to get a lot of that sap in me before I go down.
He glanced over his shoulder and noted that all five hoods scaled the fence. He kept one eye on them and one on the manhole a few meters away. He had uncovered it earlier, and now he prayed his timing would be right. The sack was clumsier than he had expected, and he had to let it go early. By the time he squeezed through the manhole and dropped into the fetid atmosphere of the sewer, one of the hoods cleared the fence and scrambled toward him.
He fumbled with the protective cloth thrown over the circuit breaker and threw the switch. No screams followed, just the clatter of shoes as the one hood who had made it over ran to the manhole. Sumner splashed into darkness, groping for the penlight he had brought along. He got it out and flicked it on in time to see the fork in the conduit.
Behind him, the hood had tramped into the duct and kicked through the water, the glint of a knife in his hand. At the fork, Sumner stopped running and bent down, his light stabbing left and right. He had left a canister near here hours ago, but the wash of sludge at his knees ran stronger now than before. The canister had been knocked over. He sloshed the slimy water until his fingers closed on a slick metal handle. As he lifted it out, he broke the cork seal and gushed gasoline into the running stream.
The hood approaching the fork in the conduit smelled the fuel and scurried back the way he had come. Sumner rushed deeper into the duct. Farther on, he found the exit manhole. Whatever the stunner darts had hit him with began to work. Drowsy and nauseated, he still had enough strength to haul himself out of the sewer.
He emerged at the far end of the courtyard and could see the chain-link fence. Four bodies adorned it. Below them, sparks drizzled off the gate hinges where the metal resistance varied. The dogs paced in slow circles, whining forlornly.
All the streetlamps and warehouse lights had blacked out. Darkness swathed the whole area except for the voltage spraying from the fence. Even so, Sumner spied the one hood who had chased him. He had gone back up the manhole and retrieved the sack Sumner had left behind and thrown it over his shoulder. He huddled across the courtyard to a narrow gate. In a few moments, the lock clacked open, and he rushed through.
Sumner grinned evilly. The sack contained fifteen pounds of explosives purchased on the black market and wrapped in a thin sheet of kiutl leaves. He had rigged it to explode when it was opened.
After the hood disappeared, Sumner walked slowly over to the fence and stared at the bodies. Three of them draped the top and one dangled by a leg. Smoke faintly wisped from all the bodies. A nauseating odor of burnt cloth and flesh roiled around them. Where metal buttons or zippers touched the fence, sparks sporadically shot out and pattered to the ground.
Sumner took the can of spraypaint from where he had hidden it in a corner of the court. With a sweeping, inspired arm, he scrawled on the asphalt: SUGARAT.
He turned and swayed across the yard to a back gate that he had left open. He had parked his car a few blocks away. After napping a couple of hours to wear down the dart-toxin, he woke ready for the Tour.
The next day, he tuned his scansule into the current-events station. News included weather reports, catalogue of ships that had arrived during the night, an account of an unexplained blackout in the business district, and a report of an explosion that had gutted the offices of Camboy Shipping. Mr. Camboy and two unidentified persons had been killed in the blast.
Teeth Dreams
Sumner stretched contentedly, savoring a straight run of clean road. The last time he had looked, a stream flowed alongside him, cutting grooves, scoops, and potholes in the rock. While he immersed in his memories, it had thinned to a rill, then a trickle, then flat land cracked and shrunken in the sun.
Spires and arcs of wind-eaten stone blazed an electric green beneath the strong sun, and large cloudshadows migrated over the desert floor. In the inflamed distance, far to the northwest, an isolated storm raged over the Flats: A mass of purple clouds, veined with lightning, trawled curtains of rain.
The sway of the terrain promoted a drowse, and Sumner didn’t notice the stranger standing in the road until closing to within a hundred meters. The figure stood motionless in calligraphic shadows. Sumner could see little of the figure beneath a serape of wild harlequin colors and a beat-up brown leather hat with wide brim set low over the face. Sumner decided not to stop. Something belligerent about the way this character wore that low-set hat and stood, feet wide apart, hands hidden beneath the serape. A convoy pirate! Sumner feared. He floored the accelerator and bent low over the wheel.
A whine high-pitched from the rear of the car, and the console lights blinked out. Sumner pumped the accelerator furiously. He yanked the starter chip out and slammed it back in. He pounded on the steering wheel and kicked the console. All in vain. The car slowed remorselessly, gliding gently over the road. It came to a stop exactly where the stranger stood.
Wog!
Sumner groped for the tire iron under his seat. Before he could heft it, the stranger’s hands appeared from under the serape holding a short silver-gold sword with a thin curved blade. Adroitly, the blade twirled from hand to hand.
The stranger stepped to the side so that Sumner had a clear view through his open window. An orange appeared from beneath the serape and rolled into the air. With a blurred flourish, the thin sword crisscrossed the fruit, and juice sparked in the sunlight. The traveler snapped the sword back into its scabbard, caught the still-whole orange as it dropped and offered Sumner the fruit. Sumner wiped his sweat-runneled face on his sleeve and reached out to accept it. The orange opened like a blossom in his hand.
He looked up under the wide-brimmed hat, searching out a face, and a squelchy pain twisted his bowels. A big mongrel with the feral air of a dorga renegade regarded him placidly, a large man with dark and taut skin, minutely etched by fine, nervelike wrinkles at the corners of mouth and eyes. With both ears bone-pierced and natty hair twisting out from beneath the brim of his hat in spikes and loops, he indeed looked piratical. His good left eye was meat-colored and curiously slanted. To the empty socket of his right eye, he had fitted a shard of mirror, a luminous hole in a rippled, glossy scar that flared from his scalp to the corner of his mouth.
“I’m Nefandi.” He spoke in accented Massel, his voice coarse as his face. Humor glinted in his one eye. He reached out quickly and grabbed Sumner by the ears. The fat youth tried to pull away, but Nefandi had a firm hold. He squeezed the boy’s ears as he brought his red eye up close.
Sumner tried not to flinch when the dark features pressed near enough for him to see jaundiced smoke in the staring eye. A balmy mix of sweat and some musky fragrance like champaca misted around him. Abruptly, Nefandi let go and helped himself to a wedge of the orange in the boy’s hand.
Sumner tried to gather his wits as the squelchy feeling in his bowels became an urgent cramp. “I’m Sumner Kagan. I—”
“Pleased,” Nefandi acknowledged, taking another piece of orange. He grinned crazily, mouth stuffed with fruit.
Sumner squeezed his thighs together to suppress a diarrheic shiver. “My car—”
“Small machine to drag this far into the desert. Where you going?”
“Uh, nowhere right now. It stalled on me.” Sumner clenched his whole body to keep from soiling himself. “I have to dump,” he said meekly.
“Go ahead, radoo. You might as well be at ease.”
Nefandi opened the car door and pulled Sumner by an ear. “Right this way, tud. Haul it out.” His hands playfully squeezed Sumner’s shoulders, arms, and belly as he guided him from the car.
Outside, Sumner scurried off between two talons of green rock, tugged his pants down, and squatted. Nefandi watched for a moment and then looked around warily. His hand beneath his serape clutched the haft of his sword. He wondered if he should kill the fat boy. His eyes filtered the sky along the horizon. Nothing moved in that empty expanse, and his hand relaxed. There’s still time, he told himself.
His mirrored right eye—equipped with a sensex—could scan the full electromagnetic spectrum. To the southeast, he had observed several infrared spots. Those would be strohlkraft—and that would explain the weak radio noise from there.
He swept the horizon again, slower, with the sensex open to the biospectral range. East, an orange haze suffused from the plantlife outside the Flats. North and west, he saw nothing, just lifeless stretches of Rigalu Flats. The green terrain appeared gray in the sensex. Only a faint bioresponse registered as pink efflorescence low in the sky from the interaction of airborne bacteria.
He faced west again. Static prickled over his cheek and brow as he strained the sensex to its limits. He was scanning for psynergy, lifeforce. A dim blue energy glowed for an instant over the gray waste about forty kilometers away. Perhaps this radiated from the voor-child he had been sent to destroy.
Since dropping into Rigalu Flats, he had sensed strong psynergy in the area. He realized it as a furtive muscular sensation, definitely biospectral, yet until now invisible and of no proximity he could accurately assess.
Biospectral energy, psynergy or kha, as the voors called it, permeated everything living. That was how he had first spotted Sumner—a scarlet pinpoint in the distance. When the car came into sight, he had known by its shimmering luster that the driver had no intention of slowing down. So he stalled its engine with the field-inducer in the haft of his sword.
Was it worth it? he wondered, knowing that every time he used the inducer he revealed his exact location to every timeloose distort in the desert.
He allowed himself a moment to clear his mind. He knew that clarity alone offered hope of finding the voor he stalked. Two days of circling through this ghost city had left him nerve-weary and dreamy, and he gazed down into the dust patina of his boots, hoping to drain his mind.
Nefandi was an artificial man, designed and bioengineered by the eo, a powerful technocracy four thousand kilometers to the north. There, a dreamworld had intrigued into reality—a world without distorts, dissatisfactions, or death. An outpost of a cosmic empire vaster than human thought, the eo offered the starkest pleasures to everyone. Nefandi had found his favorite rapture in coobla, a drugless midbrain stimulator that cramped him with bliss.
Psyfactored by his creators to emphasize pleasure over individuation, Nefandi had known the immense ravishment of coobla countless times and merely existed without it, fractional and dysphoric. He existed as a total product of his society. The eo had grown his body in the id forest outside the biotectured city of Cleyre to serve as an ort, a handservant. He remembered nothing of his time as an ort, for only his body had functioned then. Centuries later, after those whom he had been created to serve no longer needed him, the eo allowed his mind to emerge. He lived free for a time while the eo watched to see what use he might satisfy. He could have traveled and explored the world that had created him. He could have devoted himself to the immense culture around him and expanded his awareness and social value. But his psyfactoring, stronger than his free will, gave him over to coobla, the beatitude of nervelocked joy.
A lifetime of unmitigated delight slunk by before he exhausted his common resources and the eo took the coobla from him. To return to his ecstasy trance, he needed a benefactor, someone who had a use for him and who could pay with coobla. And that was why he served the godmind called the Delph.
The Delph at one time had been the strongest being on the planet. A century before the eo created Nefandi, the Delph had a span of will huge as the Earth. He provided the gateway to the multiverse, and the contours of the manifested world revealed the shape of his whim. This was so because the Delph had been able to receive and conduct the subtle psynergy radiating from the galactic core. But the psynergy he relied on originated in a directional and shifting source. As starpatterns changed, the galactic psynergy slimmed, and the Delph reverted to the small, organic existence of a mortal man. Still the Delph in title, he souled a technology unmatched anywhere on the planet; yet, his only real power inhered in his mystery.
To protect himself against godminds with other sources of power until his own starchanneled psynergy returned, he shaped Nefandi into a killer. For many years now, Nefandi had fulfilled the Delph’s will by hunting down timeloose distorts, rogue eo, and voors whose psychic reach fringed on godmind. He returned to Cleyre or Nanda or Reynii at the completion of each kill, and the Delph allowed him to lose himself again in coobla for a few years.
Such was Nefandi’s story: pleasure as fetish. And why not? he often pondered. Who was he anyway?—motherless, fatherless, an ort. Consciousness is delirium, he had come to believe, and sometimes he frenzied himself wondering if he possessed wholeness or if his soul subsisted only as hunger. Useless to ponder. Destiny is too huge to be held by any one mind.
Thoughts and desire thinned away from Nefandi as he relaxed, and he sensed once more a strong, steady pulse of kha somewhere to the west. He looked about and saw nothing.
Kha sometimes moved elusively, especially in the blue regions. The shorter the wavelength, the more advanced the intelligence behind it. Usually. The sun in the biospectral range appeared dazzlingly blue. Kiutl plants and harpy eagles also showed blue. So did voors.
Humans glowed with a shifting yellow-green. This is why he finally decided not to kill the fat boy. Sumner’s kha shone sunburst gold. His soma’s strong and unmarred, Nefandi could see as Sumner pulled his pants over his broad, quavering buttocks. Senseless to destroy such a rare creature.
When he had first grabbed Sumner’s ears, he had felt the pulse in his throat and fingered the glands there. The boy had a strong heart, and though overweight, he carried a layered obesity. The adipose tissue cells had not yet begun to break the fascial symmetry of his body. Nefandi recognized that the boy suffered a neurotic and not a biological problem. Helping him out of the car, probing a few neural ganglia, the bioengineered man had tried to release some of the somatic tension locked in the boy’s surrounding muscles. Useless. Beneath that fat, muscles had cramped tight as brick.
As he cinched his pants, Sumner thought of bolting, and knew at once the idea was zaned. He would never survive the walk back to McClure. Hind rats and poison lizards would make a meal of him, and that thought urged him back to the car.
Nefandi ate the orange that Sumner had left on the console. He spoke around the fruit: “I want you to take me to your voors.”
Sumner stiffened, and the breath of a lie snagged in his throat: Nefandi fingered the Eye of Lami that had been dangling inside his car. The sun flashed like wisdom in his mirror-eye.
“The car’s bust,” Sumner mumbled.
Nefandi grinned, and one hand slipped beneath his serape. The car jumped to a start.
