Radix

After his fear dissolved he felt dispirited, vacant as a bone. His flesh was stitched to the cold stones underneath, and he had lost his peripheral vision. The billowing colors were all he could see, and they dazzled him. When he closed his eyes they were still there, vaulting through the great space that was his mind: How open a man's mind is, after all. A huge stadium. Wide open. Ready to be filled with anything that drops into it.
Vertigo and fear seized him. Colors vapored, his center fell away again, and he soared. Depthless silence surrounded him and increased his apprehension. Get a hold! he bawled. Get a hold! The burning sky was rushing through the cavern-ous space inside him, and he clutched at random thoughts (if the sea wants you, lad), images (a gullied, packed-dirt alley)— Anything! Get ahold of anything! Honey-toned legs: long and slinky—it was the woman he had seen on the train, the one with the shapely legs, muscles pliant, not rippling with the vibrations of the car. At the moment their gazes met he had flinched. Her eyes were gray as cement, cold as news-print. Her life was private and sealed.
Then.
But now—now the whole lucid, vacuous sky was falling through him. He was wide open.
Clarity. He exhaled softly. He was voided—vast and hollow as a cathedral. His dread subsided. The gentle compo-sure he had known before was coming back, and with it came the face of the woman he had
seen on the train. It floated before him, pale and slender as a gas. There was nothing private or sealed about it now.
He immediately recognized the indifference of her eyes as a defense. With his present lucidity there was no trouble facing them or even approaching and sliding past them. Be-hind the arched cheekbones and the defiant curl of lips, she was light and soft, almost watery.
An irresistible anxiety nailed him when he realized that he wasn't just imagining this. His mind had found this woman somewhere in the city, and now he was inside her. He could hear the deep sound of her blood—wump—wump-ump—um-wump—like the deep bass tocking of a frog. Her thoughts were nebulous, a diffused sepia light swirling sporadically into dark tide pools, blood-red, fierce.
Sumner couldn't tell what was happening to her at first. Is she scared? Angry? He was disoriented until the beating of her heart quickened to an unreal tempo. Then he heard it for what it was. Not her heart at all but—the thump of a bed. Hau! She's rutting! A nerve-shearing pang of orphaned lone-liness and rage stabbed him. I don't want to feel her rut, he cried to himself. Nonetheless, a hot weaseling between his legs urged him to linger, and he had to struggle to pull himself away. As he withdrew, her body climaxed, and a windburst of feathered light and radiant petals surrounded him.
When he was himself again, the sky pressing down, fusing him to the cool rock, his muscles were tightsewn, angry. He felt gnarled with lust, shabby, smelling of sweat. An afterimage idled among the mistings inside his eyelids: rounded shadows of buttocks and breasts, glimpsed quickly as he had spun away.
Again he tried to get up, but he was held down, this time it seemed 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 was drifting, too irate to care where the telepathic drug was taking him.
An animal face wheeled out of the darkness and stopped to confront him. It was a wolf, its eyes crystal-bright, silver hairs radiating off its muzzle, shifting with an animated lu-cency. The jewel eyes, too savage to know fear, watched him, taut with purpose. The gaze was vast as star-silence.
Transfixed by it, Sumner's anger shriveled. Immediately the sharp lines of the wolf's face unknotted, became transpar-ent, and another face was revealed. It was his own. Seeing its beefy shape, the cheeks paunched around the small, squat nose, the jaw slack, the eyes moist and edgy, he recoiled and churned awake, sweat-soaked and trembling.
With a whimper of surprise and relief he saw that he was sitting up. The paralysis had passed. And though his muscles were heavy and soft as wet sand and his insides were icy with fear, he was able to pull himself to his feet. It was then that he sensed more time had passed than he thought. The Goat Nebula was burning brightly in the west. In a short while it would be midnight.
Sumner was grateful that he had been meticulous in his preparations, for he was too hollowed out now to think. Everything he needed was already positioned and tested. All that remained was timing and, as usual, luck. A lot of luck.
After a few minutes of 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 was waiting in the shadowed alcove where he had left it. The sack was burlap and bulky, 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 were empty of inner voices, but he knew that he was being watched. The presence of other people 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 to be certain it would open, and then he turned to face the street.
There were some fugitive movements in a splash of shadows a hundred meters away. Then stillness. He kept his eyes slack, looking for any movement. Veils of light from spotlights at either end of the fence illuminated the whole courtyard. Even the roofs were visible, and he kept a good eye on them in case sniping was to be part of the game.
Abruptly the shadows came alive. A pack of angry dogs charged across the court. Close behind them were five men in hoods. Sumner was surprised by the dogs, and he barely had enough time to get through the gate and pull his cumber-some 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. When they fired there was no noise. Metal clattered at his heels, and then a barb of pain twisted in his shoulder. He reached back and tore loose a dart. A watery white liquid was oozing out of it. Poison? he was wondering when another dart slammed into him. He yanked it from his buttock quickly, before all the toxin could be injected. For once he was grateful 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 saw that all five hoods were scaling 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 more clumsy 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 was over the fence and scrambling toward him.
He fumbled with the protective cloth he had thrown over the circuit breaker and threw the switch. There were no screams, just the clatter of shoes as the one hood who had made it over ran up to the manhole. Sumner splashed into the 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 splashed into the duct and was kicking 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 was 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 let the gasoline gush into the running stream.