Radix

The hood was closing in on the fork in the conduit when he smelled the fuel. Without waiting for Sumner to ignite it, he scurried back the way he had come.
Sumner rushed deeper into the duct. Farther on he found the exit manhole he had prepared. Whatever the stun-ner darts had hit him with was beginning to work. He was feeling drowsy and nauseous. Still he had enough strength to haul himself out of the sewer.
He came out at the far end of the courtyard and could see the chain-link fence. Four bodies were hanging on it. Below them a shower of sparks was dropping off the gate hinges where the metal resistance varied. The dogs were moving in slow circles, whining forlornly.
All the streetlamps and warehouse lights were out. The whole area was dark except for the flashings at the fence. Even so, Sumner was able to spot the one hood who had chased him. He had gone back up the manhole and retrieved the sack Sumner had left behind. He had thrown it over his shoulder and was huddling across the courtyard to a narrow gate. In a few moments, the lock clacked open, and he was through.
Sumner grinned evilly. The sack contained fifteen pounds of explosives wrapped in a thin sheet of kiutl leaves. It was rigged to explode when it was opened.
After the hood was gone, Sumner walked slowly over to the fence and stared at the bodies. Three of them were draped over the top and one was dangling by a leg. All of them were smoking. A nauseating odor of burnt cloth and flesh roiled around them. Where metal buttons or zippers touched the fence, sparks were sporadically shooting out and pattering 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. His car was parked a few blocks away. After napping a couple of hours to wear down the dart-toxin, he was ready for the Tour.
The next day he tuned his scansule into the current-events station. There was a weather report, a 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, there had been a flowing stream alongside him, cutting grooves, scoops, and potholes in the rock. But while he had been 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 windeaten stone blazed an electric green beneath the strong sun, and large cloudshadows mi-grated over the desert floor. In the inflamed distance, far to the northwest, an isolated storm raged over the Flats: It was a mass of purple clouds, veined with lightning, trawling cur-tains of rain.
The sway of the terrain was a drowse, and he didn't see the stranger standing in the road until he was less than a hundred meters away. The figure stood motionless in a callig-raphy of shadows. All Sumner could see of him was a serape of wild harlequin colors and a beat-up brown leather hat with its wide brim set low over his face. Sumner decided not to stop. There was something belligerent about the way he wore his hat and the way he was standing, feet wide apart, hands hidden beneath the serape, A convoy pirate! Sumner thought. He floored the accelerator and bent low over the wheel.
Suddenly a whine highpitched from the rear of the car, and the console lights went out. Sumner pumped the acceler-ator furiously. He yanked the starter chip out and slammed it back in. He pounded on the steering wheel and kicked the console, but all in vain. The car slowed down 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, but before he could heft it the stranger's hands appeared from under the serape. He was holding a short silver-gold sword with a thin curved blade. Adroitly he twirled it from hand to hand.
He stepped to the side so that Sumner had a clear view through his open window. Then he took an orange from beneath his serape and rolled it into the air. With a blurred flourish, his thin sword crisscrossed the fruit, and juice sparked in the sunlight. The stranger snapped the sword back into its scabbard, letting the still-whole orange drop into his palm.
He walked over to Sumner and offered him 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 at the man to search out his face, a squelchy pain twisting his bowels. He was a big mongrel with the feral air of a dorga renegade. His skin was dark and taut, minutely etched with fine, nervelike wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and eyes. Both his ears were bone-pierced, and his natty hair twisted out from beneath the brim of his hat in spikes and loops. His good left eye was meat-colored and curiously slanted. The empty socket of his right eye was fitted with 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 said in accented Massel. His voice was coarse as his face, but there was a humorous glint in his one eye. He reached out quickly and grabbed Sumner by the ears. Sumner tried to pull away, but Nefandi had a firm hold. He squeezed the boy's ears as he brought his eye up close. Sumner tried not to flinch as the dark features pressed near enough for him to see jaundiced smoke in the one eye. A balmy mix of sweat and some musky fragrance like champaca misted around him. Abruptly Nefandi let him go and helped himself to a wedge of the orange in Sumner's hand.
Sumner tried to gather his wits, but the squelchy feeling in his bowels had become an urgent cramp. "I'm Sumner Kagan. I—"
"Pleased," Nefandi acknowledged, taking another piece of orange. He grinned crazily, his mouth stuffed with fruit.
Sumner squeezed his thighs together to suppress a diar-rheic 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 him for a moment and then looked around warily. His hand was beneath his serape, clutching the haft of his sword. He wondered if he should kill the fat boy. His eyes filtered the sky along the horizon. It was empty, and his hand relaxed. There's still time, he told himself.
His right eye—the mirrored one—was fitted with a sensex that could scan the full electromagnetic spectrum. To the southeast he had seen 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, there was an orange haze from the plantlife outside the Flats. North and west, there was nothing, just the lifeless stretches of Rigalu Flats. The green terrain looked gray in the sensex. The only bioresponse was a faint pink efflorescence low in the sky from the interac-tion of airborne bacteria.