Radix

Sumner packed a honeytwist into his mouth and farted when he passed the orange nite-glo sign with the Masseboth symbol on it. It marked the inner city limits and declared that the area was under Masseboth protection.
The symbol was two pillars. One was supposed to be ivory and the other black obsidian. The ivory one, as Sumner remembered from his grim two years of mandatory civil education, represented cultural preservation and advance-ment. The secrets of petroleum refinement, vulcanized rub-ber, antibiotics, transistor circuitry, and too much else that had been taken for granted for years were forgotten after the apocalypse that ended the kro-culture. Those that had survived the holocaust and the dark centuries that followed were many generations past any memory of civilization. Only a handful had preserved snatches of the old technology and culture. In time they got together and assembled a civilized community. Centuries later, the Masseboth Protectorate emerged. The white pillar was the symbol of its heritage.
The obsidian pillar stood for the muscle of the Protector-ate. Though the Masseboth were confined to the eastern seacoast, with only a few settlements like McClure in the interior, they had the military strength to dominate a much larger empire. What confined them was not the threat of the tribes to the north and west but something that was wrong with the human race. Distorts—people who were genetically malformed—were more the rule than the exception these days, and the Masseboth, who liked things the way they were, had their hands full keeping their population strong.
Also, most of the planet was still unmapped. The Protec-torate just didn't have the resources to cope with the vastness and strangeness of their own continent, let alone the rest of the world. A lot was left unexplained—like devas. Military reports, two famous film clips, and rumors described the awesome power of the devas. No one knew what they were, or even if they were intelligent. They had apparently saved endangered explorer-craft, but they had also smashed mapping-balloons that had journeyed too far north. Vast funnels of light were how they were invariably witnessed. But always deep in the unmapped north.
Sumner took the word of his teachers that there had been a time before devas and distorts and raga storms. He didn't think about it much, but he liked to feel that he was informed. That's why he hated going through center-city McClure. There on the massive time-stained walls of the Berth, which housed the university and all the administrative buildings, were scrawls, graffiti, cerebral vomit. Instead of the streetnames or gang slogans that were brightly streaked throughout his neighborhood, the Berth walls were roweled with nonsense—
YOU ARE THE PERPETUAL STRANGLE
BELIEVE IN NEVER NOTHING ALWAYS AMNESTY FOR THE DEAD!
It was infuriating. But there was no way for Sumner to get to where he was going without passing the Berth. To-night, as the walls loomed closer, their smoky searchlights swinging overhead, he spotted a new scrawl, much larger than the rest—
GIVE UP
YOUR ENDOCRINE INFATUATION BEFORE YOUR FIRST THRILL ON MALIGNANCY HILL
Sumner used to wonder who it was that went around writing this stuff and how they did it without getting caught. One night he left his car at home and walked into center-city. He lurked for hours in the dank, gloomy alleys, peering out at a long sweep of the Berth walls. Eventually, a kid maybe fifteen years old strolled past. Large glossy letters began to appear, spraypainted on backwards as he went by. Sumner waited until he was done, then lunged out and snagged him. At first he thought it was a voor, but when he held him to the light he could plainly see it was only a nervous kid.
"What the rauk is this supposed to mean?" Sumner demanded, lifting the punk toward the still dripping paint— FIRSTNESS.
The boy looked at him apprehensively, thinking perhaps that Sumner was a Masseboth cop. When he saw that he was just an ugly face, he pulled himself loose and straightened his shirt. His hair was close-cropped, his ears unpierced, his clothes plain, and there was a listless, chalky look on his face. He was obviously a student.
"Spill it," Sumner ordered. He despised students be-cause they were pithless White Pillar lackeys who thought they had the inside view of reality.
"Where're you from?" the boy asked, pulling himself up and looking Sumner straight in the eyes.
"Right here in McClure, slip. Down by the Point."
"Nuh," the student said. "I mean before that."
"What? I've always lived in the city."
The student shook his head sadly. "Think about it, tud. Where were you before McClure?" He turned to go, and then looked back once, a little annoyed, a little bemused. "Don't stop thinking about it."
The only thing Sumner had been thinking about at that moment was grabbing the boy by his ankles and bashing his head against his scrawl. But he had held back. This was Masseboth territory, and the last thing he had wanted was a run-in with the police, especially over a sapless student.
Sumner had no respect for the White Pillar. They were stringent scientists and yet they worshipped Mutra, a deity that rebirthed humans until they attained genetic perfection.
Absurd turds, Sumner thought, banking his car through the nightshadow of the Berth. Most of the city—most of the world, as far as he knew—were distorts. They were catego-rized by color code and allowed to live and propagate so long as their distortions were not visible. Brown cards were the low rung, people too genetically scrambled to have children. They worked the slow-kill jobs in the shale factories. Green and yellow cards could have families, but the Pillars moni-tored them carefully since most of their offspring were nerve-and bone-warped. Blue cards were the lucky ones. They coupled at will, and most mates were happy to have them, since the majority of their progeny were clean.
Only the white cards were wholly free of distortion. They were the privileged ones for whom bordello-clinics had been established to receive their unmarred genetic material at any time of day or night. Sumner was a white card.
After passing the Berth, Sumner cruised the neighbor-hoods of the women he desired. These were women to be seen from a distance, coming or going, on lunch break by the factories, or at night with their escorts. Sumner never fanta-sized about having sex with them. That was inconceivable because of his physical repugnance. But their presence, the fact that such creatures existed, was important. Their beauty and their fulfillment as people balanced the violence, the hunger, and the continual dread of the world. After a kill, like tonight, or when the muscular tension of living got too intense, he would drive around looking to look at women. The mystery of living and dying was visible for him in the sway of a beautiful woman's walk, and the arousal he felt, because it was hopeless, was mystical. Seeing women, lean and filled with peace, strolling home beneath the soft weight of evening, he felt the psychic tension that corded at the root of his neck loosen for a while.
At ease with himself, Sumner felt poised enough to stop at Mutra's Parlor, the bordello outside center-city. The place was a nondescript brick-peaked building between an abattoir and a saloon. This late at night the street was dark and empty, and Sumner parked his car at the front door.
"It's the fat boy again," the red-haired woman at the one-way window said after Sumner entered the vestibule. A matron was handing him a towel and a Mutric prayer book. He left the book on the plastic table there and walked through the double-pillared door toward the showers.
"Kagan, right?" another woman asked. She was older, her heavily kohled eyes looted. "He's been around a lot lately."