Radix

Sumner's plummet jolted, and he slowed down. Strings of force lowered him toward the dorga pits. The smoking clumps of shacks, untouched as yet by the sun, looked unin-habited. He spun over the swarm of lone huts and slid through streams of curved air toward the west slope of the city. Hills and knolls of trash skimmed beneath him. When he was four meters above the ground, the force that was suspending him snapped, and he dropped to the earth.
His legs crumpled under him, and he rolled down a dark bank into a shadowed cove. The cove was really a hollow among heaps ofjunk: rotting wood, crowds of discarded crates and boxes, ribbons of fatigued metal, the crushed frame of a car belly-deep in weeds. The place was deserted except for pigs and wind-eels and a solitary dog. A rank mist laced with organic odors engulfed everything.
Sumner stirred to rise, but he was too weak. The frenzy of his absurd flight had exhausted the last of his strength.
Even as first light gilded the mounds of rubbish, he was sinking into a deep stupor.
It was late in the morning when he came around. His head was hollow and his body, like empty tubing, sagged as he tried to sit up. Through the pain of his battered muscles he forced himself to his feet. He hung onto a corroded pipe, then rolled back clumsily into the trash pile. In his daze he lay there, flies stuck to the abraded sores on his lips, and watched a lone bird circling far up in the sky.
Thoughts were too loud for his aching head. He closed his eyes and rolled to his side. Later he was nudged awake by something cold and wet. It was the nose of a ribby, sharp-faced pariah dog. It watched him for a while without expecta-tion, then loped off behind a drift of smoking garbage.
Bravely Sumner pitched to his feet, staggered, fell, and lumbered up again. Keeling from side to side, he plodded across the trash fields, oblivious to the dorgas sorting junk among the weeds of the wild verge. Seeing him coming, the dorgas hooted and cried. Some threw garbage, and all watched him until he was out of sight.
Sunlight was falling, a thick, late afternoon amber on the rutted dirt road, as he limped into the city. The houses lined up on either side of the road, a few meters back, were all the same: concrete-block stoops, walls of stained scantlings, rusted wire in the windows, corrugated metal sheets for roofs. As he went along, zinnia clumps, hibiscus hedges, and ixora bushes appeared among the huts, sprouting around the pink cement outhouses.
The dust was thick and caught in his nostrils with the smell of chicken dung and rubbish. It made him feel nau-seous, but he knew he couldn't stop here. Leaning in the doorways and sometimes seated in front of their huts in sagging chairs with blistered arms and worn cushions, were the dorgas. Sulking, vacant women with long matted hair ignored him. The men, wild, red-eyed, in rags, stared at him, their foreheads X-scarred by drone straps.
Farther on he saw a distort child sitting in the pale dust beneath a carat palm. The face was small and tight, the scaled flesh around the sunken eyes looked bruised, the front of the tattered shirt was wet with drool. When Sumner went by, clods of dirt, pebbles, and shards of glass shot off the road and pelted him. The distort leered to see him hobbling anxiously over the broken ground, head between his shoulders.
He was relieved when he reached the first paved streets where there was a park with flower-cracked walls. But even here, where the houses had doors and windows, tokens of danger were everywhere: Wind-eels squirmed in the air above tangles of unfamiliar weeds, and black carrion corbeaux squat-ted on fence posts; a smell of stale smoke was in the air; great, gritty ants' nests hung from the limbs of shade trees. Nevertheless he stopped to call up his strength and to look back over the way he had come. The park was on a rise, and he could see down to where a stream the color of rust fringed the dorga pits. Wooden shacks on thin stilts wavered in the heat. The eroded area was like a crater, isolated and depressed.
A sharp thought pierced the exhausted stillness of his mind: That's my home if the police get me. His stomach heaved and then settled back. He was too drained and numb to sustain his dread. But as he slumped through the dried grass of the park, he peered across the deserted, mangrove-choked spaces with apprehension. Not until the avenues broadened and he saw cars was he able to sink into his torpor again and walk on mindlessly.
Around the arcades, on the shopping malls, and in the open market people were making last minute purchases for that evening's dinner. A crowd of children went by, laughing and shouting, carrying schoolbooks under their arms. The younger ones wore red vests and had tiny packs on their backs. Vendors hawked fruit with loud, trilling calls. Small children played kili in the gutter, mindless of the speeding bicycles and cars. One man was stringing paper lanterns to an overhead wire for that night's local street festival.
The surge of vitality was immense, and Sumner had to move briskly to keep from breaking into tears. Everything was so familiar and sane. It was as if the brutal absurdity of the past day had never occurred. He was aching and dazed, but he was home. Turning the corner of the street where he lived, he felt all the terror and humiliation he had experi-enced well up in him, and for an hysterically long string of moments he was baffled. Though he had lived here all his life, suddenly he recognized nothing.
In this part of the city the streets were unpaved—dirt roads laid over with dark wooden planks. He shuffled down the middle of the street, his mind blank. The sky had gone smoky with nightfall, and the
green lead windows were suf-fused with light. Their hazy glow reminded him of the Flats. He stood in the street gawking at them, trying to remember where he was going.
Down at the far end of the street the elevated tracks rumbled with an incoming train—shift workers returning home. The muted roar jolted him, it sounded so like the deva wind that had ripped across the Flats. He backed to the sidewalk and was thinking about bolting when a shrill voice exploded his languor: "Pudding!"
He curled around to see Zelda rushing out of the door-way to their house. She skipped wildly toward him, pale, bone-thin arms high in the air, little bird's eyes wide with surprise.
"Mutra! What's happened to you? What's happened to my baby?" She put both of her spidery hands on his face and looked searchingly into his eyes. "You look dead!" Her shriv-eled face was aghast as she took in the ragged figure before her. "Quick—into the house."
She shoved Sumner down the street and tugged him by his arm into the foyer. In the crinkled light of a globe lantern she studied him with growing alarm. "What's happened to you? You smell like the Dark One!"
The stale but well remembered odor of clove incense jarred Sumner's mind. The broken look on his face began to fade. His bright, startled eyes glanced about.
"Are you hurt?" Zelda whined. "Can't you talk?"
He plucked at his ravaged shirt and smiled giddily. "I'm home."
Zelda's face lit up. "Yes, pudding, you're home. But what happened to you? Where's the car? There was an acci-dent, wasn't there? Look at your clothes! They're scorched and—your neck! Mutra!" She drew back his collar and gaped at the swatches of purpled skin around his throat.
The horrified expression on her face shook Sumner. He pulled away and looked at himself in the foyer's oval mirror. His face was bruised, lips split, eyelids swollen. At the sides of his neck, where Jeanlu had fastened onto him with her death grip, the skin was livid, scalded. He flipped his collar up. "The car's gone," he croaked.
Zelda's eyes locked on his. She was too stunned to respond. She stared at him blindly and continued to stare even as he turned past her and lugged himself up the stairs.