Radix

He tore off his shirt and covered Sumner's quivering body. "Everybody else out of here," he ordered. "The Con-clave will want pain for this."
The station cleared quickly, and when the medics ar-rived Anareta was alone, stooped over a half-alive man.
Sumner lifted himself awake, rising out of a maw of darkness. A mad whining turned in his ears, and he waited for the nightmare to continue. But the world had changed. Twangy medicinal odors clouded around him. And the light was softer, thin and gauzy.
The pain of his body had become so intense that it was pleasurable. For an age, it seemed, he had been dreaming of his hurt as a radiance. He was floating inside himself, his body a vision sustained by the intensity of his pain-pleasure. He twisted his body to ignite the fleshlight that had become his joy, but the fluffy embrace of a mattress swallowed most of his pain.
"It's over now," a female voice said softly. The sweet, moist warmth of her breath sharpened Sumner's senses. The gentle fragrance of calambac lilted in the air, and a hazy face hovered above him. He tensed for an expected barb of pain, but the hand that touched him was quiet.
She bent closer, and he saw that her face was lovely as music. Dark heavy-hung hair settled around him. He lifted above the numbness of his body and saw the green physician's uniform the woman was wearing and the intravenous bladders hanging on the posts of his bed. But then the hurt of his body fractured his alertness, and he dropped back into his stupor.
"Stay with us, Sumner," the doctor whispered, and the lambent caress of her hair silked over his face as she pulled away.
For a double-hearted moment, Sumner urged to reach past his hurt and hold this woman as he would have held his life, but he knew that if he let go of his pain-vision now, he would be giving up forever the dreaminess beaten into his nerves. Living would again become agony. But this woman—
A wave of loneliness swelled in him, and he clutched for her.
The first day that he was strong enough to touch her was the last day he saw her. By then consciousness had hardened enough for him to know that he was in an infirmary within sight of the Berth. Tall, narrow windows lined the walls, one for each bed in the ward. Sunlight, thick and steady as stone, lay on his face every morning, and the black days labored by.
Most nights his sleep was haunted and violent. In the languid light of false dawn he invariably woke to a vision of the doctor who had lured him back into his life with her tawny skin and black hair and breath that smelled of candy. For that one moment he was happy, and for the rest of the day the exasperating hallucination of her beauty dogged him. He was alone, as always. Betrayed into living. But why? Why had the police not killed him? The green-smocked medical staff that attended him and the other dour men in the ward knew nothing.
Chief Anareta visited Sumner once, but the boy became so agitated at the sight of the black, red-trimmed Masseboth uniform that the doctor in charge asked the chief to leave before he could introduce himself. The chief had come to say farewell. After the full report of the beating had been filed, the Black Pillar authorities had decided to retire the chief. He was being sent to a camp outside Xhule where his white card could be put to more regular use. Anareta was happy about his discharge. Xhule was a bucolic valley of garden villages and a university where he could pursue his kro studies. He had wanted to find some way of thanking the Sugarat, but after seeing the great fear in the boy he realized that the most he could do for Kagan was to forget him.
Gradually Sumner's pain shifted into healing aches: dull throbs, itching flesh and muscles. Yet he didn't want to live.
He tried to stop eating, but the staff shoved tubes through his nose and down his throat. And though he willed himself to die, his body continued to get stronger.
When the cruel day came for him to learn to walk again, he refused to move. His brain had been rubbed smooth with pain, and time meant little to him. Apart from the lunatic dreams that wracked him to a lathered frenzy each night, he was empty. No expectations. No hopes. Time would kill him. He would wait.
Hoping to awaken Sumner to his life, a blue-gowned nurse wheeled his bed to the lune ward and left him at the far end, where the vomit was crusted on the walls and the fecal stench numbed his whole body.
The lunes were the husks of McClure's society, people who had fallen into themselves in the chemical factories or the mines and who were kept alive for medical experiments. Their stares were vacant or, at best, beast-filled, and their phantom howls and gut-twisting shrieks gnawed at Sumner's nerves and made his nightmares even more terrible.
But Sumner refused to cooperate with the staff. He was determined to die, and he would have smothered himself in lassitude if an unexpected revulsion hadn't suddenly and evilly overcome him. One night he thrashed awake and found a milky-eyed lune chewing the scabs off his leg-wounds. The next day, he was ready to walk.
After a month of water exercises, weight lifting, and blinding pain, Sumner could move about without crutches. The staff had been patient and good with him, and his body healed well. But he showed no appreciation. He remained solitary and withdrawn, mechanically completing his work-outs and eating his meals. Few thoughts moved through his numb mind, and those that did were simple, immediate animal logics. A sullen indifference misted his eyes, and the medical staff finally realized that the police had succeeded after all. The Sugarat was dead.
* * *
Chief Anareta entered a serene garden alongside the Berth. He was out of uniform, and he looked haggard in the green pullover and brown flannels he was wearing. For a full two minutes he stood beside a bluerose bush staring at a red-cowled monk who sat reading on a stone bench a few paces away.
When the savant glanced up, his head rocked with rec-ognition and his cowl fell back, revealing a tough, blunt-featured face softened with surprise. "Chief!" the monk rasped. He stood up with a coarse grunt, his body monolithic, his short hair streaked like smoke. "You look smaller out of black."
"The Pillars took my black away, Kempis." Anareta companionably gripped the big savant's shoulder. "I was re-tired after the deeps looked into me."
Kempis' stare chiseled sharper. "Deeps? How far into your mind did they look?"
"Not far enough to see you," Anareta said with a reassur-ing smile. Twenty years before, the chief had helped Kempis secretly enter the Protectorate. Before that the monk had been an outlander, the undistorted but homeless offspring of distorts, a wanderer and a bandit. Anareta had found him at a branding station where the wounded and heavily bandaged corsair was being fitted for drone headstraps. The wit-light in the huge man's eyes had stopped the chief the instant their gazes touched. Kempis was not an apparent distort, and the savage callousness that Anareta had become accustomed to seeing in the faces of ardent criminals was not there. Muscled by compassion, he had taken Kempis aside and spoken with him long enough to confirm what he had suspected: The man wasn't a ritual-programmed tribesman or gangmember—he was an individual. Through his bureaucratic contacts, the chief had been able to clear Kempis' record, secure him a green card, and position him as a savant with the White Pillar.
Savants had an easy life. They were essentially librarians and researchers, well respected in the Protectorate, and tra-ditionally expected to extend the species by maintaining very active sex lives. Kempis had always been happy serving Mutra.