Radix

He peered at Sumner, solemn as a cobra. "The White Pillar will stud you if they can, but the Black Pillar wants you hurting. Don't let either of them get you. Cut them off as soon as you can. You're young, and the physicians say you're still whole. So stop acting like a corpse. Come alive. This world is huge and strange. I've seen things in it I don't believe myself anymore. But it's all out there—distorts, voors, creatures and places we don't have names for yet. Get away the first chance you get. Become a corsair. Go north. Go as far as you can. Only freedom is real."
He wheezed and sucked at the air. "Believe me, the north is another world. The Masseboth won't follow you there. And some of those distort women—" He chuckled with croupy abandon and then struggled to catch his breath.
"Where are the Masseboth sending me?" Sumner asked, his voice gritty. "Where am I going?"
Kempis stared at him in silence, intrigued and gratified. Then: "If you knew that, son, you'd have lived forever."
Broux's face was crueclass="underline" the mouth a slash, the jaw a clamp, the skin bronzed from sunburn and malaria, the hair iron-gray and cropped close to the carved contours of his square head. He was the commander of Meat City, a slimy hole punched into the green shimmering face of the western rain forest. Broux's camp looked more like a trash heap than the military camp it was supposed to be. In fact, the scraggy lot walled in by jungle was a human trash heap, the final depot where the Masseboth Black Pillar sent the personnel too rebellious for service in the regular units but too valuable to be executed. Under Broux's brutal command, the soldiers were pitted against the jungle and worked into conformity or else broken.
Broux took a special interest in Sumner from the first. He saw the boy, scab-masked and painworn, as he limped out of the strohlkraft that had delivered him and eight others to Meat City. The men were
lionfaced, their gazes guarded but truculent, the fight in them strong—but the boy was differ-ent: he stood squatly on the landing field staring with open apprehension at the monotonous litter of rotting shacks and scantling huts set on concrete pilings above mustard-yellow mudflats.
Unlike everyone else in the camp he had a white card stapled to his file, and the White Pillar had appended a rider in bold print: Sumner Kagan was to be worked hard, but he wasn't to be killed. Twice a year he would be taken to a breeding hostel—other than that, Broux could do whatever he liked with the boy.
"You're mine now, Kagan," Broux growled. The dragon-dark of his eyes looked the boy over, seeing the shape of the animal inside Sumner's withered obesity, already knowing exactly how much pain this body could digest. "If you work in Meat City, you live. The only rest here is death." Broux's grin sharked straight back over his jaw, then vanished in-stantly. "It's three kilometers around this clearing. Run the jungleline. Go!"
Sumner loped off, and Broux barked after him: "Pick it up, Kagan. Run!"
Sumner ran, steadily at first. But as the sun rose higher, hot and arrogant in the sky, something in him began to unravel. Colors ribboned by, and the blood drummed faster as if boiling in his ears. He retched and gasped at the thick air, and long, deep muscles knotted up in his legs. He was still limping around the camp at nightfall when Broux called him in.
Eaten by fatigue, Sumner didn't have the strength to pick up his rations, but Broux pushed his face into the bean paste, and so he ate. Immediately afterward he collapsed on his cot and lay unmoving until Broux rolled him out at dawn.
Again he was ordered to run the jungleline. By the time he had eased into the rhythm of his run, the sun's heat had become rabid. At noon he collapsed and had to be slapped awake by a guard.
Sumner swayed to his feet and forced himself to run— hard, hoping a stroke would tug him out of Broux's grasp. For days this nightmare repeated itself. Then, miraculously, the hours thinned out. A secret compartment swelled open in his lungs, and the fire he had been carrying in there cooled. Limitless power flowed into his tendons, and the hot needles pinning his shoulders to his chest fell away, leaving his body loose and slinky. He glided through the drifts of sunlight with defiant strides.
Broux was impressed. The McClure police had wracked Sumner, and Broux had been convinced by the boy's shiver-ing gaze that his will was warped. But Sumner was stronger than the bruised mash of his body revealed. The next day, from the shade of his command tent, Broux watched as Sum-ner joined the other men for the hole patrol—the daily grave detail.
The digging didn't go well for Sumner. On the fringe of the jungle, a damp miasmic heat steaming softly around him with the death pall of the graves, Sumner breathed through his mouth and tried lifting small shovelfuls of yellow mud. Soon the grim heat built up in his fatigues, and when he peeled back his shirt the stinging flies tormented him.
Nevertheless he worked relentlessly, wanting the heat to kill him. His hands were sloughed raw by the splintery handle of his spade, and his body was cramped with pain and fatigue. At day's end he returned to his hut feverish, too exhausted to eat the bitter herbs and root paste that was dinner but force-fed by Broux's pincer grip at the back of his neck. Afterward he lay flat on his cot, stupefied, numbed free of his nightmares.
Time blurred into routine for Sumner. Broux worked him hard nine days and rested him one. For a long time Sumner slept through those free days, too hollow to dream. But one day he found that he wasn't wasted enough to ignore the barrack flies anymore. He spent that day meandering about the camp, groggily pondering his situation.
He was a slave, he realized, his will as exhausted as his body. Broux was working him, not to death, but to the brink of life, keeping him alive for the White Pillar—or just for the pain. Sumner didn't know.
He thought of Kempis and running away. And he thought of Nefandi, the deva, and the voors, and his dread sparkled. The world was evil, too dark to be enlightened by thoughts. And that made the painful routines of Meat City seem good. When the hole patrol trudged by with the buckled bodies of that day's dead, the familiarity of their workchant soothed away all desire for escape.
At the end of the day, as he undressed for sleep, he was amazed by how much his body had changed. His thighs, which ached close to the bone with weariness, were con-toured now, and his arms had thickened and deepened around the shoulders. Without a mirror, he contented himself to lie in the dark, feeling the tautness of his stomach and the curved breadth of his chest. The mood of a ghost-thin pride softened his dreaming that night. But Broux had seen that Sumner's stamina was expanding, and the next day he worked him harder than ever. For many weeks after that, Sumner's life was felt and not thought.
Broux tossed a handful of pebbles into a mudpool and watched the watercircles dawn through each other. Behind him the work crews were lining up beneath a holt of im-mense rubber trees for that day's assignments. The officers with machine pistols strapped to their thighs and clipboards in their hands were shouting through the bodycount. Broux listened to the distant roll call with melancholy. He was tired of being a warden. He was almost sixty, and this was all his life had come to: corrosive air, fevered flies, riotous jungle walls—a prison as much for him as for any of the wretched men he had been ordered to break.
But was his fate different from anyone else in the Protec-torate? He turned to supervise the men as they filed past, dragging their shovels and machetes to the jungle's fringe. The cities were sour-hearted with dorga pits—everybody had a distort-brother, sister, or child—and the most anyone could hope for was to stay whole. Why was the world this way? Why did flesh go wrong? He heelkicked a rock into the mudpool and cleared his mind. A man could break his teeth on questions like this.