Radix

In the Corps, at least, he was treated like any other man. He wore a blue jumpsuit with the black-and-white Masseboth emblem on the sleeves, and he bunked in zinc-shelled bar-racks far from the jungle. But, unlike the other men, he had known the great, futureless pain of Meat City and servitude, and he was happy only when exhaustion freed him. Uninter-ested in his barrack's meager entertainments, he spent all his leave time practicing diving drills or swimming and running to the frayed fringes of his endurance.
Openly, the camp mocked him for his emotionless life. But secretly he was envied for his remarkable diving skills and strength. He won several rare citations for breaking distance and stamina records, and he became a camp hero in Corps competitions.
None of that, though, had any value for Sumner. Life for him was a prolonged and tedious exertion, devoid of pleasure or ambition. Not even death seemed worth striving for. Occa-sionally at night beneath the deep throw of stars and skyfires, he thought of Kempis and freedom, but in the day thoughts of running away seemed cold and tiny. His daily life was mechanical, and he, in turn, had become spiritless as a machine.
So it wasn't bravery or compassion but merely routine that sent him one day toward death. On an assignment in a choppy, storm-driven sea, a dinghy that he and four other men were huddled in capsized. They were all in red wetsuits, but the one man who was strapped to the oxygen tanks hit his head on the keel and sank out of sight.
Everybody went down after him as far as they could without exhausting the breath they needed to surface. Sum-ner kept going. The water turned cold, then colder, and ached against his ears. A cramped fist of pain twisted in his chest and tried to knuckle up his throat, but he thrashed his legs harder and lanced deep into the dark.
His brain was rending into vaporous light when his hands closed on the oxygen tanks. He dragged at the mouthpiece and filled his lungs with life; then he fitted the mouthpiece to the other man and bearhugged him as he had been taught. The man was alive and became lighter as his chest swelled. Sumner unbuckled all but one of the tanks, and with his companion secured under his arm, he began the slow ascent. An hour later he broke the surface, untied the tank, and backstroked for shore with the man in tow.
Shortly after that, two men from the Masseboth elite forces visited him. They wore crushed leather swagger-jackets, buff-colored regimentals, and red felt rumal caps with silver cobra insignias.
Sumner was sitting on his cot with his clothes off, drift-ing toward sleep, when they came in. They sat on either side of his bunk, and a musky odor of sagebrush and the outside filled the air. One of them had mocha-colored skin and sloped Mongol eyes. His name was Ignatz, and though there was an animal-distance in his gaze, he surveyed Sumner with approval. The soldier with the chip-toothed grin and peach-down moustache called himself Gage.
They explained right away—Gage in an easy manner, Ignatz with terse, leathery statements—that his fearlessness and his strength had become well known, and that they wanted to show him a good time and talk to him about their elite corps—the Rangers.
Sumner stared back at them, remote as a mountain. "This squad owns me," he said with his eyes half closed.
Ignatz walked a square of red paper through his fingers and presented it to him. It was a three-day pass.
They took him up the coast in a seasled at full throttle, shearing through a maze of night trawlers, skipping across the oily reflections of torchlit villages, and finally gliding into a solitary lantern-strung cove. The rangers gave Sumner a room in the opulent arbor-cottage there. He slept soundly in a shagsheet hammock, and when he woke at dawn he forgot for a moment where he was.
Both rangers were already up. They were dressed casu-ally in hipslung army briefs and colorful jupes. Ignatz was tending a steampit of sea spiders dug into the sand, and Gage was arranging ice over red-glass bottles of mentis beer.
Gage threw a bottle at Sumner, and Kagan snatched it out of the air.
"You enjoy killing?" he asked, as Sumner hunkered down next to him.
Sumner looked at the ranger flatly, remembering too clearly the horrible dread that had driven him to kill as the Sugarat and the deep pain that had turned him against Broux. "No."
"But you like it." Gage's eyes were clear and active as water spinning over rocks. "If you didn't, you wouldn't have been so good at it."
"Or done it at all," Ignatz's dark voice said as he settled beside Sumner. He was a partial deep—a telepath that the Rangers had found useful in their recruiting endeavors. When he looked into Sumner he saw the Nothungs tumbling into an acid vat and the Black Touch distorts soaked with firegum, the smoke twisting off their bodies like a dark music. He cleanly snapped the neck off a bottle with a jerk of his wrist and passed the foaming brew to Gage. "Nobody kills the way you did without liking it."
"I don't like it."
Ignatz gave Sumner a long, penetrating look. Then he pushed himself up with his legs and returned to the baking spider crabs.
Gage knocked his beer bottle against Sumner's and apol-ogized for his partner with a broad smile. "Ignatz likes to kill. In the reef colonies, he stalks the village wharves and taverns looking for corsairs to slice. He's a distort-mauler. I'm differ-ent. On assignment I've seen distort tribes knock strohlkraft out of the air with nothing more than their minds. That's enough evil for me. When I take my four-month leave each year I prefer spending my time at places like this, savoring my life. Ignatz and I are the two extremes of the Rangers. I think you'll fit in closer to me."
Ignatz called them over to the firepit, and Gage handed Sumner another beer. While they ate, the two rangers took turns recounting tales of the weird north.
"If I thought you could believe me," Ignatz said with piercing sincerity, "I'd tell you about a telepathic jungle and a city of intelligent apes."
Sumner nodded with polite interest. He too had experi-enced the unbelievable, and he listened with an open, ac-cepting face.
By noon Sumner had heard enough stories and swilled enough mentis beer to feel zestful but at ease. His eyes were shiny, and he watched with bemused interest as Ignatz used the edge of his hand to snap the necks off half-empty bottles of beer. Gage went into the cottage and returned with three gorgeous women.
Sumner's heart exploded when he saw them, but he managed to keep his face composed. Gage introduced them, and their names rattled in Sumner's head with the jarring memories of all the women he had loved but never known in McClure. He sucked anxiously at another mentis beer.
Both Ignatz and Gage handled themselves with such poise that soon Sumner was once again sincerely relaxed. Even drinking beer with long foam-swallowing gulps or non-chalantly fondling their women, the gestures and mannerisms of the two rangers were clean and purposeful. No action of theirs was gratuitous, and that impressed Sumner more than the rangers' stories.
When it came time to go into the cottage with his woman, Sumner feigned indifference. The woman was shadowhaired and lean as smoke, her green eyes tigered with gold. She spent the whole night and much of the next day ingeniously and compassionately using her almond-brown body to dispel his unease. Her mouth worked with a dexterity he thought reserved for fingers alone, and he experienced a violent pleasure with her.
The next day his body was laved in blissful lethargy. Sitting alone with the rangers in a golden afternoon of seaspray, driftwood fires, braised fish, and mentis beer, he listened abstractedly to their proposals.