Radix

Sumner blinked into the sun of his first day in the swamps and put a hand to his stinging cheek. He looked at the docent with bewildered hurt. What did this halfman want?
Mauschel turned about and armwalked to the grassy brink of the marsh, where grapes of sunlight hung on the black water. Against a wickerwork of roots buttressing the mudbank was his flatboat. He looked back and saw Sumner kneeling naked in the swordgrass, a hand to his cheek. Re-morse flushed in him when he saw the resentment in the young man's eyes. His hand touched the rubbed leather of a legstump, and the guilt shriveled. He was a teacher, he reminded himself, lowering his body into the tar-stained boat. That was all he was.
He punted across the sleeping water. Sumner stood in the fluttering sunlight, following him with his blue stare. If he ever wakes up, he'll be good, Mauschel thought, admiring the man's lank and brawn. Years before—many years before— Mauschel had been a ranger. "He who never was," he said softly, gazing into the black water, remembering that morn-ing a world ago when he first saw the mollusk scales behind his knees. He had been in the field then, and he had let himself believe the desquamations were a jungle fungus. A fellow ranger had to tell him: The black scales were genetic. He was a distort.
Selfscan was all that kept him living after he blew his legs off to hide the distortion. "Selfscan is life," he said to the algae-boiling water. "If Kagan ever wakes up to that, he'll be good." Mauschel's keen eyes read the shadows of the water-ways, and he guided the flatboat through the mists of sunlight and the drifts of spiderflowers into the dark soul of the swamp.
After Sumner's first night in the swamp, his life was shaped by routines that continued unchanged for several years. Senior recruits who had watched his encounter with Mauschel from their coverts among the trees taught him the basics of swamp survival. They were reticent, hungry-looking men who disappeared as soon as they had shown him how to flake a knife from stone and how to twine fabric from plant fiber. Within days Sumner had a lair of his own in a mangaba tree and he was spearing fish from his own dugout.
But life in the swamp was difficult. He had to content himself eating roots, insects, and the small prey he could catch. Each day enjambed the next like the structure of a dream, and slowly the selfscan that Mauschel had been so fervent about began to make sense. It was watching, simply watching without thinking. The difficulty was learning to live with himself.
He remembered Gage and Ignatz with dark and rueful feelings. Becoming a ranger was viciously harder than they had ever intimated. In the first months of his swamp life he had been ambushed several times by other recruits. And the price of this blundering was high. When a recruit was am-bushed he lost everything he had to those who found him: foraged food, knives, even clothes. Twice Sumner had almost starved. Then he learned to stop wondering and simply watch— watching everything, his whole body a lens open to time, perceiving every sexual moment of the day, every turn of the wind.
One day, watching the light rising up the trees in a slow silence as night came on, Sumner sensed someone closing in. He slunk noiselessly through the underbrush and squeezed himself into the embrace of a thick-bodied willow. Bird chirp-ings circled his hearing, and the wind breathed algal scents through the tufted grass. As his thoughts thinned and selfscan deepened, he centered on the approach of the other.
From beneath huge elm roots, along the mud rim of a black pool, a shadowfigure appeared and moved
swiftly in Summer's direction. The figure was obscured by ferns, but Sumner could hear fatigue in the heavy gait. He fixed his attention on the palmetto leaves flexing in the wind until the intruder was striding hard past him—a hooded man in a gray jerkin and leggings.
Sumner waited a pace and then swung out with his left arm, fast and low, and caught a skinny, fawn-boned ankle. With a twist he toppled the lanky body and jumped astride, forcing his knee into the back of the narrow jerkin. He seized the hood in one hand and jerked it back.
A scream widened in his eyes. He was holding a distort: a bald creature with moon-marbly skin and red eyes.
The distort thrashed, and Sumner pulled back stiffly on the hood and reached for his knife. Mauschel had ordered him at several of their regular sessions to kill any distorts he encountered. Looking down at the oyster-gray face, he felt his knife strong and right in his hand. But he didn't strike.
Foc orders! He let the hood go and stepped back, sheath-ing his knife. The distort rolled over and sat staring at him with its raw eyes, the face childlike and tilted slightly as if listening to some feeling-pitched song just within hearing.
"Get out of here before a real ranger shows up," Sumner gruffed.
The distort shakily stood and bowed. With its malformed hands open in gratitude, it stepped closer. Sumner turned, but before he could move away, the creature touched him. His vision smudged, and a strand of ice-wind finer than a thread of starlight curled over his skin. Is it wrong to love everyone? a gentle voice asked at the back of his head. His whole body shuddered, and an overwhelming euphoria rushed up through the hollows of his lungs and throat. When he blinked sight into his eyes, the distort was gone.
But the telepathic bond between them remained. Sum-ner felt the other being long into the night. Sprawled out in his mangaba tree, wrung by the distort's exhaustion, he felt its swamp-dread as it crossed a fen of mosstrees and quick-sand. Deeper, he knew the being's fear of what it was fleeing: Distort-hunters had found its tribe three nights ago, and the whole forest the tribe lived in had been set ablaze. The companion that had crossed the hills and entered the swamp with it had been spotted yesterday and shot in the back, just below the shoulder, blowing its heart into its hands.
Sumner turned restlessly in his lair, and at the far end of the swamp the distort felt his unease and stopped running. The earth it squatted against was cold wet darkness, but the sky was a drunkenness of light. Sumner experienced the distort's awe and relaxed. As he circled toward sleep, the telepathy opened
into sound and he heard the distort's quiet voice a last time: I think it is good to live.
* * *
Under the tutelage of a blind man with a back as broad as a bison's and all five senses in his hands, Sumner rigor-ously worked to toughen the vulnerable parts of his body. He pounded sand and deadwood with his hands, feet, elbows, and knees, armoring them with bone-callus. Punches and massage hardened his sternum and abdomen until a tree limb could be broken across his stomach. And he learned to in-stantly flex and relax his neck so that he could absorb blows to his face with his eyes open. Only then was he shown how properly to compress his breath into the needletip of his body's center and to twist his stroke at the precise moment of impact. When he could knock the bark off a tree with his bare hands and feet, the blind master was through with him. He had learned to use his whole body at once.
From a wiry old woman with mud-brown skin, he mas-tered the botanical secrets of the land, learning how to make curare from strychnos vines, malarial prophylaxes from cin-chona bark, barbasco insect repellent, and a topical pain-killer from waxy red genipa berries.
Lounging in the blanched grass on a knoll of cedar during a pause in his training, watching deer feed, Sumner felt like singing. But music was a ghost in his mouth because he was uneasy with his voice, and so he lay in the tree-chopped sunlight with the other recruits, content to listen to the birds' green songs.
These men might starve him in the swamp if he weren't alert, but during the training sessions they shared they were brothers. He was as strong and poised as any of them, resting between wrestling sessions, humming with the just-seen knowl-edge of bodytwists, kneelocks, and slinky evasions. He looked down at the rays of muscle in his legs with pride. And for that seldom moment, hair starred with sweat, chest and torso muscledrawn and gleaming, his life was divined.