Radix

At the far end of the office in a darkly shaded back room with the door ajar, a deep waited. She had been sent by Ranger Command to assess telepathically the recruits at Dhalpur and cull any latent deeps. Every year at this time for the last thirty-two years she had come to this swamphole, to this very tarpaper shack, and opened herself to the minds of killers. She had become increasingly sensitive—and bored.
Deeps—telepathically endowed humans—were the only distorts tolerated by the Masseboth, though secretly. Fetally induced kiutl, under the proper conditions, produced deeps. But their life was stringent.
Neither the Black nor the White Pillar trusted them wholly, and they were always under observation.
But this old deep was satisfied with her life, if not her work, and her self-content showed in her wide-spaced eyes— gray, acutely alert eyes. Her face was patrician, noble-browed, and her gray hair was short but stylishly feathered. She glanced over Sumner Kagan's scrip, pausing briefly at Broux's murder. The deeps who had investigated Broux's death had seen immediately that Sumner was responsible, and they had marked him then as a possible ranger. The trick with assess-ing killers, she had learned, was eliminating the ones who stopped short.
She thumbed a kiutl-tab into her mouth and looked up to see a tall, long-shouldered man with red hair walking tentatively through the outer office. Wisdom brightened in her eyes, and mindmusic brimmed into her ears: She saw the golden bodylight around the giant, and the sight of this full-gened human, this whole man, tuned happily inside her.
She looked again at the scrip to see who this ranger's docent was. Mauschel— the distort, she noted with a flicker of disappointment. That man was too strict—wanting his re-cruits to accomplish his unfinished life. He was always ruin-ing men. As if his pain were the world's. She put the paperboard aside and covered it with a fold of her white robe.
Sumner filled the doorway, the broad set of his eyes taking all of her in at once. She signed him to close the door and sit in a cane chair opposite her. As he gracefully lowered himself into her presence, all the while studying her with those bunsen-blue eyes, she saw the purple scald marks at the sides of his neck. "How did that happen, soldier?" she asked, touching her throat.
"Voors," Sumner replied, and at the sound of his voice she saw into him, saw the shadow of a dead world: a crater pool surrounded by dying tamarinds, nodules of fungus blis-tering the grass where acrid vapors smoked out of the earth—a blunderland of mad flies and trees with the shapes of pain.
And there, rising out of the green water of the pool, a child white as nothingness with eyes like ice.
She blinked, startled by the clarity of her in-seeing. Then, with disciplines drilled into her since infancy, she brought her mind back into the present. She didn't want to know about voors or anything else in this man's past. She had been sent to do one thing: find other deeps. The less she took away with her the better she would sleep that night.
"Just that name—voors—scares me," she said convinc-ingly, opening a notebook in her lap. "I'm from Prophecy, and I only leave the city once a year to do this survey for Ranger Command. I'm here to see that the recruits are well-treated. One of my tactics is to speak with as many of you as I can. I hope you'll be frank with me. Nothing you say here will be associated with you again, unless you wish it so." She smiled, and Sumner nodded, only the microshifts in the muscle-armoring around his eyes revealing his suspicion. "Are you happy here?" she asked ingenuously.
Sumner sat tall but relaxed, modulating his breathing the way Mauschel had taught him to do when he was being interrogated. "Yes."
In that one sound, the deep saw the grimness in this man's life: the arduous fighting drills, the anxiety of ambush in the swamp's dark spaces, the loneliness— But she peered past this emotional fog looking for a special kind of silence— the depth of the telepath.
"Tell me about yourself," she said. "Anything at all. Just talk." The deep lowered her eyes, pretending to write in her notebook, her gaze loosely following her scrawl as she cen-tered into a trance.
Sumner shifted in his seat and looked around at the threadbare carpet, the bamboo-slatted windows. . . .
"Talk—please."
"I was ambushed again, a few days ago," he said, the words spiraling into his mind. "I hate getting caught because then I have to feel what I did wrong until my guts ache. That's the only way I can forget. I hurt myself for a while."
She urged him on with a roll of her free hand.
"Sometimes I feel like water locked inside a tree," he said, burst-skull feelings jumping into words. "I'm tired of sword classes and gun classes and hiding in the swamp and taking orders. But then I think, all of life is shit. We live until we die—and then nothing. Does anybody have the right to want anything?"
He paused. The woman had stopped writing and was sitting there with her eyes closed. "Dhalpur has been the strongest life I've had so far," he added softly.
The old woman hadn't heard a word of what he had said. She was looking long into his mindark, searching among the daze of memories and thought-loops for the silence. But this man was all dreaming. His bodylight was wondrous but his mindark was muddled. She closed the notebook and placed her palms over her eyes. "Thank you, soldier. You may go now."
"That's all?" Sumner asked, the hurt he had brought forward burning behind his eyes.
"Yes, that's all. Please go now."
Sumner stood up and went to the door slowly. Outside, heat rippled in the air over the metal roofs of the swamp village where the officers lived, and he stood watching that for a while, feeling that he had left something behind.
At the end of his third year in the wilderness, Sumner went mad. The rigorous demands of his training and the vast solitude of his life in selfscan crushed him. It happened while he was watching the rain moving in vague pillars over the savanna, as he completed a complex routine Mauschel had taught him. The toes of both of his feet were tying and untying tedious strings of knots; one hand was doing wrist and finger maneuvers with a butterfly-blade, the other pack-ing and fitting cartridges. Deeper, he was fluttering his dia-phragm, signaling his heart to slow down.
Each day for months he had been doing this and more intricate routines, and he had become expert at settling deep into himself and watching his body function on its own. But today, with the rain smoking just outside his burrow and the wind whispering over the grasslands with a sound that was almost human, he found that he couldn't stop. With lunatic precision, his toes knotted and unknotted twine, his left hand flashed sharp metal around his fingers, his right hand capped bullets, and his heart consciously slowed and slowed, gliding beyond his control.
Sitting in a broth of umber light, his limbs moving mechanically, his will paralyzed, Sumner felt his heart stop. His toes and hands went on even as the whine of blood, tuning its high note in his ears, thinned out of hearing. Vision narrowed and misty oblivion circled in, muffling his panic—
Pain abrupt as a scream wrenched him out of his trance. The butterfly-blade had knicked his thumb. He stared with sudden lucidity at the pale slice in his flesh and saw how the blood was holding back. Then the red flow began, and his heart quopped loudly in his ears.
Unthinking, he dropped everything and ran barefoot into the rain. The wind slashed at him, and he wondered what he was doing. But then unwilled selfscan took over, blocking out thoughts and feelings, and propelling him into the storm.
He ran with the storm, following the wizenings of the wind, needless of siltholes and mudpools. The rain wandered on ahead of him, leading him staggering into the gloom of a misty forest. A dense effluvium of rotting bark and wet earth engulfed him, and he stopped with his arms widespread. The vaporous fatigue of his long run rose out of his legs and chest and fogged over his mind. He dropped to the fleshy earth and slept deep.