Radix

Zelda had aged greatly in the intervening years. She had been reduced to a wraith in a brown etamine shift embroi-dered with starsigns. Sumner watched her closely as she drifted about the tiny room lighting tallow sticks and prepar-ing incense coals. He felt no emotion for her, and as they sat down on bamboo stools before a crumbling corkwood table, he wondered why he had bothered to come in.
She handed him seven painted lentils and told him to cast them. After several throws, she looked up and studied him with eyes bright as pain. "Your history is one of acci-dents. Deception and error guide you. Soon, if it hasn't happened already, you'll confront someone from your past, possibly a child. But I see no recognition. Only what we know is real. Also, quite soon, you will have to discard everything. But you will adjust, for I see you are a man for whom all destinations are temporary. You change readily, sometimes obscuring your own purposes, though a deep, burning part of you is always the same. That is the paradox of your nature—the cloud and the star."
Sumner laid all the money he had across the table, and Zelda straightened and stared at him more closely. Before she could recognize him he stood up, and with her profuse gratitude singing in his ears, he returned to the night of rain.
Zelda's pathetic old age affirmed Sumner's conviction to die young. He had seen old rangers, rheumy-eyed and pale, fading away in noisy government offices or, worse, fumbling in the field and being brutally humiliated by distorts, butch-ered with their own knives. That wouldn't happen to him.
Sumner took risks most of the other rangers eluded. Death, to him, was freedom at the crest, escape from the body's inevitable slide. He was afraid of nothing—not torture or loneliness or the weirdest distorts. How could he fear them? Life was a brief harrowing voided by death, and these were the healings of pain.
Sumner sat on a pierhead gnawing at a whole orange. On the dirty beach around him, scrawny pigs and dogs scavenged among loosely bundled bales of garbage.
He finished his orange, wiped his hands on his shorts, and stood up. Seabirds poised on tall, lilting
fish-spears turned their heads to watch him as he ambled down the ruined beach. Today was his last day in the hamlet of Laguna. The man he had been assigned to kill had arrived the night before. Actually, his victim wasn't a man—it was a voor called Dai Bodatta.
For over a month Sumner had been waiting for this voor, living unobtrusively in one of the blue pastel shanties across the bay. The fisherman's widow who rented him the place had no doubt that he was anything more than the dockworker he claimed to be. Like the other stevedores, he wore soiled canvas-top shoes, remnant shorts, and an oil-stained singlet. And like them he worked a dawn-to-dusk shift, loading barges with crates of rice and scraping and painting hulls—until today.
He walked out to the middle of the windward shore where the bay washed over a pink bench of coral. The tide was rushing in, and white feathers and dragontails of spray lashed with the sea boom.
This was the far end of Laguna Bay, where another harbor had once flourished. Plague had doomed that village many years before and now only blackened stumps of old pilings, a few charred boat ribs, and a storm-staggered jetty remained. The villagers thought this crescent of land that separated them from the sea was haunted, and they used it as a dump. Sumner was convinced that this was where he would confront the voors.
He sat down on a chunk of driftwood tangled in beach vine and cupped a hand against the late morning light to see the island better. Situated in the middle of the bay was a small, tree-crowded knob of stone. No sign of voors was visi-ble among the tiers of sea pine, but Sumner knew they were there. Last night hundreds of voors had crossed the bay in black-hulled rigs.
Alerted at dusk by a mirrorflash from a ranger farther down the coast, Sumner had sat up all night watching the voors arrive. The night-lens he had used revealed the cowled figures in the boats. From the side of the island facing away from Laguna, blue and green fires were visible for a few hours. Then they vanished, and by dawn nothing was left of the voors—except for the dreams. Most of the hamlet woke groggy from a night of restless, moody dreaming.
Voors were not often seen this far south, but over the past few years they had been gathering annually in different coves and bays of the region. No one knew why the voors came, but each year their number grew, and lately the Masseboth had become concerned. Word of a new leader of the voors spread through the northern coast cities with wild rumors of a voor invasion. And though hardly anyone there had ever seen a voor and known it, fear mounted. Travelers mistaken for voors were viciously murdered, and distorts who had long been ignored were herded together and drowned. To ease the situation, the Masseboth decided to eliminate the one voor who had been leading the others south. Unfortu-nately, nothing more was known than the name of that voor— Dai Bodatta.
Sumner was glad the voors had come to his bay. A month of inactivity had made him restless. With one hand he dug a hole in the sand behind the driftwood and extracted an oilcloth satchel. Inside the sack was an electric-pump hand-gun, a rifle extension, half a dozen clips, a night/day lens, and numerous slabs of gel explosives. He removed the handgun, wiped it clean of grease, and fitted a clip into it. Checking the alignment of the sights, he turned to follow a gull sliding out over the bay, and his sweaty singlet sucked at his back. The bay water beyond the coral ridge was jade-green and clear as an eye.
Sumner peered through the lens and saw movement on the shore of the island. Voors in gray and brown mantles were assembling, hauling their small boats out from behind stands of sea pines. Hair crested by the wind, he stood tall and swept the bay with the lens, looking for other ships. There were none. The morning shift was already moored, and the afternoon fleet was crowding the bay mouth, waiting to get out to sea.
Quickly Sumner stooped and removed the thin slabs of gel explosives; then he reached into the sand below the driftwood and took out a small square tin of firing caps. Excitement throbbed in his chest, and he had to raise the lens again to be certain that the voors were going to cross. In broad daylight, he marveled, watching the small boats splash into the water.
He doublechecked his rifle and the firing caps, and then he sat down. It was time again for selfscan: full attention on the stalled shadows—noon, the turning point.
Black the blood and the bones . . .
Tala squinted into the noon glare buzzing off the water and waited for her eyes to adjust to the light. Clochan and the others were dragging the ships out from behind the trees which meant that they had already probed the far shore for howlies. Still, she scanned slowly. Pale sketches of coral glowed beneath the green water. A shark was gliding near the reef, turning swiftly with powerful strokes of its huge caudal. Farther out, silver sparks flurried in the sunlight where minnows chopped the surface. And on the far bank: tilted red mangroves, black palm fronds, and white sand littered with howlie debris and torn sargassum. No howlies—though she felt something evil and elusive. She tried to concentrate, but her drowsy body was
cold with lethargy, and she couldn't focus beyond herself very well.
Clochan waved from where he was standing, knee-deep in the kelp-drench. The cold within her flushed warmer, and the loose end of a voice rose out of the back of her mind: Bring out the stonelights.
Tala nodded, but before turning she stared hard across the bay again. The jittery trees stared back empty. She dismissed her fear with a hiss and walked back through the pines to a cave of overhanging trees. Chanting voices from far within melled with the hum of wind-stirred leaves and the incoming tide, sounding like the mumble of a dream. Her eyes adjusted rapidly to the darkness, and she moved nimbly through the red shadows to a rim-crusted incline that swooped steeply out of sight. Here the chanting was very clear: Black the blood and the bones beneath the skin. Black the earth one finger under. Black the emptiness bent over time.