Radix

The Mothers conferred for a moment. Then: They say you must give your dugout to them. You won't be needing it anymore. Instead, you 're to go with Ardent Fang to the breeding stables. If you perform well there, your dugout and the right to hunt may be returned to you.
Sumner stared vigorously upward until the Mothers de-parted.
All the women in the breeding stable were naked except for their bright rag-wrapped heads and the yellow dots metic-ulously painted over their ovaries. In the crinkled lantern-light, Ardent Fang was at home. He breathed the dark spicy odors without notice, and laughed as Sumner hesitated at the top of the ramp.
With one hand he pulled at Sumner's arm, and with the other he gestured at the tiers of mating stalls. The stable was a massive hive of wooden cubicles, each with a young female writhing lewdly before it. Brown-garbed matrons, elderly women who had never borne an acceptable child, patrolled the aisles and stairways, tending to the young women's needs and encouraging them to be provocative.
Even in the frail light there was no hiding the fact that these women were distorts. All of them were abnormal in some way: swollen foreheads, foreshortened or distended limbs, scaled flesh, horned shoulders, snouted faces. Sumner was too disgusted to look. He stood hopelessly at the head of the ramp until one of the matrons, a slight woman with knobbed hands and leathery lips, guided him to a stall with a blue lantern.
The girl who was sprawled there on a tangle of blankets had a lithe, voluptuous body, clean and narrow as light, the legs splayed, the hips gyrating, the dark cloud of mons hair glistening. But her face— It was a crude patchwork of faces sewn into an emotionless mask. Sumner wanted to look away, but the eyes within the bonepits were alive and electrical, beckoning him, pleading.
The matron stepped past Sumner and moved to place a blanket over the girl's face. Sumner waved her out. He focused on the feathery grain of wood glazed with blue lantern-light and slid into selfscan. He looked at the girl and saw her without emotion—saw her as creatures see each other. The face was twisted and darkened strangely, but it was the life in it that he fixed on. The sharp sexual odor of the place became suddenly palpable, and he removed his clothes. He let the erotic odors and the woman-softness of the girl's body move him, and he rutted with her without emotion, riding his body to a quick climax.
Ardent Fang watched Sumner's performance with inter-est. He was pleased that such an outstanding hunter and woodworker was a lousy lover. His member was of a good size, indeed it was formidable, but his style was crude, totally primitive. If they had shared a language, he would have been glad to enlighten him. As it was, Lotus Face actually seemed pleased with himself to have finished so quickly. Ardent Fang shrugged, Strange ways, and went off to start his rounds.
Sumner serviced three women a day for several weeks. He preferred to finish his mating chores early in the day so that he had time to fish. Fishing was the only occupation the Mothers allowed him, and he had a favorite angling perch at one end of a broad, parklike glade. There, at the sedgy rim of the brown river, he lazily trawled for trout.
The Serbota hunters who stalked the swollen river wouldn't talk with him now that the Mothers had taken away his dugout. Only the children and the ne tolerated his pres-ence. The ne were particularly receptive to him, and they set aside a room for him in one of their lodges. But Sumner was never at ease among them. They were generous to a fault and anxious to share the secrets of their trades with him, but they were perpetually dour. Their sadness ran deep because they were genderless and without the purpose of family. Sumner preferred to be alone.
Often, trawling the deep pools created by fallen trees, far up the river, he saw his dugout sliding over the water, light as a leaf. Each time there was someone different in it, and each time they pretended not to see him. Sumner wasn't angry. He was proud of his canoe, and he was happy it had no one owner. In a way it was still his, and there was always the chance that he would get it back.
Toward the end of his second month in Miramol, Sum-ner met with Bonescrolls again. It began while he was fish-ing. He had dropped a grasshopper into a deep marly channel among weeds, and a trout had struck immediately. He hooked it and was sloshing backwards in the current when he sensed them.
Two voors, their black hoods thrown back, their search-less, vague eyes fixed on him, were behind him, advancing quickly. Both had black-crusted lizard faces, and staring at them, Sumner felt a dull chill ice across his back. He hesi-tated only an instant, but in that moment one of the voors snarled its lips and revealed a tiny blowgun clenched be-tween its teeth. The dart stung the side of his neck as he began the roll to evade it.
With horrible reptile slowness, he tumbled to his back, curled his legs in, and swung to his belly. The toxin they had hit him with turned his muscles to slag, and as he crumbled he saw the two voors crouching over him. One of them was saying something insistently: "Dai Bodatta!"
A swell of pain bulged in his throat and piled downward, dragging him into unconsciousness. He struggled, squinting through gusty lights of green-silver. The voors had taken his arms, and they were lugging him over the ground. He felt like wet sand. He felt like wood.
The air trembled, and a roar crashed through the glade so loud that Sumner's chest tightened. The bush ahead of them parted, and a silver-blue puma burst into the clearing, its yellow pupils two jets of flame. It crouched before them, all its heavy muscles bunched tightly below the mad pulse of its throat.
The voors dropped Sumner's arms and backstepped. The last thing he saw of them was their black cowls fluttering like wings at the forest's edge. Then the suspenseful musk of the big cat filled his sinuses as its shadow slouched over him.
The black-bellied puma was still with him when he woke to a scalding headache. The voors want you for their own purposes, Drift explained, one hand on the puma's head. The magnar thinks you should leave Miramol for a while and stay with him in the desert.
Sumner sat silent for a moment, feeling his life floating inside him. He would be happy to leave Miramol. And he wanted to meet again this being that could command voors and animals. He looked at the puma, and the big cat stared back keenly, its green eyes tricked with reflections.
"I'll go now," he said, pulling himself upright against the gravity of the drug.
Now? The ne clicked its eyes. It listened to the hum-ming of Sumner's mind and saw that he remembered the desert crossing they had done together. He knew the route through the wasteland to the magnar. The ne was amazed, for even seers usually needed several crossings to learn the way. Shouldn't you rest?
"I've been resting for weeks." He watched as the puma ambled into the forest. "And the voors want me now. It'll be harder for them to surprise me in the desert."
We'll get you canteens and strider-sandals at the lodges.
"I don't need them."
Drift stared and saw that this was true. Take this, then. It held out the ne walking stick that it was carrying.
Sumner smiled and took the tall stick. "You found me in the desert, remember? Don't worry."
The ne's eyes starshined. It's not you I am truly afraid for. It's the magnar. I've seen death around him.
Sumner hefted the walking stick and turned away from the river and the ne. "I'm sworn to serve Bonescrolls. I'll watch after him."
Drift accompanied him to where the lateritic silt of the wastes began, and it left him there with a traditional chant:
We are made of distances.
We are constantly going further,
Alone and predestined,
Learning slowly
That stopping is not arriving.