Radix

Corby, deep in the body's instincts, felt the violence in Culler, and the voor reached out with his kha and stroked the howlie's limbic brain.
A sense of music expanded in Culler, and he thought it was the delight of anticipating this ranger's death. Only the peeler could compensate his humiliation, Culler realized. His ditchwater eyes flashed with satisfaction, and he turned away.
Screams and curving howls weirded in the air, and sev-eral Serbota began mumble-chanting to Paseq. The retch smell of burning flesh thickened with the wind. Through the grating and the pall of black smoke, the afternoon sun smeared like blood.
* * *
Sumner was frightened, and his fear was slowing the flow of kha from the planet. To calm him, Corby lifted him out of his body. Ghost smoke flowed, and abruptly Sumner was high over Skylonda Aptos, seeing the wasteland and the hundreds of thousands of Masseboth troops that occupied it. Camps and their network of oiled roads covered the eastern edge of the desert like villages.
With voor-speed, Sumner's consciousness crossed the rolling horizon to the sea. Sunshafts rayed among gigantic cloud fjords over an armada of troopships sailing north.
An invasion! Sumner, amazed, wanted to fly ahead.
Not yet. Corby's voice shone in him. Without our body, we 're too weak to go far north.
Corby dropped them south through veils of ice clouds, the rocky coastline twisting below like windblown smoke. When the white bartizans and towers of prophecy emerged from among the seacliffs, their flight slowed, and they sailed over the outskirts of the city. Lakes gleamed, and an opulent village loomed closer: house-modules set into multilevel lawns of opal plants and yew trees. Rain-light settled like dust on the hedgerows.
Inside one of the modules was a tall room with a waxed parquet floor that mirrored a chess table and a white piano. Nine black long-haired cats lounged in plump chairs, on a tassel-shrouded sofa, across the mantel of a small fireplace, and among the many nooks of the bookshelves that tiered the pine walls.
Sumner's consciousness narrowed around the gentle mu-sic in the air. A lanky, wolfish man in a satin-green dinner jacket was hunched over the piano, playing Scriabin etudes. Sumner recognized Chief Anareta. The long lines of his face were calmer, less deep than they had been in McClure years before. The music slipped into Debussy, and Anareta closed his eyes.
The door-buzzer purred.
Anareta pushed away from the keyboard. Images of a lean woman with autumn-colored hair flickered through his mind as he unlatched the front door. But when he swung it open, he confronted a square figure in a black, red-trimmed uniform.
"Chief Anareta?" The dark raptor of the soldier's face scanned him. "I'm Field Commander Gar. I'm here on a Conclave order. Sorry to startle you."
"I was expecting someone else."
"Yes, I've heard your white card keeps you busy." The Commander's voice was opaque with fatigue. "May I come in?"
Anareta moved hurriedly aside. "Yes, of course."
Gar knocked his mud-clotted boots against the outside stoop and hulked into the room. He gazed with undisguised amazement at the suite's kro furnishings. "Your card's kept you comfortable, I see." He picked up a chess piece, a knight, and moved it among the brawn of his fingers like a rock. "War as a toy." He sneered.
"You mentioned a Conclave order, Commander?"
Still examining the knight, Gar unpocketed a red mobili-zation warrant and handed it to him. "A convoy swayvan will pick you up tomorrow at oh-five hundred."
The chief's hard gaze sought out and held Gar's stare. Over the eight years of his retirement, Anareta had forgotten the chafe of being commanded. "What can I do for the Protectorate?" he asked with tactful evenness.
"The Black Pillar needs you." Gar put the chess piece down and wearily tugged a leather portfolio from his thigh pocket. "You've been reactivated, Chief. Upgraded to field-colonel."
"Why? I'm a lousy fighter. With my white card, I service the Protectorate best in a bordello."
The commander raised his scarred eyebrows. "You are also a scholar, Anareta. Unlike most white cards, your brain is as important as your glands. Few Black Pillar officers are as knowledgeable about the kro as you."
"What do you want with a kro scholar?"
Gar passed the slim portfolio to Anareta. "Those are unretouched photos of distort tribes north of here. Look at them. You'll be seeing a lot of that soon."
The chief shuffled through the photographs of quarreled flesh and looked up at Gar with tight eyes. "I did my military service on the frontier forty years ago. Why are you sending me back?"
Gar leaned to the side of a rosewood bookcase. "Last month, by direct order of the Ruling Conclave, all of our troops except for a skeletal support force were mobilized for an invasion."
Anareta peered in disbelief at the officer. When he saw the affirmation in Gar's exhausted face, something snakelike uncoiled rapidly in his stomach. "Invasion of what? The dis-tort tribes are too scattered."
"Not the distorts, though the larger tribes have already been broken by our hellraiders. The main thrust of the Black Pillar is north."
"North? That's wilderness." Blood darkened the corners of his eyes as Anareta tried to comprehend.
"Don't be impatient with me. You know how little any-one down the line knows. For now, just remember you're a soldier again. The Black Pillar needs someone who under-stands how people lived twelve hundred years ago. I've flown six thousand kilometers to get you."
"Why?"
Commander Gar's weathered face stiffened as he as-sessed Anareta. "You were a police chief in a frontier city. What do you know about the eo?"
Anareta shook his head, befuddled.
The commander looked grim with sleepiness. "Strohlkraft, luxtubes, storm architecture, practically our whole technol-ogy, was given to us by a society we know nothing about. They put us on our feet five hundred years ago, and they've been extending us ever since."
"Who are they?" Anareta asked, his voice choked with incredulity.
"Eo—that's what we've been told to call them. Who knows what their self-name is. They're a reticent people."
"Are they distorts?"
"Perhaps. But the ones I've seen looked whole. The latest guesswork is that they're offworlders."
"Aliens?" Anareta looked simple-faced.
"We may have to extend our viewpoint a little, eh?" A sardonic smile came and went on the commander's stern lips. "All I know is what I've been told. The eo have requested a massive occupying force. The Black Pillar have complied. Now the Masseboth strategists have called down for a kro scholar. That's you."
"I don't know. This is a lot to ponder." Anareta stared past Gar, feeling out the implications of what he had learned. On the sill, between pots of pink fleshy flowers, a framed epigram leaned: Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust. A musical clock in another room chimed a few inches of a clever melody.
The bluntness of Gar's features gentled almost, then hard-ened again. "Whose music is that?"
"Chopin," Anareta muttered.
"Is she kro?"
Anareta sat unmoving. For years he had contented him-self with his white-card services and his research. Now he felt as though he had been living in another time. Eo. Why had no one told him? Offworlders! Rain stopped briefly, then lashed again, heavier than before.
"It's a lot to think about," Gar agreed, turning from Anareta's withdrawn look. He brushed his fingers along the rows of bound books. "Tell me, what was the greatest accom-plishment of the kro?"