ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABC Amber LIT Converter ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 www.ABBYY.com http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html www.ABBYY.com [Radix Tetrad 01] – Radix By A. A. Attanasio Scanned, formatted and proof-read by BW-SciFi Release Date: 18th, July, 2003 Ebook Version 1.0 Acknowledgments The inwardness of this effort has indebted me to many people. I am particularly grateful to my family for their compassionate support; the poet Jon Lang for sharing his visions and for allowing me to transmogrify his poem "The Other" into the Voor Litany (pages 299- 300); the editor Maria Guarnaschelli for ennobling this book with her clarity and caring; the composer Victor Bongiovanni for permission to use a voice from his musical composition "Berceuse from Suite for Piano Four-Hand"* as Sumner's undersong (page 445); and the copy editor Betsy Cenedella for closing the circle. Robert Silverberg published an early and greatly re-visioned excerpt of "The Blood's Hori-zon" in hisNew Dimensions 7 (Harper & Row, 1977). I also want to thank Artie Conliffe for the map of the hemisphere and Fred Marcellino for the cover art. *"Berceuse from Suite for Piano Four-Hand" copyright© 1979 by Victor Bongiovanni. Contents Distorts Firstness Pictures of the Real Universe ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABC Amber LIT Converter ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 www.ABBYY.com http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html www.ABBYY.com Teeth Dreams Voors The Mysteries The Emptying The Blood's Horizon Godmind Destiny as Density Trance Port The Untelling Epilogue Appendix Worldline Profiles Argot Thingscanbe— and their Being is grounded inNothing's ability tonoth. —kenneth burke, Language as Symbolic Action ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABC Amber LIT Converter ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 www.ABBYY.com http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html www.ABBYY.com DISTORTS No man knows himself.—Iching Firstness Blinded by the headlights, Sumner Kagan lunged off the road and slid down the dirt embankment into the dark. Above and behind him braking tires squealed furiously. Sav-age voices yowled as the Nothungs, in leather streetgear, rolled out of their Death Crib and chased after him. They were five viper-thin men with blood-bruised ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABC Amber LIT Converter ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 www.ABBYY.com http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html www.ABBYY.com eyes and teeth filed to points. "Run, Wad—run!" the Nothungs yelled. At the bottom of the incline Sumner veered into the marsh. He looked like a spooked cow in the dark, waddling heftily from side to side, with only the Death Crib's head-lights shimmering off his smudged and tattered shirt. He pushed into the tall grass, arms flailing wildly. His night vision had returned and he could see clearly the squat silhou-ette of the alkaloid factory on the horizon. He knew there was a packed dirt path somewhere around here. Not far behind, the Nothungs were whistling chains through the air, howling, and cracking stones together. If he merely stumbled he would be torn to pieces—the police could search the marshes for weeks and still they wouldn't find all of him. He thrashed through a brake of cattails, and then his feet hit hard earth. It was the path, a straight run to the alkaloid factory. In the west the Goat Nebula was rising. He screwed his mind into that brilliant green spark and kept his thick legs pumping. When he reached the chain-link fence of the factory the Nothungs were close enough to pelt his broad, stoop-shouldered back with scattered handfuls of gravel. There was barely time to find the hole that he had sheared through the fence earlier that day. He found it beneath the massive and mud-streaked billboard: NO GO! TRESPASSERS SHOT! He bellycrawled through and had to strain to haul his corpulent body to its feet. He banged up a long metal ramp toward a broad staircase that ascended into the dark galleries of the factory. It was bad planning, he told himself, to have to climb stairs after such a long run. It might all end here.Rau! His feet and legs were numb with fatigue and his heart was slamming in his throat. He fixed his eyes on the dark shadows at the head of the stairs and ignored the pain that stabbed him more sharply with each step. Just as he made it to the top, one of the Nothungs clutched at his pants and ripped off his back pocket. Desper-ately, spastically, he sprawled forward and kicked free. Strug-gling with his own pendulous weight, he pulled himself to his feet as the Nothungs came bellowing over the top. Exhaustion staggered him but he fought against it. The big vat was up ahead. He could see it below through the wire mesh of the ramp. ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABC Amber LIT Converter ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 www.ABBYY.com http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html www.ABBYY.com The Nothungs were now coming up strong directly be-hind him, ricocheting their chains off the pipes on either side. They thought they had him trapped. Alone, in an aban-doned factory. That appealed to their imaginations. Sumner had known it would. The silver scars on the metal post, where the DANGER sign had once been, blurred past him, and Sumner took its cue and leaped. The knotted rope was there all right, and its stiff threads stung his pulpy hands as he swung heavily to the other side. There were two sharp screams behind him, two splashes. Swiftly he looped the rope around the railing and, plod-ding off into the darkness, found the broad pipe that would carry him back to the other side. He staggered along it, adjacent to the ramp where three silent Nothungs were meekly peering down into the darkness. An emergency waterhose was just where he had left it. He had tested it that morning. One of the Nothungs was yelling across the darkness: "We'll find you, fat boy! We'll rip you!" "Aw, blow it out, screwfaces," Sumner said, just loud enough to be heard. He had already turned the waterpower on, and as three rage- dark faces spun around, he opened the valve. The blast clipped their legs out from under them and logrolled them off the ramp, their wails lost in the hiss and bang of water hitting acid. Sumner listened deeply to the hissing water as he crouched with fatigue over the limp hose. His breath was tight in his throat, and his leg muscles were spasming from the hard run. He paused only briefly before taking a canister of red spraypaint from its hiding place beside the waterhose. With an unsteady arm he mist-scrawled on one of the broad overhead pipes: SUGARAT. Sumner didn't stop to rest until he got to his car in a lot behind the factory. It was a standard bottle-green electric car, squarebacked, with three small hard rubber tires and two scoop seats. He loved it more than anything else. It was his home, more of a place of fealty and comfort than the rug-walled residence he shared with his mother. He slumped over and laid his head and arms on the cool metal roof. When he caught his breath he opened the door and dropped into the driver's seat, his head lolling back against the headrest. One hand fingered the wooden steering wheel and the other dangled over a carton of stale crumbcake. He stuffed a morsel in his mouth, and though it was dry and powdery, a fossil of its original flavor spread ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABC Amber LIT Converter ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 www.ABBYY.com http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html www.ABBYY.com over his tongue. He closed his eyes to savor it. He hadn't eaten in two days. He had had to settle this thing with the Nothungs, and he couldn't enjoy eating when he was thinking about killing. But now that was over. It was time for the Tour. His stomach grumbled in anticipation. Stuffing another block of cake in his mouth, he slid the starter chip into the ignition slot. He felt a warmth spread over him as he opened the clutch, set the car in gear, and wheeled out through the elephant grass. Sumner and his car had a lot in common. They were both bulky, squarebacked, and sloppy. Dunes of crumbs drifted out of the corners and over stains of beer, gravy, and pastry fillings. Shreds of wrapping paper, crushed cookie cartons, a bedraggled sock, and numerous bottle caps were wedged between the seats and under the dash. And there, beneath the particolored triangular Eye of Lami—which Jeanlu the witch-voor had given him to protect him from his enemies—were three words: BORN TO DREAD. Their am-biguity pleased him. Besides eating, the thing he did most consistently and with the most fervor was dread. Anxiety sparked through him constantly. And though he hated its hot taste in the back of his throat, he accepted it as one of the necessary indignities of life. So he ate, as if his dread were something that could be smothered somewhere deep in his gut, broken down, and digested. But his real obsession wasn't food or anxiety. He wanted to be dreaded. He wanted to be the legendary Dark One— magic shining through his ugliness, indifferent to loneliness, deep and calm with violence. He wanted everyone to know he was dangerous. The problem was that no one ever witnessed his daring deceptions. He was the Sugarat. And no one knew. In the past six years the Sugarat had achieved a notori-ety that fringed on myth. At first he had singled out streetgangs who had humiliated or abused him. He had trapped and destroyed them for his own gratification, never considering that there would be repercussions. But his first few kills had created such a power imbalance among the many gangs of McClure that street warfare raged as it never had before. Rival gangs warred to fill the vacancies the Sugarat had opened up. Firebombs exploded in the homes of gang lead-ers. Assassinations bloodied commuter trains. Hand to hand combat in the markets and shops became commonplace in the days that followed each of the Sugarat's vendettas. ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABC Amber LIT Converter ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 www.ABBYY.com http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html www.ABBYY.com Sumner thrived on this power. He began to kill more often, for insults and slights he wouldn't have noticed before. He had become important. He had found a way of shaking the world. Of course, there was always the very real likeli-hood that one of his ploys would backfire, but the dread of being mauled by a gang in no way matched the loathing he felt for himself when he was alone and bored. It was only dread and a little luck that had kept him alive this long. But now the police wanted Sugarat, and that was some-thing else. For six years they had known he was behind the spasms of violence wrenching the city. They wanted him at any price, but there was nobody, not one weaselly informer, not one witness or skinny- shanked clue to point him out. Nobody knew the Sugarat. That was why Sumner needed the Tour—to feel what he had done in the past, to know who he was now. He drove first along a rutted dirt road that smoothed into a causeway and arced out of the industrial district. In a few moments he was at the edge of his hometown, McClure. He parked the car in a dirt field crowded with the hulks of convoy trucks and ambled into The Bent Knife. Ignoring the stares of the dogfaced truckers, he wedged himself into a phone stall and called the police. "Zh-zh," he hissed when the phone was picked up. The officer at the other end groaned, recognizing the ritual greet-ing of the Sugarat. Sumner smiled and in a mumbled whisper told the police where they could find the Nothung corpses. Then he hung up and, tucking his torn shirt in as he went along, lumbered over to the counter and ordered six sand-wiches to go. He liked his sandwiches wide open and sloppy: horseneck clams with miso and seaweed; chunks of veal blanketed in a mushroom sauce of puffballs and chicken-of-the-woods. At The Bent Knife, however, he settled for egg gumbo on toast and barley rolls stuffed with hot pressed tongue. He drove back into the ancient, burned-out factory dis-trict. He didn't touch his food but let its steamy odors graze his nostrils with the seductive promise of heartburn. The Tour began at the site of. the first kill of his life. It was a fire- gutted warehouse, just a sunken-in crater with three scorched aluminum walls tottering around it. He parked his car where he could clearly see the seared white ash of the interior and, on one of the ribbed aluminum walls, streaked with mud and smoke, the huge scrawled letters SUGARAT. ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABC Amber LIT Converter ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 www.ABBYY.com http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html www.ABBYY.com He broke out one of the egg sandwiches, sniffed it ap-preciatively, then devoured it as he reminisced. He had killed seven members of the Black Touch here. The hardest part had been getting the gasoline. It was expensive, and he had had to starve himself to be able to afford enough of it. As for the liquid detergent, he had simply waited for a shipment to come in to the local mart and then, in his old delivery boy outfit, rolled off a barrel of it. Mixed together, the gasoline and the thick detergent made an extremely viscous incendi-ary. He had stacked three drums of it in the rafters of the warehouse. The strategy had been the same. When the razor-fisted headbreakers of the Black Touch chased him into the building, he had doused them with the firegun and touched them off with a torch flare. The burn had been beautiful, the screaming brief. It was his best kill. A perfect dupe. Every-thing he had done in the six years since was derivative. Sumner cruised his kill-sites, enjoying his food and re-playing his strategies. Stacked vertically on the I-beam of a broken trestle were the letters SUGARAT. Beside it was a black tumulus of rail gravel. This was where Sumner had lured a whole gang of Bigbloods beneath the drop-site of a gravel loader. When the chute opened they had been sight-ing him with their makeshift nail-slings. They never got off a shot. At another table, with the dank susurrus of a bog twirl-ing about him, he sat on the hood of his car nibbling a barley roll. He gazed into the darkness and the shape of dead trees where the Slash headbreakers had pursued him over a swampbridge. The bridge had been tricked to collapse, of course. But the real shocker for the headbreakers came after they sloshed into the bog—when Sumner ignited the firegum coating the mud they were in. When his last sandwich was eaten, Sumner was parked again outside the alkaloid factory. He figured the police had come and gone, because the Death Crib had been taken away. He only vaguely remembered why he had killed the Slash, the Black Touch, and the Bigbloods. It was hard to remember. He didn't think about it much. He wasn't one to brood, though his problems loomed larger each day. He had been out of work for a year and, at seventeen, was already the father of a five-year-old boy he was terrified of. Yet he rarely mulled over his life. He was motivated by a muscular intuition, an urging in the meat of his body to eat, to kill, to find sex. It was his dread. For Sumner, finding sex was a lot more difficult than setting up a kill. He was big and ugly: six foot five, with rolls of fat bagging under his ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABC Amber LIT Converter ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 www.ABBYY.com http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html www.ABBYY.com eyes, coiling around his neck, swaying like tits under his shirt. His face was glazed with the seepings of subcutaneous grease and crusty with eruptions that never went away but only migrated across his features. He had tried to grow a beard, but it came in mangy and made him look diseased. It disgusted him to see himself, so he had ripped out the rearview mirror in his car and kept apart, even from himself. On the way back into McClure, Sumner picked up some pastries and cruised through the residential streets, eyeing the houses of all the women he desired. McClure was an old city, maybe four hundred years old, and like most of the towns that had cropped up this deep in the interior, it was made of stone. At least the older buildings were. It was a matter of necessity, since the weather was dangerously unpredictable. Fierce cyclones—raga storms—with winds of four hundred kilometers an hour swooped across the country with little warning. Whole cities were sometimes lost, coastlines reshaped. Nonetheless, wooden houses were perched on hills in the more affluent sections. They were status symbols in the truest sense, meant to be abandoned when the raga storms came. As part of the nexus of McClure's society, the wealthy had been able to reserve cubicles in the Berth, a massive citadel in the center of town. Even if the Berth were to be completely buried by a raga storm, there was enough oxygen, food, and water inside to sustain thousands of people until they could dig themselves out. Sumner packed a honeytwist into his mouth and farted when he passed the orange nite-glo sign with the Massebôth symbol on it. It marked the inner city limits and declared that the area was under Massebôth protection. The symbol was two pillars. One was supposed to be ivory and the other black obsidian. The ivory one, as Sumner remembered from his grim two years of mandatory civil education, represented cultural preservation and advance-ment. The secrets of petroleum refinement, vulcanized rub-ber, antibiotics, transistor circuitry, and too much else that had been taken for granted for years were forgotten after the apocalypse that ended the kro-culture. Those that had survived the holocaust and the dark centuries that followed were many generations past any memory of civilization. Only a handful had preserved snatches of the old technology and culture. In time they got together and assembled a civilized community. Centuries later, the Massebôth Protectorate emerged. The white pillar was the symbol of its heritage. ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 ABC Amber LIT Converter ABBYY PClDicFk hTerrae tno sbfouyrmer2.0 www.ABBYY.com http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html www.ABBYY.com The obsidian pillar stood for the muscle of the Protector-ate. Though the Massebôth were confined to the eastern seacoast, with only a few settlements like McClure in the interior, they had the military strength to dominate a much larger empire. What confined them was not the threat of the tribes to the north and west but something that was wrong with the human race. Distorts—people who were genetically malformed—were more the rule than the exception these days, and the Massebôth, who liked things the way they were, had their hands full keeping their population strong. Also, most of the planet was still unmapped. The Protec-torate just didn't have the resources to cope with the vastness and strangeness of their own continent, let alone the rest of the world. A lot was left unexplained—like devas. Military reports, two famous film clips, and rumors described the awesome power of the devas. No one knew what they were, or even if they were intelligent. They had apparently saved endangered explorer-craft, but they had also smashed mapping- balloons that had journeyed too far north. Vast funnels of light were how they were invariably witnessed. But always deep in the unmapped north. Sumner took the word of his teachers that there had been a time before devas and distorts and raga storms. He didn't think about it much, but he liked to feel that he was informed. That's why he hated going through center-city McClure. There on the massive time-stained walls of the Berth, which housed the university and all the administrative buildings, were scrawls, graffiti, cerebral vomit. Instead of the streetnames or gang slogans that were brightly streaked throughout his neighborhood, the Berth walls were roweled with nonsense— YOU ARE THE PERPETUAL STRANGLE BELIEVE IN NEVER NOTHING ALWAYS AMNESTY FOR THE DEAD! It was infuriating. But there was no way for Sumner to get to where he was going without passing the Berth. To-night, as the walls loomed closer, their smoky searchlights swinging overhead, he spotted a new scrawl, much larger than the rest— ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html