A. A. Attanasio - Radix Tetrad 1 - Radix

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[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 his
New 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
Teeth Dreams
Voors
The Mysteries
The Emptying
The Blood's Horizon
Godmind
Destiny as Density
Trance Port
The Untelling
Epilogue
Appendix
Worldline
Profiles
Argot
Things can be—
and their Being is grounded
in Nothing's ability to noth.
—kenneth burke,
Language as Symbolic Action
DISTORTS
No man knows himself. —I ching
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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—
GIVE UP
YOUR ENDOCRINE INFATUATION BEFORE YOUR FIRST THRILL ON MALIGNANCY
HILL
Sumner used to wonder who it was that went around writing this stuff and how they did it without
getting caught. One night he left his car at home and walked into center-city. He lurked for hours in the
dank, gloomy alleys, peering out at a long sweep of the Berth walls. Eventually, a kid maybe fifteen years
old strolled past. Large glossy letters began to appear, spraypainted on backwards as he went by. Sumner
waited until he was done, then lunged out and snagged him. At first he thought it was a voor, but when he
held him to the light he could plainly see it was only a nervous kid.
"What the rauk is this supposed to mean?" Sumner demanded, lifting the punk toward the still dripping
paint— FIRSTNESS.
The boy looked at him apprehensively, thinking perhaps that Sumner was a Massebôth cop. When he
saw that he was just an ugly face, he pulled himself loose and straightened his shirt. His hair was
close-cropped, his ears unpierced, his clothes plain, and there was a listless, chalky look on his face. He
was obviously a student.
"Spill it," Sumner ordered. He despised students be-cause they were pithless White Pillar lackeys who
thought they had the inside view of reality.
"Where're you from?" the boy asked, pulling himself up and looking Sumner straight in the eyes.
"Right here in McClure, slip. Down by the Point."
"Nuh," the student said. "I mean before that."
"What? I've always lived in the city."
The student shook his head sadly. "Think about it, tud. Where were you before McClure?" He turned to
go, and then looked back once, a little annoyed, a little bemused. "Don't stop thinking about it."
The only thing Sumner had been thinking about at that moment was grabbing the boy by his ankles and
bashing his head against his scrawl. But he had held back. This was Massebôth territory, and the last thing
he had wanted was a run-in with the police, especially over a sapless student.
Sumner had no respect for the White Pillar. They were stringent scientists and yet they worshipped
Mutra, a deity that rebirthed humans until they attained genetic perfection.
Absurd turds, Sumner thought, banking his car through the nightshadow of the Berth. Most of the
city—most of the world, as far as he knew—were distorts. They were catego-rized by color code and
摘要：

[RadixTetrad01]–RadixByA.A.AttanasioScanned,formattedandproof-readbyBW-SciFiReleaseDate:18th,July,2003EbookVersion1.0AcknowledgmentsTheinwardnessofthisefforthasindebtedmetomanypeople.Iamparticularlygratefultomyfamilyfortheircompassionatesupport;thepoetJonLangforsharinghisvisionsandforallowingmetotra...

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