Radix

"Tud," the redhead spit. "White cards shouldn't get it free. Not when they're that ugly."
"Tell it to Mutra," the older woman said. They were the only two on call that night, and the dowdy dressing room where they sat was sad with the other women's absence: vacant dressing stalls hung with lingerie and shadows. She opened a blue vial, propped her foot on a small table, and began painting her toenails. "Got your bag in?"
For white card men, the women wore diaphragms de-signed to catch and hold the valuable sperm. Later, the seminal fluid was transferred to special ampules and sent to the birth camps where would-be mothers were inseminated. The work was Mutra's holy mission, and all the women involved were well paid. Even so, the redhead was reluctant to service Sumner. "If only he weren't so gross. I've had him the last three times. My luck must be dead. Do you think—"
"No." The older woman scowled and shook her head. "This flop is yours."
Scrubbed down, Sumner went to the narrow room where a redhead in traditional lingerie was sitting on the edge of the cot. He had been with her several times before, and he was familiar with her moves. Like all the others she was revulsed by his obesity, so he didn't dawdle. The disgust in her face was dulled by the dim light, but Sumner could feel how her flesh tightened under his touch. When he mounted her he looked at her breasts and her firebright hair but not her eyes.
He rutted mechanically, the way he masturbated. Within moments, spurred by the cold lust of having killed, hot with the memory of almost being killed, he was seized by an orgasm.
The redhead squeezed herself out from under him. Only after the door glared open and darkened behind her did Sumner realize they hadn't said a word to each other.
Sumner dressed clumsily and lumbered out to his car, sexually hollowed and emotionally abraded. He hated seeing his ugliness in the way the prostitutes handled him. That was always harder than looking in a mirror, but he needed the relief, especially after a kill. As he drove off he thought about the kill and how close he had come to losing himself.
When he got home, the triumph of duping the Nothungs was all spooled out. The Tour had given him a relentless dose of heartburn, and the unfathomable writing on the Berth walls had started his dread smoldering again. Not even cruis-ing the love streets and getting laid had eased him. He wanted to be alone, but he knew that his gawky mother with her sharp face and piercing voice would be waiting up for him.
Reluctantly, Sumner chained and bolted the low garage door and took a long look down the street to steel himself for the inevitable. The avenue was made of packed dirt with wooden planks laid over it. It was narrow and lined on both sides with tall thin buildings of rough black stone. It was late, and no one was
sitting out on the stoops. Down at the far end of the street, among the rusted supports of the elevated train, a pack of dogs moved from alley to alley like a breeze of specters.
Sumner opened the heavy door with his latchkey and stood for a moment in the foyer. He let the fusty odor of clove incense settle in on him and adjusted his eyes to the papery light of the globe lanterns that dangled above. Behind the steep stairway with its frayed red carpet was a small room that led into the basement. There his mother held her spirit sessions. A sharp voice called out: "Is that you, pudding?"
Sumner grunted and started up the stairs. On the third step a woman's face appeared between the slim posts of the banister. It was the color of clouded silver with pink rubbery lips and radiant black eyes. She was framed in a halo of fire-frizzed hair. "Where're you going, pudding?"
"Nowhere, Ma," Sumner replied.
"Nowhere isn't a place," his mother reminded him. She stepped around the banister and stood at the foot of the stairs. She was small, thin as a needle, with flat, wrinkled dugs just barely covered by a crinkled blue shift. The red paint of her eyelids was so thick it smeared as her eyes widened to take in Sumner's mud-knobbed boots, his splat-tered pants, and the mushroom-pale midriff bulging over his belt.
"What in the name of Mutra have you been doing?" she shrilled, clutching at the two black feathers that hung be-neath the folds of her neck. "Work those boots off now and leave them outside. The wangol you drag home is moody enough without lugging the flesh of the planet through here."
Sumner's mother made her living as a spirit guide. She conversed with the dead in people's shadows and was re-puted to be almost as receptive as a voor, though Sumner knew for a fact that she wasn't. Nonetheless, she had an awesome reputation in the neighborhood, maintained by being meticulous about the influences—or wangol—that entered her home. Mud, a veritable broth of primal wangol, was strictly forbidden.
As Sumner sat on the stoop removing his boots she went over to the sludge he had dragged in and sprinkled it with a white powder from a small horn she kept strapped to her thigh. She said it was elk marrow dust that neutralized unfa-miliar wangol, but Sumner had found out long ago that it was nothing but detergent and bread crumbs.
It wasn't that his mother was a blatant charlatan. She really believed it was elk marrow dust. But Sumner knew the old crone who sold his mother her wangol supplies. She used to be a whore, years and years ago, but when she lost her leg plying her trade in a toolshed where an electric swivel-saw had been left carelessly plugged in, she resorted to a life of wangol worship. Once, as a little kid, Sumner had hidden himself in a root cellar of the old crone's house. There, leaning on a stuffed crocodile, surrounded by long strings of garlic, and bottles and vials of various luck powders, he peered through a knothole and watched her prepare her neomancy stash: Rusty water became Getaway Lotion, grease and sawdust became Wangol Oil, and commercial detergent and bread crumbs were concocted into elk marrow dust. Even in those fargone days Sumner was a loner. He had never told his mother what he had seen.
It probably wouldn't have made much difference. Zelda was devout. She had a blue rose tattoo on her lower left buttock, something Sumner spied in his first explosive days of puberty, and she went out twice a week to commune with other spirit guides from all over the city. Besides, without the zords that her shadow-reading brought in, they would both probably starve.
The only thing that absolutely infuriated Sumner was Zelda's professed capacity to speak directly and authorita-tively to his dead father. The business about all the terrible wangol he hauled around was tolerable. The four times a year that she set her hair on fire and ran through the house to clear out evil powers were smelly but amusing. And the warty, liver-spotted old men she let use her body to help commune with their dead wives were merely disgusting. But when she would stop in midsentence to consult his dead father, Sumner had to bite his tongue to keep from strangling her.
With his boots off, Sumner trudged up the stairs, care-fully averting his eyes from the cheap rugs that hung from the ceiling. Insipid scenes of misty bogs and full moons over mirror-slick sea covered the scabby, mildewed walls. Zelda was hopping along right behind him. "What have you done to yourself, pudding? You come home sludged as a corpse and not a word out of your sad mouth for your mother. You've been to the whorehouse again, haven't you? Look at your hair, it's still wet. Don't you have any respect for yourself? Do you want children you'll never see by women you'll never see? Why throw your seed at Mutra when you could marry the way your father did. He was a blue card, and he didn't drop his seed foolishly. Where would you be now if he did? In some Mutra camp without parents, with a government name, never knowing who you were. Do you want that for your children? You're a white card, Sumner. You're rare—a spirit blessing. If you cleaned yourself up and lost some weight, you could marry into a wealthy family. You could open your life. You could do something for your mother— instead of this." She poked his expansive gut. "Tell me what happened to you. Was it an accident? It wasn't an accident! Not in your father's car!"