Radix

"Sit still, waddle," the old voor's voice spoke from some-where beside the truck.
Sumner backed away, feeling his aggression congeal to cold fear. He couldn't tear his eyes away from the cretin face with its cushiony flesh and glossy lips. Its grotesqueness drained him, and he slumped back against the far wall.
With a jolt the antique truck lurched to a start, and he was thrown across the rusted floor. Fighting the sway of the truck, he crawled to the front of the compartment and laced his fingers through the wire mesh of the window that was there. The two voors paid no attention to him, and he looked beyond them, through the bug-splattered windshield at the empty wharf road they were bumping down.
He hung to the wire mesh and gazed intently, hoping to spot some landmark that would give him an idea of where they were taking him. But that was hopeless. The cowled driver seemed to be turning corners randomly, backtracking on himself again and again. At first, Sumner thought they were trying to confuse him, but that didn't make sense. They'd hood me if I wasn't supposed to know, he reasoned.
It was only after he glimpsed, at the far end of one street, a gray car with black and white pillars on its hood, that he understood what was happening. The voors were using their telepathy to elude the police. They were looking for a gap in the stop-and-search patrols that ringed the city. After a few minutes of circling, they found one.
Sumner had never been outside of McClure. Most peo-ple spent their whole lives in the city and never left. There was no reason to leave. Outside was wilderness where hind rats and distort tribes ruled. Other cities were far off, and unless you were a merchant or convoy driver they offered nothing that couldn't be found in McClure.
Awed, Sumner watched the dark gaunt buildings of McClure bob off into the distance. All around them was desert—flat and empty as an ancient seabed. "Where're you taking me?" Sumner demanded.
"You're going to get laid, waddle," the old voor said. "Nothing more."
Sumner knew from the tone of the voor's voice that it was hopeless to ask more questions. He was sure that they were taking him someplace desolate where they could canni-balize him at their leisure.
After more than an hour of being jostled and thrown about, Sumner felt the road smooth out. On the left was black rock, immense palisades. On the right, a yawn of space. They were on a ledge road, bucking along at almost top speed. Sumner was so nervous that he didn't even glance to the right. When he did, he gasped.
Down below, for as far as he could see, was a desert of pale green sand laced with swirls of black ash. Everywhere there were broken domes, spires, and turrets fantastically honeycombed, pocked, cratered, and smoothed by wind ero-sion. The place was a labyrinth of arabesque shapes, echoes of radiance and scaled colors. It took Sumner a long while to perceive that the broken honeycombs were buildings: The whole colossal landscape was—had been—a city!
"It was called Houston," the old voor said. "Or Dallas. I'm not sure which anymore."
Sumner stared dumbfounded at the ghost city and its phantasmagoric shapes until the rickety truck suddenly swung off the rimroad. White chalk cliffs blocked his view of the Flats as they careened along a rutted dirt track. In a cluster of old big-boled trees, they jerked to a stop.
Beyond the trees was a small whitewashed adobe cottage with coral-pink tiles scaling a swayback roof. Blue gentians bloomed in wooden troughs beneath oval clear glass win-dows. Behind the cottage was a cirque of tamarind trees bowing over a crystal blue pool that had formed in the basin of an old bomb crater.
The two voors, one on either side, led Sumner along a mica-flecked path to the edge of the pool. A large wooden tub was there brimming with sudsy water.
"Off with your clothes, waddle."
Sumner nervously obeyed. When he was naked, the old voor scooped a bulky sponge out of the tub and threw it at him. "Wash," he ordered. When he had lathered himself all over, they shoved him into the pool. The water was deep but warm, and he clung to the side while the voors sudsed and soaked his clothes and then beat them dry on a large sunbaked boulder.
He dressed, and the voors walked him back to the front of the cottage. The old voor motioned Sumner toward the house.
Sumner fidgeted.
"Just get over there, howlie," the old voor said, his voice severe. "You want to go home, right? Then do what I say."
Sumner walked up to the cottage and climbed the three polished cedar steps to the door. He moved to knock, but before his hand came down, the door opened.
A woman stood in the doorway wearing a flinty-blue dress with threads of gold at the cuffs and a wide-throated collar. She was gorgeous—tall, with a musical body and black rambling hair. Her eyes, liquid and dreamy as any voor's, were smoke-blue and sparked with many strawberry-gold flecks. She ran a slender hand along the doorjamb and ges-tured for Sumner to come in.
There was something selcouth about the place. Beer-colored shafts of sunlight filled the room, threading through dense curtains of drying roots and flowers. Brown Indian pipes, swamp violets, groundsel, bloodweed, wind apples, and ice-clear stalks of kiutl hung from thick, well-seasoned rafters.
"My name's Jeanlu," the woman said.
Sumner stammered out his name and lingered in the doorway until Jeanlu closed the door and offered him a seat.
"Sit down, please." Her voice was gentle and unhurried, and she trailed a delicate musky scent that set her apart from the brassy aroma of the plants. Sumner sat down, his eyes torn between her and the colorful carpet.
"This is my veve," she said, gesturing at the carpet, a patchwork of eleven different landscapes: a red sea combed by wind; dark sheol-flowers sprouting beneath two moons; blue-barked pines; and a series of brilliant images that could have come from a scansule crystal display. "Do you know what a veve is?"
Sumner shook his head.
"Every voor has one, in some form or other. It shows our lineage—where we're from." She pointed to a black square pinpointed with white flecks. "This is a planet we call Unchala. It doesn't exist anymore. An eternity ago it was the home of all voors, in a galaxy you don't have a name for."
Sumner wasn't listening. He expected the other voors to come in any moment. "How come there are eleven?" he asked, afraid of a silence.
"That's all any voor remembers. We all remember a different eleven. It's sharing that holds the brood together." She walked over to the stove. "Would you like something to drink?"
He shook his head and began cracking his knuckles nervously. His hands were large and fat, scabby with dirt that even the sudsy bath couldn't get out. They were a testament to his perpetual anxiety, the nails chewed to nubs.
"Something to eat, perhaps?" She held out a pastry glistening with honey and studded with almonds. He couldn't refuse.
While he worked on the pastry, he studied Jeanlu. She was very attractive, and he began to wonder if maybe the old voor had been telling the truth. What if she does want me? he thought with a pang of fear. He had never been intimate with a woman before.
"Don't worry about it," Jeanlu said with a handsome smile. "I'm sure you'll catch on quickly."
Sumner's ears flared red. She was so beautiful he had forgotten she was a voor. She could read his thoughts as easily as the embarrassment on his face. "But why me?" he managed to blurt out, trying to cover his lapse. "I'm . . ." He was going to say ugly, but instead mumbled, ". . . just a kid. I'm only eleven."
"I don't care," she said sincerely. "You have a white card. That's all that matters to me."
Sumner swallowed the last morsel of pastry and shifted uncomfortably in the chair.