Radiant

CHAPTER 10

Tanha [Pali]: Craving, in the sense of fixation. It’s natural to want food when you’re hungry, but it’s unskillful to fixate on food. One can fixate on fears, hopes, ideas, etc., just as easily as one fixates on physical cravings. The Buddha’s second truth is that fixation is the cause of all suffering.

Festina and Tut landed safely. Tut began gathering his parachute, but Festina just waved at me to take care of hers while she set up a Sperm-field anchor.

Captain Cohen would soon maneuver Pistachio to wag the ship’s tail toward us. He’d been tracking us up to the point we got EMP’d, so he could approximate when we’d be in position for a lock attempt. Festina therefore unstrapped one of the carrying cases from her chest and drew the mirror-sphere from inside. All three of us looked for mist nearby… but the EMP cloud was nowhere in sight. Since its last target had been Li’s shuttle, perhaps the cloud was staying with the craft. For some reason, I imagined the cloud hovering steamily just outside the cockpit, taking malicious delight in watching Li try to land without instruments or electricity.

Too bad for Li; but his troubles might make things easier for us. If Li and the shuttle kept the EMP cloud distracted, we could establish our lifeline back to Pistachio without interference. Festina set the mirror-sphere in the grass at her feet — the grass as yellow as saffron — then we waited for the Sperm-tail to arrive.

The waiting gave me time to look around again, not for hostile EMP clouds but for a sense of where we were. The Grindstone was thirty paces to my right — a slow-moving river almost a kilometer wide, filled with coffee brown water and wads of foliage floating or caught on reeds near the shoreline. We stood on the western floodplain, and I do mean flood: the Grindstone’s banks were so low, the area where I stood would be underwater almost every spring. Yellow grass grew at our feet, along with the sort of scrub brush that can sprout waist-high over a single summer; but nothing more permanent had seeded on these flats, because the yearly floods drowned any plants that tried to become perennial.

To my left, a hundred meters from the riverbank, rose a second bank that bounded the floodplain. This bank was two stories high, choked with multicolored vegetation but cut by a few scrabbly trails worn through the weeds — paths that animals had made when going to drink at the river.

On top of the higher bank, the Unity huts formed a single long line like a dozen river-watching sentinels. Some study had found that a survey team’s productivity improved by 0.8 percent if every member’s living quarters had a scenic view of water. Therefore, as per standing regulations, the huts lined across the top of the rise so that everyone could look out a window and see the river.

The huts themselves appeared primitive: wooden walls, thatched roofs. But the wood wasn’t wood and the thatch wasn’t thatch — both were flameproof, weatherproof synthetics with a high insulation factor and suffused with nontoxic repellents to discourage insects. Even so, the Unity did a superlative job of simulating natural materials. They even gave survey team huts a pleasant woody smell… because, of course, another study had found that performance improved by some fraction when team members could fill their nostrils with forestlike aromas. Everything inside the huts would be similarly optimized for efficiency, safety, and salutary psychological effect; but I had no more time for gawking around, because Pistachio’s Sperm-tail came sweeping across the valley.

Festina didn’t hesitate. Usually you open a stasis field with a special needle-nosed tool that pops the outer shell like a soap bubble… but Festina simply punched the silvery surface with her fist. The mirror-field burst with a gassy hiss, revealing its cache of contents: Bumbler, stun-pistol, comm unit, and anchor. The anchor was a small black box with four horseshoe-shaped gold inlays on its upper surface. Festina grabbed the anchor and moved it to a clear patch of grass. Then she pressed the ON switch.

The Sperm-tail reacted immediately. Up till now, it had simply been wagging at random, lazily swinging like a bell-ringer’s rope… but as soon as the anchor was activated, the tail’s behavior acquired a sense of purpose. It raced straight toward us, responding to the anchor device’s invisible pull.

Sperm-tails always reminded me of long, thin tornadoes: the bottom tip kissing the ground… the funnel cloud creamy but sparkling with glints of green and blue… the whole thing stretching far up out of sight, past the clouds, past the ozone, all the way to where Pistachio waited.

And once we’d locked onto the Sperm-tail, it would provide a nearly instantaneous route from Muta’s surface to our ship. For us as well as…

Uh-oh.

I closed my eyes, thinking, Balrog, help me. Then I did something I’d never done before: reached out with my sixth sense. Used it actively instead of passively receiving whatever came in. Spread my mind to the world, trying to listen rather than merely hear.

The busy life force of insects. The placid life force of plants. The ponderous life force of microorganisms, too simple to have any emotion — just the sense of presence, like the feel of stone when you’re in the mountains. The complicated auras of Festina and Tut. And beyond those known entities, what else? I expanded my senses, sank into them as I’d sink into meditation, noted anything that seemed out of place…

…and there it was. A spark of eagerness, hidden in the background. Burning anticipation. The spark was so faint, it must be trying to conceal itself… but it was too excited, too hungry, to be perfectly restrained.

The EMP cloud was waiting for us to connect with Pistachio. It wasn’t off chasing the shuttle; it had circled back in secret. And the Sperm-tail was now only meters away, speeding straight for the anchor.

Feeling sick at what I had to do, I lifted my heel and slammed it down on the little black box. The box’s casing shattered; internal circuit boards snapped under my foot.

The Sperm-tail, our one route off Muta, danced away like a fishing line that’s been deliberately cut.

Festina whirled toward me. Her life force erupted with fury, but with our comms dead, I couldn’t hear the curses she must have been spewing my way.

Then suddenly, we were enveloped in fog. It came from everywhere: from the ground, from the river, oozing from pores in the scrub brush, vomiting from the mouths of insects, distilling from the very air. The cloud had even been hiding on our own tightsuits, nestled into tucks of the fabric, lurking in our belt pouches and backpacks. Now it emerged in a roar of anger, beating so hard on my mental awareness I almost passed out… until in a flash my sixth sense vanished — either burned out from overload or shut down by the Balrog to protect my vulnerable brain from the howling din.

Fog surged and roiled around me, as if clawing my suit with vaporous talons. I couldn’t help thinking of pretas: the hungry ghosts of Bamar folktales, condemned to a realm near the lowest purgatory. They’re spirits of humans who based their lives on greed. In the afterlife, pretas are always ravenous, with huge stomachs but throats so tiny they can never swallow enough food to sate their appetites. Hungry, hungry forever… or at least until they learn something from their punishment and are ready to be born anew.

The pretas of Muta — the smoky cloud — swarmed furiously, just outside my suit. I could imagine dozens of ghosts in that cloud pressing their gaunt, starved faces against my visor, frenzied to devour me. By reflex, I began a protective chant — one I’d used to ward off demons when I was Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl. But the fog-things, the pretas, whatever they were, refused to be dispelled. They continued to curl angrily around me, as if they would crush me to paste if only they had the strength.

Festina loomed out of the mist. She touched her helmet to mine so we could hear each other talk. Immediately I babbled excuses for what I’d done: "I realized the cloud — it was out there — it wanted to board Pistachio, I don’t know why — but it was going to go right up the Sperm-tail and I — I’m sorry, but I had to…"

"Of course you did," Festina said. "I’m a fool not to think of it myself. I was just too busy trying to set up the link before we were EMP’d again. I never thought…" She turned her eyes skyward, though neither of us could see anything but fog. "This fucking cloud would have EMP’d the ship dead. Then… I don’t know. Maybe the damned mist wants a way off planet. Maybe it could have taken over Pistachio and used the ship to spread to other systems." She turned her gaze back to me. "Glad one of us was thinking."

"But now we’re marooned."

"Didn’t you always assume that would happen?"

"Yes. Sooner or later."

"Then we’re right where we expected," Festina said. "Mission unfolding according to plan: we land, we get screwed over, we try to survive." She gave a rueful smile. "The story of every Explorer’s life."

"Did you see how the shuttle turned after we…"

"Yes. Li must have stowed away. Probably Ubatu too. And if they landed in one piece, they’re now in Drill-Press. We’ll have to go rescue them."

She looked at me — eye to eye, our visors touching. Her voice came softly through. "Didn’t you expect that too, Youn Suu? Didn’t you guess something would force us to visit the city? And we’ll have to press on till we’ve solved this planet’s problems. Isn’t that what you expected?"

I thought about the avalanche of karma surrounding the woman in front of me. "Yes," I said. "I thought that’s how it would go."

Festina flicked out her hand and slapped me on the side of the head — not hard, but not soft either. "Idiot!" she yelled, loud enough for me to hear, though the slap had knocked my helmet away from hers. She leaned in again. "You’re an Explorer, for God’s sake! Didn’t the Academy teach you life is messy? You don’t necessarily learn the answers. You never tie off all the loose ends. Damned near every time you walk away from a mission, you’re thinking, What the fuck did that mean? Why did it happen like that? And you’ll never know. You’ll never even come close." She scowled at me through her visor. "How can you think this will work out neatly?"

"It won’t work out neatly," I said. "Maybe it won’t work out at all. But we are here to solve Muta’s problems. That’s why I got bitten by the Balrog. That’s why you happened to be on Cashleen. That’s why Li and Ubatu stowed away on the shuttle. And the Academy taught me exactly what it taught you: that an Explorer’s life is messy except when your strings are being pulled by smart, powerful aliens. Then the going gets neat and tidy… doesn’t it, Admiral?"

Festina glared for another moment; then she sighed. "Yes. When the Big Boys choose you as a pawn, they put you onto their chessboard and move you straight into trouble. But only up to a point. I don’t know exactly how the League thinks, but in recent years, I’ve developed a hand-waving theory about the way they treat us lesser beings. They’ll manipulate the shit out of us, without a shred of guilt, to bring us to a crossroads and a life-or-death decision. Then they let the chips fall where they may. The League won’t save your ass if you choose wrong. And there’s no guarantee you’ll like your choices. You might find death the most attractive option. The League doesn’t care much about human lives, but it cares a lot about human decisions. Sometimes I wonder if they deliberately arrange crises to test us. As if what we do in emergencies can answer some question they can’t address on their own."

Silence. Then I rolled my eyes and groaned. "And people call Buddhists superstitious! If you actually believe that old wives’ tale — that humans are needed by semidivine aliens to solve some grand problem that’s too deep for anyone else — honestly, Festina, that’s archaic! Haven’t we outgrown such wishful thinking? ‘Ooo, Homo sapiens may seem insignificant compared to higher species, but we’re actually the only hope for the League’s intellectual completion.’ What’s next, believing in fairies?"

Festina laughed and shoved me away. She made some retort, but the words were inaudible, muffled by her helmet. I found myself laughing too, not because anything was funny, but just from release of tension… and suddenly, the gloom around us was gone, literally as well as emotionally. The EMP cloud shot toward Drill-Press, and we were left blinking in bright afternoon sunshine.

I looked around for Tut. He wasn’t immediately visible, but I finally caught sight of him lying on his back, half hidden by yellow grass. Not too surprisingly, he was naked again; though he’d (mostly) stayed in uniform while aboard Pistachio, Tut apparently had strong nudist leanings. This time, with his tightsuit dead, he hadn’t had the luxury of instant undressing by emergency evac. Instead, he’d wrestled his suit off piece by piece — a strenuous process bare-handed, since disrobing was usually done by robots — then he’d piled component parts into a pillow for his head. When I walked up to him, he smiled and waved but remained where he was.

"Lot cooler like this, Mom. Want to join me?"

I shook my head. Explorers — sane Explorers — have a horror of exposing themselves to the microbes of an unknown planet. Eventually (as I’d already realized), my suit would have to come off. Its near-perfect insulation held in almost every microjoule of heat my body produced; without cooling systems, the interior was already reaching sauna temperature. Thanks to my Bamar genes, I could tolerate equatorial conditions for a while. But not forever. I was steeped in sweat like tea in a pot, all trickles and salt in my eyes.

Still, I could hold out till we got to the Unity camp. Then I’d rummage through the huts for clothing that fit me. Tut would have to do the same — nudist or not, he’d need clothes. It was autumn in this part of the world; come nightfall, the air would turn cool. And who knew how long we’d be here? In days or weeks, winter would come. Even though we were close to the tropics, there’d be frigid snaps that no one could survive naked.

Odd to think about freezing when I was verging on heatstroke. Welcome to the Explorer Corps.

When I turned back to look at Festina, she’d already removed her helmet. She hadn’t taken it off purely because she was hot (though the hair framing her face was sodden with perspiration); she’d been forced to open up because she wanted to talk to Pistachio. In her hand was the comm from the first stasis field she’d cracked… but the unit had apparently been EMP’d by the fog. Festina poked the ON button a few times without any effect. Then she tossed the device aside and opened another mirror-sphere. Another anchor, stun-pistol, Bumbler, and comm. I looked, but didn’t see the EMP cloud anywhere. Either it was truly gone, or it was playing possum in the hope we’d try to set up a Sperm-link again.

Festina turned on the new comm unit. It responded immediately: "Admiral Ramos, come in. Admiral Ramos, come in…" Pistachio’s ship-soul was once more on autorepeat.

"Ramos here," Festina said. Her voice barely reached my ears because of the muffling effect of my own helmet. I was annoyed to hear her so poorly… and annoyed that I immediately thought, Oh, I’ll take the helmet off, when only a few seconds earlier, I’d told myself I’d keep my suit sealed despite the threat of heat prostration. What a vac-head I was! Stubborn in the face of possible death, but buckling immediately if it meant being left out of other people’s conversation.

Still, I wanted to hear and to talk without my head trapped in a fishbowl. I flipped up the latches and unscrewed the helmet from its throat seal. The instant my suit was open, heat poured out through the neckhole, propelled by the high pressure that had inflated the suit’s skin. The subsequent rush of coolness was bliss.

"Admiral!" Cohen’s voice came through Festina’s handheld comm. Now I could hear it clearly. "What’s your status, Admiral? We thought the tail had locked, but then-"

"There’s an entity down here," Festina interrupted. "A cloud that can EMP things. Its behavior appears intelligent… or at least purposeful. Setting up a link would have given it a free ride to Pistachio."

"Oy. That would have been bad." The captain paused. "So what now?"

"We’re close to Camp Esteem. We’ll take a look around. But first, can you check the whereabouts of Li and Ubatu?"

A brief pause. Then: "The ship-soul says they aren’t aboard."

"Damn." Festina made a face. "Anyone else missing?"

Another pause. "No, Admiral. Just those two."

"Then they’re down here with us. Stowed away on the shuttle. Fuckwits. If they survived the landing, they’re in Drill-Press; we’ll have to go there after Camp Esteem." Festina took an angry breath. "While we’re doing that, Captain, why don’t you draw up a list of charges to put those shitheads in jail? It’ll help pass the time."

"Anything else we can do, Admiral?"

"No. Do not under any circumstances send another rescue team. That’s a Class One order. Stay in orbit and monitor the situation."

"I hate to ask this, Admiral, but how long do you want us to stay?"

"Last I heard, the Unity were sending one of their luna-ships. ETA three days. So stay till it gets here. After that, use your judgment; but given how little the Unity likes us, they’ll probably order you out of the system once you’ve given them a report."

"So they order me," Cohen said. "Doesn’t mean I have to go."

Festina suppressed a smile. "Captain, there’s no need to set off a diplomatic incident. The Unity may be humorless, but they’re not evil or incompetent. They’ll do what they can to rescue everyone — us as well as their own people. And a luna-ship has a lot more resources than a small Technocracy frigate. If it’s possible to get us back safely, the Unity will do it."

"And if it isn’t possible?"

"That’s what ‘expendable’ means, Captain. Ramos out."

The three of us started for the rise edging the floodplain. Tut took a few steps, then ouch-footed back to his pile of discarded suit parts. "Stepped on something," he said in a pained voice.

"An insect?" Festina asked. "A plant thorn? If it was something that might be poisonous to humans…"

"Nah, Auntie, it was just a sharp stone." Tut fished out his tightsuit’s boots and put them on. They fit snugly, coming up to his knees. I made a mental note that when I abandoned my tightsuit, I too would keep the boots; they were tough, well cushioned, and precisely fitted to my feet. I’d never find shoes half so perfect in the Unity camp.

"Take your gloves too," Festina told Tut. "In case there’s something you shouldn’t touch with your bare hands."

Obligingly, Tut put on the gloves. With gold gloves and boots but nothing else, he looked like a dancer from the kind of establishment where good Bamar girls didn’t go. In the past, I’d regretted not visiting such places — another sinful thrill I ought to have experienced. Now, looking at Tut, I decided I hadn’t missed much.

Or maybe naked men looked better when there was music.

We started walking. My sixth sense was still shut down — deactivated since that moment I’d been surrounded by the cloud and felt its torment, like hungry ghosts. I considered asking the Balrog to activate the sense again… but as that thought went through my mind, something crunched underfoot. An insect? Or just a plant. Probably an insect. Since I didn’t want to think of all the bugs I’d kill en route to the camp, I decided to hold off on life-force awareness for a while.

Besides, I had enough trouble concentrating on my own life force. Even with the helmet removed, my suit was torturously hot. I’d left my parachute where we’d landed, but I still carried a lot of gear, including the four stasis cases strapped to my chest. Back on Pistachio, they hadn’t seemed that heavy. Now… ugh. Maybe Muta’s gravity was stronger than normal.

(Rookie that I was, I hadn’t even looked at the planet’s grav readings. I’d assumed if the Unity planned to settle here, the G-pull was close to Earth-standard. A stupid beginner’s mistake. I’d have to get the numbers from Tut when Festina wasn’t within earshot. Tut wouldn’t chew me out for neglecting crucial data, but Festina would flay me alive.)

The climb up the rise wasn’t difficult — just hot. And smelly. Every frond of Mutan vegetation had a mustardlike scent: sometimes sharp, sometimes subtle, but always there. These plants hadn’t yet learned the trick of using perfumes to attract insect pollinators, so their odor was just an unintentional side effect of biochemistry. I assumed the mustard fragrance came from some chemical every plant shared, the way Earth plants all have a whiff of chlorophyll. The smell was so pervasive, the Unity survey teams surely must have investigated it and figured out what the chemical was… but I couldn’t remember reading anything in the data they sent us. In fact, I couldn’t remember a single thing about the ubiquitous mustard aroma.

Uh-oh.

Aloud, I said, "The Unity reports didn’t mention the mustard smell."

Festina stopped dead in the middle of the trail. "You’re right. Nothing about smell. Do you think those bastards edited their reports? Or held data back, even when they said they were sharing everything?"

Behind me, Tut laughed. "Don’t get upset, Auntie. The Unity just can’t smell."

Festina and I said in unison, "What?"

Tut laughed again. "They can’t smell. Not a single one of them. Cut it right out of their genome."

"You’re kidding," I said.

"Nope. Back in the early days, they decided maybe they should heighten their sense of smell — augment it the way they augmented their muscles and brainpower. They should have known better. A lot of them live in these luna-ships, right? Millions of people packed together. The smell’s bad enough for normal senses, but augment everyone’s nosepower a few hundred times, and it made for disaster. Not to mention they got a side effect: everyone’s response to human pheromones shot sky-high. The anger pheromones, the sex pheromones…" Tut giggled. "Must have been fun. Anyway, the bigwigs admitted they’d screwed up… so you know the Unity, they overreacted the other way. Genetically altered all future generations to remove the nerves for both the olfactory cells and the VMO."

"Good thinking," I said. "That way when something catches fire, they can’t smell the smoke."

"They have mechanical sensors for smoke," Tut replied. "Computerized sniffers, a thousand times more sensitive than normal noses. The Unity got good at artificial olfactory simulation."

"How do you know all this?" Festina asked. "I’ve never heard it before… and I thought I was well-informed on our ally races."

"The Unity are close-mouthed about certain things," Tut told her. "Things you only find out if you live with them."

"You lived with the Unity?"

He tapped his gold-plated face. "How do you think I got this? The Technocracy doesn’t do face stuff, does it? Not for potential Explorers. If you got an Explorer face, no one in the Technocracy dares fix it." Tut shrugged. "So when I was sixteen, I ran off to the Unity. Got myself gilded, then spent three hundred and sixty-four days in a luna-ship before they kicked me out — some law against outsiders living with them a whole year. But I learned a lot of secrets. They confided in me. They liked me."

Festina looked as if she doubted that last statement. I, however, believed it. The Unity’s overregimented goody-goodies might find Tut refreshing — like a court jester. He said things no one else would, but spontaneously, not just to be shocking. Tut was odd without being threatening. As a bonus, he was living proof of the Unity belief that Technocracy people were lunatics. I could see Unity folks being charmed by Tut the way rich urbanites might be charmed by country bumpkins. Sophisticates love artlessness.

"So what else do you know about the Unity?" I asked.

"Hard to make a list, Mom. But I’ll tell you the most important: they stopped being human centuries ago. Don’t even have the same number of chromosomes; they got twenty-four pairs now instead of our twenty-three. That extra chromosome contains a bunch of new features they wouldn’t talk about, not even to me." He smiled a golden smile. "But hey, I was sixteen, and so busy getting laid, I didn’t ask a lot of questions. They all wanted a night with me, Mom… partly because I was a different species, so no chance of them getting pregnant. And I was forbidden fruit, you know? Sex with me was exotic and perverse and-"

"We get the picture," Festina interrupted.

"Bet you don’t. They’re all augmented, right? So both the men and the women-"

"We get the picture" Festina repeated… which was half a lie, because I didn’t get the picture at all. If we found any corpses at Camp Esteem, I intended to check their anatomies.

The camp lay before us as we topped the rise: huts lining the ridge, larger buildings a short distance beyond. "Check the huts first," Festina said. "Look for bodies or signs of disturbance. We’ll be more thorough later, but right now we’re just checking for survivors."

I headed for the closest hut, but Tut stayed where he was. "Hey!" he yelled. "Unity people! Anybody home?"

Festina turned to me. "You know, shouting never crossed my mind."

"Tut tends to be direct," I told her. "Also insane."

"Well… making noise shouldn’t matter. That cloud thing already knows we’re here."

I nodded, then called, "Come on, Tut. Let’s check the huts."

He hollered once more, "Anybody hear me?" No response in the camp, except from a small brown lizard that scurried away from the noise. "Okay, Mom," Tut said, "I’ll help look around. But it sure seems like nobody’s home."

Tut was right: nobody was home. He took the four huts in the middle of the line, Festina took the four on the north, and I took the four to the south. We found no survivors, and no corpses either — just empty living quarters, with no indication of trouble.

Each hut had a bed, a closet, and a desk, plus a utility table whose contents varied by team member. One person’s table supported an electron microscope; another had a collection of soil samples; a third had a megarack of computer memory bubbles, while the last hut I looked in had dozens of small, mirrored stasis fields. (I cracked a sphere open. It held a partly dissected beetle.) The huts displayed military neatness, diminished only by a few last-moment touches of disarray from people hurrying to get to breakfast on time. A jacket tossed over the back of a chair. Wrinkles on the coverlet, where someone sat down after making the bed and didn’t straighten the sheets after standing up. An orange fern leaf on the floor — maybe blown in by the wind, maybe tracked in on somebody’s boot.

Apart from these lapses, the huts would easily pass the most stringent inspection. Clean, tidy, almost impersonal. On each desk sat a small holo globe showing a posed family scene — the number of parents varying from one to six, but the number of children always exactly the same: one son, one daughter, their ages two years apart — and every such globe was precisely the same size and placed in precisely the same position on the desk, as if the Unity had strict regulations for the proper display of one’s family unit. Maybe they did. The Unity reputedly liked to regiment people’s home lives as much as it regimented everything else.

But one area in each hut was not regulated: the mask shrine. The shrines hung on the wall immediately opposite the door, suspended at eye level beside the closet. Each shrine had a shelf, a backdrop, and a pedestal for the mask itself… but there the similarities ended. In the first hut I entered, the shelf, backdrop, and pedestal were all matte steel, and the mask a metallic thing of wire, gears, LEDs, and chrome; its eyeholes were covered with mirror glass, and its soul-gem, in the middle of the forehead, was a yellow industrial diamond. By contrast, the next hut’s shrine was constructed entirely of organic things — a mahogany shelf upholstered with bird feathers, a backdrop of growing vines, and a pedestal made of bone, all supporting a mask of deerhide with a pearl soul-gem above its eyes. Next door had an outer-space motif, with a photographic starscape as background and star-shaped sequins everywhere else. The soul-gem had the pockmarked look of a stony meteorite. In the final hut I entered, the entire shrine was shrouded in lush black velvet, but the mask itself was pure white silk. The gem was a black opal: black on white on black.

I wasn’t a stranger to extravagant shrines — every home on Anicca had at least one Buddha surrounded by small offerings and written vows to pursue enlightenment. But in the otherwise immaculate Camp Esteem huts, the mask shrines appeared too garish… as if the Unity members used the masks and the shrines as a way of venting all the emotion/anarchy/creative impulses they normally suppressed.

Of course, my reaction to the shrines was colored by what I knew. The straitlaced Unity, so restrained and socially delicate, had created a religion of total excess: primal, barbaric, orgiastic. Every night they donned masks… drugged or danced themselves into altered states of consciousness… then ended with ritual fights and copulation. If I’d been born in the Unity, I would have lost my virginity at my first sacred dance, around the age of twelve — but I would scarcely remember the experience or any other coupling thereafter, because all such sexual encounters took place in a trance-like delirium where normal mental processes were suppressed.

Copulation without conscience. Riot without responsibility. It was easy to see the attraction… and just like the Unity to cold-bloodedly design their religious practice as a psychological release valve rather than genuine spirituality.

Still… when I thought about the masks in the huts, I wondered what totem I might have chosen if I’d been a Unity child. What mask would I hide behind when I wanted to lose myself? Unbidden, a mental picture arose: a smooth woman’s face sculpted in copper-brown leather, but with the left cheek gashed open by a knife.

Trying to force the image from my mind, I hurried to join the others.

We went to the mess hall next. It was just as the probe had shown — abandoned partway through breakfast, food on the table undisturbed by insects. I hadn’t seen or heard any insects in the entire camp; the only living creature I’d spotted was that lizard who scuttled away when Tut yelled. I wondered if local fauna could have been "eaten" by the EMP cloud… but that didn’t make sense. If nothing else, the cloud was mobile: it had, for example, enveloped us on the floodplain. But there’d been plenty of insects down on the flats. So even if the cloud was an insectivore, why would it devour all the bugs around camp but leave the floodplain swarms untouched?

Festina stuck her head out of the kitchen. "I found the source of the probe’s IR reading. There’s a gas stove still burning. Anybody want scrambled eggs that have gone all black and crispy?"

Tut immediately said, "I’ll try some."

"Before you do," I said (knowing the only way to keep Tut from consuming burned eggs was to distract him till they vanished from his mind), "have you noticed there are no insects on the food? Don’t you find that odd?"

"Nah," Tut said. "The Unity are great at insect repellants. It’s one of the first things they do on a new planet — figure out what disgusts local insects, then gene-jiggle themselves to pump out the appropriate chemicals. Usually in their sweat. Remember, Mom, Unity folks have no sense of smell. They don’t care if they stink to high heaven. Makes for some pretty exotic reeks in Unity cities, let me tell you."

Though I’d been breathing cookhouse air for at least a minute, I couldn’t help sniffing in search of "exotic reeks." It didn’t smell like much of anything — just a slight burned odor from the kitchen. The eggs had incinerated themselves more than thirty-six hours ago, so the worst of the char stench was gone. Tut also gave a sniff, then shrugged. "Mutan insects don’t have Earthling noses. Maybe this place stinks of something we can’t smell."

"Or maybe," I said, "the camp did stink while the Unity people were here — enough that insects cleared out and built their nests elsewhere. Now that Team Esteem is gone, the smell has faded too… but it’s only been a day and a half, so the insects haven’t found their way back yet."

"Hmph." That was Festina, returning from the kitchen. She went to the dining table and studied it. Tut and I did the same. Just like the recon photos — cutlery set down haphazardly, chairs pushed back… as if everybody had suddenly decided to rush outside and never returned.

But wait. Now that I looked, I saw not every place had been abandoned hurriedly. One chair on the far side of the table was tucked away tidily. The plate was clean except for a few crumbs, and the juice glass was empty. The cutlery had been neatly set aside. "See that?" I said. "One person had finished eating and left the table."

"Looks like it," Tut agreed. "But even in the Unity, there’s always one person who eats faster than anyone else."

"Maybe," said Festina, "that person had reason to eat faster yesterday morning. Pressing work to be done. He or she ate quickly, then left the mess hall. Probably to get started on work."

"Then everyone else ran outside," I said. "Like maybe the person who left first called for help. Or there was some noise that made the rest of the team think the first person was in trouble."

Festina nodded. "It would have to be something like that — something that made everybody’s reflexes kick in automatically. Unity survey teams are smart about survival. If they’d just heard a strange sound, they wouldn’t let everybody investigate; they’d send two or three people to scout, keeping in constant contact by radio. The only time they’d respond to a threat en masse would be if one of their own was in danger right under their noses."

"True," Tut agreed. "Unity folk love following procedures. They’d only give in to impulse if, like, a friend was screaming, ‘Help, help, help!’ "

"So," Festina said, "this person X who left breakfast first must have got in trouble while crossing the compound. Except that we didn’t see any bodies lying out in the dirt."

Tut said, "Maybe X got as far as one of the other buildings. Stepped inside, and bam, something happened."

"We’ve already checked the huts and this mess hall," Festina said. "Three other buildings to go."

As we walked across the compound, Festina reported our latest findings to Captain Cohen. We still had comm access to Pistachio: the EMP cloud hadn’t zapped us since we’d opened our second stasis sphere. That meant we also had a working stun-pistol and Bumbler. Festina carried the stunner holstered at her hip — she wouldn’t let Tut or me touch the weapon — but she made no protest as I took the Bumbler and strapped it around my neck.

I felt better having a Bumbler… not that its sensors revealed anything useful. The three remaining buildings gave off no special readings. In particular, there were no IR hot spots big enough to indicate human life — just a few patches of mild warmth, probably from the afternoon sun shining through windows and raising the temperature of objects that could absorb heat. The Bumbler showed no notable sources of other types of energy: no tachyons, no terahertz, no radio or microwaves. I’d seen more interesting readings from a patch of ragweed.

So it came as no surprise that we found nothing noteworthy in the first building we entered — the survey team’s laboratory. It was a prefab design, with a single corridor down the center: two rooms to the left and two to the right, all four labs of equal size. One was devoted to plants, animals, and soil samples; another was obviously where team members studied microbes (with microscopes, petri dishes, and DNA sequencers); and the last two labs were both dedicated to technological artifacts that must have been retrieved from Drill-Press.

Most of the artifacts were typical products of high tech: nondescript boxes made of plastic and other artificial materials. Las Fuentes apparently liked their gear in earth-tone colors — every box was some shade of brown, from light biscuit to dark umber, sometimes in mottled combinations like desert camouflage — but apart from the color scheme, I drew no other conclusions. I certainly couldn’t guess what the devices might do.

Perhaps the Unity had figured out the machinery’s purpose, but there was no way to tell. A brief search showed the survey team had kept no notes on paper or in any other hard-copy form. That didn’t surprise me — Unity people all had wireless computer links embedded in their brains. Why scribble notes in a journal when they could download their thoughts directly to a computer?

At least Team Esteem stored their data in bubble chips that used long-chain organic molecules to encode information. Such molecules weren’t damaged by EMPs. Therefore, whatever the surveyors had learned about Fuentes technology could eventually be recovered.

But not by us. We couldn’t read the bubble chips without a computer… and all the computers in Camp Esteem had been EMP’d into uselessness.

Quite possibly, the earth-toned Fuentes devices had also been killed by EMPs… if they hadn’t already gone dead in the fall of Fuentes civilization, or in the millennia that followed. All these fancy machines were probably as defunct as my tightsuit.

But I didn’t put that to the test by trying to turn them on.

The next building was a repair shop/garage: a single large space that housed the usual equipment required to maintain an installation like Camp Esteem, plus a pair of antigrav vehicles built for strength rather than speed. The AGVs probably couldn’t go faster than 50 kph, but they looked powerful enough to lift twenty times their own mass. Good for making trips into Drill-Press and bringing back heavy artifacts. The artifacts I’d seen in the camp had all been small, light enough to be carried by hand. But the Unity always planned for contingencies, and if the survey team needed to drag a forty-ton hunk of Fuentes machinery back to camp, they had the horsepower to do it.

Too bad the AGVs had been EMP’d like everything else and were now just giant paperweights. We left them where they were and went on to the last building.

The sign on the building was a pictograph of stacked boxes, indicating general storage. The door was locked.

"The Unity is always so damned anal-retentive," Festina muttered. "Why the hell would they lock the door on a planet with no other intelligent beings? A simple doorknob would keep out animals. But no, they installed a big-ass lock."

I said, "Maybe some team members weren’t allowed in here. Restricted access to prevent pilferage."

"Stupid," Festina grumbled. "They should trust their own people."

I raised an eyebrow. "The way you trusted Tut and me when you locked us out of the equipment room last night?"

"Oh. Yeah." She stared at the closed door in front of us. "Anyone good at picking locks?"

She was joking… trying to lighten the mood after her gaffe. It had been centuries since anyone manufactured locks that could be picked. Broadcast dramas still showed thieves opening doors with piano wire and crochet hooks, but no modern lock could be opened so simply. Lock-cracking these days required extremely sophisticated equipment — ultrasound projectors, nanite bafflers, protein synthesizers — and we’d brought nothing like that with us.

In search of another way in, we walked around the building. It had no windows; it had no second door. Tut tentatively kicked a wall, but his foot made no impression on the surface — the building was made from silver-gray plastic, probably tough enough to survive a hurricane and whatever other hazards Muta might dish out. Short of cannon fire, the walls were impregnable.

"This is annoying," Festina said as we finished back at the front door. "Doesn’t it feel like the answer to our questions might be inside this building?" She paused. "Of course, if we do get the door open, we might regret it."

"Yeah," Tut agreed. "Like VR adventures where you bust your ass getting into a locked room, then find the room has a monster inside."

"Exactly. This is too tempting not to be dangerous." Festina stepped back and examined the building again. "Still, if there were a way in…"

"There may be," I said. "Why don’t you puny humans step aside and let Balrog-girl show you some moss power."

In truth, I didn’t know what moss power might do. Navy files said the Balrog had earthshaking telekinetic abilities, but I didn’t know whether the spores would be willing to help smash a locked door. If I was the moss’s Trojan horse — if it was hiding inside me so someone or something didn’t know the Balrog was on Muta — then my alien hitchhiker would avoid revealing its presence with showoff tricks. The Balrog might also consider me presumptuous for acting as if I could command it to open doors. Still, this door had "Clue to the mystery" written all over it… and if the Balrog wanted our investigation to make progress, it would help us get inside.

Therefore, I closed my eyes and reached within myself as if lowering my body into dark water. Balrog, I thought, can you do this? Can you help me do this?

No answer. Not in words. But I got the impression I’d phrased my request incorrectly. A moment later, I realized what I had to say. I don’t know if the answer came from my own intuition or if the knowledge had been planted in my mind; but I knew what the Balrog wanted to hear.

I took a deep breath… knowing I was moving another step down the path toward my own oblivion. Balrog, I said silently — feeling scared, feeling excited, feeling as if I’d once more been seduced into something against my better judgment but also feeling no desire to resist the heat of temptation — Balrog, I will let you do this through me. I’ll surrender to you that much.

Seconds passed. I felt no change. I’d imagined I might be possessed, feel my body moving without my will. Possibly I’d hear triumphant laughter echoing through my brain, the demonic exaltation that always comes when the foolish maiden succumbs to the devil in some bad melodrama. I was even prepared to black out… then to wake up who knows where, who knows when… if I ever woke up at all.

But nothing like that happened. Nothing discernible changed… except that my sixth sense returned. Even that was no great transformation — more like opening my eyes after having them closed for a few minutes. I could be blase about it: once again perceiving the auras of Festina and Tut, as well as the microbial world and a few pseudolizards hiding in nearby shadows. I couldn’t perceive life signs inside the storage building, nor did I have any mystic "X-ray" intuition about the door lock. My sixth sense told me nothing I hadn’t already seen with my eyes: the lock was metal; the door was the same tough silver-gray plastic as the rest of the building; the hinges were on the inside; there was no obvious point of vulnerability.

I reached into my mind once more, hoping the Balrog might hint what I should do next. No such hint came. I’d surrendered myself to the damned moss and got nothing in return. Blazing with anger, I yelled in my mind, What am I supposed to do? Kick the door in? I drew back my right foot and shot it out hard, aiming for the center of the door’s blank rectangular face.

Just before my kick made contact, some unexpected strength added itself to my own muscle power. Extra mass. Extra acceleration. Extra force.

Slam!

The door split in two, straight down the middle. My foot almost did the same. The boot of my tightsuit absorbed some fraction of the impact, but not nearly enough. With my sixth sense I could see bones splintering from my heel to my toes. I perceived the massive fracturing process in a clear-minded thousandth of a second before the pain made its way up my nervous system and struck the "What the hell did you just do?" part of my brain. I even had time to think, "I’m really going to hate this." Then, agony exploded with a bloody red splash, and there was nothing in my skull but torment.