Radiant

CHAPTER 12

Magga [Pali]: Path. The Buddha’s fourth truth is that the way to purge oneself of tanha (fixations) is to follow a program called the Eightfold Path: practices to lessen the grip of one’s fixations and eventually achieve freedom.

Next stop: Drill-Press. The Fuentes city.

If there was any nearby information about Var-Lann’s hypothetical defense system, it would lie among the mud-covered ruins. Not that the Fuentes would have left big signs pointing to secret alien-killing machinery… and not that we could read Fuentes writing, even if there were such signs… and not that the actual defense machinery was more likely to be in Drill-Press than anywhere else on the planet… but the city was still the first place to start looking. No other Fuentes settlement was close enough to reach on foot.

Besides, Li and Ubatu crash-landed in the ruins. Professional courtesy demanded we make a token effort to see what had happened to them.

First, though, we needed more practical clothing. I was soggy with sweat inside my overinsulated tightsuit; Festina was similarly steaming. Therefore, we scrounged through the Unity huts till we found clothes that would fit us. Not too surprisingly, we both obtained uniforms from the same woman: the only member of Team Esteem close to our size. Unity women tended toward Amazonian proportions — tall, broad-shouldered, long in the leg. Unity bioengineering policies decreed that females should average exactly the same height as males, and both should be built like demigods. Fortunately, Unity policies also decreed that each survey team should have one man and one woman substantially smaller than the norm, in case there was need to send someone into cramped spaces… exploring caves, for example, or picking through wreckage in a collapsed building. Festina and I searched till we found the hut of the mandatory short woman, then fought our way out of our tightsuits and into two of the woman’s spare uniforms.

I let Festina have the official "dress" uniform. It was made from nanomesh fabric — an assemblage of nanites that adhered to the body as tight and thin as paint — but at least the nanocloth was a dignified black. (Black was the official color of both the Unity Survey Service and our own Explorer Corps. In the Academy, we’d often speculated if the Unity was imitating us, or vice versa. Historical records didn’t help to determine who chose black first. Incredibly, the Technocracy had no records of when or how the Explorer Corps got started. No one knew if that omission was a deliberate snub, benign neglect, sheer incompetence, or something more sinister.)

As for me, I got stuck with a nanomesh uniform that clung just as revealingly — the Unity was the sort of culture that preached virtuous restraint while wearing clothes so snug and sheer that everyone could see your appendectomy scar — but besides being tight enough to show whether I was an inny or an outy, the uniform was one of those multicolored jester suits that passed for Mutan camouflage: yellow, blue, crimson, purple, orange, green, mauve, splashed in motley spottles and blotches all over the skintight cloth… as if I’d rolled in fruit salad. The moment I emerged from the hut, Tut yelled, "Hey, Mom, you look like spumoni."

Tut himself looked like a bear. While Festina and I had been dealing with clothes, he’d toured the other huts and collected all the sacred masks. Some of the masks were now slung on a belt at his waist, while others hung on a makeshift bandoleer draped from his shoulder to his hip… but he’d saved one mask to wear over his gold-plated face: a life-sized bear mask, complete with what looked to be genuine bear fur and teeth. In the middle of the bear’s forehead was a blood-red ruby as big as my thumb.

The thought of Tut stealing the masks disturbed me; it was like looting relics from a temple. I had little respect for the Unity’s mask religion — an outlet for the worst in human nature, not striving to achieve the best — but in the spirit-parched secular world of the Technocracy’s mainstream, I felt kinship for any religious artifacts.

"Those don’t belong to you," I told Tut. "If you take them, they’ll get broken."

"But, Mom, they’re shiny-finey!" He capered around me, making mock growls. "Grr-arrh! Grr-arrh! The bear says the masks want to dance!"

"Tut…"

"They’ve been stuck inside, grr-arrh! With no one to wear them, grr-arrh! Their owners have left, the masks are bereft, and they’re looking for fun now, grr-arrh!"

He began making clawing gestures at me, still bouncing in circles and calling, "Grr-arrh! Grr-arrh!"

"Tut!" I said. "This isn’t funny. It’s disrespectful."

"Masks don’t want respect, grr-arrh. They’d much rather play and pet, grr-arrh. They just want to dance, and to get in your pants. A mask is the best lay you’ll get, grr-arrh!"

"Tut…" Then it struck me: this was a man who’d spent a year with the Unity. Living among them. Learning their language. Had he also taken part in their orgies? Did he get himself stoked up on ritual drugs or brain-feeds, then mask-dance himself into ecstasy? He’d been sixteen at the time; of course he’d attend an orgy if invited. Being Tut, he would have thrown himself into the experience with total abandon. If invited. Supposedly, the Unity didn’t let you join their rites unless you had a spirit-mask of your own, but…

Wait. Tut did have a mask. The gold-plating on his face. When did he get that? During his time with the Unity. Had he been wearing a genuine Unity spirit-mask for as long as I’d known him?

No. Real spirit-masks had a soul-gem in the forehead. Tut’s gold face didn’t. But perhaps soul-gems were only for full-fledged members of the Unity. Outsiders like Tut might be allowed to have masks of their own but couldn’t add a gem because they couldn’t claim full Unity status.

That made sense. The Unity did accept converts to their religion; in some places, they’d angered the Technocracy by actively proselytizing. So it was entirely possible Tut’s face was a mask and he was a practiced trance-dancer.

Which was bad news for us. The last thing we needed was Tut trying to relive his youth in a blur of unconstrained copulation.

Or was there more here at work than a simple yearning for the past? Something had happened to Tut’s aura — something I couldn’t define. It seemed more chaotic than before… not just Tut’s usual insanity but a warring pandemonium of driving urges. Black anger. Crimson lust. White-hot hatred. Muddy grief. And some odd unnatural extra that fought all the rest: a slippery purple force I couldn’t identify. The colors clashed against each other madly, like Muta’s motley foliage. Their battle seemed strong enough to rip Tut’s life force apart.

Unless I did something.

"Tut," I said in a quiet but firm voice. "It’s broad daylight; the masks shouldn’t be out. You know that. The masks might want to dance, but the sun hurts their eyes. Isn’t that right? Isn’t there a rule that says masks are only for after dark?"

I hoped I was right. One shouldn’t trust Technocracy rumors about Unity beliefs… but in this case, I thought the rumors might be true. Mask dances were strictly regulated, like everything else in the Unity — Unity leaders didn’t want people frolicking and fornicating when they should be doing productive work. I expected restrictions would have been built into the mask religion’s dogma: dances could only take place at night, after a full day of contributing to the common good.

Besides, I thought, the masks would look more powerful after dark. In the bright afternoon light, they just looked shabby — the bear, for example, had a slightly asymmetric snout, possibly from getting banged around in wild dances and wilder couplings. Such small imperfections wouldn’t be noticeable after dark, when the only light came from a bonfire… but now, under the glaring sun, the bear appeared soulless and silly. The masks on Tut’s belt and bandoleer displayed similar weakness: bouncing haphazardly as he jumped around, flimsy constructions of glitter and plastic and feathers. Come sundown, they might become terrifying; for now, the only terror was Tut’s losing what was left of his mind.

I wondered why we’d come to this planet in the company of a madman.

"Tut," I said. "The masks aren’t supposed to come out in the sun-"

"I know!" he snapped. With an angry motion, he pulled the bear mask off his head. "You can be a real party pooper, Mom. Always so goody-goody. It’s irritating."

"Sorry."

"Don’t say you’re sorry if you don’t intend to change." Sulkily, he hooked the bear mask to his belt, where it hung like some flea-bitten hunting trophy. "We might turn to smoke any second. Isn’t that enough to make you loosen up?"

I wondered what he meant by loosening up. Was this about sex? Or was it just that I disapproved of his fun, the dancing, the nudity, the pilfering of Team Esteem’s sacred objects?

Looking at his life force, I couldn’t tell. Tut’s aura had returned to its usual jumbled confusion; the colors had faded, damped to a more manageable intensity. Emotions were swirling at random now — just bumping haphazardly against each other, not actively at war. Yet there was still a sort of after-haze of what I’d seen before: flashes of raw emotion, as pure and demanding as the overwhelming hunger of the pretas.

What was I seeing? Tut himself, or Tut infested with microbes that would soon make him into a frustrated ghost?

At that moment, Festina came out of the hut in her new Unity clothes. She looked good. I didn’t know whether or not she’d been bioengineered, but few natural humans could meet the aesthetic demands of nanomesh: few natural bodies betrayed no sagging or folding under the spray-on-thin layer of nanites. And the black color suited her perfectly — much better than admiral’s gray. Her life force showed that she knew it; she seemed more vibrant, confident, and determined. When she saw Tut decked out with the masks, it didn’t faze her. She just said, "You’ll need more clothing. It’ll get cold after dark."

"I picked up a uniform too. It’s in my pack." Tut turned to show he wore a Unity backpack — just a small one, only reaching halfway down his spine, but with plenty of room for a change of clothes. I knew Tut might be lying, and the backpack contained something other than a Unity uniform… for example, the drugs Team Esteem would have kept on hand to help with their orgies. But Festina chose to believe Tut was telling the truth.

"All right," she said. "We’re ready to go. Let’s head south."

It should have been a pleasant walk. Bright afternoon. Riots of rainbow foliage. Protolizards sunning themselves on every rock. Our noses soon got used to the omnipresent odor of mustard, and we didn’t have much gear to carry: Festina and I both lugged a single stasis-field container, but we’d left the rest at Camp Esteem. Besides the mirror-sphere, I’d filled a small Unity backpack with a water canteen, first-aid kit, and food rations; Festina had done the same. The supplies would let us last a few days in Drill-Press. If we needed more, we could always return to the Unity camp — assuming we hadn’t turned to smoke in the meantime.

So a short, easy walk on a sunny fall day: it should have been pleasant. But my sixth sense wouldn’t let me ignore the complications simmering around me. Tut and his chaotic life force… Festina and her avalanche karma… the insects who occasionally died under my feet… the gnawing sense of pretas never far away, ready to pounce if we tried to escape by Sperm-tail.

To distract myself, I took Bumbler readings of everything around me. We walked through a mass of invisible germs: Var-Lann’s bugs, built to tear people apart. And they weren’t just on the outside — when I turned the Bumbler on Festina, I could see the germs in her lungs, her stomach, her digestive tract, her bloodstream. Tut was the same… utterly infested. For a while, I avoided scanning myself because I didn’t want to know the truth; but avoidance was unskillful behavior. At last I forced myself to use the Bumbler on my own body…

…and discovered I wasn’t infected. Clean as autoclaved glass.

Yes, I inhaled Var-Lann’s microbes with every breath. Yes, they congregated on my skin and were attempting to crawl in through my ears, the edges of my eye sockets, every possible orifice. But the moment they got inside — whether it was my bronchial tubes, my gut, or elsewhere — the germs were annihilated by tiny red spores.

I belonged to the Balrog. The moss wouldn’t share me with interlopers.

The notion almost made me laugh: that I’d be saved from Muta’s lethal defense system by the Balrog’s prior claim. A slave protected by her master’s possessiveness.

Dour thoughts made the walk hard to bear. Physically, however, it was no great effort. Team Esteem had made the trip hundreds of times, clearing a trail we had no trouble following. The route passed through varied stands of foliage: chest-high purple ferns… then knee-high rubbery red ferns… then yellow-orange giant ferns rising as tall as trees… yielding at last to real trees: Capsicillium croceum, the Fuentes’ trademark groves.

This late in the growing season, the trees held none of their distinctive "minichili" fruit. The ground, however, was littered with fallen chilis: all of them bright yellow, the size of my little finger, and covered with crawling insects. Only one species of insect was actually eating the fruit — a bug like a small black ant, which by some fluke of evolution had found itself able to digest the minichili’s alien sugars and proteins. The rest of the insects present were eating the little black ants, or eating the insects who ate the ants. Why didn’t the ants run away? Likely because Muta’s indigenous flora hadn’t yet learned to produce fruit of their own. Minichilis were the only true fruit on the planet: a nutritional bonanza the ants just couldn’t resist. Besides, there were so many ants chowing down on the fruit, the predators would never get them all. Plenty of well-fed ants would survive to breed… and next year the process would repeat itself.

The comforting cycle of life.

Above us, the Capsicillium croceum leaves were thick and green, even this close to winter. They wouldn’t fall off till first frost… at which point they’d drop overnight, entire trees denuded. Until then, however, the dense foliage over our heads was enough to block our view of the city, right up to the moment when we emerged from the woods.

Suddenly, skyscrapers soared above us.

On aerial photos, the towers had seemed bland — we’d seen nothing but flat roofs with rectangular cross sections. From the ground, however, the blandness disappeared: each building was profusely decorated with mosaic tiles, some large, some small, some glossy, some matte, some forming abstract geometric designs, some coming together in pictures fifty stories tall.

For a moment we stood unmoving, enrapt by the giant pictures. Many showed furry bipeds, brown or black, with rabbitlike haunches and long tails that ended in a sharp-edged scoop like a garden spade. The creatures’ heads were insectlike, with bulging faceted eyes and strong-looking mandibles: one mandible attachment on each side of the mouth, plus one on the top and one on the bottom, forming a diamond arrangement.

I wondered what the mandibles were for. Holding food? But the creatures had perfectly good arms — slightly shorter than human arms, but ending in well-proportioned hands with three fingers and an opposable thumb. You don’t need mandibles when you have hands… unless the mandibles were for social display. Or for cracking some special kind of food. Or they played a role in mating, communication, perception, hunting, or some other aspect of life I couldn’t imagine. Evolution doesn’t create body parts for any particular purpose; the body parts always come first. If the parts prove useful to the creature that has them, both the parts and the creature survive. These creatures must have made the most of what they had, because they were probably the ones who’d built this city.

"Are those Fuentes?" I asked Festina.

She nodded. "Furry bad-tempered beetles. They may look ridiculous, but don’t underestimate them — they’re damned dangerous in a fight. Strong arms, stronger kicks, wicked bites from those mandibles, and they can swing their tails like maces. Not to mention they’re immune to stun-pistols…"

"I thought there were no Fuentes left," Tut said.

"I thought the same till I met two. They told me they were the last, but I prefer to reserve judgment."

"So there might be fur beetles somewhere in Drill-Press?" Tut lifted the bear mask hanging on his belt. "I could put this on so they’d see me as a friend. You know… furry."

"No!" I told him. Sharply.

Festina looked at me with a raised eyebrow. Tut just let go of the mask. "Jeez, Mom, ease up, okay?"

"This is as eased as I get," I told him. "We’re walking into a city of ghosts."

"You believe in ghosts?" Festina asked.

"Yes. Don’t you?"

"No. But I’ll give you this much," she said. "In a universe full of weird-shit aliens, there’s always something to fill ghosts’ ecological niche. Scary things that jump out and go ‘Boo!’ I can’t tell you how often…" Her voice trailed off, apparently lost in memories of the past. After a moment, Festina said, "I take it back. There are ghosts. Problem is, we don’t recognize them as such till we’re in over our heads."

Without another word, she started into the city.

The streets were covered with silt, laid down whenever the river overflowed. When the Fuentes were here, they would have prevented such flooding by adjusting dams — the Unity files had noted a series of dams and sluices, starting hundreds of kilometers upstream and extending all the way to the sea. Once the Fuentes had gone, however, the system broke down; no one had lowered or raised the dams in millennia, so they’d become useless concrete waterfalls. The river had returned to its age-old pattern of rise and fall, occasionally swelling high enough to soak the city’s feet.

At the moment, the water was low, and the dirt on the streets was dry. No plants grew in that soil; either the silt was too shallow to support plant roots, or the lack of vegetation had a more sinister cause. Some alien civilizations impregnated their paving materials with herbicides — a toxic way to prevent grass and weeds from sprouting. If the Fuentes had used the same trick six thousand years ago, the streets might still contain enough chemicals to discourage local plant life.

I didn’t use the Bumbler to see if that was true. When you’re walking on poison, sometimes you just don’t want to know.

There’s something eerie about uninhabited cities. Walking in the unnatural quiet. Drill-Press wasn’t absolutely silent — insects buzzed, a soft breeze was blowing, and the river provided a constant babble — but without the noise of people or machines, the city seemed as hushed as a sickroom.

A thousand looming mosaics of furry beetles didn’t help. Alien giants looked down on us, holding unknown objects (tools? toys? symbols of office?) or working at unknown tasks. I wondered if the pictures might be advertisements for consumer products or tributes to illustrious citizens. No way to tell. Each picture was probably rich with iconography… perhaps a particular position of the mandibles indicated a saint, or a gesture of the tail a sex-star… but that was a study for archeologists, if any ever visited this planet. Certainly, Team Esteem hadn’t spent much time thinking about the pictures. In all the reports I’d read, the mosaics weren’t even mentioned.

Then again, the reports said little about anything in the city. Team Esteem had been dropped on Muta by the last luna-ship to visit the system. Since then, whatever the team had learned was stored in computers at their camp — useless EMP’d computers, whose data had never been downloaded back to the Unity homeworld. Someday someone might manage to recover the data and read the surveyors’ findings; but from our point of view, the only records Team Esteem had left were scuff marks in the soil.

Those scuff marks showed where the team usually went when they visited Drill-Press. Without a word of discussion, we followed the path most traveled. The Unity people had spent months searching this city for points of interest; gradually, however, they’d settled on a single trail to a single destination.

It would be useful to know what that destination was.

We walked down the street, our eyes and ears open. Tall buildings rose around us: nothing less than twenty stories. Obviously, the Fuentes hadn’t believed in single-family dwellings, or little shops with a homey feel. They’d had plenty of room to expand the city — there’d been no other settlement within a thousand kilometers, and no geographical barriers to prevent them from spreading out as far as they liked. But the Fuentes had kept their city tightly compact. Either they preferred to squeeze together (some species instinctively liked to live in one another’s laps) or they stuck to a crowded lifestyle established on planets where space was more limited.

My mental awareness penetrated a short distance into nearby buildings, but only showed mud-covered floors and water-damaged walls. No remains of furniture or other belongings. Floods had rotted or washed away the contents of all rooms at ground level, and my sixth sense didn’t reach to higher floors.

So what had these places been? Homes? Stores? Amusement centers? How had the Fuentes lived? How had they filled their days? What did they consider important? Explorers seldom asked such questions — we were too busy assessing immediate threats to worry about more ephemeral concerns. We were scouts, not archeologists. But I found myself asking why the Fuentes had come here so long ago. Why journey tens or hundreds of light-years to a planet that would never feel like home? Why build a city in the middle of nowhere, not even close to other cities on the same planet? What would you do in such a place?

Aloud I said, "Do you think they were running from something?"

"What do you mean?" Festina asked.

"The Fuentes who lived here. Do you think they were running away? Maybe they followed an unorthodox religion, so they came to avoid persecution."

"It’s possible," Festina said. "Why do you ask?"

"Because the cities are so far apart. Only two on this entire continent… and just four more Fuentes cities on the rest of the planet. Why space things out so much? Because the people wanted to avoid each other? Didn’t want to be ‘contaminated’ by outsiders’ beliefs?"

"Maybe they needed a lot of land," Festina suggested. "Maybe each family belonged to a separate clan, and they divided all of Muta between the clans. The Fuentes might have had the same sort of territorial instincts as Greenstriders."

"Or maybe," Tut said, "each city was doing dangerous shit, and they didn’t want to blow each other up."

Festina and I looked at him. He shrugged. "You two come from civilized worlds. Farms, parks, gardens, all homey and domestic. Me, I was born on an ice moon where we kept blobs of liquid helium as pets. So why did my family live in a shithole whose temperature was damned near absolute zero? Because my old man was a nanotech guy, developing stuff so potentially lethal, one slipup could wipe out everything in sight. Gray goo meltdown. The only place he was allowed to work was that godforsaken moon, far from anything else."

I considered that a moment. "You think the Fuentes might have used Muta for risky research? And the cities were spaced far apart for safety?"

"We all have our own colored lenses, Mom. You see a city in the middle of nowhere, and you think it’s because of religion. Auntie says maybe they were trying to grab the most land possible. I see the same setup and wonder if they were doing something so damned dangerous, they were sent to an isolated site on an isolated world to reduce casualties if someone dropped a test tube." He smiled a broad golden smile. "All a matter of perspective, isn’t it?"

"True," Festina said. She looked around. "One more lethal possibility to worry about. Just bloody wonderful." She took a few steps, then turned back to Tut. "I understand now why you ran away from home as a teenager. Even the Unity must have looked better than an ice moon."

"Nah," he said. "I left home cuz my helium pets evaporated." He started up the street… which is when I yelled, "Look out!" and grabbed for the pistol on Festina’s belt.

My sixth sense had limited range: about ten meters. That’s why I hadn’t sensed Li and Ubatu stowed away in the shuttle, and why I didn’t sense the ambush till almost too late. Fortunately, our attacker’s life force was strong — a blazing ball of hatred that burned so fiercely, I knew it was trouble the instant it registered on my inner eye. Even so, I barely had time to shout my warning before Tut was under assault.

In loose zoological terms, the creature was a pouncer — a predator who lies in wait till prey walks by, then leaps from concealment and makes a fast kill. In comparative evolution terms, the beast was Muta’s version of a pseudosuchian — a bipedal reptilelike land animal whose descendants would evolve into dinosaurs. In immediate life-or-death terms, what we saw was a mass of teeth and claws hurtling from a gap between buildings — the same height as Tut, but built along the lines of a slender T. rex. Big legs, small arms, strong tail, huge head, the whole of its body fast and light but as powerful as a striking hawk. Its scaly skin was leopard yellow with spots of red and brown: excellent camouflage for hiding in Muta’s foliage, but also good when standing in shadows against a motley mosaic wall. Normal vision could easily miss it… until the moment it made its attack, hurtling toward Tut with its fangs poised for action.

At the last moment, it screamed — like an eagle’s piercing cry, but as loud as a lion. No doubt the scream was intended to freeze the prey in terror; but Tut had started moving the instant I shouted my warning, and he didn’t let the monster’s caterwaul slow him down. Tut pivoted fast as soon as I yelled, looking for the source of danger. He spotted the attacking animal a split second after it started its charge… and instead of trying to dodge or escape, he ran toward the beast on a collision course. Just before impact, Tut angled off and threw out his arm in a classic "clothesline" maneuver. The animal (so primitive its species would need twenty million years just to become as smart as a dinosaur) didn’t have the intelligence or reflexes to deal with a surprise tactic. The big reptile just continued its forward charge as Tut’s arm caught it cleanly across the throat.

If Tut had hit me that way, I would have slammed to the ground hard on my back. Our pseudosuchian attacker was jerked off its feet and knocked backward, but was too lightweight to hit the street with much impact — the animal had more in common with birds than with massive reptiles like alligators. Furthermore, the beast’s strong tail struck the street before its body, taking the brunt of the fall. Half a second later, uninjured by its plunge to the pavement, the creature whipped its tail furiously and used the momentum to spin to its feet. It screeched once more in rage, kicking up dust as it wheeled for another run at Tut. The screech died in the beast’s throat as I fired the stun-pistol three times, as fast as I could pull the trigger. I would have kept shooting from sheer adrenaline… but the animal went limp with an annoyed-sounding gurgle, and Festina plucked the gun from my hand.

"You got it," she said quietly. Then her head snapped around as Tut stepped toward the beast. He reached out his bare foot to nudge the fallen animal and see if it was really unconscious. "Don’t!" Festina cried. My mouth was open to yell the same thing, because everyone knows the monster always attacks one last time when you think it’s down for good.

But Tut never had the sense to leave well enough alone. Despite Festina’s warning, he prodded the predator lightly in its ribs. The animal’s mouth yawned open… but instead of biting off Tut’s foot, it gave a soft sigh. Steamlike vapors hissed from the beast’s maw — a cloud whose life force roiled with fury. It wreathed once around Tut’s body, possibly looking for something to EMP. I thought it would come for Festina and me next, shorting out another Bumbler, comm unit, and stun-pistol; but the cloud lingered with Tut, brushing (almost caressing) the masks he carried. I sensed the cloud’s emotions shifting from hostility to unbearable sorrow. Then the cloud shot away, rocketing down the street faster than any pseudosuchian could run. In a moment, it had disappeared into the depths of the city.

The three of us watched it vanish. Then Tut said, "Umm… did we just find out the EMP clouds can possess Muta’s minidinosaurs? Like, the clouds can make dinosaurs attack us?"

Festina and I nodded.

Tut beamed. "Cool!"

Using the Bumbler, I scanned for more predators. Nothing showed up on the readouts, but that didn’t mean much. The nearby buildings blocked X-rays, microwaves, terahertz radiation, and even radio — all the EM frequencies we used when looking for trouble. Fuentes construction materials seemed purposely designed to prevent the type of spying we wanted to do. It made sense that high-tech people would want their buildings opaque to prying eyes, but it put us at a disadvantage: more cloud-possessed carnivores might lurk down any side street, and the Bumbler wouldn’t know till we were within ambush range.

When I reported this to Festina, she just shrugged. "I’ve been checking the dirt on the street," she said. "No tracks of big nasties except the one that just attacked. Large predators don’t often come into this city."

"That makes sense," I replied. "Predators go where there’s prey. Prey usually means herbivores, and Drill-Press has nothing to attract plant-eaters." I gestured toward the bare, weedless streets. "No vegetation anywhere."

"You think the baby T. rex wandered here by accident?" Tut asked. "Or did the cloud possess Rexy out in the countryside, then force him to come to the city?"

"Good question," Festina said. "I wish I knew the answer. It’d be nice to know if the cloud could really seize animal minds and compel them to do things against their instincts… or if the cloud only nudged a predator who was already close by."

"Either way," Tut said, "it’s odd the cloud would be hostile… I mean, if it really is Var-Lann or one of the other Unity folks. Why would it make a Rexy attack us? Isn’t it obvious we’re here to help?"

"Who knows what’s obvious to a cloud?" Festina asked. "The Unity and Technocracy have never been friends. Maybe Team Esteem thinks we’re invading opportunists: trying to claim Muta now that it’s unoccupied."

I shook my head — remembering how Var-Lann’s life force had changed after he’d disintegrated. The man had showed no ill will toward us while he’d been alive. Once he became a cloud, however, his emotions changed as he grew frustrated at not being able to… to do something, I couldn’t tell what. Frustration had turned to outrage, outrage to fury, and fury to a berserk need to lash out at anyone who wasn’t suffering the same torment.

According to Aniccan lore, that sequence of emotions was the classic pattern for pretas. Ghosts might feel joy at the moment of death, either because they were released from the agony of dying or because they thought the afterlife would be some grand heaven that erased the discontent of living. Then they’d realize death wasn’t an escape from their pasts — that the seeds of karma continued to grow, that one didn’t achieve wisdom and tranquillity just because one stopped breathing. There’s no free ride, not even in the afterlife. So the exhilaration of supposed freedom would turn to rage at continuing slavery… the ghosts’ knowledge that they were still fettered by the decisions they’d made and the people they’d become as a consequence.

It took time for that rage to abate — time spent wandering through other realms of existence until the ghosts could stomach the notion of being reborn: until their anger burned out and they found themselves ready to take another try at life. That was the path the unenlightened dead always walked. So I wouldn’t have been surprised if the ghosts of Team Esteem felt such an overpowering resentment, they’d want to make trouble for any living person who came within reach. However, I wasn’t naive. Normal ghosts couldn’t touch our physical realm; they didn’t look like smoke, nor did they use dinosaurs to attack those whose hearts were still beating.

It was almost as if Var-Lann’s hypothesized bacterial defense system killed people and turned them into ghosts, but left them trapped in this realm of existence. Even if they wanted to move on, they couldn’t. They drifted as clouds of dissociated cells — cells with shadows in their chromosomes and murder in their hearts. The clouds carried enough electrical energy to short out machine circuits, and perhaps to goad primitive wildlife into fury; but they didn’t have enough energy to… they didn’t have the power to…

No. I still couldn’t figure out what was happening. But I thought I was on the right track, if I could just fill in some blanks. Perhaps Festina was thinking along the same lines. As I came to an impasse in my own thoughts, Festina sighed, and said, "No sense brooding. Let’s follow Team Esteem’s tracks and see what they were working on. Maybe that will give some answers."

The path worn by Team Esteem led to the center of town. It wasn’t a straight-line route — the streets never let you go farther than a block or two without running into a public square built around a statue or fountain or amphitheater, or maybe just a flat paved area closed in with ornate metalwork fencing — but the Unity team’s tracks circled these obstacles and continued forward till they reached the city’s core.

There, two bridges spanned the Grindstone a hundred meters apart… and built between the bridges, entirely above the water, was a graceful building radically different from the rest of the city’s architecture. There were no brash mosaics on this building’s walls, just an unadorned white surface that looked like polished alabaster but wasn’t: any natural stone exposed to the weather for sixty-five centuries couldn’t possibly retain such a mirror-smooth finish. The building was as glossy as a polished pearl. Unlike the squared-off high-rises elsewhere in the city, the river building’s exterior had no sharp edges — just flowing curves that arced from one bridge to the other, like a third elegant bridge constructed between two less eyecatching cousins. If laid out flat on the ground, the building would only be a single story tall. As it was, however, its rainbowlike arch lifted much higher over the river… maybe a full six stories above the water at the center of its span.

"Pretty," said Festina, "but impractical. What are the floors like inside? Are they bowed like the building itself? You’d have to bolt down the furniture to keep it from sliding downhill."

"Forget the drawbacks, Auntie," Tut said. "Think about the possibilities. Get a chair on wheels, take it to the middle of the arch, then ride it down the central hallway as fast as you can go. Bet you’d get awesome speed by the time you hit the bottom."

"What if there is no central hallway?" I asked. "Maybe the architecture is designed to prevent people go-carting on office chairs."

"Come on, Mom, what’s the point of building a place like that if you can’t go cannonballing down the middle? That’s just sick."

"Central hallway or not," Festina said, "this is obviously the heart of the city. Designed to catch attention." She glanced up and down the river. "It’s visible quite a distance along both shores… and from the skyscrapers on either side."

"So what is it?" I asked. "A temple? A royal palace?"

"Go-cart track," Tut muttered.

"I don’t know what it is," Festina replied. "But it appears to be where Team Esteem spent a lot of time." She gestured toward the trail we’d been following. It led up the nearest of the two cross-bridges, heading for the white building above the water. "Let’s see what our friends in the Unity found."

She started forward again. Tut and I trailed silently behind her.

The path worn in the mud did indeed lead to the white, arched building. We followed the tracks to the middle of the nearest supporting bridge, then turned onto an access ramp that faded seamlessly from the bridge’s gray stone into the pearl-like alabaster of the building before us. The doors to the place were made of the same material as the walls: so glossy I could see my face faintly reflected in the surface.

I looked scared.

Tut, however, showed no signs of fear. He went to the door, grabbed its oversized handle, and yanked the thing open. As he did, I noticed Festina’s hand dart to the butt of her stun-pistol — but no EMP cloud or pseudosuchian hurtled out at us. The building’s surprise was more subtle than direct attack. For a moment, I didn’t even realize there was anything amiss… till it dawned on me the corridor beyond the entrance was perfectly, levelly flat.

A ridiculous instinct made me want to step back to see if the building still looked arched from the outside. I fought the urge; I didn’t want to act like some bumpkin unable to believe her eyes. Besides, I could count on Tut to do the honors. As soon as he saw the flat corridor in front of us, he ran to the side of the access ramp where he could get a clear view of the building. "Looks all curved from here," he called. "Does it still look level to you?"

"As straight as a laser," Festina said. "Either it’s a visual illusion, or the Fuentes had hellishly good spatial distortion technology. Looks like this building’s interior is a pocket universe that can lie level inside an arched shell."

"Bastards," Tut muttered. "Now there’s no point go-carting down the hall."

At that moment, the hall in question flickered — like a fluorescent light that’s malfunctioning. In this case, however, it wasn’t light that cut in and out; it was geometry. The flat floor jumped to the sort of curve one expected from an arched building… then back to a level surface… then bent, then flat again, fluttering rapidly back and forth till it settled down once more to a perfectly even keel.

Tut looked at Festina and me. "You saw that too, right?"

Festina nodded. "The building is losing its horizontal hold. Whatever technological trickery keeps the place level, it’s not going to last much longer." Her eyes took on a distant look. "This isn’t the first time I’ve come across Fuentes technology nearing the end of its life. Maybe their equipment uses some standard component, like a control chip or power supply… and that component has a working lifetime of six and a half millennia." She turned her head to the sky. "Maybe all over the galaxy, there are abandoned Fuentes settlements we haven’t found; and in each one, lights are flickering, machines are stuttering, computers are crashing… because they all use the same crucial part, and that part is so old, it’s become erratic."

The corridor flickered again. A single leap this time: like a skipping rope when someone snaps one end. The floor jerked precipitously, then dropped again to placid rest.

"If we were inside," I said, "would we have felt that? Like an earthquake tossing us around?"

"I doubt it," Festina replied. "If it had the force of an earthquake, it would have shaken the building apart. Even the few jumps we’ve seen should have caused major structural damage… and who knows how long the interruptions have been happening? Months? Years?" She shrugged. "Once we’re inside, we likely won’t notice the fluctuations. It’s only while we’re here, on the outside looking in, that we can tell weird shit is happening."

"What about when things finally die for good?" Tut asked. "Will that wreck the place?"

"Probably not," Festina said. "If flicking back and forth doesn’t bounce everything to pieces, shutting off and staying off shouldn’t either. But what do I know? This stuff goes way beyond anything I’ve learned about physics."

"I hope the place flies apart," Tut told her. "When the flatness finally goes, I hope the building can’t stand its new shape and just goes kerflooey! Wouldn’t that be great? Especially if you were inside and the floor under your feet just shot up, boom. Wouldn’t that be better than riding office chairs down the halls?"

Festina stared at him a moment, then turned away. "Let’s get in and out fast, shall we? Before anything dramatic happens. I’m allergic to excitement."

Once we’d stepped into the building’s central corridor, we saw no more flickers in reality. We didn’t hear or feel disturbances either — to our normal five senses, the building was as solid and unmoving as an ancient mountain.

But to my sixth sense, the place felt like a trampoline.

Every fluctuation sent my mental awareness skittering. It reminded me of age fourteen when I’d caught an inner-ear infection: the normally stable world seemed subject to swoops and staggers, movements made more disturbing because they didn’t jibe with the rest of my senses. Being on a real trampoline wouldn’t have been half so bad; at least then, all my senses would have agreed on what my body was experiencing. But having perceptions at odds with each other produced a sort of motion sickness — or nonmotion sickness — that left me dizzy with nausea after every bounce. I tried to hide my queasiness, but Festina noticed almost immediately.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Uhh, sure…"

"Don’t lie to me, Explorer! Are you all right?"

"Uhh…" I tried to gather my thoughts. Fortunately, the fluctuations only lasted a few seconds, after which tranquillity returned. I’d never mentioned my sixth sense to Festina… and was afraid to do so now, for fear of the way she’d react if she learned I’d been keeping secrets from her. At the same time, I didn’t want to tell an absolute lie. "It’s the Balrog," I said, swallowing back my disorientation. "I think it can sense when the building bounces. It’s… it’s making me seasick."

Festina took the Bumbler and gave me a head-to-toe scan. "No obvious change in your infestation," she said. "No, wait. Your foot. The spores have spread."

"Which foot?" I asked. As if I didn’t remember shattering the bones when I kicked down the door of the storage building.

"Your right," Festina said. She lifted her head from the Bumbler’s display. "You don’t feel any different?"

"In my foot? I don’t feel much of anything."

"I imagine that’s true." Festina stared thoughtfully at me. Her life force showed a growing mistrust — mistrust of me. Probably she was remembering how I’d smashed the door, then pretended to be all right. She realized now I must have been hiding what actually happened… and she had to be wondering what else I might have hidden.

The building flickered: a shudder so strong I almost threw up. Turn the sixth sense off, I thought fiercely to the Balrog. I can’t handle it here.

"You’d better go back outside," Festina told me as my stomach heaved. Her aura showed concern for my health… but she was also glad for an excuse to send me away, at least till she decided how to handle an alien-infested stink-girl who’d obviously concealed important facts.

Balrog, I thought again. She thinks I’m turning traitor. Shut off the sixth sense so she won’t send me away. Please! I need to think clearly. Shut it off.

And just like that, I became blind; the sixth sense vanished, and I was reduced to my five fleshly ones. I could no longer tell where I was or what was around me unless I actually looked. Tut and Festina had no auras: all surface, no interpretation. I saw them staring at me, but nothing told me what they were feeling.

It made me laugh — bitterly. How long had I had the sixth sense? Less than two days… but going without it now felt like losing a limb. In fact, I had lost a limb, my foot turned to moss; but that seemed like a minor inconvenience compared to the amputation of my mental awareness. In that moment, I mourned more for my lost alien perception than for my real flesh and blood.

Demon, I thought silently toward the red moss. You got me addicted so easily. And if you’re as prescient as everyone says, you probably saw this coming — that I’d set the sixth sense aside and realize how much I missed it. But I won’t ask you to turn it back on. I won’t.

No response from the omnipresent spores… but I imagined them mocking me. The Balrog knew perfectly well I’d ask for the sixth sense back, probably the instant I left the building. I knew it too. I’d invent some rationalization for why it was necessary: it would be "in the best interests of the mission" to regain my heightened perception. As soon as I could, I’d ask the Balrog to reinstate my enhanced awareness. If the spores delayed even for a second, I’d be ready to beg.

Disgusting, disgusting addiction. Even worse, I didn’t care how needy I might be, how much I’d have to grovel. I just wanted to see again. The only thing stopping me from pleading for the sixth sense back, right then and there, was the look on Festina’s face.

"What’s just happened?" she asked. I couldn’t tell if her voice was sympathetic or dangerously restrained. "Something’s changed, hasn’t it? What happened, Youn Suu?"

"The Balrog… it’s, uhh… it’s numbed me. So I won’t feel the fluctuations anymore."

"Did it tell you that?"

I shook my head. "It doesn’t tell me anything — it never speaks. I just know I’ve been… numbed."

"I wish I could be numbed," Tut said. "Does it make you horny?"

"No." It makes me sad. "But I’m okay. I can go on now."

"Think again," Festina said. "You’re going back outside — where you’ll feel better, and we won’t have to worry about the Balrog playing tricks."

I wanted to yell and argue; but if I did, she’d only mistrust me more. Luckily, Tut came to my rescue.

"Come on, Auntie," he told Festina, "we can’t send Mom outside on her own. Not if she’s sick. She might get eaten by a Rexy."

"You can stay outside with her. Keep her safe."

"No way," Tut said. "Then you’d be alone, Auntie… and who knows what dangerous shit might be in this building. Not to mention, if we’re trying to find what the Unity was up to, three people can search a lot faster than one. There’s a reason the Explorer Corps frowns on single-person operations."

I could have given Tut a big wet kiss for standing up to Festina… and standing up for me. But I merely held myself upright like a competent human being. I’d overcome my dizziness from the spatial fluctuations and hadn’t yet begun to suffer serious withdrawal from losing my sixth sense. (I hoped there wouldn’t be withdrawal symptoms; but I could feel some perverse urge trying to invent some. My ancestors would have blamed that urge on the demon-god Mara, who keeps people under his power by filling them with worldly cravings and delusions. I seldom believed in Mara, but I knew the ease with which my brain could create trouble for itself. It would rather be bleeding than quiet.)

Festina looked at Tut and me, then growled. "Three Explorers is a stupid size for a landing party. Not enough people to split up safely, but enough for the admiral to get outvoted." She glared. "Just remember, this isn’t a democracy. I can and will pull rank if I think it’s necessary. I’ll do it the instant you really become a liability."

"I’m feeling better now," I said. "Honest."

"No, Youn Suu. The Balrog is letting you feel better. Or making you feel better. And that’s assuming you are Youn Suu. For all I know, the real Youn Suu could have been silenced, and now the Balrog is speaking with her mouth."

I’m the real Youn Suu, I thought. But I didn’t say it aloud — Festina wouldn’t have believed it.

Even I had my doubts.