Radiant (17 page)

Corpses now. Small, shriveled corpses. In some, the skin was intact enough to show the blemished cheek; in others, decay or some ravaging cause of death had erased all sign of disfigurement.

Every cadaver had a shining crimson dot in the middle of each foot.

So did the living Youn Suu's. All nineteen years old. A few maimed or crippled from unknown accidents. A few showing signs of disease, from palsied tremors to leprous rot. Most, however, were intact—even healthy—inside their varied prisons.

Some clutched the steel bars that blocked their freedom; those girls howled obscenities to empty air. Some had their backs to the bars of their cage, sitting at food-heaped tables: eating, drinking, carousing. Some seemed engaged with invisible sex partners: lying, standing, kneeling.

Many were dancing. Elegant, frenzied, languid, lascivious. Masked for a festival or wearing full ballet garb, dressed down in rehearsal tights or even naked. Tightly contained steps, or wild leaps that caromed off the walls of their prisons.

Every dancing foot revealed a spot of crimson.

A million million possibilities. All the Youn Suu's there could be. All imprisoned; all claimed by the spores.

The vision floated on, past ever-stranger versions of the same girl. With the left half of her face metal instead of flesh. Plastic instead of metal. Glass instead of plastic. The entire face unblemished... or gold-plated like Tut... or entirely missing, no muscles or bone, leaving the brain behind open and exposed.

Versions with fur or reptilian scales. Multicolored versions with Cashling spottles. Versions with insectlike mandibles or protruding snouts.

On and on the vision moved... till it reached not the end but the middle. The line of Youn Suu's the vision had followed was a single spoke of a wheel that spread the breadth of a galaxy. More Youn Suu's dotted the wheel's other spokes: Youn Suu's from different cycles of time, when all that had been would recur. Her string of lives would be relived, again and again as time repeated—each cycle a perfect rerun of all those before, unless, like the Buddha, she burned her way out from the ever-returning trap. But no Youn Suu had managed such a feat of liberation; all were still imprisoned, whether the cages were cramped stone cubicles or opulent pleasure palaces with the jail bars swathed in silk.

Except...

At the center of the wheel—the hub where the vision led—were two Youn Suu's free of all confinement.

One lay unmoving on a sweat-soaked bed. She had no Balrog marks on her feet; no spores anywhere on her body. She wasn't breathing: dead but cleansed. No Balrog. No prison.

The second Youn Suu was half-eaten: moss from the waist down, just like Kaisho, but with the left leg severed short at the knee and an abundance of blood-raked scratches wherever human flesh remained. This one was alive. Her eyes were open. She smiled, as if pleased with her cannibalized state. Delighted to be the Balrog's banquet.

Were these the only alternatives? Or was there a final version of Youn Suu: one who'd escaped the cosmic wheel and so wasn't here on display. A Youn Suu beyond the wheel's grasp... beyond the endless repetitions... beyond the prisons, beyond the Balrog, beyond all chains and fetters.

Dead or alive, the only Youn Suu worth striving for.

A choice was made; and who knows what did the choosing? Certainly not a girl named Youn Suu. All possible versions of her were locked in prisons of the wheel... not standing outside, looking on, assessing options. There was no Youn Suu free to make a choice.

And yet, a choice was made.

I awoke shivering.

The bedclothes were clammy. The air smelled of vomit and urine. When I moved, I could feel crusty deposits flaking off from my chest and upper arms. The taste in my mouth was so vile I gagged; I might have thrown up again on the spot except there was nothing left in my stomach.

But I was alive.

The red dots had disappeared from my feet. Healed over. The cabin lay in total blackness. I thought of asking the room to turn on the lights, but decided I didn't want to see the mess I'd made. Instead, I walked lumpenly to the washroom and rinsed my mouth ten or twenty times.

"Balrog?" I said in the darkness. "Did I make another choice? Was that what the dream was about?"

No answer. Never an answer.

I washed myself off in the shower, scrubbing with all my strength. Then I went back to the bed, gathered up the sheets, and washed them in the shower too until the smell of soap overcame the reek of bodily fluids. As for the bed itself, I offered my thanks to whoever decreed that navy mattresses should be one hundred percent waterproof—able to be cleaned with a damp cloth. I wiped the mattress down, then sat at my desk to give everything a chance to dry.

Through all this, I hadn't turned on the lights. I didn't need to. Despite the utter darkness, I could make my way without stumbling. I knew the exact position of every object in the room. If I concentrated, I knew the location of individual dust motes in the air. I didn't sense them; I just knew. And this time, I didn't tell the Balrog to take away its gift of inhuman perception. Keeping the room pitch-black was comforting after I'd almost died.

"I
did
almost die," I said to the Balrog. "Right? And you let me decide... or did you? Was it just another trick to seduce me?"

The vision I'd had—an infinite wheel of Youn Suu lives from countless cycles of time—accorded exactly with the teachings I'd learned while growing up.
Exactly.
As if the Balrog plucked images from my mind and built a cosmic experience tailored to my expectations. And the decision I'd made (if I really did make a decision... and what had I decided?)... did the decision save my life? Or would the Balrog have kept me alive anyway? It controlled my body. It could suppress my deadly fever if it chose. The Balrog might have started the fever in the first place, so it could give me a taste of what I thought Ultimate Enlightenment would be like.

I couldn't trust anything I'd just been through. Wasn't this precisely the way nefarious cult leaders won converts? Wear down the target's physical resistance with fatigue, starvation, and fever. Orchestrate experiences that brought on heightened emotional states. Wait for the target to embrace offered truths and fall deliriously in love with the guru himself... or in this case, the guru
itself.
An alien known for playing games with lesser creatures.

"I'm tired," I told the Balrog. "If you're going to keep toying with me, save it till tomorrow."

Within minutes, I'd fallen asleep in the chair. No dreams. When I opened my eyes, it was morning.

Shunyata [Sanskrit]: The trait of being transitory and interconnected with other things. No thing is absolute or complete in itself. Where, for example, is a chair's chairness? Not in any of its parts: a chair leg is not a chair; a backrest is not a chair. But even a complete assemblage of chair parts is not enough for chairness. Chairs can be chairs only in appropriate environments—they need gravity, a species whose anatomy can fit into the chair, and various other external conditions. Chairness is therefore not a property of a particular object, but a set of relationships between the object and external factors. This quality is shunyata... often translated as "emptiness." In isolation, a chair may exist as an object but it's "empty." Chairness arises only when the object relates in a specific way to the rest of the world.

I ate more that breakfast than at any other meal in my life. And I'd never been a hesitant eater: my high-powered gene-spliced metabolism always needed plenty of fuel. But that morning, I surpassed all previous records. I just couldn't stop shoveling in food.

The phrase "eating for two" kept echoing in my head. I pictured the Balrog siphoning off my intake, not letting a single mouthful reach my stomach... but even that image wasn't enough to slow me down. I remained so hungry I found myself casting ardent looks at the mess's meat section—bacon, sausage, kippers, and slabs of dead animal I couldn't even identify—to the point where I might have renounced my lifelong vegetarianism if Tut hadn't walked in the door.

He was looking surprisingly dapper, with his face burnished far beyond his usual shiny-finey standards. Gold glinted like pure rich honey under the mess's bright morning lights; either Tut had found some new metal polish or he'd spent untold hours buffing it to a perfect mirror surface.

"Hey, Mom," he said, "I've been looking for you. Were you messing with the door to the equipment room? It's locked, and it won't let me in."

"Festina did that. Admiral Ramos. She won't let us near the equipment, for fear we'd do something bad."

Tut made a noise like his feelings had been hurt. I told him, "Don't pout, it's mostly me she mistrusts. Or rather, the Balrog inside me."

"Huh." He looked down at the dishes all around my place at the table. There was nothing for him to steal this time—I'd eaten everything and practically licked the plates clean. "So when do we get to this planet?" he asked.

I tongued a control on the roof of my mouth. In the bottom corner of my right eye, a digital time readout appeared. "We'll be there in two hours," I told him. "Do you know what we're doing once we arrive?"

"Auntie gave me the basics last night. Mystery threat. Search for survivors. Save anyone we find. I'm also supposed to stun the knickers off you if the Balrog tries any tricks."

"Good luck. You'll need it."

My sixth sense was still in perfect working order; I hadn't asked the Balrog to turn it off after the previous night. Not only did I know the position of everything near me, including objects behind my back and out of sight around corners, but I'd begun perceiving life forces again. If Tut decided to shoot me, his intention would ring out loud and clear from his aura: enough warning to let me dodge, or even shoot him first.

It seemed unfair, in a way—having this extra edge over Tut's mere human perceptions. But if I asked the Balrog to turn the sixth sense off, what good would that do? The Balrog itself would still have its full mental awareness; Tut and everyone else would still be at a disadvantage relative to the spores. So why should I blind myself when it wouldn't help anyone? Staying augmented put me on a more even footing with the moss inside me. It might even give me the strength to resist any power plays the Balrog might attempt.

Yes. I'd keep the sixth sense for the time being.

As soon as I'd made that decision, my voracious hunger abated. It felt like a return to sanity.

A short time later, Festina called to say that Tut and I could check out the tightsuits we'd wear for the landing. She let us into the equipment area one at a time and kept close watch on everything we did.

I wasn't allowed to touch anything except my own suit. Festina said she'd checked the other equipment herself. I couldn't help asking a barrage of questions, mostly about how Festina had dealt with new gear and procedures—things that had changed since she'd been on active Explorer duty. But it turned out "Auntie" Festina had kept up with recent developments in the Explorer Corps: she'd done everything exactly the way I would have. She even let me look at the results of diagnostic tests she'd run earlier that morning. All equipment was working at optimal.

Once we'd finished with the tightsuits, Festina took Tut and me to the bridge, where she seated herself at the seldom-used Explorers' console. Sometime during the night, she'd programmed four probe missiles to perform initial reconnaissance on the site where we'd land. The missiles would be sent down as soon as
Pistachio
reached Muta orbit. Based on their data, we'd decide how to proceed.

"And what site are we going to?" I asked.

"The one that sent the Mayday."

Festina turned a dial on her console, and the bridge's vidscreen changed to show a satellite photo of Muta—one of hundreds included in the files we'd received from the Unity. A red dot glowed in the middle of a region that looked like a vast plain. "The Unity called this Camp Esteem." She made a face. "Typical Unity name. It happens to be the newest camp on the planet... so the survey team was fresher than any other team in residence. Maybe that's why they managed to get out a call for help when all the other teams went without a peep. Or not. It could just be coincidence."

"If that's the most recent site developed," I said, "it should be close to Fuentes ruins. The last four teams were all investigating Las Fuentes."

"I know. Team Esteem was poking through an abandoned Fuentes city they code-named Drill-Press." Festina made another face. I knew from the files I'd read that the Unity had named all of Muta's geography after wholesomely useful tools. (I was glad we weren't going anywhere near the Fuentes city called Reciprocating Saw.)

Festina went back to the satellite photo. "For the sake of caution, the Unity surveyors didn't pitch camp inside the city—they set up quarters a short distance away." She zoomed the view on the vidscreen. "That's the city, Drill-Press, in the lower half of the picture. You'll notice a good-sized river running through downtown. The river's called Grindstone. The Unity camp is here: fifteen minutes upstream from the city."

The original photo had shown a good chunk of the continent, so the zoom had disappointingly crude resolution—pixels the size of fingerprints, with a chunky lack of detail. Nevertheless, I could make out the features Festina had described. A good-sized river ran vertically down the center of the shot; it had a few gentle curves, but essentially flowed north to south (according to a legend in a corner of the picture). In the north, just west of the river, the Unity camp was highlighted with a digitally superimposed red circle. A cluster of prefab buildings lay within the circle: twelve small huts (living quarters for the survey team's dozen members) and four larger units... a mess hall, a lab, an equipment maintenance shop, and a general storage area.

To the south, near the bottom of the photograph, lay the Fuentes city. Drill-Press. Even after sixty-five hundred years, it was easy to identify. This was not some Old Earth archeological site where primitive peoples built houses from sticks; on Muta, the "ruins" had fifty-story skyscrapers made from high-tech construction materials... materials as good or better than the self-repairing
chintah
in Zoonau. Las Fuentes had been more advanced than the Cashlings, and this city must have been constructed near the height of Fuentes achievement. It was hard to see much on the poor-resolution aerial photo, but none of the buildings showed obvious damage. Most of the roofs had rectangular cross sections, and I noticed no irregularities that might indicate holes, or edges eroded away. All of Drill-Press seemed structurally intact; "ruins" in name only. At ground level, the city was likely a mess—in six and a half millennia, the river must have flooded its banks on numerous occasions, leaving silt and water damage on the buildings' bottom floor—but floodwaters wouldn't have climbed much higher. Damage on upper floors would come from other sources: insects and other local wildlife. Mold. Mildew. Microbial rot.