Radiant (50 page)

Gold light filled the dome of the station. It built to a blazing intensity, then exploded outward through the spikes in the building's crown. For a moment, my sixth sense returned, showing me hundreds of
pretas
outside the station, permeated with healing bursts of energy. I waited to see them transform...

...but instead I went blind.
Truly
blind. No sixth sense. No eyes. The spores in my body—the ones replacing parts of my brain, the ones that had kept me alive through broken bones, hemorrhages, and even amputation—all of them reached the end of their strength and died en masse within me.

I was purged of my infestation... and left with a body no longer able to survive on its own.

Everything went black.

Prajna [Pali]: Wisdom; insight; understanding.

To my great surprise, I woke up. More or less.

I was no longer in the station. I was no longer anywhere. My surroundings were neither light nor dark, hot nor cold. Just there. Peaceful and placid, undemanding, unyielding.

So,
I thought,
the Afterlife Bardo. I'm dead.

Tibetan scholars liked to contemplate the gaps between things—particularly the gap between death and rebirth. They called these in-between states Bardos. The Bardo of Death was sometimes pictured as a spirit realm where the recently deceased made choices in preparation for their next life.

As a non-Tibetan, I had my doubts. In standard scriptures, the Buddha never mentioned Bardos; I'd always considered them holdovers from some pre-Buddhist mysticism. At best, I'd thought Bardos might be useful metaphors for stages in a more metaphysical journey.

Yet here I was. Or so it appeared.

Balrog,
I said, with soundless words,
you're manipulating my perceptions again. Simulating an afterlife. Must you keep playing these games?

A point of red appeared in the nothingness. A solitary Balrog spore. It hovered in my consciousness—not speaking, just waiting.

This is all in my mind,
I said.
What's left of my mind. Considering I'm missing most of my brain, it's surprising I can think at all.

Silence.

You're helping me, aren't you? Working your magic from afar. For thousands of years, the Divine walled off the station from your influence... but the Divine are out of the picture. As soon as a few
pretas
got elevated—truly elevated—they'd deal with the Divine, one way or another. So you're no longer shut out, and you can reach my dying brain. Right?

The glowing red spore showed no reaction... but I felt as if it was listening. Hearing my final thoughts.

I
am
dying, aren't I? When you came to me back in Zoonau, I knew this all might lead to my death. And here it is. My death.

The spore dimmed slightly, then returned to its steady glow.

But,
I continued,
you could still save me, couldn't you? If I invited you into my body again, you could patch me up. You could teleport spores into me from anywhere in the galaxy. You could heal me by infesting me again.

The spore bobbed slightly.

For several moments, I didn't speak. Finally, I said,
I'm not afraid of death. True death might not lead to a Bardo, but I'm not afraid. Fear is unskillful.

This time, the spore didn't respond. It was still waiting.

There's more I could do, isn't there? I'm not afraid of death, but living would let me accomplish useful things.
I laughed lightly.
The Bodhisattva's decision—choosing not to move on, because there are still creatures who need help.

The spore fluttered momentarily. I didn't know what that meant. There were surely an infinite number of things I would never understand even if I became enlightened. Enlightenment isn't omniscience; it's just freedom.

At that moment, I had a degree of freedom. Free choice: I could bid farewell to the Balrog and let death come as it always comes eventually; or I could invite the Balrog to enter me, once again surrendering to alien infestation.

Put it another way: I could run from the sufferings of the universe, or I could join forces once again with a quirky creature who'd called me to be its champion.

I had no body, but I moved toward the glowing spore. I opened my being... my trust... my love...

Once again, I woke up.

Festina was lightly slapping my face. "Youn Suu. Come on, Youn Suu, wake up. Come on..."

I opened my eyes. What I saw first was Festina's hand; it had ooze on it. She'd been slapping my bad cheek and hadn't cared. I took her hand... kissed it... wiped it off on my uniform. When she looked embarrassed, I just smiled. "I'm fine," I said. "I died for a bit, but decided that was too easy."

"What do you mean, you died?" By now, Festina had pulled back her hand and was wiping it vigorously on her own uniform. Wiping off my kiss? "I scanned you with the Bumbler," she said. "You weren't dead, you just fainted." She gave me a look. "If you'd been dead, you idiot, I'd be giving you CPR, not patting your face as if you were a swooning chambermaid."

I shrugged. Whether I'd really died didn't matter. If I'd rejected the Balrog, all the CPR in the universe wouldn't have helped me. But the dead spores inside me had been replaced by fresh ones, full of mischievous energy. I could feel them—feel their power.

My sixth sense was back.

Which meant I could tell what was happening in the rest of the station. Light continued to gush from the station's emitter plate... and Tut still lay on the golden disk, bending this way and that to make shadows on the ceiling with his body. His thin frame didn't block much of the radiance—certainly not as much as the Divine had all these years.

I couldn't sense the Divine. Perhaps when the first
pretas
were uplifted, they'd used their new power to eradicate the spores; or perhaps the newly elevated Fuentes had dealt more kindly with their centuries-long enemies. The
pretas
might have helped the Divine to ascend too, as should have happened from the very beginning. Vengeance or mercy: often hard to predict.

I felt the Fuentes' arrival a moment before I saw it—a powerful presence blossoming in the room, a life force of dazzling vitality. The creature's aura blazed from a spot behind Festina's back... and suddenly, there was a small slick of purple on the floor, a sheen of quivering jelly.

How anticlimactic.

When I pointed out our visitor to Festina, she sighed. "Now the big boys arrive—to pat us on the back and send us on our way."

"Actually," the jelly said, "we're patting
ourselves
on the back." The voice was female: low and gentle, slightly amused. "We did an excellent job choosing our champion."

Festina glared. "So Youn Suu's theory about champions is true?"

The jelly laughed. "Admiral, you can't expect me to give a straight answer. Perhaps what Youn Suu said
is
true; perhaps every member of the Explorer Corps is the protégé of some high-echelon race in the League of Peoples. Perhaps each member of the corps was created or chosen in the belief that
Homo sapiens
have the potential to do something we can't do ourselves. Or perhaps we overheard Youn Suu expound that hypothesis, and we find it amusing to encourage such a ridiculous conjecture."

"I hate you guys," Festina muttered. "Every smug bastard in the League. I really hate you."

"Hypothetically," I said to the jelly, "if you
did
sponsor a particular Explorer as your champion... who would it be?"

"Not me," Festina said. "Please tell me I'm not the one. I'd hate to be created by something that looks like grape jam."

The jelly laughed again. "Rest assured, Admiral, you aren't ours. Neither is Youn Suu; she and her ilk belong to the Balrog."

"So if it isn't me and it isn't Youn Suu..." Festina's head turned, and so did mine: both of us looked toward Tut.

"Your legends recount many refreshing forms of madness," the jelly said. "Mostly, such stories are untrue to life. Genuine mental illnesses are seldom amusing; those who suffer from such conditions are miserably dysfunctional. But your folktales abound with wise fools and lunatics. If one carefully arranges precise metabolic imbalances throughout a child's gestation and infancy..."

Festina finished the sentence. "You get someone who's loony but still competent. Assuming you aren't just lying about this whole 'champion' thing."

No, I thought, the "champion thing" wasn't a lie. I remembered the flashes of purple I'd seen in Tut's aura, helping him fight off possession by the
pretas.
It was the same shade of purple as the Fuentes jelly: just a tiny flicker of aid from his "sponsors" to keep him in the game. The jelly couldn't actually force Tut to do anything—that would ruin the spontaneity of the experiment—but they could orchestrate events to bring Tut to when and where he was needed.

"If you're Tut's patron," I said to the jelly, "who's Festina's?"

"That will be revealed at a time of her patron's choosing... assuming, again, we aren't lying."

"And in the meantime, the patron just lets me sweat in ignorance?" Festina asked.

"Ignorance is necessary," the jelly replied. "If we influence you too much, we prevent you from acting spontaneously. That defeats the whole exercise. We cannot guide you, or we may unwittingly steer you away from... whatever you might discover. For the same reason, we cannot rescue you from every trouble that arises. Dealing with life-or-death situations is when you are most likely to make a breakthrough." The jelly paused. "Or at least that's one school of thought."

Festina growled. "So you just keep manipulating Explorers into one potentially lethal danger after another to see how we react?"

The jelly chuckled. "Admiral... that's what 'expendable' means."

If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him: An adage that warns against one last fixation—you can become unskillfully attached to Buddhism itself. You have to discard this final dependency too.

Poised on the beach outside the station, Festina, Tut, and I watched pulses of gold light spread from the spikes in the crown. My sixth sense told me the radiation blanketed an area fifty kilometers in radius; any
preta
within that zone ascended after a few seconds of exposure. As I'd expected, the news had spread to every EMP cloud in the world. The whole smoky population of the planet was now on the way, simmering toward us at the speed of sound. Within twenty-four hours, every
preta
on Muta would be free.

"You realize," I said to Festina and Tut, "you two can still become transcendent. The microbes are working on your bodies. In hours or days, you'll disintegrate. Next thing you know, you'll be demigods."

"No," Festina said, "next thing I know I'll be purple jelly." She waved her hand dismissively. "No thanks."

"Maybe only Fuentes turn into purple jelly. Maybe humans turn into
green
jelly."

"Ooo!" said Tut. "Could
I
turn into green jelly? Or gold jelly. That would be even better."

Festina raised an eyebrow. "Do you really want to ascend, Tut? I don't see the appeal... unless you'd like to thumb your nose at the jelly Fuentes. Once you're jelly yourself, they can't use you as their champion."

Tut thought about it a moment. "Nah, Auntie. If I ascended, I might go all serious. Wouldn't want to wear masks... wouldn't want to eat cookies... wouldn't want to pull down my pants and—"

"We get the point," Festina interrupted.

She pulled a Sperm-tail anchor from her backpack, flicked the ON switch, and set it on the ground. Unclipping her comm from her belt, she said, "Captain Cohen, we're ready for home."

"Very good, Admiral. The Sperm-tail's on its way."

Seconds later, the tail whisked out of the sky above the lake. Small waves rippled placidly, glinting in the soft early sunlight. The tail seemed to play in the fresh air, flicking this way and that, admiring its reflection in the water's surface. Then it remembered its duty and flew to the anchor, forming a fluttering pillar reaching all the way to
Pistachio.

"So that's it?" Tut asked. "Nothing else to do?"

"Nothing but fill out a million reports," Festina replied. "We didn't rescue the survey teams, but we've done all we can. They must have ascended by now... and I assume they'll be polite enough to inform the Unity they're safe."

"The Admiralty won't be thrilled," Tut said, "considering the Unity has just acquired a few dozen gods, and the Technocracy gets stuck with nothing. The balance of power's been thrown out of whack."

Festina shrugged. "Who knows what the survey teams will do, now that they're elevated? Maybe they'll help the Unity... but maybe they'll decide there's more interesting things to do than hang out with mere humans."

"Maybe," I said, "the uplifted survey teams will create their own champions in the Explorer Corps."

"It's possible," Festina agreed. "Assuming the whole champion business isn't bullshit. You have to realize, Youn Suu, the Balrog may have planted that notion in your mind as a joke. Or to mislead us from something else."

"You're going to ignore the possibility?"

"No, I'll investigate the crap out of it... but quietly. The navy treats Explorers badly enough already. The last thing I want is the High Council deciding we're dangerous minions of alien masters, planted in the fleet to do God knows what. The corps could end up in jail... or worse. So I'd appreciate the two of you not mentioning the champion theory in your reports. Let me look into it discreetly."

"Fine with me, Auntie," Tut said. "I don't understand it anyway." He looked at the anchored Sperm-tail. "Ready to go?"

"After you," Festina told him.

Tut grinned. "You two want to be alone?"

"Go. That's an order."

Tut gave Festina a sloppy salute and bent over the small anchor box. A moment later, he disappeared upward: sucked into the Sperm-tail's pocket universe and propelled all the way to the ship.