Radiant (7 page)

...a perfect moss-replica of my most recent egg sculpture. A tall slim egg with a single barred window, the bars wrapped with holy guardian snakes. One of the snakes lifted its head and winked at me; then the front of the egg swung open like a door, inviting me to step inside.

What's this?
I mouthed.
A carriage?
Once again, no answer... but the Balrog's intent was obvious. It wanted me to climb into one of my Gotama prisons. Once I stepped inside, the door would lock behind me. Then I'd presumably be transported to Tut, carried into the city center fast enough to participate in whatever happened next. The Balrog was giving me a chance to make a difference in Zoonau's fate.

But I knew this was more than an offer of transit. I had to make a choice: I could join forces with the Balrog, volunteering to help in whatever the mossy alien was up to... or I could walk away and forever hold my peace.

My teachers at the Academy had warned about such situations—when a smarter-than-human alien asked you to buy in or opt out. There was only one reason you'd ever be given such a yes-or-no choice: because you risked getting killed if you did what the alien wanted.

Suppose the Balrog foresaw such a threat to me. Then the League of Peoples demanded I be offered the chance to say no. Otherwise—if the spores just grabbed me against my will—the Balrog would be guilty of dragging me into a lethal situation without option of escape. In other words, murder. The Balrog would catch trouble from the League unless I willingly stuck my head in the noose.

Which was where I was at that moment. If I stepped into that big mossy egg, I doubted I'd have another chance to back out. These things were almost always onetime offers. Like swallowing a porcupine—once you started, you had to keep going till you got it all down.

I hesitated. League law said the Balrog couldn't lure me into
certain
death—there had to be a chance I'd survive. Maybe a good chance. But there was also a chance I'd die. Too bad the Balrog wasn't obliged to explain what the percentages were.

Whatever the chances were, I knew what I was going to do—not what I
had
to do, but what I
would
do.

One step forward... and the Balrog closed around me.

I half expected to be teleported straight to some final destination. Navy records reported Kaisho Namida jumping instantaneously from star system to star system, sometimes hundreds of light-years in a single bound. But my mossy carriage simply lifted a centimeter off the pavement and accelerated at a couple of Gs, soon skimming along at a pace my Bumbler reported as a kilometer a minute.

This gave me time to take readings—in particular, to see where Zoonau's inhabitants had gone. I switched to an IR scan... and gasped as I saw a blaze of heat sources at the city center. A huge mob of Cashlings had gathered there. Thousands. Tens of thousands. The whole population of Zoonau? A moment later, data analysis gave me a tally: 91,734 Cashling heat signatures... and two humans.
Two
humans? Tut and who else? The second human wasn't me—I hadn't reached the square yet, so I wasn't included in the count. Could there have been another human in Zoonau when the Balrog attacked?

Plenty of humans visited Cashleen, but almost all stayed in the planet's capital, thousands of kilometers away. The capital was home to our Technocracy embassy... and humans usually stuck close to the embassy. Whatever your purpose for coming to Cashleen, the embassy staff were far more likely to provide useful assistance than any Cashling you might find. So who would have reason for coming to a backwater like Zoonau?

I winced as an answer came to me: someone from the embassy staff.

Zoonau had been attacked two hours ago: plenty of time for somebody to fly in from the capital. No embassy personnel had been sent to Zoonau officially—the powers that be wanted
Pistachio
to handle everything—but I could easily imagine an ambitious vice consul buzzing off to Zoonau as soon as the news came in. He or she could have reached the city before our landing party, hoping to win a career boost by dealing with the Balrog single-handed. It was just the sort of grandstanding maneuver one expected from success-hungry bureaucrats... and just the sort of rashness that made Explorers grind their teeth.

Now I had to deal with a madman
and
an intrusive amateur.

I heard the people in the square before I saw them: thousands of gabbling voices, loud despite the muffling moss on every echoing surface. Then my transport egg rounded a corner, and the crowd was directly before me. No one had stayed down on street level; they were all packed onto the ziggurat, trampling flowers in the terrace gardens, clogging the open areas, milling on the stairs. I counted eight levels to the ziggurat, all of them spacious by normal standards... but with more than ninety thousand Cashlings crammed onto a single building, it looked like a dangerous squeeze.

Why had they come to this central area? Only one answer. The Balrog herded them here. It had used its spores to push or intimidate people through the streets until they reached the heart of the city.

The Balrog wanted an audience.

Once again, I tuned my Bumbler to Tut's homing beacon. He was on the top level now, heading for the pulpit in the center. The Bumbler could reconstruct what was happening up there, as if looking through a telescope. Dozens of Cashlings fought for the pulpit, either because they had some inspired message to proclaim or because they just wanted to seize the highest spot on the pyramid—an "I'm the king of the castle" impulse. When Tut shoved his way through the crowd, several people tried to grab him, hold back the human in their midst... but a few blasts from Tut's stun-pistol, and the opposition slumped to the roof tiles. The Cashlings edged back as Tut climbed to the pulpit's perch.

Meanwhile, my Balrog-built egg had reached the ziggurat and started ascending the stairs. The egg didn't fly, but surfed on a wave of spores that carried us smoothly upward. Cashlings ahead of us got brushed aside by a mossy wedge that preceded the egg, like the cowcatcher on an Old Earth locomotive. Anyone in our way was knocked left or right, their falls cushioned by beds of moss that sprang up to provide a safe landing. Other wads of moss performed crowd control—making sure no one accidentally got trampled.

Interesting. Navy files claimed the Balrog disliked contact with lesser beings... but the moss was taking a hands-on approach to keep the Cashlings safe.

Despite Balrog efforts to clear the way, our progress up the ziggurat was slow. Hundreds of people stood between us and the top. Many of them seemed eager to block us if they could, shouting curses and throwing themselves in our path. I don't know what they hoped to accomplish; they were just so angry at the Balrog, they must have decided that if it wanted to take me upward, they wanted to get in the way. In other words, the Cashlings were acting out of sheer rebelliousness: the sort of rebelliousness that could turn to violence, especially if Tut did something inflammatory.

"People of Zoonau!" Tut's voice boomed over the city. The pulpit obviously had a built-in sound system, and he'd patched his tightsuit radio into the feed. Giant hologram images materialized in the air, scores of them, all showing Tut's golden face five stories tall. The pulpit had holo-projectors too.

"My name is Tut," he said with a cheerful metallic smile. "I'm from the Technocracy's Outward Fleet—here to assess the situation and lend a hand." He paused, looked around. "Okay, here's my assessment. You're all really really pissed off. Right?"

A roar thundered from the crowd. The Balrog continued bearing me upward. Slowly. More people hurled themselves at our egg.

"You're pissed off," Tut said, his words ringing through the streets, "because this big bully Balrog is pushing you around, and you feel like there's nothing you can do. Am I right?"

The Cashlings roared again. I'd been hoping a lot of the crowd wouldn't understand English. But almost everyone in the Cashling Reach learned our language, purely so they could amuse themselves with human movies, virtuals, and other forms of entertainment. Cashlings wouldn't lift a finger to do productive work, but they'd spend long hours acquiring an alien tongue if that's what it took to get the jokes in a mindless sitcom.

"I know what it's like to feel helpless," Tut went on. "I'm an Explorer. I know what it's like to get reamed by fat-ass aliens. But guess what: I also know how to take back control. I can tell you how to beat this damned Balrog. Do you want to hear the secret?"

The crowd screamed yes. My egg finally topped the steps, onto the flat uppermost level. Just a short distance now to the pulpit.

"Here's what you do, Zoonau!" Tut shouted. He reached up to his chest and dug his thumbs under protective flaps on his suit's yellow breastplate. Everyone watching mimicked his action... everyone except me. I was too busy thinking,
Oh no. Oh no.

Suddenly Tut threw his arms and legs wide, like a giant human X. Every Cashling did the same. I didn't. All I wanted to do was bury my face in my hands; but I held my head up, eyes open, to witness what happened next.

A tightsuit is usually an Explorer's best friend. It provides you with air and protects you from lethal environments. Once in a while, though, your tightsuit becomes a liability: if there's a life-threatening malfunction... if the suit's weight means the difference between sinking or swimming... if something small and toothy has got inside the suit with you. Therefore, the Outward Fleet equips each tightsuit with an emergency evac system, for occasions when you have to get your gear off in a hurry. You activate the system by pressing hidden buttons on your breastplate—just as Tut had done. Then you spread your arms and legs wide—just like Tut—and you wait for a very short countdown.

Three... two... one...

Tut's suit exploded from his body. Literally. Shaped demolition charges blew out the seams that held everything together. His helmet went straight up, disappearing from sight as it bulleted toward the dome overhead. Tut's sleeves shot off his outspread arms like jet-propelled bananas; the same with his pant legs, which flew apart in pieces and slapped into the upturned faces of nearby Cashling spectators. The breastplate cannonballed into the pulpit in front of him, knocking the lectern stand off its supports and toppling it onto the crowd. The backplate rocketed out and away over the edge of the ziggurat, probably falling on some unsuspecting Cashling several levels below. Other bits and pieces hurtled in random directions, belt pouches, shoulder pads, hunks of the crotch... until Tut was standing there, stark naked and hologrammatically enlarged, in front of all of Zoonau.

Huh. He'd been telling the truth. The gold
wasn't
just on his face.

My egg reached the pulpit (now just a bare platform) two seconds later. For a moment, nothing happened. Tut looked down at me, beaming a big bright smile. I stared back from my egglike prison, a Princess Gotama just before all hell breaks loose. The Balrog did nothing. The Cashlings did nothing. I thought about drawing my stun-pistol and shooting Tut before he caused further trouble... but that might send the crowd berserk.

Two heartbeats of silence.

Then the Balrog egg melted around me—all the spores slopping straight down. My helmet visor became flecked with red, and my suit felt heavy with dust. Most of the spores, however, just dropped to the roof tiles and pooled around my ankles. Several square meters of them. They glowed a soft red.

"Thanks, Mom," Tut murmured. "Knew I could count on you." Then he raised his voice and called to the Cashlings, "Here's how to show the bastards you don't care. Swan dive!" And he jumped from the pulpit, straight into the pile of spores that had just dripped off me. He was like a child leaping into a mound of autumn leaves. A moment later, Tut rolled happily naked on the red moss, laughing out loud and crooning, "Ooo, it's fuzzy!"

A murmur went through the Cashlings. A sigh. A cheer. Then they were running, sprinting at astonishing long-legged speed toward the patches of spores dabbed around the ziggurat. On the lower levels, people raced down to the city streets, crowds of them hitting the pavement and throwing themselves onto the first clumps of moss they found. If the Balrog had dodged, the Cashlings might have broken their bones as they struck cement-hard
chintah;
but the spores stayed in place, and the people plopped down on mattresses of soft moss. In seconds, 91,734 Cashlings were flipping and flopping deliriously, tossing handfuls of spores into the air, smearing red fuzz over their bodies.

Down by my feet, Tut grinned. "See, Mom? Problem solved. No one will go homicidal today—they're having too much fun."

He looked up at me with spores covering his face and body: even on the gold parts where you wouldn't think moss could stick. I smiled back vaguely, but only from reflex; inside, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Why? Because I knew this was far from over. The Balrog wouldn't have caused such a fuss, only to let the uproar be defused by a lunatic doing a fast striptease and rolling in the red. As far as I could see, the Balrog hadn't accomplished anything yet. All this sound and fury had gone nowhere... which meant "Stage Two" of the plan was still waiting to unfold.

But I said nothing. The Balrog was famous for showmanship. It was the sort of monster that held off its attacks until someone said, "We'll be safe now," or "I think it's gone." Above all else, the Balrog loved dramatic timing.

"So," Tut said, "looks like we've got this bitch under control."

I had time to wince.

Zoonau erupted in geysers of red. Spores shot up from the ground. More gusted down off the dome. Trillions of red particles tore away from the buildings. A crimson dust storm battered my world, thudding against my helmet, buffeting my body hard enough to be felt despite the tightsuit's protection. Radio static roared in my ears. The heads-up display in my visor went black. A wind ripped the Bumbler from my hands, and a moment later, I felt the little machine's shoulder strap break. The Bumbler bounced away in the tempest, but I didn't see or hear it go—the only noise was static, and the only sight an impenetrable onslaught of spores.