Radiant (3 page)

But none of that mattered. How could I trust a lunatic in life-or-death situations? Why was Tut on active duty when anyone could see he was
non compos mentis?

I asked him that once. Tut just laughed. "They don't need us sane, Mom. They just need us ready to bleed." He chucked his finger under my chin like a fond uncle amused by his young niece. "If they rejected head cases, Mom, you wouldn't be here either."

I was so affronted by his insinuation I stormed out of the room, stomped back to my cabin, and made thirteen statues of little gold-faced men being disemboweled by tiger-headed demons. When I showed Tut the results, he said, "Shiny-finey! Could I eat one?" I told him no, but later I noticed my favorite demon was missing.

Two months and fifty-four statuettes later, we finally received a distress call.

At the time,
Pistachio
was transporting twelve dignitaries to the planet Cashleen: six officers from the navy's Diplomatic Corps and six civilian envoys from the Technocracy's Bureau of Foreign Affairs. Since Tut and I had no immediate duties, we always got assigned to play host for any honored guests who came aboard... but this particular group of VIPs took one look at my face and instantly became self-sufficient. My cheek had the wondrous power to make the mighty say, "No, no, I can do my own laundry."

So I'd had little contact with the diplomats on that flight. I didn't even know what their mission was. However, Cashleen was the homeworld of the Cashling race—longtime allies of the Technocracy—so I assumed this was just the routine diplomacy that goes on between friendly powers.

The team of envoys certainly didn't behave as if their trip was important. Instead of preparing for the work ahead, they spent most the voyage getting drunk and trying to seduce the better-looking members of
Pistachio's
crew. For the entire week of the flight, Tut never went to bed alone. He told me, "Hey, Mom, everyone loves to lick gold. Did you think it was just on my face?" I consoled myself with the observation that people might be eager to sleep with him once, but nobody did it a second time.

I'd never slept with Tut myself. I'd never slept with anyone. An honest-to-goodness virgin. Not literally, of course—I'd manually ruptured my maidenhead within twenty-four hours of learning what it was... mostly to spite my mother, who'd given me an infuriating lecture on remaining intact. Only afterward did I stop to think:
Yes, I've done it, but how will my mother know?
Any "discovery scenario" I could imagine made me nauseated. Later on, I found that the thought of sex made me nauseated too. How could anyone want to do that with somebody who looked like me? Pity? Depravity? A lust so intense it didn't give a damn what it fucked? I couldn't conceive of a single acceptable reason why someone would sleep with me, so I fled every situation where the possibility might arise.

I was in my cabin, gouging a little hole in a Princess Gotama's cheek so I could plant a pearl there, when the message buzzer sounded from my desk. Most likely, I thought, the diplomats wanted me to fetch another case of Divian champagne. They never wanted to see me in person, but they were quick to ask for booze to be left outside their doors. Without looking up, I said, "What is it now?"

The ship-soul's metallic voice spoke from the ceiling. "Explorer Youn Suu. Captain Cohen requests your presence on the bridge. Immediately."

I nearly threw my figurine across the room. "Is there a response code?" I asked as I rushed to the door.

"No." Which meant the captain hadn't yet decided how to resolve the impending crisis. I had no doubt there
was
a crisis—not just because I'd been called to the bridge "immediately" but because the call came straight from the captain to me.

I was a wet-behind-the-ears Explorer Third Class. Tut was not only more experienced than I, but he outranked me: as an Explorer Second Class, he was my superior officer. Protocol demanded that the captain address all Explorer matters to Tut, who would then bring me in if he chose. Going over Tut's head to call me directly meant the captain thought the situation was so serious it couldn't be left to a madman.

(Cohen knew Tut was crazy. Everybody knew. They just pretended otherwise until their backs were to the wall.)

Pistachio's
bridge was small, made smaller by two diplomats who filled the space with bustling self-importance. One was a woman no older than I. Black skin, no hair, scalp bleached paper white and covered with complex abstract tattoos in royal purple. With flawless skin and bone structure, she was almost certainly a test-tube baby like me... but from the boutique end of the black market. Tall. Strong. Amazonian. Beautifully proportioned, but with muscles like a giant panther. She wore the gold uniform of a commander in the navy's Diplomatic Corps, plus three nonregulation diamond-stud pierce-bars mounting the bridge of her nose—a perfect example of the privileged thoroughbreds who pranced their way through the Outward Fleet's DipCor. For centuries, our military diplomats had made themselves rich through bribe-taking, blackmail, and investments based on confidential information. Then they'd established diplomatic dynasties, bringing their offspring into the corps and speedily promoting them to lucrative posts. (Nobody my age could have
earned
the rank of commander.) Over the years, DipCor had become a family-run business, full of intermarried bluebloods with inflated egos and bank accounts: the last people you'd trust to work out vital treaties. These hereditary princes and princesses didn't just live in the pleasure palace—they
owned
it. The woman in front of me turned in my direction, then quickly looked away... unaccustomed to sullying her eyes with beautyless things.

The other diplomat was a fortyish man, a civilian well tailored and well fed. He smelled of alcohol and his eyes were bloodshot. When he opened his mouth to yawn, his tongue was practically white, coated with the telltale signs of hangover. Or perhaps with gold dust from Tut. Unlike the female diplomat, this man didn't avert his eyes when he saw me. He glared with utter disgust, not only despising my blemished cheek but my face as a whole, the cells in my body, and everything down to the subatomic level. In his mind, I was obviously made from the wrong kind of quarks.

"You took long enough!" he growled. His voice suggested he was the sort of diplomat who eagerly volunteered for missions where he got to make threats.

"Youn Suu took a mere forty-three seconds from the time I first called her to the moment she appeared on the bridge." Those words came from the one person I knew in the room, Captain Abraham Cohen. In a low voice, he added, "Thought I should get the exact time... in case one of these schmuck diplomats decided to kvetch."

Captain Cohen's eyes twinkled at me. He was a delicate wispy-haired man who loved to play the fond Jewish grandpa. Often he could be charming, but sometimes I wanted to shout in his face,
I've already got a grandfather!
My occasional annoyance at Cohen, however, was nothing compared to Tut's. Tut was utterly obsessed with our captain—particularly the possibility that Cohen might be a fraud. One night, Tut had walked into my cabin at three in the morning, sat on the edge of my bed, and whispered without preamble, "Nobody's really called Abraham Cohen. It's too much, Mom. Abraham Cohen.
Abe
Cohen. The name has to be fake. I'll bet he's never even met a real Jew. He steals all that Yiddish from bad movies. You want to help me pull down his pants and see if he's circumcised?"

I'd declined. Tut left and disappeared for three days, during which time his only communication was a text message from the brig listing all the cultures besides Judaism that practiced circumcision.

There was more than one reason why Cohen would rather talk to me than to Tut.

"Youn Suu," the captain said, swiveling in his command chair to face the diplomats, "this is Commander Miriam Ubatu and Ambassador Li Chin Ho. Commander, Ambassador, this is Explorer Youn Suu. First in her class at the Academy." (Cohen always introduced me that way. I'd actually been second in my class, but every time I tried to correct the captain's claim, he chose not to hear.) "Youn Suu will know what's going on, you watch." He swiveled back to me. "Five minutes ago, we received a distress call from our embassy on Cashleen. There's been trouble."

"At the embassy?"

"No. In a Cashling city named Zoonau. The embassy sent us footage."

Cohen turned a dial on the arm of his chair. The bridge's main vidscreen changed from an unremarkable starscape to a picture of what must be Zoonau. It looked like a typical Cashling city—enclosed in a giant glass dome and devoted to one of the five "Worthy Themes" that fascinated the ancient city-builders: water, mirrors, shadow, illusion, and knots.

Zoonau was dedicated to knots. The buildings were made of dull gray concrete, bland and unpainted, which might have produced a drab panorama; but every skyscraper body turned in twists and bends, even full loops and elaborate braids, made possible by carefully placed antigrav fields, which prevented unbalanced weight distributions from causing structural collapse. No street ran straight—they all intertwined, circling, crossing, passing over or under each other. It was a profusely contorted labyrinth: like living in a mandala.

Fortunately, Cashling cities had computerized voice-guides built into every streetlamp, able to direct passersby toward any desired destination. And if you didn't like the roundabout nature of the streets, you could always get above the problem. Every twenty paces, knotted ropes rose from the ground, strung all the way to the dome. Cross-cords connected from rope to rope, along with the occasional solid rope bridge and macramé walkways that offered far more direct routes than the streets below. At one time, Cashlings must have been as nimble and strong as orangutans if they found such traverses practical.

But no longer. Even if Cashlings were physically able to clamber through rope jungles, they couldn't be bothered. In the footage of Zoonau displayed on the vidscreen, every single Cashling was down on the ground... and not doing much of anything.

Cashlings were roughly humanoid, with two legs, two arms, and one head; but they had almost no torso, so their gawky legs reached nearly to their armpits. Though none in the vidscreen picture wore clothes, they showed all the colors of the rainbow, plus quite a few shades no self-respecting rainbow would tolerate. Cashling skins were naturally adorned with vivid swirls, stripes, and spottles. Each individual had unique coloration, and most augmented their birth appearance by adding tattoos, slathering themselves with cosmetics, and randomly juggling their pigmentation genes.

But making themselves more eye-catching was the Cashlings' only field of expertise. Otherwise, they were laughingstocks: a race of lazy fools, practically incapable of taking care of themselves. Their species would have died out from sheer incompetence, except that less decadent ancestors had created cities like Zoonau: fully automated self-repairing havens that satisfied all the residents' needs. Cashling cities served as nannies to creatures who remained pompously infantile their whole lives.

As I watched, flecks of red began drifting from the top of Zoonau's dome. The flecks looked like blood-colored snow. Soft. Slightly fuzzy. Floating gently. Not real snow—more like airborne seeds. I'd seen pictures of Earth thistle fields lost in blizzards of their own thistledown... and numerous nonterrestrial plants also emitted clouds of offspring, sometimes so profusely they could smother unwary Explorers. I wasn't aware of such plants on Cashleen, but I'd never studied Cashling botany. Explorers cared more about the vegetation on uncharted planets than on worlds that were safely developed.

The red seed-fall started to settle: a dusting of crimson on the streets, soon thickening into solid mossy beds. The Cashlings themselves seemed untouched—not the tiniest speck on their colored hides. A few tried to catch seeds drifting past, but when they opened their hands, their palms were empty. The vidscreen showed one Cashling man bending to pick up a handful of the stuff... maybe thinking he could make a snowball. But as he reached down, the red particles fled: slipping just out of reach. When he withdrew his hand, the red seed-things flowed like water, back to where they'd been.

"So, Youn Suu," Cohen said. "Do you know what the red stuff is?"

I hesitated. Crimson particles. Able to move so they couldn't be grabbed. Forming into thick patches. Like moss...

The streets were now coated except for tiny clear patches around each Cashling's feet; and the blizzard was still falling. Getting thicker. The camera barely penetrated the cloud of red, but I could make out the wall of a building... and moss climbing that wall as fast as a human could walk... climbing the ropes too, spreading across the whole knotted network until every rope looked like cord covered with plush crimson velvet...

Red moss. That could move. That could see the Cashlings and get out of their way.

A chill went through me. I said, "It's the Balrog."

"Balrog?" echoed Ambassador Li. "What's a Balrog?"

"A highly advanced creature," I said. "Much more intelligent than humans."

I looked at the picture again. The moss had begun to glow: shining dimly as the city grew darker. Mats of fuzzy red clotted on Zoonau's glass dome, cutting off sunlight from outside. Streetlamps flickered to life, but their bulbs were already covered with crimson fuzz. "The moss goes by many names," I continued, trying to keep my voice even, "but when interacting with
Homo sapiens,
it calls itself the Balrog. The name refers to a fictional monster from Earth folklore, originally appearing in J. R. R. Tolkien's—"

Li made a strangled sound and kneaded his temples as if I'd aggravated his hangover headache. Neither he nor Ubatu was seated—
Pistachio's
small bridge had no guest chairs, and safety regulations forbade visitors from sitting at an active control station unless they were qualified to operate the station's equipment—so Li just tottered shakily from one foot to the other until he overcame whatever spasm had gripped him. "Explorer," he said in a forced voice, "we don't want your thoughts on literature. Stick to what's relevant."