Radiant (37 page)

"Lovely." She rocked back off her knees and onto her feet. "I have no idea if you were really possessed, but I don't want a repeat performance. Who knows what you'd do?"

"Aww, come on, Auntie, I wouldn't hurt a gnat."

"Some things I prefer not to test."

She raised her gaze to the sky. Clouds had begun to build above the southern horizon. They weren't active storm clouds, but they were the leading edge of the front that carried the storm with it. We had maybe two hours left before bad weather hit.

"Let's find a place for the night," Festina said, raising her voice so Li and Ubatu could hear. "Somewhere we won't get drenched in the downpour. Come morning, we'll see what we can do about getting off this planet."

"I'm not staying in that Unity camp," Li told her. "They impregnate their quarters with all kinds of chemicals."

He was partly correct—we'd detected insect repellents, flame retardants, wood-smell perfume, etc., in the Unity huts—but I knew Li wasn't talking about conventional additives. Urban myths about the Unity ran rampant in the Technocracy; one rumor said Unity people filled their homes with mutagens in the hope that random jolts to their DNA would accelerate their evolution.

Of course, that was nonsense. Unity folk tampered with their genomes incessantly, but never by happenstance. The Unity mistrusted spontaneity.

"If you don't like the Unity camp," Festina told Li, "we'll search for quarters in Drill-Press. There must be something appropriate. Clean and dry and safe."

"I don't know, Auntie," Tut said. "How will we find anywhere good when Bumblers can't scan the buildings? And how will we get inside? The places are probably locked."

Festina picked up the nearby metal cutters and crowbar. "I don't know how we'll find a place, but getting past locks won't be a problem."

Festina had said we wanted somewhere "clean and dry and safe." Not so easy to locate. We'd thought, for example, that anything above the ground floor would be safe from Rexies, since pseudosuchians weren't built for climbing stairs. Unfortunately, neither were the Fuentes—with their rabbitlike haunches, they'd come from burrowing ancestors very different from our own tree-climbing forebears. Instead of stairs, Drill-Press's buildings had wide welcoming ramps, providing straightforward access for Rexies as well as Fuentes.

Similarly, the city was short on "clean and dry." As my sixth sense had already noticed, most available rooms were coated with mold and fungi. "Dry" was out of the question—humidity had penetrated everywhere, rising off the river, spread by spring floods, never going away. Even some distance from the river, Drill-Press simmered in moist boggy air. When the Fuentes lived here, every building must have bristled with dehumidifiers. Six and a half millennia later, all such gadgets were out of commission, and the skyscrapers had devolved into permanent rising damp.

As for "clean"... there, we got lucky. Most housing had been swallowed by beds of swampy fuzz, but a few buildings were so larded with chemical fungicides and brews of biological toxins that local bacilli and thallophytes had never established a foothold. Such places were probably built for people with extreme allergies or germ phobias; every city in the Technocracy had a few "ultrahygienic" residences for those with health problems (real or imagined), so why shouldn't the Fuentes have some too? Long-term exposure to alien bactericides struck me as a really bad idea, but one night wouldn't be too risky. I hoped. So when my sixth sense detected a building so chock-full of germ killers, weed killers, bug killers, and other poisons that it had stayed unbesmirched for sixty-five hundred years, I surreptitiously steered our party in that direction. ("Let's try down
this
block." After we'd passed four buildings whose lobbies were puffy with mushrooms, the one with no obvious overgrowth struck everyone as a likely candidate.)

Soon we'd claimed suites on the fourth floor, one apartment for each of us. Festina, scanning the rooms with our Bumbler, knew exactly why the place was mold-free... but she decided not to tell Li his quarters were "impregnated with all kinds of chemicals."

The apartments left much to be desired: ominously low ceilings and no couches or chairs, just thin cushions flat on the floor. At least the rooms were warm, thanks to superb insulation and a passive solar heating system still functional after sixty-five centuries.

But I wouldn't spend the night indoors. The pretense of claiming apartments was just to fool Li and Ubatu—to deposit them someplace safe while Tut, Festina, and I trekked south. Therefore, I kept a sixth-sense eye on Festina to know when she was ready to go... and it was a good thing I did, because three minutes after claiming a suite, she tried to sneak off on her own.

I caught up with her on the rampway down to the ground floor. "Leaving?" I asked.

"Going to Camp Esteem for more food."

"Wasn't that the lie we intended to tell the diplomats?"

"As it happens, this is the truth."

"No it isn't." That would have been obvious, even to someone who couldn't read auras. "You're heading for the Stage Two station by yourself. You think Tut and I are dangerous."

"You are," she said. At least she had the grace not to deny it. "He's vulnerable to possession. And you're already possessed."

"By the Balrog, not the clouds."

"I don't consider that a plus."

"The Balrog is sentient," I said. "It has its own agenda, but it won't try to kill you. It's even obliged to save your life if there's a foreseeable threat."

"I agree the Balrog is sentient," Festina replied. "That doesn't mean it's benevolent. Suppose it foresaw I would end up on Muta—me personally, not humans in general. Suppose there's a chance I might activate Stage Two and send the cloud people up the evolutionary ladder. What if the Balrog wants to stop that? What if it doesn't want competition from a lot of new Tathagatas? What if it plans to screw me up?"

"So it wants to prevent you from starting Stage Two?"

"Maybe. It wouldn't have to kill me; just slow me down. Then I'd turn into a Stage One cloud and cease to be a problem. Best of all, I wouldn't actually be dead—I'd be disembodied and damned near powerless, but my consciousness would still be alive. Therefore, the League wouldn't consider the Balrog a murderer for letting me turn into smoke. The League might even pat the Balrog on the back for finding a nonlethal way to prevent the ascension of a planetful of undesirables. Muta returns to the status quo... till the next time someone threatens to start Stage Two, and the Balrog picks a new puppet to stop it."

I shook my head. What she said was possible, but didn't add up. "The Balrog has already had plenty of chances to stop you. As soon as we landed, I could have popped one of the stasis spheres, grabbed a stun-pistol, and shot you. I could have shot Tut too. It would have been easy... especially since I'm resistant to stunner fire myself."

"True," Festina said. "But the Balrog doesn't work that way. It's a tease; it times its shenanigans for maximum effect. Betrayal right when you think you've won." She looked at me sadly. "Youn Suu, at this moment I think I'm speaking to the real you, not the Balrog in Youn Suu disguise. Right now you're mostly in control. But when the crucial time comes—when I'm about to flick an activation switch or patch some broken machinery—you can't know whether the Balrog will seize your body and use you to interfere. You can't be sure you're safe. And
I
can't be sure you're safe. The Balrog is too fond of playing Ambush. You're a time bomb, Youn Suu, and I can't afford to have you near me."

"So you're going off alone. Never mind the Rexies."

"I can shoot Rexies."

"If you see them coming. And if they only attack one at a time. Suppose the clouds muster a dozen simultaneously?"

"I'll take my chances."

"What if the clouds possess
you?"
I asked. "How do you know they can't grab you as easily as they grabbed Tut?"

"They never grabbed Team Esteem," she said. "In all the years Unity teams were on Muta, there were no possession attempts. That's the sort of thing they'd have told us about—if one of their members went mad and attacked others. But their records had nothing like that. Tut's mental imbalance must make him vulnerable to the clouds. Sane people are immune."

"That's just an assumption."

Festina sighed. "Past a point, everything is an assumption. I have to make the best guess I can. Right now, that guess says I'm better off alone."

"If I follow, how would you stop me?"

She drew herself up. "Youn Suu, this is a direct order from an admiral of the Outward Fleet. Stay in this building. Do not leave for the next twenty-four hours. That's an order." A moment later, she relaxed and smiled ruefully. "As if Explorers pay attention to orders. But I'm asking you, please, stay here. If you don't, the next time I see you I'll be forced to assume you're being controlled by the Balrog. I'll stun you till your eyebrows melt, and if that doesn't work, I'll break your knees. Literally. I will punch and kick you till I've fractured enough bones to keep you from getting in my way. I'll do it on sight, without compunction. And I happen to know from Kaisho Namida, the Balrog does a lousy job of mending skeletal components. The spores will keep you alive no matter how much I beat you, but soft moss doesn't make a good substitute for hard bone. If I cripple you, you'll stay crippled for life."

She meant it. I could see no bluff in her life force. She'd hate to do it, and she'd feel sickeningly guilty afterward, but she wouldn't hesitate to put me in a wheelchair for the rest of my days—just like Kaisho Namida. Festina would damage my legs so thoroughly, the Balrog would have to replace my bones with spores... at which point, I'd become paraplegic. Moss from the hips down.

Suddenly, I wondered how Kaisho got the same way. Had there come a time when Festina decided Kaisho couldn't be trusted?

Festina gave my shoulder a gingerly pat. "Sorry it has to be this way. Under other circumstances, I'd love to have an Explorer like you watching my back. But I'm leaving now, and I don't want to see you again till this is over."

She turned and walked down the ramp. Around a corner and out of sight. With my sixth sense I watched as she left through the front doors... whereupon she ran to the side of the building, drew her stun-pistol, and waited. I'd never have seen her there with normal vision—she'd have shot me the moment I came out. But given my mental awareness, Festina had no chance of catching me in such a simple ambush.

I stayed where I was and waited. Ten minutes later, Festina decided I wasn't going to follow... so she set a brisk pace heading south. I waited a few more minutes, still watching by remote perception in case she set another ambush. Then I went down the ramp and took the same route south along the Grindstone.

According to navy regs, members of the Outward Fleet can legally disobey orders if there's no other way to save a sentient being's life. Sticklers for military discipline growl at the thought, but the League of Peoples cares more about lives than the chain of command.

So did I. Or at least that's what I told myself. I tried to believe I was acting out of concern for Festina's welfare and not because the Balrog was imperceptibly steering my thoughts in the direction it wanted me to go.

A sixth sense can come in handy. It let me keep an eye on Festina while I hung back out of sight. It also let me watch the rest of our party, still inside the chemical-laden apartment building. I could see as Tut walked into my assigned rooms (without knocking, of course), whereupon he discovered I was no longer there. He rushed to Festina's apartment and found she was gone too. Without hesitation, he ran after us—he guessed that we'd left to activate Stage Two, and he knew where we'd be heading.

Tut didn't try to be quiet: muttering indignantly as he raced in pursuit of Festina and me. Li and Ubatu heard him as he sprinted past their doors. Ubatu, ever the athletic Amazon, gave chase and caught Tut soon after he reached the street. She made short work of wrestling him to the ground—she must have trained in jujitsu or some other grappling art—and with the help of a vicious punishment hold, she forced Tut to tell her what was happening. By then Li had joined them, puffing from the chase but still with plenty of lung power to howl in outrage at being left behind. The diplomats informed Tut he would escort them downriver... and Ubatu crushed Tut's body into the pavement until he said yes.

Sorry, Tut,
I thought as I eyed the mess of scrapes on his flesh and his golden mask. If not for me, Ubatu wouldn't have been so ruthless... but as long as my body contained a "loa" of prime interest to Ifa-Vodun, Ubatu would do almost anything not to lose touch. She'd already defied navy law to follow me to Muta. How much further would she go?

So Ubatu forced Tut to set out immediately, with an irritable Li tagging along. They didn't return to their apartments for food, foul-weather gear, or even a compass. They had no Bumbler, no comm, no stun-pistol. Tut surely realized they'd be in trouble once the storm arrived, but maybe he was hoping to escape during the downpour. Till then, he had no chance of outrunning or outfighting the pitiless Ubatu.

Besides, after the way she'd roughed him up, he might have relished the thought of leading her and Li into the countryside, then giving them the slip during a monsoon. Tut wasn't vindictive by nature, but he had his limits.

So there we were: a parade, with Festina in front, me in the middle, and Tut, Li, and Ubatu bringing up the rear. As Festina might have said, "just fucking wonderful."

My perception kept track of the entire group, though we started more than two kilometers apart. Once Festina left the developed area of the city, she was forced to slow down—following game trails rather than paved roads. I too went slower when I reached the brush, though I had the advantage of automatically knowing which routes were best (shortest, fastest, least obstructed by undergrowth). If I'd wanted, I could have beaten Festina to our destination by taking shortcuts she didn't know existed... but my goal was not to get there first, it was to protect the others along the way. I simply kept pace with Festina and watched the world for danger.