Radiant (39 page)

Perhaps I should have prayed to the
nats;
they occasionally granted supernatural protection to those deemed worthy. I even considered asking the Balrog for help—surrendering more of my body in exchange for a way to save the others' lives. But I had other options of surrender open... and by the time I caught up with Festina, I'd made my choice.

Festina and I met in a meadow of blue ferns: none more than knee height, most much shorter. Nothing else grew in the area but that one fern species. My mental awareness said the ferns poisoned the soil with a toxin exuded from their roots, a weak acid they could tolerate but other plants couldn't. It wasn't a unique survival strategy—terrestrial oaks do something similar—but it seemed ominously symbolic.

I'd taken shortcuts to get ahead of Festina. The path she was following led straight through the meadow, so I settled among the ferns, sitting in lotus position, waiting for her to reach me. I'd arrived before the approaching Rexy by a slight margin; Festina would have time to deal with me before she had to take on the predator.

My sixth sense watched her draw near... but the first my normal senses could discern was a sharp beeping sound that cut through the drone of the rain as she reached the meadow's edge. The beeping was the Bumbler's proximity alarm, warning her of danger: me. She'd programmed it to consider me a threat—no better than a Rexy.

I sat where I was and waited.

In my mind's eye, I saw Festina turn the Bumbler toward me: scanning, getting a positive ID. The expression on her face didn't change. Her life force flickered briefly with anger, sorrow... then she tightened the Bumbler's shoulder strap so it wouldn't bounce and strode purposefully forward.

I wondered if she'd try shooting me first. It might have had some anesthetic effect. But Explorer training taught her not to waste a stun-pistol's batteries when it wouldn't do the job.

Her first kick came down hard on my left calf. I was, as I've said, in lotus position: sitting cross-legged, with my feet lifted up on opposite knees. The position had already put stress on my tibia and fibula; Festina's kick snapped both bones at my ankle, the sound nothing more than a dull pop surrounded by meat. I'd promised myself I wouldn't react. I still couldn't help a gasp. The pain centered on the point of impact—the stamped flesh, not the broken bones. But my perception let me see the damage under the skin, the jagged bone ends slicing into muscle and tendon, the irrevocable shattering of my ability to dance.

I'd always been a dancer. I'd always been able to use that as a means of freedom. Now, my dancing was done.

Of course I felt the other kicks. The one that broke the bones in my other ankle. The ones that turned my knees to useless gumbo. The ones that pummeled my femurs, but were unable to break such big strong bones against ground that was soft with rain. I felt Festina's bootheel slam into me again and again; I felt it every time. But those kicks were only restatements of a truth I'd learned with the very first impact: While I'd been able to dance, I wasn't quite a complete Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl. Though I never realized it, I'd been someone who could escape into blissful motion... and while I was moving, I could be radiant.

Now that was over. Lost. Squandered. As usual, I hadn't realized what I was giving up until it was too late.

When Festina finally stopped crippling me, she stood motionless for a moment. She seemed so tall. I'd been the same height once.

Then she turned away and vomited into the ferns.

Seconds later, the Bumbler's proximity alarm began to beep again: the Rexy, rushing toward us from the far side of the meadow. In Festina's aura, I saw an impulse to let it come: she considered waiting there in quiet submission like I had. Quitting and letting it all be over. No more pursuit of duty. The pain of the Rexy's claws and teeth, then nothing.

But the avalanche of karma propelled her onward. Wearily, she pulled her stun-pistol, steadied her aim, and waited for the Rexy's charge. She fired three times as it hurtled down on her, then stepped aside as the predator's body continued forward, unconscious, sliding through the wet ferns like a sled on ice.

Carefully, Festina picked up the Bumbler and scanned the great lizard to make sure it was unconscious. Then she forced herself to scan me too, to check her own handiwork.

When she set down the Bumbler the dampness on her face was more than rain.

"All right," she said in a too-harsh voice. "You wouldn't be here if you didn't want something. What is it?"

I told her. Nothing about my sixth sense—just that Rexies were converging on the others, and they needed her help. When I was done, she closed her eyes: squeezed them shut as if they stung. She laughed without humor. "Yes. Yes. Of course, I'll save them. What choice do I have? Gotta do the right thing, don't I? The right fucking thing."

She sat down beside me on the rain-soaked ferns. Drizzle pattered around us. Finally, she asked, "What do you think, Youn Suu? Did the Balrog foresee even this?"

"I don't know."

"But you knew what I'd do, didn't you."

"Yes."

"And you did it anyway. To save people's lives."

"Not really."

She looked at me. "No?"

"Saving lives sounds too heroic. Just that... if I didn't do it..."

I didn't know how to finish the sentence. We both sat in silence for a few heartbeats. Slowly, Festina got to her feet, as if fighting a fierce arthritis. "Does it hurt?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Will it hurt more if I carry you?"

"Probably not."

She tried to smile. "Not much left to injure. If I take you with me, can I still make it back to the others before the Rexies?"

"I think so."

"On Cashleen, I had to carry Tut. Now I have to carry you." Her smile became a bit more real. "Damned rookie Explorers, always getting themselves..."

Abruptly, she turned away. I wished my sixth sense would stop showing me the pain that threatened to crush her.

With a lurch, she picked me up. She must have thought if she held me so tight I couldn't see her face, she could hide what she was going through.

Arhat [Pali]: One who has achieved total enlightenment by heeding the words of the Buddha. Arhats are as completely transcendent as Gotama Buddha himself. The only difference is that Gotama perceived the truth on his own, without a teacher, while arhats needed assistance from the Buddha's words.

Festina carried me in a firefighter's lift, just as she'd carried Tut. I weighed considerably less than he did, so she managed to move at good speed: ten seconds jogging, ten seconds walking, over and over again. The jogging hurt as I bounced on her shoulder—hurt both of us, I could tell—but we pretended we couldn't hear each other's gasps over the rain.

Overhead the lightning had eased off, though another active storm cell would arrive soon. We were left with cool drizzle on mud. Puddles splashed under Festina's boots, and her jogging feet kicked dirty spatters so high they sometimes struck my face. Within seconds, the rain would wash me clean again. Our nanomesh uniforms had long ago lost the fight to stay waterproof; Festina and I were soaked to the bone.

Soaked to what few bones I had left.

Outwardly, my legs looked intact—the Balrog continued to hide its presence from spying eyes (from
pretas
or anything else watching). Inwardly, however, my legs were a mossy mess.

The bones were mostly gone: their remnants broken down by the Balrog into basic elements, to be used as raw materials for constructing new spores. The spores had then moved on to dismantle adjacent tissues—the muscles, tendons and ligaments damaged in Festina's attack. A number of important blood vessels had been severed by sharp bone fragments; if not for the Balrog, I might have bled to death through gashed arteries. But the spores had stopped the hemorrhaging... they'd reinforced my skin so no bone shards sliced into open air... and they'd restored blood flow to whatever parts of my legs remained human.

All this I saw through my mental perception: how little of me was left from hips to toes. And the Balrog hadn't finished. It was still mainly occupied with emergency repairs to keep my condition stable. Once it stanched my wounds, I had no doubt it would annex whatever flesh remained healthy—cleaning up unfinished business, but always invisible from the outside.

At least the pain was gone. The nerves at my injury sites had been cannibalized to make spores, so my brain could no longer receive neural messages of agony. No sensation at all below the pelvis. But my brain was not the only player in the game of "Who Is Youn Suu." There was also that sentient point in my abdomen (my womb, my
dantien)
which served as the seat of higher perceptions. The Point of
Me.
It watched with perfect clarity as my legs became alien territory. When I finally tried to move them—when I summoned the courage to try—nothing happened. The legs (no longer
my
legs) remained as limp as death.

I found myself speaking aloud: "Consider this body! A painted puppet with carpentered limbs, sometimes injured or diseased, full of delusions, never permanent, always changing."

"Is that a quote?" Festina asked, grunting under my weight.

"From the
Dharmapada,"
I told her. "Look at these brittle white bones," I went on, "like empty husks of fruit left to rot at the end of summer. Who could take joy in seeing them?"

"Buddhism is such a cheery religion," Festina muttered. "Then again, my nana used to recite similar lines from Ecclesiastes."

"This body is only a house of bones," I quoted, "and I have searched many cycles of lives to find the house-builder. Who would construct such an edifice of grief? But now I have seen it was always my own hands wielding the tools... and knowing that, I shall not build this house again. I shall let the rafters fall. I shall let the bones break. I shall let in the sunlight of wisdom, so that when death comes I shall not be condemned to another prison of bones."

Festina suddenly broke into a true run—not just the jog she'd been using. Her aura showed some thought had upset her. I asked, "What is it? What's wrong?"

She ran for a few more seconds, then sighed and slowed to a walk. "You said 'when death comes'... how do you know it will?"

"Everyone dies, Festina."

"Every human does. But you aren't human anymore." She paused. "How much do you know about Kaisho Namida?"

"I've read
Pistachio's
files." I gave a weak laugh. "Since the Balrog first bit me, I've read them at least ten times."

"Navy files are incomplete," Festina said. "The Admiralty lost touch with Kaisho as soon as she left the rehab center. I was the only one she kept in contact with. For a while, I... never mind. But know one thing, Youn Suu. Kaisho was middle-aged when she got bitten by the Balrog; now she's a hundred and sixteen, but physically, she's younger than me. The Balrog has rejuvenated her tissues."

"The few tissues she has left."

"The Balrog will never consume her entirely. That would be a nonsentient act. As long as the Balrog's alive, Kaisho will be too. I'm not sure Kaisho will ever die."

"Even the Balrog has to die eventually," I said. "If nothing else, it can't survive the end of our universe."

"Can't it?" Festina began jogging again. "These creatures... the ones way up the evolutionary ladder... they come and go from our universe... at least we think they do..." She slowed, out of breath. Not even Festina Ramos could jog, talk, and carry a full-grown woman without getting winded. "I was on Cashleen when the Balrog appeared," she said. "Spores literally came from nowhere. The Cashlings got it on camera: one moment there was nothing, then there were spores."

"We know the Balrog can teleport," I said.

"But there was no trace of incoming matter or energy. It didn't look like the Balrog was traveling in some other form through our universe, then reconstituted itself into spores. There was no discernible transmission. The spores just showed up. From elsewhere. From outside." Festina jogged a few more steps. "Other species do the same—the purple-jelly Fuentes, for instance. Researchers think these creatures spend most of their time outside the normal universe... whatever the hell that means. Anyway, the end of our universe may not guarantee the end of the Balrog. It may have someplace else to run."

"Nothing lasts forever," I said. "Nothing is permanent. Even if the Balrog doesn't die a conventional death, it can't just go on and on. It
can't.
Over time it'll change into something different, the way rocks break down into soil. Then the soil is used by plants, the plants are eaten by animals, and everything keeps changing forever. If the Balrog lives in some universe where entropy doesn't apply, there'll be something else that makes things change. Impermanence is an inescapable fact."

I could sense Festina smiling, though I wasn't looking at her face. "That's the voice of your upbringing," Festina said. "If my nana were here, she'd lecture you on
her
inescapable facts: everlasting heaven, everlasting hell, everlasting souls, everlasting everything else... except, of course, for the physical universe, which she discounts as fleetingly insignificant. Nana sees immortality everywhere." Festina chuckled. "If it's any consolation, Kaisho Namida is on your side. She believes devoutly in change and impermanence."

A chill went through me. "Is Kaisho Buddhist?"

Festina nodded. "Zen meditation every day... at least until the Balrog took her."

"You mean the Balrog has only claimed two human beings in all history, and
both
have been Buddhist women? Female Buddhist Explorers?"

"Ooo." Festina's aura flickered. "Ouch. When you put it that way, it's an odd coincidence. I
hate
odd coincidences." She walked a few steps. "How many practicing Buddhists do you think we have in the Explorer Corps?"

"I'm the first Explorer ever from Anicca—I checked the records once, out of idle curiosity. And Anicca's the primary center for all Buddhist traditions. There are small retreats and communities on a lot of Technocracy worlds, but the only other planet with a sizable Buddhist population is Shin'nihon."