Radiant (32 page)

"Maybe when they're smoke, they can see things we can't. Or maybe old Fuentes smoke can talk to new Unity smoke and explain what shouldn't be done."

Festina looked like she wanted to argue... then she just sighed. "Too many maybes, not enough facts. And I doubt if we'll find any great revelations. Team Esteem was here for months; does it look like they stumbled across important secrets?"

"Nah," Tut replied. "But that's how it is with the Unity: they're so damned careful, it takes them years to do anything. Look at this."

He went to one of the semitransparent balls of silver—a Fuentes stasis field. Inside was a body tucked into fetal position: arms squeezing knees, head down, tail wrapped tightly around the waist. Unlike other Fuentes in the room, the creature in the stasis sphere was entirely hairless, with bloated skin that bulged as if it were air-inflated. It reminded me of a soccer ball that'd been pumped up too much. Ready to pop its valve any second.

"See?" Tut asked. "How long has Mr. Puffy been inside this field? Since the old days, right? Since the Fuentes were still alive. But Team Esteem hasn't even opened the sphere. They saw all this stuff; and their first instinct was to draw up some long-term timetable for when they'd do what. Everything planned in cold blood. Heaven forbid they try anything on impulse... like this."

He pulled back his foot and kicked. It was not a particularly skilled move; Tut wasn't a dancer like me, nor had he done any more martial arts than the six-month course required at the Explorer Academy. Still, he had long, strong legs and plenty of time to deliver the strike: neither Festina nor I were close enough to stop him. I didn't even bother to try—a sharp impact might pop Technocracy stasis spheres, but who knew if the same was true for advanced Fuentes fields? Maybe they could withstand a hit... including the toe of Tut's boot driven full strength into the shimmering silver surface.

I was wrong. Fuentes stasis fields turned out to be just as flimsy as the Technocracy type.

The field dissipated with a hiss of released air, and Mr. Puffy tumbled onto the floor. A moment later, his spade tail whipped in a slashing circle, providing enough momentum to propel him to his feet. The alien stood there, tail writhing, mandibles weaving like daggers in front of his mouth... with Tut less than an arm's length away.

"Hey," said Tut, turning to Festina and me. "I found the monster that scared off the clouds."

The bald Fuentes stank—a stench like ancient urine, piercing and vile. I wondered if that was the natural odor of his species, or if this particular specimen, with his lack of hair and engorged flesh, was unique among his kind.

Of course, he's unique,
I told myself.
After six and a half thousand years, he's still alive.

I felt stupid for thinking "Mr. Puffy" had been dead—he was, after all, locked in stasis, where not a single microsecond had passed over the centuries. Since the room's other Fuentes were cadavers, I'd assumed the ones in stasis would be too. Team Esteem must have jumped to the same conclusion... which shows the stupidity of taking anything for granted when exploring alien planets.

But Mr. Puffy was alive. His breath rasped in and out, his tail and mandibles twitched. He looked like an angry animal in search of a target to bite. Perhaps the only thing holding him back was the strangeness of his situation. When he was first put in stasis, the room must have been full of his fellow Fuentes, plus working machinery and full-strength lights. Now the only Fuentes in the place were corpses, the machinery was half disassembled, the lights were dim as dusk, and he faced a trio of unfamiliar aliens. However upset Mr. Puffy might be, he had the sense to restrain himself till he figured out what was going on.

Tut, of course, showed no concern standing nose to nose with a newly exhumed mutant alien. "Greetings!" he said, holding out his hand. "I'm a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples. How's about some Hospitality?"

The Fuentes stared at him a moment with mandibles knitting themselves together in a complex pattern. Tut lifted his own hands to his mouth and twiddled his fingers in response. I made a soft, choking sound—when confronted with an infuriated alien, Explorers should
not
try to imitate the alien's actions. But Mr. Puffy ignored Tut's response. Instead, he turned to me. He gazed in my direction for a heartbeat... then suddenly, he charged.

Off to my right, something whirred: Festina firing her stun-pistol. She must have drawn her gun the instant Mr. Puffy came out of stasis, but she'd held off shooting till the Fuentes showed hostile intent. Not that it made any difference. Mr. Puffy wasn't fazed by the pistol blast; he didn't even slow as Festina pulled the trigger several times in succession.

As for me, I was frozen. Once again, I'd fallen victim to the reflexive paralysis programmed into me by the Outward Fleet: when taken by surprise, every muscle in my body went rigid. I had time to think,
Why now?
Why freeze in front of this alien and not when the Rexy pounced on Tut? But I knew the answer: I'd never expected the Fuentes to attack the instant he caught sight of me. Why would he? What had I done to provoke him? And if he was just attacking from undirected rage or confusion, why would he cross the room for me when Tut was right beside him?

So I froze. And Festina fired. And Tut said, "Hey, what'cha doin'?" None of which slowed Mr. Puffy as he leapt across the room, landed in front of me, and shoved his bloated hand into my mouth.

His urine stink had been bad before. This close up, it would have made me gag—if I hadn't already been gagging from his fat foul fingers sticking down my throat. The taste of his flesh was putrid beyond description; even now, just remembering, I feel my mouth pucker. Vomitous. I would have thrown up then and there, but the moment my stomach began its first flip-flop, some powerful force suppressed it. Like a plunger pushing down the bile, preventing the puke from rising. For a second, I had the crazed idea Mr. Puffy had extended his hand all the way down my esophagus and was physically doing something to stop my stomach from erupting. Then a more rational explanation struck me: the Balrog had taken control of my body to forestall unwanted regurgitation. Perhaps that was another reason why I'd gone frozen—the Balrog
wanted
me to let Mr. Puffy's fingers tickle my tonsils.

Even as that thought crossed my mind, I felt my teeth bite down. The action wasn't my own—if there could be anything more nauseating than the taste of urine-flesh stuffed into my mouth, it was the thought of biting that flesh and breaking the skin: spilling unknown body fluids across my tongue. But my jaw clenched anyway, without my volition; I bit full force, as if I wanted to chew off the alien's hand and swallow it.

The puffed-up flesh split in several places. Juices gushed out, squirting. Some ran down my chin; some dribbled into my throat. The alien's blood added a sulphurous taste to the repugnant flavors already in my mouth. Once more my stomach tried to vomit... and once more something cut short the process, paralyzing the muscles needed to spew my most recent meal.

The next moment brought a new horror: a flood of something pouring from the roof of my mouth. I could feel it streaming around the edges of the comm unit that had replaced my soft palate—as if the contents of my sinuses were suddenly spraying down at high pressure, forcing fluids past my implant to top up the goo already in my mouth. What could the fluids be? Blood? Mucus? Gray matter squeezed from my brain?

Then my teeth eased open. The Fuentes withdrew his hand... and just for a moment, in the bleeding bite marks made by my own incisors, small red dots glowed against the lab's faint light. Their glimmer faded instantly as the crimson specks swam deeper into the bloated flesh, entering Mr. Puffy's bloodstream.

Suddenly, the paralysis holding me rigid slumped away like a pregnant woman's water breaking. Splash. I doubled over and threw up gratefully. The taste of vomit was clean and pure compared to everything else I'd just ingested.

Then a hand touched my shoulder, and someone asked, "Are you all right?"

The words were spoken in Bamar, my first language. When I looked up, it was Mr. Puffy.

I gaped. How could a creature sixty-five hundred years old know my mother tongue? The Bamar language hadn't existed when Mr. Puffy went into stasis—in those days, my ancestors spoke some Indo-European dialect far removed from anything my modern ear would recognize. Besides, even if the Fuentes had visited Earth in the ancient past, and even if Mr. Puffy had learned the language of a minuscule tribe in the Irrawaddy river valley, how would he know to address me in that tongue? Telepathy? Could he pluck my background from my mind? Could he even learn my first language by drawing it from the whorls of my brain?

Then I remembered the red dots in Mr. Puffy's bite wounds and the fluids that had poured from my sinuses.

Spores. Balrog spores.

I almost threw up again. The whole thing, with the hand in my mouth and my involuntary chomping down, had been a data transfer. Mr. Puffy had taken one look at me and had seen the Balrog inside. He'd shoved his hand between my teeth and I'd helplessly
injected
him with spores—as if I were some rabid animal frothing crimson at the mouth. Moss had skittered into the Fuentes' wounds, then headed for his alien brain.

Now Mr. Puffy had a link to any data the Balrog chose to share. That included the Bamar language, which the Balrog had taken from my own memories.
Demon!
I thought.
Demon, demon, demon.

I straightened up. Wiped vomit off my face with my bare hand, then cleaned my fingers by rubbing them on a nearby tabletop. Checked my clothes, and thanked whatever reflex had helped me throw up without getting puke on my borrowed Unity uniform. Taking a deep breath, I told Mr. Puffy, "Use English. Explain what's going on."

In a soft voice, speaking English with an accent identical to my own, he said, "What do you want to know?"

This time, it was Tut and Festina who reacted in shock. I enjoyed the looks on their faces.

Festina recovered first. "Who are you?" she asked.

"Ohpa," the alien said. Its mandibles twitched. "Does that irrelevant fact enlighten you?"

Festina gave a humorless chuckle. "Fair enough. I'll ask something more meaningful. How can you speak English?"

Ohpa waved his hand. "Also irrelevant." He didn't look in my direction. I wondered if he was keeping the Balrog's data transfer a secret for my sake, or if there was some other reason not to speak of it.

"All right," Festina said. "Relevant questions. What is this place and what were you doing here?"

"This place is a playroom of reductionism and control. What you would call a laboratory." Ohpa shook himself and hopped toward a cadaver on a nearby table. Under his breath he muttered something in a language I didn't know, then extended his hand in a gesture of blessing. He turned back and told Festina, "I'm here because I succumbed to hope and ambition. I volunteered to be a test subject." He spread his arms to display his hairless body; his tail gave a spasmodic jerk. "As you can see, the experiment was unsuccessful."

"What was the experiment supposed to do?"

"Make me Tathagata."

I gasped. Festina looked my way, then asked the Fuentes, "What's Tathagata?"

Ohpa waved as if I should answer—a movement so human, he must have learned my body language from the Balrog as well as spoken words. I told Festina, "Tathagata means 'the one who has come at this time.' It was an honorific for Prince Gotama, the Buddha... to distinguish him from other Buddhas who'd lived in earlier times or might come in the future."

Festina turned back to Ohpa in surprise. "The experiment was supposed to make you a Buddha?"

"Tathagata."

"A
living
Buddha," I said. "One who's enlightened
right now...
as opposed to someone who might become a Buddha in a million more lives. Theoretically, we're
all
Buddhas—we all have the potential and will get there eventually—but a Tathagata has Awakened in the current lifetime."

Festina made a face. "I'm not thrilled when an alien claims to be a figure from Earth religion. It's way too convenient."

"Ease up, Auntie," Tut said. "Ohpa likely peeked into our heads with X-ray vision, and Youn Suu's brain happened to have an approximation for what he
really
is." Tut turned to the alien. "You aren't really Tatha-whosit, right? That's just the closest equivalent you could find in our minds."

"I'm not Tathagata at all," Ohpa replied. "The experiment was supposed to make me so, but it failed."

"How did it fail?" Festina asked.

"The actual cause you would find uninteresting." Ohpa gave a sudden leap with his rabbitlike haunches, landing several paces away and pointing to a thigh-high gray box whose contents had been partly dissected by Team Esteem. "If I told you this machine had a flaw, would you be any wiser? If I said there was an unforeseen feedback loop between my DNA and the molecular logic circuits herein, would you hear more than empty words? Do you understand the complexities of dark matter and transdimensional biology, or would it be futile to explain?"

"Transdimensional biology?" Festina said. "You're just making that up."

"If I were, you wouldn't know, would you?" Ohpa made a rasping sound in his throat—perhaps the Fuentes version of a laugh. "Suffice it to say, the procedure I underwent had errors. Instead of becoming Success Number One, I became Failure Number Thirty-six. Instead of becoming Tathagata, I became a travesty."

I asked, "What did you think it meant, becoming Tathagata? A mental transformation? A process to remove fixations from your brain?"

Ohpa swished his tail, then drove the sharp spade tip into the computer-like box beside him. Fragments of broken metal and plastic spilled onto the floor. "A mental transformation?" he said. "Removing fixations? You give my people too much credit. We had no thought of changing our psyches; we didn't think we needed it. My people dreamed of becoming gods—increasing our intelligence a thousandfold, abandoning our physical bodies and becoming pure energy—yet we imagined we'd retain our original personalities. We'd be vastly more powerful, but the same people, with the same prejudices, conceits, fears, hatreds, blind spots, envies, distorted priorities, unexamined desires, irrational goals, unconfronted denials... ah, such fools. Believing we could don transcendence as easily as a new coat. So sure of our unquestioned values. So ready for a fall."