Radiant (46 page)

"Ooooomph!" Ubatu yelled again. Her arms clenched around me. For a moment, I thought she'd use me as weapon to smack Li across the face. But the impulse passed; her grip relaxed back to normal.

"Behave, you two," Festina snapped. "Behave, or I really will make you wait outside."

She turned and walked toward the station. When the rest of us followed, she said nothing.

Bodhichitta [Sanskrit]: The awakened heart/mind/spirit. Every living creature already possesses bodhichitta. The purpose of skillful practice is to remove klesha (poisons) that prevent one's bodhichitta from making itself known.

Since the station was a giant Fuentes head, its door was placed in its mouth: a curtain of dark energy centered between the four huge mandibles. By "dark energy," I mean a field of silent blackness—an intangible thing that blocked off light, but didn't register on any of the Bumbler's sensors. When Festina reported the lack of readings, Li said, "Stupid machine. What good is it?"

"If it can't be used as eyes," Festina said, "we'll use it as a hat on a stick."

She pushed the Bumbler into the flat curtain of blackness (making sure to keep her fingers safely out of the field). She waited a moment, then pulled the little device back. "No apparent damage," she said after checking it over. "And it still works. Let's hope that means we can pass through without our intestines exploding."

Festina stepped through the sheet of blackness. A moment later, Ubatu did the same with me in her arms. Immediately, I went blind.

I still had my normal vision. Light entered the building through two glassed-in domes overhead: the faceted Fuentes eyes high up on the station's "face." The general glow was dim—outside, the sun hadn't quite reached the horizon—but the tepid illumination showed we had entered a narrow corridor circling the edge of the building. The corridor's interior wall was as smooth and white as an eggshell. It curved upward to join the outside walls a short distance below the spiked crown. The actual contents of the station (whatever they were) sat in a great white bowl inside the Fuentes head. This corridor ringed the middle of the bowl, in the gap between the inner and outer walls.

All this, I could see with my physical eyes. My sixth sense, however, stretched no farther than my skin. I could perceive everything inside my own body—millions of Balrog spores, and what little remained of my own tissues—but I could see nothing beyond... not even Ubatu's life force, though she was pressed against me, still holding me in her arms.

A deep, abject blindness.

Within me, the Balrog stirred. Its life force wasn't nervous or dismayed, but it was definitely disoriented. Disconnected. Its glow had shut down the moment we crossed the threshold—as if it was saving strength.

Ah. I understood.

The Balrog was a hive creature: each spore linked with all others, a gestalt spreading through the galaxy. The spores shared everything instantaneously—thoughts, strength, brainpower—which is why they could keep glowing, even inside my body. For normal creatures, producing light where no one could see was just wasting energy... but for Balrog spores, such squandered output would instantly be replenished from reserves in other spores. Probably, the Balrog had trillions of spores doing nothing but soaking up sun on well-lit planets, then feeding solar power to spores like the ones under my skin. The moss in my belly could draw upon huge amounts of energy as needed...

...until we'd entered this station. Which somehow cut off my spores from their fellows. Not only were they blind, devoid of their sixth sense; they were isolated. On their own.

I could almost imagine bits of moss snuggling up to my own cells for comfort. As soon as we passed through the station's black entrance, the spores had ceased to be the Balrog. Now they were piteous orphans, not dominating me but
depending
on me.

From this point on, we could expect no help from the Balrog as a whole. As for the small supply of spores I carried in my body, I assumed they were there for a purpose, but I couldn't imagine what. They had limited brainpower, limited energy, and probably limited abilities. There'd be no dramatic feats of telekinesis to save us from the station's dangers. If I got injured, perhaps the spores wouldn't even be able to keep me alive.

We humans—we Explorers—we
champions
—were finally on our own.

"What now?" Li asked behind me. He'd taken his time coming through the entrance's energy field, but had finally gathered enough courage to join us.

"Now we look around," Festina said. "And before anyone wanders off, let's use the Bumbler." She took a quick sensor scan. "No good," she reported. "We can't see through the inner wall."

"How about the Stage One microbes inside you?" I asked. "I don't suppose they decided to stay outside?"

Festina raised a questioning eyebrow. "The EMP clouds keep their distance from this station," I said. "It makes them nervous. Maybe the microbes that are trying to mutate you want to stay out too."

"Oh good," Festina muttered. "I love waltzing into places that terrify the locals." But she took more readings with the Bumbler and reported, "We still have our escort of microbes—around us and in our bloodstreams. They must be so eager to turn us into smoke, they don't care if monsters live in this building."

"They're microbes," Li said. "They're too stupid to care about anything."

He had a point. The microbes weren't
pretas;
they had no intelligence or emotions. They were just little wrecking machines, waiting for the signal to tear us apart. We could hope the signal wouldn't pass through the station's scan-proof walls... but that was just wishful thinking. The Fuentes would have done their best to make sure the signal blanketed the entire planet—
especially
into buildings like this one, which probably had a crew of maintenance personnel to make sure it worked when the time came.

"Let's get going," Festina said, slinging the Bumbler over her shoulder. "We'll circle this corridor once and see what there is to see."

We walked the circumference of the station and found two entrances into the central "bowl"—one on the north and one on the south, both curtained over with the same black energy that covered the front door. No noise came through either entrance; the building hung thick with absolute silence, as if the walls shut out every wayward sound. All we heard was our footsteps on the concrete floor... the rustling of our clothes... the beating of our hearts.

After our first circuit, we started around again. This time, Festina stopped in front of the first door we came to: the southern entrance, black, blank, revealing nothing. Once again, she pushed the Bumbler through to make sure the energy curtain was safe to enter; the machine came back unharmed. "Okay," she said. "Time to jump down the rabbit hole, Alice."

We stepped into a room brightening with dawn. I'd thought the roof of the station was opaque; it looked that way from the outside. From the inside, however, the room seemed open to the air: a sky of brightening gray, edging into cool, cloudless blue. The sun was too low to be seen, but its rays penetrated the walls, illuminating everything with a yellowed glow.

What was there to see? Ornate machinery: gleaming brass, shining steel, bits of copper and gold. The place reminded me of a Victorian astronomical observatory, with its open roof and collection of equipment below, bristling with gears, cranks, wheels, and levers. There was nothing so recognizable as a telescope, but numerous devices pointed skyward, some long and sharp like spears, others like bulbous cylinders or elongated pyramids. All of them made soft noises—one producing a hum, another a hiss, a third tick-tick-tick—filling the room with a background purr that suggested the station was still operational.

The equipment only covered the outer half of the chamber. The middle of the room was clear of clutter, with nothing but a low ash-gray dome set into the floor—the way humans might put a reflecting pool or a little garden plot in the heart of an open rotunda. But if the dome on the floor was supposed to add visual appeal, it didn't succeed. It was simply a mound of gray, twenty paces across, not quite rising to knee height in the center... not what I'd call an attractive architectural feature, but the Fuentes might have had different aesthetic tastes.

Then something fluttered in the mass of grayness. An infinitesimal motion. I looked more closely, trying to detect what had moved... and, finally, I realized what I was seeing. I should have recognized it instantly, but I'd come to rely so much on my sixth sense, my normal vision had lost its edge.

The dome—the gray heap—was fuzzy. Mossy. In fact, the mound resembled the mat of spores that had covered the city of Zoonau. It had the same texture, the same smothering weight, the same thick furry surface... everything but the color.

I was looking at the Balrog's pallid gray sibling: an anti-Balrog, faded and wilted and dulled.

Ever since we'd landed on Muta, the Balrog had carefully concealed its presence. Now I finally knew what it had been hiding from.

Festina stared at the moss. "Is that what I think it is?" she whispered.

"It appears so," I said.

"You don't know? You don't have any, uhh, feelings about it?"

"My sixth sense hasn't worked since we entered the station."

"That's disconcerting."

"Tell me about it," I said.

Festina pulled the Bumbler into position for a scan. "That stuff certainly reads like the Balrog... except, of course, the color."

"It's blotchy," Li said in a loud voice. "Like it's got mange."

He was right. Though the mound at first appeared a uniform gray, closer examination showed subtle variations in tone. Some patches were bleached nearly white; some were smokier, almost as dark as charcoal; other areas had ghostly tints, the barest touch of opal or olive... as if this wasn't a single type of moss, but a haphazard assemblage of slightly different breeds, with each individual clump squeezed against its neighbors.

Motley,
I thought. Motley like the mishmash of colors in Muta's ferns. Motley like the mosaics on Fuentes buildings. Motley like the
pretas,
seeming to form single clouds, but to my sixth sense, showing up as multitudes of different beings crammed together—neither separate nor integrated, but tossed into a jumble, like salad.

Li took a step toward the mound. "Careful," Festina said. "We don't know whether it's safe. And before you say something stupid like, 'How dangerous can moss be?' remember what the Balrog did to Zoonau."

"Is
this the Balrog?" Li asked. "Or is it something different?"

"Chemically, it's the same," Festina answered, consulting the Bumbler. "But that means nothing. Chemically, humans are nearly identical to slime molds. What matters is how the chemicals go together."

"With Balrogs," I said, "what matters is how the
spores
go together. I don't think these are a single hive mind. They're separate hive minds, huddled together for warmth."

"You say that because of the different colors?"

"Yes. And because it's what the entire planet has been shouting at us ever since we landed. Motley. Separate things unblended. That's the message."

Li gave me a disgusted look. "Planets don't shout messages. They just
are."

"What they are
is
the message," I said.

Festina frowned. "Don't go animist on me, Youn Suu. I'm still getting used to you as a junior Buddha."

"I'm an all-purpose Eastern hero. Buddhism is my specialty, but I dabble in animism as a sideline."

"So when it comes to kicking ass, I take on the gods, and you take the pissy little nature spirits?" She looked at the gray mound. "Which of us handles natural-looking moss with godlike powers?"

"What godlike powers?" Li asked. "It's just a pile of moss. No big threat."

Festina and I winced. The Balrog would have taken Li's words as a cue for attack. But the gray anti-Balrog didn't react... except for a slight shiver.

Li didn't even realize the risk he'd taken. He walked to the edge of the moss and stared at it: perhaps debating whether to poke it with his shoe. Festina tensed, but didn't stop him; even self-sacrificing Western heroes can let fools walk into the lion's mouth, just to see what the lion does. In the end, the lion—the gray moss—made no obvious response. Li glowered at the mound a moment. Then he said, "Boring!" and turned to walk away.

An odd expression came over his face. "What's wrong?" Festina asked.

"I can't move my foot," he said.

"Why not?"

"I just can't."

Festina almost took a step forward, but I shot out my hand to catch her. "Scan with the Bumbler," I said.

"Forget the damned machine," Li snapped. "I'm... I'm paralyzed. Maybe I'm having a stroke."

I knew that wasn't true; Li probably did too. But he couldn't bring himself to admit he'd been caught in a mossy trap.

"I'm getting electrical readings," Festina said. "From the gray spores."

"EMPs?" I asked.

"Not that strong. But a pattern of electrical discharges are focused on Li, and they're interfering with his nervous system. Signals aren't traveling properly between his muscles and brain."

"If we get too close, will the same happen to us?"

"Probably." Festina shucked off her backpack and pulled out a coil of soft white rope. "I might be able to lasso him and drag him back..."

"No!" Li shouted. "Just come grab me. Hurry. I'm—"

His foot lifted. Li looked at it in surprise. I assume the motion wasn't Li's doing—electrical discharges from the mound were moving the leg against Li's will—but I never found out for sure. The next moment, Li stepped into the bed of moss. Then his legs buckled, and he toppled backward.

Li fell more slowly than gravity would dictate: as if he were in a VR adventure where the action could suddenly go slow-mo for dramatic effect. His descent took at least ten seconds, drifting through the air, millimeter by millimeter, a feather wisping its way to the ground.