Radiant (8 page)

Pouches tore off my belt. My backpack flew away. Even the weight of my stun-pistol, holstered at my hip, suddenly departed as the gun was snatched by the gale.

Then, abruptly, the fury ceased. Replaced by deep silence. The blinding red chaos was sucked away, leaving only a glimpse of the last spores sailing up out of sight into the sky.

Afternoon sun poured painfully bright through the dome. The glass was clear. The buildings had returned to their dull gray. The patches of moss where Cashlings had been rolling were gone, revealing nothing but bare
chintah.

The Balrog had abandoned Zoonau. Just like that. Not a single spore left in sight.

"Uhh, Mom..."

Tut still lay on the roof tiles. I looked down. He pointed to my feet.

Both my boots were covered with spores, like fuzzy red slippers. I did nothing but stare at them dumbly—like a villain in a cheap action virtie, who looks down in surprise to see she's been shot through the heart.

"Oh," I said. "Oh."

My boots vanished like smoke. The rest of my tightsuit too—totally consumed as the spores chewed upward, faster than the speed of thought. Even my helmet didn't slow the spores down: they slashed past my eyes in a wash of crimson, leaving nothing behind but the touch of a light spring breeze blowing against my skin.

My suit was completely gone, eaten by the Balrog. Now all I wore was the thin, thigh-high chemise that most women put on under tightsuits for protection against chafing.

I looked at my feet again. The fuzzy red "slippers" were gone. Just two spores left, one on each foot, glowing in the center of each instep like Christian stigmata. I closed my eyes.

Two little kisses of pain, no worse than mosquito bites, piercing the flesh of my feet. When I opened my eyes again, I saw two pinpricks of blood, nothing more. They barely showed on my skin.

But now, the spores were inside me.

I felt nothing. Like Kaisho Namida, I couldn't sense the Balrog as it colonized my tissues. Still, I had no doubt I was rapidly becoming riddled with spores. My heart. My womb. My brain. Perhaps my nervous system was screaming in agony, but the spores invading my brain didn't let the pain register in my consciousness.

"Oh, Mom," said Tut. "You got bitten."

"I know."

"By the Balrog."

"I know."

"It's in your feet."

"I know."

"They gotta come off."

"What?"

Tut didn't answer. He scuttled across the roof tiles to a half-open equipment pouch that had fallen off my belt. My first-aid kit had slipped partway out of the pouch. Tut grabbed the kit, opened it, took out a scalpel.

"If those things spread, Mom, you're in trouble."

"They've already spread, Tut. They're deep inside me."

"You don't know that. They could just be nibbling your toes."

"Tut, when the Balrog attacked Kaisho Namida—"

"When the Balrog attacked Kaisho Namida," Tut interrupted, "her partner didn't do shit. Maybe he could have saved her."

"He didn't do anything because she was infested from head to toe in seconds."

"How did he know?"

"He scanned her with his Bumbler."

Tut shrugged. "We don't have a Bumbler."

It was true. His had disappeared during the emergency evac explosion; mine had been torn away during the Balrog's departure.

"Gotta cut off your feet," Tut said again.

I took a step back from him. "It won't help."

"It might. You never know."

I backed another step. "I'll bleed to death."

He gave me a withering look. "Think I don't know about tourniquets? And I ran past a hospital on my way in. Less than five minutes away. No problem."

"Then get me to the hospital, Tut." Another step back. "Don't cut off my feet right here."

"Time's a-wasting. And I gotta ask why you're fighting me on this. Maybe that Balrog is twisting your mind."

"If it's in my mind already, there's no point cutting off my feet."

"If it's in your mind already and it's so insistent on leaving your feet alone, amputation sounds like a
real
good idea. Anything the Balrog doesn't want, that's what I should be doing."

"Please, Tut." I felt tears in my eyes. "I won't be myself much longer. Don't take my feet. I'll lose them soon enough. Please, Tut. Let me stay me as long as I can."

He didn't answer—just rolled across the roof and grabbed another piece of equipment that had fallen from my suit. The holster holding my stun-pistol. I turned to run; the pistol whirred as he shot me in the back.

I dropped, with muscles like water. But I didn't black out—just went limp and powerless.
That shouldn't be,
I thought. Shot at close range with a stunner: I should have gone completely unconscious. How could I still be awake? Unless... oh.

The Balrog was inside me. And navy records said the Balrog was immune to stun-fire. The spores in my nervous system must have given me enough stun-resistance to stay conscious, but not enough to fight back as Tut scurried forward with the scalpel.

"Maybe I'd better take more than your feet," he said. "Cut you off at the knees. Or maybe the hip. Just to be safe." He patted my cheek. The bad one. The oozing one. Idly, he wiped his hand off on my chemise. "You'll look pretty with artificial legs, Mom. I bet you can get gold ones."

He lifted the hem of my chemise, spread my legs, and put the scalpel to my thigh. I thought of how I'd once been a dancer... how I hadn't been practicing enough recently... how I'd let the feel of movement slip away. Now I'd never get it back.

The blade was so sharp, I barely felt Tut slice in. What I did feel was the warm gush of blood running down my flesh.

Then something went WHIR. The sound of another stun-shot. And Tut toppled forward, landing unconscious on my blood-slick leg.

Still paralyzed, I couldn't turn my head to see what was happening. I could only watch as a human hand reached down and rolled Tut off me. A stun-pistol whirred again, making sure he was out cold.

More sounds of movement outside my line of sight. A fat white bandage appeared and pressed hard against the scalpel cut in my leg. "Not too bad," a woman's voice said. I could see her hand and her sleeve. She wore an Outward Fleet uniform. Admiral's gray.

Fingers on my chin turned my head toward her. She had a strong face, piercing green eyes, and a furious purple birthmark splashed across her right cheek. The dark of it against her light skin was like a photographic negative of my own white-on-dark disfiguration.

Ah,
I thought.
The other human my Bumbler detected.
Not an ambitious bureaucrat from the embassy, but the most famous admiral in our navy. Festina Ramos.

I had a terrible suspicion the Balrog had done all this to bring the two of us together.

Karma [Sanskrit]: The consequences of one's previous actions.

Ramos got surgical glue from the first-aid kit and carefully closed my wound. As she worked, I tried to guess what she was doing here. By "here," I didn't mean the top of the ziggurat—if Festina Ramos had been anywhere on Cashleen, she'd hurry to Zoonau as soon as she heard of the Balrog's attack. She would then search the city for the point of maximum chaos and inevitably find her way to Tut's pulpit. Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos was the navy's official troubleshooter-at-large. Her job and her instincts would have brought her unfailingly to the heart of the furor.

But what was she doing on Cashleen at all? What was important enough to bring her when she could have been the darling of New Earth?

Two years earlier, she'd driven the navy's High Council of Admirals into meltdown by presenting evidence of their massive corruption and wrongdoing. Felony charges against council members still had to work through the courts, but that was just a formality. The important trial had been held in the news media, and the verdict was unequivocal: guilty as charged.

The entire High Council had resigned in disgrace. Even rank-and-file admirals who weren't on the council fell prey to suspicion... except, of course, Ramos herself. She became so popular, newswires willingly printed her picture—usually with the birthmark lightened to soft mauve, but sometimes (when an article wanted to depict her as an implacable force for justice) with the birthmark left dark and foreboding.

Ramos had dominated the news for a month. During that time, she met with almost every politician on New Earth, plus many more who flew in from other planets just to grab a photo op. Those of us at the Explorer Academy believed that Ramos would be named president of the new High Council; she was the only admiral who still held the public's confidence. Rumor said the civilian government wanted to announce a complete slate of High Admirals all at once, and needed time to make sure none of the new appointees had been involved in the old council's crimes... but as soon as the background checks were complete, Festina Ramos would surely become the navy's admiral-in-chief.

Then Ramos disappeared. No word where she was going—just a brief interview with a third-string reporter who happened to be hanging around New Earth's main spaceport. Ramos said duty called her elsewhere, and she might not be back for some time. "Best wishes to the new High Council, may they serve with honor, I trust they'll receive everyone's full support, gotta go now, bye." Or words to that effect.

With that, Festina Ramos swept off the public stage like a tired ballerina who wants to get away before someone calls, "Encore!"

Navy gossip occasionally reported Ramos sightings around the galaxy—a day on Troyen with Queen Innocence... four days on Celestia with Lord Protector York and his Mandasar wife... three weeks in seclusion on Demoth with some junior proctor of the Vigil... rumors of surprise visits to archaeological digs, disease research centers, and the YouthBoost vats on Sitz—but Ramos avoided the media, never gave public statements, and kept on the move. By the time word leaked out where she'd been, she was already someplace else.

Her behavior provoked countless theories. For example, some suggested that during her investigations into the High Council, she'd discovered something she hadn't made public: a threat much worse than the crimes she'd revealed, and now she was racing from planet to planet, trying to end the danger before disaster struck. A number of my fellow Explorers, however, were sure she was the victim of "pretty people politics"—the top echelons of the Technocracy couldn't stomach a disfigured purple-cheeked woman taking command of the fleet, so they sent her on meaningless errands to remove her from the spotlight. Personally, I wondered if she'd just got fed up with the politicians, the media, and all the other talk-talk-talk. If she'd really been offered the highest post in the navy, she might have turned it down as more trouble than it was worth. Then she'd happily fled the public eye and was now on extended vacation, going wherever she liked... perhaps helping out here and there, but certainly not battling galactic-scale dangers.

Still, I'd known better than to mention my suspicions to other Academy cadets. They'd worshiped Ramos as a hero. She'd been an Explorer herself before the Admiralty abruptly bumped her (at age twenty-six) to lieutenant admiral and made her the navy's problem-solver-without-portfolio. Nobody knew how she'd won such a promotion, though everyone suspected she'd caught the High Council in some mischief and blackmailed them into making concessions. Certainly, Ramos's first official act was to conduct a "policy review" of the Explorer Corps, leading to an overhaul of corps operations and substantial improvements in the treatment of Explorers by other branches of the service. That alone would have made her popular among us "expendable crew members"... but more important, she carried out her highly visible activities
while still looking like an Explorer.
As an admiral, Ramos could easily have obtained treatment to remove her florid birthmark; but she'd stayed the way she was, no matter how much it disconcerted "normal" people.

Was it any wonder Explorers loved her?

I'd admired her as much as anyone else had. But now, as she checked that my wound was closed, I felt a dawning resentment.

Ramos's history proved she was surrounded by extraordinary karma—which is not some mystical force but the everyday processes whereby seeds sown in the past bear fruit in the present. Karma simply means that the choices you made yesterday affect the options you have today. It's common sense. Nothing is inevitable or predetermined... yet your actions and the actions of others can sometimes produce a cumulative momentum almost impossible to resist. That's what karma is: the momentum of cause and effect that drives you forward, occasionally into bottlenecks or booby traps.

Some people have more momentum than others. Some are riding an avalanche. Festina Ramos was clearly one of those avalanche riders; her karma would sweep her from crisis to crisis until her luck or momentum ran out.

And people like me would be caught in the avalanche too.

Here's what I was thinking as I lay paralyzed, watching Ramos repack the first-aid kit. Why would the Balrog care about an Ugly Screaming Stink-Girl? It wouldn't. It
would
care about a high-ranking avalanche rider like Festina Ramos; she could be useful in the Balrog's plans, whatever they were. And if those plans required a pawn to serve as host for fuzzy red spores, the Balrog would find great amusement in choosing a host who looked like the admiral's dark twin.

In other words, I'd been picked because my appearance would get a rise out of Festina Ramos.

She and I were almost the same height. We were both strong, lean, and athletic. Her hair was cut much like mine: short and uncomplicated. Our faces weren't similar if you compared individual features—her green eyes, my brown, her finely cut nose, mine wider and flatter—but anyone looking at Ramos and me would ignore such minor differences. Observers would be transfixed by our disfigured cheeks. Nothing else would matter.

Even Ramos couldn't help staring. She checked that Tut was sleeping peacefully and shooed away some curious Cashlings by brandishing her pistol; then she came back and knelt by my side. For almost a minute, she did nothing but gaze at my face. If I'd been able to move, I would have told her to stop. It reminded me too much of my mother, who'd gaze at my cheek in sickened fascination when she thought I wouldn't notice. But at least there was no disgust in Ramos's expression—I was used to stares of disgust, and the admiral's eyes were blessedly free of such condemnation. Free of pity too. Whatever Ramos was thinking, she hid it well.