Radiant

CHAPTER 15

Samsara [Pali]: The ordinary world. Also, the ordinary condition of human life, filled with fixations and dissatisfaction. Samsara is the opposite of nirvana… but they aren’t different places, they’re different ways of experiencing the same place. Samsara is the sense of being messed up; nirvana is being free of clutter.

Festina nudged me aside and took care of Tut. All she did was dribble disinfectant into the golden crack — the wound underneath was only a nick. Then she used a scalpel from the first-aid kit as a delicate pry bar, lifting the jagged edges of gold and bending them away from Tut’s face so they wouldn’t cut him again. Meanwhile, she gave Li and Ubatu a minimal rundown of what we’d found out so the two diplomats would stop plaguing us with questions. Festina told how the Fuentes had botched their ascension and turned themselves into EMPing creatures of smoke… but she failed to mention the same would happen to anyone who stayed on Muta too long.

All the time she was speaking, I sobbed: quietly, trying to make no noise. Crying as much for myself as for what I’d done to Tut. Crying because I’d reached the limit of what I could repress. It wasn’t so much emotion as a physical need — something my body had to do. I couldn’t stop it any more than I could stop my heart beating. But I felt detached from my wet cheeks and runny nose; as I fought to silence my snuffles, my mental awareness continued to view the world more clearly than my teardrop-blurred eyes.

So I saw Ubatu take back the tools and finish widening the hole in the ship’s hull. I saw Li clamber out into the late-afternoon sunshine. I saw Ubatu climb out too, her eyes on me as if appraising whether I was now ripe for attention from Ifa-Vodun. I saw the two diplomats lean over Festina’s shoulder for a few moments before they lost interest in Tut and his injuries. I saw them gaze for a moment at their surroundings, then begin ambling toward the city. I heard Festina yell at them to stay put, and I saw both their auras flash with annoyance as they slowed but didn’t stop their casual walk along the highway. They went another ten paces, just to show they didn’t have to do what Festina told them. Then they turned around and came back.

By then, I’d got myself under control. Tut was coming around. "Whoa!" he said. "Whatever I drank, I want more."

"The cloud-things got inside you," Festina replied, still kneeling beside him. "Do you remember?"

"Nope. But I forget lots of stuff… which works out pretty well, cuz the memory gaps let me stretch my imagination."

I gave my nose a final wipe as Festina turned toward me. "What about you? What tipped you off something was wrong?"

"He was chanting," I said. "Bad poetry. He did the same at Camp Esteem while he was wearing a bear mask. I thought he’d fallen into a trance… like in a Unity mask ritual. Did you ever go to a mirror dance, Tut?"

"Hundreds," he said. "Now there’s where you don’t remember stuff."

Festina frowned. "And you’re good at going into trances?"

"I’m a natural-born expert."

"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.

Tut and the diplomats closed some of the gap between us while they were still in the city and Festina and I had to fight our way through ferns. Once they ran out of road, however, they fell to the same speed as the rest of us. I thought they might slow even further; but Tut had been trained to find routes through thick forest, and Ubatu could clear paths quickly by muscling foliage aside. With such a combination of brain and brawn, they kept making reasonable progress.

Meanwhile, the sky darkened with dusk and clouds: clouds more purple and bruised than any I’d seen before. Just a quirk of Muta’s atmosphere — on alien planets, skies that look like home in sunshine can assume unearthly tints come twilight — but I couldn’t help wonder which clouds were simple water vapor and which were Stage One pretas, riding the storm like dragons.

Certainly, my mental awareness detected pretas within the looming thunderheads. I could sense their fury, frustration, and longing amidst the burgeoning gale, but I didn’t have the delicacy of perception to distinguish one ghost from another. Were there only a few, their particles spread thinly through the mass of cumulonimbus? Or were there hundreds of the ghosts? Thousands? Millions? I could almost believe every tormented spirit on Muta — Fuentes, Greenstriders, Unity, and any others who might have visited over the centuries, only to become trapped in Stage One’s hell — had gathered into a single sky-raging host, stampeding their war chariots overhead.

Tonight a great battle would be fought: a great, ridiculous battle, for we were all on the same side, wanting to end Muta’s pain. But history is full of senseless wars based on out-of-control emotions rather than rational decisions.

Several kilometers to the south, lightning flashed. After a long time, the sound of its thunder rumbled up the river valley… but between the flash and the rumble, rain had begun to fall.

The tree-height ferns did little to shut out rain. Most had vertical fronds, running directly up from the ground like festooned flagpoles. Flagpoles don’t make adequate umbrellas. A few ferns had long stems that curved into horizontal fronds resembling roofs over my head… but either the fronds were made up of many thin leaves and therefore leaked prodigiously, or they were solid enough to act as drainpipes, funneling every drop of rain toward some central point, then dumping it straight down the back of my neck.

The Unity uniform I wore was only partly waterproof, in that maddening way of all nanomesh. The nanites in the fabric were supposed to keep rain out while simultaneously drawing off sweat from my skin so I wouldn’t stew in my own juices. (Pushing through untamed wilderness is hard hot work.) Most nanomeshes keep you comfortably dry for fifteen minutes of downpour, after which the mathematics of chaos begins to take its toll. Some random excess of moisture accumulates in the crook of your elbow, or your armpit, or under your breasts, surpassing manageable tolerances. You feel a brief hot wetness, disturbingly reminiscent of bleeding; then the fabric dispatches reinforcement nanites to correct the problem, and the wetness goes away. (Just as disturbingly.) But shifting nanites to the trouble spot thins out nanite concentrations everywhere else… so soon there’s another ooze of moisture in some other area where rain and sweat abound. More nanite emergency crews are dispatched; more thinning occurs elsewhere; and the vicious circle spirals upward. Soon, transient seepage ambushes you every few steps, always somewhere new and unexpected; most of the time with the warmth of sweat but occasionally with the unkindly chill of a late-autumn torrent… and all the erratic "now you’re wet/now you’re not" water torture would be enough to drive you frantic if not for a more overwhelming concern: the uniform doesn’t cover your head, leaving your hair, face, and neck so utterly soaked that gushes of dampness elsewhere seem like trivial annoyances.

The other people in our spread-out expedition were all similarly drenched. Festina ignored the wetness, plowing doggedly forward, her aura ablaze with determination. Tut, still clad only in masks, danced and sang whatever songs came into his head… a medley of smutty folk ditties, gospel spirituals, and Myriapod throat chants (the kind fashionably used for background music in VR shoot-’em-ups). Li, wet and sulking, occasionally yelled at Ubatu to make Tut keep quiet. Ubatu pretended not to hear Li over the rush of the rain and secretly hummed along with Tut on many of the tunes. Especially the dirty ones.

Over and over, lightning lit the sky, and thunder banged in answer. An extraordinary amount of lightning activity. Perhaps this was simply normal weather on Muta… but I wondered if the pretas, creatures capable of electrical pulses, might somehow be spurring the storm to loose bolts down on our heads. If so, the ghosts couldn’t aim the attacks or overcome the basic laws of physics. Since we traveled low on the Grindstone’s floodplain, none of the lightning strikes came close to us. Either they connected with buildings in the city (and passed harmlessly through lightning rods) or they blasted unfortunate ferns on the heights of land bordering the Grindstone valley.

If the lightning made me uneasy, it downright terrified the local wildlife. As I pushed my way forward, I felt nearby insects and lizards cringe every time thunder cracked in the heavens. Most animals had found shelter from the rain and hunkered down to wait out the weather: some grudgingly so (especially nocturnal creatures who’d woken up hungry at sunset and wanted to forage for food), others miserable at being cold and wet, still others simply putting their tiny brains on idle as they numbly endured whatever came their way… but all of them jumped or shivered at every flash-crash from on high.

A few animals stayed on the move: fish, of course, and aquatic amphibians… insects too stupid to realize it was raining… and six Rexies coming toward us at top speed.

Three of the Rexies approached from the south. They’d reach Festina first; and because each was traveling from a different distance, they’d arrive one by one. If she saw them coming, she could knock them out harmlessly with her stun-pistol… and she would see them coming because she’d programmed her Bumbler’s proximity alarms to tell her when Rexies got close. Overall, she didn’t seem in danger.

Tut, Li, and Ubatu, however, would meet the other three Rexies en masse in about half an hour.

Tut’s party had no stun-pistol. Nor did they have a Bumbler to warn them of attack. Worst of all, my sixth sense told me at least two of the Rexies would reach them simultaneously… possibly all three. In this storm, Rexies moved much faster than humans — the pretas pushed the animals mercilessly, driving them to thrash through jungle vegetation without regard to safety. Their scaly skins showed numerous gashes, cut by encounters with thorns and sharp stones. Occasionally, the animals tripped on vines or slipped on slicks of wet mud, falling heavily enough to knock out teeth or fracture ribs and the delicate bones in their spindly arms. But the clouds in the Rexies’ skulls didn’t care about such minor injuries. All they wanted was the kill; and the sooner the better.

Thus the ruinous speed. By contrast, Tut and company moved with much more caution, plus the slowdown that always accompanies dampened spirits. There was no chance they’d outrun the predators heading for them.

As time went on, I saw one more thing: the Rexies adjusted their routes to set up a pincer operation. Two aimed for a position ahead of Tut et al.; the third would come in behind. I expected the two in front, bred by evolution to be pouncers rather than chasers, would find a place to lie in wait while the one at the rear drove the humans into the trap. On Earth, packs of wolves used the same tactic, but I doubted the Rexies had enough brains to devise such a plan. The pretas were the guiding intelligence, coordinating efforts over a distance of several kilometers as they brought the Rexies converging on their intended victims. Obviously, the EMP clouds could communicate with each other as well as share emotions. The ones riding the storm overhead might be acting as high observers, conveying directions to the clouds who’d got inside the Rexies’ heads.

Considering the pretas’ coordinated assault, I wondered why they’d never attacked the Unity in the same way. Team Esteem had recorded no unusual EMPs, no pseudosuchian ambushes, no odd clouds of smoke hovering in the distance. Why not? Why had the Unity been left alone for years, while our own rescue party was EMP’d before we landed and harried ever since?

Perhaps it could be explained by the knee-jerk enmity between the Unity and the Technocracy… and by the raw pain Team Esteem must have felt in their newly disembodied condition. The Fuentes clouds had suffered in Stage One for thousands of years; when the Unity survey teams landed, the clouds knew that the newcomers would soon turn to harmless smoke. Even as pretas, the Fuentes had learned some patience and restraint.

But the Unity pretas had no such control. When we sent reconnaissance probes into their camp, Team Esteem’s ghosts must have whipped themselves into fury at the thought of hated Technocracy rivals "invading" Unity territory. The smoky Team Esteem had EMP’d our probe in outrage. When we showed up in person, they’d EMP’d us again… and even if the Fuentes pretas might have preferred to avoid direct action — or if the newly transformed Var-Lann told the others we were a rescue party, not opportunistic usurpers — hostilities had already commenced.

It didn’t help that we’d talked to Ohpa (whom the pretas hated or feared) and that we were now marching toward the Stage Two station. Perhaps the ghosts thought we intended to destroy the station, thereby destroying their only remaining hope for release. However the pretas usually handled visitors, this time they’d decided we couldn’t be left to be pulled apart by microbes. We had to be eliminated: the sooner the better.

Hence the Rexies. And hence, I had to do something. Which would have been easier if I’d had a stun-pistol, a Bumbler, or a comm. But I was just as ill equipped as Tut’s group… nor was I enough of a fighter to take on three homicidal protodinosaurs.

The Rexies would kill Tut. They would kill Li. They would kill Ubatu. If I was there, they’d kill me too… unless the Balrog played deus ex machina to save me, probably consuming more of my body in the process. Either way — whether I got eaten by an alien dinosaur or an alien clump of moss — it seemed so unreal, I couldn’t work up much concern over either prospect. As for the others, I disliked Li, I feared Ubatu, and Tut might become as dangerous as the Rexies if the pretas possessed him again. Letting them all die would solve a lot of problems.

But it wouldn’t solve my biggest problem: remaining human.

I didn’t want to become a thing who calmly let others be killed. I didn’t want to descend into what I imagined was the Balrog’s attitude: unconcerned with the fate of lesser beings. The thought of Li and Ubatu dying didn’t fill me with much emotion, but the thought of me casually letting it happen — watching them die with my sixth sense, seeing their life forces ripped from their bodies and cast off to dwindle into the ether — that made me shudder. I was absolutely terrified of changing into an inhuman entity devoid of compassion.

So I had to save them. I had to. Which meant I had to do the only thing that might rescue them in time.

I had to get Festina.

If I traveled fast, taking shortcuts, I’d have just enough time to catch up with Festina and bring her back to save the others. Persuading her to help wouldn’t be easy. First, I had to get close enough that she could hear me over the storm. (Briefly, I wondered whether the Balrog could amplify my voice… but every time I asked the moss for a favor, I lost more of myself. No.) I had to get near enough to be heard, which was also near enough for Festina to break my legs. She’d unhesitatingly carry out that threat unless I found the perfect words to stop her. Assuming words would stop her at all; quite possibly she’d ignore talk completely, thinking it was just a Balrog ploy to slow her down.

Nor would it be easy explaining how I knew the locations of six widely separated Rexies. Even the nearest was more than a kilometer away, hidden by night, rain, and shrubbery. But perhaps that problem would solve itself — by my estimate, I’d reach Festina about the same time as the first Rexy coming her way. A big toothy predator howling for blood would help make my point that our friends were in similar trouble.

But only if Festina gave me a chance to speak.

As I hurried forward through soaking wet ferns, I tried to devise a persuasive approach. No inspiration presented itself. Anyway, "persuasive" was exactly what she’d expect if the Balrog were speaking through my mouth… unless the moss decided to go for "fumbling and artless" in an attempt to seem more genuine. The more I thought about it, if I chose any effective approach, its very effectiveness would make it suspect. If I prostrated myself on the ground submissively… if I saved Festina’s life from a Rexy… if I got in front of her and built one of those noose snares so popular in VR adventures, where the victims are suddenly lassoed by the ankles and yanked off their feet to dangle upside down, helpless to do anything except hear you out…

I couldn’t believe those traps actually worked. In real life, they’d probably break your neck through sheer force of whiplash.

Broken bones were very much on my mind as I hurried through the rain.

I thought of no brilliant solution to my problem. No clever phrases to win Festina over. No inspired truths or lies to smooth everything out.

My Bamar heritage left me ill equipped for subtle-tongued persuasion. I don’t claim my ancestors were scrupulously honest, but they’d never revered slick speech as an art form. Other cultures have trickster folk-heroes who can wheedle their way out of anything… but the heroes in Bamar folktales are either Buddhist saints who never tell lies, or else noble warriors who get betrayed (by treacherous friends, two-faced lovers, deceitful relatives) and die in elaborately gruesome ways. The greatest heroes are combinations — warriors who achieve saintly enlightenment just before being killed. Such people may become semidivine after death: war-spirits chosen to serve Buddha himself as deputies and emissaries.

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.