Radiant

CHAPTER 3

Paticcasamupada [Pali]: Inter-connectedness. The principle that nothing exists in isolation.

Cashling authorities claimed the Zoonau dome was completely sealed off. They were wrong. Satellite photos showed that the Balrog had shut down Zoonau’s transit ports — five conduit-sleeves connected to orbiting terminals, plus an iris-lens hole in the dome that let shuttlecraft enter and leave — but there was one access point the spores had left open: a door leading out of the city into the surrounding countryside.

I wasn’t surprised the Balrog had left us an entry. It wanted us to come. It was waiting.

I also wasn’t surprised the Cashlings had overlooked the open door. They simply wouldn’t consider it a possible option. Cashlings never left their closed environments; if they wanted to travel from one city dome to another, they used shuttles, conduit-sleeves, or some other means of transport where they could shut themselves in metal cocoons. They never ventured outdoors… because the entire Cashling race had become agoraphobic: afraid of open spaces.

The ground entrance to Zoonau had been built centuries ago, likely as an emergency exit. True to form, the Cashlings had forgotten it was there. In a human community, such a casual attitude toward civic safety would be a crime. With Cashlings, it was probably better for them to stay inside the dome, even if the city was endangered by fire, flood, or some other disaster. If Zoonau’s inhabitants fled to the wilds, they’d soon die from their own ineptitude.

Not that the wilds outside Zoonau were hostile. Satellite scans showed a temperate region of trees, meadows, and streams. Clear skies. Late spring. A few minutes after noon. You couldn’t ask for a more pleasant landing. We didn’t even have to worry about animal predators: according to navy records, all dangerous wildlife on Cashleen had been driven to extinction millennia ago. (Likely by accident. If the Cashlings had deliberately set out to exterminate unwanted species, they would have botched it the same way they botched everything else.)

So nothing prevented us from landing a negotiating team, flown down in Ambassador Li’s luxury shuttle. The ambassador himself took the cockpit’s command chair; he seemed more excited about the chance to play pilot than to talk to an alien superintelligence. As for Commander Ubatu, she arrived in the shuttle bay wearing her best dress uniform: form-fitting gold leaf, almost like a reverse of Tut (her face unadorned, but her body sheathed in shining metal). Li made some remark about the ridiculousness of formal navy garb, especially if Ubatu thought her wardrobe would impress a heap of alien moss. Ubatu replied she had to come along because she couldn’t trust Li to handle the Balrog on his own.

Of course, Li wasn’t on his own. Tut and I were there too. In the grand tradition of the Explorer Corps, we were required to thrust ourselves into the jaws of danger so that more valuable lives could remain safe. We’d been ordered to enter Zoonau, make first contact with the Balrog, and set up a comm relay for the diplomats outside. Li and Ubatu could then "engage the Balrog in frank freewheeling discussion" while Tut and I tried to keep the Cashlings from doing anything stupid.

Considering that Zoonau contained two hundred thousand people, Tut and I had no chance of controlling the city if things went sour. Our very arrival might set off a riot. I could imagine being mobbed by the first Cashlings who saw us. "Help, help, O how we’ve suffered!"

But if Tut and I were lucky, we could contact the Balrog without setting foot in Zoonau itself. What I’ve been calling a ground-level door was actually a type of airlock: a tube ten meters long passing through the dome, with one end connecting to the outside world and one to the streets of the city. If Balrog spores had spread into the tube, we could walk right up to them without being seen by Cashlings in the city proper. Even if the moss had stopped at the cityside door, we could get close but still stay in the tube, out of sight of Zoonau’s residents.

At least that was the approach I suggested to Tut. He said, "Anything you want, Mom," as if he wasn’t listening. When I asked if he had a better idea, he told me, "We’ll see when we get there."

That set off warning signals in my head. I feared deranged notions had captured Tut’s fancy, and he’d pull some stunt I’d regret. But he was my superior officer. I couldn’t make him stay behind.

Despite his disdain for Ubatu’s gold uniform, Li had dressed up too: donning a jade-and-purple outfit of silk, cut to make him look like a High-Confucian mandarin. Tut and I wore tightsuits of eye-watering brightness — his yellow, mine orange, to make it easier for us to keep visual contact with each other from a distance. I didn’t plan on straying more than a step from Tut’s side, but better safe than sorry.

The name "tightsuit" may suggest such suits cling tightly to one’s flesh. Just the opposite. A tightsuit balloons at least a centimeter out from your body; it’s "tight" because the interior is pressurized to make it bulge out taut, as if you’re sealed inside an inflated tire. This is important on worlds with unknown microbes: if your suit gets a rip, the high internal pressure won’t allow microorganisms to seep inside. It’s only a temporary measure — if you’re leaking, you’ll soon deflate — but the pressure differential may last long enough for you to patch the hole.

That was the theory, anyway. The pressure hadn’t protected Kaisho Namida from the Balrog… and I was more afraid of mossy red spores than the germs in Cashleen’s atmosphere. I’d been inoculated against Cashling microbes — I’d been inoculated against all unsafe microbes on all developed planets — but there was no known medicine to hold the Balrog at bay.

Inside my suit, my feet itched… as if they could already feel themselves being pierced by spores.

Explorers seldom touched down lightly on alien planets. Our usual method of landing packed a much harder wallop than being flown in an ambassador’s shuttle. Therefore, I’d scarcely realized we’d arrived before Tut bounded out to reconnoiter.

Li had set down on a small creek overgrown with Cashling soak-grass: a frost green reed that could grow profusely in shallow streams, forming deceptive "lawns" that hid the water beneath. A childish part of me wanted the diplomats to step out for a stroll in the "meadow." There was no real danger, since the stream was only knee deep, but I would have liked to see Li and Ubatu cursing at sloshy shoes. Instead, they both stayed in their plush swivel seats, not even glancing toward the door as I slipped out into the creek.

Water surged up my calves, but didn’t penetrate the hermetically sealed fabric of my suit — not the tiniest sense of dampness. This particular suit could cope with temperatures from -100° to +100° Celsius, had a six-hour air supply, and was tough enough to withstand low-caliber gunfire. I felt foolish hiding inside such extreme protection when Li and Ubatu just wore conventional clothes. However, tightsuits were compulsory for Explorers in uncontrolled situations, and our foray into Zoonau definitely counted as uncontrolled. Besides, without the suit I wouldn’t have had storage space for all the gear I wanted to carry. The suit’s belt pouches and backpack let me bring every Exploration essential: my Bumbler, a first-aid kit, a few emergency supplies (light-wands, rope, food rations, a compass)… and my stun-pistol.

Many Explorers despised stun-pistols. The guns emitted hypersonic blasts, supposedly strong enough to knock out attacking predators on worlds where such predators lived; but the pistols often had no effect, since alien carnivores frequently didn’t possess the sort of nervous system that could be frazzled by hypersonics. On the other hand, I didn’t have to worry about dangerous animals on Cashleen. I did have to worry about Tut doing something irrational, and the gun would work fine on him. One shot, and he’d be unconscious for six hours.

By which time, the Balrog situation would be resolved, one way or another.

Tut did a few dozen stride-jumps on the riverbank. This was and wasn’t a sign of derangement. Explorer policy strongly recommended loosening-up exercises at the start of mission: getting used to the feel of your tightsuit. However, stride-jumps weren’t nearly as useful as slow stretches and rotating the joints (arm circles, hip circles, knee circles). Jumping around wildly just raised your body temperature and made your suit’s air-conditioning work harder.

So I did some squats and extensions as I took stock of our situation. Zoonau’s dome dominated the skyline fifty paces away. It rose more than a hundred stories high, a great glass hemisphere that sparkled in the midday sun. The sparkles were all blood red — the interior of the dome had clotted solid with spores, blocking any view of events inside.

The entry tube stood out from the rest of the dome, mostly because of its construction material: a gray pseudoconcrete that contrasted dully with the dome’s glinting glass. I recognized the concrete look-alike as chintah — a Cashling word that meant "garden." Though it seemed like plain cement, chintah was a complex ecology of minerals, plants, and bacteria. Under normal conditions, chintah’s living components did little but hibernate, keeping themselves alive through photosynthesis or by eating dust from the air. However, any damage to chintah set off a frenzied round of growth, like the scrub vegetation that rushes to fill gaps caused by forest fires. Within days, any gouges would be covered over with rapid response microorganisms. Then the microbes themselves would gradually be replaced by more solid growth, the way trees slowly reclaim land clogged with underbrush. Chintah’s complete healing process took a Cashling year… by which time all trace of the original damage would vanish.

So I wasn’t surprised the chintah entry tube looked perfectly intact, despite centuries of wind, rain, and snow. What did surprise me was the door on the end: a flat slab of metal that should have rusted in place long ago. As I watched, the door swung open without a creak, exposing shadowy darkness beyond.

"Hey look, Mom!" Tut said. "Like a haunted house. Last one in is a zombie!"

He ran for the opening. I took a second too long debating whether to shoot him in the back with my stunner. By the time I unholstered my gun, Tut was out of range. Three seconds later, he reached the entry tube and disappeared inside.

I had no chance of catching him — I was a strong runner, but Tut was good too and his legs were longer than mine. When I reached the mouth of the tube, I found myself hoping he’d been stopped by a solid wall of moss closing off the tube’s other end… but there were no spores in sight, and no Tut either. He must have sprinted straight through the passage, into the streets of Zoonau; and the Balrog had let him go.

Did that mean the Balrog approved of whatever scheme my crazy partner intended? Or was it possible the Balrog hadn’t expected what Tut would do? The moss could predict the actions of normal humans; but what about the insane? Even the Balrog wasn’t infallible — somehow, for example, those Fasskisters had caught the Balrog unawares, captured some spores, and used them in ways that made the Balrog furious. The Fasskisters had suffered for their presumption… but the incident showed the Balrog didn’t anticipate everything. Sometimes lesser beings could still manage surprises.

"What are you up to, Tut?" I muttered.

As I entered the tube myself, I got out my Bumbler. It was a stocky cylindrical machine about the size of my head; in fact, two weeks earlier, Tut had painted eyes, nose, and mouth on both his Bumbler and mine. (I’d stopped him from smearing mayonnaise on the left sensor ports to simulate the goo on my cheek.) Naturally, Tut had used paint that withstood every solvent Pistachio kept in its storerooms… so Tut’s portrait of my face stared back at me as I powered up the tracking unit.

The top surface of the Bumbler — the "scalp" area, if you’re still picturing the machine as a head — was a flat vidscreen for displaying data. I keyed it to show where Tut was, as determined by a radio beacon I’d planted in his backpack when he wasn’t looking. Generally, Explorers didn’t use homing transmitters; they could be deadly on survey missions, especially if you were investigating a planet where carnivorous lifeforms could "hear" radio waves and use them to hunt prey. (Explorers found it unhealthy to be flashing a big loud "Come eat me" signal.) But that didn’t matter on a tame planet like Cashleen… which is why I’d hidden a beeper in Tut’s gear for exactly this kind of emergency.

A blip flashed on the Bumbler’s screen: Tut, still running, heading deeper into the city. But the knotted nature of Zoonau’s streets made it impossible to tell if he had a goal in mind or was just turning at random whenever he reached a corner. Either way, his path was a sequence of zigzags, loops, and switchbacks, reflected by the blip on my screen.

A voice yelled in my ear. "What’s going on, Explorer?"

Ambassador Li. Who’d cranked up the volume on our shared comm link, either because he didn’t know better or didn’t care. I almost did the same with my own end of the link, but decided not to be petty.

"My partner," I said, "has proceeded ahead to reconnoiter. I’ll be joining him in a moment."

"What’s the Balrog doing?" That was Ubatu. Her voice sounded strangely eager… but I put that down to more ghoulish fascination with aliens that ate people.

"I don’t have visual contact yet," I said. "Just a second."

I’d stopped halfway down the entry tube in order to use my Bumbler. Now I walked the rest of the way forward, feeling my heart thud in my chest. There were no Balrog spores directly in sight, but a dim ruby glow shone through the door in front of me, as if a bonfire burned just around the corner. I paused before the doorway, took a long slow breath, then peeked around the frame.

A glowing red face looked back at me. My own. Mouth open in shock. Which is surely how I looked myself.

I came perilously close to screaming, but reflexes kicked in and kept me from crying out. In fact, my reflexes kept me from doing anything.

As an ongoing experiment, the navy conditioned Explorers with one of three "instinctive" reactions to sudden shocks:

1. Dropping flat on the ground and staying down.

2. Diving, rolling, and ending up back on your feet in a fighting stance.

3. Freezing in place till you could think clearly again.

The goal was supposedly to see which response gave the best chance of surviving unexpected dangers… but most Explorers believed the Admiralty was just having fun at our expense. ("Let’s make the freaks dance!")

I’d been assigned to the third group: I froze when something took me by surprise. After years of systematic programming — through classical stimulus-response, sleep induction, and "therapeutic sensory dep" — I could no more resist my conditioning than I could fly by flapping my arms. There in Zoonau, face-to-face with my glowing red look-alike, I stood paralyzed into impotent numbness.

Thought and motion returned simultaneously: I relaxed as I realized the face in front of me was only a sculpture — a topiary version of myself constructed from red moss. The Balrog had seen me coming… had known I’d stick my head around the doorframe… and had arranged a group of spores in my likeness to startle me.

You demon, I mouthed to the spores near my face. But I didn’t say it aloud. Instead, I spoke the words that came almost as automatically to me as freezing in the face of danger. "Greetings," I told the statue. "I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples. I beg your Hospitality."

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the statue collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut. Slump, thud. The spores from the image quickly spread themselves out on the ground, joining the carpet of moss already there. A second later, all sign of my look-alike had vanished.

"Have you made contact with the Balrog?" Li asked over the comm link.

"Yes. But it didn’t want to talk to me."

"Of course not. This is a job for diplomats. Set up the relay."

I refrained from mentioning that Explorers are trained in diplomacy, just as we’re trained in planetary science, crisis management, and down-’n’-dirty survival. In fact, we received more formal training in diplomacy than the navy’s Diplomatic Corps. It was an essential part of our jobs. After all, who got sent on First Contact missions? Who might encounter extraterrestrials at any time, and whose initial actions would set the course for future human-alien relations? The Explorer Corps. Diplomats didn’t talk to anyone till Explorers broke the ice.

Which was what I was doing in Zoonau. Gauging the Balrog’s mood. And since it didn’t immediately want to eat me — nearby spores kept their distance from my feet — the situation seemed safe enough that I could turn the parlay over to Li and Ubatu.

As I worked to deploy the relay — just a small black box on a chest-high tripod — I paused now and then to examine my surroundings. Moss covered everything like spray-foam insulation. Undifferentiated red coated every surface as far as the eye could see. Streets. Buildings. Rope walkways. Even the atmosphere was tinted red: the only light was the dusky crimson that filtered through the moss-clotted dome, plus the dim streetlamps just visible beneath masses of spores.

No Cashlings moved anywhere in sight. I assumed they’d run for cover into buildings. That raised the question of whether the Balrog would pursue them inside, or whether the moss would be content to remain in the street. If this attack on Zoonau was just a way to get Pistachio’s attention, the Balrog had already succeeded. Therefore, it had no need to bash its way into Cashling homes. On the other hand, the Balrog reportedly enjoyed terrifying lesser creatures… like putting that statue of me precisely where I’d be startled to maximum effect. If the Balrog liked such cheap scare tactics, it might invade Cashling homes just to hear them squeal.

You demon, I mouthed again.

"Are you finished?" Li shouted in my ear.

"Yes, Ambassador." I turned the activation dial on the relay. Immediately, life-sized hologram images of Li and Ubatu appeared on either side of me, projected by the relay’s black box. The images turned their heads back and forth, as if scanning the city… which is exactly what they were doing. Just as the relay projected images of the diplomats onto the streets of the city, it sent images of Zoonau back to Li and Ubatu — a two-way VR connection that would allow "face-to-face" negotiations while the diplomats remained safe in the shuttle.

"Good afternoon, Balrog," Li said, bowing toward the moss. The volume on his feed was now perfectly dulcet.

"Yes, good afternoon," said Ubatu. She knelt, head bowed, and pressed her palms together in front of her chest — much more obsequious behavior than I expected from a professional diplomat. The moss beneath her hologram knees made no effort to get out of the way. Spores avoided contact with real people, but apparently didn’t bother to move for holos.

The diplomats began a prepackaged message of goodwill. While they talked, I looked down at my Bumbler. The blip showed that Tut was still running. Not as fast as before, but now he was traveling in a straight line. He must have clambered up into the network of ropes — they were the only straight thoroughfares in the city. It was perfectly possible Tut had hit the ropes just for the fun of swinging around like a monkey… but it was also possible he’d decided on a destination and was now taking the most direct route available.

That worried me.

Li and Ubatu were still talking. They’d got no response from the Balrog, but that didn’t slow them down. "…pleased for the opportunity on this historic occasion…" I slipped away, my boots making no sound on Zoonau’s pavement. When I looked down, I saw that my footfalls were being muffled by moss: the Balrog wasn’t getting out of my way, but was helping keep my escape silent.

To the best of my knowledge, I was the first person to walk on the Balrog without getting bitten. Such an unprecedented distinction filled me with dread.

As soon as I rounded a corner, the spores pulled back from my feet; once again, I was on bare pavement. It seemed the Balrog didn’t like being stepped on but had tolerated my boots in the interests of a quiet departure. I mouthed the question Why? but got no answer: just a mossy nudge against my leg, urging me forward. I began running.

At the next intersection, I checked my Bumbler for which way to turn. Tut’s blip was close to the heart of Zoonau. Since every knot city had the same general plan, I knew Tut must be approaching the central square, where the most prominent feature would be a ziggurat: a huge terraced pyramid with gardens at various levels, plenty of open areas for performances, and at the top, a raised pulpit where prophets could shout sermons to the populace. I could picture Tut jogging along the ropeways, heading for the pulpit where he’d… where he’d…

I couldn’t guess what he’d do. And I couldn’t get there in time to stop him. He was almost at his goal, while I was still blocks away.

But even as that thought sparked through my brain, a mass of spores rose before me, pushing up from the ground like a pantomime demon making its entrance through a trapdoor. The spores arranged themselves into a shapeless blob twice my height; then suddenly, the blob smoothed out into…

…a perfect moss-replica of my most recent egg sculpture. A tall slim egg with a single barred window, the bars wrapped with holy guardian snakes. One of the snakes lifted its head and winked at me; then the front of the egg swung open like a door, inviting me to step inside.

What’s this? I mouthed. A carriage? Once again, no answer… but the Balrog’s intent was obvious. It wanted me to climb into one of my Gotama prisons. Once I stepped inside, the door would lock behind me. Then I’d presumably be transported to Tut, carried into the city center fast enough to participate in whatever happened next. The Balrog was giving me a chance to make a difference in Zoonau’s fate.

But I knew this was more than an offer of transit. I had to make a choice: I could join forces with the Balrog, volunteering to help in whatever the mossy alien was up to… or I could walk away and forever hold my peace.

My teachers at the Academy had warned about such situations — when a smarter-than-human alien asked you to buy in or opt out. There was only one reason you’d ever be given such a yes-or-no choice: because you risked getting killed if you did what the alien wanted.

Suppose the Balrog foresaw such a threat to me. Then the League of Peoples demanded I be offered the chance to say no. Otherwise — if the spores just grabbed me against my will — the Balrog would be guilty of dragging me into a lethal situation without option of escape. In other words, murder. The Balrog would catch trouble from the League unless I willingly stuck my head in the noose.

Which was where I was at that moment. If I stepped into that big mossy egg, I doubted I’d have another chance to back out. These things were almost always onetime offers. Like swallowing a porcupine — once you started, you had to keep going till you got it all down.

I hesitated. League law said the Balrog couldn’t lure me into certain death — there had to be a chance I’d survive. Maybe a good chance. But there was also a chance I’d die. Too bad the Balrog wasn’t obliged to explain what the percentages were.

Whatever the chances were, I knew what I was going to do — not what I had to do, but what I would do.

One step forward… and the Balrog closed around me.

I half expected to be teleported straight to some final destination. Navy records reported Kaisho Namida jumping instantaneously from star system to star system, sometimes hundreds of light-years in a single bound. But my mossy carriage simply lifted a centimeter off the pavement and accelerated at a couple of Gs, soon skimming along at a pace my Bumbler reported as a kilometer a minute.

This gave me time to take readings — in particular, to see where Zoonau’s inhabitants had gone. I switched to an IR scan… and gasped as I saw a blaze of heat sources at the city center. A huge mob of Cashlings had gathered there. Thousands. Tens of thousands. The whole population of Zoonau? A moment later, data analysis gave me a tally: 91,734 Cashling heat signatures… and two humans. Two humans? Tut and who else? The second human wasn’t me — I hadn’t reached the square yet, so I wasn’t included in the count. Could there have been another human in Zoonau when the Balrog attacked?

Plenty of humans visited Cashleen, but almost all stayed in the planet’s capital, thousands of kilometers away. The capital was home to our Technocracy embassy… and humans usually stuck close to the embassy. Whatever your purpose for coming to Cashleen, the embassy staff were far more likely to provide useful assistance than any Cashling you might find. So who would have reason for coming to a backwater like Zoonau?

I winced as an answer came to me: someone from the embassy staff.

Zoonau had been attacked two hours ago: plenty of time for somebody to fly in from the capital. No embassy personnel had been sent to Zoonau officially — the powers that be wanted Pistachio to handle everything — but I could easily imagine an ambitious vice consul buzzing off to Zoonau as soon as the news came in. He or she could have reached the city before our landing party, hoping to win a career boost by dealing with the Balrog single-handed. It was just the sort of grandstanding maneuver one expected from success-hungry bureaucrats… and just the sort of rashness that made Explorers grind their teeth.

Now I had to deal with a madman and an intrusive amateur.

I heard the people in the square before I saw them: thousands of gabbling voices, loud despite the muffling moss on every echoing surface. Then my transport egg rounded a corner, and the crowd was directly before me. No one had stayed down on street level; they were all packed onto the ziggurat, trampling flowers in the terrace gardens, clogging the open areas, milling on the stairs. I counted eight levels to the ziggurat, all of them spacious by normal standards… but with more than ninety thousand Cashlings crammed onto a single building, it looked like a dangerous squeeze.

Why had they come to this central area? Only one answer. The Balrog herded them here. It had used its spores to push or intimidate people through the streets until they reached the heart of the city.

The Balrog wanted an audience.

Once again, I tuned my Bumbler to Tut’s homing beacon. He was on the top level now, heading for the pulpit in the center. The Bumbler could reconstruct what was happening up there, as if looking through a telescope. Dozens of Cashlings fought for the pulpit, either because they had some inspired message to proclaim or because they just wanted to seize the highest spot on the pyramid — an "I’m the king of the castle" impulse. When Tut shoved his way through the crowd, several people tried to grab him, hold back the human in their midst… but a few blasts from Tut’s stun-pistol, and the opposition slumped to the roof tiles. The Cashlings edged back as Tut climbed to the pulpit’s perch.

Meanwhile, my Balrog-built egg had reached the ziggurat and started ascending the stairs. The egg didn’t fly, but surfed on a wave of spores that carried us smoothly upward. Cashlings ahead of us got brushed aside by a mossy wedge that preceded the egg, like the cowcatcher on an Old Earth locomotive. Anyone in our way was knocked left or right, their falls cushioned by beds of moss that sprang up to provide a safe landing. Other wads of moss performed crowd control — making sure no one accidentally got trampled.

Interesting. Navy files claimed the Balrog disliked contact with lesser beings… but the moss was taking a hands-on approach to keep the Cashlings safe.

Despite Balrog efforts to clear the way, our progress up the ziggurat was slow. Hundreds of people stood between us and the top. Many of them seemed eager to block us if they could, shouting curses and throwing themselves in our path. I don’t know what they hoped to accomplish; they were just so angry at the Balrog, they must have decided that if it wanted to take me upward, they wanted to get in the way. In other words, the Cashlings were acting out of sheer rebelliousness: the sort of rebelliousness that could turn to violence, especially if Tut did something inflammatory.

"People of Zoonau!" Tut’s voice boomed over the city. The pulpit obviously had a built-in sound system, and he’d patched his tightsuit radio into the feed. Giant hologram images materialized in the air, scores of them, all showing Tut’s golden face five stories tall. The pulpit had holo-projectors too.

"My name is Tut," he said with a cheerful metallic smile. "I’m from the Technocracy’s Outward Fleet — here to assess the situation and lend a hand." He paused, looked around. "Okay, here’s my assessment. You’re all really really pissed off. Right?"

A roar thundered from the crowd. The Balrog continued bearing me upward. Slowly. More people hurled themselves at our egg.

"You’re pissed off," Tut said, his words ringing through the streets, "because this big bully Balrog is pushing you around, and you feel like there’s nothing you can do. Am I right?"

The Cashlings roared again. I’d been hoping a lot of the crowd wouldn’t understand English. But almost everyone in the Cashling Reach learned our language, purely so they could amuse themselves with human movies, virtuals, and other forms of entertainment. Cashlings wouldn’t lift a finger to do productive work, but they’d spend long hours acquiring an alien tongue if that’s what it took to get the jokes in a mindless sitcom.

"I know what it’s like to feel helpless," Tut went on. "I’m an Explorer. I know what it’s like to get reamed by fat-ass aliens. But guess what: I also know how to take back control. I can tell you how to beat this damned Balrog. Do you want to hear the secret?"

The crowd screamed yes. My egg finally topped the steps, onto the flat uppermost level. Just a short distance now to the pulpit.

"Here’s what you do, Zoonau!" Tut shouted. He reached up to his chest and dug his thumbs under protective flaps on his suit’s yellow breastplate. Everyone watching mimicked his action… everyone except me. I was too busy thinking, Oh no. Oh no.

Suddenly Tut threw his arms and legs wide, like a giant human X. Every Cashling did the same. I didn’t. All I wanted to do was bury my face in my hands; but I held my head up, eyes open, to witness what happened next.

A tightsuit is usually an Explorer’s best friend. It provides you with air and protects you from lethal environments. Once in a while, though, your tightsuit becomes a liability: if there’s a life-threatening malfunction… if the suit’s weight means the difference between sinking or swimming… if something small and toothy has got inside the suit with you. Therefore, the Outward Fleet equips each tightsuit with an emergency evac system, for occasions when you have to get your gear off in a hurry. You activate the system by pressing hidden buttons on your breastplate — just as Tut had done. Then you spread your arms and legs wide — just like Tut — and you wait for a very short countdown.

Three… two… one…

Tut’s suit exploded from his body. Literally. Shaped demolition charges blew out the seams that held everything together. His helmet went straight up, disappearing from sight as it bulleted toward the dome overhead. Tut’s sleeves shot off his outspread arms like jet-propelled bananas; the same with his pant legs, which flew apart in pieces and slapped into the upturned faces of nearby Cashling spectators. The breastplate cannonballed into the pulpit in front of him, knocking the lectern stand off its supports and toppling it onto the crowd. The backplate rocketed out and away over the edge of the ziggurat, probably falling on some unsuspecting Cashling several levels below. Other bits and pieces hurtled in random directions, belt pouches, shoulder pads, hunks of the crotch… until Tut was standing there, stark naked and hologrammatically enlarged, in front of all of Zoonau.

Huh. He’d been telling the truth. The gold wasn’t just on his face.

My egg reached the pulpit (now just a bare platform) two seconds later. For a moment, nothing happened. Tut looked down at me, beaming a big bright smile. I stared back from my egglike prison, a Princess Gotama just before all hell breaks loose. The Balrog did nothing. The Cashlings did nothing. I thought about drawing my stun-pistol and shooting Tut before he caused further trouble… but that might send the crowd berserk.

Two heartbeats of silence.

Then the Balrog egg melted around me — all the spores slopping straight down. My helmet visor became flecked with red, and my suit felt heavy with dust. Most of the spores, however, just dropped to the roof tiles and pooled around my ankles. Several square meters of them. They glowed a soft red.

"Thanks, Mom," Tut murmured. "Knew I could count on you." Then he raised his voice and called to the Cashlings, "Here’s how to show the bastards you don’t care. Swan dive!" And he jumped from the pulpit, straight into the pile of spores that had just dripped off me. He was like a child leaping into a mound of autumn leaves. A moment later, Tut rolled happily naked on the red moss, laughing out loud and crooning, "Ooo, it’s fuzzy!"

A murmur went through the Cashlings. A sigh. A cheer. Then they were running, sprinting at astonishing long-legged speed toward the patches of spores dabbed around the ziggurat. On the lower levels, people raced down to the city streets, crowds of them hitting the pavement and throwing themselves onto the first clumps of moss they found. If the Balrog had dodged, the Cashlings might have broken their bones as they struck cement-hard chintah; but the spores stayed in place, and the people plopped down on mattresses of soft moss. In seconds, 91,734 Cashlings were flipping and flopping deliriously, tossing handfuls of spores into the air, smearing red fuzz over their bodies.

Down by my feet, Tut grinned. "See, Mom? Problem solved. No one will go homicidal today — they’re having too much fun."

He looked up at me with spores covering his face and body: even on the gold parts where you wouldn’t think moss could stick. I smiled back vaguely, but only from reflex; inside, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Why? Because I knew this was far from over. The Balrog wouldn’t have caused such a fuss, only to let the uproar be defused by a lunatic doing a fast striptease and rolling in the red. As far as I could see, the Balrog hadn’t accomplished anything yet. All this sound and fury had gone nowhere… which meant "Stage Two" of the plan was still waiting to unfold.

But I said nothing. The Balrog was famous for showmanship. It was the sort of monster that held off its attacks until someone said, "We’ll be safe now," or "I think it’s gone." Above all else, the Balrog loved dramatic timing.

"So," Tut said, "looks like we’ve got this bitch under control."

I had time to wince.

Zoonau erupted in geysers of red. Spores shot up from the ground. More gusted down off the dome. Trillions of red particles tore away from the buildings. A crimson dust storm battered my world, thudding against my helmet, buffeting my body hard enough to be felt despite the tightsuit’s protection. Radio static roared in my ears. The heads-up display in my visor went black. A wind ripped the Bumbler from my hands, and a moment later, I felt the little machine’s shoulder strap break. The Bumbler bounced away in the tempest, but I didn’t see or hear it go — the only noise was static, and the only sight an impenetrable onslaught of spores.

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.