Radiant (28 page)

Unless I did something.

"Tut," I said in a quiet but firm voice. "It's broad daylight; the masks shouldn't be out. You know that. The masks might want to dance, but the sun hurts their eyes. Isn't that right? Isn't there a rule that says masks are only for after dark?"

I hoped I was right. One shouldn't trust Technocracy rumors about Unity beliefs... but in this case, I thought the rumors might be true. Mask dances were strictly regulated, like everything else in the Unity—Unity leaders didn't want people frolicking and fornicating when they should be doing productive work. I expected restrictions would have been built into the mask religion's dogma: dances could only take place at night, after a full day of contributing to the common good.

Besides, I thought, the masks would look more powerful after dark. In the bright afternoon light, they just looked shabby—the bear, for example, had a slightly asymmetric snout, possibly from getting banged around in wild dances and wilder couplings. Such small imperfections wouldn't be noticeable after dark, when the only light came from a bonfire... but now, under the glaring sun, the bear appeared soulless and silly. The masks on Tut's belt and bandoleer displayed similar weakness: bouncing haphazardly as he jumped around, flimsy constructions of glitter and plastic and feathers. Come sundown, they might become terrifying; for now, the only terror was Tut's losing what was left of his mind.

I wondered why we'd come to this planet in the company of a madman.

"Tut," I said. "The masks aren't supposed to come out in the sun—"

"I know!" he snapped. With an angry motion, he pulled the bear mask off his head. "You can be a real party pooper, Mom. Always so goody-goody. It's irritating."

"Sorry."

"Don't say you're sorry if you don't intend to change." Sulkily, he hooked the bear mask to his belt, where it hung like some flea-bitten hunting trophy. "We might turn to smoke any second. Isn't that enough to make you loosen up?"

I wondered what he meant by loosening up. Was this about sex? Or was it just that I disapproved of his fun, the dancing, the nudity, the pilfering of Team Esteem's sacred objects?

Looking at his life force, I couldn't tell. Tut's aura had returned to its usual jumbled confusion; the colors had faded, damped to a more manageable intensity. Emotions were swirling at random now—just bumping haphazardly against each other, not actively at war. Yet there was still a sort of after-haze of what I'd seen before: flashes of raw emotion, as pure and demanding as the overwhelming hunger of the
pretas.

What was I seeing? Tut himself, or Tut infested with microbes that would soon make him into a frustrated ghost?

At that moment, Festina came out of the hut in her new Unity clothes. She looked good. I didn't know whether or not she'd been bioengineered, but few natural humans could meet the aesthetic demands of nanomesh: few natural bodies betrayed no sagging or folding under the spray-on-thin layer of nanites. And the black color suited her perfectly—much better than admiral's gray. Her life force showed that she knew it; she seemed more vibrant, confident, and determined. When she saw Tut decked out with the masks, it didn't faze her. She just said, "You'll need more clothing. It'll get cold after dark."

"I picked up a uniform too. It's in my pack." Tut turned to show he wore a Unity backpack—just a small one, only reaching halfway down his spine, but with plenty of room for a change of clothes. I knew Tut might be lying, and the backpack contained something other than a Unity uniform... for example, the drugs Team Esteem would have kept on hand to help with their orgies. But Festina chose to believe Tut was telling the truth.

"All right," she said. "We're ready to go. Let's head south."

It should have been a pleasant walk. Bright afternoon. Riots of rainbow foliage. Protolizards sunning themselves on every rock. Our noses soon got used to the omnipresent odor of mustard, and we didn't have much gear to carry: Festina and I both lugged a single stasis-field container, but we'd left the rest at Camp Esteem. Besides the mirror-sphere, I'd filled a small Unity backpack with a water canteen, first-aid kit, and food rations; Festina had done the same. The supplies would let us last a few days in Drill-Press. If we needed more, we could always return to the Unity camp—assuming we hadn't turned to smoke in the meantime.

So a short, easy walk on a sunny fall day: it should have been pleasant. But my sixth sense wouldn't let me ignore the complications simmering around me. Tut and his chaotic life force... Festina and her avalanche karma... the insects who occasionally died under my feet... the gnawing sense of
pretas
never far away, ready to pounce if we tried to escape by Sperm-tail.

To distract myself, I took Bumbler readings of everything around me. We walked through a mass of invisible germs: Var-Lann's bugs, built to tear people apart. And they weren't just on the outside—when I turned the Bumbler on Festina, I could see the germs in her lungs, her stomach, her digestive tract, her bloodstream. Tut was the same... utterly infested. For a while, I avoided scanning myself because I didn't want to know the truth; but avoidance was unskillful behavior. At last I forced myself to use the Bumbler on my own body...

...and discovered I wasn't infected. Clean as autoclaved glass.

Yes, I inhaled Var-Lann's microbes with every breath. Yes, they congregated on my skin and were attempting to crawl in through my ears, the edges of my eye sockets, every possible orifice. But the moment they got inside—whether it was my bronchial tubes, my gut, or elsewhere—the germs were annihilated by tiny red spores.

I belonged to the Balrog. The moss wouldn't share me with interlopers.

The notion almost made me laugh: that I'd be saved from Muta's lethal defense system by the Balrog's prior claim. A slave protected by her master's possessiveness.

Dour thoughts made the walk hard to bear. Physically, however, it was no great effort. Team Esteem had made the trip hundreds of times, clearing a trail we had no trouble following. The route passed through varied stands of foliage: chest-high purple ferns... then knee-high rubbery red ferns... then yellow-orange giant ferns rising as tall as trees... yielding at last to
real
trees:
Capsicillium croceum,
the Fuentes' trademark groves.

This late in the growing season, the trees held none of their distinctive "minichili" fruit. The ground, however, was littered with fallen chilis: all of them bright yellow, the size of my little finger, and covered with crawling insects. Only one species of insect was actually eating the fruit—a bug like a small black ant, which by some fluke of evolution had found itself able to digest the minichili's alien sugars and proteins. The rest of the insects present were eating the little black ants, or eating the insects who ate the ants. Why didn't the ants run away? Likely because Muta's indigenous flora hadn't yet learned to produce fruit of their own. Minichilis were the only true fruit on the planet: a nutritional bonanza the ants just couldn't resist. Besides, there were so many ants chowing down on the fruit, the predators would never get them all. Plenty of well-fed ants would survive to breed... and next year the process would repeat itself.

The comforting cycle of life.

Above us, the
Capsicillium croceum
leaves were thick and green, even this close to winter. They wouldn't fall off till first frost... at which point they'd drop overnight, entire trees denuded. Until then, however, the dense foliage over our heads was enough to block our view of the city, right up to the moment when we emerged from the woods.

Suddenly, skyscrapers soared above us.

On aerial photos, the towers had seemed bland—we'd seen nothing but flat roofs with rectangular cross sections. From the ground, however, the blandness disappeared: each building was profusely decorated with mosaic tiles, some large, some small, some glossy, some matte, some forming abstract geometric designs, some coming together in pictures fifty stories tall.

For a moment we stood unmoving, enrapt by the giant pictures. Many showed furry bipeds, brown or black, with rabbitlike haunches and long tails that ended in a sharp-edged scoop like a garden spade. The creatures' heads were insectlike, with bulging faceted eyes and strong-looking mandibles: one mandible attachment on each side of the mouth, plus one on the top and one on the bottom, forming a diamond arrangement.

I wondered what the mandibles were for. Holding food? But the creatures had perfectly good arms—slightly shorter than human arms, but ending in well-proportioned hands with three fingers and an opposable thumb. You don't need mandibles when you have hands... unless the mandibles were for social display. Or for cracking some special kind of food. Or they played a role in mating, communication, perception, hunting, or some other aspect of life I couldn't imagine. Evolution doesn't create body parts for any particular purpose; the body parts always come first. If the parts prove useful to the creature that has them, both the parts and the creature survive. These creatures must have made the most of what they had, because they were probably the ones who'd built this city.

"Are those Fuentes?" I asked Festina.

She nodded. "Furry bad-tempered beetles. They may look ridiculous, but don't underestimate them—they're damned dangerous in a fight. Strong arms, stronger kicks, wicked bites from those mandibles, and they can swing their tails like maces. Not to mention they're immune to stun-pistols.."

"I thought there were no Fuentes left," Tut said.

"I thought the same till I met two. They told me they were the last, but I prefer to reserve judgment."

"So there might be fur beetles somewhere in Drill-Press?" Tut lifted the bear mask hanging on his belt. "I could put this on so they'd see me as a friend. You know... furry."

"No!" I told him. Sharply.

Festina looked at me with a raised eyebrow. Tut just let go of the mask. "Jeez, Mom, ease up, okay?"

"This is as eased as I get," I told him. "We're walking into a city of ghosts."

"You believe in ghosts?" Festina asked.

"Yes. Don't you?"

"No. But I'll give you this much," she said. "In a universe full of weird-shit aliens, there's always something to fill ghosts' ecological niche. Scary things that jump out and go 'Boo!' I can't tell you how often..." Her voice trailed off, apparently lost in memories of the past. After a moment, Festina said, "I take it back. There
are
ghosts. Problem is, we don't recognize them as such till we're in over our heads."

Without another word, she started into the city.

The streets were covered with silt, laid down whenever the river overflowed. When the Fuentes were here, they would have prevented such flooding by adjusting dams—the Unity files had noted a series of dams and sluices, starting hundreds of kilometers upstream and extending all the way to the sea. Once the Fuentes had gone, however, the system broke down; no one had lowered or raised the dams in millennia, so they'd become useless concrete waterfalls. The river had returned to its age-old pattern of rise and fall, occasionally swelling high enough to soak the city's feet.

At the moment, the water was low, and the dirt on the streets was dry. No plants grew in that soil; either the silt was too shallow to support plant roots, or the lack of vegetation had a more sinister cause. Some alien civilizations impregnated their paving materials with herbicides—a toxic way to prevent grass and weeds from sprouting. If the Fuentes had used the same trick six thousand years ago, the streets might still contain enough chemicals to discourage local plant life.

I didn't use the Bumbler to see if that was true. When you're walking on poison, sometimes you just don't want to know.

There's something eerie about uninhabited cities. Walking in the unnatural quiet. Drill-Press wasn't absolutely silent—insects buzzed, a soft breeze was blowing, and the river provided a constant babble—but without the noise of people or machines, the city seemed as hushed as a sickroom.

A thousand looming mosaics of furry beetles didn't help. Alien giants looked down on us, holding unknown objects (tools? toys? symbols of office?) or working at unknown tasks. I wondered if the pictures might be advertisements for consumer products or tributes to illustrious citizens. No way to tell. Each picture was probably rich with iconography... perhaps a particular position of the mandibles indicated a saint, or a gesture of the tail a sex-star... but that was a study for archeologists, if any ever visited this planet. Certainly, Team Esteem hadn't spent much time thinking about the pictures. In all the reports I'd read, the mosaics weren't even mentioned.

Then again, the reports said little about
anything
in the city. Team Esteem had been dropped on Muta by the last luna-ship to visit the system. Since then, whatever the team had learned was stored in computers at their camp—useless EMP'd computers, whose data had never been downloaded back to the Unity homeworld. Someday someone might manage to recover the data and read the surveyors' findings; but from our point of view, the only records Team Esteem had left were scuff marks in the soil.

Those scuff marks showed where the team usually went when they visited Drill-Press. Without a word of discussion, we followed the path most traveled. The Unity people had spent months searching this city for points of interest; gradually, however, they'd settled on a single trail to a single destination.

It would be useful to know what that destination was.

We walked down the street, our eyes and ears open. Tall buildings rose around us: nothing less than twenty stories. Obviously, the Fuentes hadn't believed in single-family dwellings, or little shops with a homey feel. They'd had plenty of room to expand the city—there'd been no other settlement within a thousand kilometers, and no geographical barriers to prevent them from spreading out as far as they liked. But the Fuentes had kept their city tightly compact. Either they preferred to squeeze together (some species instinctively liked to live in one another's laps) or they stuck to a crowded lifestyle established on planets where space was more limited.