Radiant (29 page)

My mental awareness penetrated a short distance into nearby buildings, but only showed mud-covered floors and water-damaged walls. No remains of furniture or other belongings. Floods had rotted or washed away the contents of all rooms at ground level, and my sixth sense didn't reach to higher floors.

So what had these places been? Homes? Stores? Amusement centers? How had the Fuentes lived? How had they filled their days? What did they consider important? Explorers seldom asked such questions—we were too busy assessing immediate threats to worry about more ephemeral concerns. We were scouts, not archeologists. But I found myself asking why the Fuentes had come here so long ago. Why journey tens or hundreds of light-years to a planet that would never feel like home? Why build a city in the middle of nowhere, not even close to other cities on the same planet? What would you do in such a place?

Aloud I said, "Do you think they were running from something?"

"What do you mean?" Festina asked.

"The Fuentes who lived here. Do you think they were running away? Maybe they followed an unorthodox religion, so they came to avoid persecution."

"It's possible," Festina said. "Why do you ask?"

"Because the cities are so far apart. Only two on this entire continent... and just four more Fuentes cities on the rest of the planet. Why space things out so much? Because the people wanted to avoid each other? Didn't want to be 'contaminated' by outsiders' beliefs?"

"Maybe they needed a lot of land," Festina suggested. "Maybe each family belonged to a separate clan, and they divided all of Muta between the clans. The Fuentes might have had the same sort of territorial instincts as Greenstriders."

"Or maybe," Tut said, "each city was doing dangerous shit, and they didn't want to blow each other up."

Festina and I looked at him. He shrugged. "You two come from civilized worlds. Farms, parks, gardens, all homey and domestic. Me, I was born on an ice moon where we kept blobs of liquid helium as pets. So why did my family live in a shithole whose temperature was damned near absolute zero? Because my old man was a nanotech guy, developing stuff so potentially lethal, one slipup could wipe out everything in sight. Gray goo meltdown. The only place he was allowed to work was that godforsaken moon, far from anything else."

I considered that a moment. "You think the Fuentes might have used Muta for risky research? And the cities were spaced far apart for safety?"

"We all have our own colored lenses, Mom. You see a city in the middle of nowhere, and you think it's because of religion. Auntie says maybe they were trying to grab the most land possible. I see the same setup and wonder if they were doing something so damned dangerous, they were sent to an isolated site on an isolated world to reduce casualties if someone dropped a test tube." He smiled a broad golden smile. "All a matter of perspective, isn't it?"

"True," Festina said. She looked around. "One more lethal possibility to worry about. Just bloody wonderful." She took a few steps, then turned back to Tut. "I understand now why you ran away from home as a teenager. Even the Unity must have looked better than an ice moon."

"Nah," he said. "I left home cuz my helium pets evaporated." He started up the street... which is when I yelled, "Look out!" and grabbed for the pistol on Festina's belt.

My sixth sense had limited range: about ten meters. That's why I hadn't sensed Li and Ubatu stowed away in the shuttle, and why I didn't sense the ambush till almost too late. Fortunately, our attacker's life force was strong—a blazing ball of hatred that burned so fiercely, I knew it was trouble the instant it registered on my inner eye. Even so, I barely had time to shout my warning before Tut was under assault.

In loose zoological terms, the creature was a pouncer—a predator who lies in wait till prey walks by, then leaps from concealment and makes a fast kill. In comparative evolution terms, the beast was Muta's version of a pseudosuchian—a bipedal reptilelike land animal whose descendants would evolve into dinosaurs. In immediate life-or-death terms, what we saw was a mass of teeth and claws hurtling from a gap between buildings—the same height as Tut, but built along the lines of a slender
T. rex.
Big legs, small arms, strong tail, huge head, the whole of its body fast and light but as powerful as a striking hawk. Its scaly skin was leopard yellow with spots of red and brown: excellent camouflage for hiding in Muta's foliage, but also good when standing in shadows against a motley mosaic wall. Normal vision could easily miss it... until the moment it made its attack, hurtling toward Tut with its fangs poised for action.

At the last moment, it screamed—like an eagle's piercing cry, but as loud as a lion. No doubt the scream was intended to freeze the prey in terror; but Tut had started moving the instant I shouted my warning, and he didn't let the monster's caterwaul slow him down. Tut pivoted fast as soon as I yelled, looking for the source of danger. He spotted the attacking animal a split second after it started its charge... and instead of trying to dodge or escape, he ran toward the beast on a collision course. Just before impact, Tut angled off and threw out his arm in a classic "clothesline" maneuver. The animal (so primitive its species would need twenty million years just to become as smart as a
dinosaur)
didn't have the intelligence or reflexes to deal with a surprise tactic. The big reptile just continued its forward charge as Tut's arm caught it cleanly across the throat.

If Tut had hit
me
that way, I would have slammed to the ground hard on my back. Our pseudosuchian attacker was jerked off its feet and knocked backward, but was too lightweight to hit the street with much impact—the animal had more in common with birds than with massive reptiles like alligators. Furthermore, the beast's strong tail struck the street before its body, taking the brunt of the fall. Half a second later, uninjured by its plunge to the pavement, the creature whipped its tail furiously and used the momentum to spin to its feet. It screeched once more in rage, kicking up dust as it wheeled for another run at Tut. The screech died in the beast's throat as I fired the stun-pistol three times, as fast as I could pull the trigger. I would have kept shooting from sheer adrenaline... but the animal went limp with an annoyed-sounding gurgle, and Festina plucked the gun from my hand.

"You got it," she said quietly. Then her head snapped around as Tut stepped toward the beast. He reached out his bare foot to nudge the fallen animal and see if it was really unconscious. "Don't!" Festina cried. My mouth was open to yell the same thing, because everyone knows the monster always attacks one last time when you think it's down for good.

But Tut never had the sense to leave well enough alone. Despite Festina's warning, he prodded the predator lightly in its ribs. The animal's mouth yawned open... but instead of biting off Tut's foot, it gave a soft sigh. Steamlike vapors hissed from the beast's maw—a cloud whose life force roiled with fury. It wreathed once around Tut's body, possibly looking for something to EMP. I thought it would come for Festina and me next, shorting out another Bumbler, comm unit, and stun-pistol; but the cloud lingered with Tut, brushing (almost caressing) the masks he carried. I sensed the cloud's emotions shifting from hostility to unbearable sorrow. Then the cloud shot away, rocketing down the street faster than any pseudosuchian could run. In a moment, it had disappeared into the depths of the city.

The three of us watched it vanish. Then Tut said, "Umm... did we just find out the EMP clouds can possess Muta's minidinosaurs? Like, the clouds can make dinosaurs attack us?"

Festina and I nodded.

Tut beamed. "Cool!"

Using the Bumbler, I scanned for more predators. Nothing showed up on the readouts, but that didn't mean much. The nearby buildings blocked X-rays, microwaves, terahertz radiation, and even radio—all the EM frequencies we used when looking for trouble. Fuentes construction materials seemed purposely designed to prevent the type of spying we wanted to do. It made sense that high-tech people would want their buildings opaque to prying eyes, but it put us at a disadvantage: more cloud-possessed carnivores might lurk down any side street, and the Bumbler wouldn't know till we were within ambush range.

When I reported this to Festina, she just shrugged. "I've been checking the dirt on the street," she said. "No tracks of big nasties except the one that just attacked. Large predators don't often come into this city."

"That makes sense," I replied. "Predators go where there's prey. Prey usually means herbivores, and Drill-Press has nothing to attract plant-eaters." I gestured toward the bare, weedless streets. "No vegetation anywhere."

"You think the baby
T. rex
wandered here by accident?" Tut asked. "Or did the cloud possess Rexy out in the countryside, then force him to come to the city?"

"Good question," Festina said. "I wish I knew the answer. It'd be nice to know if the cloud could really seize animal minds and compel them to do things against their instincts... or if the cloud only nudged a predator who was already close by."

"Either way," Tut said, "it's odd the cloud would be hostile... I mean, if it really is Var-Lann or one of the other Unity folks. Why would it make a Rexy attack us? Isn't it obvious we're here to help?"

"Who knows what's obvious to a cloud?" Festina asked. "The Unity and Technocracy have never been friends. Maybe Team Esteem thinks we're invading opportunists: trying to claim Muta now that it's unoccupied."

I shook my head—remembering how Var-Lann's life force had changed after he'd disintegrated. The man had showed no ill will toward us while he'd been alive. Once he became a cloud, however, his emotions changed as he grew frustrated at not being able to... to do something, I couldn't tell what. Frustration had turned to outrage, outrage to fury, and fury to a berserk need to lash out at anyone who wasn't suffering the same torment.

According to Aniccan lore, that sequence of emotions was the classic pattern for
pretas.
Ghosts might feel joy at the moment of death, either because they were released from the agony of dying or because they thought the afterlife would be some grand heaven that erased the discontent of living. Then they'd realize death
wasn't
an escape from their pasts—that the seeds of karma continued to grow, that one didn't achieve wisdom and tranquillity just because one stopped breathing. There's no free ride, not even in the afterlife. So the exhilaration of supposed freedom would turn to rage at continuing slavery... the ghosts' knowledge that they were still fettered by the decisions they'd made and the people they'd become as a consequence.

It took time for that rage to abate—time spent wandering through other realms of existence until the ghosts could stomach the notion of being reborn: until their anger burned out and they found themselves ready to take another try at life. That was the path the unenlightened dead always walked. So I wouldn't have been surprised if the ghosts of Team Esteem felt such an overpowering resentment, they'd want to make trouble for any living person who came within reach. However, I wasn't naive. Normal ghosts couldn't touch our physical realm; they didn't look like smoke, nor did they use dinosaurs to attack those whose hearts were still beating.

It was almost as if Var-Lann's hypothesized bacterial defense system killed people and turned them into ghosts, but left them trapped in this realm of existence. Even if they wanted to move on, they couldn't. They drifted as clouds of dissociated cells—cells with shadows in their chromosomes and murder in their hearts. The clouds carried enough electrical energy to short out machine circuits, and perhaps to goad primitive wildlife into fury; but they didn't have enough energy to... they didn't have the
power
to...

No. I still couldn't figure out what was happening. But I thought I was on the right track, if I could just fill in some blanks. Perhaps Festina was thinking along the same lines. As I came to an impasse in my own thoughts, Festina sighed, and said, "No sense brooding. Let's follow Team Esteem's tracks and see what they were working on. Maybe that will give some answers."

The path worn by Team Esteem led to the center of town. It wasn't a straight-line route—the streets never let you go farther than a block or two without running into a public square built around a statue or fountain or amphitheater, or maybe just a flat paved area closed in with ornate metalwork fencing—but the Unity team's tracks circled these obstacles and continued forward till they reached the city's core.

There, two bridges spanned the Grindstone a hundred meters apart... and built between the bridges, entirely above the water, was a graceful building radically different from the rest of the city's architecture. There were no brash mosaics on this building's walls, just an unadorned white surface that looked like polished alabaster but wasn't: any natural stone exposed to the weather for sixty-five centuries couldn't possibly retain such a mirror-smooth finish. The building was as glossy as a polished pearl. Unlike the squared-off high-rises elsewhere in the city, the river building's exterior had no sharp edges—just flowing curves that arced from one bridge to the other, like a third elegant bridge constructed between two less eyecatching cousins. If laid out flat on the ground, the building would only be a single story tall. As it was, however, its rainbowlike arch lifted much higher over the river... maybe a full six stories above the water at the center of its span.

"Pretty," said Festina, "but impractical. What are the floors like inside? Are they bowed like the building itself? You'd have to bolt down the furniture to keep it from sliding downhill."

"Forget the drawbacks, Auntie," Tut said. "Think about the possibilities. Get a chair on wheels, take it to the middle of the arch, then ride it down the central hallway as fast as you can go. Bet you'd get awesome speed by the time you hit the bottom."

"What if there is no central hallway?" I asked. "Maybe the architecture is designed to prevent people go-carting on office chairs."