Radiant (34 page)

The Fuentes should have anticipated that... and in their elevated purple-jelly form, they should have taken steps to deal with the problem. If they now had godlike powers, why couldn't they just teleport inside any ship approaching the Muta system and telepathically explain why the planet was dangerous? Wasn't that basic courtesy? More important, wasn't that what the League of Peoples might demand? Surely the Fuentes were required to stop people dying from the effects of the Stage One microbes.

Unless...

"Ohpa," I said, "how long can people survive in Stage One? Do the clouds eventually dissipate?"

"No," the alien said. "They absorb energy from light and nutrients from the atmosphere. I don't know their maximum life span, but they can certainly remain alive for millions of years."

"Millions?"

"Till the sun begins to fail and renders this planet uninhabitable." Ohpa's mandibles bent in a way that might have been a smile. "In cloud form, my people are quite resilient. So are the others who've undergone Stage One. They may be insane, but they are definitely alive."

"Bloody hell," Festina murmured.

"Not bloody," Ohpa replied, "but most assuredly hell. Even with my meager awareness, I hear their screams of agony. To those with greater perception, the shrieks must be shrill indeed. But the enlightened beings of this galaxy must be inured to the sounds of suffering—they hear so much of it."

Ohpa's words left the rest of us silent... but the silence seemed to howl.

It was Tut who finally spoke. "Okay," he said to Ohpa, "how do we set things right?"

The Fuentes shrugged. The movement didn't suit his alien musculature, but his Balrog-inspired knowledge of human body language seemed to think it was necessary. "I don't know what you can do. I wasn't a scientist—merely a test subject. I have no idea how to reverse the effects of Stage One."

"We don't want to
reverse
Stage One," said Festina. "That might get us in trouble with the League of Peoples." She rolled her eyes. "I hate trying to guess how the League thinks... but if we take a bunch of smoke clouds with the potential for living millions of years, and we force them back into short-lived bodies, the League might consider that the moral equivalent of murder. Doesn't matter if the clouds are in never-ending torment; we can't cut their lives short without their prior approval. On the other hand"—she looked at Ohpa—"if we could stop Stage One before
we
get turned to smoke..."

Ohpa shook his head. "The Stage One microbes are autonomous. There's no switch to turn them off. In a way, the microbes form their own crude hive mind—not sentient or even very intelligent, but fully capable of carrying out their purpose without outside direction."

"Crap," Festina growled. "What kind of idiot builds an uncontrollable rip-you-to-shit system? Haven't they heard of fail-safes?"

"The project leaders feared someone might tamper with the process," Ohpa said. "They devoted much effort to making it unstoppable."

"And since you're only slightly wise, you didn't tell them they were imbeciles?"

"I told them not to mistake paranoia for prudence. But when you tell paranoids to be more prudent, they believe you are counseling them to be more paranoid."

"You didn't spell it out for them in words of one syllable? Make... a... way... to... shut... it... off."

Ohpa replied with something in a language I didn't recognize—presumably the Fuentes' ancient tongue. His intonation was the same as Festina's: short single syllables with brief spaces between. Then he switched back to English. "I told them exactly that. But they refused to listen. 'The fool knows not the wisdom he hears, as the spoon knows not the taste of the soup.' "

I glared at him. His words came from the
Dharmapada,
an important Buddhist scripture. Ohpa could only have learned that passage by plucking it from my brain... and it irritated me how easily my thoughts could be plundered. "So that's it?" I asked. "You've waited sixty-five hundred years to tell us there's nothing we can do?"

"Mom," Tut said, "there's
gotta
be something. We wouldn't have picked up your fuzzy red hitchhiker if our chances were nil. The Balrog must think there's some way we can shake up the status quo."

"We can change the status quo just by telling the outside world what's going on. We've got a working comm; we've got Ohpa's explanation. Maybe that's all the Balrog intended—we come and find out what's what. Now we tell
Pistachio,
and they pass word to the rest of the galaxy why Muta's so lethal."

"At which point," Festina said, "every treasure hunter in the universe rushes here to grab Fuentes tech. Then they
all
turn into pissed-off ghosts."

"What else can we do?" I asked.

"Simple," Festina answered. "Figure out a way to kick-start Stage Two."

Tut turned to Ohpa. "Is that possible?"

"I don't know," the alien replied. "I don't know why Stage Two failed." His mandibles worked briefly—maybe a mannerism to show he was thinking. "It might be something simple, like a burned-out fuse. Perhaps Stage Two is ready to go, and you just need to fix some tiny thing. But the malfunction could be more serious. Perhaps it can only be repaired by persons with special expertise. And that assumes it can be repaired at all. I've been in stasis a long, long time. By now, the Stage Two equipment may have degraded too much to salvage."

"Those are all possibilities," Festina admitted, "but unless someone has a better idea, I don't see we have much choice. We can't leave Muta by Sperm-tail for fear the EMP clouds will attack
Pistachio.
But if we activate Stage Two, the clouds will go transcendental, after which they'll likely leave us alone. Then we can go back to the ship and get decontaminated before we turn smoky." She looked at Tut and me. "Is that a plan?"

"I'm all for starting Stage Two," Tut said, "but why leave afterward? If Stage Two works, we can stay on Muta and turn into demigods, right?"

"Not quite," Festina told him. "If you stay on Muta, eventually you'll undergo a process created by alien scientists with a proven record of fuck-ups: a process that might work on Fuentes but was never intended for
Homo sapiens.
Sounds more like a recipe for disaster than a golden invitation to climb Mount Olympus."

"Auntie, you're such a spoilsport. Isn't becoming godlike worth a little risk?"

"I've met godlike beings. As far as I can tell, they do nothing with their lives... except occasionally manipulate mine."

"That doesn't mean
you'd
have to act that way. You could do good things for people who need it."

"I can do that now," Festina said. "Aren't I a fabulous hero of the Technocracy?"

"Seriously," Tut said. "Seriously, Auntie. What's wrong with being a god?"

"Seriously?" Festina sighed. "Deep in my bones, something cries out that gods are something you defy, not something you become. Humans should be standing on mountaintops, screaming challenges at the divine rather than coveting divinity ourselves. We should admire Prometheus, not Zeus... Job, not Jehovah. Becoming a god, or a godlike being, is selling out to the enemy. From the Greeks to the Norse to the Garden of Eden, gods are capricious assholes with impulse control problems. Joining their ranks would be a step down."

"Jeez, Auntie!" Tut made a disgusted sound, then turned to me. "What about you, Mom? You believe in gods and stuff. Wouldn't you like to be one?"

"I'm with Festina on this. Godhood is a phase of existence for those who aren't mature enough to be born human. Buddhists would never hurl defiance at the gods—that's just rude—but we don't envy the divine condition. The gods are stuck in celestial kindergarten: flashy powers, fancy toys, people prostrating themselves before your altar... it's just childish wish fulfillment. Hardly a situation that encourages enlightenment. If your karma condemns you to birth as a god, the best you can do is resist the urge to throw thunderbolts and hope that in the next life you'll get to be human."

"Oh come on!" He turned to Ohpa. "What about you? You're enlightened. Don't you want to be elevated beyond what you are now?"

Ohpa gave a small bow. "I yearn to be Tathagata... but will the process developed on this planet truly achieve that goal? My meager wisdom makes me mistrust easy solutions. Can genuine enlightenment be imposed by external forces? Can a normal being, full of conflicts and confusion, suddenly have every mental twist made straight? If so, is the resulting entity really the original person? Or is it some alien thing constructed from the original's raw components, like a worm fed on a corpse's flesh?"

Tut threw up his hands. "You're all hopeless! You've got a chance to go cosmic, but all you do is nitpick. Can't you think big?"

"Tut," I said, "suppose this process made you wise: honest-to-goodness wise. And suddenly, you weren't interested in shining your face, or wearing masks, or pulling down Captain Cohen's pants. All you wanted to do was help people transcend frivolous impulses, and recognize the emptiness of their fixations. Suppose that happened to you all at once, not gradually learning from experience, but flash, boom, like lightning. Doesn't that sound like brainwashing? Or even getting lobotomized? Not deliberately refining yourself step by step, but having a new personality ruthlessly imposed on you."

"I see what you're getting at, Mom... but suppose honest-to-goodness wisdom turns out to
be
shining your face, wearing masks, and pulling down Captain Cohen's pants. How do you know it isn't? Wisdom could be dancing and humping, not sitting in stodgy old lotus position."

Festina chuckled. "The Taoist rebuttal to Buddhism. But we don't have time for religious debate. We've got to start Stage Two." She turned to Ohpa. "Any ideas how we do that?"

Ohpa thought for a moment. "Stage Two involved a network of projection stations all around the planet—to bathe Stage One clouds with energy to complete the transformation. The closest such station is on this river, some distance downstream: a day's journey by foot, if your species' walking pace is close to ours. It's a large building beside a dam."

"A hydroelectric dam?" Festina asked. "I hope not. If the station depends on the dam for power, we're screwed. After sixty-five hundred years with no one looking after the place, the generators will be rusted solid and clogged with silt."

Ohpa gave his tail a noncommittal flick. "I don't know how the station obtains its power. I know almost nothing about it—as I said, the Stage Two workers kept aloof from those working on Stage One."

"Then come with us to the station. However little you know, it's more than we do."

Ohpa shook his head. "I've told you what I can; have faith it's what you need. If you yourselves don't lay my people's ghosts to rest, at least you'll pass on my words, and the news will spread. Eventually, someone will bring this to an end. But I won't live to see it—my part is over."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

He turned my way. His faceted eyes showed no emotion a human could recognize, yet I felt compassion flood from him—deep pity for my ignorance. "I told you, my body needs special food. I will die without it: very soon. I avoided putting myself into stasis as long as I could, in hopes that a landing party from my own people would find me. I only entered the stasis sphere when I was on the verge of collapse."

"We have rations," Festina said, reaching into her pocket. She pulled out a standard protein bar. "Maybe this can tide you over until..."

"No. My body needs more than nutrition; it needs stabilization."

Ohpa held out his hand. The tips of his claws were smoking. Evaporating, like dry ice steaming into the air. His hand didn't shake as the claws slowly vanished, and his fingers began to disintegrate.

"Stop," said Festina. "Don't you dare do this. There are still things we need to know."

"You've heard everything necessary," Ohpa told her. "And I couldn't stop this, even if I wished to. I stayed out of stasis as long as I could—until the time remaining to this body was just sufficient to do what was needed. To speak with you."

"You couldn't know that," Festina said. "You had no idea how much time you'd need. You didn't know who'd free you from stasis, you didn't know if you'd speak our language, you didn't know if we'd sit still and listen, you didn't know if we'd care what you had to say, you didn't even know if we'd be smart enough to follow your explanations. If we'd been a party of Cashlings, you'd have spent your last minutes listening to them complain how Muta had no good restaurants."

"But you aren't Cashlings, are you? You're members of the human Explorer Corps. With a mysterious knack for turning up where you're required." Ohpa's mandibles twitched. I could almost believe he was laughing at us. "Really, Admiral Ramos... I might not be Tathagata, but give me a little credit. My timing has been impecca—"

With a rush, the rest of his arm turned to smoke, followed an instant later by his entire body. The particles hung in the air a moment, still retaining the shape of what Ohpa had been; then the cloud dispersed, thinning out, spreading in all directions until there was nothing to see.

"Huh," Tut said. "He called you 'Admiral Ramos.' I wonder how he knew. None of us ever called you that."

Festina gestured irritably. "I've met enough higher beings to know their tricks. They're all incorrigible show-offs, they love getting a rise out of lesser mortals, and
they all know my goddamned name."
She sighed. "They're also fond of dramatic exits. Speaking of which, we should get going ourselves."

"Downstream to the Stage Two station?"

"Where else?" She muttered something about "jumping through goddamned hoops for alien puppet-masters," then headed out the door.

Maitri [Sanskrit]: Loving kindness for all living creatures.

Outside the building we stopped so Festina could speak with
Pistachio.
She summarized what we'd learned, then asked Captain Cohen to do some eye-in-the-sky scouting for us. He soon reported a Fuentes building beside a dam thirty kilometers to the south. The dam had become a waterfall—silt must have closed the sluices, leaving the river with nowhere to go but over the top. Years of rushing water had mildly eroded the dam's upper ramparts, but there'd been no major collapse; the dam still held back a reservoir of cold autumnal water. The accompanying building lay on the east bank of the reservoir... which told us which side of the Grindstone we should be on for the trek downstream.