Radiant (6 page)

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...