Radiant

'Now, now,' Captain Cohen said.

'The point is,' I said, 'of all the races above us on the evolutionary ladder, Las Fuentes are the most recent to climb there. If you count 4000 B.C. as recent.'

'Actually,' Festina said, 'the most recent Fuentes ascension was two years ago. I was there.'

She’d spoken softly — a quiet statement that caught the rest of us off guard. I felt my automatic 'freeze reflex' kick in again… just for an instant, then it was gone. Li opened his mouth, then shut it. Ubatu’s mouth was open too; her hand came up to cover it.

'Admiral,' Cohen said, 'you’d better tell us about it.'

'I met some Fuentes,' Festina said. 'Possibly the only two left who hadn’t ascended.'

Li and Ubatu leaned forward eagerly, but Cohen and I eased back in our chairs as if we were about to hear bad news. I don’t know why the difference. Maybe because diplomats treat secrets like currency — the more they have, the more they can spend at opportune moments — but captains and Explorers treat secrets like bombs to be disarmed: nobody tells us classified information until it’s festered into a crisis we’re expected to fix.

'When the majority of Fuentes transformed themselves,' Festina said, 'a few couldn’t bring themselves to take the plunge. Too afraid of radical change. Personally, I don’t blame them. Who wouldn’t be horrified by the thought of becoming a mound of jelly? I’d consider it healthy to say, ‘Fuck that,’ and get on with your life.

'But those who refused to ascend,' she said, 'never forgot what they’d turned down. It must have preyed on their minds constantly; they just couldn’t get past it. I suppose they might have been lonely — missing the world and the people they’d known. Perhaps they also suffered from survivor guilt… or shame. Anyway, the holdouts never made anything of themselves; they just wandered the galaxy in the last Fuentes starship, no purpose but listless survival. The only work they could bring themselves to do was to sabotage up-and-coming races they thought might eventually become threats… but even for that, they couldn’t muster much energy. As if they’d died when the rest of their kind ascended.

'So one by one, the remaining Fuentes gave in. They still had the means to transform themselves; and each year, a few of the holdouts decided that risking change was better than centuries of going nowhere. By the time I found where they’d been hiding, there were only two left — two pathetic specimens. Physically, they were fine, even after six millennia. Las Fuentes must have had superb antiaging treatments. But mentally… what would you expect from creatures who’d lived a hundred lifetimes in fear of taking a leap of faith? I admire caution, but eventually one’s spirit shrivels. The last two Fuentes were the most soul-shriveled beings I’ve ever encountered.'

'But they eventually ascended?' Ubatu asked.

'Eventually.' Festina spoke the word as if there was a great deal more to the story but she preferred not to go into details.

'How?' Li asked. 'Did you see the process?'

Festina nodded. 'You probably know Las Fuentes left thousands of fountains behind. Those fountains produced a fluid called blood honey. Bathing in the fluid brought on the transformation.'

'They changed into purple jelly?'

'They changed into creatures who looked like jelly, given our limited vision.' Festina shrugged. 'I’ve met a number of elevated beings; none looked like much to human eyes. Does that mean ascended creatures aren’t impressive? Or could it be that Homo sapiens aren’t perceptive enough to see what’s really there?'

Li made his usual face of disgust. He clearly hated any suggestion that humans weren’t the crowning glory of the universe; but he was reluctant to contradict the celebrated Admiral Ramos. Instead, he changed the subject. 'So these fountains,' he said. 'They’re the key to the transformation. Have we studied them?'

Festina shook her head. 'They’ve been dry for thousands of years. Nothing left to study… except for the one used by the Fuentes I met.'

'And what about that fountain?'

'It’s no longer available.'

We waited for her to explain. She didn’t. In the silence, a thought struck me; I did a quick search on our files. 'There were no fountains on Muta,' I said. 'At least none found by the Unity.'

'Interesting,' Festina said. She sat back in her chair with a pensive look.

'These Fuentes,' Cohen said. 'We had a lot of their fountains on my home planet… but nothing else. Before they ascended, they cleaned up, right? Pulverized all traces of their civilization?'

Festina nodded.

'But Muta has ruins,' Cohen continued, 'as if the Fuentes didn’t have time to clean up. They just left things as is.'

'I see where you’re heading,' Ubatu said. 'We know there’s something dangerous on Muta — something that attacked the Greenstriders and the Unity. So maybe it attacked the Fuentes too. They might have started some settlements, built things up for a few years, then suddenly got taken by surprise.'

'Right,' Cohen said. 'And this happened before the Fuentes began their process of ascension — before they built the fountains, which is why there aren’t any fountains on Muta. Later, when the Fuentes were cleaning up in preparation for ascension, they couldn’t erase their abandoned colony on Muta because they were too afraid of whatever was on the planet.'

Ubatu nodded. 'That’s why there are Fuentes ruins on Muta, unlike everywhere else. They didn’t dare go back to clean up.'

'It’s possible,' Festina admitted. 'But if so, I’m more worried than ever. Sixty-five hundred years ago, Las Fuentes were much more advanced than we are. The few Fuentes artifacts that survive are technologically superior to anything we have now. If Las Fuentes had such high tech and were still scared of whatever’s on Muta, we’re really going to have our hands full.'

So what else is new? I thought.

We studied the files for several more hours but found no hints of what might lurk down on Muta. The Unity had been thorough in their investigations; they’d checked as many possibilities as time and personnel allowed, yet they’d turned up no unusual threats.

Of course, their knowledge had gaps. For one thing, the files contained almost nothing on activities in the past six months. That was how long it had been since the last luna-ship visited the planet and received downloads of survey team findings. It would have been nice to know what the teams were doing just before they went non-comm… but the Unity swore they didn’t have that information.

Perhaps, as Li suspected, the Unity was hiding something from us. Or perhaps we’d received everything the Unity had, and it just wasn’t as much as we hoped. A handful of survey teams can’t possibly learn all about a planet in just a few years. For example, the Unity knew almost nothing about Muta’s oceans: a serious problem, considering that three-quarters of the planet’s surface was covered with salt water. I couldn’t help remembering the Technocracy planet Triomphe, which once housed three hundred thousand human colonists… until an army of intelligent octopi had emerged from the deeps to exterminate every man, woman, and child.

On Muta, rampaging octopi wouldn’t be an immediate problem; the Unity had located their settlements well away from ocean shores until they could explore the marine world in depth. But the seas weren’t the only unexamined source of hazard. There were also vast numbers of unknown microbes living in the atmosphere, water, and soil. The teams had done their best with their limited time and resources — almost a third of the people on Muta were studying microscopic life-forms — but there was so much to learn, they could easily miss some microbial species that was lethal to human life.

On the other hand, microbial action was unlikely to silence everyone on every survey team simultaneously. The teams were spread all over the planet, in widely dissimilar ecosystems. Different microbes would be present in different proportions, growing at different speeds under different conditions in different individuals. How could natural germ activity strike down everyone in the same instant?

And if not natural germ activity, what about unnatural? Deliberate bioweapons. That was also possible. At the Academy, we studied a recent bioengineered plague on the planet Demoth. The plague organisms had been created by nanotech 'death factories' left over from a long-dead culture that had destroyed itself through germ warfare… and even though the aliens who made the factories had died millennia ago, the factories were still perfectly capable of analyzing Homo sapiens and producing a lethal disease precisely tailored to human metabolisms.

Thinking about that plague, I remembered something important about Demoth’s epidemic. The source of the disease had been discovered by a karmic avalanche named Festina Ramos.

I glanced at her grim face. Was she tortured by the possibility that history was repeating itself?

On Demoth, the plague had claimed sixty million lives.

A lot of death. A lot of death.

At six o’clock ship’s time, Captain Cohen was called away to talk with the Executive Officer — routine business about the next day’s arrival at Muta. Festina took the interruption as an excuse to adjourn our 'conference'… not that we’d been conferring much. We’d read the files in silence, Festina and I concentrating on planetological data while the others went through daily logs and personnel reports. Ubatu and Li got the occasional snicker from what the Unity chose to record ('Lieutenants Yardley and Juarez fined ten credits for disturbing the peace through contentious disputes on the taxonomy of slime molds'), but none of us found any glaring clues to Muta’s hidden danger.

In retrospect, we shouldn’t have expected obvious warning signs. Unity surveyors were smart and cautious. If they’d run into overt prospects of danger, they’d quickly evacuate their settlements. Even if they didn’t have a luna-ship waiting to take them away, each team had an emergency escape shuttle that could blast off from the surface and go into stable orbit until help arrived. According to the files we’d received, all those shuttles were still on the ground. The teams had been completely blindsided — they hadn’t seen what kind of trouble they were in, and, reading their records, neither could we.

So the meeting broke up. Li and Ubatu invited Festina to dinner in the VIP suite, but she said she wanted to inspect Pistachio’s landing equipment. When the diplomats had gone, however, she sat back down in her chair. 'Youn Suu?'

'Yes?'

'How do you feel now?'

'No different than usual,' I said. Which was true. Whatever the Balrog might be doing to me, I couldn’t sense the changes… any more than I could tell if my 'memories' of the aliens at the pagoda were real or artificially constructed.