Radiant

Festina and I said in unison, 'What?'

Tut laughed again. 'They can’t smell. Not a single one of them. Cut it right out of their genome.'

'You’re kidding,' I said.

'Nope. Back in the early days, they decided maybe they should heighten their sense of smell — augment it the way they augmented their muscles and brainpower. They should have known better. A lot of them live in these luna-ships, right? Millions of people packed together. The smell’s bad enough for normal senses, but augment everyone’s nosepower a few hundred times, and it made for disaster. Not to mention they got a side effect: everyone’s response to human pheromones shot sky-high. The anger pheromones, the sex pheromones…' Tut giggled. 'Must have been fun. Anyway, the bigwigs admitted they’d screwed up… so you know the Unity, they overreacted the other way. Genetically altered all future generations to remove the nerves for both the olfactory cells and the VMO.'

'Good thinking,' I said. 'That way when something catches fire, they can’t smell the smoke.'

'They have mechanical sensors for smoke,' Tut replied. 'Computerized sniffers, a thousand times more sensitive than normal noses. The Unity got good at artificial olfactory simulation.'

'How do you know all this?' Festina asked. 'I’ve never heard it before… and I thought I was well-informed on our ally races.'

'The Unity are close-mouthed about certain things,' Tut told her. 'Things you only find out if you live with them.'

'You lived with the Unity?'

He tapped his gold-plated face. 'How do you think I got this? The Technocracy doesn’t do face stuff, does it? Not for potential Explorers. If you got an Explorer face, no one in the Technocracy dares fix it.' Tut shrugged. 'So when I was sixteen, I ran off to the Unity. Got myself gilded, then spent three hundred and sixty-four days in a luna-ship before they kicked me out — some law against outsiders living with them a whole year. But I learned a lot of secrets. They confided in me. They liked me.'

Festina looked as if she doubted that last statement. I, however, believed it. The Unity’s overregimented goody-goodies might find Tut refreshing — like a court jester. He said things no one else would, but spontaneously, not just to be shocking. Tut was odd without being threatening. As a bonus, he was living proof of the Unity belief that Technocracy people were lunatics. I could see Unity folks being charmed by Tut the way rich urbanites might be charmed by country bumpkins. Sophisticates love artlessness.

'So what else do you know about the Unity?' I asked.

'Hard to make a list, Mom. But I’ll tell you the most important: they stopped being human centuries ago. Don’t even have the same number of chromosomes; they got twenty-four pairs now instead of our twenty-three. That extra chromosome contains a bunch of new features they wouldn’t talk about, not even to me.' He smiled a golden smile. 'But hey, I was sixteen, and so busy getting laid, I didn’t ask a lot of questions. They all wanted a night with me, Mom… partly because I was a different species, so no chance of them getting pregnant. And I was forbidden fruit, you know? Sex with me was exotic and perverse and-'

'We get the picture,' Festina interrupted.

'Bet you don’t. They’re all augmented, right? So both the men and the women-'

'We get the picture' Festina repeated… which was half a lie, because I didn’t get the picture at all. If we found any corpses at Camp Esteem, I intended to check their anatomies.

The camp lay before us as we topped the rise: huts lining the ridge, larger buildings a short distance beyond. 'Check the huts first,' Festina said. 'Look for bodies or signs of disturbance. We’ll be more thorough later, but right now we’re just checking for survivors.'

I headed for the closest hut, but Tut stayed where he was. 'Hey!' he yelled. 'Unity people! Anybody home?'

Festina turned to me. 'You know, shouting never crossed my mind.'

'Tut tends to be direct,' I told her. 'Also insane.'

'Well… making noise shouldn’t matter. That cloud thing already knows we’re here.'

I nodded, then called, 'Come on, Tut. Let’s check the huts.'

He hollered once more, 'Anybody hear me?' No response in the camp, except from a small brown lizard that scurried away from the noise. 'Okay, Mom,' Tut said, 'I’ll help look around. But it sure seems like nobody’s home.'

Tut was right: nobody was home. He took the four huts in the middle of the line, Festina took the four on the north, and I took the four to the south. We found no survivors, and no corpses either — just empty living quarters, with no indication of trouble.

Each hut had a bed, a closet, and a desk, plus a utility table whose contents varied by team member. One person’s table supported an electron microscope; another had a collection of soil samples; a third had a megarack of computer memory bubbles, while the last hut I looked in had dozens of small, mirrored stasis fields. (I cracked a sphere open. It held a partly dissected beetle.) The huts displayed military neatness, diminished only by a few last-moment touches of disarray from people hurrying to get to breakfast on time. A jacket tossed over the back of a chair. Wrinkles on the coverlet, where someone sat down after making the bed and didn’t straighten the sheets after standing up. An orange fern leaf on the floor — maybe blown in by the wind, maybe tracked in on somebody’s boot.

Apart from these lapses, the huts would easily pass the most stringent inspection. Clean, tidy, almost impersonal. On each desk sat a small holo globe showing a posed family scene — the number of parents varying from one to six, but the number of children always exactly the same: one son, one daughter, their ages two years apart — and every such globe was precisely the same size and placed in precisely the same position on the desk, as if the Unity had strict regulations for the proper display of one’s family unit. Maybe they did. The Unity reputedly liked to regiment people’s home lives as much as it regimented everything else.

But one area in each hut was not regulated: the mask shrine. The shrines hung on the wall immediately opposite the door, suspended at eye level beside the closet. Each shrine had a shelf, a backdrop, and a pedestal for the mask itself… but there the similarities ended. In the first hut I entered, the shelf, backdrop, and pedestal were all matte steel, and the mask a metallic thing of wire, gears, LEDs, and chrome; its eyeholes were covered with mirror glass, and its soul-gem, in the middle of the forehead, was a yellow industrial diamond. By contrast, the next hut’s shrine was constructed entirely of organic things — a mahogany shelf upholstered with bird feathers, a backdrop of growing vines, and a pedestal made of bone, all supporting a mask of deerhide with a pearl soul-gem above its eyes. Next door had an outer-space motif, with a photographic starscape as background and star-shaped sequins everywhere else. The soul-gem had the pockmarked look of a stony meteorite. In the final hut I entered, the entire shrine was shrouded in lush black velvet, but the mask itself was pure white silk. The gem was a black opal: black on white on black.

I wasn’t a stranger to extravagant shrines — every home on Anicca had at least one Buddha surrounded by small offerings and written vows to pursue enlightenment. But in the otherwise immaculate Camp Esteem huts, the mask shrines appeared too garish… as if the Unity members used the masks and the shrines as a way of venting all the emotion/anarchy/creative impulses they normally suppressed.

Of course, my reaction to the shrines was colored by what I knew. The straitlaced Unity, so restrained and socially delicate, had created a religion of total excess: primal, barbaric, orgiastic. Every night they donned masks… drugged or danced themselves into altered states of consciousness… then ended with ritual fights and copulation. If I’d been born in the Unity, I would have lost my virginity at my first sacred dance, around the age of twelve — but I would scarcely remember the experience or any other coupling thereafter, because all such sexual encounters took place in a trance-like delirium where normal mental processes were suppressed.

Copulation without conscience. Riot without responsibility. It was easy to see the attraction… and just like the Unity to cold-bloodedly design their religious practice as a psychological release valve rather than genuine spirituality.

Still… when I thought about the masks in the huts, I wondered what totem I might have chosen if I’d been a Unity child. What mask would I hide behind when I wanted to lose myself? Unbidden, a mental picture arose: a smooth woman’s face sculpted in copper-brown leather, but with the left cheek gashed open by a knife.

Trying to force the image from my mind, I hurried to join the others.

We went to the mess hall next. It was just as the probe had shown — abandoned partway through breakfast, food on the table undisturbed by insects. I hadn’t seen or heard any insects in the entire camp; the only living creature I’d spotted was that lizard who scuttled away when Tut yelled. I wondered if local fauna could have been 'eaten' by the EMP cloud… but that didn’t make sense. If nothing else, the cloud was mobile: it had, for example, enveloped us on the floodplain. But there’d been plenty of insects down on the flats. So even if the cloud was an insectivore, why would it devour all the bugs around camp but leave the floodplain swarms untouched?

Festina stuck her head out of the kitchen. 'I found the source of the probe’s IR reading. There’s a gas stove still burning. Anybody want scrambled eggs that have gone all black and crispy?'

Tut immediately said, 'I’ll try some.'

'Before you do,' I said (knowing the only way to keep Tut from consuming burned eggs was to distract him till they vanished from his mind), 'have you noticed there are no insects on the food? Don’t you find that odd?'

'Nah,' Tut said. 'The Unity are great at insect repellants. It’s one of the first things they do on a new planet — figure out what disgusts local insects, then gene- jiggle themselves to pump out the appropriate chemicals. Usually in their sweat. Remember, Mom, Unity folks have no sense of smell. They don’t care if they stink to high heaven. Makes for some pretty exotic reeks in Unity cities, let me tell you.'

Though I’d been breathing cookhouse air for at least a minute, I couldn’t help sniffing in search of 'exotic reeks.' It didn’t smell like much of anything — just a slight burned odor from the kitchen. The eggs had incinerated themselves more than thirty-six hours ago, so the worst of the char stench was gone. Tut also gave a sniff, then shrugged. 'Mutan insects don’t have Earthling noses. Maybe this place stinks of something we can’t smell.'

'Or maybe,' I said, 'the camp did stink while the Unity people were here — enough that insects cleared out and built their nests elsewhere. Now that Team Esteem is gone, the smell has faded too… but it’s only been a day and a half, so the insects haven’t found their way back yet.'

'Hmph.' That was Festina, returning from the kitchen. She went to the dining table and studied it. Tut and I did the same. Just like the recon photos — cutlery set down haphazardly, chairs pushed back… as if everybody had suddenly decided to rush outside and never returned.