Radiant

CHAPTER 11

Niroda [Pali]: Cure; cessation of an illness. The Buddha’s third truth is that suffering ceases when you let go of your fixations.

I don’t think I passed out. If I did, it was only for a moment.

And I didn’t fall down. Festina and Tut caught me, holding me upright till the pain subsided and let self-control reassert itself over sheer animal anguish. The pain didn’t go away, but the shock did. In a few seconds, I could think again.

I said, 'Ow.'

'Yeah,' Festina said, 'I bet that sums it up.'

'That was supreme, Mom!' Tut said. 'You told me you were bioengineered, but I never guessed how much.'

'Neither did I.'

Despite my foot’s agony, the Balrog’s sixth sense hadn’t deserted me. It calmly reported thirty-seven full or partial fractures in the bones of my right foot and lower leg. It also disclosed a flurry of alien activity: Balrog spores at work on the injuries. For a moment, I hoped they’d repair all the cracked and shattered bones… but no. The Balrog was no magic spirit who’d graciously make my injuries vanish. The Balrog didn’t give miracles for free; it always exacted a price.

So the bones remained broken, but spores took their place, cramming themselves together so tightly they assumed a solidity almost as strong as my original skeletal structure. Other spores sealed off the lacerated blood vessels sliced open by sharp bone fragments, while still more spores assembled themselves as surrogate tendons, ligaments, and cartilage. The result would be sturdy enough to walk on. It would not, however, be sturdy enough to kick through another door. Moss packed tightly is still just moss.

I thought of Kaisho Namida, her entire lower body turned to spores. Mentally, I asked the Balrog, Did you eat her the same way? Did she trade herself for favors bit by bit? Did she accumulate injuries, accidentally or on purpose, and little by little she made deals to have you replace her original tissues?

No answer, of course. Nothing but raging pain. The Balrog had supplanted my bones and stopped my bleeding, but it hadn’t quieted the neurons that shrieked in outrage at so much physical trauma. Oh for Buddha’s sake, I thought in exasperation, just eat the nerves and get it over with.

The pain stopped immediately. That’s what happens when a bunch of neurons get devoured and replaced by spores.

Oddly enough, my sixth sense said the foot still looked normal… at least outwardly. The skin hadn’t been broken. The displacement of the underlying bones had somehow been concealed — probably by spores eating away any outjuts and fragments that would have spoiled the foot’s external appearance. All signs of damage had been forcibly eradicated.

But the foot was no longer mine. It had become alien territory.

'I’m all right,' I lied as I pushed myself away from Tut and Festina. I took an experimental step. There was no muscle feeling in my foot, but my extended mental awareness let me compensate. I wasn’t receiving the usual body-position information along my foot’s neural pathways, but my sixth sense provided a different sort of kinesthetic feedback that made up for the loss. When I set my foot on the ground, I didn’t feel the foot touch down, I simply knew it.

That sounds as if I were experiencing things secondhand — watching my foot like a stranger’s. Not so. I experienced the movement more directly: no longer distanced by my limited nervous system or the simplification of sensation and the lag time needed for neural impulses to spark up my leg to my brain. Now I perceived my foot without any neural mediation… as if I’d previously been living my life at some remove, but finally I was fully present in one part of my body.

Pity the foot wasn’t part of my body anymore. This new mystic sense of immediacy, comprehending my foot as it really was rather than what my fallible neurons said secondhand… wasn’t that just another Balrog deception? A trick to make me think I’d gained when I’d actually been diminished?

My foot was now alien tissue. It would never be me again. And for what? So I could kick in a door?

'There’d better be something damned interesting in there,' I muttered. Walking on my nonfoot, I went inside.

At first glance, the storage building looked like any other: lots of small boxes on shelves, a few larger crates on the floor, and stasis-field mirror-spheres all over the place. Some of the spheres were as small as my fist, while others were big enough to come up to my chin as they sat on the ground. My sixth sense couldn’t penetrate the spheres — their interiors were separate little universes, removed mathematically if not physically from our own — but I assumed they held food, pharmaceuticals, batteries, and all the other perishables Camp Esteem might need.

Bad assumption.

Festina crouched near one of the biggest spheres and pointed to marks on the ground. The floor itself was gray concrete; the marks were flakes of white, turning brown around the edges. They looked like bits of dry leaves strewed across the cement. 'You’ve got the Bumbler,' Festina said to me. 'What’s this?'

I glanced at the analyzer’s readout. Did a double take and checked again. Turned a few dials, then swallowed. 'It’s human skin,' I said. 'Sort of.'

'What do you mean, sort of?'

'The cells have twenty-four chromosome pairs rather than twenty-three.'

'So the skin came from a Unity member rather than plain old Homo sapiens.'

'Also,' I said, 'the chromosome pairs aren’t pairs. One chromosome in each pair is human. The other isn’t.'

'You mean the other chromosomes contain alien DNA?' Tut looked over my shoulder at the readouts. He was, after all, a microbi specialist… but I doubted even he could make sense of the Bumbler’s finding.

'The other chromosomes aren’t alien DNA,' I told Festina. 'They aren’t even ordinary matter. It’s like each human chromosome has acquired a shadow. The shadow has the same shape, size, and mass as the real chromosome, but it’s something the Bumbler can’t register. Like there’s a normal chromosome, then beside it, there’s a chromosome-shaped hole in reality.'

Festina gave me a pained look. 'A hole in reality? Bollocks. Couldn’t it just be dark matter? Last I heard there were sixteen known dark particles and at least that many dark energy quanta.'

'Why would human skin cells contain dark matter? And how could dark matter be assembled the way I’m seeing? I’ve never heard anyone suggest you could make dark molecules. Especially not complex biological modules like DNA. These are chromosomes, Festina. Chromosomes made of dark matter? How is that more rational than holes in reality?'

Instead of answering, Festina came to look at the Bumbler’s scan. I’d magnified a single cell nucleus to fill the entire display screen. It was easy to see the chromosomes, each real one accompanied by a shadow: a cutout, an absence, unfilled by the nucleus’s liquid interior. The pseudochromosomes drifted lazily across the screen, just like their real-matter counterparts. Finally, Festina said, 'Okay, that’s disturbing, no matter what the hell those things are.' She stepped away. 'I can’t help but notice the mutant skin flakes are all beside this one stasis sphere.'

The sphere she indicated was the biggest in sight, almost as tall as me. The human/shadow hybrid cells were directly around its base. In fact, when I scanned with the Bumbler, I could find a line of such cells from the entrance door straight up to the sphere. The trail was too small to see with the naked eye, except for those marks near the sphere — as if someone had dribbled cells all across the floor, then stood long enough in one spot for the accumulation to become visible.

'Oh, Mom,' said Tut, 'I got a nasty idea what’s in that sphere.'

'We all have the same idea,' Festina told him. She turned to me. 'You like kicking things open, Youn Suu. You want to do the honors on this stasis field?'

'No thanks. My foot has had enough excitement for one day.'

She raised an eyebrow. 'Are you all right? You weren’t limping.'

'I’ll be fine. But no more kicking for a while.'

Festina held my gaze a moment longer. Then she shrugged and turned away. After a quick search of the room, she found a tool for popping stasis bubbles: a short wand with a barb on the end, like a miniharpoon. She fetched the wand and tapped it on the sphere’s mirror surface.

‹BINK›

The room filled with screaming — a scream begun the previous morning and now resumed as if no time had passed. On the floor, where the sphere had been, a man lay howling in agony. Flakes of whitish skin drifted off his body like snow.

The man’s skin had not been white to begin with. His features and bone structure were clearly African, not so different from Ubatu; but his once-dark skin had lost its pigmentation, turning paper-pale and as fragile as ash. As for his life force… I didn’t wholly trust my Balrog-given sense, but when it told me this man was dying, I had no reason for doubt. The man exuded an aura of contamination: a body at war with itself, literally ripping its tissues apart. Flecks of dry epidermis continued to shake off him onto the floor — falling from his face and hands, through the gaps between buttons on his shirt, and in powdery puffs out the bottom of his pant cuffs, as if both his legs had turned to talcum and were dispersing themselves across the concrete.

As for the man’s clothes, they were cut in the style of Unity warm-weather uniforms, but their color was unique to Muta: a multihued motley of reds, blues, and oranges, matching the rainbow riot of local vegetation. It was obviously intended to provide camouflage when survey team members moved through the brush… but it made the man look like a clown.

A leprous clown close to death.

Tut stepped toward the man, but Festina pulled him back. 'No! He might be contagious. Youn Suu, what’s the Bumbler say?'

I looked at the Bumbler’s display. 'Shadow chromosomes in all his cells. Not just his skin. His hair, his nails, his eyes… the Bumbler can’t find a single cell that’s normal. And the cells are changing shape. The blood corpuscles are so deformed they’re clogging his veins and arteries like logjams. His heart isn’t strong enough to maintain circulation — it’s barely beating.'

The man screamed louder. I couldn’t tell if he was reacting to my words or some new thrust of pain.