Radiant

doorstep, what good is a weapon that takes six years to mount a defense? By then, truly warlike invaders might have killed all the original population.'

'But the invaders wouldn’t be killers, would they?' I said. 'The League of Peoples won’t let murderers travel from one star system to another. Aliens landing on Muta couldn’t be totally homicidal.'

'Hmm,' said Festina, 'you’re right. People coming here wouldn’t be stone-cold killers. They couldn’t be. At worst, they’d be aggressive settlers… like the Europeans who came to the Americas after Columbus. Most Europeans weren’t maniacs who got a kick out of massacring natives. They were just greedy and self-centered. They wanted the riches the natives had; they usually only murdered those who got in their way. If the same thing happened on Muta…'

'If aliens showed up,' I said, 'the Fuentes would do their best to keep things peaceful. Maybe they’d give the invaders gifts or negotiate treaties. They’d go along with practically anything, just to avoid confrontation for a few years… and they’d get away with it because the newcomers were guaranteed to be halfway reasonable people. The League automatically eliminates anyone who’s totally ruthless.'

'Right,' Festina agreed. 'So the Fuentes would give the newcomers whatever was necessary to keep the peace. Six years later, after the defense system has analyzed the invaders and developed attack germs… suddenly, all the invaders get vaporized simultaneously. Problem solved. And the bugs would remain in the atmosphere to wipe out any more of the same species who dropped by.'

Tut nodded. 'That’s Var-Lann’s theory.'

Festina smiled grimly. 'If he’s right, it wasn’t a bad defense strategy. Better than fighting the invaders directly — war makes such a mess. If the Fuentes acted conciliatory until their automatic defense system produced a means of genocide… lots fewer casualties and property damage. At least on the Fuentes’ side.'

'Of course,' I said, 'the League of Peoples would consider the entire Fuentes civilization nonsentient. A sentient civilization wouldn’t callously slaughter visitors.'

'Var-Lann talked about that too,' Tut said. 'He thought the Fuentes on Muta were a splinter group: a breakaway from mainstream Fuentes culture. They didn’t behave like other Fuentes, did they? The other Fuentes cleaned up before they transcended the flesh… but the Mutan Fuentes didn’t. Var-Lann believed the Mutan Fuentes had turned rabidly isolationist. They split from the rest of Fuentes society and built their defense system to keep other species out.'

'So the Mutans didn’t meet the League’s definition of sentience,' Festina said, 'but it didn’t matter. The League only kills nonsentients who try to leave their home star system. The Mutans were isolationist stay-at-homes who didn’t want to leave anyway. They kept to this one planet, and the League never touched them.'

I nodded to myself. It wasn’t uncommon for planetary populations to turn isolationist — especially on beautiful worlds like Muta, with all the necessities of life. Even in the Technocracy, most planets had secessionist movements. The general public usually considered such movements to be crazy… but all a movement needed was a charismatic leader plus a few unpopular decisions by the central government, and soon breaking away became a serious topic of discussion.

During my lifetime, three star systems had cut ties with the Technocracy. One had since returned to the fold, but the other two continued to turn in on themselves, becoming steadily more xenophobic. Some experts thought it was only a matter of time before those two systems began shooting outsiders who came too close.

Was that what had happened to Muta? Had the people here split from the rest of Fuentes civilization, eventually building a draconian defense system to slaughter all visitors? Had that defense system built supergerms, killing the Unity survey teams and the Greenstriders that came before them?

No, I decided. It wasn’t as simple as that. For one thing, Var-Lann and his teammates hadn’t really been killed — they’d been turned into clouds that retained purpose and intelligence. And what about the shadow chromosomes in Var-Lann’s cells? Where did that come in?

Festina was obviously having similar thoughts. 'Tut, did Var-Lann say anything about dark matter?'

'Not a word,' Tut answered. 'At least nothing I understood. There was a part where he completely lost me — almost a full minute. Sorry.'

'Can’t be helped,' Festina told him. 'We’re lucky you understood anything.' She looked around the room as if searching for hints of what to do next. Nothing presented itself. Finally, she turned back to Tut, and asked, 'Is that it? Did Var-Lann say anything else?'

Tut paused, then said, 'Yeah. He, uhh… he knew we were from the Outward Fleet. He recognized your tightsuits. And even though I spoke his language, he knew I was from the Technocracy too.'

'Why?' Festina asked.

'Because I wasn’t dead. Last time Var-Lann looked, there were still plenty of bugs in the air. If any of us had twenty-four Unity chromosomes, we’d be smoke by now. But…'

'But?'

'Var-Lann pointed out that Homo sapiens aren’t much different from Homo unitatis. One chromosome, that’s all: the Unity has that one extra chromosome. And as chromosomes go, it’s pretty damned small — fewer than a hundred genes. Just a handful of things the Unity have added to themselves, and put onto a brand-new chromosome for fear of screwing up older DNA structures.' Tut took a deep breath. 'So if Var-Lann was right about this automatic defense system, he thought we were in big trouble.'

'Because the system is already creating a defense against us,' Festina said grimly.

'Right. And genetically, we’re damned near identical to the Unity. All but that one chromosome. As soon as the system starts analyzing us, it’ll see we’re almost the same… so it’ll be able to turn us to smoke with almost the same bugs. It sure as hell won’t need six whole years to produce appropriate attack germs. Var-Lann thought the system might mount an assault within days. Or hours. He told us to get off Muta fast.'

'We can’t,' Festina said. 'The only way to leave is a Sperm-tail. If we try that, the EMP cloud will ride up the tail and zap Pistachio. We’ll still be stuck, and the ship will be stuck with us.' She shook her head. 'No. Whatever trouble we’re in ourselves, there’s no point endangering Pistachio too.'

Tut shrugged. 'Then we’ll all get smoked like Team Esteem.'

'Not if I can help it.' Festina turned to me. 'You’ve got the Bumbler. Have you checked for the presence of Var-Lann’s bugs?'

I nodded. 'They’re all around us. Inside us too. I don’t know how long we’ve been breathing them — at least since we entered the camp. They’re covering our bodies… creeping in through our ears, nose, and mouth… maybe penetrating our skin…'

Festina nodded. 'Then we’re completely infested. Just fucking wonderful. But we aren’t dead yet… which gives us time to set things right.'

'How?' Tut asked.

'By finding this damned defense system and smashing the shit out of it so nobody else dies.'

'But Var-Lann might have been wrong,' Tut protested. 'He was just hypothesizing — halfway out of his head with pain. There might not be any system. And even if there is, it could be anywhere on the planet!'

'Then we’d better search fast. Let’s go.'

CHAPTER 12

Magga [Pali]: Path. The Buddha’s fourth truth is that the way to purge oneself of tanha (fixations) is to follow a program called the Eightfold Path: practices to lessen the grip of one’s fixations and eventually achieve freedom.

Next stop: Drill-Press. The Fuentes city.

If there was any nearby information about Var-Lann’s hypothetical defense system, it would lie among the mud-covered ruins. Not that the Fuentes would have left big signs pointing to secret alien-killing machinery… and not that we could read Fuentes writing, even if there were such signs… and not that the actual defense machinery was more likely to be in Drill-Press than anywhere else on the planet… but the city was still the first place to start looking. No other Fuentes settlement was close enough to reach on foot.

Besides, Li and Ubatu crash-landed in the ruins. Professional courtesy demanded we make a token effort to see what had happened to them.

First, though, we needed more practical clothing. I was soggy with sweat inside my overinsulated tightsuit; Festina was similarly steaming. Therefore, we scrounged through the Unity huts till we found clothes that would fit us. Not too surprisingly, we both obtained uniforms from the same woman: the only member of Team Esteem close to our size. Unity women tended toward Amazonian proportions — tall, broad-shouldered, long in the leg. Unity bioengineering policies decreed that females should average exactly the same height as males, and both should be built like demigods. Fortunately, Unity policies also decreed that each survey team should have one man and one woman substantially smaller than the norm, in case there was need to send someone into cramped spaces… exploring caves, for example, or picking through wreckage in a collapsed building. Festina and I searched till we found the hut of the mandatory short woman, then fought our way out of our tightsuits and into two of the woman’s spare uniforms.

I let Festina have the official 'dress' uniform. It was made from nanomesh fabric — an assemblage of nanites that adhered to the body as tight and thin as paint — but at least the nanocloth was a dignified black. (Black was the official color of both the Unity Survey Service and our own Explorer Corps. In the Academy, we’d often speculated if the Unity was imitating us, or vice versa. Historical records didn’t help to determine who chose black first. Incredibly, the Technocracy had no records of when or how the Explorer Corps got started. No one knew if that omission was a deliberate snub, benign neglect, sheer incompetence, or something more sinister.)

As for me, I got stuck with a nanomesh uniform that clung just as revealingly — the Unity was the sort of culture that preached virtuous restraint while wearing clothes so snug and sheer that everyone could see your appendectomy scar — but besides being tight enough to show whether I was an inny or an outy, the uniform was one of those multicolored jester suits that passed for Mutan camouflage: yellow, blue, crimson, purple, orange, green, mauve, splashed in motley spottles and blotches all over the skintight cloth… as if I’d rolled in fruit salad. The moment I emerged from the hut, Tut yelled, 'Hey, Mom, you look like spumoni.'

Tut himself looked like a bear. While Festina and I had been dealing with clothes, he’d toured the other huts and collected all the sacred masks. Some of the masks were now slung on a belt at his waist, while others hung on a makeshift bandoleer draped from his shoulder to his hip… but he’d saved one mask to wear over his gold-plated face: a life-sized bear mask, complete with what looked to be genuine bear fur and teeth. In the middle of the bear’s forehead was a blood-red ruby as big as my thumb.