Radiant

The thought of Tut stealing the masks disturbed me; it was like looting relics from a temple. I had little respect for the Unity’s mask religion — an outlet for the worst in human nature, not striving to achieve the best — but in the spirit-parched secular world of the Technocracy’s mainstream, I felt kinship for any religious artifacts.

'Those don’t belong to you,' I told Tut. 'If you take them, they’ll get broken.'

'But, Mom, they’re shiny-finey!' He capered around me, making mock growls. 'Grr-arrh! Grr-arrh! The bear says the masks want to dance!'

'Tut…'

'They’ve been stuck inside, grr-arrh! With no one to wear them, grr-arrh! Their owners have left, the masks are bereft, and they’re looking for fun now, grr- arrh!'

He began making clawing gestures at me, still bouncing in circles and calling, 'Grr-arrh! Grr-arrh!'

'Tut!' I said. 'This isn’t funny. It’s disrespectful.'

'Masks don’t want respect, grr-arrh. They’d much rather play and pet, grr-arrh. They just want to dance, and to get in your pants. A mask is the best lay you’ll get, grr-arrh!'

'Tut…' Then it struck me: this was a man who’d spent a year with the Unity. Living among them. Learning their language. Had he also taken part in their orgies? Did he get himself stoked up on ritual drugs or brain-feeds, then mask-dance himself into ecstasy? He’d been sixteen at the time; of course he’d attend an orgy if invited. Being Tut, he would have thrown himself into the experience with total abandon. If invited. Supposedly, the Unity didn’t let you join their rites unless you had a spirit-mask of your own, but…

Wait. Tut did have a mask. The gold-plating on his face. When did he get that? During his time with the Unity. Had he been wearing a genuine Unity spirit-mask for as long as I’d known him?

No. Real spirit-masks had a soul-gem in the forehead. Tut’s gold face didn’t. But perhaps soul-gems were only for full-fledged members of the Unity. Outsiders like Tut might be allowed to have masks of their own but couldn’t add a gem because they couldn’t claim full Unity status.

That made sense. The Unity did accept converts to their religion; in some places, they’d angered the Technocracy by actively proselytizing. So it was entirely possible Tut’s face was a mask and he was a practiced trance-dancer.

Which was bad news for us. The last thing we needed was Tut trying to relive his youth in a blur of unconstrained copulation.

Or was there more here at work than a simple yearning for the past? Something had happened to Tut’s aura — something I couldn’t define. It seemed more chaotic than before… not just Tut’s usual insanity but a warring pandemonium of driving urges. Black anger. Crimson lust. White-hot hatred. Muddy grief. And some odd unnatural extra that fought all the rest: a slippery purple force I couldn’t identify. The colors clashed against each other madly, like Muta’s motley foliage. Their battle seemed strong enough to rip Tut’s life force apart.

Unless I did something.

'Tut,' I said in a quiet but firm voice. 'It’s broad daylight; the masks shouldn’t be out. You know that. The masks might want to dance, but the sun hurts their eyes. Isn’t that right? Isn’t there a rule that says masks are only for after dark?'

I hoped I was right. One shouldn’t trust Technocracy rumors about Unity beliefs… but in this case, I thought the rumors might be true. Mask dances were strictly regulated, like everything else in the Unity — Unity leaders didn’t want people frolicking and fornicating when they should be doing productive work. I expected restrictions would have been built into the mask religion’s dogma: dances could only take place at night, after a full day of contributing to the common good.

Besides, I thought, the masks would look more powerful after dark. In the bright afternoon light, they just looked shabby — the bear, for example, had a slightly asymmetric snout, possibly from getting banged around in wild dances and wilder couplings. Such small imperfections wouldn’t be noticeable after dark, when the only light came from a bonfire… but now, under the glaring sun, the bear appeared soulless and silly. The masks on Tut’s belt and bandoleer displayed similar weakness: bouncing haphazardly as he jumped around, flimsy constructions of glitter and plastic and feathers. Come sundown, they might become terrifying; for now, the only terror was Tut’s losing what was left of his mind.

I wondered why we’d come to this planet in the company of a madman.

'Tut,' I said. 'The masks aren’t supposed to come out in the sun-'

'I know!' he snapped. With an angry motion, he pulled the bear mask off his head. 'You can be a real party pooper, Mom. Always so goody-goody. It’s irritating.'

'Sorry.'

'Don’t say you’re sorry if you don’t intend to change.' Sulkily, he hooked the bear mask to his belt, where it hung like some flea-bitten hunting trophy. 'We might turn to smoke any second. Isn’t that enough to make you loosen up?'

I wondered what he meant by loosening up. Was this about sex? Or was it just that I disapproved of his fun, the dancing, the nudity, the pilfering of Team Esteem’s sacred objects?

Looking at his life force, I couldn’t tell. Tut’s aura had returned to its usual jumbled confusion; the colors had faded, damped to a more manageable intensity. Emotions were swirling at random now — just bumping haphazardly against each other, not actively at war. Yet there was still a sort of after-haze of what I’d seen before: flashes of raw emotion, as pure and demanding as the overwhelming hunger of the pretas.

What was I seeing? Tut himself, or Tut infested with microbes that would soon make him into a frustrated ghost?

At that moment, Festina came out of the hut in her new Unity clothes. She looked good. I didn’t know whether or not she’d been bioengineered, but few natural humans could meet the aesthetic demands of nanomesh: few natural bodies betrayed no sagging or folding under the spray-on-thin layer of nanites. And the black color suited her perfectly — much better than admiral’s gray. Her life force showed that she knew it; she seemed more vibrant, confident, and determined. When she saw Tut decked out with the masks, it didn’t faze her. She just said, 'You’ll need more clothing. It’ll get cold after dark.'

'I picked up a uniform too. It’s in my pack.' Tut turned to show he wore a Unity backpack — just a small one, only reaching halfway down his spine, but with plenty of room for a change of clothes. I knew Tut might be lying, and the backpack contained something other than a Unity uniform… for example, the drugs Team Esteem would have kept on hand to help with their orgies. But Festina chose to believe Tut was telling the truth.

'All right,' she said. 'We’re ready to go. Let’s head south.'

It should have been a pleasant walk. Bright afternoon. Riots of rainbow foliage. Protolizards sunning themselves on every rock. Our noses soon got used to the omnipresent odor of mustard, and we didn’t have much gear to carry: Festina and I both lugged a single stasis-field container, but we’d left the rest at Camp Esteem. Besides the mirror-sphere, I’d filled a small Unity backpack with a water canteen, first-aid kit, and food rations; Festina had done the same. The supplies would let us last a few days in Drill-Press. If we needed more, we could always return to the Unity camp — assuming we hadn’t turned to smoke in the meantime.

So a short, easy walk on a sunny fall day: it should have been pleasant. But my sixth sense wouldn’t let me ignore the complications simmering around me. Tut and his chaotic life force… Festina and her avalanche karma… the insects who occasionally died under my feet… the gnawing sense of pretas never far away, ready to pounce if we tried to escape by Sperm-tail.

To distract myself, I took Bumbler readings of everything around me. We walked through a mass of invisible germs: Var-Lann’s bugs, built to tear people apart. And they weren’t just on the outside — when I turned the Bumbler on Festina, I could see the germs in her lungs, her stomach, her digestive tract, her bloodstream. Tut was the same… utterly infested. For a while, I avoided scanning myself because I didn’t want to know the truth; but avoidance was unskillful behavior. At last I forced myself to use the Bumbler on my own body…

…and discovered I wasn’t infected. Clean as autoclaved glass.

Yes, I inhaled Var-Lann’s microbes with every breath. Yes, they congregated on my skin and were attempting to crawl in through my ears, the edges of my eye sockets, every possible orifice. But the moment they got inside — whether it was my bronchial tubes, my gut, or elsewhere — the germs were annihilated by tiny red spores.

I belonged to the Balrog. The moss wouldn’t share me with interlopers.

The notion almost made me laugh: that I’d be saved from Muta’s lethal defense system by the Balrog’s prior claim. A slave protected by her master’s possessiveness.

Dour thoughts made the walk hard to bear. Physically, however, it was no great effort. Team Esteem had made the trip hundreds of times, clearing a trail we had no trouble following. The route passed through varied stands of foliage: chest-high purple ferns… then knee-high rubbery red ferns… then yellow-orange giant ferns rising as tall as trees… yielding at last to real trees: Capsicillium croceum, the Fuentes’ trademark groves.

This late in the growing season, the trees held none of their distinctive 'minichili' fruit. The ground, however, was littered with fallen chilis: all of them bright yellow, the size of my little finger, and covered with crawling insects. Only one species of insect was actually eating the fruit — a bug like a small black ant, which by some fluke of evolution had found itself able to digest the minichili’s alien sugars and proteins. The rest of the insects present were eating the little black ants, or eating the insects who ate the ants. Why didn’t the ants run away? Likely because Muta’s indigenous flora hadn’t yet learned to produce fruit of their own. Minichilis were the only true fruit on the planet: a nutritional bonanza the ants just couldn’t resist. Besides, there were so many ants chowing down on the fruit, the predators would never get them all. Plenty of well-fed ants would survive to breed… and next year the process would repeat itself.

The comforting cycle of life.

Above us, the Capsicillium croceum leaves were thick and green, even this close to winter. They wouldn’t fall off till first frost… at which point they’d drop overnight, entire trees denuded. Until then, however, the dense foliage over our heads was enough to block our view of the city, right up to the moment when we emerged from the woods.

Suddenly, skyscrapers soared above us.

On aerial photos, the towers had seemed bland — we’d seen nothing but flat roofs with rectangular cross sections. From the ground, however, the blandness disappeared: each building was profusely decorated with mosaic tiles, some large, some small, some glossy, some matte, some forming abstract geometric designs, some coming together in pictures fifty stories tall.

For a moment we stood unmoving, enrapt by the giant pictures. Many showed furry bipeds, brown or black, with rabbitlike haunches and long tails that ended in