Radiant

With a rush, the rest of his arm turned to smoke, followed an instant later by his entire body. The particles hung in the air a moment, still retaining the shape of what Ohpa had been; then the cloud dispersed, thinning out, spreading in all directions until there was nothing to see.

'Huh,' Tut said. 'He called you ‘Admiral Ramos.’ I wonder how he knew. None of us ever called you that.'

Festina gestured irritably. 'I’ve met enough higher beings to know their tricks. They’re all incorrigible show-offs, they love getting a rise out of lesser mortals, and they all know my goddamned name.' She sighed. 'They’re also fond of dramatic exits. Speaking of which, we should get going ourselves.'

'Downstream to the Stage Two station?'

'Where else?' She muttered something about 'jumping through goddamned hoops for alien puppet-masters,' then headed out the door.

CHAPTER 14

Maitri [Sanskrit]: Loving kindness for all living creatures.

Outside the building we stopped so Festina could speak with Pistachio. She summarized what we’d learned, then asked Captain Cohen to do some eye-in-the-sky scouting for us. He soon reported a Fuentes building beside a dam thirty kilometers to the south. The dam had become a waterfall — silt must have closed the sluices, leaving the river with nowhere to go but over the top. Years of rushing water had mildly eroded the dam’s upper ramparts, but there’d been no major collapse; the dam still held back a reservoir of cold autumnal water. The accompanying building lay on the east bank of the reservoir… which told us which side of the Grindstone we should be on for the trek downstream.

Pistachio’s cameras didn’t have enough resolution to see much detail — not from such high orbit. However, Captain Cohen had begun to build new reconnaissance probes as soon as we’d left the ship, and there’d be one ready within five hours: just enough time, he said, to gather advance data, since we’d need six hours to walk to the dam. (When Cohen said that, I thought, Six hours? We’d take six hours to walk thirty kilometers on clear flat roads. Traveling through brush, up hills and down ravines, following the shore of a meandering river and perhaps dodging the occasional Rexy, we’d take much longer… and that was ignoring nightfall, now only three hours off, plus the storm we’d seen heading our way. When Festina asked Cohen how the storm looked, he admitted, 'Oy, it’s a doozy.')

I wondered if Festina would decide it was safer to spend the night in the city, where we had shelter from lightning and pseudosuchians. There was also the question of Li and Ubatu; we hadn’t seen any sign of the shuttle, but odds were they’d tried to land in the city, where straight, paved streets would make good emergency airstrips. I found it difficult to believe Li was such an expert pilot that he’d managed a dead-stick landing without smashing to smithereens… but if the diplomats hadn’t died in a pancake collision, they might be lying injured, in need of medical help. With the three hours of daylight we had left, decency demanded we search for our fallen 'comrades' in case we could save their annoying lives.

Then again, searching Drill-Press on foot would take considerably longer than three hours. We’d save time if we could get to one of the tallest skyscraper roofs for an aerial view of the streets. However, it seemed unlikely that elevators would still work after sixty-five centuries, and I didn’t want to climb eighty stories only to find the doors to the roof locked or rusted shut. Perhaps Pistachio’s cameras could pick out the crash site, especially if the shuttle had blasted a significant crater in the heart of the city… but there might be an easier way to search: with a bit of higher help.

I settled against the side of the bridge, my elbows propped on the rail, my eyes gazing out over the river as if scanning for trouble. I paid no attention to what was actually before me; instead, I withdrew into my mind and murmured, Balrog… I admit it, I can’t stand being blind. How far do your senses go?

As usual, the answer didn’t come in words. A point of perception opened within me: a single point, not in my brain, but in my abdomen, my dantien, my womb. Though I sensed that point by means of the Balrog, this tiny part of my body seemed free of alien presence; it felt like an untainted refuge, a virgin core the spores had chivalrously refrained from violating. Knee-jerk cynicism said I shouldn’t be so gullible — why should I believe anything the Balrog showed me, let alone a comforting fiction that some crucial portion of my being remained unraped? — but it felt so real, I had trouble doubting it. The point I sensed was me: me here and now, at this moment, complete… no more permanent than a sigh, no more real than any other temporary assemblage of atoms en route to elsewhere, but still, in that instant, me.

Then the point began to expand.

Expanding beyond tissues infested with spores, glowing red in the dark of my belly…

Beyond the boundaries of my skin, sweeping over the bridge’s pavement where EMP clouds lurked in the cracks…

Up to Tut and Festina, their auras tainted with Stage One microbes…

Moving farther out, reaching down to the river beneath the bridge, where primitive fish darted after food or drifted with minds empty, occasionally flicking their tails to change course when the current took them near small obstructions…

Still growing outward, exceeding the former limits of my perception, edging up to and into skyscrapers abandoned for millennia, room after fetid room where furniture decayed under beds of mold, where strains of bacteria had evolved to thrive on Fuentes upholstery, where lice had colonized carpets and mites crawled busily through fungus-covered electronics…

Farther and farther, past blooms of vegetation where the city’s artificial herbicides had been leached away by time, and multicolored ferns from the countryside had seeded themselves, creating little Edens for insects, maybe even for a small protolizard or toad, in areas as small as my cabin on Pistachio…

Continuing beyond, as my brain became dizzy, unable to handle so much detail — not like an aerial photograph that loses resolution as the scale increases, but retaining everything, perceiving multiple city blocks, the towers, the air, the soil, all down to a microscopic level filled with life, lifeforms, life forces, quadrillions of data elements flooding my mind, and still the view expanded, more buildings, more biosphere, every millimeter unique, all of it blazing/roaring/shuddering with energy, and somewhere in the middle, a woman whose brain couldn’t take the barrage beginning to go into seizure as sensations sparked through her neurons. Too much input, too much knowledge, electrical impulses ramming down wearied axons to release volleys of chemical transmitters, her skull full of lightning and bioconductors, overload, grand mal, electroshock, white light breakdown, brain cells rupturing by the thousand in fierce flares of overexertion… and all observed from that point in my abdomen, like an impartial witness at my own beheading.

I can’t say how long the blitzkrieg lasted — it was one of those imminent-disaster experiences that take place in slow motion, simultaneously drawn-out and fleeting — but before I could react, a dismaying percentage of my brain had been damaged irreparably. Neurons collapsed from the strain. Long-established pathways of thought got chopped into disjoint pieces. Where once my consciousness had lived, there was only a soup of demolished gray matter.

Yet I still could think. I still had the sense I was me. My heart still beat, and my lungs still breathed, because wherever my neurons burst under the rush of sensation, the Balrog instantly filled in the gaps. I could see spores annexing my brain like an invader’s army: all the key connection hubs under the Balrog’s control, and millions of other spores scattered like garrison soldiers at strategically located stations.

Before, I’d simply been conquered; now I was thoroughly digested. The very thoughts I was thinking had to pass through Balrog spores: like a computer network where every transmission was compelled to run along channels controlled by the enemy. I didn’t truly believe my 'self' was that point in my abdomen — whatever significance that point might hold, my intestines/uterus didn’t have the capacity for thought. Thoughts could only be supported by the brain… and my brain was utterly compromised. Not just the higher centers, but the more ancient sections that controlled essential processes. My heartbeat. My breathing. My digestion. I could see spores completely integrated into my brain stem, and my own cells destroyed by the overload. Quietly, the spores lapped up the proteins and sugars released when my brain cells cracked open. Soon the Balrog would use my own biochemicals to build new spores.

I was irredeemably lost… and the Balrog had let me see it happen: to know I was watching my demise.

All this time, some part of me had nursed a delusion that the Balrog would let me go. Once I’d served my purpose (whatever that purpose was), how could I remain of interest to a higher lifeform? I was nobody special: just an ugly screaming stink-girl. I had nothing the Balrog could find desirable in the long term. Couldn’t I eventually go free?

But now there was no going back. When the Balrog consumed my foot, I could have limped away, crippled yet alive. Now I couldn’t survive without the spores. Vital brain cells were gone, destroyed. If the Balrog withdrew, my remaining gray matter couldn’t sustain life. I was now more than a slave — I was dependent.

Why? Because again, I’d asked the Balrog for a favor. I’d wanted the moss to grant me a gift, and it honored my request in abundance. The flood of sensation must have been deliberately intended to cause mental overload, delivered in a way that didn’t just target my perceptions but other parts of my mind as well. Why should a gush of awareness kill cells in my brain stem? But it had done so, because I’d foolishly given the Balrog carte blanche.

Stupid. Very stupid. And now my human life was over.

Unable to do anything else, I found myself laughing.

'What is it?' Festina asked, looking around as if my laughter heralded some threat.

She looked so humanly naive.

'It’s nothing,' I said. 'Just some nonsense that got into my head.' I laughed again. 'By the way… I know where Li and Ubatu are.'

Of course I knew where the diplomats were. The mind-crushing overload was past, but in its wake my awareness extended much farther than before. I didn’t attempt to test the sixth sense’s range — that might cause more meltdown — but what I wanted to see, I saw. As simple as that. With a brain that was now half- Balrog, my mental processes (perception, filtering, interpretation) took place on a higher level. If I chose to examine the bacteria in an aphid’s gut two kilometers away, the data was instantly there: not just peeking into a place where normal sight couldn’t operate, but hearing the impossibly faint sounds of microbes splashing through stomach fluids, feeling the brush of their cilia rowing them forward, tasting the tang of the chemicals they absorbed. All was within my grasp, just for the asking… so of course I knew where our missing diplomats were. The answer came as soon as I asked the question.