Radiant

breaking the delicate mechanism. I was surprised the spores had tried such a risky maneuver — if they’d miscalculated, they might have smashed the glass and put the station permanently out of order — but deprived of their age-old addiction, the bits of moss were desperate enough to take the chance. I heard no shattering glass; the Divine’s gamble had paid off.

Second, Festina gasped… not just in surprise at having her hand torn free from the pyramid. She was under some other attack: the Divine trying to kill her. Telekinetically crushing her heart? Squeezing her throat? Bursting an artery in her brain? The spores would want her dead, to make sure she gave no more trouble and to take revenge for the trouble she’d already caused. Without a sixth sense, I couldn’t tell what the Divine was doing; but the sharpness of her gasp suggested the onslaught was fast and brutal.

Third, I felt power surge within me: the red Balrog spores finally making their move. Their strength was limited — their mass was no more than a tenth of the Divine mound’s, and their energy proportionately small — but they had the advantage of surprise. The Divine spores never expected opposition on the psychic plane, so they were totally unprepared for the Balrog’s intervention. Glowing red barriers sprang up around Festina and me, beating back the Divine’s assault. Festina’s gasp turned to relief as the Divine’s crushing grip was repelled.

But the respite was only temporary; we weren’t safe yet. The red spores in my body were massively outnumbered by the gray spore heap. My internal Balrog could only protect us a short while: I felt the Divine hammering on the red glow around me, trying to bash down the wall. My spores had no strength to spare beyond keeping the enemy at bay. Festina and I would have to neutralize the Divine on our own, before the gray overwhelmed the red and ripped us all to pieces.

At least we had one advantage: the gray spores couldn’t draw on the station’s energy. Festina still held the detached yellow wire, so no power was flowing. Even as that thought crossed my mind, however, the wire jerked in her hand. The Divine must have grabbed it telekinetically; their next step would be to reconnect it and bring the station back online. With the return of radiation to the emitters, the gray spores would gain all the strength they needed to finish us off.

As Festina fought to hold the wire back, I pulled myself toward her as fast as I could. The Divine didn’t stop me; why weaken themselves by dividing their efforts? They were already concentrating on two tasks: trying to break the red fields that protected Festina and me, and shoving the wire back into place.

Festina held the wire in both hands now, wrestling it like a thin yellow snake. Her body strained with the effort, a desperate tug-of-war. It amazed me the wire didn’t break under the tension; either it was made from high-tech material far stronger than conventional copper, or the Divine were psionically reinforcing it, holding it together by the power of their will. Millimeter by millimeter, the bare tip of conductor at the end of the wire nosed its way toward the electrical terminal where it was supposed to be attached… but before it made contact, I grabbed Festina’s arms and added my strength to hers.

More precisely, I added my weight to hers. I had no legs to brace myself, and lying on the floor, I couldn’t reach high enough to grab the wire itself. All I could do was grip her bent elbows and hang off them, letting my body mass drag her down. The wire came with us, pulling away from the connection terminal by our combined efforts. In the center of the room, the Divine howled gibberish… perhaps curses in the ancient Fuentes language.

Both Festina and I hung our full weights on the wire — pulling down while the Divine tried to lift the thin strand into place. Under other circumstances, the metal line would have sliced Festina’s fingers like a garrote; but the Balrog’s glowing red shield resisted the wire’s cutting force as well as the gray moss’s ongoing assault. Still, we were only fighting a delaying action… and we weren’t winning. Bit by bit, we were pulled upward as the Divine spores exerted their willpower.

'Got any bright ideas?' Festina asked.

I looked around for inspiration. The pyramid’s open access panel showed hundreds of complex components, from electronic circuit boards to sheets of spongy biologicals to crystal vials containing colored liquids and gases… but a faint gray fog lay between us and the machinery, almost exactly like the dim red glow surrounding Festina and me. The Divine must have raised that fog as a force field, to stop us attacking the pyramid’s delicate innards. Not that we really would have tried to damage the fragile equipment — we still wanted to reactivate the station once we’d removed the Divine — but the gray spores weren’t taking chances. I was glad they had to expend energy on the gray fog field; the more they used on unnecessary measures, the less strength they had for pulling the yellow wire. But the fog meant there was nothing within reach we could use to our benefit.

So Festina and I continued to dangle — the two of us entwined awkwardly, muscles straining, our breaths loud in our ears. 'So,' Festina said, trying to make her tone conversational, 'what are the odds the Divine will exhaust themselves before they reconnect the wire?'

'I don’t know.'

'But you’re an Eastern hero,' she said with a smile. 'Aren’t you supposed to know everything we dumb Western heroes don’t?'

'Eastern heroes specialize in the big picture. Ultimate truths of the cosmos, not what’s going to happen in the next ten seconds. Although,' I added, 'hanging from this wire reminds me of a story.'

'Feel free to share.' Festina yanked on the wire as it struggled to make the connection. 'What else do I have to do but listen to stories?'

'Once upon a time,' I said, 'a monk was chased by a tiger. While running away, he accidentally fell off a cliff; he just barely saved himself by grabbing a vine on the cliff’s edge. So there he was dangling, with the tiger roaring just above his head and a deadly plunge beneath his feet.'

'I’ll like this story a lot,' Festina said, 'if the monk has a clever way to escape.'

'This isn’t that kind of story. The monk noticed the vine he was holding had berries on it. He caught a berry in his mouth and ate it. ‘Ahh,’ he said. ‘How sweet.’ And that’s the end of the story.'

'In other words,' Festina said, 'ignore your troubles and enjoy what you can?'

'No. Don’t ignore anything. That’s the point. Even if you’re in desperate straits, berries still exist, and they’re still sweet. The universe doesn’t go sour just because you personally have problems.'

'And the tiger doesn’t go away just because you eat a berry.'

'Exactly. Don’t fixate on either the berry or the tiger.'

'Okay.' Festina said nothing for a few heartbeats. The wire in her fingers continued to inch toward the terminal. 'Youn Suu,' she muttered, 'I’m having trouble seeing the berry here. Unless…'

'Grr-arrh.'

We both snapped our heads toward the door. Tut stood inside the black energy curtain: still wearing the battered bear mask, sniffing the air in a gruff ursine way.

'Grr-arrh,' he said again. 'Grr-arrh!'

'Okay,' Festina said. 'Berry… bear… it’s a stretch, but I get the point.'

'Tut!' I yelled. 'See the gray moss, Tut? The moss, Tut, the moss. Show the bastards you still don’t care.'

For a moment, he didn’t respond… and I feared his brain had been damaged by the pretas who’d worked all night to possess him.

Then: 'Hot damn, Mom!' He whipped the mask off his head. 'You’ve finally found some fun on this shit hole of a planet. Swan dive!'

As he’d done atop the ziggurat in Zoonau, Tut threw himself onto the spores.

When the Divine pulled Li and Ubatu into their midst, they’d taken their time. They’d reeled the diplomats in, making sure their descent was slow — slow enough not to crush any spores underneath.

But when Tut plunged into the mossy heap…

The Divine weren’t prepared to split their attention in so many directions: having to deal with Tut, as well as playing tug-of-war with the yellow wire, maintaining the gray fog to protect the pyramid’s mechanical guts, and keeping up pressure on the red glow that shielded Festina and me. Tut’s move caught the Divine by surprise. They were used to dragging prey in, not having it leap on top of them. Besides, the demonic gray spores were too fixated on reconnecting the yellow wire; they didn’t react to Tut until a nanosecond before he plunged into their midst. Then, at the last instant, as Tut plummeted down like an avalanche of long-delayed karma… the Divine simply bolted in fright.

Pure atavistic instinct: jump out of the way. The spores forgot everything else as they scattered in all directions, fleeing to the edges of the room with the grainy sound of a sandstorm.

The tug-of-war on the yellow wire ended abruptly. Festina and I hit the floor as the panicked Divine let go of their end.

Tut landed on solid gold: a golden disk embedded in the floor, almost exactly the size of Tut himself as he threw out his arms and legs to absorb the impact of landing. He looked like da Vinci’s drawing of human anatomical proportion as he posed spread-eagled within the golden circle. Then Festina, free from the Divine’s TK, shrugged me off and slapped the yellow wire back into place on its terminal.

All around the room, machines began to hum. A heartbeat later, golden light flooded upward from the emitter disk, streaming around Tut’s body like honey- colored fire. Gray spores howled and tried to scurry back to the radiance… but at the edges of the disk, they ran into a glowing red barrier. I could feel the Balrog spores inside me blaze with dying determination as they spent their last reserves of energy holding the Divine back.

Gold light filled the dome of the station. It built to a blazing intensity, then exploded outward through the spikes in the building’s crown. For a moment, my sixth sense returned, showing me hundreds of pretas outside the station, permeated with healing bursts of energy. I waited to see them transform…

…but instead I went blind. Truly blind. No sixth sense. No eyes. The spores in my body — the ones replacing parts of my brain, the ones that had kept me alive through broken bones, hemorrhages, and even amputation — all of them reached the end of their strength and died en masse within me.

I was purged of my infestation… and left with a body no longer able to survive on its own.

Everything went black.

CHAPTER 19

Prajna [Pali]: Wisdom; insight; understanding.