Radiant

glowing red look-alike, I stood paralyzed into impotent numbness.

Thought and motion returned simultaneously: I relaxed as I realized the face in front of me was only a sculpture — a topiary version of myself constructed from red moss. The Balrog had seen me coming… had known I’d stick my head around the doorframe… and had arranged a group of spores in my likeness to startle me.

You demon, I mouthed to the spores near my face. But I didn’t say it aloud. Instead, I spoke the words that came almost as automatically to me as freezing in the face of danger. 'Greetings,' I told the statue. 'I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples. I beg your Hospitality.'

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the statue collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut. Slump, thud. The spores from the image quickly spread themselves out on the ground, joining the carpet of moss already there. A second later, all sign of my look-alike had vanished.

'Have you made contact with the Balrog?' Li asked over the comm link.

'Yes. But it didn’t want to talk to me.'

'Of course not. This is a job for diplomats. Set up the relay.'

I refrained from mentioning that Explorers are trained in diplomacy, just as we’re trained in planetary science, crisis management, and down-’n’-dirty survival. In fact, we received more formal training in diplomacy than the navy’s Diplomatic Corps. It was an essential part of our jobs. After all, who got sent on First Contact missions? Who might encounter extraterrestrials at any time, and whose initial actions would set the course for future human-alien relations? The Explorer Corps. Diplomats didn’t talk to anyone till Explorers broke the ice.

Which was what I was doing in Zoonau. Gauging the Balrog’s mood. And since it didn’t immediately want to eat me — nearby spores kept their distance from my feet — the situation seemed safe enough that I could turn the parlay over to Li and Ubatu.

As I worked to deploy the relay — just a small black box on a chest-high tripod — I paused now and then to examine my surroundings. Moss covered everything like spray-foam insulation. Undifferentiated red coated every surface as far as the eye could see. Streets. Buildings. Rope walkways. Even the atmosphere was tinted red: the only light was the dusky crimson that filtered through the moss-clotted dome, plus the dim streetlamps just visible beneath masses of spores.

No Cashlings moved anywhere in sight. I assumed they’d run for cover into buildings. That raised the question of whether the Balrog would pursue them inside, or whether the moss would be content to remain in the street. If this attack on Zoonau was just a way to get Pistachio’s attention, the Balrog had already succeeded. Therefore, it had no need to bash its way into Cashling homes. On the other hand, the Balrog reportedly enjoyed terrifying lesser creatures… like putting that statue of me precisely where I’d be startled to maximum effect. If the Balrog liked such cheap scare tactics, it might invade Cashling homes just to hear them squeal.

You demon, I mouthed again.

'Are you finished?' Li shouted in my ear.

'Yes, Ambassador.' I turned the activation dial on the relay. Immediately, life-sized hologram images of Li and Ubatu appeared on either side of me, projected by the relay’s black box. The images turned their heads back and forth, as if scanning the city… which is exactly what they were doing. Just as the relay projected images of the diplomats onto the streets of the city, it sent images of Zoonau back to Li and Ubatu — a two-way VR connection that would allow 'face-to-face' negotiations while the diplomats remained safe in the shuttle.

'Good afternoon, Balrog,' Li said, bowing toward the moss. The volume on his feed was now perfectly dulcet.

'Yes, good afternoon,' said Ubatu. She knelt, head bowed, and pressed her palms together in front of her chest — much more obsequious behavior than I expected from a professional diplomat. The moss beneath her hologram knees made no effort to get out of the way. Spores avoided contact with real people, but apparently didn’t bother to move for holos.

The diplomats began a prepackaged message of goodwill. While they talked, I looked down at my Bumbler. The blip showed that Tut was still running. Not as fast as before, but now he was traveling in a straight line. He must have clambered up into the network of ropes — they were the only straight thoroughfares in the city. It was perfectly possible Tut had hit the ropes just for the fun of swinging around like a monkey… but it was also possible he’d decided on a destination and was now taking the most direct route available.

That worried me.

Li and Ubatu were still talking. They’d got no response from the Balrog, but that didn’t slow them down. '…pleased for the opportunity on this historic occasion…' I slipped away, my boots making no sound on Zoonau’s pavement. When I looked down, I saw that my footfalls were being muffled by moss: the Balrog wasn’t getting out of my way, but was helping keep my escape silent.

To the best of my knowledge, I was the first person to walk on the Balrog without getting bitten. Such an unprecedented distinction filled me with dread.

As soon as I rounded a corner, the spores pulled back from my feet; once again, I was on bare pavement. It seemed the Balrog didn’t like being stepped on but had tolerated my boots in the interests of a quiet departure. I mouthed the question Why? but got no answer: just a mossy nudge against my leg, urging me forward. I began running.

At the next intersection, I checked my Bumbler for which way to turn. Tut’s blip was close to the heart of Zoonau. Since every knot city had the same general plan, I knew Tut must be approaching the central square, where the most prominent feature would be a ziggurat: a huge terraced pyramid with gardens at various levels, plenty of open areas for performances, and at the top, a raised pulpit where prophets could shout sermons to the populace. I could picture Tut jogging along the ropeways, heading for the pulpit where he’d… where he’d…

I couldn’t guess what he’d do. And I couldn’t get there in time to stop him. He was almost at his goal, while I was still blocks away.

But even as that thought sparked through my brain, a mass of spores rose before me, pushing up from the ground like a pantomime demon making its entrance through a trapdoor. The spores arranged themselves into a shapeless blob twice my height; then suddenly, the blob smoothed out into…

…a perfect moss-replica of my most recent egg sculpture. A tall slim egg with a single barred window, the bars wrapped with holy guardian snakes. One of the snakes lifted its head and winked at me; then the front of the egg swung open like a door, inviting me to step inside.

What’s this? I mouthed. A carriage? Once again, no answer… but the Balrog’s intent was obvious. It wanted me to climb into one of my Gotama prisons. Once I stepped inside, the door would lock behind me. Then I’d presumably be transported to Tut, carried into the city center fast enough to participate in whatever happened next. The Balrog was giving me a chance to make a difference in Zoonau’s fate.

But I knew this was more than an offer of transit. I had to make a choice: I could join forces with the Balrog, volunteering to help in whatever the mossy alien was up to… or I could walk away and forever hold my peace.

My teachers at the Academy had warned about such situations — when a smarter-than-human alien asked you to buy in or opt out. There was only one reason you’d ever be given such a yes-or-no choice: because you risked getting killed if you did what the alien wanted.

Suppose the Balrog foresaw such a threat to me. Then the League of Peoples demanded I be offered the chance to say no. Otherwise — if the spores just grabbed me against my will — the Balrog would be guilty of dragging me into a lethal situation without option of escape. In other words, murder. The Balrog would catch trouble from the League unless I willingly stuck my head in the noose.

Which was where I was at that moment. If I stepped into that big mossy egg, I doubted I’d have another chance to back out. These things were almost always onetime offers. Like swallowing a porcupine — once you started, you had to keep going till you got it all down.

I hesitated. League law said the Balrog couldn’t lure me into certain death — there had to be a chance I’d survive. Maybe a good chance. But there was also a chance I’d die. Too bad the Balrog wasn’t obliged to explain what the percentages were.

Whatever the chances were, I knew what I was going to do — not what I had to do, but what I would do.

One step forward… and the Balrog closed around me.

I half expected to be teleported straight to some final destination. Navy records reported Kaisho Namida jumping instantaneously from star system to star system, sometimes hundreds of light-years in a single bound. But my mossy carriage simply lifted a centimeter off the pavement and accelerated at a couple of Gs, soon skimming along at a pace my Bumbler reported as a kilometer a minute.

This gave me time to take readings — in particular, to see where Zoonau’s inhabitants had gone. I switched to an IR scan… and gasped as I saw a blaze of heat sources at the city center. A huge mob of Cashlings had gathered there. Thousands. Tens of thousands. The whole population of Zoonau? A moment later, data analysis gave me a tally: 91,734 Cashling heat signatures… and two humans. Two humans? Tut and who else? The second human wasn’t me — I hadn’t reached the square yet, so I wasn’t included in the count. Could there have been another human in Zoonau when the Balrog attacked?

Plenty of humans visited Cashleen, but almost all stayed in the planet’s capital, thousands of kilometers away. The capital was home to our Technocracy embassy… and humans usually stuck close to the embassy. Whatever your purpose for coming to Cashleen, the embassy staff were far more likely to provide useful assistance than any Cashling you might find. So who would have reason for coming to a backwater like Zoonau?

I winced as an answer came to me: someone from the embassy staff.

Zoonau had been attacked two hours ago: plenty of time for somebody to fly in from the capital. No embassy personnel had been sent to Zoonau officially — the powers that be wanted Pistachio to handle everything — but I could easily imagine an ambitious vice consul buzzing off to Zoonau as soon as the news came in. He or she could have reached the city before our landing party, hoping to win a career boost by dealing with the Balrog single-handed. It was just the sort of grandstanding maneuver one expected from success-hungry bureaucrats… and just the sort of rashness that made Explorers grind their teeth.

Now I had to deal with a madman and an intrusive amateur.

I heard the people in the square before I saw them: thousands of gabbling voices, loud despite the muffling moss on every echoing surface. Then my transport egg rounded a corner, and the crowd was directly before me. No one had stayed down on street level; they were all packed onto the ziggurat, trampling flowers in the terrace gardens, clogging the open areas, milling on the stairs. I counted eight levels to the ziggurat, all of them spacious by normal standards… but with more than ninety thousand Cashlings crammed onto a single building, it looked like a dangerous squeeze.

Why had they come to this central area? Only one answer. The Balrog herded them here. It had used its spores to push or intimidate people through the streets