Like most temples on Anicca, the Ghost Fountain Pagoda was ecumenical — open to Buddhists of every denomination, and anyone else who might drop by. We therefore shared the walkways with saffron-robed Theravada monks and nuns, their heads shaved and their begging bowls full of donations from sun-happy passersby… with hawkers selling favorite Mahayana icons — prints and holos and statuettes of the saintly Bodhisattvas who symbolize various virtues… with Vajrayana mystics engaged in their perennial rituals, spinning prayer wheels, banging drums, chalking impromptu mandalas on the pavement… and with those of my own school, Tarayana, "the starry vehicle," not monastic, populist, or mystic, but more oriented toward psychology. We Tarayana adherents were respectful but dubious about showy religious practices, and therefore kept a restrained distance from the temple’s more exuberant devotees. My mother (convinced as always that she was somehow exceptional, a jewel apart from the common crowd) disdained the "superstitious breast-beating and mumbo jumbo" of the older sects in favor of the "pure scientific spirituality" of our own. Sometimes I secretly felt the same, wondering what the no-nonsense Buddha would have thought of PARINIRVANA BRAND INCENSE-STICKS™ or the man and woman practicing Neo-Tantric sex in the middle of an open sunny glade; but I refused to admit I agreed with my mother on anything. I put money into every begging bowl we passed and bought a bag of pricey red sand to sprinkle ostentatiously on patches of gravel I pretended were especially holy.
The pagoda lay in the middle of the Arboretum of Heroes: a park with concentric rings of trees and statues. The statues (bronze, stone, plastic, ceramic) depicted noble figures from myth or history — great warriors, enlightened sages, and tragic martyrs. Many individuals had been all three; there’s nothing dearer to my people’s hearts than an admired soldier who refuses to break some minor Buddhist precept and, therefore, dies horribly. The more pain and mutilation, the better. In Eastern legends, death is always part of the story. Even if a hero dies peacefully at a ripe old age, you have to include that death as part of the hero’s tale. Many Western champions just vanish into the sunset or "live happily ever after," as if death passes them by… but in the stories I heard growing up, the time and manner of a hero’s death were never glossed over. Often, they were the whole point.
Which is why the trees surrounding the statues were Capsicillium croceum. The trees’ yellow chili-fruit contained a protein that acted as deadly nerve poison to most Terran creatures. You could always see animal corpses rotting in the shady groves — squirrels and sparrows, bees and butterflies, who’d nibbled on minichilis and died within seconds. Their decomposing bodies were left where they fell, as object lessons for people walking past: "One day, this will happen to you too." The trees bore death in small fruit clusters, just as the statues carried reminders of death in the stories they evoked.
In fact, the entire temple grounds whispered of things long departed. Millennia before humans colonized the planet, Anicca had housed an alien race whom archeologists called Las Fuentes. The temple had been built on the same land as a Fuentes town… yet little remained of Las Fuentes now but the minichili trees they planted wherever they settled. They’d inhabited more than ninety planets in this part of the galaxy — planets now belonging to the Technocracy, the Unity, and several other intelligent species — but Las Fuentes had ceased to be, some sixty-five hundred years ago.
They hadn’t eradicated themselves by the usual means: war, plague, or nanite disaster. They’d gone much more quietly and deliberately than that. Before they went, Las Fuentes had cleaned up almost all trace of their presence — their cities, their farms, even their garbage dumps and cemeteries, all reduced to a fine sandlike powder. The thoroughness of this erasure drove modern-day archeologists wild with frustration; Las Fuentes had left virtually nothing our scientists could study for clues to the past. Ninety planets empty except for a few bits of bric-a-brac, one or two broken pieces of furniture… and Capsicillium croceum. The trees the aliens had planted everywhere.
Las Fuentes left one other set of mementos. On each of their planets they’d built hundreds of simple stone fountains, plus a network of roads joining every fountain to its neighbors. The fountains and roads were left intact when Las Fuentes eradicated the rest of their civilization. Most experts thought the fountains had religious significance — so sacred they couldn’t be destroyed, even when Las Fuentes divested themselves of everything else. I had my doubts about that; I disliked how xenoanthropologists used "religious significance" to label every alien practice they didn’t understand. But many human worshipers thought the fountains had religious significance too. Elsewhere in the Technocracy, Christians had constructed churches at fountain sites, Hindus had set up shrines to Vishnu or Ganesha, and Santeria worshipers conducted midnight ceremonies beside fountains in the depths of jungles. On Anicca, almost every Fuentes fountain had an associated temple or lamasery… including the Ghost Fountain Pagoda, where the pagoda was built around such a fountain, and the "ghosts" were Las Fuentes themselves.
Not that Las Fuentes were extinct… at least not in the usual sense. As Mother and I entered the pagoda (where a giant golden Buddha with lotus-petal hair and clothes of saffron spider-silk smiled in the fountain’s bowl), we passed holo images of Las Fuentes as they are today: blobs of purple jelly that shone with UV-indigo light.
Sixty-five hundred years ago, Las Fuentes hadn’t died; they’d leapt up the evolutionary ladder to transcend normal flesh and blood. They’d become purple jelly-things that could teleport at will, foresee the future, manipulate objects through force of mind, and violate most of the laws of physics.
Were powers like that sufficient compensation for becoming grape jam? Looking at the blobby jelly holos in the pagoda, I wasn’t sure if the transformation had been a fair trade-off. But then, nobody was sure of anything when it came to Las Fuentes. For example, no one knew how they’d managed their ascension. Juggling their DNA? Downloading their consciousness into nanite subsystems? Impressing their intellects onto the universal background radiation? Technocracy scientists would dearly love to replicate the Fuentes uplift procedure… but because Las Fuentes had erased their culture so effectively, our experts had nothing to go on when trying to reproduce the technology.
The new jelly-form Fuentes refused to explain what they’d done. They seldom interacted with humans; they maintained an embassy on New Earth, but the doors were usually locked. Once in a while, a mound of shimmering purple would materialize in someone’s home, make a pronouncement, then disappear again… but the jelly-things never stayed long enough to be analyzed, and they definitely didn’t answer questions from "lower beings."
Rather like gods.
That’s one reason why Aniccans built a temple around a Fuentes fountain, and why we put purple jelly holos under the same roof as the Buddha himself. Powerful beings deserved acknowledgment. We didn’t worship Las Fuentes any more than we worshiped Buddha, but we liked having their images around for inspiration. Even my mother gave a little bow and chanted something softly as she passed the purple holos. A moment later, she said, "You pray too, Ma Youn. Maybe the spirits will heal your cheek."