"Oh," said Li. "Those bastards. Useless."
He sat back in his chair as if he’d lost interest. I suppose from a diplomat’s point of view, the modern Fuentes were useless. They refused to trade with humans, they wouldn’t talk about science, and they seldom even shared tidbits of information about the galaxy and its inhabitants. "Las Fuentes may not interact much with humans," I said (trying to suppress my true/false memory of meeting a Fuentes at the temple), "but they’re still important to the Technocracy. We know of many alien species beyond human level, but Las Fuentes are the only ones who ascended within reachable history. Not long ago, they were at the same evolutionary level we are now. Then they developed some process that let them become something superior."
Li rolled his eyes. "I don’t consider purple jelly my superior."
Ubatu muttered, "I consider orange marmalade your superior."
"Now, now," Captain Cohen said.
"The point is," I said, "of all the races above us on the evolutionary ladder, Las Fuentes are the most recent to climb there. If you count 4000 B.C. as recent."
"Actually," Festina said, "the most recent Fuentes ascension was two years ago. I was there."
She’d spoken softly — a quiet statement that caught the rest of us off guard. I felt my automatic "freeze reflex" kick in again… just for an instant, then it was gone. Li opened his mouth, then shut it. Ubatu’s mouth was open too; her hand came up to cover it.
"Admiral," Cohen said, "you’d better tell us about it."
"I met some Fuentes," Festina said. "Possibly the only two left who hadn’t ascended."
Li and Ubatu leaned forward eagerly, but Cohen and I eased back in our chairs as if we were about to hear bad news. I don’t know why the difference. Maybe because diplomats treat secrets like currency — the more they have, the more they can spend at opportune moments — but captains and Explorers treat secrets like bombs to be disarmed: nobody tells us classified information until it’s festered into a crisis we’re expected to fix.
"When the majority of Fuentes transformed themselves," Festina said, "a few couldn’t bring themselves to take the plunge. Too afraid of radical change. Personally, I don’t blame them. Who wouldn’t be horrified by the thought of becoming a mound of jelly? I’d consider it healthy to say, ‘Fuck that,’ and get on with your life.
"But those who refused to ascend," she said, "never forgot what they’d turned down. It must have preyed on their minds constantly; they just couldn’t get past it. I suppose they might have been lonely — missing the world and the people they’d known. Perhaps they also suffered from survivor guilt… or shame. Anyway, the holdouts never made anything of themselves; they just wandered the galaxy in the last Fuentes starship, no purpose but listless survival. The only work they could bring themselves to do was to sabotage up-and-coming races they thought might eventually become threats… but even for that, they couldn’t muster much energy. As if they’d died when the rest of their kind ascended.
"So one by one, the remaining Fuentes gave in. They still had the means to transform themselves; and each year, a few of the holdouts decided that risking change was better than centuries of going nowhere. By the time I found where they’d been hiding, there were only two left — two pathetic specimens. Physically, they were fine, even after six millennia. Las Fuentes must have had superb antiaging treatments. But mentally… what would you expect from creatures who’d lived a hundred lifetimes in fear of taking a leap of faith? I admire caution, but eventually one’s spirit shrivels. The last two Fuentes were the most soul-shriveled beings I’ve ever encountered."
"But they eventually ascended?" Ubatu asked.
"Eventually." Festina spoke the word as if there was a great deal more to the story but she preferred not to go into details.
"How?" Li asked. "Did you see the process?"
Festina nodded. "You probably know Las Fuentes left thousands of fountains behind. Those fountains produced a fluid called blood honey. Bathing in the fluid brought on the transformation."
"They changed into purple jelly?"
"They changed into creatures who looked like jelly, given our limited vision." Festina shrugged. "I’ve met a number of elevated beings; none looked like much to human eyes. Does that mean ascended creatures aren’t impressive? Or could it be that Homo sapiens aren’t perceptive enough to see what’s really there?"
Li made his usual face of disgust. He clearly hated any suggestion that humans weren’t the crowning glory of the universe; but he was reluctant to contradict the celebrated Admiral Ramos. Instead, he changed the subject. "So these fountains," he said. "They’re the key to the transformation. Have we studied them?"
Festina shook her head. "They’ve been dry for thousands of years. Nothing left to study… except for the one used by the Fuentes I met."
"And what about that fountain?"
"It’s no longer available."
We waited for her to explain. She didn’t. In the silence, a thought struck me; I did a quick search on our files. "There were no fountains on Muta," I said. "At least none found by the Unity."
"Interesting," Festina said. She sat back in her chair with a pensive look.
"These Fuentes," Cohen said. "We had a lot of their fountains on my home planet… but nothing else. Before they ascended, they cleaned up, right? Pulverized all traces of their civilization?"
Festina nodded.
"But Muta has ruins," Cohen continued, "as if the Fuentes didn’t have time to clean up. They just left things as is."
"I see where you’re heading," Ubatu said. "We know there’s something dangerous on Muta — something that attacked the Greenstriders and the Unity. So maybe it attacked the Fuentes too. They might have started some settlements, built things up for a few years, then suddenly got taken by surprise."
"Right," Cohen said. "And this happened before the Fuentes began their process of ascension — before they built the fountains, which is why there aren’t any fountains on Muta. Later, when the Fuentes were cleaning up in preparation for ascension, they couldn’t erase their abandoned colony on Muta because they were too afraid of whatever was on the planet."
Ubatu nodded. "That’s why there are Fuentes ruins on Muta, unlike everywhere else. They didn’t dare go back to clean up."
"It’s possible," Festina admitted. "But if so, I’m more worried than ever. Sixty-five hundred years ago, Las Fuentes were much more advanced than we are. The few Fuentes artifacts that survive are technologically superior to anything we have now. If Las Fuentes had such high tech and were still scared of whatever’s on Muta, we’re really going to have our hands full."
So what else is new? I thought.
We studied the files for several more hours but found no hints of what might lurk down on Muta. The Unity had been thorough in their investigations; they’d checked as many possibilities as time and personnel allowed, yet they’d turned up no unusual threats.
Of course, their knowledge had gaps. For one thing, the files contained almost nothing on activities in the past six months. That was how long it had been since the last luna-ship visited the planet and received downloads of survey team findings. It would have been nice to know what the teams were doing just before they went non-comm… but the Unity swore they didn’t have that information.
Perhaps, as Li suspected, the Unity was hiding something from us. Or perhaps we’d received everything the Unity had, and it just wasn’t as much as we hoped. A handful of survey teams can’t possibly learn all about a planet in just a few years. For example, the Unity knew almost nothing about Muta’s oceans: a serious problem, considering that three-quarters of the planet’s surface was covered with salt water. I couldn’t help remembering the Technocracy planet Triomphe, which once housed three hundred thousand human colonists… until an army of intelligent octopi had emerged from the deeps to exterminate every man, woman, and child.