On Muta, rampaging octopi wouldn’t be an immediate problem; the Unity had located their settlements well away from ocean shores until they could explore the marine world in depth. But the seas weren’t the only unexamined source of hazard. There were also vast numbers of unknown microbes living in the atmosphere, water, and soil. The teams had done their best with their limited time and resources — almost a third of the people on Muta were studying microscopic life-forms — but there was so much to learn, they could easily miss some microbial species that was lethal to human life.
On the other hand, microbial action was unlikely to silence everyone on every survey team simultaneously. The teams were spread all over the planet, in widely dissimilar ecosystems. Different microbes would be present in different proportions, growing at different speeds under different conditions in different individuals. How could natural germ activity strike down everyone in the same instant?
And if not natural germ activity, what about unnatural? Deliberate bioweapons. That was also possible. At the Academy, we studied a recent bioengineered plague on the planet Demoth. The plague organisms had been created by nanotech "death factories" left over from a long-dead culture that had destroyed itself through germ warfare… and even though the aliens who made the factories had died millennia ago, the factories were still perfectly capable of analyzing Homo sapiens and producing a lethal disease precisely tailored to human metabolisms.
Thinking about that plague, I remembered something important about Demoth’s epidemic. The source of the disease had been discovered by a karmic avalanche named Festina Ramos.
I glanced at her grim face. Was she tortured by the possibility that history was repeating itself?
On Demoth, the plague had claimed sixty million lives.
A lot of death. A lot of death.
At six o’clock ship’s time, Captain Cohen was called away to talk with the Executive Officer — routine business about the next day’s arrival at Muta. Festina took the interruption as an excuse to adjourn our "conference"… not that we’d been conferring much. We’d read the files in silence, Festina and I concentrating on planetological data while the others went through daily logs and personnel reports. Ubatu and Li got the occasional snicker from what the Unity chose to record ("Lieutenants Yardley and Juarez fined ten credits for disturbing the peace through contentious disputes on the taxonomy of slime molds"), but none of us found any glaring clues to Muta’s hidden danger.
In retrospect, we shouldn’t have expected obvious warning signs. Unity surveyors were smart and cautious. If they’d run into overt prospects of danger, they’d quickly evacuate their settlements. Even if they didn’t have a luna-ship waiting to take them away, each team had an emergency escape shuttle that could blast off from the surface and go into stable orbit until help arrived. According to the files we’d received, all those shuttles were still on the ground. The teams had been completely blindsided — they hadn’t seen what kind of trouble they were in, and, reading their records, neither could we.
So the meeting broke up. Li and Ubatu invited Festina to dinner in the VIP suite, but she said she wanted to inspect Pistachio’s landing equipment. When the diplomats had gone, however, she sat back down in her chair. "Youn Suu?"
"Yes?"
"How do you feel now?"
"No different than usual," I said. Which was true. Whatever the Balrog might be doing to me, I couldn’t sense the changes… any more than I could tell if my "memories" of the aliens at the pagoda were real or artificially constructed.
"Have you checked yourself with a Bumbler?" Festina asked.
I nodded. "The Balrog has spread everywhere."
"If I were in your position," Festina said, "I’d be terrified. Probably screaming my lungs out."
"I doubt that."
"Oh, I wouldn’t scream out loud. But inside my head…" Festina shrugged, then gave a bitter smile. "Inside my head, I’d beat myself up — saying a normal person would scream and what was wrong with me that I never had normal reactions? But I’d still feel like shit."
"I feel like shit too," I assured her.
"Good." She smiled. "That’s a normal reaction." Then she said, "You know I can’t trust you, right?"
I suppressed a shiver. "I don’t trust myself."
"And that partner of yours…" Festina made a dismissive gesture. "When we get to Muta, I’m tempted to go down solo. I’m the only one I do trust."
My turn to make a dismissive gesture. "But you can’t go solo because it violates regulations. No one can go into danger alone when other Explorers are available as backup."
"The precise words of the regulation are ‘when other competent Explorers are available as backup.’ Between myself, Captain Cohen, and Pistachio’s doctor, I’m sure we could find grounds to declare you and Tut unfit for duty."
"I don’t doubt it." I looked at her. "But you aren’t going to do that?"
She shook her head. "The Balrog clearly wants to take part in this mission. If I said no, it would find a way to tag along in spite of me — probably by taking over your body and doing something drastic."
A prickle of fear went through me. "That would be bad."
"I agree. So I’ll let you come to Muta. I just won’t trust you." She looked at me with sad eyes. "Which means I’ve already ordered the ship-soul not to let you near the Explorer equipment rooms unless I’m there to watch you. I can’t take the chance that the Balrog will use you to sabotage our gear. I have previous experience with the goddamned moss. It likes to play games."
Festina waited for me to say something. I didn’t. After a moment, she said, "If it’s any consolation, I’ve told the ship-soul to keep Tut out too."
"Will you let him go with us to Muta?"
"I haven’t decided. Do you want him along?"
"Yes. He’s part of this too."
"Is that Youn Suu speaking or the Balrog?"
"I don’t know." I took a breath. "From this point on, I’ll never know who’s speaking, will I?"
"No. You won’t." Festina lowered her eyes in thought, drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair. "Okay," she finally said, "I’ll give Tut the choice. This is a dangerous mission — possibly lethal. He can decide for himself whether he’ll volunteer."
I thought about the Balrog giving me a similar choice down in Zoonau. If I’d known what it would entail… suddenly I was conscious of the tiny pain from the wounds on top of my feet.
Festina must have seen some change in my face because she asked, "Is there anything I can do?"
An idea popped into my mind: a way to check whether the pagoda incident actually happened. "Arrange for me to call my mother," I said. "Tonight. A direct link as soon as possible."
"I can authorize that." The navy seldom allowed direct calls home, but the great Admiral Ramos could undoubtedly pull strings to circumvent the bureaucracy. "Anything else?" she asked.
"Yes. Kill me if I start talking like a brainwashed zombie in love with the damned moss."
"Do you think that might happen?"
"I have no idea what I think. I don’t even know who’s thinking." My eyes felt hot. Before I embarrassed myself by crying, I walked stiffly from the room.
CHAPTER 6
Dharma [Sanskrit]: A word with many meanings, all related to "truth." In Gotama’s time, any teaching was called a dharma — the teacher’s view on what was and wasn’t true. Subsequently, Dharma (often capitalized) came to mean the Buddha’s teachings in particular. Dharma can also mean the whole of reality: the ultimate truth of the universe.