One lay unmoving on a sweat-soaked bed. She had no Balrog marks on her feet; no spores anywhere on her body. She wasn’t breathing: dead but cleansed. No Balrog. No prison.
The second Youn Suu was half-eaten: moss from the waist down, just like Kaisho, but with the left leg severed short at the knee and an abundance of blood-raked scratches wherever human flesh remained. This one was alive. Her eyes were open. She smiled, as if pleased with her cannibalized state. Delighted to be the Balrog’s banquet.
Were these the only alternatives? Or was there a final version of Youn Suu: one who’d escaped the cosmic wheel and so wasn’t here on display. A Youn Suu beyond the wheel’s grasp… beyond the endless repetitions… beyond the prisons, beyond the Balrog, beyond all chains and fetters.
Dead or alive, the only Youn Suu worth striving for.
A choice was made; and who knows what did the choosing? Certainly not a girl named Youn Suu. All possible versions of her were locked in prisons of the wheel… not standing outside, looking on, assessing options. There was no Youn Suu free to make a choice.
And yet, a choice was made.
I awoke shivering.
The bedclothes were clammy. The air smelled of vomit and urine. When I moved, I could feel crusty deposits flaking off from my chest and upper arms. The taste in my mouth was so vile I gagged; I might have thrown up again on the spot except there was nothing left in my stomach.
But I was alive.
The red dots had disappeared from my feet. Healed over. The cabin lay in total blackness. I thought of asking the room to turn on the lights, but decided I didn’t want to see the mess I’d made. Instead, I walked lumpenly to the washroom and rinsed my mouth ten or twenty times.
"Balrog?" I said in the darkness. "Did I make another choice? Was that what the dream was about?"
No answer. Never an answer.
I washed myself off in the shower, scrubbing with all my strength. Then I went back to the bed, gathered up the sheets, and washed them in the shower too until the smell of soap overcame the reek of bodily fluids. As for the bed itself, I offered my thanks to whoever decreed that navy mattresses should be one hundred percent waterproof — able to be cleaned with a damp cloth. I wiped the mattress down, then sat at my desk to give everything a chance to dry.
Through all this, I hadn’t turned on the lights. I didn’t need to. Despite the utter darkness, I could make my way without stumbling. I knew the exact position of every object in the room. If I concentrated, I knew the location of individual dust motes in the air. I didn’t sense them; I just knew. And this time, I didn’t tell the Balrog to take away its gift of inhuman perception. Keeping the room pitch-black was comforting after I’d almost died.
"I did almost die," I said to the Balrog. "Right? And you let me decide… or did you? Was it just another trick to seduce me?"
The vision I’d had — an infinite wheel of Youn Suu lives from countless cycles of time — accorded exactly with the teachings I’d learned while growing up. Exactly. As if the Balrog plucked images from my mind and built a cosmic experience tailored to my expectations. And the decision I’d made (if I really did make a decision… and what had I decided?)… did the decision save my life? Or would the Balrog have kept me alive anyway? It controlled my body. It could suppress my deadly fever if it chose. The Balrog might have started the fever in the first place, so it could give me a taste of what I thought Ultimate Enlightenment would be like.
I couldn’t trust anything I’d just been through. Wasn’t this precisely the way nefarious cult leaders won converts? Wear down the target’s physical resistance with fatigue, starvation, and fever. Orchestrate experiences that brought on heightened emotional states. Wait for the target to embrace offered truths and fall deliriously in love with the guru himself… or in this case, the guru itself. An alien known for playing games with lesser creatures.
"I’m tired," I told the Balrog. "If you’re going to keep toying with me, save it till tomorrow."
Within minutes, I’d fallen asleep in the chair. No dreams. When I opened my eyes, it was morning.
CHAPTER 8
Shunyata [Sanskrit]: The trait of being transitory and interconnected with other things. No thing is absolute or complete in itself. Where, for example, is a chair’s chairness? Not in any of its parts: a chair leg is not a chair; a backrest is not a chair. But even a complete assemblage of chair parts is not enough for chairness. Chairs can be chairs only in appropriate environments — they need gravity, a species whose anatomy can fit into the chair, and various other external conditions. Chairness is therefore not a property of a particular object, but a set of relationships between the object and external factors. This quality is shunyata… often translated as "emptiness." In isolation, a chair may exist as an object but it’s "empty." Chairness arises only when the object relates in a specific way to the rest of the world.
I ate more that breakfast than at any other meal in my life. And I’d never been a hesitant eater: my high-powered gene-spliced metabolism always needed plenty of fuel. But that morning, I surpassed all previous records. I just couldn’t stop shoveling in food.
The phrase "eating for two" kept echoing in my head. I pictured the Balrog siphoning off my intake, not letting a single mouthful reach my stomach… but even that image wasn’t enough to slow me down. I remained so hungry I found myself casting ardent looks at the mess’s meat section — bacon, sausage, kippers, and slabs of dead animal I couldn’t even identify — to the point where I might have renounced my lifelong vegetarianism if Tut hadn’t walked in the door.
He was looking surprisingly dapper, with his face burnished far beyond his usual shiny-finey standards. Gold glinted like pure rich honey under the mess’s bright morning lights; either Tut had found some new metal polish or he’d spent untold hours buffing it to a perfect mirror surface.
"Hey, Mom," he said, "I’ve been looking for you. Were you messing with the door to the equipment room? It’s locked, and it won’t let me in."
"Festina did that. Admiral Ramos. She won’t let us near the equipment, for fear we’d do something bad."
Tut made a noise like his feelings had been hurt. I told him, "Don’t pout, it’s mostly me she mistrusts. Or rather, the Balrog inside me."
"Huh." He looked down at the dishes all around my place at the table. There was nothing for him to steal this time — I’d eaten everything and practically licked the plates clean. "So when do we get to this planet?" he asked.
I tongued a control on the roof of my mouth. In the bottom corner of my right eye, a digital time readout appeared. "We’ll be there in two hours," I told him. "Do you know what we’re doing once we arrive?"
"Auntie gave me the basics last night. Mystery threat. Search for survivors. Save anyone we find. I’m also supposed to stun the knickers off you if the Balrog tries any tricks."
"Good luck. You’ll need it."
My sixth sense was still in perfect working order; I hadn’t asked the Balrog to turn it off after the previous night. Not only did I know the position of everything near me, including objects behind my back and out of sight around corners, but I’d begun perceiving life forces again. If Tut decided to shoot me, his intention would ring out loud and clear from his aura: enough warning to let me dodge, or even shoot him first.
It seemed unfair, in a way — having this extra edge over Tut’s mere human perceptions. But if I asked the Balrog to turn the sixth sense off, what good would that do? The Balrog itself would still have its full mental awareness; Tut and everyone else would still be at a disadvantage relative to the spores. So why should I blind myself when it wouldn’t help anyone? Staying augmented put me on a more even footing with the moss inside me. It might even give me the strength to resist any power plays the Balrog might attempt.