Or maybe naked men looked better when there was music.
We started walking. My sixth sense was still shut down — deactivated since that moment I’d been surrounded by the cloud and felt its torment, like hungry ghosts. I considered asking the Balrog to activate the sense again… but as that thought went through my mind, something crunched underfoot. An insect? Or just a plant. Probably an insect. Since I didn’t want to think of all the bugs I’d kill en route to the camp, I decided to hold off on life-force awareness for a while.
Besides, I had enough trouble concentrating on my own life force. Even with the helmet removed, my suit was torturously hot. I’d left my parachute where we’d landed, but I still carried a lot of gear, including the four stasis cases strapped to my chest. Back on Pistachio, they hadn’t seemed that heavy. Now… ugh. Maybe Muta’s gravity was stronger than normal.
(Rookie that I was, I hadn’t even looked at the planet’s grav readings. I’d assumed if the Unity planned to settle here, the G-pull was close to Earth-standard. A stupid beginner’s mistake. I’d have to get the numbers from Tut when Festina wasn’t within earshot. Tut wouldn’t chew me out for neglecting crucial data, but Festina would flay me alive.)
The climb up the rise wasn’t difficult — just hot. And smelly. Every frond of Mutan vegetation had a mustardlike scent: sometimes sharp, sometimes subtle, but always there. These plants hadn’t yet learned the trick of using perfumes to attract insect pollinators, so their odor was just an unintentional side effect of biochemistry. I assumed the mustard fragrance came from some chemical every plant shared, the way Earth plants all have a whiff of chlorophyll. The smell was so pervasive, the Unity survey teams surely must have investigated it and figured out what the chemical was… but I couldn’t remember reading anything in the data they sent us. In fact, I couldn’t remember a single thing about the ubiquitous mustard aroma.
Uh-oh.
Aloud, I said, "The Unity reports didn’t mention the mustard smell."
Festina stopped dead in the middle of the trail. "You’re right. Nothing about smell. Do you think those bastards edited their reports? Or held data back, even when they said they were sharing everything?"
Behind me, Tut laughed. "Don’t get upset, Auntie. The Unity just can’t smell."
Festina and I said in unison, "What?"
Tut laughed again. "They can’t smell. Not a single one of them. Cut it right out of their genome."
"You’re kidding," I said.
"Nope. Back in the early days, they decided maybe they should heighten their sense of smell — augment it the way they augmented their muscles and brainpower. They should have known better. A lot of them live in these luna-ships, right? Millions of people packed together. The smell’s bad enough for normal senses, but augment everyone’s nosepower a few hundred times, and it made for disaster. Not to mention they got a side effect: everyone’s response to human pheromones shot sky-high. The anger pheromones, the sex pheromones…" Tut giggled. "Must have been fun. Anyway, the bigwigs admitted they’d screwed up… so you know the Unity, they overreacted the other way. Genetically altered all future generations to remove the nerves for both the olfactory cells and the VMO."
"Good thinking," I said. "That way when something catches fire, they can’t smell the smoke."
"They have mechanical sensors for smoke," Tut replied. "Computerized sniffers, a thousand times more sensitive than normal noses. The Unity got good at artificial olfactory simulation."
"How do you know all this?" Festina asked. "I’ve never heard it before… and I thought I was well-informed on our ally races."
"The Unity are close-mouthed about certain things," Tut told her. "Things you only find out if you live with them."
"You lived with the Unity?"
He tapped his gold-plated face. "How do you think I got this? The Technocracy doesn’t do face stuff, does it? Not for potential Explorers. If you got an Explorer face, no one in the Technocracy dares fix it." Tut shrugged. "So when I was sixteen, I ran off to the Unity. Got myself gilded, then spent three hundred and sixty-four days in a luna-ship before they kicked me out — some law against outsiders living with them a whole year. But I learned a lot of secrets. They confided in me. They liked me."
Festina looked as if she doubted that last statement. I, however, believed it. The Unity’s overregimented goody-goodies might find Tut refreshing — like a court jester. He said things no one else would, but spontaneously, not just to be shocking. Tut was odd without being threatening. As a bonus, he was living proof of the Unity belief that Technocracy people were lunatics. I could see Unity folks being charmed by Tut the way rich urbanites might be charmed by country bumpkins. Sophisticates love artlessness.
"So what else do you know about the Unity?" I asked.
"Hard to make a list, Mom. But I’ll tell you the most important: they stopped being human centuries ago. Don’t even have the same number of chromosomes; they got twenty-four pairs now instead of our twenty-three. That extra chromosome contains a bunch of new features they wouldn’t talk about, not even to me." He smiled a golden smile. "But hey, I was sixteen, and so busy getting laid, I didn’t ask a lot of questions. They all wanted a night with me, Mom… partly because I was a different species, so no chance of them getting pregnant. And I was forbidden fruit, you know? Sex with me was exotic and perverse and-"
"We get the picture," Festina interrupted.
"Bet you don’t. They’re all augmented, right? So both the men and the women-"
"We get the picture" Festina repeated… which was half a lie, because I didn’t get the picture at all. If we found any corpses at Camp Esteem, I intended to check their anatomies.
The camp lay before us as we topped the rise: huts lining the ridge, larger buildings a short distance beyond. "Check the huts first," Festina said. "Look for bodies or signs of disturbance. We’ll be more thorough later, but right now we’re just checking for survivors."
I headed for the closest hut, but Tut stayed where he was. "Hey!" he yelled. "Unity people! Anybody home?"
Festina turned to me. "You know, shouting never crossed my mind."
"Tut tends to be direct," I told her. "Also insane."
"Well… making noise shouldn’t matter. That cloud thing already knows we’re here."
I nodded, then called, "Come on, Tut. Let’s check the huts."
He hollered once more, "Anybody hear me?" No response in the camp, except from a small brown lizard that scurried away from the noise. "Okay, Mom," Tut said, "I’ll help look around. But it sure seems like nobody’s home."
Tut was right: nobody was home. He took the four huts in the middle of the line, Festina took the four on the north, and I took the four to the south. We found no survivors, and no corpses either — just empty living quarters, with no indication of trouble.
Each hut had a bed, a closet, and a desk, plus a utility table whose contents varied by team member. One person’s table supported an electron microscope; another had a collection of soil samples; a third had a megarack of computer memory bubbles, while the last hut I looked in had dozens of small, mirrored stasis fields. (I cracked a sphere open. It held a partly dissected beetle.) The huts displayed military neatness, diminished only by a few last-moment touches of disarray from people hurrying to get to breakfast on time. A jacket tossed over the back of a chair. Wrinkles on the coverlet, where someone sat down after making the bed and didn’t straighten the sheets after standing up. An orange fern leaf on the floor — maybe blown in by the wind, maybe tracked in on somebody’s boot.