I reached into my mind once more, hoping the Balrog might hint what I should do next. No such hint came. I’d surrendered myself to the damned moss and got nothing in return. Blazing with anger, I yelled in my mind, What am I supposed to do? Kick the door in? I drew back my right foot and shot it out hard, aiming for the center of the door’s blank rectangular face.
Just before my kick made contact, some unexpected strength added itself to my own muscle power. Extra mass. Extra acceleration. Extra force.
Slam!
The door split in two, straight down the middle. My foot almost did the same. The boot of my tightsuit absorbed some fraction of the impact, but not nearly enough. With my sixth sense I could see bones splintering from my heel to my toes. I perceived the massive fracturing process in a clear-minded thousandth of a second before the pain made its way up my nervous system and struck the "What the hell did you just do?" part of my brain. I even had time to think, "I’m really going to hate this." Then, agony exploded with a bloody red splash, and there was nothing in my skull but torment.
CHAPTER 11
Niroda [Pali]: Cure; cessation of an illness. The Buddha’s third truth is that suffering ceases when you let go of your fixations.
I don’t think I passed out. If I did, it was only for a moment.
And I didn’t fall down. Festina and Tut caught me, holding me upright till the pain subsided and let self-control reassert itself over sheer animal anguish. The pain didn’t go away, but the shock did. In a few seconds, I could think again.
I said, "Ow."
"Yeah," Festina said, "I bet that sums it up."
"That was supreme, Mom!" Tut said. "You told me you were bioengineered, but I never guessed how much."
"Neither did I."
Despite my foot’s agony, the Balrog’s sixth sense hadn’t deserted me. It calmly reported thirty-seven full or partial fractures in the bones of my right foot and lower leg. It also disclosed a flurry of alien activity: Balrog spores at work on the injuries. For a moment, I hoped they’d repair all the cracked and shattered bones… but no. The Balrog was no magic spirit who’d graciously make my injuries vanish. The Balrog didn’t give miracles for free; it always exacted a price.
So the bones remained broken, but spores took their place, cramming themselves together so tightly they assumed a solidity almost as strong as my original skeletal structure. Other spores sealed off the lacerated blood vessels sliced open by sharp bone fragments, while still more spores assembled themselves as surrogate tendons, ligaments, and cartilage. The result would be sturdy enough to walk on. It would not, however, be sturdy enough to kick through another door. Moss packed tightly is still just moss.
I thought of Kaisho Namida, her entire lower body turned to spores. Mentally, I asked the Balrog, Did you eat her the same way? Did she trade herself for favors bit by bit? Did she accumulate injuries, accidentally or on purpose, and little by little she made deals to have you replace her original tissues?
No answer, of course. Nothing but raging pain. The Balrog had supplanted my bones and stopped my bleeding, but it hadn’t quieted the neurons that shrieked in outrage at so much physical trauma. Oh for Buddha’s sake, I thought in exasperation, just eat the nerves and get it over with.
The pain stopped immediately. That’s what happens when a bunch of neurons get devoured and replaced by spores.
Oddly enough, my sixth sense said the foot still looked normal… at least outwardly. The skin hadn’t been broken. The displacement of the underlying bones had somehow been concealed — probably by spores eating away any outjuts and fragments that would have spoiled the foot’s external appearance. All signs of damage had been forcibly eradicated.
But the foot was no longer mine. It had become alien territory.
"I’m all right," I lied as I pushed myself away from Tut and Festina. I took an experimental step. There was no muscle feeling in my foot, but my extended mental awareness let me compensate. I wasn’t receiving the usual body-position information along my foot’s neural pathways, but my sixth sense provided a different sort of kinesthetic feedback that made up for the loss. When I set my foot on the ground, I didn’t feel the foot touch down, I simply knew it.
That sounds as if I were experiencing things secondhand — watching my foot like a stranger’s. Not so. I experienced the movement more directly: no longer distanced by my limited nervous system or the simplification of sensation and the lag time needed for neural impulses to spark up my leg to my brain. Now I perceived my foot without any neural mediation… as if I’d previously been living my life at some remove, but finally I was fully present in one part of my body.
Pity the foot wasn’t part of my body anymore. This new mystic sense of immediacy, comprehending my foot as it really was rather than what my fallible neurons said secondhand… wasn’t that just another Balrog deception? A trick to make me think I’d gained when I’d actually been diminished?
My foot was now alien tissue. It would never be me again. And for what? So I could kick in a door?
"There’d better be something damned interesting in there," I muttered. Walking on my nonfoot, I went inside.
At first glance, the storage building looked like any other: lots of small boxes on shelves, a few larger crates on the floor, and stasis-field mirror-spheres all over the place. Some of the spheres were as small as my fist, while others were big enough to come up to my chin as they sat on the ground. My sixth sense couldn’t penetrate the spheres — their interiors were separate little universes, removed mathematically if not physically from our own — but I assumed they held food, pharmaceuticals, batteries, and all the other perishables Camp Esteem might need.
Bad assumption.
Festina crouched near one of the biggest spheres and pointed to marks on the ground. The floor itself was gray concrete; the marks were flakes of white, turning brown around the edges. They looked like bits of dry leaves strewed across the cement. "You’ve got the Bumbler," Festina said to me. "What’s this?"
I glanced at the analyzer’s readout. Did a double take and checked again. Turned a few dials, then swallowed. "It’s human skin," I said. "Sort of."
"What do you mean, sort of?"
"The cells have twenty-four chromosome pairs rather than twenty-three."
"So the skin came from a Unity member rather than plain old Homo sapiens."
"Also," I said, "the chromosome pairs aren’t pairs. One chromosome in each pair is human. The other isn’t."
"You mean the other chromosomes contain alien DNA?" Tut looked over my shoulder at the readouts. He was, after all, a microbi specialist… but I doubted even he could make sense of the Bumbler’s finding.
"The other chromosomes aren’t alien DNA," I told Festina. "They aren’t even ordinary matter. It’s like each human chromosome has acquired a shadow. The shadow has the same shape, size, and mass as the real chromosome, but it’s something the Bumbler can’t register. Like there’s a normal chromosome, then beside it, there’s a chromosome-shaped hole in reality."