But Tut never had the sense to leave well enough alone. Despite Festina’s warning, he prodded the predator lightly in its ribs. The animal’s mouth yawned open… but instead of biting off Tut’s foot, it gave a soft sigh. Steamlike vapors hissed from the beast’s maw — a cloud whose life force roiled with fury. It wreathed once around Tut’s body, possibly looking for something to EMP. I thought it would come for Festina and me next, shorting out another Bumbler, comm unit, and stun-pistol; but the cloud lingered with Tut, brushing (almost caressing) the masks he carried. I sensed the cloud’s emotions shifting from hostility to unbearable sorrow. Then the cloud shot away, rocketing down the street faster than any pseudosuchian could run. In a moment, it had disappeared into the depths of the city.
The three of us watched it vanish. Then Tut said, "Umm… did we just find out the EMP clouds can possess Muta’s minidinosaurs? Like, the clouds can make dinosaurs attack us?"
Festina and I nodded.
Tut beamed. "Cool!"
Using the Bumbler, I scanned for more predators. Nothing showed up on the readouts, but that didn’t mean much. The nearby buildings blocked X-rays, microwaves, terahertz radiation, and even radio — all the EM frequencies we used when looking for trouble. Fuentes construction materials seemed purposely designed to prevent the type of spying we wanted to do. It made sense that high-tech people would want their buildings opaque to prying eyes, but it put us at a disadvantage: more cloud-possessed carnivores might lurk down any side street, and the Bumbler wouldn’t know till we were within ambush range.
When I reported this to Festina, she just shrugged. "I’ve been checking the dirt on the street," she said. "No tracks of big nasties except the one that just attacked. Large predators don’t often come into this city."
"That makes sense," I replied. "Predators go where there’s prey. Prey usually means herbivores, and Drill-Press has nothing to attract plant-eaters." I gestured toward the bare, weedless streets. "No vegetation anywhere."
"You think the baby T. rex wandered here by accident?" Tut asked. "Or did the cloud possess Rexy out in the countryside, then force him to come to the city?"
"Good question," Festina said. "I wish I knew the answer. It’d be nice to know if the cloud could really seize animal minds and compel them to do things against their instincts… or if the cloud only nudged a predator who was already close by."
"Either way," Tut said, "it’s odd the cloud would be hostile… I mean, if it really is Var-Lann or one of the other Unity folks. Why would it make a Rexy attack us? Isn’t it obvious we’re here to help?"
"Who knows what’s obvious to a cloud?" Festina asked. "The Unity and Technocracy have never been friends. Maybe Team Esteem thinks we’re invading opportunists: trying to claim Muta now that it’s unoccupied."
I shook my head — remembering how Var-Lann’s life force had changed after he’d disintegrated. The man had showed no ill will toward us while he’d been alive. Once he became a cloud, however, his emotions changed as he grew frustrated at not being able to… to do something, I couldn’t tell what. Frustration had turned to outrage, outrage to fury, and fury to a berserk need to lash out at anyone who wasn’t suffering the same torment.
According to Aniccan lore, that sequence of emotions was the classic pattern for pretas. Ghosts might feel joy at the moment of death, either because they were released from the agony of dying or because they thought the afterlife would be some grand heaven that erased the discontent of living. Then they’d realize death wasn’t an escape from their pasts — that the seeds of karma continued to grow, that one didn’t achieve wisdom and tranquillity just because one stopped breathing. There’s no free ride, not even in the afterlife. So the exhilaration of supposed freedom would turn to rage at continuing slavery… the ghosts’ knowledge that they were still fettered by the decisions they’d made and the people they’d become as a consequence.
It took time for that rage to abate — time spent wandering through other realms of existence until the ghosts could stomach the notion of being reborn: until their anger burned out and they found themselves ready to take another try at life. That was the path the unenlightened dead always walked. So I wouldn’t have been surprised if the ghosts of Team Esteem felt such an overpowering resentment, they’d want to make trouble for any living person who came within reach. However, I wasn’t naive. Normal ghosts couldn’t touch our physical realm; they didn’t look like smoke, nor did they use dinosaurs to attack those whose hearts were still beating.
It was almost as if Var-Lann’s hypothesized bacterial defense system killed people and turned them into ghosts, but left them trapped in this realm of existence. Even if they wanted to move on, they couldn’t. They drifted as clouds of dissociated cells — cells with shadows in their chromosomes and murder in their hearts. The clouds carried enough electrical energy to short out machine circuits, and perhaps to goad primitive wildlife into fury; but they didn’t have enough energy to… they didn’t have the power to…
No. I still couldn’t figure out what was happening. But I thought I was on the right track, if I could just fill in some blanks. Perhaps Festina was thinking along the same lines. As I came to an impasse in my own thoughts, Festina sighed, and said, "No sense brooding. Let’s follow Team Esteem’s tracks and see what they were working on. Maybe that will give some answers."
The path worn by Team Esteem led to the center of town. It wasn’t a straight-line route — the streets never let you go farther than a block or two without running into a public square built around a statue or fountain or amphitheater, or maybe just a flat paved area closed in with ornate metalwork fencing — but the Unity team’s tracks circled these obstacles and continued forward till they reached the city’s core.
There, two bridges spanned the Grindstone a hundred meters apart… and built between the bridges, entirely above the water, was a graceful building radically different from the rest of the city’s architecture. There were no brash mosaics on this building’s walls, just an unadorned white surface that looked like polished alabaster but wasn’t: any natural stone exposed to the weather for sixty-five centuries couldn’t possibly retain such a mirror-smooth finish. The building was as glossy as a polished pearl. Unlike the squared-off high-rises elsewhere in the city, the river building’s exterior had no sharp edges — just flowing curves that arced from one bridge to the other, like a third elegant bridge constructed between two less eyecatching cousins. If laid out flat on the ground, the building would only be a single story tall. As it was, however, its rainbowlike arch lifted much higher over the river… maybe a full six stories above the water at the center of its span.
"Pretty," said Festina, "but impractical. What are the floors like inside? Are they bowed like the building itself? You’d have to bolt down the furniture to keep it from sliding downhill."
"Forget the drawbacks, Auntie," Tut said. "Think about the possibilities. Get a chair on wheels, take it to the middle of the arch, then ride it down the central hallway as fast as you can go. Bet you’d get awesome speed by the time you hit the bottom."
"What if there is no central hallway?" I asked. "Maybe the architecture is designed to prevent people go-carting on office chairs."
"Come on, Mom, what’s the point of building a place like that if you can’t go cannonballing down the middle? That’s just sick."