"He was chanting," I said. "Bad poetry. He did the same at Camp Esteem while he was wearing a bear mask. I thought he’d fallen into a trance… like in a Unity mask ritual. Did you ever go to a mirror dance, Tut?"
"Hundreds," he said. "Now there’s where you don’t remember stuff."
Festina frowned. "And you’re good at going into trances?"
"I’m a natural-born expert."
"Lovely." She rocked back off her knees and onto her feet. "I have no idea if you were really possessed, but I don’t want a repeat performance. Who knows what you’d do?"
"Aww, come on, Auntie, I wouldn’t hurt a gnat."
"Some things I prefer not to test."
She raised her gaze to the sky. Clouds had begun to build above the southern horizon. They weren’t active storm clouds, but they were the leading edge of the front that carried the storm with it. We had maybe two hours left before bad weather hit.
"Let’s find a place for the night," Festina said, raising her voice so Li and Ubatu could hear. "Somewhere we won’t get drenched in the downpour. Come morning, we’ll see what we can do about getting off this planet."
"I’m not staying in that Unity camp," Li told her. "They impregnate their quarters with all kinds of chemicals."
He was partly correct — we’d detected insect repellents, flame retardants, wood-smell perfume, etc., in the Unity huts — but I knew Li wasn’t talking about conventional additives. Urban myths about the Unity ran rampant in the Technocracy; one rumor said Unity people filled their homes with mutagens in the hope that random jolts to their DNA would accelerate their evolution.
Of course, that was nonsense. Unity folk tampered with their genomes incessantly, but never by happenstance. The Unity mistrusted spontaneity.
"If you don’t like the Unity camp," Festina told Li, "we’ll search for quarters in Drill-Press. There must be something appropriate. Clean and dry and safe."
"I don’t know, Auntie," Tut said. "How will we find anywhere good when Bumblers can’t scan the buildings? And how will we get inside? The places are probably locked."
Festina picked up the nearby metal cutters and crowbar. "I don’t know how we’ll find a place, but getting past locks won’t be a problem."
Festina had said we wanted somewhere "clean and dry and safe." Not so easy to locate. We’d thought, for example, that anything above the ground floor would be safe from Rexies, since pseudosuchians weren’t built for climbing stairs. Unfortunately, neither were the Fuentes — with their rabbitlike haunches, they’d come from burrowing ancestors very different from our own tree-climbing forebears. Instead of stairs, Drill-Press’s buildings had wide welcoming ramps, providing straightforward access for Rexies as well as Fuentes.
Similarly, the city was short on "clean and dry." As my sixth sense had already noticed, most available rooms were coated with mold and fungi. "Dry" was out of the question — humidity had penetrated everywhere, rising off the river, spread by spring floods, never going away. Even some distance from the river, Drill-Press simmered in moist boggy air. When the Fuentes lived here, every building must have bristled with dehumidifiers. Six and a half millennia later, all such gadgets were out of commission, and the skyscrapers had devolved into permanent rising damp.
As for "clean"… there, we got lucky. Most housing had been swallowed by beds of swampy fuzz, but a few buildings were so larded with chemical fungicides and brews of biological toxins that local bacilli and thallophytes had never established a foothold. Such places were probably built for people with extreme allergies or germ phobias; every city in the Technocracy had a few "ultrahygienic" residences for those with health problems (real or imagined), so why shouldn’t the Fuentes have some too? Long-term exposure to alien bactericides struck me as a really bad idea, but one night wouldn’t be too risky. I hoped. So when my sixth sense detected a building so chock-full of germ killers, weed killers, bug killers, and other poisons that it had stayed unbesmirched for sixty-five hundred years, I surreptitiously steered our party in that direction. ("Let’s try down this block." After we’d passed four buildings whose lobbies were puffy with mushrooms, the one with no obvious overgrowth struck everyone as a likely candidate.)
Soon we’d claimed suites on the fourth floor, one apartment for each of us. Festina, scanning the rooms with our Bumbler, knew exactly why the place was mold-free… but she decided not to tell Li his quarters were "impregnated with all kinds of chemicals."
The apartments left much to be desired: ominously low ceilings and no couches or chairs, just thin cushions flat on the floor. At least the rooms were warm, thanks to superb insulation and a passive solar heating system still functional after sixty-five centuries.
But I wouldn’t spend the night indoors. The pretense of claiming apartments was just to fool Li and Ubatu — to deposit them someplace safe while Tut, Festina, and I trekked south. Therefore, I kept a sixth-sense eye on Festina to know when she was ready to go… and it was a good thing I did, because three minutes after claiming a suite, she tried to sneak off on her own.
I caught up with her on the rampway down to the ground floor. "Leaving?" I asked.
"Going to Camp Esteem for more food."
"Wasn’t that the lie we intended to tell the diplomats?"
"As it happens, this is the truth."
"No it isn’t." That would have been obvious, even to someone who couldn’t read auras. "You’re heading for the Stage Two station by yourself. You think Tut and I are dangerous."
"You are," she said. At least she had the grace not to deny it. "He’s vulnerable to possession. And you’re already possessed."
"By the Balrog, not the clouds."
"I don’t consider that a plus."
"The Balrog is sentient," I said. "It has its own agenda, but it won’t try to kill you. It’s even obliged to save your life if there’s a foreseeable threat."
"I agree the Balrog is sentient," Festina replied. "That doesn’t mean it’s benevolent. Suppose it foresaw I would end up on Muta — me personally, not humans in general. Suppose there’s a chance I might activate Stage Two and send the cloud people up the evolutionary ladder. What if the Balrog wants to stop that? What if it doesn’t want competition from a lot of new Tathagatas? What if it plans to screw me up?"
"So it wants to prevent you from starting Stage Two?"
"Maybe. It wouldn’t have to kill me; just slow me down. Then I’d turn into a Stage One cloud and cease to be a problem. Best of all, I wouldn’t actually be dead — I’d be disembodied and damned near powerless, but my consciousness would still be alive. Therefore, the League wouldn’t consider the Balrog a murderer for letting me turn into smoke. The League might even pat the Balrog on the back for finding a nonlethal way to prevent the ascension of a planetful of undesirables. Muta returns to the status quo… till the next time someone threatens to start Stage Two, and the Balrog picks a new puppet to stop it."
I shook my head. What she said was possible, but didn’t add up. "The Balrog has already had plenty of chances to stop you. As soon as we landed, I could have popped one of the stasis spheres, grabbed a stun-pistol, and shot you. I could have shot Tut too. It would have been easy… especially since I’m resistant to stunner fire myself."
"True," Festina said. "But the Balrog doesn’t work that way. It’s a tease; it times its shenanigans for maximum effect. Betrayal right when you think you’ve won." She looked at me sadly. "Youn Suu, at this moment I think I’m speaking to the real you, not the Balrog in Youn Suu disguise. Right now you’re mostly in control. But when the crucial time comes — when I’m about to flick an activation switch or patch some broken machinery — you can’t know whether the Balrog will seize your body and use you to interfere. You can’t be sure you’re safe. And I can’t be sure you’re safe. The Balrog is too fond of playing Ambush. You’re a time bomb, Youn Suu, and I can’t afford to have you near me."