I shrugged. Whether I’d really died didn’t matter. If I’d rejected the Balrog, all the CPR in the universe wouldn’t have helped me. But the dead spores inside me had been replaced by fresh ones, full of mischievous energy. I could feel them — feel their power.
My sixth sense was back.
Which meant I could tell what was happening in the rest of the station. Light continued to gush from the station’s emitter plate… and Tut still lay on the golden disk, bending this way and that to make shadows on the ceiling with his body. His thin frame didn’t block much of the radiance — certainly not as much as the Divine had all these years.
I couldn’t sense the Divine. Perhaps when the first pretas were uplifted, they’d used their new power to eradicate the spores; or perhaps the newly elevated Fuentes had dealt more kindly with their centuries-long enemies. The pretas might have helped the Divine to ascend too, as should have happened from the very beginning. Vengeance or mercy: often hard to predict.
I felt the Fuentes’ arrival a moment before I saw it — a powerful presence blossoming in the room, a life force of dazzling vitality. The creature’s aura blazed from a spot behind Festina’s back… and suddenly, there was a small slick of purple on the floor, a sheen of quivering jelly.
How anticlimactic.
When I pointed out our visitor to Festina, she sighed. "Now the big boys arrive — to pat us on the back and send us on our way."
"Actually," the jelly said, "we’re patting ourselves on the back." The voice was female: low and gentle, slightly amused. "We did an excellent job choosing our champion."
Festina glared. "So Youn Suu’s theory about champions is true?"
The jelly laughed. "Admiral, you can’t expect me to give a straight answer. Perhaps what Youn Suu said is true; perhaps every member of the Explorer Corps is the protege of some high-echelon race in the League of Peoples. Perhaps each member of the corps was created or chosen in the belief that Homo sapiens have the potential to do something we can’t do ourselves. Or perhaps we overheard Youn Suu expound that hypothesis, and we find it amusing to encourage such a ridiculous conjecture."
"I hate you guys," Festina muttered. "Every smug bastard in the League. I really hate you."
"Hypothetically," I said to the jelly, "if you did sponsor a particular Explorer as your champion… who would it be?"
"Not me," Festina said. "Please tell me I’m not the one. I’d hate to be created by something that looks like grape jam."
The jelly laughed again. "Rest assured, Admiral, you aren’t ours. Neither is Youn Suu; she and her ilk belong to the Balrog."
"So if it isn’t me and it isn’t Youn Suu…" Festina’s head turned, and so did mine: both of us looked toward Tut.
"Your legends recount many refreshing forms of madness," the jelly said. "Mostly, such stories are untrue to life. Genuine mental illnesses are seldom amusing; those who suffer from such conditions are miserably dysfunctional. But your folktales abound with wise fools and lunatics. If one carefully arranges precise metabolic imbalances throughout a child’s gestation and infancy…"
Festina finished the sentence. "You get someone who’s loony but still competent. Assuming you aren’t just lying about this whole ‘champion’ thing."
No, I thought, the "champion thing" wasn’t a lie. I remembered the flashes of purple I’d seen in Tut’s aura, helping him fight off possession by the pretas. It was the same shade of purple as the Fuentes jelly: just a tiny flicker of aid from his "sponsors" to keep him in the game. The jelly couldn’t actually force Tut to do anything — that would ruin the spontaneity of the experiment — but they could orchestrate events to bring Tut to when and where he was needed.
"If you’re Tut’s patron," I said to the jelly, "who’s Festina’s?"
"That will be revealed at a time of her patron’s choosing… assuming, again, we aren’t lying."
"And in the meantime, the patron just lets me sweat in ignorance?" Festina asked.
"Ignorance is necessary," the jelly replied. "If we influence you too much, we prevent you from acting spontaneously. That defeats the whole exercise. We cannot guide you, or we may unwittingly steer you away from… whatever you might discover. For the same reason, we cannot rescue you from every trouble that arises. Dealing with life-or-death situations is when you are most likely to make a breakthrough." The jelly paused. "Or at least that’s one school of thought."
Festina growled. "So you just keep manipulating Explorers into one potentially lethal danger after another to see how we react?"
The jelly chuckled. "Admiral… that’s what ‘expendable’ means."
EPILOGUE
If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him: An adage that warns against one last fixation — you can become unskillfully attached to Buddhism itself. You have to discard this final dependency too.
Poised on the beach outside the station, Festina, Tut, and I watched pulses of gold light spread from the spikes in the crown. My sixth sense told me the radiation blanketed an area fifty kilometers in radius; any preta within that zone ascended after a few seconds of exposure. As I’d expected, the news had spread to every EMP cloud in the world. The whole smoky population of the planet was now on the way, simmering toward us at the speed of sound. Within twenty-four hours, every preta on Muta would be free.
"You realize," I said to Festina and Tut, "you two can still become transcendent. The microbes are working on your bodies. In hours or days, you’ll disintegrate. Next thing you know, you’ll be demigods."
"No," Festina said, "next thing I know I’ll be purple jelly." She waved her hand dismissively. "No thanks."
"Maybe only Fuentes turn into purple jelly. Maybe humans turn into green jelly."
"Ooo!" said Tut. "Could I turn into green jelly? Or gold jelly. That would be even better."
Festina raised an eyebrow. "Do you really want to ascend, Tut? I don’t see the appeal… unless you’d like to thumb your nose at the jelly Fuentes. Once you’re jelly yourself, they can’t use you as their champion."
Tut thought about it a moment. "Nah, Auntie. If I ascended, I might go all serious. Wouldn’t want to wear masks… wouldn’t want to eat cookies… wouldn’t want to pull down my pants and-"
"We get the point," Festina interrupted.
She pulled a Sperm-tail anchor from her backpack, flicked the ON switch, and set it on the ground. Unclipping her comm from her belt, she said, "Captain Cohen, we’re ready for home."
"Very good, Admiral. The Sperm-tail’s on its way."
Seconds later, the tail whisked out of the sky above the lake. Small waves rippled placidly, glinting in the soft early sunlight. The tail seemed to play in the fresh air, flicking this way and that, admiring its reflection in the water’s surface. Then it remembered its duty and flew to the anchor, forming a fluttering pillar reaching all the way to Pistachio.
"So that’s it?" Tut asked. "Nothing else to do?"
"Nothing but fill out a million reports," Festina replied. "We didn’t rescue the survey teams, but we’ve done all we can. They must have ascended by now… and I assume they’ll be polite enough to inform the Unity they’re safe."