As for my surroundings, I couldn’t see anything except a hodgepodge of multicolored ferns. My eyes weren’t adept at extracting information from the motley chaos. I could hear the drone of insects and sense their exact locations with my mental awareness — a horde of them flying near the plants, crawling through the foliage, scuttling under the soil — but even knowing where to look, my sight was too dazzled by leafy reds, blues, yellows, greens, to make out slow-moving flies or beetles.
And most of the insects weren’t small. Camp Esteem lay close to the tropics; according to my sixth sense, some of the bugs were as fat as my thumb and twice as long. But their coloration blended so well with the rainbow of plants, they were practically invisible.
It would be difficult not to tread on creepy-crawlies as I walked. I found that idea upsetting — not because I was squeamish about bugs, but because I’d been brought up in the tradition of ahimsa: avoidance of violence to all living creatures. Decent people watched where they stepped. Given so many other things to worry about, it may seem strange that my greatest conscious fear was accidentally tromping on a roach; but I’d been gripped by a sudden superstition that I had to keep my karma absolutely clean, or I’d never survive the mission.
I looked at the patch of flattened grass where I’d landed from the parachute drop. In the very first instant of my arrival, I’d squashed the local version of an anthill. Antlike corpses everywhere.
So much for clean karma.
I allowed myself a shudder. Then I shook off my misgivings and hurried to collect my parachute before it blew away in the breeze.
As I ran, I tried to ignore my sixth sense. It insisted on telling how many insects I crushed with every step.
CHAPTER 10
Tanha [Pali]: Craving, in the sense of fixation. It’s natural to want food when you’re hungry, but it’s unskillful to fixate on food. One can fixate on fears, hopes, ideas, etc., just as easily as one fixates on physical cravings. The Buddha’s second truth is that fixation is the cause of all suffering.
Festina and Tut landed safely. Tut began gathering his parachute, but Festina just waved at me to take care of hers while she set up a Sperm-field anchor.
Captain Cohen would soon maneuver Pistachio to wag the ship’s tail toward us. He’d been tracking us up to the point we got EMP’d, so he could approximate when we’d be in position for a lock attempt. Festina therefore unstrapped one of the carrying cases from her chest and drew the mirror-sphere from inside. All three of us looked for mist nearby… but the EMP cloud was nowhere in sight. Since its last target had been Li’s shuttle, perhaps the cloud was staying with the craft. For some reason, I imagined the cloud hovering steamily just outside the cockpit, taking malicious delight in watching Li try to land without instruments or electricity.
Too bad for Li; but his troubles might make things easier for us. If Li and the shuttle kept the EMP cloud distracted, we could establish our lifeline back to Pistachio without interference. Festina set the mirror-sphere in the grass at her feet — the grass as yellow as saffron — then we waited for the Sperm-tail to arrive.
The waiting gave me time to look around again, not for hostile EMP clouds but for a sense of where we were. The Grindstone was thirty paces to my right — a slow-moving river almost a kilometer wide, filled with coffee brown water and wads of foliage floating or caught on reeds near the shoreline. We stood on the western floodplain, and I do mean flood: the Grindstone’s banks were so low, the area where I stood would be underwater almost every spring. Yellow grass grew at our feet, along with the sort of scrub brush that can sprout waist-high over a single summer; but nothing more permanent had seeded on these flats, because the yearly floods drowned any plants that tried to become perennial.
To my left, a hundred meters from the riverbank, rose a second bank that bounded the floodplain. This bank was two stories high, choked with multicolored vegetation but cut by a few scrabbly trails worn through the weeds — paths that animals had made when going to drink at the river.
On top of the higher bank, the Unity huts formed a single long line like a dozen river-watching sentinels. Some study had found that a survey team’s productivity improved by 0.8 percent if every member’s living quarters had a scenic view of water. Therefore, as per standing regulations, the huts lined across the top of the rise so that everyone could look out a window and see the river.
The huts themselves appeared primitive: wooden walls, thatched roofs. But the wood wasn’t wood and the thatch wasn’t thatch — both were flameproof, weatherproof synthetics with a high insulation factor and suffused with nontoxic repellents to discourage insects. Even so, the Unity did a superlative job of simulating natural materials. They even gave survey team huts a pleasant woody smell… because, of course, another study had found that performance improved by some fraction when team members could fill their nostrils with forestlike aromas. Everything inside the huts would be similarly optimized for efficiency, safety, and salutary psychological effect; but I had no more time for gawking around, because Pistachio’s Sperm-tail came sweeping across the valley.
Festina didn’t hesitate. Usually you open a stasis field with a special needle-nosed tool that pops the outer shell like a soap bubble… but Festina simply punched the silvery surface with her fist. The mirror-field burst with a gassy hiss, revealing its cache of contents: Bumbler, stun-pistol, comm unit, and anchor. The anchor was a small black box with four horseshoe-shaped gold inlays on its upper surface. Festina grabbed the anchor and moved it to a clear patch of grass. Then she pressed the ON switch.
The Sperm-tail reacted immediately. Up till now, it had simply been wagging at random, lazily swinging like a bell-ringer’s rope… but as soon as the anchor was activated, the tail’s behavior acquired a sense of purpose. It raced straight toward us, responding to the anchor device’s invisible pull.
Sperm-tails always reminded me of long, thin tornadoes: the bottom tip kissing the ground… the funnel cloud creamy but sparkling with glints of green and blue… the whole thing stretching far up out of sight, past the clouds, past the ozone, all the way to where Pistachio waited.
And once we’d locked onto the Sperm-tail, it would provide a nearly instantaneous route from Muta’s surface to our ship. For us as well as…
Uh-oh.
I closed my eyes, thinking, Balrog, help me. Then I did something I’d never done before: reached out with my sixth sense. Used it actively instead of passively receiving whatever came in. Spread my mind to the world, trying to listen rather than merely hear.
The busy life force of insects. The placid life force of plants. The ponderous life force of microorganisms, too simple to have any emotion — just the sense of presence, like the feel of stone when you’re in the mountains. The complicated auras of Festina and Tut. And beyond those known entities, what else? I expanded my senses, sank into them as I’d sink into meditation, noted anything that seemed out of place…
…and there it was. A spark of eagerness, hidden in the background. Burning anticipation. The spark was so faint, it must be trying to conceal itself… but it was too excited, too hungry, to be perfectly restrained.
The EMP cloud was waiting for us to connect with Pistachio. It wasn’t off chasing the shuttle; it had circled back in secret. And the Sperm-tail was now only meters away, speeding straight for the anchor.
Feeling sick at what I had to do, I lifted my heel and slammed it down on the little black box. The box’s casing shattered; internal circuit boards snapped under my foot.
The Sperm-tail, our one route off Muta, danced away like a fishing line that’s been deliberately cut.