Radiant (25 page)

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."

Festina gave me a pained look. "A hole in reality? Bollocks. Couldn't it just be dark matter? Last I heard there were sixteen known dark particles and at least that many dark energy quanta."

"Why would human skin cells contain dark matter? And how could dark matter be assembled the way I'm seeing? I've never heard anyone suggest you could make dark molecules. Especially not complex biological modules like DNA. These are
chromosomes,
Festina. Chromosomes made of dark matter? How is that more rational than holes in reality?"

Instead of answering, Festina came to look at the Bumbler's scan. I'd magnified a single cell nucleus to fill the entire display screen. It was easy to see the chromosomes, each real one accompanied by a shadow: a cutout, an absence, unfilled by the nucleus's liquid interior. The pseudochromosomes drifted lazily across the screen, just like their real-matter counterparts. Finally, Festina said, "Okay, that's disturbing, no matter what the hell those things are." She stepped away. "I can't help but notice the mutant skin flakes are all beside this one stasis sphere."

The sphere she indicated was the biggest in sight, almost as tall as me. The human/shadow hybrid cells were directly around its base. In fact, when I scanned with the Bumbler, I could find a line of such cells from the entrance door straight up to the sphere. The trail was too small to see with the naked eye, except for those marks near the sphere—as if someone had dribbled cells all across the floor, then stood long enough in one spot for the accumulation to become visible.

"Oh, Mom," said Tut, "I got a nasty idea what's in that sphere."

"We all have the same idea," Festina told him. She turned to me. "You like kicking things open, Youn Suu. You want to do the honors on this stasis field?"

"No thanks. My foot has had enough excitement for one day."

She raised an eyebrow. "Are you all right? You weren't limping."

"I'll be fine. But no more kicking for a while."

Festina held my gaze a moment longer. Then she shrugged and turned away. After a quick search of the room, she found a tool for popping stasis bubbles: a short wand with a barb on the end, like a miniharpoon. She fetched the wand and tapped it on the sphere's mirror surface.

The room filled with screaming—a scream begun the previous morning and now resumed as if no time had passed. On the floor, where the sphere had been, a man lay howling in agony. Flakes of whitish skin drifted off his body like snow.

The man's skin had not been white to begin with. His features and bone structure were clearly African, not so different from Ubatu; but his once-dark skin had lost its pigmentation, turning paper-pale and as fragile as ash. As for his life force... I didn't wholly trust my Balrog-given sense, but when it told me this man was dying, I had no reason for doubt. The man exuded an aura of contamination: a body at war with itself, literally ripping its tissues apart. Flecks of dry epidermis continued to shake off him onto the floor—falling from his face and hands, through the gaps between buttons on his shirt, and in powdery puffs out the bottom of his pant cuffs, as if both his legs had turned to talcum and were dispersing themselves across the concrete.

As for the man's clothes, they were cut in the style of Unity warm-weather uniforms, but their color was unique to Muta: a multihued motley of reds, blues, and oranges, matching the rainbow riot of local vegetation. It was obviously intended to provide camouflage when survey team members moved through the brush... but it made the man look like a clown.

A leprous clown close to death.

Tut stepped toward the man, but Festina pulled him back. "No! He might be contagious. Youn Suu, what's the Bumbler say?"

I looked at the Bumbler's display. "Shadow chromosomes in all his cells. Not just his skin. His hair, his nails, his eyes... the Bumbler can't find a single cell that's normal. And the cells are changing shape. The blood corpuscles are so deformed they're clogging his veins and arteries like logjams. His heart isn't strong enough to maintain circulation—it's barely beating."

The man screamed louder. I couldn't tell if he was reacting to my words or some new thrust of pain.

"If his blood vessels are obstructed," Festina said, "there's no point in CPR?"

"The best hospital in the galaxy couldn't save him. Every cell in his body is..."

I had no words to finish my sentence. Festina did. "Every cell in his body is fucked."

"That pretty much sums it up," I said.

Tut had slipped out of Festina's grip. Now he crouched near the moaning man—staying slightly beyond the man's reach, but directly in his sight line. If the man
had
a sight line. With the cells of his eyes and his optic nerves so dramatically mutated, who knew if the man could see?

"Hey," Tut murmured. "Hey." Then he spoke in a language I didn't recognize: a fluid language with no harsh consonants, like linguistic honey.

"Is that the Unity's secret tongue?" Festina asked. "I thought they didn't teach it to outsiders."

"I told you, Auntie, they liked me. Now shush."

Tut spoke again to the dying man. The language was soft and beautiful—purposely designed that way. Three centuries ago, the Unity's founders created a private language... partly to separate themselves from the Technocracy, partly as social engineering. The structures of language influence the structures of thought: not simplistically, but subtly. The way you're trained to speak predisposes you to patterns in the way you think. It isn't that you're incapable of thinking in other ways; it's just that you find some thoughts easier to articulate than others. Also, growing children hear more talk about easy-to-express topics than topics the language makes difficult. Inevitably, this affects their social and intellectual development—some thoughts are "normal" while others aren't. By constructing a new language with a certain philosophical slant, the Unity had tried to make it harder for people to be bad citizens.

Or so the rumor went. One should never entirely trust Technocracy gossip about the Unity... any more than one trusts divorced spouses talking about their exes.

Tut only spoke a sentence or two. The Unity man replied with a torrent of incomprehensible words. His life force contorted with the effort. He was using his dying energies to tell what had happened: a dedicated survey team member delivering his final report. Though I could see the emotions that drove him—relief at having survived long enough to tell his story, mingled with the pain of his incipient death—my sixth sense couldn't translate what he was saying. I could see his feelings but not his message.

Even Tut couldn't follow it all. Tut's aura showed him straining to understand. The dying man spoke quickly, gasping for breath, reciting details in a language Tut hadn't heard in years. Quite possibly, the man was also using sophisticated scientific terminology; he was an elite survey team member, giving his last technical report. Tut did his best to comprehend the words, nearly inaudible, in a language only half remembered from his youth... but I could see he was failing to catch what might be vital details. Frustration showed on Tut's face and deeper down in his heart.

Festina saw the frustration too (at least on Tut's face), but she did nothing. Asking questions would only make it harder for Tut to hear the mumbling man; and this was obviously our only chance to catch what the man had to say. A deathbed data dump. It would be a small miracle if this survivor of Team Esteem lived long enough to get it all out... but at last he fell silent, his aura showing triumph despite the torment of his flesh. He'd said everything he needed to. His head slumped back, his eyes drooped shut...

...and he turned to smoke.

It was sudden, but not violent. His skin had already been peeling away in flakes and powdery grains. Now his entire body fell in on itself with the sound of sifting sand. His tissues withered into leaf-thin fragments; the fragments broke down into pinpoint particles; and the particles rose in a cloud that wafted toward the storage building's roof. My sixth sense saw the cloud's life force, first rejoicing in release from the flesh, glorying in the departure of pain... then turning angry, furious at something, frustrated... outrage growing till it reached the level of madness, a fury that banished all rationality. The cloud whirled in frenzy, spinning more and more frantically until it was nothing but pure distilled wrath. It hurtled down upon us, wanting to hurt us, as if we were horrid abominations it hungered to kill; as if the cloud truly was a hungry ghost, a
preta.
But all the
preta
could do was swirl ineffectually, trying in vain to do us injury. When it saw its efforts were futile, its aura blazed with fresh anger at its failure. It left in a rage, sweeping out of the building, a mist-elemental searching for others of its kind.

"Whoa," Tut said. "What just happened?"

"We found out what happened to the survey team." Festina glanced at the Bumbler, still strapped around my neck. "Surprise, surprise. The Bumbler's been EMP'd."

There was nothing left of the Unity man—not even the flakes and powder grains that had previously fallen off him. When I looked for the bits of skin on the floor, they were gone too... as if every part of the man had turned to smoke simultaneously, each component waiting till the whole was ready to go.

The man's clothes remained on the ground. Also an assortment of small electronic devices: the implants from inside the man's body. I recognized the cyberlink that would have connected his brain to Team Esteem's computers—it sat on the concrete, right where the man's head had been—but most of the other gadgets were unfamiliar to me. Perhaps if I'd had the time to examine them... but after ten seconds, the implants burst simultaneously into fizzing flame.

"Self-destruct mechanisms," Tut said as we all stepped back from the heat. "An automatic chemical reaction kicks in on exposure to open air. To prevent anyone from analyzing the gadgets."

"Personally," Festina said, "I'd be damned reluctant to have equipment planted in my body if the blasted stuff could explode."

"Think of the alternative," Tut said. "If the equipment
didn't
explode, we nasty Technocracy villains could dissect everything and figure out how to hack the systems. The Unity
really
doesn't want that. If we found a way to disrupt their brain-links... or the doodads that augment adrenaline flow... or any of the other implants they depend on... we could blackmail the crap out of the whole population."

"Still," Festina muttered, "I wouldn't—"

She was interrupted by a flash of flame as the man's uniform caught fire. It had been lying under the still-burning implants; probably the clothes had been treated with flame retardants, but the heat from the implants had reached some critical temperature the fabric couldn't withstand. In a few seconds, the uniform was nothing but flyaway cinders... and the implants were nearly the same. Nothing was left of the man and his effects but scorch marks on the floor and a burned metallic smell that made my eyes water.

"Huh," Festina said. "The Unity must really save money on gravediggers."

While I was still staring at the absence of remains, Festina opened another of the stasis fields strapped to her suit. She handed the anchor and Bumbler to me, but kept the stun-pistol and comm unit for herself. "See if there's anything left of the dead guy," she told me. "I'll call
Pistachio.
And you..." She pointed at Tut. "Get ready to report what the man said. You can tell Captain Cohen the same time you tell us."