"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."
"Central hallway or not," Festina said, "this is obviously the heart of the city. Designed to catch attention." She glanced up and down the river. "It’s visible quite a distance along both shores… and from the skyscrapers on either side."
"So what is it?" I asked. "A temple? A royal palace?"
"Go-cart track," Tut muttered.
"I don’t know what it is," Festina replied. "But it appears to be where Team Esteem spent a lot of time." She gestured toward the trail we’d been following. It led up the nearest of the two cross-bridges, heading for the white building above the water. "Let’s see what our friends in the Unity found."
She started forward again. Tut and I trailed silently behind her.
The path worn in the mud did indeed lead to the white, arched building. We followed the tracks to the middle of the nearest supporting bridge, then turned onto an access ramp that faded seamlessly from the bridge’s gray stone into the pearl-like alabaster of the building before us. The doors to the place were made of the same material as the walls: so glossy I could see my face faintly reflected in the surface.
I looked scared.
Tut, however, showed no signs of fear. He went to the door, grabbed its oversized handle, and yanked the thing open. As he did, I noticed Festina’s hand dart to the butt of her stun-pistol — but no EMP cloud or pseudosuchian hurtled out at us. The building’s surprise was more subtle than direct attack. For a moment, I didn’t even realize there was anything amiss… till it dawned on me the corridor beyond the entrance was perfectly, levelly flat.
A ridiculous instinct made me want to step back to see if the building still looked arched from the outside. I fought the urge; I didn’t want to act like some bumpkin unable to believe her eyes. Besides, I could count on Tut to do the honors. As soon as he saw the flat corridor in front of us, he ran to the side of the access ramp where he could get a clear view of the building. "Looks all curved from here," he called. "Does it still look level to you?"
"As straight as a laser," Festina said. "Either it’s a visual illusion, or the Fuentes had hellishly good spatial distortion technology. Looks like this building’s interior is a pocket universe that can lie level inside an arched shell."
"Bastards," Tut muttered. "Now there’s no point go-carting down the hall."
At that moment, the hall in question flickered — like a fluorescent light that’s malfunctioning. In this case, however, it wasn’t light that cut in and out; it was geometry. The flat floor jumped to the sort of curve one expected from an arched building… then back to a level surface… then bent, then flat again, fluttering rapidly back and forth till it settled down once more to a perfectly even keel.