Stupid. Very stupid. And now my human life was over.
Unable to do anything else, I found myself laughing.
"What is it?" Festina asked, looking around as if my laughter heralded some threat.
She looked so humanly naive.
"It’s nothing," I said. "Just some nonsense that got into my head." I laughed again. "By the way… I know where Li and Ubatu are."
Of course I knew where the diplomats were. The mind-crushing overload was past, but in its wake my awareness extended much farther than before. I didn’t attempt to test the sixth sense’s range — that might cause more meltdown — but what I wanted to see, I saw. As simple as that. With a brain that was now half-Balrog, my mental processes (perception, filtering, interpretation) took place on a higher level. If I chose to examine the bacteria in an aphid’s gut two kilometers away, the data was instantly there: not just peeking into a place where normal sight couldn’t operate, but hearing the impossibly faint sounds of microbes splashing through stomach fluids, feeling the brush of their cilia rowing them forward, tasting the tang of the chemicals they absorbed. All was within my grasp, just for the asking… so of course I knew where our missing diplomats were. The answer came as soon as I asked the question.
They’d landed east of the city, on a highway that continued several kilometers into the countryside. (The road led to a limestone quarry that must have supplied raw materials for the city’s skyscrapers.) The highway made a good airstrip: it was one of the few paved roads that wasn’t lined by tall buildings, so there was little danger of the shuttle hitting anything on its way in. Crash-landing had rendered the shuttle unrecognizable as an aircraft… but that just meant the craft’s crumple zones had done their job, absorbing the crash’s impact to protect the cockpit and passenger cabin. Other safety features had done their job too, including automatic airbags and flame-retardant materials that prevented fires after the crash — all measures that worked despite the electrical systems being EMP’d out of commission. Therefore, Li and Ubatu had come through unscathed, give or take a few bruises. Enough pain to prove they’d faced danger, but without causing real inconvenience. The sort of injuries they’d talk about endlessly at cocktail parties.
Getting out of the ruined shuttle was more of a challenge. Since all exterior hatches were part of crumple zones, the usual exit doors had been crushed. That wouldn’t have mattered if the crash took place in a populated area, where rescue crews could rush to the scene and extricate survivors with laser cutters. The shuttle’s designers, however, had allowed for crashes on planets where no outside help would appear. A number of hand tools were cached in the passenger cabin: drills and saws and long-handled metal snips that could (with diligence and strength) be used to mangle one’s way to freedom. Neither diplomat had much knack for manual labor, but Commander Ubatu was an uberchild with bioengineered muscles, dexterity, and stamina; she’d found the tools and begun cutting. Whenever she started to slow — and as a pampered daughter of the Diplomatic Corps, she had little experience with physical exertion that lasted longer than an aerobics class — Ambassador Li made snide remarks till Ubatu got back to work. Escape was therefore a team effort: brawn and bad temper. By the time we reached the crash site, they were minutes away from success.
It hadn’t been hard to persuade Tut and Festina to follow me to the site. I’d told a version of the truth — that the Balrog had given me a "vision" of where the diplomats were. Festina grumbled about "the damned moss telling us where to go" but didn’t otherwise question my story. She fully expected the Balrog to force images into my mind if it wanted to compel us down a particular path; that was just the sort of high-handed manipulation one received from alien parasites. It didn’t hurt that Pistachio’s cameras could get blurry photos of the shuttle exactly where I said it was. Festina still suspected the Balrog of playing games, but since the "vision" had saved us time searching, she let me lead the way.
As we walked, she continued her report to Captain Cohen. Tut spent his time watching for Rexies, though my sixth sense reported none in the vicinity. I divided my attention between spying longdistance on Li and Ubatu and eyeing Stage One EMP clouds hiding all around us.
The clouds lay invisible to normal vision, spread microscopically thin along the pavement or compressed into cracks in mosaic murals. The cloud particles blazed with impatience: a hunger to see us removed. We were constant reminders of what they had once been. We had intelligence and physicality; we could affect the world directly with our hands. Threads of malice in the clouds’ auras hinted that the pretas wanted to see us brought low like them — disintegrated into nearly impotent Stage One smoke.
But with my expanded perception, I saw that blazing anger was only part of the pretas’ story. Beneath the fury, subtler feelings quivered: grief, regret, yearning, bewilderment. The clouds, after all, had been everyday people — not abnormally evil, even if they were now subject to extremes of emotion. Their desire to see us vaporized was more pique than true malevolence.
Mostly, the clouds just wanted us gone. The sight of us made them think and remember. Once we were removed, the pretas could go back to a neutral existence: drifting, purposeless, hopeless, hollow, neither asleep nor awake, letting the centuries plod numbly past but at least not tormented by reminders of what they had lost.
Seeing us caused them sharp regrets. They preferred the long, dull ache.
None of this was an individual decision — the clouds were a hive of hives. Each cloud was a composite being made of individual particles, but the clouds as a whole formed a loose gestalt: a collective emotional consciousness. They couldn’t combine their brainpower, but they helplessly shared each other’s feelings. Their auras showed that a tiny change in the mood of one cloud spread almost instantly to every other within range of my perceptions… even to clouds kilometers away. Conceivably, a single pang of torment might spread to pretas all around the planet.
So our presence caused global pain. The ghosts couldn’t escape suffering just by keeping their distance from us. As long as we were on Muta, they’d feel us and burn.
Was it any wonder that the clouds wanted us gone, even if that meant sending Rexies to kill us?
One other thing I sensed from the smoke: the pretas didn’t know about the Balrog. The moss had stayed concealed inside me; the one time it acted overtly was transferring spores to Ohpa, and that was done quickly in a room the clouds avoided because Ohpa caused them discomfort. Tut, Festina, and I had mentioned the Balrog in conversation, but Fuentes clouds wouldn’t understand English, and the pretas of Team Esteem probably couldn’t either — the Unity disdained all languages but their own. Only official Unity translators ever learned other tongues.
So the clouds didn’t know what we were saying… and they didn’t know the Balrog had hitched a ride in my body. A good thing they couldn’t read auras — I could see the Balrog bright within me, shining like a forest fire. Ohpa, with his limited wisdom, had also seen the glow immediately; but the clouds were blind to the Balrog’s brilliance.
If the pretas had known, perhaps a whole stampede of Rexies would be heading our way.
As we approached the shuttle, we could hear loud noises inside: not just the clatter of cutting tools, but Ubatu shouting and Li yelling back. Ubatu had reverted to some unfamiliar language, but I didn’t need a translation — curses sound the same in any tongue. Li, on the other hand, opted for intelligibility in his outbursts. He spoke full English sentences devoid of actual profanity but loaded with the sort of insinuations that cause duels, bar brawls, and major diplomatic incidents. I could hear him accusing Ubatu of incompetence on the job, ignorance of every worthwhile achievement of human culture, and such a shameful degree of cowardice that Ubatu probably demanded general anesthetic when she got her scalp tattooed.