Radiant

"Huh," Tut said. "He called you ‘Admiral Ramos.’ I wonder how he knew. None of us ever called you that."

Festina gestured irritably. "I’ve met enough higher beings to know their tricks. They’re all incorrigible show-offs, they love getting a rise out of lesser mortals, and they all know my goddamned name." She sighed. "They’re also fond of dramatic exits. Speaking of which, we should get going ourselves."

"Downstream to the Stage Two station?"

"Where else?" She muttered something about "jumping through goddamned hoops for alien puppet-masters," then headed out the door.

CHAPTER 14

Maitri [Sanskrit]: Loving kindness for all living creatures.

Outside the building we stopped so Festina could speak with Pistachio. She summarized what we’d learned, then asked Captain Cohen to do some eye-in-the-sky scouting for us. He soon reported a Fuentes building beside a dam thirty kilometers to the south. The dam had become a waterfall — silt must have closed the sluices, leaving the river with nowhere to go but over the top. Years of rushing water had mildly eroded the dam’s upper ramparts, but there’d been no major collapse; the dam still held back a reservoir of cold autumnal water. The accompanying building lay on the east bank of the reservoir… which told us which side of the Grindstone we should be on for the trek downstream.

Pistachio’s cameras didn’t have enough resolution to see much detail — not from such high orbit. However, Captain Cohen had begun to build new reco

I wondered if Festina would decide it was safer to spend the night in the city, where we had shelter from lightning and pseudosuchians. There was also the question of Li and Ubatu; we hadn’t seen any sign of the shuttle, but odds were they’d tried to land in the city, where straight, paved streets would make good emergency airstrips. I found it difficult to believe Li was such an expert pilot that he’d managed a dead-stick landing without smashing to smithereens… but if the diplomats hadn’t died in a pancake collision, they might be lying injured, in need of medical help. With the three hours of daylight we had left, decency demanded we search for our fallen "comrades" in case we could save their a

Then again, searching Drill-Press on foot would take considerably longer than three hours. We’d save time if we could get to one of the tallest skyscraper roofs for an aerial view of the streets. However, it seemed unlikely that elevators would still work after sixty-five centuries, and I didn’t want to climb eighty stories only to find the doors to the roof locked or rusted shut. Perhaps Pistachio’s cameras could pick out the crash site, especially if the shuttle had blasted a significant crater in the heart of the city… but there might be an easier way to search: with a bit of higher help.

I settled against the side of the bridge, my elbows propped on the rail, my eyes gazing out over the river as if sca

As usual, the answer didn’t come in words. A point of perception opened within me: a single point, not in my brain, but in my abdomen, my dantien, my womb. Though I sensed that point by means of the Balrog, this tiny part of my body seemed free of alien presence; it felt like an untainted refuge, a virgin core the spores had chivalrously refrained from violating. Knee-jerk cynicism said I shouldn’t be so gullible — why should I believe anything the Balrog showed me, let alone a comforting fiction that some crucial portion of my being remained unraped? — but it felt so real, I had trouble doubting it. The point I sensed was me: me here and now, at this moment, complete… no more permanent than a sigh, no more real than any other temporary assemblage of atoms en route to elsewhere, but still, in that instant, me.

Then the point began to expand.

Expanding beyond tissues infested with spores, glowing red in the dark of my belly…

Beyond the boundaries of my skin, sweeping over the bridge’s pavement where EMP clouds lurked in the cracks…

Up to Tut and Festina, their auras tainted with Stage One microbes…

Moving farther out, reaching down to the river beneath the bridge, where primitive fish darted after food or drifted with minds empty, occasionally flicking their tails to change course when the current took them near small obstructions…

Still growing outward, exceeding the former limits of my perception, edging up to and into skyscrapers abandoned for mille

Farther and farther, past blooms of vegetation where the city’s artificial herbicides had been leached away by time, and multicolored ferns from the countryside had seeded themselves, creating little Edens for insects, maybe even for a small protolizard or toad, in areas as small as my cabin on Pistachio…

Continuing beyond, as my brain became dizzy, unable to handle so much detail — not like an aerial photograph that loses resolution as the scale increases, but retaining everything, perceiving multiple city blocks, the towers, the air, the soil, all down to a microscopic level filled with life, lifeforms, life forces, quadrillions of data elements flooding my mind, and still the view expanded, more buildings, more biosphere, every millimeter unique, all of it blazing/roaring/shuddering with energy, and somewhere in the middle, a woman whose brain couldn’t take the barrage begi

I can’t say how long the blitzkrieg lasted — it was one of those imminent-disaster experiences that take place in slow motion, simultaneously drawn-out and fleeting — but before I could react, a dismaying percentage of my brain had been damaged irreparably. Neurons collapsed from the strain. Long-established pathways of thought got chopped into disjoint pieces. Where once my consciousness had lived, there was only a soup of demolished gray matter.

Yet I still could think. I still had the sense I was me. My heart still beat, and my lungs still breathed, because wherever my neurons burst under the rush of sensation, the Balrog instantly filled in the gaps. I could see spores a