By which time, the Balrog situation would be resolved, one way or another.

Tut did a few dozen stride-jumps on the riverbank. This was and wasn’t a sign of derangement. Explorer policy strongly recommended loosening-up exercises at the start of mission: getting used to the feel of your tightsuit. However, stride-jumps weren’t nearly as useful as slow stretches and rotating the joints (arm circles, hip circles, knee circles). Jumping around wildly just raised your body temperature and made your suit’s air-conditioning work harder.

So I did some squats and extensions as I took stock of our situation. Zoonau’s dome dominated the skyline fifty paces away. It rose more than a hundred stories high, a great glass hemisphere that sparkled in the midday sun. The sparkles were all blood red — the interior of the dome had clotted solid with spores, blocking any view of events inside.

The entry tube stood out from the rest of the dome, mostly because of its construction material: a gray pseudoconcrete that contrasted dully with the dome’s glinting glass. I recognized the concrete look-alike as chintah — a Cashling word that meant "garden." Though it seemed like plain cement, chintah was a complex ecology of minerals, plants, and bacteria. Under normal conditions, chintah’s living components did little but hibernate, keeping themselves alive through photosynthesis or by eating dust from the air. However, any damage to chintah set off a frenzied round of growth, like the scrub vegetation that rushes to fill gaps caused by forest fires. Within days, any gouges would be covered over with rapid response microorganisms. Then the microbes themselves would gradually be replaced by more solid growth, the way trees slowly reclaim land clogged with underbrush. Chintah’s complete healing process took a Cashling year… by which time all trace of the original damage would vanish.

So I wasn’t surprised the chintah entry tube looked perfectly intact, despite centuries of wind, rain, and snow. What did surprise me was the door on the end: a flat slab of metal that should have rusted in place long ago. As I watched, the door swung open without a creak, exposing shadowy darkness beyond.

"Hey look, Mom!" Tut said. "Like a haunted house. Last one in is a zombie!"

He ran for the opening. I took a second too long debating whether to shoot him in the back with my stunner. By the time I unholstered my gun, Tut was out of range. Three seconds later, he reached the entry tube and disappeared inside.

I had no chance of catching him — I was a strong runner, but Tut was good too and his legs were longer than mine. When I reached the mouth of the tube, I found myself hoping he’d been stopped by a solid wall of moss closing off the tube’s other end… but there were no spores in sight, and no Tut either. He must have sprinted straight through the passage, into the streets of Zoonau; and the Balrog had let him go.

Did that mean the Balrog approved of whatever scheme my crazy partner intended? Or was it possible the Balrog hadn’t expected what Tut would do? The moss could predict the actions of normal humans; but what about the insane? Even the Balrog wasn’t infallible — somehow, for example, those Fasskisters had caught the Balrog unawares, captured some spores, and used them in ways that made the Balrog furious. The Fasskisters had suffered for their presumption… but the incident showed the Balrog didn’t anticipate everything. Sometimes lesser beings could still manage surprises.

"What are you up to, Tut?" I muttered.

As I entered the tube myself, I got out my Bumbler. It was a stocky cylindrical machine about the size of my head; in fact, two weeks earlier, Tut had painted eyes, nose, and mouth on both his Bumbler and mine. (I’d stopped him from smearing mayonnaise on the left sensor ports to simulate the goo on my cheek.) Naturally, Tut had used paint that withstood every solvent Pistachio kept in its storerooms… so Tut’s portrait of my face stared back at me as I powered up the tracking unit.

The top surface of the Bumbler — the "scalp" area, if you’re still picturing the machine as a head — was a flat vidscreen for displaying data. I keyed it to show where Tut was, as determined by a radio beacon I’d planted in his backpack when he wasn’t looking. Generally, Explorers didn’t use homing transmitters; they could be deadly on survey missions, especially if you were investigating a planet where carnivorous lifeforms could "hear" radio waves and use them to hunt prey. (Explorers found it unhealthy to be flashing a big loud "Come eat me" signal.) But that didn’t matter on a tame planet like Cashleen… which is why I’d hidden a beeper in Tut’s gear for exactly this kind of emergency.

A blip flashed on the Bumbler’s screen: Tut, still running, heading deeper into the city. But the knotted nature of Zoonau’s streets made it impossible to tell if he had a goal in mind or was just turning at random whenever he reached a corner. Either way, his path was a sequence of zigzags, loops, and switchbacks, reflected by the blip on my screen.

A voice yelled in my ear. "What’s going on, Explorer?"

Ambassador Li. Who’d cranked up the volume on our shared comm link, either because he didn’t know better or didn’t care. I almost did the same with my own end of the link, but decided not to be petty.

"My partner," I said, "has proceeded ahead to reconnoiter. I’ll be joining him in a moment."

"What’s the Balrog doing?" That was Ubatu. Her voice sounded strangely eager… but I put that down to more ghoulish fascination with aliens that ate people.

"I don’t have visual contact yet," I said. "Just a second."

I’d stopped halfway down the entry tube in order to use my Bumbler. Now I walked the rest of the way forward, feeling my heart thud in my chest. There were no Balrog spores directly in sight, but a dim ruby glow shone through the door in front of me, as if a bonfire burned just around the corner. I paused before the doorway, took a long slow breath, then peeked around the frame.

A glowing red face looked back at me. My own. Mouth open in shock. Which is surely how I looked myself.

I came perilously close to screaming, but reflexes kicked in and kept me from crying out. In fact, my reflexes kept me from doing anything.

As an ongoing experiment, the navy conditioned Explorers with one of three "instinctive" reactions to sudden shocks:

1. Dropping flat on the ground and staying down.

2. Diving, rolling, and ending up back on your feet in a fighting stance.

3. Freezing in place till you could think clearly again.

The goal was supposedly to see which response gave the best chance of surviving unexpected dangers… but most Explorers believed the Admiralty was just having fun at our expense. ("Let’s make the freaks dance!")

I’d been assigned to the third group: I froze when something took me by surprise. After years of systematic programming — through classical stimulus-response, sleep induction, and "therapeutic sensory dep" — I could no more resist my conditioning than I could fly by flapping my arms. There in Zoonau, face-to-face with my glowing red look-alike, I stood paralyzed into impotent numbness.

Thought and motion returned simultaneously: I relaxed as I realized the face in front of me was only a sculpture — a topiary version of myself constructed from red moss. The Balrog had seen me coming… had known I’d stick my head around the doorframe… and had arranged a group of spores in my likeness to startle me.

You demon, I mouthed to the spores near my face. But I didn’t say it aloud. Instead, I spoke the words that came almost as automatically to me as freezing in the face of danger. "Greetings," I told the statue. "I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples. I beg your Hospitality."