…everyone would be trapped in Stage One forever. Including Team Esteem. Plus Festina and Tut as soon as the Stage One system devised a way to rip them into smoke.

The same must have happened sixty-five hundred years ago. As Ohpa had said, the Fuentes offplanet would surely send teams to see what went wrong. Unfortunately, Muta’s atmosphere was still chock-full of Stage One biological agents primed to work on Fuentes cells. Any team landing without protective equipment would turn to smoke immediately. Teams with protective equipment would get EMP’d and marooned, just like our own party. Soon, they’d be forced to take off their suits, whereupon they’d fall victim to the Stage One microbes.

How many teams had the Fuentes lost before they wrote Muta off? Possibly the government continued to formulate plans for reclaiming the planet — with suits better shielded from EMPs, or perhaps by releasing counteragents into the atmosphere, designed to destroy the Stage One microbes. But it had never happened. Circumstances must have prevented it. If, for example, the Fuentes had a shifty government like the Technocracy’s, a new party might have got voted into power, and the old government decided to destroy all records of Muta rather than taking blame for the disaster. On the other hand, maybe some new set of researchers had developed a different, more reliable process for ascending the evolutionary ladder. The Fuentes would then have no reason to return to Muta; they’d changed en masse into psionic purple jelly, conveniently forgetting the Fuentes on Muta still trapped as Stage One clouds.

They’d also ignored all future starfarers who might visit Muta and suffer the same fate. Muta was a death trap; how could a supposedly sentient race leave it like this, ready to disintegrate all visitors who dropped by? One could argue the original Fuentes researchers had been volunteers, aware their work was risky. But what about the Unity, the Greenstriders, and us? At the very least, why didn’t the Fuentes build a warning beacon, telling passersby the planet was dangerous?

Perhaps they did. I could imagine other races ignoring such a beacon and landing anyway. Muta was so desirable, colonists might choose to take their chances, especially if they didn’t know the exact nature of the problem. They might even dismantle the beacon to avoid attracting the attention of other races. The more I thought about it, the more likely that sounded. The recklessly territorial Greenstriders would immediately destroy any "keep out" beacon, if the beacon hadn’t already been obliterated by species of similar temperament thousands of years earlier.

The Fuentes should have anticipated that… and in their elevated purple-jelly form, they should have taken steps to deal with the problem. If they now had godlike powers, why couldn’t they just teleport inside any ship approaching the Muta system and telepathically explain why the planet was dangerous? Wasn’t that basic courtesy? More important, wasn’t that what the League of Peoples might demand? Surely the Fuentes were required to stop people dying from the effects of the Stage One microbes.

Unless…

"Ohpa," I said, "how long can people survive in Stage One? Do the clouds eventually dissipate?"

"No," the alien said. "They absorb energy from light and nutrients from the atmosphere. I don’t know their maximum life span, but they can certainly remain alive for millions of years."

"Millions?"

"Till the sun begins to fail and renders this planet uninhabitable." Ohpa’s mandibles bent in a way that might have been a smile. "In cloud form, my people are quite resilient. So are the others who’ve undergone Stage One. They may be insane, but they are definitely alive."

"Bloody hell," Festina murmured.

"Not bloody," Ohpa replied, "but most assuredly hell. Even with my meager awareness, I hear their screams of agony. To those with greater perception, the shrieks must be shrill indeed. But the enlightened beings of this galaxy must be inured to the sounds of suffering — they hear so much of it."

Ohpa’s words left the rest of us silent… but the silence seemed to howl.

It was Tut who finally spoke. "Okay," he said to Ohpa, "how do we set things right?"

The Fuentes shrugged. The movement didn’t suit his alien musculature, but his Balrog-inspired knowledge of human body language seemed to think it was necessary. "I don’t know what you can do. I wasn’t a scientist — merely a test subject. I have no idea how to reverse the effects of Stage One."

"We don’t want to reverse Stage One," said Festina. "That might get us in trouble with the League of Peoples." She rolled her eyes. "I hate trying to guess how the League thinks… but if we take a bunch of smoke clouds with the potential for living millions of years, and we force them back into short-lived bodies, the League might consider that the moral equivalent of murder. Doesn’t matter if the clouds are in never-ending torment; we can’t cut their lives short without their prior approval. On the other hand" — she looked at Ohpa-"if we could stop Stage One before we get turned to smoke…"

Ohpa shook his head. "The Stage One microbes are autonomous. There’s no switch to turn them off. In a way, the microbes form their own crude hive mind — not sentient or even very intelligent, but fully capable of carrying out their purpose without outside direction."

"Crap," Festina growled. "What kind of idiot builds an uncontrollable rip-you-to-shit system? Haven’t they heard of fail-safes?"

"The project leaders feared someone might tamper with the process," Ohpa said. "They devoted much effort to making it unstoppable."

"And since you’re only slightly wise, you didn’t tell them they were imbeciles?"

"I told them not to mistake paranoia for prudence. But when you tell paranoids to be more prudent, they believe you are counseling them to be more paranoid."

"You didn’t spell it out for them in words of one syllable? Make… a… way… to… shut… it… off."

Ohpa replied with something in a language I didn’t recognize — presumably the Fuentes’ ancient tongue. His intonation was the same as Festina’s: short single syllables with brief spaces between. Then he switched back to English. "I told them exactly that. But they refused to listen. ‘The fool knows not the wisdom he hears, as the spoon knows not the taste of the soup.’ "

I glared at him. His words came from the Dharmapada, an important Buddhist scripture. Ohpa could only have learned that passage by plucking it from my brain… and it irritated me how easily my thoughts could be plundered. "So that’s it?" I asked. "You’ve waited sixty-five hundred years to tell us there’s nothing we can do?"

"Mom," Tut said, "there’s gotta be something. We wouldn’t have picked up your fuzzy red hitchhiker if our chances were nil. The Balrog must think there’s some way we can shake up the status quo."

"We can change the status quo just by telling the outside world what’s going on. We’ve got a working comm; we’ve got Ohpa’s explanation. Maybe that’s all the Balrog intended — we come and find out what’s what. Now we tell Pistachio, and they pass word to the rest of the galaxy why Muta’s so lethal."

"At which point," Festina said, "every treasure hunter in the universe rushes here to grab Fuentes tech. Then they all turn into pissed-off ghosts."

"What else can we do?" I asked.

"Simple," Festina answered. "Figure out a way to kick-start Stage Two."

Tut turned to Ohpa. "Is that possible?"

"I don’t know," the alien replied. "I don’t know why Stage Two failed." His mandibles worked briefly — maybe a mannerism to show he was thinking. "It might be something simple, like a burned-out fuse. Perhaps Stage Two is ready to go, and you just need to fix some tiny thing. But the malfunction could be more serious. Perhaps it can only be repaired by persons with special expertise. And that assumes it can be repaired at all. I’ve been in stasis a long, long time. By now, the Stage Two equipment may have degraded too much to salvage."