"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.

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 reconnaissance probes as soon as we’d left the ship, and there’d be one ready within five hours: just enough time, he said, to gather advance data, since we’d need six hours to walk to the dam. (When Cohen said that, I thought, Six hours? We’d take six hours to walk thirty kilometers on clear flat roads. Traveling through brush, up hills and down ravines, following the shore of a meandering river and perhaps dodging the occasional Rexy, we’d take much longer… and that was ignoring nightfall, now only three hours off, plus the storm we’d seen heading our way. When Festina asked Cohen how the storm looked, he admitted, "Oy, it’s a doozy.")

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 annoying lives.

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 scanning for trouble. I paid no attention to what was actually before me; instead, I withdrew into my mind and murmured, Balrog… I admit it, I can’t stand being blind. How far do your senses go?

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 millennia, room after fetid room where furniture decayed under beds of mold, where strains of bacteria had evolved to thrive on Fuentes upholstery, where lice had colonized carpets and mites crawled busily through fungus-covered electronics…

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 beginning to go into seizure as sensations sparked through her neurons. Too much input, too much knowledge, electrical impulses ramming down wearied axons to release volleys of chemical transmitters, her skull full of lightning and bioconductors, overload, grand mal, electroshock, white light breakdown, brain cells rupturing by the thousand in fierce flares of overexertion… and all observed from that point in my abdomen, like an impartial witness at my own beheading.

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 annexing my brain like an invader’s army: all the key connection hubs under the Balrog’s control, and millions of other spores scattered like garrison soldiers at strategically located stations.