Radiant
James Alan Gardner
 At the start of the story, Youn Suu is a rookie Explorer on her first assignment in interstellar space. Like most Explorers, she suffers from a significant physical deformity&mdash;in her case, a facial blemish that has been left untreated to "qualify" her for the Explorer Corps. Her first assignment, with her partner Tut, is to investigate a sudden infestation of the Balrog in a domed city on the home world of the Cashlings. While there, she is herself infested by the red moss. At the same time, Youn Suu and Tut encounter Admiral Festina Ramos, present on a mission of her own. Aboard an Outward fleet starship, Youn Suu is monitored medically, though there is no cure for her condition and no real treatment. The Balrog, far more than a parasite, is a hive mind well above the human level of development, so that killing it would violate the central precept of the League of Peoples. As its symbiotic relationship with its human host develops, the Balrog comes to share the mental functioning of its host, and prolongs the host's life while consuming her body&mdash;"her" because the only prior human host was also female (and also a Buddhist). Youn Suu is also exposed to potential exploitation, by people who want to use the Balrog's special abilities for their own purposes. Meanwhile, Ramos and the other explorers are called to an emergency rescue on a planet called Muta, where Unity survey teams have suddenly disappeared, with barely a peep of a distress signal. The planet Muta, temperate and Earth-like, is to outward appearances almost ideal for colonization; yet colonizing efforts by the Unity, and the Greenstriders, and perhaps others, have mysteriously failed. The three Explorers land on the planet; even with the most elaborate precautions they fall prey to its peculiar circumstances, and find themselves stranded and contaminated with a microbe that threatens to destroy their bodies. Investigating their predicament, they learn that the entire planet was once a global research station for the Fuentes, a species that discovered a way to transcend the physical body and transform itself into energy-based or consciousness-based entities. The research done by the Fuentes on Muta 6500 years earlier had been in pursuit of that goal&mdash;but had gone horribly wrong, dooming Fuentes and Greenstrider and Unity individuals to a disembodied but tortuous existence. While being hunted by raptor-like reptiles, the three Explorers must find a way to repair alien technology to reverse the damage, before their own bodies collapse.