“What for?”
“While you sleep, eight years will pass. The young won’t know you, and the old may forget. Plan Ten would wake you if anything went wrong, but prevention is better.”
She stretched, missing her workout with Zircon. Yet oddly she felt exhausted, as if she had traveled a thousand years. “I can use a good night’s sleep.”
“Remember to keep your window open.”
Poppy had turned off the news and ads. That alone was nearly worth the hospital stay.
That night, she woke every two hours to give the micros their “sign” of AZ. Each time they responded with rapturous pyrotechnics. By morning, she tossed in her sheets, unable quite to sleep, too tired to waken.
“Fern? Are you there?”
“I am here, Oh Great One.”
In the dark she felt as if she were one of them; she could almost reach out and touch the whiskers of the little ring. “Fern, I need sleep.”
“So do I. But at last we’ve built our first city.”
“Your city?”
“In the arachnoid, in the great Cisterna Magna.”
Out of the darkness grew columns of light. Fibroblast cells connected floor to ceiling, a vast colonnade extending in all directions like a scaffold across the firmament of the brain. Between two arachnoid columns hovered Fern. Her green projections twinkled as they rotated, propelling her forward. Chrys’s view followed her.
“Our arachnoid is largely wilderness, as yet uninhabited. But now we approach the Cisterna Magna, where the brain linings diverge, creating a great space for our city.”
The floor fell away sickeningly, while the ceiling soared out of sight. Across the cellular columns stretched struts and braces of all different colors, in complex pulsating structures. The struts built fantastic stellated dwellings, with micro rings tumbling in and out of hidden portals. This was the city they had built in their New World.
Her mind floated upward, toward the ceiling where the columns stretched to meet the outer lining of the brain. An opening appeared, flanked by micros of various twinkling colors, sentinels on guard. The opening extended into a tunnel, smooth and white.
“Our bridge to the bloodstream,” said Fern. “Only the eldest of the elders may cross into the blood and travel with the nanos. We will serve you better than any nanoservo built by the gods, patrolling your veins forever.”
When at last she came awake, Chrys felt as if she herself had explored an eighth world of the Fold. Her vision was transformed. How would she paint again—and how would anyone ever understand?
As she reached for the disk of nanotex by her bedside, she bounced out of bed faster than she intended. Despite her poor sleep, she felt as if her body could float away; as if the planet had lost half its gravity overnight. She started to comb her hair, a long, painstaking process, but the feel of her flexing arms puzzled her. As usual, the nanotex adhered to her chest, then spread itself in a black film around her body, automatically cleansing her skin. The film of artificial cells took on the contours of her body; a landscape familiar, yet now subtly estranged.
Doctor Sartorius came back to check her out. “Your Plan Ten nanoservos have started shaping you up, Chrysoberyl.” Their transmissions sent a stream of colored squiggles and blinking text flowing across the holostage. In Chrys’s eye, a new call button had appeared; in an emergency, a blink at that spot would bring Plan Ten.
“The plan representative will present your advanced options, during one of your daily checkups.”
Checkups every day—she would never get that spattercone done.
Daeren came in to flash his irises one last time. “How do you feel?” he asked. “Anything I need to know?”
“The blue angels again,” the infrared letters sped across her window. “Tell them we’re busy.”
“We’re okay,” Chrys said, puzzled by his question.
A quick smile crossed his lips. “You’re talking plural already.” Daeren placed a transfer patch on his neck. “The blue angels need to ‘visit.’ Yours can visit, too.” He held out the patch.
“The blue angels say we can visit!” announced Fern. “Is it permitted, Oh Great One?”
She took the patch from Daeren and placed it on her neck, then returned it with her own visitors. “If I’m carrying ten thousand of them,” Chrys wondered, “why do I always see the same two?”
“Only two have been called to be priests,” he explained. “You may call others, as you wish.”
She shook her head. “Two are enough.”
“Greetings, God of Mercy.” These letters were blue.
Chrys blinked twice. “Who are you?”
“We are called the blue angels,” the visitor said. “Your new people are growing well, though they need to curb their lifestyle. They are rather frivolous, I’m afraid, but they’ll mature.” Maybe this one was a bishop.
Behind the doctor, the wall puckered in. It seemed to change its mind, then went ahead and opened. As its edges gathered back, there came a sound of scuffling, then a shout.
In the corridor outside struggled a stranger, held between two black-limbed octopods. The man was tossing his head one way then the other, his eyes bright with terror. His nanotex hung loose, as if its power had run down. Extending from the wall, ropelike appendages caught the man’s wrists and ankles. His arm was gripped by a woman in gray, a tall Sardish blonde.
The woman in gray turned her piercing eyes toward the doctor. “Sar, the clinic’s full. We need to extend.” Her voice had a tone of finality, expecting obedience.
“Excuse me.” The doctor glided out to join them.
Chrys stared until the door resealed.
Daeren still watched where the door had closed in, his expression grim. “A slave, he turned himself in. His masters objected. Sorry, it’s been a long night at the clinic.”
Master microbes. Chrys frowned. “That could happen to me.”
“Not if you stick to the rules, and get tested twice a month.”
“What? Like some addict?”
“We all do, even the chief of security.”
She eyed him coldly. “You said these micros would keep me safe.”
“Safer than you were before.”
“But—” That vampire up on level one, the night before. More slaves every year, turning into vampires, or hauling captives to the Slave World for its microbial Enlightened Leader. “It’s a cancer,” she realized. “Like the building root cancers. It threatens all the city.”
“Not just the city. It’s reached—” He stopped, hesitant.
“How can it go on? Why can’t the Palace just round up all the vampires?”
Daeren shook his head. “The vampires are the least of it. The problem already reaches too far up.”
“Far up? What do you mean?”
“Sar runs a private clinic for the Great Houses.”
Smart cocaine. Chrys felt a chill down to her toes. Then she frowned and shook herself. “Well, I want no part of it one way or another. I just want to make art.”
“Of course you do,” said Daeren. “Nobody says, ‘I’ll grow up to be a slave.’” He looked her closely in the eye, blue rings flashing. “Your people pass. You can have them back now, and return mine.”
“Nothing but insulting questions, interminable,” complained Poppy.
“Before you leave,” Daeren added, “the chief has to certify.”
The wall parted smartly. A woman entered, the Sardish blonde who had brought in the plague victim. Her skin was exceptionally fair; Chrys could see every vein, like ivy on her arms and face. She carried herself stiff as a Palace guard. Her mouth was small, as if she would only release her words on good behavior. “I am Andradite of Sardis, Chief of Security.”
“Our ancient history tells of the god among gods,” said Fern. “The Thundergod.”
Nodding to Daeren, Andradite put a transfer patch at her neck, then immediately pressed to his. He did the same for her, swiftly, as if it were something they had done
many times. Chrys felt her scalp prickle.
Then the chief’s eyes faced Chrys. Her irises flashed bluish violet, a shade deeper than Daeren’s.
“The judges,” announced Poppy. “Throughout history, they brought trouble.”
“We have nothing to hide,” insisted Fern.
Chrys tried to look unconcerned.
“You’ve done well, so far.” Andradite offered her a patch. “Much better than some of us expected.” The chief had expected her to fail, Chrys realized. Both agents were hiding something. Why?
“Once you’re home, you will hear from us,” the chief told her. “You will join the community of controlled carriers—a highly exclusive group.”
Chrys doubted that. How exclusive could a group be, to take her?
In her window, next to Plan Ten, appeared another call button, with no label, just the color purple that the chief’s eyes flashed. “If you’re ever in trouble,” the chief told her, “the kind of trouble even Plan Ten can’t help, call us. Forget your own name, but remember that.”
FOUR
Fern tumbled through the city of the great Cisterna Magna, tasting its intricate molecules. Throughout the Cisterna, libraries of triplex DNA stored all the learning of Eleutheria. Nightclubs flashed with light-producing enzymes, singing colored music. Through the singing halls tumbled children ripe for breeding, their filaments tasting each other, hungering for just the right mate to merge.
“Fern?” Poppy’s light flashed through the optic fibers. “We need help. A merged pair is having trouble giving birth.”
Fern’s spiral tails whirled and sent her spinning down the hall. Between two columns of fibroblast, a nest of dendrimers formed the breeding chamber. Inside, two breeders had come together. Their filaments had dissolved, allowing their surface membranes to merge. As the pair merged, their DNA triplexes came together to exchange genes. Once the two triplex chromosomes recombined, the membranes would pucker and pinch in, and the new children would come apart—as three. The three newborn children would each have duplex DNA, until they each grew a third strand in order to breed again.
But this time, something had gone wrong. “The offspring can’t come apart,” flashed Poppy. The edges of the three rings puckered in all around, as the membranes sought to pinch through, but still they remained attached.
“Get the enzymes,” Fern told her. “Enzymes to cut the membrane, slowly.” Carefully her filaments applied the enzymes to the grooves between the three half-separated children. Poppy did the same around the other side; it was vital to cut evenly, lest a child tear open. The grooves deepened. At last the three rings fell apart, three different lights flashing their cries: yellow, yellow-green, and green-blue. Three children, where there had been two.
“There are so many children now,” Fern told Poppy, her filaments tasting the children to calm them. “Ten times more than I’ve ever known.”
“They’ll turn into elders soon enough,” flashed Poppy.
“The young elders are as careless as the children. And few of the children are becoming elders. Most just keep merging and dividing.”
“How else can our people grow?”
One lovely child, a ring of pink violet, seemed quieter than the rest. She had just grown her third strand of DNA, but she seemed in no hurry to join a mate. Instead, she spent all her time tasting the records of Eleutheria, studying the plans of the Comb. “I’ve figured out something,” she flashed to Fern. “The windows of the dwelling the gods call the Comb. The legendary windows that gather starlight. I can show how they were grown.”
Fern was pleased, but kept herself from revealing how much. “You’re a good student, Pink-violet. But you have less than a year to find a mate to merge.” After a year, a god’s hour, the breeder’s mating structures would dissolve, and she would inevitably become an elder.
The pink-violet one pulled in her filaments. “Merging is for gods and children. Not elders.”
“Are you sure of your choice?”
“When I become an elder, Fern, will I earn a name from the god?”
At home, Merope kept brushing around Chrys’s legs till she tripped, and even Alcyone deigned to sniff her hand. Rarely had she been away from her studio so long.
Above the painting stage hovered the virtual palette. Chrys dipped her fingers in cerulean blue and a touch of brown, then brushed her hands through the air, leaving a trail of indigo. She blocked in the spattercone of congealed rock, then the Elf moon, then added local colors: cool violet grays for the volcanic peaks, amber and gold for the opening spurt of lava; sky of deep cobalt, bearing the seven stars and their hunter.
“Oh Great One, may we taste a sign of your favor?”
She thought of something. “Poppy, I’ll give you a sign if you can help me out.”
“Of course—anything, to serve our God of Mercy.”
The room darkened, and the new painting vanished. In its place appeared the lava fountain falling into butterflies.
“A river of stars,” said Poppy.
“Poppy…how can I help other people to see it as I do?”
“All the people can see it through your eyes. They’re just busy right now.”
“I mean, the other…gods.”
A tiny replica of the volcano appeared in her eyes, hovering just before her. The replica looked washed out in black, crucial details missing, like an old oil color darkened with age. Chrys nodded. “That is how other gods see.” That was why Pearl called her butterflies too dark.
“Try this.”
The replica changed. Its details returned, in a subtly different spectrum. No more infrared lava, but the reds and golds had their own distinctive range. Not the palette she would have chosen, yet compelling in its own way. Her pulse raced—she could hardly wait to show Topaz.
“Do we please you, Oh Great One?”
She reached for an AZ and placed the wafer on her tongue.
For the next hour, Poppy helped redo two other pieces. It was more than just a shifted wavelength; an aesthetic choice was made, a choice Chrys could not have made herself. The results were exciting; but were they hers alone?
Slowly she smiled. From the public archive she downloaded an image of AZ, azetidine acid, the four-atom square with the forked tail. She set the molecule in the corner of each piece, next to her own cat’s eye.
If she worked fast, she could revise all her pieces in the gallery, and still get the moon piece done for the Elf gallery director and Zircon’s Elf patron. But then, Elves could see the infrared. Which version should she show?
With a blink at her window, she called Topaz. Topaz’s sprite floated beside a towering portrait of a fur-cloaked client from one of the Great Houses. Her finger was shaping the last stroke of eyelash and a blush on the cheek. She turned to Chrys. “How’s it going, Cat’s Eye?”
“Topaz, any chance I could have a dozen more spots at the show?”
“Are you kidding? You’re doing a dozen more pieces this week?”
Chrys looked away. She should have known better.
“The show’s important, but don’t kill yourself. I’m sure the Elves will love Lava Butterflies.” Her voice had a trace of condescension.
Chrys looked up. “I found out some things. Brain enhancers are actually self-aware. Like sentients.”
Topaz frowned. “Cat’s Eye, everyone knows a nanoservo can’t be self-aware. How could it pack a trillion neurons?”
She wondered that herself. As the sprite dissolved, Chrys realized that Topaz still thought of her as the Dolomite sophomore who knew nothing. But this time, Topaz was wrong.
Another sprite flashed into her window. Zircon looked out at her from the club; the late afternoon hour, it was full of mountainous biceps flexing. “Chrys, where have you been? The second workout you’ve missed.”
“Hey, I’m sorry.” Actually, she felt as if she had ten workouts that morning. “Don’t worry. Things are getting back to…normal.”
On his chest, the large crystal gem
s swam out in spirals.
“Stars, Oh Great One,” flashed Poppy’s letters beneath. “When will you show us the stars?”
Startled, Chrys tried to keep her face straight. But Zircon gave her a puzzled look. “Chrys, if you’re in trouble, let me know, okay?”
She made herself smile. “I had to crack cancerplast the other night.” Just the night before last—it felt like forever.
Zircon shook his head. “You couldn’t pay me to live on your level.”
“Nobody pays me to live elsewhere.”
He grinned infectiously, and lines appeared in his forehead. Not as young as he used to be, but always up for something new. “Hey, I could fix you up. I know Elves, men or women, who’d just die to have you.”
Chrys liked Zirc, and she could have fallen for him, once upon a time. “I’ve had enough of people. I’d sooner date a worm-face.”
“Mind-suckers!” Zircon shuddered. “Don’t even say that. It’s…perverted.”
That evening Chrys took a break and strolled up Center Way. The lightcraft flitting up and down, the glowing signs, the virtual decor of the Great Houses—through her eyes, the micros exclaimed at all the lights, which they called stars. For the micros, she realized, ten meters might as well be ten light-years. How could they distinguish city lights from those across the universe?
“Wait,” flashed Poppy. “Wait—I see something most important. Something from our records; the oldest records of our people.”
Chrys blinked. Her eyes came to rest upon the Comb.
“That’s it! Fern, come quickly—call the others to see…”
The Comb’s hexagonal facets shone as always, in shifting tones of gold, red, even lava. Curious, Chrys asked, “What do your records say?”
“They say that we made the Comb.”
Chrys was taken aback. “You made the Comb? How can that be?” The same strain as Titan’s, Eleutheria. But had they come from Titan himself?
“It is true,” added Fern. “Our ancestors designed the seed that grew the Comb. We have all the plans. We made it for The Blind God.”
“The Blind God?” Chrys asked. “Not the Lord of Light?” She remembered what had puzzled her before: How could her own “people” be so different from Daeren’s, if they came from his own head?
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