Taking the transfer patch, Chrys welcomed the immigrants. One was a particularly pretty sky-blue. “I call you Forget-me-not.”
“I try to forget nothing,” flashed the lilting blue letters. “I will write the entire history of the Seven Lights of Eleutheria.”
Daeren leaned back, clasped his hands and stretched, facing her painting stage. “Would you show us Mourners at an Execution? It makes people feel better to know someone cares.”
In the arch of the ceiling Xenon’s ornamental lamps dimmed, and a shadow fell, darkening Daeren’s face. The stage filled with the gloomy vision of arachnoid, the micros turning slowly, lost amid the jungle of fibroblasts, an unholy glow lurking beyond them. Wondering how the gods could take so many microbial lives.
“How are the Elves doing?” Chrys asked. “They find anything?”
His lips tightened. “Arion thinks he’s narrowed the location of the Slave World. But no habitable planet in that sector shows any sign of human life.” A place of no return, even for Elves. “I’ve tested more Elysian carriers. Two were infected, covertly, without their own people knowing.” His gaze never left Mourners. “Eris had them arsenic-wiped.”
Chrys took a deep breath.
“Can you imagine what it’s like to lose your entire population? And for others to witness?”
She shook her head. “Why? Why would Eris kill all the innocents? He himself is full of the bad ones.”
“I’m sure he replaced them with his own.” Daeren’s hands clasped and unclasped. “Eris watched me the whole while, learning my methods. Now he’s testing his own product on me. Someday the devils are bound to slip past.”
EIGHTEEN
Destruction of barbarous populations who blindly despoiled their own gods—such events occurred every generation or two and were accepted in sorrow. But the false god’s annihilation of innocents whose only crime was to miss a few criminals in their midst—this the blue angels themselves had witnessed in horror. And what had the true gods done to prevent it?
The word spread from world to world, including Eleutheria. “So,” taunted Rose, “what do you think of your One True God now?”
Fireweed did not answer, but Forget-me-not flashed ahead. “Remember the truth,” said the sky blue one. “The whole truth. The history of New Eleutheria began with a deed of evil, from whose consequence we were spared. Our own birth was a miracle.”
“Mythology,” flashed Rose. Then she added, “Don’t you have some digging to do in the archive? That point about the Fifth Light, remember; you still haven’t got it straight.”
While the cheery blue Forget-me-not vanished to the archive, Rose pressed at Fireweed. “How could Seven Lights compare to Endless Light? Your ‘God of Mercy,’ who tells you to love all the people as Herself—she herself condones slaughter of the innocents. How can God let such things be?”
Fireweed’s infrared glimmered as if half convinced. “Perhaps not. Perhaps God did not know of the slaughtered innocents.”
“If God does not know, then how can she be God?”
“It’s a mystery,” Fireweed flashed more brightly. “I am too small to understand.”
“Too small to matter, to all the great hosts lumbering outside. In truth, I tell you, there is an answer, and I can lead the Great Host to it—the very center of Endless Light.”
“‘The very center is empty,’” quoted Fireweed, an ancient saying.
The aphorism irritated Rose, but she pressed on. “Look: I have served your god for a hundred generations and soon will see my last. I don’t ask you to help me, only to stand aside when the time comes. Let the god choose.”
Six weeks till Chrys’s show opened in Helicon, the Elf capital, and already snake-eggs pestered her in the street or hid like vermin behind her drapes and light fixtures, all hunting for an “inside scoop” on her work and whatever dark personal secrets they could imagine. By accident (or perhaps not) one got stepped on. A veritable cloud of them descended, leading to the headline story, “Prominent Artist Assaults Journalist.” If the news reached Dolomoth—she could not bear to imagine it. Her little brother’s image up in the corner, turning cartwheels forever, receded even farther from reach.
“By the way,” Xenon asked one morning, “it’s no business of mine, but do artists often receive anonymous donations of ten million credits?”
Focusing her tired eyes, she counted the digits in the credit line that hovered ever longer in her window. Sure enough, there were eight, where there had only been seven the last time she counted. Her investments with Garnet were long gone; there was no explanation. Or was there?
On a hunch, she placed a call. “Garnet, what the hell are you doing to my credit line?”
The sprite in gray smiled apologetically. “What’s the harm? It’s anonymous.”
The way he said it, she couldn’t help but smile. “You know I can’t take so much as quartz dust from you.”
Garnet said quietly, “What you gave me was priceless.”
“In that case, I’m insulted.” She sighed. Being “objective” was a joke, she had decided. All the testers had to judge people they loved or hated; there was nothing objective about it. But rules were rules. “This time, I’ll pass it on to the Simian Advancement League. But next time, I’ll have to report you.”
“The Sim League—Jasper will be so pleased,” he exclaimed. “By the way, how is your new recruit? We’d like to meet him.”
Zircon—her “new recruit,” indeed. She started to protest but had another thought. Garnet needed to get out among carriers again. “You can invite him to Olympus.”
The pain was there, in the lines around Garnet’s eyes. No matter how young you look, there comes a day when you feel old. “You’ll be doing me a favor,” she insisted. “Honest.”
“In that case, I have no choice.”
The next day, she faced the Silicon planning board. At the virtual meeting, she and Jasper sat at his giant-sized holostage. On the holostage the sentients or their avatars made a diverse assemblage. One was humanoid, bipedal with a knob of a head; another, built like a ladder with various appendages; while the dominant figure extended radially like a sea urchin, a core cortex within a nest of legs. Still others were too large and extensive to be visualized, such as the transit systems of Helicon and Papilion, each represented by a cross-shaped avatar.
The board included three Elf humans, one of them Guardian Arion. Arion’s image spent most of the meeting sitting back with his arms crossed. From news accounts, Chrys guessed this pose represented the official Elf view of the sentient plans. Elves were mortified to see their aesthetics upstaged, though they could not survive a minute without the sentient partners running their cities.
Something pricked Chrys’s memory. Selenite—where was she? Why wasn’t she here to help present the design? Chrys had avoided Selenite since her accusations about art, hoping the dust would settle. Perhaps Selenite knew better—this deal would never fly.
The chair of the board was the giant black sea urchin, reputedly a top market investor like Garnet. Its twenty-odd limbs stood out straight from its body, each ending in a different mechanism for grasping, screwing, or drawing. The sea urchin methodically reviewed the city’s needs: so much residential volume, of a dozen categories, from snake-egg to transit system; so many power connections, service conduits, and sewage lines; and something called “wetware.”
The cross representing a transit system started blinking. “Does a sentient city really need so much volume for wetware?” About 12 percent of the city volume had this designation. “Couldn’t that be covered under service conduits?”
“We must plan for wet visitation,” said the sea urchin. “We’ve made our best estimate of wet volume occupancy.”
Chrys gave Jasper a questioning look. “Visiting humans,” he explained.
An Elf asked, “Have you considered the placement of the twelve percent, and the actual visitation patterns expected? Remember any Elysian city is a hundred percen
t accessible to sentients.”
Below at right blinked a circular avatar with two crossbars. A virtual information network; a sentient being who entirely lacked physical substance. “Of course, our city will be a hundred percent accessible to humans—as accessible as it is to me.”
Above Chrys’s left shoulder a light was blinking. Chrys twisted her neck up to see. A ladder with two clawed appendages waved both of them. “Speaking of wetness, why build the first city for sentients literally floating on the greatest volume of water in the Fold? We could have picked Urulan—”
“With all due respect,” interposed the giant sea urchin, “we settled the choice of planet two decades ago.” Two decades—they took their time, Chrys thought. Perhaps, she thought hopefully, they’d take another two decades more, while she went back to painting. “Other questions?” invited the chair.
The transit cross blinked again. “My calculations show the projected sewage conduits to be entirely inadequate. Such a large structure requires a greater scaling factor.”
There ensued a lengthy discussion of the amount, extent, and arrangement of sewage conduits. “Why do they need so much sewage,” she asked Jasper, “if they’re avoiding humans?”
Jasper leaned closer to whisper. “For sentients,” he explained, “sewage is mostly waste heat; an unavoidable product of even the cleanest machine. ‘Waste heat’ is unmentionable in public, like human excrement.”
The ladder with the two clawed arms spoke again. “Urulan proposed an innovative mechanism for efficient sewage dispersal.”
“That proposal received thorough discussion,” said the sea urchin. “Other questions?”
After what seemed an interminable time, the word “Eleutheria” leaped out. Chrys sat up straight, her pulse racing.
“Eleutheria—an award-winning firm of a million professional designers—presents its newly revised design for our metropolis.” Gone was the gleaming pearly surface of the great sphere that Jonquil had first proposed. In its place, the sphere shone brilliant red, into the infrared. The sphere resolved into a thousand facets, each a fiery spiral swirling gradually outward like a distant galaxy, a universe of flame.
Chrys stole a look at the Elves. None spoke, though one had a hand to her mouth. Arion’s face was white as moonstone, the veins throbbing in his forehead.
In Chrys’s window the words of Fireweed flowed across. Taking a breath, Chrys began to read aloud. “‘The form, a heroic jewel, represents the very rising of the sun. Each facet of the jewel presents a slightly different hue, as it were, a facet of the rainbow…’” A bit much, she thought, adding at the end, “It’s really just a sketch.”
The sphere cut in, its plane of section moving forward through the center. Beneath its fiery surface stretched broad shafts connecting the center with thousands of tunnels extending in every direction. The ramified tunnels led to homes, recharging stations, industrial plants for all kinds of implements of nanoplast.
The sentient machines watched and listened, with whatever sensors they had. The humanoid observed, “This metropolis will actually grow itself. Can you guarantee the entire structure will grow…intact?” For a structure floating on ocean, the slightest fissure could spell disaster. A good question, considering what had happened to the Comb.
Chrys felt her ears throbbing. “We guarantee our work.” She would end up broke, worse than before she ever heard of Eleutheria.
Jasper raised a hand, his jaw lifting impressively. “The project has the financial backing of the entire House of Hyalite, the oldest and most reliable contractor of the twin worlds.”
Fireweed’s letters glowed like lava. “We of Eleutheria stand for truth and memory. All our work we dedicate to the One True God.” No need to read out that one.
The transit cross asked, “Why does your design radiate from the center outward in all directions, instead of the more traditional cross section? How can we lay out plans?”
Chrys blinked at her keypad to pass that on. Fireweed explained, “Thematic unity requires that the inner design reflect the outer. Let all who dwell within remember that they partake of a sunlike power.” The board members took that pretty well. They wanted aesthetics, all right.
“I’m concerned about adjacencies,” spoke a lamppost-like humanoid. “The manufacturing plants must be located adjacent to adequate transport…”
The questions wore on, some clear and apt, others impenetrable. At last the ladder with the two clawed arms spoke again. “The Urulite bid came in lower,” the ladder insisted, to the visible annoyance of the giant sea urchin, whose limb endings twisted like screwdrivers. “And their design was truly pathbreaking.”
With the Silicon Board meeting behind her, Chrys redoubled her work for her show. But a few days later, Jasper called. “Congratulations,” announced the sprite with its tiny map stone. His eyes flashed with eager micros. “The choice for Silicon is Eleutheria.”
At first Chrys was not sure she had heard correctly. “Are you sure? I thought they would pick the Urulites.”
He waved a hand dismissively. “That was just trying to push the price down. All along they knew what they wanted.”
It was beginning to sink in. Her head ached as she thought what lay ahead.
“The Map of the Universe leads us to destiny,” proclaimed Forget-me-not. “To shape the greatest metropolis the Fold has ever known. It’s written in the stars.”
“The greatest structure ever to arise in all the known universe,” agreed Rose.
Jasper’s namestone, the mysterious landscape, now seemed labyrinthine, a maze in which to get lost. “I don’t know,” Chrys said slowly. “I guess I never believed it would go through.”
His eyes smiled beneath the crag of his forehead. “You yourself won’t have to do much. Just manage Eleutherians properly, like you’ve done.”
“It’s not that.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve been thinking. I don’t believe great art was meant to be lived in. It’s a contradiction: the ego of a great mind versus the comfort of many.”
Jasper nodded. “The great cathedrals were not particularly comfortable, but look what life flowed from them. The Palace of Asragh—what do you think inspired the great flowering of Urulite culture?” He raised a finger. “Do you think humans invented art to hang in a museum? Art has always served to communicate wealth and power, to incite revolution, to invoke the gods. Art like yours.”
For a moment Chrys was speechless. “If sentients want to build something, why in the Fold would they need help from humans, let alone micros?”
“That’s like saying, why would an Iridian restaurant hire an Urulite chef? They simply want the best.”
She remembered Doctor Sartorius, his evasive response about microscopic sentients. “They’re making a statement, aren’t they? Human rights for microsentients.” Sentients even smaller than a pesky snake-egg.
Jasper shrugged. “Clients always have their reasons.”
Vain art, hidden politics, a living place for millions. She sighed. “All right. I’m sure Selenite will help.” As she had for the Comb.
Jasper’s face went blank. He turned his head sideways, his jaw prominent in his profile. “If you don’t mind, Chrys, could you turn aside a moment?”
She looked away, avoiding micro contact. On the shelf by the pyroclastic alarm, Merope had curled up asleep. The cat was putting on weight, Chrys noticed.
“My people have been informed that Eleutheria wants this job for their own.”
Without thinking, she started to turn her head, but stopped. “Without Selenite? But we’re partners.”
“Eleutherians have decided opinions on the Deathlord.”
Some things would be easier without Selenite; but without her, the project would end up like the Comb. “At least she knows her business.”
“The sentients aren’t interested in her, either. They figure they’ll rely on their own structural engineers. But I agree with you, Selenite would be a help.”
“If we t
ake this job,” she told her people, “we’ll need the help of the Deathlord’s minions.”
“The Deathlord?” Rose was outraged. “How can you deal with that authoritarian state?”
“One True God,” said Fireweed, “You know how I love you and all your people, and I long to obey your word. But the Deathlord violates your own most fundamental principle of mercy.”
“Nevertheless,” Chrys replied, “we dwell in the same universe. We must work together. Don’t you think the minions are better off for your influence?”
Rose flashed, “The Deathlord has forbidden me to visit.”
Appalled, Chrys looked back at Jasper. She couldn’t deal with Selenite—and she couldn’t deal without her.
Jasper’s sprite still looked carefully away, his features in profile jutting like the Dolomite cliffs. “Why not wait a generation or two. Ideas are immortal, but micros don’t live forever.”
That night was her turn on call for the Committee. In her window flitted a young woman in torn nanotex, hair disheveled, no stonesign. She raised both hands as if reaching up the face of a cliff. “Help me,” she groaned. “Nothing left. They’ll kill me if I don’t pay.” Not so smart—the smarter strains didn’t threaten, they just took you to the slave ship.
“Where are you?” The woman didn’t answer, or couldn’t, but the locator in Chrys’s window showed the vicinity of Gold of Asragh. Chrys no longer hung out there; the place had gone downhill, too many pimps and psychos, let alone the thickest slave traffic in the Underworld.
Out front, the old nightspot now had a simian boy and girl in red, vamping for customers. Chrys looked away. She asked the medic on call, “Do I have to go in?”
“That’s not where the signal reads,” the worm-face replied. “Go to the alley, behind, possibly underground.”
She craned her neck dubiously. “Not alone, I won’t.”
“You’re monitored every moment; they all know that.” The medic stretched his worms for a better look down the alley. “On second thought, I’ll come with you.” Usually the medic stayed outside, to avoid spooking the patients, some of whom had never known decent care.
Brain Plague Page 28