A few of Daeren’s blue angels had stayed with her to heal. “Not the blue angels. They were sick—they’ve been through so much.”
“They face trial. And so do you.”
“Keep talking,” urged Forget-me-not. “We need to keep some of the defectors. At least the mathematicians—they’re really smart. We’ll tell the judges—”
Chrys pulled against the octopod arms until one gave her a shock. She clenched her teeth. “I rescued him—”
“We’ll see what you rescued.”
Doctor Sartorius said, “He’s stabilized. He can handle consciousness for a few minutes.”
Andra frowned. “Is Selenite here yet?”
“Just arrived.”
Chrys demanded, “What’s going on?”
Andra gave her a look, haunted yet calculating. Daeren lay surrounded by a webbing of filaments from the wall. Behind him waited Selenite with a grim expression, arms folded. Daeren’s eyes were open, bright with pain.
The chief brought her face close to his. “Listen,” Andra spoke rapidly. “Your people survived, about two hundred thousand of them.” One in five—what became of the rest? Torture? Starvation? “You have to give them up.”
His eyes flitted away, then back, irises dark. “It wasn’t their fault.”
“No, but your forebrain’s shot to hell. You know the rule. You have to heal in the clinic.”
“Alone?”
“How else?” Andra demanded. “You’ll be arsenic-wiped every day. Tell them.”
“I can’t do that,” Daeren whispered. “I can’t send them away. Homeless.”
“They’ll have a home—half with me, half with Selenite.” By regulation, a carrier could not hold more than 10 percent over their limit.
“Selenite? But she’ll breed them for—”
“They’ll live, won’t they? Why didn’t you think of that when you gave yourself up?”
Chrys caught her breath. Whatever could Andra mean?
Daeren closed his eyes. “Why did you bring me back?”
“What really happened to him?” Chrys demanded of her people. “What do the blue angels say?”
A moment of hesitation. “They say he went to the masters. Because he had destroyed their world, he gave them his.”
She stared without seeing, without breathing. She remembered his eyes, when he last came to see her, the shifting eyes of a slave. His last call for help.
“I warned you,” whispered Andra. “He can’t have micros again, ever.”
Doctor Sartorius stood by the cot, tendrils hanging motionless from his head, their eye sensors turned aside. Chrys caught the sentient carapace between her hands. His warmth surprised her; “waste heat,” the sentient unspeakable. No eyes, but she faced the worms. “Doctor, can’t you do something? He’s no slave; he just slipped. You know what he is. You’ve got to cure him.”
“I’ll do what I can, Chrysoberyl.” The doctor’s voice was strangely soft, the different voice that she had heard once or twice, still distinctly his. “But chemicals alone cannot fix the brain, without exchanging one slavery for another.”
TWENTY-ONE
From the world of Endless Light, hundreds of defectors from the masters had swarmed in, all at once—desperate elders smuggling sick children, as well as agitators and infiltrators. Even years later a few more, unrepentant, were rooted out of hiding in the bone marrow, preparing their secret poisons.
The judges in purple emitted volumes of disgust, enough to permeate the arachnoid. “Such lack of judgment we have never seen,” they proclaimed. “You can never know you’ve found them all; there could be others even we did not find. You should be arsenic-wiped.”
Fireweed was about to say that Eleutherians had investigated themselves more thoroughly than did the judges, but she thought better of it. “We are eternally grateful for your assistance—and so are our new citizens.” Those who came for a better life had settled in. Engineers and mathematicians, some of them brilliant. In the closed society of Endless Light, lacking resources as well as freedom of speech, the greatest minds embraced mathematics. The Leader’s loss was Eleutheria’s gain.
“And your population is in excess again,” the judge added. “You’re fined ten thousand atoms of palladium.”
“We’re correcting the problem, as you can taste.” The pheromones had been reset to encourage development of elders.
“And next time, don’t induce all the foreign children to merge prematurely just to prevent their deportation. It’s indecent.” Eleutheria had done this for generations to keep the most genetic benefit from immigrant talent.
Fireweed emitted placating pheromones of the highest quality. “Anything else? Surely we can continue this discussion in the nightclub, over AZ.” Most people consumed azetidine as quickly as they could absorb it from the blood, but Fireweed had learned Rose’s trick of saving some for special occasions.
“Eleutheria!” The judge emitted molecules of exasperation. “You people think you know everything, but you were fooled once. Don’t think you won’t be fools again.”
Her night passed in fitful slumber; she could not awake without remembering and crying herself to sleep again. In the morning, her message light blinked insistently. Chrys roused herself, her eyelids sore, her back aching from strain. Wearily, she fetched a disk of nanotex. The material spread smoothly up her arms and down to her toes.
The sprite was a stranger, an Iridian gentleman with a few modest agates swimming in his talar. “You went to the Slave World. Did you see my son?” A still image followed, a young man in thick nanotex with gem-cutting tools at his side. His short-cropped hair stood up like a brush, and his smile had that half scared look of someone just getting used to adulthood.
The news must have got out. Chrys swallowed. “I—I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”
“Please—it’s been a year since they took him. I know he would send word, if he could. Can’t they even let their slaves send word home? Why doesn’t the Palace negotiate?”
Her mouth opened, but she could not think what to say.
“Send me your recording,” he demanded. “I’ll recognize my son.”
“It’s classified,” she said quickly.
The man’s face brightened. “So there is a recording. Release it.”
Chrys sighed. “Believe me, it won’t help you.”
“I’ll sue to get it released.” The man’s voice softened. “Please—my only son. He was to take over the stonecutting shop this year, when those plague-ridden pirates got him.”
She bit her lip. “If there were anything I could do, believe me, I would. Every week I take my shift in the Underworld, helping folks like your son—”
The man stiffened. “My son never went near the Underworld. He was clean-living, until he was kidnapped.” He raised his hands. “Can you go? Negotiate his release? I’ll pay ransom.”
“No,” she whispered. Then aloud, “I can’t go back, ever.”
“You got your own back! Help my son!”
The rest of that morning, the calls came—a daughter, a brother, a grandson lost, the year before, the previous month, or just that week. Several that week, in fact. A lot of good it had done, boiling the world of Endless Light.
In desperation she forwarded all calls to Xenon. Her own work had fallen behind, and the following day she was due to meet Ilia at the Gallery Elysium to preview her exhibit. But when she sat at the painting stage, all she could do was stare.
“New ideas,” flashed Lupin, a new elder whose lemon yellow reminded her of Jonquil. “We have new ideas—for advanced compositions…”
Her hand, as if on its own, traced a ghostly outline of Daeren’s forehead. No good—she was never any good at humans. With a flick of her hand, the shape dissolved in white—pure, even light that filled the entire cube of stage. One more piece, she needed for her show; but what could it be? What pattern of pixels could begin to express what she had undergone?
“Chrysoberyl,” called Xen
on. “Chief Andra is trying to reach you.”
Darkness surrounded Andra’s eyes, as if she had not slept much either. “I’ve spoken with Arion.”
“About what?”
“Your treason.”
“Oh, right.” Tipping off the slaves, though Eris already had.
“If Arion tells the Palace, the Palace octopods will haul you in. Arsenic-wiped first, questions later.”
Passage to Solaria; she had to look up the schedule. Solaria was several days journey, with numerous jump folds.
“For now,” Andra told her, “Arion agrees to overlook your indiscretion. I traded valuable intelligence—some of the best we ever received. Daeren’s brain held high-level defectors, including advisors to the Leader.”
“I see.” Chrys bit her lip. “You know where that intelligence will go.” Straight to Eris.
“I know well enough,” Andra coldly replied. “I bought your people’s lives, do you understand?”
Chrys looked away. Her heart beat faster. “How is Daeren?”
“The Committee will see.”
Above the virtual leaves and the flying fish, someone had set the sky gray, with a fine mist of rain. The Committee members sat close together, humans trading patches all around but avoiding each other’s eyes. Sartorius and Flexor both had their worms pulled in, barely twitching.
Opal embraced Chrys. “Thanks,” she whispered. For what, Chrys wondered bitterly.
“Why, Andra?” Pyrite shook his head in puzzlement. “Why did he do it?”
Andra looked around the circle. “Ask yourselves. Ask your own people.”
Opal looked away, her face deeply creased. Pyrite held his head in his hand as if it ached. “My people were stunned, by the…by what happened to the Slave World.”
“Concerned.” Jasper spoke in a low voice as he held Garnet’s hand. Garnet looked away without speaking. “We were concerned,” Jasper admitted, “about what we heard. We had…questions.”
Chrys stared until her eyes swam. Anger, outrage—all the micro people had turned on Daeren, gave him no peace for helping Arion destroy the Slave World.
Selenite lifted her chin. “Mine were not concerned. Mine had nothing to say about it. The Slave World was an abomination. Daeren did what he had to. I was impressed.” Small comfort, thought Chrys. On top of everything, why had Andra made him send half his people to the Deathlord, to be bred into mitochondria?
Jasper’s hand tensed, and his throat dipped as he swallowed. “No matter how bad things get, you don’t just run to the masters. Think of Andra and Chrys. He must have known we’d risk our lives.”
“And all his own people,” added Opal. “What became of them?”
“He made a devil’s bargain,” Andra explained. “The masters took over, but they let the blue angels alone. The masters took most of the arsenic, of course, letting his own people slowly starve. They destroyed the pleasure center, but the blue angels protected his central memory and personality longer than usual.” Andra swallowed, her neck like a pillar of stone. “Protected while they starved, hoping for help, knowing none had ever come before.”
“But Chrys came,” said Opal.
“Yes,” said Andra. “Chrys got him back.”
Chrys looked up. “Why are you so angry at him?”
Jasper lifted his hands. “Haven’t you been listening?”
“Because all of us, every day, think of Endless Light.” Andra’s voice came faster. “We all know it’s there—a burst of heaven, and your troubles are over.”
No one denied it. Chrys recalled her own brush with the vampire.
Doctor Sartorius’s face worms came alive. “It was only one slip. In his work, Daeren resisted far more encounters than most of us. And even when he gave up, his own people remained faithful. I’ve never seen that before.”
Pyrite looked up hopefully. “Could he have them back?”
Jasper shook his head. “Never. How could he control them?”
Chrys asked, “Why not?”
“Because he’ll remember,” explained Opal. “Even after he heals, he’ll always remember what they can do. Dream of it every night.”
“But they want to go back.” Andra’s face was paler than ever. “All day and all night, the ones I took begged me to send them back.”
“Back to Daeren?” Pyrite exclaimed. “After he betrayed and starved them?”
“Even so.” Her voice sank to a whisper. “They know he won’t survive alone.”
“What do you mean, he won’t survive?” demanded Chrys. “Plan Ten can heal anything.”
Sartorius raised a worm. “The brain heals. But carriers who lose their people die, sometimes even before they leave the clinic.”
“How?”
Selenite frowned. “Any way they can, that’s how. Chrys, let Sar alone; he doesn’t like it any more than you do.”
The others looked away. Only Pyrite looked up in surprise; apparently no one had told him either. Chrys tried to remember what life was like before the little rings came to stay. Living alone. Even when she lived with Topaz, she could remember waking up nights in the dark, Topaz fast asleep with her back turned, feeling alone, totally alone in the universe. She recalled it as a fact outside herself; she could no longer imagine, now, what aloneness meant.
Pyrite said at last, “So it’s a death sentence.”
No one denied it. Garnet stared at Chrys, his irises flashing rapidly.
“They say, you have to do something, God of Mercy,” flashed Forget-me-not. “You have to help him.”
What more could she do, thought Chrys.
“There may be another way,” said the doctor. “An experimental treatment.” He paused as if measuring his words. “The blue angels could help us heal him.”
In the tranquil sky, a flock of fish flew overhead.
“Out of the question,” snapped Jasper. “Daeren didn’t just slip, like Garnet; he fell all the way. It will be months before he can feel anything normally.”
Doctor Sartorious said, “The blue angels could accelerate the healing process by monitoring the neurons closely, more subtly than the nanos can.”
“But in the meantime, how can he carry people in his head and not beg them to make him feel better? And then, for the rest of his life?”
“They’ll just have to say no.”
“Then who’s the master?” Jasper shook his head. “You’re condoning slavery.”
Selenite leaned forward slightly. “I wonder. You can’t live without mitochondria; does that make you their slave?”
Jasper looked at her in surprise. “You always say, rules are rules.”
“True, but the rules allow for experimental treatment. We have to stop letting the masters get the better of us.” She added, “I think the blue angels can handle it. Last night I found them reasonably well behaved. A bit forward—myself, I’d breed that out of them—but if the good doctor has a plan, I say give it a try.”
Throughout this exchange Andra kept quiet. Chrys saw now why she had enlisted Selenite.
“He can’t stay at the clinic,” the doctor added, “it’s a micro-free zone. Andra and I can look after him; we’ll set up a facility at home.”
“What are the gods up to?” Fireweed had been trying to get her attention.
“A stay of execution.”
Only a month till her show opened at Gallery Elysium. Chrys met Ilia there with Yyri, Zircon’s former lover. The two Elves smiled, their butterflies projecting behind them, golden swallowtails with dots of red and blue.
Yyri stretched out her hands, though careful not to actually touch Chrys. “Why Chrysoberyl,” she exclaimed, as if to a long lost friend. “Or, should I say, ‘Azetidine’? I haven’t seen you since the Seven Stars.” The Seven’s last show; the recollection felt like another world, light-years away. Suddenly, Ilia and Yyri laughed simultaneously. Their electronic sixth sense must have shared a witticism at the expense of primitive art.
“The God of Many Colors!” Lu
pin flashed lemon yellow, enthusiastic as old Jonquil. “Can we visit? Their nightclubs are legend.”
Ilia met her eyes, but the rings were absent. Chrys hesitated. “Are we—”
“Later, dear,” Ilia whispered. Then Chrys realized, Yyri was not a carrier. “Let’s review your catalogue from start to finish. First, your early work.”
Yyri clapped her hands. “I do love a historical approach. Discern the seeds of genius in one’s crudest beginnings.”
The first pyroclastic flow Chrys had clumsily attempted, sophomore year, and the one awful self-portrait; these Ilia had insisted on. Pieces that Chrys would have been mortified to reveal to any Iridian dealer were now shown in Helicon as signs of incipient genius.
“Lava Butterflies,” Ilia nodded to Yyri. “The colors struck my eye.” Her first piece with Eleutherian collaboration, signed with the molecule Azetidine.
“She was your find, my dear.” Yyri’s eye savored the more recent volcanoes, the lava flowing upward into arachnoid stalactites, all bearing Chrys’s Eleutherian nom d’art. “The form oscillates between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Imponderable imagination.”
Ilia leaned toward Chrys, a gleam in her eye. “Silicon—is it final?”
Chrys caught her breath. She had yet to give Jasper the bad news. She made herself smile. “Still negotiating. You know how…sentients are.”
“We’d love to include the model. We’ll save a place for it.”
Yyri clasped her hands. “Quite a coup, Ilia. Silicon—radical concept—people are just beside themselves.”
The cerebral landscapes and portraits followed, taking up the bulk of the show. Little colored rings careening through the arachnoid, tasting their nightclubs and their calculator cells. Ilia nodded at each, as if at a familiar neighborhood.
“An otherworldly universe,” exclaimed Yyri. “I’ve never seen anything quite so…alien.”
Ilia’s hand swept toward Fern, the ring of green filaments twinkling the commandments of Eleutheria. “Let’s bring her out front, like a greeter. She looks so friendly.”
Fern, Aster, Jonquil. It was harder than Chrys had expected to face them, world-sized, exposed to public view. She had wanted to show only portraits from the other carriers, but Ilia had insisted her own were the best. So here they all were, spaced at intervals against a black dome, constellations within some foreign galaxy. Chrys felt overwhelmed, as if in a crowd of a hundred people talking.
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