Chrys held back. Daeren squeezed her hand, then let go. “Leave us,” he told the doctor.
After the doctor had gone, Daeren stepped toward the bed. “Eris. You remember me.”
Chrys had to restrain herself from pulling him back. She’d have her people scour his bones afterward; she doubted those Elves who cleared Eris knew what they were doing.
The white folds of Daeren’s talar swished as he took another step. “Eris, I have some friends for you.”
Eris roused himself, twisting around. His face was a tortured mask. The shock of recognition nearly made Chrys black out; she caught herself, stepping back. “You have them, don’t you?” Eris tried to rise from the bed, but he fell to his knees on the floor and grasped Daeren’s talar. “Give them back. Please, give them to me.”
Daeren’s face tightened with pity and distaste. He held out the transfer. Seizing it from his hand, Eris pressed it to his neck. His eyes widened, a rapt expression suffused his face. Then he fell to kiss the talar’s hem.
Suddenly Daeren grasped his arm and tried to pull him up. “Listen, friend. Pull yourself together. You’re a human being.”
The Elf could only stare, uncomprehending.
In the news, an old unused satellite station outside Valedon had exploded, the cause unknown. Andra confirmed it was the end of the Slave World, and the Leader. “But not the end of ‘endless light,’” she warned the carriers at Olympus. “We’re advancing for now, but who knows what the brain plague will do next.”
Opal agreed. “There will always be light and leaders, and only wisdom to tell good from bad.”
Catching sight of Sartorius, Chrys gave the post-shaped sentient a quick hug. “I hope it wasn’t too bad at the Palace.”
“Tolerable, thanks,” said the worm-face. A vast understatement, Chrys guessed. “For now, Flexor is taking over our treatment program. I have to go to Helicon to start theirs.”
“With microbial partners.” The blue angels had a new calling.
“They really help,” said the doctor. “They help those who need to say yes.”
Chrys searched the virtual singing-trees for Jasper, who was planning the official seeding of Silicon. The seed would be sown in a protective enclosure floating just outside Helicon. Beneath the arch of a tree Moraeg waved to her. Beside her, Carnelian, who had officially joined the Committee to represent “independent” interests, was there listening earnestly to Garnet’s latest investment advice.
A newcomer caught her eye, an exceptionally tall woman with the most impressive build Chrys had ever seen. Chrys stared, puzzled. There was something familiar about her. Then the face smiled back. Chrys’s jaw just about dropped to the floor.
“Hello, dear,” crooned Zircon in a deep contralto. “I hope you like the change. I’ve been working on it for some time.”
“Excuse me while I faint.”
“Oh,” she raised a hand, “don’t do that. It might be catching.”
“Check the building code first.”
Zircon frowned at a serving caryatid, which had come out full of worms in the face. “Can’t we fix those servers?”
All the caryatids were worm-faces today. “You must be in love with Doctor Flexor.”
Selenite caught her arm. “Chrys, you have to talk with us. It’s…important.”
Jasper was there, looking very serious. Her heart sank. What had her people done now?
“Chrys.” Selenite seemed somehow embarrassed. “I know your people mean well, but—it just isn’t done.”
“What isn’t done?”
“Solicitation,” said Jasper. “Fund-raising.” Warily, he stroked his jaw.
“Why isn’t it done?”
Selenite crossed her arms. “It’s absurd. You can’t just rebuild the Underworld. Public housing is always a failure.”
“That’s right.” Jasper’s jaw jutted forward. “I should know, I grew up in it. We sims don’t want fancy designers messing around down there. Property values rise, we get shoved out.”
“Quite true.”
“We know you have a good heart,” Selenite added, “but you have to understand, the Underworld has always been there. Every society has an Underworld.”
“Absolutely.”
Selenite spread her hands. “Then why do you let them do this?”
Chrys shrugged. “My people have done well for me. I like to humor them. I can spare a few million credits.”
“But we don’t have to.”
“Certainly not. Just say no.”
Selenite looked at Jasper, then back to Chrys. “They’d better do it right. Or else.”
Jasper put a hand to the crag of his brow. “Look, they can have half a billion to play with. Just don’t let them talk to Garnet.”
When the journalist Quinx’s story came out, Chrys was amazed to see her parents on camera, her mother churning butter, her father leading the goats up the mountain. Immediately she called home.
“I hope you weren’t too bothered.” Chrys’s hands twisted nervously. “It wasn’t my idea.”
Her father kept his mouth small but did not seem displeased. “They got it wrong,” he noted. “My flock last year won the prize at the village fair, not the county.”
Chrys smiled brightly. “You see, they always exaggerate. All the other stuff, too,” she added hopefully.
“Not the health plan.” Her mother sounded puzzled. “The new health plan for all of Dolomoth. They didn’t mention that.”
So Arion had remembered. Chrys sighed. “You know, I was thinking of visiting home. With a friend.” Friends, about a million of them.
Her mother nodded with satisfaction. “True angels always come home.”
Chrys returned to Helicon to train Ilia to test the Elf carriers. “I hope you’re pleased with your sales,” the gallery director told her. “Both originals and copies are doing well—with a surprising range of buyers. Names we’ve never seen before.”
“And some anonymous,” Chrys pointed out. “I wonder who bought Seven Stars and the Hunter?”
Ilia gave her a look. “He couldn’t very well let anyone else have it, could he?”
The morning light spread the turquoise waves with flecks of titanium. Upon the sea floated the seed of Silicon, a dark pod of plast, not unlike Garnet’s ball of “flowers.” Just a demo, of course, the ceremonial breaking of ground on a world that had none. Around the pod stretched an immense ring-shaped observation platform, full of sensors, controllers, and protective devices. The brains in the back had been busy.
On the platform, Chrys shaded her eyes with her hand, squinting against the wind that tugged at her hair, which she had pulled back and bound as tight as she could. Her gray talar braced itself intelligently in the wind. Wind and water, azure and alabaster—an inspiration for her next piece, her eyes quickly sketched.
Recollecting herself, Chrys flashed a nervous smile at the members of the Board. The sentients seemed pleased, as far as one could tell, while the Elves looked on, their smiles frozen, as the seed sprouted and grew into an outrageous lava-colored dome of the model, each window a swirling spiral galaxy. Next to the board members stood the Prime Guardian of Elysium and the Protector of Valedon, his talar weighted down with gems, and all the other honored guests, humans, worm-faces, and other sentients of every size and description, that had come out to honor the first new city of Elysium to be built in two thousand years. And by the time it’s done, she silently told them, some of you will hate me. For good reason.
“Azetidine.” Calling her nom d’art, the snake-eggs descended, swirling around her, obscuring her view. “Some say, Azetidine, that you yourself are not the real builder of Silicon. Is it true?”
“Of course I’m not the builder. The seed of Silicon was actually built by—” She winked to download the long list of “brains in the back,” sentient engineers, most of whom did not even bother to take sonic names, who had physically created the seed and would nurture its growth for the next few decades.
Chrys stood taller, the wind from the sea already pulling filaments of lava from her hair. “Silicon was designed by the lights of Eleutheria. The light of Truth, ever true to its nature; of Beauty, the kind of beauty to draw the awe of generations; of Sacrifice…”
“Silicon is nothing,” flashed Lupin. “Nothing compared to what we’re building next.”
“For once, be modest.”
“…and above all, the Eighth Light of Mercy. Eleutheria is a way of being, a path of endless life. All those who seek to build in truth and memory shall find our way.”
Bonus
Short-Story
The following related short-story is reproduced below as first published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in August 1995.
“That rat didn’t die.” Andra walked around the holostage. Before her, projected down from the geodesic dome, the planet’s image shone: Iota Pavonis Three, the first new world approved for settlement in over four centuries. As Andra walked around, the brown swirl of a mysterious continent peered out through a swathe of cloud. She stopped, leaning forward on her elbows to watch. What name of its own would the Free Fold Federation ultimately bestow on IP3, Andra wondered; such a lovely, terrifying world.
“Not the last time, the rat didn’t.” The eye speaker was perched on her shoulder. It belonged to Skyhook, the sentient shuttle craft that would soon carry Andra from the study station down to land on the new world. A reasonable arrangement: The shuttle craft would carry the human xenobiologist through space for her field work, then she would carry his eye on the planet surface, as she did inside the station. “The rat only died down there the first eight times.”
“Until we got its ‘skin’ right.” The “skin” was a suit of nanoplast, containing billions of microscopic computers, designed to filter out all the local toxins—arsenic, lanthanides, bizarre pseudoalkaloids. All were found in local flora and fauna; inhaling them would kill a human within hours. In the old days, planets had been terraformed for human life, like Andra’s own home world Valedon. Today they would call that ecocide. Instead, millions of humans would be lifeshaped to live here on planet IP3, farming and building—the thought of it made her blood race.
“We got the right skin for the rat,” Skyhook’s eye speaker pointed out. “But you’re not exactly a rat.”
From across the holostage, an amorphous blob of nanoplast raised a pseudopod. “Not exactly a rat,” came a voice from the nanoplast. It was the voice of Pelt, the skinsuit that would protect Andra on the alien planet surface. “Not exactly a rat—just about nine-tenths, I’d say. Your cell physiology is practically the same as a rat; why, you could even take organ grafts. Only a few developmental genes make the difference.”
Andra smiled. “Thank the Spirit for a few genes. Life would be so much less interesting.”
Pelt’s pseudopod wiggled. “The rat lived, and so will you. But our nanoservos completely jammed.” The microscopic nanoservos had swarmed into sample life forms from IP3 to test their chemical structure. But for some reason they could barely begin to send back data before they broke down. “Nobody cares about them.”
“Of course we care,” Andra said quickly. Pelt never let anyone value human life above that of sentient machines. “That’s why we cut short the analysis, until we can bring samples back to the station. That’s why we’re sending me.”
“Us,” he corrected.
“All right, enough already,” said Skyhook. “Why don’t we review our data one last time?”
“Very well.” A third sentient voice boomed out of the hexagonal panel in the dome directly overhead. It was the explorer station herself, Quantum. Quantum considered herself female, the others male; Andra could never tell why, although sentients would laugh at any human who could not tell the difference. “Here are some microbial cells extracted from the soil by the last probe,” said Quantum.
The planet’s image dissolved. In its place appeared the highly magnified shapes of the microbes. The cells were round and somewhat flattened, rather like red blood cells. But if one looked closer, one could see that each flattened cell was actually pinched in straight through like a bagel.
“The toroid cell shape has never been observed on other planets,” said Quantum. “Otherwise, the cell’s structure is simple. No nuclear membranes surround the chromosomes; so, these cells are like bacteria, prokaryotes.”
Skyhook said, “The chromosome might be circular, too, as in bacteria.”
“Who knows?” said Pelt. “On Urulan, all the chromosomes are branched. It took us decades to do genetics there.”
“We just don’t know yet,” said Quantum. “All we know is, the cells contain DNA.”
“The usual double helix?” asked Skyhook. The double helix is a ladder of DNA nucleotide pairs, always adenine with thymine or guanine with cytosine, for the four different “letters” of the DNA code. When a cell divides to make two cells, the entire helix unzips, then fills in a complementary strand for each daughter cell.
“The nanoservos failed before they could tell for sure. But it does have all four nucleotides.”
Andra watched the magnified microbes as their images grew, their ring shapes filling out like bagel dough rising. “I’ll bet their chromosomes run right around the hole.”
At her shoulder Skyhook’s eye speaker laughed. “That would be a neat trick.”
Quantum added, “We identified fifteen amino acids in its proteins, including the usual six.” All living things have evolved to use six amino acids in common, the ones that form during the birth of planets. “But three of the others are toxic—”
“Look,” exclaimed Andra. “The cell is starting to divide.” One of the bulging toroids had begun to pucker in, all along its circumference. The puckered line deepened into a furrow all the way around the cell. Along the inside of the “hole,” a second furrow deepened, eventually to meet the furrow from the outer rim.
“So that’s how the cell divides,” said Skyhook. “Not by pinching in across the hole; instead it slices through.”
“The better to toast it.”
At that Pelt’s pseudopod made a rude gesture. “Pinching the hole in wouldn’t make sense, if your chromosomes encircles the hole; you’d pinch off half of it.”
Andra squinted and leaned forward on her elbows. “I say—that cell has three division furrows.”
“The daughter cells are dividing again already?” Skyhook suggested.
“No, it’s a third furrow in the same generation. All three furrows are meeting up in the middle.”
“That’s right,” boomed Quantum’s voice. “These cells divide in three, not two,” she explained. “Three daughter cells in each generation.”
Sure enough, the three daughter cells appeared, filling themselves out as they separated. Other cells too had puckered in by now, at various stages of division, and all made their daughters in triplets. “How would they divide their chromosomes to make three?” Andra wondered. “They must copy each DNA helix twice before dividing. Why would that have evolved?”
“Never mind the DNA,” said Pelt. “It’s those toxic amino acids you should worry about.”
“Not with you protecting me. The rat survived.”
Quantum said, “We’ve discussed every relevant point. We’ve established, based on all available data, that Andra’s chance of survival approaches 100 percent.”
“Uncertainties remain,” Skyhook cautioned.
Andra stood back and spread her hands. “Of course we need more data—that’s why we’re going down.”
“All right,” said Skyhook. “Let’s go.”
“I’m ready.” Pelt’s pseudopod dissolved, and the nanoplast formed a perfect hemisphere.
Andra unhooked Skyhook’s eye speaker from her shoulder. Then she walked back around the holostage to lift the hemisphere of
Pelt onto her head. Pelt’s nanoplast began to melt slowly down over her black curls, leaving a thin transparent film of nanoprocessors covering her hair, her dark skin, and her black eyes. It formed a special breather over her nose and mouth. Everywhere the nanoplast would filter the air that reached her skin, keeping planetary dust out while letting oxygen through. The film covered the necklace of pink andradites around her neck, spreading down her shirt and trousers. She lifted each foot in turn to allow the complete enclosure. Now she would be safe from any chemical hazard she might encounter.
In Skyhook’s viewport, the surface of planet IP3 expanded and rose to meet them. Numerous tests had established its physical parameters as habitable—gravity of nine-tenths g, temperatures not too extreme, oxygen sufficient and carbon dioxide low enough, water plentiful. The ozone layer could have been denser, but human colonists would have their eyes and skin lifeshaped for extra enzymes to keep their retina and chromosomes repaired.
At a distance the planet did not look remarkably different from Andra’s home world. A brilliant expanse of ocean met a mottled brown shore, rotating slowly down beneath the craft. Beyond, in the upper latitudes, rolled the blue-brown interior of a continent, broken only by a circle of mountains.
As Skyhook fell swiftly toward the land, curious patterns emerged. Long dark bands ran in parallel, in gently winding rows like a string picture. The lines were bands of blue vegetation; the probe had sent back footage of it, wide arching structures tall as trees. Each band alternated with a band of yellow, which gave way to the next band of blue. Over and over the same pattern repeated, ceasing only at the mountains.
“I’ve never seen patterns like that on uncolonized worlds,” Andra mused.
“They do look like garden rows,” Skyhook admitted. “Perhaps the native farmers will come out to greet us.”
If there were intelligent life forms, they had yet to invent radio. A year of monitoring the planet at every conceivable frequency had yielded nothing, not so much as a calculation of pi.
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