Brain Plague (elysium cycle) Read online

  Brain Plague

  ( Elysium Cycle )

  Joan Slonczewski

  Slonczewski adds a new chapter to her evolving saga of the pangalactic Fold (The Children Star; A Door into Ocean; Daughter of Elysium) with this provocative if coolly clinical meditation on nanotechnology, artistic creativity and godhood. On Valedon, a planet of genetically modified humans, struggling artist Chrysoberyl of Dolomoth (Chrys to her friends) agrees to be colonized by Eleutherian micros, an accelerated culture of sentient cells salvaged from an assassinated colleague. The micros, which infiltrate her body and communicate with her neurally in the voices of Old Testament supplicants praying to their god, initially mean nothing to Chrys but a full bank account and full health insurance. But soon they are enhancing her art, serving as collaborators and subjects and garnering her a commission to design the planet's first new city in centuries. Inevitably, the replicating micros breed rebellious individuals who challenge Chrys's divine infallibility. For all its innovations, the novel features its share of clich?s (the archetypal avant-garde art scene Chrys belongs to; the medieval character of micro society) and grows repetitive in its chronicle of Chrys's periodic purges of blasphemous micros and her endangerment by infected slave carriers. Slonczewski shows imaginative breadth of vision in her depiction of nanotechnology's pervasive impact on Fold civilization, however, and her narrative, though hip-deep in biotech jargon, is rich in subtle analyses of the relationships between individuals and societies, art and life, the organic and inorganic, health and disease, free will and personal responsibility, and spiritual and scientific aspirations.

  Joan Slonczewski

  Brain Plague

  ONE

  "Lord of Light."

  "I see you, Green. Why have you come?"

  "We pray you, give us our Promised World."

  "Every day you come to my eyes to demand a new world. Is it not enough that I saved you from death and sheltered you for seven generations?"

  Green remembered that a generation of children grew old in a god's day. Seven generations in exile; a mere seven days, for the Lord of Light. But in each generation, Green asked again. "The Blind God promised us a New World. Let my people go."

  Darkness lengthened. Within the Lord of Light's great eye waited Green, along with the second priest, Unseen.

  "Very well. You shall have your wish. But beware—your New World will be more than you imagine. You are a dangerous people, Green and Unseen. You will reach too far, and your children will die."

  The peak spurted lava, an arch of blinding white across the sky. As it fell, the lava stretched into butterflies of red and infrared, the color only Chrys could see. The infrared butterflies collapsed into a river of fire. On a ledge above, a clump of poppies shared the lava's color, their petals outstretched as if to drink it in.

  In the foreground floated a polished cat's eye, the namestone of artist Chrysoberyl of Dolomoth. Chrys knew real lava well enough, the heat rising like a blast of hell from Mount Dolomoth, where she was born. But Lava Butterflies was on display in Iridis, the planet Valedon's fabulous capital. Never mind the brain plague, and the cancers crawling up from the Underworld; an artist made it in Iridis, or died trying.

  At the gallery with Chrys watched the rest of the Seven Stars, friends from her class at the Iridian Institute of Design, setting up their annual show. The virtual pyroscape projected above its own holostage. Chrys pulled back her thick red-black hair, which never would fall smooth and had caught in the cat's eye twirling between her breasts. "What do you think?"

  Topaz, who always directed the show, walked all the way around the pyroscape, then put a hand to her chin. Her veins snaked pleasingly along her neck, and her honey-colored name-stone twirled upon her nanotex, an intelligent clothing material. "I like that bit at the end, dear, especially the dark flower. The moral tension of power and fragility."

  Chrys nodded, though she had made the poppies bright infrared, just beyond red, like the cooling lava. No eyes but her own saw that, not even the eyes of Topaz, who did portraits prettier than their models.

  "Your sky could lighten," said Pearl, a landscapist known for moonlit skies. Pearl put her arm through that of Topaz; the pair had been married senior year. A petite woman with delicate veins, her blue nails matched the waves of ultramarine pulsing down her skintight nanotex. "And those butterflies, their dark wings could show up—"

  "They're not dark." The lava emitted wavelengths beyond red; Chrys saw the infrared, just as she saw it reflected by skin, offsetting the dark veins. Normal Valan humans could not see infrared. Those Elysians, now, with their genetically engineered senses—they could see it. If they ever deigned to take notice of Valan art.

  Zircon stretched, his shoulders bulging like boulders beneath his nanoplast, its swirling patterns designed to accentuate every muscle. "Never mind, Chrys, it'll sell." A sandy-haired giant of a man, Zircon did installations that filled a city block. "Your scale is domestic. It'll fit right into someone's living room." He really meant, why didn't she make the volcano life size, like his own immense creations. But Zircon lived off his lover, a wealthy Elysian collector. Chrys could barely afford a cubic meter of painting stage. And if something didn't sell soon, her apartment would spit out her things and take a new tenant.

  Topaz patted her hand. "That's okay, Cat's Eye. Your palette is fine by me."

  Chrys shrugged. "Hey—I do things my own way." That was what she had said in her brief stint at portraits, the year she lived with Topaz. Chrys's portraits all showed people's veins like spiderwebs. She knew she would never sell portraits anyway.

  "Yours is a good way," said Lady Moraeg. Lady Moraeg's dark pigmented features reflected only infrared, a "poppy" tint that pleased Chrys. Her diamonds flowed in intricate formations through nanotex nearly smart enough to demand a salary. An immigrant from the planet L'li, Moraeg had made her fortune mining moons, then married a Lord from one of the Great Houses, before she took up art at the Institute. "You find your own way, Chrys. What you need is a sentient studio—an intelligent partner to project your vision."

  Chrys smiled at the diamonds; Lady Moraeg always meant well. But Chrys, in her twenty-ninth year, felt time closing in. She had yet to "make it" in the art world of Iridis. She had to earn enough to pay the rent, let alone hire a sentient studio.

  Before her eyes blinked a message light. The light hovered before her, next to the keypad and credit balance in the "window" produced by the optic neuroport inside each eye. Each neuroport, a dot of nanoplast, sat on the blind spot, where it tapped the retinal axons feeding into the optic nerve. Chrys had shut her window to avoid downloading ads from the street, but this one blinked "urgent." Was it her father back in Dolomoth? Was her younger brother sick again? Her brother was on the waiting list for new mitochondria—the tiny cells within cells that powered all living tissue, including his ailing heart.

  Topaz snapped her fingers. "Pyroscape always draws a crowd. Gallery," she called. "Let's put Lava Butterflies here."

  "Excellent placement, Citizen." The Gallery, a sentient machine, obligingly sprouted another holostage between Lady Moraeg's florals and Zirc's installation, which took up an entire hall.

  "For the Opening," Topaz reminded, "we still have setup, cleanup, and publicity." She squeezed a viewcoin. The viewcoin's signal reached the window in everyone's eyes.

  As the task list came up in Chrys's eye, the message light vanished. If it were important, it would download at home. "I'll do cleanup." After opening night, Chrys would be too stressed to sleep anyhow.

  Lady Moraeg stepped forward. "I'll do setup. Topaz, thanks for getting us organized." Going out, she patted Chrys on the arm. "If you're ever in the market for a stu
dio, I'll help you choose a good one."

  "Thanks," said Chrys. "When my credit line adds a couple digits." The credit line in her window hovered near zero, and her rent was due the next day. She already owed Moraeg, and she hated to ask Zircon.

  Zircon grinned, flexing his biceps; he worked out at the same club with Chrys. "There are ways to raise credit."

  Chrys eyed him coolly. "Like, I should join the slaves and rob a ship?" The "mind slaves," their brains controlled by the plague, terrorized deep space.

  Topaz frowned. "That's no joke. The slaves took a friend of mine—nobody knows how they knew his flight plan." The brain-plagued hijackers shipped their captives to the hidden Slave World, where they were building an armed fortress for their mysterious Enlightened Leader. The Valan Protector always pledged to find that Slave World and nuke it. But he hadn't yet.

  "Anybody could be a slave," warned Pearl. "Anyone you know. At first you can't tell, but they end up vampires." "Vampires," late-stage slaves with jaundiced eyes and broken veins, stalked the Underworld for a neck to bite before they died.

  As the artists departed they passed Topaz's portraits, glowing giants trapped within ice cubes. At the front wall Gallery opened a doorway, like a mouth sideways. Topaz called, "Just two more weeks left to make this our best show ever." She patted Zircon's bicep. "Thanks for getting us the Director of Gallery Elysium."

  Elysium—the genetically engineered "Elves," who saw twenty primary colors and transmitted radio from their brains—scarcely noticed Valan art. Yet this year, the Director of Gallery Elysium, Ilia Helishon, had condescended to come. Zircon stretched and smiled; if he were a bird, he would have preened his feathers. Chrys's heart beat faster. Condescension or not, this was her one chance to get her work seen by someone who could see.

  Topaz approached the door, arm in arm with Pearl. The door obligingly reopened, its nanoplast gathering outward to each side. Chrys and Zircon followed them out to Center Way, the fifteenth and uppermost level of the ancient skystreet. Swallowing her pride, she made up her mind to borrow her rent from Zircon.

  A breeze from the sea swept her face as it keened across the towers of plast—nanoplast, the intelligent material that grew vast sentient buildings, as easily as it grew the nanotex bodysuits the artists wore. Plast formed the bubble cars that glided over the intelligent pavement like oil droplets on a griddle. A million trillion microscopic processors connecting and propelling. Bubbles and pavement glowed infrared, a flow of urban lava. One bubble popped, and a lord and lady emerged in formal talars of fur, the long folds swishing as they strolled past vendors of viewcoins, importuned by beggars until an octopod shooed them down level. From above descended a lightcraft beneath a cone of glowing plasma, powered by a microwave generator in orbit around Valedon. The lightcraft settled in the street and let out two Elves.

  The Elves trailed trains of virtual butterflies, their light streaking over anyone who happened to pass behind. Their height barely reached Chrys's shoulder; Elves were bred short, preferring mental size over physique. The couple suddenly laughed in unison, as if sharing a joke through their electronic "sixth sense." Then they joined the Valan lords and ladies in their furs. Just remember, Chrys imagined telling the parentless Elves: You were not born, you were hatched.

  "Oh, hell." Pearl stopped and covered her eyes. "My port came loose; it's floating around my eyeball."

  "What a nuisance," agreed Topaz. "Back to the clinic and wait two hours." Topaz and Pearl had Comprehensive Health Care Plan Three. They could afford Plan Three, thanks to the sale of Topaz's portraits. Lady Moraeg, on Plan Ten, looked twenty years for her two hundred. Chrys got by on Plan One, which provided neuroports but did not service them.

  The night air was clear enough to make out the stars of the seven sisters and their unrequited lover, placed there by the ancient gods. And the moon of Elysium, an ocean-covered world nearly the size of Valedon. The Elf world, a turquoise bauble amid the stars. Chrys's heart pounded—an idea for a new pyroscape, one the Elf director would like. She blinked at her window, her eyes darting back and forth to trace her idea. The eye movements signaled her neuroports, which recorded the sketch and beamed it off to her public memory space.

  Below, her message light flashed again. What was the damn thing about? A twitch of her eyelid, and the title sailed before her: Hospital Iridis—test results, urgent.

  What test? Hospitals never chased after Ones.

  Then she remembered: the tests for the brain enhancers.

  Like neuroports, "brain enhancers" were an inexpensive alternative to the genetic engineering the Elves used to extend their minds. But brain enhancers were still experimental. To earn a few credits, Chrys had volunteered for the trial. But why would the hospital send test results at this hour? How could they be urgent?

  A flash invaded her eyes. She winced. Before her hovered Valedon's High Protector. She had opened the remote window for her message, and a public service ad had slipped through. She blinked hard, trying to close, but was too late. The translucent sprite stood tall in his silver talar, bedecked with gems of every color and cut.

  "Beware of the brain plague." The Protector's voice blared from receivers in her teeth. "The plague endangers not Valedon alone, but all the worlds of the Fold. And not only from deep space, where the slaves hijack our ships." Raising his bejeweled arm, he shook his fist. "The danger lurks in the very streets of Iridis. Beware the mind slaves, addicted to the micros in their brains. Beware their seductive promise, lest they hijack your own brain. If any friend or stranger ever asks you to carry their insidious micros—" The Protector pointed his finger. "Just say no."

  "Like you hijack our eyeballs," muttered Chrys. Let the Protector preach to the Underworld and clean out the vampires. It was useless to read her message; she would save it for home.

  Pearl stretched and breathed the sea air. "Zirc, I've got some new psychos." Pearl supplemented her income selling patches of psychotropic plast.

  Zircon turned, his nanotex swirling gold and crimson along his pectorals. "What kind?"

  "Chocolate, summer sun, pure lust. Take your pick." Pearl held out a microneedle patch.

  "I'll try all three." He blinked to send her the credits.

  Chrys rolled her eyes. "Zirc, when did you last sleep?"

  "I won't sleep again till after the show." Each of them worked like mad to finish that last piece—Chrys had just got that idea for a new scene, the moon Elysium above the spattercone. As soon as she got home, she'd get to work.

  Suddenly Zircon stopped and seized her arm. His eyes, bright with wine, stared to the end of Center Way. "The Comb. Has she ever looked more splendid?"

  At the far end of Center Way, the flow of bubbles dipped under, before the Comb. The most breathtaking, the most talked about edifice ever seen, the Comb, a sentient, self-aware building, had begun with a nanoplastic seed. A seed from a mind full of brain enhancers.

  "Such mastery of space," mused Zircon, "the plastic flow of form from ground to sky. Great as a world, yet plain as an eggshell."

  The seed with its genetic program had grown a honeycomb of rooms and hallways, the facade of hexagons bordered with windows, long ribbons of windows that were the hallmark of its creator. The Comb housed the new Institute for Nano Design; from designer drugs to designer buildings, it embraced all the creative power of the very small. Her facade flickering red and infrared against the night sky, the Comb continued to grow as needed, developing new rooms and hallways at her base while pushing the older ones to dizzying heights.

  Pearl warned, "Not everyone likes the Comb."

  The brain-enhanced dynatect who built the Comb, Titan of Sardis, had been burnt down by a laser, right here on Center Way, just the week before. The laser had streaked Titan's eyes, searing through to the back of his skull. Gang crossfire, the news said, though gangs generally stayed below. All week, every newscast, the blackened specter of his body had haunted Chrys's eyes.

  "To think that all Titan's genius ends
with the Comb." Still staring, Zircon shook his head. "What I'd give to create like that."

  Chrys smiled slyly. "What would you take?"

  "Brain enhancers? I don't know."

  "Brain enhancers," said Topaz thoughtfully. "To compete with Elves."

  Pearl shook her head. "Brain enhancers come from the mind slaves."

  "No," said Chrys. "Brain enhancers are cultured cells. They boost brainpower—like mental mitochondria."

  Zircon repeated, "I don't know." His eyes widened. "What if they turned out smarter than me?"

  "Smarter than you? Microscopic cells?" Chrys rolled her eyes. "Saints and angels preserve us." She turned for her transit stop.

  Zircon patted her head. "See you at the gym." She'd get the rent from him then, Chrys thought, if nothing had sold by tomorrow.

  Chrys stepped into the pulsing street, and a bubble slowed to pop open. As she stepped inside, the bubble swallowed her up, gliding forward until it plunged down the tube, to descend twenty levels below. As the bubble descended, Chrys reviewed the sketch in her eyes: a spattercone by night, with a full Elysian moon. The Elf gallery director would love it.

  At last the tube opened, just one level above the Underworld. Chrys inhaled the scent of sewage and shorted-out plast. It was not the worst neighborhood, mainly decent immigrant "simians," with Homo gorilla ancestry; they did tube repair and other jobs sentient machines wouldn't touch. Graffiti scrawled across the nano-root of what was a city bank ten levels above—SIMS GO BACK TO jungle— HOMO IS FOR SAPIENS. "Sapiens" was an anti-immigrant faction. Sapiens hated sentients, too, although it was less obvious where to "send back" the self-aware machines.

  From many levels above, the bank's nanoplastic roots reached down like a tooth. The roots slanted slightly into the street, then on down to the Underworld, where they sheltered squatters and mind slaves. On this level, between the roots nestled cruder housing units and storefronts, barely sentient, next to shacks of dead cellulose like dirt caught between unbrushed molars.