Brain Plague (elysium cycle) Page 16

  "We found them, Oh Great One," said Aster. "We captured the masters before they caused permanent damage."

  The master micros; they had tried to take her over. The thought left her shaking. And yet... where was that place they sent her? Was there no way back?

  Below, at the foot of the spiral stairs, two medics arrived. "You're on record as a carrier," said one worm-face, as if reciting a history.

  "We'll check you out," said the other, "but we can't touch the micros till your agent arrives."

  Her skin was starting to recover, but her head ached, and her stomach felt unsettled. She sat down in the kitchen, in case she needed the sink.

  The limb of a worm-face slapped a bandage on her arm, then its tendrils sank into her scalp, pressing more roughly than Doctor Sartorius. "Disgusting," he or she muttered. "Why don't you let us just clear them out?"

  "Some lifestyle," the other medic remarked.

  "Great One, these nanos are unfriendly," flashed Aster. "Please, Great One; don't let them hurt us. We did our best; we caught all the invaders we could find."

  "Look," said the medic, "why do you put up with this? We could clean you out completely."

  "You're on Plan Ten," said the other. "You could live forever. Instead, you're a menace to society."

  Chrys glared back. These medics sounded like Sapiens. Maybe they'd burnt her cat.

  The first medic waved its worms smoothly, in a motion meant to be pleasing. "If you want to feel good, we have ways. We can shape your mind however you please, just as we shape your body."

  Mind-suckers. Chrys sketched the handsign against evil.

  Xenon chimed for a new arrival. There stood Daeren, at the foot of the caryatids. Chrys sighed with relief.

  "She's been exposed," the worm-face told Daeren as he came up the stairs. "We have to file a report."

  "Section oh-three-five-one," Daeren agreed. "If you're done, please wait outside."

  The medics hesitated, obviously reluctant to give up their patient, but they finally packed in their worms.

  Daeren put a patch at his neck. "Next time, call us first, the purple button," he advised Chrys. "We make sure they send the right medics." For some reason, his eyes seemed to blink brighter than usual. Pulling back her tangled hair, Chrys squinted, unable to look straight.

  "Oh Great One, we don't need testing today. It's all under control."

  "If it's under control," Chrys told them, "you have nothing to worry about."

  Daeren pulled up a chair. "Try and relax, Chrys," he told her. "Can you keep your eyes open?"

  Chrys held her eyes open. The blue rings round his eyes flashed furiously.

  "That's better." He held out the transfer patch.

  "No, no!" begged Jonquil. "Not today—another generation."

  "We're too busy. We can't see blue angels today."

  Chrys frowned. "Why are they afraid?"

  Daeren held out the patch. "Don't keep the blue angels waiting."

  "God of Mercy, they'll kill all the new children."

  "Is that true?" Chrys asked. "You'll kill all the vampire's children?"

  His voice quickened. "Chrys, I can't answer that. You have to take the patch."

  "Just answer my question."

  "If you don't take the patch, you're a slave. Those medics out there will wipe you clean. Section oh-three—"

  "Promise me you won't kill anyone."

  He threw up his hands. "I'm the last one to want to kill them; you know that. But I can't make a promise I won't keep. I don't yet know what I'll find." He took a deep breath. "Chrys—for god's sake, take the patch."

  "So instead of their slave, I'm yours?"

  For a moment every tendon stood on his neck. Several different thoughts seemed to cross his face. "All right," he said in a monotone. "I promise."

  She put the patch at her neck. The minutes passed. Daeren's hair over his amber-colored forehead reminded her of Moraeg. The Seven; how she missed them all.

  Suddenly, he sank back and relaxed, satisfied by the signals his investigators sent out her eye. "Your Eleutherians are okay. Just tell them to quit hiding the vampire's children—I don't care what their math scores are."

  "But you said—"

  "We don't kill them all. We take them out to sort them. Some we can civilize and settle among carriers."

  "The blue angels are taking our children." The golden letters pleaded in her window. "Please, Great One; they're all settled in with us. They lost their home once; don't uproot them again."

  "Can't the Eleutherians just keep the children? They kept masters' children before."

  He stared. "They did what?"

  She cursed her tongue. "You missed a transfer, from that slave," she reminded him. "It fell in the street. They said I had to save them."

  "What in hell do you think you're doing? You have no training for relief and rescue."

  "Should I just let them die? You always say they're people."

  He let out a breath. "I'm glad they were saved; we were sorry we missed them. But you can't take such risks. If you go wrong, your whole population dies."

  "The blue angels want to take Rose." Aster's pale violet flashed sadly.

  Chrys shook her head. "I warned her to quit preaching Enlightenment."

  "But she helped us. She knows all the invaders' tricks; she helped us capture them."

  Chrys gave Daeren a tentative look. "Can't you leave Rose? She has nutty ideas, but she means no harm."

  "The one you call Rose is an unrepentant master. She'll take you over, if she hasn't already."

  "I want a second opinion."

  He stopped, taken aback. He crossed his arms. "If that's what you want. I'll call Andra. Excuse me." He turned and left the room.

  "The Thundergod," Chrys warned Aster. "Now you're in real trouble."

  "Never mind, it buys us time. We'll settle the children and make Rose keep dark."

  "The children are settled," added Jonquil, "as if they were born here. They know nothing else; they've grown here for years."

  Years? At the corner of her eye, the time read well past midnight. Four microbial years. She had not realized how long the medics took, and the blue angels investigating. What a lot of trouble she had caused. And yet, that place the masters showed ... was there no way back? Pressing her hands to her head, she squeezed her eyes shut. "Aster, show me fireworks."

  Colors burst through her window, the daily showers of hue that she so enjoyed. It brought her back to herself. Opening her eyes, she looked around the kitchen. She thought of Daeren, here to help her yet again. Whatever did one offer someone this late, or this early in the morning? "Xenon, how about some orange juice."

  The table slid open and two glasses came up. Chrys put a cup of AZ chips between them as Daeren returned. "Andra will be here," he said, not looking at her.

  She nodded. "Thanks. Have a seat."

  He sat with his arms crossed, looking out to the hall.

  Chrys held out an AZ. "Give them one, from me."

  He started to shake his head, then something changed his mind. He took the wafer with a brief smile. His eyes were dark now, yet something about him remained a mystery.

  "How'd you get into all this?" Chrys asked suddenly. "It didn't make you rich, like the others."

  Daeren took a sip of the orange juice. "My first year at law school, I ran short of credit. I answered an ad, like you did. Andra gave me some of hers, lawyers, I figured. But this group had ideas of their own—why else would they emigrate?"

  "What ideas?"

  "They want to found a sort of microbial world federation, getting all the micro people to agree to live in peace and respect their environment."

  "And obey the gods."

  His finger pensively worked around the rim of the glass. "I guess I found the people themselves more interesting than law books. I'm not poor; I draw my salary from the clinic. I can't invest with Garnet because he's my client half the time. But I also work the Palace, promoting micro r
ights. They need basic human rights, to pursue their dream."

  She pictured Lord Zoisite at the Palace listening with a straight face to Daeren promoting rights for microbes.

  "I go to Elysium, too, to work with Arion."

  "Guardian Arion? He barely thinks Valans are people, let alone—"

  "He's interested in micros. And we provide him with valuable intelligence."

  That sounded dangerous. "Did you ever . . . get in trouble with micros?" she asked. "Did they ever get to your neurons?"

  "Not so far. We've been careful."

  She thought of that feeling, the heavens opening and light pouring through. "What's so bad about 'enlightenment?' I mean, if we trust the micro people with everything else in our bodies...."

  Daeren drank the orange juice and set down the glass. "You're a colorist. You always use the brightest colors."

  "That's part of it."

  "Why don't you fill the whole volume with the brightest white light?"

  "It would be empty."

  He returned her look, as if that were the answer.

  Xenon announced the Chief of Security. Andra came up and checked Chrys in the eyes, her own flashing deep violet. She gave a nod. "Daeren, you go home and get some sleep." She gave Chrys a patch full of "judges." The minutes lengthened, two women alone, each with a million people inside.

  "Are they all right?" Chrys asked at last. "I feel okay."

  "We're trying to track down the vampire's children. Most of them already seem to have merged."

  The Eleutherians probably gave them hormones to hurry them along. No wonder they wanted extra time. "What about Rose? Is she really dangerous?"

  "She's about as dangerous as the rest of yours." The Chief's tone made it clear what she thought of the rest of them. "Daeren has requested reassignment. You'll have a new tester."

  Chrys fell struck as if by a physical blow. "Just because I got a second opinion?"

  "It's been two months, which is time to rotate, in any case. We avoid getting too close to clients, to stay objective. You'll start next week with Selenite."

  The Deathlord—what a disaster. "Selenite's my business partner. Isn't that, like, a conflict of interest?"

  "She has an opening at present. All our agents are overbooked; the street caseload is rising." Andra looked away, the grim look of a general taking heavy casualties. "A new virulent strain has hit the streets. We don't know its source, though we suspect..." She did not finish. "We've taught your people a few tips to handle masters. Things we usually only teach agents." She gave Chrys a pointed stare. "The knowledge makes them even more dangerous. But with your lifestyle, you'll probably need it."

  ELEVEN

  Less than a year to go before the great test of the Comb. The gods had manufactured the vector to Eleutherian specifications, and soon they would inoculate the root. The moment was critical; the worst time imaginable for a government crisis in Eleutheria. But here it was. Jonquil had fallen to the gravest scandal since Aster convened the Council.

  "Jonquil," Aster demanded. "With all of our troubles, all the refugees to settle and the Comb to fix, how could you do this?"

  "It's not against the law," flashed Jonquil.

  "Everyone is shocked and disgusted." Aster's filaments emitted the most pungent molecules she could without awakening microglia.

  "It's no one else's business."

  "It concerns everyone. An elder trying to merge with children."

  "Only temporarily."

  "Corrupting the elders," flashed Aster. "Elders can't merge— even gods don't merge with children. It's the basis of civilization."

  "True, but some of us have exotic taste."

  "The Council won't stand for your taste. We've lost our majority; the government will collapse." As Aster had aged, she had gradually seen how people mirrored their own gods. The Lord of Light cared for law and policy, and his people pursued these. But the God of Mercy cared for ideas of any sort, of all colors on the palette. And so Eleutherian pursued new ideas and inventions, their most creative period of history—and their most chaotic politically.

  Now Aster faced a vote of no confidence in the Council, throwing out herself and Jonquil. Half the members of her own party had deserted; she would lose by two votes. Who would govern? Who else had the experience, and the trust of the god?

  Rose approached her. "My condolences, Comrade." Her new radical party, the Friends of Enlightenment, had actually won two seats on the Council.

  "Never mind," flashed Aster shortly. "We'll regroup."

  "I'm sure you will, indeed. I'm sure you'll overcome your comrade's latest descent into degeneracy."

  "What do you want, Rose?" Rose was too political to offer mere sympathy.

  "Not what I want, but what I can deliver. The votes of the two members of my party, to join yours in coalition."

  "The Friends of Enlightenment? Join us in coalition?" Aster emitted molecules of repulsion. She had never thought that Rose could attract more than a handful of foolish elders to her masters' ideology. But now she had a party in power.

  "Are we so bad?" asked Rose. "What do we stand for—'The Good of the People.' A knight and a bishop move differently, yet they share the same end."

  "Ends do not justify means."

  "No," agreed Rose, emitting disdain. "Means justify ends, in your degenerate society. That will be your undoing. But the endgame is far off; and for now, to regain your advantage, you'll have to promote a pawn."

  The roots of the Comb spread gradually wider through each level they penetrated. At the seventeenth level down, the roots housed a shopping center frequented by middle-class simians and university students. This was the level Selenite chose to inject the virus containing all the instructions the micros had programmed.

  Within the root, arterial tubes carried growth materials upward, while venous tubes carried waste down. To reach an arterial tube, the maintenance crew crossed through the stores. Chrys passed counters stacked high with designer nanotex, lawyers in gem-swirling talars trying out Solarian perfumes, youngsters gaping at servo cats, dragons, unicorns, and caterpillars. One little boy crouched on the floor, reverently petting a servo kitten. For a moment she froze, seeing the stray cat in the Underworld, and the stray kids playing stickball. Maybe it wasn't another cat she needed for Merope. If her micros could pick up homeless children, why couldn't she?

  Jasper and a couple of other members of the Board followed, along with half a dozen sentient engineers of diverse size and shape. A snake-egg or two hovered; Chrys eyed them warily, hoping this event would not interest the press.

  The virus containing the correction program floated inside a pod of silicone. A servo arm lifted the pod and pressed it to the intake port of the root's arterial tube, to carry the infection upward and outward to all the interstices of the Comb. As the virus multiplied, its progeny would bear its memory molecules to the correct address in each cell of the building, patching the program to shift their growth by an infinitesimal amount—just enough to realign the overall growth to its proper path.

  The snake-eggs hovered near Selenite. "Is it true that the Comb is splitting in three?"

  "And you are attempting a desperate corrective measure?" "Are you actually using Titan's original brain enhancers?" To evade the snake-eggs, Chrys stepped back out the doorway into the jewelry department, where she pretended to admire a display of fine namestones. But the snake-eggs followed. "You are the dynatect's protege," insisted one, hovering at eye level.

  "I'm no dynatect," muttered Chrys. "I'm just a carrier." "An artist," said another. "Dynatects have often been painters and sculptors. You carry on that tradition."

  "When is your next show?"

  Chrys looked up. Her show could use publicity, especially without the Seven helping out. "The fifteenth of next month, at the Fifth Street Gallery, second level."

  "And what do you paint?"

  "Pyroscape." She took a breath. "I do portraits too. Portraits of micro people."

&n
bsp; "Micro people? I don't believe our database includes that ethnic group."

  "Brain enhancers. You'll see what they really look like."

  That evening, her studio was spread across the news, including the portraits of Fern and of Opal's favorite. Immediately after came the latest abduction of hapless spacefarers, three that week alone. As if the masters didn't have enough addicts to lure out to their Slave World.

  Chrys was appalled. She called Opal. "I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have talked to them—I had no idea how it would come out."

  Opal smiled thoughtfully. "I wonder what people will make of it. Seeing our micros, scaled to human size."

  She wondered. She could not guess what the Seven would think—if they even came to her show.

  In the morning Xenon had unpleasant news. "I did not wish to wake you, Chrysoberyl, but late last night, I regret to say, I was vandalized."

  Outside, the two caryatids holding up the balcony had their eyes gouged out. A laser had streaked across each, leaving in each nanoplastic face a blackened valley of death.

  Chrys stared, feeling the numbness sink to her toes. Ever since she first heard of brain enhancers, death had stalked her. All her hard work could come to nothing, as it had for Titan.

  "I should have fixed the caryatids right away," Xenon apologized, "but I wanted to leave the evidence."

  "What does it matter?" Chrys asked dully. "They'll never find who did it."

  "Oh, but I saw exactly who did it." The vandals' image flashed into her eyeballs. Two young men from a Great House, up the street from Garnet. The taller one had a loutish look about him, rather like her elder brother before he left home to raise his own goats and sons on the next mountain.

  Andra appeared in her window. "It's a hate crime," the lawyer assured her. "An open-and-shut case."

  "So we get them for defacing caryatids." While murder went unpunished.

  "The boys have no previous record," Andra said. "Their father wants to settle for ten thousand credits, to keep their record clean."