Brain Plague Page 3

  “Micros are strictly regulated by the hospital’s Carrier Security Committee,” the doctor assured her. “If you’re still interested, a security agent will meet with us to discuss the transfer and safety precautions.”

  “I’ve signed nothing,” she warned.

  The door parted, smooth as a pair of drapes, nothing like Chrys’s creaking doors. The security agent was human, at least, and surprisingly young. Clean-cut, formal gray nanotex, with a smart expensive namestone of green malachite. A college kid trying to look old, like a Palace aide, the kind you’d expect to see lobbying against simian immigration.

  “Daeren of Malachite, agent of carrier security,” the doctor introduced him.

  Chrys rose politely to shake his hand.

  “I understand you’re the top candidate for our program.” The quintessential Iridian bureaucrat.

  Chrys narrowed her eyes. “Are you a doctor?”

  “I’m a carrier.”

  A carrier. She stiffened involuntarily. She had actually touched the hand of someone who carried plague, no matter what the doctor called it. To be sure, he looked nothing like an Underworld vampire; he glowed with health, a runner’s lean muscles and solid veins. His features were melting-pot Valan, a bit darkened like Moraeg, not surprising with his L’liite given name. But as Pearl said, plague carriers looked okay at first.

  The doctor added, “Micros are not contagious. They require artificial transfer.”

  The agent nodded. “To transfer them against a recipient’s will or knowledge is a terminal crime. Section six-three-one, part A.” “Terminal” meant, they lock you away for life. The ultimate sentence on all seven worlds of the Fold.

  Chrys crossed her arms and lifted her chin. “So how do you transfer them? Like vampires?”

  The tendons stiffened in Daeren’s neck. “We use a microneedle patch.”

  “Like psychoplast.”

  The worm face squirmed. “Medicine has always turned poisons into useful drugs. Curare, digitalis, even snake venom. And microbes have been used for gene surgery since ancient times. An immunodeficiency virus was the prototype for Plan Ten’s nanoservos.”

  “If it’s so safe, why the security committee?”

  Daeren said, “Any growing thing can go bad. The committee protects you, just like Plan Ten keeps you healthy.”

  Chrys shook her head. “I still don’t get it. Why do people take the risk?”

  “Why did you apply?”

  She would not mention the rent. “The Comb,” she said at last. “They say that brain enhancers designed her. I’m an artist; I want to enhance my work.”

  Daeren took a seat and folded his hands. If only her brother could look so good, Chrys thought resentfully. “The Comb was grown by micros,” he said. “So are nine out of ten new medical treatments coming out today. So are most of the new devices Valedon exports. Your optic neuroports—micros invented them.”

  Her scalp prickled as she thought of all those eye windows that had come on the market just a few years before. “What do you mean, ‘micros invented them’?” Chrys wondered. “I mean, how do they enhance your brain—how does it really work?”

  “Micros are intelligent,” he said.

  “Well, sure.” Intelligent buildings, intelligent medical machines—everything was “intelligent” these days.

  “Intelligent people.”

  Chrys stared hard at the agent, then at the doctor. She counted the doctor’s appendages, one by one, all five of them. Was this really the planet’s top brain surgeon? Could there be some mistake?

  “‘People’?” she repeated. “Like, human beings?” Like the sentient doctor himself? Some intelligent machines had earned human rights in the Fold. There were all kinds of “people” nowadays; most humans had got used to it, aside from groups like Sapiens. But…microscopic people?

  The worm face flexed two appendages together. “The law does not permit me, as a doctor, to answer your question. Only the Secretary of the Fold can determine what is human.”

  The agent nodded. “A special commission at the Secretariat has been at this for twenty years. They have yet to make a ruling. But you’ll know.”

  “Daeren is right,” the doctor said. “Any human carrier would agree.”

  “It’s absurd,” Chrys exclaimed. “Nothing that small can have enough…connections to be self-aware.”

  “Self-awareness occurs in sentients with about a trillion logic gates,” the doctor explained. “A micro cell contains ten times that number of molecular gates.”

  Chrys shook her head in disbelief. “If the micros are people, why does the Protector condemn them all?”

  Daeren leaned forward slightly, and the stone at his neck sparkled sea green. “The Protector is in a tough position. Our economy will depend on micros—it’s our only way to compete with Elysium. But plague micros built the Slave World, just as ours built the Comb.”

  “Right,” said Chrys sarcastically. “I suppose their ‘Enlightened Leader’ is a microbe.”

  He hesitated. “That’s classified.”

  Microbial spies and dictators. “Saints and angels preserve us,” she whispered.

  “Your micros will have nothing to do with the plague,” Daeren assured her. “We’ve selected a very special strain for you: Eleutheria, the same strain as Titan of Sardis.”

  Chrys caught her breath. What would you take—that was the question. Zircon lacked the nerve. Did she? “I’m no dynatect,” she pointed out. “I’m just a starving artist.”

  “Carriers never starve,” the agent said. “You create art—these are the most creative strains we’ve got.” He paused, hesitant. “They’re a bit tricky, though. They flash a wide range of colors, wider than most Valans can see. But you see infrared, like an Elysian. You’ll handle them better.”

  Better than whom, she wondered. “Did Titan…handle them all right?”

  “He had his eyes enhanced to the Elysian range.”

  “His death was just an accident, wasn’t it? I mean, it wasn’t caused by—”

  “Titan’s murder was a hate crime. He was killed because he was a carrier.” The agent looked her in the eye. “As a carrier, you’ll have more to fear from fellow humans than from micros.”

  Chrys frowned. There was altogether too much hate in Iridis. Hate for sentients, hate for simian immigrants, hate for artists who mocked the Great Houses—the Protector instigated that, Chrys suspected. “We pyroscape artists attract our share of nuts, too,” she admitted. “When I make enough sales, I’ll buy security.”

  The doctor added, “You can meet the micros yourself and ask them your questions.”

  “‘Meet them?’ Where?”

  “Micros can’t live outside a human host,” the doctor said. “They live just beneath the skull, in the arachnoid, a web of tissue between the outer linings of the brain.”

  On the stage appeared a giant brain, sliced through the frontal lobe. Between the cortex and the skull lay a thin sea of fluid, dipping deep into the folds of cortex. The sea of fluid was crisscrossed by a fine spiderweb, all around the cortex and into the folds. “Cobwebs on the brain?” Chrys asked.

  “The arachnoid is a normal part of your brain. It cushions the brain from impact, preventing injury.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “But the micros aren’t in my brain. Where are they now?”

  “Daeren prepared the culture. When you’re ready to meet them, we will transfer two ‘visitors’ from his brain to yours.”

  So it was like the vampires. Chrys took a breath. “That’s…unsanitary. What if they grow and make me sick?”

  “Impossible,” the doctor assured her. “The first two Daeren sends will be ‘elders,’ a non-reproductive form.”

  Daeren agreed. “Like Elysians, they can live for many generations but have no children of their own.”

  “I see.” Even micro people had their long-lived superclass.

  “The two elders we send are very special: the priests, who guide their people.
They will explain—”

  “Priests?” Chrys put up her hands. “No way. I never could stand priests.”

  He thought a moment. “You can call them something else, if you like. You’re the host; inside your head, you make the rules.”

  Doctor Sartorius added, “Once they talk with you, you’ll understand.”

  “Just how do we ‘talk’?”

  “The micros flash light, like fireflies,” said Daeren. “That’s how they ‘talk’ to each other, and to you.”

  Talking with fireflies. How absurd.

  “After they visit, you can send them back with no ill effect.”

  Chrys suddenly tensed all over. She gripped the edge of her chair until the plast puckered in. “All right, I’ll talk with your ‘priests.’ Just tell them, no preaching.”

  “You tell them,” he said. “Inside your own head, you make the rules.” As he spoke, a hospital form lit up and hovered above the holostage.

  Chrys read the form warily. “You’re sure you can get them out again?”

  “Of course, Chrysoberyl,” promised the doctor.

  From a pocket in his seamless nanotex Daeren withdrew a patch of plast the size of a thumb. The kind used for immunizations, it contained microscopic transfer needles that penetrated the skin without injury. He placed it at the side of his neck, just below the base of the skull. “The two micros will migrate into the patch. When I hand it to you, you need to place it immediately, just as I did.”

  He took the transfer patch and held it out to her. Chrys picked it up. She turned it over in her palm. It felt like an ordinary bit of plast, smooth and warm, like the time she got booster shots. At last she placed it on her neck. It molded itself and adhered to the skin.

  “That’s fine,” he observed. “Except that you just made them wait two days. Would you like to sit in a lightcraft that long?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Micros live ten thousand times faster than we do. For them, one minute feels like a week. An hour is a year; a day is a generation.”

  “Well,” said Chrys, “they can put up with it. You said I make the rules.”

  “Inside your own head. Outside—we’ll get to that. Don’t move the patch yet.”

  The patch was starting to tickle her skin. “How long does it take?”

  “Not long, but you need to make sure they got through. They’ll let you know, when they reach your retina.”

  “My retina? You mean they crawl inside my eyes?”

  “Just inside the blind spot, where they can reach your neuroport. Try closing your eyes.” A light flashed, pale green. She clapped her hands to her head. Moments ticked by, the sweat from her palms dampening her hair. Flashes of green, out of the dark, at random. The flashes swirled in fernlike fronds, then suddenly came into focus.

  A luminous disk of green, with a small depression in the middle. It did not look like the candy rings of the doctor’s image; more like a star, full of twinkling projections. The projections extended in all directions, several times farther than the width of the ring-shaped body.

  “Is that…it?”

  Daeren’s voice intensified. “What does she look like?”

  “Furry,” said Chrys. “Not like on the holostage.”

  The doctor explained, “The holostage showed a space-filling model, based on electron density. The micros can’t really ‘see’ details visually, because their size is just above the resolution limit for light. However, they can detect light blinking very fast, like a sound wave.”

  Daeren nodded. “They ‘hear’ blinking light, rather like we hear sound. We can hear speech clearly, but can’t ‘picture’ the source.”

  “Then how do they ‘see’ all those fine projections?”

  He glanced at the doctor.

  “Each of those fine projections is a long chain molecule,” the doctor explained. “A receptor molecule that can ‘taste’ different kinds of molecules in its path.”

  Like a cat’s whiskers, she thought.

  The green color fluttered in and out like a strobe. Then letters appeared, as if on a keypad: “I am here.”

  Chrys’s eyes flew open. “She can talk!” The words hovered in her window, like a message from the city, but only in one eye.

  “What did she say?” Daeren demanded suddenly. “Is she okay? Where’s the other one?”

  Another bewhiskered ring, tinted infrared, like a poppy at sunrise. “Here I am! Can you see me?”

  Chrys’s window projected full spectrum, but nobody ever sent her text in infrared. She gripped the edge of her chair. “They said ‘I am here,’ both of them.”

  “You saw Unseen, that’s good.” He sat back, his hands relaxed. “You can put down the patch now.”

  The transfer patch peeled off her neck, leaving a tingling sensation.

  “Greetings from Eleutheria.” Again in her right eye the letters pulsed green. “Please, Oh Great One, give us a sign. We have waited so long. We bring gifts and songs of praise.”

  “They’re praying.” Chrys laughed. “God never listens to humans—why should he care about micros?”

  “You should answer them, before they get discouraged.”

  “What?”

  “Please, Oh Great One. We have waited so long for the Promised World.”

  Her jaw fell, and she stared at the agent. “You mean…they’re praying to me?”

  “They’d better. You’re their entire world; you offer life or death.”

  She continued to stare, without reading the rest of the letters that desperately appeared. To be prayed to, herself, was definitely a concept outside her experience, in Dolomoth let alone Iridis. “Saints and angels,” she muttered to herself. “So how do I talk back?”

  “Use your keypad.”

  “You mean they can tap my neuroports?”

  “They designed them.”

  Micros designed the neuroports, for sale all over Valedon—to help the micros spread. Suddenly it dawned on her. She looked at the doctor, then back to the agent. “They’re taking over—and you help them.”

  The agent sighed. “Iridians always say that, about the latest new immigrants: ‘They’ll take over.’ We said it of L’liites before they married into the Great Houses. We said it about sentients, and simians. And now micros.”

  Microbial “immigrants”?

  “Oh Great One—without a sign, we will die.”

  She blinked twice, then focused on the text box, where the neuroports would detect movement of her eye muscles. Her eyes flickered simply, “Hello.”

  “A sign! The god in her mercy has given a sign.”

  “Let us sing in praise.”

  The two bewhiskered rings tumbled over. Then a swirl of color opened at the center, expanding, with all the colors of the rainbow, violet through infrared. The swirl grew, until it filled her entire visual field. Chrys watched, transfixed. After a few seconds, the swirl faded. A burst of stars, expanding, shifting through lava, red and orange, only to fall at her feet. Another starburst, then another, all in different ranges of color.

  “Did you like them, Oh Great One?” The infrared letters returned. “Which did you like best?”

  Her eyes wrote, “I liked the starburst.”

  “At last, I am seen! And the God of Mercy likes my offering best.”

  Just like human priests, playing holier than thou. “I like all offerings equally,” Chrys wrote back. “My world is a democracy.”

  The letters came back green. “As the God wishes. Are we granted names?”

  “What is your name?”

  “We went nameless in the eyes of the Lord of Light. Our own God will grant us names.”

  The mention of another god, whoever that was, made her vaguely jealous. “I’ll call you Fern,” she told the green letters. “And you will listen to no other god but me.”

  “Of course, God of Mercy. We live or die at your pleasure.”

  “What do you call me?” came the infrared.

  “I call yo
u Poppy.”

  “Thanks, Oh Great One. May we bring our children to the arachnoid?”

  This question brought her back to reality. The doctor was still there, and Daeren watched her like a cat. She asked him, “Do you go through this all day?”

  For the first time Daeren smiled. “I can’t see your window, but, yes, I expect so. I’m used to it.”

  “Do you ever tell them to shut up?”

  “It’s rarely necessary. They know me too well.” He leaned forward. “Watch my eyes.”

  “What?” Puzzled, she watched his irises, cat’s-eye-brown with intense radial lines. Suddenly their rims flashed, a ring of blue light around each. Astonished, Chrys stared, her lips parted.

  “The blue angels call us,” wrote her green letters. “Tell the Lord of Light we’ve done well.”

  So Daeren was the one they called the Lord of Light. Her mouth closed, and she drew back. “Will my eyes strobe like that?”

  “Only to contact another carrier. Otherwise, they’ll stay dark.”

  Other carriers? There must be a whole pantheon of human carriers, each with micros swimming in the cobweb lining of the brain, and flashing rings around their eyes, like a nightclub act. “What keeps them from infecting your brain and making you sick?”

  “They stay within the arachnoid layer, just outside the cortex. They never touch your neurons. They’re only allowed a population of a million.”

  That sounded like plenty. “How can you be sure? You can’t control a disease.”

  “Your Plan Ten nanoservos monitor your brain. Besides, the micros control themselves. Even ordinary microbes, without intelligence, usually limit their occupation of animal hosts.”

  “If they don’t make you sick, what do they do in the…arachnoid?”

  “Build homes and schools, raise their children. And help your work.”

  Little candy-colored rings building schools upon her brain.

  “Do I please you, Oh Great One?” flashed the infrared. “What do you look like?”

  “No, Poppy,” said Fern. “To look on the face of God forbodes death.”

  Microbial superstition. “Here I am,” blinked Chrys. Her eyes downloaded her old self-portrait, from her sophomore year with Topaz. Her hair was lava flowing down her shoulders, and every vein snaked with anatomic precision along her face and breasts, out her arms and down to her feet.