Brain Plague Page 6

  “The Blind God was our world, before the great exodus, when the Lord of Light took us in.”

  She stared, unseeing, her pulse racing. How could these micros have “made” the Comb, and still have the plans? Who was the Blind God? What had those doctors not told her?

  At the hospital again the next morning, Doctor Sartorius listened to the nanos reporting from Chrys’s bloodstream. His worm-like arms extended to plug into the hospital wall. Chrys still couldn’t help expecting flies. “No sign of inflammation,” he said. “The nanos are doing their job.”

  Chrys eyed him skeptically. “Nano-cells are ‘intelligent,’ but never as smart as people. How can micros be so smart? They’re too small to have neurons.”

  One of the worms flicked toward the holostage, extending like an antenna. “Micros are about the size of a white blood cell. Each cell packs an array of polymers, with ten trillion units.” Above the stage glowed a cage of atoms, with links joining in all dimensions. “Units connect by a ‘spiro gate’ that can twist in two directions. One twist allows current to flow across the link, the other not.” The model came alive with twisting connections, as if thoughts were flitting across them. “These polymers transmit information, as surely as human neurons, or sentient circuits.”

  She regarded the sentient doctor curiously. “If micros that small can be ‘people,’ then why can’t nano-cells be ‘sentient,’ like you?”

  The doctor’s worms retracted and were still. The spiro-gated molecules gave way to legal documents, the kind Daeren liked to quote, scrolling down the holostage. “When machines first…claimed sentience, the Fold Council set a lower limit for size at ten cubic centimeters. Nothing smaller could be a ‘person,’ with ‘personal rights.’”

  “What?” Chrys spread her hands. “How can you just decree what’s a person and what’s not?”

  Doctor Sartorius returned to the holostage. “If you have no further questions, the Plan Ten representative is here today, to inform you of your benefits.”

  The Plan Ten rep was a human female, of model proportions, the kind all art students drew their first year. Her nanotex was modest gray, but it shifted subtly to highlight her perfect legs and ankles. Her curves were more than enough to remind Chrys how long it had been since she shared a bed, and to make her, just for a moment, rethink her resolution.

  “Chrysoberyl, I’m here to answer any questions you may have about the Comprehensive Deluxe Health Package Plan Ten.” The woman’s tone was professional, yet softly persuasive. “You may call us anytime, of course; from anywhere, on any world.”

  “Even the Underworld?”

  The Plan rep smiled confidingly. “Our competitors, up through Plan Eight, provide instant coverage only for the more convenient parts of the city. But with Plan Ten, our emergency response time everywhere is under five minutes. You needn’t give up any of your favorite night spots.”

  “I see.” Chrys patted her hair self-consciously, though it never would stay down.

  The Plan rep nodded to the holostage. “Now, according to our records,” she observed, “you have yet to choose your age and appearance.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Upon the stage appeared Chrys herself, life size. Like a mirror, only without the usual mirror reversal; at first her own face looked askew.

  “Plan Ten allows you to specify exact age, color, and so on. For most of our clients, age is the main concern. Have you thought about it?”

  Chrys blinked. “I’ve had other things on my mind.”

  “Of course,” the woman nodded understandingly. “Carriers always do. But think now.” She turned to the holostage. “Our most discerning clients choose age eighteen to twenty.”

  The virtual Chrys seemed to smooth out a bit, like one of Topaz’s portraits. Chrys tensed and swallowed. She had not thought of herself as already having aged. But the Chrys in the holostage looked to her like a pre-teen. “I’m too small to look young,” she observed, half to herself. “People still pat me on the head.”

  “Stature can be increased.” The Chrys on stage grew a couple of centimeters. “As for age, how old would you like to look? Distinguished? Venerable? Mother of Ages?”

  The virtual Chrys grew fine lines in her forehead, but still stood erect and authoritative. As the skin shrunk around her face and hands, she looked fierce, indomitable, an iron lady. At last she shriveled into a million wrinkles, her eyes still bright and clear. Like a saint who’d spent her life tending dying people in the street.

  “You can always change your selection,” the Plan rep quietly observed.

  Chrys clenched and unclenched her hands, and swallowed again, hard. “To be real honest, I think I’d like to keep on looking exactly the age I am now.”

  “Excellent—a very wise choice. Our wisest clients generally choose as you did,” the Plan rep assured her. “Now, as to internal organs, of course, these can be optimized separately. Most clients simply take the age of optimal function—for the female, visual acuity peaks at age ten, muscle strength at age twenty, sexual response at age forty, and so forth. Is that fine with you?”

  Chrys blinked. “I guess so.” For her, health had always meant simply not being sick.

  “And muscle mass.” The woman’s dimples deepened apologetically. “I’m sorry, this one is so complex. Some examples—” The virtual Chrys expanded and shrank, while the rep rattled on about upper body strength, a gymnast’s flexibility, the balanced curves of a swimmer. “For sheer strength, there’s this.” The body grew hills all over, like a volcanic slope bulging with magma.

  Chrys smiled suddenly. “I’ll take that.” Zircon would be in for a surprise.

  “A bold choice,” the rep exclaimed, a bit too quickly. “A client of your sophistication might be interested in our more advanced options. Would you consider a change of gender?” She leaned forward confidentially. “Our competitor, Plan Nine, offers only one change of gender per lifetime. Can you imagine? What if you changed your mind, and couldn’t switch back?” She shook her head. “Our plan guarantees to switch you back, as often as you choose.”

  Chrys’s jaw fell. For a minute, she could not imagine what to say. “To be really honest…” She thought of something. “Gender change would be great, but there’s something else I’d like even more.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’d like to sign away all my rights to, uh, change of gender, and use the funds saved to fix my brother’s mitochondria. Could I do that?”

  The woman looked shocked. “Sign away your own body rights? Like selling an eye or a kidney—you couldn’t do that.”

  Chrys had considered it.

  The encounter with Plan Ten left her vexed and sad. At last Daeren came to complete her visit. “Anything I need to know?” Shoulders straight, limbs fit and lean; Daeren had the health her brother never would. He looked her in the eye, and his own twinkled blue. “You need to get more sleep.”

  Something inside her snapped. “Excuse me, can you tell me how old you really are? I was raised to respect elders.”

  Daeren stiffened, and a tendon stood out in his neck. “I was raised to respect everyone. Assume I’m a hundred.” Young enough to be defensive. “Is anything wrong?” he asked. “I know Fern feels overwhelmed, but it will pass.” He handed her a transfer patch.

  Chrys accepted the patch and handed it back to him, getting used to the routine of visiting micros. “Why do they say they built the Comb?”

  Daeren frowned. “It would be more correct to say they share ancestry with those who seeded the Comb.”

  “But my micros came from your head, didn’t they? Why aren’t they blue angels?”

  “I’m like a way station,” he told her. “My people are strain Coelicolor; they’re social workers, immigration specialists. They take in refugees and train colonists to develop new worlds.”

  So a carrier could hold more than one strain. Different ethnic neighborhoods. “These refugees and colonists…they come from other people’s brains?”
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  “That’s right. Micros like to travel.”

  “So where did mine ‘travel’ from, originally? From Titan?”

  “They grew inside me for seven generations. That’s like a couple of centuries. Their duty is to leave the past behind, and serve their new world.”

  Committee talk again. “Was Titan their ‘Blind God’?” Chrys asked. “How could a blind carrier ‘talk’ with them?”

  Now he looked really upset. “The Eleutherians have exceptional memory, but they sometimes get things twisted.” He leaned closer, and the blue rings sparkled.

  “Oh Great One, the blue angels bid us forget,” flashed Poppy. “But you told us to recover all our memories.”

  “Sure, but keep it dark for now.”

  Daeren put the patch back on his neck, just beneath his dark hair, then he held it out. “You can have your people back. They already miss their nightclubs.”

  “Nightclubs? You mean, strobe lights hung beneath my skull?”

  “The molecular equivalent. I told you, your strain lives fast.”

  She remembered the wild-eyed slave, and the stern Chief Andradite. “Is that why the chief said she expected worse? Why did you give me such a bad strain?”

  “They can get into trouble, but they’re exceptionally creative. You could have had a strain of accountants.”

  She gave him a look. “Accountants cause more trouble than any artist.” Something was missing, but she could not put a finger on it. She leaned back with a sigh. “I had no idea what I was getting into.”

  He asked quietly, “Are you sorry?”

  She thought of the transformed pyroscapes. “No. I just feel like I’m back on Mount Dolomoth, walking on lava.”

  It was his turn to stare. “You’ve walked on lava?”

  “Two hours old.” The heat rising, simmering, suffocating. The surface dark and slick, with holes to the interior glowing like poppies. She was twelve when the long dormant Mount Dolomoth had erupted, and it had fascinated her ever since.

  “I hope you won’t try that again. A million lives depend on you.”

  She crossed her arms. “Listen, Lord of Light—if I have to risk a million of them raising hell in their nightclubs, they can just as well risk me.”

  On her way home an acrid haze obscured her street. But the buildings looked intact, aside from the usual old windows stuck open, gasping sideways. The haze must have seeped up from below. After a slave hijacking, Sapiens always blamed the sims, so they torched the Underworld. They usually stayed below; but right here on her block a gang of Sapiens marched toward her, lasers on their belts, pads of stunplast girding their knees and palms. Chrys unobtrusively crossed the street. If the carnage reached her level, she might have to go stay with Topaz and Pearl.

  Safe at home, she called down a Titan retrospective. Titan’s early career as a half-baked formalist, like Zircon. Titan’s first brain-enhanced commissions, dwellings that soared like living, breathing things offering flowers to the world. Titan’s more advanced works, each now a landmark. And his social ascent, on the arm of one Lady after another, each better connected than the last. Always women, oddly enough, a medieval obsession.

  A stranger flickered into her window. “Chrys, I’m Opal of Orthoclase. Andra asked me to call.” Opal called from the Institute for Nano Design—the Comb. Her namestones were a cluster of rainbow drops that formed a flower, only to flow apart again. She gave a friendly smile, almost in a motherly way, her face as round and smooth as her gems. Behind her, her holostage was twice as large as Chrys’s entire studio. The walls jutted at wide angles, creating the honeycomb of rooms for which the Comb was famous. “Chrys—I’m so glad we caught up at last. A colorist, aren’t you? Daeren says you’re doing so well.”

  “Thanks,” said Chrys warily.

  “My people can’t wait to see Eleutherians again. I hear they’re just the same…” Stepping backward, Opal spread her arm toward her stage. “We design medical servos.”

  “The kind used for Plan Ten?”

  Opal nodded. “And more experimental applications. But you ‘design,’ too, don’t you. It’s all art, don’t you think?”

  Chrys cleared her throat. “What can I do for you?”

  “Oh Great One, we recall the legends of this starry-eyed god,” flashed Fern, “the God of Wisdom, and her clever people, the ‘wizards.’ The wizards are our long-lost cousins; let us renew ties with them.”

  “Not today,” returned Chrys. “Go tend your children.”

  “The cafe here serves carriers,” Opal was saying. “We can meet here tomorrow.”

  It had not occurred to Chrys that restaurants would shun carriers, even worse than sims, if they knew. A knot of pain formed in her stomach. “I’d love to,” she told Opal, “after my show opens next week.”

  Opal’s mouth went straight and her eyes widened. “I promised I’d see you this week. It’s important.”

  “Thanks; you’ve kept your promise. The day after the Opening, okay?”

  Hours of work turned into days, as the spattercone grew. The cone’s straight sides pointed to the sky, drawing the viewer up from echoing lines below. Above the holostage, Chrys’s finger traced the streams of lava that rose from the cone, reaching toward the turquoise moon. Then she traced the moon’s details, subtly following the curve of lava. The moon was the center of a pool where ripples led outward, down to the ground.

  But as the piece played forward it developed in a new way, distinctly different from any pyroscape Chrys had done before. Instead of arching to fall back to ground, the streams of lava kept going till they reached the sky. The sky collected a long lava river, smooth and thin, with lava strands connecting down to the ground below; unmistakably reminiscent of arachnoid. And the turquoise moon, amid the strands, sprouted luminous filaments of light.

  “Oh Great One,” called Fern. “A young elder begs a favor from you. A true scholar; I recommend her highly. She asks you to give her a name.”

  Why not, thought Chrys; the other priests were so busy. “What does she look like?”

  A diffuse light, magenta, with long starry filaments. Star with a dark center. Chrys’s lips softened. “Aster,” she decided. “I call you Aster.”

  “Oh Great One, I am not worthy to meet your eyes. But only ask, and I will follow.”

  For some reason she felt afraid. It was too much for her; all these people and their children would find out she was a fraud. She shook herself. What did she care, they were only microbes. “Aster, can you help me perfect the turquoise moon?”

  “I will help the god, in whatever small ways I can. May the god also bless our own work, our creation of dwellings for the gods.”

  “I am no dynatect, Aster,” she warned.

  “You shall become a great dynatect. Greater even than the Blind God.”

  “A prophet!” Chrys laughed aloud.

  Then she froze. The Blind God—that was Titan. It had to be. But the murdered dynatect had not been blind…until he was attacked. The limp body, sprawled in the street like a piece of trash, the eyes burnt into the skull. Had the micros lived through that? Had Plan Ten arrived in five minutes, only to save the micros from his dying brain? What else was that agent hiding?

  FIVE

  “When shall we build?” Poppy demanded of Fern. “We have all our plans, old and new, but we are out of practice. As elders die, we lose their experience.”

  In the Cisterna Magna, they had reestablished the Council of Thirty, the ancient governing body of Eleutheria. They organized trade in arsenic and palladium, and regulated the mining of vitamins from the blood. Now the Council wanted to resume building for the gods.

  “We build when we are called,” said Fern. “The gods seek their own dwellings. In the meantime, the god calls us to shape Truth and Beauty in the stars.” The God of Mercy built creations out of light itself.

  “Where are all the peoples from our history?” asked Aster. “The judges of the Thundergod, the wizards of Wisdom, the minio
ns of the Deathlord?” Aster, and the others born here, had met only Eleutherians. They were isolated, cut off from the rest of civilization, from new ideas and fresh genes. “We need to meet all the people of other gods. We have made all kinds of tasty molecules to trade with them. We need to meet their children, and recruit the brightest for our work.”

  Poppy said, “This god always goes alone. What is wrong?”

  Fern wished she knew. History showed that even gods needed other gods. A god apart spelled trouble.

  As always, Chrys was sure the Opening night would be a disaster—the Gallery would run short of power and refuse to display half the paintings, the cakes and lambfruits would be missing, the wine would be bitter, and no guests would show up. Nervously Chrys paced the exhibit halls, getting her first chance to see everything together. As she passed through the doorway to Topaz’s portraits, her arm hit the edge, punching it in. “Damn,” she muttered as the doorway reshaped itself, avoiding Pearl’s curious stare. Her muscles had swelled noticeably, and she felt like she was bouncing on a low-gravity moon.

  Topaz’s portraits always drew a crowd, and this year she had some high-class commissions, including Lord Zoisite, the Palace minister of justice. In the full-size portrait, the minister wore his fur talar, its draped lines projecting verticality. Sparkling gems signaled his calling, his portfolio, his Great House, his wife’s House, and several other affiliations. The back lighting framed his head like a halo, typical of Topaz. The haloes, as well as the subtly shortened noses and smoothed complexions, made all her subjects look like members of one family. What Plan Ten did for health, Topaz did for art.

  “A god,” flashed Aster, “placed among the stars.”

  A portrait in the stars. That’s how it would look, to a micro peering out of her eye.

  “Legend tells that someday our own people will be placed among the stars.”

  “How will that happen, Aster?”

  Lady Moraeg was eyeing her oddly. “Chrys, are you okay?”