Brain Plague

But he handed her the patch as usual. It felt warm in her fingers. She put it to her neck. Seconds passed; above on the holostage blinked a message light, and a servo scurried out from the wall to answer. Then again all was still.

'Greetings, Oh Great One.' These letters came sky blue. 'My sisters and I will serve among your people and hold them to the Law. For the rest of my life I am yours. Do you grant me a name?'

'Delphinium.' For the rest of the micro's life, a month at best. Still, that was quite a gift. She thought of something. 'Delphinium, can you tell me about the Lord of Light— what's he really like?'

'The Lord of Light is the wisest and most wonderful of all the gods. His commands, and of course yours, are to be obeyed without question...'

The poor Eleutherians would have to listen to that drivel for the next month. Serve them right. Chrys looked up and folded her arms. 'You owe me the truth,' she told Daeren. 'Where did you get these Eleutherians? Why didn't they die with the Blind God?'

Daeren clenched and unclenched his hands. 'They survived because I got there with Plan Ten. The medic had Titan's circulation stabilized, but his brain had been sliced in half. There was nothing we could do for him.' He hesitated, blinking rapidly. 'But the micros—a few might still be alive.' His face creased, as if struggling with himself. 'The rule is, micros must die with their host, so that they never experience a god's death; for them, the gods are immortal. But I couldn't leave them. I put a patch at his neck. The blue angels went in, but they said the few left were too sick to survive the transfer.' He paused again. 'So I used my teeth.'

Chrys stared until the wall's sickly green swam before her eyes.

'The gum tissue is thin, the capillaries right near the surface. I pressed my teeth at his neck, then counted the seconds for two long minutes.' He took a breath. 'They were there, all right. Barely a thousand of them, half children—they had their priorities straight. And they'd saved all their records—every damn plan of everything they ever built, all bundled up in nano-cells.'

Saf would have sucked her blood for ace, thought Chrys. Daeren had sucked Titan's, for Fern and Poppy. 'So why didn't you keep them?'

'We gave them their own cistern of arachnoid, and let them grow to ten thousand. I let them visit my eyes every hour around the clock. But it wasn't enough. Every day, all they asked was, 'When can we have our new world? The Promised World? The Blind God promised.' Every day, for seven days.' Seven generations.

'What did Titan promise?'

Daeren shook his head. 'Whatever Titan promised, there's a long waiting list for carriers. The Eleutherians were lucky enough to settle with me. But I was never good enough,' he added bitterly. 'They wouldn't even let me grant them names. They built their own city; they never let their children mix with blue angels. I guess mine weren't smart enough for them.' He paused, considering. 'I could have had my visual spectrum expanded to please them, but I was too proud. I do things my own way.' Finally he looked at Chrys. 'You were at the top of the list— clean living, professional, free of addiction. And you see infrared.'

Chrys nodded slowly. 'You were so anxious to pass them on.'

'We should have waited till after your show,' he admitted. 'But after seven sleepless nights, I'd had enough.' He nodded. 'By the way, oral transmission gets you locked away for life. Subsection oh-one-A.'

He had risked that much to rescue Eleutherians, yet they gave him nothing but grief. How dismally human.

'God of Mercy,' came Fern's letters. 'Aster and I are ready to help you with your work.'

'We'll see about that,' Chrys told them. 'We're starting over with some new rules. Ten Commandments.'

'Yes, Oh Great One.'

'First, you will obey every word I say, and keep out of my brain cells.'

'We will obey.'

'Second, you'll let me sleep as long as I want every night.'

'That will be no problem now.'

'You will write a book about all the reasons you are grateful to live inside my head, and read it out to me every morning.'

'Every day. And what else?'

'Just go back to number one.' Enough playing god; she'd make herself sick.

Doctor Sartorius returned with his worms, their tool-shaped ends smoothed away. 'How do you feel, Chrysoberyl?'

On the holostage, the quiet beach reappeared. Chrys turned to watch, trying to relax while the doctor's worms probed her scalp. 'They say I can sleep okay now,' she told the doctor. 'Is that right? I thought their population was only half grown.'

An inset box displayed the luminous red S-curve. At the midpoint blinked a marker, about five hundred thousand. Yet the number of children had fallen off. 'Once they've passed half way,' Sartorius explained, 'their rate of increase levels off, so the proportion of children declines sharply.'

Daeren agreed. 'The elders should have things under control. But never take them for granted.'

'So I can go home?' she asked hopefully.

'You'll stay here under observation. Until the chief lets you go.'

From her hospital bed, Chrys checked her online gallery. Most of her new works displayed correctly, though Turquoise Moon needed more contrast. Her credit balance showed a third digit; one piece had sold. That meant she could pay her next rent.

But none of her friends called. They didn't know, she told herself. Or else Pearl had told them all. Either way, she had no heart to reach them.

'Oh Great One, we are ready to serve you.'

Microbial friends—was that all she had left? All they had was her, exiled forever from their great dynatect. Suddenly she called the holostage. 'Show me the dynatect Titan.'

The stage asked, 'Alive or dead?'

'Before he died.'

The holostage filled with full-spectrum footage. There stood Titan, amidst a cloud of snake egg reporters. His talar, draped half open to reveal gold nanotex, was trimmed with infrared that few Valans could see, a pose of casual arrogance. His face had a prominent forehead, eyes wide, yet somehow drawn inward.

A snake egg asked him about the Comb. 'Some say, Lord Titan, that you yourself did not really build the Comb; you were just a culture dish for those who did. Is it true?'

Titan's head expanded to fill the stage. 'The Comb was made 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, of only the best and finest materials. ...' As he spoke, his irises lit up, rings of infrared.

Chrys felt a chill. 'Fern . . . was that Poppy?'

'That was Poppy.'

'What did she say?'

'She said that the Comb was nothing compared to what we planned next.'

Chrys swallowed hard. 'She did not live to see.'

'She lived to see a god die. The gods rarely let us see that and live.'

They should have died with Titan; but Daeren broke the rule. Her scalp prickled. 'Do any others yet live, who remember?'

'Only I remember. The others know only you, and your act of mercy.'

'What do you remember of the Blind God?'

'When the blindness came, I starved. My cell ate its own proteins and half my memory DNA. I remember only the sketch of one future creation, for the God of the Map Stone. This god bears a remarkable stone, a map of the universe.'

Their next commission; that would be the one thing they'd recall. 'Who was the God of the Map Stone? What other gods did you know?'