'It won't last,' Chrys warned. 'Keep fixed on my eyes.' She had to give Rose one more chance to talk them into giving up.
'What are you?' Pearl asked curiously. 'You're undercover, aren't you.'
Chrys put a patch at Pearl's neck. A few would defect, never more. What if one day they all did? she wondered. A carrier, even a tester, was never allowed to increase her population more than 10 percent.
Flexor came inside. Her face worms extended into long tendrils around Pearl's head and neck. The nanoservos would tear every arsenic atom out of her tissues, and out of any micros that were left.
'It's coming back,' Pearl gasped. 'The pain—'
'The micros messed up your pain circuits. They need to heal.' Flexor added to Chrys, 'The pain saved her. When they're too smart for pain—'
Pearl's cry split the night. The worm-face got her into the light-craft and to the hospital; a five-minute ride, it felt the longest Chrys ever took. At the door to the clinic, she stopped. Pearl still moaned, her head turning back and forth to find relief that would not come. Topaz looked back toward Chrys as if to a lifeline.
'No farther for me,' Chrys told her. 'The clinic is a micro-free zone.'
'A what?'
Doctor Flexor drew them in and the door closed.
'Our defectors have settled in,' reported Jonquil. 'Not the brightest, but they work hard. When do we get to build Silicon?'
In the window Chief Andra appeared, irises glimmering violet, standing tall as an ancient Sardish warrior. 'Chrys, you've done well.' She must have watched the whole time. 'We'll put you on call.'
Chrys swallowed and said nothing.
Jonquil could never forget her expedition to that vast New World, strange-tasting, wildly beautiful, terrifying. The macrophages she had to outswim, evading the viselike grip of antibodies, only to behold the words of a new god. A god awaiting people.
By contrast, after generations beyond counting, even the farthest reaches of her own god's circulation felt familiar to Jonquil. She patrolled there with Fireweed, training the infrared elder to detect the slightest need for repair, signs even the nanoservos might miss. Her filaments twitched. 'There— I taste a precancerous cell.'
Fireweed extended her filaments. 'An abnormal growth protein,' she flashed, sending molecules of alertness. 'Only stage one.'
'Nevertheless, let's mark the site.' Micros themselves did not dare leave the bloodstream to penetrate the epithelium, lest they attract deadly immune cells, but the Plan Ten nanoservos would eliminate the cancer.
On their way back to the arachnoid, the two elders came upon an outcast micro. Incapable of work, the grayish ring jostled aimlessly among the red cells, begging for vitamins. Fireweed brushed its filaments to pass it a few.
'Why?' asked Jonquil. 'Why prolong its miserable existence?'
'The One True God decreed, 'Love Me, love My people.
'You call that brainless microbe a person?' Mutant children whose brains failed to reach Eleutherian standards were barred from the nightclubs, never exposed to the pheromones that ripened for breeding, nor did they mature as elders. Worth no more than a virus.
'There, but for a twist of DNA, go you or I,' flashed Fireweed. 'All people are one.'
'You sound like Rose,' observed Jonquil. 'Don't listen to her, just live like her.' Rose's abstemious lifestyle had earned her an exceptionally long and healthy life, the envy of many. But then, had Rose truly lived? Jonquil wondered. Jonquil herself, with the god's help, had led the greatest cultural renaissance Eleutheria had ever seen. But now, she felt the arsenic atoms tearing loose from her membranes one by one. Foreseeing the end, she had passed on to Rose her most vital knowledge, the photo codes from the judges of the Thunder god. The codes enabled people to pass safely among the masters.
Fireweed said, 'That unbeliever does not sway me. But the new heretics— those who seek to emigrate to the New World— they shame us.' After Jonquil and Fireweed had spread their stories of the New World, an unorthodox sect had risen up demanding to emigrate, to found a purer society in the wilderness. Jonquil tried to pass laws against them. A mistake, the restrictions only attracted converts to their fanatical leader: a Green One, verdant as the legendary Fern.
Before dawn Chrys tossed in her bed, her eyes full of colored cells twinkling, rolling through the arachnoid. 'God of Mercy,' flashed Jonquil. 'Great One, we need your help.' 'What is it?'
'A new sect begs to address you. Will you see their leader?'
'Sure.'
'God of the Eleutherians.' The new one flashed green.
Chrys smiled, thinking fondly of Fern. 'I call you . .. Pteris.' A large, handsome tree-fern.
'That shall be—until we find our New World.'
'What?'
'The new god promised us a New World. Let my people go.'
Chrys shot upright, as wide awake as if the volcano smoking in the distance had exploded. Her startled cat jumped off the bed. 'What nonsense are you talking? Jonquil, what's this?'
'My deepest apologies, God of Mercy,' the yellow letters flashed. 'Alas, these heretics were undone by the tales of our exploits in the uninhabited world. We'll remove them, to trouble you no longer.'
'New god'—What had Moraeg told them?
'We shall return,' the green one challenged. 'We'll defy even death. Every year, we'll return to demand our New World.'
'Why?' asked Chrys. 'What's wrong with Eleutheria?'
'Eleutheria is a sham. Corrupted, untrue to its founding principles. 'World of opportunity'—what falsehood. See all the beggars floating homeless in the veins.'
'Jonquil? I thought you and Rose took care of this.'
'We tried,' Jonquil admitted, 'but in recent years, perhaps, I've not kept up so well.'
'Rose? Is this your doing?'
'Nonsense,' said Rose. 'I have nothing to do with those god-talkers. I've tried what I can to spread enlightenment, but degenerate societies consume themselves from within.'
'Rose,' countered Jonquil, 'you yourself want only the best chess champions. How could we breed the best, if we let all cells with inferior genes into the nightclubs?'
'Fireweed?' blinked Chrys. 'What do you know of this?'
'Such heretics,' said Fireweed, 'in ancient times would have had their arsenic torn out.' The letters came blood-red. 'But truly, the heretics remind us how poorly we ourselves serve our God.
