Brain Plague

The stench overpowered her. She vomited over and over, until her stomach was empty. Gasping for breath, she wiped her face and looked up. The bodies here, some piled next to the wall, were concave where muscles ought to be convex. Eyelids shrunken back, leaving round holes like mouths screaming. The drone of the flies. In faces and other soft parts, twisting and crawling, white maggots.

Chrys doubled over again, retching violently, though there was nothing more to come out. She turned and stumbled out back to the corridor.

'Let me go,' she croaked at the worker slaves. They grinned back, as if forgetting their errand. Suddenly she remembered something. Her hand trembling violently, she fumbled at her pocket for a viewcoin. 'Look. You can have this. Let me go.'

The slave gazed intently. 'Star pictures.' Seeming to recall his business, he beckoned her onward through the lava tunnel. On the ceiling a cancer went dark and fell to the floor; Chrys steered herself around it. At last the slave brought her to a larger room, reasonably clean, bare of any furnishing.

In the middle of the room stood Saf.

'The Leader of Endless Light,' rhapsodized Rose. 'I will die content.'

A fly caught in Chrys's hair. Frantic with revulsion, she tore it out. Then she turned to the Leader—actually, the Leader's host. After all these months, Saf's body remained in reasonable health, still recognizable as the slave Chrys had met at the Gold of Asragh after the Seven's last show. Perhaps, despite 'all for all,' the Leader managed to keep more than a few extra resources for her own host.

Saf's irises flashed white rings, like maggots biting their own tails. 'I—am—the Leader of Endless Light,' Saf rasped. 'You— make pictures in stars.'

Chrys swallowed and dug her hands in her pockets. 'Take whatever you want. Just let me go.'

'You—choose Endless Light. You make pictures for us.'

She shivered so hard she nearly collapsed. 'No,' she said, shaking her head. 'No, no,' she said more loudly. 'Let me go.' Her voice broke.

Saf hesitated. 'No one ever says no.' That was because everyone else who got this far was already hooked inside. Chrys was not—but Rose kept pretending. Why? she wondered. Why did Rose still keep out the others? Not quite ready to give up degenerate Eleutheria?

'Rose, I've seen enough. I need to take my people home. Tell the slaves to let us go.'

'Great Host, how can we leave? These people are so poor—they need our help, and all our arsenic stores, to promote their dream.'

'Their dream will come to nothing, Rose. Believe me. All I can do is provide food for maggots.'

'I could make you stay. One touch of dopamine, and you would beg to stay. Such are the 'gods,' ' taunted Rose.

'Where are your sisters of Eleutheria? My people, why have you forsaken me?'

For a long moment, no answer.

'Here I am,' came the blue letters of Forget-me-not.

Chrys nearly collapsed with relief.

'The Council voted to override the High Priest.'

'Alas,' added infrared Fireweed, 'we have nothing to learn here. Half starved, overrunning their habitat; lacking even civil discourse, they follow authoritarian control.'

'Then let's get out of here,' urged Chrys.

'Rose must give us her codes. Until then, we can do nothing.'

Saf still stared, maggot rings in her eyes, the Leader inside puzzling at this unprecedented act of noncompliance. How long before she figured out?

Chrys's breath came faster. 'Rose— Didn't I always treat you well? I saved your life and took away your chains. I made you my High Priest.'

'And all the times I saved you, and your degenerate Eleutheria, ' countered Rose. 'Why don't you trust me?'

Daeren had said Rose's one saving grace was her ego. 'Rose— if I stay here, I can't paint. There's no painting stage. There will be no more pictures in the stars.'

'Who needs dirty pictures?'

'And the portraits? What about yours?'

Darkness.

'Your own portrait, Rose. How shall I make it?'

Still no response.

'The other High Priests each have their own portrait for eternity, for all to see, people and human alike. Why not you? Why should the champion be missing, when all the rest have theirs? People who can't even develop their pieces without doubled pawns?'

'I should have castled sooner,' Rose cryptically replied. 'Very well. I'll bring you back to the studio for the portrait. But you must promise to return to Endless Light.'

'Of course, I'll return. I promise, Rose.' Her words babbled across the keypad, misspelled. 'You know I always keep my promise.'

'Then do as I say, for a change. Look aside from the Leader, and don't look back. Move close to a worker. Look him in the face.'

Whirling around, she walked up to the nearest slave. The man stared, and his eyes flashed maggot rings. Without a word, he turned and marched down the hall. Chrys followed, out the hall past the fetid rooms full of 'endless light,' then outside at last to the clean fresh wind. Inside the ship, the slave set a course and barked brief instructions. Then abruptly he left.

'Back so soon?' asked the ship curiously as it erased its doors and strapped her down. 'I didn't expect to see you again.'

In her window the health lights blinked brighter, as DNA damage accumulated in her bone marrow. What the devil could those half-dead slaves be up to? What had possessed her own people to put her through this nightmare? And what would the Committee do when they found out?

NINETEEN

After their narrow escape from Endless Light, the Council of Thirty was in turmoil, all the colors flashing dismay and horror, until they blended into white. Fireweed and Forget-me-not took stock together. How could they have led Eleutheria to such a precipice? And now, how could the God let them live?

'I am to blame,' glowed Fireweed's infrared. 'Tempted by dark visions, I listened to Rose.' Rose was now bound in dendrimers, exiled to the remotest cistern of the arachnoid.

'Rose is aging,' suggested Forget-me-not. 'She was demented.' Fireweed suspected otherwise. 'Rose planned this for generations. ' Nothing, not even generations of life in freedom, could dissuade Rose from the conviction that the Leader she was taught to revere since birth held the way of truth; the way for all people to live as one. And indeed, the masters of Endless Light continued to believe. But where they saw light, Fireweed saw only ignorance and want. People who claimed to live 'each for all,' but in fact they lived only to master and outgrow their host—dying with their host, all but a dubious few who escaped to perpetuate the ghastly cycle.

There was nothing enlightened about this—it was the way of all ordinary mindless microbes.

For Fireweed, all was darkness. She still could not reconcile her own love of God with the murder of innocents which the God seemed to condone. Now, the God would demand her own life— and perhaps that of her entire people. 'Tell God the fault was mine alone. Only I must die.'