Brain Plague

neck like a pillar of stone. 'Protected while they starved, hoping for help, knowing none had ever come before.'

'But Chrys came,' said Opal.

'Yes,' said Andra. 'Chrys got him back.'

Chrys looked up. 'Why are you so angry at him?'

Jasper lifted his hands. 'Haven't you been listening?'

'Because all of us, every day, think of Endless Light.' Andra's voice came faster. 'We all know it's there—a burst of heaven, and your troubles are over.'

No one denied it. Chrys recalled her own brush with the vampire.

Doctor Sartorius's face worms came alive. 'It was only one slip. In his work, Daeren resisted far more encounters than most of us. And even when he gave up, his own people remained faithful. I've never seen that before.'

Pyrite looked up hopefully. 'Could he have them back?'

Jasper shook his head. 'Never. How could he control them?'

Chrys asked, 'Why not?'

'Because he'll remember,' explained Opal. 'Even after he heals, he'll always remember what they can do. Dream of it every night.'

'But they want to go back.' Andra's face was paler than ever. 'All day and all night, the ones I took begged me to send them back.'

'Back to Daeren?' Pyrite exclaimed. 'After he betrayed and starved them?'

'Even so.' Her voice sank to a whisper. 'They know he won't survive alone.'

'What do you mean, he won't survive?' demanded Chrys. 'Plan Ten can heal anything.'

Sartorius raised a worm. 'The brain heals. But carriers who lose their people die, sometimes even before they leave the clinic.'

'How?'

Selenite frowned. 'Any way they can, that's how. Chrys, let Sar alone; he doesn't like it any more than you do.'

The others looked away. Only Pyrite looked up in surprise; apparently no one had told him either. Chrys tried to remember what life was like before the little rings came to stay. Living alone. Even when she lived with Topaz, she could remember waking up nights in the dark, Topaz fast asleep with her back turned, feeling alone, totally alone in the universe. She recalled it as a fact outside herself; she could no longer imagine, now, what aloneness meant.

Pyrite said at last, 'So it's a death sentence.'

No one denied it. Garnet stared at Chrys, his irises flashing rapidly.

'They say, you have to do something, God of Mercy,' flashed Forget-me-not. 'You have to help him.'

What more could she do, thought Chrys.

'There may be another way,' said the doctor. 'An experimental treatment.' He paused as if measuring his words. 'The blue angels could help us heal him.'

In the tranquil sky, a flock of fish flew overhead.

'Out of the question,' snapped Jasper. 'Daeren didn't just slip, like Garnet; he fell all the way. It will be months before he can feel anything normally.'

Doctor Sartorius said, 'The blue angels could accelerate the healing process by monitoring the neurons closely, more subtly than the nanos can.'

'But in the meantime, how can he carry people in his head and not beg them to make him feel better? And then, for the rest of his life?'

'They'll just have to say no.'

'Then who's the master?' Jasper shook his head. 'You're condoning slavery.'

Selenite leaned forward slightly. 'I wonder. You can't live without mitochondria; does that make you their slave?'

Jasper looked at her in surprise. 'You always say, rules are rules.'

'True, but the rules allow for experimental treatment. We have to stop letting the masters get the better of us.' She added, 'I think the blue angels can handle it. Last night I found them reasonably well behaved. A bit forward—myself, I'd breed that out of them—but if the good doctor has a plan, I say give it a try.'

Throughout this exchange Andra kept quiet. Chrys saw now why she had enlisted Selenite.

'He can't stay at the clinic,' the doctor added, 'it's a microfree zone. Andra and I can look after him; we'll set up a facility at home.'

'What are the gods up to?' Fireweed had been trying to get her attention.

'A stay of execution.'

Only a month till her show opened at Gallery Elysium. Chrys met Ilia there with Yyri, Zircon's former lover. The two Elves smiled, their butterflies projecting behind them, golden swallowtails with dots of red and blue.

Yyri stretched out her hands, though careful not to actually touch Chrys. 'Why Chrysoberyl,' she exclaimed, as if to a long lost friend. 'Or, should I say, 'Azetidine'? I haven't seen you since the Seven Stars.' The Seven's last show; the recollection felt like another world, light-years away. Suddenly, Ilia and Yyri laughed simultaneously. Their electronic sixth sense must have shared a witticism at the expense of primitive art.

'The God of Many Colors!' Lupin flashed lemon yellow, enthusiastic as old Jonquil. 'Can we visit? Their nightclubs are legend.'

Ilia met her eyes, but the rings were absent. Chrys hesitated. 'Are we—'

'Later, dear,' Ilia whispered. Then Chrys realized, Yyri was not a carrier. 'Let's review your catalogue from start to finish. First, your early work.'

Yyri clapped her hands. 'I do love a historical approach. Discern the seeds of genius in one's crudest beginnings.'

The first pyroclastic flow Chrys had clumsily attempted, sophomore year, and the one awful self-portrait; these Ilia had insisted on. Pieces that Chrys would have been mortified to reveal to any Iridian dealer now shown in Helicon as signs of incipient genius.

'Lava Butterflies,' Ilia nodded to Yyri. 'The colors struck my eye.' Her first piece with Eleutherian collaboration, signed with the molecule Azetidine.

'She was your find, my dear.' Yyri's eye savored the more recent volcanoes, the lava flowing upward into arachnoid stalactites, all bearing Chrys's Eleutherian nom d'art. 'The form oscillates between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Imponderable imagination.'

Ilia leaned toward Chrys, a gleam in her eye. 'Silicon—is it final?'

Chrys caught her breath. She had yet to give Jasper the bad news. She made herself smile. 'Still negotiating. You know how ... sentients are.'

'We'd love to include the model. We'll save a place for it.'

Yyri clasped her hands. 'Quite a coup, Ilia. Silicon—radical concept—people are just beside themselves.'

The cerebral landscapes and portraits followed, taking up the bulk of the show. Little colored rings careening through the arachnoid, tasting their nightclubs and their calculator cells. Ilia nodded at each, as if at a familiar neighborhood.

'An otherworldly universe,' exclaimed Yyri. 'I've never seen anything quite so ... alien.'

Ilia's hand swept toward Fern, the ring of green filaments twinkling the commandments of Eleutheria. 'Let's bring her out front, like a greeter. She looks so friendly.'

Fern, Aster, Jonquil. It was harder than Chrys had expected to face them, world-sized, exposed to public view. She had wanted to show only portraits from the other carriers, but Ilia had insisted these were the best. So here they all were, spaced at intervals against a black dome, constellations within some foreign galaxy. Chrys felt overwhelmed, as if in a crowd of a hundred people talking.

Yyri smiled more broadly than ever, though her eyes looked puzzled. Then her face relaxed. 'Of course, dear, I see. Such extraordinary rendering of personality.'

The next hall contained Jonquil's inspirations. It made Chrys's palms sweat to see them, all those off-color depictions of children merging and worse, all together in one place, but Ilia had insisted on every one. Yyri smiled politely, then suddenly stared as Ilia's sixth sense reached her. 'Oh my,' she exclaimed. 'How exquisitely