Chrys opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
Opal squeezed her hand. "The carrier community will be pleased to see truth prevail against hatred."
"Is it true," another hummed at Chrys, "that all the genius of Titan's brain enhancers is spent addressing his disastrous design flaws? The days of breathtaking new creation are over?"
"Of course we cannot comment," Opal put in, "but we refer you to the House of Hyalite."
Chrys winced. Nothing was definite about Silicon—and she hoped nothing would be.
The snake-eggs buzzed more closely around herself and Opal. "Is it true that Titan's successor shares his peculiar predilections—"
Opal clapped her hands to her head. "My design prototype calls—a malfunction has just released toxic elements. Hurry, Chrys." They raced to the shimmering door of the Comb.
"They're awful," breathed Chrys.
"Not really. They're awful when they follow you inside and hide behind the drapes."
"I'm nothing like Titan," Chrys insisted. "I'm—respectable."
Opal glanced at her sideways. "You might watch what you put on display."
"That's a damned stereotype. Art is not real life. If it were, who'd want it?"
Opal nodded soothingly. "Believe me, Chrys, we all know you're 'respectable.' That's why you're on the Committee. Have you seen our latest nanodetectors for the brain plague?"
The stairs flowed smoothly upward at a shallow angle, then doubled backward up the side of the next hexagonal hall. Imagine Silicon, a whole city built to such indefensible designs. Preposterous.
Opal stopped at a doorway. "Our laboratory."
At first glance, the laboratory was full of cancerplast. Bulbs of plast, some crawling within crystalline cages, others flowering into intricate forms. Chrys took a step back.
"It's all right," Opal assured her, "everything's under control." Her cheeks dimpled. "As controlled as any living thing ever is." At her command, partitions slid down on four sides, hiding away the experimental plast and generating a full-scale viewing stage. Total darkness descended.
"Ten," came a voice out of the dark, marking the magnification. "One hundred . . . one thousand.. .." At a billion-fold, a bright speck appeared, growing. It became a mechanical spider, then kept growing until it towered overhead like a giant squid.
"What is that?"
"A dendrimer." Opal's voice hovered at her shoulder. "A molecular machine, the size of a micro filament. Note its extensible arms. It's a sensor for dopamine."
"You mean .. . that swims around in my head?" A giant squid, plumbing the depths of her brain.
"The dendrimers float about your neurons, binding and releasing dopamine. When dopamine occupies more than half the dendrimer's arms, it sends a signal. Once a critical number of signals coincide, it sets off the alarm."
"So you design the dopamine sensors."
"My wizards do," Opal said. "Now, we're trying to build more sophisticated sensors, which detect scarcer molecules that come from damaged neurons. And scarcer yet, the molecules put out by misbehaving micros." Her face appeared, floating in the sea of dark, and her two hands shaped the dendrimer arms, resetting an atom or two. "But there are limits. The good doctor wants these dendrimers to detect the new strain of the masters—essentially, to tell good people from bad. The oldest project of history. How can mere molecules do that?"
Chrys shook her head. "Even an artist can't do that."
"And yet, a simple human can tell." The darkness receded, and the walls went up, revealing the cancerlike experimental creatures of plast. Opal picked up one in her hand to examine, then adjusted the settings on the cage of another. Chrys's hair stood on end. "A human who knows and cares," Opal added. "Our best defense is still just that. That's why Selenite and I do so well together."
"You 'test' each other?"
"Not formally, but our people can visit each other, around the clock, at any hour of any micro 'year.' Selenite's more ornery ones can escape execution, while mine can be threatened to ship to her."
Chrys thought it over. "Jasper was so upset...."
"Because he blamed himself for missing Garnet's downfall. He's such a perfectionist. But he'll manage. He'll do more for Garnet than your Watchers."
"Daeren's not a couple." It slipped out, though she wished it unsaid.
"Daeren does things his own way. We all fall in love with him—most of us got our people through him. But he only had eyes for Titan."
The thought chilled her. She remembered Titan's sculptures at Daeren's home.
"Whereas Titan..." The formidable dynatect had been obsessed with women, especially women already attached. Opal shrugged. "There's no accounting for taste."
Yet Daeren had tested Titan. How could he be "objective"? He certainly hadn't been objective when he pressed his teeth into the dying carrier's neck.
In her studio now Chrys had more than a dozen collaborators in her head. Besides the color specialists, there were experts on line and form, texture and value. She had linked their signals at her optic nerve directly to the painting stage. A cavernous landscape of arachnoid, lit only by the luminous rings that dwelt there. The details of the microbial filaments were below the resolution of light visible to humans, but the micros could translate their chemical-sensed details into light and shadow.
"A new composition," proposed Fireweed. "One with profound emotional impact."
Dark as a nightscape, with only hints of lurid flame in the distance, like a forest fire at night. "I can't see much," Chrys told her assistants. "More definition. Where's the focus?"
A small group of ring people, russet and gray-blue, their filaments trembling. "More contrast," ordered Chrys. The little rings came to life, yet their colors remained strangely subdued. Puzzled, she asked, "What is this?"
" 'Mourners at an Execution.
Chrys blinked. "Is this a political protest? "
"Of course not," Fireweed assured her. "God's will is always just."
Chrys was not convinced. But then, the Elf gallery director wanted something controversial. Better politics than porn.
That evening she was on call. The first call came from a lady with a family tree's worth of gems on her breast. "You must get here at once," insisted the lady imperiously. "He hides it, but I know he's infected again."
The case file scrolled down. Lord Zoisite.
The minister of justice had a lengthy file, including two previous stays at the clinic, with six months between. Now it had been six months since the last time, and several contacts had already been made. Chrys took a deep breath. "My Lady, according to our records, he's refused help twice in the past month."
"Well, this time, you have to do something."
By now, Chrys had handled enough calls to echo some of Selenite's more sarcastic commentary. Instead, she put on her difficult-client smile.
Outside, the lightcraft touched down in minutes. Chrys skipped downstairs past her caryatids to meet it. The medic on call, a new one, raised a face worm languidly. "Old Zoisite again. Does he really still run the justice department?"
"Last I heard." Chrys barely got herself strapped in before the craft lurched upward.
The medic twirled his face worms in a rude gesture. "Humans," he exclaimed. "It's a wonder you ever got off your birthworld."
Not one of the sympathetic ones. Just her luck. "Look, Doc, if you know so much, can you tell me how to get to him? What can I do that's not been tried?"