Daeren leaned back, clasped his hands and stretched, facing her painting stage. "Would you show us Mourners at an Execution? It makes people feel better to know someone cares."
In the arch of the ceiling Xenon's ornamental lamps dimmed, and a shadow fell, darkening Daeren's face. The stage filled with the gloomy vision of arachnoid, the micros turning slowly, lost amid the jungle of fibroblasts, an unholy glow lurking beyond them. Wondering how the gods could take so many microbial lives.
"How are the Elves doing?" Chrys asked. "They find anything?"
His lips tightened. "Arion thinks he's narrowed the location of the Slave World. But no habitable planet in that sector shows any sign of human life." A place of no return, even for Elves. "I've tested more Elysian carriers. Two were infected, covertly, without their own people knowing." His gaze never left Mourners. "Eris had them arsenic-wiped."
Chrys took a deep breath.
"Can you imagine what it's like to lose your entire population? And for others to witness?"
She shook her head. "Why? Why would Eris kill all the innocents? He himself is full of the bad ones."
"I'm sure he replaced them with his own." Daeren's hands clasped and unclasped. "Eris watched me the whole while, learning my methods. Now he's testing his own product on me. Someday the devils are bound to slip past."
EIGHTEEN
Destruction of barbarous populations who blindly despoiled their own gods—such events occurred every generation or two and were accepted in sorrow. But the false god's annihilation of innocents whose only crime was to miss a few criminals in their midst—this the blue angels themselves had witnessed in horror. And what had the true gods done to prevent it?
The word spread from world to world, including Eleutheria. "So," taunted Rose, "what do you think of your One True God now?"
Fireweed did not answer, but Forget-me-not flashed ahead. "Remember the truth," said the sky blue one. "The whole truth. The history of New Eleutheria began with a deed of evil, from whose consequence we were spared. Our own birth was a miracle."
"Mythology," flashed Rose. Then she added, "Don't you have some digging to do in the archive? That point about the Fifth Light, remember; you still haven't got it straight."
While the cheery blue Forget-me-not vanished to the archive, Rose pressed at Fireweed. "How could Seven Lights compare to Endless Light? Your 'God of Mercy,' who tells you to love all the people as Herself—she herself condones slaughter of the innocents. How can God let such things be?"
Fireweed's infrared glimmered as if half convinced. "Perhaps not. Perhaps God did not know of the slaughtered innocents."
"If God does not know, then how can she be God?"
"It's a mystery," Fireweed flashed more brightly. "I am too small to understand."
"Too small to matter, to all the great hosts lumbering outside. In truth, I tell you, there is an answer, and I can lead the Great Host to it—the very center of Endless Light."
" 'The very center is empty,' " quoted Fireweed, an ancient saying.
The aphorism irritated Rose, but she pressed on. "Look: I have served your god for a hundred generations and soon will see my last. I don't ask you to help me, only to stand aside when the time comes. Let the god choose."
Six weeks till Chrys's show opened in Helicon, the Elf capital, and already snake-eggs pestered her in the street or hid like vermin behind her drapes and light fixtures, all hunting for an "inside scoop" on her work and whatever dark personal secrets they could imagine. By accident (or perhaps not) one got stepped on. A veritable cloud of them descended, leading to the headline story, "Prominent Artist Assaults Journalist." If the news reached Dolomoth—she could not bear to imagine it. Her little brother's image up in the corner, turning cartwheels forever, receded even farther from reach.
"By the way," Xenon asked one morning, "it's no business of mine, but do artists often receive anonymous donations of ten million credits?"
Focusing her tired eyes, she counted the digits in the credit line that hovered ever longer in her window. Sure enough, there were eight, where there had only been seven the last time she counted. Her investments with Garnet were long gone; there was no explanation. Or was there?
On a hunch, she placed a call. "Garnet, what the hell are you doing to my credit line?"
The sprite in gray smiled apologetically. "What's the harm? It's anonymous."
The way he said it, she couldn't help but smile. "You know I can't take so much as quartz dust from you."
Garnet said quietly, "What you gave me was priceless."
"In that case, I'm insulted." She sighed. Being "objective" was a joke, she had decided. All the testers had to judge people they loved or hated; there was nothing objective about it. But rules were rules. "This time, I'll pass it on to the Simian Advancement League. But next time, I'll have to report you."
"The Sim League—Jasper will be so pleased," he exclaimed. "By the way, how is your new recruit? We'd like to meet him."
Zircon—her "new recruit," indeed. She started to protest but had another thought. Garnet needed to get out among carriers again. "You can invite him to Olympus."
The pain was there, in the lines around Garnet's eyes. No matter how young you look, there comes a day when you feel old. "You'll be doing me a favor," she insisted. "Honest."
"In that case, I have no choice."
The next day, she faced the Silicon planning board. At the virtual meeting, she and Jasper sat at his giant-sized holostage. On the holostage the sentients or their avatars made a diverse assemblage. One was humanoid, bipedal with a knob of a head; another, built like a ladder with various appendages; while the dominant figure extended radially like a sea urchin, a core cortex within a nest of legs. Still others were too large and extensive to be visualized, such as the transit systems of Helicon and Papilion, each represented by a cross-shaped avatar.
The board included three Elf humans, one of them Guardian Arion. Arion's image spent most of the meeting sitting back with his arms crossed. From news accounts, Chrys guessed this pose represented the official Elf view of the sentient plans. Elves were mortified to see their aesthetics upstaged, though they could not survive a minute without the sentient partners running their cities.
Something pricked Chrys's memory. Selenite—where was she? Why wasn't she here to help present the design? Chrys had avoided Selenite since her accusations about art, hoping the dust would settle. Perhaps Selenite knew better—this deal would never fly.
The chair of the board was the giant black sea urchin, reputedly a top market investor like Garnet. Its twenty-odd limbs stood out straight from its body, each ending in a different mechanism for grasping, screwing, or drawing. The sea urchin methodically reviewed the city's needs: so much residential volume, of a dozen categories, from snake-egg to transit system; so many power connections, service conduits, and sewage lines; and something called "wetware."
The cross representing a transit system started blinking. "Does a sentient city really need so much volume for wetware?" About 12 percent of the city volume had this designation. "Couldn't that be covered under service conduits?"
"We must plan for wet visitation," said the sea urchin. "We've made our best estimate of wet volume occupancy."
Chrys gave Jasper a questioning look. "Visiting humans," he explained.