A day passed, then evening. To her surprise, Daeren stopped by. Merope jumped down from her lap as she rose to greet him. Her pulse raced; it always felt good to see him, though she tried to hide how much.
"Chrys—I have to know." Daeren seemed more agitated than she had ever seen him; his eyes would not rest, but darted this way and that. "Did you tell them?"
"Daeren, what do you mean?"
"They were gone," he told her. "The Leader, and the healthier hosts. Did you warn them?"
She blinked, confused. "I thought you did. If you didn't—"
"Chrys, this isn't a village feud in Dolomoth. It's about the law of the Free Fold."
Her eyes narrowed. "Now you sound like Topaz. You won't listen to me."
"If you warned them, it's treason."
"If you didn't, then who did? Daeren—"
"Treason—don't you see?" His eyes rolled away. "They could put you away for life—with all your people wiped."
She put her hands on her hips. "So what if we warned them? Aren't they our cousins? You know it. You want to know what they think of it? Like a slave—you can't even look."
He faced her then. For a moment their eyes locked. Then he let out a cry and whipped his head away. "I've had enough. Someone else will have to deal with you." Without another word, he left.
She stared, too shocked to call after him. For a time she could only stand there, her eyes not seeing. Stumbling to her room, she fell onto the bed, half asleep. Someone else will have to deal with you, the words echoed. But there was no one else, no one in all seven worlds of the Fold.
"One True God, how the neurotransmitters flux through your brain. We fear for you."
Too low to reply, Chrys imagined herself falling forever, falling through one of those streams of white-hot lava she had watched on Mount Dolomoth as a child, as the ground quaked beneath her feet, her ears deafened. No human being had ever moved her as much as that mountain come alive. Yet Daeren felt somehow different, off scale. She had had no idea how much she counted on him. And now, what had she done to turn him away?
"God of Mercy," called Forget-me-not, "have mercy on yourself. Your dopamine and serotonin have fallen drastically."
"One True God, is there anything we could do?" asked Fireweed. "Could we not adjust your dopamine, just enough to tide you over?"
Chrys felt as if she would never get up, would never care about anything or anyone again. "Do as you will."
"Oh Great One," flashed sky blue Forget-me-not, "in ages past, the Watcher Dendrobium herself foretold that one day you would speak just so, and that we must say no."
Dendrobium, Daeren's favorite Watcher, had chosen to live her last life out with Chrys. The tears flowed at last. "The Lord of Light is gone, and I love him. I can't live without him."
"You love him?" said Forget-me-not. "The love of the gods? Like children who seek to merge?"
"We knew nothing of this," added Fireweed.
"We knew nothing, when we spoke in anger to the blue angels."
Chrys resisted saying they must be total imbeciles if they lived inside her own head and couldn't tell that she hopelessly loved Daeren. Didn't they feel her pulse rise every time her eyes fixed on him?
"There is but One True God," Fireweed observed, "yet the God longs for another. A mystery—How can this be? There's only one answer: to serve God well, we must serve the other as our own."
"Fireweed is right," said Forget-me-not. "Ancient history tells that the Lord of Light longed for nothing more than Eleutherians to devote themselves to him. So, we will worship him as our own god, and his heart will be yours."
Now that they knew, what a disaster. She could never face him again—she'd just die.
The message light blinked. Andra's sprite appeared. "Security alert—an emergency announcement. We've lost contact with Daeren, in the Underworld."
TWENTY
While awaiting the next word of their anguished god, the two priests tasted their records of hormone levels in the god's circulation. "It's true," said Forget-me-not, "there was always a rise in adrenaline when we met the Lord of Light. But then, in my youth with the blue angels, most gods who met the Lord of Light raised their adrenaline. I thought they feared testing."
"Adrenaline means more than fear," said Fireweed. "And divine love is more than adrenaline and dopamine."
"Certainly. There's phenylethylamine and oxytocin. Love is a most complex and difficult problem."
In the meantime, however, Eleutheria had another complex problem to solve: the mega-scale calculation for Silicon.
"One possible solution," said Fireweed, "is a newer, faster, more compact computing network." But the mechanism for such a network as yet existed only in theory. Such a network would require smaller molecules to transduce information, based on different elements of the rare earth series. But which elements would work best, and what organic ligands? The research would take yet another generation, perhaps several.
"I still prefer the mathematical route," said Forget-me-not. "A proof asserts the existence of a more efficient algorithm."
"It exists, fine—but the algorithm itself has yet to be found."
"How can we sign the contract? " worried Forget-me-not.
"Have faith," said Fireweed. "Have faith in the Seven Lights. Virtue and Power will get us there."
"Or new immigrants," flashed the blue one. "We've grown soft. Historically, we take in refugees every third generation; but now we're three generations overdue."
"I've been thinking about refugees," said Fireweed. "Rose built up our refugee program, resettling thousands of defectors. But in recent years she missed chances to innovate."
"Such as?"
"The masters, even unrepentant ones, aren't all bad. They just have a bad system."
Forget-me-not flashed warily, "Those false blue angels are downright predatory."
"But the tamer ones—suppose we could help them better manage their own hosts."
"No arsenic," Forget-me-not warned. "Against divine law."
"The masters waste nine-tenths of their own arsenic through ignorance and mismanagement. If we could teach them conservation, we might help them become better people—"
"Or better predators."
The Committee met again virtually, the second emergency in a week. "His last contact was in the Underworld, just outside the tube." Andra's voice cut like steel. "The same way Chrys vanished—except it was right in the open street."
"Revenge." Jasper nodded, his gem-encrusted chair virtually spliced to Andra's. "They took revenge for the destruction of the Slave World."
Opal held Selenite's hand, her delicate veined face deeply troubled. "The news said that Daeren himself directed the destruction of the Slave World. Our own people were appalled."
Chrys exclaimed, "It's not true. They got it wrong."
Andra said, "The blue angels all share descent with the masters. How do you think he felt?"
Of course, taking in refugees all the time, by now their population came as much from masters as it did from Andra's judges. And yet, in the end, Daeren chose humanity. Recalling how she had lashed at him, Chrys felt chilled.