"They face trial. And so do you."
"Keep talking," urged Forget-me-not. "We need to keep some of the defectors. At least the mathematicians—they're really smart. We'll tell the judges—"
Chrys pulled against the octopod arms until one gave her a shock. She clenched her teeth. "I rescued him—"
"We'll see what you rescued."
Doctor Sartorius came over. "He's stabilized. He can handle consciousness for a few minutes."
Andra frowned. "Is Selenite here yet?"
"Just arrived."
Chrys demanded, "What's going on?"
Andra gave her a look, haunted yet calculating. Daeren lay surrounded by a webbing of filaments from the wall. Behind him waited Selenite with a grim expression, arms folded. Daeren's eyes were open, bright with pain.
The chief brought her face close to his. "Listen," Andra spoke rapidly. "Your people survived, about two hundred thousand of them." One in five—what became of the rest? Torture? Starvation? "You have to give them up."
His eyes flitted away, then back, irises dark. "It wasn't their fault."
"No, but your forebrain's shot to hell. You know the rule. You have to heal in the clinic."
"Alone?"
"How else?" Andra demanded. "You'll be arsenic-wiped every day. Tell them."
"I can't do that," Daeren whispered. "I can't send them away. Homeless."
"They'll have a home—half with me, half with Selenite." By regulation, a carrier could not hold more than 10 percent over their limit.
"Selenite? But she'll breed them for—"
"They'll live, won't they? Why didn't you think of that when you gave yourself up?"
Chrys caught her breath. Whatever could Andra mean?
Daeren closed his eyes. "Why did you bring me back?"
"What really happened to him?" Chrys demanded of her people. "What do the blue angels say?"
A moment of hesitation. "They say he went to the masters. Because he had destroyed their world, he gave them his."
She stared without seeing, without breathing. She remembered his eyes, when he last came to see her, the shifting eyes of a slave. His last call for help.
"I warned you," whispered Andra. "He can't have micros again, ever."
Doctor Sartorius stood by the cot, tendrils hanging motionless from his head, their eye sensors turned aside. Chrys caught the sentient carapace between her hands. His warmth surprised her; "waste heat," the sentient unspeakable. No eyes, but she faced the worms. "Doctor, can't you do something? He's no slave; he just slipped. You know what he is. You've got to cure him."
"I'll do what I can, Chrysoberyl." The doctor's voice was strangely soft, the different voice that she had heard once or twice, still distinctly his. "But chemicals alone cannot fix the brain, without exchanging one slavery for another."
TWENTY-ONE
From the world of Endless Light, hundreds of defectors from the masters had swarmed in, all at once—desperate elders smuggling sick children, as well as agitators and infiltrators. Even years later a few more, unrepentant, were rooted out of hiding in the bone marrow, preparing their secret poisons.
The judges in purple emitted volumes of disgust, enough to permeate the arachnoid. "Such lack of judgment we have never seen," they proclaimed. "You can never know you've found them all; there could be others even we did not find. You should be arsenic-wiped."
Fireweed was about to say that Eleutherians had investigated themselves more thoroughly than did the judges, but she thought better of it. "We are eternally grateful for your assistance—and so are our new citizens." Those who came for a better life had settled in. Engineers and mathematicians, some of them brilliant. In the closed society of Endless Eight, lacking resources as well as freedom of speech, the greatest minds embraced mathematics. The Leader's loss was Eleutheria's gain.
"And your population is in excess again," the judge added. "You're fined ten thousand atoms of palladium."
"We're correcting the problem, as you can taste." The pheromones had been reset to encourage development of elders.
"And next time, don't induce all the foreign children to merge prematurely just to prevent their deportation. It's indecent." Eleutheria had done this for generations to keep the most genetic benefit from immigrant talent.
Fireweed emitted placating pheromones of the highest quality. "Anything else? Surely we can continue this discussion in the nightclub, over AZ." Most people consumed azetidine as quickly as they could absorb it from the blood, but Fireweed had learned Rose's trick of saving some for special occasions.
"Eleutheria!" The judge emitted molecules of exasperation. "You people think you know everything, but you were fooled once. Don't think you won't be fools again."
Her night passed in fitful slumber; she could not awake without remembering and crying herself to sleep again. In the morning, her message light blinked insistently. Chrys roused herself, her eyelids sore, her back aching from strain. Wearily, she fetched a disk of nanotex. The material spread smoothly up her arms and down to her toes.
The sprite was a stranger, an Iridian gentleman with a few modest agates swimming in his talar. "You went to the Slave World. Did you see my son?" A still image followed, a young man in thick nanotex with gem-cutting tools at his side. His short-cropped hair stood up like a brush, and his smile had that half scared look of someone just getting used to adulthood.
The news must have got out. Chrys swallowed. "I—I'm sorry, I can't help you."
"Please—it's been a year since they took him. I know he would send word, if he could. Can't they even let their slaves send word home? Why doesn't the Palace negotiate?"
Her mouth opened, but she could not think what to say.
"Send me your recording," he demanded. "I'll recognize my son."
"It's classified," she said quickly.
The man's face brightened. "So there is a recording. Release it."
Chrys sighed. "Believe me, it won't help you."
"I'll sue to get it released." The man's voice softened. "Please—my only son. He was to take over the stonecutting shop this year, when those plague-ridden pirates got him."
She bit her lip. "If there were anything I could do, believe me, I would. Every week I take my shift in the Underworld, helping folks like your son—"
The man stiffened. "My son never went near the Underworld. He was clean-living, until he was kidnapped." He raised his hands. "Can you go? Negotiate his release? I'll pay ransom."
"No," she whispered. Then aloud, "I can't go back, ever."
"You got your own back! Help me!"
The rest of that morning, the calls came—a daughter, a brother, a grandson lost, the year before, the previous month, or just that week. Several that week, in fact. A lot of good it had done, boiling the world of Endless Light.
In desperation she forwarded all calls to Xenon. Her own work had fallen behind, and the following day she was due to meet Ilia at the Gallery Elysium to preview her exhibit. But when she sat at the painting stage, all she could do was stare.
"New ideas," flashed Lupin, a new elder whose lemon yellow reminded her of Jonquil. "We have new ideas—for advanced compositions. ..."
Her hand, as if on its own, traced a ghostly outline of Daeren's forehead. No good—she was never any good at humans. With a flick of her hand, the shape dissolved in white—pure, even light that filled the entire cube of stage. One more piece, she needed for her show; but what could it be? What pattern of pixels could begin to express what she had undergone?