Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  He paused dramatically, then swept his hand up to indicate the rafters overhead, the many stories beyond. “We are part of an ancient tradition here at Seven Chimneys. We are a halfway house, a way-station for those fleeing the Ascendants. There were many places like this, once; Seven Chimneys is one of the last.

  “The Underground Railway, they called it during the North American Civil War. It was the Sanctuary Movement later, and The Havens during the Long Night of the First Ascension.” Blue light streamed from his face as he threw his head back and his voice rang out. My own voice broke like a boy’s when I spoke.

  “Who do you shelter?”

  In a swift motion he clapped the enhancer back over his eyes. The brilliant blue rays of the optics were extinguished; now I had to squint through the shadows to see him. “Geneslaves. Fossa was one of the first. He has remained here with us, to help reassure others that they will not be betrayed. There have been many others: aardmen fleeing the City, argalæ kept as prostitutes by Ascendant troops, salamanders from the mines. And energumens, of course; and people like yourself. Oh, yes—we have taken in several escapees from HEL over the years. Not many, because not many survived long enough to reach us, but more than you might think. I was very impressed to see what Emma had done with them—her reasons were heinous, of course, but the results were very interesting. An entire cohort of adolescent psychic terrorists. They would have been very useful during wartime.”

  I bit my lip, not sure whether to believe him. But there had been unexplained disappearances at HEL from time to time—the empath Sarah Jabera was one, and a young telepath named Isaac Dunstan. I had always assumed they were suicides—there were always suicides at HEL—or else that they had been captured or killed by the fougas.

  “I still don’t know why you are telling me this.” I spoke slowly, trying to choose words that would not offend him, or endanger me and my friends. “I can’t help you—especially with geneslaves.”

  Trevor leaned so close that I could smell the bitter scent of lemons on his breath. “Oh, but you could!—we all could, if only enough of us would side with them, rise to overthrow the Autocracy! Already there have been riots in some of the HORUS colonies. The energumens and cacodemons have attempted coups on several stations. Just a week ago we heard of aardmen at a logging camp in the United Provinces—they slayed their supervisors and escaped into the Hudson Bay Territory. And there will be others, too, now that the geneslaves have started to throw off the tyranny of their human masters.”

  I tried to turn away, but Trevor clutched at my arm. “There will be war soon, Wendy: a different kind of war, a revolution from within! In some places it has already begun. There is a great purge coming, the beginning of a new age!

  “But I am not alone in seeing this, Wendy—there are others, wiser and older than I am, who have seen into the future of our planet! They can read the skies as people once read books, and they have told me what is written there. A terrible secret, one that will irrevocably change our world. But some of us will be strong enough, wise enough, to learn from what is to come—and we will triumph! We will remake the world! We will bring about a true Final Ascension, one that will not thrive on slavery and barbaric despotism. One that will not be built on the bodies of slaves, human or otherwise.”

  I stared at him in disbelief, thinking of the ghoulish aardmen in the City, the diseased lazars and sentient trees and other mutated creatures that had deviled me since my escape from HEL. What insane rebels would ever ally themselves with them ?

  Trevor pushed me away impatiently. “You don’t believe me? But you know it’s true! You have seen them, who hasn’t? Millions of creatures—living things, sentient things, creatures that can weep when their young are torn from them and creatures that will never give birth—made by humans to serve as slaves, discarded or murdered after they have been used! We brought them into the world, but it is a world some of them can barely survive in, they have been so carefully manipulated to exist only in those cracks and dark corners where the Ascendants want them to live and die while serving them. Rendered sterile by the tyrants; given life spans a fraction of ours; seizing the young of those who are permitted to give birth…

  “If the geneslaves were all freed tomorrow, it would still be a hundred years, a thousand years, before we could ever make amends for the horrors they have endured at our hands. Only if we join with them to make war upon the tyrants; only if someday, perhaps, our blood mingles with theirs: then we may begin to expiate the suffering we have brought upon the world.”

  ”They may have suffered, but I have never harmed one,” I cried, feeling besieged. “I flee them when I can—they are monstrous things, they are monsters….”

  Trevor shook his head. “No more than you are. You are one of them, Wendy Wanders. I can see it in you: you are not as other people. Perhaps you never were. And to the Ascendants you are less than human.”

  “No!” I shouted. “I never was, never —it’s over now, there is nothing left —”

  My hands flew to my head, covering my ears. I could feel the scars there at my temples, the nodes that had slowly healed even as my ability to tap into the thoughts and dreams of others had faded. I wanted to scream, to lash out at him as I had done with others before; but it was true, my powers were gone now. There was nothing left.

  “ You are left, Wendy.” I shuddered at how calm he sounded. “You know I speak the truth. You are not like the rest of us, not like Jane or your Paphian lover. You and Miss Scarlet have more in common than they do; you and Fossa.”

  I shook my head furiously, thinking of the aardman—his gnarled face, those curved yellow teeth and the tail like a fleshy whip between his hind legs.

  “No.”

  “ Yes. Admit it to yourself, Wendy: you belong with us, with all of us who are fighting the tyrants. It is a war against humanity; but you know that you are not truly human. Help us, Wendy. Join us.”

  “ No! ”

  Trevor laughed softly. Behind him the rows of glowing corpses seemed to shiver in the ghostly light. He leaned forward, with one finger brushed the hair from my temple and probed the raised lip of skin there.

  “Emma Harrow did this?” he murmured. At his touch a small fiery explosion went off inside my skull. I gasped, closing my eyes against the pain. “I would have proceeded differently—no scars, nothing to show that you had ever been touched….”

  I moaned, stiffening as his other hand slowly closed around my wrist. His words echoed in my mind—

  … very useful during wartime…

  “It’s gone, my powers are gone!” I cried frantically. His grip tightened as I tried to pull away. “I—I went without my medication for too long—the visions left me, it’s gone now, whatever power I had is gone—”

  Trevor shook his head, his voice soothing. “That doesn’t matter, Wendy. I told you, I am a very fine surgeon. Nothing matters, except that we understand each other.”

  Abruptly he let go of me. I staggered back, my hands flailing as I tried to find something to use as a weapon; but Trevor only laughed, as though I had been frightened by some shadow on the wall of a sunny room.

  “But we have a long time to learn how to do that, don’t we?” he said. “All winter, in fact. And I’m certain that you will come to see how worthy our cause is.”

  He bent and began picking up empty baskets, stacking them inside one another. “Would you mind handing me that?” he asked lightly.

  I stared at him warily, but he only continued to gather his things. Indeed, he seemed to have forgotten me. Finally I looked to where he had pointed and saw a willow basket, its contents lost in shadow. As I leaned down to pick it up, I heard him turn and walk back toward the steps.

  “A remarkable theoretician, Emma Harrow.” His voice rang faintly in the dank air as he began to climb the stairs. “But a rather clumsy surgeon.”

  I waited until I heard the door creak open upstairs. Then I followed him, the basket clutched between my cold fingers. It was
n’t until I reached the top step that I glanced down to see what I held—

  A skull.

  A human skull with a number of small perfectly round holes bored into it. Between the holes words had been scratched into the flaking bone, and a crude image. Tiny cracks radiated from the letters like tears.

  EMMA WYSTAN HARROW

  Sic semper tyrannus

  The Alliance was not subtle in its methods. With a cry I dropped the basket and fled to my room.

  5

  Cisneros

  NEITHER NEFERTITY NOR I had any need for sleep. Sleep is for humanity, to ease its tragic passage from dreams to waking, and eventually from dreams to death. I had already crossed over to the other side, and could only look back upon my own dreams as one would review a distant landscape from some unimaginably high lookout: as something lovely but detached from oneself, as though one did not breathe the same air they breathed down there, or sip the same passionately blue water.

  So I no longer dreamed, but during my months in the regeneration vats the biotechnicians did not apply the usual course of neural treatments to my swollen brain. If they had, I would have been as other rasas are: a mere corpse with the use of limbs and locomotion, with no will, no speech, nothing but the faintest haze of memories to cloud my dull eyes.

  But the Ascendants had more ambitious plans for me. Shiyung Orsina, the margravine who monitored my progress, had the twin vices of sentiment and vengeance to interfere with my rebirth; and so it was that I made my reentry into the world with my memories intact.

  More than that. My masters wanted me to lose nothing of the decades of training I had endured, all that time of being heated in the crucibles of their wars and planning rooms, fired by my own ambition until I was as finely tempered and lethal a weapon as they could devise. To this end all of my memories were reactivated—a simple thing, really, merely a series of electrical pulses administered to the proper quarters of the brain, and then a wash of proteins to these same nodes. The result of this excessive stimulation was ironic. Like all successful Aviators, I had spent my life suppressing memories. To do otherwise was to court madness, because who could live with the knowledge of what we must endure, between the equatorial war zones and the orbital colonies above us? My own mind had already reached its limit of guilty horrors, like a sponge soaked in acid that is slowly eaten away by its burden. That was the cause of my degeneration in the capital; but now the Ascendants had squeezed me dry, plucked from my decaying body my mind like a small overripe fruit and set it into this new shining shell, where it could neither wither nor flourish, only continue. And with me my memories, fresh as yesterday’s rain. No, more so: because while I could no longer taste or smell or feel the rain upon my tongue, my memories of storms fifty years past were enough to whiten my sleepless nights with lightning and lancing hail.

  And so, all unknowing, the Ascendants had imprinted me with the undoing of all their efforts. By electing my regenerated corpse Imperator, they thought they had created at last the ideal military commander: bloodless, heartless, but with the mind of a tyrant and the deathless teguments of their most sophisticated constructs. But they neglected to consider the power of memory, of desire that can outlive even the body. They had restored my past to me. In so doing they also restored my soul.

  On the edge of the rise Nefertity stood in silence, watching the dawn stretch its cold gray hands across the prairie. I remained by myself, brooding on what could have befallen the HORUS colonies and wondering what I might learn when I sought out my masters once more.

  Did I say I stood by myself? Ah, but it did not seem so to me! I was besieged with memories, like Androcles butterflies swarming about a corpse. The dead came back to speak with me, and others whom I had long forgotten—childhood friends and lovers; janissaries who had served under me at the battles of Nng Dao and Recife, and who died there when the Shinings came; fellow Aviators and cadets from the NASNA Academy, their minds and wills not yet broken by our Ascendant masters, their voices so clear and loud, I could hear them crying out across the years as though they stood no farther from me than did Nefertity.

  And thus it was that Aidan Harrow came to me again. Or rather, I went to him, my memories leading me until all about me the prairie faded and once more I was a youth: my arms aching from early-morning fencing practice with my replicant tutor, my bruised knuckles poised above the door to his room while in the distance I could hear bells wailing to signal the start of first reflections. Our floor rector, a slender, sallow woman named Elspeth Mandodari, had sent me to awaken the newest cadet.

  “He has a sister in the Auris Wing,” she said, adding in a voice tinged with disapproval, “A twin. But I’ll get her.”

  It was common for cadets to sleep late during their first days at the Academy. The best of intentions and most sophisticated of alarms could not conspire against our need for sleep, especially since our days started before four A.M . In the summer this was not so bad. The Academy was located on the northeasternmost shore of the continent, on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean that was supposedly the first place in North America where the sun struck each day. By May or early June sun slanting through the gray-filmed windows would wake us at three-thirty; an hour later it would look as though it were midday outside. But even this had not been enough to rouse me during my first week at the Academy. Instead I was kicked out of bed by the boy who would later be my partner in Gryphon training, a bullying mulatto named Ivor French.

  I had resolved to be kinder to the unknown somnambulist twin. I rapped gently at first on the heavy oaken door—a gesture more to ease my own conscience than to actually cause a stir inside, since to be heard at all one had to practically batter the planks with iron staves. But someone was already awake. A moment later a cheerful voice called, “ Entrez! ” And so I did, somewhat reticently, the door groaning as it swung in upon rusted hinges.

  It was a standard first-level cadet’s room. That is to say, a tiny, narrow cell perfectly in keeping with the Academy’s original design some six hundred years earlier, which was as Le Couvent de Notre-Dame des Afflictions. Aidan’s room retained its air of sunlit penitence. It overlooked the eastern ridge of the rocky fell called Plasma Mole, several hundred feet above where the ocean moaned and throbbed in dutiful counterpoint to our own smaller sufferings. Like postulants, we were not permitted to bring with us any remnants of our former lives. This gave the rooms an air of uncanny expectancy, as though even after centuries of silence and retribution they still awaited some measure of passion, of temptation or betrayal. Beneath a single window waited a coffin-sized iron bedstead, with its immaculate white linens, stiff from being dried outside in the chilly maritime air, and a feather pillow flattened by generations of aching heads. The smell of dust and pencil shavings was almost lost beneath that of the last rugosa roses blooming on the stony edge of Plasma Mole. The room’s sole ornamentation, besides the gorgeous enameled slab of sky above a spavined wooden desk, was the plasteel representation of the NASNA motto and its blighted moon, hanging beside the bed. The whitewashed walls should have been almost painfully sunlit, the ceilings marbled with the viridian wash of reflected ocean.

  But I was surprised to enter Aidan Harrow’s room and find it dark. Actually, not very dark; but to one accustomed to that ruthless blue northern light, it had the appearance of a hermit’s forest lair. I took two steps inside (four more would have brought me to the window) and shaded my eyes as though I had been blinded.

  “Mandodari wanted to make sure you were awake,” I said, trying to keep disapproval from clouding my voice. A cerulean cadet’s jacket had been strung across the window and hung with other oddments of clothing in an effort to keep the sun out. I frowned and squinted. I still wasn’t certain just where the room’s tardy occupant lay.

  “Mmm. Of course. Well, I’m up.”

  A head suddenly popped from the heap of covers on the bed. A stray shaft of light struck his hair, a mass of auburn waves surrounding a pointed puckish face, shar
p-chinned and with a small pointed nose. He was tall and lanky for his age, but that face was oddly childlike; or maybe it was just his expression, the slight threat of mindless violence that was never absent from his gray-green eyes. When he slid from the covers, I saw he was already fully dressed. Indeed from the rumpled look of his linen shirt and leather trousers, I gathered he had slept in his clothes.

  “I’m Aidan Harrow. From St. Clive.” That was a tiny village in the southern maritimes, a day’s air travel from Plasma Mole.

  I nodded stiffly. “Margalis Tast’annin.”

  Aidan’s eyes widened. “The poet’s son? I heard you were here.”

  With one hand he began smoothing the tangled hair back from his forehead. In the other he clutched a book. At a loss as to conversation, I tilted my head to read the title—purely a matter of convention, since the only book we were permitted to use in first level was the ancient talking edition of An Inquiry into Some Ethical Points of Celestial Navigation. I was quite shocked to see that this was not what Aidan held at all.

  “That’s under interdict!”

  I hadn’t meant to sound so prudish: I was genuinely stunned that someone would be so cavalier about flouting the rules. Punishment for even simple infractions was severe—most of the infirmary was given over to punitive devices, many of them quite new—and possession of contraband reading material was a serious offense.

  “Are you going to turn me in?”

  Aidan looked at me coolly, but his tone was innocently curious. If he had acted belligerent or even frightened, I probably would have reported him. As it was, I shut the door behind me and crossed the room to take the book from his hand.

  “No. But you better get rid of it, or hide it outside. May I see?”

  Even before I looked at it, I could tell, by its scent and feel, that it had not come from the Academy library. A flimsy plastic jacket protected its cover and spine, but even that couldn’t hide how old it was. I drew it to my face and sniffed. When I rifled the pages, dust smelling of cloves and hemp made me sneeze.