Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  “It’s just a book.” Aidan’s voice cracked and he flushed. “From my father—from his library.”

  The plastic cover was so old and desiccated, it was difficult to read the title. I opened it, holding it gingerly so that the loose pages wouldn’t fall out. It was printed on thick paper that had aged to the color of rich cream, much heavier and softer than the cheap fiber used for talking books. The end-pieces were marbled, yellow and blue and green. The title page held a little holo no bigger than the ball of my thumb, showing an elaborately stylized eye that seemed to follow me when I moved. Beneath it, title and author were jetprinted in a deliberately shaky hand.

  Errores Maleficarum et Incunabula

  By Michel DeFries

  Beneath this was the legend Privately Printed in the Independent Commonwealth of California (later part of the Western Unity, and still later part of the Pacific Ocean) and a date some four hundred years earlier.

  I stared at it curiously, and had started to turn the pages when I heard the electronic bell shriek the quarter hour, last call for first reflections. I swore, recalling Mandodari’s punitive use of the memory enhancer, which exhausted one even as it made sleep impossible for days afterward.

  “Here—” I shoved the book back at Aidan and strode to the door. “Do something with it—get rid of it, if you’re smart. And do something about that —”

  I glowered and pointed at the window draped with Aidan’s clothes. “—Unless you want to spend the rest of the week in the infirmary.”

  The mockery vanished from his eyes. Nodding, he crossed to the window and tore down his jacket, sending socks and shirt flying. I left before I could see what he did with the book.

  Nefertity and I left as dawn twined through the desert air. Nefertity wished to give farewells to the humans we had left in the valley. Not from any sentiment on her part—she was a construct, remember that, and I refused to believe her capable of any human feeling—but because she feared they might follow us and perish in the desert.

  “Leave them be,” I said. I had already turned and was starting for my Gryphon, Kesef, where it crouched on the hillside. “We will find them again if we need them. The world is a small place now, Nefertity. Come.”

  The nemosyne’s eyes blazed azure. I smiled, thinking of the woman who had programmed her. What a monster she must have been! But I said nothing, stepping over clumps of prickly pear and broomweed, kicking apart a nest of fire ants until I reached the Gryphon and called out to it.

  “Kesef. Wake.”

  The aircraft shuddered. Its deceptively fragile wings expanded like a bat’s, unfolding into long blackened petals. From its nose several long filaments extended, testing the air. I could hear it humming inside as it listened to whatever tales those slender filaments might tell: rain, sun, wind; radiation, mutagens, storms. I guessed sun and a hot northwestern wind. Here where the great coastal prairies had once stretched for hundreds of miles, it was nearly always sun and wind.

  From behind me Nefertity called softly. “Where are you taking me?”

  I pointed to the west. A man’s eyes would have looked down the sloping hillside onto an endless plain, gold and brown and green fading into a sky that daylight would soon scorch to white. I could see beyond that, to where the Glass Mountains rose and then gave way to the Glass Desert, where the few towns and cities had been embalmed in obsidian waves by the Second Shining. “To Cisneros.”

  She joined me beneath the Gryphon. We waited until it unfolded the narrow ladder leading into its belly, then climbed inside.

  “And what is Cisneros?” she asked.

  She slipped into the seat behind me, the restraining belts crackling softly as they looped around her glowing torso. I lay back in my own seat, feeling it mold itself to the hard shell I still could not think of as my body. I closed my eyes for a moment before replying, “NASNA’s Pacific elÿon base.”

  “Pacific? It is in the ocean?”

  I shook my head as Kesef’s neural web descended to cover my face. “Yes. Off the west coast. The southern part of the Californian peninsula, I think it may have been in your time.”

  Kesef hissed. In the broken lingo that Gryphons and Aviators use to communicate verbally, it asked how it could interface with me. I had no flesh for the web to adhere to save my right hand. I raised this and commanded it to use my eyes. An instant later I felt the cool dampish touch of the webs across them, my vision obscured momentarily as the gray mist resolved into an intricate pattern of cross-hatching and glowing orange grids. I felt the Gryphon probing my mind, its questioning clicks as once again it confronted the mass of cerebral tissue and neural wiring that had replaced my brain. Then silence as Kesef found the familiar strata of memory and command that had joined us for so long. I relaxed my hold on the arms of my seat, plunging into that blissful rush that signals the beginning of the biotic interface between Aviator and craft.

  In front of me the interior of the Gryphon faded. In its place swam the image of Cisneros as I had last seen it, years before. Indistinct at first, then growing stronger and more lucid as Kesef’s memory banks fleshed out the picture I struggled to recall, until it seemed I stood there again, swaying slightly with that unconscious rhythm one developed after months at base. The landing platforms rising and falling on the Pacific swells, their bands of light pulsing from green to violet and silhouetting the tiny figures of Aviators and ground crew, like blackened cinders swarming in the darkness. In the distance flames shooting skyward from the offshore refineries, and the flashing lights of the fougas patrolling the prison on Tijuana Island. The smell of burning petrol; the silken odor of the spray as it salted my leather uniform and pooled on the metal platform beneath my boots. Above me the NASNA standard snapped in the night, its cloven moon a maleficent eye glaring at the full and resplendent orb shining above the sea. If I tilted my head back, I could read the glittering letters pricked out upon the standard:

  Oderint dum metuant.

  Let them hate, so long as they fear.

  And over all of it the Ascendants’ fleet of celestial airships, blotting out the moon as they hovered above the loading docks, waiting to start their journeys to the HORUS colonies. Like vast ruby-colored clouds, like a second sky gravid with poisonous rain. The elÿon.

  “Cisneros,” I whispered: a command for Kesef. But there was no need for me to speak aloud—already the Gryphon had begun to quiver like a greyhound before a race.

  “And there?” The nemosyne’s sweet voice cut through the soft roar of Kesef’s solar engines as they fed greedily upon their energy stores.

  “There I will confer with my advisers. I will learn what damage has been done to the HORUS colonies, and decide which station might hold our prize. Then we will go there and reclaim Metatron.”

  I did not share with her my fears—that there might be no HORUS colonies left where humans still lived and ruled. Instead I focused all my thoughts on Kesef and tried to blot out images of HORUS in flames.

  Aviators are solitary, trained—bred, some say—to possess a single-mindedness that drives them with mad abandon into the inferno that any sane person would flee. Nowhere is this singular passion more evident than in our tryst with the Gryphons. When I was at the Academy, it was rumored that our aircraft were quite literally a compendium of Aviator traits: that the brains of brilliant commanders who had fallen in battle were enshrined within the circuitry and neutral fibers of the next generation of Gryphons, a biotic Valhalla. Sherborne Zeal was supposed to have been immortalized thus, and Ciarin Jhabvilos.

  I never gave much credence to those stories, but my link with Kesef had seen me through the Archipelago Conflict and the Shining at Recife, and even through the first skirmishes of the so-called Volcanic War, fought in that nether region of the heavens where the air is filled with flames. Once I had interfaced with Kesef, I did not like to have my concentration broken. I raised my hand commandingly.

  “Silence now! I will tell you when to speak again; when we reach our destina
tion.”

  The vision of Cisneros faded. In the darkened window in front of me I could see Nefertity’s reflection, a woman made of light. She did not speak, but long after we had begun our ascent, the reflected image of her eyes burned through whatever visions Kesef might have shown me of the world that shimmered far, far below us.

  It took us most of that day to reach the Pacific coast. We passed above the Glass Mountains: dark brown and black, as though charred by the explosion that had turned the western prairie into a smooth expanse of congealed sand, blinding to look upon. Then the dun-colored reaches of the great Nevadan Desert. Never a hospitable countryside, it had been largely ignored by warring factions of Ascendants, and to my knowledge had never been the object of viral assault by the Commonwealth or Emirate. So, surprisingly, in this barren wilderness one saw signs of human habitation—tent cities where the roving Children of Zion lived; the domed prospects of lonely families tucked within the shadows of the Toiyabe Range; even tiny grids of yellow and green, brave efforts at hydroculture siphoning illegal waters from the Merino Aquifer. I had often glimpsed such ungoverned vistas from the air, particularly in the northern mountains and in areas like those ringing the California Peninsula, where the tremendous geological upheavals of the last centuries left huge fissures in the continent, unmapped and as yet unclaimed by the Autocracy. Aviators were supposed to report these homesteaders to NASNA Command. Months afterward you might see them at the Population Control Centers, each with a monitor clamped to her wrist; and then later set to work at the Archipelago’s hydrofarms, or shipped to the sunless tunnels of the L-5 mines, or strapped unconscious to a gurney at the Human Engineering Laboratory.

  I did not inform the Ascendants of what I saw in my travels, then or ever. I had no great sentiment for those small lives stolen from the beleaguered countryside, but neither did I hold any love for my Ascendant superiors, with their slave-run farms and the research facilities where they enslaved corpses when living bodies were scarce. I wondered now if those people living on the edge of the world had glimpsed some revolution in the skies above; if one night they had seen the stars in their courses shift or go out, candles extinguished by a freezing wind.

  Our journey was mostly a silent one. A few times Nefertity asked me about the habitations below us, but I ignored her. I had a sort of joy in those brief moments of flight with Kesef—the only joy I was capable of feeling—and occasionally I cursed myself for bringing the nemosyne with me. At the least I could have disabled her speaking mechanism, but I did not.

  It is difficult to describe my feelings for the nemosyne. Referring to Nefertity as her, when of course she was a construct. It was only that her coding program had been female, Sister Loretta Riding of the Order of Divine Compassion. Nefertity was no more feminine than I was masculine—less so, since just months before, I had been a man, and she had never been anything more than a delicately shaped array of neural wiring and glass and plasteel. But she held within her datafiles thousands of years of women’s histories: folktales, songs, paintings, fables, poems: such a trove that I believe it somehow had shaped the rigid anima of a twenty-second-century robot and given it the sensibility of a living woman. Despite the unyielding touch of her plasteel hands and the uncanny radiance of her eyes, it was impossible to think of Nefertity as anything but she. But even when I was a man, I knew there were those who believed I was not human, but a monster.

  I was not, no more than any Aviator is a monster. If I had been, I would have rejoiced in my incarnation as a rasa: deathless, since my corpse had been regenerated; fearless, since what could harm me now? Harm a creature who had died and been reborn with this adamant shell?

  But I did not rejoice. I loathed it, with a hatred that would have been impossible for me to fathom before blood and sinew and bones, skull and arms and torso were torn from me, leaving only a human hand and two raving eyes trapped within an Ascendant tool. Perversely, it had been that hatred that kept me sane—at least as sane as ever I had been—even as now it was hope that was sending me westward with the waning day.

  Evening fell, the late fiery evening that marks nightfall in that part of the world. We were still many miles from the coast, but already the sky was streaked with the lurid colors coughed forth by the floating refineries and manufacturing forms that choke the Pacific shores like kelp. As we grew nearer, excitement filled me, to be returning there after so long. Kesef battled the night wind that rose from the cooling ocean. I could feel the slender structure shaking all around me, its wings hugging in close as it dived and then soared back into the twilight like a nighthawk. There was no sound except for the hollow rush of wind around the Gryphon’s wings.

  Behind me Nefertity sat in silence. Her body had cooled to a faint silvery gray, the color of dull metal. Only her eyes betrayed that she was anything but a common server. Anticipation of our arrival at Cisneros had whetted my desire for company; unexpectedly I felt the need to talk.

  “We will be there very soon,” I said.

  Silence. I thought she had retreated into her dormant mode, but then a flicker of gold speared her breast, and she replied, “The thought seems to cheer you.”

  The golden threads spread like flame across her torso, captive lightning. Outside, stars began to show in the greenish sky. Below us there were no lights; only reflected sunset smeared across mile after mile of ruins, the fallen spires and spars of what had once been the great Pacific sprawl. I felt a pang, recalling other flights over this place.

  “It is a place where I was happy once,” I said. “My second assignment was to Cisneros. I was very young, just a few years out of the Academy—”

  “Where was your first assignment?”

  “Buru.” Nefertity shook her head as I explained, “It used to be the primary assignment for all Aviators, a sort of training site. An island in the Archipelago. It is gone now—”

  Swallowed by the rising seas that had claimed so many island and coastal countries; but no one mourned the fall of Buru, not even the cannibal janissaries who patrolled its capital before the deluge. “I was there as part of the peacekeeping force, keeping watch over the hydrofarms. My great fortune was to leave after only six months. That was when I came here.”

  She leaned over to stare out the tiny round window, steadying herself as Kesef abruptly dropped a thousand feet. “And what is—was—down there?”

  Beneath us the jagged ruins rose like tiny islands from channels of deep blue water. For centuries nothing had grown there. After the devastating earthquakes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the cities were abandoned, the vast farms and vineyards reclaimed by the desert. Then came the Split; and now the sea covered it all. As Kesef drew closer to the surface of the waves, the silence that had trapped us for so many hours began to give way. We could hear a hissing, and a sort of soft booming roar; then a series of crashes and booms, like the struts and spars of a ship giving way in a storm. Other tones rang out, some deep like the crush of machinery, some clear and sweet as bells. Beneath all of it was a steady throb, like the pulse of blood in one’s ears.

  “The Pacific sprawl. Ruined cities. Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara. All lost in the Split.”

  “All of them?” Nefertity’s jadeite eyes glowed in the darkness behind me. “Just—destroyed? Like that?”

  I shrugged. “They were fortunate for a long time. The survivors of the first earthquakes seceded from the rest of the country. Eventually they joined with the Nipponian Empire. The Nipponians had a greater defense system than the Autocracy; when the Split came, their autoclaves went on alert and destroyed the forces sent to help them. Nothing was saved. The fantômes —those are the abos who still live there in a few places, a pathetic race—the fantômes say they still dredge up bodies from the caverns beneath the ruins.” I gazed down at the waves. “Listen—can you hear?”

  Nefertity cocked her head and drew closer to the window. “Yes. What it is?”

  “The sea gnawing at the foundations of the cities.
The fantômes say it is the voices of the dead. They believe the sea is eating away at the world, bit by bit, and someday the rest of us will be devoured as well.”

  I turned back to the cockpit, scanning the horizon for my first sight of Cisneros. Kesef continued to descend, until we skimmed only a few hundred feet above the water. Twisted girders and shattered pyramids broke through the surface, some of them strung with ragged banners to mark where the fantômes had staked out their territories. I imagined I could smell their squalid settlements, reeking of fish and salted flesh, and once I did see a tiny group squatting on the edge of a makeshift pier, their hunched bodies silhouetted by the light of a fire burning in a steel drum. They might never know that HORUS or the Autocracy had been destroyed. Generations hence they would still be eking their precarious living from the sea and the detritus of an earlier civilization. When finally I tore my gaze from them, I saw the floating city before me.

  From this distance Cisneros at first appeared to be a mirage, the weary eye spinning færy domes and turrets from the endless artificial reefs stretching below. But as we grew closer, the shimmering globes of green and gold and blue and crimson took more solid form. I could pick out the tall, slender recon towers, the ancient satellite dishes like a field of white poppies turned toward the stars, the glittering blue-green residence domes. Behind it all, plumes of brilliant flame and blue gas spewed from the refineries, miles off but seeming near enough that their heat might singe one’s hair.

  And hovering in the sulfurous sky like some mad dream of the floating city, the billowing mass of the elÿon: the biotic craft, half-living organism and half-machine, with which the Ascendants plied the nearer reaches of space.

  “A Nipponian fleet!” Nefertity cried in amazement.

  “No.” I gazed at the elÿon closest to us, an umbrella-shaped leviathan the color of sunset, its edges rosy-pink and blurred from the heat of its engines. “Although the Ascendants did claim many of them after the Split. The Nipponian vessels are much finer than those made by the Autocracy.”