Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

I nodded. “Very well. There will be gear on board you can use.”

  “Thank you, Imperator. I’m not familiar with the Izanagi. I assume there’s some crew?”

  Meaning human crew, besides the adjutants.

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  As the glass elevator crept closer to the elÿon, the air grew warmer and blindingly bright, the glowing fleet blotting out the soothing darkness of the night sky. Even when I closed my eyes, I could still see vast unfolding petals of crimson and salmon-pink. The droning sound grew louder, swelled into a single profound boom, boom. A throbbing gargantuan voice: Izanagi’s voice. For an instant it seemed that our elevator and all it contained were engulfed in flames. Then the booming was abruptly silenced, the radiance disappeared as though a huge hand had covered the sky. With a wrenching sound the elevator opened.

  Before us a soiled ribbon of gray carpeting led into the gaping mouth of the elÿon. Nefertity hung back from the door, and I heard Valeska sigh, a noise that was almost a shudder. Without a word we boarded the Izanagi.

  6

  The End of Winter

  WE SPENT THAT WINTER and spring at Seven Chimneys. There was no further mention of geneslave rebellions, no soft threats of what would happen if I did not support Trevor in whatever mad scheme he had. I might have dreamed the whole thing; indeed, when a few days later I crept back down to the basement, I couldn’t find the skull with Dr. Harrow’s name on it, although the cadavers were still where they had been, glowing on their steel beds.

  I did not tell my friends what I had learned. I thought the news would only terrify Miss Scarlet, and perhaps goad Jane into doing something foolish. To me Trevor Mallory turned an innocent face, as welcoming as he had been when I first saw him. The rebels he had spoken of, those “others” who might convince me of their just cause—they never appeared, though there were many nights when I woke soaked with sweat, imagining I heard the silken voices of energumens plotting in the house below.

  Jane didn’t seem to notice any change in me. She was as happy as I’d ever seen her. Her days passed among the animals that lived at Seven Chimneys, small black-and-white shepherd dogs and black-faced sheep and several furtive, half-feral cats the size of newborn lambs. She and Giles made a good team. She spent her mornings with him, caring for the sheep and the evil-eyed swine who rooted furiously in their pen behind the barn. Each night she’d help him bring in wood for the recalcitrant heating system, listening patiently to his daily complaints about how poorly it heated that vast and drafty house.

  “We need a whole new fireplace, there—” He’d kick at the bricks with one worn leather boot, scowling at the rain of loose mortar. “This was designed back when the winters were warmer—”

  And after dumping their armloads of seasoned oak and green birch, they’d go back outside, to see to the sheep again and frown at the threatening mingy gray skies. Later, Jane might seek out Trevor, asking his advice about some herbal remedy for distemper or scabies. But she never took to Fossa.

  “I can’t stand them,” she confessed to me one night after we’d shared another bottle from Trevor’s cellar. “The animals, the ones like Scarlet—they don’t upset me. But those things—”

  She grimaced, took a swallow of wine. “—Those mutants —ugh.” And shuddering, she passed the bottle to me.

  That was on a rare evening Jane and I spent together. The truth was, her happiness wore at me, made me bitterly aware of all I had lost. And I couldn’t bear to be with Miss Scarlet, either. At first she sought me out often, especially early in the morning when the sun set our frozen windows afire.

  “Bad dreams!” she’d gasp, letting the door to my room slam behind her as she pattered across the floor. “I can’t bear it, Wendy, I wake up and the sun makes me think of flames….”

  She would crawl into bed with me, her small body shivering despite its coat of fur and a shabby nightshirt. But I offered her scant comfort, only let one hand fall nearly weightlessly upon her little head. My own nightmares kept me tossing until dawn, but I would not share them with anyone.

  And so we grew apart, we who had been inseparable, before the feast of the Winterlong cleaved love and friendship from us. The change was hardest on Miss Scarlet. Unaccustomed to spending months alone, without the buffer of an audience or rehearsal between herself and her demons, she grew depressed. Like myself, Miss Scarlet had been the subject of experimentation—in her case, research that had gifted a chimpanzee with human speech and emotions. But it was her great and lifelong sorrow that she was never to be truly human. And despite her grace and effort onstage, many in the City had seen her as only a freakish heteroclite, a trained monkey mouthing ancient scripts. Now, far from her paints and powders and crinolines, she languished in front of the fire in Seven Chimneys’ main room, wearing the child’s clothes Trevor had found for her. There she would sip her tea, or a mild broth made from those mushrooms called Life Away, which induce soft dreams.

  “I think the Goddess has forgotten we are here,” she said to me once, her small black eyes reddened beneath drooping lids and her voice drowsy. “All of us, in the City and all across the world; else so many people that we loved would not have died.”

  I said nothing. I feared what she said was true, and after a moment she turned away. Gradually it grew harder and harder for Jane or me to rouse her from these sad reveries. Only Fossa seemed able to talk to her at those times. As the weeks passed, I watched in growing dismay as the two of them would sit together on the worn brocade sofa, while Trevor’s collection of skulls grinned down at them from the mantel. Fossa’s gargoyle head would bend over Miss Scarlet’s small dark one, and the even current of their conversation would course on until broken by the chimpanzee’s sudden rapturous quoting of some new text, or Fossa’s low, urgent growl. Sometimes Trevor joined them for these discussions, easing himself onto the edge of the couch as though for a quick word and then staying for hours. I tried not to think about what all this meant, and avoided Trevor’s quietly triumphant looks when I passed through the room.

  And myself? In one quick year I had gone from being incapable of feeling any independent emotions, to fairly drowning in them. Every night I forced myself to stay awake, drinking Trevor’s previous coffee, walking outside till the cold nearly killed me, dipping into a horde of candicaine pipettes I found in one of the empty guest rooms. Anything to keep from sleeping; anything to keep from dreaming of him.

  But it was no use. Each snowfall made me think of Justice: those hours before a performance when we would huddle together before the little fire in Miss Scarlet’s grate, the grand entertainments we had from the Paphians in the weeks preceding the feast of Winterlong. Everything had his print upon it, as though his ashes had drifted to earth here, touching that lamp, those clothes, covering the floor so that everywhere I walked, tracks remained to remind me I was moving further and further away from him. Then when exhaustion overtook me, I would drink wine or Trevor’s raw, strong brandy until I fell asleep, shoving the pillows from my bed lest I wake with one in my arms, tearstained and bearing the mark of my kisses. And I avoided Giles, whose gentle features and gray-blond hair put me in mind of my lover’s.

  Later, I wondered sometimes whether Trevor meant for it to be like that. Jane in her little world in the barn; Scarlet and I alone with our miseries. But even Trevor Mallory couldn’t change the weather: the worst winter he had seen in a lifetime (and Trevor’s lifetime was thrice any of ours).

  “It’s changed,” he muttered one evening, staring out to where a brutal gale tore branches from the oaks. Wind and ice had already felled an ancient chestnut tree. “The bastards have done something to the weather again—seeded the clouds over Kalimantan, probably, or done something to choke the air with ash.” He glanced over his shoulder and started to see me there, then smoothed his features and smiled slightly. “But our time will come, Wendy; it will come soon enough.” I gave him a curt nod and quickly left the room.

  While Trevor’s geneslaves never
appeared, there were a few other visitors to the inn that winter. One February twilight the dull whine of a snowmobile echoed through the still air, and two black silhouettes appeared against the snow drifted along the front walk.

  “Go to your rooms!”

  Giles’s anxious voice interrupted me where I hunched over a monitor in the kitchen, playing the intricate game called Horlage. In the background the shortwave radio hummed to itself, a song I had heard in the City, an aria from The Gods Abandon Antony. Without a word Giles strode to the radio and switched it off.

  “What is it?” Jane stood in the doorway that led outside to the barn. She shook the snow from her coat. “That lamb’s going to have twins—”

  “Not now!” hissed Giles. Miss Scarlet padded into the room, frowning and looking up at him questioningly. Giles pointed silently toward the front of the house. My hand froze on the monitor’s dials.

  Voices. Two men, asking loudly for a night’s lodging. I heard the nasal twanging of the server, Mazda, begin to reply, but then Trevor’s welcoming tones boomed out. Moments later we heard footsteps heading up the main hall.

  “Quickly now,” breathed Giles, hurrying all three of us toward the stairs that led to the back wing of the house. “They’re Ascendant janissaries. There’s been trouble in the City.”

  For an instant his gaze caught mine. “Rebels,” he whispered as he held the door for us to go upstairs. “A small armed band of aardmen attacked the Ascendant barracks and was killed—”

  Miss Scarlet gasped. “The monsters!”

  “Aardmen! Well, thank god for th—” Jane began, when Miss Scarlet broke in.

  “How could they murder them? Venceremos! Death to the human tyrants! The Ascendant monsters will pay—like he says, our day will come! ”

  Jane stopped in the dim stairwell and stared at her, open-mouthed. “ What? ”

  “Not now!” said Giles, yanking Miss Scarlet after him; but not before she bared her teeth, as though at an unseen enemy.

  “What the hell was that about, Scarlet?” Jane exploded when we were safely in her room and Giles had left. “ Human tyrants? Is this something Fossa’s been whispering in your ear? What’s going on?”

  Miss Scarlet bowed her head. “Nothing,” she said, and inspected the hem of her dress.

  “Wendy?” Jane raised her eyebrows, her face flushed, and looked at me. “Do you know anything about this?”

  “No—not exactly—”

  Giles had made us leave the lights off. In the dark room the window’s rectangle of deep blue glowed eerily, cobalt glass etched with black where the branches of the oaks scraped at the glass. I pretended to stare outside, but from the corner of my eye I watched Miss Scarlet. She had changed over the last months. It wasn’t just her clothing—a child’s red jumper of plain linen that hung loosely from Miss Scarlet’s slender arms and legs, giving her the appearance of a marionette twitching where she sat on the floor. It was Miss Scarlet herself. It was as though in losing her fine clothes, her costumes and cosmetics and props, she had lost that other Scarlet—the one that never raised her voice except onstage before a spellbound audience, that read to me from her beloved theatrical biographies and yearned always for the miracle that would make her human.

  But that Scarlet was gone now. Or she had found another part to play: conspirator instead of coquette, Lady Macbeth instead of Miranda.

  “You should know, if you don’t already,” Miss Scarlet announced. “There’s a war going on—”

  Jane rolled her eyes, her dark hair flopping into her face. “A war? There’s always a war, Scarlet! Since the day you were born, there’s been at least one Ascension and I don’t know how many battles, not to mention the Archipelago Conflict and whatever’s going on now in the City.” She shoved a stack of clothes onto the floor and sprawled on the bed, yawning.

  Miss Scarlet glared. “This is different,” she said, and her voice made me shiver. Because it had changed as well. It was throatier now, more like Fossa’s with its undercurrent of fury; the sound of a dog choking back a snarl. “Those were your wars—Ascendants, the Commonwealth and Emirate and the HORUS colonies….”

  “Our wars!” Jane almost yelled. I covered her mouth with one hand, with the other gestured frantically at the floor to remind her that we weren’t alone in the house. “ Our wars? ” she went on, her voice low but her brown eyes blazing. “Everyone I ever knew and loved died back in that City, Scarlet, you know that! Those were Ascendant janissaries—”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Miss Scarlet’s eyes were cold, flecks of black ice in her wrinkled black face. “I meant, those were all human wars. And this is different. This is all of us—geneslaves—against the rest of you. This will be the first gene war.”

  Jane stared at her, stunned. Then she turned to me.

  “A gene war?” she repeated in a small voice.

  Even without my old powers I could feel her sudden fear, her heart pounding like a second heart beside my own. I looked over at Miss Scarlet: her wizened face with its nimbus of dark fur, more grizzled now than it had ever been; her long yellow teeth and tiny black hands with their clever fingers. When she gazed back, her expression had changed; she was keeping something from us. The deceit gave her a feral look, as though a fine membrane had lowered over her eyes, occluding the warmth and goodwill that had always glowed there.

  “Gene wars?” Jane said again, her voice rising pleadingly. “Tell me, Scarlet—please, explain to me…”

  But Miss Scarlet had turned away. She crossed the room, her bare feet pattering on the wood floor, and silently pried the door open. Only as she stepped into the hall did she turn to look back at me. For an instant her eyes held mine. Amber eyes, eyes with the shape and color of leaves in them; an animal’s eyes. And suddenly I felt lost, a huge clumsy thing stumbling through the trees until I reached a place where the ground was sheared away beneath me. Miss Scarlet had leapt easily over that chasm; but I could not follow.

  “Scarlet!” Jane cried. “Where are you going?”

  Miss Scarlet shook her head. “Have Wendy explain it to you,” she called softly as the door closed after her. “ She understands.”

  I looked at Jane. Her face was red, and she blinked back tears furiously. When I stared to say something, she pushed me away and stared out the window to where stars burned against the deepening sky.

  “Jane,” I began, my hand touching her shoulder, “I should have told you, but I didn’t want you to worry—”

  “Leave me alone!” She slapped my hand away. She whirled and stared at me. I could feel her gaze burning into the side of my face, where beneath my hair the scars remained. “You’re one of them too, aren’t you?” she hissed. “You think I’ve done something terrible to you, that’s why you won’t talk to me, or touch me—” Choking, she turned back to the window.

  I stood, the blood pulsing behind my eyes so that a brittle aura hung above everything. I walked to the door blindly, and my hands clutched at scars that I knew would never really heal.

  Late the next morning I crept to the top of the stairs, where a small round window looked down on the frozen front walk glittering in the sunlight. I stood and watched as the Ascendant janissaries made a brusque farewell to Trevor, bits of ice flying up behind their feet as they hurried to their snowmobile. In a few minutes they were gone. Only a long trail like a serpent’s showed where they had been, and the distant whine of their vehicle slicing through the still air.

  The smells of coffee and cumin brought me downstairs. I met Miss Scarlet in the kitchen, where Giles was grinding spices in a mill and tossing them into an iron skillet to roast.

  “Where’s Trevor?” Miss Scarlet asked. She sat on a low stool beside Fossa, who regarded me with narrowed yellow eyes before turning away.

  I shrugged. “Upstairs, I guess.” I sat at the table, picking up the little monitor and pretending great interest in the game of Horlage I’d left there yesterday. Giles continued to shake spices from grinder to pan
to a heavy blue-rimmed plate. I fiddled with the knobs and images of my game, and after a few minutes said casually, “Who were our guests last night?”

  A long silence. Giles turned to pull a clouded Ball mason jar from a shelf and shook a fragrant mound of coriander seeds into his palm. I looked up at him, the game monitor chattering to itself in my lap. Miss Scarlet stared at Giles with poorly concealed impatience, and Fossa tipped his head sideways, like a dog waiting for a command.

  “Well, all right,” Giles said crossly. He poured the coriander seeds back into the jar and wiped his hand on his trousers. “They were janissaries, Ascendants—”

  “Of course,” Miss Scarlet said triumphantly.

  Giles gave her a dirty look. “They came from the City of Trees—there’s been rioting there. Apparently the Paphians and Curators have thrown their lot with the aardmen and lazars, and they’ve all set themselves against the Ascendants.”

  “So they are fighting!” exulted Miss Scarlet. She threw her head back with a flourish I recalled from her interpretation of Medea. “Ah, I wish I could see it!”

  “You may,” croaked Fossa. He shifted where he sat hunched on the floor and grinned, his muzzle cracking open to show sharp white teeth. “But winter is a bad season for war.”

  Giles frowned. “They’re all bad seasons for war.” He gave a small cry and wrapped a cloth around his hand, pulled the smoking skillet from the woodstove and dropped it into the sink. “Damn!” He glared at Miss Scarlet, who had the grace to look abashed. “You shouldn’t be rejoicing over this war, Miss Scarlet. It’s children and courtesans and scholars and plague victims against the Autocracy: now who do you think is going to win?”

  The chimpanzee stared down at her gnarled hands. “Of course, you’re right,” she said softly. “I forget sometimes—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Giles sighed. He stared at the woodstove and absently pulled the dishcloth through his fingers. “Those two from last night—they think they’re going to summon help from Cassandra. But they’ll never get there.”