Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  The servers looked at each other and exchanged a round of clicking noises. Then the first one plucked Valeska’s sleeve and began to cross toward a wide round door.

  “Imperator Tast’annin—” Valeska’s voice was pinched, a little desperate. I recalled that she had never been to HORUS, and so would not have been inside an elÿon before, except on inspection. I raised my hand and tried to sound reassuring.

  “I will find you after we’ve embarked.” She nodded once, stumbling a little as her replicant guide escorted her through the door. Beside me Nefertity waited in silence, observing the remaining two Maio units with smoldering green eyes.

  “They will not harm her?” she asked at last.

  “Harm her?” I gestured dismissively at the replicants. They swiveled their silver heads and walked away, to disappear back down the long gray corridors that had disgorged them. “No. They’re standard escorts. Relatively speaking, few humans make the journeys on the elÿon. There will be no human crew on this one save its adjutant. And Captain Novus, of course.”

  Nefertity turned to survey our chamber. Motes of crystal light danced in the air around her, white and blue and red; the only true colors in that room. “Is it all so dreary?”

  I crossed to where an arched doorway opened onto a dim corridor and beckoned Nefertity to follow me. “It’s deliberate,” I replied. “After the Third Ascension, elÿon travel grew quite common, but the rate of psychosis among the crews and passengers was so high that some vessels arrived with all hands dead, save the adjutants. We now believe that any kind of stimulation contributes to the illness—”

  I gestured at the smooth, drab walls, the soft indirect light that made everything look as though it had been cast in pewter. “—So the design attempts to soothe travelers. At least here in the entry foyer and cabins. Other parts of the vessel might be more interesting, if they’ve bothered with them at all. Most vessels no longer employ a human crew.”

  Nefertity moved noiselessly behind me as we walked down the hall. “But your Aviators? How do they travel?”

  “The same as anyone else. A mild anesthesia, psychotropic drugs. After twelve or so hours they can walk around the decks, but the replicants will always accompany them in case there’s need for intervention.”

  “And you?” Nefertity paused to stare out a tiny window that showed nothing but a hazy umber darkness. “Did you travel like that?”

  I strode past her, my boot heels thudding on the carpeted floor. “At first. But I was more disciplined than most. After several years the drugs were no longer necessary. Many people grow bored on the elÿon, but I always find it interesting to visit the adjutants.”

  Nefertity left the window and followed a few steps behind me. “Is that where we are going now?”

  I nodded. I was weary of conversation. It made it difficult for me to concentrate on where I actually was. So featureless were our surroundings that my memories threatened to spill over into them, paint a sky over the dun-colored ceilings and sow the floors with the lush reeds and vines I had last seen in the Archipelago. Such hallucinations were a commonplace of elÿon journeys. I had taught myself to overcome them, and even now I had no reason to believe I would be any more susceptible than I had been, since the trappings of my humanity had been flensed from me as carefully as the rind from an orange. But my mind remained human, prey to fears, especially since I found my thoughts returning again and again to my youth. I would need to concentrate fully on the problem of what had become of the HORUS colonies.

  There were no other corridors branching off this one; very few doors, and those few locked. I knew they opened onto the vast network of pipes and conduits that channeled rivers of nucleic fluid throughout the craft, the seemingly random maze of glass and plasteel veins that pumped liquid data and propulsion fluid to the heart of the vessel. The elÿon was like a gargantuan beast, an immense vein-fed polyp encased in polymer heat shields and glassy plates. Instead of a rudimentary brain it had the adjutant, sealed within his cell; and as parasites, those few passengers it would consent to carry, safely strapped within their own small cavities at the vessel’s center. The elÿon were the zenith of the Ascendants’ centuries of toying with human and animal genetics: living vessels that swam among the stars.

  The single corridor spiraled slowly out and up, as we traveled toward the center of the huge craft. Real windows appeared now, still narrow but letting in ribboned shafts of orange flame, the occasional lancing dart of a searchlight or passing aviette. It was like walking within the coils of a vast shell, its pale interior lit by intermittent flares of candlelight. Sensing my mood (she was, after all, a sort of woman), Nefertity remained silent, only now and then stopped to stare out a window.

  “That is the adjutant’s chamber, there.”

  My voice sounded too loud, amplified by the empty hall. I pointed to where the corridor ended in a high arch, its spandrel a sheet of clear plasteel opening onto a knot of coiled tubes, flickering yellow and green where navigational fluids pulsed through them. We passed beneath the arch, and I heard the faint sound, part serpentine hiss and part sigh, that signaled entry into the adjutant’s quarters.

  The manifest Agent Shi Pei had given me listed one Zeloótes Franschii as the Izanagi’s sole crew, his inception date nearly a year earlier. This would be his last journey. The chemically induced insomnia necessary for successful navigation could not be kept up for more than ten or twelve solar months before dementia, and finally coma, set in. More than a few elÿon had been lost when their adjutants died en route to HORUS, but I had already decided not to worry about that.

  I pointed to the far end of the great room, telling Nefertity, “His name is Zeloótes Franschii. We will talk to him—they grow lonely on these voyages, and one can learn much from adjutants. The process of navigating the elÿon makes one’s mind as an empty cup, and many strange things are poured into it.”

  The entire far wall had been given over to a huge scanner, its curved surface covered with details that did not resemble a map so much as an illuminated anatomical chart. But it was a map, showing the elÿon’s interior construction as well as an illuminated diagram of the adjutant’s brain, with glowing bursts of color indicating those portions being stimulated by the bath of neurots and electrical pulses that made up the elÿon’s navigational system. As a subtle underlay to all this there was a chart of the heavens, showing both the renamed constellations—Maswan, the Circumfuge, Eisler 33—and the drunken orbits of the HORUS colonies, Quirinus and Totma 3 and Adhvi Sar, Sternville and Hotei and Helena Aulis.

  “That is a navigational chart?”

  I smiled, hearing Sister Loretta Riding’s incredulity in the nemosyne’s words. “It is.”

  “They must go mad, studying it.”

  “They do.”

  We reached the wall. It was a moment before my eyes could focus on the adjutant. He seemed a part of that whole baroque design, an insect snared in some great luminous web. A withered, frail creature pinned to the wall, tubes and wires and vials strung about him like so many sacrificial offerings.

  “Lascar Franschii.” I used the ancient term for sailor, the word the adjutants use to describe themselves.

  The spindly figure twitched, so freighted with the instruments that kept him alive that he could scarcely move.

  “Imperator Tast’annin.” The voice was a low sibilant. It came not from the man in front of us but from a speaking tube above his head. His own mouth was plugged with a wide corrugated tube, pale yellow like a sandworm. His eyes were gone, plucked from his head before his first journey and replaced by two gleaming faceted jewels that had sunk deeply into the hollow sockets beneath his brow. His skin had collapsed into folds like crumpled worn velvet, gray and yellow. There was no way of telling what race of man he had been; he scarcely seemed a man at all. As he spoke, his head jerked almost imperceptibly. I could sense the faint heat from his optics as their gaze swept across my face. “Imperator, you honor me.”

  There was no
way to tell if the words were meant ironically. I glanced aside at Nefertity. She stared with wide emerald eyes glittering as the adjutant’s own.

  “But this is a terrible thing,” she said in a low voice. She raised her hands as though to offer him some comfort. “That is a man there—they are torturing a man!”

  A spasm crossed the adjutant’s cheek. He might have been amused, or in pain—although it was unusual for them to feel pain, their sensory receptors having long since been destroyed. “You have a compassionate replicant,” his hollow voice rang out. “How interesting.”

  “Are you in pain?” Nefertity approached him, stretched her silvery fingers to graze the slack line of his jaw. “Why have they done this to you?”

  A hoarse wheezing crackled from the speaking tube: laughter. “Oh, but it is an honor, replicant. Almost as much an honor as has been given your master in his new body.”

  I felt a jolt of anger. Had he been another kind of man, I would have killed him. But his judgment was impaired; he had lost the neural inhibitors that should have kept him from speaking to me thus. And his term as adjutant was nearly ended; meaning, of course, his life. The adjutants were given careful doses of prions, brain proteins that attack the thalamus and intercept sleep. The permanent dream-state induced by this enables them to lose all sensory perception, so that their impressions can be better channeled into the elÿon’s neural web and so provide the mindless biotic vessels with a governing consciousness. The adjutant’s body was fed by the complex if primitive web of tubes. The simpler side effects of the prion disease—increased heartbeat, elevated body temperature—were regulated by monitors and a NET. The hallucinations do not usually interfere with the elÿon’s progress, although once in an elegant if destructive pas de deux two of the billowing craft seemed to have been controlled by the same dream, and collided. Their wreckage still spans the outer orbit of the HORUS station Advhi Sar. The only aspect of the navigational method that cannot be controlled is this inevitable disintegration of the brain, as the proteins cause the thalamus to shrink and leave spongy holes in the cortex. It is a relatively slow death, but painless, except for those rare occasions when sensory hallucinations set the navigators shrieking and tossing in their webs.

  “It is an honor of sorts,” I said stiffly. “They are political prisoners who would otherwise be executed—”

  “Innocent! Innocent!” His words were garbled almost beyond recognition by the speaking tube. A spew of nonsense followed, ending with a high-pitched yowl like a cat’s. Nefertity drew back from the wall, her eyes sparking alarm.

  “It is the preliminary phases of his dementia,” I explained. “It is unusual for them to live for more than twelve months—I had hoped we might see him through his final voyage.”

  As suddenly as they had begun, the adjutant’s screams stopped. “Oh, I will live,” he said, the speaking tube giving his words a hollow resonance. “I have already received notice of when I will die: not until after you disembark at Quirinus. I have a few more errands left to do.” His head flopped back and forth as another burst of raw laughter exploded in the chamber.

  I wondered what those errands might be, and who was commanding him. Which of the colonies still had Ascendants governing the elÿon fleet? To my later grief I did not ask Lascar Franschii about this. Instead I turned to Nefertity. “Is this disturbing you? If so, you can join Captain Novus in her quarters.”

  A rattling from the adjutant’s speaking tube brought more laughter. “Imperator! You are so solicitous of your fembot.” The last word came out as a derisive gasp.

  The nemosyne turned her lantern eyes upon the man pinned to the wall. “I will go,” she said, and walked away. “Your cruelties sicken me.”

  “So sensitive!” cried Lascar Franschii. “Tell me, Imperator, when did our masters order the creation of these softhearted constructs? I am moved, touched, fascinated beyond measure by such a thing! Are they all like this now, or is it only the Imperators who are given such delicacies?”

  I took a step toward him, grabbing the coil of crimson and blue and green tubes feeding into the myriad slits in his body. “Be silent, Lascar Franschii, else—”

  “Oooh, oooh!” The adjutant gasped and moaned, writhing within his webbed prison. “Be quick, be quick, be still my heart—” Above him the shimmering map glowed more brightly. A trailer of gold like flame shot from one end of the wall to the other. The optics that glittered where his eyes had been flared deep blue, nearly black, and his mouth twisted into a hateful grimace. “Paaugh—I curse you, Tast’annin, your eyes betray you—”

  I felt a sudden weariness, a sickness with myself for reacting to the ravings of an adjutant, and dropped my hand. The tubes fell back against the wall with a thud. “My eyes?”

  “Yesss—” The speaking tube quivered as he hissed. “My brothers fought you at the Archipelago. On Kalimantan. I was only a child, they kept me hidden in the caverns with the other children and the hydrapithecenes. But I saw you on the ’files—you did not laugh when the bodies ignited, as your troops did. The sight sickened you, did it not? It drove you to destruction! How can a man look upon such things and not go mad? Your eyes are the same now as they were then—they betray you, Imperator! What is it like to be a corpse, and have no tongue to cleave to your mouth in fear? Where does the fear go when you die?”

  The optics rattled in his eye sockets, the speaking tube bulged from his twisted mouth as though he would disgorge it. Rage swept through me and I cried, “Silence, Lascar! I will engage another elÿon—be still!”

  I raised my hand threateningly, but he took no notice. Why should he? After a moment I turned away and headed for the door. I had nearly reached it when the adjutant’s voice roared out, so heavily amplified that the nets of wires shook like vines storm-rent against the wall.

  “Do not waste your efforts, Imperator! None of the other elÿon have clearance to attend upon Quirinus.”

  I stopped and looked back. “Why not?”

  Within the glowing interstices of the nav charts, the adjutant’s form twitched as he raised his head. “There is no one left to command them. No one but you. Besides, Quirinus should still be under quarantine. It was beset by plague, hidden in a rice shipment from the Archipelago. The station was sabotaged by a Commonwealth delator posing as a psycho-botanist.”

  Spikes of greenish light flowed from his optics. It was easy to imagine triumph in his voice, though the speaking tube rendered nearly all emotion from it.

  “Which plague?”

  “ Irpex irradians. ” As the words boomed out, the adjutant’s head drooped upon his chest, as though exhausted. “Every one of them. Dead.”

  “So I was told by commanding Agent Shi Pei. Is there any. danger of contagion?”

  The adjutant’s shoulders twitched in what might have been a shrug. “Who knows? I would not rely on her word, though. Agent Shi Pei grows lax in her duties. I hear she spends much of her time in a hammock, smoking kef and reviewing ’files relating to the destruction of NASNA Prime.”

  “But no official quarantine was ever declared,” I said.

  The adjutant’s head tilted in a nod. “True. The energumens were immune, and there are no human survivors. The microphage can live for only seventy-two hours without a host. But you have no reason to fear, Imperator, you and your sentimental construct. Even our masters do not yet have organic plagues to attack the dead—and plague may be the least of your problems, if the Alliance succeeds with its plans.”

  “I have a woman with me, Valeska Novus. I would not have her harmed—”

  The adjutant’s voice came out in a dull moan. “Check with the Quirinus scholiast if you don’t believe me. There is little danger of contagion.”

  I nodded. “Very well. Tell me of this Alliance.”

  He raised his head, and this time I could see where his mouth was drawn in a cold, small smile, like a bloodless wound.

  “It began on Sternville. The energumens rioted, and the cacodemons. They comman
deered an aviette and attacked Helena Aulis and MacArthur, raising troops along the way. Cacodemons, mostly, and aardmen; also those argalæ intelligent enough to follow what was happening. Since then they’ve taken several of the Commonwealth stations, destroyed NASNA Prime and the Triton mining platform, and they tried to attack Urisa headquarters—anyplace where geneslaves outnumbered the human population, which is nearly everywhere in HORUS. The energumens lead them. They say that they have sent rebels to Earth, to organize geneslaves there in mass revolts. They say there has long been an underground network, of geneslaves and humans both, working to overthrow the tyranny of the Ascendants.”

  “But how can this have happened?” I asked. “And so quickly—”

  A low moan came from the speaking tube. “Slaves, Imperator—not even genetic monsters will stay slaves forever. There is a robot that leads them, a construct they call the Oracle. To rally the energumens, it speaks to them of Luther Burdock—”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “Luther Burdock? The geneticist?”

  “Yes. The energumens think of him as their father. Some of them worship his memory. I have seen it—in the HORUS colonies strange rituals evolve among the energumens and pass quickly from one generation to the next. And so this Oracle has preyed upon their beliefs. It has told them that Luther Burdock has been resurrected and will lead his monstrous children in war against mankind.”

  “And is it true?” I demanded.

  The adjutant shuddered. “Who knows? Certainly it is true that the rebellion has spread everywhere that there are geneslaves—which, of course, is every place on HORUS and Earth. And it is true that some people claim they can still see a resemblance to Burdock’s daughter in the energumen clones. And, ” he added slyly, the speaking tube magnifying his glottal voice, “there are those who have always believed that he made certain preparations for his eventual return.”

  I was silent. Of course. There had always been whispered remarks at the Academy when we spoke of Burdock, rumors that he had cloned not only his daughter but himself. But in four hundred years he had never resurfaced. Why now? I looked at Lascar Franschii and asked, “The energumens who have returned to Earth—how have they done so?”