Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  The wires and tubes holding the adjutant snapped and shook like bridge cables in a high wind. “By elÿon, of course! They commandeered the elÿon and disembarked in the hidden zones! You have seen yourself how easy it would be—”

  I thought about that for several minutes; thought about Lascar Franschii, who had no reason to love the Ascendants. Yes, it would be very easy to get an adjutant to defect.

  I shook my head. Even so: a geneslave rebellion on Earth! It was an absurd thought. And yet it had happened on Quirinus, and on all the other stations as well, if I was to believe Zeloótes Franschii. I had seen for myself the empty sky where the splendid lights of HORUS should have been.

  I realized then that I should have spent more time at Cisneros, reviewing whatever newsfiles they had and trying to locate any human survivors of the rebellions. I might have learned more of how the world had changed while I died and was reborn. I might not have forgotten my original intent in going to Quirinus, which was to find the nemosyne called Metatron. And I might have spared myself much of what was to follow.

  I gazed once more at the glittering web that held the adjutant. “Tell me, then, Lascar Franschii: what is it that they want?”

  A distinct cough. Pinkish spittle flew in a coarse spray around my head. “Our destruction, of course!” His laughter ,. rippled through the room. “The Oracle has taught them well. I have seen it: its ’file appears and they sit before it enthralled, and afterward go forth to do its will. I would never take orders from such a thing—a replicant, a mere robot; but paugh! these geneslaves, they are like children. You can manipulate them with words and pictures.

  “And that is what the Oracle has done. It has told them that they have a destiny, that they are to repopulate the world. It has told them that was the grand dream that Luther Burdock had for them. They can’t reproduce as we humans can, at least not yet; but sooner or later they will find a way to do that as well. Sooner, I think.”

  “But someone must command this robot! Who?”

  The shining web trembled until I thought he would fall from it. His face twisted with some terrible effort, and then he smiled, a horrible grimace that made me take a step back.

  “Well, Imperator, the Oracle says that Luther Burdock is alive. I believe the Oracle is his.”

  I regarded him coldly. “And how do you know so much of this, Lascar?”

  He shuddered, and with great effort produced another tortured smile.

  “I told you.” His voice spilled from the speaking tube, harsh and deep. “They have commandeered many elÿon to take them to Earth….”

  “And what then, Lascar Franschii?” My voice was cold with rage. “Did the insurgents confide in you their plans beyond the destruction of mankind?”

  The optics in the adjutant’s skull sent out pulses of brilliant blue and orange. “Surely you know the rest, Imperator! ‘O brave new world, That has such people in’t!’ Two legs good, but four legs will be better, when the aardmen come into power—which, of course, they never will.

  “You know what they say: ‘The Revolution is like Saturn; it eats its own children.’ I hear the energumens are doing that already. And once they have seized control, they will not relinquish it, to mankind or other geneslaves, even if it means death. They would have made wonderful Aviators, Imperator.”

  I stretched out my hand and tapped restively at the wall. At last I asked, “But the Ascendants must still be governing from somewhere. Not everyone was in HORUS.”

  “Of course not!” The adjutant’s voice rose to a howl. “Our masters will admit no failure, they will admit nothing! They are trying to govern us from the reclaimed capital now, and from Vancouver and New Wichita. But every envoy they have sent to Quirinus has been killed. Their bodies are returned via elÿon, their heads grafted onto their stomachs, their brains removed and looped together like a string of drying morels.”

  “And this is the work of—?”

  The adjutant’s head hobbled enthusiastically. Scarlet lights rippled across the web to form an aureole around his twisted body. “The energumens. They are like children whose tyrannical rector has been slain! They laugh and make a game of toying with the remains of their masters, and anyone foolish enough to interrupt their play.”

  His voice swooped to a conspiratorial tone. “Ah, but you know, Imperator, I think that they are starting to succumb to the same lunacies as their masters. Some of them claim to have seen the Watcher in the Skies—yes, I heard them, they spoke of it and I laughed and they grew angry with me. They do not like it when you laugh at them. Others believe they are the children of the Final Ascension, and those on Quirinus are Amazons.

  “I’ve never seen anything like them. Converts to the Mysteries of Lysis. A priest was interned there for several months, before the Ascendants grew impatient with his doctrine. He made quite an impression upon the energumens, though, especially their leader. Kalamat, her sisters call her; of course, their masters called them all Kalamat. She has an artistic temperament, Imperator—a great admirer of the dance, and your mother’s poetry, and sonic sculptures by people like Kyrië Martinez.”

  The adjutant choked on his laughter. “But in a few days you will be able to see for yourself, Imperator Tast’annin. I have received clearance to depart now. I suggest you find an empty cell and position yourself until we are underway.”

  I nodded grimly and took my leave, pausing at the doorway to gaze back to where he thrashed and moaned within his web, the nav chart glimmering around him. I stood there for several minutes, thinking on what he had said.

  Kalamat: The Miracle. I knew the name, of course, any child fortunate enough to have formal schooling knew of Kalamat and her history; and even those children who had never seen a scroll or classroom had been threatened with Kalamat’s fate if they did not behave. I wondered what it meant, that an energumen with that name now led her sisters on Quirinus. Finally I left, Lascar Franschii’s sickly laughter echoing behind me.

  I quickly found an empty chamber, but once there I found it difficult to calm myself. Instead I stood beside the wall, gazing at a scrim showing a night view of Tokyo Bay before the Three Hour War. My mind raced as I tried to make sense of all that I had learned. There was nothing to be done, now that we were underway; no point in returning to the City of Trees, since I knew I would not find Metatron there. I did not care just yet to confront my surviving superiors in Vancouver or New Wichita. They might view my actions as a defection, and feel that their rasa Imperator was in need of further rehabilitation, or even permanent retirement. I felt lost amid some inner labyrinth, trying to find the one path that would bring me clear of all these maddening things—Metatron, the rebel Alliance, Kalamat, Luther Burdock’s Oracle.

  And so, lost among them, I remembered a day at the Academy, long long ago….

  “I’m not going.” Aidan stopped in front of the door, throwing his head back so that his auburn hair fell into his eyes. “It’s barbaric, their bringing an energumen in like this….”

  John and I looked at each other in surprise. Aidan’s reaction was bizarre, especially in light of Aidan’s mockery of John’s revelations during our last game of Fear. If John could overcome his revulsion at an energumen, surely the fearless Aidan Harrow could do the same.

  “It will probably be in a cage, Aidan,” I said reassuringly. “We’ll sit in the back if you’re worried—”

  Aidan shot him a furious glance, then shook his head. “I’m not afraid, Sky Pilot,” he said, using the derisive nickname I hated. “It’s just—well, it’s cruel, that’s all, cruel and…”

  His voice died, maybe because what part of our studies did not have to do with cruelty? We were in the hallway outside the first-level classroom, where of late we had been studying Luther Burdock, whose devoutly cruel lifework was to make possible all the later horrors of our own age.

  Of course, our rectors did not think of Burdock in such terms. To them—and to us their students, still living in the golden haze of youth—Burdoc
k was a hero, the brilliant geneticist who refused to recant his beliefs and so was executed by the fundamentalists of the short-lived Third Ascendancy. For the last few weeks we had been watching old ’files of him in his laboratory, and re-creating some of his more basic experiments in our own classrooms. It was horrifying and fascinating work, even on such a primitive schoolboy level—watching the retroviruses do their work upon a colony of cyclops, exposing amoebas and paramecia and brine shrimp to the metrophages and seeing them change, almost before our eyes. We could not, of course, replicate even the simplest of Dr. Burdock’s efforts at real gene-splicing, but then we didn’t really need to. The evidence was all around us in any case: the aardmen who did the heavy labor at the Academy, lifting hundred-kilo sacks of flour and moving the huge video backdrops of the cycloramas where we held our war games; the hydrapithecenes and sirens that acted as victims in our simulated raids on the Archipelago, imprisoned in their tidal pools; the argalæ that serviced the older male students in the nearby town of Kasco. No, the NASNA Academy was not lacking in geneslaves. What surprises me now is how few of us were ever moved by their plight.

  We had all of us since childhood been thrilled and terrified by tales of Dr. Burdock. He had refined the primitive work of the twenty-first century’s genetic engineers and created the first-generation geneslaves for the Ascendants. He was equal measures Louis Pasteur and Victor Frankenstein, his legend as much a part of our lives as his creations. That was why it was odd to see Aidan so disturbed by Burdock’s work with his daughter. It was a terrible thing, perhaps, but it had happened so long ago, and at any rate, we had been hearing about it forever.

  John Starving nudged me, whispering, “We’d better go in—there’s Bowra—”

  I turned to see our rector plodding down the corridor, his worn crimson leathers burnished by the light spilling from the high recessed windows above him. John and I started in, but Aidan remained in the hall, glaring defiantly in Bowra’s direction.

  “Come on —you’ll be sent down!—” I hissed. Aidan had missed so many classes and training sessions that the infirmary had a permanent carrel for him. His wrists were raw where he had been strapped in, and his eyes had dark circles beneath them, from the nightmares induced by the drugs they fed him in a futile effort to make him more pliant. I yanked at his arm, pulling him through the door after me. He swore as John and I dragged him to the back of the chilly room and shoved him into an ancient metal folding chair. We threw ourselves into the seats next to his. A small pulse throbbed at the corner of John’s mouth, showing how angry he was with Aidan; but Aidan only slouched in his chair and glared sullenly at the front of the room. By the window I could see Emma Harrow, staring at us with a frown. She was fascinated, practically enthralled, by Luther Burdock. She and John argued endlessly over the ethical aspects of his work. When she saw me looking at her, she turned away and started talking to another student.

  A moment later Bowra entered. His piggish eyes darted suspiciously across the rows of exhausted cadets.

  “Good morning,” he croaked brusquely. He turned to crank up the dilapidated old ’file machine, and the morning’s session began.

  Flickering ’file images filled the room. “Cassandra, Virginia, United States, 2069,” Bowra recited in a bored voice, and leaned back upon his desk.

  The first part was familiar enough: old holofiles showing the everyday life of the great man. Burdock and his daughter Cybele eating dinner in their grand compound, attended by the first generation of aardmen—surprisingly slight and hirsute creatures, resembling dogs more than their descendants do. Burdock strolling the grounds of his mountain compound, pointing out the cages where aardmen howled and scratched, the huge oceanic tank that imprisoned his leviathan folly Zalophus. A carefully staged shot of Burdock leafing through books full of fotos, pretending to search for the individual who would be the perfect subject for his work. Burdock dropping the books and throwing up his hands in exaggerated dismay at the hopelessness of his task.

  Then the ’files changed. Now they had a clarity, a documentary quality that the earlier ones had lacked, and which I found chilling. My friends did too—when I glanced at them, their eyes were fixed on the front of the room, and while John frowned, Aidan’s pale face held a look of disgust that bordered on terror.

  We saw Cybele alone in her room, curly head bent over a scroll, her face screwed into a frown as she strove to hear whatever it was saying. My heart ached to see her. She was so young, so much prettier than any of the Academy recruits, with their hard darting eyes and nervous hands. The picture shifted to a formal holo portrait of father and daughter, Cybele smiling wistfully, as though she already knew where her future lay.

  And finally, ancient ’files from that remarkable operation; images as famous as the archival footage of the First Shining or the twentieth-century lunar ascent. The kindly man’s head bent over the shining elfin face of his trusting adolescent daughter. Her fearless gaze, the little-girl voice asking We won’t die? and his soft reply—

  “We will die. But then we will be regenerated, because of that— ”

  And the camera scanned the banks of steel and glass crucibles, the metal canisters and frozen vials of DNA. Then came quick flashes of Cybele unconscious, and Luther Burdock’s pale face and fatigue-smudged eyes staring at a gleaming steel vat where something floated, a whitish form like a bloated football, turning over and over as fluids churned into the vat and still Luther Burdock watched, patient and exhausted: waiting, waiting.

  And, finally, Burdock staring exultantly as across the clipped green lawns of his compound came the slender figures of two girls. Hand in hand, wearing identical shifts of white linen, their dark curls spilling around heart-shaped faces: Cybele and her cloned sister.

  Kalamat. The miracle.

  “You know the rest, of course,” Bowra coughed wearily, letting the ’file flicker into stray shafts of silver and blue light that sprayed across our faces. “Now to end this segment of your training module, I’ve arranged for one of the Kalamat series to be brought here this morning—”

  He glanced at his watch, pressed it, and impatiently spoke to the Junior Officer who served as his flunky. A few minutes later we all turned at the sound of two sets of footsteps echoing down the corridor.

  “Imre, that toad,” Aidan hissed, grimacing.

  Pilot Imre’s tread was easily recognized, because of his limp. But the other step was unfamiliar: a heavy, even ponderous, tread, as of huge feet dragging slowly across the cold stone floors. John and I exchanged glances. I knew he was recalling that cage in Wyalong so many years ago. But he only smiled at me wryly before turning away.

  I looked over at Aidan and saw how pale he was. The freckles stood out on his high cheekbones, and he stared fixedly at his knees. I leaned over to say something to him, something reassuring. But before I could speak, the door was flung open. The energumen stumbled into our classroom.

  It was huge, even larger than I had expected—nearly eight feet tall. Pilot Imre walked beside it, separated by several feet of heavy luminous chains. He held a sonic cudgel between his nervous fingers. The thing was sedated, of course. It trudged into the middle of the room, where Imre sent a small blast at it—an unnecessary cruelty. The thing moaned softly and we all gasped.

  Because its voice, at least, had not changed. It was still the voice of a fifteen-year-old girl, childlike, horribly out of place in that cold, echoing chamber. I shivered and muttered a curse. Beside me I could hear John Starving swearing under his breath. Of the three of us only Aidan was silent, his gray-green eyes fixed on the front of the room.

  I don’t know what would have been more terrible—to view some creature utterly flensed of all resemblance to its human originator, or to see what we saw. A huge figure, unmistakably human but no less monstrous for all that—tall and big-boned, its head shaven and tattooed with an identifying ideogram that showed it belonged to the independent Urisa Agency, an L-5 mining conglomerate. Its arms were corded w
ith muscle, its legs thick and welted with the marks of chains and with raw blisters left by other cudgels.

  But when Imre tugged its chain, the creature raised its head; and there was the face of Cybele Burdock. Grotesquely elongated, with flesh the color of obsidian rather than Cybele’s tawny brown, and rampant with scars; but Cybele’s face nonetheless. I knew it by the eyes, if nothing else. Because even though it would certainly have killed me without thinking, crushing my head between its huge hands like a melon husk, still it had the eyes of a child—bright and wistful despite the sedatives. Hopeful, even, as though somewhere within that monstrous body Cybele Burdock was still imprisoned, and still dreamed of escape.

  “God, look at her.” Next to me John Starving tightened his hands upon his knees. “She’s just like that other one, in Wyalong—it’s like it’s the same one —”

  I nodded, my mouth too dry to speak. When I glanced at Aidan, he was gazing at the energumen in a sort of horrified rapture. I quickly looked away.

  At the front of the room Bowra was rattling on about the energumens—their strength, their speed, their intelligence. At the word intelligence several cadets broke into nervous laughter. The drugs, combined with the incongruous innocence of its features, gave the energumen the appearance of a huge and slightly witless child.

  “Come on, then. Say your name. Tell them who you are,” rasped Bowra, as Imre gave the chain another yank and prodded the energumen impatiently. There was a burst of static, loud enough to make my ears ring. The energumen cried out, tried to clap its hands to its ears, but the chains held it back. Imre shouted at it, pointing to the classroom full of rapt faces.

  “Your name! Go on, tell them—”

  The energumen swayed from side to side, staring fixedly at the floor as it moaned softly. Then, very slowly, it raised its shaven head and spoke.