Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  Hundreds of years ago this had all been farmland. But because of its proximity to the nation’s ancient capital, the countryside had very early on fallen to chemical and viral rains that burned the green fields and lush stands of trees, leaving barren, poisoned soil to bake beneath a poisonous sun.

  Eventually the trees returned: twisted, blackened things that clawed from the earth like so many grasping hands. Dull-green spines covered them, and waxy leaves pitted and wrinkled as a toad’s skin, their thickened surface a protection against the sun’s killing rays. When the truck scraped against them, they released pungent scents of pine or creosote, and bled a resin that hardened into rusty-looking scabs that gave the trees an even more wounded appearance. It was a vicious landscape, the worse to look upon in that glaring light. Soft brick-colored dust covered everything, settling into the folds of my coverall and getting into my mouth and nostrils, so that my tongue swelled and it choked me to swallow.

  Outside nothing moved. There were no birds, no squirrels or darting lizards; not even any insects save bloated wasps the size of my thumb. Iridescent green and black, with huge, evil yellow eyes, their slender wings spanned half the length of my hand. When one flew into the cab, I could see its stinger like a black thorn protruding from its abdomen. I scuttled across the floor, pulling my hood about my face; but it was already gone, buzzing like a fouga’s engines as it flashed out the window.

  When I peered after it, I saw for the first time we had been driving up a steep incline. Behind us I could see where the road wound down a craggy fell, sometimes cutting back on itself when it reached a spot where rocks had fallen to block the way, or where an ancient bridge had rusted and collapsed into a wide and fast-running stream. It was like one of those living maps we had played with at HEL: the nearly barren hillside, and then the blasted plain with its crippled trees, and in the nether distance a haze like greenish smoke, obscuring where I imagined Seven Chimneys stood and, far beyond, the City of Trees.

  Suddenly the van swerved around a sharp curve. I fell forward, banging against the edge of the window and cutting my chin on its metal cusp. Blood trickled between my fingers. Before I could even cry out, the caravan cleared the turn, shuddering to a stop; and the world changed.

  It was as though the zealous hand of Miss Scarlet’s beloved Goddess had swiped across the earth, tossing away dust and rocks and thorns, all the detritus that remained of an earlier, grosser attempt at creating a world. We were atop a hill, higher than I had ever been in my life. On the horizon immense blue thunderheads rose in dizzying tiers. A steady wind lapped against my face, and for a moment I closed my eyes, forgetting the throbbing pain in my chin. When I opened them, I saw that Jane and Suniata had both awakened. The cacodemon stood and silently walked to the front of the cab, where it crouched beside Cadence. Jane rubbed her eyes and yawned.

  “Where are we?” she asked groggily. I pointed outside.

  A few feet from the caravan the red clay road ended, sheared off as cleanly as though it had been sliced away with a granite knife. Instead of that infernal plain of thorns, we gazed down into a valley dappled with birch and willows that hugged the banks of a rocky stream. For a moment I could only stare straight down, stunned, trying to figure out what had happened to the rest of the world. Then I slowly drew my head up, looking for the storm clouds brooding on the horizon.

  They were gone. They had never been there at all. What I had taken to be clouds were not clouds, but mountains. Huger than anything I could have imagined, stretching in a long line from north to south, they blotted out everything except for their own ranks, until the distance swallowed them in a powder of purple and green. I had only ever glimpsed mountains in cinemafiles or on the yellowing reels of film kept by the Curators for occasional entertainments, but there was no mistaking them now.

  “Mountains,” I breathed. When I tore my gaze away, I saw Cadence standing by the open door, staring out with gas-blue eyes.

  “That’s right,” she said softly. Her drawl had deepened, and for the first time she looked at me and smiled. “I always stop here. Even in the middle of winter, when I never know if I can get started again.” She pointed outside, cradling the stump of her hand against her breast. “We’re in the Blue Ridge Mountains now—that’s what you see there. And somewhere out there” —she tilted her head to indicate north and east—“that’s where you’ll find your City. If you travel a few days due west, you come to the Appalachians. But I never have done that except once. If there’s anyplace on earth more beautiful than the Blue Ridge, I’m too old to see it now.”

  Jane’s voice wafted from the back of the van like a ghost’s. “How old are you?”

  Cadence stared at her. Then unexpectedly she laughed, tossing her head so that the hood slipped from her mane of white hair. “You’re not going to rest till I tell you, are you? Ninety-two—”

  Jane’s eyes widened. Cadence cut her off before she could ask another question. “But I had a few of my father’s mushrooms to help me through the rough spots.” Abruptly she turned away and sat down. A moment later the caravan was hurtling on once more.

  Jane stumbled to her feet. The cacodemon looked at her, then at me. He blinked, his tiny mouth twisting in an incomprehensible grimace—smile? frown? wonderment? He raised one hand and opened it slowly, his fingers uncurling like the long pale fronds of a lily. I stared at it, then lifted my hand and did the same. Suniata regarded me with round guileless eyes, then nodded once, as though completing some ritual, and turned away.

  I turned back to gazing out the window. In front of us the nearest of the mountains seemed to kneel. Its outcroppings formed a sheltered valley girded by a river and checkered with pale green and yellow squares.

  Fields! I thought in amazement. They really were growing things here; they really had escaped the viral rains and lived to reclaim the wilderness. There was a dappled mirror that might have been a lake, and above it, in the throat of the mountains, a deep emerald hollow like the shadow of a cloud. Cadence’s voice called out over the drone of the engines.

  “That’s Cassandra, there—”

  She pointed at the shadow, her hand stabbing repeatedly at the air as though to pin the image there for us to see. “That’s where we all live now.” She bent back over the wheel, her blue hood falling over her shoulders.

  Where we all live…

  For some reason my mind seized those words, as though they held some secret, a message from the country: something that had to do more with green trees and stone than with blood and memory. Something that might show me how the deaths of Justice and Trevor and all those others, how the fall of the City of Trees and even the Mad Aviator’s resurrection, could make sense. There were green places left that the Ascendants had not yet poisoned. There were demons, too; but the only one that I had met was named Peace. For the first time since we had fled the City, I felt something besides grief and despair and rage; for the first time I felt hope, like a small flame licking at my heart.

  The van made another sharp turn. The red road dropped away before us, and Cadence’s voice rang out as we swept down the hillside.

  “This is where it all begins again!” she cried. Beside her Suniata stood with one hand upon Cadence’s shoulder.

  “ This is where it all begins, ” I echoed, flinging my head back to stare into the burning sky; but if she or Jane or Suniata heard me, I never knew.

  10

  The Oracle Speaks

  I GOT TO KNOW Aidan Harrow very well during his three years at the NASNA Academy. We were often paired during meditations and also for the grueling sessions that were meant to prepare us as pilots—hours spent in a tiny stim chamber with another cadet, bombarded by images and sensations culled from actual ’file footage of atrocities enacted in the Archipelago and during the Three Hour War. He was not a good candidate for the Academy. He tired easily, which I always attributed to the time he spent reading or drinking at night, instead of sleeping those few hours when he had the chance. And he w
as a coward; he never seemed to grow accustomed to the everyday horrors that an Aviator has to face. Even with the stim chamber, and the psychoactive drugs administered by the infirmary to cadets who were having such problems; even with the threat of humiliation in front of his peers—because Aidan was proud, arrogant even—he could never endure pain, or even tedium. My offers to help him with his studies and lend him my replicant tutor were met with derision. I never fully understood why he was at the Academy in the first place. Something to do with his father, who while not an Aviator himself had served under Gerald Baskin following the last Ascension. Emma made a much better cadet. I was surprised when, after her brother’s death, she dropped out of the corps; but in light of her fascination with Luther Burdock, her choice of career seems obvious now, and her death by suicide indicates a fragility of flesh and spirit that I would hope never to see in my troops.

  Aidan was a terrible partner for training exercises—he wept often, and always gave vent to his furious temper—but otherwise he was popular among the other cadets. Like many people whose nature is in essence craven, he was charming, and of course his looks brought him many admirers. During his first year he played the boy to Keenan Pyle, who was a notorious pederast and whose classes were always filled with the youngest and best-looking of the first-level cadets. But after that Aidan grew more aloof. As I have told you, he shared a bed with his twin sister. Even the most world-weary of us saw that as a weakness, a febrile affectation, like the incestuous pairings of the ruling families of the Ascendancy.

  “Who do they think they are?” Amaris di Gangi sneered one morning. We watched as Aidan and Emma crossed the lawn together, the sun glinting from their auburn heads, the lines of their uniforms flowing from their lanky bodies like oil from a hot pan. “Naki and Benshan Orsina?”

  I shrugged but said nothing. It was spring, the short, intense northern spring that flares as blue as the heart of a flame and is as quickly gone. Lupines grew along the spine of land overlooking the water where we sat. Below us waves pounded the rocky shore, and a quartet of cormorants swam and dived past the breakers. There were seals basking on the rocks. Aidan and Emma headed toward them, turning from the grassy lawn to a narrow footpath worn into the hillside by generations of cadets and, before them, novitiates marking the Stations of the Cross along the shore.

  “What do you think they do together?” Amaris began, but before she could continue, I stood. Brushing grass from my leather trousers, and slinging my hands in my pockets, I hurried down the path after the twins.

  “Margalis.” Emma looked up, frowning slightly. The cerulean leather of her cadet’s uniform made her look sallow, her wide mouth a gash in her pale face. “You’re not at exercises?”

  “Canceled. Congden got called in for an emergency meeting. There was a strike at the Greenland station last night.”

  “I heard.” Aidan made an apologetic face when Emma looked at him accusingly. “Well, you didn’t ask, so why should I tell you? It was supposed to be kept secret, anyway.”

  I nodded in agreement. Emma sighed, tucking a wisp of hair behind one ear. “Well. I’m going back— I’ve still got exercises, unless they’ve canceled them for everyone.”

  “I doubt it.” But I smiled, trying to will Emma to look at me. She ducked her head, stumbling as she walked up the edge of the stony path, anything to avoid my eyes. “’Bye, Emma—”

  She raised a hand but didn’t look back, her trouser legs flapping around her knees.

  “Why does she do that?” I followed Aidan, who was striding along the path to where a large boulder stuck out above the seals dozing in the sun. “Every time I see her, she runs away.”

  Aidan shrugged, turned to show me a white vulpine grin in his sunburned face. “I don’t know, Sky Pilot. She says she’s afraid of you.”

  I felt my face twitch in annoyance, at the nickname and at the thought of Emma being frightened of me. “Afraid! Why the—”

  “Don’t ask me, Sky Pilot. Here, be quiet or you’ll scare them.”

  I shut up, biting back harsh words. Sky Pilot was what Aidan called me, that and Rocket Man, derogatory nicknames he’d hoped would catch on among our friends. They never did, but he stubbornly refused to call me Margalis, or anything else for that matter, hoping, I suppose, that one day the monikers would stick. Sky Pilot was from a folk song, something he’d dug up in the audio archives at the Academy and made his friends listen to one night when we should have been going over the recordings of Dmitri Rilkov’s 2332 lectures at the NASNA War College.

  “Listen! A song about Margalis!” he crowed, popping out his earpiece and motioning us to join him. A dull buzzing came from the earpiece, as though a frantic bluebottle were trapped inside. “Come listen—”

  So we’d listened. Even after having been remastered a century earlier, the original recording was so ancient, one could scarcely make it out. It was as though the centuries themselves had nibbled away at words and music, leaving only vague tones, an out-of-tune voice, the faint skirling of bagpipes, and distant echoes of firearms.

  Sky Pilot!

  How high can you fly?

  You’ll never, ever, ever reach the sky …

  “That’s terrible,” Emma said stonily when it was finished. “You can’t even hear it.”

  “Listen again!” Aidan twirled in his seat, punching buttons on the player, but by then everyone had returned to their studies. He was still the only person who ever called me that.

  Now Aidan crept out onto the boulder on his hands and knees, tossing back his burnished hair and pursing his lips. Behind us the green tips of the tall pines scratched lazily at the sky. On the gravel beach some fifteen feet below, the seals wheezed and snored. When he reached the edge of the rock, Aidan bellied down with his chin on his hands. I joined him, careful to keep my leather jacket from catching on the boulder’s sharp edges. We lay there for a long time without speaking, just watching the seals and the play of the birds in the water—cormorants, skuas, black and white gulls. The air smelled of pine and sweet rugosa roses and the sea, and very faintly of the woodfires burning in the Academy kitchens. The day had that intense blue clarity that often proceeds a storm: a weather-breeder, they called it in the maritimes. This far north the summer’s heat was not intense, but, paradoxically, the sunlight was. I could feel my fair skin burning, and swore silently at the chronic shortages that kept us from having access to any kind of protection from the killing rays—lotions, veils, even just a visor for our uniform hats. But the meager warmth was pleasant for all that.

  After a while I must have dozed. When I looked up again, Aidan had rolled onto his back, propping himself against a wedge of driftwood. He was reading a talking book. I could hear its voice, serious as that of any rector, and occasional trills of background music.

  “What’s that?” I leaned over, trying to see what was on the little screen.

  He moved a few inches away, trying to make it look as though he were just getting more comfortable. But I could see his eyes: genuinely startled that I’d awakened, and genuinely worried.

  “Nothing.” He turned the thing so low, I could barely make it out—a man’s voice, refined in that twenty-third-century manner, but I couldn’t understand the words. Before Aidan could stop me, I flicked my finger against the side of the book so that its title flickered across the screen.

  PAGAN SURVIVALS

  Spiritual Origins of the Energumens And Revelations of Their Triumphant Future,

  With Predictions of the apocalypse to Come

  by dude Hwong

  Colorfully archaic script and a baroque fanfare of Third Ascension ælopipes accompanied the copyright and warnings. Then the man’s voice came again, faint as an insect’s.

  Had Luther Burdock known the future uses to which his innocent daughter would be put, surely he would never have shared his apocalyptic discoveries with the rest of mankind….

  “You’re reading that ?” I cried out, incredulous. Jude Hwong was a notorious fraud,
one of those religious fanatics who crops up at the end of every century and gains a cult through predicting the fall of the current world order. Thus far, none of his many predictions had come true—no rebirth of ancient gods, no epiphanies among the energumens, no messages from extrasolar visitors. His work was childish, but that didn’t keep it from being under interdict. In spite of myself I grew angry at Aidan for putting us both in danger. “You’re going to get caught, one of these days. What, do you want to get kicked out?”

  I tried to grab the book from him. He snatched it back, but not before my hand bumped it and the book scrolled to another section and read,

  This small group of researchers—astrophysicists and astrologers, mostly—believed that the mythology surrounding the Watcher in the Skies had a direct correspondence to the fragmented records of Icarus’s appearance in 2172-73. Tragically, their barbaric execution by the dictator Simon Legistheis has prevented us from learning more thoroughly from their—

  Aidan sat bolt upright, flicking off the book and shoving it beneath his jacket. His face was bright red, from embarrassment and the sun; it made his blue eyes glow like an animal’s caught in the glare of night-lights. “Fuck off, soldier boy.”

  “Well, do you want to get caught?”

  He hunched his shoulders together and raised his hand to strike at me—even though I was a good six inches taller and a much better fighter—then glanced down at the rough scree below us. The tide had come in, ripples of black and indigo sloshing across the gravel. The seals were humping slowly into the water, shouting hoarsely at each other and sending up wedges of sand and grit as they breasted into the cold surf. The sight of them seemed to calm Aidan. When he turned back to me, his eyes were no less intense, but he smiled mockingly.