Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  “I am your brother. I am Metatron.”

  And with a sound like air rushing to fill a void, he was gone.

  2

  The Splendid Lights

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF Margalis Tast’annin, Aviator Imperator of the Seventeenth Ascendant Autocracy, 0573 New Era

  I am the Aviator Imperator Margalis Tast’annin, the chief ranking military commander of the Seventeenth Ascendant Autocracy. As I record these words, I am aware that they may well never be read or scanned by anyone save myself. But it is a duty for one of my stature, even a prisoner as I am now, to make manifest an account of what has befallen me—what will befall all of us, who are tethered by some precarious thread, duty or need or love, to the world that in my language is named Earth. I received my appointment as Imperator some months ago, from the ruling Ascendant triumvirate known as the Orsinate. The three Orsina sisters are dead now: one by my own hand, the others lost to the tsunami that swept away the city-state of Araboth. I feel no regret for them whatsoever, save only that I did not murder ziz and Nike as I did Shiyung. Although they named me Imperator, they were also the ones who reclaimed my corpse from the City of Trees and rehabilitated me as a rasa, one of the walking dead. It was in that form that I briefly stalked the Earth and skies before my incarceration here, where only my mind is free to roam as before.

  Before my death and rehabilitation, I was known as the Aviator Margalis Tast’annin. My last posting was to the City of Trees, the abandoned capitol of what was, hundreds of years ago, the North American United States. It was in that City that I was betrayed by those who were to answer to my command. At their hands I was tortured and dismasted, then left for dead in the ruins of that haunted place known as the Engulfed Cathedral. But I did not die, not then. I lived, long enough to see the rebirth of an ancient and terrible god known as the Gaping One, personified by a whore and his demonic twin sister. Of the courtesan Raphael Miramar I know nothing. He may be dead; for his sake, I hope that he is. He suffered much at my hands, but it is a greater horror at crueler hands than mine that awaits him if he is still alive.

  As for his sister, Wendy Wanders—I would not presume to tell the tale of a creature whose powers of cruelty and spite, for a little while at least, were perhaps even greater than my own.

  After the domed city of Araboth fell to the monstrous storm Ucalegon, I fled, my Gryphon aircraft Kesef bearing myself and the cataclysm’s other four survivors north, to the scorched prairie that had grown over the ruins of other cities in the wasteland. We finally landed near a human settlement. I remained in the biotic aircraft, overcome by an exhaustion that would have killed another man; but since I was no longer a man in any real sense of the word, I merely sat silently in the pilot’s seat of the craft, and waited for night to come. The nemosyne Nefertity accompanied the three humans we had rescued to the outskirts of the settlement and left them there, with much weeping and regret on their parts, I would imagine. I had no desire, then or ever, to speak or meet with them again. But the nemosyne I very much wanted, and knowing her promise to return would bind her to me, I remained behind.

  In the intervening hours of solitude I sat and waited for Nefertity’s return, my metal hand resting upon the control panel of the Gryphon as upon the neck of a flesh-and-blood mount. I felt no hunger, nor thirst, nor even the mounting tedium that surely would have enraged me in my earlier life, when I was still a man and not the mere simulacrum of one. In the ticking heat of that long afternoon I let my thoughts go free, so many hounds racing through the emptiness to capture whatever queer things they might find, and bring them back for me to save or destroy or cherish as I would. And so it was that I found my thoughts running back many years—as indeed they do now, more easily than they prey upon the business of the hour—to my youth, and the strange and evil world I knew then; stranger perhaps in some ways than the world I live in now….

  When I was at the NASNA Academy, there was a game we used to play late at night, after our rectors had gone to sleep. It was a small group of us who gathered in Aidan’s room—Aidan Harrow, his twin sister Emma, Neos Tiana, and myself, Margalis. Occasionally John Starving, who years later served under me in the Archipelago Conflict and died there, poisoned by the embolismal parasite known as kacha —sometimes brave John joined us as well, though he was several years younger than the rest of us, and risked expulsion if he was found on our floor.

  The game was called Fear. Aidan invented it, Aidan who was always the ringleader among our cohort, with his long pale legs and streaming hair the color of old blood. The game went like this. We would sit in a circle on the floor beside Aidan’s bed, Emma always beside her brother, then Neos, then John, then me on the other side of Aidan. In the center of the circle would be a bottle of something—cheap wine usually, though once Neos brought a slender venetian-glass decanter of apsinthion, and another time Emma presented us with a vial of the caustic hallucinogen greengill. Whatever it was, it would be passed around the circle, along with bread hoarded from our suppers all week and a small jar of lime pickle that Aidan kept only for these occasions. The Academy was notoriously stingy in feeding its cadets; there was not a night that I recall when I did not go to bed hungry, and I think it was hunger as much as our desire for companionship and the dark thrill of violation that brought us together on those cold evenings.

  So you must imagine us, crouched in the shadow of Aidan’s bed (he often shared it with his sister, but we pretended not to know that) with a single lumiere casting a greenish light upon our thin faces. We were all seventeen years old, except for John Starving; and his name notwithstanding, he was the heartiest of us. Aidan and Emma were skinny as planks, white-skinned, with that reddish hair and green cat-eyes. Neos was like a curlew, all bent knees and long beak, but with bright black eyes and black hair like an oiled cap close against her skull. John was nearly as tall as myself, but broad-shouldered and with a wide, dark face. I was nothing but bones and nerve in those days: very tall, not yet stooped from the burden of my command, and popular enough with my peers. I knew that Neos fancied me, as did Aidan; but Emma feared me because I had killed a boy in a fight several years earlier. At the Academy one was not expelled or even suspended for such misdemeanors. After the investigation I was given a private tutor, a replicant named Vus, and my time in the gymkhana increased from two to four hours daily. If my rations had been doubled to make up for the extra exercise, perhaps I would not have been so eager to attend Aidan’s soirees.

  There was always something uncanny about Aidan Harrow. In all the years that have passed since our youth together, it still does not surprise me that there is a line I can draw, from Aidan to his sister Emma, from Emma to the empath Wendy Wanders, and so to the dark one who has imprisoned me here. It may have been simply that Aidan was beautiful, with that angular grace and his witch-eyes; and of course it helps that he died young, by his own hand, so that I always remember him laughing in the half-light of his cadet’s room. Unlike his sister, doomed to live another twenty-odd years before succumbing to her own private auto-da-fé at the Human Engineering Laboratory. Emma was never the beauty that Aidan was, even though sometimes it was hard to tell them apart. Perhaps she simply didn’t share her twin’s unabashed delight in her own appearance, or maybe it was just that odd apportioning of features that takes place sometimes between siblings, with the boys stealing all their mothers’ beauty, and the girls left with hard mouths and wary eyes.

  Whatever it was, there was always a subtle pressure to be next to Aidan. In the near dark we sat, our knees bumping, and tore hunks of stale bread and smeared them with lime pickle hot enough to make you weep. The bottle would go around, lingering longest at Aidan’s mouth; and we would talk, weaving the intricate pattern of custom and superstition that is the lot of NASNA Aviators from childhood to the pyre. News from our endless classes in strategy and ancient history; rumors of strife with the Commonwealth; conjecture as to when we would finally be allowed to make the jump from flight simulators to training craft.
Here and there an uncommonly lurid thread would emerge when someone had gossip of rape, conquest, madness, death. Aidan would tease me, giving vent to a vicious streak that would have served him well in adulthood had he survived. From his father—a depressive ethnomusicologist addicted to morpha—he had learned innumerable folk songs dating back hundreds of years, and he would sing these in a clear reedy tenor, giving the words a cruel twist to highlight the weaknesses of one or another of his rectors or classmates. Finally, when bottle and prattle were nearly spent, Aidan would stretch and beckon us closer, until I could smell the salt and citrus on his breath.

  “Now,” he would say. He had an uncanny voice. When he sang, it was with a sweet boy’s tone, but in speaking something seemed to taint it, so that I always felt he was either lying or on the verge of mad laughter. No one but Emma was surprised when he hanged himself. “Who will go first? Emma?”

  Emma started and shook her head. “No—not tonight—I’ll go next, I have to think—”

  Aidan shrugged, leaned forward over the lumiere until his forehead grazed Neos’s. “All right then—what about you, Sky Pilot?”

  I winced at the hated nickname and shook my head.

  “Neos—?”

  “This footage I saw in the archives,” Neos said without hesitation. Her white cheeks were a sullen red from excitement and the apsinthion; it looked as though she had been slapped. “There was a fire in this very tall building, and no way out. In one of the windows a man leaned out with all this smoke around him. I couldn’t tell if he was fat or if he had just bloated up from the heat. I think maybe he was burning up, his skin was so dark…

  “There was no sound, so you just saw him there, breathing and leaning out the window. Finally he fell down inside and you couldn’t see him anymore, and then the film ran out. I always wondered, if they were near enough to film him, why didn’t they try to get him out of there?”

  Emma and John shuddered, and I grimaced. “I’ve seen that one,” I said. “It was the air attack on London, 2167. There’s another one that shows the river in flames, all these people—”

  “Is that your turn, Sky Pilot?” Aidan looked at me, reaching for the bottle and taking a sip from the little that remained in it.

  “No.” I looked away and caught Neos’s feverish eyes. “Someone else go next.”

  For a minute no one said anything. At last John reached to take the bottle from Aidan, swallowed a mouthful of the green liqueur, and coughed. “All right,” he said. “A woman I saw—”

  “You did that last time,” said Emma.

  “Not this one. It was—it wasn’t a real woman. I mean, it was a geneslave. When we were in Wyalong…”

  John’s parents were both Aviators, now dead. For many years they had been stationed on a form in the Great Barrier Reef, and somehow had managed to take John with them instead of sending him as was customary to the Aviators’ crèche. “I guess I was about six. A supply boat had arrived, and there was this enormous crate, that sort of gray plasteel with holes in it that they use for shipping livestock. It was big enough to hold cattle in; I guess that should have told me something. No one was watching and so I walked right up to it; it came up over my head and I pressed my face against it, to look inside the holes—”

  “Ugh.” Emma made a small noise and took a swipe at the bottle, then leaned back so that her thigh brushed against Aidan’s hand.

  “Shh,” said Neos.

  “And this, this hand jabbed out at me—only it was bigger than any hand I’d ever seen, it was as long as my forearm and golden —I mean this unnatural color, like it had been dyed. I remember the nails were short, they’d been cut back but they still scratched me and I thought I’d been poisoned. I started screaming and fell backward, and of course everyone came running and my father picked me up. They jabbed something at whatever was inside the crate, some kind of tranquilizer I guess; then everyone sort of forgot about me again. I found a place to sit on a pier and I watched, and after a while someone came and they opened the crate, and picked up this long leash and pulled out what was inside.”

  He paused, took the bottle from Emma, and eyed it critically before draining the last swallow of apsinthion.

  “So what was it?” Aidan cocked his head, grinning. “An aardman? Tortured prisoners from the Commonwealth?”

  John put the bottle down and stared at him for a long moment before answering. “No,” he said at last. He didn’t like Aidan. He told me years later that once he had walked in on him in bed with Emma. She had been crying and her lip was bleeding, but Aidan only laughed and told John to leave the room. “It was an energumen.”

  “An energumen?” Aidan’s voice rose as he settled with his back against the bed. “That’s it? You were afraid of an energumen?”

  Beside me Neos shuddered. Only a fool wouldn’t be afraid of an energumen. Of all the Ascendants’ geneslaves, they were the most like humans, with an almost supernatural strength and intelligence and a malevolence that almost surpassed the Ascendants’ own. They had beautiful faces: flat noses, dewy black eyes, blossom-heavy lips; and their skin ran the range from golden to onyx. Tall, superbly strong, their most compelling trait was their raw intelligence. Like a child’s intellect, inquiring but never forgetting the answers to their questions. It was a measure of their masters’ hubris that their breeding allodiums continued to produce them, year after year, without any thought to the threat such an enslaved population might one day pose.

  John glanced down at his hand, then up again. “Yes. Because—well, she looked so much like a girl, I mean a human girl. Except for the color of her skin, and her size. She was just in that crate, like what we usually got—pigs and dogs, you know. And—well, it scared me, maybe because she was naked, I’d never really seen a naked woman before—”

  Aidan snickered but his sister elbowed him.

  “—and it was just, oh I don’t know, it made me think of my mother, I guess that’s what frightened me. Because it was monstrous in spite of all that, and it was the first energumen I’d ever seen. Later I found out they’d brought her there as a breeder, they had a new strain of hydrapithecenes they were developing, and she was the host.”

  Neos wrinkled her nose. “Did you see her again?”

  “Oh, yes. She was in the labs—they gave her a room, it’s not like they kept her in a cage all the time. I think they were afraid of her being raped by the crew on the supply boat—she was from the Archipelago—”

  His voice drifted off and he stared at his hands again. Poor John! When he fought under me, he kept a young girl on the island as a mistress—she might have been all of thirteen. After he died, her family killed her, threw her onto one of the eternal pyres by the canal, where the rubber wastes have been burning for a hundred years. Because she had been kept by an Aviator, you see— memji, they called us there, demons. I don’t even think he ever slept with her.

  “And that’s what you were afraid of?” Aidan’s tone was mock-serious, with just a note of derision. “An energumen?” He laughed then, grabbing his sister’s hand and tugging it until she laughed too, a little uneasily.

  “They frighten me, too,” Neos said softly. Her eyes when she raised them were dark and bright, and she looked at me as though betraying a secret. “I think you would have to be mad, not to be afraid of them.”

  But Aidan only laughed, though Emma’s voice fell off at Neos’s words. John said nothing more, only stared silently at the candle burning down before us….

  Suddenly my reverie was shaken. I heard Kesef’s voice, announcing “Imperator, someone is approaching us.”

  I opened my eyes, blinking at the near-darkness that filled the Gryphon’s tiny cabin. My eyes and my right hand were the only parts of my physical corpus that remained in the shell of plasteel and neural fibers that encased my consciousness. In Araboth I had been regenerated as a rasa, one of the Ascendants’ living corpses; and so I had attained an immortality of sorts, but not one, alas! which offered me any joy. When I gla
nced out the window of the aircraft, I saw the nemosyne standing at the edge of the tor where we had landed. Night had fallen. She gazed out across the prairie, to where the settlement’s few lights, scarlet and bronze and white, pillaged the sleeping hillsides. For a moment I stared down at her. In the soft darkness she glowed faintly, blue and gold, her translucent skin like a web of water surrounding her frail and complex innards. She was the most beautiful construct I had ever seen, surpassing even the artistry of those Fourth Ascension craftsmen who had used the long-dead coryphées of the twentieth-century cinema as models for the replicants, and gave them such enchanting names: Garbos, Marlenas, Marilyns.

  But you would never mistake Nefertity for a human being. Her face and torso were obviously composed of glass and metal and neural threads, and while her voice was that of the saintly woman who had programmed her, there was a crystalline ring to it, an eerie chill that recalled the songs of those hydrapithecenes the Ascendants call sirens, who seek to lure men and women to their tanks by the purity of their voices and slay them there as they bend to embrace the waiting monsters. I thought of the sirens as I watched Nefertity, the faint glow of her body casting a violet shadow upon the barren earth. After a minute or so I climbed from the Gryphon to join her.

  Outside the air was warm and dry. I could not actually feel it, of course, no longer having any skin except the sturdy membrane of black and crimson resins that sheathed my memories. But I knew this place, knew how the winds swept across the deserted prairie, bringing with them the scent of powdered stone and burning mesquite. Even through an Aviator’s leathers, you always felt that wind leaching away sweat and tears, leaving an incrustation of salt like rime upon your cheeks.