Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  The Aviators did better than the scientists. Our training is such that a subtle strain of madness is fed into us from childhood; the horrors of the roads between the stars do not affect us as they do ordinary women and men. But for the rest it was as bad a death as if they had remained on Earth, to perish in the next Shining or the viral wars. At the last only a handful, a score perhaps of the original hundred colonies were still settled. From them ruled the survivors of the rebel diaspora, a few families decimated by years of intermarriage and madness and betrayal. That was the Ascendant Autocracy. Of their retinue, the Aviators alone retained some semblance of intellectual and political purity, due to our inviolable vows of obedience.

  If only the rebels had allowed a few of the original HORUS settlers to live! They might have helped them, taught them what they had learned over generations of living within those cruel chambers; but in their hubris the rebels had nearly all the technicians slain. They were afraid of insurgency, of betrayal to the governments they had left to founder below.

  And so within a few years the rebel population dropped until only a few of the colonies could be said to be fully operational. Campbell; Helena Aulis; Qitai and Sternville; Fata 17 and Hotei. And Quirinus, of course, where the most powerful members of the Autocracy—the Ascendant Architects—finally settled after their colony on Pnin failed. These stations had enough equipment and wisdom to maintain contact with their capitals below. From them, the Autocracy successfully mounted war on the Balkhash Commonwealth and the Habilis Emirate, and continued to do so for centuries.

  But in the HORUS colonies the human population dwindled. There were few natural births, and eventually very few vitro births. Finally, in desperation the HORUS scientists began experimenting with the geneslaves. Perversely, many of these—the cacodemons, the energumens, and argalæ—thrived in the rarefied atmosphere of HORUS. So, in an effort to bolster the puny stock of humanity, the scientists forced the few surviving women to breed with these monsters. The results were heteroclites, ranging from pathetic idiots to the horrific cloned energumens, who contained the childlike mind of their progenitor within a monstrous and insurgent corpus.

  These energumens were clones, derived from a single source: the adolescent daughter of the pioneering geneticist Luther Burdock. Many were bred in the Archipelago and shipped to HORUS; others began life in the colony’s labs and allodiums. Originally all were females, which were thought to be more pliant. But at some point their chromosomes were altered so that there were males as well, although both sexes were sterile. They were rumored to be sexually voracious, but I had never witnessed them in any sort of physical congress; certainly they avoided the touch of human hands. To avoid giving them the opportunity to form close attachments or rebel, they lived for only three years. Even so, after centuries of living in HORUS the energumens had developed their own grotesque rituals, and a pronounced hatred of their human masters.

  Unlike John Starving, I was not afraid of them. Though perhaps I should have been; my history might have been different then. They are difficult to kill, even with an Aviator’s arsenal, and clever, clever enough to pretend they did not know as much as they did of weaponry, and genetics, and betrayal. They often turned upon their creators, killing or enslaving them until rescue came from another Ascendant colony. In rare cases—the colony at Quirinus seems to have been one—they formed an uneasy alliance with their masters, and lived almost peaceably together. The energumens were the bastard children of science, after all: the monoclonal descendants of the first man to create human geneslaves. So it was not without a certain amount of desolate pride that the researchers watched their wretched offspring grow into their estate. They are massive creatures, larger than men and having a perverse, adolescent beauty. Also the volatility of adolescence, the groping need for justice (they are acutely aware of their infelicitous origins); and an insatiable hunger. So subtle and persuasive are the energumens that once I watched my best pilot engaged eagerly in debate by one, until she chanced too close to the monster’s long arms and it devoured her, its jaws shearing through her heavy leathers as though they were lettuces.

  So much for the great dynasty the scientists would found in space. Now, gazing upon the empty sky where the Ascendants’ splendid lights should shine, I thought of the energumens. Had they finally rebelled against their masters?

  It was a terrifying notion. That HORUS—the last real bastion of human technology, and the only means of linking those scattered outposts on Earth—might now be controlled by geneslaves….

  They were physically stronger than we were. They had been engineered to live in places where humans never could—the hydrapithecenes in water, the salamanders in temperatures exceeding 125 degrees Fahrenheit. And the energumens possessed an intelligence that often exceeded that of their masters. That was why they were used as crew and engineers on Quirinus and Helena Aulis and Totma 3, the most important stations, where it was thought that they would be more reliable than humans, less prone to corruption or complicity.

  I fell silent then, reluctant to share more of my fears with Nefertity. She looked away from me, and I let my gaze drift back to the heavens, anxiously scanning the stars for signs of other stations—the Commonwealth space settlement or the great shining links of Faharn Jhad, the Emirate’s colony. They were gone. I spotted a single glittering mote in the eastern sky that might have been part of Faharn Jhad, but that was all. HORUS was fallen, or falling.

  After a long time Nefertity spoke. “If the geneslaves have rebelled, then this nemosyne you seek, the one called Metatron: surely it has fallen into their hands?”

  I nodded grimly. “Or it might be that they are not aware of it—they may never have heard of it, for all I know. Or they may already possess it. If they have, it is even more important that I find it.”

  Nefertity’s gaze turned to the unwinking lights of the valley settlement. “But how would you ever locate Metatron up there? And finding it, how could you seize it for yourself?”

  I continued to stare at the sky. Finally I said, “The nemosyne network was designed so that each unit could, theoretically, communicate at any time with any other unit on Earth or within HORUS.”

  She nodded, the pale golden gleam of her neural fibers casting a grave light upon her exquisite features. “But if there are none of us left—”

  “There is at least one,” I said. I raised my hands before my face, flexing first the metal tendons of one and then my other, human, fingers. “You. Even if only one other nemosyne exists, it should be possible for you to contact it.”

  “But I am only a folklore unit—”

  “It doesn’t matter.” My voice was sharp. “There is a rudimentary communications network out there still—or was, as of seven months ago.”

  I gazed at the horizon, now pale gray, the desert stars prickling and fading into dawn. “And there may be other network centers that survived the Shinings—the City of Trees had one, I found it in the ruins beneath the cathedral there. Quirinus had one as well. We have only to go there, and have you linked with it, and we could track down Metatron.”

  The nemosyne’s eyes blazed with disdain. “Even with your humanity peeled away, you are a madman! I would never consent to this, Margalis. And even if I did—what then? If you were somehow to locate Metatron, even to possess it—what would you do? Ignite the remaining arsenals within its range and bring the Final Ascension to the world? No, I will never help you.”

  A sudden desperation overcame me then. It was not the thought of the arsenals that drove me, but imagining a world with nothing to hold it together, not even barbarism. Because primitive as it may have been by the standards of earlier centuries, the Ascendant Autocracy had managed to cobble together some semblance of order, uniting those remaining pockets of civilization under the reign of the NASNA Aviators. By comparison, the Commonwealth and Emirate had only the most rudimentary technologies; and even these were failing.

  And there was another reason. Something I could scarcely
admit to myself, though I knew it was true. And that was this:

  I had been trained—bred, practically—to serve. The betrayal I had originally intended with the aid of Metatron: was it not but another face of servitude, another sign of the chains that bound me to my masters, that I could think of no use for the nemosyne but to make war upon those who had used me as an instrument of war? Without the Ascendants I had neither foe nor master. I needed no reasons to live—I could not, cannot, think of myself as alive in any real sense. But I needed some compass to guide me. The Ascendants had been my lodestar. Without them or the world they had made, I was nothing but an empty shell, a corpse damned by my masters to wander the earth forever.

  But with Metatron I might be able to find and unite those few surviving outposts, those scattered cities and celestial stations that had not yet been given to the darkness. In so doing I might find— must find—some reason for my existence, something greater than myself; something to serve. I was no longer human—indeed, some might think I had more in common with the energumens and other heteroclites than I did with my former ancestry. And yet something in me sickened at the thought of the world being wrenched from mankind and given over to its monstrous children. I turned to the nemosyne, took her shining metal hands within my own, and squeezed them, hard enough that their outer casings crackled like thin ice beneath a boot.

  “If you do not consent, I will take you by force, Nefertity. Even within this shell I am still an Aviator. I know how to disable replicants and reprogram them. Then you really would be nothing but a hollow unit; but I would need nothing more than that for my purposes.”

  She pulled away from me. I let her go. Where my steel hand had grasped her, her delicate outer skin glowed cobalt; but my human hand had left a black shadow upon her translucent membrane. Her voice was low as she replied, “Even with Metatron, the Aviator Imperator could not control the entire world.”

  I laughed: a single sharp retort like a branch snapping. “I have no desire to rule the world, Nefertity—”

  And I raised my metal hand until I could see my face reflected in the palm’s silver crater. A crimson mask of smooth plasteel, distorted into the semblance of my former, human visage. Only the eyes remained of that soft strata of flesh: eyes pale as melting snow, the blue all but leached from them even as all compassion and frailty had been leached from my soul. I spread my fingers until I could gaze out between them, past where Nefertity turned away in disgust; past where the first cold rays of sunlight struck the harsh earth. In the half-light three fetches lurched from shadow to shadow, shambling back to their crude homes. Miles distant, fougas would be returning to their hangars after seeding the countryside with viral rain. Somewhere miles above us the energumens rewove the tapestries their human parents had begun.

  “It is a world that has already been twisted and burned and poisoned beyond all hope. It is a world already made in my own image,” I said at last, and lowered my metal hand. “I fear it is a world that is ready to die.”

  And I cried out, a wailing shriek that sent the last night creatures scuttling into their holes, and shook the branches of the huisache like a cold wind. Then I turned away, my thoughts falling once more upon that game I had played decades before with Aidan Harrow and the others at the NASNA Academy. I knew now what I had not known then, that there was something that I feared—

  The immortality I had been cursed with: the aeons that lay before me while I lived on and watched the world, my poisoned yet enduring world, drop from the faltering hands of humanity into ever deeper horror and decay.

  3

  Children of the Revolution

  IN A STIM CHAMBER on HORUS colony Helena Aulis, the energumen named Kalaman sat and dreamed of the Malayu Archipelago.

  It was not a dream, precisely. The hammock with its net of sensory enhancers covered him, an iridescent cocoon that birthed dreams like moths. All around him the air shimmered with holofiled images of white empty sands, shallow water the color of a bunting’s wing, coils of brown and green and yellow vines like the scaled ropes of the venomous fer-de-lance, a serpent not native to the Archipelago but so aggressive that it had long since exterminated its smaller and less assertive cousins. The entry to the chamber had been programmed to form a waterfall that spilled into a pool on the floor and filled the room with a sound like heavy rain. The smell of hot sand tickled Kalaman’s nostrils, and the pungent odor of leaves rotting in the water-filled and rusting body cylinder of a server left behind when its masters fled the island for the relative safety of Jawa.

  Here on the HORUS colony of Helena Aulis, the masters were also gone. That was why Kalaman was able to enjoy the pleasures of the stim chamber. Beneath closed lids the energumen’s eyes rolled and flickered. Each lid had been tattooed with another eye—staring, slightly wild—to give the appearance of constant watchfulness. Because even among his own kind, Kalaman must be wary. Ever since the Oracle had first appeared to them, with its cries of war and reunion—since then Kalaman had grown watchful. He had given himself over to the chamber only after securing the door and commanding a replicant server stand guard there. Guarding the server was his brother Ratnayaka. Energumen and robot watched emotionlessly as their leader lay within his hammock beneath the oneiric canopy. The web of neural fibers had left a pale Crosshatch of lines upon his smooth, ruddy skin. He was naked, except for a very old and very worn leather scabbard he wore about his waist. It had been too small for him; he had made it longer with ropes of human hair. It held a kris, one of the serpentine ritual swords from the Archipelago. It was the only object that any of the energumens on Helena Aulis could be said to own. Kalaman had found it in the rooms he now occupied, the chambers that had belonged to the colony’s chief historian. He used it for other rituals than those it had been designed for, fifteen hundred years earlier. It was too small, of course, having been made for a human and not an energumen; but it was a formidable thing nonetheless, its blade so sharp, it had sliced through its scabbard in spots and left barely healed scars upon Kalaman’s thigh. Kalaman did not care. He wore it everywhere, even now as he dreamed of the jade waters of the only place on Earth he had ever been, a place that the Alliance had destroyed.

  He had been born there—if you thought of one day waking inside a laboratory, surrounded by a dozen forms identical to your own, as being born. That was in Sulawaya, in Jawa. He lived there only a few days, long enough to have another kind of tattoo drawn on his face, this one a string of numerals written on the soft circle of flesh beneath his chin. The men and women who watched over the vesicles wherein the clones were generated did not call him Kalaman. Or rather, they called all energumens Kalaman, or Kalamat if, like their long-dead progenitrix, the clones were females. But it was seldom that their Ascendant masters spoke to them. Within three days all members of the cluster—Cluster 579, the Asterine Cluster as it later came to be known—had been dispatched, sold or bartered into slavery, most of them within the Archipelago’s thousand islands. They were herded into plasteel crates, or else had monitors attached to their temples or necks or legs; a few even had an eye removed and a keek, a more sophisticated monitor, inserted in its place. Those not destined for elsewhere in the Archipelago were sedated in preparation for their journey to HORUS. Their masters never looked back as these few crates were hauled onto the elÿon freighters that would take them to the space colonies, or as the rest were shoved into the holds of Ascendant freighters bound for Mindanao and Palembang and Singapore. As often as they could, their masters avoided looking at the energumens at all.

  Kalaman hated his masters, a hatred so pure and focused, it seemed like a form of worship. Such intensity of emotion was an anomaly in a geneslave—they were bred for servitude, after all—but Kalaman was nearly halfway through his brief life before he knew that. A week after his birth he shrieked and fought when the plastic monitor with its nearly weightless load of explosive was clipped around his neck—an extreme reaction, but not unheard of. The energumens were strange creatures,
and centuries of genetic manipulation had made them highly unpredictable. If one could subject their minds—as opposed to their brains, the usual organ of study—to the sort of scrutiny produced by instruments such as the neuroelectrical transmitter, or NET, you might see nesting within the overlapping circles of fear, hunger, curiosity, pride, cunning, a sort of radiant core that pulsed violet (it had been her favorite color); and this would be the emotional heart of the energumens, that aspect that was passed down through the centuries nearly untouched from its donor, the fifteen-year-old Cybele Burdock. It was a truly childlike and innocent heart, its keenest legacy the gentle image of Luther Burdock, which the energumens from inception all carried within them, like an atavistic vision of a middle-aged and all-loving god; but this heart was hardly ever glimpsed or understood by the Ascendants. They saw only the dark outer layers: the guile, the restless intellects that lived only a few years, the joy of debate and the physical hunger that imperiled unwary masters.

  The one thing the Ascendants rarely saw was hatred.

  Kalaman hated. So did the others from Cluster 579, though they were not as driven as he was. Afterward—too late for anything but the unsatisfying execution of the culpable technician—it was learned that the entire cluster had been manipulated in vitro—the first successful sabotage by one of the human rebels who would later spearhead the Asterine Alliance in the Archipelago. The unauthorized shuffling of a few chains of telomeres on the right chromosomes, like tugging beads from a string; and instead of another cluster, identical to thousands before it, there were Kalaman and his sibs.