Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  And yet suddenly I could see the affinity between them, something older even than their bond as geneslaves. At HEL I had seen holofiles of cave paintings, eerie drawings from a site in Uropa that had been destroyed during the Third Shining. Tiny black mannikins flinging spears at fleeing ibex; crouched figures stalking something with bulging eyes and vestigial tail, something that looked very much like the aardman Fossa. I had paid little attention to those ’files—the paintings were gone, after all, turned to ash and steam along with all those other treasures from the Magdalenian epoch.

  But now I felt as though one of those cave paintings had come to life and moved in the smoky firelight before me. Only Miss Scarlet held no weapon, and the creature that stared down at her was nodding slowly as it growled, “No harm—no harm—”

  In the hallway Jane stared back impatiently.

  “Come on, then,” she snapped. I rose and left the room, hugging my blanket tightly across my chest. Fossa padded after me, and Miss Scarlet beside him. As we walked down the hall, I was surprised to see that weak daylight now shone upon the frayed carpets. The shrieking wind had died away. Outside, it seemed, the storm had moved on. Inside Seven Chimneys I felt as though it had just begun.

  We were given three adjoining rooms in the upper story of one of the long ells that extended from the back of the main house. Small rooms, probably not the finest at Seven Chimneys, but clean and comfortably furnished with tired furniture that looked accustomed to its surroundings. My chamber had a small fireplace—“A Jeffersonian fireplace,” Giles explained proudly; “this was part of Virginia once”—and overlooked sloping fields that in the distance surrendered to woodland, all now lost beneath the snow. Solar panels were fixed to the roof below amid a spiky array of antennae. I was surprised to see a video monitor beneath the window, small but with all its dials and screens intact. I pressed a switch, and waves of gray and white covered one screen. Hissing filled the air, but no images. After a moment I turned it off.

  There were other odd things as well. A kinetic sculpture in the bathroom, showing a young man coyly disrobing and ducking into a spray of water. Talking books that whispered long-forgotten titles when I picked them up: Jane Eyre, Descent into Hell, Magya Pliys 754. There was even some kind of telefile, much larger and older than any I’d ever seen, but so shiny and clean, it seemed never to have been used. Its yellow plastic headpiece fit snugly over my temples. When I clicked it on, I heard faint music, all clicks and sirens and high-pitched voices. Warhola Amarosa, a late twenty-third-century castrato opera. Two summers ago Gilgor, one of the other empaths at HEL, had played it incessantly. I removed the headset and stared at it, frowning. Where was the transmission coming from? I knew that Curators used to broadcast to radio receivers within the City, but surely such transmissions had been curtailed by the occupation. Who would be broadcasting something as trivial as an opera if the City was under siege? But if the transmission didn’t originate in the City, where did it come from? Puzzled, I replaced the headset and explored the rest of the room.

  Everything appeared to be of a similar vintage as the opera, perhaps one hundred fifty years old. I picked up a holo chip the size of a pebble and held it to my eye, saw a miniature and incredibly detailed landscape of sunset cliffs and azure sea, with archaic aviettes scuttling across the sky like beetles. There was a machine that played back a recording of Trevor and Giles arguing about house repairs, and a vocoder that, when I spoke into it, translated my words into Tagalog. I went from one corner of the room to the next, continually astounded to find objects so old that still worked, that hadn’t been destroyed or remanded by the Ascendants. The vocoders and ’files and machines all had the air of being stockpiled, as though Seven Chimneys were some sort of museum; and perhaps that was the truth of it. Perhaps Trevor Mallory’s family had somehow managed to keep all these things safe and hidden through the years. Or perhaps they kept them here expressly for those high-ranking Ascendants who visited once or twice a year. But that seemed unlikely. If these things were really intended for use by Ascendant guests, they wouldn’t be hidden in the back bedrooms. Still, who else would use such things?

  In the City I had seen how the Curators managed their collections of ancient objects, archaic computers and navigation systems and engines jumbled up with sarcophagi and the petrified remains of ancient archosaurs and other extinct creatures. Everything treasured and catalogued and studied, but all with their original uses forgotten or perverted over the centuries. Even items that had been in common use at HEL—’file chips, torchieres, simple prosthetics—were in the City used primarily as ornaments by Paphians, or battered among the Curators as mere oddments.

  Yet here in the wilderness two solitary men had retained the use of a telefile—and the fact that it picked up transmissions meant that somebody else had one, too. I frowned, flicking at a robotic monad the size of my little finger. It buzzed and retreated back onto the shelf it shared with toothbrushes and empty morpha tins. Suddenly I felt exhausted. The first stirrings of the grief I had held in check began to creep through the crumbling layers of my fatigue. I turned to dress for dinner.

  My clothes were laid out on the spindle-bed, dry now if no cleaner or warmer than they had been. But beside them were other garments. A blouse of thick buttery suede, trimmed with bone-and-glass buttons; a long flowing skirt of some kind of jacquard, crimson and deep blue and shot with gold thread. There were high woolen boots, too, with heavy leather soles, knit in an intricate pattern of red and green and white. I sat for a long time, holding the blouse and stroking it. I thought of Justice: how I always had traveled with him disguised as a boy; how it had been months and months since I had worn woman’s clothing—not since leaving HEL. I picked up the torn tunic I had worn at Winterlong and brought it to my face, smelling ashes and blood and smoke. Without warning, grief overwhelmed me: like nausea, waves of it so powerful, I could scarcely breathe. I fell onto the bed and sobbed, until sorrow gave way to rage and I ripped the tunic end to end, clawing at my face and then burying it in a pillow so that I could scream without being heard, over and over and over again.

  A name: Justice. And another—

  Aidan.

  The name I had used in the City of Trees. But Justice was dead now, buried somewhere in the bowels of the Engulfed Cathedral along with Anna and Dr. Silverthom and all those other victims of the Mad Aviator. All of them dead, or imprisoned, except for myself and my two companions. But I felt as though I alone had survived, Wendy Wanders, Subject 117; no longer lovely or powerful, no longer safe within the citadel my mind had erected around itself since my tormented childhood.

  Alone, alone, alone!

  I wanted to shriek, recalling the Cathedral in flames, and the City itself like some lovely canvas, curled and blackened, burning, burning. All of it gone; all of them, even the Mad Aviator, dead.

  But then I remembered what Giles had said.

  “It will be the best news we’ve had in a year if we knew him — if he’s really dead, as you say.”

  I shivered, pulling the suede blouse to my chest. Impossible, of course. I had seen the Aviator fall, his face torn away by the impact from Jane’s pistol. And yet, and yet…

  Grief turned to terror at the thought of Margalis Tast’annin, still alive somewhere; still searching for me. I forced myself to focus on something else—the kinetic sculpture’s monotonous dishabille, the clicks and whines from the castrato aria; my own voice chanting in another language.

  And finally grief and terror gave way to a numbness, an utter exhaustion that was like a sort of joy. My head ached from crying, but the tears were gone now. Carefully I placed the suede blouse back upon the bed. Then I gathered my old clothes and brought them to the tiny fireplace. Piece by piece I fed them to the flames: trousers, blouse, belt, scarves. Thick foul smoke filled the room as the cloth danced upon the metal hearth, but I didn’t care. I waited until the flames died back, then, heedless of the pain, stuck my hand beneath the grate and drew back fingers sme
ared with hot ashes. When I rubbed them on my face, they tasted bitter and burned my tongue; but all I could think of was Justice burning, all I could wish was that these had been his ashes, that I might somehow have tasted his death.

  It was Jane who found me there a little later. Naked, staring into the little fire grate like a dull child, my mouth smeared black, my hands filthy.

  “Wendy,” she said gently. I wouldn’t look at her, but I could hear the heartbreak in her voice. “Oh, Wendy—”

  She pulled me gently to my feet and helped me into the bathroom. There she washed my face and hands, dabbed at the wound on my cheek, and brought me the new clothes from the bed. Like a patient child she dressed me, saying little, rinsing my hair until it was free of soot and blood. Then she kissed me, her mouth lingering on my cheek, her lips parting the slightest bit so that I could feel her warm breath. When she lowered her face to kiss my hands, I saw the tears in her eyes.

  “Oh, Wendy,” she whispered. I shut my eyes and breathed deeply, tried to bring up some image that might ease the pounding in my head; but found nothing but Justice’s face, pale and lifeless where he lay on the Cathedral’s stone floor.

  “Go, please,” I said hoarsely. Jane’s hands slid from mine. I could hear her crossing the room, hear her pause at the door where I imagined her looking back at me, her brown eyes bright with tears. Then the door opened and shut, and I was alone once more.

  Not long after that someone tapped gently at my door. “Dinner soon,” Trevor’s soft drawl came to me. “We’ll be downstairs.” I heard him pass to the next room and call to Miss Scarlet. I waited until his soft tread echoed on the steps again. Then, sighing, I walked to the mirror that hung near the door.

  The new clothes did not suit me at all. Part of it was their anachronistic cut. No one wore skirts much anymore, neither men nor women. These obviously had been made for a woman, someone my own height but with wide hips and heavy breasts, the kind of woman the Paphians might name margravine at one of their masques. They were not clothes that became me. In my boy’s attire I had always looked beautiful, a tall, slender youth with tawny hair and gray eyes, too serious, perhaps, but with a softness about my mouth that had made me popular with my Paphian audiences.

  All that was gone now. The Aviator’s words came back to me, when he had imprisoned me at the Cathedral—

  “Not so pretty as you were, Wendy Wanders …”

  And it was true. My singed hair hung raggedly around my face; my face itself was gaunt and gray save where my cheek had been seared, and that livid scar glowed like the impression of some deathly kiss. My eyes were swollen, but that seemed almost a mercy—who could bear to look into those eyes now, that had seen such things? The blouse and skirt hung limply on me, neither too large nor too small but just wrong —clothes made for another kind of life than mine. Already I regretted burning my other things. I raised my hand to cover the reflection of my face, when another knock came at the door.

  “Wendy?”

  Miss Scarlet’s voice, hesitant and worried.

  “I’m coming.” I turned, walking clumsily with the long skirts billowing about my bare legs. I refused to wear those woolen boots. They made me think of moujiks, sour-faced Balkhash peasants straining over their fields of soy and triticale.

  “Dinner smells good, at least,” Miss Scarlet said as I joined her in the hall. Her voice had a sharp, forced brightness. I nodded silently, refusing to meet her eyes, and she tried another tack.

  “There was a telefile in my room. And a dumbwaiter. And some kind of imaging mirror that showed what my insides looked like. What’s your room like?”

  I shrugged. Miss Scarlet pursed her lips. “At least they gave you new clothes.”

  I gave up and smiled wanly. “You, too.” It was impossible for me to be unkind to Miss Scarlet for long.

  She ducked her head and did a little pirouette on the bare pine floor. Her clothes had obviously been made for a child, a boy probably—cheap cotton trousers and a too-small tunic that Miss Scarlet had belted with a remnant of her Winterlong finery. It was odd to see her dressed like that, with none of the elegance she usually affected. The tunic’s arms were too short, and her hands bristled at the end of them, thick with dark fur, her palms the color of an old-fashioned pencil eraser.

  “Your shoes didn’t fit?” she asked. “Neither did mine—”

  She stretched out one foot until her long toes curled around the banister at the head of the stairs. She looked over her shoulder at me and grinned, and for an instant I thought she was going to swing down, hand over hand. Instead she waited patiently until I reached the steps, and walked demurely at my side.

  In the main corridor we found Jane. She had changed back into her own clothes, which looked so travel-worn and stained, I asked if she hadn’t been given new ones.

  “I feel more comfortable this way,” she announced. “Look at these.” She pointed at the water-stained plaster wall where two paintings hung, side by side.

  Flight! was the caption on one of them. It showed a terrified black-skinned woman clutching a bundle and stumbling down the embankment of a wide, furiously boiling river. At her heels a ravening mass of hounds slavered and howled, and in the background I could barely discern the hulking figure of a white man with a face as hideous as the hounds’. Upon closer investigation, the bundle the woman hugged to her proved to be an infant. It was a very old print, nearly as old as the house, I would guess, and like much else at Seven Chimneys could easily have belonged in one of the Curator’s museums.

  The other picture was not nearly so old—three hundred years, perhaps. It was a holofile, set in a round frame of gold chromium brushed so that it had a rough veneer like wood. The ’file showed a dark landscape done in swirling blues and violets, a landscape thick with trees and watched over by a shining quarter-moon. As I stared at it, clouds passed across the moon’s face, turning the shadows beneath into slashes of black and indigo. But then the clouds moved on; the moon glowed brighter, revealing a scene much like that in the other painting. Only instead of hounds, there was a brace of aardmen, silvery monitors winking around their necks as they pursued something down a sharp incline into a ravine. I had to peer more closely to see what they hunted: a figure like a very tall man, but with a childish face and huge, heavily muscled arms that ended in disproportionately large hands.

  “Ugh,” I said, drawing back. At my side Miss Scarlet craned her neck, trying vainly to make out what I saw. “Don’t,” I warned, pushing her gently down the hall in front of me. “It will spoil your appetite.”

  “Flight to the Ford,” the ’file whispered its title as we hurried past. Jane followed us with a rigid smile on her pale face.

  “There seems to be a kind of theme here,” she said, fixing me with a fierce look. Before she could go on, Trevor appeared in a doorway ahead of us.

  “Very nice,” he said. He looked at Miss Scarlet and me and murmured approvingly. He had changed into a kimono, a blue so deep, it was almost black. With his enhancer and his sharp features and silvery hair, he looked more like an elegant replicant than a human host. “Please, please come in,” he urged.

  It was a splendid room; even Jane drew her breath in sharply as we entered. A rich burgundy-colored paper stamped with golden poppies covered the walls. In places mildew had eaten away at the pattern, but that only made it seem lovelier, more of a miracle that it had survived so long. A huge Oriental rug covered the floor, woven with plumes and arabesques of blue and gold. The edges had worn so that you could see the carpet’s weft, and beneath it the wooden floorboards shining with oil. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, some of its crystals missing. Thick red candles burned in empty sockets that had once held electric bulbs, and the wax dripped to congeal on a table that could have seated twenty, though only six places were set. I was wondering who the sixth could be when Fossa entered from another doorway. He walked in that mincing way that aardmen have, and I was surprised to see jewels glinting from his thick wrists�
�heavy bands of steel burnished to a glossy finish, set with amethysts and the holo-projecting lozenges called hyalines.

  “Fossa—” Trevor indicated a seat, an elongated divan piled with pillows. The aardman hunched his shoulders, murmuring something unintelligible. He settled into the chair, his long legs drawn up beside him. I started when Trevor gently prodded my shoulder.

  “Please, Wendy—” He pointed to a chair opposite Fossa. “Be seated.”

  It was a strange meal. Giles and Trevor sat at opposite ends of the long table, with Miss Scarlet and me on one side and Jane and Fossa across from us. Above our heads the candles in the chandelier stayed lit, despite the tiny electric lights glowing from recesses in the walls behind us. Lakes of molten wax continued to spread across the scarred tabletop. In the background soft music played. I recognized the repetitive chiming voices, broken by bass notes like snarls. “The Eleusinian Chorus” by Marriette Greeves, something else familiar to me from HEL. A faint perfume of almond blossom filled the air, and wisps of smoke bore various smells from the kitchen—a pungent note of rosemary, the mellow scents of cumin and fenugreek and roasting garlic.

  “You will try our wine, of course.” Trevor broke the uneasy silence, one eyebrow raised above the shining arc of his enhancer. Giles smiled and turned in his seat, beckoning to someone in the kitchen. A moment later a server appeared, the first I had seen since we arrived. It was far older than those we had used at HEL, walking on stiff steel legs jointed backward like those of a heron. Its metal torso gleamed. The black grid of its face had been painstakingly covered with an overlay of lenticular leaf that showed a soothing pattern of soft greens and blues, an effect reassuring to those aristocrats who had used the first-generation servers, and preferred this abstract effect to a crude effort at replicating a human face.