“You should not blame yourselves,” he said. He beckoned us to sit beside him on the bed, and I saw how his hands trembled, and felt how cold they were as they patted my own. “Neither of us knew that they were searching for you, Wendy, else we would have made other plans for you and Jane and Miss Scarlet—”
“They’re gone,” Jane broke in. She glanced nervously about the room, as though afraid of seeing Trevor’s corpse propped in a corner. “Scarlet and Fossa. They jumped out the window—the tracks seemed to go into the woods.”
Giles shut his eyes and ran a hand lightly over his face. “Ah, no,” he murmured; then said, “But no, I’m not surprised, not really.”
His voice shook slightly as he looked away, staring at the dark rectangle of a window set in the far wall. “Fossa hates the NASNA Aviators. He was enslaved by them for many years in Araboth before he escaped. Well, then.” He sighed and turned back to us. “We won’t have to worry about them, at least.”
“What do you mean, not worry?” Jane cried, aghast. “We should be out there now, looking for them!”
Giles shook his head adamantly. “ No. Fossa knows what he’s doing—they’ve probably set out for Cassandra. He knows the way, and even on foot they’ll probably get there before you do.”
“What are you talking about?” I stared at him as though he were mad. But Giles only sat calmly, stroking the worn cotton quilt with its pattern of interlocking circles. Double Wedding Ring, Trevor had called it; a gift from his daughter. A small brown stain had spread across one panel, and Giles’s fingers paused there as he answered.
“You can’t stay here. By tomorrow there will be more Aviators—sooner, if they come directly from the City of Trees.”
I blanched, and he went on quickly. “But I don’t think they will. From what those two told us, there is only a janissary force in the City now. The Aviators pulled out to attend to an insurrection in Vancouver, and the soldiers who remain have their hands full trying to keep down the rebels. As for the rest of us—we’ll all have to take sides now. It seems your talk of the genewars has actually come to pass,” he ended softly. His blue eyes stared mistily at the bed, and I knew he was speaking to Trevor and not to us. But then he seemed to recall where he was. He sighed again and stood, pacing to the wall where an old monitor hung crookedly from a pair of hooks. He straightened it, then clicked it on. The screen stayed blank, but the room filled with low music, gongs and chanting. A gamelan orchestra. I wondered again where the transmissions came from.
“Cassandra,” Giles said, as though he knew my thought. “I have already notified Cadence. They should have left by now—if the weather holds, if they don’t run into Aviators on the way, they should be here late tomorrow morning to take both of you back with them.”
“Cassandra? But what good will that do? And what about you?” Jane scowled, staring out the window to where the forest waited. “And Scarlet? What about them?”
“I told you, I believe they have already left for Cassandra. That was the plan, if ever anything happened—”
“So you’ve been expecting this?” Jane fairly shouted. “Some nice little toss-up with NASNA, and Fossa and Scarlet take to the woods?”
“Trevor had an escape planned long before we ever heard of you,” Giles said smoothly. A note of sorrow crept into his voice. “But you’re right, he did expect it—I think he hoped for it, in a way….”
“But not dying,” I cried. I thought of how intent Trevor had always been, how much like a man with some great work still ahead of him. “Surely he didn’t want that?”
Giles smiled, an odd, twisted smile. “I don’t think he cared—I know he wasn’t afraid of dying, not the way I am—but then, things are different for Trevor. He’s lived so long, and he had—well, he made plans, you know. I don’t think this really took him by surprise, in the end. And I know I’ll be with him again, but it’s just so…”
His voice trailed off, and he slumped over, weeping silently. Jane looked at me, her eyebrows raised, then glanced worriedly around the room—for weapons, I realized. She thought as I did: that Giles meant to kill himself.
“Well, we can’t leave you,” she said at last. “You’ll be—well, it’s just not a good idea, your being here alone. That’s all,” she ended awkwardly.
Giles drew a deep, gasping breath and looked up at her. “Oh, I won’t be alone, ” he said. His hand crept to the dark penumbra of blood on the quilt. “I’ve got him. ”
My flesh crawled at his tone. I had heard it before—that same note lodged somewhere between madness and exultation—first when I had watched the poet Morgan Yates kill herself at HEL, and then later when Dr. Harrow confronted me before her own suicide, and finally at the Engulfed Cathedral with Tast’annin. Suddenly I felt sick and weak, thinking of all those other deaths that I had caused. There was a roaring in my ears, as though some wind whirled inside my brain, a raging gale that might extinguish me; and at the corner of my eyes I saw small bursts of light, blinding white and yellow: the warning signs of a seizure. I took a deep breath, shut my eyes, and waited until the roaring dimmed, and the blinding flashes cooled to dull throbbing blues and greens. Finally I let my breath out in a long sigh.
“I have to sleep,” I whispered. “I’m sorry, I have to go—” I turned and stumbled for the door. After a moment I heard Jane follow me.
Before we stepped into the hallway, I stopped and looked back at Giles. He had stopped crying, though his face still looked wet and raw. He gazed at the monitor on the wall as though its screen held some beloved image.
“We will wait, then,” I said. “Till tomorrow, at least. For them to come from Cassandra.”
Beside me Jane made an angry hissing sound, but she only said, “I guess we don’t have much choice.”
“Oh no,” said Giles. Slowly he turned to look at us, his luminous blue eyes as brilliant and cold as Trevor’s optics. In his slender hand he held the Aviator’s gun. “You don’t understand, my friends—
“You no longer have any choice at all.”
7
The Alliance Spreads Its Net
“I WISH TO SPEAK with you, O my sister Kalamat.”
Even without looking up from where I pored over the scrolls that held the history of Quirinus, I knew the voice belonged to Cumingia, though it could have been that of any one of us. Our voices were as alike as our faces; in a roomful of us talking and laughing, our Masters had never been able to distinguish one from another. But I felt within me the taut probings of Cumingia’s anxious nature, just as, blindfolded and deafened, I would know Lusine by the tranquil warmth I felt in her presence, or Hylas by the rage that radiated from her like the venomous prongs of a sagittal.
“Come to me, sister.” I switched off the scroll and stood, stretching and yawning. “You are not asleep?”
Cumingia shook her head. “I cannot sleep. I hear him now all the time—”
I sighed. I took the scroll I had been reading and walked across the small round chamber. Formerly, it had been the domain of the Quirinus exchequer, and his disproportionately large and lavishly covered bed stood beneath an oneiric canopy. I had never felt the need to control my dreams as had the exchequer, who was plagued by nightmares. The canopy was off now, its expanse of neural webbing limp and gray as dirty silk. I batted at the flimsy stuff, settled on the bed, and beckoned my sister to join me.
“Vasida has heard him too,” Cumingia blurted, as though I had argued with her. “And Polyonyx—”
“Shh. I am listening.”
It is a thing our Masters have never understood, this manner in which the children of Luther Burdock can hear each other’s thoughts. But even among our Masters there are born those who shared a womb, Gemini and triplets and the like, and these are well-known to possess the ability to feel the emotions of their twins. So why should it surprise our Masters that those of us who share the mind and body of Cybele Burdock can also share our thoughts? Though I must admit that my senses were less acute than my si
sters’.
I closed my eyes, thinking that my proximity to Cumingia—the most sensitive of all of us, though that was like judging between one hair and another—might make it easier for me to detect the voices of that other, the one who named himself Kalaman, and who lived on another distant satellite where they had rebelled and wrested control from their Masters.
My sisters had told me that he spoke quite eloquently of insurgency, of revolution; of returning to claim the Element that the Tyrants had ruled for millennia. But I had not yet heard him for myself. Perhaps my head was too full of my own meditations to easily permit the sly and subtle voice of Kalaman to speak within it. Besides, I knew of what he spoke: the same passionate aria of war and blood that the Oracle proclaimed, and that now sang out across the Ether; the song taken up by one HORUS colony after another as our brothers and sisters rioted and one by one the Ascendants fell, plunging from their shining stations to burn between them like so many livid stars. Afterward the triumphant survivors had called to us, some, like Kalaman, insinuating themselves into our dreams; others stalking through the media chambers, their ’filed images grinning like cats as they read off exultant strings of names and executions, until the transmissions ended and they blinked into splinters of light.
Their messages were all the same. The Asterine Alliance, they called themselves: belonging to the stars. It was what the Oracle had named them, and it was the Oracle that had inspired them; but in this too I was reluctant to go along. I had my own oracle, a little silver globe left by Father Irene, the eunuch priest who had for a little while lived on Quirinus and preached to us of his Goddess. The Ascendants drove him from the colony after two months, but it was too late. We had already fallen in love with him and his mistress, the Wild Maiden, the Lady of the Beasts. It was for her that we sacrificed our breasts—a small thing, because who among us would ever suckle young? And it was true, as Father Irene told us, that we were already hers: for the Ascendants look upon us as beasts, and all animals are sacred to her. Like us she was enslaved, but then freed, and like us too she has her holy rages. She is the moon, and her consort is that smaller moon called Ione, where once the Ascendants held their prisoners: a moon long dead, and all its towers fallen. Her oracle was the little globe that Father Irene had left with us. I know it is not a true oracle, because it does not answer my questions, only shows me images of the Wild Maid over time, and recites her hymns—
The mightiest of mountains tremble, the woods with their cloak of darkness shriek as within the beasts bellow and flee The Element groans, as does the sea where dolphins and sirens seek shelter in the waves, and stars tumble and she runs, in and out, across the sky, in and out among the stars, her arrows flashing as men die and the beasts feed…
It is a bloodthirsty hymn, I suppose, but they are words only, and have given me much solace in the months since Father Irene was deported.
The other Oracle, though, the Asterine Oracle, has given form and weight to its words, and brought new kinds of worship to HORUS. Here on Quirinus our Masters died, but it was not by our hands. We gave them proper interment, casting their bodies into the Ether; but on other colonies our brothers and sisters enact darker rites. The torments of Alijj on Totma 3; pyres of liquid flame at Hotei; their Masters trepanned on Helena Aulis by our brother Kalaman and his followers. Sic semper tyrannus, the Oracle says; thus always to tyrants; and claims that Luther Burdock would have it thus. But it is not in this way that I recall our father. He was a gentle man. I once saw him weep over the body of an aardman who died during the course of routine surgery, and he was unfailingly kind to all those who worked with him, men or beasts or half-men.
And so I believe that I remember him best. I know that I love him best, though my sisters say that cannot be so: that we all can only love him equally, because we are all the same. But I do not feel the same as they do.
This new Oracle also seems to know a different man than I remember.
“Your father is waiting for you on Earth. We have made arrangements, he and I, for all his children to return to him.” That was what the Oracle said. It is a splendid thing, this Oracle, much stronger and more beautiful than mine, though it does not know any hymns. In its appearance it is like a man made of black and shining metal, like a robotic construct; but it says it is a nemosyne—that is, One Who Remembers. What this Oracle remembers is war.
“It is time!” the Oracle announced during one of its recent apparitions. It appears more often now, in the media gallery and sometimes in the hall where we share our meals. Its words are different each time it appears, but their meaning is always the same. It speaks of war, of new triumphs over our Masters (the Oracle calls them the Tyrants); and of how their rule is ending. The Oracle said that the Element was ours by right, since mankind had proved such poor rulers. We had only to slay the Tyrants, and enslave those who survived, and we would come into our vast estate. This at least was the destiny it claimed Luther Burdock had prepared us for; but I remember no such thing of our father. I do not believe he ever desired that his children should wrest control of the Element from his kind; but neither do I believe he meant for us to be slaves. It is a mystery how this should have happened to us. But then, all things about our father are a mystery.
There is much I do not understand about our world, the hollow metal form where we play out our thousand days, thence to die and be replaced by other, identical sisters. But now, with our Masters dead, we have lost the secret of our reproduction. We do not breed, because our Masters felt that allowing us to breed would give us too much control over our own fates. They wished to have the power over us of life and death: and so we are sterile, and live for only a thousand days.
But the Oracle said that our father would undo this evil. If only we would come to him, he would give us all new lives. He and other men had unlocked the secrets of mortality. They had found ways to extend life. We would live for a thousand thousand days. We would live almost forever.
And this, you see, meant a great deal to me. Because of my thousand days, there were less than a score remaining.
But I said nothing of all this to my sister Cumingia when she came to see me in the library. I thought it strange, that she and the others could hear the voice of our brother Kalaman singing across the void, and I could not: I could sense only my sisters here on Quirinus. Hylas and Polyonyx turning restlessly in the bed they shared, Pira’s face nestled between those of Lusine and Hipponyx and Chama, as alike as three violets. But of the others, those of our blood who lived elsewhere in the shining net that made up the HORUS colonies—of them I felt nothing at all.
“He does not speak to me,” I said at last.
“Ach! He is so loud I cannot sleep —” Cumingia pressed her hands to her ears, then flung them out as though she might disperse the voice ringing in her head. “My sister Kalamat, how is it you can’t hear him?”
I sat upon the bed that had been the exchequer’s. In my hands, the scroll I had been reading still gave out the faintest impression of warmth and sunlight, the smell of some rich red fruit rotting in heaps on the warm earth—just a few of the things we had never known outside of the library and its thousands of holofiles.
“I do not know,” I said after a moment, and frowned. The scroll slid from my fingers to the bed, and the sensations passed. Already I could not recall them clearly, though they were there, somewhere within me, within the deeply buried memories of Luther Burdock’s daughter. “What is he saying now?’
“That the Agstra Primus Station has joined the Alliance. That upon the Element there is revolution, in Uropa and the city of Vancouver. That there are many thousands of us now with our father in his stronghold. That they do not understand why we have not joined them.”
Her voice was not accusing, but I felt her disappointment with me, a fine crimson fault line running through the consciousness we shared, the psychic structure I always perceived as a sturdy gray mass like stone or concrete.
“These are all things the Oracle h
as told us already,” I said. “So I do not know why our brother Kalaman must tell us too.”
“He says he is lonely.” Cumingia sat beside me. Her fingers drifted across the cover of my scroll. “It is strange, O my sister Kalamat, that he does not call to you. Very strange.”
She meant it was strange because I was the one they called Kalamat. That was the name given to all energumens by the Tyrants, but among ourselves it is only a priestess who is called that, only a leader. It was to me that Father Irene gave the Oracle of the Great Mother, and so to my sisters I was Kalamat; as this other was named Kalaman by his cohort.
I sighed. Over the last few weeks my sisters had grown increasingly unhappy with my leadership. They wanted to leave Quirinus; to heed the Oracle, go to the Element and there do our father’s bidding and embark upon this holy war. And from what my sisters told me, Kalaman fed their unhappiness. He spoke to them of blood, of the gruesome feast he and his brothers had made of their Masters, and even of their own kind. Kalaman said this blood feast had made them stronger. It had made the bonds between Kalaman and his chosen ones unbreakable, so that they would be chief among those our father would greet when they returned to him. They would be the most beloved of Luther Burdock. And it was this thought that troubled me most; because I wanted my father to love no one as much as me.
My sister knew my mind. “If you were not so full of our father, Kalamat, you might better hear other voices.”
“I would rather hear my father’s voice than this Kalaman’s!” I said sharply. “And why should we believe him? How are we to know that our father really is alive? The Oracle speaks of him, and you say that Kalaman speaks of him. But who has seen him, who awakened him from his long sleep? And, sister, how can we know what is really going on in the Element—how can we even know what is happening anywhere else in HORUS? The only proof we have is ’file transmissions, but ’files can lie. We might be the only ones left in HORUS. With our Masters gone, perhaps the other colonies have fallen into ruin.”
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