Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  Cumingia shook her head, her black eyes blazing. “No! They have all gone before us to the Element, that is all! And Kalaman says an elÿon is coming to take him from the Helena Aulis station. That they will come for us, and with them we will return—”

  “We will not go,” I said stubbornly. “What if it is a trap? What if our Masters seek vengeance for their dead?”

  A sly look crept across Cumingia’s face. “Ah, but it is not, sister! Think of this,” she crowed. “I know something the priestess Kalamat does not!—

  “Our father is going to speak to us! Kalaman says that the Oracle has promised this. Tonight, when we are passing over the region of the Element where he now lives and the ’file signal is strongest: we will hear him for the first time!”

  “You are certain?” My hand flew to where I had offered my breast to the Wild Maid, and made the gesture against lies. “Who has told you this? Kalaman?”

  She nodded. “He has told all of us. Luther Burdock will speak tonight, and welcome us to the Alliance.”

  Our father speaking to us! I felt such joy that I kissed her. “Thank you, my sister! This is wonderful news, and if it is true—if he speaks to us—”

  I said nothing more. I did not want to promise, Then we will leave here. I would wait to hear what our father had to tell us—if indeed it was our father—before going along with any plan to abandon our home on Quirinus. Though in truth there was no way I could prevent my sisters from leaving. I tried to calm myself and began to make preparations for bed.

  After a few minutes my sister Cumingia left me. “I am sorry to have interrupted your reading,” she said, although I was not to read anymore that evening. When she was gone, I sat in silence for a long time. Finally I stood and, crossing to the desk, found there the holofile recorder that still held the ’file disk Cumingia had left with me several days before. Absently I set it on the floor in front of me and watched as the now-familiar image appeared, the flaming eye and golden letters, the strange message ending with the chanted name:

  “ Icarus. Icarus. Icarus. Icarus. ”

  I let the ’file play through twice, then switched it off and replaced the recorder. I sighed, returned to bed, and lay there waiting for sleep to come. It did not. My head was too full of my father, his gentle face at the moment I recall most clearly—

  “ We won’t die? ”

  My own voice, that voice we all shared; and his reply—

  “ Only this, darling — you’ll only remember this —”

  And I recalled the touch of our father’s hands upon my brow, those strong hands that always smelled of iodine and formaldehyde and alcohol spirits, and blood. Finally I turned until I faced the wall, and dreamed of him.

  Ah, Cumingia had the truth of it there! I thought too much of our father, of Dr. Luther Burdock’s hands, his eyes and laughing voice. My mind was ever too full of him. Of finding him again, of having him hug me close to his chest and laugh as he called me Little Moon—but was it to me, Kalamat, or to Cybele that he spoke?

  I do not know. I only know that the dream of our father filled me as the sun filled the iridescent sails that powered Quirinus. Like the sun he was all life, all warmth and brightness to me, and there was not a minute of my life that I did not yearn for him.

  Across the cold reaches of the Ether, on Helena Aulis where Kalamat’s wicked brothers lived, there was a wonderful toy in the room that had been the office of the station’s Chief Architect. The office itself was vast and perfectly round, with walls of such blinding whiteness that, out of desperation, the eye papered them with fantastic images: leaves, winged triangles, swastikas, swimming eyes. The energumen Kalaman, however, had no need of such imaginary embellishments. Before the rebellion, he had spent much time in this office with the Chief Architect, assisting in mundane chores—compiling demographic profiles of the other HORUS colonies, copying renderings of stupas and bunkers in the Balkhash Mountains, reading to the Architect from endless lists of figures.

  It was dull work. An argument could be made that Kalaman’s part in the Asterine Alliance had come about by virtue of his imagining some activity that might combine these assorted bits of trivia. Population figures, maps of armories, numerical equations whose final sum was a new type of bomb: you add them all, and the answer is revolution. One should never underestimate the effects of stupefying boredom upon a bright young student.

  During those eternal sunless days he had first seen the heliotype in use. It was a strategic aid, a type of virtual map. By giving it the proper coordinates, you could create a symbolic visual referent for any celestial object you could imagine, in colors so pure and vivid, they made you want to pop them into your mouth. The sun was a fist-sized ball, a scintillating ruby; the Earth (Kalaman called it the Element) a sea-blue eye; and there were any number of iridescent stars, planets, moons, meteors, comets, aerolites, space stations, and nebulae, as well as enhanced projections of killer asteroids aimed at the moon, satellites poised to implode into glittering dust, quasars like flattened gumdrops, spiky floating remnants of celestial ships, and of course those fanciful efforts to picture ExtraSolar Transports, dubbed asters by the Ascendants; nothing necessarily to scale.

  Kalaman sat there now, an entire galaxy of these images spinning around his head like so many colossal bees. Every now and then he would stop one of the whirling eidolons and draw it to him for inspection, then release it to carom through the air once more. Now his huge black eyes were fixed on a golden torus that spun lazily a few inches from his nose. It was the heliotype’s vision of Quirinus, filtered of course through Kalaman’s own projection of what he wanted the station to look like. So the torus had tiny windows like the hexagonal cells of honeybees, and through them Kalaman could see even tinier figures, black and red and ivory, moving purposefully through their golden hive.

  If he had wanted to—if Kalaman’s vision could somehow have stretched beyond the peeling outer walls of Helena Aulis to encompass the rest of the universe he was so anxious to strike against—he might have seen an elÿon like a fuchsine bubble, trailing quicksilver streamers as it rose to bump against the languidly turning torus. He might have squinted approvingly into the emerald heart of the Element to see a radiant grid, the shimmering perimeters of which encompassed both the City of Trees and the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains; and within that grid a block of white like a cube of sugar, a cube meant to be a building. A house, an inn in fact, where still more livid specks plotted determinedly the overthrow of the Autocracy. He might have glimpsed a peculiar glowing body, half-star and half-moon, shimmering ominously at the perimeter of the heliotype’s range.

  And finally, he might have seen a heavy shining object tumbling languorously against the gleaming white walls of the Architect’s chamber: a space station shaped like an hourglass, and inside it a tiny brick-red form like a crooked finger, surrounded by brilliant sparks, whirling atoms: the dream of Kalaman himself, planning a war within a web of dancing worlds.

  “They are dying, O my brothers! They hardly resist us at all!”

  Kalaman’s voice rang out through the Third Assembly Hall of Helena Aulis. He blinked, smiling, so that his tattooed eyes fluttered coquettishly. Beneath him shone the faces of his eighteen surviving siblings, as though his own face were reflected in myriad mirrors, jet and silver and cinnabar. He was suspended in the air by means of an invisible pensile net—a cheap trick, but effective nonetheless, as the Ascendants had found when using it to welcome prisoners of war or dignitaries from enemy colonies. Beside him floated his brother Ratnayaka. Like Kalaman he was smiling, his hands resting on his knees. Both wore knee-length skirts of linen dyed yellow and green, hitched up now to show their powerful legs, hairless and so heavily muscled, they seemed to be entwined with serpents. They were like twin apsaras, those supernatural concubines with which the Indus deities reward their fallen heroes. Their immense faces serene, their lips parted to show the tip of their tongues, pink and crimson, and their carefully filed teeth.


  “It is time we moved on to the next stage,” Kalaman was saying in his reedy tenor. The other energumens nodded, silent; they could sense what was to come. “The Oracle has spoken to me, and I have done as he commands. Our beloved brother Ratnayaka has prepared the aviettes for our departure tomorrow, Solar Time 0770 hours. We will go to Quirinus. We have sisters there whom we are to welcome into our Alliance. They will join us, and from Quirinus we will journey to the Element.”

  A murmur, a trembling as of wind shaking the limbs of a small forest.

  “The Element, O my brother Kalaman?”

  The question came from Riatu, whose black eyes were fairly invisible in his ebony face. Like most of the others, he had been born on Helena Aulis, where he had toiled in the station’s media center. His only memories of Earth belonged to Cybele Burdock, and had been garishly enhanced by ’file transmissions showing the destruction of Commonwealth bases by Ascendant janissaries and Aviators. For all that he could sense Kalaman’s inarguable will, like strong fingers brushing up and down his spine, his voice was tinged with unease.

  “The Element.” Kalaman nodded, glanced aside at Ratnayaka. His ivory-skinned brother was suspended next to him, his one eye half-closed, the other shrouded by its crimson band beneath its adornment of thin gold rings. Still exhausted by the aftermath of their harrowing of Sindhi, Kalaman imagined, and he smiled before continuing.

  “The Oracle spoke to me this morning. I have several transmissions to share with you, from Hotei and Totma 3 and Vancouver….”

  Within his invisible net Ratnayaka yawned. His brother’s voice became a sonic blur. He was not exhausted, as Kalaman thought. Rather, last night’s harrowing had made him feel immensely huge and powerful: as though he had somehow absorbed Sindhi’s body mass, rather than his soul. But it had left him with an overwhelming hunger, a desire that nearly drove him mad. Sitting there with the taut cords of the pensile web cutting into his legs, Ratnayaka closed his eye because he was afraid it would betray him to his brothers, afraid they would see the hunger there. This was why it was unwise to perform the ritual harrowing by oneself, or with only two participants. The experience had strengthened the psychic bond between himself and Kalaman, and Sindhi too of course—even now he could sense him, like a gathering warmth inside his skull. But the immediate rapture had faded, leaving Ratnayaka with that gnawing hunger. Not a physical craving—the harrowing depleted one of the base need for food, which was fortunate since the stores on Helena Aulis were growing low—but the desire to repeat the sublime experience. To devour a brother’s very essence, so similar to his own, and taste the rich pulp that would release shreds of their shared memory into Ratnayaka’s own mind. Kalaman believed the process somehow helped extend their lives. Perhaps by just a few weeks; but when one’s life span extended only three years, that could be a significant amount of time.

  Of course, one couldn’t go on devouring one’s brothers and sisters forever. Fortunately, there were humans. Although the harrowing of their tyrant masters had been nothing like this, only a confusing jolt of fear and horror before their trepanned bodies were cast into the void. But the process could be refined, of course. Ratnayaka had already begun researching it in the station laboratories. And the Oracle had assured him that upon the Element everything was in place for such a project—it would be a simple matter of occupying the hydrofarms and other bioengineering centers, and exchanging geneslaves for Tyrants….

  “This transmission is from Porto Alegre.”

  Ratnayaka opened his eye. In front of him his brothers stared raptly as the file played. The air filled with smoke and flames, the choking stench of burning chemicals. Tiny figures could be seen running from a series of domes, pursued by larger figures brandishing protonic weapons. Ratnayaka could hear the terrified screams of Tyrants as they were engulfed by flames. All around him, his brothers cheered.

  Abruptly the scene changed, switched in a sickening whirl to another angle (the aardmen who ’filed the transmission were having difficulty mastering the equipment). Rows of Tyrants in yolk-yellow uniforms had been lined up along a pier thrust into the Lagoa dos Patos. Behind them the sky curdled into great clots of scarlet and purple as the sun set behind blazing skyscrapers. In the foreground aardmen crouched, some of them wearing the black star of the Asterine Alliance on bands around their necks. Cacodemons stood beside them, tall and ramrod straight and heavily armed, their faces marred by the bristling spikes of their feeding tubes. From the Tyrants came a faint, high wailing (the audio section of this ’file was also very poor). Then without warning the pier exploded. Liquid flame and burning bits of cloth and flesh rained down upon the ragged Asterine army. The aardmen howled triumphantly. The scene blinked into oblivion, and Ratnayaka’s brothers applauded.

  There were other scenes on other ’files. An audio transmission from the Habilis Emirate colony Sepkur, where the energumens had kept their former masters alive. For nearly a month the Sihk general Aswan Turis had been forced to order his troops on Earth to carry out lunatic attacks upon their own military holdings. Despite his cooperation, the energumens finally killed him, beheading him as the Emirate executes delators, the most common spies and traitors. His body was sent to the Emirate capital in Tripoli, along with a hidden bomb that the energumens detonated from the HORUS station. The Emirate’s military was already weakened by its war with the Ascendants. No one imagined it could withstand this blow.

  Thus it went across the globe. ’File after ’file showed the holocaust engulfing the planet: the rebuilt ruins of Paris once more in flames, its spires and blighted chestnut trees collapsing into ash; floating cities sinking because their hydrapithecenes and sirens had sabotaged them; other coastal cities devastated by energumen-seeded tidal waves and storms when their early-warning systems failed. Few enough of these technological outposts remained on Earth. Now one by one they fell, and the global maps of the HORUS colonies showed darkness like a stain spreading across the continents far below.

  “There are too many of us for them to conquer!” gloated Kalaman, and his brothers clapped and laughed aloud. “Only twenty of us here on Helena Aulis; but a million, ten million, on the Element!”

  The global maps that shimmered in the air before him suddenly blinked off. In their place a tiny orb appeared, pulsing viridian and violet. It grew, sending off showers of sparks and the piercing sound of a glass harmonium. Now the orb was the size of a fist, a skull; now it was the height of a man. Within it the darting shafts of green and purple took on human shape until the Oracle stood there before them, wrapped in heatless lightning.

  “Greetings, brothers!” His voice was sweet and clear as a young boy’s. “You have seen what your sisters and brothers have done without you—are you ready now to join them?”

  Kalaman and his brothers cheered, in a single voice so thunderous that the ceiling trembled and the hanging lanterns flickered.

  “I am glad!” Metatron cried. “Because there is an elÿon coming for you—it will be here tomorrow, when your lights turn over to day.”

  The glowing figure turned, extended one shining hand to where Kalaman watched it through slitted black eyes. “You have done well by your brothers, Kalaman. Your father will embrace you when you arrive—

  “But first you must ready yourselves for him. Whatever weaponry there is on Helena Aulis you must find and bring to the docking area. Also whatever stores remain of food and medicines. From here the elÿon will proceed to Quirinus, to gather your sisters; and then to Earth!”

  And Metatron bowed to Kalaman, more gracefully than any construct, more gracefully than any human man; and the gathered energumens shouted and raised their arms in salute to him and Kalaman. Only Ratnayaka did not shout. He regarded the fanfare coolly with his ebony eye, embracing his brother Kalaman; and with his delicate mouth he smiled. A perilous smile, any man would have realized: the smile of Judas as he kissed his beloved prophet, the smile Clytemnestra wore when she welcomed Agamemnon. But there were no longer any men
on Helena Aulis, and the energumens had not read the classics.

  8

  Izanagi to Quirinus

  INSIDE, THE IZANAGI RESEMBLED every elÿon freighter I had ever boarded: a vast gray space, the color of its pale carpeting lost beneath a layer of dust, its curved walls and ceiling hung with cobwebs that trapped more dust in patterns like limp feathers. The port authority was supposed to disinfect all personnel and freight to prevent intrusions by insects or other parasites. Still, the spiders got on board, somehow. I had never seen an elÿon that did not have them, rain-colored droplets sliding up and down the struts of the drunken webs they wove, unhinged by the craft’s strange gravity.

  The Izanagi seemed cleaner than most vessels—the result of neglect more than fastidiousness. It had been traveling among the HORUS colonies for several months now, with only its adjutant living on board. I half-expected there to be energumen rebels hidden within its chambers, or some kind of automated weaponry; but I found no evidence of either. Perhaps the energumens had used it and cast it adrift until it returned to Cisneros; perhaps it had never come within the reach of the rebel Alliance. But I was impatient, and willing to risk the dangers in order to reach Quirinus.

  As Valeska, Nefertity, and I stepped out into the main entryway, a bell chimed, a hollow, high-pitched tone alerting the crew to our arrival. A minute later doors opened in the misty walls, and several replicant servers appeared to escort us.

  “Imperator Tast’annin,” one hissed. It was a fifth-generation Maio server, dating from the Third Ascension, tall and slender like some attenuated metal insect, with small glowing red eyes. “May I show you to your quarters?”

  “No,” I said shortly, and turned to the server addressing Valeska, another Maio construct with that distinctive sibilant voice. “Captain Novus is the only one among us who will need formal quarters. Who is the adjutant aboard?”