Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  “Well, are you going to turn me in, Sky Pilot?”

  I pushed down the urge to hit him and looked away. “No. But someone will. Where do you get them, anyway?”

  He shrugged, reached into a pocket and took out a tiny silver canister, bullet-shaped and with a crystal head. He unscrewed it and tapped out an amphaze patch, slipped it ostentatiously behind one ear. “My father. He was a collector. They’re worth a lot. ”

  “Not anymore,” I said coldly. Aidan was always trying to impress people with how much his father owned—furniture, books, even a house. From what Emma said, it was all true, which made it even worse that Aidan spoke so blithely of it. “One of these days they’re going to seize all his things and it will be your fault. And that”—I pointed to where he’d hidden the talking book—“ that’s just garbage. Why do you waste your time with it?”

  Aidan’s breath came more quickly. I watched his pupils dilate, as quickly as a dog’s when threatened. When he spoke, I could smell the amphaze on his breath, an unpleasant chemical scent like raw alcohol or morpha.

  “Because they tell me things.”

  I shivered a little. The wind had come up over the sea, and with the sun gone over the ridge of land behind us, it had grown cool, as it does of an evening in the maritimes. But it was Aidan’s voice that chilled me. That same voice he used to hold us in thrall at night in his room, while the bottles passed around and our furtive games played themselves out, with all of us secretly waiting for some great dark revelation that never came.

  “Things? They tell you things?” I tried to sneer as Amaris di Gangi had; but the wind made my voice sound thin and sour.

  Aidan’s eyes glittered dangerously. “There is another world beneath this one. You should know that—isn’t it what your mother’s poetry is all about? This world is getting torn away, everything we’ve done to it has made it weak and tired; and now the other world is showing through. Some day it will be all that’s left….”

  I sighed loudly. My mother’s work—deliberately obscure visionary poetry, harking back to eighteenth-century verse that no one but herself seemed to have heard of—had enjoyed a fleeting popularity before it was condemned for its decadence. “Well, for now, this world is the one I’m worried about,” I said, adding, “If I worry at all.”

  “You should,” Aidan said with the smug air of a recent convert. “Did you know they’re predicting some kind of cataclysm within this century? Within our lifetimes, Sky Pilot.”

  “Oh, really? Who is predicting this? Jude Hwong? From the gas chamber?”

  Aidan shook his head. “You shouldn’t sneer at it, Margalis.” His seriousness was laughable; I almost didn’t notice he had used my real name. “You know, he quotes your mother in here—that poem about the Watcher in the Skies. He says it’s a revelation of the cataclysm—”

  “It’s a revelation he even read it,” I said drily. When he did amphaze or anything else, Aidan’s talk was always like this. Old gods, old sciences. The self-destructive research that had so eroded the thin civilized surface of our world that another, more ancient one was about to break through any day.

  “You think it’s all madness, don’t you?” Now Aidan sounded edgy. He had turned from watching the seals to sit with knees bent, fingers tapping nervously along the creases in his yellow trousers. “But you know, Margalis, it’s no crazier than what they teach us here. Focusing on some inner landscape so that we don’t see our hands burning to bone in front of us. Focusing on the sound of the Gryphon’s engines, so we don’t hear the pilot screaming in the other seat. Taking vows of vigilance and obedience and swearing off the most basic human emotions. Cutting open nursling aardmen, to see if they will scream under the knife.”

  “Those are exercises. They’ll save your life someday, in combat—”

  “I know what they are! But these are exercises, too—”

  He touched his breast where the talking book was hidden, and I recalled how I had found him once before, the Defries Incunabula open on his bed, chanting softly at the dawn. “The Academy teaches you that there are other ways to see the world. Well, my books teach you that there are other worlds to see.”

  I maintained a cold silence. As I said, there was much talk like this in the Academy. We were young, some of us barely more than children, and such things appeal to youth. Millennial cults, the revival of archaic and often lurid religions. To Aidan and everyone else I showed a hard face when the conversation turned to such matters—and inevitably it did; we may have been NASNA cadets, but the oldest among us was not yet twenty—but for myself, I was profoundly disturbed by Aidan’s books, by his ecstatic desire to believe in old gods, old ways. I was disturbed because such things made sense to me, in a manner that I could never articulate.

  When I first was assigned to the domed city of Araboth and met Shiyung Orsina, the youngest of the Orsinas’s ruling family, I found that we shared an interest in odd cults and quaint rituals. She merely as a fancy, something to whet her jaded and decadent tastes; but for me it was always deeper than that. Without precisely understanding how or why, I have always been driven by a hidden need to believe in something; but I have never found anything stronger than myself to believe in.

  This compulsion to serve is deeply ingrained in an Aviator. We are taken in childhood, and from our earliest days we are trained to obey. But we are also encouraged to flout authority, to usurp it when possible and if necessary betray even our closest allies, our most beloved ideals. It is the only way for a military elite to survive in a world so fragmented that it defies rational attempts at control. So it is that the Aviators hold within them a dangerously contorted psyche, as meticulously and deliberately twisted as those tiny trees the Nipponian emperors raise in their solariums in the Floating Land. It is never a surprise when an Aviator goes mad; it only matters if his madness keeps him from carrying out his duties.

  In Aidan’s case, his obsession with things demonic, with disaster cults and astronomy, obsolete sorceries and obscure religions, had ruined his concentration. He missed classes, exercises, training events. Even repeated visits to the infirmary and threats of a prolonged course of mind treatments were not enough to keep him from reading and enacting his little private seances.

  But what was worst, to me at least, was the way that he had somehow managed to infect me with his madness. I had achieved First in our level, and it was rumored that I would be given a commission before graduation. The conflict with the Emirate was not going well; it would not be the first time a student had been sent to war before completing his course of studies. I would never jeopardize my chances of escaping from the Academy by doing anything so obvious (and stupid) as attempting to raise some demon in my dormitory room. But Aidan’s bitter cynicism toward NASNA and his peculiar taste in books had affected me nonetheless.

  I wanted to believe in something. Worse, I needed to. It was no longer enough that the skirmishes be won, the conflicts shortened or ended, the Orsinate or the Autocracy satisfied by our efforts. I needed to believe in something else; something greater than myself. I was trained to accept the Aviators as the finest, strongest, most brilliant men and women of the continent. At the Academy I learned that I was the finest among them all. It was no surprise to me, really, when years later I was named Aviator Imperator. My madness and eventual rehabilitation as a rasa: no, I had not expected that. But I had been ready to accept the mantle of Imperator, perhaps since that first day I entered the ascetic confines of the Academy.

  Still, if I was the jewel in the Autocracy’s crown, I had to believe in the worthiness of the brow I adorned. And it was painfully obvious, even to my nineteen-year-old self, that the Ascendants and the Orsinate were not worthy of me. But if t hey were not, who, or what, was? Bred and trained as a weapon, I must serve somebody. Aidan’s books and Aidan’s talk made me think that there might be other ways of serving; other things to serve.

  “What other worlds are you talking about, Aidan?”

  I tried to make my
tone disdainful, but the curiosity was there, a raw kernel of it plain as the cold rock beneath us. Aidan saw my weakness, and laughed.

  “The Sky Pilot wants other worlds now! Huh—”

  He looked away, off to where the sky was greening twilight above the sea’s horizon. After a moment he said in a softer voice, “Well, there are other things. There is the Watcher in the Skies, for one. And other things, too. We—I—have seen some of them. At home.” The reluctance that crept into his voice made me realize that Emma, too, must know some of this. Perhaps that accounted for her unhappiness, her habit of always looking out the corner of her eyes. “And here, too.”

  “What have you seen here?” I could no longer even pretend at offhandedness. From across the green sweep of lawn came the sturdy echo of the bell clanging for the first dinner shift, but I ignored it. “Could you—can you show me?”

  “It’s not like that,” said Aidan impatiently. “These things—whatever they are—they have their own reasons for showing themselves to us. I mean, Jude Hwong says that the records show the Watcher of the Skies last appeared nearly four hundred years ago. I don’t know when we’ll see it again. All of these things—it’s not like you call them and they come. It’s more—well, it’s more like interfacing with the Gryphons. You prepare yourself— I prepare myself—and sit back, and then it’s there.”

  Now I grew impatient. “ What’s there?”

  “Something else.” He fidgeted, suddenly at a loss for words. He squinted into the sunset, the ruddy light making his face look almost molten. “Don’t you ever think about that, Margalis?” he asked softly. “How strange all this is?”

  He gestured at the sea, the sky, the waving firs behind us. “Here it all looks the way it always did; but the rest of the world has changed completely. I mean, Hwong says how once there were archosaurs everywhere, and now there’s us; but someday we might be gone, and it will be only…”

  His voice drifted off. For a moment he looked sadder and more serious than I had ever seen him. “Seeing Kalamat that time—they really are different from us, the energumens. In a way, they’re better. They can learn everything we can, only faster; and obviously they’re stronger. Even the name energumen —and Burdock never called them that, he always called them his children—it means ‘possessed by demons.’

  “But the demons that possess them are us. ”

  He stood, as though to embrace the ridge that hid the Academy from our sight. After a moment his arms fell limply, and he sighed. “Christ, I can’t explain it, really. It’s just like there’s something else there. I could see it, that day they brought Kalamat here. I could see it in her eyes. Something older than me, or any of us, a sort of presence. And now it’s inside me, or trying to get inside me. Or else it’s in there now and trying to get out.”

  I stared at him, my mouth open to make a cruel retort. But Aidan’s eyes were wide and staring, distant yet glowing with a sort of manic concentration. He looked crazed, but there was a certain kind of sense in his words.

  I had heard of people going mad in the HORUS colonies. Some of them—astrophysicists in particular were prone to this—claimed to be possessed by the spirits of American astronauts. Others simply went mad, raving that extrasolar beings had invaded their minds. During the twenty-second century, when the strange phenomenon of the Watcher of the Skies appeared, scientists and other observors in HORUS went into an apocalyptic frenzy—for naught, as it turned out. The flaming eidolon disappeared as slowly and silently as it had appeared. Just another one of the oddities of life in the colonies. That was why the energumens and other cacodemons were first sent to HORUS—space did not drive them mad. I said as much to Aidan.

  “And you don’t have to get all worked up over these things, you know,” I added, somewhat smugly. “Just put yourself into an E-state and give your mind a chance to respond. Anyone can do it—”

  Well, anyone with the training and discipline of a true Aviator. Aidan creased his brow, but he didn’t look annoyed. It didn’t look as though he were thinking of me at all anymore. His indifference angered me, that and his absolute certainty that he was privy to some great secret.

  “You’re going to get suspended, Aidan, or expelled, for wasting your time with books like that. Someone will turn you in.” I started to my feet, halted in a half-crouch when he turned to me, his eyes blazing from gray to blue.

  “What do you know about it?” he cried. “There are all kinds of things they do that we don’t understand, that don’t make any sense—”

  When he said they, he jabbed his hand in the direction of the Academy, where the silhouettes of our classmates could be seen hurrying toward supper, black and thin as though etched against the sky with a needle. But I knew he wasn’t really thinking of them but of those others, our masters: the Ascendants in their distant circuits of the Earth, falling slowly and endlessly through the heavens. “Their geneslaves, their mutagens—does that make sense? Luther Burdock deforming his daughter for science— that makes sense?”

  I shrugged. In the face of this outburst my own anger dissipated as abruptly as it had come on. “Well, does it?” Aidan shouted.

  I made a show of rolling my eyes and sighing. Then I turned away and pried a bit of stone from the boulder, tossed it into the waves curling and receding in the darkness below. “No. Of course it doesn’t.”

  I had no idea what had gotten into him. I said so, adding, “And he didn’t deform his daughter—all those modifications were made long after he and Cybele were dead. You know that.”

  “I don’t see how you can defend him,” Aidan spat; although in fact I had said nothing in defense of Burdock, then or ever. “He used her clone, and what’s the difference there? It would be like using Emma for an experiment, instead of me. And ever since then—well, they’re really not human anymore, are they?”

  I started to argue with him, but stopped. It was hopeless arguing with Aidan when he lost his temper, especially after he’d done an amphaze dot. He would end up punching me, or running off in a fury, or shouting until he brought one of our rectors down upon us. Instead I stood, shivering in the evening air. “We better get back if we want to find any supper left.”

  He sat crouched at my feet, his eyes still ablaze. To my surprise he only nodded and stumbled up. “You’ll never understand,” he said bitterly. He kicked at a pocket of loose stones, sending them flying into the water. “Fucking Sky Pilot. Fucking Rocket Man—”

  He turned and headed for the grassy knoll that led to the Academy. I waited to see if he would look back, gesture for me to hurry after him; but he only hunched his shoulders against the chilly breeze and went on by himself. After a few minutes I followed.

  Within a few days I had utterly forgotten our conversation. Years later I would recall it, when I was at HEL and saw the fruits of his sister’s manipulation of the brains of children; and again when Lascar Franschii told me of the fate of the Quirinus station.

  As I have said, time passes differently in the elÿon. It is a risk derived from the means of travel, the great biotic craft powered by the brain of a madman—a deliberately engineered madman, but a lunatic nonetheless. So powerful was the adjutants’ control over the psychic atmosphere of their vessels that even the shortest of voyages, such as ours, were often upset by passengers growing disturbed and sometimes violent—thus the reliance over the centuries upon psychotropic drugs as a means of controlling them. Superstitious colonists, particularly those from the fundamentalist inner territories, believed that dreams became unmoored during passage, to stalk and sometimes destroy their creations.

  And certainly strange things happened aboard the elÿon. In the beginning women were often used as adjutants. It was thought that their greater capacity for pain—proved through the rigors of childbirth and such anomalies as the remarkable fate of those survivors of the inferno on Pequod 9 —would make them ideal navigators. But then it was found that missions piloted by women were more likely to end in bizarre tragedies. The most comm
on explanation given was that women dreamed more lucidly than men. After the Second Ascension the Kataly, a Commonwealth elÿon, was lost with all hands. When its ’files were retrieved from the wreckage, investigators viewed scenes of nearly incomprehensible rites being performed by passengers and crew alike, ending with a bacchanalian dance that led to mass exodus through one of the craft’s air locks. The adjutant then piloted the elÿon through a convoy of diplomatic aviettes headed for NASNA Prime. Later, it was learned that the adjutant had been an adherent of the Mysteries of Lysis. Some reverie of hers had no doubt spawned the mass hallucinations and ecstatic dancing that led to the loss of the vessel.

  In the wake of this discovery, robotic crews replaced human ones. Women were seldom used as navigators, and male candidates were carefully screened for attributes such as excessive imagination and tenacity of religious belief. I tell you all this so that it may perhaps be easier to understand what happened to me during that brief celestial journey.

  I had often traveled by elÿon in my earlier life. It was unavoidable during my tours in the HORUS colonies, and later when I was stationed at NASNA Prime, before my unhappy assignment to the abandoned capital. Nearly always I had refused the psychotropic drugs administered by the vessels’ medical constructs. I also refused to remain in the tiny cells that were required for all passengers and most crew. A matter of pride, I will admit. But I never experienced anything resembling a hallucination; never glimpsed the legendary celestial body that my mother had written of in Mystica.

  The Watcher in the Skies was one of the great mysteries of the HORUS colonies. Since its first—and, as far as we knew then, its only—appearance in the years 2172 and 2173, it had inspired countless works of art and speculative science. There were also numerous eyewitness accounts, such as that famous passage in Commander Ned Wyeth’s Astralaga, where he writes of