Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  “You have hated very well, Imperator. Now it is time you learned to fear”

  The letters crumbled into ash as Metatron’s voice rose to a howl. The walls of the carrel shook around me and ’files and books slid from tables and shelves. Before my eyes the nemosyne grew larger, billowing out like an elÿon readying for flight, until he seemed to take up the entire room: a vast black cloud shot with violet lightning, pierced by two raging emerald eyes. With an explosive roar he was gone.

  Silence; then a barely audible sound echoed in the room.

  Another voice, my own voice, faint and tremulous as though it had been recorded on faulty equipment and was now being played back from a great distance—years, perhaps; decades …

  “ I must serve somebody, ” it— I —said; and then the library grew silent one more.

  The chamber’s light had dimmed when a sound roused me.

  “Imperator.”

  I whirled, my hand raised to strike; but at the far end of the room stood Captain Novus. Her face was red, her eyes puffy from the drugs she had been given. “A replicant woke me and said that we are approaching Quirinus.” She yawned, rubbing her arms, and shook her head. “The time says it’s been fifty-three hours. Is that possible?”

  Fifty-three hours! But of course it was possible. It seemed now that anything was possible.

  “Yes,” I said numbly. I was glad I had only one human hand, and that she could not see how it trembled. “I warned you, elÿon travel is disorienting.”

  I walked past her, headed for the door leading back to the navigation cell. “Make sure Nefertity has been reactivated. Both of you will meet me in the adjutant’s chamber as soon as possible.”

  She stared at me, surprised at my subdued tone, then nodded. “As you wish, Imperator,” she said, and hurried down the corridor.

  In the navigation cell I tried to question Lascar Franschii about my vision of Aidan Harrow and the subsequent message from the nemosyne he referred to as the Oracle.

  “Of course there are ghosts here!” the adjutant whined. “There are ghosts on every elÿon, how do you think we travel so quickly? They pull us, we are chained to them, spirits of the past, the dead, the damned—”

  There was more of this babble, but in a rage I yanked his speaking tube from the wall. When Valeska and Nefertity arrived, Lascar Franschii was thrashing furiously within his web of wires, squeaking like a bat.

  “That is cruel,” Nefertity said coldly. She slid the speaking tube back into his mouth. A froth of blood and spittle greeted her for her kindness, and a stream of curses. Even Captain Novus looked appalled.

  “We’d better find the docking area,” she said as the adjutant kicked weakly at the wall behind him. Without a word I strode to the door, not waiting for the others to follow.

  “Will he—will that affect our landing?” Captain Novus asked uneasily when we were out of earshot. “He seems to be having some kind of seizure.”

  “We have fallen into a trap that Lacar Franschii has helped set for us, Captain Novus. Please arm yourself and be prepared for a hostile encounter. Under no circumstances should you allow my replicant to be harmed.”

  Valeska Novus swallowed and glanced at Nefertity beside her like a radiant shadow. “Yes, Imperator,” she said, and was silent.

  We entered the main corridor, its glowing walls painting us all a lurid crimson. At the end of the hallway was the door through which we had first entered the Izanagi. Three of the Maio servers stood beside it, their silver faces turned attentively toward us.

  “Imperator Margalis Tast’annin,” one of them announced in its clear, cold voice as we approached. “There is no human escort on HORUS colony Quirinus to greet you. A psychological reading of those aboard shows only thirteen auxiliary personnel, female energumens from Kalamat Cluster 533. There is evidence of recent biochemical sabotage. In addition, three auxiliary capsules bearing the designation HORUS Colony Helena Aulis are in the process of making an unauthorized docking at Quirinus. We recommend aborting this mission.”

  “I don’t believe we could abort this mission under any circumstances,” I said curtly. “And we will have no need of human escorts. I have reason to believe that the energumens are expecting us.”

  Before us the door shuddered as the elÿon docked into the main entryway of the HORUS station. I could hear Valeska’s shallow breathing, and from the navigator’s cell far behind us the voice of Lascar Franschii bellowing with laughter. With a sound like a knife scraping glass, the entry-way began to open. Brilliant blue light poured into the chamber, mingling with the elÿon’s crimson glow to turn everything a vivid purple. A moment later we were gazing into the vast recesses of Quirinus.

  11

  Cassandra

  AS OUR CARAVAN APPROACHED the river bounding Cassandra, I could see why the Ascendants had not been able to destroy the town. Protonic cannons lined the riverbank: steel-blue cylinders pointed at the sky, steaming in the morning sun. Earthen berms and small brick outbuildings rose beside them, and from these swarmed figures clad in the dusty blue hoods and tunics I slowly realized must be the uniform of the Asterine Alliance. Most of these figures were men and women; but there were others who went about unclothed, or wearing abbreviated versions of the uniform. Aardmen with their hunched gait; ethereal argalæ, struggling to carry the smallest cartons in their frail twiglike arms; cacodemons and huge and horrible four-legged things like equine men. All of them moved busily along the shore, like the apocalyptic figures in a recusant’s tapestry brought to life. Beyond them the river was wide and brilliant as the sky, and as calm. I could see where fish were rising to snap at clouds of insects, and where a motorized dinghy V’ed lazily through the placid waters as though on no more serious errand than fishing, heading for the far shore.

  “There’s a checkpoint ahead,” Cadence warned us. She pointed to a ramshackle metal building at river’s edge. Immediately past it a bridge spanned the water, its rusted spans repaired with wooden beams and salvaged metal. “ I’ll take care of everything.” She glanced at Jane, then turned back to the wheel. Jane looked affronted. She stuck her chin in the air and in beleaguered silence joined me at the open window.

  The van crept the last few yards toward the guardhouse. People had stopped their work—mostly hauling crates and canisters from several other ancient caravans parked near the cannons—and stood in small groups, staring at us as the sentries waved us through. Beside the guardhouse a huge figure stood by a smaller, hooded one, inspecting something that might have been a transformer or some kind of old ’file transmitter. As I watched, the larger creature turned, very very slowly, and stared at us as we passed. I had an impression of fawn-colored skin and slightly darker hair, and eyes that were black and implacable as a starless sky.

  At that unblinking gaze a cold tongue of dread licked at me, and I shuddered. Even from a distance there was something eerie, almost obscene, about that form. As though some ancient monolith had begun to move—like the City’s Obelisk or Sorrowful Lincoln—something formed over the course of aeons out of marble and fire and blood; something that should never have been given life. The thing watched our caravan rattle by, its huge hands holding the dully gleaming core of the transmitter as though it were a hollow log. As the van rounded a corner, I turned to look back at it. For an instant its eyes met mine, and I gasped.

  Because those eyes—pupilless, cold and deep as black water—were utterly without guile or hatred. For all the grotesque immensity of its body, the gaze that met mine glowed with the rapturous curiosity of a child’s.

  “What is that?” I whispered.

  Jane stared after it, her face drawn.

  “Energumen,” she said. I knew from her expression that she had never before seen one alive.

  Nor had I. I had never even quite believed that they existed, let alone that one might work peacefully side by side with humans. The notion had seemed too ludicrously horrible even for the Ascendants: deformed, bioengineered clones twice the size of a
man, created to serve as slaves in the HORUS colonies and the most distant reaches of the Archipelago.

  This one, though, had not been quite so large as I had imagined—perhaps only two feet taller than a man, though beside it that solitary human had looked spindly and utterly inconsequential in his loose uniform. I stared after them until our caravan began to cross the bridge.

  “Christ,” Jane muttered. She stood beside me and looked dispiritedly out at the rusted spars and sagging cables. “We’re in for it now, Wendy.”

  I pointed to where dull-gray canisters and spiky arrays of wire and metal had been bound to the struts with lengths of barbed wire, until the whole thing looked like the work of some great caddisworm. Jane nodded glumly.

  “Explosives. They’ve got the whole thing rigged so that if anyone tries to cross—like, say, someone trying to rescue us—the bridge will go under— pfft —like that.”

  In the front seat Cadence turned and gave us a warning look. Jane grew silent, crossing her arms on her chest and casting a baleful glance to where Suniata stood in silence beside the driver’s seat, his round carp’s-eyes fixed on the road before us.

  And so we reached the shores of Cassandra. Behind us the placid waters of the Shenandoah curled out of sight between the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Ahead of us stretched the road, wider now, with long gouges in the red clay where shallow trenches had been dug and rudimentary channels stood half-full of rusty-looking water. Our caravan slowed, creeping to avoid boulders and trees that had fallen in the course of constructing more armories and crude storage buildings. There were many men and women working here, wearing the hooded blue uniform of the Alliance, as well as a number of energumens: all carrying sacks of meal and grain, dragging great steel beams across the wounded ground, pulling the broken axle from beneath a pile of wreckage. Compared to their slight, almost scrawny forebears, the energumens were surprisingly graceful, with smooth, heavily muscled bodies. Most wore only a loose linen skirt about their narrow waists. Their skins were different colors—the same vibrant red as the Virginia clay; a dusky bluish-brown, like the flesh of a muscat grape; an ivory tone like fluid wax.

  But what I found strangest about them was their faces. Or rather, their face —because they all shared the same features. Large intelligent eyes above rounded cheeks, wide foreheads, childish round mouths. Jane grimaced when they stopped their work and gazed after us, but to me they looked like grotesquely large children. Only their eyes betrayed their demonic origins, with black iris and cornea and tiny white pupils, and the same expression of intense inquisitiveness as they watched us pass.

  There was another checkpoint up ahead, and an even more staggering array of weaponry, all of it arranged in shining, neatly ordered columns beneath the lacquered blue sky. At the sight, even Jane’s customary irony turned to disbelief.

  “Scarlet was right,” she said. Outside, two energumens worked on a metal platform that supported a satellite dish twice the size of our van. On the ground beneath them another energumen manipulated a control panel. Slowly the entire apparatus swiveled, liked a monstrous clockwork toy. “This really is war.”

  “Not just war.” Cadence looked over her shoulder while she steered the caravan with her one hand. “Jihad.”

  Jane frowned. “Jihad?” Suniata nodded, and Cadence smiled triumphantly.

  “ Holy war,” she said. “To avenge them, and redeem ourselves.”

  “Redeem who ?” Jane asked suspiciously.

  “Us. All of humanity.” Cadence’s voice took on the same ringing tone I had heard in Miss Scarlet’s when she played one of the more ardent roles in her repertoire, Saint Joan or Clytemnestra or Maw-ree Zilus. The van veered dangerously close to a stack of bricks as she went on. “This is a war of redemption—yours, ours, all of humanity’s! We sought to enslave the world, and like all slaves the world has finally rebelled. It is up to us, for those humans who have joined the Alliance, to redeem our race. The Earth will be cleansed of humanity. We will free those beings we created, end their centuries of servitude, so that at last they can take their places beside us in a new world—”

  She paused to look over at Suniata, and her eyes shone with a radiance that transcended anything I had ever seen before in a man or woman. Not simple love, certainly not lust; but an intensity of expression that I can only describe as beatific. It was a gaze that scorched; I could imagine myself flinching if she was to turn it upon me. I thought then of her father and the enhancer he had worn over his damaged face, and wondered if his eyes had withered away from such incandescent ardor.

  And then I felt the cool, slightly moist touch of Suniata’s hand upon mine, and a simple thought like a jolt of adrenaline, coursing from his fingers to my brain—

  But of course! Didn’t you know?

  I drew away sharply, staring into that bloated fishlike face as though into a warped mirror. Suniata only nodded and turned back to Cadence. Jane put her hand on my shoulder and tried to pull me to her.

  “Wendy? What is it?” I shook her away, suddenly frightened.

  Because all this time I had thought of the cacodemon merely as an odd accessory to this journey; a creature whose function was to serve as some kind of silent adjunct to Cadence, perhaps to cow Jane and me by his presence.

  But now, with Cadence gazing at him with that wonder and reverence and, yes, fear, igniting her blue eyes, I saw the truth of it.

  The cacodemon was not her servant. She was his. In some misguided effort to reverse the wrongs of hundreds of years of genetic engineering and biological warfare, the human members of the Asterine Alliance had offered themselves as infantry and handsel to the geneslaves.

  “No, not beside us in that new work!—above us,” Cadence continued. Her hood had slipped from her head, so that all I saw was a halo of brilliant white above the blue folds of her uniform. “This world has become unlivable. The sun is poisoned, and the water, so that nothing from our past can safely live upon it.

  “But these others—”

  She raised the stump of her left hand triumphantly. “The new creatures, the ones we created—they can survive in this world we have made! To them the poisons are like cool water, and darkness is daylight. They can live among the stars without falling prey to madness, and when they breed—and they will!—they will have only a single offspring, so that the subtle balance of our new world will not be overthrown. We gave birth to them in darkness, but that darkness has welcomed them, even as it has swallowed us.”

  I felt as though someone had run an icy finger across my throat. “Are you—do you mean to make slaves of us, then? Your own kind?”

  Cadence shook her head. “No,” she said softly, her voice nearly drowned by the droning engines. “You will see—we are not devoured by self-hatred, seeing these new creatures. They would never have come to be, were it not for us; were it not for their father, the man who gave birth to all of them. We honor them, that is all. We honor him.

  “But you’ll see, Wendy. And Jane. Icarus is coming. And when he comes, a new world will come with him, even as this one falls away.”

  She crouched back over the steering wheel, the wind whipping her hair into silver froth. For another moment Suniata looked at me, his gaze flat and inscrutable as a viper’s.

  Icarus. Into my mind rose the image that had been printed on Giles’s packets of cigarettes, and on the wine and brandy we’d drunk at Seven Chimneys.

  Iχαpυσ

  Icarus: that was what the strange characters spelled. Whomever—or whatever—the Asterine Alliance had taken as their emblem, was a thing called Icarus.

  For the first time Suniata spoke aloud, the tendrils around his mouth rising as though to taste the name.

  “Icarus,” he whispered, and nodded at me. Then he turned to stare outside.

  “Icarus,” I thought, and even though the name was meaningless to me, I felt it like a palpable weight upon my heart.

  In her seat Cadence peered through the front window, occasionally glancing at
Suniata and nodding as though to some unspoken question. From the manner in which the cacodemon touched her—his long flattened fingers brushing now her neck, now her elbow or the wrinkled stump of her arm—I imagined they must be engaged in conversation, a new and subtle means of speech that stupid folk like Jane or me would never understand. Twice Suniata pointed, and Cadence craned her neck to see what he had indicated: improvements, I gathered, that had been made since their departure the day before.

  Beyond the edge of the road were endless heaps of crates and heavy canvas sacks, some of them ripped open to spill their burden of ammunition and armored clothing beneath the tossing limbs of birches and young oaks. Behind the trees hundreds of vehicles were thrown together, nosing each other like bastard pups searching for their mother: caravans and jitneys and trucks and trylons, Ascendant aviettes with their wings folded up like a pterosaur’s and blunt-nosed Harkers from the Commonwealth. In the distance I glimpsed the wreckage of a fouga. Its outer skin had burned away so that only its steel infrastructure remained, like the shattered ribs and vertebrae of a whale gnawed to bone by some unimaginably vast predator. Two cacodemons emerged slowly from its blackened hulk, dragging corpses and what looked like the body of a huge worm. Others of their kind huddled together over the ruins of the dirigible’s gondola, shaking their heads solemnly and staring at a flickering image that might have been a holofile of the warship’s flight plan.

  “Look at all this,” Jane murmured, shaking her head. “They must have gone to war against the entire world, to get all this….”

  “Oh, but we have,” said Cadence, and Jane fell silent.

  The caravan drove out from under the canopy of oaks, to a sunlit place where the road widened. To either side grass and flowering vines grew over the remains of ancient buildings long since given over to the earth. Here the mountains were so close that I could smell them, their secrets trickling from dark places like water, the wind rushing down gray cuffs in a cold torrent. Through a stand of live oaks, their trunks blackened and burled with age, I could glimpse the very foot of the mountain, a gray-and-green rampart rising thousands of feet above us until it vanished in blue haze. Scattered about its base were broken chunks of granite and boulders like chunks of dirty ice. From the center of all this rose an immense pair of polished metal doors, buttressed with steel beams and smooth slabs of rock that must have been torn from the mountain itself. Trees grew above the doors, spindly, gnarled trees whose roots clutched at the loose soil trapped between stones that had been loosed by avalanche or storm. For all the sunlight and warmth spilling from the unclouded sky, it was a grim place. I could imagine black eagles nesting there, or vultures, but not wrens or larkspurs or the darting wild finches: nothing that might give voice to song.