“Wendy Wanders,” I finally said.
“Very n-nice. And you?”
Jane stuck her chin out belligerently. “Jane Alopex. And look, Doctor Burdock, we don’t have—”
The man rolled his eyes and nodded, flapping his hand. “Of course, of course! You’re not p-prisoners here, Jane—W-wendy? I hope they didn’t tell you that?” He peered at us worriedly.
Jane looked taken aback. “Well, no,” she admitted after a moment. Dr. Burdock looked relieved.
“Because that’s really not the point of any of this at all, is it? Really quite the opposite, really just the sort of th-thing we’re trying to do away with here. You understand?”
He leaned forward, looking up at us earnestly through his glasses and fumbling at his shirt pocket until he found a packet of cigarettes. He lit one and took several deep drags before continuing.
“Oh, I know some of my advisers get a little zealous at times—you can understand that, can’t you? I mean, having seen firsthand what we’re up against?—but I wouldn’t want you to think we were holding you here against your will. I wouldn’t want you to think that at all.”
Behind a veil of blue smoke his eyes widened and he tilted his head, waiting for our assurance. I coughed nervously. When it became apparent Jane wasn’t going to say anything, I cleared my throat and said, “Well, yes. I mean, we did think that—we didn’t really want to come here, but they didn’t give us much choice, and everything—I mean, the manner in which we were escorted here—well, it did make me—us—think we were prisoners.”
Dr. Burdock frowned, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. Finally he shook his head.
“Well,” he said, raising his eyebrows as though the idea had just occurred to him. “Well, maybe you are, then. Hmm.”
He made a face and looked at me more closely through the smoke. “You’re the empath? The one Trevor told me about, the one from the—what do you call it—the Engineering Laboratory for Health?”
“The Human Engineering Laboratory.”
“Right-o! The Human Engineering Laboratory!” He beamed, as though I had scored well on a test. “Well! And you’re an empath—that is, you can sense the emotions of other people? Without their telling you, without touching them?”
I shook my head. “Not anymore. I used to—I used to be able to read dreams. And I did have to touch them. I—I need some contact. With their blood, or saliva.”
“Mmm.” Dr. Burdock frowned, tipped more ashes into the overflowing metal disk. “Not really a psychic, then. No incidences of clairvoyance, poltergeist activity, nothing unusual like th-that?”
I thought of the Boy in the Tree, of the visions I had seen with my brother Raphael. I looked away. “Nothing.”
A slightly disappointed silence. The sound of the waterfall seemed to grow louder. Then, “Oh, well,” he said, smiling. “You’re welcome here anyway, there’s always room for eager young people. You are rather young, aren’t you? How old—sixteen? seventeen?”
“Eighteen.”
He stubbed out his cigarette, raising his eyebrows at Jane, and she concurred. He said, “Eighteen! Well, that’s still very young, compared to me, of course, forty-three, though it doesn’t seem so long, though of course, you know, sometimes it feels like forever….”
The brown eyes seemed to cloud over. When he spoke again, his voice was softer and even more hesitant. “I had a daughter, you know. Not much younger than you. Cybele. She was—”
He sighed and looked away, to where the energumens hunched over their monitors. “She was a beautiful girl,” he finished softly. “I miss her so much, even now. Even after all this time. I keep thinking I’ll see her, that perhaps one of them might—”
He broke off with a sigh. The darkness in his eyes spread across his face, and his mouth twitched, almost as though he were talking to himself. “But of course, none of them really do,” he said after a moment. He looked at me and smiled sadly, then shook his head, the way a dog does to shake off the rain. “Oh, well. Perhaps we can make it different someday soon. This wasn’t at all what I had in mind, you know—”
He gestured at the energumens, the shadowy forms of two aardmen heading toward the narrow bridge behind the waterfall. At last his gaze fell with distaste upon the argala. “What they’ve done with my work. These poor c-creatures. Prostitutes. S-slaves. Not my idea, not my idea at all,” he ended firmly, and chewed his lower lip. “And the others—what they did to my girls…”
His voice trailed off and he stared into the darkness. “Savagery,” he said a long moment later, the word coming out in a hiss. “S-savage beasts ! To think they would do that, to think they would take a child and—”
He lowered his voice, but pointed with a quick stabbing motion toward the energumens. “That. Not that it’s their fault what they look like, but—”
He moved his chair closer, staring at us with wide mad pupils. “My children, you understand,” he said, and his face seemed to glow in the half-light. “All my work for the good of humanity, and this is what they’ve done to it. Circus animals. Brute l-laborers. Whores. All those years, all this time—and this, this is what they’ve done to my children.”
His voice rose so that the energumens stopped and looked at us. Luther Burdock ignored them; only stared at me, his glasses fogged from his excitement.
“Four hundred years. A lot can happen in four hundred years. But this—this isn’t right. This just—is not— acceptable.
“You understand, don’t you?” he asked me softly. He held his hand out, cupped so that the empty palm faced the ceiling. “Even it if means people dying. Even if it means everyone dying—”
His face grew red and his breath came out in ragged bursts. “We can’t —let them— do this—to children.”
On the other side of the room an aardman growled. The energumens continued to stare at us in silence. Luther Burdock pointed at one with a shaking finger. Behind their thick plastic lenses, his eyes were filled with tears.
“My daughter!” he said, his voice shaking “That was my daughter. “
I moved back, reaching for Jane’s hand. My heart was pounding, my mouth dry. Because, looking at the man sitting there before us, with his shock of long hair and his deceptively mild brown eyes, I had no doubt whatsoever but that this was Luther Burdock—whoever he was, and however old he was—and that he was completely, utterly insane.
The room was silent. Jane took my hand, looking from Burdock to myself and back again. At their workstations the energumens turned blank, unsurprised faces toward us, then one by one swiveled back to their monitors. The argala whistled and murmured to herself. The remaining aardmen crouched with eyes fixed on Luther Burdock, the stumps of their vestigial tails thudding against the cold floor.
For several minutes all was still. And then, from somewhere in the darkness of the caverns echoed the sound of footsteps. A measured tread, a sharp clicking as of metal boots striking the stone ground; but boots that belonged to an extraordinarily light-footed soldier. Jane and I looked around anxiously, but Dr. Burdock was oblivious.
“Savages,” he said to himself. He bared his teeth and jabbed at something invisible. “ B-brutes. i
In the labyrinthine passages the unseen figure approached slowly. A minute of silence when he reached the bridge; I could barely see a slender form moving behind the scrim of water and candlelight. Then came a small thump as whoever it was jumped to the floor. Jane pulled away from me, her head craned to see what was emerging from the darkness.
A soft sound as he entered the chamber. The aardmen growled softly. Luther Burdock alone seemed not to hear it; not to hear or care. The mad fire in his eyes was extinguished. Once again he looked at us quite calmly, only a sheen of spittle upon his lips showing that he had ever been anything but this placid figure.
“We still have a great deal of work to do,” he said absently, his brown eyes soft and bland. “So much to do, and so little…”
I looked away, to where
that unseen person began to cross the room. The leaping candlelight touched him, a little at a time. I saw his feet first, dainty as a stag’s but sheathed in black metal; then his legs, also metal and coiled about with violet plasteel tubes. Then his torso, a confection of lavender and jet glass and chrome; and finally his face. A face that might have been carved from crystal, then stained with the crushed fruit of grapes and plums and all dusky things. A man’s face, elegant and serene—save for his mouth. That was too wide and thin, and coiled as in laughter; but even the most sophisticated of replicants do not hold smiles well.
“Greetings to our guests,” he said in a low, mocking voice. “I see you have found our spiritual father?”
My heart froze inside me. “Who—?” I gasped, stepping forward while Jane stared at him in dismay. “Who are you?”
The replicant turned until its eyes met mine. Emerald eyes, jade eyes, eyes that had swallowed every precious green thing in the world and held them hostage until the moment they would seize me again.
“Wendy Wanders,” he said softly, and the hand that gripped mine was strong and sharp as an osprey’s talons. “Well-met in Cassandra, sister mine.”
It was the Gaping One. The hypostate I had called the Boy in the Tree, the demonic godling who had tormented me before fleeing me at the Engulfed Cathedral—but he had fled only his human form, it seemed. Now he had found another.
“No—” I stammered. “You are—you’re—” But before I could finish, the replicant bowed its head.
“Metatron,” he said with exaggerated modesty. An energumen glanced up at that voice, loud and clear as though announcing itself to a great hall; then turned back to its work.
“You know each other—very nice,” said Dr. Burdock.
“Wendy?” began Jane, reaching for me, but I pushed her away.
“How did you get here?—what are you doing?—” I spat. “You were—you died back there—”
The replicant only looked at me, runnels of violet light flickering up and down his breast and across his face. “Oh, no,” he said, and raising his voice, recited,
“ ‘ The immortal Gods alone have neither age nor death. All other things almighty Time disquiets. ’ ”
Then he smiled again, showing that perfect curve of a mouth filled with perfectly even, ebony teeth. “There are great advantages to my present condition,” he said calmly, and turned to Luther Burdock. “Doctor—there is some problem with the plasma cultivar, and as you said, we have so much to do before tomorrow evening. Perhaps you could—?”
Dr. Burdock started. “Mmm? Yes, of course, thank you thank you.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, then looked at us apologetically.
“I’m sorry; but it really can’t wait, you know. Time and tide and—well, Icarus. But you’ve been shown quarters? Given a—um, a uniform, and all that?”
“No!” Jane exploded. “We haven’t been shown anything, and I’d like to know what in hell is going on.”
Dr. Burdock pursed his lips, glanced over at Metatron. “Oh. Well…?”
“What is going on,” the replicant said in that slightly hollow, breathy voice, “is a war. A Great War, perhaps truly A War to End All Wars.
“At least,” he added slyly, “it might be a war to end all men.”
“How can you be party to this, Burdock?” demanded Jane. She pointed angrily at the energumens. “These are—well, they’re geneslaves, is what they are, mutants and—well, I don’t even know what that is,” she ended, glaring at Metatron. “How can you defend them?”
Dr. Burdock raised his head. His eyes were ineffably sad. “Defend them?” he said softly. “But of course I must d-defend them. Didn’t you hear me? Don’t you understand? I created them. They are my—my children.”
He gazed at an aardman lolling on the floor, its long legs splayed behind it like a dog’s. “Those—what you call the aardmen—they were mine—my dogs, you see, Great Danes, I bred them quite carefully for many years. But this was not what I had in mind—”
He clenched his fingers into the semblance of a clawed hand and bared his teeth “You see? Not that. Not a sort of monster. Dogs, ” he said firmly. “They were supposed to be—well, they were supposed to be people, but like dogs.”
Beside me I could hear Jane whisper, “He’s a complete idiot.” I recalled her at the Zoo, lovingly tending her cougars and red wolves and stags, and thought again how she had hated to see any of the others, the hybrid creatures that spent their pathetic lives hobbled halfway between humanity and wild things, doomed to die behind glass-and-iron bars.
Jane herself continued to stare balefully at Dr. Burdock. “Well, what the hell good did you think it would do? ‘People like dogs?’ And those other things—hydrapithecenes, sirens, those things they use as whores?”
Metatron looked on amused as Dr. Burdock shook his head. “No! You don’t understand— none of those were mine, none of that was what I meant at all. It’s so different now. All of that, out there—”
He flapped his hand, indicating the ceiling and the world beyond. “Why, everything’s changed utterly. Everything’s ruined. Dead, or dying, poisoned…much much worse than in my time, you understand? Much worse. In my time you could still drink water without worrying about mutagens, you had to wear hoods and shades outside, but there were still people to wear them—not everyone had died because of the sun, or the wars. And we didn’t have our politicians and armies floating around in space. It was—oh, it was quite different, we thought it was a horrible world, but it wasn’t like this. ”
He looked forlornly at Metatron. “Can you explain it to them?”
The replicant shook his head. “Oh, I think not,” he said lightly. “I think they understand quite enough. But, Doctor—the cultivar?”
Sighing, Dr. Burdock nodded and wheeled his chair from his desk. Jane looked around desperately, as though someone else might appear to help us, and finally demanded, “Just tell me something, Doctor, just tell me one thing —
“This war, this Alliance—all of this here, in these caves—what are you doing? Are you making more of them—of your—your children? Or are you just gathering the forces out there and bringing them here for safekeeping?”
Luther Burdock hesitated and looked at her thoughtfully.
“Well,” he said at last. “Yes. There are more of them. I have been—I’ve been quite busy since he brought me here.”
He inclined his head toward Metatron. “I’ve had a good deal of help, though. Some very distinguished people have worked with me. Had to—there’ve been quite a few advancements since—since before, when I was practicing. Rather marvelous things you can do with fungus and prions, accelerating the growth of clonal tissue, et cetera, et cetera. Quite remarkable genetic advances, which this Metatron has assisted me in learning. And, of course, psychosurgery is a delicate thing, and his hands don’t shake.”
“So it’s true,” I said numbly. Burdock stood, pushed his chair back into the desk, and smoothed his pants. “You’re making more of them—more geneslaves—to act as soldiers? But that’s no better than what the Ascendants have done.”
“Soldiers?” He pinched the glasses on the bridge of his nose and squinted as though in pain. “Goodness no. Or no, of course, some of them are soldiers; but we have other plans. These aerolites, Apollo objects like Icarus—well, soldiers wouldn’t be much use against that.
“So I’ve gone ahead with a plan I’d thought about before. Only of course the situation is much worse now than it was then. Here and elsewhere—”
He tipped his head to the ceiling, so that the candlelight glinted on his spectacles. Metatron continued to stare at him with that vulpine smile and those unblinking emerald eyes.
“A sort of—er—a general housecleaning seems to be in order,” Burdock went on. “Ad astra aspera, you know. Through great hardship to the stars. But not soldiers, no, not really s-soldiers at all.
“What I had in mind,” he said, stooping to pick up a bit of paper from t
he floor at his feet and crumpling it into a ball before tossing it away. “What I had in mind, after the whole general sweep-up was done, but sometime before Icarus’s arrival, was launching this—um— fleet we’ve been gathering. Not warships,” he added firmly. “More of an ark. ”
And turning, he left Jane and me staring openmouthed, as Metatron escorted him to his laboratory.
12
The Return to the Element
MY FATHER CAME TO me in a dream that afternoon.
“You must be brave, Kalamat,” he said. He looked much older, his hair sifted with white and his face lined. “Whatever happens, you must remember that you cannot die. You must not be afraid of the dark.” He hugged me close, his hands smelling of tobacco and curative chemicals.
But how was it that he could hold me, because surely he was still a man and small enough that I could sit him upon my knees? And why was his hair white, when he had never aged? My heart began to pound, but when I started to ask him about these things, his face changed, the skin grew bruised, black and purple, and then darkened still more until I was not gazing at my father at all but into the cold emerald eyes of the Oracle. I woke with a cry, my bed-hammock rocking so that it was a wonder I didn’t spill out.
“Kalamat?” My sister Polyonyx stood beside my hammock, eyeing me doubtfully. “I heard you shouting from the media chamber.”
I rubbed my eyes, yawning, then slid from bed. “I had a dream. A dream of our father.”
Polyonyx nodded, reverently touching the tattooed pattern of red and black circles that marked where her breast had been. “Oh, but think, Kalamat! It is nearly time that he will truly speak with us—it is only a little while before we are passing over North America—and if it’s true, if the Oracle did not lie—”
I nodded and yawned again ruefully. The end of the thousand days of my mortality was a bitter taste in my mouth during those last days on Quirinus. I had not slept well in many weeks, and had come to depend on these afternoon naps.
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