Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  She made a strange gesture, dipping her head and touching her head and breast with her closed fist. “God save us, he found it all right. Found him, found Luther Burdock, and after a few years managed to bring him back, like he was never dead at all. Poor soul,” she whispered, and for a moment a shaft of pity lit her dark eyes. “He wakes up and he don’t know all these years gone by. He thinks it’s only yesterday he had that girl and now she’s gone. Nothing left but them —”

  And shuddering, she cocked a thumb at the energumens.

  I looked at them and shivered. The man nodded eagerly. “It happens every time, the same way. He doesn’t believe it’s really her. He keeps thinking he’ll find her the way he left her, but when he realizes she’s gone—” He made claws of his hands and raked them through his thin hair, miming desperation and madness. “Happens every time.”

  “How many times?” My voice sounded cold and much too loud. Because all of a sudden it all began to make sense to me, with that terrible kind of logic that adheres only in dreams. “How many times has it happened?”

  “Who’s counting?” the man said, and cackled.

  “He starts out by helping us, or wanting to,” the woman whispered. “Thinks he’s going to save us from his crazy star. Then he starts to look at all his old ’files and records, and the madness comes onto him, every year it’s the same.”

  “But this time it’s worse,” the man broke in. “He’s obsessed about this imaginary star of his. And that robot Metatron backs him up, tells us all that the Doctor’s right, there’s this star headed right for us. Comes by every four, five hundred years, bang-o—but now who could count all that time? I know they say the Doctor saw it, I know they say he’s that old; but I don’t believe it. I think this Metatron just wants a way to kill off all us old people and send the young ones to their death. That’s what I think.”

  I remembered the unearthly malevolent green eyes that had stared at me from behind Metatron’s metal mask. It was easy enough for me to believe that he would do such a thing.

  “And Dr. Burdock?” I asked. “What happens to him? Tomorrow night?”

  “The scientists will come,” the woman began; but before she could finish, a shadow loomed across the table.

  “Will you help us with this packing?” one of the energumens asked in its clear, girlish voice. “Our fingers are far too big—” And it raised its clawed hands as it gestured for us to follow.

  “I guess we’re just going to find out when everyone else does,” Jane said darkly. Her brown eyes were wide and shot with a desperation I’d never seen before. “God, I wish I had my pistol.”

  I bowed my head. “I don’t think it would help this time, Jane,” I whispered, and turned to follow the energumen.

  “You must be brave, Kalamat,” my father had told me in my dream. And so I made a show of fearlessness and went with the Sky Pilot and the Light Mother into the elÿon: myself and all my sisters. I had already told them that I had no intention of leaving this place where our father was; no intention of going forth to battle as the Oracle had commanded us. Brief as it was, my entire life had been tied up with a dream of my father. If I was to die now, I would die with him. And perhaps it would be as he had said, perhaps death would not truly claim me at all.

  I was a fool. I thought my sisters would stay with me. I was expecting for Hylas, at least, and Polyonyx to follow me, and I was prepared to fight our brother Kalaman if he tried to prevent them and force them to accompany our brothers into war.

  But my sisters did not care. They were being sent as janissaries to a place we had never seen, to a planet we had only ever glimpsed in dreams, but this meant little to them.

  “O Kalamat! It seems sad, that you will not come with us, and that we will be going so far away,” said Hylas. But she did not look sad. We were on the viewing deck of the Izanagi, staring out at the gauzy stars, the tiny fractured wheels of the distant fallen HORUS colonies. Her eyes had a molten glow, like jet with a faint silvery sheen. “But then you would be leaving us soon, anyway…perhaps it is for the best.”

  I nodded sadly, and with disappointment. Of course: why should my death matter any more than the myriad other deaths we had witnessed during our thousand days?

  But then my sister suddenly grabbed my arm. “Look there,” Hylas said, her voice rising slightly. Her forehead creased and her delicate mouth bunched into a frown as she pointed at a dark celestial body, neither star nor HORUS station, that bloomed behind the thick curved glass of the viewing deck. “What is that? A comet?”

  I moved closer to her and looked out the window. I could see it in the distance, an amorphous shape that stood out against the nether background like a ragged hole cut in black silk. “A comet would not be so dark,” I said, though the object had a somber halo, a dusky violet haze that surrounded it and seemed to pulse as we watched. “But I do not know what it is,” I went on, and added, “And really, I do not care.”

  Hylas’s frown faded. She tilted her head, gazing at me with soft black eyes, and said gently, “At least you will see our father.” She reached out to trace the foggy outline of that strange radiant object upon the glass. A note of longing crept into her voice. “Will you tell him—will you let me know if he remembers me?”

  A wave of sorrow overwhelmed me. I turned and embraced her. “You will know, Hylas. You will still be able to hear me within your mind.” I stroked her forehead, then leaned forward to kiss her.

  “Perhaps,” she said absently. She pressed her face against the glass and stared at the strange pulsing glow. “But I do not think so. I think the sounds of battle will drive you from my mind.”

  I nodded, then whispered, “But not your heart, sister. Do not let them drive me from your heart.” For the last time I looked upon her, the darkness at her back pierced only by the gleam of that black star without a name. Before she could see the tears upon my face, I fled the viewing deck.

  The energumen Ratnayaka refused to allow Valeska Novus to stay with me during the elÿon voyage.

  “I do not trust humans, Imperator,” he said, flashing me a grin with those pointed teeth. “Our history is one of betrayals by them.”

  “As is my own,” I began tersely; but he waved away my protest with a frown.

  “No! Had not the Oracle ordered that we bring you and your entire escort to Cassandra, she would not be alive now—” His pointed white teeth glittered like a gavial’s in the elÿon’s rosy light.

  I had Nefertity accompany Captain Novus to her room. I would not trust my aide alone with the energumens—I had seen myself how they would cannibalize humans and each other—nor did I wish for the nemosyne to be left unattended. Ratnayaka was not happy with this arrangement, but Kalaman grew angry when he complained.

  “You will answer to me, brother, until we set foot upon the Element. And then you may answer to whomever you please.”

  Ratnayaka bowed, grimacing. He had removed the crimson patch from his eye; the wound there had begun to fester and seemed to pain him. I could see a speck of blackened metal embedded in the flesh, and guessed there had been a keek there once, or some other prophylactic monitor. But his remaining eye held enough black malevolence to intimidate an entire battalion of humans. When he turned it now upon his brother Kalaman, I marveled that the other did not cringe beneath its glare.

  I thought then that Kalaman had not too long to live. He sweated as though from fever, and I never saw him eat or drink—though that was not unusual; many people do not feel comfortable eating during an elÿon voyage. But Ratnayaka too seemed consumed by something—illness or desire or perhaps that madness that stalks the elÿon’s rubeous hallways.

  “As you will, brother,” Ratnayaka hissed at him. He turned to walk a little unsteadily toward where the other energumens had gathered upon the viewing deck.

  “He is ill,” I said to Kalaman.

  “It is his heart that eats him,” Kalaman replied. Sorrow seemed to vie with pride in his voice. “He does not like it th
at I am master now; but he will not turn against me.” He looked at me with glowing black eyes and said, “You must understand, I have only a few more days left of my thousand. But it is enough, that I will look upon our father and this Oracle before I die; although it may be that our father will not let this happen to me. The Oracle has said there is a means now for us to outlive our destinies, that there is a way for us to grow old and bear young as humans do. Perhaps I will live long enough to see Ratnayaka harrowed by my children,” he ended, and his eyes glittered cold as Ratnayaka’s own.

  Just then a cry rang out from the viewing area.

  “O my brother, but look!”

  Kalaman strode to where the others pointed, and I followed slowly, my metal boots striking the floor and sending sharp echoes across the chamber. A great foreboding hung about me, a cloud of fear that made me wish I had Nefertity by my side, or even Valeska Novus. Twice before I have felt this sense of brooding horror. Once as I stood upon a high place in the Archipelago, and looked down upon my troops as they walked into a tide of liquid flame and writhed in silent agony amid the waves of gold and black, like maggots dropped in burning oil; and again when I first gained a sort of half-consciousness within the regeneration vats of Araboth and realized I had lost forever the last traces of my humanity.

  But this was a different sort of fear. It encompassed not only myself, but also all those I had ever held within my heart with either love or hatred. At the window I stopped and looked to where the energumens stood in a long line, some forty-odd creatures more monstrous even than myself, each reflecting the face and manner of the one next to it so that I seemed to look upon some ancient frieze showing a more ancient race than humanity, gazing out upon the stars.

  “What is that, O brother? Can you see it?”

  A few feet from where I stood, Kalaman’s brothers and sisters moved aside to let him press himself against the window, staring out with those obsidian eyes. A moment later his voice came to me softly, filled with wonder.

  “I do not know what this is. Perhaps he does—” He glanced over his shoulder and gestured for me to come closer. “Imperator—?”

  I joined him at the window. On the other side of the thick glass the universe loomed, a darkness so vast that even the million stars pricked upon it seemed nothing but stray motes of light, put there perhaps by nothing but the will of myriad creatures that refused to acknowledge the void. At the rim of my vision I could just see the first sweet curve of Earth showing as we approached, and I knew that somewhere out of sight the moon waited, a hole in the sky through which we might escape that endless night. And then I saw what Kalaman and all the others were pointing at.

  Had I still been mortal, my heart might not have been able to bear the sight. I felt a small gratitude that Captain Novus was safely drugged within her chamber. Slowly I drew my hands up before me and rested them upon the glass, my metal hand beside my human one, and stared between them at what was there.

  In the formless void there grew a point of still greater darkness. In mass and color it was like one of those bursts of neutronic power favored by the Air Corps of the Habilis Emirate, which turn the deserts to black glass where they fall. As I watched, this celestial object grew deeper in color, showing within its heart shafts of blue and violet and crimson. All around it the atmosphere glowed —though that is too weak a word for it; it was as though it somehow swallowed the light of all those other pallid stars, then gave it forth again a thousandfold. In all my years I had never seen anything like it. Not in the shining azure skies above the Archipelago, nor in the desert’s stark and frozen nights, or even during my tenure on the great glittering weapondecks of NASNA Prime.

  All around me I could hear the energumens murmuring, their clear high voices bright with amazement and childish wonder. None of them seemed to be afraid.

  “Imperator?” Kalaman’s voice came again at my elbow, and when I glanced up at him, I saw that his face was lit with curiosity but no fear. “My brothers say they have been watching it for some time now. Some admit they first saw it days ago, but never spoke of it to me.”

  I drew back from the window, but then that word watching stung me like a thornfly. I recalled the thing Captain Wyeth had written of in the Astralaga: the mysterious star traveler, the Watcher in the Skies. He had described it as an object that his entranced crew had observed for over eighteen hours before it disappeared. A freakish black aurora, most had believed; some kind of solar flare that had come and gone within a matter of hours. But now Kalaman’s crew claimed to have watched it for several days.

  “Who has seen this thing?” I cried out. Several of the energumens turned to me, their beautiful faces calm, their colorless eyes holding within them the reflected flare of the Watcher’s gaze.

  “I have,” one said in his lilting voice. “Many days ago. As the orbit of Helena Aulis shifted, I glimpsed it, like a violet lumiere flickering in the darkness. It is far bigger now than it was then.”

  Indeed, even as I stared, I could see that it was growing larger. Whatever it was, it still must be untold miles from where the Izanagi made its stately passage through the Ether. But it was moving. And it was headed toward the Earth.

  “Imperator?” Kalaman laid his great hand upon my shoulder and gently turned me to face him. “What is this thing? Can you tell us?”

  “I do not know,” I said, my voice sounding hollow and disgustingly weak. “But I will find out.” And I left them and headed for the library.

  In the skies above the dreaming Blue Ridge Mountains hung a pinkish glow, a brilliance that faded only slightly during that long afternoon. By nightfall the aurora had grown to a splendent luminous sheet, rippling and coruscating so that the stars were swallowed by it and showed as tiny puckered flaws in the fabric of the night, if they showed at all. For the last few weeks this roseate glow had been glowing slowly brighter, as each day more and more of the Alliance’s captured elÿon were brought here to join the fleet that now numbered nearly forty.

  Had there been anyone to glimpse that fleet billowing across the haze of the Blue Ridge, they might have imagined the mountains were afire; but in Cassandra hardly anyone remained above ground. Those few energumen sentries guarding the entrance to Paradise Caverns were inured to the wonder of the elÿon. If they had had any say in the matter, they might have wished to be with their brothers and sisters, gathered deep within the mountain’s granite heart, and there await the Coming they had so long awaited.

  It was an evening in late summer. The fields that a few days ago had been bright and green and golden were now stripped to a dull viridian, laced with red where the raw clay had been exposed by the passage of agricultural machines. Once there would have been much celebration in Cassandra, for it had been a good harvest; but there were no humans left to rejoice. They had all gone underground, or else had been slain when they fought to keep their lands from being given as fodder for the geneslaves. Now the fields lay barren, and the scraped earth steamed in the dying light as the sun fell behind the glowing hills and the harvest moon began to creep above the shattered plain to the east.

  At the base of the nearest mountain, where the energumen guards stood watch over the black mouth of Paradise Caverns, a tiny procession unfolded. They crept from down the mountainside: twelve white-hooded figures divided into pairs, and each pair carrying between them a long silvery object, like an aviette capsule or coffin. The eerie glow of the elÿon fleet touched their bodies with lurid pink and crimson, and made the capsules they bore gleam as though they were cast in gold. They moved in a silence that was unbroken by the song of night birds or insects, or the voices of those human onlookers who might have been expected to gaze upon this autumnal ceremony with awe. Even the sound of the encircling river was muted, as from respect—or fear.

  But while the flame-tinged darkness made an eerie background to their vespertine procession, those white-clad acolytes were not quite alone. A single figure observed them, hidden by the shadow of the mountain itself: watc
hed them and then raised its head to the fiery sky beyond. The light from the elÿon fleet sent waves of lavender and rose streaming across the dark and angular planes of its body. To one looking down from the billowing craft, the figure might have seemed that of a man, save for the faint purple lightning that played about its head, as though reflecting some storm behind its deceptively calm metal face.

  So in silence Metatron watches the sky: waiting, waiting in the silence. The twelve hooded figures with their silvery burdens step slowly and carefully down the last few feet of the mountain. Their tiresome descent at last completed, they pause, shifting the weight of the caskets from shoulder to shoulder, then round the final curve of the path that will bring them to the cavern entrance. Still Metatron gazes heavenward, as the pairs of cenobites bear their softly gleaming caskets beneath the steel archway and into the patient darkness; and finally he is rewarded.

  Above the dreaming mountain a spark appears, a thing like a glowing coal that grows brighter and brighter in the gaudy sky. As it grows nearer, it seems to billow and swell, surging through the air like a cloud traveling at impossibly high speed, until it is close enough that Metatron can without a doubt identify it—another elÿon come to join the silent fleet tethered above the Blue Ridge.

  But this is a singular vessel. As he watches it float among its brethren, nudging between their rounded pink flanks, Metatron smiles and raises one metal hand as though in greeting. Then he begins to walk toward the entrance to the caverns, to initiate the last part of the ritual that will bring about his Final Ascension.

  On the eastern cusp of the world the moon is poised to rise. The Izanagi takes its place among those other crimson clouds above the dark-bound mountains. Untold miles above them all, Icarus has begun the weeks-long descent from its parhelion passage. The regenerated corpse of Margalis Tast’annin shrieks in impotent rage as he sees too late the cold grace and frightful elegance of Metatron’s last betrayal.