Icarus Descending w-3

by Elizabeth Hand

  Retirement ceremony, that nameless old man had told Jane and me. The whole damn thing just happens again; it’s the same every time. I shivered, but even as I tried to look away, to seek vainly for some escape from the room, for some sign of help unlooked for—Miss Scarlet or Giles or even Fossa—I felt eyes upon me, his eyes, and helplessly stared up once more.

  He stood there, a shining icon in black and lavender, and from within the perfect curves of his replicant’s face those other eyes gazed down upon me. Green as new leaves, green as poison, Eyes I dare not meet in dreams: the vernal gaze of the Boy in the Tree, the Gaping One, imprisoned or reborn in that hollow construct’s shell. His polished body reflected the liquid darkness above, the luminous moon: a lunar deity or a man made out of night. I tried to pull away from his gaze, fought against it as though it were a serpent casting its coils tight about my chest; but I could not. And then very slowly Metatron smiled at me, and in that smile I saw the death of all that I had ever held dear.

  “Welcome!” he cried, his raised arms stretched toward the moonlit sky. Behind him the waiting figures tilted their heads back, so that shadows slashed the cowls of their pristine white robes, poured from their breasts to cover the silver capsules beside them. “Welcome to all the Alliance; welcome to Icarus!”

  From a thousand throats, human and animal and heteroclite, came an answering roar. Only the other figures on the platform did not to reply. They remained stiff, hands resting uneasily at their sides, their hooded faces staring at god knows what as the cries and howls of the Asterine Alliance filled the cave. Smiling, Metatron waited until the voices died, until the last echoes flew from the cavern like the bats who had fled before them. When he dropped his hands, silence fell upon the crowd, sudden and ominous as a cloud extinguishing the sun’s warmth. He turned toward one of the white-robed figures, and in a low, clear voice said, “We are ready.”

  The figure turned to Metatron. I could see nothing of his features, but somehow it seemed to me there was a reluctance in the way it responded, reluctance or perhaps even enmity. The acolyte nodded curtly, took a step until he stood directly above the silver capsule on the center table. He seemed to hesitate, and glanced up to where Metatron stood with coldly glowing eyes. The replicant nodded, still smiling, and the acolyte turned back to his task.

  He bent over the capsule, his hands sliding from beneath the long cuffs of his robe to grasp a set of heavy-looking handles set into the metal casket. As he bowed, he tossed back the hood of his robe. For a moment his face was obscured as he yanked at the cover of the steel pod.

  With a soft sucking noise the lid popped open. The white-robed acolyte fell back, glancing up at the silent Metatron. Then he turned to look out upon all those assembled in the cavern. His gaze swept across the line of energumen guards. I heard Jane gasp as it rested on her, then moved to link with mine. His eyes were blue, blue as irises, and showed no recognition of me whatsoever. His face was smooth and unlined, his hair black; but there was no doubt who it was. It was Trevor Mallory.

  I had thought that our arrival upon the Element would be met with some fanfare, that there would be a boarding party or some other group of rebels there to greet me. But there was no one. The Maio server gave me a cool goodbye—“Farewell, Kalamat”—and left. In front of me, the loading ramp unfolded and spiraled down into the twilight. For a moment I felt a heart-stopping terror: we were still in the frozen wastes of the Ether, and in an instant I would be dead from trying to breath in that airless place. But air filled my lungs, warm and with a sweet taste like watered honey. I breathed deeply, and were it not for the sorrow that cut the edge of my exhilaration, I might have laughed with joy.

  The Izanagi had docked beside a great shining mist-shriven tower, wrapped about with gangways and stairs and chutes for the unloading of freight and personnel. In the air around us I glimpsed other elÿon, bobbing like slowly deflating balloons. Fougas drifted between them, their smooth sides gleaming dull gray. Some had been sloppily painted blue and stenciled with the symbol of the Asterine Alliance, a pyramid surmounted by a black star. But most still bore the insignia of their original affiliates—the white hand that was the sigil of the Balkhash Commonwealth, the Emirate’s yellow stars, the Eye of HORUS and blighted moon of the Autocracy’s NASNA Aviators.

  Behind me I heard footsteps. I drew back until the rosy shadows cast by the elÿon fleet hid me. I watched as my sisters left the Izanagi, and with them the brothers I had never known. They were quiet, silenced perhaps by excitement or trepidation, though my brothers held within their eyes something of hunger or desire, a small spark of untriggered violence that I had seen before, in the fearful goading eyes of some of our Masters. They had daubed themselves with symbols of their allegiance, tattoos and scarifications of pyramids and stars. One of them bore in his arms something as limp and shapeless as a suit of our Masters’ astral vestments. As he passed me, I saw this was the desiccated corpse of the vessel’s adjutant, a forlorn creature that had been half-dead before we boarded. Down the ramp he went, to be given whatever obsequies they provide such hapless things on the Element.

  A few minutes later my brother Kalaman appeared, and with him the one-eyed rebel called Ratnayaka. Between them they carried a figure that fought furiously, cursing as they held him up by his arms, so that his leather boots hung a full two feet above the metal flooring.

  “Let me go!” he shouted. His voice sounded thin and surprisingly fragile in the open air. He looked frail too, where he dangled between my brothers, his crimson leathers askew upon his angular metal limbs and the red mask of his face twisted into an agony of rage and despair. “I will not serve him—I will not —”

  At that sight a great sadness filled me. All the fury and controlled venom of the Aviator Imperator stretched like a taut line between Kalaman and Ratnayaka until I feared he would snap, and these last traces of his command fall limp as the adjutant’s own body within my brothers’ arms. But Tast’annin’s strength and rage, at least, did not fail him. He railed ceaselessly as they bore him away, and while from another throat his last words might have sounded peevish or frightened, to me they rang in memory like my father’s own voice, proud and deathless and indomitable—

  “ I will not serve him! I will not serve —”

  That was the last I saw of him; the last I saw of any of them. Within minutes they were gone, the tall loping figures of my brothers lost in the fog. Of all the passengers of the Izanagi, only I remained. Obviously I was not deemed important enough to require an escort, energumen or replicant, to see me from the vessel. I stood alone behind the curved metal balustrade overlooking the long gangway that wound like a silver stair through mist and clouds of tiny flying insects, until finally it disappeared beneath the tops of trees that crowded the side of what I now knew must be a mountain. From below I could hear voices, my sisters calling out to each other and the hollow booming sound of a robotic Watchman shouting orders. For some minutes I stood and listened, until abruptly the voices ceased, as sharply and suddenly as though they had come from a vocoder that had been switched off. The silence was disconcerting, until I realized that probably they had all been herded into one of the other elÿon. I strained to see through the mist, looking from one narrow spiraling stair to the next, seeking to find any of my sisters ascending to their new lives aboard the warrior vessels. I never saw them again.

  At last I could wait no longer. Soon someone would board the Izanagi, and if I did not want to be conscripted into service upon her or some other Alliance ship, I would have to leave. I still held within me the vision of my father, and it was this that finally give me the strength to take my first step down that long narrow walkway. The air was chill, cooler than it had been aboard the elÿon, but as I descended, it grew warmer, and with this new warmth came the scents of many things: flowers, water, the stored sunny heat of trees just being released into the evening air. I had thought it would be a strange thing, a frightening thing, to first set foot upon the Element. But wh
en at last I stepped from the smooth metal path onto stony ground, it was as though I had awakened to find myself within a familiar dream.

  I remembered this place. I remembered the trees and their names—oak, aspen, stunted pines—and also the sounds that came to me. Noises not unfamiliar because I had heard them on ’files and in the stim chambers of Quirinus; but still it was thrilling, almost terrifying, to hear them now—wind, water, the faint rustling tread of an animal’s footfall in the bracken—and to see in the darkness not far from me a blurred light that I knew was the mouth of a cave. We had come here once, long ago, my father and I. There had been smiling men in uniforms, and a shop where they sold rocks—I had thought that was funny, to sell rocks when there were so many lying about the floor of the cavern. Indeed the whole place was nothing but stone, a castle of granite and limestone and shale embedded in the heart of Mount Massanutten. The name came back to me too, as surely as if it had been my own; and now my heart was pounding and I had to clasp my hands tightly to keep them from shaking.

  Because of course he would be here. Of course he would remember—it was the last thing we had done together, before the operation. He had brought me here, to show me that even in the blind core of the Earth there could be light and beauty; that even things seemingly as cold and dead as stone could be seen to have a life, and in stalactites and anthodites could grow and bloom like roses.

  See, daughter? Nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all…

  He was here. He was waiting. Do not fear the darkness, he had said. We will always be together, somewhere… .

  And so I walked unafraid into the Paradise Caverns, nodding silently to my brothers and sisters who stood guard beside the main gate, and went to meet my father.

  “Wendy! It’s Trevor—it’s him —” Jane’s shrill voice cut through the room as she grabbed me. “But he’s dead! We saw him, he died —”

  I could only shake my head, my hands clutching helplessly at the air. The tall man on the platform shook back hair that was dark and thick as a girl’s, and his eyes, though beset by a kind of despair, were blue as Cadence’s had been. Once again I saw him standing in the cool darkness of his cellar, the corpses behind him glowing faintly as he spoke.

  Of course, it has some interesting applications for clones… .

  And I heard Giles’s grief-ridden voice choking, He made plans…. I know I’ll be with him again….

  “It’s his clone,” I said hoarsely. “The scientists, the ones they told us about—they’re all clones. They’ve been hiding here for centuries. That’s where Metatron came from. That’s who found Luther Burdock…”

  I fell silent as one of the energumens looked at me warningly. I stared back up at the dais, where Trevor stood gazing into the recesses of the open capsule. His expression was absolutely desolate. Whatever he glimpsed there might have been enough to sear away his vision and leave his eyes dead and blank behind their scrim of flesh. When he looked away again, all the light was gone from them. He seemed as aged and blind as the man I had known at Seven Chimneys.

  “What are you waiting for?” Metatron’s voice held an undercurrent of mockery, and slivers of emerald light danced from his face as he looked at Trevor Mallory. “You have done this before. There’s no time now for dalliance. Begin, else I will do it for you.”

  Bleakly Trevor nodded. He edged closer to the open capsule, then bent over and tugged at something inside. In all the vast space around us I heard nothing, save Jane’s ragged breathing and the slower, measured breath of the energumen guards. On the dais the other hooded acolytes stood still as columns in their white robes, their blank faces turned toward the center table. Then something scrabbled at the inside of the capsule. A horrible sound, as of a corpse trying to claw its way from its coffin. Trevor frowned and leaned in more closely, then drew back, his face knit with dismay as a hand appeared above the pod’s metal rim.

  On the other side of the pod another hand clutched at the metal. A moment later a head emerged: a face so white it seemed incandescent, topped by a shock of thick brown hair. For an instant he flailed at the air, and I thought he would fall back inside. But then he righted himself, and slapping away Trevor’s hand, he sat up.

  “Luther Burdock,” whispered Jane. “But—what’s wrong with him?”

  “It’s his clone,” I said dully.

  “But the other—the one we saw last night—”

  “Dead,” I whispered. And somehow I knew that was the truth of it, and that we would never see that Luther Burdock again.

  This one was naked, and so pale, it seemed he must be terribly ill, but I knew that was not the case. I knew it was that he had just been born. He pulled himself clumsily from the silver pod, swinging his legs over its edge and nearly falling, then jumping to stand shakily beside Trevor Mallory. He was naked, his skin almost translucent and gleaming as though oiled. His face had the unformed look of an infant’s. There were no lines to show where experience had been etched upon him, no scars or blemishes. His skin had a soft, slack look to it, as though the muscles beneath had never been stretched or pulled. He looked around blankly, then stared down at his feet. His eyebrows knit together, and slowly he drew his hands to cover his genitals.

  Trevor Mallory looked impatiently at the nearest acolyte, who pulled a faded blue robe from beneath his white one and handed it to Burdock. Burdock stared at it, his expression so transparently innocent that I felt I was looking at one of those robotic models of the human brain that the Ascendants used to train their surgical technicians. When Trevor put a hand upon his shoulder, he started, then quickly shrugged into the robe. He shook its folds from his face, squinting painfully. With a wry smile Trevor reached into a pocket and drew out a pair of spectacles. For a moment Luther Burdock only stared at them. Then he grabbed them and slid them onto his face.

  With that small gesture he truly seemed to be born anew. Behind the plastic lenses his brown eyes glittered. The innocence drained from them, and he made a fist of his hand, opening and closing it as though deriving strength from the motion. He looked around, his face carefully set to show no fear, no surprise. He stared at the white-robed acolytes, the six remaining capsules with their hidden burdens; then gazed out upon the ranks of silent waiting creatures. At sight of them his composure seemed to fail him. He turned to look first at Metatron and then at Trevor Mallory.

  “Where is my daughter?”

  His voice was tremulous as an old man’s. When there was no reply, he called out again, loudly and with such a commanding tone that far overhead the stalactites gave off faint tinging echoes.

  “ Where is my daughter ?”

  A nearly imperceptible shifting among the acolytes on the dais. Trevor Mallory bowed his head and stared at the floor. Metatron’s emerald eyes flashed, and he started to raise his hand, as though to point out at the massed throng of geneslaves. But before he could do so, there was a sharp cry from somewhere behind the stage. The hooded acolytes looked around, alarmed. A murmur passed through the crowd, as people and geneslaves murmured and shuffled, striving to see what was happening. On the dais Luther Burdock stood with his hands clenched at his sides, and stared accusingly at Trevor Mallory. Behind him Metatron turned, slowly as though pulled by wires. His torso glowed a brilliant angry purple.

  “ Daddy !”

  Up the steps leading to the dais a figure ran: taller than any human girl, but with a girl’s voice and a girl’s sweet smile. An energumen, identical to all the others in that place save only that she had no uniform, and her voice, if anything, was purer, more childlike than that of her cloned siblings. She wore nothing save a loose short linen skirt that hiked above her knees. Her skin was tawny brown and she wore her hair long and in loose curls. Smooth white scar tissue marked where one breast had been. Tears streamed from her huge black eyes as she ran to where Luther Burdock stood with his back to her. She towered above the cowled acolytes, pushing them aside. “Daddy, it’s me!”

  Luther Burdock whirled about. At first
his gaze swept across the cavern, but then he stopped and looked anxiously back and forth, as though searching for someone shorter than himself. “Cybele?” he called, then cried out more desperately, “Kalamat? Cybele”?

  “Father—”

  And looking up he saw her: a grotesquely tall scarred figure, arms outstretched, her ecstatic voice ringing throughout the cavern. For an instant his expression was one of joyous disbelief. Then, like petals falling from a faded blossom his joy fell away, and there was only disbelief and horror.

  “ No !” He fell back as she lunged to embrace him.

  “Daddy!”

  She had nearly fallen herself as she grabbed him. For a moment he struggled in her arms, his white face twisted with loathing; but then he stopped. I could see another expression trembling there, another kind of disbelief, but tempered with wonder and not fear. Above him the energumen looked huge, a giantess toying with a man. But her face was tender, and glowed with delight as her huge hand cupped his face and she gazed down at him with an expression of transcendent joy. And suddenly it seemed that he recognized her, recognized something. A soft cry escaped him, a word I couldn’t understand. Slowly he opened his arms to her embrace.

  “Stop her! Save him !”