Icarus Descending (35 page)

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 common 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

…this monstrous and bizarre thing we saw after seventeen days in orbit. Iacono noticed it first, but when he told us about it, we all just laughed at him. Then
I
saw it, and it was just as he’d described it: a shape that at first glance resembled a cloudy nebula, or maybe some waste pod cut loose from one of the stations. Only this thing actually seemed to
move,
and you know nebulae don’t do that! We all gathered on the observation deck to watch. Afterward I was stunned to learn eighteen hours had passed while we sat there—and we didn’t even notice. Didn’t get hungry or thirsty or tired, didn’t get up to go to the bathroom, nothing. Just watched that thing get bigger and bigger, until it filled the entire window: an enormous whitish mass, not really having any kind of shape or form. Eventually it disappeared, the way smoke does on a windy day—though you know there’s no wind up there.

Later when we tried to describe it to each other, we all admitted to having had the experience of being observed. Of being
watched;
but by whom or what we never knew.

Maybe my refusals to submit to a drugged journey came in part from my desire to see that phantasm. As I have told you, I’ve long been interested in manifestations of this type. Aidan Harrow with his talk of new gods; his sister Emma with the demons she created out of stolen children and brain proteins; Raphael Miramar and the Gaping One; Wendy Wanders and her uncanny power to kill with her mind. Even today, in the Archipelago they believe in graveyard spirits that they call
memji,
creatures with white teeth that stand on one leg and wait for the dead to be buried before crawling into their graves to copulate with them.

Long ago people laughed disdainfully at such ideas; but since the First Shining the world has changed. Aidan Harrow convinced me of this, and my mother. Both believed that the subtle and gross “improvements” wrought by our failed sciences made the Earth an increasingly hostile place for humanity. But these same changes had flung open a door for other, older things. Things that had lived here once, aeons ago; things that might return now to fill the void left by our systemized extermination of our own race.

Fool that I was! I believed the Watcher in the Skies might be such a thing, but I held few hopes of seeing it on this voyage. For some time I remained in my passenger cell, alone with my memories and that gruesomely lovely mural of Tokyo Bay. Eventually I checked the monitor, to insure that Lascar Franschii had told me the truth and that we had, indeed, left Cisneros. Then I left to check on Valeska Novus.

I found her cushioned within one of the roomier passenger cells near my own. The air in here was chilly, to aid in slowing down the metabolism of human travelers. Valeska looked quite pale, slung in a sort of hammock that in turn was held between two enormous cushions like a pair of plush hands. I bent over her and placed my finger against her throat, seeking a pulse. I found none. Then I held my hand above her mouth, watching to see if her breath would cloud the metal: nothing. Were it not for the monitor beside her that showed a thread of silver, indicating her heartbeat, one would think her dead.

On the wall across from her one of the vessel’s robotic crew was plugged in, and observed me with three unblinking red eyes.

“We recommend that all passengers remain in their cells until we arrive at our destination,” it announced in a breathy voice.

“I am not a human passenger,” I said shortly. The construct’s eyes swiveled as I crossed the room to the door.

“We recommend this for all passengers,” it went on. “This is for your safety as well as ours.” Ignoring it, I let the door slam behind me.

I found Nefertity in a neighboring cell, also cushioned as though she were a human traveler. Her light had dimmed to a very dull pewter gleam, and her eyes were closed. It was perverse, but in that state of hiatus she looked more human than she ever had before. She might have been a woman sculpted of ice, and suddenly I felt a pang, one of those rare tugs of emotion that reminded me that I now had more in common with this beautiful machine than with the Aviator dreaming in the next room. I turned and left, fleeing that notion as much as the sight of the nemosyne, so unnervingly vulnerable where she slept.

The crew roster for the elÿon had listed only a handful of constructs to support its solitary adjutant. Since the
Izanagi
had been a freighter, there was little need for human staff. I wandered alone through its spiraling corridors, all of them twisting inward to where Zeloótes Franschii was suspended within his web of dreams and ganglia.

The polymer walls had a roseate cast that changed color, deepening to red and a deep lavender. While the walls appeared amorphous and soft to the touch, they were in fact quite strong. I could see through them to where nucleic fluids pulsed within transparent conduits, and the elÿon’s immense ganglia floated past, like blood-colored stars. All of this and more—storage bladders, pressure chambers, hivelike cells filled with neurotransmitting fluid—was contained behind those walls. The habitable space within an elÿon is actually quite small: a series of tiny chambers branching off from the corridors coiling into the heart of the ship. From inside, it resembles a nautilus more than anything else. I was always conscious of strolling warily within a thing that has sentience, even if it is not quite
alive.