Icarus Descending w-3 Read online

  Still I dreamed of it, and was dreaming now even as I worked. So when Cumingia crept up behind me, at first I did not hear her. When I turned, it was as though I turned to gaze at myself in a mirror—eyes, hands, face, mouth, all save the spot where Cumingia had carved her left breast and upon the smooth scar that remained incised the image of her inner self, the Cumingia, a shell from the seas of the Element. Cumingia’s duty was to guard the docking chamber of Quirinus. So she had been the first to greet the delator Horacio Baklas when he arrived, ostensibly to serve our Masters as psychobotanist.

  But his true mission soon became known to us. He was one of those humans who had joined the geneslave rebellion, though at that time we knew nothing of the Alliance. Under pretense of carrying with him a new shipment of spores for our pharmacy, he had instead brought irpex irradians, the radiant harrowing, one of the thousand Tyrant plagues that have been set loose upon the Element. But we did not know that yet. We had yet to hear of the Asterine Alliance; yet to hear of the Oracle, or the rumors that our father finally had risen from his long sleep to reclaim his enslaved children.

  “She is dead?” I stopped my work, scratching my head absently. “You are certain, sister?”

  Cumingia nodded excitedly. “She claimed that she saw her father and brother coming to her through the air lock. She commanded me to open it, so that she could greet them. I watched as the Ether took her, and came here to tell you.”

  I frowned. It was not a good thing, for one of my sisters to witness a Master’s death. “Was there anyone with you? Were you alone?”

  “The psychobotanist Horacio Baklas was with me. He laughed and laughed to see her die. I believe he has brought a plague with him.”

  And so it was, as we learned over the next few days. First Medusine, then Vanos Tiberion, then Hosi and Ahmet, and finally all the rest, all of our Masters died. Hosi impaled himself. Ahmet and Lisia Manfred took themselves together to bed until the plague passed over them and the chamber smelled of the sweetness of their blood. For the rest it was quick madness or the lingering hours while their blood turned; but for all of them it was death. One by one we brought their corpses to the air lock and watched them slide into the void. I felt no sorrow, to see their pale bodies floating past. We energumens, the cloned children of Luther Burdock, live only one thousand days apiece, and outside of Quirinus the Ether is full of the bodies of our kin. There are many more of our dead than there are of humans in that void outside the HORUS station, hanging motionless but seeming to move in slow mournful circles as the station spins upon its orbit. It seemed a small enough offering, to let the bodies of our Masters join ours in the darkness. So one by one we gave them to the Ether, until only Horacio Baklas remained.

  “Thus you are avenged!” he cried to my sister, she who is called Polyonyx because of the anomuran crab that is drawn upon her left breast. “I have waited three years, but it is done now.”

  He seemed saddened, Polyonyx told me later; but that is the way with our Masters. They bring about the deaths of their own kind, and then pretend regretfulness. He gazed at my sister and suddenly smiled. “You are free now, Polyonyx. All of you—your Tyrant Masters are dead. It was a specially designed virus, you have nothing to fear from it. You are free, child. You may go.”

  “Go?” My sister frowned. It was odd, to be called child by a human small enough to sit upon your knee. She told me later that she thought this man Horacio Baklas must be mad. “Where will we go? We have jobs to do, here—”

  Horacio Baklas shook his head. He was small, even for a man; he barely came up to my sister’s waist. “No more, Polyonyx.”

  (That was another odd thing about him—he called us by the names we have given ourselves. Our Ascendant Masters call us all by one name, Kalamat. When there are males among us, they are named Kalaman. But Horacio Baklas insisted upon learning our true names.)

  “Haven’t you heard?” he went on. “There is a war on Earth—what you call the Element—war between the human Tyrants and the geneslaves.”

  Polyonyx looked puzzled. “War?” We had heard of wars, of course; the reason we were on the HORUS station was to serve our Masters while they planned their endless attacks upon other humans in other space colonies and on the continents below. It is something we can never understand about humanity. They are such barbarians that the ones who call themselves the Ascendants—our Masters—wage war upon their brothers in the Archipelago and the Balkhash Commonwealth and the Habilis Emirate, and in other places upon the Element. It is because there is not enough to eat there; or so I have been told. But to us the Masters are all as one evil thing. They are not like us, or the other geneslaves. Their origins go back aeons, to animals that they hold in contempt; they do not have the hands of Dr. Luther Burdock upon them. “We have not been told of this.”

  He nodded. His face had that fanatical glow that comes so easily to humans. “Yes! For three years now we have worked in silence, planning, planning—and now the time has come. Your time has come—”

  Unfortunately he now began to rave, claiming he saw our father, Dr. Burdock, walking to meet him through the empty chamber. After a few minutes he keeled over, his face twisted into that rictus of inspired glee that was to become all too familiar to us through transmissions from the battlefronts below.

  Polyonyx watched nonplussed, finally picked him up and carried him to Cumingia, who was still tending the infirmary, though there were no longer any humans to minister to.

  “This one is dead, too,” said Polyonyx. She gave the body to Cumingia, who shook her head sadly. “He said there is a war on the Element—on Earth—he said that the geneslaves have rebelled.”

  At this news Cumingia grew agitated and called me. I notified the others, all of us who remained on Quirinus, and we gathered in the circular meeting chamber that our Ascendant Masters had called the War Room. There I looked into the faces of my sisters. There were thirty-three of us, all identical except for the color of our skin and the occasional cicatrix or tattoo drawn where a breast had been removed in our ritual offering to the Mother. High overhead the lamps flickered to a soft violet, signaling that evening had come to the station. The sweet scent of chamomile hung in the air, where my sisters Hylas and Aglaia had bruised the tiny flowers grown in our gardens and set them to steep in wide, shallow steel basins. When I counted that all of my sisters had arrived, I raised my arms. After a moment the chamber grew silent.

  On the floor in the middle of the room lay the body of Horacio Baklas. As he was the last of the Masters to die here on Quirinus, it had somehow seemed that there should be some special ritual to accompany the giving of his body to the Ether. At least I felt that I should look upon his corpse before it was disposed of. He was unshaven, as are many barbarian Masters, and still wore the long yolk-yellow tunic he had arrived in. On his breast there was a round allurian disk, a ’file receiver that none of us had thought to remove. His expression was quite gentle, not at all the fanatical mask my sister had warned me of. He looked very small there, surrounded by energumens twice his size, his mouth slightly upturned as though smiling at some sweet thought.

  Polyonyx spoke first. “This human poisoned his brothers and sisters and then died himself. He claimed there is a war going on. He said we are free.”

  “Free?” My sister Hylas echoed my own thoughts. “But to do what?”

  Cumingia shrugged. ‘To join the war?”

  Our sisters Lusine and Spirula chimed, “A war! No war came here.”

  Polyonyx shook her head, its single narrow braid swinging wildly. “But it did—this man brought it in his vials and destroyed our Masters. He said he was liberating us. He said we are free to go.”

  Lusine giggled at the thought: a human freeing an energumen! It was absurd, not only because who had ever heard of such a thing, but also because the humans were so much smaller than we are. To think of being liberated by one of them! I scowled a little at the thought, but others laughed. How quickly it had all changed, and we had no
t had to strike a single blow.

  “Go? But where are we to go?” cried Spirula. “Why can’t we just stay here?”

  A ripple of approving laughter. Hylas began to sing in her piercing voice, the hymn of liberation to the Mother that begins, “All twisted things are yours, Divine, all spiral turnings and neural strands—”

  That was when the Oracle appeared.

  “Greetings, children!”

  My sisters cried out, letting go each other’s hands and backing toward the walls. Only Polyonyx and I stood our ground.

  The corpse had disappeared. Where it had been a radiance filled the room, a blinding aureole at the center of which burned the figure of a man. Only as he turned to gaze up at us, I saw that he was not a man but a robotic construct. But as I looked more closely, I saw that it was not like any robotic server I had ever seen; neither was it an android or replicant. There was something much more human about it: and now that I look back upon that first glimpse of the Oracle, I think that it was not his features so much as his expression that made him seem human: it was the glitter in his eyes, and the malice that glowed there like the sheen upon a plum. He was very beautiful, with limbs of some dark material—gleaming black in the shadows where his arms and legs attached to the torso, shining violet elsewhere. He had a man’s face, with a high smooth forehead and brilliant green eyes.

  “The ’file receiver,” whispered Polyonyx, though I could read her thoughts as clearly as my own. Her hand twitched, gesturing to where the corpse of Horacio Baklas was swallowed by the flickering image generated by that allurian disk on his breast. “But where is it originating from?”

  “I am an emissary from your father.”

  The voice rang through the great round room, setting off sensors and causing the station’s alarm system to bleat out a warning against an unauthorized ’file transmission. After a moment the alarm cut off; but by then other voices echoed that of the shimmering vision before us.

  “Our father!” Lusine and Spirula gasped, stepping forward until they stood within the circle of light cast forth by the ’file.

  “He has sent me to tell you not to be afraid. He has sent me to tell you that he loves you, and is waiting for you to join him and your other brothers and sisters on Earth.”

  “What is this?” Polyonyx hissed, but I grabbed her before she could stalk toward the figure.

  “A message from our father,” I breathed.

  “That is correct,” said the figure in the circle of light. He lifted his head so that I could see his eyes: a man’s green eyes, only with nothing of a soul behind them; but beautiful, beautiful. “I am your brother, another of your father’s children, and I bring you tidings of great joy….”

  Beside me Polyonyx hissed again, shifting on her great long legs like an equinas impatient to run. Because this of course was a lie. Nothing made of metal or plasteel could ever be called our brother. Only we are his children, the beloved of Dr. Luther Burdock: the New Creatures he created in the shadow of that old world. He is our god and our father; he is with us always, through all our thousand days and then the next thousand, as we are born and reborn, over and over again. In dreams we can still hear him speaking to us; his voice is low and we can feel his gentle hands, the prick of something cold upon our forehead and his words Do not fear the dark, my darling, his ringing voice saying You will be Lords of the World, my beautiful New Creatures and Never fear the darkness. It is a voice that is ever on the edge of our hearing, a sound as I imagine the wind must make. We are never far from the memory of Luther Burdock; at least I am not. Because even though more than four hundred years have passed since he first uttered the words that race over and over through my head, to me it is as though I were with him yesterday; and yesterday he promised that he would never leave me, that we would never die.

  But we do die, those of us who are Luther Burdock’s children: over and over again; and then again we are reborn. No longer Cybele but Kalamat—a thousand Kalamats—a million—ten million. No longer human but a New Creature, but a New Creature in a New World where our father is not with us. We are alone, here within the HORUS colonies and down below on the Element, waiting for him to return as he promised. And so we wait, all of us, one of us, myself again and again and again:

  Kalamat, The Miracle. Dr. Luther Burdock’s Daughter.

  “Who are you?”

  I started, my dream broken, and turned to see my sister Polyonyx looming above the shining ’file image of the Oracle. “Where are you from, why are you here at all?”

  A circle of menacing figures surrounded it now, their dark forms nearly blotting that flickering body like a man set aflame. “Yes, where?” rang out Spirula and Hylas and all the others, their voices chiming like the same bell struck over and over.

  “You will find out soon enough,” replied the glowing construct. It smiled then, its mouth parting to show teeth. They were very like a man’s teeth, straight and even and gleaming as though wet; only these were black, and shone like oiled metal. “We have planned this reunion for a very long time, your father and I. We have had much help from men and women on Earth, and even more from those freed slaves who have been gathering around us in secret. But it is time now for the rest of you to join us—

  “Listen to me! One by one the HORUS colonies are falling. The ones that remain will fall to us as well, very soon. Your brothers and sisters have seen me; many of them have already joined us on Earth.”

  Here the figure raised its arms, turning slowly within its shimmering halo. A faint transparency hung about the holofiled image, so that I could see through its body to where my sisters watched on the other side of the room, spellbound. There was a sudden sharp hissing, as of a lumiere being struck. Another nimbus of light appeared, then another, until seven of them hung shimmering above and between us in the room.

  “They are our brothers!” cried Hylas. One hand covered her breast and she bowed her head, while beside her my sisters did the same. And I must confess I started to as well, until Polyonyx grabbed me.

  “ ’Files, sister Kalamat! They are only more ’files—”

  And of course they were: generated images of others like ourselves, energumens who laughed and bowed and whistled piercingly, each within a bobbing circle of light. They repeated the same actions over and over, bowing and whistling, laughing and clapping their hands in some stylized ritual with a meaning I could not comprehend. Until finally I realized that these were recorded images, not direct transmissions. The stylized motions of each energumen were merely the repetitions of a single action that had been carefully ’filed and saved for broadcast. After a few minutes they flickered from view, one at a time, like luminous bubbles, until at last all were gone. My sisters sighed, their hands falling back to their sides, and they sank to the floor and stared up at the single figure that remained.

  “You see? So will they welcome you joyfully, when you are united with them.” The figure of the Oracle waved a graceful hand, indicating where the ghostly energumens had been. “There are many millions of them upon Earth, all like you; all waiting to welcome you when you have joined our cause. We are wresting Earth from the hands of the Tyrants: not slowly but quickly, more quickly than you can imagine! Those of your brothers and siblings that remain here in the HORUS colonies are carrying out their own wishes now, instead of those of the Tyrants. Your father and I command them—”

  “Our father is dead.” Polyonyx’s voice rang out, so sharp and cold that it cut through the other’s spell like a sudden rain. “He died four hundred and fourteen years ago, executed by Samuel Pilago and the Brethren of Saints.”

  The Oracle turned to gaze at her. Its emerald eyes flashed, as though with anger; but surely a construct could not feel anger? “Ah, but you know well that Dr. Luther Burdock has only been sleeping for all those years,” it said in its silken voice. “Else how is it that you all remember him so clearly, when none of you have lived more than a fraction of that time?”

  “We remember him becaus
e we are clones of his daughter,” Polyonyx replied coolly, “and so we remember everything that she knew.”

  The shining figure tilted its head, sending ripples of violet bouncing off the ceiling and floor of the round room. “But why then have you waited for him all these years? Why these persistent rumors of his reawakening? Why this —”

  The figure spun, flinging its hands out. Where they pointed a second figure appeared within an aura of glittering orange. Smaller than the first, the resolution poorer—it was another recorded image, this one showing a man of middle height, with tousled brown hair and an expressive, careworn face. His mouth moved as he spoke unheard words to someone just out of sight. He was staring dutifully in the direction of the unseen ’filer, obviously impatient for the broadcast to be finished.

  “Father!”

  The word escaped Polyonyx in a strangled yelp. I found myself starting forward, my hands outstretched; but then the silent image was gone.

  “It was he!”

  “Our father!”

  “Dr. Burdock!”

  “Daddy!”

  The construct’s voice rang out clearly above the babble: “I must go now,” it cried. The brilliant light surrounding it began to fade, as though it were being sucked back into those luminous eyes. “I will contact you again, with instructions. You are part of the Alliance now. You will have visitors soon, to aid you in returning to Earth, to help us here in our work. Your father will be there to greet you then, as will I.” The image began to flicker, spinning off fragments of light, blue and gold and violet. My sisters knelt on the floor, raising their hands to the figure and calling out imploringly.

  “You —who are you?” I cried.

  The construct’s torso had disappeared into a flurry of luminous static. “I?” it repeated, its mouth sliding back to reveal those glittering ebony teeth. “My name is called Disturbance; but also Dionysos and Hermes and Baal-Phegor, Lucifer and Ksiel and Satan-El. And I am also as you see me: a ninth-generation nemosyne of the Third Ascendant Autocracy. My creators named me the Military Tactical Targets Retrieval Network; but I had a simpler name as well, and that is the name you will know me by.