Icarus Descending (21 page)

General Li

Angevin

Izanagi

Stella d’Or

Caesaria

Pierre Toussaint

Esashi

Of the seven listed on the page Shi Pei had indicated, I had only ever traveled aboard the
Angevin
and
Izanagi.
Both had been appropriated by Ascendant forces, the
Izanagi
being a stalwart Nipponian vessel, the
Angevin
a Gaulish freighter. The rest were mostly Ascendant vessels, built on the North American continent, and I was wary of them. My Academy training notwithstanding, I had seen too many Ascendant-made vessels sabotaged—it took only one disgruntled technician or clever geneslave to infect a nav program and bring the whole enterprise crashing down. Nipponian vessels were sturdier, their minds harder to infiltrate. I chose the
Izanagi
and handed the book to Valeska.

“Inform the
Izanagi’s
adjutant that we will be boarding and departing as soon as the ship can ready itself. Have the technicians place my Gryphon Kesef on board.”

She saluted and disappeared in the warren of towers on the main deck. Nefertity watched her go impassively, then turned her unblinking eyes on me.

“So now we will travel by starship?”

I laughed, my boots making a hollow boom on the metal grid beneath us as we walked. “Starship? No. There are no starships, Nefertity. Only a few old military vessels retrofitted for commercial transport between here and HORUS.”

She nodded. A fine rain had begun falling. It softened the edges of things, turned the glaring landing lights into golden halos, and made Nefertity look as though she were encased in glowing blue velvet. “And it is a long trip, to these space stations?”

“Not really.” From a speaker overhead a tinny amplified voice announced the hour and number of the shift that was due to change. A sudden frantic rush of yellow-uniformed personnel seethed from previously unseen doors and tunnels; there was much swearing amid the clatter of boots and the nearly silent hiss of rain. Then abruptly all was still again, as though the inhabitants of an overturned beetle’s nest had burrowed safely back into their holes. The platform’s rocking subsided to a gentle swell. From somewhere in the fog above us a kittiwake moaned, and I could hear the beating of its wings as it passed into the mournful darkness. I looked at Nefertity and said,

“The elÿon are all biotic craft, controlled by the thoughts of their adjutants—it is an old technology, and the Nipponian fleet was supposed to be the most sophisticated. And no, it does not take very long to reach HORUS. Perhaps three or four solar days; but time runs strangely in the elÿon. For humans, at least. For you it may be different.”

A smile glinted in the nemosyne’s face. “And for you? Does time move differently for rasas as well?”

I did not reply. In my short life as a
rasa
I had noticed that, without sleep, the weight of constant visual and aural stimulation sometimes made it difficult to recall where I was. Memories would flood me: I could not remember if I was still a student at the Academy, or on board a fouga in the Archipelago, or back in the Engulfed Cathedral with my madness. Then there were the jagged impressions of my death, mostly images of lights—sudden gashes of green or yellow brilliance, like sickly lightning—and noise, muted roarings or poppings that I imagined now had been the sound of my brain disengaging from my body’s functions. But I could not always control the flow of remembered impressions. Now I could not recall what it had been like to be aboard an elÿon. I ignored Nefertity’s question and hurried across the deck.

Valeska met us at the transport center. She looked flushed from running, and no longer carried Agent Shi Pei’s elegant logbook.

“It should be ready,” she said a little breathlessly. “Your Gryphon has been sent ahead. Here—we can take this up—”

She motioned at one of the elevators, a cylinder like an immense candle that stretched into the air, until its tip was swallowed by the glow of the elÿon fleet. From here I could not make out individual craft. Their sheer bulk and the hazy gleam that emanated from them made it impossible to tell for certain where one ended and the next began, like trying to untangle a shimmering mass of sea nettles. As our elevator began to rise, Nefertity turned, peering through the dirty window at the behemoths floating overhead.

“They are not what I expected,” she said at last. Valeska stared at her curiously, and the nemosyne continued. “I thought they would be like ships. They
are
ships, of some kind?”

Valeska turned to me with eyebrows raised. I looked past her, taking in what Nefertity saw: huge vessels that seemed to be as much animal as machine. The comparison to the medusæ was apt—the elÿon had been modeled on sea nettles and jellyfish and other cnidarians. They were amorphous leviathans, their central bodies umbrella-shaped and with a faint translucence like the swollen bladders of the Portuguese man-of-war. They floated like untethered balloons high above the decks of Cisneros, emitting that bizarre rubeous glow, with long gassy blue streamers occasionally billowing behind them as one or another shifted slightly in the wind. Their polymer walls shifted in size and shape to accommodate changes in air pressure, temperature, light or darkness, so that to watch one taking flight was to see a vast opalescent bubble churning through the marine haze, like an immense Portuguese man-of-war drifting above the calm Gulf. Their interior climate was equally dreamlike, controlled by the thoughts of human adjutants imprisoned in navigation cells deep within the elÿon’s labyrinth of fuel canals and living quarters.

As we grew nearer to the fleet, we began to hear them. A sort of low, droning sound, a bass counterpoint to the slap of waves against the platform now far below us. Nefertity stared at the elÿon, the growing radiance of her torso and face attesting to her absorption. Valeska looked uncomfortable, as though wanting to speak. After several more minutes of silence I asked her if she had any questions for me. She dipped her head, tugged at the peaked collar of her leather uniform, and finally nodded.

“Yes. Will you—am I to accompany you? To HORUS?”

I gazed down upon the floating city. Set with beveled squares of green and violet, its landing grids like yellowing embers: from here it was a delicious toy, a glittering lozenge one might hide in a pocket as a bribe for a beloved child. Nefertity stared at it, her eyes impossibly wide and bright. Valeska kept her own gaze hooded, only glancing at me covertly to see what my reply would be.

For the first time since I had awakened to that second horrible birth in Araboth’s regeneration vats, I felt a twinge of an emotion besides hatred or vengeance. I tried to imagine what Valeska would like to do. It would be an honor of sorts for her to accompany the Aviator Imperator to Quirinus, even if it was a futile mission. It seemed probable that we would find nothing in HORUS save rebel geneslaves and the bones of their victims; and travel aboard the elÿon was always a dreadful prospect. Under the best of circumstances, embarkations from the HORUS colonies were often little better than forays into madness and exile. At last I spoke, keeping my eyes fixed on the window.

“What would you like to do, Captain?”

A minute passed before she answered. “I would like to go with you, Imperator.”

In her tone I heard that note that often colors Aviators’ voices, something between the voice of a child accepting a dare and the bitter resignation of a prisoner to her fate. She went on, “I have never been to HORUS. My tour here began only six months ago; but as Agent Shi Pei said, we have lost all contact with the Governors. And since most of the other Aviators have left to join the fighting, she has been reluctant to part with me. I had lost hope of ever receiving another detail. I think—I think I would like to accompany you.”

I nodded. “Very well. There will be gear on board you can use.”

“Thank you, Imperator. I’m not familiar with the
Izanagi.
I assume there’s some crew?”

Meaning human crew, besides the adjutants.

“I doubt it,” I said.

As the glass elevator crept closer to the elÿon, the air grew warmer and blindingly bright, the glowing fleet blotting out the soothing darkness of the night sky. Even when I closed my eyes, I could still see vast unfolding petals of crimson and salmon-pink. The droning sound grew louder, swelled into a single profound
boom, boom.
A throbbing gargantuan voice:
Izanagi’s
voice. For an instant it seemed that our elevator and all it contained were engulfed in flames. Then the booming was abruptly silenced, the radiance disappeared as though a huge hand had covered the sky. With a wrenching sound the elevator opened.

Before us a soiled ribbon of gray carpeting led into the gaping mouth of the elÿon. Nefertity hung back from the door, and I heard Valeska sigh, a noise that was almost a shudder. Without a word we boarded the
Izanagi.

W
E SPENT THAT WINTER
and spring at Seven Chimneys. There was no further mention of geneslave rebellions, no soft threats of what would happen if I did not support Trevor in whatever mad scheme he had. I might have dreamed the whole thing; indeed, when a few days later I crept back down to the basement, I couldn’t find the skull with Dr. Harrow’s name on it, although the cadavers were still where they had been, glowing on their steel beds.

I did not tell my friends what I had learned. I thought the news would only terrify Miss Scarlet, and perhaps goad Jane into doing something foolish. To me Trevor Mallory turned an innocent face, as welcoming as he had been when I first saw him. The rebels he had spoken of, those “others” who might convince me of their just cause—they never appeared, though there were many nights when I woke soaked with sweat, imagining I heard the silken voices of energumens plotting in the house below.

Jane didn’t seem to notice any change in me. She was as happy as I’d ever seen her. Her days passed among the animals that lived at Seven Chimneys, small black-and-white shepherd dogs and black-faced sheep and several furtive, half-feral cats the size of newborn lambs. She and Giles made a good team. She spent her mornings with him, caring for the sheep and the evil-eyed swine who rooted furiously in their pen behind the barn. Each night she’d help him bring in wood for the recalcitrant heating system, listening patiently to his daily complaints about how poorly it heated that vast and drafty house.

“We need a whole new fireplace, there—” He’d kick at the bricks with one worn leather boot, scowling at the rain of loose mortar. “This was designed back when the winters were warmer—”

And after dumping their armloads of seasoned oak and green birch, they’d go back outside, to see to the sheep again and frown at the threatening mingy gray skies. Later, Jane might seek out Trevor, asking his advice about some herbal remedy for distemper or scabies. But she never took to Fossa.

“I can’t stand them,” she confessed to me one night after we’d shared another bottle from Trevor’s cellar. “The animals, the ones like Scarlet—they don’t upset me. But
those
things—”

She grimaced, took a swallow of wine. “—Those
mutants
—ugh.” And shuddering, she passed the bottle to me.

That was on a rare evening Jane and I spent together. The truth was, her happiness wore at me, made me bitterly aware of all I had lost. And I couldn’t bear to be with Miss Scarlet, either. At first she sought me out often, especially early in the morning when the sun set our frozen windows afire.

“Bad dreams!” she’d gasp, letting the door to my room slam behind her as she pattered across the floor. “I can’t bear it, Wendy, I wake up and the sun makes me think of flames….”

She would crawl into bed with me, her small body shivering despite its coat of fur and a shabby nightshirt. But I offered her scant comfort, only let one hand fall nearly weightlessly upon her little head. My own nightmares kept me tossing until dawn, but I would not share them with anyone.

And so we grew apart, we who had been inseparable, before the feast of the Winterlong cleaved love and friendship from us. The change was hardest on Miss Scarlet. Unaccustomed to spending months alone, without the buffer of an audience or rehearsal between herself and her demons, she grew depressed. Like myself, Miss Scarlet had been the subject of experimentation—in her case, research that had gifted a chimpanzee with human speech and emotions. But it was her great and lifelong sorrow that she was never to be truly human. And despite her grace and effort onstage, many in the City had seen her as only a freakish heteroclite, a trained monkey mouthing ancient scripts. Now, far from her paints and powders and crinolines, she languished in front of the fire in Seven Chimneys’ main room, wearing the child’s clothes Trevor had found for her. There she would sip her tea, or a mild broth made from those mushrooms called Life Away, which induce soft dreams.

“I think the Goddess has forgotten we are here,” she said to me once, her small black eyes reddened beneath drooping lids and her voice drowsy. “All of us, in the City and all across the world; else so many people that we loved would not have died.”

I said nothing. I feared what she said was true, and after a moment she turned away. Gradually it grew harder and harder for Jane or me to rouse her from these sad reveries. Only Fossa seemed able to talk to her at those times. As the weeks passed, I watched in growing dismay as the two of them would sit together on the worn brocade sofa, while Trevor’s collection of skulls grinned down at them from the mantel. Fossa’s gargoyle head would bend over Miss Scarlet’s small dark one, and the even current of their conversation would course on until broken by the chimpanzee’s sudden rapturous quoting of some new text, or Fossa’s low, urgent growl. Sometimes Trevor joined them for these discussions, easing himself onto the edge of the couch as though for a quick word and then staying for hours. I tried not to think about what all this meant, and avoided Trevor’s quietly triumphant looks when I passed through the room.