Icarus Descending (29 page)

“There are too many of us for them to conquer!” gloated Kalaman, and his brothers clapped and laughed aloud. “Only twenty of us here on Helena Aulis; but a million, ten million, on the Element!”

The global maps that shimmered in the air before him suddenly blinked off. In their place a tiny orb appeared, pulsing viridian and violet. It grew, sending off showers of sparks and the piercing sound of a glass harmonium. Now the orb was the size of a fist, a skull; now it was the height of a man. Within it the darting shafts of green and purple took on human shape until the Oracle stood there before them, wrapped in heatless lightning.

“Greetings, brothers!” His voice was sweet and clear as a young boy’s. “You have seen what your sisters and brothers have done without you—are you ready now to join them?”

Kalaman and his brothers cheered, in a single voice so thunderous that the ceiling trembled and the hanging lanterns flickered.

“I am glad!” Metatron cried. “Because there is an elÿon coming for you—it will be here tomorrow, when your lights turn over to day.”

The glowing figure turned, extended one shining hand to where Kalaman watched it through slitted black eyes. “You have done well by your brothers, Kalaman. Your father will embrace you when you arrive—

“But first you must ready yourselves for him. Whatever weaponry there is on Helena Aulis you must find and bring to the docking area. Also whatever stores remain of food and medicines. From here the elÿon will proceed to Quirinus, to gather your sisters; and then to Earth!”

And Metatron bowed to Kalaman, more gracefully than any construct, more gracefully than any human man; and the gathered energumens shouted and raised their arms in salute to him and Kalaman. Only Ratnayaka did not shout. He regarded the fanfare coolly with his ebony eye, embracing his brother Kalaman; and with his delicate mouth he smiled. A perilous smile, any man would have realized: the smile of Judas as he kissed his beloved prophet, the smile Clytemnestra wore when she welcomed Agamemnon. But there were no longer any men on Helena Aulis, and the energumens had not read the classics.

I
NSIDE, THE
IZANAGI
RESEMBLED
every elÿon freighter I had ever boarded: a vast gray space, the color of its pale carpeting lost beneath a layer of dust, its curved walls and ceiling hung with cobwebs that trapped more dust in patterns like limp feathers. The port authority was supposed to disinfect all personnel and freight to prevent intrusions by insects or other parasites. Still, the spiders got on board, somehow. I had never seen an elÿon that did not have them, rain-colored droplets sliding up and down the struts of the drunken webs they wove, unhinged by the craft’s strange gravity.

The
Izanagi
seemed cleaner than most vessels—the result of neglect more than fastidiousness. It had been traveling among the HORUS colonies for several months now, with only its adjutant living on board. I half-expected there to be energumen rebels hidden within its chambers, or some kind of automated weaponry; but I found no evidence of either. Perhaps the energumens had used it and cast it adrift until it returned to Cisneros; perhaps it had never come within the reach of the rebel Alliance. But I was impatient, and willing to risk the dangers in order to reach Quirinus.

As Valeska, Nefertity, and I stepped out into the main entryway, a bell chimed, a hollow, high-pitched tone alerting the crew to our arrival. A minute later doors opened in the misty walls, and several replicant servers appeared to escort us.

“Imperator Tast’annin,” one hissed. It was a fifth-generation Maio server, dating from the Third Ascension, tall and slender like some attenuated metal insect, with small glowing red eyes. “May I show you to your quarters?”

“No,” I said shortly, and turned to the server addressing Valeska, another Maio construct with that distinctive sibilant voice. “Captain Novus is the only one among us who will need formal quarters. Who is the adjutant aboard?”

The servers looked at each other and exchanged a round of clicking noises. Then the first one plucked Valeska’s sleeve and began to cross toward a wide round door.

“Imperator Tast’annin—” Valeska’s voice was pinched, a little desperate. I recalled that she had never been to HORUS, and so would not have been inside an elÿon before, except on inspection. I raised my hand and tried to sound reassuring.

“I will find you after we’ve embarked.” She nodded once, stumbling a little as her replicant guide escorted her through the door. Beside me Nefertity waited in silence, observing the remaining two Maio units with smoldering green eyes.

“They will not harm her?” she asked at last.

“Harm her?” I gestured dismissively at the replicants. They swiveled their silver heads and walked away, to disappear back down the long gray corridors that had disgorged them. “No. They’re standard escorts. Relatively speaking, few humans make the journeys on the elÿon. There will be no human crew on this one save its adjutant. And Captain Novus, of course.”

Nefertity turned to survey our chamber. Motes of crystal light danced in the air around her, white and blue and red; the only true colors in that room. “Is it all so dreary?”

I crossed to where an arched doorway opened onto a dim corridor and beckoned Nefertity to follow me. “It’s deliberate,” I replied. “After the Third Ascension, elÿon travel grew quite common, but the rate of psychosis among the crews and passengers was so high that some vessels arrived with all hands dead, save the adjutants. We now believe that any kind of stimulation contributes to the illness—”

I gestured at the smooth, drab walls, the soft indirect light that made everything look as though it had been cast in pewter. “—So the design attempts to soothe travelers. At least here in the entry foyer and cabins. Other parts of the vessel might be more interesting, if they’ve bothered with them at all. Most vessels no longer employ a human crew.”

Nefertity moved noiselessly behind me as we walked down the hall. “But your Aviators? How do they travel?”

“The same as anyone else. A mild anesthesia, psychotropic drugs. After twelve or so hours they can walk around the decks, but the replicants will always accompany them in case there’s need for intervention.”

“And you?” Nefertity paused to stare out a tiny window that showed nothing but a hazy umber darkness. “Did you travel like that?”

I strode past her, my boot heels thudding on the carpeted floor. “At first. But I was more disciplined than most. After several years the drugs were no longer necessary. Many people grow bored on the elÿon, but I always find it interesting to visit the adjutants.”

Nefertity left the window and followed a few steps behind me. “Is that where we are going now?”

I nodded. I was weary of conversation. It made it difficult for me to concentrate on where I actually was. So featureless were our surroundings that my memories threatened to spill over into them, paint a sky over the dun-colored ceilings and sow the floors with the lush reeds and vines I had last seen in the Archipelago. Such hallucinations were a commonplace of elÿon journeys. I had taught myself to overcome them, and even now I had no reason to believe I would be any more susceptible than I had been, since the trappings of my humanity had been flensed from me as carefully as the rind from an orange. But my mind remained human, prey to fears, especially since I found my thoughts returning again and again to my youth. I would need to concentrate fully on the problem of what had become of the HORUS colonies.

There were no other corridors branching off this one; very few doors, and those few locked. I knew they opened onto the vast network of pipes and conduits that channeled rivers of nucleic fluid throughout the craft, the seemingly random maze of glass and plasteel veins that pumped liquid data and propulsion fluid to the heart of the vessel. The elÿon was like a gargantuan beast, an immense vein-fed polyp encased in polymer heat shields and glassy plates. Instead of a rudimentary brain it had the adjutant, sealed within his cell; and as parasites, those few passengers it would consent to carry, safely strapped within their own small cavities at the vessel’s center. The elÿon were the zenith of the Ascendants’ centuries of toying with human and animal genetics: living vessels that swam among the stars.

The single corridor spiraled slowly out and up, as we traveled toward the center of the huge craft. Real windows appeared now, still narrow but letting in ribboned shafts of orange flame, the occasional lancing dart of a searchlight or passing aviette. It was like walking within the coils of a vast shell, its pale interior lit by intermittent flares of candlelight. Sensing my mood (she was, after all, a sort of woman), Nefertity remained silent, only now and then stopped to stare out a window.

“That is the adjutant’s chamber, there.”

My voice sounded too loud, amplified by the empty hall. I pointed to where the corridor ended in a high arch, its spandrel a sheet of clear plasteel opening onto a knot of coiled tubes, flickering yellow and green where navigational fluids pulsed through them. We passed beneath the arch, and I heard the faint sound, part serpentine hiss and part sigh, that signaled entry into the adjutant’s quarters.

The manifest Agent Shi Pei had given me listed one Zeloótes Franschii as the
Izanagi’s
sole crew, his inception date nearly a year earlier. This would be his last journey. The chemically induced insomnia necessary for successful navigation could not be kept up for more than ten or twelve solar months before dementia, and finally coma, set in. More than a few elÿon had been lost when their adjutants died en route to HORUS, but I had already decided not to worry about that.

I pointed to the far end of the great room, telling Nefertity, “His name is Zeloótes Franschii. We will talk to him—they grow lonely on these voyages, and one can learn much from adjutants. The process of navigating the elÿon makes one’s mind as an empty cup, and many strange things are poured into it.”

The entire far wall had been given over to a huge scanner, its curved surface covered with details that did not resemble a map so much as an illuminated anatomical chart. But it
was
a map, showing the elÿon’s interior construction as well as an illuminated diagram of the adjutant’s brain, with glowing bursts of color indicating those portions being stimulated by the bath of neurots and electrical pulses that made up the elÿon’s navigational system. As a subtle underlay to all this there was a chart of the heavens, showing both the renamed constellations—Maswan, the Circumfuge, Eisler 33—and the drunken orbits of the HORUS colonies, Quirinus and Totma 3 and Adhvi Sar, Sternville and Hotei and Helena Aulis.

“That is a navigational chart?”

I smiled, hearing Sister Loretta Riding’s incredulity in the nemosyne’s words. “It is.”

“They must go mad, studying it.”

“They do.”

We reached the wall. It was a moment before my eyes could focus on the adjutant. He seemed a part of that whole baroque design, an insect snared in some great luminous web. A withered, frail creature pinned to the wall, tubes and wires and vials strung about him like so many sacrificial offerings.

“Lascar Franschii.” I used the ancient term for
sailor,
the word the adjutants use to describe themselves.

The spindly figure twitched, so freighted with the instruments that kept him alive that he could scarcely move.

“Imperator Tast’annin.” The voice was a low sibilant. It came not from the man in front of us but from a speaking tube above his head. His own mouth was plugged with a wide corrugated tube, pale yellow like a sandworm. His eyes were gone, plucked from his head before his first journey and replaced by two gleaming faceted jewels that had sunk deeply into the hollow sockets beneath his brow. His skin had collapsed into folds like crumpled worn velvet, gray and yellow. There was no way of telling what race of man he had been; he scarcely seemed a man at all. As he spoke, his head jerked almost imperceptibly. I could sense the faint heat from his optics as their gaze swept across my face. “Imperator, you honor me.”

There was no way to tell if the words were meant ironically. I glanced aside at Nefertity. She stared with wide emerald eyes glittering as the adjutant’s own.

“But this is a terrible thing,” she said in a low voice. She raised her hands as though to offer him some comfort. “That is a man there—they are torturing a man!”

A spasm crossed the adjutant’s cheek. He might have been amused, or in pain—although it was unusual for them to feel pain, their sensory receptors having long since been destroyed. “You have a compassionate replicant,” his hollow voice rang out. “How interesting.”

“Are you in pain?” Nefertity approached him, stretched her silvery fingers to graze the slack line of his jaw. “Why have they done this to you?”

A hoarse wheezing crackled from the speaking tube: laughter. “Oh, but it is an honor, replicant. Almost as much an honor as has been given your master in his new body.”

I felt a jolt of anger. Had he been another kind of man, I would have killed him. But his judgment was impaired; he had lost the neural inhibitors that should have kept him from speaking to me thus. And his term as adjutant was nearly ended; meaning, of course, his life. The adjutants were given careful doses of prions, brain proteins that attack the thalamus and intercept sleep. The permanent dream-state induced by this enables them to lose all sensory perception, so that their impressions can be better channeled into the elÿon’s neural web and so provide the mindless biotic vessels with a governing consciousness. The adjutant’s body was fed by the complex if primitive web of tubes. The simpler side effects of the prion disease—increased heartbeat, elevated body temperature—were regulated by monitors and a NET. The hallucinations do not usually interfere with the elÿon’s progress, although once in an elegant if destructive pas de deux two of the billowing craft seemed to have been controlled by the same dream, and collided. Their wreckage still spans the outer orbit of the HORUS station Advhi Sar. The only aspect of the navigational method that cannot be controlled is this inevitable disintegration of the brain, as the proteins cause the thalamus to shrink and leave spongy holes in the cortex. It is a relatively slow death, but painless, except for those rare occasions when sensory hallucinations set the navigators shrieking and tossing in their webs.