Icarus Descending (30 page)

“It
is
an honor of sorts,” I said stiffly. “They are political prisoners who would otherwise be executed—”

“Innocent! Innocent!” His words were garbled almost beyond recognition by the speaking tube. A spew of nonsense followed, ending with a high-pitched yowl like a cat’s. Nefertity drew back from the wall, her eyes sparking alarm.

“It is the preliminary phases of his dementia,” I explained. “It is unusual for them to live for more than twelve months—I had hoped we might see him through his final voyage.”

As suddenly as they had begun, the adjutant’s screams stopped. “Oh, I will live,” he said, the speaking tube giving his words a hollow resonance. “I have already received notice of when I will die: not until after you disembark at Quirinus. I have a few more errands left to do.” His head flopped back and forth as another burst of raw laughter exploded in the chamber.

I wondered what those errands might be, and who was commanding him. Which of the colonies still had Ascendants governing the elÿon fleet? To my later grief I did not ask Lascar Franschii about this. Instead I turned to Nefertity. “Is this disturbing you? If so, you can join Captain Novus in her quarters.”

A rattling from the adjutant’s speaking tube brought more laughter. “Imperator! You are so solicitous of your fembot.” The last word came out as a derisive gasp.

The nemosyne turned her lantern eyes upon the man pinned to the wall. “I will go,” she said, and walked away. “Your cruelties sicken me.”

“So sensitive!” cried Lascar Franschii. “Tell me, Imperator, when did our masters order the creation of these softhearted constructs? I am moved, touched, fascinated beyond measure by such a thing! Are they all like this now, or is it only the Imperators who are given such delicacies?”

I took a step toward him, grabbing the coil of crimson and blue and green tubes feeding into the myriad slits in his body. “Be silent, Lascar Franschii, else—”

“Oooh, oooh!” The adjutant gasped and moaned, writhing within his webbed prison. “Be quick, be quick, be still my heart—” Above him the shimmering map glowed more brightly. A trailer of gold like flame shot from one end of the wall to the other. The optics that glittered where his eyes had been flared deep blue, nearly black, and his mouth twisted into a hateful grimace. “Paaugh—I curse you, Tast’annin, your eyes betray you—”

I felt a sudden weariness, a sickness with myself for reacting to the ravings of an adjutant, and dropped my hand. The tubes fell back against the wall with a thud. “My eyes?”

“Yesss—” The speaking tube quivered as he hissed. “My brothers fought you at the Archipelago. On Kalimantan. I was only a child, they kept me hidden in the caverns with the other children and the hydrapithecenes. But I saw you on the ’files—you did not laugh when the bodies ignited, as your troops did. The sight sickened you, did it not? It drove you to destruction! How can a man look upon such things and not go mad? Your eyes are the same now as they were then—they betray you, Imperator! What is it like to be a corpse, and have no tongue to cleave to your mouth in fear? Where does the fear go when you die?”

The optics rattled in his eye sockets, the speaking tube bulged from his twisted mouth as though he would disgorge it. Rage swept through me and I cried, “Silence, Lascar! I will engage another elÿon—be still!”

I raised my hand threateningly, but he took no notice. Why should he? After a moment I turned away and headed for the door. I had nearly reached it when the adjutant’s voice roared out, so heavily amplified that the nets of wires shook like vines storm-rent against the wall.

“Do not waste your efforts, Imperator! None of the other elÿon have clearance to attend upon Quirinus.”

I stopped and looked back. “Why not?”

Within the glowing interstices of the nav charts, the adjutant’s form twitched as he raised his head. “There is no one left to command them. No one but you. Besides, Quirinus should still be under quarantine. It was beset by plague, hidden in a rice shipment from the Archipelago. The station was sabotaged by a Commonwealth delator posing as a psycho-botanist.”

Spikes of greenish light flowed from his optics. It was easy to imagine triumph in his voice, though the speaking tube rendered nearly all emotion from it.

“Which plague?”

“
Irpex irradians.
” As the words boomed out, the adjutant’s head drooped upon his chest, as though exhausted. “Every one of them. Dead.”

“So I was told by commanding Agent Shi Pei. Is there any. danger of contagion?”

The adjutant’s shoulders twitched in what might have been a shrug. “Who knows? I would not rely on her word, though. Agent Shi Pei grows lax in her duties. I hear she spends much of her time in a hammock, smoking kef and reviewing ’files relating to the destruction of NASNA Prime.”

“But no official quarantine was ever declared,” I said.

The adjutant’s head tilted in a nod. “True. The energumens were immune, and there are no human survivors. The microphage can live for only seventy-two hours without a host. But
you
have no reason to fear, Imperator, you and your sentimental construct. Even our masters do not yet have organic plagues to attack the dead—and plague may be the least of your problems, if the Alliance succeeds with its plans.”

“I have a woman with me, Valeska Novus. I would not have her harmed—”

The adjutant’s voice came out in a dull moan. “Check with the Quirinus scholiast if you don’t believe me. There is little danger of contagion.”

I nodded. “Very well. Tell me of this Alliance.”

He raised his head, and this time I could see where his mouth was drawn in a cold, small smile, like a bloodless wound.

“It began on Sternville. The energumens rioted, and the cacodemons. They commandeered an aviette and attacked Helena Aulis and MacArthur, raising troops along the way. Cacodemons, mostly, and aardmen; also those argalæ intelligent enough to follow what was happening. Since then they’ve taken several of the Commonwealth stations, destroyed NASNA Prime and the Triton mining platform, and they tried to attack Urisa headquarters—anyplace where geneslaves outnumbered the human population, which is nearly everywhere in HORUS. The energumens lead them. They say that they have sent rebels to Earth, to organize geneslaves there in mass revolts. They say there has long been an underground network, of geneslaves and humans both, working to overthrow the tyranny of the Ascendants.”

“But how can this have happened?” I asked. “And so quickly—”

A low moan came from the speaking tube. “Slaves, Imperator—not even genetic monsters will stay slaves forever. There is a robot that leads them, a construct they call the Oracle. To rally the energumens, it speaks to them of Luther Burdock—”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Luther Burdock? The geneticist?”

“Yes. The energumens think of him as their father. Some of them worship his memory. I have seen it—in the HORUS colonies strange rituals evolve among the energumens and pass quickly from one generation to the next. And so this Oracle has preyed upon their beliefs. It has told them that Luther Burdock has been resurrected and will lead his monstrous children in war against mankind.”

“And is it true?” I demanded.

The adjutant shuddered. “Who knows? Certainly it is true that the rebellion has spread everywhere that there are geneslaves—which, of course, is every place on HORUS and Earth. And it is true that some people claim they can still see a resemblance to Burdock’s daughter in the energumen clones.
And,
” he added slyly, the speaking tube magnifying his glottal voice, “there are those who have always believed that he made certain preparations for his eventual return.”

I was silent. Of course. There had always been whispered remarks at the Academy when we spoke of Burdock, rumors that he had cloned not only his daughter but himself. But in four hundred years he had never resurfaced. Why now? I looked at Lascar Franschii and asked, “The energumens who have returned to Earth—how have they done so?”

The wires and tubes holding the adjutant snapped and shook like bridge cables in a high wind. “By elÿon, of course! They commandeered the elÿon and disembarked in the hidden zones! You have seen yourself how easy it would be—”

I thought about that for several minutes; thought about Lascar Franschii, who had no reason to love the Ascendants. Yes, it would be very easy to get an adjutant to defect.

I shook my head. Even so: a geneslave rebellion on Earth! It was an absurd thought. And yet it had happened on Quirinus, and on all the other stations as well, if I was to believe Zeloótes Franschii. I had seen for myself the empty sky where the splendid lights of HORUS should have been.

I realized then that I should have spent more time at Cisneros, reviewing whatever newsfiles they had and trying to locate any human survivors of the rebellions. I might have learned more of how the world had changed while I died and was reborn. I might not have forgotten my original intent in going to Quirinus, which was to find the nemosyne called Metatron. And I might have spared myself much of what was to follow.

I gazed once more at the glittering web that held the adjutant. “Tell me, then, Lascar Franschii: what is it that they want?”

A distinct cough. Pinkish spittle flew in a coarse spray around my head. “Our destruction, of course!” His laughter ,. rippled through the room. “The Oracle has taught them well. I have seen it: its ’file appears and they sit before it enthralled, and afterward go forth to do its will.
I
would never take orders from such a thing—a replicant, a mere robot; but paugh! these geneslaves, they are like children. You can manipulate them with words and pictures.

“And that is what the Oracle has done. It has told them that they have a destiny, that they are to repopulate the world. It has told them
that
was the grand dream that Luther Burdock had for them. They can’t reproduce as we humans can, at least not yet; but sooner or later they will find a way to do that as well. Sooner, I think.”

“But someone must command this robot! Who?”

The shining web trembled until I thought he would fall from it. His face twisted with some terrible effort, and then he smiled, a horrible grimace that made me take a step back.

“Well, Imperator, the Oracle says that Luther Burdock is alive. I believe the Oracle is his.”

I regarded him coldly. “And how do
you
know so much of this, Lascar?”

He shuddered, and with great effort produced another tortured smile.

“I told you.” His voice spilled from the speaking tube, harsh and deep. “They have commandeered many elÿon to take them to Earth….”

“And what then, Lascar Franschii?” My voice was cold with rage. “Did the insurgents confide in you their plans beyond the destruction of mankind?”

The optics in the adjutant’s skull sent out pulses of brilliant blue and orange. “Surely you know the rest, Imperator! ‘O brave new world, That has such people in’t!’ Two legs good, but four legs will be better, when the aardmen come into power—which, of course, they never will.

“You know what they say: ‘The Revolution is like Saturn; it eats its own children.’ I hear the energumens are doing that already. And once they have seized control, they will not relinquish it, to mankind or other geneslaves, even if it means death. They would have made wonderful Aviators, Imperator.”

I stretched out my hand and tapped restively at the wall. At last I asked, “But the Ascendants must still be governing from somewhere. Not everyone was in HORUS.”

“Of course not!” The adjutant’s voice rose to a howl. “Our masters will admit no failure, they will admit nothing! They are trying to govern us from the reclaimed capital now, and from Vancouver and New Wichita. But every envoy they have sent to Quirinus has been killed. Their bodies are returned via elÿon, their heads grafted onto their stomachs, their brains removed and looped together like a string of drying morels.”

“And this is the work of—?”

The adjutant’s head hobbled enthusiastically. Scarlet lights rippled across the web to form an aureole around his twisted body. “The energumens. They are like children whose tyrannical rector has been slain! They laugh and make a game of toying with the remains of their masters, and anyone foolish enough to interrupt their play.”

His voice swooped to a conspiratorial tone. “Ah, but you know, Imperator, I think that they are starting to succumb to the same lunacies as their masters. Some of them claim to have seen the Watcher in the Skies—yes, I heard them, they spoke of it and I laughed and they grew angry with me. They do not like it when you laugh at them. Others believe they are the children of the Final Ascension, and those on Quirinus are Amazons.

“I’ve never seen anything like
them.
Converts to the Mysteries of Lysis. A priest was interned there for several months, before the Ascendants grew impatient with his doctrine. He made quite an impression upon the energumens, though, especially their leader. Kalamat, her sisters call her; of course, their masters called them
all
Kalamat. She has an artistic temperament, Imperator—a great admirer of the dance, and your mother’s poetry, and sonic sculptures by people like Kyrië Martinez.”

The adjutant choked on his laughter. “But in a few days you will be able to see for yourself, Imperator Tast’annin. I have received clearance to depart now. I suggest you find an empty cell and position yourself until we are underway.”

I nodded grimly and took my leave, pausing at the doorway to gaze back to where he thrashed and moaned within his web, the nav chart glimmering around him. I stood there for several minutes, thinking on what he had said.

Kalamat: The Miracle. I knew the name, of course, any child fortunate enough to have formal schooling knew of Kalamat and her history; and even those children who had never seen a scroll or classroom had been threatened with Kalamat’s fate if they did not behave. I wondered what it meant, that an energumen with that name now led her sisters on Quirinus. Finally I left, Lascar Franschii’s sickly laughter echoing behind me.

I quickly found an empty chamber, but once there I found it difficult to calm myself. Instead I stood beside the wall, gazing at a scrim showing a night view of Tokyo Bay before the Three Hour War. My mind raced as I tried to make sense of all that I had learned. There was nothing to be done, now that we were underway; no point in returning to the City of Trees, since I knew I would not find Metatron there. I did not care just yet to confront my surviving superiors in Vancouver or New Wichita. They might view my actions as a defection, and feel that their
rasa
Imperator was in need of further rehabilitation, or even permanent retirement. I felt lost amid some inner labyrinth, trying to find the one path that would bring me clear of all these maddening things—Metatron, the rebel Alliance, Kalamat, Luther Burdock’s Oracle.