Icarus Descending (13 page)

Alone, alone, alone!

I wanted to shriek, recalling the Cathedral in flames, and the City itself like some lovely canvas, curled and blackened, burning, burning. All of it gone; all of them, even the Mad Aviator, dead.

But then I remembered what Giles had said.

“It will be the best news we’ve had in a year if we
knew
him
—
if he’s really dead, as you say.”

I shivered, pulling the suede blouse to my chest. Impossible, of course. I had seen the Aviator fall, his face torn away by the impact from Jane’s pistol. And yet, and yet…

Grief turned to terror at the thought of Margalis Tast’annin, still alive somewhere; still searching for me. I forced myself to focus on something else—the kinetic sculpture’s monotonous dishabille, the clicks and whines from the castrato aria; my own voice chanting in another language.

And finally grief and terror gave way to a numbness, an utter exhaustion that was like a sort of joy. My head ached from crying, but the tears were gone now. Carefully I placed the suede blouse back upon the bed. Then I gathered my old clothes and brought them to the tiny fireplace. Piece by piece I fed them to the flames: trousers, blouse, belt, scarves. Thick foul smoke filled the room as the cloth danced upon the metal hearth, but I didn’t care. I waited until the flames died back, then, heedless of the pain, stuck my hand beneath the grate and drew back fingers smeared with hot ashes. When I rubbed them on my face, they tasted bitter and burned my tongue; but all I could think of was Justice burning, all I could wish was that these had been his ashes, that I might somehow have tasted his death.

It was Jane who found me there a little later. Naked, staring into the little fire grate like a dull child, my mouth smeared black, my hands filthy.

“Wendy,” she said gently. I wouldn’t look at her, but I could hear the heartbreak in her voice. “Oh, Wendy—”

She pulled me gently to my feet and helped me into the bathroom. There she washed my face and hands, dabbed at the wound on my cheek, and brought me the new clothes from the bed. Like a patient child she dressed me, saying little, rinsing my hair until it was free of soot and blood. Then she kissed me, her mouth lingering on my cheek, her lips parting the slightest bit so that I could feel her warm breath. When she lowered her face to kiss my hands, I saw the tears in her eyes.

“Oh, Wendy,” she whispered. I shut my eyes and breathed deeply, tried to bring up some image that might ease the pounding in my head; but found nothing but Justice’s face, pale and lifeless where he lay on the Cathedral’s stone floor.

“Go, please,” I said hoarsely. Jane’s hands slid from mine. I could hear her crossing the room, hear her pause at the door where I imagined her looking back at me, her brown eyes bright with tears. Then the door opened and shut, and I was alone once more.

Not long after that someone tapped gently at my door. “Dinner soon,” Trevor’s soft drawl came to me. “We’ll be downstairs.” I heard him pass to the next room and call to Miss Scarlet. I waited until his soft tread echoed on the steps again. Then, sighing, I walked to the mirror that hung near the door.

The new clothes did not suit me at all. Part of it was their anachronistic cut. No one wore skirts much anymore, neither men nor women. These obviously had been made for a woman, someone my own height but with wide hips and heavy breasts, the kind of woman the Paphians might name margravine at one of their masques. They were not clothes that became me. In my boy’s attire I had always looked beautiful, a tall, slender youth with tawny hair and gray eyes, too serious, perhaps, but with a softness about my mouth that had made me popular with my Paphian audiences.

All that was gone now. The Aviator’s words came back to me, when he had imprisoned me at the Cathedral—

“Not so pretty as you were, Wendy Wanders
…”

And it was true. My singed hair hung raggedly around my face; my face itself was gaunt and gray save where my cheek had been seared, and that livid scar glowed like the impression of some deathly kiss. My eyes were swollen, but that seemed almost a mercy—who could bear to look into those eyes now, that had seen such things? The blouse and skirt hung limply on me, neither too large nor too small but just
wrong
—clothes made for another kind of life than mine. Already I regretted burning my other things. I raised my hand to cover the reflection of my face, when another knock came at the door.

“Wendy?”

Miss Scarlet’s voice, hesitant and worried.

“I’m coming.” I turned, walking clumsily with the long skirts billowing about my bare legs. I refused to wear those woolen boots. They made me think of moujiks, sour-faced Balkhash peasants straining over their fields of soy and triticale.

“Dinner smells good, at least,” Miss Scarlet said as I joined her in the hall. Her voice had a sharp, forced brightness. I nodded silently, refusing to meet her eyes, and she tried another tack.

“There was a telefile in my room. And a dumbwaiter. And some kind of imaging mirror that showed what my insides looked like. What’s your room like?”

I shrugged. Miss Scarlet pursed her lips. “At least they gave you new clothes.”

I gave up and smiled wanly. “You, too.” It was impossible for me to be unkind to Miss Scarlet for long.

She ducked her head and did a little pirouette on the bare pine floor. Her clothes had obviously been made for a child, a boy probably—cheap cotton trousers and a too-small tunic that Miss Scarlet had belted with a remnant of her Winterlong finery. It was odd to see her dressed like that, with none of the elegance she usually affected. The tunic’s arms were too short, and her hands bristled at the end of them, thick with dark fur, her palms the color of an old-fashioned pencil eraser.

“Your shoes didn’t fit?” she asked. “Neither did mine—”

She stretched out one foot until her long toes curled around the banister at the head of the stairs. She looked over her shoulder at me and grinned, and for an instant I thought she was going to swing down, hand over hand. Instead she waited patiently until I reached the steps, and walked demurely at my side.

In the main corridor we found Jane. She had changed back into her own clothes, which looked so travel-worn and stained, I asked if she hadn’t been given new ones.

“I feel more comfortable this way,” she announced. “Look at these.” She pointed at the water-stained plaster wall where two paintings hung, side by side.

Flight!
was the caption on one of them. It showed a terrified black-skinned woman clutching a bundle and stumbling down the embankment of a wide, furiously boiling river. At her heels a ravening mass of hounds slavered and howled, and in the background I could barely discern the hulking figure of a white man with a face as hideous as the hounds’. Upon closer investigation, the bundle the woman hugged to her proved to be an infant. It was a very old print, nearly as old as the house, I would guess, and like much else at Seven Chimneys could easily have belonged in one of the Curator’s museums.

The other picture was not nearly so old—three hundred years, perhaps. It was a holofile, set in a round frame of gold chromium brushed so that it had a rough veneer like wood. The ’file showed a dark landscape done in swirling blues and violets, a landscape thick with trees and watched over by a shining quarter-moon. As I stared at it, clouds passed across the moon’s face, turning the shadows beneath into slashes of black and indigo. But then the clouds moved on; the moon glowed brighter, revealing a scene much like that in the other painting. Only instead of hounds, there was a brace of aardmen, silvery monitors winking around their necks as they pursued something down a sharp incline into a ravine. I had to peer more closely to see what they hunted: a figure like a very tall man, but with a childish face and huge, heavily muscled arms that ended in disproportionately large hands.

“Ugh,” I said, drawing back. At my side Miss Scarlet craned her neck, trying vainly to make out what I saw. “Don’t,” I warned, pushing her gently down the hall in front of me. “It will spoil your appetite.”

“Flight to the Ford,”
the ’file whispered its title as we hurried past. Jane followed us with a rigid smile on her pale face.

“There seems to be a kind of
theme
here,” she said, fixing me with a fierce look. Before she could go on, Trevor appeared in a doorway ahead of us.

“Very nice,” he said. He looked at Miss Scarlet and me and murmured approvingly. He had changed into a kimono, a blue so deep, it was almost black. With his enhancer and his sharp features and silvery hair, he looked more like an elegant replicant than a human host. “Please,
please
come in,” he urged.

It was a splendid room; even Jane drew her breath in sharply as we entered. A rich burgundy-colored paper stamped with golden poppies covered the walls. In places mildew had eaten away at the pattern, but that only made it seem lovelier, more of a miracle that it had survived so long. A huge Oriental rug covered the floor, woven with plumes and arabesques of blue and gold. The edges had worn so that you could see the carpet’s weft, and beneath it the wooden floorboards shining with oil. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, some of its crystals missing. Thick red candles burned in empty sockets that had once held electric bulbs, and the wax dripped to congeal on a table that could have seated twenty, though only six places were set. I was wondering who the sixth could be when Fossa entered from another doorway. He walked in that mincing way that aardmen have, and I was surprised to see jewels glinting from his thick wrists—heavy bands of steel burnished to a glossy finish, set with amethysts and the holo-projecting lozenges called hyalines.

“Fossa—” Trevor indicated a seat, an elongated divan piled with pillows. The aardman hunched his shoulders, murmuring something unintelligible. He settled into the chair, his long legs drawn up beside him. I started when Trevor gently prodded my shoulder.

“Please, Wendy—” He pointed to a chair opposite Fossa. “Be seated.”

It was a strange meal. Giles and Trevor sat at opposite ends of the long table, with Miss Scarlet and me on one side and Jane and Fossa across from us. Above our heads the candles in the chandelier stayed lit, despite the tiny electric lights glowing from recesses in the walls behind us. Lakes of molten wax continued to spread across the scarred tabletop. In the background soft music played. I recognized the repetitive chiming voices, broken by bass notes like snarls. “The Eleusinian Chorus” by Marriette Greeves, something else familiar to me from HEL. A faint perfume of almond blossom filled the air, and wisps of smoke bore various smells from the kitchen—a pungent note of rosemary, the mellow scents of cumin and fenugreek and roasting garlic.

“You will try our wine, of course.” Trevor broke the uneasy silence, one eyebrow raised above the shining arc of his enhancer. Giles smiled and turned in his seat, beckoning to someone in the kitchen. A moment later a server appeared, the first I had seen since we arrived. It was far older than those we had used at HEL, walking on stiff steel legs jointed backward like those of a heron. Its metal torso gleamed. The black grid of its face had been painstakingly covered with an overlay of lenticular leaf that showed a soothing pattern of soft greens and blues, an effect reassuring to those aristocrats who had used the first-generation servers, and preferred this abstract effect to a crude effort at replicating a human face.

“Wine please, Mazda,” Giles ordered.

“Yes, master,” the server hissed, and crane-stepped back into the kitchen.

Trevor and Giles tried to draw us into conversation, but Jane was too wary and I was too exhausted to say much. Miss Scarlet and Fossa carried on a heated discussion of medical practices and ancient cinema. The aardman had adjusted the hyalines on his wrists so that blurred projected images appeared at the end of each of his thick, knobby paws—crude holos of a pair of perfect, milk-white hands with tapering fingers set with many rings, glowing with that slightly blurred aura that surrounds cheap, Archipelago-made hyalines. The projected hands moved perfectly with Fossa’s own. As he and Miss Scarlet spoke, I watched him, his hulking figure bent over the table, lifting his fork and knife with those ridiculously delicate fingers and bringing the food to his gnarled face. I stared fascinated, until Miss Scarlet shot me a disapproving glance and I turned back to my meal.

The food was odd, too. Not the wine, an earthy cabernet served in goblets of that mouth-blown violet glass made by abos in Wyalong—Trevor must have a fine cellar, with such crystal to match it. But after a sweet, soft white goat cheese served with lovage and rue (fresh herbs! in winter!) the server brought in platters that steamed and gave forth a heady, musky scent.

“Wendy.” Giles nodded at Mazda to indicate it should serve me first. “Please, help yourself—”

With steady, gleaming hands the server ladled out a dark broth. Small round objects swam in a rich sauce, heavily scented of juniper berries. I stared doubtfully at my plate as the replicant continued around the table, then passed back into the kitchen for the next course and began the whole process again.

“What—what
are
they?” I asked at last, poking at my plate with a knife.

“Mushrooms,” said Trevor. His enhancer sent lavender ripples dancing from his wineglass as he held it to the light.

“Mushrooms?”
said Jane.

“Mushrooms,” Miss Scarlet repeated avidly from where she balanced on a stack of books atop her chair. “How lovely!”

There were mushrooms in sauce; an aspic of tiny pink mushrooms like the tips of one’s fingers; a tray of what appeared to be slices of bread, but which were actually great round crescents of the sort of fungus one finds growing on trees. Across the table Jane gulped her wine and picked at several mushrooms stuffed with garlic and herbs, while next to her Fossa ate greedily, as did Trevor and Giles. I nibbled tentatively at one breadlike wheel and found it very bland. Still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to clean my plate, and like Jane I drank a lot of wine.

“They’re the only plants not affected by the mutagens,” Trevor explained between mouthfuls. “Everything else—corn, tomatoes, beans—we harvest half what we once did. Come winter we’re pretty much reduced to living on whatever herbs we can grow in the greenhouse. And even those don’t do very well in natural light—too much from the high end of the spectrum. So it’s gotten difficult to put things up. The tubers don’t keep the way they used to, and with the fruits we’re pretty much limited to eating them as fast as they fall from the trees—they practically spoil overnight.