Icarus Descending (16 page)

He smiled and plucked another of the star-shaped growths from the table. “I’ll give you a hint. I was born in the Free State of Virginia, three years before the Third Shining.”

The Third Shining. Nearly two hundred years before.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was still facing me, chewing calmly, his enhancer a silver crescent across his face. “Why are you telling me this?”

He shrugged, still smiling. “Because you and your friends will be with us for several months—at least until March, when the roads will be more easily traveled. And because I have learned from experience that guests here become curious, over time, and it is more expedient to explain certain things truthfully to those who can bear the knowledge—to those who might perhaps
benefit
from learning new things. And because I think that we share a common enemy, you and I. You know what it is like to have been enslaved, to have been a pawn in the hands of the Ascendants. Someone with your history, with your powers—you might well benefit from what we have learned—”

I shook my head fiercely. “I have no enemies—”

Again that raised eyebrow. “No? And what of Margalis Tast’annin?”

“He was a madman—I knew nothing of him before we were captured—and besides, he’s dead now.”

Trevor’s voice rang out eerily in the dimness. “But what he stands for is not dead! The strength and horror of NASNA and the Ascendant Autocracy are not dead! They still breed geneslaves in their laboratories and cells. Everywhere on Earth humanity has become a tyrant, bending animals and children and heteroclites to their will. And not only within the Ascendant Autocracy: the Balkhash Commonwealth is no better, and some believe that the Habilis Emirate is worse.”

I shivered. I had never had any interest in talk of this sort. At HEL, Dr. Harrow had tried in vain to educate her empaths in politics. I retained only a vague memory of multicolored images on glowing mapscreens, their borders swelling and retreating, amoebalike, as each day brought subtle and evanescent political changes to the continents depicted there. “I know nothing of this,” I insisted.

“You should learn, then!” Trevor’s hand slapped down upon the edge of a table. “Six hundred years ago there was a war here—a different kind of war, a ground war. They fought because men enslaved other men, bartered and sold them like animals. It was an abomination to man and nature, and the world never recovered from it. Even a hundred fifty years later it was still reeling from the horrors of slavery—and then the First Shining came and they were all wiped away.”

I looked away from the glare of his enhancer. “But there are no slaves now.”

“Aren’t there?” Trevor whipped the enhancer from his face, so that the piercing light from his optics lit our corner of the room. “What were you at HEL, Wendy? What was Fossa? What was Miss Scarlet? And these are only the geneslaves! What of the moujik peasants from the Commonwealth, and the child farms on Kalimantan?”

I shook my head stubbornly. “I know nothing of this, nothing! And my friends know less—in the City they live simply, for pleasure only, or for knowledge—”

“In the City they live for nothing now!” cried Trevor. “Ascendant janissaries from Araboth and Vancouver have occupied it. If any of your friends survived the initial attacks, they are prisoners—slaves or worse. Your lover was one of the fortunate ones, to have died before they arrived. You of all people should know what happens when the Ascendants seize control.” I said nothing, only stared numbly into the misty phosphorescence swirling about him.

He was right: in the days following Dr. Harrow’s suicide, Ascendant personnel had swarmed into the Human Engineering Laboratory. They had murdered many of the other empaths and surely would have killed me as well, after subjecting me to more of their “research.” I thought of the paintings and ’files hanging in the corridors upstairs; of the scars upon Miss Scarlet’s throat; of Fossa, and the other aardmen who had given obeisance to the Aviator in the Cathedral. I thought of Justice dead; of countless others in the City of Trees, bound to steel gurneys with their heads shaved as mine had been, screaming as their minds were taken from them.

At last I said slowly, “I think I understand what you are telling me. But if you’re part of some—some rebellion, some resistance movement—there’s nothing I can do to help you. My usefulness as an empath has ended. My friends are as you see them: an educated geneslave who performs as an actress and a girl who’s good with animals. That’s all.”

“Ah, but your powers might come back,” Trevor said, an edge of excitement in his voice. “I know a great deal about these things—the proper stimulation, with drugs and psychotropic chemicals; even natural adrenaline could do it….”

“No!”
My shout sent a lantern swinging above us. “I am not going to be used like that again, not for anything—especially not for some fucking geneslave
riot
—”

Trevor dipped his head so that the light from his optics swept across the floor. His mouth was tight, his voice cold.

“This is not a riot, Wendy. Nor is it some hastily planned rebellion. Some of us have been working toward this for our entire lives—a means of undoing the wrongs wrought over the centuries by the tyrants, a union of mankind and geneslaves—

“An
Alliance.
”

He paused dramatically, then swept his hand up to indicate the rafters overhead, the many stories beyond. “We are part of an ancient tradition here at Seven Chimneys. We are a halfway house, a way-station for those fleeing the Ascendants. There were many places like this, once; Seven Chimneys is one of the last.

“The Underground Railway, they called it during the North American Civil War. It was the Sanctuary Movement later, and The Havens during the Long Night of the First Ascension.” Blue light streamed from his face as he threw his head back and his voice rang out. My own voice broke like a boy’s when I spoke.

“Who do you shelter?”

In a swift motion he clapped the enhancer back over his eyes. The brilliant blue rays of the optics were extinguished; now I had to squint through the shadows to see him. “Geneslaves. Fossa was one of the first. He has remained here with us, to help reassure others that they will not be betrayed. There have been many others: aardmen fleeing the City, argalæ kept as prostitutes by Ascendant troops, salamanders from the mines. And energumens, of course; and people like yourself. Oh, yes—we have taken in several escapees from HEL over the years. Not many, because not many survived long enough to reach us, but more than you might think. I was very impressed to see what Emma had done with them—her reasons were heinous, of course, but the results were very interesting. An entire cohort of adolescent psychic terrorists. They would have been very useful during wartime.”

I bit my lip, not sure whether to believe him. But there
had
been unexplained disappearances at HEL from time to time—the empath Sarah Jabera was one, and a young telepath named Isaac Dunstan. I had always assumed they were suicides—there were always suicides at HEL—or else that they had been captured or killed by the fougas.

“I still don’t know why you are telling me this.” I spoke slowly, trying to choose words that would not offend him, or endanger me and my friends. “I can’t help you—especially with geneslaves.”

Trevor leaned so close that I could smell the bitter scent of lemons on his breath. “Oh, but you could!—we
all
could, if only enough of us would side with them, rise to overthrow the Autocracy! Already there have been riots in some of the HORUS colonies. The energumens and cacodemons have attempted coups on several stations. Just a week ago we heard of aardmen at a logging camp in the United Provinces—they slayed their supervisors and escaped into the Hudson Bay Territory. And there will be others, too, now that the geneslaves have started to throw off the tyranny of their human masters.”

I tried to turn away, but Trevor clutched at my arm. “There will be war soon, Wendy: a different kind of war, a revolution from within! In some places it has already begun. There is a great purge coming, the beginning of a new age!

“But I am not alone in seeing this, Wendy—there are others, wiser and older than I am, who have seen into the future of our planet! They can read the skies as people once read books, and they have told me what is written there. A terrible secret, one that will irrevocably change our world. But some of us will be strong enough, wise enough, to learn from what is to come—and we will triumph! We will remake the world! We will bring about a true Final Ascension, one that will not thrive on slavery and barbaric despotism. One that will not be built on the bodies of slaves, human or otherwise.”

I stared at him in disbelief, thinking of the ghoulish aardmen in the City, the diseased lazars and sentient trees and other mutated creatures that had deviled me since my escape from HEL. What insane rebels would ever ally themselves with
them
?

Trevor pushed me away impatiently. “You don’t believe me? But you know it’s true! You have seen them, who hasn’t? Millions of creatures—living things,
sentient
things, creatures that can weep when their young are torn from them and creatures that will never give birth—made by humans to serve as slaves, discarded or murdered after they have been used! We brought them into the world, but it is a world some of them can barely survive in, they have been so carefully manipulated to exist only in those cracks and dark corners where the Ascendants want them to live and die while serving them. Rendered sterile by the tyrants; given life spans a fraction of ours; seizing the young of those who are permitted to give birth…

“If the geneslaves were all freed tomorrow, it would still be a hundred years, a
thousand
years, before we could ever make amends for the horrors they have endured at our hands. Only if we join with them to make war upon the tyrants; only if someday, perhaps, our blood mingles with theirs: then we may begin to expiate the suffering we have brought upon the world.”

”They may have suffered, but
I
have never harmed one,” I cried, feeling besieged. “I
flee
them when I can—they are monstrous things, they are monsters….”

Trevor shook his head. “No more than you are. You are one of them, Wendy Wanders. I can see it in you: you are not as other people. Perhaps you never were. And to the Ascendants you are less than human.”

“No!” I shouted. “I never was,
never
—it’s over now,
there is nothing left
—”

My hands flew to my head, covering my ears. I could feel the scars there at my temples, the nodes that had slowly healed even as my ability to tap into the thoughts and dreams of others had faded. I wanted to scream, to lash out at him as I had done with others before; but it was true, my powers were gone now. There was nothing left.

“
You
are left, Wendy.” I shuddered at how calm he sounded. “You know I speak the truth. You are not like the rest of us, not like Jane or your Paphian lover. You and Miss Scarlet have more in common than they do; you and Fossa.”

I shook my head furiously, thinking of the aardman—his gnarled face, those curved yellow teeth and the tail like a fleshy whip between his hind legs.

“No.”

“
Yes.
Admit it to yourself, Wendy: you belong with us, with all of us who are fighting the tyrants. It is a war against humanity; but you know that you are not truly human. Help us, Wendy. Join us.”

“
No!
”

Trevor laughed softly. Behind him the rows of glowing corpses seemed to shiver in the ghostly light. He leaned forward, with one finger brushed the hair from my temple and probed the raised lip of skin there.

“Emma Harrow did this?” he murmured. At his touch a small fiery explosion went off inside my skull. I gasped, closing my eyes against the pain. “I would have proceeded differently—no scars, nothing to show that you had ever been touched….”

I moaned, stiffening as his other hand slowly closed around my wrist. His words echoed in my mind—

…
very useful during wartime…

“It’s gone, my powers are gone!” I cried frantically. His grip tightened as I tried to pull away. “I—I went without my medication for too long—the visions left me, it’s gone now, whatever power I had is gone—”

Trevor shook his head, his voice soothing. “That doesn’t matter, Wendy. I told you, I am a very fine surgeon. Nothing matters, except that we
understand
each other.”

Abruptly he let go of me. I staggered back, my hands flailing as I tried to find something to use as a weapon; but Trevor only laughed, as though I had been frightened by some shadow on the wall of a sunny room.

“But we have a long time to learn how to do that, don’t we?” he said. “All winter, in fact. And I’m certain that you will come to see how worthy our cause is.”

He bent and began picking up empty baskets, stacking them inside one another. “Would you mind handing me that?” he asked lightly.

I stared at him warily, but he only continued to gather his things. Indeed, he seemed to have forgotten me. Finally I looked to where he had pointed and saw a willow basket, its contents lost in shadow. As I leaned down to pick it up, I heard him turn and walk back toward the steps.

“A remarkable theoretician, Emma Harrow.” His voice rang faintly in the dank air as he began to climb the stairs. “But a rather clumsy surgeon.”

I waited until I heard the door creak open upstairs. Then I followed him, the basket clutched between my cold fingers. It wasn’t until I reached the top step that I glanced down to see what I held—

A skull.

A human skull with a number of small perfectly round holes bored into it. Between the holes words had been scratched into the flaking bone, and a crude image. Tiny cracks radiated from the letters like tears.