Icarus Descending (17 page)

EMMA WYSTAN HARROW

Sic semper tyrannus

The Alliance was not subtle in its methods. With a cry I dropped the basket and fled to my room.

N
EITHER NEFERTITY NOR I
had any need for sleep. Sleep is for humanity, to ease its tragic passage from dreams to waking, and eventually from dreams to death. I had already crossed over to the other side, and could only look back upon my own dreams as one would review a distant landscape from some unimaginably high lookout: as something lovely but detached from oneself, as though one did not breathe the same air they breathed down there, or sip the same passionately blue water.

So I no longer dreamed, but during my months in the regeneration vats the biotechnicians did not apply the usual course of neural treatments to my swollen brain. If they had, I would have been as other
rasas
are: a mere corpse with the use of limbs and locomotion, with no will, no speech, nothing but the faintest haze of memories to cloud my dull eyes.

But the Ascendants had more ambitious plans for me. Shiyung Orsina, the margravine who monitored my progress, had the twin vices of sentiment and vengeance to interfere with my rebirth; and so it was that I made my reentry into the world with my memories intact.

More than that. My masters wanted me to lose nothing of the decades of training I had endured, all that time of being heated in the crucibles of their wars and planning rooms, fired by my own ambition until I was as finely tempered and lethal a weapon as they could devise. To this end
all
of my memories were reactivated—a simple thing, really, merely a series of electrical pulses administered to the proper quarters of the brain, and then a wash of proteins to these same nodes. The result of this excessive stimulation was ironic. Like all successful Aviators, I had spent my life
suppressing
memories. To do otherwise was to court madness, because who could live with the knowledge of what we must endure, between the equatorial war zones and the orbital colonies above us? My own mind had already reached its limit of guilty horrors, like a sponge soaked in acid that is slowly eaten away by its burden.
That
was the cause of my degeneration in the capital; but now the Ascendants had squeezed me dry, plucked from my decaying body my mind like a small overripe fruit and set it into this new shining shell, where it could neither wither nor flourish, only continue. And with me my memories, fresh as yesterday’s rain. No, more so: because while I could no longer taste or smell or feel the rain upon my tongue, my memories of storms fifty years past were enough to whiten my sleepless nights with lightning and lancing hail.

And so, all unknowing, the Ascendants had imprinted me with the undoing of all their efforts. By electing my regenerated corpse Imperator, they thought they had created at last the ideal military commander: bloodless, heartless, but with the mind of a tyrant and the deathless teguments of their most sophisticated constructs. But they neglected to consider the power of memory, of desire that can outlive even the body. They had restored my past to me. In so doing they also restored my soul.

On the edge of the rise Nefertity stood in silence, watching the dawn stretch its cold gray hands across the prairie. I remained by myself, brooding on what could have befallen the HORUS colonies and wondering what I might learn when I sought out my masters once more.

Did I say I stood by myself? Ah, but it did not seem so to me! I was besieged with memories, like Androcles butterflies swarming about a corpse. The dead came back to speak with me, and others whom I had long forgotten—childhood friends and lovers; janissaries who had served under me at the battles of Nng Dao and Recife, and who died there when the Shinings came; fellow Aviators and cadets from the NASNA Academy, their minds and wills not yet broken by our Ascendant masters, their voices so clear and loud, I could hear them crying out across the years as though they stood no farther from me than did Nefertity.

And thus it was that Aidan Harrow came to me again. Or rather, I went to him, my memories leading me until all about me the prairie faded and once more I was a youth: my arms aching from early-morning fencing practice with my replicant tutor, my bruised knuckles poised above the door to his room while in the distance I could hear bells wailing to signal the start of first reflections. Our floor rector, a slender, sallow woman named Elspeth Mandodari, had sent me to awaken the newest cadet.

“He has a sister in the Auris Wing,” she said, adding in a voice tinged with disapproval, “A twin. But I’ll get
her.”

It was common for cadets to sleep late during their first days at the Academy. The best of intentions and most sophisticated of alarms could not conspire against our need for sleep, especially since our days started before four
A.M
. In the summer this was not so bad. The Academy was located on the northeasternmost shore of the continent, on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean that was supposedly the first place in North America where the sun struck each day. By May or early June sun slanting through the gray-filmed windows would wake us at three-thirty; an hour later it would look as though it were midday outside. But even this had not been enough to rouse me during my first week at the Academy. Instead I was kicked out of bed by the boy who would later be my partner in Gryphon training, a bullying mulatto named Ivor French.

I had resolved to be kinder to the unknown somnambulist twin. I rapped gently at first on the heavy oaken door—a gesture more to ease my own conscience than to actually cause a stir inside, since to be heard at all one had to practically batter the planks with iron staves. But someone was already awake. A moment later a cheerful voice called, “
Entrez!
” And so I did, somewhat reticently, the door groaning as it swung in upon rusted hinges.

It was a standard first-level cadet’s room. That is to say, a tiny, narrow cell perfectly in keeping with the Academy’s original design some six hundred years earlier, which was as Le Couvent de Notre-Dame des Afflictions. Aidan’s room retained its air of sunlit penitence. It overlooked the eastern ridge of the rocky fell called Plasma Mole, several hundred feet above where the ocean moaned and throbbed in dutiful counterpoint to our own smaller sufferings. Like postulants, we were not permitted to bring with us any remnants of our former lives. This gave the rooms an air of uncanny expectancy, as though even after centuries of silence and retribution they still awaited some measure of passion, of temptation or betrayal. Beneath a single window waited a coffin-sized iron bedstead, with its immaculate white linens, stiff from being dried outside in the chilly maritime air, and a feather pillow flattened by generations of aching heads. The smell of dust and pencil shavings was almost lost beneath that of the last rugosa roses blooming on the stony edge of Plasma Mole. The room’s sole ornamentation, besides the gorgeous enameled slab of sky above a spavined wooden desk, was the plasteel representation of the NASNA motto and its blighted moon, hanging beside the bed. The whitewashed walls should have been almost painfully sunlit, the ceilings marbled with the viridian wash of reflected ocean.

But I was surprised to enter Aidan Harrow’s room and find it dark. Actually, not very dark; but to one accustomed to that ruthless blue northern light, it had the appearance of a hermit’s forest lair. I took two steps inside (four more would have brought me to the window) and shaded my eyes as though I had been blinded.

“Mandodari wanted to make sure you were awake,” I said, trying to keep disapproval from clouding my voice. A cerulean cadet’s jacket had been strung across the window and hung with other oddments of clothing in an effort to keep the sun out. I frowned and squinted. I still wasn’t certain just where the room’s tardy occupant lay.

“Mmm. Of course. Well, I’m up.”

A head suddenly popped from the heap of covers on the bed. A stray shaft of light struck his hair, a mass of auburn waves surrounding a pointed puckish face, sharp-chinned and with a small pointed nose. He was tall and lanky for his age, but that face was oddly childlike; or maybe it was just his expression, the slight threat of mindless violence that was never absent from his gray-green eyes. When he slid from the covers, I saw he was already fully dressed. Indeed from the rumpled look of his linen shirt and leather trousers, I gathered he had slept in his clothes.

“I’m Aidan Harrow. From St. Clive.” That was a tiny village in the southern maritimes, a day’s air travel from Plasma Mole.

I nodded stiffly. “Margalis Tast’annin.”

Aidan’s eyes widened. “The poet’s son? I heard you were here.”

With one hand he began smoothing the tangled hair back from his forehead. In the other he clutched a book. At a loss as to conversation, I tilted my head to read the title—purely a matter of convention, since the only book we were permitted to use in first level was the ancient talking edition of
An Inquiry into Some Ethical Points of Celestial Navigation.
I was quite shocked to see that this was not what Aidan held at all.

“That’s under interdict!”

I hadn’t meant to sound so prudish: I was genuinely stunned that someone would be so cavalier about flouting the rules. Punishment for even simple infractions was severe—most of the infirmary was given over to punitive devices, many of them quite new—and possession of contraband reading material was a serious offense.

“Are you going to turn me in?”

Aidan looked at me coolly, but his tone was innocently curious. If he had acted belligerent or even frightened, I probably
would
have reported him. As it was, I shut the door behind me and crossed the room to take the book from his hand.

“No. But you better get rid of it, or hide it outside. May I see?”

Even before I looked at it, I could tell, by its scent and feel, that it had not come from the Academy library. A flimsy plastic jacket protected its cover and spine, but even that couldn’t hide how old it was. I drew it to my face and sniffed. When I rifled the pages, dust smelling of cloves and hemp made me sneeze.

“It’s just a book.” Aidan’s voice cracked and he flushed. “From my father—from his library.”

The plastic cover was so old and desiccated, it was difficult to read the title. I opened it, holding it gingerly so that the loose pages wouldn’t fall out. It was printed on thick paper that had aged to the color of rich cream, much heavier and softer than the cheap fiber used for talking books. The end-pieces were marbled, yellow and blue and green. The title page held a little holo no bigger than the ball of my thumb, showing an elaborately stylized eye that seemed to follow me when I moved. Beneath it, title and author were jetprinted in a deliberately shaky hand.

Beneath this was the legend
Privately Printed in the Independent Commonwealth of California
(later part of the Western Unity, and still later part of the Pacific Ocean) and a date some four hundred years earlier.

I stared at it curiously, and had started to turn the pages when I heard the electronic bell shriek the quarter hour, last call for first reflections. I swore, recalling Mandodari’s punitive use of the memory enhancer, which exhausted one even as it made sleep impossible for days afterward.

“Here—” I shoved the book back at Aidan and strode to the door. “Do something with it—get rid of it, if you’re smart. And do something about
that
—”

I glowered and pointed at the window draped with Aidan’s clothes. “—Unless you want to spend the rest of the week in the infirmary.”

The mockery vanished from his eyes. Nodding, he crossed to the window and tore down his jacket, sending socks and shirt flying. I left before I could see what he did with the book.

Nefertity and I left as dawn twined through the desert air. Nefertity wished to give farewells to the humans we had left in the valley. Not from any sentiment on her part—she was a construct, remember that, and I refused to believe her capable of any human feeling—but because she feared they might follow us and perish in the desert.

“Leave them be,” I said. I had already turned and was starting for my Gryphon, Kesef, where it crouched on the hillside. “We will find them again if we need them. The world is a small place now, Nefertity. Come.”

The nemosyne’s eyes blazed azure. I smiled, thinking of the woman who had programmed her. What a monster
she
must have been! But I said nothing, stepping over clumps of prickly pear and broomweed, kicking apart a nest of fire ants until I reached the Gryphon and called out to it.

“Kesef. Wake.”

The aircraft shuddered. Its deceptively fragile wings expanded like a bat’s, unfolding into long blackened petals. From its nose several long filaments extended, testing the air. I could hear it humming inside as it listened to whatever tales those slender filaments might tell: rain, sun, wind; radiation, mutagens, storms. I guessed sun and a hot northwestern wind. Here where the great coastal prairies had once stretched for hundreds of miles, it was nearly always sun and wind.

From behind me Nefertity called softly. “Where are you taking me?”

I pointed to the west. A man’s eyes would have looked down the sloping hillside onto an endless plain, gold and brown and green fading into a sky that daylight would soon scorch to white. I could see beyond that, to where the Glass Mountains rose and then gave way to the Glass Desert, where the few towns and cities had been embalmed in obsidian waves by the Second Shining. “To Cisneros.”

She joined me beneath the Gryphon. We waited until it unfolded the narrow ladder leading into its belly, then climbed inside.

“And what is Cisneros?” she asked.

She slipped into the seat behind me, the restraining belts crackling softly as they looped around her glowing torso. I lay back in my own seat, feeling it mold itself to the hard shell I still could not think of as
my body.
I closed my eyes for a moment before replying, “NASNA’s Pacific elÿon base.”