Icarus Descending (31 page)

And so, lost among them, I remembered a day at the Academy, long long ago….

“I’m not going.” Aidan stopped in front of the door, throwing his head back so that his auburn hair fell into his eyes. “It’s barbaric, their bringing an energumen in like this….”

John and I looked at each other in surprise. Aidan’s reaction was bizarre, especially in light of Aidan’s mockery of John’s revelations during our last game of Fear. If John could overcome his revulsion at an energumen, surely the fearless Aidan Harrow could do the same.

“It will probably be in a cage, Aidan,” I said reassuringly. “We’ll sit in the back if you’re worried—”

Aidan shot him a furious glance, then shook his head. “I’m not
afraid,
Sky Pilot,” he said, using the derisive nickname I hated. “It’s just—well, it’s cruel, that’s all, cruel and…”

His voice died, maybe because what part of our studies did
not
have to do with cruelty? We were in the hallway outside the first-level classroom, where of late we had been studying Luther Burdock, whose devoutly cruel lifework was to make possible all the later horrors of our own age.

Of course, our rectors did not think of Burdock in such terms. To them—and to us their students, still living in the golden haze of youth—Burdock was a hero, the brilliant geneticist who refused to recant his beliefs and so was executed by the fundamentalists of the short-lived Third Ascendancy. For the last few weeks we had been watching old ’files of him in his laboratory, and re-creating some of his more basic experiments in our own classrooms. It was horrifying and fascinating work, even on such a primitive schoolboy level—watching the retroviruses do their work upon a colony of cyclops, exposing amoebas and paramecia and brine shrimp to the metrophages and seeing them change, almost before our eyes. We could not, of course, replicate even the simplest of Dr. Burdock’s efforts at real gene-splicing, but then we didn’t really need to. The evidence was all around us in any case: the aardmen who did the heavy labor at the Academy, lifting hundred-kilo sacks of flour and moving the huge video backdrops of the cycloramas where we held our war games; the hydrapithecenes and sirens that acted as victims in our simulated raids on the Archipelago, imprisoned in their tidal pools; the argalæ that serviced the older male students in the nearby town of Kasco. No, the NASNA Academy was not lacking in geneslaves. What surprises me now is how few of us were ever moved by their plight.

We had all of us since childhood been thrilled and terrified by tales of Dr. Burdock. He had refined the primitive work of the twenty-first century’s genetic engineers and created the first-generation geneslaves for the Ascendants. He was equal measures Louis Pasteur and Victor Frankenstein, his legend as much a part of our lives as his creations. That was why it was odd to see Aidan so disturbed by Burdock’s work with his daughter. It was a terrible thing, perhaps, but it had happened so long ago, and at any rate, we had been hearing about it forever.

John Starving nudged me, whispering, “We’d better go in—there’s Bowra—”

I turned to see our rector plodding down the corridor, his worn crimson leathers burnished by the light spilling from the high recessed windows above him. John and I started in, but Aidan remained in the hall, glaring defiantly in Bowra’s direction.

“Come
on
—you’ll be sent down!—” I hissed. Aidan had missed so many classes and training sessions that the infirmary had a permanent carrel for him. His wrists were raw where he had been strapped in, and his eyes had dark circles beneath them, from the nightmares induced by the drugs they fed him in a futile effort to make him more pliant. I yanked at his arm, pulling him through the door after me. He swore as John and I dragged him to the back of the chilly room and shoved him into an ancient metal folding chair. We threw ourselves into the seats next to his. A small pulse throbbed at the corner of John’s mouth, showing how angry he was with Aidan; but Aidan only slouched in his chair and glared sullenly at the front of the room. By the window I could see Emma Harrow, staring at us with a frown. She was fascinated, practically enthralled, by Luther Burdock. She and John argued endlessly over the ethical aspects of his work. When she saw me looking at her, she turned away and started talking to another student.

A moment later Bowra entered. His piggish eyes darted suspiciously across the rows of exhausted cadets.

“Good morning,” he croaked brusquely. He turned to crank up the dilapidated old ’file machine, and the morning’s session began.

Flickering ’file images filled the room. “Cassandra, Virginia, United States, 2069,” Bowra recited in a bored voice, and leaned back upon his desk.

The first part was familiar enough: old holofiles showing the everyday life of the great man. Burdock and his daughter Cybele eating dinner in their grand compound, attended by the first generation of aardmen—surprisingly slight and hirsute creatures, resembling dogs more than their descendants do. Burdock strolling the grounds of his mountain compound, pointing out the cages where aardmen howled and scratched, the huge oceanic tank that imprisoned his leviathan folly Zalophus. A carefully staged shot of Burdock leafing through books full of fotos, pretending to search for the individual who would be the perfect subject for his work. Burdock dropping the books and throwing up his hands in exaggerated dismay at the hopelessness of his task.

Then the ’files changed. Now they had a clarity, a documentary quality that the earlier ones had lacked, and which I found chilling. My friends did too—when I glanced at them, their eyes were fixed on the front of the room, and while John frowned, Aidan’s pale face held a look of disgust that bordered on terror.

We saw Cybele alone in her room, curly head bent over a scroll, her face screwed into a frown as she strove to hear whatever it was saying. My heart ached to see her. She was so young, so much prettier than any of the Academy recruits, with their hard darting eyes and nervous hands. The picture shifted to a formal holo portrait of father and daughter, Cybele smiling wistfully, as though she already knew where her future lay.

And finally, ancient ’files from that remarkable operation; images as famous as the archival footage of the First Shining or the twentieth-century lunar ascent. The kindly man’s head bent over the shining elfin face of his trusting adolescent daughter. Her fearless gaze, the little-girl voice asking
We won’t die?
and his soft reply—

“We will die. But then we will be regenerated, because of
that—
”

And the camera scanned the banks of steel and glass crucibles, the metal canisters and frozen vials of DNA. Then came quick flashes of Cybele unconscious, and Luther Burdock’s pale face and fatigue-smudged eyes staring at a gleaming steel vat where something floated, a whitish form like a bloated football, turning over and over as fluids churned into the vat and still Luther Burdock watched, patient and exhausted: waiting, waiting.

And, finally, Burdock staring exultantly as across the clipped green lawns of his compound came the slender figures of two girls. Hand in hand, wearing identical shifts of white linen, their dark curls spilling around heart-shaped faces: Cybele and her cloned sister.

Kalamat. The miracle.

“You know the rest, of course,” Bowra coughed wearily, letting the ’file flicker into stray shafts of silver and blue light that sprayed across our faces. “Now to end this segment of your training module, I’ve arranged for one of the Kalamat series to be brought here this morning—”

He glanced at his watch, pressed it, and impatiently spoke to the Junior Officer who served as his flunky. A few minutes later we all turned at the sound of two sets of footsteps echoing down the corridor.

“Imre, that toad,” Aidan hissed, grimacing.

Pilot Imre’s tread was easily recognized, because of his limp. But the other step was unfamiliar: a heavy, even ponderous, tread, as of huge feet dragging slowly across the cold stone floors. John and I exchanged glances. I knew he was recalling that cage in Wyalong so many years ago. But he only smiled at me wryly before turning away.

I looked over at Aidan and saw how pale he was. The freckles stood out on his high cheekbones, and he stared fixedly at his knees. I leaned over to say something to him, something reassuring. But before I could speak, the door was flung open. The energumen stumbled into our classroom.

It was huge, even larger than I had expected—nearly eight feet tall. Pilot Imre walked beside it, separated by several feet of heavy luminous chains. He held a sonic cudgel between his nervous fingers. The thing was sedated, of course. It trudged into the middle of the room, where Imre sent a small blast at it—an unnecessary cruelty. The thing moaned softly and we all gasped.

Because its voice, at least, had not changed. It was still the voice of a fifteen-year-old girl, childlike, horribly out of place in that cold, echoing chamber. I shivered and muttered a curse. Beside me I could hear John Starving swearing under his breath. Of the three of us only Aidan was silent, his gray-green eyes fixed on the front of the room.

I don’t know what would have been more terrible—to view some creature utterly flensed of all resemblance to its human originator, or to see what we saw. A huge figure, unmistakably human but no less monstrous for all that—tall and big-boned, its head shaven and tattooed with an identifying ideogram that showed it belonged to the independent Urisa Agency, an L-5 mining conglomerate. Its arms were corded with muscle, its legs thick and welted with the marks of chains and with raw blisters left by other cudgels.

But when Imre tugged its chain, the creature raised its head; and there was the face of Cybele Burdock. Grotesquely elongated, with flesh the color of obsidian rather than Cybele’s tawny brown, and rampant with scars; but Cybele’s face nonetheless. I knew it by the eyes, if nothing else. Because even though it would certainly have killed me without thinking, crushing my head between its huge hands like a melon husk, still it had the eyes of a child—bright and wistful despite the sedatives. Hopeful, even, as though somewhere within that monstrous body Cybele Burdock was still imprisoned, and still dreamed of escape.

“God, look at her.” Next to me John Starving tightened his hands upon his knees. “She’s just like that other one, in Wyalong—it’s like it’s the
same one
—”

I nodded, my mouth too dry to speak. When I glanced at Aidan, he was gazing at the energumen in a sort of horrified rapture. I quickly looked away.

At the front of the room Bowra was rattling on about the energumens—their strength, their speed, their intelligence. At the word
intelligence
several cadets broke into nervous laughter. The drugs, combined with the incongruous innocence of its features, gave the energumen the appearance of a huge and slightly witless child.

“Come on, then. Say your name. Tell them who you are,” rasped Bowra, as Imre gave the chain another yank and prodded the energumen impatiently. There was a burst of static, loud enough to make my ears ring. The energumen cried out, tried to clap its hands to its ears, but the chains held it back. Imre shouted at it, pointing to the classroom full of rapt faces.

“Your name! Go on, tell them—”

The energumen swayed from side to side, staring fixedly at the floor as it moaned softly. Then, very slowly, it raised its shaven head and spoke.

“Kalamat.”

Its eyes, so dark they were almost black, stared pleadingly at the silent room.

Will it hurt, Daddy?

I looked away; but beside me I could see how Aidan strained to see it, could hear his breathing and the curses he murmured, nearly drowned by Imre’s command.

“
Louder!
”

“Kalamat,” the energumen whispered in its childish voice, and began to weep.

I
DID NOT SLEEP
that night, nor did Jane. Several times I saw Giles walking wordlessly from room to room, carrying boxes and objects that trailed wires and cords behind him. He carried them all to the front hallway and left them piled there: every one of the inn’s monitors, video screens, telefiles, and magisters, and last of all the shortwave radio from the kitchen. When I passed the empty rooms, they looked blinded, with ragged holes where the monitors and telefiles had been yanked from the crumbling plaster walls. Afterward I did not see Giles again, although in the hollow hour before dawn I heard soft noises and followed them until I found their source, in the steps leading down to the cellar. A glimmer of light ran along the bottom of the closed doorway. I rested my hand on the wood and paused, listening. I expected to hear sobs, or perhaps Giles talking to himself; but there was only the sound of someone moving down there, as though Trevor still silently went about his work, gathering mushrooms.

Dawn found me alone on the front porch. The sun seemed to flush a certain expectancy from the green shadows of the trees, a quiet foreboding that grew deeper as heat seeped into all the hidden places of the world and the sky burned away from indigo to blue to white. By the time the roosters began crowing in the barn, the morning already seemed exhausted. The leaves curled limply on the oaks; the smell of honeysuckle was everywhere, thick enough that I could taste it in my throat, gritty with pollen and dust.

“Are you packed?”

I turned to see Jane framed in the doorway. She had traded her old clothes for loose cotton trousers and a man’s white shirt, and cut her brown hair so it curled raggedly around her face.

“I thought maybe I’d look different,” she said. No note of apology or even explanation in her voice, just a blank statement. Her brown eyes were smudged with lilac circles, and her mouth was drawn thin with exhaustion. “So the Aviators won’t recognize me, if they come. God, it’s hot. Do you think it’ll be like this in Cassandra?”

“I don’t know.” I sighed, shaking my head at Jane’s appearance. It would take more than a bad haircut to keep the Aviators at bay. “I’ll go gather my things.”

I went upstairs. My body acted as a faithful old servant, caring for a feckless master too dissipated to pay attention to such matters as going about the business of washing, changing my clothes, lying down on the bed for a few minutes’ rest, even ordering me to the kitchen, where I found Giles heating water in the little glass oven for tea.