Icarus Descending (48 page)

“What is that, O brother? Can you see it?”

A few feet from where I stood, Kalaman’s brothers and sisters moved aside to let him press himself against the window, staring out with those obsidian eyes. A moment later his voice came to me softly, filled with wonder.

“I do not know what this is. Perhaps
he
does—” He glanced over his shoulder and gestured for me to come closer. “Imperator—?”

I joined him at the window. On the other side of the thick glass the universe loomed, a darkness so vast that even the million stars pricked upon it seemed nothing but stray motes of light, put there perhaps by nothing but the will of myriad creatures that refused to acknowledge the void. At the rim of my vision I could just see the first sweet curve of Earth showing as we approached, and I knew that somewhere out of sight the moon waited, a hole in the sky through which we might escape that endless night. And then I saw what Kalaman and all the others were pointing at.

Had I still been mortal, my heart might not have been able to bear the sight. I felt a small gratitude that Captain Novus was safely drugged within her chamber. Slowly I drew my hands up before me and rested them upon the glass, my metal hand beside my human one, and stared between them at what was there.

In the formless void there grew a point of still greater darkness. In mass and color it was like one of those bursts of neutronic power favored by the Air Corps of the Habilis Emirate, which turn the deserts to black glass where they fall. As I watched, this celestial object grew deeper in color, showing within its heart shafts of blue and violet and crimson. All around it the atmosphere
glowed
—though that is too weak a word for it; it was as though it somehow swallowed the light of all those other pallid stars, then gave it forth again a thousandfold. In all my years I had never seen anything like it. Not in the shining azure skies above the Archipelago, nor in the desert’s stark and frozen nights, or even during my tenure on the great glittering weapondecks of NASNA Prime.

All around me I could hear the energumens murmuring, their clear high voices bright with amazement and childish wonder. None of them seemed to be afraid.

“Imperator?” Kalaman’s voice came again at my elbow, and when I glanced up at him, I saw that his face was lit with curiosity but no fear. “My brothers say they have been watching it for some time now. Some admit they first saw it days ago, but never spoke of it to me.”

I drew back from the window, but then that word
watching
stung me like a thornfly. I recalled the thing Captain Wyeth had written of in the
Astralaga:
the mysterious star traveler, the Watcher in the Skies. He had described it as an object that his entranced crew had observed for over eighteen hours before it disappeared. A freakish black aurora, most had believed; some kind of solar flare that had come and gone within a matter of hours. But now Kalaman’s crew claimed to have watched it for several days.

“Who has seen this thing?” I cried out. Several of the energumens turned to me, their beautiful faces calm, their colorless eyes holding within them the reflected flare of the Watcher’s gaze.

“I have,” one said in his lilting voice. “Many days ago. As the orbit of Helena Aulis shifted, I glimpsed it, like a violet lumiere flickering in the darkness. It is far bigger now than it was then.”

Indeed, even as I stared, I could see that it was growing larger. Whatever it was, it still must be untold miles from where the
Izanagi
made its stately passage through the Ether. But it
was
moving. And it was headed toward the Earth.

“Imperator?” Kalaman laid his great hand upon my shoulder and gently turned me to face him. “What is this thing? Can you tell us?”

“I do not know,” I said, my voice sounding hollow and disgustingly weak. “But I will find out.” And I left them and headed for the library.

In the skies above the dreaming Blue Ridge Mountains hung a pinkish glow, a brilliance that faded only slightly during that long afternoon. By nightfall the aurora had grown to a splendent luminous sheet, rippling and coruscating so that the stars were swallowed by it and showed as tiny puckered flaws in the fabric of the night, if they showed at all. For the last few weeks this roseate glow had been glowing slowly brighter, as each day more and more of the Alliance’s captured elÿon were brought here to join the fleet that now numbered nearly forty.

Had there been anyone to glimpse that fleet billowing across the haze of the Blue Ridge, they might have imagined the mountains were afire; but in Cassandra hardly anyone remained above ground. Those few energumen sentries guarding the entrance to Paradise Caverns were inured to the wonder of the elÿon. If they had had any say in the matter, they might have wished to be with their brothers and sisters, gathered deep within the mountain’s granite heart, and there await the Coming they had so long awaited.

It was an evening in late summer. The fields that a few days ago had been bright and green and golden were now stripped to a dull viridian, laced with red where the raw clay had been exposed by the passage of agricultural machines. Once there would have been much celebration in Cassandra, for it had been a good harvest; but there were no humans left to rejoice. They had all gone underground, or else had been slain when they fought to keep their lands from being given as fodder for the geneslaves. Now the fields lay barren, and the scraped earth steamed in the dying light as the sun fell behind the glowing hills and the harvest moon began to creep above the shattered plain to the east.

At the base of the nearest mountain, where the energumen guards stood watch over the black mouth of Paradise Caverns, a tiny procession unfolded. They crept from down the mountainside: twelve white-hooded figures divided into pairs, and each pair carrying between them a long silvery object, like an aviette capsule or coffin. The eerie glow of the elÿon fleet touched their bodies with lurid pink and crimson, and made the capsules they bore gleam as though they were cast in gold. They moved in a silence that was unbroken by the song of night birds or insects, or the voices of those human onlookers who might have been expected to gaze upon this autumnal ceremony with awe. Even the sound of the encircling river was muted, as from respect—or fear.

But while the flame-tinged darkness made an eerie background to their vespertine procession, those white-clad acolytes were not quite alone. A single figure observed them, hidden by the shadow of the mountain itself: watched them and then raised its head to the fiery sky beyond. The light from the elÿon fleet sent waves of lavender and rose streaming across the dark and angular planes of its body. To one looking down from the billowing craft, the figure might have seemed that of a man, save for the faint purple lightning that played about its head, as though reflecting some storm behind its deceptively calm metal face.

So in silence Metatron watches the sky: waiting, waiting in the silence. The twelve hooded figures with their silvery burdens step slowly and carefully down the last few feet of the mountain. Their tiresome descent at last completed, they pause, shifting the weight of the caskets from shoulder to shoulder, then round the final curve of the path that will bring them to the cavern entrance. Still Metatron gazes heavenward, as the pairs of cenobites bear their softly gleaming caskets beneath the steel archway and into the patient darkness; and finally he is rewarded.

Above the dreaming mountain a spark appears, a thing like a glowing coal that grows brighter and brighter in the gaudy sky. As it grows nearer, it seems to billow and swell, surging through the air like a cloud traveling at impossibly high speed, until it is close enough that Metatron can without a doubt identify it—another elÿon come to join the silent fleet tethered above the Blue Ridge.

But this is a singular vessel. As he watches it float among its brethren, nudging between their rounded pink flanks, Metatron smiles and raises one metal hand as though in greeting. Then he begins to walk toward the entrance to the caverns, to initiate the last part of the ritual that will bring about his Final Ascension.

On the eastern cusp of the world the moon is poised to rise. The
Izanagi
takes its place among those other crimson clouds above the dark-bound mountains. Untold miles above them all, Icarus has begun the weeks-long descent from its parhelion passage. The regenerated corpse of Margalis Tast’annin shrieks in impotent rage as he sees too late the cold grace and frightful elegance of Metatron’s last betrayal.

From within Paradise Caverns echos faint chanting and the sound of childish voices singing. The last Long Night has begun.

Do not fear the darkness, daughter,
my father had said; but the thought of my sisters embracing their own deaths with such fervor had sickened and saddened me so that I could not bear to be with them any longer. I knew it would be a very little while before I stepped upon the Element for the first (and last) time. I would seize these few minutes to compose myself, to decide how I would greet my father, how I would ready myself for the death that awaited me there.

So it was that I took myself alone and headed for a chamber where I would prepare myself for our final descent. I was walking through the endless rose-colored corridors of the
Izanagi
when I heard a terrible cry. My heart froze at that sound: as though a man looked upon his own death and shrieked to see it there before him.

But it was no man who met me in that hallway. It was the
rasa
Tast’annin, fleeing from one of the elÿon’s chambers with his hands raised as though to shield his eyes from some unspeakable torment. When he looked up and saw me, I wished he had kept his gaze from meeting mine. The harsh lines of that metal face were twisted into an anguished mask, but a thousand times more agony was trapped within his eyes. They were the only human thing about him, those eyes. Now it seemed that they sought oblivion, and seized upon me with horror and no hope of escaping whatever doom they had looked upon.

“Imperator!” I cried, and tried to make my voice commanding. I feared he had succumbed to that madness which seizes humans during an elÿon passage. “We are making our descent, you should be in your chamber—”

“The Watcher!” His voice rose to a howl, and he turned to slash at the air as though someone pursued him. “Your warning came too late, Aidan, too late!—All these years and we never
knew
—”

Without looking back at me, he raced down the hall. I watched him go, my heart pounding, then hurried into the room he had left.

It was the elÿon’s library. A chair had been overturned, and several books lay spilled upon the ground where they chattered and sang softly to themselves. I bent to pick them up, silencing off their soft voices, then hurried to the row of empty carrels against the wall.

The first two showed no evidence of having been used in many months, but in the next I saw what I was looking for. A shimmering image hung in the empty air above the desk, a fist-sized ball of perversely radiant darkness with a violet aura that streamed into the empty room like a beacon. Beneath it flickering golden letters spelled out the doom that Tast’annin had fled.

SEARCH REQUEST 10254799

SUBJECT: APOLLO OBJECT
ICARUS 3

CARBONACEOUS CHONDRITE ASTEROID DISCOVERED BY NORTHEASTERN REPUBLIC ASTRONOMER GEOFFREY CHESTER [2097-2189]. FIRST APPARITION RECORDED IN 2172, ALTHOUGH PRIMITIVE RECORDS SUGGEST EARLIER APPARITIONS IN 1743 AND 1320 A.C.E. (CF MICHEL DEFRIES’S
ICARUS 3: HARBINGER OF REVOLUTIONS?
AND MARJORIE ALACOSTA’S
THE PLAGUE YEARS: AN ACADEMIC SUMMARIA
.) NOW KNOWN TO BE THE PARENT BODY OF THE ATOYOTAN METEOR SHOWERS, ICARUS 3 IS BELIEVED TO HAVE A RECURRENT PERIOD OF 423-427 YEARS. PERTURB ATIONS OF JUPITER MAY CAUSE ITS ECCENTRIC ORBIT TO COME DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO EARTH WITHIN ITS NEXT INTERVAL, WITH POSSIBILITY OF COLLISION RATED AT .97 ON THE DARTMOUTH SCALE. ICARUS’S DESCENDING NODE IS ANTICIPATED CIRCA 2522 A.C.E. AT PRESENT, A UNITED EFFORT BY U.R.P.H. AND MIAEYAN CONFERENCE SCIENTISTS IS UNDERWAY TO DEVELOP SOME MEANS OF AVERTING THE CATASTROPHIC CLIMATIC CHANGES THAT MAY BE CAUSED BY ICARUS’S RECURRENCE. SEE ALSO
KT EXTINCTIONS
AND ENTRIES FOR
WINSLOW, TUNGUSKA
, AND
MANHATTAN (KANSAS) CRATERS
.

I read the words twice, then with shaking voice commanded the scholiast to give me the date of the entry.

“Twenty-two oh four,” the scholiast intoned.

More than three hundred years earlier, and well before myriad Ascensions and Shinings had seemingly destroyed any records of the meteor’s earlier sightings.

Before that moment I had never heard of Icarus. Neither had the Imperator, nor I was certain, anyone else now alive. It had been discovered during that brief golden period when technology flowed between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries—discovered, dutifully recorded, and forgotten. This is what Hylas had seen and pointed out to me on the viewing deck. This is what had driven Tast’annin from the room in madness. For many minutes I sat there, silent, staring at the letters shimmering in the air before me. Finally I commanded the scholiast to retrieve them, and turned away.

I thought of the Oracle. Another remnant of those days; one that seemingly had knowledge of many things forgotten by men and science and never known to us, the twisted children of men and science. I thought of my father, of the secrets he must have brought with him from that earlier time when we first lived in the shadow of the mountains. And suddenly it seemed to me very clear why we were bound for the Element, and what the special destiny was that the Oracle had promised to us. And were it not for the thought of my father there below, innocent of this and like all his kind doomed to death, I would have run madly after Tast’annin and, shrieking, given tongue to the fear that overcame me.

But I did not run. I did not cry out, or even weep, thinking of the world below and this strange thing poised like a hammer above it. Instead I walked very slowly to a room near the docking chamber. There I strapped myself into a hammock and waited, counted the minutes and waited until the elÿon’s passage halted, and I could embrace my father.