Icarus Descending

10 The Oracle Speaks

I GOT TO KNOW Aidan Harrow very well during his three years at the NASNA Academy. We were often paired during meditations and also for the grueling sessions that were meant to prepare us as pilots—hours spent in a tiny stim chamber with another cadet, bombarded by images and sensations culled from actual ’file footage of atrocities enacted in the Archipelago and during the Three Hour War. He was not a good candidate for the Academy. He tired easily, which I always attributed to the time he spent reading or drinking at night, instead of sleeping those few hours when he had the chance. And he was a coward; he never seemed to grow accustomed to the everyday horrors that an Aviator has to face. Even with the stim chamber, and the psychoactive drugs administered by the infirmary to cadets who were having such problems; even with the threat of humiliation in front of his peers—because Aidan was proud, arrogant even—he could never endure pain, or even tedium. My offers to help him with his studies and lend him my replicant tutor were met with derision. I never fully understood why he was at the Academy in the first place. Something to do with his father, who while not an Aviator himself had served under Gerald Baskin following the last Ascension. Emma made a much better cadet. I was surprised when, after her brother’s death, she dropped out of the corps; but in light of her fascination with Luther Burdock, her choice of career seems obvious now, and her death by suicide indicates a fragility of flesh and spirit that I would hope never to see in my troops.

Aidan was a terrible partner for training exercises—he wept often, and always gave vent to his furious temper—but otherwise he was popular among the other cadets. Like many people whose nature is in essence craven, he was charming, and of course his looks brought him many admirers. During his first year he played the boy to Keenan Pyle, who was a notorious pederast and whose classes were always filled with the youngest and best-looking of the first-level cadets. But after that Aidan grew more aloof. As I have told you, he shared a bed with his twin sister. Even the most world-weary of us saw that as a weakness, a febrile affectation, like the incestuous pairings of the ruling families of the Ascendancy.

“Who do they think they are?” Amaris di Gangi sneered one morning. We watched as Aidan and Emma crossed the lawn together, the sun glinting from their auburn heads, the lines of their uniforms flowing from their lanky bodies like oil from a hot pan. “Naki and Benshan Orsina?”

I shrugged but said nothing. It was spring, the short, intense northern spring that flares as blue as the heart of a flame and is as quickly gone. Lupines grew along the spine of land overlooking the water where we sat. Below us waves pounded the rocky shore, and a quartet of cormorants swam and dived past the breakers. There were seals basking on the rocks. Aidan and Emma headed toward them, turning from the grassy lawn to a narrow footpath worn into the hillside by generations of cadets and, before them, novitiates marking the Stations of the Cross along the shore.

“What do you think they do together?” Amaris began, but before she could continue, I stood. Brushing grass from my leather trousers, and slinging my hands in my pockets, I hurried down the path after the twins.

“Margalis.” Emma looked up, frowning slightly. The cerulean leather of her cadet’s uniform made her look sallow, her wide mouth a gash in her pale face. “You’re not at exercises?”

“Canceled. Congden got called in for an emergency meeting. There was a strike at the Greenland station last night.”

“I heard.” Aidan made an apologetic face when Emma looked at him accusingly. “Well, you didn’t ask, so why should I tell you? It was supposed to be kept secret, anyway.”

I nodded in agreement. Emma sighed, tucking a wisp of hair behind one ear. “Well. I’m going back— I’ve still got exercises, unless they’ve canceled them for everyone.”

“I doubt it.” But I smiled, trying to will Emma to look at me. She ducked her head, stumbling as she walked up the edge of the stony path, anything to avoid my eyes. “’Bye, Emma—”

She raised a hand but didn’t look back, her trouser legs flapping around her knees.

“Why does she do that?” I followed Aidan, who was striding along the path to where a large boulder stuck out above the seals dozing in the sun. “Every time I see her, she runs away.”

Aidan shrugged, turned to show me a white vulpine grin in his sunburned face. “I don’t know, Sky Pilot. She says she’s afraid of you.”

I felt my face twitch in annoyance, at the nickname and at the thought of Emma being frightened of me. “Afraid! Why the—”

“Don’t ask me, Sky Pilot. Here, be quiet or you’ll scare them.”

I shut up, biting back harsh words. Sky Pilot was what Aidan called me, that and Rocket Man, derogatory nicknames he’d hoped would catch on among our friends. They never did, but he stubbornly refused to call me Margalis, or anything else for that matter, hoping, I suppose, that one day the monikers would stick. Sky Pilot was from a folk song, something he’d dug up in the audio archives at the Academy and made his friends listen to one night when we should have been going over the recordings of Dmitri Rilkov’s 2332 lectures at the NASNA War College.

“Listen! A song about Margalis!” he crowed, popping out his earpiece and motioning us to join him. A dull buzzing came from the earpiece, as though a frantic bluebottle were trapped inside. “Come listen—”

So we’d listened. Even after having been remastered a century earlier, the original recording was so ancient, one could scarcely make it out. It was as though the centuries themselves had nibbled away at words and music, leaving only vague tones, an out-of-tune voice, the faint skirling of bagpipes, and distant echoes of firearms.

Sky Pilot!

How high can you fly?

You’ll never, ever, ever reach the sky …

“That’s terrible,” Emma said stonily when it was finished. “You can’t even hear it.”

“Listen again!” Aidan twirled in his seat, punching buttons on the player, but by then everyone had returned to their studies. He was still the only person who ever called me that.

Now Aidan crept out onto the boulder on his hands and knees, tossing back his burnished hair and pursing his lips. Behind us the green tips of the tall pines scratched lazily at the sky. On the gravel beach some fifteen feet below, the seals wheezed and snored. When he reached the edge of the rock, Aidan bellied down with his chin on his hands. I joined him, careful to keep my leather jacket from catching on the boulder’s sharp edges. We lay there for a long time without speaking, just watching the seals and the play of the birds in the water—cormorants, skuas, black and white gulls. The air smelled of pine and sweet rugosa roses and the sea, and very faintly of the woodfires burning in the Academy kitchens. The day had that intense blue clarity that often proceeds a storm: a weather-breeder, they called it in the maritimes. This far north the summer’s heat was not intense, but, paradoxically, the sunlight was. I could feel my fair skin burning, and swore silently at the chronic shortages that kept us from having access to any kind of protection from the killing rays—lotions, veils, even just a visor for our uniform hats. But the meager warmth was pleasant for all that.

After a while I must have dozed. When I looked up again, Aidan had rolled onto his back, propping himself against a wedge of driftwood. He was reading a talking book. I could hear its voice, serious as that of any rector, and occasional trills of background music.

“What’s that?” I leaned over, trying to see what was on the little screen.

He moved a few inches away, trying to make it look as though he were just getting more comfortable. But I could see his eyes: genuinely startled that I’d awakened, and genuinely worried.

“Nothing.” He turned the thing so low, I could barely make it out—a man’s voice, refined in that twenty-third-century manner, but I couldn’t understand the words. Before Aidan could stop me, I flicked my finger against the side of the book so that its title flickered across the screen.

PAGAN SURVIVALS

Spiritual Origins of the Energumens And Revelations of Their Triumphant Future,

With Predictions of the apocalypse to Come

by dude Hwong

Colorfully archaic script and a baroque fanfare of Third Ascension ælopipes accompanied the copyright and warnings. Then the man’s voice came again, faint as an insect’s.

Had Luther Burdock known the future uses to which his innocent daughter would be put, surely he would never have shared his apocalyptic discoveries with the rest of mankind….

“You’re reading that ?” I cried out, incredulous. Jude Hwong was a notorious fraud, one of those religious fanatics who crops up at the end of every century and gains a cult through predicting the fall of the current world order. Thus far, none of his many predictions had come true—no rebirth of ancient gods, no epiphanies among the energumens, no messages from extrasolar visitors. His work was childish, but that didn’t keep it from being under interdict. In spite of myself I grew angry at Aidan for putting us both in danger. “You’re going to get caught, one of these days. What, do you want to get kicked out?”

I tried to grab the book from him. He snatched it back, but not before my hand bumped it and the book scrolled to another section and read,

This small group of researchers—astrophysicists and astrologers, mostly—believed that the mythology surrounding the Watcher in the Skies had a direct correspondence to the fragmented records of Icarus’s appearance in 2172-73. Tragically, their barbaric execution by the dictator Simon Legistheis has prevented us from learning more thoroughly from their—

Aidan sat bolt upright, flicking off the book and shoving it beneath his jacket. His face was bright red, from embarrassment and the sun; it made his blue eyes glow like an animal’s caught in the glare of night-lights. “Fuck off, soldier boy.”

“Well, do you want to get caught?”

He hunched his shoulders together and raised his hand to strike at me—even though I was a good six inches taller and a much better fighter—then glanced down at the rough scree below us. The tide had come in, ripples of black and indigo sloshing across the gravel. The seals were humping slowly into the water, shouting hoarsely at each other and sending up wedges of sand and grit as they breasted into the cold surf. The sight of them seemed to calm Aidan. When he turned back to me, his eyes were no less intense, but he smiled mockingly.

“Well, are you going to turn me in, Sky Pilot?”

I pushed down the urge to hit him and looked away. “No. But someone will. Where do you get them, anyway?”

He shrugged, reached into a pocket and took out a tiny silver canister, bullet-shaped and with a crystal head. He unscrewed it and tapped out an amphaze patch, slipped it ostentatiously behind one ear. “My father. He was a collector. They’re worth a lot. ”

“Not anymore,” I said coldly. Aidan was always trying to impress people with how much his father owned—furniture, books, even a house. From what Emma said, it was all true, which made it even worse that Aidan spoke so blithely of it. “One of these days they’re going to seize all his things and it will be your fault. And that”—I pointed to where he’d hidden the talking book—“ that’s just garbage. Why do you waste your time with it?”

Aidan’s breath came more quickly. I watched his pupils dilate, as quickly as a dog’s when threatened. When he spoke, I could smell the amphaze on his breath, an unpleasant chemical scent like raw alcohol or morpha.

“Because they tell me things.”

I shivered a little. The wind had come up over the sea, and with the sun gone over the ridge of land behind us, it had grown cool, as it does of an evening in the maritimes. But it was Aidan’s voice that chilled me. That same voice he used to hold us in thrall at night in his room, while the bottles passed around and our furtive games played themselves out, with all of us secretly waiting for some great dark revelation that never came.

“Things? They tell you things?” I tried to sneer as Amaris di Gangi had; but the wind made my voice sound thin and sour.

Aidan’s eyes glittered dangerously. “There is another world beneath this one. You should know that—isn’t it what your mother’s poetry is all about? This world is getting torn away, everything we’ve done to it has made it weak and tired; and now the other world is showing through. Some day it will be all that’s left….”

I sighed loudly. My mother’s work—deliberately obscure visionary poetry, harking back to eighteenth-century verse that no one but herself seemed to have heard of—had enjoyed a fleeting popularity before it was condemned for its decadence. “Well, for now, this world is the one I’m worried about,” I said, adding, “If I worry at all.”

“You should,” Aidan said with the smug air of a recent convert. “Did you know they’re predicting some kind of cataclysm within this century? Within our lifetimes, Sky Pilot.”

“Oh, really? Who is predicting this? Jude Hwong? From the gas chamber?”

Aidan shook his head. “You shouldn’t sneer at it, Margalis.” His seriousness was laughable; I almost didn’t notice he had used my real name. “You know, he quotes your mother in here—that poem about the Watcher in the Skies. He says it’s a revelation of the cataclysm—”

“It’s a revelation he even read it,” I said drily. When he did amphaze or anything else, Aidan’s talk was always like this. Old gods, old sciences. The self-destructive research that had so eroded the thin civilized surface of our world that another, more ancient one was about to break through any day.

“You think it’s all madness, don’t you?” Now Aidan sounded edgy. He had turned from watching the seals to sit with knees bent, fingers tapping nervously along the creases in his yellow trousers. “But you know, Margalis, it’s no crazier than what they teach us here. Focusing on some inner landscape so that we don’t see our hands burning to bone in front of us. Focusing on the sound of the Gryphon’s engines, so we don’t hear the pilot screaming in the other seat. Taking vows of vigilance and obedience and swearing off the most basic human emotions. Cutting open nursling aardmen, to see if they will scream under the knife.”

“Those are exercises. They’ll save your life someday, in combat—”

“I know what they are! But these are exercises, too—”

He touched his breast where the talking book was hidden, and I recalled how I had found him once before, the Defries Incunabula open on his bed, chanting softly at the dawn. “The Academy teaches you that there are other ways to see the world. Well, my books teach you that there are other worlds to see.”

I maintained a cold silence. As I said, there was much talk like this in the Academy. We were young, some of us barely more than children, and such things appeal to youth. Millennial cults, the revival of archaic and often lurid religions. To Aidan and everyone else I showed a hard face when the conversation turned to such matters—and inevitably it did; we may have been NASNA cadets, but the oldest among us was not yet twenty—but for myself, I was profoundly disturbed by Aidan’s books, by his ecstatic desire to believe in old gods, old ways. I was disturbed because such things made sense to me, in a manner that I could never articulate.

When I first was assigned to the domed city of Araboth and met Shiyung Orsina, the youngest of the Orsinas’s ruling family, I found that we shared an interest in odd cults and quaint rituals. She merely as a fancy, something to whet her jaded and decadent tastes; but for me it was always deeper than that. Without precisely understanding how or why, I have always been driven by a hidden need to believe in something; but I have never found anything stronger than myself to believe in.

This compulsion to serve is deeply ingrained in an Aviator. We are taken in childhood, and from our earliest days we are trained to obey. But we are also encouraged to flout authority, to usurp it when possible and if necessary betray even our closest allies, our most beloved ideals. It is the only way for a military elite to survive in a world so fragmented that it defies rational attempts at control. So it is that the Aviators hold within them a dangerously contorted psyche, as meticulously and deliberately twisted as those tiny trees the Nipponian emperors raise in their solariums in the Floating Land. It is never a surprise when an Aviator goes mad; it only matters if his madness keeps him from carrying out his duties.

In Aidan’s case, his obsession with things demonic, with disaster cults and astronomy, obsolete sorceries and obscure religions, had ruined his concentration. He missed classes, exercises, training events. Even repeated visits to the infirmary and threats of a prolonged course of mind treatments were not enough to keep him from reading and enacting his little private seances.

But what was worst, to me at least, was the way that he had somehow managed to infect me with his madness. I had achieved First in our level, and it was rumored that I would be given a commission before graduation. The conflict with the Emirate was not going well; it would not be the first time a student had been sent to war before completing his course of studies. I would never jeopardize my chances of escaping from the Academy by doing anything so obvious (and stupid) as attempting to raise some demon in my dormitory room. But Aidan’s bitter cynicism toward NASNA and his peculiar taste in books had affected me nonetheless.

I wanted to believe in something. Worse, I needed to. It was no longer enough that the skirmishes be won, the conflicts shortened or ended, the Orsinate or the Autocracy satisfied by our efforts. I needed to believe in something else; something greater than myself. I was trained to accept the Aviators as the finest, strongest, most brilliant men and women of the continent. At the Academy I learned that I was the finest among them all. It was no surprise to me, really, when years later I was named Aviator Imperator. My madness and eventual rehabilitation as a rasa: no, I had not expected that. But I had been ready to accept the mantle of Imperator, perhaps since that first day I entered the ascetic confines of the Academy.

Still, if I was the jewel in the Autocracy’s crown, I had to believe in the worthiness of the brow I adorned. And it was painfully obvious, even to my nineteen-year-old self, that the Ascendants and the Orsinate were not worthy of me. But if t hey were not, who, or what, was? Bred and trained as a weapon, I must serve somebody. Aidan’s books and Aidan’s talk made me think that there might be other ways of serving; other things to serve.

“What other worlds are you talking about, Aidan?”

I tried to make my tone disdainful, but the curiosity was there, a raw kernel of it plain as the cold rock beneath us. Aidan saw my weakness, and laughed.

“The Sky Pilot wants other worlds now! Huh—”

He looked away, off to where the sky was greening twilight above the sea’s horizon. After a moment he said in a softer voice, “Well, there are other things. There is the Watcher in the Skies, for one. And other things, too. We—I—have seen some of them. At home.” The reluctance that crept into his voice made me realize that Emma, too, must know some of this. Perhaps that accounted for her unhappiness, her habit of always looking out the corner of her eyes. “And here, too.”

“What have you seen here?” I could no longer even pretend at offhandedness. From across the green sweep of lawn came the sturdy echo of the bell clanging for the first dinner shift, but I ignored it. “Could you—can you show me?”

“It’s not like that,” said Aidan impatiently. “These things—whatever they are—they have their own reasons for showing themselves to us. I mean, Jude Hwong says that the records show the Watcher of the Skies last appeared nearly four hundred years ago. I don’t know when we’ll see it again. All of these things—it’s not like you call them and they come. It’s more—well, it’s more like interfacing with the Gryphons. You prepare yourself— I prepare myself—and sit back, and then it’s there.”

Now I grew impatient. “ What’s there?”

“Something else.” He fidgeted, suddenly at a loss for words. He squinted into the sunset, the ruddy light making his face look almost molten. “Don’t you ever think about that, Margalis?” he asked softly. “How strange all this is?”

He gestured at the sea, the sky, the waving firs behind us. “Here it all looks the way it always did; but the rest of the world has changed completely. I mean, Hwong says how once there were archosaurs everywhere, and now there’s us; but someday we might be gone, and it will be only…”

His voice drifted off. For a moment he looked sadder and more serious than I had ever seen him. “Seeing Kalamat that time—they really are different from us, the energumens. In a way, they’re better. They can learn everything we can, only faster; and obviously they’re stronger. Even the name energumen —and Burdock never called them that, he always called them his children—it means ‘possessed by demons.’

“But the demons that possess them are us. ”

He stood, as though to embrace the ridge that hid the Academy from our sight. After a moment his arms fell limply, and he sighed. “Christ, I can’t explain it, really. It’s just like there’s something else there. I could see it, that day they brought Kalamat here. I could see it in her eyes. Something older than me, or any of us, a sort of presence. And now it’s inside me, or trying to get inside me. Or else it’s in there now and trying to get out.”

I stared at him, my mouth open to make a cruel retort. But Aidan’s eyes were wide and staring, distant yet glowing with a sort of manic concentration. He looked crazed, but there was a certain kind of sense in his words.

I had heard of people going mad in the HORUS colonies. Some of them—astrophysicists in particular were prone to this—claimed to be possessed by the spirits of American astronauts. Others simply went mad, raving that extrasolar beings had invaded their minds. During the twenty-second century, when the strange phenomenon of the Watcher of the Skies appeared, scientists and other observors in HORUS went into an apocalyptic frenzy—for naught, as it turned out. The flaming eidolon disappeared as slowly and silently as it had appeared. Just another one of the oddities of life in the colonies. That was why the energumens and other cacodemons were first sent to HORUS—space did not drive them mad. I said as much to Aidan.

“And you don’t have to get all worked up over these things, you know,” I added, somewhat smugly. “Just put yourself into an E-state and give your mind a chance to respond. Anyone can do it—”

Well, anyone with the training and discipline of a true Aviator. Aidan creased his brow, but he didn’t look annoyed. It didn’t look as though he were thinking of me at all anymore. His indifference angered me, that and his absolute certainty that he was privy to some great secret.

“You’re going to get suspended, Aidan, or expelled, for wasting your time with books like that. Someone will turn you in.” I started to my feet, halted in a half-crouch when he turned to me, his eyes blazing from gray to blue.

“What do you know about it?” he cried. “There are all kinds of things they do that we don’t understand, that don’t make any sense—”

When he said they, he jabbed his hand in the direction of the Academy, where the silhouettes of our classmates could be seen hurrying toward supper, black and thin as though etched against the sky with a needle. But I knew he wasn’t really thinking of them but of those others, our masters: the Ascendants in their distant circuits of the Earth, falling slowly and endlessly through the heavens. “Their geneslaves, their mutagens—does that make sense? Luther Burdock deforming his daughter for science— that makes sense?”

I shrugged. In the face of this outburst my own anger dissipated as abruptly as it had come on. “Well, does it?” Aidan shouted.

I made a show of rolling my eyes and sighing. Then I turned away and pried a bit of stone from the boulder, tossed it into the waves curling and receding in the darkness below. “No. Of course it doesn’t.”

I had no idea what had gotten into him. I said so, adding, “And he didn’t deform his daughter—all those modifications were made long after he and Cybele were dead. You know that.”

“I don’t see how you can defend him,” Aidan spat; although in fact I had said nothing in defense of Burdock, then or ever. “He used her clone, and what’s the difference there? It would be like using Emma for an experiment, instead of me. And ever since then—well, they’re really not human anymore, are they?”

I started to argue with him, but stopped. It was hopeless arguing with Aidan when he lost his temper, especially after he’d done an amphaze dot. He would end up punching me, or running off in a fury, or shouting until he brought one of our rectors down upon us. Instead I stood, shivering in the evening air. “We better get back if we want to find any supper left.”

He sat crouched at my feet, his eyes still ablaze. To my surprise he only nodded and stumbled up. “You’ll never understand,” he said bitterly. He kicked at a pocket of loose stones, sending them flying into the water. “Fucking Sky Pilot. Fucking Rocket Man—”

He turned and headed for the grassy knoll that led to the Academy. I waited to see if he would look back, gesture for me to hurry after him; but he only hunched his shoulders against the chilly breeze and went on by himself. After a few minutes I followed.

Within a few days I had utterly forgotten our conversation. Years later I would recall it, when I was at HEL and saw the fruits of his sister’s manipulation of the brains of children; and again when Lascar Franschii told me of the fate of the Quirinus station.

As I have said, time passes differently in the elÿon. It is a risk derived from the means of travel, the great biotic craft powered by the brain of a madman—a deliberately engineered madman, but a lunatic nonetheless. So powerful was the adjutants’ control over the psychic atmosphere of their vessels that even the shortest of voyages, such as ours, were often upset by passengers growing disturbed and sometimes violent—thus the reliance over the centuries upon psychotropic drugs as a means of controlling them. Superstitious colonists, particularly those from the fundamentalist inner territories, believed that dreams became unmoored during passage, to stalk and sometimes destroy their creations.

And certainly strange things happened aboard the elÿon. In the beginning women were often used as adjutants. It was thought that their greater capacity for pain—proved through the rigors of childbirth and such anomalies as the remarkable fate of those survivors of the inferno on Pequod 9 —would make them ideal navigators. But then it was found that missions piloted by women were more likely to end in bizarre tragedies. The most common explanation given was that women dreamed more lucidly than men. After the Second Ascension the Kataly, a Commonwealth elÿon, was lost with all hands. When its ’files were retrieved from the wreckage, investigators viewed scenes of nearly incomprehensible rites being performed by passengers and crew alike, ending with a bacchanalian dance that led to mass exodus through one of the craft’s air locks. The adjutant then piloted the elÿon through a convoy of diplomatic aviettes headed for NASNA Prime. Later, it was learned that the adjutant had been an adherent of the Mysteries of Lysis. Some reverie of hers had no doubt spawned the mass hallucinations and ecstatic dancing that led to the loss of the vessel.

In the wake of this discovery, robotic crews replaced human ones. Women were seldom used as navigators, and male candidates were carefully screened for attributes such as excessive imagination and tenacity of religious belief. I tell you all this so that it may perhaps be easier to understand what happened to me during that brief celestial journey.

I had often traveled by elÿon in my earlier life. It was unavoidable during my tours in the HORUS colonies, and later when I was stationed at NASNA Prime, before my unhappy assignment to the abandoned capital. Nearly always I had refused the psychotropic drugs administered by the vessels’ medical constructs. I also refused to remain in the tiny cells that were required for all passengers and most crew. A matter of pride, I will admit. But I never experienced anything resembling a hallucination; never glimpsed the legendary celestial body that my mother had written of in Mystica.

The Watcher in the Skies was one of the great mysteries of the HORUS colonies. Since its first—and, as far as we knew then, its only—appearance in the years 2172 and 2173, it had inspired countless works of art and speculative science. There were also numerous eyewitness accounts, such as that famous passage in Commander Ned Wyeth’s Astralaga, where he writes of

…this monstrous and bizarre thing we saw after seventeen days in orbit. Iacono noticed it first, but when he told us about it, we all just laughed at him. Then I saw it, and it was just as he’d described it: a shape that at first glance resembled a cloudy nebula, or maybe some waste pod cut loose from one of the stations. Only this thing actually seemed to move, and you know nebulae don’t do that! We all gathered on the observation deck to watch. Afterward I was stunned to learn eighteen hours had passed while we sat there—and we didn’t even notice. Didn’t get hungry or thirsty or tired, didn’t get up to go to the bathroom, nothing. Just watched that thing get bigger and bigger, until it filled the entire window: an enormous whitish mass, not really having any kind of shape or form. Eventually it disappeared, the way smoke does on a windy day—though you know there’s no wind up there.

Later when we tried to describe it to each other, we all admitted to having had the experience of being observed. Of being watched; but by whom or what we never knew.

Maybe my refusals to submit to a drugged journey came in part from my desire to see that phantasm. As I have told you, I’ve long been interested in manifestations of this type. Aidan Harrow with his talk of new gods; his sister Emma with the demons she created out of stolen children and brain proteins; Raphael Miramar and the Gaping One; Wendy Wanders and her uncanny power to kill with her mind. Even today, in the Archipelago they believe in graveyard spirits that they call memji, creatures with white teeth that stand on one leg and wait for the dead to be buried before crawling into their graves to copulate with them.

Long ago people laughed disdainfully at such ideas; but since the First Shining the world has changed. Aidan Harrow convinced me of this, and my mother. Both believed that the subtle and gross “improvements” wrought by our failed sciences made the Earth an increasingly hostile place for humanity. But these same changes had flung open a door for other, older things. Things that had lived here once, aeons ago; things that might return now to fill the void left by our systemized extermination of our own race.

Fool that I was! I believed the Watcher in the Skies might be such a thing, but I held few hopes of seeing it on this voyage. For some time I remained in my passenger cell, alone with my memories and that gruesomely lovely mural of Tokyo Bay. Eventually I checked the monitor, to insure that Lascar Franschii had told me the truth and that we had, indeed, left Cisneros. Then I left to check on Valeska Novus.

I found her cushioned within one of the roomier passenger cells near my own. The air in here was chilly, to aid in slowing down the metabolism of human travelers. Valeska looked quite pale, slung in a sort of hammock that in turn was held between two enormous cushions like a pair of plush hands. I bent over her and placed my finger against her throat, seeking a pulse. I found none. Then I held my hand above her mouth, watching to see if her breath would cloud the metal: nothing. Were it not for the monitor beside her that showed a thread of silver, indicating her heartbeat, one would think her dead.

On the wall across from her one of the vessel’s robotic crew was plugged in, and observed me with three unblinking red eyes.

“We recommend that all passengers remain in their cells until we arrive at our destination,” it announced in a breathy voice.

“I am not a human passenger,” I said shortly. The construct’s eyes swiveled as I crossed the room to the door.

“We recommend this for all passengers,” it went on. “This is for your safety as well as ours.” Ignoring it, I let the door slam behind me.

I found Nefertity in a neighboring cell, also cushioned as though she were a human traveler. Her light had dimmed to a very dull pewter gleam, and her eyes were closed. It was perverse, but in that state of hiatus she looked more human than she ever had before. She might have been a woman sculpted of ice, and suddenly I felt a pang, one of those rare tugs of emotion that reminded me that I now had more in common with this beautiful machine than with the Aviator dreaming in the next room. I turned and left, fleeing that notion as much as the sight of the nemosyne, so unnervingly vulnerable where she slept.

The crew roster for the elÿon had listed only a handful of constructs to support its solitary adjutant. Since the Izanagi had been a freighter, there was little need for human staff. I wandered alone through its spiraling corridors, all of them twisting inward to where Zeloótes Franschii was suspended within his web of dreams and ganglia.

The polymer walls had a roseate cast that changed color, deepening to red and a deep lavender. While the walls appeared amorphous and soft to the touch, they were in fact quite strong. I could see through them to where nucleic fluids pulsed within transparent conduits, and the elÿon’s immense ganglia floated past, like blood-colored stars. All of this and more—storage bladders, pressure chambers, hivelike cells filled with neurotransmitting fluid—was contained behind those walls. The habitable space within an elÿon is actually quite small: a series of tiny chambers branching off from the corridors coiling into the heart of the ship. From inside, it resembles a nautilus more than anything else. I was always conscious of strolling warily within a thing that has sentience, even if it is not quite alive.

I walked for a long time, never really going anywhere. Because of the Izanagi’s utilitarian purpose, there were few windows, no signs, no pictures, no holofiles; nothing to relieve the sense of wandering within a huge, rosy ventricle, like the cavity of a human heart. There was, however, a viewing deck, and it was to this I was headed. On all my previous ventures aboard the elÿon, I had been undisturbed by the dreamy light, the thick air scented faintly of saline and ozone. As a rasa, I assumed I would be truly impervious to the subtle lunacies that could stalk you through those blood-warm tunnels.

Instead I felt a growing unease. I had checked a map posted outside Nefertity’s cell to determine the location of the viewing deck. Surely I should have arrived there by now; but the corridor kept winding away in front of me, unbroken by doors or windows, an endless labyrinth pulsing softly with every shade of red. The clicking of my metal feet upon the floor grew louder, and with it another sound, like blood thumping at my temples. Only, of course, I am a bloodless construct, but still that noise hammered at me. It seemed to come from everywhere, and finally I thought it must be the pulse of the elÿon itself that I heard, the rhythmic mindless beating of a thing that has no heart but is itself a viscus, floating through the firmament. I began to hurry, until I raced down those corridors, the echo of my footsteps nearly drowning out that other infernal noise.

Finally the hallway started to widen. The roseate glow grew darker, tinged with blue like a bruise. I had reached the viewing deck.

Before me opened an immense plaza, set with rows of columns of softly glowing steel and jet. To either side a huge window curved upward, to form a domed peak that seemed to open onto the heavens. All was cloaked in a deep, soft, embracing darkness. From ventricles in the floor and walls, tiny jets of air hissed. Probably the ventricles released some mild sedatives or euphoric incense, Pangloss or Ecstasy; but of course I smelled nothing. Overall it was a soothing place, and I walked to the window. If I had still been a man, I would have laughed with relief, to see framed there familiar stars.

They hung unmoving in the darkness, brighter even than I remembered them. Old stars with new names: Cadillac, Wilson, Miguel Street, Goring. But most of that curved glass was filled with the Earth. My world, the old world where I had lived and died.

From here it did not seem so diseased a place. You could not see the continents that had been glazed to deserts of glass and sand, or those parts of the oceans where the water had turned red with decaying diatoms and plankton. You could not tell where the Emirate had set the Arabian Ocean aflame, or where mutagens had turned the great northern steppes between Calgary and Monis into a wilderness of twisted tick-pines, haunted by the howls of aardmen and dire wolves. From here the Earth seemed as it ever had, a calm marbled eye gazing into the firmament. From here it was beautiful.

I thought of the energumens, looking upon a place they had never seen, except in the implanted memories of a fifteen-year-old girl. Could they really dream of conquest, of launching war upon their masters? And would the Earth welcome them, if they returned to claim it?

I don’t know how long I stood there, staring back into that blue-green orb. Hours, certainly; though it could have been days. I had no need for food or water, and there was nothing within the Izanagi to mark the passage from day to night. But finally I did draw away from that window—mindful, perhaps, of Commander Wyeth and his enraptured crew.

I turned and walked across the plaza. Overhead, stars glittered within the domed ceiling, so brightly that their scattered reflections shone in the polished floor at my feet. It was cool here—I could see condensation on my torso’s outer casing. The light was dim and diffuse, spilling from slender indigo torchieres set between the steel and black columns. Quite a grand viewing deck, considering the Izanagi’s freighter status. But it had been a Nipponian vessel, and they set great store by beauty and ritual. I had attended formal moon-viewings on other elÿon in the Nipponian fleet, and sat with their Emperor as he composed delicate verse to honor an eclipse. It seemed a noble thing to me, to think they had provided such a fine deck for those few men and women who might ever have cause to use it. I let my hand linger upon the smooth brass curves of a torchiere, then took the last few steps to the far side of the chamber.

With no home planet to fill it, this window seemed more immense than its twin. Distant stars bloomed and reeled, distorted by the energy fields surrounding the elÿon. The constellations looked different here, and it took me a moment to realize why.

The HORUS colonies, of course. The stations were gone that would have filled the gaps in Osaka-O and The Circuit of Ten. The stray stars that were actually MacArthur, Sternville, Campbell: gone, all gone. There should have been at least ten of the colonies visible from here, if you knew where to look. I spotted only one, a flicker of blue where immense solex panels candled into flame as it tilted toward the sun. That would be Advhi Sar. I tried to remember what the adjutant had told me about that station—had it fallen to the energumens as well? And there was another celestial orb that I did not recognize, a rather hazy, whitish mass, so pale and amorphous, it might almost have been a dimple or blemish upon the window. Surely it should not have been there? But my thoughts were confused. Old dreams and memories had been tossed together by the intrusion of the adjutant overmind; I could remember nothing clearly.

So for many minutes I stood there, gazing out upon that black map. I may even have entered that state of rapture that seized Wyeth and his crew; because the next thing I knew I was no longer alone.

A figure leaned against the window: a tall young man wearing the red-trimmed, cerulean leathers of an Aviator cadet. On his left hand winked a heavy gold ring, set with a single large blue stone. From where I stood, I could not make out the letters surrounding that stone, but I knew they were there. I raised my hand, my human hand, until light struck the ring it too bore, illuminating the thick gold letters that spelled NASNA. Slowly I clenched my fingers in the Aviator’s salute. The figure against the window did the same. His auburn hair spilled across his forehead and he smiled, his gray eyes flecked with green where the light touched them.

I lowered my hand. Still he said nothing. And then I recalled what I had read once, in his book in fact, the forbidden DeFries Incunabula: that the dead cannot speak unless they are first addressed by the living. I took a step toward him, half-expecting him to disappear into glints of starlight. He did not move.

“Aidan,” I said.

His smile grew even wider, showing predatory white teeth in his vulpine face. When he spoke, it was with that same voice I had been imagining for days now, its boyishness offset by mockery and a certain feminine cruelty.

“Sky Pilot! I’ve been waiting such a long time to see you again.”

I winced. “What are you doing here?” Although now that he had manifested himself, it was as though I had been expecting him. My sleeplessness, my steady diet of dreams, had prepared me for this. It was perhaps a miracle that they had not all come back to haunt me.

“Only this, the traditional employ of revenants. A warning.”

He leaned forward and stretched, a great cat wakened from its warm sleep, and for the first time I saw the marks around his neck, bright red and black, as though he had been burned. I glanced at the floor, half-expecting to see a rotted rope fallen there; but there was nothing.

“A warning?”

He nodded, smiling slyly, then ducked his head. Sudden seriousness creased his eyes. “You are in danger, Sky Pilot.”

I looked at him shrewdly. “And why should you warn me? And why should I heed you? A phantasm, a stray glimmer of starlight upon the viewing deck. Have you warned everyone who comes here to look upon the sky?”

Once more the figure grinned, tossing back his long hair, and straightened the crimson cuffs of his uniform jacket. I recalled how he had been buried in it, given full honors as a NASNA cadet even though he was a suicide. That was my doing. I had petitioned Manning Tabor, insisting that Aidan’s death had actually been the most noble course for him to take with his life, if the others would have led to madness and an eventual soiling of his Aviator’s rank.

“Of course not.” There was no rancor in his voice, only a sort of detached amusement. He began to walk toward me. A heavy earthen scent wafted through the room, a freezing wind. I felt cold, and sudden terror.

Because as a rasa, I should not be able to feel, or smell, anything. When the figure reached for my hand, I drew it back sharply. His eyes widened and sly laughter filled the chamber.

“Ah! I have waited a very long time for that—there is something the Rocket Man is afraid of!”

“Your purpose.” My voice sounded hollow, the voice of a replicant and not a man. “I must return to my quarters.”

He smoothed the front of his leathers and gazed smiling at the floor. “I told you, Sky Pilot. Nothing but your welfare. A warning for the Rocket Man.”

“Why do you bother with me? I had nothing to do with your death, revenant.”

He shrugged, drew his hand to his face. For the first time I noticed how pale he was, how the skin on his cheekbones seemed gray and slack. Perhaps such phantasms have a very short life before they begin to decay.

“I bear you no ill will,” he said. His tone was ragged and shrill. “Listen to me—

“You are on a fool’s errand, Margalis. Chasing after lesser demons when the devil Himself is preparing to devour you.”

He swept out his hand to indicate the swollen green tear shining in the window opposite. “Look at it well, Sky Pilot: you may not have another chance. There is a cataclysm in the stars that will engulf your entire world. But you can escape it. Flee now, take this elÿon, and you may travel fast enough and far enough to survive.”

I stared at him in disbelief, then laughed. “Don’t be absurd! We will dock at Quirinus within a day or two. If I don’t find what I seek there, I will return and look for it on Earth.”

“What you seek will find you, old friend.” He grinned with a skull’s cold grimace, and his words came out slurred, as though his tongue were exhausted by the effort of speaking. “You are going now to meet with your own destruction, Margalis. Your own and your world’s.”

“I am going as Imperator of the Ascendant forces, to investigate the mutiny of Quirinus and seek the nemosyne named Metatron.”

Aidan only laughed shrilly and said, “ ‘Oh, the fierce wretchedness that glory brings us!’ ”

Without warning he slumped over. His fingers splayed outward so that his ring struck the floor, and I heard a loud crack, as though the tile shattered beneath it. With an effort he pushed himself up on his hands. When he raised his face to gaze at me, the wound on his throat burned fiercely—truly burned, with small brilliant flames like an incandescent torque thrust about his neck.

“The damned ever seek redemption,” he whispered. “But listen to me, Margalis. I was human, once. And even the dead can weep, to see the world they loved in flames—”

His voice rose in a wail. “Much has happened while you slept, Margalis. And I have learned much, oh, too much! about those who dwell behind the veil between the worlds—

“I was wrong about them, Sky Pilot. The demons bring no gifts—they know nothing but death, and they would kill us, kill us all! There are records here in the ship’s library that will show you—look at them and learn, Margalis. Luther Burdock’s children have heard the voice of the Oracle. They will betray you—”

He opened his hand. Onto the floor dropped a small object, the kind of ’file disk that had been manufactured half a century ago, when I was a boy. It struck the tiles and for an instant spun before falling down flat.

“Behold Icarus,” he whispered.

As I watched, a small cone of pallid white light rose from the disk, and from this was projected a blurred object, like an eye or cloudy whirlpool. Within its haze the foggy eye seemed to move. Threads of gray and white flowed from it, and after a moment tiny gold letters appeared at the apex of the cone of light, letters far too small for me to read. From the flattened disk on the floor shrilled a voice like that of the smallest monad, so that I had to strain to hear it.

“… it is of the utmost importance that the JPL Project permits immediate release of warning transcripts and all information relating to this disastr —…”

The words burned off into static, and then there came another voice, so faint and distant, it was like the wail of something drowning in the abyss.

“ Icarus. Icarus. Icarus. Icarus. ”

“What—” I cried; but as suddenly as it had begun, the voice grew silent. The luminous cone retracted into the ’file disk. Where he lay sprawled upon the floor, Aidan Harrow’s revenant stared up at me with sickly glowing eyes.

“You may be the only one with the strength and will to stop him, Margalis,” he whispered, and curled his hand in a final salute. “Farewell, old friend…Sky Pilot….”

I bent to touch him, drew back sharply. Flames leapt from the floor, flames and the smell of charred leather. There was a soft explosive sound, and a ball of smoke roiled toward me. I brought my hand protectively to my face. When I drew it away again, the flames were gone.

The viewing deck was empty. When I stopped to examine the floor, I found a small circle of ash where the ’file disk had been. As my finger stretched forth to touch it, it melted away like snow, and I stood back up in a daze.

“ There are records here in the ship’s library that will show you — look at them and learn. ”

“The library,” I whispered. I turned and fled the viewing deck, my heels clashing against the tiles, while behind me the blue-glazed eye of Earth gazed implacably upon the Izanagi.

The library was nearly as spacious as the viewing deck, with a great window running the length of one wall. Outside, stars burned and swirled in that dreamy waltz that accompanies the elÿon’s bursts of acceleration. I hardly gave them a look. I hurried to a carrel, throwing myself into the seat so quickly, I ripped its fabric with my metal hand.

“What would you like to research?” The pleasant voice of the ship’s librarian questioned me softly. In front of me appeared the generated image of a slight young man, clad in the simple black-and-gray suit of a Nipponian scholiast.

“All records of hostile maneuvers within the last six months.”

The figure rippled and faint dots of red and green imposed themselves upon his face. The library’s datafiles were deteriorating; the strain upon Lascar Franschii was starting to show. “Do you wish to review activity within the HORUS sectors or a particular region of Earth?”

I hesitated before deciding. I would look first upon the place where I had spent most of my career.

“The Archipelago.”

The scholiast nodded and the image blinked out—too quickly, another sign of the ship’s degrading systems. There was an instant when I might have imagined the soft click and buzz of the elÿon’s vast datafiles being accessed. Then the first icon appeared.

Before me an emerald plain wove into view, threads of turquoise and deep blue racing through it until the complete landscape shone in the library’s musty air. Beneath the ’filed image, glowing letters spelled out a name, latitude and longitude, and other coordinates. I gazed upon the Arafura Sea, its waters deceptively calm and utterly devoid of the landmarks that should have been there.

My voice was tight as I asked, “Where are the islands of the Archipelago? Where is Alor Setar? Where is Kalimantan?”

The scholiast’s reply hung calmly in the spaces above the wavering green ocean. “Alor Setar was destroyed by tsunami on the nineteenth of June, Old Solar Calendar.”

I counted back. It was the same day that the wave had swallowed Araboth. Not a week had passed since then. A terrible pressure began to build within my mind.

“Show me Sulawaya, then,” I ordered. “Sulawesi and Jawa.”

The ocean wrinkled, darkened to indigo as the image shifted. I saw a long line of blackened crags emerging from the water like knots of charred bone, some of them smoking as though racked by volcanic activity. Another string of letters and numerals appeared—

LRT 02° 10’ S—LONG 114° 44 E, CONFIG 9743 PRIOR STATUS: JAWA

“Where is this?” I asked with dread.

“Jawa,” the scholiast murmured.

I shook my head in disbelief. “But it’s gone. There’s nothing there.”

“The Ascendant Autocracy at Vancouver mistakenly believed the tsunami that destroyed their holdings at Araboth was the result of an Emirate attack. On twenty June o.s.c. they sent twenty thousand troops to attack the Emirate’s city of Tarabulus. Emirate troops retaliated with protonic weapons intervention directed at Jawa.”

The image flickered and changed to a close-up, empty turquoise waters flecked with gold and white beneath the remorseless sun. The glowing letters shifted until they spelled out another message.

LAT 04° 11’ S—LONG 107°30’ E CONFIG 9899 PRIOR STATUS: DJAKARTA, JAWA

It had been the Ascendant’s primary base in the Malayu Archipelago, one of the only remaining technopolies in the world.

“It’s gone,” I whispered. “How can it be gone?”

Once lush green mountains had risen from that sea, islands and glittering spans of bridges, the dark spires of refinery platforms and floating webs of agrivelts where the hydrapithecenes toiled. Now there was nothing; nothing but water, a single vast ocean encompassing the seas of Arafura and South China, Timor and Banda and Sulu.

They had all been destroyed. Sumatera, Jawa, Alor Setar, Kalimantan—all the thousand islands that had been spread across the ocean’s jeweled net like so many butterflies—all gone. Only a few score ragged promontories rose above the smooth blue surface. Black and molten orange beneath a faint haze of smoke and ash, they were all that remained of the system of hydrofarms and refineries that had been the Ascendants’ most valuable planetary holdings. The largest single population center in what remained of the civilized world had been reduced to steam and ash.

“ No! ”

My anguished shout rang through the chamber, setting off a small warning beacon by the door. I raged on heedlessly. How could they have done this? Who could have done this? Even the Habilis Emirate would not have deliberately destroyed such a rare hoard of resources; not even the Autocracy. But then I thought of Tarabulus, the beautiful and ancient heart of the Emirate. If it truly had been ravaged by Ascendant troops…

I knew how these lightning wars went. But the thought of that empty sea, of the horrible waste of lives and the precious hydrofarms, sickened me so that I sat in silence for a long time, staring blankly at the floor. Finally I raised my head and called out to the scholiast.

“More,” I whispered. “Let me see more.”

“Please be specific,” the scholiast’s voice rebuked me gently.

The clawed fingers of my left hand raked the top of the carrel. “The HORUS colonies,” I cried harshly. “Show me what became of the HORUS colonies.”

The ’filed image of the Archipelago radiated into random jots of emerald. An instant later a new ’file opened. It showed a whirlpool of black and ultramarine, with a date superimposed upon it.

JUNE 08, 2592, N.A.E. 73

At the whirlpool’s center a brilliantly shining torus tumbled in a languorous somersault. I could barely read the letters on its side—

HORUS/NASNA/CAMPBELL PRIME SERIES 0779988342

For a moment the torus hung there, no larger than my hand but seemingly as solid. Then, as silently as though it were some seed-heavy blossom scattered by the wind, the station burst. A speck of black at its center spread like spilled ink, as the shining outer rim of the structure stretched and bowed until finally it broke apart, flying soundlessly into the heavens. Campbell Prime had been destroyed. The holofile ended abruptly.

I clenched my fist and said, “NASNA Prime. Show me.” Flick. Another date; another silent maelstrom.

OCTOBER 31, 2591, N.A.E. 72

In the heart of this spiral the familiar struts and hourglass of the NASNA Prime Station slowly rotated. I could see the long silver tear that marked the main viewing deck, and imagined crimson-uniformed figures there, staring out into the void. I watched transfixed as one end of the hourglass distended. It bubbled outward, did not burst so much as disintegrate. Spars and beams of metal spilled out as the station cracked open like an egg, discharging its living humors. There was a blinding burst of light; then nothing.

Throwing back my head like an animal I let forth a howl, a shriek of rage and horror that surely would have frozen anyone who heard it; but who was there in that place to hear? When the echoes of my fury died away, I bowed, and covered my face with my hand.

There was a long silence. Then, “Have you another request?” asked the librarian.

I looked up. The ’file had looped back and started to play again. At the sound of my voice the image froze, the explosion like a brittle flower hanging in front of me.

“No! No, wait—yes, there is something else I would like to see.”

The destruction of NASNA Prime flickered off. The scholiast reappeared, assumed his usual patient expression. I leaned forward, my hand stabbing at the air.

“The footage you just showed me, of the NASNA Prime Station—where did it come from?”

The scholiast’s image froze as it searched for data. After nearly a minute it announced crisply, “Lyapang Wondot 3—that is, Autocratic News Service 3.”

“No—where did they get it from? Who actually ’filed it?

Was there a person’s name? Who knew that station was going to be destroyed? ”

Again the scholiast accessed its files. This time golden letters flowed through the air, spelling out the source.

UNKNOWN HOLOFILER, HELENA AULIS AUXILIARY CAPSULE PERDITA.

“Helena Aulis,” I said dully. The auxiliary capsule had been deployed from the colony that Lascar Franschii claimed held one of the leaders of the geneslave rebellion. “Run a personnel check on the broadcaster for that transmission.”

High-pitched squeals as the loop was played back and analyzed.

“Nonhuman auxiliary personnel,” the scholiast said at last. “Point of origin, HORUS colony Helena Aulis. Clearance Code 7, Energumen, male, Kalaman Cluster 579.”

An energumen. Again I stabbed at the air.

“That footage of the Campbell station,” I barked. “Who ’filed it? Who knew Campbell Prime was to be destroyed?”

Another golden banner.

UNKNOWN HOLOFILER, HELENA AULIS AUXILIARY CAPSULE PERDITA.

I waved impatiently. “Run a personnel check.”

More squeals. Then, “Nonhuman auxiliary personnel. Point of origin, HORUS colony Helena Aulis. Clearance Code 7, Energumen, male, Kalaman Cluster 579.”

Another energumen—or the same one—had witnessed and probably instigated the destruction of both NASNA Prime and the Campbell Station. Seemingly random acts of terrorism, and no one had ever thought to trace the news sources.

Or if they had, the correct information was never revealed.

The pressure in my mind roared like flame.

Kalaman Cluster 579.

Months before anyone was aware of it, the energumens had already begun their assault on the Ascendant Autocracy—and the Emirate, and no doubt the Balkhash Commonwealth as well.

“One more question,” I said. The shrill echo of my voice shivered in the cool air. “You said that Jawa was destroyed by Ascendant troops in retaliation for a presumed attack by the Emirate on Kalimantan and Araboth.

“But there was no attack, not according to your records. A tsunami destroyed Araboth. Who notified Quirinus headquarters otherwise? Who told them Araboth had been destroyed by the Habilis Emirate?”

The scholiast flickered in and out of sight. A disembodied voice announced, “That is classified information.”

“I am the Aviator Imperator Tast’annin!” I roared, then shouted my clearance code. The scholiast’s impassive face shimmered back into sight. After a few moments it said, “Medusine Kovax received a transmission on 19 June o.s.c. informing her of Emirate hostility in the North American theater. Ascendant troops responded within fourteen solar hours.”

“And the source for this transmission?”

A beat. Without emotion the scholiast recited, “The relay was traced to the Perdita, an auxiliary capsule from Helena Aulis.”

It was as Lascar Franschii had said. The energumens and other geneslaves had declared war on humanity.

I turned and stalked across the room, trying to calm myself; trying to call upon all my decades of training to keep from being overwhelmed by the sheer simplicity and lunacy and effectiveness of this campaign. After a few minutes my rage and sense of helplessness began to ebb. I stopped at the window and stared out, not really seeing anything.

For a terrorist movement—one that could only have burgeoned in the last year, even the last few months, else surely I would have heard rumors of it—it was amazingly well organized. They had the same weapons as the Autocracy; more of them, now that they had assumed control of HORUS. And seemingly they had at least one intelligent leader in this male energumen from Cluster 579. Every one of the places destroyed by their ragged troops had been an Ascendant stronghold, an armory or military base or resource holding of particular strategic value. It was not the sort of information geneslaves would have access to, even infernally gifted ones.

Unless…

Unless their maneuvers were all being dictated by another leader. One who knew the exact placement of the Ascendant armories and the more ancient weapons stores that had been lost over the centuries.

“The Oracle!” I cried.

“Your request?” The scholiast appeared and inclined its head to me.

“The Oracle—the messenger that has been appearing to the energumens in the HORUS colonies—do you have it on ’file?”

The scholiast blinked from view. An endless minute passed, and another. Finally it wove back into sight.

“There is an urgent ’file message for you, Imperator. Please stand by.”

In the air before me a darkness appeared, an oily cloud that swirled in slowly widening circles until it formed a viscous globe roughly man-sized, the color of a black pearl. A faint lavender light candled within its heart, a violet radiance that grew more and more intense, until I had to shield my eyes from it.

“Imperator Tast’annin.”

I lowered my hand. Within the shimmering globe stood the figure of a man, his outlines blurred by the shifting light. But as I stared, I saw that this was not a man at all, any more than Nefertity was a woman. It was a construct, a replicant, but more beautifully made than any I had ever seen, save for my nemosyne companion.

And of course that is what it was. The Ascendant’s missing military unit; the nemosyne I was searching for.

“Metatron,” I whispered.

He bowed slightly. “Imperator Tast’annin. I have been anxious to meet with you.”

My voice rose angrily. “Where are you transmitting from? How did you know I was here?”

“Agent Shi Pei informed me, shortly before she was relieved of her duties at Cisneros.” Silvery threads rippled across the violet mask of his face, and he smiled.

“How did you know I was at Cisneros?”

“A breach in their security system.” He gave a dismissive wave, an airy gesture that seemed charged with supernatural meaning. “They have all been relieved of their duties.”

Slow horror built in me as I asked, “What do you mean?”

He cupped his palms as though holding some living treasure, daggerwing butterfly or wormwood moth. When he opened them, a tiny jeweled box floated above his violet fingers. Sparks of light leapt from it like luminous spray. I leaned forward. The scintillating rays resolved into minute towers crashing in upon themselves; the flashing gems became blocks of residential units exploding into bursts of gold and crimson and black. I was looking at a ’filed image of Cisneros in flames.

In spite of my resolve I jerked backward. The nemosyne laughed.

“Oh, it won’t burn you, Imperator—”

Crack!

He clapped his hands together and the jewel-box disappeared. “There,” he said, flicking his fingers as though to cleanse them; “ that’s done.” He looked up at me, his emerald eyes glowing. “Now what shall we see next? Wichita? Vancouver? Punta Arenas?”

At each name a glittering image spun into sight. Wichita’s domes like dun-colored bubbles, Vancouver’s spires and minarets, the ice-locked casements of Antarctica’s capital. The nemosyne drew back, regarding them critically. “Or perhaps we should pluck an eye from HORUS—”

And there were the lazily turning stations of Hotei, Helena Aulis, Quirinus, Advhi Sar, each image much cleaner than the real thing and small enough to fit in my hand. Metatron’s eyes narrowed. Light gleamed from one plasteel arm as he reached out and contemplatively pinched Advhi Sar’s shining torus between two fingers. As I watched, he brought it to his mouth and, smiling, bit down upon it with glittering meal teeth.

“ Stop it. ”

I knew they were only ’filed images, but it was too easy to recall Jawa and NASNA Prime, and Araboth’s domes crushed by the prince of storms. Metatron only shrugged.

“As you wish, Imperator.” The shining cities blinked from sight. For an instant the nemosyne was utterly still, staring at me with the cold dull gaze of an adder. Any resemblance to a mortal man was gone. I was looking at a being infinitely less human than Lascar Franschii or myself, or even Nefertity. His coldly glittering eyes, the cruel and angular lines of his face, were less alive than anything I had ever seen. Yet he was charged with such malevolence, such unshakable strength and arrogance, that he seemed more powerful than anything I had ever gazed upon.

“What are you?” I whispered.

“Many things.” He smiled again, slowly, and said, “My name is Legion.”

“Who discovered you? Who has programmed you to do these things? Why?”

A shrug of those gleaming shoulders. “ Ad astra per asperan, Imperator. You will find out soon enough.”

The nemosyne’s image flickered, as though the transmission were fading. His voice began to grow fainter. “Certain Ascendant outposts on Earth and in HORUS have proved difficult for my followers to reclaim. It seems they have formed their own alliances. Ironic, isn’t it, that after all these centuries your Autocracy and Emirates and Commonwealth should suddenly find themselves with a common enemy?”

His voice grew silken as he crooned, “But we are not your enemy, Imperator, the geneslaves and I. Humanity is. And you are no longer human. Your human masters have done nothing but fail you, again and again. Don’t you think it is time you shed your lingering affection for mem? Don’t you think it is time you found a new master?”

In the air above his head fiery words appeared, the NASNA motto Oderint dum metuant spelled out in flames.

“You have hated very well, Imperator. Now it is time you learned to fear”

The letters crumbled into ash as Metatron’s voice rose to a howl. The walls of the carrel shook around me and ’files and books slid from tables and shelves. Before my eyes the nemosyne grew larger, billowing out like an elÿon readying for flight, until he seemed to take up the entire room: a vast black cloud shot with violet lightning, pierced by two raging emerald eyes. With an explosive roar he was gone.

Silence; then a barely audible sound echoed in the room.

Another voice, my own voice, faint and tremulous as though it had been recorded on faulty equipment and was now being played back from a great distance—years, perhaps; decades …

“ I must serve somebody, ” it— I —said; and then the library grew silent one more.

The chamber’s light had dimmed when a sound roused me.

“Imperator.”

I whirled, my hand raised to strike; but at the far end of the room stood Captain Novus. Her face was red, her eyes puffy from the drugs she had been given. “A replicant woke me and said that we are approaching Quirinus.” She yawned, rubbing her arms, and shook her head. “The time says it’s been fifty-three hours. Is that possible?”

Fifty-three hours! But of course it was possible. It seemed now that anything was possible.

“Yes,” I said numbly. I was glad I had only one human hand, and that she could not see how it trembled. “I warned you, elÿon travel is disorienting.”

I walked past her, headed for the door leading back to the navigation cell. “Make sure Nefertity has been reactivated. Both of you will meet me in the adjutant’s chamber as soon as possible.”

She stared at me, surprised at my subdued tone, then nodded. “As you wish, Imperator,” she said, and hurried down the corridor.

In the navigation cell I tried to question Lascar Franschii about my vision of Aidan Harrow and the subsequent message from the nemosyne he referred to as the Oracle.

“Of course there are ghosts here!” the adjutant whined. “There are ghosts on every elÿon, how do you think we travel so quickly? They pull us, we are chained to them, spirits of the past, the dead, the damned—”

There was more of this babble, but in a rage I yanked his speaking tube from the wall. When Valeska and Nefertity arrived, Lascar Franschii was thrashing furiously within his web of wires, squeaking like a bat.

“That is cruel,” Nefertity said coldly. She slid the speaking tube back into his mouth. A froth of blood and spittle greeted her for her kindness, and a stream of curses. Even Captain Novus looked appalled.

“We’d better find the docking area,” she said as the adjutant kicked weakly at the wall behind him. Without a word I strode to the door, not waiting for the others to follow.

“Will he—will that affect our landing?” Captain Novus asked uneasily when we were out of earshot. “He seems to be having some kind of seizure.”

“We have fallen into a trap that Lacar Franschii has helped set for us, Captain Novus. Please arm yourself and be prepared for a hostile encounter. Under no circumstances should you allow my replicant to be harmed.”

Valeska Novus swallowed and glanced at Nefertity beside her like a radiant shadow. “Yes, Imperator,” she said, and was silent.

We entered the main corridor, its glowing walls painting us all a lurid crimson. At the end of the hallway was the door through which we had first entered the Izanagi. Three of the Maio servers stood beside it, their silver faces turned attentively toward us.

“Imperator Margalis Tast’annin,” one of them announced in its clear, cold voice as we approached. “There is no human escort on HORUS colony Quirinus to greet you. A psychological reading of those aboard shows only thirteen auxiliary personnel, female energumens from Kalamat Cluster 533. There is evidence of recent biochemical sabotage. In addition, three auxiliary capsules bearing the designation HORUS Colony Helena Aulis are in the process of making an unauthorized docking at Quirinus. We recommend aborting this mission.”

“I don’t believe we could abort this mission under any circumstances,” I said curtly. “And we will have no need of human escorts. I have reason to believe that the energumens are expecting us.”

Before us the door shuddered as the elÿon docked into the main entryway of the HORUS station. I could hear Valeska’s shallow breathing, and from the navigator’s cell far behind us the voice of Lascar Franschii bellowing with laughter. With a sound like a knife scraping glass, the entry-way began to open. Brilliant blue light poured into the chamber, mingling with the elÿon’s crimson glow to turn everything a vivid purple. A moment later we were gazing into the vast recesses of Quirinus.