Icarus Descending

11 Cassandra

AS OUR CARAVAN APPROACHED the river bounding Cassandra, I could see why the Ascendants had not been able to destroy the town. Protonic cannons lined the riverbank: steel-blue cylinders pointed at the sky, steaming in the morning sun. Earthen berms and small brick outbuildings rose beside them, and from these swarmed figures clad in the dusty blue hoods and tunics I slowly realized must be the uniform of the Asterine Alliance. Most of these figures were men and women; but there were others who went about unclothed, or wearing abbreviated versions of the uniform. Aardmen with their hunched gait; ethereal argalæ, struggling to carry the smallest cartons in their frail twiglike arms; cacodemons and huge and horrible four-legged things like equine men. All of them moved busily along the shore, like the apocalyptic figures in a recusant’s tapestry brought to life. Beyond them the river was wide and brilliant as the sky, and as calm. I could see where fish were rising to snap at clouds of insects, and where a motorized dinghy V’ed lazily through the placid waters as though on no more serious errand than fishing, heading for the far shore.

“There’s a checkpoint ahead,” Cadence warned us. She pointed to a ramshackle metal building at river’s edge. Immediately past it a bridge spanned the water, its rusted spans repaired with wooden beams and salvaged metal. “ I’ll take care of everything.” She glanced at Jane, then turned back to the wheel. Jane looked affronted. She stuck her chin in the air and in beleaguered silence joined me at the open window.

The van crept the last few yards toward the guardhouse. People had stopped their work—mostly hauling crates and canisters from several other ancient caravans parked near the cannons—and stood in small groups, staring at us as the sentries waved us through. Beside the guardhouse a huge figure stood by a smaller, hooded one, inspecting something that might have been a transformer or some kind of old ’file transmitter. As I watched, the larger creature turned, very very slowly, and stared at us as we passed. I had an impression of fawn-colored skin and slightly darker hair, and eyes that were black and implacable as a starless sky.

At that unblinking gaze a cold tongue of dread licked at me, and I shuddered. Even from a distance there was something eerie, almost obscene, about that form. As though some ancient monolith had begun to move—like the City’s Obelisk or Sorrowful Lincoln—something formed over the course of aeons out of marble and fire and blood; something that should never have been given life. The thing watched our caravan rattle by, its huge hands holding the dully gleaming core of the transmitter as though it were a hollow log. As the van rounded a corner, I turned to look back at it. For an instant its eyes met mine, and I gasped.

Because those eyes—pupilless, cold and deep as black water—were utterly without guile or hatred. For all the grotesque immensity of its body, the gaze that met mine glowed with the rapturous curiosity of a child’s.

“What is that?” I whispered.

Jane stared after it, her face drawn.

“Energumen,” she said. I knew from her expression that she had never before seen one alive.

Nor had I. I had never even quite believed that they existed, let alone that one might work peacefully side by side with humans. The notion had seemed too ludicrously horrible even for the Ascendants: deformed, bioengineered clones twice the size of a man, created to serve as slaves in the HORUS colonies and the most distant reaches of the Archipelago.

This one, though, had not been quite so large as I had imagined—perhaps only two feet taller than a man, though beside it that solitary human had looked spindly and utterly inconsequential in his loose uniform. I stared after them until our caravan began to cross the bridge.

“Christ,” Jane muttered. She stood beside me and looked dispiritedly out at the rusted spars and sagging cables. “We’re in for it now, Wendy.”

I pointed to where dull-gray canisters and spiky arrays of wire and metal had been bound to the struts with lengths of barbed wire, until the whole thing looked like the work of some great caddisworm. Jane nodded glumly.

“Explosives. They’ve got the whole thing rigged so that if anyone tries to cross—like, say, someone trying to rescue us—the bridge will go under— pfft —like that.”

In the front seat Cadence turned and gave us a warning look. Jane grew silent, crossing her arms on her chest and casting a baleful glance to where Suniata stood in silence beside the driver’s seat, his round carp’s-eyes fixed on the road before us.

And so we reached the shores of Cassandra. Behind us the placid waters of the Shenandoah curled out of sight between the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Ahead of us stretched the road, wider now, with long gouges in the red clay where shallow trenches had been dug and rudimentary channels stood half-full of rusty-looking water. Our caravan slowed, creeping to avoid boulders and trees that had fallen in the course of constructing more armories and crude storage buildings. There were many men and women working here, wearing the hooded blue uniform of the Alliance, as well as a number of energumens: all carrying sacks of meal and grain, dragging great steel beams across the wounded ground, pulling the broken axle from beneath a pile of wreckage. Compared to their slight, almost scrawny forebears, the energumens were surprisingly graceful, with smooth, heavily muscled bodies. Most wore only a loose linen skirt about their narrow waists. Their skins were different colors—the same vibrant red as the Virginia clay; a dusky bluish-brown, like the flesh of a muscat grape; an ivory tone like fluid wax.

But what I found strangest about them was their faces. Or rather, their face —because they all shared the same features. Large intelligent eyes above rounded cheeks, wide foreheads, childish round mouths. Jane grimaced when they stopped their work and gazed after us, but to me they looked like grotesquely large children. Only their eyes betrayed their demonic origins, with black iris and cornea and tiny white pupils, and the same expression of intense inquisitiveness as they watched us pass.

There was another checkpoint up ahead, and an even more staggering array of weaponry, all of it arranged in shining, neatly ordered columns beneath the lacquered blue sky. At the sight, even Jane’s customary irony turned to disbelief.

“Scarlet was right,” she said. Outside, two energumens worked on a metal platform that supported a satellite dish twice the size of our van. On the ground beneath them another energumen manipulated a control panel. Slowly the entire apparatus swiveled, liked a monstrous clockwork toy. “This really is war.”

“Not just war.” Cadence looked over her shoulder while she steered the caravan with her one hand. “Jihad.”

Jane frowned. “Jihad?” Suniata nodded, and Cadence smiled triumphantly.

“ Holy war,” she said. “To avenge them, and redeem ourselves.”

“Redeem who ?” Jane asked suspiciously.

“Us. All of humanity.” Cadence’s voice took on the same ringing tone I had heard in Miss Scarlet’s when she played one of the more ardent roles in her repertoire, Saint Joan or Clytemnestra or Maw-ree Zilus. The van veered dangerously close to a stack of bricks as she went on. “This is a war of redemption—yours, ours, all of humanity’s! We sought to enslave the world, and like all slaves the world has finally rebelled. It is up to us, for those humans who have joined the Alliance, to redeem our race. The Earth will be cleansed of humanity. We will free those beings we created, end their centuries of servitude, so that at last they can take their places beside us in a new world—”

She paused to look over at Suniata, and her eyes shone with a radiance that transcended anything I had ever seen before in a man or woman. Not simple love, certainly not lust; but an intensity of expression that I can only describe as beatific. It was a gaze that scorched; I could imagine myself flinching if she was to turn it upon me. I thought then of her father and the enhancer he had worn over his damaged face, and wondered if his eyes had withered away from such incandescent ardor.

And then I felt the cool, slightly moist touch of Suniata’s hand upon mine, and a simple thought like a jolt of adrenaline, coursing from his fingers to my brain—

But of course! Didn’t you know?

I drew away sharply, staring into that bloated fishlike face as though into a warped mirror. Suniata only nodded and turned back to Cadence. Jane put her hand on my shoulder and tried to pull me to her.

“Wendy? What is it?” I shook her away, suddenly frightened.

Because all this time I had thought of the cacodemon merely as an odd accessory to this journey; a creature whose function was to serve as some kind of silent adjunct to Cadence, perhaps to cow Jane and me by his presence.

But now, with Cadence gazing at him with that wonder and reverence and, yes, fear, igniting her blue eyes, I saw the truth of it.

The cacodemon was not her servant. She was his. In some misguided effort to reverse the wrongs of hundreds of years of genetic engineering and biological warfare, the human members of the Asterine Alliance had offered themselves as infantry and handsel to the geneslaves.

“No, not beside us in that new work!—above us,” Cadence continued. Her hood had slipped from her head, so that all I saw was a halo of brilliant white above the blue folds of her uniform. “This world has become unlivable. The sun is poisoned, and the water, so that nothing from our past can safely live upon it.

“But these others—”

She raised the stump of her left hand triumphantly. “The new creatures, the ones we created—they can survive in this world we have made! To them the poisons are like cool water, and darkness is daylight. They can live among the stars without falling prey to madness, and when they breed—and they will!—they will have only a single offspring, so that the subtle balance of our new world will not be overthrown. We gave birth to them in darkness, but that darkness has welcomed them, even as it has swallowed us.”

I felt as though someone had run an icy finger across my throat. “Are you—do you mean to make slaves of us, then? Your own kind?”

Cadence shook her head. “No,” she said softly, her voice nearly drowned by the droning engines. “You will see—we are not devoured by self-hatred, seeing these new creatures. They would never have come to be, were it not for us; were it not for their father, the man who gave birth to all of them. We honor them, that is all. We honor him.

“But you’ll see, Wendy. And Jane. Icarus is coming. And when he comes, a new world will come with him, even as this one falls away.”

She crouched back over the steering wheel, the wind whipping her hair into silver froth. For another moment Suniata looked at me, his gaze flat and inscrutable as a viper’s.

Icarus. Into my mind rose the image that had been printed on Giles’s packets of cigarettes, and on the wine and brandy we’d drunk at Seven Chimneys.

Iχαpυσ

Icarus: that was what the strange characters spelled. Whomever—or whatever—the Asterine Alliance had taken as their emblem, was a thing called Icarus.

For the first time Suniata spoke aloud, the tendrils around his mouth rising as though to taste the name.

“Icarus,” he whispered, and nodded at me. Then he turned to stare outside.

“Icarus,” I thought, and even though the name was meaningless to me, I felt it like a palpable weight upon my heart.

In her seat Cadence peered through the front window, occasionally glancing at Suniata and nodding as though to some unspoken question. From the manner in which the cacodemon touched her—his long flattened fingers brushing now her neck, now her elbow or the wrinkled stump of her arm—I imagined they must be engaged in conversation, a new and subtle means of speech that stupid folk like Jane or me would never understand. Twice Suniata pointed, and Cadence craned her neck to see what he had indicated: improvements, I gathered, that had been made since their departure the day before.

Beyond the edge of the road were endless heaps of crates and heavy canvas sacks, some of them ripped open to spill their burden of ammunition and armored clothing beneath the tossing limbs of birches and young oaks. Behind the trees hundreds of vehicles were thrown together, nosing each other like bastard pups searching for their mother: caravans and jitneys and trucks and trylons, Ascendant aviettes with their wings folded up like a pterosaur’s and blunt-nosed Harkers from the Commonwealth. In the distance I glimpsed the wreckage of a fouga. Its outer skin had burned away so that only its steel infrastructure remained, like the shattered ribs and vertebrae of a whale gnawed to bone by some unimaginably vast predator. Two cacodemons emerged slowly from its blackened hulk, dragging corpses and what looked like the body of a huge worm. Others of their kind huddled together over the ruins of the dirigible’s gondola, shaking their heads solemnly and staring at a flickering image that might have been a holofile of the warship’s flight plan.

“Look at all this,” Jane murmured, shaking her head. “They must have gone to war against the entire world, to get all this….”

“Oh, but we have,” said Cadence, and Jane fell silent.

The caravan drove out from under the canopy of oaks, to a sunlit place where the road widened. To either side grass and flowering vines grew over the remains of ancient buildings long since given over to the earth. Here the mountains were so close that I could smell them, their secrets trickling from dark places like water, the wind rushing down gray cuffs in a cold torrent. Through a stand of live oaks, their trunks blackened and burled with age, I could glimpse the very foot of the mountain, a gray-and-green rampart rising thousands of feet above us until it vanished in blue haze. Scattered about its base were broken chunks of granite and boulders like chunks of dirty ice. From the center of all this rose an immense pair of polished metal doors, buttressed with steel beams and smooth slabs of rock that must have been torn from the mountain itself. Trees grew above the doors, spindly, gnarled trees whose roots clutched at the loose soil trapped between stones that had been loosed by avalanche or storm. For all the sunlight and warmth spilling from the unclouded sky, it was a grim place. I could imagine black eagles nesting there, or vultures, but not wrens or larkspurs or the darting wild finches: nothing that might give voice to song.

“Well, Wendy,” Jane said, hugging herself and staring at the mountain with a face as cold and unyielding as its own. “Looks like the end of the world, all right.”

All up and down the mountainside innumerable solar disks rose on crooked stiltlike legs, like great black beetles that had crawled from a giant’s corpse. Lines of rebels marched between them, snaking down to the road in an unbroken file. They would have been invisible save for their sky-colored uniforms and the weapons they carried, double-bladed yataghans and flame-shooting culverins glinting in the sun, and a billowing standard bearing the now-familiar image of mountains and star and the name Icarus spelled in archaic script. A dull thunder echoed from somewhere far above us. The lines of troops halted and turned to stare up the mountainside. A moment later a cloud of black smoke appeared in the sky. A faint rain of leaves and shattered stone pattered against the caravan and sent the rebels scuttling down their path.

When she heard the first explosion, Cadence sent the van lurching forward. We racketed past another stand of starved-looking trees and a battered plastic urinal. To the right of the road loomed a metal sign, so old and pitted with rust, it looked like an autumn leaf chewed by locusts.

WELCOME TO CASSANDRA

GATEWAY TO THE BLUE RIDGE

A few yards past it was a smaller sign.

WHEN IN CASSANDRA VISIT WORLD-FAMOUS PARADISE CAVERNS!

On the flaking metal someone had scrawled Ad astra aspera in blue paint.

“We mean to cleanse this world and find another,” said Cadence softly. She lifted her head to gaze at the shining gate that loomed before us, then raised her hand as an energumen sentry waved us on. Beside her, the cacodemon turned to regard Jane and me with coldly glittering eyes.

He said, “Your kind have always thought of us as monsters, but it is to us that this great task has fallen.” He spoke in a whisper, as though it hurt him to talk. “If we are truly monsters, perhaps then we are better suited to another world than to this one.”

Cadence nodded, adding fervently, “ ‘I have said to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister.’ ” She yanked on a lever in the front of the cab, retracting the solex shields, and the engines died. “ ‘How much less man, that is a worm? and the son of man, which is a worm?’ ”

I said nothing. Jane drew me close as the caravan shuddered to a halt. With a low moan of greeting Suniata leapt from the van to embrace another of his kind waiting by the doors. In her seat Cadence turned and looked at Jane and me, her blue eyes flashing as she drawled, “Welcome to Paradise.”

Minutes later we stood before the entrance to the caverns, an arched steel gate three times the height of a man and with heavy iron bars so thick, I couldn’t wrap my hands around them. Rusted signs dangled from the bars; others were recessed into the stone itself, and had a slick green patina of moss and algae hiding the letters.

TOURS Begin Hourly and Last 90 Minutes

PARENTS, Please! Carry All Children Under Three Years of Age Caverns Close at Sunset Daily

High above the gate’s arch a sheet of metal had been embedded into the granite, its engraved letters worn but still elegant as they shone in the midday sun.

VELCOME!

TO

PARADISE CAVERNS

As Jane and I stared, several humans in rebel uniforms walked past. They stared at us curiously and, I thought, with sympathy. When they reached the gate, they saluted the energumen sentry and passed inside—all save the last, who hesitated. Looking back at us, he raised his hand and, in a furtive show of solidarity, grimaced. Then he too disappeared into that gaping darkness.

“Come with me, friend,” a soft voice sounded. I started as Suniata’s moist hand closed over mine. “We must go inside now. There is very little time left for our work here. You and Jane will have to meet with Dr. Burdock today.”

“Dr. Burdock?” Jane repeated incredulously. Behind us Cadence stood outside her caravan, laughing with a burly man who gestured extravagantly at the cavern entrance. Compared to the cacodemon’s soft tone, their voices sounded as shrill and meaningless as the cry of locusts. “Luther Burdock’s been dead for four hundred years.” The cacodemon said nothing, only folded his hands inside his sleeves and entered the caverns.

As we followed him, I knew why those other people had slowed their pace. Even an enormous bank of electrified lanterns couldn’t dispel the infernal darkness. Two van-sized solar generators stood to either side of the doorway, trembling from the effort of converting the light gathered outside, but it still wasn’t enough. Nothing would have been enough.

“Christ, Wendy, how can they live in here?” Jane’s fingers twined around mine. She craned her neck, her brown eyes so wide they gave her a slightly maddened expression. “This is like, like—well, shit. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It is a very great honor,” Suniata said in a hushed admonitory tone. “Tomorrow night we will have our first glimpse of Icarus and the exodus will begin. You are meeting the Doctor at a very precious time.”

“Oh, of course,” Jane said drily. “Please make sure the Doctor knows just how thrilled we are.” At Suniata’s disapproving glare she shrugged and added, “I mean it: a very great honor.”

The cacodemon turned away; he would waste no more talk with us. I pulled Jane to me and kissed her quickly on the cheek. Her hand tightened around mine as we followed our guide into the somber heart of Cassandra.

A faint damp breeze blew through the passage. From the ceiling naked bulbs hung between twisted spires of calcified stone. In places, the stalactites had started to grow around the lights, so that they glowed eerily from between flows of softly glowing white and yellow and dull orange, like molten wax. Softened knobs of stone welled up from the floor, some of them waist-high, others so small they looked like skulls, all that remained of bodies that had melted into the earth. The passage was wide enough to drive a van through, and one did pass us, the sound of its motor quieted to a wasp’s hum, the voices of its human and aardmen passengers muted within that echoing space.

Suniata led us through galleries filled with weapons stores; past lightless tunnels and black and silent lakes that reflected the crenulated ceiling and turned it into an endless plain, where mountains and tors needled upward to touch the very tips of the things they reflected. There were empty chambers covered with fine yellow shrouds of pollen blown in from unseen chimneys, so smooth and deep and soft that one could drown in it, and tiny cells that held nothing but corrugated pillars of amber-colored stone, bound about with coils of copper like sheaves to be brought to harvest. There were workrooms, bedrooms, dormitories, libraries, all couched within the rock and filled with silent uniformed figures, who were crouching or stooped or upright by turns, busily engaged in fitting weaponry or reading flickering monitors. Loveliest of all was an atrium where crystalline stars covered walls and ceiling, everything but the floor, glimmering coldly in the light of a single small lantern. Their fragile tines broke away at the faintest touch of my finger. The sound of them shattering upon the stones was the echo of my own dismay at having destroyed something so lovely.

“Nowhere else, our father says, nowhere else will you see these,” Suniata said, pausing to cup one of his white spade-fingered hands about a crystal but being careful not to touch it. “Anthodites, they called them. Because they are like flowers.”

We went on. I stumbled along beside Jane, my mouth filled with the lingering taste of the creosote trees we had seen hours earlier, my eyes always turning away from the steady, feeble gleam of the electric lights to seek something else in the midnight corridors, something like the sun.

I had always thought of darkness as something I knew: a half-wild creature that could be beaten back into corners and chained with light. Even the starless sky was not something to fear, because the sun was always there, a scythe upraised to fall upon the gloom.

But in Paradise Caverns I learned that darkness is not like that at all. Darkness cannot be put away, or cut back, or tamed. It is what Is: the last thing, the only thing. The rest of us, stars and suns and creatures squatting around the fire, are mere flaws in its fabric, rips and tears too small to mend, or bubbles floating on the surface of an infinite and tenebrious sea. Even on our Earth there are secret vales where there is no sun; but there is no place that does not know the night.

“I hear water.” Jane’s whisper was a ragged sound. “Listen—can you hear?”

I could. The sound grew until the cavern resonated with it. Above our heads, bulbs hanging from twisted wires swung slowly back and forth, back and forth. Suniata threaded his way past elephantine stalagmites, their sides wet and gleaming. We followed, slowly and with increasing reluctance. The limestone spires hanging from the ceiling trembled and emitted faint chimes, so that the chamber seemed to be filled with an invisible choir. Suddenly Jane clutched my arm and pointed.

“God, look at that!”

Before us roared a river, half as wide as that which circled the mountain outside. I do not know if it was sister to that stream or an extension of it. Certainly it was wilder, raging through a channel it had gouged from the slick rock and throwing up spume and a fine icy mist.

The roaring grew louder as we followed the river, walking down a narrow passage a fraction as wide as that roiling beast. Abruptly the black stream plunged around a corner into utter darkness, like a worm burrowing into its hole. The narrow path came to a dead end. Strung across the violent water was a bridge made of planks and rope. One end stood just a few feet from us. The other disappeared into the darkness. In the middle it sagged and swayed as though something huge trod across it just out of our sight.

“We’ll cross here,” Suniata said matter-of-factly. He had thrown back the hood of his cape and looked like a monkish analog of the Frog Footman. Jane whistled in disbelief, but before she could say anything, the cacodemon had clambered onto the bridge and lurched off into the darkness. Jane looked at me; we both looked around at the empty passage. We had seen no one in some time. I had long since given up trying to remember the way back.

“Well,” Jane said, and tugged dubiously at a frayed end of rope. “It’s either this or wait for something else to kill us.” She swung herself up and began to cross.

I waited until she reached the middle of the bridge, and when she seemed safely on her way toward the far shore, I climbed after her. It was easy enough, once I got used to the slick wooden planks twisting and snapping at each step. Halfway across I stopped and looked down. The water boiled perhaps ten feet below me, its black surface flecked with white and yellow vortices. I stared, trying to measure the distance. Suddenly a face appeared in the water.

“Come, sister,” it hissed. A human face, but with skin like oiled green leather and a round lipless mouth edged with tiny white teeth. “Jump—I will catch you.”

I yelled and stumbled forward, clutching frantically at the ropes and sending the entire bridge bouncing and twitching like a spider’s guyline. The hydrapithecene hissed again, but I was already gone. Where the bridge ended I jumped to the floor, wrenching my ankle. Jane caught me as I staggered against her.

“Siren!” I gasped. Behind her Suniata regarded me dispassionately.

“They live here, too,” he said, and turned away.

“Are you hurt?” Jane asked, pushing the hair from my face.

“Not really,” I said. I winced as I rubbed my ankle. “Just twisted it a little.”

“Good,” she murmured, and pulled me to her. She kissed me, her mouth brushing mine so lightly, I thought it was a drop of water running across my lips. My tongue darted out to flick it away, and she kissed me again, harder—no doubt of it this time—then slowly drew back, her fingers resting against my damp cheek and stroking the wet curls plastered at my neck.

“Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. “If they were going to kill us, they’d have done it by now. And I would never let them hurt you.”

I didn’t tell her I wasn’t afraid—not really, not any more than anyone would be who’d just seen a siren’s nightmare face gabbling up out of an underground river—but then Suniata’s voice came back to us again, low and urgent, begging us to follow.

We did. In a few minutes we found the true source of the thunderous sound we’d been hearing. We were in a wide gallery, dimly lit and less dramatic than others we’d passed, except where a glittering canopy seemed to cover the far side of the room. Behind it shadows moved with the jerky stride of puppets or primitive servers. It took me a moment to attach the nearly deafening roar with this delicate vision, and another moment to realize that what we were approaching was a waterfall, lit from behind by a blaze of electric lanterns.

“This is where Dr. Burdock works,” said Suniata.

“A nice spot to come back from the dead,” Jane said, her voice cracking.

“Take my hand, Wendy,” Suniata called softly. “And you, Jane, take hers—”

We followed him, one behind the other, across a narrow stone bridge that arched above the pool where the cascade fell. The stones were wet beneath our feet, and I was terrified of falling. Spray drenched us, and mingled with the sharp limey reek of the water was a burning chemical scent, formaldehyde and preserving alcohol and something so caustic, it made my throat sore. Abruptly Suniata let go of me, and one by one we jumped to the slippery ground, Jane and me shivering and cupping our hands beneath our arms from the cold.

“Dr. Burdock,” Suniata called. He peered into the darkness, then seemed to see whom he was looking for. “Dr. Burdock, we have two new recruits.”

Here the chemical smell was overwhelming, and mingled with a muskier animal odor. From the ceiling hung a makeshift chandelier, a warped metal wheel set with empty wine bottles. Each held a guttering candle that sent long strings of yellow wax tapering to the floor. Beneath this crouched six aardmen. They stared intently at a holofile scarcely brighter than the candles overhead. Nearby a single argala poked tentatively at another ’file disk, rather forlorn with her wispy yellow hair and enormous dormouse eyes. More monitors were set up beside a row of steel tables that recalled Trevor Mallory’s cellar garden. Three energumens sat before them with their great heads bowed, fingers tracing slowly across the dusty screens as they scryed some lost secret. As we passed, the energumens looked sideways at us with glowing black eyes.

“Dr. Burdock…,” Suniata called again. The cacodemon’s blue-robed figure slipped in and out of sight between steel tables and ramshackle shelves. On one of these a bloodstained robe had been tossed, and the red imprint of an enormous hand shone against the metal. A row of books lined the top shelf—very old books made of paper, with curling faded covers and pages that crumbled away when I touched them. The chemical smell gave way to the more prosaic stench of tobacco. When he saw the bloodstained robe, Suniata straightened, and though he could not smile, his voice sounded brighter. “Ah! Dr. Burdock! Here we are.”

Behind the sagging shelves a man sat at a small desk, staring earnestly at the pages of a small white book. A metal hubcap listed at his elbow, filled with fingerling stubs of cigarettes and a gray dune of ashes. He wore a plain white shirt, no longer clean, and gray trousers hiked up to show bony ankles and a pair of canvas shoes that had once been white but were now stained rusty brown and crusted with dirt. He was perhaps forty, with dark hair and a round earnest face. His cheeks were rosy, as though they had been lovingly pinched, and his eyes behind a pair of antique plastic spectacles were the devout guileless brown of a spaniel’s. When he saw Suniata, he looked up in surprise, then snapped the book closed, holding it prayerfully between his palms.

“Ah, y-yes, Suniata! And you have brought g-g- guests .”

He didn’t stand, instead leaned forward and let the glasses ride down his nose so he could peer above them. His voice was measured, cheerful; the kind of voice I imagined a much-loved teacher would have. He had a slight stammer that made his speech seem ingratiatingly hesitant, as though he valued the listener’s opinion much more than his own. “W-who are your friends?”

“This is the empath we told you about. The other—” Suniata shrugged. “Her lover?”

Jane blushed but said nothing. The man stared at us, his mouth slightly ajar and his front teeth pressing gently into his lower lip. Finally he started, as though waking from some half-sleep, and nodded briskly.

“Well, yes. Of course. Thank you very much, Suniata, thank you very very much.” He gestured expansively at several empty chairs. “Please. Take a s-seat. And Suniata—thank you.”

This time thank you obviously meant good-bye. The cacodemon bowed his head and left. The man fiddled with his glasses and dropped his book, made a temple of his hands and drummed his fingertips together. Finally he cleared his throat, tipping his head so that the glasses slid back onto the bridge of his nose.

“Well. Introductions, yes?” He raised his eyebrows and looked at us with great seriousness, as though awaiting another suggestion. When none was forthcoming, he went on. “I am Luther Burdock. Dr. Burdock, they call me here. And you are—?”

I took a deep breath. Across the room the geneslaves moved industriously in the shadows. The argala frowned at its ’file. The aardmen reclined in silence beneath their candles. The energumens worked by the studious green glow of their monitors. None of them were paying us the slightest attention.

“Wendy Wanders,” I finally said.

“Very n-nice. And you?”

Jane stuck her chin out belligerently. “Jane Alopex. And look, Doctor Burdock, we don’t have—”

The man rolled his eyes and nodded, flapping his hand. “Of course, of course! You’re not p-prisoners here, Jane—W-wendy? I hope they didn’t tell you that?” He peered at us worriedly.

Jane looked taken aback. “Well, no,” she admitted after a moment. Dr. Burdock looked relieved.

“Because that’s really not the point of any of this at all, is it? Really quite the opposite, really just the sort of th-thing we’re trying to do away with here. You understand?”

He leaned forward, looking up at us earnestly through his glasses and fumbling at his shirt pocket until he found a packet of cigarettes. He lit one and took several deep drags before continuing.

“Oh, I know some of my advisers get a little zealous at times—you can understand that, can’t you? I mean, having seen firsthand what we’re up against?—but I wouldn’t want you to think we were holding you here against your will. I wouldn’t want you to think that at all.”

Behind a veil of blue smoke his eyes widened and he tilted his head, waiting for our assurance. I coughed nervously. When it became apparent Jane wasn’t going to say anything, I cleared my throat and said, “Well, yes. I mean, we did think that—we didn’t really want to come here, but they didn’t give us much choice, and everything—I mean, the manner in which we were escorted here—well, it did make me—us—think we were prisoners.”

Dr. Burdock frowned, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. Finally he shook his head.

“Well,” he said, raising his eyebrows as though the idea had just occurred to him. “Well, maybe you are, then. Hmm.”

He made a face and looked at me more closely through the smoke. “You’re the empath? The one Trevor told me about, the one from the—what do you call it—the Engineering Laboratory for Health?”

“The Human Engineering Laboratory.”

“Right-o! The Human Engineering Laboratory!” He beamed, as though I had scored well on a test. “Well! And you’re an empath—that is, you can sense the emotions of other people? Without their telling you, without touching them?”

I shook my head. “Not anymore. I used to—I used to be able to read dreams. And I did have to touch them. I—I need some contact. With their blood, or saliva.”

“Mmm.” Dr. Burdock frowned, tipped more ashes into the overflowing metal disk. “Not really a psychic, then. No incidences of clairvoyance, poltergeist activity, nothing unusual like th-that?”

I thought of the Boy in the Tree, of the visions I had seen with my brother Raphael. I looked away. “Nothing.”

A slightly disappointed silence. The sound of the waterfall seemed to grow louder. Then, “Oh, well,” he said, smiling. “You’re welcome here anyway, there’s always room for eager young people. You are rather young, aren’t you? How old—sixteen? seventeen?”

“Eighteen.”

He stubbed out his cigarette, raising his eyebrows at Jane, and she concurred. He said, “Eighteen! Well, that’s still very young, compared to me, of course, forty-three, though it doesn’t seem so long, though of course, you know, sometimes it feels like forever….”

The brown eyes seemed to cloud over. When he spoke again, his voice was softer and even more hesitant. “I had a daughter, you know. Not much younger than you. Cybele. She was—”

He sighed and looked away, to where the energumens hunched over their monitors. “She was a beautiful girl,” he finished softly. “I miss her so much, even now. Even after all this time. I keep thinking I’ll see her, that perhaps one of them might—”

He broke off with a sigh. The darkness in his eyes spread across his face, and his mouth twitched, almost as though he were talking to himself. “But of course, none of them really do,” he said after a moment. He looked at me and smiled sadly, then shook his head, the way a dog does to shake off the rain. “Oh, well. Perhaps we can make it different someday soon. This wasn’t at all what I had in mind, you know—”

He gestured at the energumens, the shadowy forms of two aardmen heading toward the narrow bridge behind the waterfall. At last his gaze fell with distaste upon the argala. “What they’ve done with my work. These poor c-creatures. Prostitutes. S-slaves. Not my idea, not my idea at all,” he ended firmly, and chewed his lower lip. “And the others—what they did to my girls…”

His voice trailed off and he stared into the darkness. “Savagery,” he said a long moment later, the word coming out in a hiss. “S-savage beasts ! To think they would do that, to think they would take a child and—”

He lowered his voice, but pointed with a quick stabbing motion toward the energumens. “That. Not that it’s their fault what they look like, but—”

He moved his chair closer, staring at us with wide mad pupils. “My children, you understand,” he said, and his face seemed to glow in the half-light. “All my work for the good of humanity, and this is what they’ve done to it. Circus animals. Brute l-laborers. Whores. All those years, all this time—and this, this is what they’ve done to my children.”

His voice rose so that the energumens stopped and looked at us. Luther Burdock ignored them; only stared at me, his glasses fogged from his excitement.

“Four hundred years. A lot can happen in four hundred years. But this—this isn’t right. This just—is not— acceptable.

“You understand, don’t you?” he asked me softly. He held his hand out, cupped so that the empty palm faced the ceiling. “Even it if means people dying. Even if it means everyone dying—”

His face grew red and his breath came out in ragged bursts. “We can’t —let them— do this—to children.”

On the other side of the room an aardman growled. The energumens continued to stare at us in silence. Luther Burdock pointed at one with a shaking finger. Behind their thick plastic lenses, his eyes were filled with tears.

“My daughter!” he said, his voice shaking “That was my daughter. “

I moved back, reaching for Jane’s hand. My heart was pounding, my mouth dry. Because, looking at the man sitting there before us, with his shock of long hair and his deceptively mild brown eyes, I had no doubt whatsoever but that this was Luther Burdock—whoever he was, and however old he was—and that he was completely, utterly insane.

The room was silent. Jane took my hand, looking from Burdock to myself and back again. At their workstations the energumens turned blank, unsurprised faces toward us, then one by one swiveled back to their monitors. The argala whistled and murmured to herself. The remaining aardmen crouched with eyes fixed on Luther Burdock, the stumps of their vestigial tails thudding against the cold floor.

For several minutes all was still. And then, from somewhere in the darkness of the caverns echoed the sound of footsteps. A measured tread, a sharp clicking as of metal boots striking the stone ground; but boots that belonged to an extraordinarily light-footed soldier. Jane and I looked around anxiously, but Dr. Burdock was oblivious.

“Savages,” he said to himself. He bared his teeth and jabbed at something invisible. “ B-brutes. i

In the labyrinthine passages the unseen figure approached slowly. A minute of silence when he reached the bridge; I could barely see a slender form moving behind the scrim of water and candlelight. Then came a small thump as whoever it was jumped to the floor. Jane pulled away from me, her head craned to see what was emerging from the darkness.

A soft sound as he entered the chamber. The aardmen growled softly. Luther Burdock alone seemed not to hear it; not to hear or care. The mad fire in his eyes was extinguished. Once again he looked at us quite calmly, only a sheen of spittle upon his lips showing that he had ever been anything but this placid figure.

“We still have a great deal of work to do,” he said absently, his brown eyes soft and bland. “So much to do, and so little…”

I looked away, to where that unseen person began to cross the room. The leaping candlelight touched him, a little at a time. I saw his feet first, dainty as a stag’s but sheathed in black metal; then his legs, also metal and coiled about with violet plasteel tubes. Then his torso, a confection of lavender and jet glass and chrome; and finally his face. A face that might have been carved from crystal, then stained with the crushed fruit of grapes and plums and all dusky things. A man’s face, elegant and serene—save for his mouth. That was too wide and thin, and coiled as in laughter; but even the most sophisticated of replicants do not hold smiles well.

“Greetings to our guests,” he said in a low, mocking voice. “I see you have found our spiritual father?”

My heart froze inside me. “Who—?” I gasped, stepping forward while Jane stared at him in dismay. “Who are you?”

The replicant turned until its eyes met mine. Emerald eyes, jade eyes, eyes that had swallowed every precious green thing in the world and held them hostage until the moment they would seize me again.

“Wendy Wanders,” he said softly, and the hand that gripped mine was strong and sharp as an osprey’s talons. “Well-met in Cassandra, sister mine.”

It was the Gaping One. The hypostate I had called the Boy in the Tree, the demonic godling who had tormented me before fleeing me at the Engulfed Cathedral—but he had fled only his human form, it seemed. Now he had found another.

“No—” I stammered. “You are—you’re—” But before I could finish, the replicant bowed its head.

“Metatron,” he said with exaggerated modesty. An energumen glanced up at that voice, loud and clear as though announcing itself to a great hall; then turned back to its work.

“You know each other—very nice,” said Dr. Burdock.

“Wendy?” began Jane, reaching for me, but I pushed her away.

“How did you get here?—what are you doing?—” I spat. “You were—you died back there—”

The replicant only looked at me, runnels of violet light flickering up and down his breast and across his face. “Oh, no,” he said, and raising his voice, recited,

“ ‘ The immortal Gods alone have neither age nor death. All other things almighty Time disquiets. ’ ”

Then he smiled again, showing that perfect curve of a mouth filled with perfectly even, ebony teeth. “There are great advantages to my present condition,” he said calmly, and turned to Luther Burdock. “Doctor—there is some problem with the plasma cultivar, and as you said, we have so much to do before tomorrow evening. Perhaps you could—?”

Dr. Burdock started. “Mmm? Yes, of course, thank you thank you.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, then looked at us apologetically.

“I’m sorry; but it really can’t wait, you know. Time and tide and—well, Icarus. But you’ve been shown quarters? Given a—um, a uniform, and all that?”

“No!” Jane exploded. “We haven’t been shown anything, and I’d like to know what in hell is going on.”

Dr. Burdock pursed his lips, glanced over at Metatron. “Oh. Well…?”

“What is going on,” the replicant said in that slightly hollow, breathy voice, “is a war. A Great War, perhaps truly A War to End All Wars.

“At least,” he added slyly, “it might be a war to end all men.”

“How can you be party to this, Burdock?” demanded Jane. She pointed angrily at the energumens. “These are—well, they’re geneslaves, is what they are, mutants and—well, I don’t even know what that is,” she ended, glaring at Metatron. “How can you defend them?”

Dr. Burdock raised his head. His eyes were ineffably sad. “Defend them?” he said softly. “But of course I must d-defend them. Didn’t you hear me? Don’t you understand? I created them. They are my—my children.”

He gazed at an aardman lolling on the floor, its long legs splayed behind it like a dog’s. “Those—what you call the aardmen—they were mine—my dogs, you see, Great Danes, I bred them quite carefully for many years. But this was not what I had in mind—”

He clenched his fingers into the semblance of a clawed hand and bared his teeth “You see? Not that. Not a sort of monster. Dogs, ” he said firmly. “They were supposed to be—well, they were supposed to be people, but like dogs.”

Beside me I could hear Jane whisper, “He’s a complete idiot.” I recalled her at the Zoo, lovingly tending her cougars and red wolves and stags, and thought again how she had hated to see any of the others, the hybrid creatures that spent their pathetic lives hobbled halfway between humanity and wild things, doomed to die behind glass-and-iron bars.

Jane herself continued to stare balefully at Dr. Burdock. “Well, what the hell good did you think it would do? ‘People like dogs?’ And those other things—hydrapithecenes, sirens, those things they use as whores?”

Metatron looked on amused as Dr. Burdock shook his head. “No! You don’t understand— none of those were mine, none of that was what I meant at all. It’s so different now. All of that, out there—”

He flapped his hand, indicating the ceiling and the world beyond. “Why, everything’s changed utterly. Everything’s ruined. Dead, or dying, poisoned…much much worse than in my time, you understand? Much worse. In my time you could still drink water without worrying about mutagens, you had to wear hoods and shades outside, but there were still people to wear them—not everyone had died because of the sun, or the wars. And we didn’t have our politicians and armies floating around in space. It was—oh, it was quite different, we thought it was a horrible world, but it wasn’t like this. ”

He looked forlornly at Metatron. “Can you explain it to them?”

The replicant shook his head. “Oh, I think not,” he said lightly. “I think they understand quite enough. But, Doctor—the cultivar?”

Sighing, Dr. Burdock nodded and wheeled his chair from his desk. Jane looked around desperately, as though someone else might appear to help us, and finally demanded, “Just tell me something, Doctor, just tell me one thing —

“This war, this Alliance—all of this here, in these caves—what are you doing? Are you making more of them—of your—your children? Or are you just gathering the forces out there and bringing them here for safekeeping?”

Luther Burdock hesitated and looked at her thoughtfully.

“Well,” he said at last. “Yes. There are more of them. I have been—I’ve been quite busy since he brought me here.”

He inclined his head toward Metatron. “I’ve had a good deal of help, though. Some very distinguished people have worked with me. Had to—there’ve been quite a few advancements since—since before, when I was practicing. Rather marvelous things you can do with fungus and prions, accelerating the growth of clonal tissue, et cetera, et cetera. Quite remarkable genetic advances, which this Metatron has assisted me in learning. And, of course, psychosurgery is a delicate thing, and his hands don’t shake.”

“So it’s true,” I said numbly. Burdock stood, pushed his chair back into the desk, and smoothed his pants. “You’re making more of them—more geneslaves—to act as soldiers? But that’s no better than what the Ascendants have done.”

“Soldiers?” He pinched the glasses on the bridge of his nose and squinted as though in pain. “Goodness no. Or no, of course, some of them are soldiers; but we have other plans. These aerolites, Apollo objects like Icarus—well, soldiers wouldn’t be much use against that.

“So I’ve gone ahead with a plan I’d thought about before. Only of course the situation is much worse now than it was then. Here and elsewhere—”

He tipped his head to the ceiling, so that the candlelight glinted on his spectacles. Metatron continued to stare at him with that vulpine smile and those unblinking emerald eyes.

“A sort of—er—a general housecleaning seems to be in order,” Burdock went on. “Ad astra aspera, you know. Through great hardship to the stars. But not soldiers, no, not really s-soldiers at all.

“What I had in mind,” he said, stooping to pick up a bit of paper from the floor at his feet and crumpling it into a ball before tossing it away. “What I had in mind, after the whole general sweep-up was done, but sometime before Icarus’s arrival, was launching this—um— fleet we’ve been gathering. Not warships,” he added firmly. “More of an ark. ”

And turning, he left Jane and me staring openmouthed, as Metatron escorted him to his laboratory.