Icarus Descending

13 Icarus Descending

SOME TIME AFTER DR . Burdock and the replicant Metatron had disappeared, a young man named Edward Dean entered the chamber where Jane and I sat anxiously eyeing the energumens and aardmen. “I’ll show you to your quarters,” he said, beckoning us to follow him over the waterfall bridge.

“You’re the first person we’ve seen here, except for Dr. Burdock,” Jane said as we followed him through a wide, downward-leading tunnel. Edward Dean looked at her, puzzled.

“But there are people everywhere.” He was small and wiry, with short curling reddish hair and the same drawling voice as Trevor and Cadence Mallory. “I saw you with them—Suniata, and those others back in Dr. Burdock’s office.”

Jane shook her head. “I meant people— human people—”

Edward stopped, his gingery eyebrows raised in surprise and, I realized, embarrassment on Jane’s behalf. He lowered his voice, looking over his shoulder to make sure no one else had heard.

“Oh, but those are people, Jane,” he said with great earnestness. “Everyone here is treated just exactly the same. That’s the whole meaning of the Alliance: no more slaves. Everyone is treated the same, ” he ended firmly.

“Except for human prisoners like us, I expect,” said Jane.

Edward shrugged, pulling at the frayed collar of his blue uniform. “I don’t expect you’re actually prisoners. I mean, you’re members of the Alliance, aren’t you?” When we said nothing, he read it as agreement. “Well, then, you’re not prisoners—you’re rebels,” he finished, and walked on.

“Rebels, huh,” Jane repeated, looking after him balefully. “Well, among your rebels, have you happened to see a chimpanzee—a talking chimpanzee, name of Miss Scarlet Pan? She was abducted by one of your rebels. An aardman. Fossa. He was at Seven Chimneys with us.”

Edward glanced back and stroked his chin. “A talking chimpanzee? No, ma’am, I don’t think I’ve seen that. I don’t think I’d forget it if I had.”

Jane sighed. “No, I don’t think you would.”

The Paradise Caverns were endless. Each passage we walked through branched off into dozens of others, some luridly lit by electrical lights or sputtering torches, others black and ominous, with ineffectual links of rusted chain strung across their entrances and little handwritten WARNING! signs. Crates and stacks of supplies were heaped on the floor. Against the walls cartons and bales of wire leaned precariously, between sacks of grain and sodden bales of alfalfa and sheaves of wheat. Where grain had spilled upon the stone floor, it remained unswept and uneaten—I had seen no evidence of rodents, except for the bats that hung like sheets of drying meat in the reaches of some of the larger caves.

Weapons were treated with equal carelessness, and again I wondered how this so-called Alliance could be so successful. I’d seen no real evidence of organization, no one acting in authority except for the nemosyne Metatron and, perhaps, Luther Burdock—though Burdock seemed more of a human puppet, albeit a mad one, than he did any kind of leader. Yet somehow the members of the Alliance had managed to sabotage Ascendant and Commonwealth targets, at least enough of them to put by great stores of weapons and liberate those geneslaves who now called themselves rebels.

I slowed my footsteps every time we passed those seemingly forgotten piles of guns and other artillery. Once, while Edward Dean deliberated between which of two passages to choose, I caught Jane staring greedily at a row of sonic guns leaning haphazardly against one wall. Cadence had taken Jane’s pistol before we left Seven Chimneys. It would have been absurdly simple for her to grab a weapon now—no one seemed to be guarding any of the stores. Indeed, except for two uniformed men who greeted Edward with loud, even overstated, cheerfulness, we passed nobody at all.

But Jane left the weapons where we saw them. Perhaps she felt as I did, that we had seen enough killing since we fled the City of Trees. Or perhaps she was simply afraid.

We did see plenty of old signs. Edward ignored them, but Jane made a point of reading each aloud:

OBERON’S PLAYROOM

GRAMPY’S NICHE

THE FAIRY BALLROOM

ANGEL’S ROOST

MARTHA’S WEDDING CAKE

Edward’s interpretation of the same places was more mundane.

“That’s the secondary war room.”

“Aardmen’s storage rooms.”

“Mess hall.”

“Dr. Burdock’s meditation room.”

“That’s some big ol’ stalagmite.”

There were also many little metal placards warning visitors not to touch rock formations, informing us of the temperature inside the Caverns (fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, year-round) and the hours of the cafeteria and the Gift Shop (ten A.M . to six P.M .). More foreboding were the hand-lettered signs, inked on cardboard or warped sheets of plywood, the uneven letters spelled out painstakingly, as though by hands unaccustomed to holding pen or brush.

ICARUS IS COMING

ARE YOU PREPARED?

AD ASTRA ASPERA, VICTORY IS OURS!

CASSANDRA WELCOMES ICARUS

THE NIGHT IS HIS—SOON ALL WILL BE HIS!

Most ominous of all were placards that showed only a smudged swirl of white or gray paint, daubed with black to indicate a sort of eye; and underneath a single word.

ICARUS

“Who is this Icarus?” Jane finally demanded. We had been walking for nearly an hour, following a circuitous route that seemed deliberately planned to keep us from being able to find our way out again. Now we stood at a little crossroads where two tunnels met: a wide passage where cool air flowed and the sound of distant water echoed, and a second, very narrow corridor of stone, with rippling walls covered with the crystalline formations called anthodites, glittering spines that looked as though they would rip through your clothes if you brushed against them.

“Icarus?” Edward Dean stopped and eyed us suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

“I mean these signs.” Jane tapped the corner of a damp curl of cardboard, her finger sending a filigree of limestone splintering from the wall. “Icarus, Icarus, Icarus. Must be an important person.”

Edward shook his head. “Not a person, really,” he said uneasily, then looked as though he had admitted too much. “You’ll see tomorrow.”

And we walked in silence once more, until the near-darkness grew oppressive and I finally spoke, as much to hear the sound of a voice as to learn something.

“Is this where Dr. Burdock lived? Here in the Caverns? Before—well, before things happened to him?”

Our guide shook his curly head. “Oh, no. He lived up there, in Cassandra with the rest of us.”

He stopped, pointing at the ceiling, then explained, “I mean, I wasn’t alive, all those years ago; but my great-great-great-grandfather was. Ran the toll booth there at the Shenandoah Bridge. Dr. Burdock had a place outside of town. Big research facility, and a house too. It’s all still there, at least the ruins are—they burnt it before the Third Ascension. You know, when the fanatics took him and his girls and killed ’em.”

His wide blue eyes glinted in the shadows as he went on. “You know, Dr. Burdock is a real important person in these parts. He was a very great man, but he was a kind man, too. Cassandra was just a poor hollow in the mountains back then, but when he started his laboratory here, he gave jobs to a lot of people. We have ’files here of his work,” he said reverently, “you know, the first experiments with Cybele Burdock and Lacey—that was his dog—and all sorts of other records as well. He always took very good care of the people who worked for him. My family never did, but just about everyone else here is descended from people who worked for Luther Burdock. The survivors, I mean, those who weren’t killed when the fundamentalists came into power and tried to put a stop to his work. So you have to understand, when the Doctor came back—well, it was like Elvis or Jesus or one of the other Prophets rose clear up from the dead.”

I thought of the Paphians’ cult of the Gaping One and tried not to grimace. “Who brought him back?”

Edward stared at his feet, moving the tip of one worn canvas shoe to trace something indecipherable on the stone floor.

“Other scientists,” he said at last. He glanced furtively up the passage before continuing. “People who’d fled the Ascendants—oh, a long, long time ago, well after the Third Shining at least. They’d been carrying on Dr. Burdock’s work long after his death—trying to bring him back, you know. They came here, I guess, because Cassandra has always been a place where we don’t like other people telling us what to do.”

I thought of Trevor hunched over the steel tables bearing his gruesome harvest. “Trevor Mallory. Have you ever heard of him?”

Edward slitted his eyes thoughtfully. “No-oo, I don’t think I have,” he said at last. “Is he somehow related to Cadence?”

“She’s his daughter.”

“Hmm. Well, I guess someone might know him, but I don’t. But that doesn’t mean anything. Most of those people—the scientists—they came from away. I mean, they weren’t native to here originally, though they’ve lived here for a long time now; and they’ve always kept to themselves a good deal.”

“They’re still here?” asked Jane, incredulous.

Edward ducked his head, his blue eyes darkening. “Some of them,” he ended shortly, and stared into the darkness.

Jane and I glanced at each other, but Edward said nothing more. From somewhere came the faint plink plink of water dripping, and a dull rustling that might have been bats. After a minute I asked, “So you live up there, then?” I crooked a thumb at the ceiling.

Edward rubbed his head. “No; not anymore. For the last year I’ve been down here. Oh, I get up abovegrounds sometimes, but it’s funny, you get used to it down here, you forget all about there’s another place, another way of living.”

He sucked his lower lip thoughtfully, as though trying to figure out if he could confide in us or not. At last he said, “You know, the Doctor says this is all preparing us for what happens next.”

“Oh, yes?” Jane raised an eyebrow. “How’s that?”

“Well, you know. Living in a confined space, the darkness, getting used to the genesl—I mean, the aardmen and energumens and the rest of ’em. Once Icarus comes, it’ll be different from what we’re all accustomed to. I mean, not so different for me, I grew up on a farm and we always had lots of animals—not that these other, um, people are animals, but you understand. It does take some getting used to, especially never seeing the sun.”

“I see,” Jane said doubtfully. “But—well, what does happen next? What was that he was saying about an ark?”

Edward Dean sighed, as though he were trying to explain something to a pair of thick-witted children. “Dr. Burdock has told us there is to be a Coming.”

The way he said it made my flesh creep. “A Coming? What do you mean? Like the Final Ascension the Paphians talk about?”

He shrugged and looked furtively down the passageway. “I don’t know about that,” he said in a low voice. “I don’t know much about Paphians, although maybe they’ve heard of it too.”

“So what is it that’s coming?” broke in Jane.

“Well, I don’t understand it all that well, but Dr. Burdock says it’s a sort of star. He knows about these things—he remembers from before, you see, back when he was first alive. He’s seen it. When he was a young man, he said. Once every four hundred years or so it comes. Only this time he says it will be different. He says it will be dangerous. That’s why they’re trying to gather all these starships—you know, the elÿon, the Ascendant’s transport fleet. You understand?”

Jane looked at me blankly. “Not really. Wendy?”

I leaned against the wall, the chill from the stone leaching into me. Inside my head I could feel a pounding, the dull pain that had once presaged a seizure but now seemed only to bring a blankness, a darkness where once visions had held sway.

“I don’t know what this means,” I said slowly. Dread seeped through my body, numbing as the cavern’s cold. “But it sounds like—well, what kind of star did he say it was?”

Edward shook his head. “I don’t know. But you understand, don’t you—the Doctor remembers things from a very long time ago, from before we lost the power to see into the sky. Up there”—he made a circling motion with his finger—“up where the Ascendant Tyrants lived, they could still see things, although Metatron says they didn’t understand what they were seeing. And because they didn’t understand, they didn’t warn us when they should have. And now Dr. Burdock says it’s too late—for everyone but us. The chosen ones; the Asterine Alliance. Ad astra aspera —you know what that means? To the stars through great hardship. That’s where we’re going. To the stars.”

Jane’s ruddy face went dead white. “What do you mean, to the stars ?”

“And Icarus?” I urged. “Who’s that?”

He didn’t reply; only turned and walked quickly down the tunnel. Jane swore and reached for my hand.

“Damn it, what the hell does all this mean? Stars falling once every four hundred years—I’ve never heard anything like it. If it’s such a terrible danger, why didn’t Trevor or Giles warn us? They seem to have known an awful lot about this place.”

I bit my lip, recalling Giles’s reluctance my first morning at Seven Chimneys, when I had asked him about the symbol and strange lettering on a cigarette pack from Cassandra. “Maybe they didn’t know,” I said doubtfully. “Or maybe they didn’t want us to know.”

Jane said, “What’s this star, then? Is it a kind of Shining?” She rubbed her forehead, her eyes dark-shadowed in her pale face. “God, I wish we knew where Scarlet was.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know.” My head ached horribly, and I could hardly bear the touch of her hand upon mine. I pulled away, heedless of Jane’s hurt look, and hurried after Edward.

We followed him for several more minutes in near-darkness, the passage narrowing until we walked in single file with our hands groping at the walls. Ahead I could see a line of very bright lights and hear muffled voices.

“This here will be where you’ll sleep.” Edward’s voice echoed loudly as we finally stepped out of the narrow passage. Before us a large chamber seemed to have been carved out of the ocher walls, and in it many blue-clad figures sat or stood talking in earnest groups. Aardmen, energumens, even one of the profoundly strong and somber-looking starboks, its uniform torn where its massive shoulders had strained the fabric. But there were few humans. Only two that I could see, a man and a woman seated by themselves at a makeshift table against the wall.

“I’ve got to get back to work,” said Edward. He stopped where the tunnel opened into the chamber and rested his hand on the stone wall. “Can I answer any more questions?” he added dutifully.

“Oh no, you’ve done a fine job of that already,” Jane snapped. “I guess if we want to learn anything, we’ll just have to ask Dr. Burdock himself.”

Edward gave a small gasp. “But we don’t bother the Doctor about things like that!” he said, aghast. “Especially about Icarus, or his”—he lowered his voice, looking past us to the energumens looming above the other geneslaves—“his daughter. He’s very sensitive, you see.”

“I’m starting to feel a little sensitive myself,” Jane said threateningly.

Edward shook his head. “You’ve got to be patient —it will all be different after tomorrow. It won’t just be the Doctor anymore. There’ll be others we can all talk to, enough for everybody, enough to lead us all to the stars.”

He sighed, as though remembering a painful memory. “You see, it’s always much easier for him in the very beginning. Before he remembers it all. After a few months it gets difficult, and by the time a year’s gone by—well, that’s when we have the retirement party and start all over again. Only this time it will be different—”

“ Retirement party?” My voice cracked in disbelief.

“Well, of course,” Edward said, aggrieved. “ You’ll see—but I really have to go.” He started to turn away, stopped and looked back at us one last time, his plain face creased with concern.

“You do understand how hard this all is for him, don’t you? I mean, you understand that he’s not the first one?”

I tilted my head, staring into his grave blue eyes. “You mean Luther Burdock?”

Edward Dean nodded. “That’s right.” But before I could ask anything else, he spun and hurried down the dank passage, the pad-pad of his footsteps echoing long after he was lost to sight.

“Well, of course he’s not the first one,” Jane said peevishly. “Not unless he’s about five hundred years old.”

I thought of Trevor Mallory and his cerebrimus mushrooms, and said, “Well, no. He’s a clone, that’s obvious. Trevor and Giles said Luther Burdock practically invented the whole clonal procedure they used with the first generation of geneslaves. He must have stored some of his own tissue, in case something happened to him.”

“Why don’t these people just stay dead?” Jane said darkly.

“Shh—” I looked over to where the energumens had turned to watch us. “We’d best go in.”

When we entered the chamber the geneslaves stared at us, the aardmen with reserved amber eyes, the energumens with a black intensity. We skirted them nervously, and Jane said, “It doesn’t look to me like they’re very happy we’ve joined their Alliance.”

I nodded. Overhead a few electric bulbs hung from twisted strands, casting a weak white glare over the shadowy figures below. A few filthy pallets of straw or old cloth were strewn across the floor, along with battered pots and split wooden casks. At a table by the far wall the two humans we had first glimpsed looked at us guardedly. When we stopped in the middle of the room, at a loss as to where to go, the woman raised her hand and with a curt motion beckoned us over.

“Sit down,” she coughed, flapping a hand in front of her mouth. Beside her the man nodded once in greeting.

“Thanks,” said Jane in relief. There were a few spindly metal folding chairs leaning against the wall, and we pulled these over to the rickety table. “We’re not—well, we’re not really sure what’s going on here.”

The woman and man exchanged a look. Now that we were sitting with them, I saw how old they were, nearly as old as Cadence. Oily gray hair lay flat against their skulls, and their dark faces were mottled with sunspots and small lesions. A sour smell hung about them, rancid oil and urine and raw fear. They might have been brother and sister, or it might have been that age alone had stripped them of whatever had once differentiated them. After we sat, the woman clutched at the table, leaning forward and whispering hoarsely, “What have you heard?”

I shrugged and glanced at Jane. “Heard? We haven’t heard anything. We just got here.”

“We were hoping you could tell us what’s going on,” Jane added.

The man gave a little yelp and slammed his hands against the edge of the table. “I told you!” he cried, and the woman frantically slapped at him until he lowered his voice. “I told you,” he wheezed, jabbing at the air with one skeletal finger. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was unshaven and so thin that his wrists protruded from his uniform like raw bones. “More prisoners, that’s all they are—nothing but prisoners!”

“What do you mean, prisoners?” I looked at the woman. She shook her head, gesturing for me to be silent, then looked pointedly over to where the energumens continued to watch us. One of them laughed when it saw me staring, then, still laughing, turned back to its work. “They’re holding you prisoner here?” I whispered.

The man’s head bobbled eagerly on his skinny neck, and Jane stared at him in disgust.

“It’s true,” the woman choked. She reached across the table to grab my hands. Hers were gnarled as from much labor, but incredibly strong for one so thin and old. “After the harvest they dragged us from our farm and brought us here. They said we’re too old, said we can’t work anymore. Truth is, they don’t want us to work anymore—they’ve brought us down here to die. It’s only the young ones they keep alive—for breeders, ” she whispered venomously. “They need some of us, you know, they can’t go on without some of us.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Jane. “I thought you were all part of this—”

“Only the young and stupid.” The man laughed bitterly. His bleary gray eyes included us in his judgment. “Like that idiot who showed you here—he don’t see what it’s got planned for them. The rest of us, it don’t even care if we know—we’re old and dying anyway. It just takes our land and our food for provisions for the rest of them, and drags us down here to rot.”

“Who does?” I demanded, then lowered my voice when I saw one of the aardmen glance at me with eager sly eyes.

“That thing—” The woman made a gesture and spat. “The construct. Metatron.”

“What have they got planned?” said Jane.

The man bared his teeth, the flickering light causing his dull eyes to gleam like two blood-streaked stones. “That Coming. The same thing Burdock’s been talking about all these years. Just more of his craziness, is all. More of the same trouble the scientists been planning for five hundred years. Only this time they’ve brought that construct to back him up, and their Alliance, so’s all the young people bought into it. They’ve got their ships on the other side of the mountain, all packed and ready to go. Just like that! Take our children and pfft !”

“But he’s mad,” the woman said, pounding softly at the table. Tears slid from the corner of her eyes, but she seemed not to notice she wept. “Who can believe any of it? A star coming from the sky! It’s just another part of his madness.”

“Her son,” the man explained, leaning toward us and whispering. “Her son’s joined up with them, thinks he’s going to see the stars. But let me tell you, ain’t none of ’em’s ever going to see no stars. Ain’t none of ’em’s ever going to see anything except the inside of an Ascendant prison vessel been turned into an Alliance prison vessel.”

The woman let out a sob. The man leaned back, his face suddenly gone slack with defeat.

I took a deep breath. “Tell me,” I said, my voice catching, “about the ships. And Dr. Burdock. About his madness—what is it? What causes it?”

“It’s his daughter,” the man whispered, his eyes dull. “See, it takes a while for him to figure it all out, about the energumens and all. ’Cause, of course, he’s actually been dead for all these years, but he don’t know that, at least not at first. ’Cause he’s a clone,” he hissed, and from the flicker of fear and hatred in his gaze, I knew that he would have been one of those who would have burned Burdock and his child, all those centuries ago. “But when finally he understands what’s happened to his little girl, the craziness comes onto him, and he just goes screaming into the night. But then, of course, he just starts all over. The whole damn thing just happens again. It’s the same every time.”

“Who’s his daughter?” asked Jane.

“ You know,” insisted the man. “That girl, what-you-call-her. Cybele. The first one, the one in all the pictures, all the ’files. The one he cloned, the one they used for the energumens.”

Suddenly I felt as I had when that grinning livid face had grinned up at me out of the black water beneath the bridge. “The energumens,” I murmured, and looked to where they lolled against the far wall of the dim chamber. “He—he really did clone his daughter to make them ?” And I recalled those creatures outside by the river: their immensity, the ease with which they slung upon their shoulders steel beams and sacks of grain; but also their oddly childish faces, their haunted obsidian eyes. “His daughter !”

The man nodded. “Of course she didn’t look like that in the beginning—there were a lot of, well, improvements that the Ascendants made to the stock. Only Burdock, of course, wasn’t too happy to find out his little girl grew up to be one of those. But Jesus Christ, that was what, four hundred years ago? Seems like a man could get used to anything in four hundred years.”

“He hasn’t been awake for four hundred years.” The woman glared at him, then turned to me. “They only found him fifty years ago,” she said, and sighed. “Fifty years and I should know: I was there. One of those scientists came out to our farm, looking for anything might have belonged to Burdock’s labs back then. He wanted to sift through the ruins back of our fields, but I wouldn’t let him. Showed him a gun and he went off quick enough,” she said, smacking her lips at the memory. “But then there were others felt differently about it, you know, a whole lot of fools here had their daddies and mamas worked for Burdock back then. Soon enough that scientist found what he wanted—”

She made a strange gesture, dipping her head and touching her head and breast with her closed fist. “God save us, he found it all right. Found him, found Luther Burdock, and after a few years managed to bring him back, like he was never dead at all. Poor soul,” she whispered, and for a moment a shaft of pity lit her dark eyes. “He wakes up and he don’t know all these years gone by. He thinks it’s only yesterday he had that girl and now she’s gone. Nothing left but them —”

And shuddering, she cocked a thumb at the energumens.

I looked at them and shivered. The man nodded eagerly. “It happens every time, the same way. He doesn’t believe it’s really her. He keeps thinking he’ll find her the way he left her, but when he realizes she’s gone—” He made claws of his hands and raked them through his thin hair, miming desperation and madness. “Happens every time.”

“How many times?” My voice sounded cold and much too loud. Because all of a sudden it all began to make sense to me, with that terrible kind of logic that adheres only in dreams. “How many times has it happened?”

“Who’s counting?” the man said, and cackled.

“He starts out by helping us, or wanting to,” the woman whispered. “Thinks he’s going to save us from his crazy star. Then he starts to look at all his old ’files and records, and the madness comes onto him, every year it’s the same.”

“But this time it’s worse,” the man broke in. “He’s obsessed about this imaginary star of his. And that robot Metatron backs him up, tells us all that the Doctor’s right, there’s this star headed right for us. Comes by every four, five hundred years, bang-o—but now who could count all that time? I know they say the Doctor saw it, I know they say he’s that old; but I don’t believe it. I think this Metatron just wants a way to kill off all us old people and send the young ones to their death. That’s what I think.”

I remembered the unearthly malevolent green eyes that had stared at me from behind Metatron’s metal mask. It was easy enough for me to believe that he would do such a thing.

“And Dr. Burdock?” I asked. “What happens to him? Tomorrow night?”

“The scientists will come,” the woman began; but before she could finish, a shadow loomed across the table.

“Will you help us with this packing?” one of the energumens asked in its clear, girlish voice. “Our fingers are far too big—” And it raised its clawed hands as it gestured for us to follow.

“I guess we’re just going to find out when everyone else does,” Jane said darkly. Her brown eyes were wide and shot with a desperation I’d never seen before. “God, I wish I had my pistol.”

I bowed my head. “I don’t think it would help this time, Jane,” I whispered, and turned to follow the energumen.

“You must be brave, Kalamat,” my father had told me in my dream. And so I made a show of fearlessness and went with the Sky Pilot and the Light Mother into the elÿon: myself and all my sisters. I had already told them that I had no intention of leaving this place where our father was; no intention of going forth to battle as the Oracle had commanded us. Brief as it was, my entire life had been tied up with a dream of my father. If I was to die now, I would die with him. And perhaps it would be as he had said, perhaps death would not truly claim me at all.

I was a fool. I thought my sisters would stay with me. I was expecting for Hylas, at least, and Polyonyx to follow me, and I was prepared to fight our brother Kalaman if he tried to prevent them and force them to accompany our brothers into war.

But my sisters did not care. They were being sent as janissaries to a place we had never seen, to a planet we had only ever glimpsed in dreams, but this meant little to them.

“O Kalamat! It seems sad, that you will not come with us, and that we will be going so far away,” said Hylas. But she did not look sad. We were on the viewing deck of the Izanagi, staring out at the gauzy stars, the tiny fractured wheels of the distant fallen HORUS colonies. Her eyes had a molten glow, like jet with a faint silvery sheen. “But then you would be leaving us soon, anyway…perhaps it is for the best.”

I nodded sadly, and with disappointment. Of course: why should my death matter any more than the myriad other deaths we had witnessed during our thousand days?

But then my sister suddenly grabbed my arm. “Look there,” Hylas said, her voice rising slightly. Her forehead creased and her delicate mouth bunched into a frown as she pointed at a dark celestial body, neither star nor HORUS station, that bloomed behind the thick curved glass of the viewing deck. “What is that? A comet?”

I moved closer to her and looked out the window. I could see it in the distance, an amorphous shape that stood out against the nether background like a ragged hole cut in black silk. “A comet would not be so dark,” I said, though the object had a somber halo, a dusky violet haze that surrounded it and seemed to pulse as we watched. “But I do not know what it is,” I went on, and added, “And really, I do not care.”

Hylas’s frown faded. She tilted her head, gazing at me with soft black eyes, and said gently, “At least you will see our father.” She reached out to trace the foggy outline of that strange radiant object upon the glass. A note of longing crept into her voice. “Will you tell him—will you let me know if he remembers me?”

A wave of sorrow overwhelmed me. I turned and embraced her. “You will know, Hylas. You will still be able to hear me within your mind.” I stroked her forehead, then leaned forward to kiss her.

“Perhaps,” she said absently. She pressed her face against the glass and stared at the strange pulsing glow. “But I do not think so. I think the sounds of battle will drive you from my mind.”

I nodded, then whispered, “But not your heart, sister. Do not let them drive me from your heart.” For the last time I looked upon her, the darkness at her back pierced only by the gleam of that black star without a name. Before she could see the tears upon my face, I fled the viewing deck.

The energumen Ratnayaka refused to allow Valeska Novus to stay with me during the elÿon voyage.

“I do not trust humans, Imperator,” he said, flashing me a grin with those pointed teeth. “Our history is one of betrayals by them.”

“As is my own,” I began tersely; but he waved away my protest with a frown.

“No! Had not the Oracle ordered that we bring you and your entire escort to Cassandra, she would not be alive now—” His pointed white teeth glittered like a gavial’s in the elÿon’s rosy light.

I had Nefertity accompany Captain Novus to her room. I would not trust my aide alone with the energumens—I had seen myself how they would cannibalize humans and each other—nor did I wish for the nemosyne to be left unattended. Ratnayaka was not happy with this arrangement, but Kalaman grew angry when he complained.

“You will answer to me, brother, until we set foot upon the Element. And then you may answer to whomever you please.”

Ratnayaka bowed, grimacing. He had removed the crimson patch from his eye; the wound there had begun to fester and seemed to pain him. I could see a speck of blackened metal embedded in the flesh, and guessed there had been a keek there once, or some other prophylactic monitor. But his remaining eye held enough black malevolence to intimidate an entire battalion of humans. When he turned it now upon his brother Kalaman, I marveled that the other did not cringe beneath its glare.

I thought then that Kalaman had not too long to live. He sweated as though from fever, and I never saw him eat or drink—though that was not unusual; many people do not feel comfortable eating during an elÿon voyage. But Ratnayaka too seemed consumed by something—illness or desire or perhaps that madness that stalks the elÿon’s rubeous hallways.

“As you will, brother,” Ratnayaka hissed at him. He turned to walk a little unsteadily toward where the other energumens had gathered upon the viewing deck.

“He is ill,” I said to Kalaman.

“It is his heart that eats him,” Kalaman replied. Sorrow seemed to vie with pride in his voice. “He does not like it that I am master now; but he will not turn against me.” He looked at me with glowing black eyes and said, “You must understand, I have only a few more days left of my thousand. But it is enough, that I will look upon our father and this Oracle before I die; although it may be that our father will not let this happen to me. The Oracle has said there is a means now for us to outlive our destinies, that there is a way for us to grow old and bear young as humans do. Perhaps I will live long enough to see Ratnayaka harrowed by my children,” he ended, and his eyes glittered cold as Ratnayaka’s own.

Just then a cry rang out from the viewing area.

“O my brother, but look!”

Kalaman strode to where the others pointed, and I followed slowly, my metal boots striking the floor and sending sharp echoes across the chamber. A great foreboding hung about me, a cloud of fear that made me wish I had Nefertity by my side, or even Valeska Novus. Twice before I have felt this sense of brooding horror. Once as I stood upon a high place in the Archipelago, and looked down upon my troops as they walked into a tide of liquid flame and writhed in silent agony amid the waves of gold and black, like maggots dropped in burning oil; and again when I first gained a sort of half-consciousness within the regeneration vats of Araboth and realized I had lost forever the last traces of my humanity.

But this was a different sort of fear. It encompassed not only myself, but also all those I had ever held within my heart with either love or hatred. At the window I stopped and looked to where the energumens stood in a long line, some forty-odd creatures more monstrous even than myself, each reflecting the face and manner of the one next to it so that I seemed to look upon some ancient frieze showing a more ancient race than humanity, gazing out upon the stars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEARCH REQUEST 10254799

SUBJECT: APOLLO OBJECT ICARUS 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the navigation cell I found Lascar Franschii suspended within his web of light.

“You knew!” I howled. I grabbed his leg and yanked it, heedless of the sprung wires and cables whistling as they whipped around him. “You had to know, making these trips—”

Lascar Franschii bounced and jiggled like a toy tossed into a rubber net. “Imperator—” he began. Then the voice tube slipped from his mouth and he moaned. I reached and snapped one of the tubes running into his throat. A hissing as air escaped, and his chest began to cave in like a deflated balloon.

“ You knew! All this time shuttling back and forth for your master, while that waits for us! How could you? How could you doom mankind, doom an entire world —we might have done something, might have tried to destroy it, but now it’s too late—”

Without the voice tube, Lascar Franschii’s voice came out in a barely audible wheeze. I pulled more tubes and wires from his body, each one severing a vital connection; but still he managed to gasp, “Your kind, Imperator—doomed me !—what care—take to skies— never !—”

The last wire uncoiled in a serpentine tangle of red and gray. Lascar Franschii’s head lolled upon his shrunken chest, his empty eyes bleeding and his mouth ajar. I stared at him, my fist clenching trailing strands that gave off a putrescent stench. Abruptly the floor beneath me trembled. Lights flashed around the perimeter of the nav chamber, and throughout the web that had held the adjutant, glowing white lines appeared in meaningless patterns. A calm, hushed voice breathed from the voicenet.

“The Human-Assisted Biotic Navigational System is encountering communication difficulties. We are now indoctrinating unassisted alternative landing procedures. All biological personnel, please ready yourselves for docking in Cassandra in four minutes. We are now indoctrinating unassisted alternative landing procedures. All biological personnel, please ready yourselves…”

As the voicenet continued its soft chanting, I stumbled from the room, heading for where Valeska Novus and Nefertity slept in the innocent wombs of their safety hammocks. The elÿon’s truncated landing found me crouched before the door of their room, gibbering like an adjutant myself at the thought of what awaited us in the sky outside.

I was safely in my hammock when the voicenet began its emergency announcements. I recall little of the last minutes of our flight. My mind was too full of thoughts of my father, of the images that had sent a madness upon Tast’annin and which my own mind could still barely grasp.

I don’t know for how long I lost consciousness. Perhaps a few minutes, perhaps an hour. It was one of the Maio servers that found me, its small cold fingers probing for a pulse in my throat until I woke, gasping as from a terrible dream.

“Icarus!” I cried, then drew a shaking hand across my eyes as it came to me that it was not a dream. The server looked at me with its tiny unblinking eyes and said, “We have made a successful emergency landing at Cassandra, former Free Take of Virginia. All other biological personnel have exited the craft. I will escort you to the docking area.”

It waited with an idiot’s patience while I extricated myself from the hammock, which was too small for an energumen and left cruel red markings on my thighs and arms. Then I followed it into the main corridor. All around us the elÿon’s walls pulsed, their color fading from fuchsia to soft pink as its random energies discharged into the air outside. I was going to my death, I knew that; but then so was everyone else. With slow steps I crossed from the hallway into the docking area, and then walked to meet the doors slowly opening to welcome me with the sweet warm scent of the Element.

There was no sun to wake Jane and me from our exhausted sleep. We were roused by an energumen, the same one who had drafted us into helping to haul sacks of grain from one cavernous room to another. It was backbreaking, mindless work, but afterward even the foul-smelling pallets on the floor were welcome, and the two of us collapsed into dreamless sleep. When we woke, there was no light, and the room was empty save for the one who shook us with her huge clumsy hands.

“You would have slept through everything,” she said accusingly. “Come on now, and hurry.”

“Is there water anywhere to wash with?” Jane asked plaintively, but the energumen only shook her head.

“In the river, if you want. But hurry.”

We followed her, Jane pausing, before we climbed back over the narrow rope bridge, to splash her face and drink. I joined her, cupping my hands into the water and bringing it to my lips. It had a harsh taste, like stone rasping across my tongue, and was icy cold. I shuddered and stumbled back to my feet.

It was a different path we followed now, one that we had not seen before. In some strange way I felt that we were in the oldest section of Paradise Caverns: that part which had seen little of the hands of men upon its cold, forbidding walls. In other tunnels I had watched the energumens run with an awkward stooping gait, to keep their heads from grazing against the low ceilings. But here the ceiling reared so far above us that it made me dizzy to look up. There were few electrical bulbs, and these cast a faint glow that did little to pierce the gloom. The walls were crenulated, as though made of paper that had been crumpled into endless folds of cream and dull orange, stretching up and up until the darkness swallowed them. And while I could see nothing of the farthest reaches of the ceiling, somehow I sensed that it receded as we traveled onward; that the tunnel was widening to form a chamber huge enough that it could encompass a vast building, one as large as the Engulfed Cathedral or the City’s Obelisk. Our footsteps sounded weirdly in that immense space, the slapping of the energumen’s bare feet echoing until it seemed an entire unseen army marched there beside us.

Far ahead lights began to show in the darkness. As we grew nearer the passage, these grew larger and brighter, and finally we walked along a wide avenue strung with solar globes and smaller electrical bulbs, all of them leading into a vast cavern. The energumen glanced back at us, then paused and waited until we caught up with her.

“This is where they will be,” she said, pointing.

The room was filled with people. Humans, energumens, aardmen, starboks, the wistful argalæ and hideous salamanders; all of them standing and staring patiently at the front of the cavern. Thousands of them, all in the worn blue uniforms of the Asterine Alliance, all with the same expectant expressions. But there were only a few hundred humans, and most of these were young, my own age or a few years older.

“God—look at them all,” breathed Jane. She turned to me, her face flushed. “Scarlet might be here, Wendy!”

“You’re right—” I felt a sudden rush of hope and fear at the thought of her small simian face peering up from the tattered folds of one of those ill-fitting uniforms. I grabbed Jane’s hand and together we started to push our way through the crowd, when our energumen guide stopped us, one huge hand clapping upon our shoulders.

“You’re to stay with me,” she said. “Up here, to the very front.” With what must have seemed surpassing gentleness to her—but forcefully enough to leave my shoulder bruised and aching—she turned us and directed us to the front of the immense chamber.

So with her guidance, we plowed through that mob. They were very well behaved for rebels, I thought. They scarcely acknowledged Jane and me at all, though some of the waiting energumens reached to stroke their sister as she passed among them, or called to her softly by name. I craned my neck, trying to see above the heads of the energumens and other geneslaves, but all I could determine was that the chamber was even larger than I first guessed. And there must have been an opening somewhere. The air was fresh, and carried with it the warm sweetness of a late summer’s night, the smell of honeysuckle and wild roses and the dusty scent of goldenrod. Beneath our feet the floor had a decided downward slant, like a steeply raked stage, so that those tall enough to stand on a level with the energumens would have been able to see quite clearly whatever was happening in the distance. The waiting crowd was quite still, the energumens and aardmen nearly silent, the argalæ sometimes calling out in their questioning owlish voices. Only the other humans spoke to each other in low tones, and turned to look at us curiously, though no one greeted us. And we never saw Miss Scarlet, though I scanned the crowd for her desperately, and stared at every aardman I passed in vain hopes that one might be Fossa.

After many minutes of jostling we finally reached the front of the cavern. The crowd thinned out, until there was only a long line of energumens standing straight and tall, their faces innocently alert in the glare of the electric lights. Their hoods were thrown back and their tunics draped in loose coils around their long legs. They resembled so many beautiful statues, save only for the weapons they held; stunners and sonic guns and even swords, all of them human-sized, and so too small for those fearsome warriors, but still intimidating. Our guide led us to the center of this line. Two of her sisters moved aside to let us stand between them.

“Metatron has asked that they be brought here,” she told them. “He said it is most important that they be able to see clearly.” The other energumens nodded, staring down at us with their eerie, nearly pupilless black eyes. With a slight nod of her head, our guide turned and quickly disappeared into the throng.

“It will begin soon,” one of the waiting guard told us, not unkindly. She moved aside to give us a better view. “Just a little longer until the moon rises.”

I looked behind us. There stood rank upon rank of blue-uniformed figures, large and small, gargoyle warriors and sun-pocked women who must have been farmers, men whose hands held their weapons uneasily and aardmen who gripped theirs in strong, gnarled paws. All gazing toward the front of the room where I stood, so that after a moment I had to turn away, frightened by the sight of all those eyes.

But what lay in front of me was no more reassuring. It reminded me of an operating theater in HEL, only larger and brighter: as though it really were some kind of theater, one where unspeakable rituals were played out within the looming darkness.

At the front of the great cavern was a round raised dais, brilliant white and surrounded by small spotlights set about the stone floor. Upon the platform gleamed six metal boxes, man-sized and coffin-shaped. They were set upon six broad steel tables like those I had seen in Trevor Mallory’s cellar, arranged in two rows of three; and in the center was a single empty table. I caught the same unforgettable scent that had tormented me at HEL, the sharp stink of iodine and alcohol and formaldehyde, the faint organic smells of neurotransmitting fluid and the saline solution used to preserve living tissue for transplants.

“Jesus, Wendy, what are they going to do?” Jane’s voice came through chattering teeth. I pulled her close to me and stroked her hand, as cold as my own.

“I don’t know.” The horrible thought seized me, that it was for me those cold chambers were intended. But before I could say anything, the already hushed space grew deadly still.

“The moon,” one of the energumens whispered, and pointed at the ceiling. I looked up, and with a gasp saw that what I had taken to be the closed darkness of the cavern’s roof was in fact a great hole gaping there, a ragged vent that opened onto the night sky. This was where the smell of honeysuckle came from. And now I could also hear the distant chittering of bats, and see them in a thin skirling cloud fleeing into the night sky. Faintest of all came the sound of the great river on its slow sad course about the mountain. As I stared, a faint gleam appeared on the lower lip of the cave’s yawning mouth, like a row of teeth suddenly illumined there. A pearly glow that grew brighter and brighter, until in the cave’s opening there appeared the curved rim of the full moon, so brilliant that I had to shade my eyes. At sight of it a great sigh ran through the cavern. Humans and half-human creatures alike raised their arms, as though they were looking upon the moon’s pale face for the first time; for the first time, or the last.

Gradually the sound of all those yearning voices ebbed, and the moon slowly tracked her milky path across the sky. Other noises began to fill the cavern; rustlings as of impatience, agitated murmurs, and the questing low cries of the argalæ. Beside Jane and me our energumen guardians stared fixedly at the raised platform, and so we set our gaze there too. There was nothing else to see, really, save the blue-clad troops of the Alliance stirring restlessly beneath the harvest moon.

And then suddenly a figure appeared on the dais, his arms raised in greeting. Silhouetted against the moonlight, a tracery of violet and pale lavender like veins beneath his metal skin: Metatron. Behind him marched a row of figures, human-sized and wearing hooded white tunics. There were twelve of them. They moved in utter silence, walking slowly until they reached the center of the platform. The last two bore between them a long silver capsule, like those already resting upon the steel tables. They paced to the single remaining empty table and carefully lowered the casket there. Then the other white-robed acolytes stepped silently across the dais until they stood behind the remaining capsules, faceless hooded forms like the ghostly figures of astral navigators in the most ancient of the Ascendants’ ’files. There was something about the slow, almost rehearsed precision of their movement, that made me think that they had done this many times before.

Retirement ceremony, that nameless old man had told Jane and me. The whole damn thing just happens again; it’s the same every time. I shivered, but even as I tried to look away, to seek vainly for some escape from the room, for some sign of help unlooked for—Miss Scarlet or Giles or even Fossa—I felt eyes upon me, his eyes, and helplessly stared up once more.

He stood there, a shining icon in black and lavender, and from within the perfect curves of his replicant’s face those other eyes gazed down upon me. Green as new leaves, green as poison, Eyes I dare not meet in dreams: the vernal gaze of the Boy in the Tree, the Gaping One, imprisoned or reborn in that hollow construct’s shell. His polished body reflected the liquid darkness above, the luminous moon: a lunar deity or a man made out of night. I tried to pull away from his gaze, fought against it as though it were a serpent casting its coils tight about my chest; but I could not. And then very slowly Metatron smiled at me, and in that smile I saw the death of all that I had ever held dear.

“Welcome!” he cried, his raised arms stretched toward the moonlit sky. Behind him the waiting figures tilted their heads back, so that shadows slashed the cowls of their pristine white robes, poured from their breasts to cover the silver capsules beside them. “Welcome to all the Alliance; welcome to Icarus!”

From a thousand throats, human and animal and heteroclite, came an answering roar. Only the other figures on the platform did not to reply. They remained stiff, hands resting uneasily at their sides, their hooded faces staring at god knows what as the cries and howls of the Asterine Alliance filled the cave. Smiling, Metatron waited until the voices died, until the last echoes flew from the cavern like the bats who had fled before them. When he dropped his hands, silence fell upon the crowd, sudden and ominous as a cloud extinguishing the sun’s warmth. He turned toward one of the white-robed figures, and in a low, clear voice said, “We are ready.”

The figure turned to Metatron. I could see nothing of his features, but somehow it seemed to me there was a reluctance in the way it responded, reluctance or perhaps even enmity. The acolyte nodded curtly, took a step until he stood directly above the silver capsule on the center table. He seemed to hesitate, and glanced up to where Metatron stood with coldly glowing eyes. The replicant nodded, still smiling, and the acolyte turned back to his task.

He bent over the capsule, his hands sliding from beneath the long cuffs of his robe to grasp a set of heavy-looking handles set into the metal casket. As he bowed, he tossed back the hood of his robe. For a moment his face was obscured as he yanked at the cover of the steel pod.

With a soft sucking noise the lid popped open. The white-robed acolyte fell back, glancing up at the silent Metatron. Then he turned to look out upon all those assembled in the cavern. His gaze swept across the line of energumen guards. I heard Jane gasp as it rested on her, then moved to link with mine. His eyes were blue, blue as irises, and showed no recognition of me whatsoever. His face was smooth and unlined, his hair black; but there was no doubt who it was. It was Trevor Mallory.

I had thought that our arrival upon the Element would be met with some fanfare, that there would be a boarding party or some other group of rebels there to greet me. But there was no one. The Maio server gave me a cool goodbye—“Farewell, Kalamat”—and left. In front of me, the loading ramp unfolded and spiraled down into the twilight. For a moment I felt a heart-stopping terror: we were still in the frozen wastes of the Ether, and in an instant I would be dead from trying to breath in that airless place. But air filled my lungs, warm and with a sweet taste like watered honey. I breathed deeply, and were it not for the sorrow that cut the edge of my exhilaration, I might have laughed with joy.

The Izanagi had docked beside a great shining mist-shriven tower, wrapped about with gangways and stairs and chutes for the unloading of freight and personnel. In the air around us I glimpsed other elÿon, bobbing like slowly deflating balloons. Fougas drifted between them, their smooth sides gleaming dull gray. Some had been sloppily painted blue and stenciled with the symbol of the Asterine Alliance, a pyramid surmounted by a black star. But most still bore the insignia of their original affiliates—the white hand that was the sigil of the Balkhash Commonwealth, the Emirate’s yellow stars, the Eye of HORUS and blighted moon of the Autocracy’s NASNA Aviators.

Behind me I heard footsteps. I drew back until the rosy shadows cast by the elÿon fleet hid me. I watched as my sisters left the Izanagi, and with them the brothers I had never known. They were quiet, silenced perhaps by excitement or trepidation, though my brothers held within their eyes something of hunger or desire, a small spark of untriggered violence that I had seen before, in the fearful goading eyes of some of our Masters. They had daubed themselves with symbols of their allegiance, tattoos and scarifications of pyramids and stars. One of them bore in his arms something as limp and shapeless as a suit of our Masters’ astral vestments. As he passed me, I saw this was the desiccated corpse of the vessel’s adjutant, a forlorn creature that had been half-dead before we boarded. Down the ramp he went, to be given whatever obsequies they provide such hapless things on the Element.

A few minutes later my brother Kalaman appeared, and with him the one-eyed rebel called Ratnayaka. Between them they carried a figure that fought furiously, cursing as they held him up by his arms, so that his leather boots hung a full two feet above the metal flooring.

“Let me go!” he shouted. His voice sounded thin and surprisingly fragile in the open air. He looked frail too, where he dangled between my brothers, his crimson leathers askew upon his angular metal limbs and the red mask of his face twisted into an agony of rage and despair. “I will not serve him—I will not —”

At that sight a great sadness filled me. All the fury and controlled venom of the Aviator Imperator stretched like a taut line between Kalaman and Ratnayaka until I feared he would snap, and these last traces of his command fall limp as the adjutant’s own body within my brothers’ arms. But Tast’annin’s strength and rage, at least, did not fail him. He railed ceaselessly as they bore him away, and while from another throat his last words might have sounded peevish or frightened, to me they rang in memory like my father’s own voice, proud and deathless and indomitable—

“ I will not serve him! I will not serve —”

That was the last I saw of him; the last I saw of any of them. Within minutes they were gone, the tall loping figures of my brothers lost in the fog. Of all the passengers of the Izanagi, only I remained. Obviously I was not deemed important enough to require an escort, energumen or replicant, to see me from the vessel. I stood alone behind the curved metal balustrade overlooking the long gangway that wound like a silver stair through mist and clouds of tiny flying insects, until finally it disappeared beneath the tops of trees that crowded the side of what I now knew must be a mountain. From below I could hear voices, my sisters calling out to each other and the hollow booming sound of a robotic Watchman shouting orders. For some minutes I stood and listened, until abruptly the voices ceased, as sharply and suddenly as though they had come from a vocoder that had been switched off. The silence was disconcerting, until I realized that probably they had all been herded into one of the other elÿon. I strained to see through the mist, looking from one narrow spiraling stair to the next, seeking to find any of my sisters ascending to their new lives aboard the warrior vessels. I never saw them again.

At last I could wait no longer. Soon someone would board the Izanagi, and if I did not want to be conscripted into service upon her or some other Alliance ship, I would have to leave. I still held within me the vision of my father, and it was this that finally give me the strength to take my first step down that long narrow walkway. The air was chill, cooler than it had been aboard the elÿon, but as I descended, it grew warmer, and with this new warmth came the scents of many things: flowers, water, the stored sunny heat of trees just being released into the evening air. I had thought it would be a strange thing, a frightening thing, to first set foot upon the Element. But when at last I stepped from the smooth metal path onto stony ground, it was as though I had awakened to find myself within a familiar dream.

I remembered this place. I remembered the trees and their names—oak, aspen, stunted pines—and also the sounds that came to me. Noises not unfamiliar because I had heard them on ’files and in the stim chambers of Quirinus; but still it was thrilling, almost terrifying, to hear them now—wind, water, the faint rustling tread of an animal’s footfall in the bracken—and to see in the darkness not far from me a blurred light that I knew was the mouth of a cave. We had come here once, long ago, my father and I. There had been smiling men in uniforms, and a shop where they sold rocks—I had thought that was funny, to sell rocks when there were so many lying about the floor of the cavern. Indeed the whole place was nothing but stone, a castle of granite and limestone and shale embedded in the heart of Mount Massanutten. The name came back to me too, as surely as if it had been my own; and now my heart was pounding and I had to clasp my hands tightly to keep them from shaking.

Because of course he would be here. Of course he would remember—it was the last thing we had done together, before the operation. He had brought me here, to show me that even in the blind core of the Earth there could be light and beauty; that even things seemingly as cold and dead as stone could be seen to have a life, and in stalactites and anthodites could grow and bloom like roses.

See, daughter? Nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all…

He was here. He was waiting. Do not fear the darkness, he had said. We will always be together, somewhere… .

And so I walked unafraid into the Paradise Caverns, nodding silently to my brothers and sisters who stood guard beside the main gate, and went to meet my father.

“Wendy! It’s Trevor—it’s him —” Jane’s shrill voice cut through the room as she grabbed me. “But he’s dead! We saw him, he died —”

I could only shake my head, my hands clutching helplessly at the air. The tall man on the platform shook back hair that was dark and thick as a girl’s, and his eyes, though beset by a kind of despair, were blue as Cadence’s had been. Once again I saw him standing in the cool darkness of his cellar, the corpses behind him glowing faintly as he spoke.

Of course, it has some interesting applications for clones… .

And I heard Giles’s grief-ridden voice choking, He made plans…. I know I’ll be with him again….

“It’s his clone,” I said hoarsely. “The scientists, the ones they told us about—they’re all clones. They’ve been hiding here for centuries. That’s where Metatron came from. That’s who found Luther Burdock…”

I fell silent as one of the energumens looked at me warningly. I stared back up at the dais, where Trevor stood gazing into the recesses of the open capsule. His expression was absolutely desolate. Whatever he glimpsed there might have been enough to sear away his vision and leave his eyes dead and blank behind their scrim of flesh. When he looked away again, all the light was gone from them. He seemed as aged and blind as the man I had known at Seven Chimneys.

“What are you waiting for?” Metatron’s voice held an undercurrent of mockery, and slivers of emerald light danced from his face as he looked at Trevor Mallory. “You have done this before. There’s no time now for dalliance. Begin, else I will do it for you.”

Bleakly Trevor nodded. He edged closer to the open capsule, then bent over and tugged at something inside. In all the vast space around us I heard nothing, save Jane’s ragged breathing and the slower, measured breath of the energumen guards. On the dais the other hooded acolytes stood still as columns in their white robes, their blank faces turned toward the center table. Then something scrabbled at the inside of the capsule. A horrible sound, as of a corpse trying to claw its way from its coffin. Trevor frowned and leaned in more closely, then drew back, his face knit with dismay as a hand appeared above the pod’s metal rim.

On the other side of the pod another hand clutched at the metal. A moment later a head emerged: a face so white it seemed incandescent, topped by a shock of thick brown hair. For an instant he flailed at the air, and I thought he would fall back inside. But then he righted himself, and slapping away Trevor’s hand, he sat up.

“Luther Burdock,” whispered Jane. “But—what’s wrong with him?”

“It’s his clone,” I said dully.

“But the other—the one we saw last night—”

“Dead,” I whispered. And somehow I knew that was the truth of it, and that we would never see that Luther Burdock again.

This one was naked, and so pale, it seemed he must be terribly ill, but I knew that was not the case. I knew it was that he had just been born. He pulled himself clumsily from the silver pod, swinging his legs over its edge and nearly falling, then jumping to stand shakily beside Trevor Mallory. He was naked, his skin almost translucent and gleaming as though oiled. His face had the unformed look of an infant’s. There were no lines to show where experience had been etched upon him, no scars or blemishes. His skin had a soft, slack look to it, as though the muscles beneath had never been stretched or pulled. He looked around blankly, then stared down at his feet. His eyebrows knit together, and slowly he drew his hands to cover his genitals.

Trevor Mallory looked impatiently at the nearest acolyte, who pulled a faded blue robe from beneath his white one and handed it to Burdock. Burdock stared at it, his expression so transparently innocent that I felt I was looking at one of those robotic models of the human brain that the Ascendants used to train their surgical technicians. When Trevor put a hand upon his shoulder, he started, then quickly shrugged into the robe. He shook its folds from his face, squinting painfully. With a wry smile Trevor reached into a pocket and drew out a pair of spectacles. For a moment Luther Burdock only stared at them. Then he grabbed them and slid them onto his face.

With that small gesture he truly seemed to be born anew. Behind the plastic lenses his brown eyes glittered. The innocence drained from them, and he made a fist of his hand, opening and closing it as though deriving strength from the motion. He looked around, his face carefully set to show no fear, no surprise. He stared at the white-robed acolytes, the six remaining capsules with their hidden burdens; then gazed out upon the ranks of silent waiting creatures. At sight of them his composure seemed to fail him. He turned to look first at Metatron and then at Trevor Mallory.

“Where is my daughter?”

His voice was tremulous as an old man’s. When there was no reply, he called out again, loudly and with such a commanding tone that far overhead the stalactites gave off faint tinging echoes.

“ Where is my daughter ?”

A nearly imperceptible shifting among the acolytes on the dais. Trevor Mallory bowed his head and stared at the floor. Metatron’s emerald eyes flashed, and he started to raise his hand, as though to point out at the massed throng of geneslaves. But before he could do so, there was a sharp cry from somewhere behind the stage. The hooded acolytes looked around, alarmed. A murmur passed through the crowd, as people and geneslaves murmured and shuffled, striving to see what was happening. On the dais Luther Burdock stood with his hands clenched at his sides, and stared accusingly at Trevor Mallory. Behind him Metatron turned, slowly as though pulled by wires. His torso glowed a brilliant angry purple.

“ Daddy !”

Up the steps leading to the dais a figure ran: taller than any human girl, but with a girl’s voice and a girl’s sweet smile. An energumen, identical to all the others in that place save only that she had no uniform, and her voice, if anything, was purer, more childlike than that of her cloned siblings. She wore nothing save a loose short linen skirt that hiked above her knees. Her skin was tawny brown and she wore her hair long and in loose curls. Smooth white scar tissue marked where one breast had been. Tears streamed from her huge black eyes as she ran to where Luther Burdock stood with his back to her. She towered above the cowled acolytes, pushing them aside. “Daddy, it’s me!”

Luther Burdock whirled about. At first his gaze swept across the cavern, but then he stopped and looked anxiously back and forth, as though searching for someone shorter than himself. “Cybele?” he called, then cried out more desperately, “Kalamat? Cybele”?

“Father—”

And looking up he saw her: a grotesquely tall scarred figure, arms outstretched, her ecstatic voice ringing throughout the cavern. For an instant his expression was one of joyous disbelief. Then, like petals falling from a faded blossom his joy fell away, and there was only disbelief and horror.

“ No !” He fell back as she lunged to embrace him.

“Daddy!”

She had nearly fallen herself as she grabbed him. For a moment he struggled in her arms, his white face twisted with loathing; but then he stopped. I could see another expression trembling there, another kind of disbelief, but tempered with wonder and not fear. Above him the energumen looked huge, a giantess toying with a man. But her face was tender, and glowed with delight as her huge hand cupped his face and she gazed down at him with an expression of transcendent joy. And suddenly it seemed that he recognized her, recognized something. A soft cry escaped him, a word I couldn’t understand. Slowly he opened his arms to her embrace.

“Stop her! Save him !”

The shriek came from Metatron. Violet lightning shimmered as his hand sliced through the air and he pushed one of the acolytes forward. The man moved slowly, as though frightened and unsure what to do. But then, as though the replicant’s will moved him, he suddenly darted across the stage. I glimpsed a silvery dart at the energumen’s breast, something flashing at her throat like a feeding hummingbird. Luther Burdock shouted, tried to stand and push away the other man, but the energumen held him too tightly. She seemed not to notice her attacker at all. A last stab of argent light; then she threw her head back, staring at the shadows high high above. Her great hands fell loosely from Luther Burdock. As slowly as though she lay down to sleep, she drooped back upon the floor.

Burdock stared at her, then savagely pushed the other man aside. He knelt beside her, pulling the huge head into his lap and leaning over her so that his tears fell onto her face.

“Kalamat.”

His head bowed as he called to her, his hands stroking back the tangled curls from her forehead. She moved, and I could see how she smiled, how she tried to lift her hand to graze his cheek. “Oh, daughter,” he moaned, and bent closer. Her eyes closed, though she still smiled, a child falling into a long, sweet sleep. Suddenly she cried out. Her back arched violently. One of her hands moved as though to grasp his, dropped with a soft thump to the floor; and the great figure was still.

For a moment all was silent. Then Metatron shouted a command. Several energumens loped up to the platform and dragged her body out of sight. Behind them Luther Burdock screamed and fought, as Trevor Mallory and another energumen restrained him. The other white-clad figures remained beside the six silver caskets, quiet as ever, though from the way they turned and looked from one to another, I imagined they were as dismayed by this turn of events as those watching them. All around us I could hear whispers and growls, and from the energumens scattered angry shouts. But then Metatron stepped forward and cried out, “It is a sacrifice, that is all—another sacrifice!” He turned to Trevor Mallory and hissed, “Now—do it now .”

Trevor moved back, so that only the other energumen held Luther Burdock’s struggling form. Burdock’s glasses had come off, and his faded blue uniform was stained with blood. He kicked fiercely at his captor and spat at Trevor Mallory.

“You let them kill her! You did that, you and the others—you ruined them all—how could you, how could you?—”

Trevor stared at him, his eyes round and empty. Next to him stood the acolyte who had killed the energumen. His hand still held a red-slicked knife. As I watched he took a quick step forward and plunged it into Luther Burdock’s breast. With one fluid motion he stepped back, as though he had performed a task he had long rehearsed.

I cried out, aghast, and Jane beside me. But all around us we heard nothing. Luther Burdock’s hand slapped against his chest, gripped the handle of the knife. His fingers tried to close about it, then splayed open as he sank to the floor. Blood spread across his white shirt. His head tipped backward, so that he seemed to stare up to where the full moon hung like a huge calm face above the cavern. In a moment he was dead.

Metatron stepped across the platform. When he reached the corpse, he stared at it with impassive emerald eyes. Trevor Mallory glanced down as well, but his face was contorted with anguish. He quickly turned away, gazing at the acolytes still waiting patiently beside the remaining capsules. He made a sharp slashing motion with one hand and barked out an order.

At the signal the acolytes bowed over their silver caskets. They rumbled with unseen clasps, slowly pulled at the lids until each was open. Clear liquid streamed from the metal, pooling on the floor and staining the hems of the acolytes’ robes. My stomach churned and I fought to keep from running. I did not want to see what those caskets held.

At the steel rim of first one and then another, hands appeared, fingers grabbing at the metal and clutching frantically, slipping on the wet surface. As before, they rose awkwardly from their resting places, liquid streaming from their shoulders and torsos so that they glowed in the moonlight like quicksilver.

“Jesus,” breathed Jane. “It’s him again.”

It was Luther Burdock. Six Luther Burdocks, each one naked and shivering, all shaking their heads and looking around with the same blank infant’s gaze. As they stumbled from their cells, they were helped by the acolytes, who wrapped them in stained blue tunics and wiped their faces with the hems of their own robes. When they had finished, the white figures stepped back, turning to where Metatron watched with a small smile.

“Very good,” he said at last. “You may go now and ready yourselves for departure.”

The twelve acolytes filed from the platform. Last of all went Trevor Mallory. When he passed Metatron, he stopped and looked at the replicant with burning eyes. Metatron met his gaze coldly.

“Well?” he asked. I waited for Trevor to say something, to shout or strike the inhuman figure standing there; to show some of the rage and brilliance I had known in Trevor Mallory. But that man, it seemed, had died at Seven Chimneys. After a moment he lowered his head and shuffled after the others.

Now only Metatron and Luther Burdock’s clones remained, six pallid men blinking and abashed in the moonlight. I cannot explain to you how horrible it was to see them, how they made my flesh crawl until I wanted to do as that acolyte had done and murder each of them with my own hands. They were so alike, so new and utterly unformed, with adult faces and bodies and expressions that were not so much innocent as mindless, so many empty vessels waiting to be filled.

Metatron stepped forward. He tilted his head, regarding them coolly. For the first time in many minutes he turned his unblinking gaze upon the throng assembled in the cavern.

“We are ready now,” he cried. He swept his arms out to indicate first the clones of the ancient geneticist, and then the rows of watching energumens. “We have the wisdom of Luther Burdock, the strength and numbers of his children, and enough of humanity to serve us all. Across the globe our brothers and sisters are set to join us as we harvest what remains of this poisoned earth and leave it to be burned clean. Let the avenging star come: we are ready to flee this world and find another!”

The cavern erupted into cheering and shrieking howls. I pulled Jane to me and held her close as the floor beneath us shook and overhead the stalactites trembled.

“I will lead you,” cried Metatron. “I will lead you in this last holy war, and I will have as navigator the mightiest of our Enemy’s warriors—”

His voice shook as he raised his hands and turned. And that was when I saw him, borne forth by two energumens as though he were a man in flames, his face and body destroyed and encased in scarlet metal. Only his eyes remained to betray who and what he had been: the Ascendant’s greatest hero, the Aviator Imperator Margalis Tast’annin.

“ No! ” His voice rang out, louder even than Metatron’s. My own voice echoed his disbelief. On the platform the six men who were Luther Burdock looked around uneasily. “ Let us go! ”

Metatron only smiled at the Aviator’s fury, and looked past him to where two other figures stood at the edge of the platform. One struggled within her energumen captor’s grip—another Aviator, her face bruised and bleeding but her eyes aflame with hatred. But the other figure stood quite calmly, between two energumens who kept back from her as though afraid. When I saw her, I gasped, because her form was identical to that of Metatron, only encased in shining silver and blue and gold instead of violet and black. And as though she had heard me, she turned, seeming to search through the crowd until her eyes caught mine. Eyes as green and lambent as Metatron’s own; but where his held malice and cunning, hers were mild, seemingly unperturbed by all the chaos around her. Foolishly, I started to speak, as though she might hear me. Indeed, from the way she tilted her head, it seemed she did. But then Metatron’s voice cut through the air, and she turned away again.

“Take him to the elÿon Izanagi and install him as its adjutant.” Metatron pointed at the energumen who held Tast’annin. “Since he was careless enough to kill its navigator, he shall act as mine, and guide us to the stars.”

Tast’annin howled again, but his voice was lost amid the clamor. He fought to turn his head, looking desperately through the crowd; and then his gaze pierced mine. Jane gasped and try to pull me back, but I did not move, only stared at him.

It seemed that the roaring around me grew still. In all that vast space there was only myself and that crimson figure. Of his human visage nothing but a tormented metal mask remained. His eyes were so pale, it seemed all color had fled from them at sight of things more terrible than I could imagine. But what was most frightening was the expression in those eyes. I had seen them to hold only rage and lust to power. But now they gazed upon me pleadingly and with a desperation so awful, I nearly wept. It seemed I heard his voice again, as I had heard it in the Engulfed Cathedral, telling me, “ Even I must serve something …”

It was as though he heard my thoughts. The silence was riven by a great roar as he threw his head back and shouted, “ I will not serve you, Metatron! I will not serve! ”

Metatron laughed. “You have no choice, Tast’annin. None of us have any choice. We all serve a greater master now—”

He pointed at the sky. A few bats still skimmed across the entrance to the cave, flecks of black skating across the moon’s weary face. On the platform the pale blue-robed figures of Luther Burdock looked up, as did everyone around me. It seemed that the moon grew paler; that it faded until it was little more than a blurred cloud floating in endless darkness. For a moment it was as though we stared into some terrible colorless dawn. And then I saw what it was that drove the moon from her rightful place.

At the edge of the sky a radiance appeared, a brilliance that was not white but tinged with blue and red and violet and yellow, like a shattered rainbow hurled into the night. It grew brighter, and brighter still, until I shaded my eyes with my hands and gasped, my voice lost amid a thousand others.

“Behold Icarus!” cried Metatron. “My son in his glory, the burning boy! He comes, he comes. Within weeks he will be here, and the mutilated Earth at last will be freed from its suffering!”

Within the blinding light that filled the sky a point of black appeared, a small ragged core of darkness like an eye or mouth. It did not move or grow larger; only seemed to pulse slightly, like a heart beating within the void of heaven.

“This is crazy !” Jane yelled. Fear and anger tore at her face; anger won, and she pounded her thigh with her fist. “I thought the Aviator was mad, but this—” She grabbed me and began to pull me through the crowd. No one stopped us now; no one noticed us at all. “Come on, Wendy, this is—”

I yanked back from her. “We can’t go,” I said numbly. My eyes remained fixed on the deathly radiance above us. “Don’t you see what that is? Metatron is right—it’s some kind of falling star—where can we go?”

And in answer I felt huge hands close around my arms, and saw Jane fall back into the grip of another energumen.

“You’re to come with us,” it said. I did not fight, and after a moment I saw Jane grow limp as well. She shot me a last desperate glance as they led us from the shouting throng, up the steps to where Metatron stood surrounded by his cloned aides. I tried to shake off my captor’s hands, and looked to see Tast’annin and his two companions being led out through the cave’s entrance. Then the energumen pulled me, until I faced Metatron upon the dais. He looked at me and smiled, his eyes throwing off shafts of jade and emerald where they caught the reflection of Icarus’s brilliance. His voice was mocking as he greeted me.

“ Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.”

Another wave of shouts and snarling cheers rose from the cavern. Metatron stretched out his glowing hand to touch my chin.

“You are very fortunate, Wendy Wanders, to see the new world that awaits us.”

For a long moment he held my gaze, then pushed me away. “Bring them to the Izanagi with Imperator Tast’annin,” he commanded the energumens, and stalked from the platform.

Behind me in the darkness Luther Burdock’s corpse lay cold and still. Above it the empty-eyed forms of his cloned brethren stared impassively into the sky. I turned to where the corpse of the creature who had called herself his daughter was sprawled upon the floor. As I stared, it seemed to move slightly. Then it did move, and with pity and horror I watched as it struggled to turn its head. At my side, Jane’s brown eyes grew wide with rage and compassion.

“It’s not dead yet!—” She looked around for help. “They can’t just leave it, it’s not—”

But then our guards tugged gently at us. Jane’s hand groped for mine as we were led away. A warm wind poured through the cave’s opening, and a rosy light that came from the elÿon fleet.

All about us the air echoed with cries of wonder and terror, as the geneslaves and people of Cassandra gazed into the sky. I walked slowly before my captors, as though I were being taken to see a marvelous surprise and wanted to delay the pleasure. I could see my own shadow in the brilliance cast off by Icarus, faint as though drawn in water. I continued slowly until someone pulled Jane’s hand from mine. Then I was borne by arms larger and stronger than my own, up the rocky slope to the billowing crimson cloud that had swallowed the Aviator Tast’annin. I did not look back, though I heard Jane calling for me, her voice faint as a swallow’s thrown into the throat of a storm: not then, nor when the energumen carried me into the waiting elÿon.

With surprising gentleness, it bore me through twisting passages, until we reached a tiny room where it placed me in a sling. Carefully it bound me against the rigors of the journey, then showed me where soon tiny needles would prick my wrists and throat and lead me into dark sleep. Only after it left did I turn to gaze out the tiny window opening onto the world.

It was all there: trees, rocks, mountains, river: all of it, and people besides, weeping and pointing at the sky; and aardmen and energumens and the other geneslaves, rushing to herd their charges into me waiting elÿon. For many minutes I stared out, never lifting my gaze to the sky. Not until the walls surrounding me quivered, and I knew the elÿon was beginning to take flight. Then I looked up.

There it was. Icarus, the falling boy, the black eye of fate gazing down upon us with that deceptively calm and brilliant stare. I could imagine his laughter, a sound that would rock worlds, and see his hand reaching for me, reaching for all of us: vast and implacable and terrifying. Soon he would be upon us; soon there would be no escape. But then like a cold kiss I felt the prick of unseen needles upon my flesh. Warmth surged into my veins. I saw the eye recede, saw the imagined retreat of the asteroid into the void; and in darkness fell into my final voyage.

In the darkness something warm and wet streams from Kalamat’s breast. Behind her closed eyelids she can sense a brightness, a warmth; the promise of something wonderful, something more marvelous than she has ever known. She can feel her father’s hands upon her forehead, so small and light they might be leaves blowing across her skin, and though the raging pain does not subside, her body relaxes, her hands unclench, and her jaw, and she tries to speak.

“Daddy,” she chokes. “Daddy—”

Even as she winces from the effort, she smiles; because this time she knows he hears her.

“Do not fear the dark, daughter,” he whispers. His voice catches, and something falls upon her face. “The night can never harm you, and anyhow soon it will be time for us to wake.”

“Yes,” she wants to say. “Yes, I know.” But already death has drawn a noose tight around her, yanking words and finally thought from her mind.

And then in the darkness Kalamat smiles, knowing her father is there amid all those small struggling figures, knowing that even death is a small thing now. Because she has found him, she has found him at last.