Icarus Descending

2 The Splendid Lights

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF Margalis Tast’annin, Aviator Imperator of the Seventeenth Ascendant Autocracy, 0573 New Era

I am the Aviator Imperator Margalis Tast’annin, the chief ranking military commander of the Seventeenth Ascendant Autocracy. As I record these words, I am aware that they may well never be read or scanned by anyone save myself. But it is a duty for one of my stature, even a prisoner as I am now, to make manifest an account of what has befallen me—what will befall all of us, who are tethered by some precarious thread, duty or need or love, to the world that in my language is named Earth. I received my appointment as Imperator some months ago, from the ruling Ascendant triumvirate known as the Orsinate. The three Orsina sisters are dead now: one by my own hand, the others lost to the tsunami that swept away the city-state of Araboth. I feel no regret for them whatsoever, save only that I did not murder Âziz and Nike as I did Shiyung. Although they named me Imperator, they were also the ones who reclaimed my corpse from the City of Trees and rehabilitated me as a rasa, one of the walking dead. It was in that form that I briefly stalked the Earth and skies before my incarceration here, where only my mind is free to roam as before.

Before my death and rehabilitation, I was known as the Aviator Margalis Tast’annin. My last posting was to the City of Trees, the abandoned capitol of what was, hundreds of years ago, the North American United States. It was in that City that I was betrayed by those who were to answer to my command. At their hands I was tortured and dismasted, then left for dead in the ruins of that haunted place known as the Engulfed Cathedral. But I did not die, not then. I lived, long enough to see the rebirth of an ancient and terrible god known as the Gaping One, personified by a whore and his demonic twin sister. Of the courtesan Raphael Miramar I know nothing. He may be dead; for his sake, I hope that he is. He suffered much at my hands, but it is a greater horror at crueler hands than mine that awaits him if he is still alive.

As for his sister, Wendy Wanders—I would not presume to tell the tale of a creature whose powers of cruelty and spite, for a little while at least, were perhaps even greater than my own.

After the domed city of Araboth fell to the monstrous storm Ucalegon, I fled, my Gryphon aircraft Kesef bearing myself and the cataclysm’s other four survivors north, to the scorched prairie that had grown over the ruins of other cities in the wasteland. We finally landed near a human settlement. I remained in the biotic aircraft, overcome by an exhaustion that would have killed another man; but since I was no longer a man in any real sense of the word, I merely sat silently in the pilot’s seat of the craft, and waited for night to come. The nemosyne Nefertity accompanied the three humans we had rescued to the outskirts of the settlement and left them there, with much weeping and regret on their parts, I would imagine. I had no desire, then or ever, to speak or meet with them again. But the nemosyne I very much wanted, and knowing her promise to return would bind her to me, I remained behind.

In the intervening hours of solitude I sat and waited for Nefertity’s return, my metal hand resting upon the control panel of the Gryphon as upon the neck of a flesh-and-blood mount. I felt no hunger, nor thirst, nor even the mounting tedium that surely would have enraged me in my earlier life, when I was still a man and not the mere simulacrum of one. In the ticking heat of that long afternoon I let my thoughts go free, so many hounds racing through the emptiness to capture whatever queer things they might find, and bring them back for me to save or destroy or cherish as I would. And so it was that I found my thoughts running back many years—as indeed they do now, more easily than they prey upon the business of the hour—to my youth, and the strange and evil world I knew then; stranger perhaps in some ways than the world I live in now….

When I was at the NASNA Academy, there was a game we used to play late at night, after our rectors had gone to sleep. It was a small group of us who gathered in Aidan’s room—Aidan Harrow, his twin sister Emma, Neos Tiana, and myself, Margalis. Occasionally John Starving, who years later served under me in the Archipelago Conflict and died there, poisoned by the embolismal parasite known as kacha —sometimes brave John joined us as well, though he was several years younger than the rest of us, and risked expulsion if he was found on our floor.

The game was called Fear. Aidan invented it, Aidan who was always the ringleader among our cohort, with his long pale legs and streaming hair the color of old blood. The game went like this. We would sit in a circle on the floor beside Aidan’s bed, Emma always beside her brother, then Neos, then John, then me on the other side of Aidan. In the center of the circle would be a bottle of something—cheap wine usually, though once Neos brought a slender venetian-glass decanter of apsinthion, and another time Emma presented us with a vial of the caustic hallucinogen greengill. Whatever it was, it would be passed around the circle, along with bread hoarded from our suppers all week and a small jar of lime pickle that Aidan kept only for these occasions. The Academy was notoriously stingy in feeding its cadets; there was not a night that I recall when I did not go to bed hungry, and I think it was hunger as much as our desire for companionship and the dark thrill of violation that brought us together on those cold evenings.

So you must imagine us, crouched in the shadow of Aidan’s bed (he often shared it with his sister, but we pretended not to know that) with a single lumiere casting a greenish light upon our thin faces. We were all seventeen years old, except for John Starving; and his name notwithstanding, he was the heartiest of us. Aidan and Emma were skinny as planks, white-skinned, with that reddish hair and green cat-eyes. Neos was like a curlew, all bent knees and long beak, but with bright black eyes and black hair like an oiled cap close against her skull. John was nearly as tall as myself, but broad-shouldered and with a wide, dark face. I was nothing but bones and nerve in those days: very tall, not yet stooped from the burden of my command, and popular enough with my peers. I knew that Neos fancied me, as did Aidan; but Emma feared me because I had killed a boy in a fight several years earlier. At the Academy one was not expelled or even suspended for such misdemeanors. After the investigation I was given a private tutor, a replicant named Vus, and my time in the gymkhana increased from two to four hours daily. If my rations had been doubled to make up for the extra exercise, perhaps I would not have been so eager to attend Aidan’s soirees.

There was always something uncanny about Aidan Harrow. In all the years that have passed since our youth together, it still does not surprise me that there is a line I can draw, from Aidan to his sister Emma, from Emma to the empath Wendy Wanders, and so to the dark one who has imprisoned me here. It may have been simply that Aidan was beautiful, with that angular grace and his witch-eyes; and of course it helps that he died young, by his own hand, so that I always remember him laughing in the half-light of his cadet’s room. Unlike his sister, doomed to live another twenty-odd years before succumbing to her own private auto-da-fé at the Human Engineering Laboratory. Emma was never the beauty that Aidan was, even though sometimes it was hard to tell them apart. Perhaps she simply didn’t share her twin’s unabashed delight in her own appearance, or maybe it was just that odd apportioning of features that takes place sometimes between siblings, with the boys stealing all their mothers’ beauty, and the girls left with hard mouths and wary eyes.

Whatever it was, there was always a subtle pressure to be next to Aidan. In the near dark we sat, our knees bumping, and tore hunks of stale bread and smeared them with lime pickle hot enough to make you weep. The bottle would go around, lingering longest at Aidan’s mouth; and we would talk, weaving the intricate pattern of custom and superstition that is the lot of NASNA Aviators from childhood to the pyre. News from our endless classes in strategy and ancient history; rumors of strife with the Commonwealth; conjecture as to when we would finally be allowed to make the jump from flight simulators to training craft. Here and there an uncommonly lurid thread would emerge when someone had gossip of rape, conquest, madness, death. Aidan would tease me, giving vent to a vicious streak that would have served him well in adulthood had he survived. From his father—a depressive ethnomusicologist addicted to morpha—he had learned innumerable folk songs dating back hundreds of years, and he would sing these in a clear reedy tenor, giving the words a cruel twist to highlight the weaknesses of one or another of his rectors or classmates. Finally, when bottle and prattle were nearly spent, Aidan would stretch and beckon us closer, until I could smell the salt and citrus on his breath.

“Now,” he would say. He had an uncanny voice. When he sang, it was with a sweet boy’s tone, but in speaking something seemed to taint it, so that I always felt he was either lying or on the verge of mad laughter. No one but Emma was surprised when he hanged himself. “Who will go first? Emma?”

Emma started and shook her head. “No—not tonight—I’ll go next, I have to think—”

Aidan shrugged, leaned forward over the lumiere until his forehead grazed Neos’s. “All right then—what about you, Sky Pilot?”

I winced at the hated nickname and shook my head.

“Neos—?”

“This footage I saw in the archives,” Neos said without hesitation. Her white cheeks were a sullen red from excitement and the apsinthion; it looked as though she had been slapped. “There was a fire in this very tall building, and no way out. In one of the windows a man leaned out with all this smoke around him. I couldn’t tell if he was fat or if he had just bloated up from the heat. I think maybe he was burning up, his skin was so dark…

“There was no sound, so you just saw him there, breathing and leaning out the window. Finally he fell down inside and you couldn’t see him anymore, and then the film ran out. I always wondered, if they were near enough to film him, why didn’t they try to get him out of there?”

Emma and John shuddered, and I grimaced. “I’ve seen that one,” I said. “It was the air attack on London, 2167. There’s another one that shows the river in flames, all these people—”

“Is that your turn, Sky Pilot?” Aidan looked at me, reaching for the bottle and taking a sip from the little that remained in it.

“No.” I looked away and caught Neos’s feverish eyes. “Someone else go next.”

For a minute no one said anything. At last John reached to take the bottle from Aidan, swallowed a mouthful of the green liqueur, and coughed. “All right,” he said. “A woman I saw—”

“You did that last time,” said Emma.

“Not this one. It was—it wasn’t a real woman. I mean, it was a geneslave. When we were in Wyalong…”

John’s parents were both Aviators, now dead. For many years they had been stationed on a form in the Great Barrier Reef, and somehow had managed to take John with them instead of sending him as was customary to the Aviators’ crèche. “I guess I was about six. A supply boat had arrived, and there was this enormous crate, that sort of gray plasteel with holes in it that they use for shipping livestock. It was big enough to hold cattle in; I guess that should have told me something. No one was watching and so I walked right up to it; it came up over my head and I pressed my face against it, to look inside the holes—”

“Ugh.” Emma made a small noise and took a swipe at the bottle, then leaned back so that her thigh brushed against Aidan’s hand.

“Shh,” said Neos.

“And this, this hand jabbed out at me—only it was bigger than any hand I’d ever seen, it was as long as my forearm and golden —I mean this unnatural color, like it had been dyed. I remember the nails were short, they’d been cut back but they still scratched me and I thought I’d been poisoned. I started screaming and fell backward, and of course everyone came running and my father picked me up. They jabbed something at whatever was inside the crate, some kind of tranquilizer I guess; then everyone sort of forgot about me again. I found a place to sit on a pier and I watched, and after a while someone came and they opened the crate, and picked up this long leash and pulled out what was inside.”

He paused, took the bottle from Emma, and eyed it critically before draining the last swallow of apsinthion.

“So what was it?” Aidan cocked his head, grinning. “An aardman? Tortured prisoners from the Commonwealth?”

John put the bottle down and stared at him for a long moment before answering. “No,” he said at last. He didn’t like Aidan. He told me years later that once he had walked in on him in bed with Emma. She had been crying and her lip was bleeding, but Aidan only laughed and told John to leave the room. “It was an energumen.”

“An energumen?” Aidan’s voice rose as he settled with his back against the bed. “That’s it? You were afraid of an energumen?”

Beside me Neos shuddered. Only a fool wouldn’t be afraid of an energumen. Of all the Ascendants’ geneslaves, they were the most like humans, with an almost supernatural strength and intelligence and a malevolence that almost surpassed the Ascendants’ own. They had beautiful faces: flat noses, dewy black eyes, blossom-heavy lips; and their skin ran the range from golden to onyx. Tall, superbly strong, their most compelling trait was their raw intelligence. Like a child’s intellect, inquiring but never forgetting the answers to their questions. It was a measure of their masters’ hubris that their breeding allodiums continued to produce them, year after year, without any thought to the threat such an enslaved population might one day pose.

John glanced down at his hand, then up again. “Yes. Because—well, she looked so much like a girl, I mean a human girl. Except for the color of her skin, and her size. She was just in that crate, like what we usually got—pigs and dogs, you know. And—well, it scared me, maybe because she was naked, I’d never really seen a naked woman before—”

Aidan snickered but his sister elbowed him.

“—and it was just, oh I don’t know, it made me think of my mother, I guess that’s what frightened me. Because it was monstrous in spite of all that, and it was the first energumen I’d ever seen. Later I found out they’d brought her there as a breeder, they had a new strain of hydrapithecenes they were developing, and she was the host.”

Neos wrinkled her nose. “Did you see her again?”

“Oh, yes. She was in the labs—they gave her a room, it’s not like they kept her in a cage all the time. I think they were afraid of her being raped by the crew on the supply boat—she was from the Archipelago—”

His voice drifted off and he stared at his hands again. Poor John! When he fought under me, he kept a young girl on the island as a mistress—she might have been all of thirteen. After he died, her family killed her, threw her onto one of the eternal pyres by the canal, where the rubber wastes have been burning for a hundred years. Because she had been kept by an Aviator, you see— memji, they called us there, demons. I don’t even think he ever slept with her.

“And that’s what you were afraid of?” Aidan’s tone was mock-serious, with just a note of derision. “An energumen?” He laughed then, grabbing his sister’s hand and tugging it until she laughed too, a little uneasily.

“They frighten me, too,” Neos said softly. Her eyes when she raised them were dark and bright, and she looked at me as though betraying a secret. “I think you would have to be mad, not to be afraid of them.”

But Aidan only laughed, though Emma’s voice fell off at Neos’s words. John said nothing more, only stared silently at the candle burning down before us….

Suddenly my reverie was shaken. I heard Kesef’s voice, announcing “Imperator, someone is approaching us.”

I opened my eyes, blinking at the near-darkness that filled the Gryphon’s tiny cabin. My eyes and my right hand were the only parts of my physical corpus that remained in the shell of plasteel and neural fibers that encased my consciousness. In Araboth I had been regenerated as a rasa, one of the Ascendants’ living corpses; and so I had attained an immortality of sorts, but not one, alas! which offered me any joy. When I glanced out the window of the aircraft, I saw the nemosyne standing at the edge of the tor where we had landed. Night had fallen. She gazed out across the prairie, to where the settlement’s few lights, scarlet and bronze and white, pillaged the sleeping hillsides. For a moment I stared down at her. In the soft darkness she glowed faintly, blue and gold, her translucent skin like a web of water surrounding her frail and complex innards. She was the most beautiful construct I had ever seen, surpassing even the artistry of those Fourth Ascension craftsmen who had used the long-dead coryphées of the twentieth-century cinema as models for the replicants, and gave them such enchanting names: Garbos, Marlenas, Marilyns.

But you would never mistake Nefertity for a human being. Her face and torso were obviously composed of glass and metal and neural threads, and while her voice was that of the saintly woman who had programmed her, there was a crystalline ring to it, an eerie chill that recalled the songs of those hydrapithecenes the Ascendants call sirens, who seek to lure men and women to their tanks by the purity of their voices and slay them there as they bend to embrace the waiting monsters. I thought of the sirens as I watched Nefertity, the faint glow of her body casting a violet shadow upon the barren earth. After a minute or so I climbed from the Gryphon to join her.

Outside the air was warm and dry. I could not actually feel it, of course, no longer having any skin except the sturdy membrane of black and crimson resins that sheathed my memories. But I knew this place, knew how the winds swept across the deserted prairie, bringing with them the scent of powdered stone and burning mesquite. Even through an Aviator’s leathers, you always felt that wind leaching away sweat and tears, leaving an incrustation of salt like rime upon your cheeks.

“I hope they will be safe there,” Nefertity said, her voice dry, nearly emotionless. “The boy wept when I left him.”

I nodded, walking until I stood beside her at the edge of the cliff. “They will be safer there than anywhere they might go with us.”

Nefertity said nothing, only stared with glowing emerald eyes into the darkness. She was a nemosyne, a memory unit created as a robotic archive centuries earlier; but she had been imprinted with the voice and persona of a particular woman, the archivist Loretta Riding. She was by far the most eloquent simulacrum I have ever come across. As I said, the Ascendants have androids that cannot be distinguished from humans except in the most intimate situations. Nefertity was not one of these, but sitting here in the dark, listening to her speak, it was only the absence of her breathing that indicated she was a replicant; that and the fox-fire glow emanating from her transparent body.

“I hope they will be safe,” she repeated at last. “It is a primitive encampment there, and they have been accustomed to the luxuries of Araboth.”

“They will learn about hardship then,” I replied coolly, “like everyone else in the world.”

The nemosyne fell silent. It had been less than a week since she had been awakened, found in the bowels of the domed city we had fled as it collapsed. Even replicants, it seems, can have a difficult time adjusting to the concept of death. Nefertity did not like to be reminded that Loretta Riding was centuries given to the earth. Even less did she like to be under my call, but that was the deal we had struck. There had been only five of us who survived the wreckage of Araboth: the nemosyne and myself, and three humans: the boy Hobi Panggang; Rudyard Planck the dwarf; and the hermaphrodite Reive Orsina, the bastard heir to the fallen city of Araboth. I had brought them here, to the relative safety of that rustic village whose lights gleamed across the canyon, and permitted the humans to go free in exchange for Nefertity’s promise to continue on with me. She was not happy with the arrangement—and such was the subtlety of her manufacture that her distress was apparent even now, in the darkness—but I knew she would not attempt to escape from me. It is a gift I have, this power to command. Because of it, even the most rational of humans and their constructs have followed me to hell and back, from the airless parabolas of the HORUS colonies to the mutagen-soaked beaches of the Archipelago.

We sat in silence for some minutes, listening to the sounds of the western night: wind rattling the twisted branches of mesquite and huisache, the bell-like call of the little boreal owls, which are so tame, they will creep into your lap if you are patient enough. A little ways behind us, nestled in a hollow of the mesa, the Gryphon Kesef was hidden. In the darkness it resembled a great bat, its solex wings upfolded now that there was no sun for them to seek. I could hear the creak of its frail-looking spars and struts as the breeze played through them like the strings of an electrified theorbo. From the settlement below us came the hollow echo of the chimes the valley people set outside their windows, to scare away the fetches, the survivors of the Shinings and their descendants. Sickly, shambling creatures who haven’t the strength or cunning to raise and hunt their own food. At night they creep from house to house, hoping to find a window open whence they can gain entry and throttle their prey while they sleep. Children they kidnap to raise as slaves and indoctrinate with their pestilence. From where we sat we could see them, their skin waxy as cactus blossom, lurching from their crude shelters beneath the mesa’s shadow like drunkards from a tavern. In the distance the protective chimes rang in the evening breeze.

When Nefertity spoke again, her voice was like that sound, only clearer and sweeter.

“It is a terrible world you have made, Margalis Tast’annin.”

“I have been but a tool for those who would shape the world,” I replied.

“You were a man once, and had the power to rebel.”

“The power to rebel is nothing without one has the power to command. But you know that, my friend. You would have made an impressive leader, Nefertity.”

The nemosyne’s body glowed a brighter blue. “I would have made an impressive library,” she said coldly. Which was true: the name Nefertity was merely a glossing of her acronym, NFRTI or the National Feminist Recorded Technical Index. She was the only survivor of her kind that I knew of, the only one of those elegant and sophisticated glossaries of human memory and knowledge to be found in four centuries. “My programmer, Loretta Riding— she might have made a leader, she was a saint, a true saint—but she would never have consented to serve such a man as you.”

I laughed, so loudly that a blind cricket grubbing at my feet took flight in alarm. “If she was a saint, then, she would be happy to know she has achieved such immortality, shrouded in blue crystal and gold and sitting on a hill conversing with a dead man.”

Her tone turned icy. “What do you want with me, Margalis?”

I stooped and let my right hand—my human hand, that vestige of flesh and corruption the Ascendant biotechs had left me—brush the stony ground. In the darkness I could detect living things by their heat: the red blur of a kit fox on a nearby ridge, the tiny boreal owls like glowing fists roosting upon the prickly pear, crickets and wolf spiders marking a frayed crimson carpet across the sand. I waited for a cricket to approach me and then swept it up to my face. When I opened my palm, it lay there quite still, its long antennae tickling the warm air. It had three eyes; in daylight they would not appear bright red but sea-blue, and larger than a cricket’s eyes should be. In this part of the Republic everything had suffered some mutation, though not everything was as obviously stricken as this creature. I waved my hand and it leapt into the darkness.

“What do I want with you?” I waited until the cricket’s little trajectory ended, then turned back to Nefertity. “I have told you: I want to find the military-command nemosyne. I want to find Metatron.”

“Metatron.” If she could have, she would have spat. “You must have been mad when you were human, Margalis. I have told you, I know nothing of Metatron. I am a folklore unit, the repository of women’s tales and histories. And you have told me that all of the others of my kind were destroyed—”

“I don’t believe Metatron was destroyed. It was too valuable; they would have found some way to bring it to safety somewhere, to preserve it.”

They were the Ascendant Autocracy. The rebel angels who stormed heaven after the Second Shining, the stellar Aviators who commandeered the HORUS space stations and created the net of offworld alliances that even now carried out its mad and futile campaigns to bring the world under a single government. Metatron was the glory of that earlier age, the shining sapphire in the technocrats’ crown. The most elaborate and sophisticated weapons system ever devised, a nemosyne that commanded the vast submersible fleet and squadrons of Gryphons and fougas and the celestial warships called the elÿon. The Military Tactical Targets Retrieval Network. MTTRN: Metatron.

A joke, Sajur Panggang had explained to me back at the Academy. He was a year older than I, and as an Orsina—a cousin, but still of their blood—he was being trained in such arcane matters, rather than for combat.

“I read about it, in a book,” he said. That alone was testimony of Metatron’s strange lineage. Like so much of the Prime Ascendants’ lore, the name hearkened back to ancient times, a religion long dead. Metatron, the leader of the host of fiery angels; but also Satan-El, the Fallen One. Metatron, the breath of whose wings brings death, and who has countless, all-seeing eyes.

“It was destroyed when Wichita fell.” Nefertity’s voice cut through my dreaming. She gazed out at the little valley below us. “That was what Loretta said: it was the one good that came from that Shining.”

I shook my head. “It was not in Wichita. There are records at the Academy that show it was brought to the old capital, to Crystal City. There were bunkers there that could withstand a thousand Shinings.”

“But it was not in the capital.” The nemosyne’s eyes glittered green and gold, sentient stars plucked from the sky. “You died there searching for it.”

“You are right. It was not in the City of Trees; but that does not mean it was destroyed. I believe it was stolen by rebel janissaries and brought to safety.”

I tilted my head back until I commanded a view of the sky: the stars cool and unmoving on that field of blue-black, broken here and there by shimmering traces of gold where the atmosphere had been torn by celestial warfare. “I believe it is up there.”

The nemosyne followed my gaze. In the western aspect of the sky a pallid star slowly moved through the constellation 201 Sikorsky, that which for three thousand years had been named Delphinus. It was no true star but one of the failing HORUS stations, like the one that had been my home and commanding outpost until its destruction that autumn by rebels from the Balkhash Commonwealth. Such a little time had passed since then—not even a year—but I felt as distanced from that earlier life of mine as I did from the celestial station passing overhead.

I thought then how long it had been since I looked up to see the stars. In Araboth the Quincunx Domes had blotted out all but the smeared impression of light and shadow beyond their curved worn face. Before my brief tenure beneath the domes, I had been in the City of Trees, where I had seen the stellar explosion that marked the destruction of the NASNA Prime Station. Seven months, then, since I had seen the night sky. As I gazed upward, I felt that same agony of love and longing that had ever gnawed at me when I looked upon the stars: a yearning more powerful than any you will ever know, unless you have since childhood been pledged to NASNA’s cohort. In all the battles I have ever been in upon Earth, I always found some moment to step away from the flames and stench of burning flesh and renew the pact I had made with the stars. Because they are always there, cold and watchful eyes gazing down upon the play of horrors we enact again and again upon the Earth. It is a sort of balm to me, to think of them there unchanging; and with them the steady slow promenade of the HORUS colonies as they mark their lesser orbits through the sky.

So it was with a sense of calm and reassurance that I watched the pale fleck of light edging through that constellation in the western sky. I wondered which of the HORUS colonies it was: Helena Aulis, I thought at first, or perhaps its sister-station of MacArthur. I stood for many minutes, as it left the stars of 201 Sikorsky and entered those of Lascan; but then slowly an unease came over me.

Because the station that I watched was not where it should be. Over the years the orbital patterns of HORUS had grown as familiar to me as the map of scars and renewed tissue on my own hands; but there was something wrong with this. At this time of year, midsummer, there should have been three man-made stars charting that path through Sikorsky. Instead only one of the Ascendants’ splendid lights wove its way through the stars, slowly and steadily as a barge through water.

“Something is wrong,” I said to myself. Nefertity gazed at me curiously, and I went on. “They can’t have changed their orbits. MacArthur and Helena Aulis should be there—”

My metal hand stabbed at the sky, blotting out the stars. “But they are not. And there—to the northwest, see?—we should be able to see Quirinus by now. But it is not in its accustomed place.”

Nefertity turned to see where I pointed. “Surely you are mistaken?” she said. “Perhaps it is the wrong part of the sky you are looking at. Or perhaps in the last few months their orbits have changed.”

I shook my head. “No…” My unease grew, even as that single light reached the edge of the horizon and disappeared into the darkness there. “Something has happened,” I went on slowly. My mind raced, seeking some explanation. I was looking at the wrong part of the sky; I had lost track of the time of year; for inexplicable reasons the Ascendants had changed the orbits of their colonies. But I knew my knowledge of the stars, at least, had not suffered any change. As for a change in the orbits of the HORUS colonies—that could not have happened, not so quickly. The Ascendant bureaucracy was a tangle of willful diplomats and cold-eyed Aviators, with a failing communications network linking them. Even the most minor changes in the stations took place only over a period of years, unless—

Unless there had been some kind of rebellion.

“Something has gone wrong,” I said. I turned to Nefertity, whose glowing eyes were still fixed upon the sky. ‘The HORUS colonies have been disrupted, and no one in Araboth told me. No one told me, or—”

My voice died: the rest of my thought was too frightening to speak aloud.

Or no one knew.

I clenched my hand into a fist, the leather straining against the metal joints. What could have happened? A rebellion among the Ascendant Autocracy; assassination, poison, plague—only some terrible misfortune could have disrupted HORUS. But if that was the case, who now was ruling? With Araboth fallen, and the NASNA Prime Station destroyed months ago, and myself absented from the Governors—who was left?

Nefertity’s delicate voice intruded upon my thoughts. “And among all this confusion, you still believe that other nemosyne is somewhere within those space stations? How would they have gotten it there?”

“The celestial warships,” I said dully. “The elÿon fleet—even after the Third Shining, when travel between the continents became almost impossible, the Autocracy was still utilizing the elÿon for passage to HORUS. I believe it was during the decade after the Third Shining that Metatron was brought to HORUS for safekeeping. Until then records show that it was housed at the Republic’s military command in Crystal City; but after the Third Shining there is no further mention of it. I made much study of this at the Academy, and elsewhere when the data were available. I thought at first it had been taken to the ancient capital, but I found no trace of Metatron in the City of Trees, though I did find an ancient arsenal there. Its weapons stores were intact; and this led me to believe that someplace nearby—Warrenton, perhaps, which is where the Aviators lived once—there might also have been an armory that had remained untouched during the Shinings and subsequent Ascensions. Perhaps even an airfield from whence rebel janissaries might have held rendezvous with the elÿon.”

Nefertity made a small noise, a sound that in a human woman would have been a sigh. She glanced over her shoulder to where Kesef crouched in the darkness, then up into the sky.

“So you believe it is there,” she said softly. Her arm when she raised it left a glowing arc of pale blue light in its path. “There? Or there?”

Her voice was mocking but also tentative, with a note that might have presaged fear.

“It could be anywhere. It could even still be here on Earth—in the mountains outside the abandoned capital, or even somewhere in the Archipelago, although I don’t think that is possible. Because over the centuries others have searched for it. Surely it would have been found by them. Or, if it were destroyed, there would have been some record, somewhere—such an important piece of military hardware couldn’t just disappear completely.

“No, I think it is up there, in the HORUS colonies. There are more of the HORUS stations than you can imagine—”

At least, I thought grimly, there had been more of them. In my service to the Ascendants I had visited many. Now I began to tell Nefertity of their history.

Some of the colonies were barely fit for human habitation; and indeed, it was debatable that those who lived there now were truly human. It was centuries since the oldest colonies were constructed, the first ones as way-stations for that great mad dream our ancestors had of seeding the stars. Later they became military outposts, and after the Second Shining many recusants fled to them in hopes of escaping the plagues and mutagenic warfare that swept the earth.

But of course these were not rebels in the sense of being revolutionaries or visionaries, criminals or outcasts or even political malcontents. They had never organized. They had no leaders, no political agenda. They were merely those who had the means and opportunity to commandeer the elÿon warships—Aviators and scientists, mostly, and their families and geneslaves; all of them eager to flee the countries they had helped destroy. They left Earth in whatever elÿon they could hijack, and within weeks or months they reached the colonies. Once there, the existing hierarchies were overthrown, the original HORUS technicians and settlers murdered, and the rebels moved in. From these rebel scientists and their military elite are descended the present Autocracy. An ignoble beginning for the Ascendants; but these rebels were not noble people. They were cowards and opportunists who lacked the discipline or vision to rule the world they had so eagerly violated and then abandoned.

They were stupid as well. Because even with all their knowledge of the stars, their carefully designed programs for biotopias and new strains of geneslaves fit to live in the colonies, the rebels knew nothing of the true nature of HORUS. Some of them had spent time within the settlements—Aviators, mostly, and those bioastrologists whose plans for the genetically engineered cacodemons were their undoing. But their lives had revolved around pure research, the endless petty manipulation of forms and figures on ’file screens and magisters. For them the decision to flee to HORUS was an expeditious one. They had little time to do more than assemble their cohorts and weaponry. As it turned out, the brief though bloody resistance they encountered from the original HORUS settlers was the easiest part of their diaspora.

Those original inhabitants had over several generations learned how to live within the limitations of the HORUS colonies. When they were executed, the bitter knowledge they had won was lost. The rebels were left with nothing but their computers and books and geneslaves. In a very short time, they began to die.

The children went first, and then their parents—grief made it easier for the madness to burrow into their minds. They were all so ill-suited for the colonies. You must imagine what it is like up there, inside those ancient failing structures, many of them windowless, others so open to the vastnesses of space that the eye rebels and creates imaginary landscapes kinder to memory and desire. And it is through such windows that the madness comes. Air locks are left open in the mistaken belief that they are doors leading to trees and grass; oxygen lines are pruned like vines. The rebels forgot that the word lunacy has its roots in the confrontation between men and the ancient watchers of the skies. Those who didn’t succumb to madness fell prey to inertia, depression, fear of being swallowed by the darkness.

The Aviators did better than the scientists. Our training is such that a subtle strain of madness is fed into us from childhood; the horrors of the roads between the stars do not affect us as they do ordinary women and men. But for the rest it was as bad a death as if they had remained on Earth, to perish in the next Shining or the viral wars. At the last only a handful, a score perhaps of the original hundred colonies were still settled. From them ruled the survivors of the rebel diaspora, a few families decimated by years of intermarriage and madness and betrayal. That was the Ascendant Autocracy. Of their retinue, the Aviators alone retained some semblance of intellectual and political purity, due to our inviolable vows of obedience.

If only the rebels had allowed a few of the original HORUS settlers to live! They might have helped them, taught them what they had learned over generations of living within those cruel chambers; but in their hubris the rebels had nearly all the technicians slain. They were afraid of insurgency, of betrayal to the governments they had left to founder below.

And so within a few years the rebel population dropped until only a few of the colonies could be said to be fully operational. Campbell; Helena Aulis; Qitai and Sternville; Fata 17 and Hotei. And Quirinus, of course, where the most powerful members of the Autocracy—the Ascendant Architects—finally settled after their colony on Pnin failed. These stations had enough equipment and wisdom to maintain contact with their capitals below. From them, the Autocracy successfully mounted war on the Balkhash Commonwealth and the Habilis Emirate, and continued to do so for centuries.

But in the HORUS colonies the human population dwindled. There were few natural births, and eventually very few vitro births. Finally, in desperation the HORUS scientists began experimenting with the geneslaves. Perversely, many of these—the cacodemons, the energumens, and argalæ—thrived in the rarefied atmosphere of HORUS. So, in an effort to bolster the puny stock of humanity, the scientists forced the few surviving women to breed with these monsters. The results were heteroclites, ranging from pathetic idiots to the horrific cloned energumens, who contained the childlike mind of their progenitor within a monstrous and insurgent corpus.

These energumens were clones, derived from a single source: the adolescent daughter of the pioneering geneticist Luther Burdock. Many were bred in the Archipelago and shipped to HORUS; others began life in the colony’s labs and allodiums. Originally all were females, which were thought to be more pliant. But at some point their chromosomes were altered so that there were males as well, although both sexes were sterile. They were rumored to be sexually voracious, but I had never witnessed them in any sort of physical congress; certainly they avoided the touch of human hands. To avoid giving them the opportunity to form close attachments or rebel, they lived for only three years. Even so, after centuries of living in HORUS the energumens had developed their own grotesque rituals, and a pronounced hatred of their human masters.

Unlike John Starving, I was not afraid of them. Though perhaps I should have been; my history might have been different then. They are difficult to kill, even with an Aviator’s arsenal, and clever, clever enough to pretend they did not know as much as they did of weaponry, and genetics, and betrayal. They often turned upon their creators, killing or enslaving them until rescue came from another Ascendant colony. In rare cases—the colony at Quirinus seems to have been one—they formed an uneasy alliance with their masters, and lived almost peaceably together. The energumens were the bastard children of science, after all: the monoclonal descendants of the first man to create human geneslaves. So it was not without a certain amount of desolate pride that the researchers watched their wretched offspring grow into their estate. They are massive creatures, larger than men and having a perverse, adolescent beauty. Also the volatility of adolescence, the groping need for justice (they are acutely aware of their infelicitous origins); and an insatiable hunger. So subtle and persuasive are the energumens that once I watched my best pilot engaged eagerly in debate by one, until she chanced too close to the monster’s long arms and it devoured her, its jaws shearing through her heavy leathers as though they were lettuces.

So much for the great dynasty the scientists would found in space. Now, gazing upon the empty sky where the Ascendants’ splendid lights should shine, I thought of the energumens. Had they finally rebelled against their masters?

It was a terrifying notion. That HORUS—the last real bastion of human technology, and the only means of linking those scattered outposts on Earth—might now be controlled by geneslaves….

They were physically stronger than we were. They had been engineered to live in places where humans never could—the hydrapithecenes in water, the salamanders in temperatures exceeding 125 degrees Fahrenheit. And the energumens possessed an intelligence that often exceeded that of their masters. That was why they were used as crew and engineers on Quirinus and Helena Aulis and Totma 3, the most important stations, where it was thought that they would be more reliable than humans, less prone to corruption or complicity.

I fell silent then, reluctant to share more of my fears with Nefertity. She looked away from me, and I let my gaze drift back to the heavens, anxiously scanning the stars for signs of other stations—the Commonwealth space settlement or the great shining links of Faharn Jhad, the Emirate’s colony. They were gone. I spotted a single glittering mote in the eastern sky that might have been part of Faharn Jhad, but that was all. HORUS was fallen, or falling.

After a long time Nefertity spoke. “If the geneslaves have rebelled, then this nemosyne you seek, the one called Metatron: surely it has fallen into their hands?”

I nodded grimly. “Or it might be that they are not aware of it—they may never have heard of it, for all I know. Or they may already possess it. If they have, it is even more important that I find it.”

Nefertity’s gaze turned to the unwinking lights of the valley settlement. “But how would you ever locate Metatron up there? And finding it, how could you seize it for yourself?”

I continued to stare at the sky. Finally I said, “The nemosyne network was designed so that each unit could, theoretically, communicate at any time with any other unit on Earth or within HORUS.”

She nodded, the pale golden gleam of her neural fibers casting a grave light upon her exquisite features. “But if there are none of us left—”

“There is at least one,” I said. I raised my hands before my face, flexing first the metal tendons of one and then my other, human, fingers. “You. Even if only one other nemosyne exists, it should be possible for you to contact it.”

“But I am only a folklore unit—”

“It doesn’t matter.” My voice was sharp. “There is a rudimentary communications network out there still—or was, as of seven months ago.”

I gazed at the horizon, now pale gray, the desert stars prickling and fading into dawn. “And there may be other network centers that survived the Shinings—the City of Trees had one, I found it in the ruins beneath the cathedral there. Quirinus had one as well. We have only to go there, and have you linked with it, and we could track down Metatron.”

The nemosyne’s eyes blazed with disdain. “Even with your humanity peeled away, you are a madman! I would never consent to this, Margalis. And even if I did—what then? If you were somehow to locate Metatron, even to possess it—what would you do? Ignite the remaining arsenals within its range and bring the Final Ascension to the world? No, I will never help you.”

A sudden desperation overcame me then. It was not the thought of the arsenals that drove me, but imagining a world with nothing to hold it together, not even barbarism. Because primitive as it may have been by the standards of earlier centuries, the Ascendant Autocracy had managed to cobble together some semblance of order, uniting those remaining pockets of civilization under the reign of the NASNA Aviators. By comparison, the Commonwealth and Emirate had only the most rudimentary technologies; and even these were failing.

And there was another reason. Something I could scarcely admit to myself, though I knew it was true. And that was this:

I had been trained—bred, practically—to serve. The betrayal I had originally intended with the aid of Metatron: was it not but another face of servitude, another sign of the chains that bound me to my masters, that I could think of no use for the nemosyne but to make war upon those who had used me as an instrument of war? Without the Ascendants I had neither foe nor master. I needed no reasons to live—I could not, cannot, think of myself as alive in any real sense. But I needed some compass to guide me. The Ascendants had been my lodestar. Without them or the world they had made, I was nothing but an empty shell, a corpse damned by my masters to wander the earth forever.

But with Metatron I might be able to find and unite those few surviving outposts, those scattered cities and celestial stations that had not yet been given to the darkness. In so doing I might find— must find—some reason for my existence, something greater than myself; something to serve. I was no longer human—indeed, some might think I had more in common with the energumens and other heteroclites than I did with my former ancestry. And yet something in me sickened at the thought of the world being wrenched from mankind and given over to its monstrous children. I turned to the nemosyne, took her shining metal hands within my own, and squeezed them, hard enough that their outer casings crackled like thin ice beneath a boot.

“If you do not consent, I will take you by force, Nefertity. Even within this shell I am still an Aviator. I know how to disable replicants and reprogram them. Then you really would be nothing but a hollow unit; but I would need nothing more than that for my purposes.”

She pulled away from me. I let her go. Where my steel hand had grasped her, her delicate outer skin glowed cobalt; but my human hand had left a black shadow upon her translucent membrane. Her voice was low as she replied, “Even with Metatron, the Aviator Imperator could not control the entire world.”

I laughed: a single sharp retort like a branch snapping. “I have no desire to rule the world, Nefertity—”

And I raised my metal hand until I could see my face reflected in the palm’s silver crater. A crimson mask of smooth plasteel, distorted into the semblance of my former, human visage. Only the eyes remained of that soft strata of flesh: eyes pale as melting snow, the blue all but leached from them even as all compassion and frailty had been leached from my soul. I spread my fingers until I could gaze out between them, past where Nefertity turned away in disgust; past where the first cold rays of sunlight struck the harsh earth. In the half-light three fetches lurched from shadow to shadow, shambling back to their crude homes. Miles distant, fougas would be returning to their hangars after seeding the countryside with viral rain. Somewhere miles above us the energumens rewove the tapestries their human parents had begun.

“It is a world that has already been twisted and burned and poisoned beyond all hope. It is a world already made in my own image,” I said at last, and lowered my metal hand. “I fear it is a world that is ready to die.”

And I cried out, a wailing shriek that sent the last night creatures scuttling into their holes, and shook the branches of the huisache like a cold wind. Then I turned away, my thoughts falling once more upon that game I had played decades before with Aidan Harrow and the others at the NASNA Academy. I knew now what I had not known then, that there was something that I feared—

The immortality I had been cursed with: the aeons that lay before me while I lived on and watched the world, my poisoned yet enduring world, drop from the faltering hands of humanity into ever deeper horror and decay.