Icarus Descending

8 Izanagi to Quirinus

INSIDE, THE IZANAGI RESEMBLED every elÿon freighter I had ever boarded: a vast gray space, the color of its pale carpeting lost beneath a layer of dust, its curved walls and ceiling hung with cobwebs that trapped more dust in patterns like limp feathers. The port authority was supposed to disinfect all personnel and freight to prevent intrusions by insects or other parasites. Still, the spiders got on board, somehow. I had never seen an elÿon that did not have them, rain-colored droplets sliding up and down the struts of the drunken webs they wove, unhinged by the craft’s strange gravity.

The Izanagi seemed cleaner than most vessels—the result of neglect more than fastidiousness. It had been traveling among the HORUS colonies for several months now, with only its adjutant living on board. I half-expected there to be energumen rebels hidden within its chambers, or some kind of automated weaponry; but I found no evidence of either. Perhaps the energumens had used it and cast it adrift until it returned to Cisneros; perhaps it had never come within the reach of the rebel Alliance. But I was impatient, and willing to risk the dangers in order to reach Quirinus.

As Valeska, Nefertity, and I stepped out into the main entryway, a bell chimed, a hollow, high-pitched tone alerting the crew to our arrival. A minute later doors opened in the misty walls, and several replicant servers appeared to escort us.

“Imperator Tast’annin,” one hissed. It was a fifth-generation Maio server, dating from the Third Ascension, tall and slender like some attenuated metal insect, with small glowing red eyes. “May I show you to your quarters?”

“No,” I said shortly, and turned to the server addressing Valeska, another Maio construct with that distinctive sibilant voice. “Captain Novus is the only one among us who will need formal quarters. Who is the adjutant aboard?”

The servers looked at each other and exchanged a round of clicking noises. Then the first one plucked Valeska’s sleeve and began to cross toward a wide round door.

“Imperator Tast’annin—” Valeska’s voice was pinched, a little desperate. I recalled that she had never been to HORUS, and so would not have been inside an elÿon before, except on inspection. I raised my hand and tried to sound reassuring.

“I will find you after we’ve embarked.” She nodded once, stumbling a little as her replicant guide escorted her through the door. Beside me Nefertity waited in silence, observing the remaining two Maio units with smoldering green eyes.

“They will not harm her?” she asked at last.

“Harm her?” I gestured dismissively at the replicants. They swiveled their silver heads and walked away, to disappear back down the long gray corridors that had disgorged them. “No. They’re standard escorts. Relatively speaking, few humans make the journeys on the elÿon. There will be no human crew on this one save its adjutant. And Captain Novus, of course.”

Nefertity turned to survey our chamber. Motes of crystal light danced in the air around her, white and blue and red; the only true colors in that room. “Is it all so dreary?”

I crossed to where an arched doorway opened onto a dim corridor and beckoned Nefertity to follow me. “It’s deliberate,” I replied. “After the Third Ascension, elÿon travel grew quite common, but the rate of psychosis among the crews and passengers was so high that some vessels arrived with all hands dead, save the adjutants. We now believe that any kind of stimulation contributes to the illness—”

I gestured at the smooth, drab walls, the soft indirect light that made everything look as though it had been cast in pewter. “—So the design attempts to soothe travelers. At least here in the entry foyer and cabins. Other parts of the vessel might be more interesting, if they’ve bothered with them at all. Most vessels no longer employ a human crew.”

Nefertity moved noiselessly behind me as we walked down the hall. “But your Aviators? How do they travel?”

“The same as anyone else. A mild anesthesia, psychotropic drugs. After twelve or so hours they can walk around the decks, but the replicants will always accompany them in case there’s need for intervention.”

“And you?” Nefertity paused to stare out a tiny window that showed nothing but a hazy umber darkness. “Did you travel like that?”

I strode past her, my boot heels thudding on the carpeted floor. “At first. But I was more disciplined than most. After several years the drugs were no longer necessary. Many people grow bored on the elÿon, but I always find it interesting to visit the adjutants.”

Nefertity left the window and followed a few steps behind me. “Is that where we are going now?”

I nodded. I was weary of conversation. It made it difficult for me to concentrate on where I actually was. So featureless were our surroundings that my memories threatened to spill over into them, paint a sky over the dun-colored ceilings and sow the floors with the lush reeds and vines I had last seen in the Archipelago. Such hallucinations were a commonplace of elÿon journeys. I had taught myself to overcome them, and even now I had no reason to believe I would be any more susceptible than I had been, since the trappings of my humanity had been flensed from me as carefully as the rind from an orange. But my mind remained human, prey to fears, especially since I found my thoughts returning again and again to my youth. I would need to concentrate fully on the problem of what had become of the HORUS colonies.

There were no other corridors branching off this one; very few doors, and those few locked. I knew they opened onto the vast network of pipes and conduits that channeled rivers of nucleic fluid throughout the craft, the seemingly random maze of glass and plasteel veins that pumped liquid data and propulsion fluid to the heart of the vessel. The elÿon was like a gargantuan beast, an immense vein-fed polyp encased in polymer heat shields and glassy plates. Instead of a rudimentary brain it had the adjutant, sealed within his cell; and as parasites, those few passengers it would consent to carry, safely strapped within their own small cavities at the vessel’s center. The elÿon were the zenith of the Ascendants’ centuries of toying with human and animal genetics: living vessels that swam among the stars.

The single corridor spiraled slowly out and up, as we traveled toward the center of the huge craft. Real windows appeared now, still narrow but letting in ribboned shafts of orange flame, the occasional lancing dart of a searchlight or passing aviette. It was like walking within the coils of a vast shell, its pale interior lit by intermittent flares of candlelight. Sensing my mood (she was, after all, a sort of woman), Nefertity remained silent, only now and then stopped to stare out a window.

“That is the adjutant’s chamber, there.”

My voice sounded too loud, amplified by the empty hall. I pointed to where the corridor ended in a high arch, its spandrel a sheet of clear plasteel opening onto a knot of coiled tubes, flickering yellow and green where navigational fluids pulsed through them. We passed beneath the arch, and I heard the faint sound, part serpentine hiss and part sigh, that signaled entry into the adjutant’s quarters.

The manifest Agent Shi Pei had given me listed one Zeloótes Franschii as the Izanagi’s sole crew, his inception date nearly a year earlier. This would be his last journey. The chemically induced insomnia necessary for successful navigation could not be kept up for more than ten or twelve solar months before dementia, and finally coma, set in. More than a few elÿon had been lost when their adjutants died en route to HORUS, but I had already decided not to worry about that.

I pointed to the far end of the great room, telling Nefertity, “His name is Zeloótes Franschii. We will talk to him—they grow lonely on these voyages, and one can learn much from adjutants. The process of navigating the elÿon makes one’s mind as an empty cup, and many strange things are poured into it.”

The entire far wall had been given over to a huge scanner, its curved surface covered with details that did not resemble a map so much as an illuminated anatomical chart. But it was a map, showing the elÿon’s interior construction as well as an illuminated diagram of the adjutant’s brain, with glowing bursts of color indicating those portions being stimulated by the bath of neurots and electrical pulses that made up the elÿon’s navigational system. As a subtle underlay to all this there was a chart of the heavens, showing both the renamed constellations—Maswan, the Circumfuge, Eisler 33—and the drunken orbits of the HORUS colonies, Quirinus and Totma 3 and Adhvi Sar, Sternville and Hotei and Helena Aulis.

“That is a navigational chart?”

I smiled, hearing Sister Loretta Riding’s incredulity in the nemosyne’s words. “It is.”

“They must go mad, studying it.”

“They do.”

We reached the wall. It was a moment before my eyes could focus on the adjutant. He seemed a part of that whole baroque design, an insect snared in some great luminous web. A withered, frail creature pinned to the wall, tubes and wires and vials strung about him like so many sacrificial offerings.

“Lascar Franschii.” I used the ancient term for sailor, the word the adjutants use to describe themselves.

The spindly figure twitched, so freighted with the instruments that kept him alive that he could scarcely move.

“Imperator Tast’annin.” The voice was a low sibilant. It came not from the man in front of us but from a speaking tube above his head. His own mouth was plugged with a wide corrugated tube, pale yellow like a sandworm. His eyes were gone, plucked from his head before his first journey and replaced by two gleaming faceted jewels that had sunk deeply into the hollow sockets beneath his brow. His skin had collapsed into folds like crumpled worn velvet, gray and yellow. There was no way of telling what race of man he had been; he scarcely seemed a man at all. As he spoke, his head jerked almost imperceptibly. I could sense the faint heat from his optics as their gaze swept across my face. “Imperator, you honor me.”

There was no way to tell if the words were meant ironically. I glanced aside at Nefertity. She stared with wide emerald eyes glittering as the adjutant’s own.

“But this is a terrible thing,” she said in a low voice. She raised her hands as though to offer him some comfort. “That is a man there—they are torturing a man!”

A spasm crossed the adjutant’s cheek. He might have been amused, or in pain—although it was unusual for them to feel pain, their sensory receptors having long since been destroyed. “You have a compassionate replicant,” his hollow voice rang out. “How interesting.”

“Are you in pain?” Nefertity approached him, stretched her silvery fingers to graze the slack line of his jaw. “Why have they done this to you?”

A hoarse wheezing crackled from the speaking tube: laughter. “Oh, but it is an honor, replicant. Almost as much an honor as has been given your master in his new body.”

I felt a jolt of anger. Had he been another kind of man, I would have killed him. But his judgment was impaired; he had lost the neural inhibitors that should have kept him from speaking to me thus. And his term as adjutant was nearly ended; meaning, of course, his life. The adjutants were given careful doses of prions, brain proteins that attack the thalamus and intercept sleep. The permanent dream-state induced by this enables them to lose all sensory perception, so that their impressions can be better channeled into the elÿon’s neural web and so provide the mindless biotic vessels with a governing consciousness. The adjutant’s body was fed by the complex if primitive web of tubes. The simpler side effects of the prion disease—increased heartbeat, elevated body temperature—were regulated by monitors and a NET. The hallucinations do not usually interfere with the elÿon’s progress, although once in an elegant if destructive pas de deux two of the billowing craft seemed to have been controlled by the same dream, and collided. Their wreckage still spans the outer orbit of the HORUS station Advhi Sar. The only aspect of the navigational method that cannot be controlled is this inevitable disintegration of the brain, as the proteins cause the thalamus to shrink and leave spongy holes in the cortex. It is a relatively slow death, but painless, except for those rare occasions when sensory hallucinations set the navigators shrieking and tossing in their webs.

“It is an honor of sorts,” I said stiffly. “They are political prisoners who would otherwise be executed—”

“Innocent! Innocent!” His words were garbled almost beyond recognition by the speaking tube. A spew of nonsense followed, ending with a high-pitched yowl like a cat’s. Nefertity drew back from the wall, her eyes sparking alarm.

“It is the preliminary phases of his dementia,” I explained. “It is unusual for them to live for more than twelve months—I had hoped we might see him through his final voyage.”

As suddenly as they had begun, the adjutant’s screams stopped. “Oh, I will live,” he said, the speaking tube giving his words a hollow resonance. “I have already received notice of when I will die: not until after you disembark at Quirinus. I have a few more errands left to do.” His head flopped back and forth as another burst of raw laughter exploded in the chamber.

I wondered what those errands might be, and who was commanding him. Which of the colonies still had Ascendants governing the elÿon fleet? To my later grief I did not ask Lascar Franschii about this. Instead I turned to Nefertity. “Is this disturbing you? If so, you can join Captain Novus in her quarters.”

A rattling from the adjutant’s speaking tube brought more laughter. “Imperator! You are so solicitous of your fembot.” The last word came out as a derisive gasp.

The nemosyne turned her lantern eyes upon the man pinned to the wall. “I will go,” she said, and walked away. “Your cruelties sicken me.”

“So sensitive!” cried Lascar Franschii. “Tell me, Imperator, when did our masters order the creation of these softhearted constructs? I am moved, touched, fascinated beyond measure by such a thing! Are they all like this now, or is it only the Imperators who are given such delicacies?”

I took a step toward him, grabbing the coil of crimson and blue and green tubes feeding into the myriad slits in his body. “Be silent, Lascar Franschii, else—”

“Oooh, oooh!” The adjutant gasped and moaned, writhing within his webbed prison. “Be quick, be quick, be still my heart—” Above him the shimmering map glowed more brightly. A trailer of gold like flame shot from one end of the wall to the other. The optics that glittered where his eyes had been flared deep blue, nearly black, and his mouth twisted into a hateful grimace. “Paaugh—I curse you, Tast’annin, your eyes betray you—”

I felt a sudden weariness, a sickness with myself for reacting to the ravings of an adjutant, and dropped my hand. The tubes fell back against the wall with a thud. “My eyes?”

“Yesss—” The speaking tube quivered as he hissed. “My brothers fought you at the Archipelago. On Kalimantan. I was only a child, they kept me hidden in the caverns with the other children and the hydrapithecenes. But I saw you on the ’files—you did not laugh when the bodies ignited, as your troops did. The sight sickened you, did it not? It drove you to destruction! How can a man look upon such things and not go mad? Your eyes are the same now as they were then—they betray you, Imperator! What is it like to be a corpse, and have no tongue to cleave to your mouth in fear? Where does the fear go when you die?”

The optics rattled in his eye sockets, the speaking tube bulged from his twisted mouth as though he would disgorge it. Rage swept through me and I cried, “Silence, Lascar! I will engage another elÿon—be still!”

I raised my hand threateningly, but he took no notice. Why should he? After a moment I turned away and headed for the door. I had nearly reached it when the adjutant’s voice roared out, so heavily amplified that the nets of wires shook like vines storm-rent against the wall.

“Do not waste your efforts, Imperator! None of the other elÿon have clearance to attend upon Quirinus.”

I stopped and looked back. “Why not?”

Within the glowing interstices of the nav charts, the adjutant’s form twitched as he raised his head. “There is no one left to command them. No one but you. Besides, Quirinus should still be under quarantine. It was beset by plague, hidden in a rice shipment from the Archipelago. The station was sabotaged by a Commonwealth delator posing as a psycho-botanist.”

Spikes of greenish light flowed from his optics. It was easy to imagine triumph in his voice, though the speaking tube rendered nearly all emotion from it.

“Which plague?”

“ Irpex irradians. ” As the words boomed out, the adjutant’s head drooped upon his chest, as though exhausted. “Every one of them. Dead.”

“So I was told by commanding Agent Shi Pei. Is there any. danger of contagion?”

The adjutant’s shoulders twitched in what might have been a shrug. “Who knows? I would not rely on her word, though. Agent Shi Pei grows lax in her duties. I hear she spends much of her time in a hammock, smoking kef and reviewing ’files relating to the destruction of NASNA Prime.”

“But no official quarantine was ever declared,” I said.

The adjutant’s head tilted in a nod. “True. The energumens were immune, and there are no human survivors. The microphage can live for only seventy-two hours without a host. But you have no reason to fear, Imperator, you and your sentimental construct. Even our masters do not yet have organic plagues to attack the dead—and plague may be the least of your problems, if the Alliance succeeds with its plans.”

“I have a woman with me, Valeska Novus. I would not have her harmed—”

The adjutant’s voice came out in a dull moan. “Check with the Quirinus scholiast if you don’t believe me. There is little danger of contagion.”

I nodded. “Very well. Tell me of this Alliance.”

He raised his head, and this time I could see where his mouth was drawn in a cold, small smile, like a bloodless wound.

“It began on Sternville. The energumens rioted, and the cacodemons. They commandeered an aviette and attacked Helena Aulis and MacArthur, raising troops along the way. Cacodemons, mostly, and aardmen; also those argalæ intelligent enough to follow what was happening. Since then they’ve taken several of the Commonwealth stations, destroyed NASNA Prime and the Triton mining platform, and they tried to attack Urisa headquarters—anyplace where geneslaves outnumbered the human population, which is nearly everywhere in HORUS. The energumens lead them. They say that they have sent rebels to Earth, to organize geneslaves there in mass revolts. They say there has long been an underground network, of geneslaves and humans both, working to overthrow the tyranny of the Ascendants.”

“But how can this have happened?” I asked. “And so quickly—”

A low moan came from the speaking tube. “Slaves, Imperator—not even genetic monsters will stay slaves forever. There is a robot that leads them, a construct they call the Oracle. To rally the energumens, it speaks to them of Luther Burdock—”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Luther Burdock? The geneticist?”

“Yes. The energumens think of him as their father. Some of them worship his memory. I have seen it—in the HORUS colonies strange rituals evolve among the energumens and pass quickly from one generation to the next. And so this Oracle has preyed upon their beliefs. It has told them that Luther Burdock has been resurrected and will lead his monstrous children in war against mankind.”

“And is it true?” I demanded.

The adjutant shuddered. “Who knows? Certainly it is true that the rebellion has spread everywhere that there are geneslaves—which, of course, is every place on HORUS and Earth. And it is true that some people claim they can still see a resemblance to Burdock’s daughter in the energumen clones. And, ” he added slyly, the speaking tube magnifying his glottal voice, “there are those who have always believed that he made certain preparations for his eventual return.”

I was silent. Of course. There had always been whispered remarks at the Academy when we spoke of Burdock, rumors that he had cloned not only his daughter but himself. But in four hundred years he had never resurfaced. Why now? I looked at Lascar Franschii and asked, “The energumens who have returned to Earth—how have they done so?”

The wires and tubes holding the adjutant snapped and shook like bridge cables in a high wind. “By elÿon, of course! They commandeered the elÿon and disembarked in the hidden zones! You have seen yourself how easy it would be—”

I thought about that for several minutes; thought about Lascar Franschii, who had no reason to love the Ascendants. Yes, it would be very easy to get an adjutant to defect.

I shook my head. Even so: a geneslave rebellion on Earth! It was an absurd thought. And yet it had happened on Quirinus, and on all the other stations as well, if I was to believe Zeloótes Franschii. I had seen for myself the empty sky where the splendid lights of HORUS should have been.

I realized then that I should have spent more time at Cisneros, reviewing whatever newsfiles they had and trying to locate any human survivors of the rebellions. I might have learned more of how the world had changed while I died and was reborn. I might not have forgotten my original intent in going to Quirinus, which was to find the nemosyne called Metatron. And I might have spared myself much of what was to follow.

I gazed once more at the glittering web that held the adjutant. “Tell me, then, Lascar Franschii: what is it that they want?”

A distinct cough. Pinkish spittle flew in a coarse spray around my head. “Our destruction, of course!” His laughter ,. rippled through the room. “The Oracle has taught them well. I have seen it: its ’file appears and they sit before it enthralled, and afterward go forth to do its will. I would never take orders from such a thing—a replicant, a mere robot; but paugh! these geneslaves, they are like children. You can manipulate them with words and pictures.

“And that is what the Oracle has done. It has told them that they have a destiny, that they are to repopulate the world. It has told them that was the grand dream that Luther Burdock had for them. They can’t reproduce as we humans can, at least not yet; but sooner or later they will find a way to do that as well. Sooner, I think.”

“But someone must command this robot! Who?”

The shining web trembled until I thought he would fall from it. His face twisted with some terrible effort, and then he smiled, a horrible grimace that made me take a step back.

“Well, Imperator, the Oracle says that Luther Burdock is alive. I believe the Oracle is his.”

I regarded him coldly. “And how do you know so much of this, Lascar?”

He shuddered, and with great effort produced another tortured smile.

“I told you.” His voice spilled from the speaking tube, harsh and deep. “They have commandeered many elÿon to take them to Earth….”

“And what then, Lascar Franschii?” My voice was cold with rage. “Did the insurgents confide in you their plans beyond the destruction of mankind?”

The optics in the adjutant’s skull sent out pulses of brilliant blue and orange. “Surely you know the rest, Imperator! ‘O brave new world, That has such people in’t!’ Two legs good, but four legs will be better, when the aardmen come into power—which, of course, they never will.

“You know what they say: ‘The Revolution is like Saturn; it eats its own children.’ I hear the energumens are doing that already. And once they have seized control, they will not relinquish it, to mankind or other geneslaves, even if it means death. They would have made wonderful Aviators, Imperator.”

I stretched out my hand and tapped restively at the wall. At last I asked, “But the Ascendants must still be governing from somewhere. Not everyone was in HORUS.”

“Of course not!” The adjutant’s voice rose to a howl. “Our masters will admit no failure, they will admit nothing! They are trying to govern us from the reclaimed capital now, and from Vancouver and New Wichita. But every envoy they have sent to Quirinus has been killed. Their bodies are returned via elÿon, their heads grafted onto their stomachs, their brains removed and looped together like a string of drying morels.”

“And this is the work of—?”

The adjutant’s head hobbled enthusiastically. Scarlet lights rippled across the web to form an aureole around his twisted body. “The energumens. They are like children whose tyrannical rector has been slain! They laugh and make a game of toying with the remains of their masters, and anyone foolish enough to interrupt their play.”

His voice swooped to a conspiratorial tone. “Ah, but you know, Imperator, I think that they are starting to succumb to the same lunacies as their masters. Some of them claim to have seen the Watcher in the Skies—yes, I heard them, they spoke of it and I laughed and they grew angry with me. They do not like it when you laugh at them. Others believe they are the children of the Final Ascension, and those on Quirinus are Amazons.

“I’ve never seen anything like them. Converts to the Mysteries of Lysis. A priest was interned there for several months, before the Ascendants grew impatient with his doctrine. He made quite an impression upon the energumens, though, especially their leader. Kalamat, her sisters call her; of course, their masters called them all Kalamat. She has an artistic temperament, Imperator—a great admirer of the dance, and your mother’s poetry, and sonic sculptures by people like Kyrië Martinez.”

The adjutant choked on his laughter. “But in a few days you will be able to see for yourself, Imperator Tast’annin. I have received clearance to depart now. I suggest you find an empty cell and position yourself until we are underway.”

I nodded grimly and took my leave, pausing at the doorway to gaze back to where he thrashed and moaned within his web, the nav chart glimmering around him. I stood there for several minutes, thinking on what he had said.

Kalamat: The Miracle. I knew the name, of course, any child fortunate enough to have formal schooling knew of Kalamat and her history; and even those children who had never seen a scroll or classroom had been threatened with Kalamat’s fate if they did not behave. I wondered what it meant, that an energumen with that name now led her sisters on Quirinus. Finally I left, Lascar Franschii’s sickly laughter echoing behind me.

I quickly found an empty chamber, but once there I found it difficult to calm myself. Instead I stood beside the wall, gazing at a scrim showing a night view of Tokyo Bay before the Three Hour War. My mind raced as I tried to make sense of all that I had learned. There was nothing to be done, now that we were underway; no point in returning to the City of Trees, since I knew I would not find Metatron there. I did not care just yet to confront my surviving superiors in Vancouver or New Wichita. They might view my actions as a defection, and feel that their rasa Imperator was in need of further rehabilitation, or even permanent retirement. I felt lost amid some inner labyrinth, trying to find the one path that would bring me clear of all these maddening things—Metatron, the rebel Alliance, Kalamat, Luther Burdock’s Oracle.

And so, lost among them, I remembered a day at the Academy, long long ago….

“I’m not going.” Aidan stopped in front of the door, throwing his head back so that his auburn hair fell into his eyes. “It’s barbaric, their bringing an energumen in like this….”

John and I looked at each other in surprise. Aidan’s reaction was bizarre, especially in light of Aidan’s mockery of John’s revelations during our last game of Fear. If John could overcome his revulsion at an energumen, surely the fearless Aidan Harrow could do the same.

“It will probably be in a cage, Aidan,” I said reassuringly. “We’ll sit in the back if you’re worried—”

Aidan shot him a furious glance, then shook his head. “I’m not afraid, Sky Pilot,” he said, using the derisive nickname I hated. “It’s just—well, it’s cruel, that’s all, cruel and…”

His voice died, maybe because what part of our studies did not have to do with cruelty? We were in the hallway outside the first-level classroom, where of late we had been studying Luther Burdock, whose devoutly cruel lifework was to make possible all the later horrors of our own age.

Of course, our rectors did not think of Burdock in such terms. To them—and to us their students, still living in the golden haze of youth—Burdock was a hero, the brilliant geneticist who refused to recant his beliefs and so was executed by the fundamentalists of the short-lived Third Ascendancy. For the last few weeks we had been watching old ’files of him in his laboratory, and re-creating some of his more basic experiments in our own classrooms. It was horrifying and fascinating work, even on such a primitive schoolboy level—watching the retroviruses do their work upon a colony of cyclops, exposing amoebas and paramecia and brine shrimp to the metrophages and seeing them change, almost before our eyes. We could not, of course, replicate even the simplest of Dr. Burdock’s efforts at real gene-splicing, but then we didn’t really need to. The evidence was all around us in any case: the aardmen who did the heavy labor at the Academy, lifting hundred-kilo sacks of flour and moving the huge video backdrops of the cycloramas where we held our war games; the hydrapithecenes and sirens that acted as victims in our simulated raids on the Archipelago, imprisoned in their tidal pools; the argalæ that serviced the older male students in the nearby town of Kasco. No, the NASNA Academy was not lacking in geneslaves. What surprises me now is how few of us were ever moved by their plight.

We had all of us since childhood been thrilled and terrified by tales of Dr. Burdock. He had refined the primitive work of the twenty-first century’s genetic engineers and created the first-generation geneslaves for the Ascendants. He was equal measures Louis Pasteur and Victor Frankenstein, his legend as much a part of our lives as his creations. That was why it was odd to see Aidan so disturbed by Burdock’s work with his daughter. It was a terrible thing, perhaps, but it had happened so long ago, and at any rate, we had been hearing about it forever.

John Starving nudged me, whispering, “We’d better go in—there’s Bowra—”

I turned to see our rector plodding down the corridor, his worn crimson leathers burnished by the light spilling from the high recessed windows above him. John and I started in, but Aidan remained in the hall, glaring defiantly in Bowra’s direction.

“Come on —you’ll be sent down!—” I hissed. Aidan had missed so many classes and training sessions that the infirmary had a permanent carrel for him. His wrists were raw where he had been strapped in, and his eyes had dark circles beneath them, from the nightmares induced by the drugs they fed him in a futile effort to make him more pliant. I yanked at his arm, pulling him through the door after me. He swore as John and I dragged him to the back of the chilly room and shoved him into an ancient metal folding chair. We threw ourselves into the seats next to his. A small pulse throbbed at the corner of John’s mouth, showing how angry he was with Aidan; but Aidan only slouched in his chair and glared sullenly at the front of the room. By the window I could see Emma Harrow, staring at us with a frown. She was fascinated, practically enthralled, by Luther Burdock. She and John argued endlessly over the ethical aspects of his work. When she saw me looking at her, she turned away and started talking to another student.

A moment later Bowra entered. His piggish eyes darted suspiciously across the rows of exhausted cadets.

“Good morning,” he croaked brusquely. He turned to crank up the dilapidated old ’file machine, and the morning’s session began.

Flickering ’file images filled the room. “Cassandra, Virginia, United States, 2069,” Bowra recited in a bored voice, and leaned back upon his desk.

The first part was familiar enough: old holofiles showing the everyday life of the great man. Burdock and his daughter Cybele eating dinner in their grand compound, attended by the first generation of aardmen—surprisingly slight and hirsute creatures, resembling dogs more than their descendants do. Burdock strolling the grounds of his mountain compound, pointing out the cages where aardmen howled and scratched, the huge oceanic tank that imprisoned his leviathan folly Zalophus. A carefully staged shot of Burdock leafing through books full of fotos, pretending to search for the individual who would be the perfect subject for his work. Burdock dropping the books and throwing up his hands in exaggerated dismay at the hopelessness of his task.

Then the ’files changed. Now they had a clarity, a documentary quality that the earlier ones had lacked, and which I found chilling. My friends did too—when I glanced at them, their eyes were fixed on the front of the room, and while John frowned, Aidan’s pale face held a look of disgust that bordered on terror.

We saw Cybele alone in her room, curly head bent over a scroll, her face screwed into a frown as she strove to hear whatever it was saying. My heart ached to see her. She was so young, so much prettier than any of the Academy recruits, with their hard darting eyes and nervous hands. The picture shifted to a formal holo portrait of father and daughter, Cybele smiling wistfully, as though she already knew where her future lay.

And finally, ancient ’files from that remarkable operation; images as famous as the archival footage of the First Shining or the twentieth-century lunar ascent. The kindly man’s head bent over the shining elfin face of his trusting adolescent daughter. Her fearless gaze, the little-girl voice asking We won’t die? and his soft reply—

“We will die. But then we will be regenerated, because of that— ”

And the camera scanned the banks of steel and glass crucibles, the metal canisters and frozen vials of DNA. Then came quick flashes of Cybele unconscious, and Luther Burdock’s pale face and fatigue-smudged eyes staring at a gleaming steel vat where something floated, a whitish form like a bloated football, turning over and over as fluids churned into the vat and still Luther Burdock watched, patient and exhausted: waiting, waiting.

And, finally, Burdock staring exultantly as across the clipped green lawns of his compound came the slender figures of two girls. Hand in hand, wearing identical shifts of white linen, their dark curls spilling around heart-shaped faces: Cybele and her cloned sister.

Kalamat. The miracle.

“You know the rest, of course,” Bowra coughed wearily, letting the ’file flicker into stray shafts of silver and blue light that sprayed across our faces. “Now to end this segment of your training module, I’ve arranged for one of the Kalamat series to be brought here this morning—”

He glanced at his watch, pressed it, and impatiently spoke to the Junior Officer who served as his flunky. A few minutes later we all turned at the sound of two sets of footsteps echoing down the corridor.

“Imre, that toad,” Aidan hissed, grimacing.

Pilot Imre’s tread was easily recognized, because of his limp. But the other step was unfamiliar: a heavy, even ponderous, tread, as of huge feet dragging slowly across the cold stone floors. John and I exchanged glances. I knew he was recalling that cage in Wyalong so many years ago. But he only smiled at me wryly before turning away.

I looked over at Aidan and saw how pale he was. The freckles stood out on his high cheekbones, and he stared fixedly at his knees. I leaned over to say something to him, something reassuring. But before I could speak, the door was flung open. The energumen stumbled into our classroom.

It was huge, even larger than I had expected—nearly eight feet tall. Pilot Imre walked beside it, separated by several feet of heavy luminous chains. He held a sonic cudgel between his nervous fingers. The thing was sedated, of course. It trudged into the middle of the room, where Imre sent a small blast at it—an unnecessary cruelty. The thing moaned softly and we all gasped.

Because its voice, at least, had not changed. It was still the voice of a fifteen-year-old girl, childlike, horribly out of place in that cold, echoing chamber. I shivered and muttered a curse. Beside me I could hear John Starving swearing under his breath. Of the three of us only Aidan was silent, his gray-green eyes fixed on the front of the room.

I don’t know what would have been more terrible—to view some creature utterly flensed of all resemblance to its human originator, or to see what we saw. A huge figure, unmistakably human but no less monstrous for all that—tall and big-boned, its head shaven and tattooed with an identifying ideogram that showed it belonged to the independent Urisa Agency, an L-5 mining conglomerate. Its arms were corded with muscle, its legs thick and welted with the marks of chains and with raw blisters left by other cudgels.

But when Imre tugged its chain, the creature raised its head; and there was the face of Cybele Burdock. Grotesquely elongated, with flesh the color of obsidian rather than Cybele’s tawny brown, and rampant with scars; but Cybele’s face nonetheless. I knew it by the eyes, if nothing else. Because even though it would certainly have killed me without thinking, crushing my head between its huge hands like a melon husk, still it had the eyes of a child—bright and wistful despite the sedatives. Hopeful, even, as though somewhere within that monstrous body Cybele Burdock was still imprisoned, and still dreamed of escape.

“God, look at her.” Next to me John Starving tightened his hands upon his knees. “She’s just like that other one, in Wyalong—it’s like it’s the same one —”

I nodded, my mouth too dry to speak. When I glanced at Aidan, he was gazing at the energumen in a sort of horrified rapture. I quickly looked away.

At the front of the room Bowra was rattling on about the energumens—their strength, their speed, their intelligence. At the word intelligence several cadets broke into nervous laughter. The drugs, combined with the incongruous innocence of its features, gave the energumen the appearance of a huge and slightly witless child.

“Come on, then. Say your name. Tell them who you are,” rasped Bowra, as Imre gave the chain another yank and prodded the energumen impatiently. There was a burst of static, loud enough to make my ears ring. The energumen cried out, tried to clap its hands to its ears, but the chains held it back. Imre shouted at it, pointing to the classroom full of rapt faces.

“Your name! Go on, tell them—”

The energumen swayed from side to side, staring fixedly at the floor as it moaned softly. Then, very slowly, it raised its shaven head and spoke.

“Kalamat.”

Its eyes, so dark they were almost black, stared pleadingly at the silent room.

Will it hurt, Daddy?

I looked away; but beside me I could see how Aidan strained to see it, could hear his breathing and the curses he murmured, nearly drowned by Imre’s command.

“ Louder! ”

“Kalamat,” the energumen whispered in its childish voice, and began to weep.