Elizabeth Hand - Icarus Descending

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.