Elizabeth Hand - Icarus Descending

But now Kalaman was too exhausted to send his thoughts any farther than his own head. He raised one hand, shading his eyes from the glow of the canopy, and turned slightly until he could see across the room.

“Ratnayaka,” he whispered.

On the other side of the chamber Ratnayaka stirred. He had not heard Kalaman, precisely; instead he felt him, like the breath of a moth’s wing across his consciousness. He was identical to his sibling, except for the color of his skin, which was an ivory yellow, the color of a jaundiced eye; that and the fact that he really did possess a single jaundiced eye, the other having been replaced by a keek. After the successful rebellion on Helena Aulis he had pried the prosthetic orb from its socket. It still had not healed completely: the nearly atrophied eyelid hung in a limp fold of flesh, giving him a queasy look. And so Ratnayaka, who was vain (another anomaly; he too had been a member of Cluster 579) wore a patch over that eye, a neatly woven circle of red-and-gold silk tied about his sleek long head with a cord of braided hemp. Like Kalaman he had filed his upper front teeth into dull white V’s and stained his lower teeth red with madder-root, so that they disappeared when he opened his mouth. A line of thin gold rings hung from a series of tiny piercings in his brow. As he crossed the chamber to Kalaman, the rings made a nearly imperceptible tinkling.

“O, my brother,” Ratnayaka said softly. In a room full of energumens speaking, one would hear the same voice over and over—louder, softer, angry, laughing—an effect that had driven their masters to distraction, and which Kalaman had exploited when planning the revolt on Helena Aulis. “O Kalaman, I am here—”

Kalaman drew him close, his fingers playing with the rings dangling above Ratnayaka’s eye patch. “Ratnayaka, beloved: I have done as the Oracle bade me. I have called to our sisters on Quirinus. All but my sister Kalamat—she does not seem to hear me.” He frowned, let his hand move up and across his sibling’s forehead, to rub the coarse stubble on his skull. “We should go there soon, I think.”

Ratnayaka nodded. “Of course.” He had been thinking the same thing himself.

Quirinus was where the Ascendant Architects had lived, before they succumbed to the plague loosed by one of the Alliance’s human sympathizers. The energumens on Quirinus were among the last to join the Alliance. At least, Kalaman assumed they had aligned themselves with the rebels; what energumens would not? In the last few months he had spoken to many of his kind, through standard ’file transmissions and the more subtle forms of thought that left him drained and shaken. He had been surprised that there were so many of them: their human masters had done a good job of keeping their numbers a secret. And the Oracle claimed there were more of them than could be imagined down below, on the Element. Energumens and cacodemons, aardmen and argalæ and even men and women—the Oracle had promised Kalaman a place of honor among them all, a place of honor beside their father when Kalaman and his brothers returned to the Element.

And so he was anxious to leave Helena Aulis, the hollow metal torus that had been prison to him for the twenty months of his brief life. He and his brothers had no reason to continue to stay within the HORUS colonies. Their enemies were dead; any weaponry could be transported to the Element, to better serve the Alliance. To hasten their journey there, the Oracle had arranged for an elÿon to meet them a few days hence—a vessel called the Izanagi, whose adjutant had been easily subverted by the rebels on Totma 3. They had given the navigator enough of a neural supply to forestall his pre-programmed death by several weeks. Enough time, the Oracle had told them, to launch another round of assaults upon the Element. The elÿon would rendezvous at Quirinus. There Kalaman and his brothers would board it; and the others, their sisters. Kalaman had never seen a female energumen. At Quirinus he would finally meet the one they called Kalamat; the only one who, consciously or not, had not responded to his mental forays. He was anxious to leave the station, anxious that the others should know of the journey that awaited them.

“I will tell our brothers,” Kalaman said.

He closed his eyes. All about him the simulated wind stirred, the curlews cried and swept past on imaginary currents that could not warm him. Kalaman relaxed, tried to open his mind and heart to his brothers on Helena Aulis; but it was no use. The effort of calling to the other energumens across the void that yawned between this station and Quirinus had exhausted him. His heart had slowed, his hands and feet felt as though they were trapped in ice. He could die from these repeated efforts to cry out across the abyss—one of his brothers had died, just days after they had executed the last of the tyrants.

But Kalaman would not be so weak or careless. He had found the means to restore himself during the days when they held their Ascendant Masters hostage: he had learned about the harrowing. Later, when there were no more humans left alive, he discovered that the effects of the harrowing were even more intense when practiced upon his brothers. But that must be done with great care. A few of his brothers—Bili here on Helena Aulis, Castor and Mfwawi on Totma 3—had displayed the same flair for leadership that Kalaman possessed. It would not do for the Alliance to be destroyed by internecine fighting even before they joined their father and the Oracle. And, of course, harrowing his brothers meant that there would be fewer of them, though those few would be stronger than before, oh, much stronger.

The first had been Jhayash, injured during that final skirmish against the humans, when their masters had assaulted them with their last stores of protonic flares. He could not bear to watch Jhayash suffer and slowly die, could not bear to feel it; and so almost without thinking he had taken him, and afterward felt strong, so strong! and all his brothers with him.

He had heard of such things—it was well-known that the energumens of Advhi Sar had ritually dispatched their own kind, and there were many tales in the Archipelago of both human and energumen cannibals. But for Kalaman and his brothers, Jhayash had been the first. In the last months there had been others: all given to Kalaman, to keep him strong, to keep his clever mind alert and able. When he felt horribly wearied by his efforts at communicating with their sibs in the other stations, or exhausted by the hours linked to the stratboards, watching scenes of the destruction on the Element: then he would give himself over to the harrowing. At such times he had plucked a human hostage from the dwindling group in the prison bay. Later, when they were all dead, he had begun to choose carefully from among his brothers, and always he had invited his other siblings to share the harrowing with him. Afterward the survivors had grown stronger, their psychic link more intense. Kalaman had grown strongest of all, but he needed to: the Oracle had said he was to be a leader. Now, if he went for many days without a harrowing, a sickness came upon him, and so upon his brothers. And they could not weaken: not now, not when they were so close to closing the ranks of the Alliance.

Kalaman sighed, breathed deeply the salt-scented air. He should choose one now, before he grew too tired to make the summons. Ratnayaka was the nearest. Standing there beside him, his single eye was fixed upon his brother with a vigilance that resembled hunger as much as it did love. And Kalaman knew that hunger, real hunger, was as much a part of Ratnayaka as his scarred eye socket and the line of fine gold rings along his brow. If he was truly wise, Kalaman would choose Ratnayaka for the harrowing, and spare himself the confrontation he knew was to come.