Elizabeth Hand: Icarus Descending

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—”