Elizabeth Hand: Icarus Descending

“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.”