Elizabeth Hand - Icarus Descending

“This is the empath we told you about. The other—” Suniata shrugged. “Her lover?”

Jane blushed but said nothing. The man stared at us, his mouth slightly ajar and his front teeth pressing gently into his lower lip. Finally he started, as though waking from some half-sleep, and nodded briskly.

“Well, yes. Of course. Thank you very much, Suniata, thank you very very much.” He gestured expansively at several empty chairs. “Please. Take a s-seat. And Suniata—thank you.”

This time thank you obviously meant good-bye. The cacodemon bowed his head and left. The man fiddled with his glasses and dropped his book, made a temple of his hands and drummed his fingertips together. Finally he cleared his throat, tipping his head so that the glasses slid back onto the bridge of his nose.

“Well. Introductions, yes?” He raised his eyebrows and looked at us with great seriousness, as though awaiting another suggestion. When none was forthcoming, he went on. “I am Luther Burdock. Dr. Burdock, they call me here. And you are—?”

I took a deep breath. Across the room the geneslaves moved industriously in the shadows. The argala frowned at its ’file. The aardmen reclined in silence beneath their candles. The energumens worked by the studious green glow of their monitors. None of them were paying us the slightest attention.

“Wendy Wanders,” I finally said.

“Very n-nice. And you?”

Jane stuck her chin out belligerently. “Jane Alopex. And look, Doctor Burdock, we don’t have—”

The man rolled his eyes and nodded, flapping his hand. “Of course, of course! You’re not p-prisoners here, Jane—W-wendy? I hope they didn’t tell you that?” He peered at us worriedly.

Jane looked taken aback. “Well, no,” she admitted after a moment. Dr. Burdock looked relieved.

“Because that’s really not the point of any of this at all, is it? Really quite the opposite, really just the sort of th-thing we’re trying to do away with here. You understand?”

He leaned forward, looking up at us earnestly through his glasses and fumbling at his shirt pocket until he found a packet of cigarettes. He lit one and took several deep drags before continuing.

“Oh, I know some of my advisers get a little zealous at times—you can understand that, can’t you? I mean, having seen firsthand what we’re up against?—but I wouldn’t want you to think we were holding you here against your will. I wouldn’t want you to think that at all.”

Behind a veil of blue smoke his eyes widened and he tilted his head, waiting for our assurance. I coughed nervously. When it became apparent Jane wasn’t going to say anything, I cleared my throat and said, “Well, yes. I mean, we did think that—we didn’t really want to come here, but they didn’t give us much choice, and everything—I mean, the manner in which we were escorted here—well, it did make me—us—think we were prisoners.”

Dr. Burdock frowned, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. Finally he shook his head.

“Well,” he said, raising his eyebrows as though the idea had just occurred to him. “Well, maybe you are, then. Hmm.”

He made a face and looked at me more closely through the smoke. “You’re the empath? The one Trevor told me about, the one from the—what do you call it—the Engineering Laboratory for Health?”

“The Human Engineering Laboratory.”

“Right-o! The Human Engineering Laboratory!” He beamed, as though I had scored well on a test. “Well! And you’re an empath—that is, you can sense the emotions of other people? Without their telling you, without touching them?”

I shook my head. “Not anymore. I used to—I used to be able to read dreams. And I did have to touch them. I—I need some contact. With their blood, or saliva.”

“Mmm.” Dr. Burdock frowned, tipped more ashes into the overflowing metal disk. “Not really a psychic, then. No incidences of clairvoyance, poltergeist activity, nothing unusual like th-that?”

I thought of the Boy in the Tree, of the visions I had seen with my brother Raphael. I looked away. “Nothing.”

A slightly disappointed silence. The sound of the waterfall seemed to grow louder. Then, “Oh, well,” he said, smiling. “You’re welcome here anyway, there’s always room for eager young people. You are rather young, aren’t you? How old—sixteen? seventeen?”

“Eighteen.”

He stubbed out his cigarette, raising his eyebrows at Jane, and she concurred. He said, “Eighteen! Well, that’s still very young, compared to me, of course, forty-three, though it doesn’t seem so long, though of course, you know, sometimes it feels like forever….”

The brown eyes seemed to cloud over. When he spoke again, his voice was softer and even more hesitant. “I had a daughter, you know. Not much younger than you. Cybele. She was—”

He sighed and looked away, to where the energumens hunched over their monitors. “She was a beautiful girl,” he finished softly. “I miss her so much, even now. Even after all this time. I keep thinking I’ll see her, that perhaps one of them might—”

He broke off with a sigh. The darkness in his eyes spread across his face, and his mouth twitched, almost as though he were talking to himself. “But of course, none of them really do,” he said after a moment. He looked at me and smiled sadly, then shook his head, the way a dog does to shake off the rain. “Oh, well. Perhaps we can make it different someday soon. This wasn’t at all what I had in mind, you know—”

He gestured at the energumens, the shadowy forms of two aardmen heading toward the narrow bridge behind the waterfall. At last his gaze fell with distaste upon the argala. “What they’ve done with my work. These poor c-creatures. Prostitutes. S-slaves. Not my idea, not my idea at all,” he ended firmly, and chewed his lower lip. “And the others—what they did to my girls…”

His voice trailed off and he stared into the darkness. “Savagery,” he said a long moment later, the word coming out in a hiss. “S-savage beasts ! To think they would do that, to think they would take a child and—”

He lowered his voice, but pointed with a quick stabbing motion toward the energumens. “ That. Not that it’s their fault what they look like, but—”

He moved his chair closer, staring at us with wide mad pupils. “My children, you understand,” he said, and his face seemed to glow in the half-light. “All my work for the good of humanity, and this is what they’ve done to it. Circus animals. Brute l-laborers. Whores. All those years, all this time—and this, this is what they’ve done to my children.”

His voice rose so that the energumens stopped and looked at us. Luther Burdock ignored them; only stared at me, his glasses fogged from his excitement.

“Four hundred years. A lot can happen in four hundred years. But this—this isn’t right. This just—is not— acceptable.

“You understand, don’t you?” he asked me softly. He held his hand out, cupped so that the empty palm faced the ceiling. “Even it if means people dying. Even if it means everyone dying—”

His face grew red and his breath came out in ragged bursts. “We can’t —let them— do this—to children.”

On the other side of the room an aardman growled. The energumens continued to stare at us in silence. Luther Burdock pointed at one with a shaking finger. Behind their thick plastic lenses, his eyes were filled with tears.

“My daughter!” he said, his voice shaking “ That was my daughter. “