Elizabeth Hand - Icarus Descending

He looked forlornly at Metatron. “Can you explain it to them?”

The replicant shook his head. “Oh, I think not,” he said lightly. “I think they understand quite enough. But, Doctor—the cultivar?”

Sighing, Dr. Burdock nodded and wheeled his chair from his desk. Jane looked around desperately, as though someone else might appear to help us, and finally demanded, “Just tell me something, Doctor, just tell me one thing —

“This war, this Alliance—all of this here, in these caves—what are you doing? Are you making more of them—of your—your children? Or are you just gathering the forces out there and bringing them here for safekeeping?”

Luther Burdock hesitated and looked at her thoughtfully.

“Well,” he said at last. “Yes. There are more of them. I have been—I’ve been quite busy since he brought me here.”

He inclined his head toward Metatron. “I’ve had a good deal of help, though. Some very distinguished people have worked with me. Had to—there’ve been quite a few advancements since—since before, when I was practicing. Rather marvelous things you can do with fungus and prions, accelerating the growth of clonal tissue, et cetera, et cetera. Quite remarkable genetic advances, which this Metatron has assisted me in learning. And, of course, psychosurgery is a delicate thing, and his hands don’t shake.”

“So it’s true,” I said numbly. Burdock stood, pushed his chair back into the desk, and smoothed his pants. “You’re making more of them—more geneslaves—to act as soldiers? But that’s no better than what the Ascendants have done.”

“Soldiers?” He pinched the glasses on the bridge of his nose and squinted as though in pain. “Goodness no. Or no, of course, some of them are soldiers; but we have other plans. These aerolites, Apollo objects like Icarus—well, soldiers wouldn’t be much use against that.

“So I’ve gone ahead with a plan I’d thought about before. Only of course the situation is much worse now than it was then. Here and elsewhere—”

He tipped his head to the ceiling, so that the candlelight glinted on his spectacles. Metatron continued to stare at him with that vulpine smile and those unblinking emerald eyes.

“A sort of—er—a general housecleaning seems to be in order,” Burdock went on. “Ad astra aspera, you know. Through great hardship to the stars. But not soldiers, no, not really s-soldiers at all.

“What I had in mind,” he said, stooping to pick up a bit of paper from the floor at his feet and crumpling it into a ball before tossing it away. “What I had in mind, after the whole general sweep-up was done, but sometime before Icarus’s arrival, was launching this—um— fleet we’ve been gathering. Not warships,” he added firmly. “More of an ark. ”

And turning, he left Jane and me staring openmouthed, as Metatron escorted him to his laboratory.

MY FATHER CAME TO me in a dream that afternoon.

“You must be brave, Kalamat,” he said. He looked much older, his hair sifted with white and his face lined. “Whatever happens, you must remember that you cannot die. You must not be afraid of the dark.” He hugged me close, his hands smelling of tobacco and curative chemicals.

But how was it that he could hold me, because surely he was still a man and small enough that I could sit him upon my knees? And why was his hair white, when he had never aged? My heart began to pound, but when I started to ask him about these things, his face changed, the skin grew bruised, black and purple, and then darkened still more until I was not gazing at my father at all but into the cold emerald eyes of the Oracle. I woke with a cry, my bed-hammock rocking so that it was a wonder I didn’t spill out.

“Kalamat?” My sister Polyonyx stood beside my hammock, eyeing me doubtfully. “I heard you shouting from the media chamber.”

I rubbed my eyes, yawning, then slid from bed. “I had a dream. A dream of our father.”

Polyonyx nodded, reverently touching the tattooed pattern of red and black circles that marked where her breast had been. “Oh, but think, Kalamat! It is nearly time that he will truly speak with us—it is only a little while before we are passing over North America—and if it’s true, if the Oracle did not lie—”

I nodded and yawned again ruefully. The end of the thousand days of my mortality was a bitter taste in my mouth during those last days on Quirinus. I had not slept well in many weeks, and had come to depend on these afternoon naps.

“Yes, yes, the Oracle.” I frowned, recalling my dream, our father’s face swallowed by the Oracle’s brooding one. “Well, perhaps we should gather in the media chamber to await this marvelous thing.”

Polyonyx nodded, her face glowing. “Oh, yes, sister! Many of us are there already—we were waiting for you. ”

I gave her an apologetic smile and turned away. The truth was, I wondered if our father would really speak. I alone among my sisters did not hear the silken voice of our brother Kalaman. Nor did I trust the Oracle Metatron, an unease I could not shake for all that I tried. He spoke of this Elemental war as a holy war, and of our kind as being of greater mind and heart than the humans we had slain; but to me it seems no better thing to die at the hands of an energumen than at a man’s. I would ask my father about this; and also how it was that of all his children only Kalamat doubted, only Kalamat questioned and had bad dreams.

But for now I would join my sisters to await his coming. I kissed Polyonyx. When we embraced, I felt her trembling, and touched that quivering place in her mind that would brook no fear or caution of whatever would happen that evening.

“It is wonderful that this Oracle has come to us.” She drew away from me, shaking back the hundred beaded plaits of her hair. “And that he will bring us to the Element to meet our brothers and sisters.”

“Yes.” I stared past her to the small round window that looked out upon the Ether, the cold darkness where the bodies of our Masters and my own dead sisters floated, waiting for a clarion that would never sound to wake them. “Yes, Polyonyx. Perhaps this will be a wonderful thing.”

In the media chamber I found my sisters assembled. Those who had not offered their hair to the Mother had plaited it into long braids or drawn it back through loops of metal or plastic. All of them had painted afresh the tattooed images and robbed dry ink into the cicatrices where their breasts had been. I was the only one who had not seen to such ministrations. I had forgotten. I had actually not thought of this as a holy gathering, but rather a matter of business: as when our Masters would have us join them to welcome a new diplomat in the docking area, or watch a parade of new prisoners taken from another colony—a ceremony meant to be a warning to us, as much as a celebration of some new triumph.

But to my sisters, this garnering was a great occasion.

“O Kalamat, think of it! We will see our father again—” Cumingia cried. She kissed me and the scent of violets lingered upon my brow.

“Our father,” I repeated, and sighed. Why couldn’t I believe this would really be him, Luther Burdock? “It will be a ’file transmission, sister, not our father in flesh.”

“Oh, pff! Soon enough it will be him. When the Element welcomes us once more.”

Cumingia whirled to face the great window that covered one side of the hall. In the void outside hung the shining sphere of the Element, a blue-green tear that our Mother Herself might have wept. “Do you think he will remember me?” she asked softly.