Elizabeth Hand - Icarus Descending

But I also knew that Luther Burdock had no real idea as to what was going on within the Asterine Alliance. Just as he had never answered the summonses sent to him at our home in the mountains; just as he had paid no attention to the news on the telefiles, the reports of the growing power of the New Ethical Front and the United Party for Humanity. He was speaking to us only as a sop to some other person. Whatever enchantments of science had awakened him and brought him back to life, they had not changed him. As always, he wanted only to return to his work, whatever that work might now be.

The Asterine Alliance did not belong to Luther Burdock or his children at all. It belonged to Metatron. What plans he had for us, I feared to guess.

But our father had turned back to the ’filing screen. “I have to go now,” he said. “But I understand you will be here within a few days. I look forward to meeting with you and discussing our future together. Until then—”

He bunched his fingers together and made an odd little salute. “Ad astra et cetera.”

The image blinked into dead air. A moment of utter silence, and then chaos.

“It was Father!”

“Did you see—”

“He remembered! I could tell he remembered—”

My sisters ran to embrace each other, laughing and crying out across the room, pointing at the Element’s watchful blue eye outside or running to the window to see if they could glimpse the elÿon that was to join us.

“O Kalamat!” exclaimed Cumingia as she hugged me. “You always loved him the best—you must be so happy now!—but what is it? What’s the matter?”

She drew away from me, shaking back her beads and frowning. “Kalamat?”

“Don’t you—how can you—they are sending us to fight, sister. Didn’t you hear? They are sending us to war in the Commonwealth.”

Cumingia’s brow furrowed, and then she gave a small laugh. “But only for a little while. You heard what the Oracle said—in a few weeks we will be together again. Oh, Hylas!—”

She turned away to take another sister into her arms. I walked through the little crowd, saying nothing as my sisters reached to stroke my cheek or laughingly called my name. I shook them from me, my heart raging with anger and dismay.

War! He was sending us to war. How could they not hear that, how could they not care? I had only a handful of days yet to live, but I would not be spendthrift with them, squandering them in battle. It did not matter if it was a war we could not lose. It was not what we were made for, it was not what I was made for.

And I realized then that my sisters had no idea why they had been made. Their thousand days they accepted greedily, but without question. Our lives serving the Architects on Quirinus had been busy but not difficult. We were not treated cruelly, we had our dormitories and our pleasures, we were even permitted our Rites of Lysis, so long as they did not intrude upon the Ascendants.

But for the first time I knew that, for my sisters, this had always been enough. They wept when one of us died, wept as they recited the orison and bore the bodies to the chutes that would cast them into the Ether; but afterward they forgot. They remembered our father, but he was as a father in a dream, a father glimpsed in a cinemafile. Not someone to spend an entire lifetime mourning, even if that life lasted only a handful of days.

And there was the truth of it. I was not like them, no more than I was like our Masters. Something had gone wrong when they made me, some phantom turning of the road of cells and nerves that led to Kalamat. Instead of a creature as like to those others as one grain of wheat is to its kin, they had somehow created me.

And I remembered my father. I loved him. I could never forget.

At the window I stopped and leaned my head against the glass. I wept, remembering Luther Burdock. I remembered how he had held me when I was a child and awakened screaming in my bed, how he stroked my curls and whispered to me.

“ Do not fear the dark, daughter, ” he had said. “ The night can never harm you, and anyhow, soon it will be time for us to wake. ”

I stared out at the Element, the world that in my memory had always belonged to my father, but now belonged to Metatron. And if like our great Mother I could have wept worlds, new worlds, my tears would have seeded the Ether with stars.

As the aviette auxiliary capsule approached the golden torus that was the colony of Quirinus, the energumens Ratnayaka and Kalaman sat apart from their brothers and stared outside. Travel in the aviette made Kalaman uneasy, a holdover from earlier terrorist forays when he had still feared discovery by the Ascendants and subsequent punishment or attack. He sat with his hands clenched in his lap, the flattened blade of his kris straddling his knees, and hoped they would arrive at Quirinus soon.

Beside him, Ratnayaka sensed his brother’s fear. Any one of them might have known it; but the rest were clustered at another window, pointing to where the other two aviettes seemed to float like smooth flattened teardrops in the Ether. Kalaman’s fear made his brother tremble. To think that Kalaman’s mind was so open to his own! He brought his face close to Kalaman’s and stroked his cheek, then let his hand rest upon Kalaman’s thigh. Murmuring, Ratnayaka caressed the feathery impression of scars that Kalaman had drawn there with his kris. His brother was so beautiful. Even in these rare hours of calm, Ratnayaka could see the rage within him, filling Kalaman as blood or wine might fill a crystal krater, until at last it spills out and stains the hands of the libation bearer.

Ratnayaka knew this rage as another might know the kisses or sweet mouth of a lover; as Kalaman himself knew the much-fingered blade of his kris. It was a gorgeous thing, that rage, hot and quick as a culverin’s flame; but it had been fired and tempered in the rarefied furnace of a HORUS colony. Upon the Element, Kalaman’s ardor, his solitary and sanguine nature, would not fare so well. Metatron wanted generals and janissaries; the cool, sturdy grip of a revolver or blade that yields to a command, and not the lethal holocaust of a Shining.

Kalaman was such a thing: a shining creature, an uncontrollable flame. But Ratnayaka was a general—had he not been his brother’s lieutenant?—a general and, if necessary, a sword that might be wielded by another’s hand; say, Metatron’s.

Ratnayaka smiled, looking upon his brother, and lovingly ran his fingers across a small raised scar upon his knee. No, there would be no place for Kalaman upon the Element. As for Ratnayaka himself: he knew patience as he knew the sound of his brother’s voice. And some swords have been known to betray their masters.

“O Kalaman,” he whispered.

Still his brother did not move, not even when Ratnayaka leaned forward to nuzzle his throat.

“We will finally see them,” was all Kalaman said after several minutes. With wide, calm eyes he stared out the window, at the radiant torus and its beveled lines of lights, red and blue and violet. “All those sisters we have never met…”

Ratnayaka drew back from his brother and nodded, his eye a sullen gleam in his ruddy face. “We can teach them what we know. We can bring our secrets with us to the Element—”

He thought hungrily upon the brothers they had harrowed in the cool green-lit chambers of Helena Aulis. How lovely they had all been, how greedily he had fallen upon Djistra, the last to be consumed before they left the only home they had ever known; and how Kalaman had given all that final pleasure to Ratnayaka, taking nothing for himself.

Kalaman shook his head. “No,” he said softly. His voice sounded distant, as though a ’file of Kalaman spoke there, and not the energumen himself. “That is a thing that belongs here—”