Elizabeth Hand - Icarus Descending

Nefertity said nothing, only stared with glowing emerald eyes into the darkness. She was a nemosyne, a memory unit created as a robotic archive centuries earlier; but she had been imprinted with the voice and persona of a particular woman, the archivist Loretta Riding. She was by far the most eloquent simulacrum I have ever come across. As I said, the Ascendants have androids that cannot be distinguished from humans except in the most intimate situations. Nefertity was not one of these, but sitting here in the dark, listening to her speak, it was only the absence of her breathing that indicated she was a replicant; that and the fox-fire glow emanating from her transparent body.

“I hope they will be safe,” she repeated at last. “It is a primitive encampment there, and they have been accustomed to the luxuries of Araboth.”

“They will learn about hardship then,” I replied coolly, “like everyone else in the world.”

The nemosyne fell silent. It had been less than a week since she had been awakened, found in the bowels of the domed city we had fled as it collapsed. Even replicants, it seems, can have a difficult time adjusting to the concept of death. Nefertity did not like to be reminded that Loretta Riding was centuries given to the earth. Even less did she like to be under my call, but that was the deal we had struck. There had been only five of us who survived the wreckage of Araboth: the nemosyne and myself, and three humans: the boy Hobi Panggang; Rudyard Planck the dwarf; and the hermaphrodite Reive Orsina, the bastard heir to the fallen city of Araboth. I had brought them here, to the relative safety of that rustic village whose lights gleamed across the canyon, and permitted the humans to go free in exchange for Nefertity’s promise to continue on with me. She was not happy with the arrangement—and such was the subtlety of her manufacture that her distress was apparent even now, in the darkness—but I knew she would not attempt to escape from me. It is a gift I have, this power to command. Because of it, even the most rational of humans and their constructs have followed me to hell and back, from the airless parabolas of the HORUS colonies to the mutagen-soaked beaches of the Archipelago.

We sat in silence for some minutes, listening to the sounds of the western night: wind rattling the twisted branches of mesquite and huisache, the bell-like call of the little boreal owls, which are so tame, they will creep into your lap if you are patient enough. A little ways behind us, nestled in a hollow of the mesa, the Gryphon Kesef was hidden. In the darkness it resembled a great bat, its solex wings upfolded now that there was no sun for them to seek. I could hear the creak of its frail-looking spars and struts as the breeze played through them like the strings of an electrified theorbo. From the settlement below us came the hollow echo of the chimes the valley people set outside their windows, to scare away the fetches, the survivors of the Shinings and their descendants. Sickly, shambling creatures who haven’t the strength or cunning to raise and hunt their own food. At night they creep from house to house, hoping to find a window open whence they can gain entry and throttle their prey while they sleep. Children they kidnap to raise as slaves and indoctrinate with their pestilence. From where we sat we could see them, their skin waxy as cactus blossom, lurching from their crude shelters beneath the mesa’s shadow like drunkards from a tavern. In the distance the protective chimes rang in the evening breeze.

When Nefertity spoke again, her voice was like that sound, only clearer and sweeter.

“It is a terrible world you have made, Margalis Tast’annin.”

“I have been but a tool for those who would shape the world,” I replied.

“You were a man once, and had the power to rebel.”

“The power to rebel is nothing without one has the power to command. But you know that, my friend. You would have made an impressive leader, Nefertity.”

The nemosyne’s body glowed a brighter blue. “I would have made an impressive library,” she said coldly. Which was true: the name Nefertity was merely a glossing of her acronym, NFRTI or the National Feminist Recorded Technical Index. She was the only survivor of her kind that I knew of, the only one of those elegant and sophisticated glossaries of human memory and knowledge to be found in four centuries. “My programmer, Loretta Riding— she might have made a leader, she was a saint, a true saint—but she would never have consented to serve such a man as you.”

I laughed, so loudly that a blind cricket grubbing at my feet took flight in alarm. “If she was a saint, then, she would be happy to know she has achieved such immortality, shrouded in blue crystal and gold and sitting on a hill conversing with a dead man.”

Her tone turned icy. “What do you want with me, Margalis?”

I stooped and let my right hand—my human hand, that vestige of flesh and corruption the Ascendant biotechs had left me—brush the stony ground. In the darkness I could detect living things by their heat: the red blur of a kit fox on a nearby ridge, the tiny boreal owls like glowing fists roosting upon the prickly pear, crickets and wolf spiders marking a frayed crimson carpet across the sand. I waited for a cricket to approach me and then swept it up to my face. When I opened my palm, it lay there quite still, its long antennae tickling the warm air. It had three eyes; in daylight they would not appear bright red but sea-blue, and larger than a cricket’s eyes should be. In this part of the Republic everything had suffered some mutation, though not everything was as obviously stricken as this creature. I waved my hand and it leapt into the darkness.

“What do I want with you?” I waited until the cricket’s little trajectory ended, then turned back to Nefertity. “I have told you: I want to find the military-command nemosyne. I want to find Metatron.”

“Metatron.” If she could have, she would have spat. “You must have been mad when you were human, Margalis. I have told you, I know nothing of Metatron. I am a folklore unit, the repository of women’s tales and histories. And you have told me that all of the others of my kind were destroyed—”

“I don’t believe Metatron was destroyed. It was too valuable; they would have found some way to bring it to safety somewhere, to preserve it.”

They were the Ascendant Autocracy. The rebel angels who stormed heaven after the Second Shining, the stellar Aviators who commandeered the HORUS space stations and created the net of offworld alliances that even now carried out its mad and futile campaigns to bring the world under a single government. Metatron was the glory of that earlier age, the shining sapphire in the technocrats’ crown. The most elaborate and sophisticated weapons system ever devised, a nemosyne that commanded the vast submersible fleet and squadrons of Gryphons and fougas and the celestial warships called the elÿon. The Military Tactical Targets Retrieval Network. MTTRN: Metatron.

A joke, Sajur Panggang had explained to me back at the Academy. He was a year older than I, and as an Orsina—a cousin, but still of their blood—he was being trained in such arcane matters, rather than for combat.

“I read about it, in a book,” he said. That alone was testimony of Metatron’s strange lineage. Like so much of the Prime Ascendants’ lore, the name hearkened back to ancient times, a religion long dead. Metatron, the leader of the host of fiery angels; but also Satan-El, the Fallen One. Metatron, the breath of whose wings brings death, and who has countless, all-seeing eyes.

“It was destroyed when Wichita fell.” Nefertity’s voice cut through my dreaming. She gazed out at the little valley below us. “That was what Loretta said: it was the one good that came from that Shining.”