Elizabeth Hand - Icarus Descending

“You do understand how hard this all is for him, don’t you? I mean, you understand that he’s not the first one?”

I tilted my head, staring into his grave blue eyes. “You mean Luther Burdock?”

Edward Dean nodded. “That’s right.” But before I could ask anything else, he spun and hurried down the dank passage, the pad-pad of his footsteps echoing long after he was lost to sight.

“Well, of course he’s not the first one,” Jane said peevishly. “Not unless he’s about five hundred years old.”

I thought of Trevor Mallory and his cerebrimus mushrooms, and said, “Well, no. He’s a clone, that’s obvious. Trevor and Giles said Luther Burdock practically invented the whole clonal procedure they used with the first generation of geneslaves. He must have stored some of his own tissue, in case something happened to him.”

“Why don’t these people just stay dead?” Jane said darkly.

“Shh—” I looked over to where the energumens had turned to watch us. “We’d best go in.”

When we entered the chamber the geneslaves stared at us, the aardmen with reserved amber eyes, the energumens with a black intensity. We skirted them nervously, and Jane said, “It doesn’t look to me like they’re very happy we’ve joined their Alliance.”

I nodded. Overhead a few electric bulbs hung from twisted strands, casting a weak white glare over the shadowy figures below. A few filthy pallets of straw or old cloth were strewn across the floor, along with battered pots and split wooden casks. At a table by the far wall the two humans we had first glimpsed looked at us guardedly. When we stopped in the middle of the room, at a loss as to where to go, the woman raised her hand and with a curt motion beckoned us over.

“Sit down,” she coughed, flapping a hand in front of her mouth. Beside her the man nodded once in greeting.

“Thanks,” said Jane in relief. There were a few spindly metal folding chairs leaning against the wall, and we pulled these over to the rickety table. “We’re not—well, we’re not really sure what’s going on here.”

The woman and man exchanged a look. Now that we were sitting with them, I saw how old they were, nearly as old as Cadence. Oily gray hair lay flat against their skulls, and their dark faces were mottled with sunspots and small lesions. A sour smell hung about them, rancid oil and urine and raw fear. They might have been brother and sister, or it might have been that age alone had stripped them of whatever had once differentiated them. After we sat, the woman clutched at the table, leaning forward and whispering hoarsely, “What have you heard?”

I shrugged and glanced at Jane. “Heard? We haven’t heard anything. We just got here.”

“We were hoping you could tell us what’s going on,” Jane added.

The man gave a little yelp and slammed his hands against the edge of the table. “I told you!” he cried, and the woman frantically slapped at him until he lowered his voice. “I told you,” he wheezed, jabbing at the air with one skeletal finger. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was unshaven and so thin that his wrists protruded from his uniform like raw bones. “More prisoners, that’s all they are—nothing but prisoners!”

“What do you mean, prisoners?” I looked at the woman. She shook her head, gesturing for me to be silent, then looked pointedly over to where the energumens continued to watch us. One of them laughed when it saw me staring, then, still laughing, turned back to its work. “They’re holding you prisoner here?” I whispered.

The man’s head bobbled eagerly on his skinny neck, and Jane stared at him in disgust.

“It’s true,” the woman choked. She reached across the table to grab my hands. Hers were gnarled as from much labor, but incredibly strong for one so thin and old. “After the harvest they dragged us from our farm and brought us here. They said we’re too old, said we can’t work anymore. Truth is, they don’t want us to work anymore—they’ve brought us down here to die. It’s only the young ones they keep alive—for breeders, ” she whispered venomously. “They need some of us, you know, they can’t go on without some of us.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Jane. “I thought you were all part of this—”

“Only the young and stupid.” The man laughed bitterly. His bleary gray eyes included us in his judgment. “Like that idiot who showed you here—he don’t see what it’s got planned for them. The rest of us, it don’t even care if we know—we’re old and dying anyway. It just takes our land and our food for provisions for the rest of them, and drags us down here to rot.”

“Who does?” I demanded, then lowered my voice when I saw one of the aardmen glance at me with eager sly eyes.

“That thing—” The woman made a gesture and spat. “The construct. Metatron.”

“What have they got planned?” said Jane.

The man bared his teeth, the flickering light causing his dull eyes to gleam like two blood-streaked stones. “That Coming. The same thing Burdock’s been talking about all these years. Just more of his craziness, is all. More of the same trouble the scientists been planning for five hundred years. Only this time they’ve brought that construct to back him up, and their Alliance, so’s all the young people bought into it. They’ve got their ships on the other side of the mountain, all packed and ready to go. Just like that! Take our children and pfft !”

“But he’s mad,” the woman said, pounding softly at the table. Tears slid from the corner of her eyes, but she seemed not to notice she wept. “Who can believe any of it? A star coming from the sky! It’s just another part of his madness.”

“Her son,” the man explained, leaning toward us and whispering. “Her son’s joined up with them, thinks he’s going to see the stars. But let me tell you, ain’t none of ’em’s ever going to see no stars. Ain’t none of ’em’s ever going to see anything except the inside of an Ascendant prison vessel been turned into an Alliance prison vessel.”

The woman let out a sob. The man leaned back, his face suddenly gone slack with defeat.

I took a deep breath. “Tell me,” I said, my voice catching, “about the ships. And Dr. Burdock. About his madness—what is it? What causes it?”

“It’s his daughter,” the man whispered, his eyes dull. “See, it takes a while for him to figure it all out, about the energumens and all. ’Cause, of course, he’s actually been dead for all these years, but he don’t know that, at least not at first. ’Cause he’s a clone,” he hissed, and from the flicker of fear and hatred in his gaze, I knew that he would have been one of those who would have burned Burdock and his child, all those centuries ago. “But when finally he understands what’s happened to his little girl, the craziness comes onto him, and he just goes screaming into the night. But then, of course, he just starts all over. The whole damn thing just happens again. It’s the same every time.”

“Who’s his daughter?” asked Jane.

“ You know,” insisted the man. “That girl, what-you-call-her. Cybele. The first one, the one in all the pictures, all the ’files. The one he cloned, the one they used for the energumens.”

Suddenly I felt as I had when that grinning livid face had grinned up at me out of the black water beneath the bridge. “The energumens,” I murmured, and looked to where they lolled against the far wall of the dim chamber. “He—he really did clone his daughter to make them ?” And I recalled those creatures outside by the river: their immensity, the ease with which they slung upon their shoulders steel beams and sacks of grain; but also their oddly childish faces, their haunted obsidian eyes. “His daughter !”