Elizabeth Hand: Icarus Descending

At last I could wait no longer. Soon someone would board the Izanagi, and if I did not want to be conscripted into service upon her or some other Alliance ship, I would have to leave. I still held within me the vision of my father, and it was this that finally give me the strength to take my first step down that long narrow walkway. The air was chill, cooler than it had been aboard the elÿon, but as I descended, it grew warmer, and with this new warmth came the scents of many things: flowers, water, the stored sunny heat of trees just being released into the evening air. I had thought it would be a strange thing, a frightening thing, to first set foot upon the Element. But when at last I stepped from the smooth metal path onto stony ground, it was as though I had awakened to find myself within a familiar dream.

I remembered this place. I remembered the trees and their names—oak, aspen, stunted pines—and also the sounds that came to me. Noises not unfamiliar because I had heard them on ’files and in the stim chambers of Quirinus; but still it was thrilling, almost terrifying, to hear them now—wind, water, the faint rustling tread of an animal’s footfall in the bracken—and to see in the darkness not far from me a blurred light that I knew was the mouth of a cave. We had come here once, long ago, my father and I. There had been smiling men in uniforms, and a shop where they sold rocks—I had thought that was funny, to sell rocks when there were so many lying about the floor of the cavern. Indeed the whole place was nothing but stone, a castle of granite and limestone and shale embedded in the heart of Mount Massanutten. The name came back to me too, as surely as if it had been my own; and now my heart was pounding and I had to clasp my hands tightly to keep them from shaking.

Because of course he would be here. Of course he would remember—it was the last thing we had done together, before the operation. He had brought me here, to show me that even in the blind core of the Earth there could be light and beauty; that even things seemingly as cold and dead as stone could be seen to have a life, and in stalactites and anthodites could grow and bloom like roses.

See, daughter? Nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all…

He was here. He was waiting. Do not fear the darkness, he had said. We will always be together, somewhere… .

And so I walked unafraid into the Paradise Caverns, nodding silently to my brothers and sisters who stood guard beside the main gate, and went to meet my father.

“Wendy! It’s Trevor—it’s him —” Jane’s shrill voice cut through the room as she grabbed me. “But he’s dead! We saw him, he died —”

I could only shake my head, my hands clutching helplessly at the air. The tall man on the platform shook back hair that was dark and thick as a girl’s, and his eyes, though beset by a kind of despair, were blue as Cadence’s had been. Once again I saw him standing in the cool darkness of his cellar, the corpses behind him glowing faintly as he spoke.

Of course, it has some interesting applications for clones… .

And I heard Giles’s grief-ridden voice choking, He made plans…. I know I’ll be with him again….

“It’s his clone,” I said hoarsely. “The scientists, the ones they told us about—they’re all clones. They’ve been hiding here for centuries. That’s where Metatron came from. That’s who found Luther Burdock…”

I fell silent as one of the energumens looked at me warningly. I stared back up at the dais, where Trevor stood gazing into the recesses of the open capsule. His expression was absolutely desolate. Whatever he glimpsed there might have been enough to sear away his vision and leave his eyes dead and blank behind their scrim of flesh. When he looked away again, all the light was gone from them. He seemed as aged and blind as the man I had known at Seven Chimneys.

“What are you waiting for?” Metatron’s voice held an undercurrent of mockery, and slivers of emerald light danced from his face as he looked at Trevor Mallory. “You have done this before. There’s no time now for dalliance. Begin, else I will do it for you.”

Bleakly Trevor nodded. He edged closer to the open capsule, then bent over and tugged at something inside. In all the vast space around us I heard nothing, save Jane’s ragged breathing and the slower, measured breath of the energumen guards. On the dais the other hooded acolytes stood still as columns in their white robes, their blank faces turned toward the center table. Then something scrabbled at the inside of the capsule. A horrible sound, as of a corpse trying to claw its way from its coffin. Trevor frowned and leaned in more closely, then drew back, his face knit with dismay as a hand appeared above the pod’s metal rim.

On the other side of the pod another hand clutched at the metal. A moment later a head emerged: a face so white it seemed incandescent, topped by a shock of thick brown hair. For an instant he flailed at the air, and I thought he would fall back inside. But then he righted himself, and slapping away Trevor’s hand, he sat up.

“Luther Burdock,” whispered Jane. “But—what’s wrong with him?”

“It’s his clone,” I said dully.

“But the other—the one we saw last night—”

“Dead,” I whispered. And somehow I knew that was the truth of it, and that we would never see that Luther Burdock again.

This one was naked, and so pale, it seemed he must be terribly ill, but I knew that was not the case. I knew it was that he had just been born. He pulled himself clumsily from the silver pod, swinging his legs over its edge and nearly falling, then jumping to stand shakily beside Trevor Mallory. He was naked, his skin almost translucent and gleaming as though oiled. His face had the unformed look of an infant’s. There were no lines to show where experience had been etched upon him, no scars or blemishes. His skin had a soft, slack look to it, as though the muscles beneath had never been stretched or pulled. He looked around blankly, then stared down at his feet. His eyebrows knit together, and slowly he drew his hands to cover his genitals.

Trevor Mallory looked impatiently at the nearest acolyte, who pulled a faded blue robe from beneath his white one and handed it to Burdock. Burdock stared at it, his expression so transparently innocent that I felt I was looking at one of those robotic models of the human brain that the Ascendants used to train their surgical technicians. When Trevor put a hand upon his shoulder, he started, then quickly shrugged into the robe. He shook its folds from his face, squinting painfully. With a wry smile Trevor reached into a pocket and drew out a pair of spectacles. For a moment Luther Burdock only stared at them. Then he grabbed them and slid them onto his face.

With that small gesture he truly seemed to be born anew. Behind the plastic lenses his brown eyes glittered. The innocence drained from them, and he made a fist of his hand, opening and closing it as though deriving strength from the motion. He looked around, his face carefully set to show no fear, no surprise. He stared at the white-robed acolytes, the six remaining capsules with their hidden burdens; then gazed out upon the ranks of silent waiting creatures. At sight of them his composure seemed to fail him. He turned to look first at Metatron and then at Trevor Mallory.

“Where is my daughter?”

His voice was tremulous as an old man’s. When there was no reply, he called out again, loudly and with such a commanding tone that far overhead the stalactites gave off faint tinging echoes.

“ Where is my daughter ?”

A nearly imperceptible shifting among the acolytes on the dais. Trevor Mallory bowed his head and stared at the floor. Metatron’s emerald eyes flashed, and he started to raise his hand, as though to point out at the massed throng of geneslaves. But before he could do so, there was a sharp cry from somewhere behind the stage. The hooded acolytes looked around, alarmed. A murmur passed through the crowd, as people and geneslaves murmured and shuffled, striving to see what was happening. On the dais Luther Burdock stood with his hands clenched at his sides, and stared accusingly at Trevor Mallory. Behind him Metatron turned, slowly as though pulled by wires. His torso glowed a brilliant angry purple.