Authors: Elizabeth Hand
Sky Pilot!
How high can you fly?
You’ll never, ever, ever reach the sky …
“That’s terrible,” Emma said stonily when it was finished. “You can’t even hear it.”
“Listen again!” Aidan twirled in his seat, punching buttons on the player, but by then everyone had returned to their studies. He was still the only person who ever called me that.
Now Aidan crept out onto the boulder on his hands and knees, tossing back his burnished hair and pursing his lips. Behind us the green tips of the tall pines scratched lazily at the sky. On the gravel beach some fifteen feet below, the seals wheezed and snored. When he reached the edge of the rock, Aidan bellied down with his chin on his hands. I joined him, careful to keep my leather jacket from catching on the boulder’s sharp edges. We lay there for a long time without speaking, just watching the seals and the play of the birds in the water—cormorants, skuas, black and white gulls. The air smelled of pine and sweet rugosa roses and the sea, and very faintly of the woodfires burning in the Academy kitchens. The day had that intense blue clarity that often proceeds a storm: a weather-breeder, they called it in the maritimes. This far north the summer’s heat was not intense, but, paradoxically, the sunlight was. I could feel my fair skin burning, and swore silently at the chronic shortages that kept us from having access to any kind of protection from the killing rays—lotions, veils, even just a visor for our uniform hats. But the meager warmth was pleasant for all that.
After a while I must have dozed. When I looked up again, Aidan had rolled onto his back, propping himself against a wedge of driftwood. He was reading a talking book. I could hear its voice, serious as that of any rector, and occasional trills of background music.
“What’s that?” I leaned over, trying to see what was on the little screen.
He moved a few inches away, trying to make it look as though he were just getting more comfortable. But I could see his eyes: genuinely startled that I’d awakened, and genuinely worried.
“Nothing.” He turned the thing so low, I could barely make it out—a man’s voice, refined in that twenty-third-century manner, but I couldn’t understand the words. Before Aidan could stop me, I flicked my finger against the side of the book so that its title flickered across the screen.
PAGAN SURVIVALS
Spiritual Origins of the Energumens And Revelations of Their Triumphant Future,
With Predictions of the apocalypse to Come
by dude Hwong
Colorfully archaic script and a baroque fanfare of Third Ascension ælopipes accompanied the copyright and warnings. Then the man’s voice came again, faint as an insect’s.
Had Luther Burdock known the future uses to which his innocent daughter would be put, surely he would never have shared his apocalyptic discoveries with the rest of mankind….
“You’re reading
that
?” I cried out, incredulous. Jude Hwong was a notorious fraud, one of those religious fanatics who crops up at the end of every century and gains a cult through predicting the fall of the current world order. Thus far, none of his many predictions had come true—no rebirth of ancient gods, no epiphanies among the energumens, no messages from extrasolar visitors. His work was childish, but that didn’t keep it from being under interdict. In spite of myself I grew angry at Aidan for putting us both in danger. “You’re going to get caught, one of these days. What, do you
want
to get kicked out?”
I tried to grab the book from him. He snatched it back, but not before my hand bumped it and the book scrolled to another section and read,
This small group of researchers—astrophysicists and astrologers, mostly—believed that the mythology surrounding the Watcher in the Skies had a direct correspondence to the fragmented records of Icarus’s appearance in 2172-73. Tragically, their barbaric execution by the dictator Simon Legistheis has prevented us from learning more thoroughly from their—
Aidan sat bolt upright, flicking off the book and shoving it beneath his jacket. His face was bright red, from embarrassment and the sun; it made his blue eyes glow like an animal’s caught in the glare of night-lights. “Fuck off, soldier boy.”
“Well,
do
you want to get caught?”
He hunched his shoulders together and raised his hand to strike at me—even though I was a good six inches taller and a much better fighter—then glanced down at the rough scree below us. The tide had come in, ripples of black and indigo sloshing across the gravel. The seals were humping slowly into the water, shouting hoarsely at each other and sending up wedges of sand and grit as they breasted into the cold surf. The sight of them seemed to calm Aidan. When he turned back to me, his eyes were no less intense, but he smiled mockingly.
“Well, are you going to turn me in, Sky Pilot?”
I pushed down the urge to hit him and looked away. “No. But someone will. Where do you get them, anyway?”
He shrugged, reached into a pocket and took out a tiny silver canister, bullet-shaped and with a crystal head. He unscrewed it and tapped out an amphaze patch, slipped it ostentatiously behind one ear. “My father. He was a collector. They’re worth a
lot.
”
“Not anymore,” I said coldly. Aidan was always trying to impress people with how much his father owned—furniture, books, even a house. From what Emma said, it was all true, which made it even worse that Aidan spoke so blithely of it. “One of these days they’re going to seize all his things and it will be your fault. And that”—I pointed to where he’d hidden the talking book—“
that’s
just garbage. Why do you waste your time with it?”
Aidan’s breath came more quickly. I watched his pupils dilate, as quickly as a dog’s when threatened. When he spoke, I could smell the amphaze on his breath, an unpleasant chemical scent like raw alcohol or morpha.
“Because they
tell me things.”
I shivered a little. The wind had come up over the sea, and with the sun gone over the ridge of land behind us, it had grown cool, as it does of an evening in the maritimes. But it was Aidan’s voice that chilled me. That same voice he used to hold us in thrall at night in his room, while the bottles passed around and our furtive games played themselves out, with all of us secretly waiting for some great dark revelation that never came.
“Things? They
tell
you things?” I tried to sneer as Amaris di Gangi had; but the wind made my voice sound thin and sour.
Aidan’s eyes glittered dangerously. “There is another world beneath this one. You should know that—isn’t it what your mother’s poetry is all about?
This
world is getting torn away, everything we’ve done to it has made it weak and tired; and now the other world is showing through. Some day it will be all that’s left….”
I sighed loudly. My mother’s work—deliberately obscure visionary poetry, harking back to eighteenth-century verse that no one but herself seemed to have heard of—had enjoyed a fleeting popularity before it was condemned for its decadence. “Well, for now,
this
world is the one I’m worried about,” I said, adding, “If I worry at all.”
“You should,” Aidan said with the smug air of a recent convert. “Did you know they’re predicting some kind of cataclysm within this century? Within our
lifetimes,
Sky Pilot.”
“Oh, really?
Who
is predicting this? Jude Hwong? From the gas chamber?”
Aidan shook his head. “You shouldn’t sneer at it, Margalis.” His seriousness was laughable; I almost didn’t notice he had used my real name. “You know, he quotes your mother in here—that poem about the Watcher in the Skies. He says it’s a revelation of the cataclysm—”
“It’s a revelation he even read it,” I said drily. When he did amphaze or anything else, Aidan’s talk was always like this. Old gods, old sciences. The self-destructive research that had so eroded the thin civilized surface of our world that another, more ancient one was about to break through any day.
“You think it’s all madness, don’t you?” Now Aidan sounded edgy. He had turned from watching the seals to sit with knees bent, fingers tapping nervously along the creases in his yellow trousers. “But you know, Margalis, it’s no crazier than what they teach us here. Focusing on some inner landscape so that we don’t see our hands burning to bone in front of us. Focusing on the sound of the Gryphon’s engines, so we don’t hear the pilot screaming in the other seat. Taking vows of vigilance and obedience and swearing off the most basic human emotions. Cutting open nursling aardmen, to see if they will scream under the knife.”
“Those are exercises. They’ll save your life someday, in combat—”
“I know what they are! But
these
are exercises, too—”
He touched his breast where the talking book was hidden, and I recalled how I had found him once before, the Defries
Incunabula
open on his bed, chanting softly at the dawn. “The Academy teaches you that there are other ways to see the world. Well, my books teach you that there are other worlds to see.”
I maintained a cold silence. As I said, there was much talk like this in the Academy. We were young, some of us barely more than children, and such things appeal to youth. Millennial cults, the revival of archaic and often lurid religions. To Aidan and everyone else I showed a hard face when the conversation turned to such matters—and inevitably it did; we may have been NASNA cadets, but the oldest among us was not yet twenty—but for myself, I was profoundly disturbed by Aidan’s books, by his ecstatic desire to believe in old gods, old ways. I was disturbed because such things made sense to me, in a manner that I could never articulate.
When I first was assigned to the domed city of Araboth and met Shiyung Orsina, the youngest of the Orsinas’s ruling family, I found that we shared an interest in odd cults and quaint rituals. She merely as a fancy, something to whet her jaded and decadent tastes; but for me it was always deeper than that. Without precisely understanding how or why, I have always been driven by a hidden need to
believe
in something; but I have never found anything stronger than myself to believe in.
This compulsion to serve is deeply ingrained in an Aviator. We are taken in childhood, and from our earliest days we are trained to obey. But we are also encouraged to flout authority, to usurp it when possible and if necessary betray even our closest allies, our most beloved ideals. It is the only way for a military elite to survive in a world so fragmented that it defies rational attempts at control. So it is that the Aviators hold within them a dangerously contorted psyche, as meticulously and deliberately twisted as those tiny trees the Nipponian emperors raise in their solariums in the Floating Land. It is never a surprise when an Aviator goes mad; it only matters if his madness keeps him from carrying out his duties.
In Aidan’s case, his obsession with things demonic, with disaster cults and astronomy, obsolete sorceries and obscure religions, had ruined his concentration. He missed classes, exercises, training events. Even repeated visits to the infirmary and threats of a prolonged course of mind treatments were not enough to keep him from reading and enacting his little private seances.
But what was worst, to me at least, was the way that he had somehow managed to infect
me
with his madness. I had achieved First in our level, and it was rumored that I would be given a commission before graduation. The conflict with the Emirate was not going well; it would not be the first time a student had been sent to war before completing his course of studies. I would never jeopardize my chances of escaping from the Academy by doing anything so obvious (and stupid) as attempting to raise some demon in my dormitory room. But Aidan’s bitter cynicism toward NASNA and his peculiar taste in books had affected me nonetheless.
I wanted to believe in something. Worse, I
needed
to. It was no longer enough that the skirmishes be won, the conflicts shortened or ended, the Orsinate or the Autocracy satisfied by our efforts. I needed to believe in something else; something greater than myself. I was trained to accept the Aviators as the finest, strongest, most brilliant men and women of the continent. At the Academy I learned that I was the finest among them all. It was no surprise to me, really, when years later I was named Aviator Imperator. My madness and eventual rehabilitation as a
rasa:
no, I had not expected
that.
But I had been ready to accept the mantle of Imperator, perhaps since that first day I entered the ascetic confines of the Academy.
Still, if I was the jewel in the Autocracy’s crown, I had to believe in the worthiness of the brow I adorned. And it was painfully obvious, even to my nineteen-year-old self, that the Ascendants and the Orsinate were not worthy of me. But if t
hey
were not, who, or what, was? Bred and trained as a weapon, I must serve somebody. Aidan’s books and Aidan’s talk made me think that there might be other ways of serving; other things to serve.
“What other worlds are you talking about, Aidan?”
I tried to make my tone disdainful, but the curiosity was there, a raw kernel of it plain as the cold rock beneath us. Aidan saw my weakness, and laughed.
“The Sky Pilot wants other worlds now! Huh—”
He looked away, off to where the sky was greening twilight above the sea’s horizon. After a moment he said in a softer voice, “Well, there
are
other things. There is the Watcher in the Skies, for one. And other things, too. We—I—have seen some of them. At home.” The reluctance that crept into his voice made me realize that Emma, too, must know some of this. Perhaps that accounted for her unhappiness, her habit of always looking out the corner of her eyes. “And here, too.”
“What have you seen here?” I could no longer even pretend at offhandedness. From across the green sweep of lawn came the sturdy echo of the bell clanging for the first dinner shift, but I ignored it. “Could you—can you show me?”
“It’s not like that,” said Aidan impatiently. “These things—whatever they are—they have their own reasons for showing themselves to us. I mean, Jude Hwong says that the records show the Watcher of the Skies last appeared nearly four hundred years ago.
I
don’t know when we’ll see it again. All of these things—it’s not like you call them and they come. It’s more—well, it’s more like interfacing with the Gryphons. You prepare yourself—
I
prepare myself—and sit back, and then it’s there.”