Authors: Elizabeth Hand
In the navigation cell I found Lascar Franschii suspended within his web of light.
“You knew!” I howled. I grabbed his leg and yanked it, heedless of the sprung wires and cables whistling as they whipped around him. “You had to know, making these trips—”
Lascar Franschii bounced and jiggled like a toy tossed into a rubber net. “Imperator—” he began. Then the voice tube slipped from his mouth and he moaned. I reached and snapped one of the tubes running into his throat. A hissing as air escaped, and his chest began to cave in like a deflated balloon.
“
You knew!
All this time shuttling back and forth for your master, while
that
waits for us! How could you? How could you doom mankind, doom an entire
world
—we might have done something, might have tried to destroy it, but now it’s too late—”
Without the voice tube, Lascar Franschii’s voice came out in a barely audible wheeze. I pulled more tubes and wires from his body, each one severing a vital connection; but still he managed to gasp, “Your kind, Imperator—doomed
me
!—what care—take to skies—
never
!—”
The last wire uncoiled in a serpentine tangle of red and gray. Lascar Franschii’s head lolled upon his shrunken chest, his empty eyes bleeding and his mouth ajar. I stared at him, my fist clenching trailing strands that gave off a putrescent stench. Abruptly the floor beneath me trembled. Lights flashed around the perimeter of the nav chamber, and throughout the web that had held the adjutant, glowing white lines appeared in meaningless patterns. A calm, hushed voice breathed from the voicenet.
“The Human-Assisted Biotic Navigational System is encountering communication difficulties. We are now indoctrinating unassisted alternative landing procedures. All biological personnel, please ready yourselves for docking in Cassandra in four minutes. We are now indoctrinating unassisted alternative landing procedures. All biological personnel, please ready yourselves…”
As the voicenet continued its soft chanting, I stumbled from the room, heading for where Valeska Novus and Nefertity slept in the innocent wombs of their safety hammocks. The elÿon’s truncated landing found me crouched before the door of their room, gibbering like an adjutant myself at the thought of what awaited us in the sky outside.
I was safely in my hammock when the voicenet began its emergency announcements. I recall little of the last minutes of our flight. My mind was too full of thoughts of my father, of the images that had sent a madness upon Tast’annin and which my own mind could still barely grasp.
I don’t know for how long I lost consciousness. Perhaps a few minutes, perhaps an hour. It was one of the Maio servers that found me, its small cold fingers probing for a pulse in my throat until I woke, gasping as from a terrible dream.
“Icarus!” I cried, then drew a shaking hand across my eyes as it came to me that it was
not
a dream. The server looked at me with its tiny unblinking eyes and said, “We have made a successful emergency landing at Cassandra, former Free Take of Virginia. All other biological personnel have exited the craft. I will escort you to the docking area.”
It waited with an idiot’s patience while I extricated myself from the hammock, which was too small for an energumen and left cruel red markings on my thighs and arms. Then I followed it into the main corridor. All around us the elÿon’s walls pulsed, their color fading from fuchsia to soft pink as its random energies discharged into the air outside. I was going to my death, I knew that; but then so was everyone else. With slow steps I crossed from the hallway into the docking area, and then walked to meet the doors slowly opening to welcome me with the sweet warm scent of the Element.
There was no sun to wake Jane and me from our exhausted sleep. We were roused by an energumen, the same one who had drafted us into helping to haul sacks of grain from one cavernous room to another. It was backbreaking, mindless work, but afterward even the foul-smelling pallets on the floor were welcome, and the two of us collapsed into dreamless sleep. When we woke, there was no light, and the room was empty save for the one who shook us with her huge clumsy hands.
“You would have slept through everything,” she said accusingly. “Come on now, and hurry.”
“Is there water anywhere to wash with?” Jane asked plaintively, but the energumen only shook her head.
“In the river, if you want. But hurry.”
We followed her, Jane pausing, before we climbed back over the narrow rope bridge, to splash her face and drink. I joined her, cupping my hands into the water and bringing it to my lips. It had a harsh taste, like stone rasping across my tongue, and was icy cold. I shuddered and stumbled back to my feet.
It was a different path we followed now, one that we had not seen before. In some strange way I felt that we were in the oldest section of Paradise Caverns: that part which had seen little of the hands of men upon its cold, forbidding walls. In other tunnels I had watched the energumens run with an awkward stooping gait, to keep their heads from grazing against the low ceilings. But here the ceiling reared so far above us that it made me dizzy to look up. There were few electrical bulbs, and these cast a faint glow that did little to pierce the gloom. The walls were crenulated, as though made of paper that had been crumpled into endless folds of cream and dull orange, stretching up and up until the darkness swallowed them. And while I could see nothing of the farthest reaches of the ceiling, somehow I sensed that it receded as we traveled onward; that the tunnel was widening to form a chamber huge enough that it could encompass a vast building, one as large as the Engulfed Cathedral or the City’s Obelisk. Our footsteps sounded weirdly in that immense space, the slapping of the energumen’s bare feet echoing until it seemed an entire unseen army marched there beside us.
Far ahead lights began to show in the darkness. As we grew nearer the passage, these grew larger and brighter, and finally we walked along a wide avenue strung with solar globes and smaller electrical bulbs, all of them leading into a vast cavern. The energumen glanced back at us, then paused and waited until we caught up with her.
“This is where they will be,” she said, pointing.
The room was filled with people. Humans, energumens, aardmen, starboks, the wistful argalæ and hideous salamanders; all of them standing and staring patiently at the front of the cavern. Thousands of them, all in the worn blue uniforms of the Asterine Alliance, all with the same expectant expressions. But there were only a few hundred humans, and most of these were young, my own age or a few years older.
“God—look at them all,” breathed Jane. She turned to me, her face flushed. “Scarlet might be here, Wendy!”
“You’re right—” I felt a sudden rush of hope and fear at the thought of her small simian face peering up from the tattered folds of one of those ill-fitting uniforms. I grabbed Jane’s hand and together we started to push our way through the crowd, when our energumen guide stopped us, one huge hand clapping upon our shoulders.
“You’re to stay with me,” she said. “Up here, to the very front.” With what must have seemed surpassing gentleness to her—but forcefully enough to leave my shoulder bruised and aching—she turned us and directed us to the front of the immense chamber.
So with her guidance, we plowed through that mob. They were very well behaved for rebels, I thought. They scarcely acknowledged Jane and me at all, though some of the waiting energumens reached to stroke their sister as she passed among them, or called to her softly by name. I craned my neck, trying to see above the heads of the energumens and other geneslaves, but all I could determine was that the chamber was even larger than I first guessed. And there must have been an opening somewhere. The air was fresh, and carried with it the warm sweetness of a late summer’s night, the smell of honeysuckle and wild roses and the dusty scent of goldenrod. Beneath our feet the floor had a decided downward slant, like a steeply raked stage, so that those tall enough to stand on a level with the energumens would have been able to see quite clearly whatever was happening in the distance. The waiting crowd was quite still, the energumens and aardmen nearly silent, the argalæ sometimes calling out in their questioning owlish voices. Only the other humans spoke to each other in low tones, and turned to look at us curiously, though no one greeted us. And we never saw Miss Scarlet, though I scanned the crowd for her desperately, and stared at every aardman I passed in vain hopes that one might be Fossa.
After many minutes of jostling we finally reached the front of the cavern. The crowd thinned out, until there was only a long line of energumens standing straight and tall, their faces innocently alert in the glare of the electric lights. Their hoods were thrown back and their tunics draped in loose coils around their long legs. They resembled so many beautiful statues, save only for the weapons they held; stunners and sonic guns and even swords, all of them human-sized, and so too small for those fearsome warriors, but still intimidating. Our guide led us to the center of this line. Two of her sisters moved aside to let us stand between them.
“Metatron has asked that they be brought here,” she told them. “He said it is most important that they be able to see clearly.” The other energumens nodded, staring down at us with their eerie, nearly pupilless black eyes. With a slight nod of her head, our guide turned and quickly disappeared into the throng.
“It will begin soon,” one of the waiting guard told us, not unkindly. She moved aside to give us a better view. “Just a little longer until the moon rises.”
I looked behind us. There stood rank upon rank of blue-uniformed figures, large and small, gargoyle warriors and sun-pocked women who must have been farmers, men whose hands held their weapons uneasily and aardmen who gripped theirs in strong, gnarled paws. All gazing toward the front of the room where I stood, so that after a moment I had to turn away, frightened by the sight of all those eyes.
But what lay in front of me was no more reassuring. It reminded me of an operating theater in HEL, only larger and brighter: as though it really
were
some kind of theater, one where unspeakable rituals were played out within the looming darkness.
At the front of the great cavern was a round raised dais, brilliant white and surrounded by small spotlights set about the stone floor. Upon the platform gleamed six metal boxes, man-sized and coffin-shaped. They were set upon six broad steel tables like those I had seen in Trevor Mallory’s cellar, arranged in two rows of three; and in the center was a single empty table. I caught the same unforgettable scent that had tormented me at HEL, the sharp stink of iodine and alcohol and formaldehyde, the faint organic smells of neurotransmitting fluid and the saline solution used to preserve living tissue for transplants.
“Jesus, Wendy, what are they going to do?” Jane’s voice came through chattering teeth. I pulled her close to me and stroked her hand, as cold as my own.
“I don’t know.” The horrible thought seized me, that it was for
me
those cold chambers were intended. But before I could say anything, the already hushed space grew deadly still.
“The moon,” one of the energumens whispered, and pointed at the ceiling. I looked up, and with a gasp saw that what I had taken to be the closed darkness of the cavern’s roof was in fact a great hole gaping there, a ragged vent that opened onto the night sky. This was where the smell of honeysuckle came from. And now I could also hear the distant chittering of bats, and see them in a thin skirling cloud fleeing into the night sky. Faintest of all came the sound of the great river on its slow sad course about the mountain. As I stared, a faint gleam appeared on the lower lip of the cave’s yawning mouth, like a row of teeth suddenly illumined there. A pearly glow that grew brighter and brighter, until in the cave’s opening there appeared the curved rim of the full moon, so brilliant that I had to shade my eyes. At sight of it a great sigh ran through the cavern. Humans and half-human creatures alike raised their arms, as though they were looking upon the moon’s pale face for the first time; for the first time, or the last.
Gradually the sound of all those yearning voices ebbed, and the moon slowly tracked her milky path across the sky. Other noises began to fill the cavern; rustlings as of impatience, agitated murmurs, and the questing low cries of the argalæ. Beside Jane and me our energumen guardians stared fixedly at the raised platform, and so we set our gaze there too. There was nothing else to see, really, save the blue-clad troops of the Alliance stirring restlessly beneath the harvest moon.
And then suddenly a figure appeared on the dais, his arms raised in greeting. Silhouetted against the moonlight, a tracery of violet and pale lavender like veins beneath his metal skin: Metatron. Behind him marched a row of figures, human-sized and wearing hooded white tunics. There were twelve of them. They moved in utter silence, walking slowly until they reached the center of the platform. The last two bore between them a long silver capsule, like those already resting upon the steel tables. They paced to the single remaining empty table and carefully lowered the casket there. Then the other white-robed acolytes stepped silently across the dais until they stood behind the remaining capsules, faceless hooded forms like the ghostly figures of astral navigators in the most ancient of the Ascendants’ ’files. There was something about the slow, almost rehearsed precision of their movement, that made me think that they had done this many times before.
Retirement ceremony,
that nameless old man had told Jane and me.
The whole damn thing just happens again; it’s the same every time.
I shivered, but even as I tried to look away, to seek vainly for some escape from the room, for some sign of help unlooked for—Miss Scarlet or Giles or even Fossa—I felt eyes upon me,
his
eyes, and helplessly stared up once more.
He stood there, a shining icon in black and lavender, and from within the perfect curves of his replicant’s face those other eyes gazed down upon me. Green as new leaves, green as poison,
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams:
the vernal gaze of the Boy in the Tree, the Gaping One, imprisoned or reborn in that hollow construct’s shell. His polished body reflected the liquid darkness above, the luminous moon: a lunar deity or a man made out of night. I tried to pull away from his gaze, fought against it as though it were a serpent casting its coils tight about my chest; but I could not. And then very slowly Metatron smiled at me, and in that smile I saw the death of all that I had ever held dear.