Authors: Elizabeth Hand
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.”
I shook my head. “It was not in Wichita. There are records at the Academy that show it was brought to the old capital, to Crystal City. There were bunkers there that could withstand a thousand Shinings.”
“But it was not in the capital.” The nemosyne’s eyes glittered green and gold, sentient stars plucked from the sky. “You died there searching for it.”
“You are right. It was not in the City of Trees; but that does not mean it was destroyed. I believe it was stolen by rebel janissaries and brought to safety.”
I tilted my head back until I commanded a view of the sky: the stars cool and unmoving on that field of blue-black, broken here and there by shimmering traces of gold where the atmosphere had been torn by celestial warfare. “I believe it is up there.”
The nemosyne followed my gaze. In the western aspect of the sky a pallid star slowly moved through the constellation 201 Sikorsky, that which for three thousand years had been named Delphinus. It was no true star but one of the failing HORUS stations, like the one that had been my home and commanding outpost until its destruction that autumn by rebels from the Balkhash Commonwealth. Such a little time had passed since then—not even a year—but I felt as distanced from that earlier life of mine as I did from the celestial station passing overhead.
I thought then how long it had been since I looked up to see the stars. In Araboth the Quincunx Domes had blotted out all but the smeared impression of light and shadow beyond their curved worn face. Before my brief tenure beneath the domes, I had been in the City of Trees, where I had seen the stellar explosion that marked the destruction of the NASNA Prime Station. Seven months, then, since I had seen the night sky. As I gazed upward, I felt that same agony of love and longing that had ever gnawed at me when I looked upon the stars: a yearning more powerful than any you will ever know, unless you have since childhood been pledged to NASNA’s cohort. In all the battles I have ever been in upon Earth, I always found some moment to step away from the flames and stench of burning flesh and renew the pact I had made with the stars. Because they are always there, cold and watchful eyes gazing down upon the play of horrors we enact again and again upon the Earth. It is a sort of balm to me, to think of them there unchanging; and with them the steady slow promenade of the HORUS colonies as they mark their lesser orbits through the sky.
So it was with a sense of calm and reassurance that I watched the pale fleck of light edging through that constellation in the western sky. I wondered which of the HORUS colonies it was: Helena Aulis, I thought at first, or perhaps its sister-station of MacArthur. I stood for many minutes, as it left the stars of 201 Sikorsky and entered those of Lascan; but then slowly an unease came over me.
Because the station that I watched was not where it should be. Over the years the orbital patterns of HORUS had grown as familiar to me as the map of scars and renewed tissue on my own hands; but there was something wrong with this. At this time of year, midsummer, there should have been
three
man-made stars charting that path through Sikorsky. Instead only one of the Ascendants’ splendid lights wove its way through the stars, slowly and steadily as a barge through water.
“Something is wrong,” I said to myself. Nefertity gazed at me curiously, and I went on. “They can’t have changed their orbits. MacArthur and Helena Aulis should be there—”
My metal hand stabbed at the sky, blotting out the stars. “But they are not. And there—to the northwest, see?—we should be able to see Quirinus by now. But it is not in its accustomed place.”
Nefertity turned to see where I pointed. “Surely you are mistaken?” she said. “Perhaps it is the wrong part of the sky you are looking at. Or perhaps in the last few months their orbits have changed.”
I shook my head. “No…” My unease grew, even as that single light reached the edge of the horizon and disappeared into the darkness there. “Something has happened,” I went on slowly. My mind raced, seeking some explanation. I was looking at the wrong part of the sky; I had lost track of the time of year; for inexplicable reasons the Ascendants had changed the orbits of their colonies. But I knew my knowledge of the stars, at least, had not suffered any change. As for a change in the orbits of the HORUS colonies—that could not have happened, not so quickly. The Ascendant bureaucracy was a tangle of willful diplomats and cold-eyed Aviators, with a failing communications network linking them. Even the most minor changes in the stations took place only over a period of years, unless—
Unless there had been some kind of rebellion.
“Something has gone wrong,” I said. I turned to Nefertity, whose glowing eyes were still fixed upon the sky. ‘The HORUS colonies have been disrupted, and no one in Araboth told me. No one told me, or—”
My voice died: the rest of my thought was too frightening to speak aloud.
Or no one knew.
I clenched my hand into a fist, the leather straining against the metal joints. What could have happened? A rebellion among the Ascendant Autocracy; assassination, poison, plague—only some terrible misfortune could have disrupted HORUS. But if that was the case, who now was ruling? With Araboth fallen, and the NASNA Prime Station destroyed months ago, and myself absented from the Governors—who was left?
Nefertity’s delicate voice intruded upon my thoughts. “And among all this confusion, you still believe that other nemosyne is somewhere within those space stations? How would they have gotten it there?”
“The celestial warships,” I said dully. “The elÿon fleet—even after the Third Shining, when travel between the continents became almost impossible, the Autocracy was still utilizing the elÿon for passage to HORUS. I believe it was during the decade after the Third Shining that Metatron was brought to HORUS for safekeeping. Until then records show that it was housed at the Republic’s military command in Crystal City; but after the Third Shining there is no further mention of it. I made much study of this at the Academy, and elsewhere when the data were available. I thought at first it had been taken to the ancient capital, but I found no trace of Metatron in the City of Trees, though I did find an ancient arsenal there. Its weapons stores were intact; and this led me to believe that someplace nearby—Warrenton, perhaps, which is where the Aviators lived once—there might also have been an armory that had remained untouched during the Shinings and subsequent Ascensions. Perhaps even an airfield from whence rebel janissaries might have held rendezvous with the elÿon.”
Nefertity made a small noise, a sound that in a human woman would have been a sigh. She glanced over her shoulder to where Kesef crouched in the darkness, then up into the sky.
“So you believe it is there,” she said softly. Her arm when she raised it left a glowing arc of pale blue light in its path. “There? Or there?”
Her voice was mocking but also tentative, with a note that might have presaged fear.
“It could be anywhere. It could even still be here on Earth—in the mountains outside the abandoned capital, or even somewhere in the Archipelago, although I don’t think that is possible. Because over the centuries others have searched for it. Surely it would have been found by them. Or, if it were destroyed, there would have been some record, somewhere—such an important piece of military hardware couldn’t just disappear completely.
“No, I think it is up there, in the HORUS colonies. There are more of the HORUS stations than you can imagine—”
At least, I thought grimly, there
had
been more of them. In my service to the Ascendants I had visited many. Now I began to tell Nefertity of their history.
Some of the colonies were barely fit for human habitation; and indeed, it was debatable that those who lived there now
were
truly human. It was centuries since the oldest colonies were constructed, the first ones as way-stations for that great mad dream our ancestors had of seeding the stars. Later they became military outposts, and after the Second Shining many recusants fled to them in hopes of escaping the plagues and mutagenic warfare that swept the earth.
But of course these were not
rebels
in the sense of being revolutionaries or visionaries, criminals or outcasts or even political malcontents. They had never organized. They had no leaders, no political agenda. They were merely those who had the means and opportunity to commandeer the elÿon warships—Aviators and scientists, mostly, and their families and geneslaves; all of them eager to flee the countries they had helped destroy. They left Earth in whatever elÿon they could hijack, and within weeks or months they reached the colonies. Once there, the existing hierarchies were overthrown, the original HORUS technicians and settlers murdered, and the rebels moved in. From these rebel scientists and their military elite are descended the present Autocracy. An ignoble beginning for the Ascendants; but these rebels were not noble people. They were cowards and opportunists who lacked the discipline or vision to rule the world they had so eagerly violated and then abandoned.