Authors: Elizabeth Hand
Here on the HORUS colony of Helena Aulis, the masters were also gone. That was why Kalaman was able to enjoy the pleasures of the stim chamber. Beneath closed lids the energumen’s eyes rolled and flickered. Each lid had been tattooed with another eye—staring, slightly wild—to give the appearance of constant watchfulness. Because even among his own kind, Kalaman must be wary. Ever since the Oracle had first appeared to them, with its cries of war and reunion—since then Kalaman had grown watchful. He had given himself over to the chamber only after securing the door and commanding a replicant server stand guard there. Guarding the server was his brother Ratnayaka. Energumen and robot watched emotionlessly as their leader lay within his hammock beneath the oneiric canopy. The web of neural fibers had left a pale Crosshatch of lines upon his smooth, ruddy skin. He was naked, except for a very old and very worn leather scabbard he wore about his waist. It had been too small for him; he had made it longer with ropes of human hair. It held a
kris,
one of the serpentine ritual swords from the Archipelago. It was the only object that any of the energumens on Helena Aulis could be said to own. Kalaman had found it in the rooms he now occupied, the chambers that had belonged to the colony’s chief historian. He used it for other rituals than those it had been designed for, fifteen hundred years earlier. It was too small, of course, having been made for a human and not an energumen; but it was a formidable thing nonetheless, its blade so sharp, it had sliced through its scabbard in spots and left barely healed scars upon Kalaman’s thigh. Kalaman did not care. He wore it everywhere, even now as he dreamed of the jade waters of the only place on Earth he had ever been, a place that the Alliance had destroyed.
He had been born there—if you thought of one day waking inside a laboratory, surrounded by a dozen forms identical to your own, as being born. That was in Sulawaya, in Jawa. He lived there only a few days, long enough to have another kind of tattoo drawn on his face, this one a string of numerals written on the soft circle of flesh beneath his chin. The men and women who watched over the vesicles wherein the clones were generated did not call him Kalaman. Or rather, they called all energumens Kalaman, or Kalamat if, like their long-dead progenitrix, the clones were females. But it was seldom that their Ascendant masters spoke to them. Within three days all members of the cluster—Cluster 579, the Asterine Cluster as it later came to be known—had been dispatched, sold or bartered into slavery, most of them within the Archipelago’s thousand islands. They were herded into plasteel crates, or else had monitors attached to their temples or necks or legs; a few even had an eye removed and a keek, a more sophisticated monitor, inserted in its place. Those not destined for elsewhere in the Archipelago were sedated in preparation for their journey to HORUS. Their masters never looked back as these few crates were hauled onto the elÿon freighters that would take them to the space colonies, or as the rest were shoved into the holds of Ascendant freighters bound for Mindanao and Palembang and Singapore. As often as they could, their masters avoided looking at the energumens at all.
Kalaman hated his masters, a hatred so pure and focused, it seemed like a form of worship. Such intensity of emotion was an anomaly in a geneslave—they were bred for servitude, after all—but Kalaman was nearly halfway through his brief life before he knew that. A week after his birth he shrieked and fought when the plastic monitor with its nearly weightless load of explosive was clipped around his neck—an extreme reaction, but not unheard of. The energumens were strange creatures, and centuries of genetic manipulation had made them highly unpredictable. If one could subject their minds—as opposed to their brains, the usual organ of study—to the sort of scrutiny produced by instruments such as the neuroelectrical transmitter, or NET, you might see nesting within the overlapping circles of fear, hunger, curiosity, pride, cunning, a sort of radiant core that pulsed violet (it had been her favorite color); and this would be the emotional heart of the energumens, that aspect that was passed down through the centuries nearly untouched from its donor, the fifteen-year-old Cybele Burdock. It was a truly childlike and innocent heart, its keenest legacy the gentle image of Luther Burdock, which the energumens from inception all carried within them, like an atavistic vision of a middle-aged and all-loving god; but this heart was hardly ever glimpsed or understood by the Ascendants. They saw only the dark outer layers: the guile, the restless intellects that lived only a few years, the joy of debate and the physical hunger that imperiled unwary masters.
The one thing the Ascendants rarely saw was hatred.
Kalaman hated. So did the others from Cluster 579, though they were not as driven as he was. Afterward—too late for anything but the unsatisfying execution of the culpable technician—it was learned that the entire cluster had been manipulated in vitro—the first successful sabotage by one of the human rebels who would later spearhead the Asterine Alliance in the Archipelago. The unauthorized shuffling of a few chains of telomeres on the right chromosomes, like tugging beads from a string; and instead of another cluster, identical to thousands before it, there were Kalaman and his sibs.
Physically he resembled all the others, eight feet tall and big-boned, his features incongruously delicate for that face, the size of a horse’s but with Cybele’s narrow nose and Cybele’s pert mouth and Cybele’s broad cheekbones. His skin was red, almost a brickish color—they tried to vary skin color, to make it easier to identify those destined for places other than the Archipelagian hydrofarms or Urisa mining colonies—and he had the same eerie eyes, the colors of pupil and iris reversed so that they had a truly demonic appearance. Not Cybele’s eyes; an energumen’s. A monster’s.
Kalaman opened those eyes now, where he lay beneath the wispy tendrils of the oneiric canopy. It was as though a pinpricked beam of light sliced through a black hole. The shining pupil grew larger, adapting to the bright room, until the iris disappeared and there were only those two staring orbs, dead white and fixed on the canopy overhead. He had come here to rest, to recover from the exertions of sending his thoughts and will across the Ether, to try to speak to those of his kind who lived in the other HORUS colonies. It was a skill the energumens had developed over the last few hundred years, and one which their masters did not clearly understand. A sort of telepathy, like that which exists between twins; but stronger, since when they employed this subtle telepathy, the cloned siblings were, in essence, only talking to themselves.
But now Kalaman was too exhausted to send his thoughts any farther than his own head. He raised one hand, shading his eyes from the glow of the canopy, and turned slightly until he could see across the room.
“Ratnayaka,” he whispered.
On the other side of the chamber Ratnayaka stirred. He had not heard Kalaman, precisely; instead he felt him, like the breath of a moth’s wing across his consciousness. He was identical to his sibling, except for the color of his skin, which was an ivory yellow, the color of a jaundiced eye; that and the fact that he really did possess a single jaundiced eye, the other having been replaced by a keek. After the successful rebellion on Helena Aulis he had pried the prosthetic orb from its socket. It still had not healed completely: the nearly atrophied eyelid hung in a limp fold of flesh, giving him a queasy look. And so Ratnayaka, who was vain (another anomaly; he too had been a member of Cluster 579) wore a patch over that eye, a neatly woven circle of red-and-gold silk tied about his sleek long head with a cord of braided hemp. Like Kalaman he had filed his upper front teeth into dull white V’s and stained his lower teeth red with madder-root, so that they disappeared when he opened his mouth. A line of thin gold rings hung from a series of tiny piercings in his brow. As he crossed the chamber to Kalaman, the rings made a nearly imperceptible tinkling.
“O, my brother,” Ratnayaka said softly. In a room full of energumens speaking, one would hear the same voice over and over—louder, softer, angry, laughing—an effect that had driven their masters to distraction, and which Kalaman had exploited when planning the revolt on Helena Aulis. “O Kalaman, I am here—”
Kalaman drew him close, his fingers playing with the rings dangling above Ratnayaka’s eye patch. “Ratnayaka, beloved: I have done as the Oracle bade me. I have called to our sisters on Quirinus. All but my sister Kalamat—she does not seem to hear me.” He frowned, let his hand move up and across his sibling’s forehead, to rub the coarse stubble on his skull. “We should go there soon, I think.”
Ratnayaka nodded. “Of course.” He had been thinking the same thing himself.
Quirinus was where the Ascendant Architects had lived, before they succumbed to the plague loosed by one of the Alliance’s human sympathizers. The energumens on Quirinus were among the last to join the Alliance. At least, Kalaman assumed they had aligned themselves with the rebels; what energumens would not? In the last few months he had spoken to many of his kind, through standard ’file transmissions and the more subtle forms of thought that left him drained and shaken. He had been surprised that there were so many of them: their human masters had done a good job of keeping their numbers a secret. And the Oracle claimed there were more of them than could be imagined down below, on the Element. Energumens and cacodemons, aardmen and argalæ and even men and women—the Oracle had promised Kalaman a place of honor among them all, a place of honor beside their father when Kalaman and his brothers returned to the Element.
And so he was anxious to leave Helena Aulis, the hollow metal torus that had been prison to him for the twenty months of his brief life. He and his brothers had no reason to continue to stay within the HORUS colonies. Their enemies were dead; any weaponry could be transported to the Element, to better serve the Alliance. To hasten their journey there, the Oracle had arranged for an elÿon to meet them a few days hence—a vessel called the
Izanagi,
whose adjutant had been easily subverted by the rebels on Totma 3. They had given the navigator enough of a neural supply to forestall his pre-programmed death by several weeks. Enough time, the Oracle had told them, to launch another round of assaults upon the Element. The elÿon would rendezvous at Quirinus. There Kalaman and his brothers would board it; and the others, their sisters. Kalaman had never seen a female energumen. At Quirinus he would finally meet the one they called Kalamat; the only one who, consciously or not, had not responded to his mental forays. He was anxious to leave the station, anxious that the others should know of the journey that awaited them.
“I will tell our brothers,” Kalaman said.
He closed his eyes. All about him the simulated wind stirred, the curlews cried and swept past on imaginary currents that could not warm him. Kalaman relaxed, tried to open his mind and heart to his brothers on Helena Aulis; but it was no use. The effort of calling to the other energumens across the void that yawned between this station and Quirinus had exhausted him. His heart had slowed, his hands and feet felt as though they were trapped in ice. He could die from these repeated efforts to cry out across the abyss—one of his brothers
had
died, just days after they had executed the last of the tyrants.
But Kalaman would not be so weak or careless. He had found the means to restore himself during the days when they held their Ascendant Masters hostage: he had learned about the harrowing. Later, when there were no more humans left alive, he discovered that the effects of the harrowing were even more intense when practiced upon his brothers. But that must be done with great care. A few of his brothers—Bili here on Helena Aulis, Castor and Mfwawi on Totma 3—had displayed the same flair for leadership that Kalaman possessed. It would not do for the Alliance to be destroyed by internecine fighting even before they joined their father and the Oracle. And, of course, harrowing his brothers meant that there would be fewer of them, though those few would be stronger than before, oh,
much
stronger.
The first had been Jhayash, injured during that final skirmish against the humans, when their masters had assaulted them with their last stores of protonic flares. He could not bear to watch Jhayash suffer and slowly die, could not bear to
feel
it; and so almost without thinking he had taken him, and afterward felt strong, so strong! and all his brothers with him.
He had heard of such things—it was well-known that the energumens of Advhi Sar had ritually dispatched their own kind, and there were many tales in the Archipelago of both human and energumen cannibals. But for Kalaman and his brothers, Jhayash had been the first. In the last months there had been others: all given to Kalaman, to keep him strong, to keep his clever mind alert and able. When he felt horribly wearied by his efforts at communicating with their sibs in the other stations, or exhausted by the hours linked to the stratboards, watching scenes of the destruction on the Element: then he would give himself over to the harrowing. At such times he had plucked a human hostage from the dwindling group in the prison bay. Later, when they were all dead, he had begun to choose carefully from among his brothers, and always he had invited his other siblings to share the harrowing with him. Afterward the survivors had grown stronger, their psychic link more intense. Kalaman had grown strongest of all, but he needed to: the Oracle had said he was to be a leader. Now, if he went for many days without a harrowing, a sickness came upon him, and so upon his brothers. And they could not weaken: not now, not when they were so close to closing the ranks of the Alliance.
Kalaman sighed, breathed deeply the salt-scented air. He should choose one now, before he grew too tired to make the summons. Ratnayaka was the nearest. Standing there beside him, his single eye was fixed upon his brother with a vigilance that resembled hunger as much as it did love. And Kalaman knew that hunger,
real
hunger, was as much a part of Ratnayaka as his scarred eye socket and the line of fine gold rings along his brow. If he was truly wise, Kalaman would choose Ratnayaka for the harrowing, and spare himself the confrontation he knew was to come.