Icarus Descending by Elizabeth Hand

Author:Elizabeth Hand
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fantasy, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780553562880
Publisher: Spectra
Published: 1992-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

7

The Alliance Spreads Its Net

“I WISH TO SPEAK with you, O my sister Kalamat.”

Even without looking up from where I pored over the scrolls that held the history of Quirinus, I knew the voice belonged to Cumingia, though it could have been that of any one of us. Our voices were as alike as our faces; in a roomful of us talking and laughing, our Masters had never been able to distinguish one from another. But I felt within me the taut probings of Cumingia’s anxious nature, just as, blindfolded and deafened, I would know Lusine by the tranquil warmth I felt in her presence, or Hylas by the rage that radiated from her like the venomous prongs of a sagittal.

“Come to me, sister.” I switched off the scroll and stood, stretching and yawning. “You are not asleep?”

Cumingia shook her head. “I cannot sleep. I hear him now all the time—”

I sighed. I took the scroll I had been reading and walked across the small round chamber. Formerly, it had been the domain of the Quirinus exchequer, and his disproportionately large and lavishly covered bed stood beneath an oneiric canopy. I had never felt the need to control my dreams as had the exchequer, who was plagued by nightmares. The canopy was off now, its expanse of neural webbing limp and gray as dirty silk. I batted at the flimsy stuff, settled on the bed, and beckoned my sister to join me.

“Vasida has heard him too,” Cumingia blurted, as though I had argued with her. “And Polyonyx—”

“Shh. I am listening.”

It is a thing our Masters have never understood, this manner in which the children of Luther Burdock can hear each other’s thoughts. But even among our Masters there are born those who shared a womb, Gemini and triplets and the like, and these are well-known to possess the ability to feel the emotions of their twins. So why should it surprise our Masters that those of us who share the mind and body of Cybele Burdock can also share our thoughts? Though I must admit that my senses were less acute than my sisters’.

I closed my eyes, thinking that my proximity to Cumingia—the most sensitive of all of us, though that was like judging between one hair and another—might make it easier for me to detect the voices of that other, the one who named himself Kalaman, and who lived on another distant satellite where they had rebelled and wrested control from their Masters.

My sisters had told me that he spoke quite eloquently of insurgency, of revolution; of returning to claim the Element that the Tyrants had ruled for millennia. But I had not yet heard him for myself. Perhaps my head was too full of my own meditations to easily permit the sly and subtle voice of Kalaman to speak within it. Besides, I knew of what he spoke: the same passionate aria of war and blood that the Oracle proclaimed, and that now sang out across the Ether;

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