Icarus Descending Read Free Page A

designed virus, you have nothing to fear from it. You are free, child. You may go.”
    “Go?” My sister frowned. It was odd, to be called child by a human small enough to sit upon your knee. She told me later that she thought this man Horacio Baklas must be mad. “Where will we go? We have jobs to do, here—”
    Horacio Baklas shook his head. He was small, even for a man; he barely came up to my sister’s waist. “No more, Polyonyx.”
    (That was another odd thing about him—he called us by the names we have given ourselves. Our Ascendant Masters call us all by one name, Kalamat. When there are males among us, they are named Kalaman. But Horacio Baklas insisted upon learning our true names.)
    “Haven’t you heard?” he went on. “There is a war on Earth—what you call the Element—war between the human Tyrants and the geneslaves.”
    Polyonyx looked puzzled. “War?” We had heard of wars, of course; the reason we were on the HORUS station was to serve our Masters while they planned their endless attacks upon other humans in other space colonies and on the continents below. It is something we can never understand about humanity. They are such barbarians that the ones who call themselves the Ascendants—our Masters—wage war upon their brothers in the Archipelago and the Balkhash Commonwealth and the Habilis Emirate, and in other places upon the Element. It is because there is not enough to eat there; or so I have been told. But to us the Masters are all as one evil thing. They are not like us, or the other geneslaves. Their origins go back aeons, to animals that they hold in contempt; they do not have the hands of Dr. Luther Burdock upon them. “We have not been told of this.”
    He nodded. His face had that fanatical glow that comes so easily to humans. “Yes! For three years now we have worked in silence, planning, planning—and now the time has come. Your time has come—”
    Unfortunately he now began to rave, claiming he saw our father, Dr. Burdock, walking to meet him through the empty chamber. After a few minutes he keeled over, his face twisted into that rictus of inspired glee that was to become all too familiar to us through transmissions from the battlefronts below.
    Polyonyx watched nonplussed, finally picked him up and carried him to Cumingia, who was still tending the infirmary, though there were no longer any humans to minister to.
    “This one is dead, too,” said Polyonyx. She gave the body to Cumingia, who shook her head sadly. “He said there is a war on the Element—on Earth—he said that the geneslaves have rebelled.”
    At this news Cumingia grew agitated and called me. I notified the others, all of us who remained on Quirinus, and we gathered in the circular meeting chamber that our Ascendant Masters had called the War Room. There I looked into the faces of my sisters. There were thirty-three of us, all identical except for the color of our skin and the occasional cicatrix or tattoo drawn where a breast had been removed in our ritual offering to the Mother. High overhead the lamps flickered to a soft violet, signaling that evening had come to the station. The sweet scent of chamomile hung in the air, where my sisters Hylas and Aglaia had bruised the tiny flowers grown in our gardens and set them to steep in wide, shallow steel basins. When I counted that all of my sisters had arrived, I raised my arms. After a moment the chamber grew silent.
    On the floor in the middle of the room lay the body of Horacio Baklas. As he was the last of the Masters to die here on Quirinus, it had somehow seemed that there should be some special ritual to accompany the giving of his body to the Ether. At least I felt that I should look upon his corpse before it was disposed of. He was unshaven, as are many barbarian Masters, and still wore the long yolk-yellow tunic he had arrived in. On his breast there was a round allurian disk, a ’file receiver that none of us had thought to remove. His