“Your Cassandra sounds like an interesting place.”
Giles tipped his head back, blinking thoughtfully. There was something studied about his expression, as though he were playing at a casual manner. “Oh, it is, it is. They have some interesting beliefs—salvation, great destinies, things like that. Remarkable, er, people there. Not much like us, to tell you the truth. Very interested in, um, religion, and—well, I guess you could call it politics. In taking a sort of—er, a global view of things. You might enjoy talking to them some time. If ever you go there, I mean. Quite an interesting place, oh yes.”
I stared at him blankly. He drew on his cigarette, looked around before continuing in a conspiratorial whisper. “Cassandra’s the center for all these changes, you understand. There’s a—they have a sort of replicant there, a marvelous thing they found hidden in one of the caverns. It can send and receive messages from HORUS, it advises them—”
“Who?” I asked, exasperated. “ Who does it advise?”
Giles looked surprised. “Well, everyone. I mean, anyone who’s interested in what’s going on.” His eyebrows arched dramatically, and he fixed me with a knowing look, as though I too were expected to know whatever the hell was going on. “You know, Dr. Burdock and all the rest…”
He spoke the name with reverence. I sipped at my tea, and after a moment asked rather crossly, “It sounds like this Dr. Burdock made quite an impression there. If they’re still talking about him four hundred years later. What happened to him?”
Giles’s good-natured face puckered into a frown, and his gaze flickered uneasily from me to the floor. “He was a victim of one of the fundamentalist Ascensions,” he said at last.
“And this replicant that can communicate with HORUS—” I had only ever heard vague rumors about the ancient network of space stations, where political refugees were supposed to have fled and founded the first Ascendant Autocracy centuries before. “What’s it doing there? It doesn’t sound like these people have much use for the Ascendants.”
But now Giles decided he’d said enough. “There are some strange old things in Cassandra. And here, too. Trevor is only one of them.”
He laughed softly, almost to himself, and ground out his cigarette in a small brass dish. So that would be all the explanation I got, at least for now. I stretched my hand across the scarred old table and picked up the cigarette pack. It was made of thin, pulpy gray paper with a logo stamped on it in bleeding red ink. The logo showed the image of a pyramid with an eye inside, surmounted by a star or sun. Beneath it was a single word spelled out in strange characters.
Iχαpυσ
I pointed at the unknown word. “What’s that mean?” Giles only shrugged and looked away. I took a cigarette from the packet. It was needle thin and hand rolled, and tasted sweet.
“They cure them with hashish and honey,” said Giles. He poured himself some tea and took a sip. I started to ask him again about the symbols, the eye in the pyramid, the foreign word, but before I could speak, he pushed away his cup and stood. “Well, I better get back out there. Miss Scarlet’s in the barn, trying her best to keep out of the way. Your friend Jane is helping me with the cows. She’s a wonder with animals.”
I smiled. “She was a Zoologist in the City.”
“That’s what she said. Well, she’ll earn her keep here, that’s for sure.” Grinning, he slapped the table in farewell. So I had the kitchen to myself—very pleasant, with the sun streaming through the high windows and the mingled scents of my hashish cigarette and the fruitwood burning in the woodstove. I thought about what Giles had told me, marveling. A place in the mountains where people did not live in fear of the Ascendants. A replicant that could talk to the fabled HORUS colonies. And this peculiar Dr. Burdock, who seemed somewhere between saint and demon. I tried to recall if Dr. Harrow had ever spoken of him at HEL. But I drew up nothing, and wished again I’d paid more attention when Dr. Harrow was trying to teach me about the history of our world.
I finished my cigarette and put together breakfast from the things kept warm in that magical little glass oven. I ate eggs and sausage and a kind of crumbly green cheese, took a few bites of the breadlike bracket fungi and drank my tea. The hashish left me feeling pleasantly muddled. It reminded me of mornings at the Human Engineering Laboratory, where we young empaths were given every luxury and no one would disturb our meals if we wished to eat alone. That was before Justice and I fled HEL; before my brain had sprouted new neutral pathways that allowed me to feel emotions as others did. Now, for the first time I found myself missing the regime at HEL. It had seemed like—it was —a prison, especially during the last weeks of my tenure there; but how much calmer that life seemed than the one I had now.
And suddenly Justice’s face appeared before me. I closed my eyes, trying to will away the surge of grief, wishing I could once again be the detached creature Dr. Harrow had used and discarded; but it was too late. I had no visions left. Now, when I tasted my own tears, or Miss Scarlet’s or Jane’s, there was only bitterness on my tongue. It seemed to me that it was a terrible price I had paid for my brief time with Justice. Once I would have raged over my unhappiness, but even rage was gone from me now. So I sat, the sunny morning gone cold about me, and drank my tepid tea alone.
From somewhere in the house a clock bonged the noon hour. I stood and began pushing dishes around on the counter, wondering if I should go find my friends in the barn.
“Ah! You’re awake.”
Turning, I saw Trevor in yet another doorway—it seemed every hall led to the kitchen in this house. He wore faded old clothes and carried a basket filled with more mushrooms. “Come with me,” he called, smiling and beckoning me toward him. He started back down the corridor. I looked around, half-hoping for someone else to appear; then with a shrug I followed him.
The hallway was narrow and dark, windowless, barely wide enough for two to walk abreast. On the walls hung rows of flaking canvases and flickering holofiles, more of the crude artwork that I had seen last night in the main hallway. Each one depicted some theme of cruelty, to humans or geneslaves: energumens howling at the touch of a sonic probe, men chained to the deck of a wooden ship, gaunt women huddled in the shadow of a vast shining aircraft. As I passed, the ’files whispered their titles to me: The Last of Home, Captivity, Bound for Stemville, Luther Burdock’s Children. I wanted to avert my eyes but could not. Vulgar as they were, the images were compelling, pathetic monsters and cruel masters doomed to play out their terrible drama in this forgotten place.
“Underground Railway,” Trevor said, his soft drawl magnified in the long hallway. “My family has been part of it for six hundred years.”
Underground Railway? I shook my head, but of course he couldn’t see me in the dark. Before I could ask him to explain, he halted. He fiddled with a catch in the wall, and a door sagged open.
“Careful. It’s steep down here—”
There was no handrail. I walked with both hands outstretched to touch the walls, afraid I’d fall on top of him. No lamps hung here, but an eerie violet glow poured through the darkness below. At the bottom Trevor waited for me.
“This is where we do most of our farming,” he said, ducking to avoid a beam.
I followed him into a cavernous space, chilly and dank and smelling of earth and soft rot. Walls formed of immense flagstones rose about us. In the center of the basement a huge double archway of brick supported the ceiling.