It was a standard first-level cadet’s room. That is to say, a tiny, narrow cell perfectly in keeping with the Academy’s original design some six hundred years earlier, which was as Le Couvent de Notre-Dame des Afflictions. Aidan’s room retained its air of sunlit penitence. It overlooked the eastern ridge of the rocky fell called Plasma Mole, several hundred feet above where the ocean moaned and throbbed in dutiful counterpoint to our own smaller sufferings. Like postulants, we were not permitted to bring with us any remnants of our former lives. This gave the rooms an air of uncanny expectancy, as though even after centuries of silence and retribution they still awaited some measure of passion, of temptation or betrayal. Beneath a single window waited a coffin-sized iron bedstead, with its immaculate white linens, stiff from being dried outside in the chilly maritime air, and a feather pillow flattened by generations of aching heads. The smell of dust and pencil shavings was almost lost beneath that of the last rugosa roses blooming on the stony edge of Plasma Mole. The room’s sole ornamentation, besides the gorgeous enameled slab of sky above a spavined wooden desk, was the plasteel representation of the NASNA motto and its blighted moon, hanging beside the bed. The whitewashed walls should have been almost painfully sunlit, the ceilings marbled with the viridian wash of reflected ocean.
But I was surprised to enter Aidan Harrow’s room and find it dark. Actually, not very dark; but to one accustomed to that ruthless blue northern light, it had the appearance of a hermit’s forest lair. I took two steps inside (four more would have brought me to the window) and shaded my eyes as though I had been blinded.
“Mandodari wanted to make sure you were awake,” I said, trying to keep disapproval from clouding my voice. A cerulean cadet’s jacket had been strung across the window and hung with other oddments of clothing in an effort to keep the sun out. I frowned and squinted. I still wasn’t certain just where the room’s tardy occupant lay.
“Mmm. Of course. Well, I’m up.”
A head suddenly popped from the heap of covers on the bed. A stray shaft of light struck his hair, a mass of auburn waves surrounding a pointed puckish face, sharp-chinned and with a small pointed nose. He was tall and lanky for his age, but that face was oddly childlike; or maybe it was just his expression, the slight threat of mindless violence that was never absent from his gray-green eyes. When he slid from the covers, I saw he was already fully dressed. Indeed from the rumpled look of his linen shirt and leather trousers, I gathered he had slept in his clothes.
“I’m Aidan Harrow. From St. Clive.” That was a tiny village in the southern maritimes, a day’s air travel from Plasma Mole.
I nodded stiffly. “Margalis Tast’annin.”
Aidan’s eyes widened. “The poet’s son? I heard you were here.”
With one hand he began smoothing the tangled hair back from his forehead. In the other he clutched a book. At a loss as to conversation, I tilted my head to read the title—purely a matter of convention, since the only book we were permitted to use in first level was the ancient talking edition of An Inquiry into Some Ethical Points of Celestial Navigation. I was quite shocked to see that this was not what Aidan held at all.
“That’s under interdict!”
I hadn’t meant to sound so prudish: I was genuinely stunned that someone would be so cavalier about flouting the rules. Punishment for even simple infractions was severe—most of the infirmary was given over to punitive devices, many of them quite new—and possession of contraband reading material was a serious offense.
“Are you going to turn me in?”
Aidan looked at me coolly, but his tone was innocently curious. If he had acted belligerent or even frightened, I probably would have reported him. As it was, I shut the door behind me and crossed the room to take the book from his hand.
“No. But you better get rid of it, or hide it outside. May I see?”
Even before I looked at it, I could tell, by its scent and feel, that it had not come from the Academy library. A flimsy plastic jacket protected its cover and spine, but even that couldn’t hide how old it was. I drew it to my face and sniffed. When I rifled the pages, dust smelling of cloves and hemp made me sneeze.
“It’s just a book.” Aidan’s voice cracked and he flushed. “From my father—from his library.”
The plastic cover was so old and desiccated, it was difficult to read the title. I opened it, holding it gingerly so that the loose pages wouldn’t fall out. It was printed on thick paper that had aged to the color of rich cream, much heavier and softer than the cheap fiber used for talking books. The end-pieces were marbled, yellow and blue and green. The title page held a little holo no bigger than the ball of my thumb, showing an elaborately stylized eye that seemed to follow me when I moved. Beneath it, title and author were jetprinted in a deliberately shaky hand.
Errores Maleficarum et Incunabula
By Michel DeFries
Beneath this was the legend Privately Printed in the Independent Commonwealth of California (later part of the Western Unity, and still later part of the Pacific Ocean) and a date some four hundred years earlier.
I stared at it curiously, and had started to turn the pages when I heard the electronic bell shriek the quarter hour, last call for first reflections. I swore, recalling Mandodari’s punitive use of the memory enhancer, which exhausted one even as it made sleep impossible for days afterward.
“Here—” I shoved the book back at Aidan and strode to the door. “Do something with it—get rid of it, if you’re smart. And do something about that —”
I glowered and pointed at the window draped with Aidan’s clothes. “—Unless you want to spend the rest of the week in the infirmary.”
The mockery vanished from his eyes. Nodding, he crossed to the window and tore down his jacket, sending socks and shirt flying. I left before I could see what he did with the book.
Nefertity and I left as dawn twined through the desert air. Nefertity wished to give farewells to the humans we had left in the valley. Not from any sentiment on her part—she was a construct, remember that, and I refused to believe her capable of any human feeling—but because she feared they might follow us and perish in the desert.
“Leave them be,” I said. I had already turned and was starting for my Gryphon, Kesef, where it crouched on the hillside. “We will find them again if we need them. The world is a small place now, Nefertity. Come.”
The nemosyne’s eyes blazed azure. I smiled, thinking of the woman who had programmed her. What a monster she must have been! But I said nothing, stepping over clumps of prickly pear and broomweed, kicking apart a nest of fire ants until I reached the Gryphon and called out to it.
“Kesef. Wake.”
The aircraft shuddered. Its deceptively fragile wings expanded like a bat’s, unfolding into long blackened petals. From its nose several long filaments extended, testing the air. I could hear it humming inside as it listened to whatever tales those slender filaments might telclass="underline" rain, sun, wind; radiation, mutagens, storms. I guessed sun and a hot northwestern wind. Here where the great coastal prairies had once stretched for hundreds of miles, it was nearly always sun and wind.
From behind me Nefertity called softly. “Where are you taking me?”
I pointed to the west. A man’s eyes would have looked down the sloping hillside onto an endless plain, gold and brown and green fading into a sky that daylight would soon scorch to white. I could see beyond that, to where the Glass Mountains rose and then gave way to the Glass Desert, where the few towns and cities had been embalmed in obsidian waves by the Second Shining. “To Cisneros.”