She joined me beneath the Gryphon. We waited until it unfolded the narrow ladder leading into its belly, then climbed inside.
“And what is Cisneros?” she asked.
She slipped into the seat behind me, the restraining belts crackling softly as they looped around her glowing torso. I lay back in my own seat, feeling it mold itself to the hard shell I still could not think of as my body. I closed my eyes for a moment before replying, “NASNA’s Pacific elÿon base.”
“Pacific? It is in the ocean?”
I shook my head as Kesef’s neural web descended to cover my face. “Yes. Off the west coast. The southern part of the Californian peninsula, I think it may have been in your time.”
Kesef hissed. In the broken lingo that Gryphons and Aviators use to communicate verbally, it asked how it could interface with me. I had no flesh for the web to adhere to save my right hand. I raised this and commanded it to use my eyes. An instant later I felt the cool dampish touch of the webs across them, my vision obscured momentarily as the gray mist resolved into an intricate pattern of cross-hatching and glowing orange grids. I felt the Gryphon probing my mind, its questioning clicks as once again it confronted the mass of cerebral tissue and neural wiring that had replaced my brain. Then silence as Kesef found the familiar strata of memory and command that had joined us for so long. I relaxed my hold on the arms of my seat, plunging into that blissful rush that signals the beginning of the biotic interface between Aviator and craft.
In front of me the interior of the Gryphon faded. In its place swam the image of Cisneros as I had last seen it, years before. Indistinct at first, then growing stronger and more lucid as Kesef’s memory banks fleshed out the picture I struggled to recall, until it seemed I stood there again, swaying slightly with that unconscious rhythm one developed after months at base. The landing platforms rising and falling on the Pacific swells, their bands of light pulsing from green to violet and silhouetting the tiny figures of Aviators and ground crew, like blackened cinders swarming in the darkness. In the distance flames shooting skyward from the offshore refineries, and the flashing lights of the fougas patrolling the prison on Tijuana Island. The smell of burning petrol; the silken odor of the spray as it salted my leather uniform and pooled on the metal platform beneath my boots. Above me the NASNA standard snapped in the night, its cloven moon a maleficent eye glaring at the full and resplendent orb shining above the sea. If I tilted my head back, I could read the glittering letters pricked out upon the standard:
Oderint dum metuant.
Let them hate, so long as they fear.
And over all of it the Ascendants’ fleet of celestial airships, blotting out the moon as they hovered above the loading docks, waiting to start their journeys to the HORUS colonies. Like vast ruby-colored clouds, like a second sky gravid with poisonous rain. The elÿon.
“Cisneros,” I whispered: a command for Kesef. But there was no need for me to speak aloud—already the Gryphon had begun to quiver like a greyhound before a race.
“And there?” The nemosyne’s sweet voice cut through the soft roar of Kesef’s solar engines as they fed greedily upon their energy stores.
“There I will confer with my advisers. I will learn what damage has been done to the HORUS colonies, and decide which station might hold our prize. Then we will go there and reclaim Metatron.”
I did not share with her my fears—that there might be no HORUS colonies left where humans still lived and ruled. Instead I focused all my thoughts on Kesef and tried to blot out images of HORUS in flames.
Aviators are solitary, trained—bred, some say—to possess a single-mindedness that drives them with mad abandon into the inferno that any sane person would flee. Nowhere is this singular passion more evident than in our tryst with the Gryphons. When I was at the Academy, it was rumored that our aircraft were quite literally a compendium of Aviator traits: that the brains of brilliant commanders who had fallen in battle were enshrined within the circuitry and neutral fibers of the next generation of Gryphons, a biotic Valhalla. Sherborne Zeal was supposed to have been immortalized thus, and Ciarin Jhabvilos.
I never gave much credence to those stories, but my link with Kesef had seen me through the Archipelago Conflict and the Shining at Recife, and even through the first skirmishes of the so-called Volcanic War, fought in that nether region of the heavens where the air is filled with flames. Once I had interfaced with Kesef, I did not like to have my concentration broken. I raised my hand commandingly.
“Silence now! I will tell you when to speak again; when we reach our destination.”
The vision of Cisneros faded. In the darkened window in front of me I could see Nefertity’s reflection, a woman made of light. She did not speak, but long after we had begun our ascent, the reflected image of her eyes burned through whatever visions Kesef might have shown me of the world that shimmered far, far below us.
It took us most of that day to reach the Pacific coast. We passed above the Glass Mountains: dark brown and black, as though charred by the explosion that had turned the western prairie into a smooth expanse of congealed sand, blinding to look upon. Then the dun-colored reaches of the great Nevadan Desert. Never a hospitable countryside, it had been largely ignored by warring factions of Ascendants, and to my knowledge had never been the object of viral assault by the Commonwealth or Emirate. So, surprisingly, in this barren wilderness one saw signs of human habitation—tent cities where the roving Children of Zion lived; the domed prospects of lonely families tucked within the shadows of the Toiyabe Range; even tiny grids of yellow and green, brave efforts at hydroculture siphoning illegal waters from the Merino Aquifer. I had often glimpsed such ungoverned vistas from the air, particularly in the northern mountains and in areas like those ringing the California Peninsula, where the tremendous geological upheavals of the last centuries left huge fissures in the continent, unmapped and as yet unclaimed by the Autocracy. Aviators were supposed to report these homesteaders to NASNA Command. Months afterward you might see them at the Population Control Centers, each with a monitor clamped to her wrist; and then later set to work at the Archipelago’s hydrofarms, or shipped to the sunless tunnels of the L-5 mines, or strapped unconscious to a gurney at the Human Engineering Laboratory.
I did not inform the Ascendants of what I saw in my travels, then or ever. I had no great sentiment for those small lives stolen from the beleaguered countryside, but neither did I hold any love for my Ascendant superiors, with their slave-run farms and the research facilities where they enslaved corpses when living bodies were scarce. I wondered now if those people living on the edge of the world had glimpsed some revolution in the skies above; if one night they had seen the stars in their courses shift or go out, candles extinguished by a freezing wind.
Our journey was mostly a silent one. A few times Nefertity asked me about the habitations below us, but I ignored her. I had a sort of joy in those brief moments of flight with Kesef—the only joy I was capable of feeling—and occasionally I cursed myself for bringing the nemosyne with me. At the least I could have disabled her speaking mechanism, but I did not.
It is difficult to describe my feelings for the nemosyne. Referring to Nefertity as her, when of course she was a construct. It was only that her coding program had been female, Sister Loretta Riding of the Order of Divine Compassion. Nefertity was no more feminine than I was masculine—less so, since just months before, I had been a man, and she had never been anything more than a delicately shaped array of neural wiring and glass and plasteel. But she held within her datafiles thousands of years of women’s histories: folktales, songs, paintings, fables, poems: such a trove that I believe it somehow had shaped the rigid anima of a twenty-second-century robot and given it the sensibility of a living woman. Despite the unyielding touch of her plasteel hands and the uncanny radiance of her eyes, it was impossible to think of Nefertity as anything but she. But even when I was a man, I knew there were those who believed I was not human, but a monster.