I was not, no more than any Aviator is a monster. If I had been, I would have rejoiced in my incarnation as a rasa: deathless, since my corpse had been regenerated; fearless, since what could harm me now? Harm a creature who had died and been reborn with this adamant shell?
But I did not rejoice. I loathed it, with a hatred that would have been impossible for me to fathom before blood and sinew and bones, skull and arms and torso were torn from me, leaving only a human hand and two raving eyes trapped within an Ascendant tool. Perversely, it had been that hatred that kept me sane—at least as sane as ever I had been—even as now it was hope that was sending me westward with the waning day.
Evening fell, the late fiery evening that marks nightfall in that part of the world. We were still many miles from the coast, but already the sky was streaked with the lurid colors coughed forth by the floating refineries and manufacturing forms that choke the Pacific shores like kelp. As we grew nearer, excitement filled me, to be returning there after so long. Kesef battled the night wind that rose from the cooling ocean. I could feel the slender structure shaking all around me, its wings hugging in close as it dived and then soared back into the twilight like a nighthawk. There was no sound except for the hollow rush of wind around the Gryphon’s wings.
Behind me Nefertity sat in silence. Her body had cooled to a faint silvery gray, the color of dull metal. Only her eyes betrayed that she was anything but a common server. Anticipation of our arrival at Cisneros had whetted my desire for company; unexpectedly I felt the need to talk.
“We will be there very soon,” I said.
Silence. I thought she had retreated into her dormant mode, but then a flicker of gold speared her breast, and she replied, “The thought seems to cheer you.”
The golden threads spread like flame across her torso, captive lightning. Outside, stars began to show in the greenish sky. Below us there were no lights; only reflected sunset smeared across mile after mile of ruins, the fallen spires and spars of what had once been the great Pacific sprawl. I felt a pang, recalling other flights over this place.
“It is a place where I was happy once,” I said. “My second assignment was to Cisneros. I was very young, just a few years out of the Academy—”
“Where was your first assignment?”
“Buru.” Nefertity shook her head as I explained, “It used to be the primary assignment for all Aviators, a sort of training site. An island in the Archipelago. It is gone now—”
Swallowed by the rising seas that had claimed so many island and coastal countries; but no one mourned the fall of Buru, not even the cannibal janissaries who patrolled its capital before the deluge. “I was there as part of the peacekeeping force, keeping watch over the hydrofarms. My great fortune was to leave after only six months. That was when I came here.”
She leaned over to stare out the tiny round window, steadying herself as Kesef abruptly dropped a thousand feet. “And what is—was—down there?”
Beneath us the jagged ruins rose like tiny islands from channels of deep blue water. For centuries nothing had grown there. After the devastating earthquakes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the cities were abandoned, the vast farms and vineyards reclaimed by the desert. Then came the Split; and now the sea covered it all. As Kesef drew closer to the surface of the waves, the silence that had trapped us for so many hours began to give way. We could hear a hissing, and a sort of soft booming roar; then a series of crashes and booms, like the struts and spars of a ship giving way in a storm. Other tones rang out, some deep like the crush of machinery, some clear and sweet as bells. Beneath all of it was a steady throb, like the pulse of blood in one’s ears.
“The Pacific sprawl. Ruined cities. Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara. All lost in the Split.”
“All of them?” Nefertity’s jadeite eyes glowed in the darkness behind me. “Just—destroyed? Like that?”
I shrugged. “They were fortunate for a long time. The survivors of the first earthquakes seceded from the rest of the country. Eventually they joined with the Nipponian Empire. The Nipponians had a greater defense system than the Autocracy; when the Split came, their autoclaves went on alert and destroyed the forces sent to help them. Nothing was saved. The fantômes —those are the abos who still live there in a few places, a pathetic race—the fantômes say they still dredge up bodies from the caverns beneath the ruins.” I gazed down at the waves. “Listen—can you hear?”
Nefertity cocked her head and drew closer to the window. “Yes. What it is?”
“The sea gnawing at the foundations of the cities. The fantômes say it is the voices of the dead. They believe the sea is eating away at the world, bit by bit, and someday the rest of us will be devoured as well.”
I turned back to the cockpit, scanning the horizon for my first sight of Cisneros. Kesef continued to descend, until we skimmed only a few hundred feet above the water. Twisted girders and shattered pyramids broke through the surface, some of them strung with ragged banners to mark where the fantômes had staked out their territories. I imagined I could smell their squalid settlements, reeking of fish and salted flesh, and once I did see a tiny group squatting on the edge of a makeshift pier, their hunched bodies silhouetted by the light of a fire burning in a steel drum. They might never know that HORUS or the Autocracy had been destroyed. Generations hence they would still be eking their precarious living from the sea and the detritus of an earlier civilization. When finally I tore my gaze from them, I saw the floating city before me.
From this distance Cisneros at first appeared to be a mirage, the weary eye spinning færy domes and turrets from the endless artificial reefs stretching below. But as we grew closer, the shimmering globes of green and gold and blue and crimson took more solid form. I could pick out the tall, slender recon towers, the ancient satellite dishes like a field of white poppies turned toward the stars, the glittering blue-green residence domes. Behind it all, plumes of brilliant flame and blue gas spewed from the refineries, miles off but seeming near enough that their heat might singe one’s hair.
And hovering in the sulfurous sky like some mad dream of the floating city, the billowing mass of the elÿon: the biotic craft, half-living organism and half-machine, with which the Ascendants plied the nearer reaches of space.
“A Nipponian fleet!” Nefertity cried in amazement.
“No.” I gazed at the elÿon closest to us, an umbrella-shaped leviathan the color of sunset, its edges rosy-pink and blurred from the heat of its engines. “Although the Ascendants did claim many of them after the Split. The Nipponian vessels are much finer than those made by the Autocracy.”
“And so this is how you travel to the stars?”
“To the stars? No. Merely to the HORUS colonies.” I turned away impatiently: we were coming upon the floating city so quickly, it seemed we might overshoot it. “Brace yourself—”
I closed my eyes, once more feeling Kesef’s web probing for instruction. At my command the Gryphon stalled. For an instant we hung there as my mind filled with images filtered through Kesef’s optics. Beneath us shimmered an impossibly wide vista of grids, covered with the glowing geometric patterns used in guiding the elÿon during docking procedures. On the deck five or six people had gathered, shielding their eyes against the glow of the airships. I had not ordered Kesef to signal ahead of our arrival, and unexpected landings were rare at Cisneros. They stared up at us, their faces lost in the shadow of their uniform hoods; one man clutched frantically at a vocoder and shouted into it. Cisneros, at least, seemed still to be functioning as an Ascendant outpost. Suddenly Kesef dropped, a vertiginous plunge that once would have made me grin with exhilaration. Now I only braced myself and waited. A grinding noise as the Gryphon’s legs extended; a gentle bounce as we set down. We had landed.