“He does not speak to me,” I said at last.
“Ach! He is so loud I cannot sleep —” Cumingia pressed her hands to her ears, then flung them out as though she might disperse the voice ringing in her head. “My sister Kalamat, how is it you can’t hear him?”
I sat upon the bed that had been the exchequer’s. In my hands, the scroll I had been reading still gave out the faintest impression of warmth and sunlight, the smell of some rich red fruit rotting in heaps on the warm earth—just a few of the things we had never known outside of the library and its thousands of holofiles.
“I do not know,” I said after a moment, and frowned. The scroll slid from my fingers to the bed, and the sensations passed. Already I could not recall them clearly, though they were there, somewhere within me, within the deeply buried memories of Luther Burdock’s daughter. “What is he saying now?’
“That the Agstra Primus Station has joined the Alliance. That upon the Element there is revolution, in Uropa and the city of Vancouver. That there are many thousands of us now with our father in his stronghold. That they do not understand why we have not joined them.”
Her voice was not accusing, but I felt her disappointment with me, a fine crimson fault line running through the consciousness we shared, the psychic structure I always perceived as a sturdy gray mass like stone or concrete.
“These are all things the Oracle has told us already,” I said. “So I do not know why our brother Kalaman must tell us too.”
“He says he is lonely.” Cumingia sat beside me. Her fingers drifted across the cover of my scroll. “It is strange, O my sister Kalamat, that he does not call to you. Very strange.”
She meant it was strange because I was the one they called Kalamat. That was the name given to all energumens by the Tyrants, but among ourselves it is only a priestess who is called that, only a leader. It was to me that Father Irene gave the Oracle of the Great Mother, and so to my sisters I was Kalamat; as this other was named Kalaman by his cohort.
I sighed. Over the last few weeks my sisters had grown increasingly unhappy with my leadership. They wanted to leave Quirinus; to heed the Oracle, go to the Element and there do our father’s bidding and embark upon this holy war. And from what my sisters told me, Kalaman fed their unhappiness. He spoke to them of blood, of the gruesome feast he and his brothers had made of their Masters, and even of their own kind. Kalaman said this blood feast had made them stronger. It had made the bonds between Kalaman and his chosen ones unbreakable, so that they would be chief among those our father would greet when they returned to him. They would be the most beloved of Luther Burdock. And it was this thought that troubled me most; because I wanted my father to love no one as much as me.
My sister knew my mind. “If you were not so full of our father, Kalamat, you might better hear other voices.”
“I would rather hear my father’s voice than this Kalaman’s!” I said sharply. “And why should we believe him? How are we to know that our father really is alive? The Oracle speaks of him, and you say that Kalaman speaks of him. But who has seen him, who awakened him from his long sleep? And, sister, how can we know what is really going on in the Element—how can we even know what is happening anywhere else in HORUS? The only proof we have is ’file transmissions, but ’files can lie. We might be the only ones left in HORUS. With our Masters gone, perhaps the other colonies have fallen into ruin.”
Cumingia shook her head, her black eyes blazing. “No! They have all gone before us to the Element, that is all! And Kalaman says an elÿon is coming to take him from the Helena Aulis station. That they will come for us, and with them we will return—”
“We will not go,” I said stubbornly. “What if it is a trap? What if our Masters seek vengeance for their dead?”
A sly look crept across Cumingia’s face. “Ah, but it is not, sister! Think of this,” she crowed. “I know something the priestess Kalamat does not!—
“Our father is going to speak to us! Kalaman says that the Oracle has promised this. Tonight, when we are passing over the region of the Element where he now lives and the ’file signal is strongest: we will hear him for the first time!”
“You are certain?” My hand flew to where I had offered my breast to the Wild Maid, and made the gesture against lies. “Who has told you this? Kalaman?”
She nodded. “He has told all of us. Luther Burdock will speak tonight, and welcome us to the Alliance.”
Our father speaking to us! I felt such joy that I kissed her. “Thank you, my sister! This is wonderful news, and if it is true—if he speaks to us—”
I said nothing more. I did not want to promise, Then we will leave here. I would wait to hear what our father had to tell us—if indeed it was our father—before going along with any plan to abandon our home on Quirinus. Though in truth there was no way I could prevent my sisters from leaving. I tried to calm myself and began to make preparations for bed.
After a few minutes my sister Cumingia left me. “I am sorry to have interrupted your reading,” she said, although I was not to read anymore that evening. When she was gone, I sat in silence for a long time. Finally I stood and, crossing to the desk, found there the holofile recorder that still held the ’file disk Cumingia had left with me several days before. Absently I set it on the floor in front of me and watched as the now-familiar image appeared, the flaming eye and golden letters, the strange message ending with the chanted name:
“ Icarus. Icarus. Icarus. Icarus. ”
I let the ’file play through twice, then switched it off and replaced the recorder. I sighed, returned to bed, and lay there waiting for sleep to come. It did not. My head was too full of my father, his gentle face at the moment I recall most clearly—
“ We won’t die? ”
My own voice, that voice we all shared; and his reply—
“ Only this, darling — you’ll only remember this —”
And I recalled the touch of our father’s hands upon my brow, those strong hands that always smelled of iodine and formaldehyde and alcohol spirits, and blood. Finally I turned until I faced the wall, and dreamed of him.
Ah, Cumingia had the truth of it there! I thought too much of our father, of Dr. Luther Burdock’s hands, his eyes and laughing voice. My mind was ever too full of him. Of finding him again, of having him hug me close to his chest and laugh as he called me Little Moon—but was it to me, Kalamat, or to Cybele that he spoke?
I do not know. I only know that the dream of our father filled me as the sun filled the iridescent sails that powered Quirinus. Like the sun he was all life, all warmth and brightness to me, and there was not a minute of my life that I did not yearn for him.
Across the cold reaches of the Ether, on Helena Aulis where Kalamat’s wicked brothers lived, there was a wonderful toy in the room that had been the office of the station’s Chief Architect. The office itself was vast and perfectly round, with walls of such blinding whiteness that, out of desperation, the eye papered them with fantastic images: leaves, winged triangles, swastikas, swimming eyes. The energumen Kalaman, however, had no need of such imaginary embellishments. Before the rebellion, he had spent much time in this office with the Chief Architect, assisting in mundane chores—compiling demographic profiles of the other HORUS colonies, copying renderings of stupas and bunkers in the Balkhash Mountains, reading to the Architect from endless lists of figures.