In Aidan’s case, his obsession with things demonic, with disaster cults and astronomy, obsolete sorceries and obscure religions, had ruined his concentration. He missed classes, exercises, training events. Even repeated visits to the infirmary and threats of a prolonged course of mind treatments were not enough to keep him from reading and enacting his little private seances.
But what was worst, to me at least, was the way that he had somehow managed to infect me with his madness. I had achieved First in our level, and it was rumored that I would be given a commission before graduation. The conflict with the Emirate was not going well; it would not be the first time a student had been sent to war before completing his course of studies. I would never jeopardize my chances of escaping from the Academy by doing anything so obvious (and stupid) as attempting to raise some demon in my dormitory room. But Aidan’s bitter cynicism toward NASNA and his peculiar taste in books had affected me nonetheless.
I wanted to believe in something. Worse, I needed to. It was no longer enough that the skirmishes be won, the conflicts shortened or ended, the Orsinate or the Autocracy satisfied by our efforts. I needed to believe in something else; something greater than myself. I was trained to accept the Aviators as the finest, strongest, most brilliant men and women of the continent. At the Academy I learned that I was the finest among them all. It was no surprise to me, really, when years later I was named Aviator Imperator. My madness and eventual rehabilitation as a rasa: no, I had not expected that. But I had been ready to accept the mantle of Imperator, perhaps since that first day I entered the ascetic confines of the Academy.
Still, if I was the jewel in the Autocracy’s crown, I had to believe in the worthiness of the brow I adorned. And it was painfully obvious, even to my nineteen-year-old self, that the Ascendants and the Orsinate were not worthy of me. But if t hey were not, who, or what, was? Bred and trained as a weapon, I must serve somebody. Aidan’s books and Aidan’s talk made me think that there might be other ways of serving; other things to serve.
“What other worlds are you talking about, Aidan?”
I tried to make my tone disdainful, but the curiosity was there, a raw kernel of it plain as the cold rock beneath us. Aidan saw my weakness, and laughed.
“The Sky Pilot wants other worlds now! Huh—”
He looked away, off to where the sky was greening twilight above the sea’s horizon. After a moment he said in a softer voice, “Well, there are other things. There is the Watcher in the Skies, for one. And other things, too. We—I—have seen some of them. At home.” The reluctance that crept into his voice made me realize that Emma, too, must know some of this. Perhaps that accounted for her unhappiness, her habit of always looking out the corner of her eyes. “And here, too.”
“What have you seen here?” I could no longer even pretend at offhandedness. From across the green sweep of lawn came the sturdy echo of the bell clanging for the first dinner shift, but I ignored it. “Could you—can you show me?”
“It’s not like that,” said Aidan impatiently. “These things—whatever they are—they have their own reasons for showing themselves to us. I mean, Jude Hwong says that the records show the Watcher of the Skies last appeared nearly four hundred years ago. I don’t know when we’ll see it again. All of these things—it’s not like you call them and they come. It’s more—well, it’s more like interfacing with the Gryphons. You prepare yourself— I prepare myself—and sit back, and then it’s there.”
Now I grew impatient. “ What’s there?”
“Something else.” He fidgeted, suddenly at a loss for words. He squinted into the sunset, the ruddy light making his face look almost molten. “Don’t you ever think about that, Margalis?” he asked softly. “How strange all this is?”
He gestured at the sea, the sky, the waving firs behind us. “Here it all looks the way it always did; but the rest of the world has changed completely. I mean, Hwong says how once there were archosaurs everywhere, and now there’s us; but someday we might be gone, and it will be only…”
His voice drifted off. For a moment he looked sadder and more serious than I had ever seen him. “Seeing Kalamat that time—they really are different from us, the energumens. In a way, they’re better. They can learn everything we can, only faster; and obviously they’re stronger. Even the name energumen —and Burdock never called them that, he always called them his children—it means ‘possessed by demons.’
“But the demons that possess them are us. ”
He stood, as though to embrace the ridge that hid the Academy from our sight. After a moment his arms fell limply, and he sighed. “Christ, I can’t explain it, really. It’s just like there’s something else there. I could see it, that day they brought Kalamat here. I could see it in her eyes. Something older than me, or any of us, a sort of presence. And now it’s inside me, or trying to get inside me. Or else it’s in there now and trying to get out.”
I stared at him, my mouth open to make a cruel retort. But Aidan’s eyes were wide and staring, distant yet glowing with a sort of manic concentration. He looked crazed, but there was a certain kind of sense in his words.
I had heard of people going mad in the HORUS colonies. Some of them—astrophysicists in particular were prone to this—claimed to be possessed by the spirits of American astronauts. Others simply went mad, raving that extrasolar beings had invaded their minds. During the twenty-second century, when the strange phenomenon of the Watcher of the Skies appeared, scientists and other observors in HORUS went into an apocalyptic frenzy—for naught, as it turned out. The flaming eidolon disappeared as slowly and silently as it had appeared. Just another one of the oddities of life in the colonies. That was why the energumens and other cacodemons were first sent to HORUS—space did not drive them mad. I said as much to Aidan.
“And you don’t have to get all worked up over these things, you know,” I added, somewhat smugly. “Just put yourself into an E-state and give your mind a chance to respond. Anyone can do it—”
Well, anyone with the training and discipline of a true Aviator. Aidan creased his brow, but he didn’t look annoyed. It didn’t look as though he were thinking of me at all anymore. His indifference angered me, that and his absolute certainty that he was privy to some great secret.
“You’re going to get suspended, Aidan, or expelled, for wasting your time with books like that. Someone will turn you in.” I started to my feet, halted in a half-crouch when he turned to me, his eyes blazing from gray to blue.
“What do you know about it?” he cried. “There are all kinds of things they do that we don’t understand, that don’t make any sense—”
When he said they, he jabbed his hand in the direction of the Academy, where the silhouettes of our classmates could be seen hurrying toward supper, black and thin as though etched against the sky with a needle. But I knew he wasn’t really thinking of them but of those others, our masters: the Ascendants in their distant circuits of the Earth, falling slowly and endlessly through the heavens. “Their geneslaves, their mutagens—does that make sense? Luther Burdock deforming his daughter for science— that makes sense?”