I shrugged. In the face of this outburst my own anger dissipated as abruptly as it had come on. “Well, does it?” Aidan shouted.
I made a show of rolling my eyes and sighing. Then I turned away and pried a bit of stone from the boulder, tossed it into the waves curling and receding in the darkness below. “No. Of course it doesn’t.”
I had no idea what had gotten into him. I said so, adding, “And he didn’t deform his daughter—all those modifications were made long after he and Cybele were dead. You know that.”
“I don’t see how you can defend him,” Aidan spat; although in fact I had said nothing in defense of Burdock, then or ever. “He used her clone, and what’s the difference there? It would be like using Emma for an experiment, instead of me. And ever since then—well, they’re really not human anymore, are they?”
I started to argue with him, but stopped. It was hopeless arguing with Aidan when he lost his temper, especially after he’d done an amphaze dot. He would end up punching me, or running off in a fury, or shouting until he brought one of our rectors down upon us. Instead I stood, shivering in the evening air. “We better get back if we want to find any supper left.”
He sat crouched at my feet, his eyes still ablaze. To my surprise he only nodded and stumbled up. “You’ll never understand,” he said bitterly. He kicked at a pocket of loose stones, sending them flying into the water. “Fucking Sky Pilot. Fucking Rocket Man—”
He turned and headed for the grassy knoll that led to the Academy. I waited to see if he would look back, gesture for me to hurry after him; but he only hunched his shoulders against the chilly breeze and went on by himself. After a few minutes I followed.
Within a few days I had utterly forgotten our conversation. Years later I would recall it, when I was at HEL and saw the fruits of his sister’s manipulation of the brains of children; and again when Lascar Franschii told me of the fate of the Quirinus station.
As I have said, time passes differently in the elÿon. It is a risk derived from the means of travel, the great biotic craft powered by the brain of a madman—a deliberately engineered madman, but a lunatic nonetheless. So powerful was the adjutants’ control over the psychic atmosphere of their vessels that even the shortest of voyages, such as ours, were often upset by passengers growing disturbed and sometimes violent—thus the reliance over the centuries upon psychotropic drugs as a means of controlling them. Superstitious colonists, particularly those from the fundamentalist inner territories, believed that dreams became unmoored during passage, to stalk and sometimes destroy their creations.
And certainly strange things happened aboard the elÿon. In the beginning women were often used as adjutants. It was thought that their greater capacity for pain—proved through the rigors of childbirth and such anomalies as the remarkable fate of those survivors of the inferno on Pequod 9 —would make them ideal navigators. But then it was found that missions piloted by women were more likely to end in bizarre tragedies. The most common explanation given was that women dreamed more lucidly than men. After the Second Ascension the Kataly, a Commonwealth elÿon, was lost with all hands. When its ’files were retrieved from the wreckage, investigators viewed scenes of nearly incomprehensible rites being performed by passengers and crew alike, ending with a bacchanalian dance that led to mass exodus through one of the craft’s air locks. The adjutant then piloted the elÿon through a convoy of diplomatic aviettes headed for NASNA Prime. Later, it was learned that the adjutant had been an adherent of the Mysteries of Lysis. Some reverie of hers had no doubt spawned the mass hallucinations and ecstatic dancing that led to the loss of the vessel.
In the wake of this discovery, robotic crews replaced human ones. Women were seldom used as navigators, and male candidates were carefully screened for attributes such as excessive imagination and tenacity of religious belief. I tell you all this so that it may perhaps be easier to understand what happened to me during that brief celestial journey.
I had often traveled by elÿon in my earlier life. It was unavoidable during my tours in the HORUS colonies, and later when I was stationed at NASNA Prime, before my unhappy assignment to the abandoned capital. Nearly always I had refused the psychotropic drugs administered by the vessels’ medical constructs. I also refused to remain in the tiny cells that were required for all passengers and most crew. A matter of pride, I will admit. But I never experienced anything resembling a hallucination; never glimpsed the legendary celestial body that my mother had written of in Mystica.
The Watcher in the Skies was one of the great mysteries of the HORUS colonies. Since its first—and, as far as we knew then, its only—appearance in the years 2172 and 2173, it had inspired countless works of art and speculative science. There were also numerous eyewitness accounts, such as that famous passage in Commander Ned Wyeth’s Astralaga, where he writes of
…this monstrous and bizarre thing we saw after seventeen days in orbit. Iacono noticed it first, but when he told us about it, we all just laughed at him. Then I saw it, and it was just as he’d described it: a shape that at first glance resembled a cloudy nebula, or maybe some waste pod cut loose from one of the stations. Only this thing actually seemed to move, and you know nebulae don’t do that! We all gathered on the observation deck to watch. Afterward I was stunned to learn eighteen hours had passed while we sat there—and we didn’t even notice. Didn’t get hungry or thirsty or tired, didn’t get up to go to the bathroom, nothing. Just watched that thing get bigger and bigger, until it filled the entire window: an enormous whitish mass, not really having any kind of shape or form. Eventually it disappeared, the way smoke does on a windy day—though you know there’s no wind up there.
Later when we tried to describe it to each other, we all admitted to having had the experience of being observed. Of being watched; but by whom or what we never knew.
Maybe my refusals to submit to a drugged journey came in part from my desire to see that phantasm. As I have told you, I’ve long been interested in manifestations of this type. Aidan Harrow with his talk of new gods; his sister Emma with the demons she created out of stolen children and brain proteins; Raphael Miramar and the Gaping One; Wendy Wanders and her uncanny power to kill with her mind. Even today, in the Archipelago they believe in graveyard spirits that they call memji, creatures with white teeth that stand on one leg and wait for the dead to be buried before crawling into their graves to copulate with them.
Long ago people laughed disdainfully at such ideas; but since the First Shining the world has changed. Aidan Harrow convinced me of this, and my mother. Both believed that the subtle and gross “improvements” wrought by our failed sciences made the Earth an increasingly hostile place for humanity. But these same changes had flung open a door for other, older things. Things that had lived here once, aeons ago; things that might return now to fill the void left by our systemized extermination of our own race.
Fool that I was! I believed the Watcher in the Skies might be such a thing, but I held few hopes of seeing it on this voyage. For some time I remained in my passenger cell, alone with my memories and that gruesomely lovely mural of Tokyo Bay. Eventually I checked the monitor, to insure that Lascar Franschii had told me the truth and that we had, indeed, left Cisneros. Then I left to check on Valeska Novus.