Icarus Descending Read Online Free PDF

we sat, our knees bumping, and tore hunks of stale bread and smeared them with lime pickle hot enough to make you weep. The bottle would go around, lingering longest at Aidan’s mouth; and we would talk, weaving the intricate pattern of custom and superstition that is the lot of NASNA Aviators from childhood to the pyre. News from our endless classes in strategy and ancient history; rumors of strife with the Commonwealth; conjecture as to when we would finally be allowed to make the jump from flight simulators to training craft. Here and there an uncommonly lurid thread would emerge when someone had gossip of rape, conquest, madness, death. Aidan would tease me, giving vent to a vicious streak that would have served him well in adulthood had he survived. From his father—a depressive ethnomusicologist addicted to morpha—he had learned innumerable folk songs dating back hundreds of years, and he would sing these in a clear reedy tenor, giving the words a cruel twist to highlight the weaknesses of one or another of his rectors or classmates. Finally, when bottle and prattle were nearly spent, Aidan would stretch and beckon us closer, until I could smell the salt and citrus on his breath.
    “Now,” he would say. He had an uncanny voice. When he sang, it was with a sweet boy’s tone, but in speaking something seemed to taint it, so that I always felt he was either lying or on the verge of mad laughter. No one but Emma was surprised when he hanged himself. “Who will go first? Emma?”
    Emma started and shook her head. “No—not tonight—I’ll go next, I have to think—”
    Aidan shrugged, leaned forward over the lumiere until his forehead grazed Neos’s. “All right then—what about you, Sky Pilot?”
    I winced at the hated nickname and shook my head.
    “Neos—?”
    “This footage I saw in the archives,” Neos said without hesitation. Her white cheeks were a sullen red from excitement and the apsinthion; it looked as though she had been slapped. “There was a fire in this very tall building, and no way out. In one of the windows a man leaned out with all this smoke around him. I couldn’t tell if he was fat or if he had just bloated up from the heat. I think maybe he was burning up, his skin was so dark…
    “There was no sound, so you just saw him there, breathing and leaning out the window. Finally he fell down inside and you couldn’t see him anymore, and then the film ran out. I always wondered, if they were near enough to film him, why didn’t they try to get him out of there?”
    Emma and John shuddered, and I grimaced. “I’ve seen that one,” I said. “It was the air attack on London, 2167. There’s another one that shows the river in flames, all these people—”
    “Is that your turn, Sky Pilot?” Aidan looked at me, reaching for the bottle and taking a sip from the little that remained in it.
    “No.” I looked away and caught Neos’s feverish eyes. “Someone else go next.”
    For a minute no one said anything. At last John reached to take the bottle from Aidan, swallowed a mouthful of the green liqueur, and coughed. “All right,” he said. “A woman I saw—”
    “You did that last time,” said Emma.
    “Not this one. It was—it wasn’t a real woman. I mean, it was a geneslave. When we were in Wyalong…”
    John’s parents were both Aviators, now dead. For many years they had been stationed on a form in the Great Barrier Reef, and somehow had managed to take John with them instead of sending him as was customary to the Aviators’ crèche. “I guess I was about six. A supply boat had arrived, and there was this enormous crate, that sort of gray plasteel with holes in it that they use for shipping livestock. It was big enough to hold cattle in; I guess that should have told me something. No one was watching and so I walked right up to it; it came up over my head and I pressed my face against it, to look inside the holes—”
    “Ugh.” Emma made a small noise and took a