Icarus Descending Read Online Free PDF Page B

swipe at the bottle, then leaned back so that her thigh brushed against Aidan’s hand.
    “Shh,” said Neos.
    “And this, this hand jabbed out at me—only it was bigger than any hand I’d ever seen, it was as long as my forearm and golden —I mean this unnatural color, like it had been dyed. I remember the nails were short, they’d been cut back but they still scratched me and I thought I’d been poisoned. I started screaming and fell backward, and of course everyone came running and my father picked me up. They jabbed something at whatever was inside the crate, some kind of tranquilizer I guess; then everyone sort of forgot about me again. I found a place to sit on a pier and I watched, and after a while someone came and they opened the crate, and picked up this long leash and pulled out what was inside.”
    He paused, took the bottle from Emma, and eyed it critically before draining the last swallow of apsinthion.
    “So what was it?” Aidan cocked his head, grinning. “An aardman? Tortured prisoners from the Commonwealth?”
    John put the bottle down and stared at him for a long moment before answering. “No,” he said at last. He didn’t like Aidan. He told me years later that once he had walked in on him in bed with Emma. She had been crying and her lip was bleeding, but Aidan only laughed and told John to leave the room. “It was an energumen.”
    “An energumen?” Aidan’s voice rose as he settled with his back against the bed. “That’s it? You were afraid of an energumen?”
    Beside me Neos shuddered. Only a fool wouldn’t be afraid of an energumen. Of all the Ascendants’ geneslaves, they were the most like humans, with an almost supernatural strength and intelligence and a malevolence that almost surpassed the Ascendants’ own. They had beautiful faces: flat noses, dewy black eyes, blossom-heavy lips; and their skin ran the range from golden to onyx. Tall, superbly strong, their most compelling trait was their raw intelligence. Like a child’s intellect, inquiring but never forgetting the answers to their questions. It was a measure of their masters’ hubris that their breeding allodiums continued to produce them, year after year, without any thought to the threat such an enslaved population might one day pose.
    John glanced down at his hand, then up again. “Yes. Because—well, she looked so much like a girl, I mean a human girl. Except for the color of her skin, and her size. She was just in that crate, like what we usually got—pigs and dogs, you know. And—well, it scared me, maybe because she was naked, I’d never really seen a naked woman before—”
    Aidan snickered but his sister elbowed him.
    “—and it was just, oh I don’t know, it made me think of my mother, I guess that’s what frightened me. Because it was monstrous in spite of all that, and it was the first energumen I’d ever seen. Later I found out they’d brought her there as a breeder, they had a new strain of hydrapithecenes they were developing, and she was the host.”
    Neos wrinkled her nose. “Did you see her again?”
    “Oh, yes. She was in the labs—they gave her a room, it’s not like they kept her in a cage all the time. I think they were afraid of her being raped by the crew on the supply boat—she was from the Archipelago—”
    His voice drifted off and he stared at his hands again. Poor John! When he fought under me, he kept a young girl on the island as a mistress—she might have been all of thirteen. After he died, her family killed her, threw her onto one of the eternal pyres by the canal, where the rubber wastes have been burning for a hundred years. Because she had been kept by an Aviator, you see— memji, they called us there, demons. I don’t even think he ever slept with her.
    “And that’s what you were afraid of?” Aidan’s tone was mock-serious, with just a note of derision. “An energumen?” He laughed then, grabbing his sister’s hand and tugging it until she laughed too,