The Commandant is standing on the top of the Utrecht Observatory, watching the night sky. The Observatory is the tallest building in the city; it is a marvel that it has never been hit by Detonations. Some say that it is not a marvel at all, it is part of the Pharonic Army’s plan to devastate the cities, return the Old Dutch Republics and the rest of the Old World Faithful Nations to a pre-industrial wasteland. In this thick dark silence the poisonfog that the hackers use to obscure the pilot’s satmaps will be dispersed and the Loyal Army will be able to find its way over the desiccated land as unerringly as a plague of locusts, using the few remaining tall monuments as guides. The Observatory will give them locations for all of northern Europe, from the so-called Gibbet of Mont St. Michel to the Urals if they are still standing. With the aid of the Great Astrolabe of High Vienna they can turn their attentions to the East of Europe, further, to the very edges of the West Pacific Empire and the cradle of civilization. If they triangulate the Observatory and the Gibbet, in the other direction, with Thoor Bucky off the coast of Galway the Loyal Army pilots can take care of the Empire of Thule and the Atlantic Islands of Ireland and Celtic-Saxony. The Commandant is officially part of the Loyal Pharonic Army but he is beginning to wonder. The comms pin in his palm, still infected after his last training bout, tingles and flashes, as though hoping to make the Commandant remember his duty and report to his superior officers. The apricot beam, signalling that a connecting bandwith is available, turns the Commandant’s bones to shadows, and his veins to bright neon streams. The Commandant ignores the comms pin. He would not know how to describe what he can see.
Underneath the tower there is a laboratory, of sorts. It is an open secret and a peculiar hangover from the early days of the Pharaoh’s New Empire, when the Army was promoted as the social unit responsible for achievement, and the expression of human dynamism. Carefully cultivated, the Pharaoh’s New Imperial Army, and especially the units of the Loyal States, attracted the best brains, those women and men who otherwise would have gone to the traditional institutes of learning and discovery. With funding only going to the Army, the scientists and inventors had little choice. But with the Imperial War – officially still called the Pharaoh’s Mercy but called by its opponents the Dead Man’s Battle – going on after so many generations, even the military institutions have little by way of resources. The laboratory under the Observatory is itself in a bad way, with the scientists spending as much of their day jerryrigging additional shelters, tending the sick and wounded, tending the semi-legal breweries and terraformed vegetable and herb gardens as they do pulling apart the physical world for military ends. The life’s work of a scientist combines explaining and nurturing the material world. The ramshackle, remote places where they live and work are often called Monkyards. It was in the Utrecht Monkyard that the first Icharus uncased its wings.
The Ichari were supposed to be a crack defence unit for the Imperial Armies of the Pharaoh. They were robots, but augmented with human parts. Their brains, the zenith of achievement with computer chips using one-dimensional carbon nanotubes, are themselves top-secret as the single repository of the complete Pharonic plan for (so it was rumoured) an inter-planetary Empire. Their bodies are machines, immeasurably strong, armour plated and light as a bird. They stand between seven and eight feet tall, long-limbed, skinned with human skins, and sexless. Their faces are modelled on the morphed features of a female model and a male actor, both voted to be the most beautiful people in the world. The Ichari have a wingspan of almost twenty-four feet, and they are powered by electricity, by dark matter that they eat from the atmosphere by diving with their mouths gaping like baleen whales, and by human adrenalin. They have no voices. Their bones are steel, their blood is petrol and human blood. Based on the information with which they were born and unimpeded by any human ability to reflect, to feel or to guess, the Ichari are beautiful, remote butchers.
Now the Commandant is watching Ichari turn cartwheels along the shattered Dutch skyline.
When the Commandant goes back down underground to the body of the laboratory, the Chief Scientist, Brother Smalls, is waiting for him, looking irritable.
“We don’t have all night, Jackson,” he says, “We have to try and anesthesize one, and it has to be tonight. Tomorrow night we have – well, a visitor, and we cannot have Ichari in the building when we have outsiders coming in.”
“Who is your visitor?” Jackson asks, curiously. The laboratory never has visitors if they can avoid it, and the presence of one suggests that it is an imposition forced upon them.
“We have a Necrologue visiting. It’s a long story.”
Jackson is surprised. He has heard of people who collected the names of the dead but he has never really believed that they existed; like attendees at the Woodstock Communion, pretenders are far more common than the genuine article. Necrologues are popular amongst the believers in The Archangels; these Angelites, as they are called, believe that no-one can achieve the Pearly Gates if their name has not been recorded and, equally importantly, read aloud in the presence of believers, after death. They are elusive people, the Necrologues – even the Angelites are a liminal people, living on the fringe of safe society, pushing out into the darkened corners of shattering civilization, drawing the attention of some unnamed bogeyman away from the bulk of humanity to follow the dancing, theatrical figure of the Necrologue. The Pharaoh uses the Necrologues for propaganda purposes because the causes of death recorded were often lies; no one ever died in the War. The Commandant’s son, whom he would never see again, once gave him a shirt on which was emblazoned “Belief and Confusion,” the synopsis of the last words of the Commandant’s executed superior. Major-Lieutenant O’Donnell had asked the Pharaoh a question about the War and the Pharaoh answered
“What War?”
O’Donnell was sentenced to death by firing squad, and the next day his last words were I die as I realise now that many died before me; in the belief that it is for the good of my country and confusion as to how that might be.
“Right,” says the Commandant, “But you are not telling me the full story, Smalls. Why is it so complicated? Anesthesize it, already.”
Smalls glares at him, and steps over the cracked marble floor-tiles to the plastic-coated door that leads to the holding-stalls. He hesitates for a fraction of a second, grasps the rattling handle and pulled open the door. Nothing happens, nothing moves or speaks or shows Jackson any reason to notice it. He steps forward, more confidently than Smalls, his encrusted army boots clearing the crooked tiles. Smalls is looking down the dark stairwell. After a few seconds, a sound swoops out, and Jackson stops in his tracks, one foot still raised. Smalls looked at him. His expression is serene. Jackson looks as though a caterpillar has offered him a hookah. The sound is melancholy, but aggressive, inhuman but full of feeling. He thinks of the Ichari, five of them, turning cartwheels on the skyline. The question with an Icharus, he thinks, is not have we made humans into machines, but how do we know if the machines have become humans?
“That’s them,” he says, ungrammatically and even after so many years felt the cynical gaze of his English teacher upon him.
“That’s them,” Smalls echoes and stands back to let Jackson stand nearer to the door. The sound bursts out again, and is accompanied this time, by the sound of the Icharus rattling the walls of its enclosure. Jackson swallows. When they are in their enclosures the Ichari are supposed to be calm, supine even; it is supposed to be the equivalent of putting a hood over the eyes of a falcon. They are supposed to sit quietly on, as it were, the wrist. They are not supposed to rattle the walls.
“They were not built with voices,” Jackson says to Smalls. There is no point speaking of the reverberations from the angry Icharus.
“They have no voice-box,” he says again, “How is it making that noise?”
“We are fairly certain that it is communicative,” Smalls says. His voice sounds vaguely reproachful as if Jackson had neglected a basic etiquette by not asking what the scientists had discovered about their anomaly.
“We are fairly confident that the Icharus is speaking, if you will, to the other Ichari. As far as we can tell she is using her rib-cage.”
“She?Rib-cage?” There is no difference in Jackson’s levels of astonishment. The Ichari are genderless, act as they are programmed to act and have no voices. Now one is she and is using something without orders, her rib-cage in a purpose for which it was not built. Smalls laughs.
“We have always been able to tell male from female,” he says, “But there is no point in you knowing. It makes no difference.”
“Then why bother knowing? Why bother making them with a difference?”
“Because it is there to be known,” Smalls says under his breath. Jackson does not know what to do so he approaches the doorway and peers into the darkness over the stairwell as though there is an action he is contemplating taking. Smalls shuts the door.
“So it is evolving,” Jackson says flatly. He has a distant awareness of how bad this could be, but he cannot express it. He can not envision this; even after years of combat – he joined the army when he was fourteen – he has not seen anything bad enough to imagine an evolving Icharus. He cannot speak about it or react to it because he has no action to suggest, no conclusion to recommend.
When Smalls is leaving the laboratory early the next morning to take his horse-riding lesson, Jackson is still sitting on an upturned box, his steepled fingers over his mouth. When Smalls is safely away and he knows the building is empty, Jackson takes the keys he has stolen from Small’s pocket and goes downstairs. The Icharus is always awake. She is looking at Jackson, her eyes beaming a cold neon blue. She is the most beautiful and most repulsive thing he has ever seen.
“She is using her rib-cage,” Jackson says, “She. She is speaking. She is evolving.”
He thinks of the five Ichari turning cartwheels on the skyline, the five Ichari playing. This Icharus has found a way to express her desire to speak. To wish to speak she must have reflected. In less than twenty-four hours he has seen the butchering monsters display an impulse to communicate and an impulse to play. He unlocks the holding cage.
There is a photograph, which Jackson saw many years ago, of a polar bear with its vast paw resting on, unmistakably hugging, a wolf. The wolf is not struggling and does not appear alarmed. What Jackson did not think of – or perhaps he deliberately ignored – is that the polar bear may choose to hug a wolf but it is still a killing machine with no natural enemies; it will be a polar bear until it chooses another form of behaviour. The door of the holding cage opens and the Icharus, still an Icharus despite being gendered, despite evolving a rib-cage through which she can push sound, steps out. Jackson is in the worst place for a full human – in the line of sight of an Icharus.
The escaped Icharus is not discovered until morning. It is the smell of congealed blood that draws the scientists downstairs; such has been their experience that they are resigned rather than distressed at the remains of the Commandant.
After the Commandant has been buried in a very small casket, Smalls’ successor, Amal Hurritly, burns open Smalls’ safe and discovers what it was that Smalls had hidden there before he died after a kick from his normally placid and favourite horse. Hurritly takes out the cloth bandage and puts it on the dissection table, switching on the lamp and angling the beam so that the package is illuminated. With the light upon it, the dull linen almost glows, the patches of blood look fresh and glistening. Hurritly sighs, and pulls on her gloves. Using a bent forceps she gingerly lifts the corners of the cloth, and opens it out. It takes her several minutes to recognize what it is she sees. The comms pin in her hand is tingling; she is supposed to report to her superior. The light on the gadget flashes, streams steadily, turning her bones to shadows and her veins to glowing streams. Hurrity ignores it, she will not report. After almost ten minutes she can describe what it is that she is looking at, what it is that Smalls had hidden, but she is not sure of the consequences of it. She is not sure how these consequences will manifest themselves and she knows from long and bitter experience that if she tells the superiors, they will want to know what steps to take, what unit to send in, who to blame. They will want, as Hurritly describes it to her husband, to either fuck it or kill it and she has no sacrificial victim to offer them for either purpose. The Icharus has made a tool and Hurritly knows that this is a hugely significant step for an Icharus but she does not know in what direction and she does not know what will be the outcome for humans in the path of that direction. Moreover, the Icharus has made a musical tool, it has fashioned a peculiar, flute-like organ from the Commandant’s ribs and vertebrae. Hurritly can see, even without the microscope, that the Icharus used its – her – own nails to fashion the bone but it is not until Hurritly puts the instrument into the zoom-box that she sees where the Icharus has hidden one last surprise. Near the base of the instrument, on what had been the Commandant’s lumbar disc, the Icharus has carved a decoration, in the form of five concentric rings, each set within the next. The decoration is tiny, the shadow of the bone curve almost hides it. Hurritly touches it carefully with her finger, concentrating on the miniscule ridges to prevent herself having to concentrate on what any of it means.
A few nights after the Commandant’s ashes have been scattered over the Zuyder Zee, Hurritly stands on top of the observation tower. The Ichari are flying, in a V formation like a skein of swans. Hurritly thinks that they are beautiful. Then she notices that they are flying flat. Usually Ichari fly upright, they rise straight from the ground and fly like a statue has taken flight, like the archangels to which they were first compared. Hurritly watches them for a second and then recalls what it means when the Ichari fly flat. The formation turns and flies towards the Observatory. Hurritly races for the door to the underground.
