Elizabeth Hand
Æstival Tide
Winterlong, Book 2
FOR RICHARD GRANT:
Parcus deorum cultor et infrequens
Some minutes later a murmur ran through the crowd. Through my heavy eyelids which had almost closed at the horror of her tale, I saw gown after gown passing, and parasols, and fans, and happy faces, and accursed faces, dancing, whirling, rushing. It was like a burst of immense flowers, like a whirl of fantastic birds.
“The doors, darling!” cried Clara, “the doors are opening! Come, come quickly! And don’t be sad anymore… Think of all the beautiful things you’re gong to see!”
THE LEVELS OF ARABOTH In descending order
SERAPHIM (LEVEL 9) The Orsinate’s Level
CHERUBIM (Level 8) The Imperators’ Level
THRONES (Level 7) Cabinets & Cabals
DOMINATIONS (Level 6) The Vivarium Level; Chambers of Mercy
VIRTUES (Level 5) The Hermaphrodites’ Level
POWERS (Level 4) The ’Filers’ Level (Mediatechs)
PRINCIPALITIES (Level 3) The Moujiks’ Level; The Medifacs
ARCHANGELS (Level 2) The Rasas’ Level; The Refineries
ANGELS (Level 1) The Undercity
Book One ORDINARY TIME
Prologue: IN ARABOTH
INSIDE OF A REGENERATION vat on Seraphim, the highest level of Araboth, something wakes. Once a man and now something less than that, still it thinks of itself as him; still he recalls the manner of his dying, as though it were a dream.
Because, as the poets say, Death was really just a brief sleep after all. There was a smell of brimstone, and of sleet; then a wash of light the color of the sea. Then, for a timeless reach, there was nothing: that was when he was really dead. But now he is waking once more; and if he had a voice he would shriek to shatter the chamber that imprisons him.
The woman stands above the vat, staring down at the puffy white body with its net of tubes and wires running from it. She knows he is alive again. She says nothing; only leans forward a little, so that the cuff of her crimson surgical gown trails into the vat of nutrients and tangles with a tube running into the man’s mouth. Her mouth opens and she whispers a name; and almost, almost she can imagine that he might hear her.
In the tank the man tries to stir, struggles to let his arms flow through this warm pool, but if no longer dead he is still unsure if he is alive. He can feel nothing. His arms are little more than a memory of flesh and sinew, his eyes open onto the saline darkness and there is nothing there to see. He wonders if this is another nightmare—there were many nightmares, untold nightmares, once—or if he has somehow, again, failed his masters. Because if that is the case, he knows where he is. He knows that this is not Hell but a regeneration chamber. He knows that Hell is not other people, as a man once said; Hell is oneself, the same broken body and twisted mind doomed to return to itself over and over again, a barren country where not even Death claims dominion. And from somewhere within the softly churning ocean that is all he now knows comes the memory of another face, a charred-white skull crumbling into ruin as its voice rings triumphantly through the cold air—
“ ‘ Look at the stars! Look, look up at the sky! —’ ”
But here in the regeneration chamber there is no triumph in rebirth. There is no sky here, there are no stars. He is in a place that sees nothing of the heavens. And then suddenly it is as though a caul has been stripped from his eyes. It seems that at last he can see something.
He sees a face, the face of a woman hovering above his watery crucible. It is a face he recognizes. The watery surface of the regeneration chamber ripples as he flails beneath it, knowing now the truth: that even in death he cannot escape her, even in death she will make a weapon of him. She has found him, she has reclaimed the fallen one and brought him to Araboth. The grinding wheel turns once more and he is doomed again to eternal service in the War in Hell.
To reach Angels, the Undercity, one must go down, down through the nine levels of the vast stepped pyramid that is Araboth. One begins at Level Nine, Seraphim, the pinnacle of the Holy City. Seraphim, where the Orsinate Ascendancy dwell—the city’s rulers, the surviving members of the deranged Orsina family who still exert their febrile will upon the ruins of the continent outside. The Orsinate, themselves subject to the whims of the true Ascendant Autocracy, who live in the slowly decaying wheels of the HORUS stations, the Human Orbital Research Units in Space, where they retreated after the mass extinctions and mutations of the Third Shining. On some evenings the skygates open in the Central Quincunx Dome. Then the Aviators return in their warplanes, the Gryphons and the great silent dirigibles called fougas arrowing down through the heavy air of Araboth to refuel. Afterward, the Aviators walk unsteadily upon the smooth white avenues, and behind their eyes one can glimpse the flames of islands burning in the Archipelago, and smell in their sweat the sweet reek of a madness that overcomes fear. On these evenings, after the Aviators are gone and the skygate remains open, the Orsinate and their cabinet gather on the viewing platforms and stare up through that little lozenge of ultramarine darkness. They imagine, some of them, that they can see the faint lights of the HORUS stations tracking across the sky—grimy stars dying an interminable silent death even as their masters continue to send their whispered commands earthward, to land with the Aviators on the ancient ramparts of the domed city. It is the only glimpse of the stars that anyone in Araboth will ever see, except for once every decade at Æstival Tide.
On Level One, the Undercity, no one has ever seen the stars. And few of the aristocracy on Level Nine have ever seen the Undercity. To reach it one must leave Seraphim and descend to Cherubim, and thence to Thrones, and Dominations, Virtues and Powers and Principalities and Archangels, each level of the ziggurat larger and more ancient and ruinous than the one above. The levels are named for the Divine Choirs, the orders of angels. A subtle joke played by those who founded Araboth centuries before. Those founders were religious people—thus The Holy City of the Americas —members of two cruel and ancient faiths who joined forces after the Second Ascension and have ruled this continent ever since. And so the oldest level of the ziggurat is Level One, Angels, where once another city stood, before there were domes and mutagenic rains and space stations marking drunken parabolas across the night sky. In Araboth, Level One is the Undercity. And few people go there of their own free will.
There are ancient things in the Undercity. The Beautiful One is one of them; but for centuries the Beautiful One has been asleep. Like the man thrashing feebly in the regeneration chamber on Level Nine, the Beautiful One is somewhere between wakefulness and dreaming; though not between life and death. Because the Beautiful One is not human, and so she has never really been alive.
But now the Beautiful One is waking, too. On the lowest level of the Holy City, Level One where only Angels dwell, there the Beautiful One is stirring. Her glass eyes flicker and her metal lips part and she sees them, the others who have come to worship her. Angels, they are called ironically on the upper levels; the fallen ones. But in her twilight state the Beautiful One does not see angels. She sees a man, tall and finely dressed, and around him pale forms crouched in the darkness, white-skinned, corpselike, their eyes glowing an unearthly green. They are rasas, “the scraped ones,” regenerated corpses set to work on Archangels’ refineries and the medifacs of Principalities. The ones who are here in the Undercity have somehow managed to escape their servitude above. Even the dead, it seems, can recognize that there are degrees of suffering in Hell. Sometimes the Beautiful One thinks that she hears them call her by an ancient name, their tongueless mouths struggling over the word; and in her sleep she answers them.