by Ashanti Luke
“Now that all of you have joined us, we can parlay on the problem at hand,” the man in blue and black said, pacing the floor, hands clasped behind his back.
“But first, allow me to introduce myself. I am Torus Balfour Denali,” he paused as if he were awaiting recognition. Cyrus, head pounding with the beating of his heart, could not tell what part of his name, if any, was a title until he noticed the thick-rimmed oval ring clasped to the man’s insignia badge—Torus was a contrast to the squares worn by the members of his entourage. When no acknowledgement came, the strange man continued, “I am commander of the Archons of Asha and I believe you are espions and that you should be treated as such.” He paused again as if he expected a response other than confusion. “However, hospitality has been demanded of me by the Praetoriate. It is their desire that I show you the utmost courtesy while your sudden ‘appearance’ is investigated. It is their belief that the war was over too long ago for a reconnaissance operation to be of use, but I find your appearance so close to The Advent of the Defiance to be entirely too ironic.”
“There was a war?” someone behind Cyrus blurted. The outburst was so sudden it rang through his ears and settled with pounding authority in his temple.
Denali scoffed with an expression that looked like he was about to hock and spit. He then waved his hand through the air in an almost unconscious gesture as if he was slapping the air with the back of his hand. “I will not trifle with your feigned confusion,” he looked as if he were about to spit again. “Quadrad Chaldea will regale any queries you port to have.” Denali made another slapping motion and left as the guard to his right moved forward.
“I may have orders to gale you out, but you can all punt off as far as I am haunted,” he mimed the same hand motion Denali had made, only less theatrically, “So to your first que-ree, the war started in the first gyre and was finished by the Defiance of the Knight of Swords on eight DC, Murioplex, twenty-five gyres from. Some think what the Sword Scourge did was overstrong, but if you query me, I wage you terrasites were arreared too long.” He basked for a moment in the light streaming from the bands in the ceiling, proud either of his words or what they meant, or perhaps a mixture of both. Whatever conceit was inherent in his delivery was lost in the quagmire of confusion on the faces of everyone in his audience.
Tanner leaned over to Cyrus, who was holding the bruise on his head and mumbling figures to himself. “Whoever these people are have been here hundreds of years…” Tanner said softly into his ear.
“Yeah, the technology is much more advanced,” Cyrus winced.
“And the language is almost a creole. Even British English and original American English weren’t this different up until just before the Uni.”
“Well, they weren’t six hundred light years apart either, but…”
“You que me or you finish the jatter, dexter!” the guard interrupted, folding his arms as he stood. He moved closer to Cyrus. “You are the punty breed-hound that put the gork to Colfax. He moved within arm’s reach. “If they dint order me to coddle, I would strong-arm you rightforth.”
Cyrus took his hand from his head, rolled his shoulders back, and flared his nostrils as he met the eyes of the soldier Denali had called Chaldea. Tanner could almost feel the fury building in Cyrus again, as if tendrils of some invisible electromagnetic current were stretching out of Cyrus’s eyes toward the strange man before him. Cyrus was almost lifting himself from the seat with his anger when Chaldea retracted.
“Scrabbling like a feist-monkey only vinces you more the spions. But I gale you this; I won gork out like that sunfried Colfax. You tuss with me you get finished, complete. If I were you, I would process that rightforth, dexter.” Chaldea gestured and the door opened. Six armed men with triangles on their badges entered the room and ushered the scientists out in two groups. Cyrus, Tanner, Villichez, Toutopolus, Jang, Winberg, Torvald, Cohn, Uzziah, and Murphy were corralled and shuffled in one direction, while Milliken, Davidson, Qin, Fordham, Eisenhertz, Tsuchiya, Murphy, Koresh, bin Hassan, and Thompson were marshaled in the other.
Cyrus’s group was set up in a room that looked like a barracks. It was a long, somewhat narrow room with five bunk beds lining the wall on one side and a long window with a view of the city on the other. There were two footlockers at the foot of each bunk and a rather large, and completely out of place, holostation in the corner of the room furthest away from the door. Opposite the sliding entrance door was an antiquated swinging door that led to what must have been the showers and the lav. After they all shambled into the room, the door was closed behind them and they were left to their own devices without any instructions or explanation. After their level of exhaustion began to overtake their level of confusion, they began to settle into various bunks. Cyrus made an attempt to do a few push-ups to quell his frustration, but they only made his head pound more fiercely. Finally, he settled on the bottom bunk closest to the lav and holostation.
Jang settled next to the window, watching traffic speed by below. They were about seven stories up as far as Jang could tell. The elevator they had been packed into had the numbers covered and the soldiers had sheltered the buttons when they pressed them. The elevator was a large one designed to move freight, but it had been too cramped to get a good idea what button had been pressed. Now, Jang could see that they were about twenty-five meters above ave level. Upon closer inspection, Jang realized the floors must have been slightly higher than those on Earth because on all the buildings he could see, what his eyes told him should have been seven stories appeared to be only slightly larger than five.
After his head had convinced him it would explode if he did another push-up, Cyrus went over to the holostation and turned it on to pick up the broadcast stream. Remarkably, even though it was considerably larger, had a higher resolution, and projected directly onto the floor, the hand gestures to operate the holostation were very similar to those on Earth. A few of the scientists sat together on the bunks, but no one really said much of anything. After about an hour of lumbering around, the door opened, and three soldiers brought clear plastic container of food for each of the scientists. There was cubed steak, rice, and tomatoes on a bed of lettuce, as well as a cup of water glued in the corner of each. The soldiers handed each scientist a container, and then grabbed Toutopolus rudely, shuffling him out the door with his dinner.
Cyrus watched as they took Toutopolus in the middle of shoveling a forkful of tomato and lettuce into his mouth. A few of the others had noticed Toutopolus’s abduction, but most were too exhausted to protest as they turned their attention back to the first food they had seen in uncountable hours. Cyrus noticed Tanner bowing his head over his own container of food for much longer than normal. Cyrus picked up his own food, dragged his feet over to the bunk Tanner had chosen, and opened his dinner as he sat down.
After a moment, Tanner looked up from his prayer to find Cyrus shoveling chunks of steak into his mouth. Cyrus noticed Tanner had finished his vigil, “Tastes strange. Really slimy,” he spoke between exaggerated chews.
“That’s because you haven’t had real meat in two hundred years,” Tanner said as he opened his own meal. “Any idea what they’re doing with Toutopolus?”
“I was just about to ask the same thing,” Cyrus chewed another bite of ground steak, “Meat’s pretty grimy if you don’t eat it for a while, huh?” He swallowed. “I think they’re probably querying him now about all this espion nonsense.”
Someone in the room began sobbing. Tanner swallowed, and then looked at Cyrus for a long moment. “I thought you hated the holocast stream.”
“I do. But it’s the fastest way to find out anything. Everyone here seems bent off their runner—too bent to fill us in.”
“One way or the other we’re going to have to adjust.” Tanner looked at his food, hands on his knees, “This is the deal, huh?”
Cyrus shook his head. “Just trying to figure out what the timeframe is. I keep wondering how I can keep Darius from cruising up
on this snag a year from now.”
“After they find out what happened, they could let us go.”
“So far, they don’t seem like the letting-go type.” Cyrus shoveled a mouthful of rice into his mouth and chewed quickly. He spoke through the food as he stood, “I’m gonna gather some more recon.”
Cyrus walked back to the holostation to find Jang propped up in front of it, his own lunch devoid of rice and vegetables, with only a small bite taken from the steak. As Cyrus walked, he noticed Dr. Cohn curled up on a bottom bunk, whimpering with his sheet over his head.
Cyrus could feel the same pressure that was flowing through his body when he kicked Colfax 43235. It strangled his mind into its least common denominator, but it motivated him, made him impetuous. It took every ounce of his intellect and reason to keep him calm, but he needed focus now more than piss and vinegar, and another outburst like the one on the personnel carrier might get him shot.
Cyrus knelt next to Jang, who was cycling through streams on the holostation. He settled on a stream that must have been dedicated to children because there were grown men grinning unrealistically and prancing around in single-colored outfits. Jang seem fixated on the ridiculous scene as the men began singing numbers and counting various fruits, some recognizable, some strange versions of the familiar. The fruits bounced around the floor of the barracks in bunches as the men counted in sing-song voices.
“I’m processing,” Jang said before Cyrus could ask, and then fell back into his trance. Cyrus ate more of his dinner and looked around the room. Winberg was rocking himself on a bunk next to Villichez, speaking to softly to be heard. Cyrus couldn’t help noticing that it was the quietest he had ever heard Winberg speak. Commander Uzziah was standing in the corner beside the lav door with his arms folded. Cyrus could tell his eyes were absorbing every nook and cranny of the room. Torvald stood at the window, transfixed at the scene outside. His food was untouched and his body was limp against the window itself, which seemed the only thing that kept him from blowing away like a discarded wrapper on a desolate, windy ave corner.
After what seemed like a half hour of little change, Dr. Murphy screamed from inside the lav and came running toward the door, his pants draped awkwardly beneath his waist. When he reached the door, the cuff of his pants leg must have caught underfoot, because he tumbled toward the door and crashed against it face-first. His body bounced, but he lunged back at the door and began pounding on it and screaming, “What the hell is going on? Tell us what is going on!” over and over again.
Villichez made an attempt to calm him down, but it was of little use. Finally, after about five minutes, some guards came to the room and Murphy collapsed to the floor in a sobbing, exhausted heap. The soldiers entered and everyone expected them to attack Murphy or haul him away, but they merely pushed him to the side. They returned a spent Toutopolus and moved directly to the bunk of Dr. Cohn, who had seemed to have run out of water to fuel his tears. Cohn was repeating a verse to a song in Hebrew softly to himself when they snatched him from his bunk. He seemed like he was going willfully until he reached the door and saw Dr. Murphy, now silent, slumped uncomfortably against the wall. Dr. Cohn stopped, focused on Murphy for a moment, and then began thrashing wildly and muttering in Hebrew. One of the guards reeled from being smacked in the face by a flailing elbow, but two others grabbed Cohn’s arms at the wrists and twisted them painfully behind his back. Cohn dropped his weight like a veteran tantrum-thrower and stiffened his legs, but the guards wordlessly scooped his legs from under him and took him away.
Everyone was silent after the spectacle. Villichez, somehow composed through all this, moved over to the bunk where Toutopolus sat and put his hand on his shoulder. Cyrus went to move closer to where they were so he could hear what had happened, but Uzziah stopped him. “They are watching us,” Uzziah said, pushing Cyrus toward the holostation where Jang still sat mesmerized.
Uzziah ignored Jang and moved his hand, signaling the holostation to its maximum volume. Jang stayed focused on the holographic figures moving on the floor. Uzziah turned his back to the holostation, looking toward Villichez and Toutopolus, but he stepped so that his mouth was very close to Cyrus’s ear. Cyrus stayed focused on the holograms on the floor as Uzziah spoke. “They took the one that was hysterical, the one that had obviously broken, but the least violent,” he mumbled.
“What does it mean?” Cyrus muttered under his own breath as if he were speaking to Jang kneeling on the floor in front of him.
“It means they still think they are fighting some war. But whatever it is, the rest of the city seems unconcerned. Something very odd is happening here.”
“Beyond the fact that none of this should be here?” Cyrus’s attempt at humor was smothered by the tension in his own voice.
“I think I got it!” Jang yelled, hopping to his feet and alarming both Uzziah and Cyrus into defensive positions.
“You’ve got what?” Cyrus said, relaxing his guard, but falling a step away from Jang.
“The names of the Dhekad. They are like months but shorter. The names are like transliterated Greek numbers. Dhekak is the first. Murioplex is when that Chaldea idiot said this Defiance thing happened. Aekatomuriox, the current Dhekad, is the sixth. So it’s my guess they are all named after the respective 10-base Greek numbers, or at least variations on them, which would imply that each one is only ten days, or rather DC or Dome Cycles, long. My guess is, that’s the time it takes for them to complete one phase-cancelled sunrise and sunset. Their years are called gyres and, as far as I can tell, are made up of ten Dhekads and one hundred DC.” He was so excited he was out of breath from having not paused to breathe during his oration.
Cyrus stopped, the muscles in his body froze suddenly as if some visceral part of him knew something his brain did not yet comprehend. “Wait, did that program say what gyre it is now?”
Jang looked confused, as if he had been following a line of breadcrumbs and the trail in front of him had just been blown away by some unexpected gale. “Uh… three DC, Aekatomuriox, two thousand, two hundred and sixteenth gyre.”
Cyrus rolled his eyes to the ceiling and mumbled to himself, rolling numbers through his head as quickly as he could without jumbling them. After a few seconds, he paused, quickly checked his figures in his head again, and then looked back at Jang. “That would mean the war happened about 607 Earth years ago. Good lord…”
“But we have no idea how long after settlement the war started,” Jang added.
“I don’t think these hound’s wives are gonna offer up that information from the looks of it either. We’ll have to take shifts on the gram until we can figure it out.”
“Sure,” Jang moved back toward his perch, but then stopped and turned back to Cyrus, “Out of curiosity, why the urgency?”
“The only way they could have been here is if someone developed some sort of faster-than-light technology. Some form of continual-phase shift most likely, but the question is more when than how.”
“Still not sure what that has to do with what they are doing to us and when it will stop.”
Cyrus was calm, but his eyes, as focused and still as they were, seemed as if they were staring not at Jang, but into some horrific place that humans did not belong and were not welcome. “Well, it has very little to do with us all directly, but it has very much to do with me. So if you don’t mind, for the sake of the others, could you please humor me? Because if I don’t find out what’s happened to my son soon, I’m gonna set as much of this place on fire as I can ‘til they shoot me—and if me being shot doesn’t affect you, I’m sure the fire will.”
thirteen
• • • • •
—I have something to tell you, Dada.
—What’s that Dari?
—Well, uhh… Uhh, never mind.
—Come on Dari, you can’t tell someone you have something to tell them and then tell them never mind. That’s foul.
—Well, okay, but promise you won’t get m
ad.
—How can I promise you that? The simple fact that you feel the need to ask me to not get mad means you believe whatever you have to say most likely will make me mad. That’s like asking someone to promise to not die just before you stab them. I have very little control over the emotions generated by what you haven’t said yet.
—Well, that’s why I don’t want to say it.
—Hmm. Remember when we were coming down the ave after I picked you up yesterday, and that guy in the bright green lev turned in front of us against the arrow?
—Yeah, that was scary.
—Why was it so scary?
—Because he stopped right in front of us, and you had to tweak the x-axis to not hit him. We almost slid into the ave going the other way.
—All because the guy decided halfway through his mistake that he was being a test dummy.
—But what does that have to do with me?
—Listen Darius, and I’m gonna say this so you remember it. You can’t be half a fuck-up. Sometimes, when you start something, you just have to finish to keep things from being worse. Things were screwed up the moment you decided to do what you did. So if you start to say something that might put someone off their x-axis, own up and finish it.
—Dada, I lost my ephemeris today and I can’t do my homework until I get a new one.
—Then we have to get you a new one before the gallery closes so we can get it primed and logged in today.