by Ashanti Luke
—You’re not mad?
—No, I wish you’d take better care of your things, but no, I’m not mad. I would have been mad if I had to hear it from Miss Hasabe though. I swear that woman calls me more than your mother does. Your mother’s going to begin to think she and I are having an affair.
—Uhh…
—What now?
—I don’t know about mommy being scared of an affair, Dada. Cuz mommy’s real pretty, and Miss Hasabe looks like a shaved monkey with a wig on.
—Dari! That’s not a very nice thing to say.
—You can’t be half a… well you know the rest.
—Boy, your antics are gonna get us both into some serious trouble.
—Well, when it happens, I’ll try and give you as much early warning as I can.
• • • • •
The room was beginning to smell like a locker room. Eight DCs had passed since they had been brought here and they had only seen the cleaning bot once. Jang believed the bot came in five-DC cycles, at the beginning and end of each Dhekad. Even if the bot had come in two-DC cycles, it would be impossible for them to remove the stench of anxiety and misery that thickened the air, making breathing deliberate. It didn’t help that many did not shower for fear of surveillance. To some it didn’t matter, others got over it as time passed, but a few could not get beyond the idea of being watched every moment. Torvald would walk around normally, watch the holostation, but he would shiver periodically, as if a draft had passed over him. Eventually he would huddle up in his lower bunk, concealed by his blanket and the shadows. The showers themselves were like an ice bath. Uzziah remarked that the settings for hot water only worked marginally, probably to keep them from obscuring the gaze of their observers with steam. This theory seemed to prompt Murphy and Cohn to avoid the showers completely. The showers were not as cold as they seemed, but the knowledge of being watched with scrutiny while naked lowered the temperature for most of them dramatically. As far as the level of hospitality, nothing changed. Periodically, someone would sit by themselves for too long, or would talk too much about their life at home, or would stare at the wall or outside the window too long, and would get scooped up by guards. Villichez had unaffectionately named the guards The Flying Monkeys, as after seeing a hologramized version of The Wizard of Oz, they had become a frequent subject of his son’s nightmares. Cohn and Toutopolus had been taken twice, and Murphy, Tanner, and Jang had all been taken once each. Tanner and Jang had both been taken—Jang literally while he was asleep—and had been left in empty rooms for hours without being asked any questions. Everyone’s actions in turn became calculated and, as far as Cyrus could tell, no one slept until his body shut down from exhaustion.
A tap on his shoulder turned Cyrus’s attention away from the hologram. “My turn,” Jang stood behind him. His lab coat draped around his shoulders in a way that made it look more like a cape. “Find out anything?”
“Not really. They keep talking about the mass migration to Druvidia that’s coming up. Evidently, getting living space there is a big deal, and I guess new construction has been going on there to accommodate a large population.”
“Must be taxing having to move every generation in order to run from the night. Wonder why they don’t just make dome cycle lights that turn inward.”
“Well, these I’m sure run off the power of Set itself; I can’t imagine the energy source required otherwise.”
“I guess they do have a ginormous free fusion reactor… say, you know, I forgot to tell you earlier, there was a cast about the development of the faster-than-light drive last night, or night cycle rather. They were talking about the first ship to colonize here. The Anemoi I think it was called.”
“They say how it worked?”
“Something about reaching 50% of the speed of light and then turning the gravity drive in on itself. Causes space-time to ripple and uses Laurel contraction or something like that…”
“Lorenz contraction.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Well they said the gravity squeezes the ship to a size small enough to kind of fold into space-time and unfold in another place. Time lapses, but it is measured in seconds, not years. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but the cast was written for Novitiates. It was pretty puerile.”
“Probably has something to do with building more efficient gravity drives. They have obviously made ones smaller that are less demanding of energy.”
“Like that personnel lev we rode in on. That thing wasn’t EM.”
“They say when they developed it?”
“I think they said it took around thirty gyres on Earth to develop it and implement it into the first ship. Thirty gyres—a little more than eight years I guess.”
“Pretty big project,” Cyrus stood, stretching out his legs momentarily before standing fully erect. He arched his back and his shoulders blades until there was a slight pop from his spine. Jang pulled his lab coat over his shoulders and sat Indian style, usual position in front of the holovision. “You get much rest?” Cyrus asked as he turned to walk away.
“Nope, been hard to sleep since I got waylaid. I catch ten to twenty here and there in fugues. I’m starting to see people standing behind me. I’d be a complete lab rodent right now if it wasn’t for my shifts on this thing.” Jang indicated the hologram as an advertisement for upscale living space in Druvidia displayed a somewhat Spartan, but spacious dwelling. Cyrus nodded and returned to his own bunk.
Villichez stood looking out the window as Cyrus sat down next to him. The dome was dimming almost imperceptibly, giving the impression of a sunset in a moonless sky. The artificial twilight was convincing except for the corner of orange sun peeking from behind a building at the end of the ave, fading with the darkening dome rather than descending below the horizon as it should.
“The speech patterns in this place are becoming marginally understandable, no?” Villichez scanned the ave outside, looking at the other building, in hopes someone might be there looking back.
“Seems to me, the more proper speech, like from the newscasts and children’s casts, are more like standard Commonspeak than the colloquial speech in this facility. I find the educational and informational streams considerably easier to understand.” Cyrus said, rubbing his thighs deliberately and stretching out his fingers to their limits as he kneaded his legs with his palms.
“Discover anything on your shift?” Villichez didn’t take his eyes away from the city milling beneath them.
“Not really. Even though it was the newscast, seems like not much happens here. This Defiance thing seems to be the most interesting thing around.” Cyrus rubbed the fingers in his right hand until two of his knuckles popped. “Someone did steal some sort of military vehicle. They blamed it, like everything else wrong the last few Dome Cycles, on those Apostate clowns. Other than that it was normal, just your usual robbery or violent act.” Cyrus twined the fingers of his hands together and then untwined them.
“Disturbing that we find robbery and acts of violence normal, don’t you think?” Villichez stayed focused on the dimming sun, no longer too bright to look at directly.
“Well, jealousy and anger, however base, are natural human emotions. Our responses to them would also have a range of normalcy and a threshold. A threshold that, I would think, exists on both sides of the bell curve. For every depraved action, there should be an overly tolerant, or equally base, inertia. They have to both exist for motion in any direction, but we tend to select them arbitrarily, and to our own tastes.” Cyrus was more alert now, his fingers no longer needing to move to engage his mind.
“I’m not sure I follow your meaning,” Villichez turned from the window to face Cyrus.
“You see, it is not unheard of for a renegade monkey who is denied alpha status by a stronger monkey to steal the female offspring of the alpha monkey and raise it himself. Not as its own offspring, but as a mate, so that his own offspring might be stronger. If a human had even the desire to do this, you would log a
great deal of hours in your appointment book. If he actually went through with it, we would throw him into the deepest darkest nook of the most horrid prison we could find. And yet, zoologists turn a jaundiced eye to it, reading it off as natural, so long as it’s a monkey that’s doing it. No one throws the monkey in jail. We just log it, categorize it, and keep moving. I know this example is extreme, but there are a great many responses to emotion that are not as extreme, but fit the same paradigm that humans and monkeys share. But people like Winberg and the Meritocracy believe they somehow are unsavory for men, or rather affluent men, to indulge in.”
“But, human beings, my friend, are not monkeys.”
“Given our current circumstance, I strongly beg to differ,” Cyrus smiled. Villichez opened his mouth to answer but whatever he was about to say was shattered into oblivion by Jang’s excitement.
“Look! There’s a cast stream on that Knight of Swords guy,” Jang reported, raising the contrast on the hologram so everyone could see. Everyone who had the slightest of their wits about them focused on the images that spread across the floor.
“...first Grand Mobius of Archons fronted the plight in the defense of Asha. Aerik Kazamesh, who became known as The Man of Swords, levied on the first vessel from Earth forty-seven gyres before the first. He helped design the Eurydice Dome and was given the title of Prefect of Stone while the first Prolocutor, Rex Mundi, was overseeing the construction of Druvidia.” An image of a city-sized dome under construction spread across the floor in front of them. Construction levs lumbered around the structure carrying building materials and manipulating parts of the dome with mechanical arms. The image faded, revealing a recording of a considerably older hologram. A man wearing a white linen robe was speaking in remarkably clear Commonspeak, with no trace of the accent the scientists had been assaulted with since their ill-fated arrival.
“When Prolocutor Mundi refused to allow any more levies from Earth and began violently turning away more persistent ships, Kazamesh was appointed Grand Mobius. He then established the Archons of Asha to help defend against the Terran backlash.”
“A quiet and private man, Kazamesh refused public interviews and only regaled queries through surrogation. Although his surrogations were always quip and keen, he proved as shrewd and ruthless at military strategy. His strategies turned back attack after attack from Earth.” An image of a man wearing a more Earth-like version of the uniform Denali had been wearing faded from view, and the image was replaced by holograms of several smaller fighters attacking an ominous warship in a four-point pincer formation. Suddenly, what looked like a small asteroid sped in from some place off the hologram and collided with the warship in a place where the fighters had been concentrating their fire. It tore a hole in the side of the warship and metal, flame, and what could have only been bodies vomited from the scar. As the flames dissipated into the vacuum, the image faded again to reveal another image of Kazamesh in uniform, now holding some sort of card.
“When asked how he managed to continue to win battles with minimal losses, he jatterly remarked that he used a set of Tarot cards given to him by his mother. This spawned the moniker ‘Knight of Swords,’ which he himself embraced.” The hologram grew, filling the floor with the image of a Tarot card. The card showed a knight, sword in hand, charging on his horse toward some unseen foe. The card rotated once slowly and then dissolved into more scenes of interstellar battle. Extraplantetary lasers extended from Ashan frigates, ripping into large Earth warships. The warships fired volleys of missiles so numerous they looked like clouds of smoke. Electromagnetic disrupter fields around the warships gave off flashes of purple and red as they diffused many of the lasers, while frigates and fighters evaded or launched countermeasures. It looked like the later levels of Conquest of Ages, but was both quieter and yet more sinister.
“Earth began to send more vessels, and it seemed the war would press on for hundreds of gyres, but the invention of the Whisper Node gave Asha the edge over our oppressors. The ability to communicate instantly over any distance gave the Archons the ability to attack Earth directly.” What must have been scientists and engineers, not in lab coats, but in light blue jumpsuits, posed next to an odd cube of machine that looked like a food processor. The scene switched to an image of a land dock where frigates and other engines of destruction were being assembled.
“Resources were plentiful, but with the construction of Jacob’s Ladder and the Druvidian Project, ship construction was limited. Prolocutor Mundi suggested the forces regroup and fortify, but the Man of Swords had devised one final attack.” A computer-generated image of a carrier ship, seemingly weaponless, appeared on the screen. It rotated slowly as it hovered above the floor. The side of the ship melted away to reveal its insides, giving an impression of scale. It was a smaller, extremely Earth-like ship that looked much like the Paracelsus.
“In defiance of the orders of the Prolocutor and the Praetoriate, the Knight of Swords launched Mjolnir, a faster-than-light craft retrofitted with a near-light drive. In a most heartless attack, he ordered Mjolnir to unfold just outside Earth orbit, traveling at 98% of the speed of light.” An image of the northern hemisphere of Earth appeared, and just above the North Pole, there was a glimmer that erupted into what looked like a laser beam. The beam flashed for a fraction of a second and then erupted in an explosion in the Arctic Circle. Even though the hologram played out in slow motion, the explosion spread faster than the eye could see, filling the floor with a flash of white light. Cyrus wanted to shield his eyes as Jang and Villichez did, but he looked on, enduring the pain of his pupils shrinking to pinpoints.
“The impact with the polar ice cap must have caused great devastation. The decisive blow finished the war, but little is currently known of the Terrans’ fate as no word has been heard from Earth in the 2200 gyres since the Defiance.” The hologram, which had remained inactive since the explosion, now faded what looked like a tribunal into view. There were three figures sitting behind a large table on a rostrum. They each wore blue hoods that completely obscured their faces. A small diadem rested on each hood. The symbol of an eye surrounded by six wings in an aster graced each diadem. A man stood before the tribunal, hands clasped behind his back. He had the same stature as the image of the man they had associated with the Knight of Swords, but this man’s hair was less perfect, his clothing more ruffled, and his unkempt beard obscured his features. The hologram focused more on the tribunal than on the man.
“For his crimes, the Knight of Swords was sentenced to death, but was pardoned and exiled by Prolocutor Mundi. At his adjudication, the Sword Scourge, when asked if he had any remorse, regaled that there was only one man in the universe he had to answer to, and he refused to say anything else. Upon his exile, the Sword Knight’s charisma left a lasting legacy. Even rightforth, the message of the Knight speaks to youth, and has resulted in the formation of the Apostates of the Sword, a radical group that spreads mayhem and confusion throughout the city. There are even rumors that the bunker where the Knight was exiled has been inhabited for several gyres by the Apostates. However, that rumor is unconfirmed as the location of that bunker is unknown. The Advent marks the DC where light from the explosion of Mjolnir can be seen in the darkened dome. There will be a full DC darkening and all ave traffic will be stopped for one full hor in observance of the Advent of The Defiance.”
“What the hell is a hor?” Winberg bellowed.
“It’s an hour, just with the accent,” Jang replied as someone from the back of the group shushed them both.
Cyrus could barely hear them. He stared through the three dimensional scenes that played out on the floor. The shapes and colors blurred, the sounds became muffled, and everything obscured until neither images nor sounds held meaning for him. His vision faded until only the numbers in his head were real.
Forty-seven gyres since the first.
He rolled the number around in his head. Divided it by three point six five.
Twelve point eight or so.
Close to thirteen years between the first ship landing and the war.
The war had begun about six hundred seven or six hundred eight years ago. Ended a little more than six hundred years ago. That was why the light was reaching Asha from the explosion in the next few Dhekads.
Outside of relativity, the Paracelsus had left earth six hundred thirty-one years ago.
Only a little more than ten or eleven years before the faster-than light ship could have possibly been launched.
But, according to Jang, the FTL technology took eight years to develop. In Cyrus’s experience with Jang, he had seldom, if ever, been wrong with his figures—especially not simple ones.
Eight years. They had begun developing the faster-than-light technology four years after the Asha expedition had left. If Cyrus had not heard about it before, it meant that it had begun development not too long after it had been proposed—which would have been no later than a year before…
…there was no way the Uni could have spared the expense of two interplanetary expeditions, was there? No, not when a more efficient method was less than a decade away.
Which meant, by typical Uni protocol, the production of the FTL ship would have preempted the launch of the Damocles. Cyrus asked again just in case he had been mistaken, “How many gyres did it take them to develop the FTL ship again?”
There was a pause, as if it took a moment to translate Cyrus’s question, and then finally Jang realized and answered, “Thirty.”
Thirty. The word solidified in the air—scorching at the surface, and yet impossibly cold at the core. It was a comet that invaded Cyrus’s atmosphere, eclipsing his sky. Then, defenseless, his eyes sank below the horizon, as the comet, with all the impact of a myriad of nuclear weapons, collided with his own world, knocking it off its kilter.
Tanner could see, in that moment, Cyrus’s dark days expanded to months, years, a lifetime as his entire world teetered sideways. The renewed life Cyrus had engendered in himself the last five years sank through the cracks, hiding beneath the surface; the lines in Cyrus’s face became clearer, his cheeks quivered, and Tanner knew a thick ocean of isolation and self-hate was filling the void beneath, faster than his hand could reach Cyrus’s shoulder. It was a futile attempt at comfort—but he left it there anyway.