by Ashanti Luke
—Well, I don’t think Terry’s gonna be aggravating anyone for a while.
—I hope you’re right, but somehow, I think as soon as his mouth heals, and as long as people like Miss Hasabe make excuses for him, he’ll be in someone else’s face, pissing someone else off, acting like consequences don’t exist. You see, people like to believe violence is a disorder, an aberration. Something that happens when diplomacy fails, but the thing they never tell you is that when courtesy goes down the lavpool, diplomacy goes with it. You see, violence is what happens when the dealer says all bets are off, but the gamblers won’t leave the table. It’s what happens when people have nothing left to say, but something, either the problem or one of the people, forces them to keep talking. Sometimes people don’t get the point until someone gets hurt.
—I don’t like hurting people, Dada.
—As well you shouldn’t. Hurting another person is a terrible thing, but sometimes terrible things are necessary to keep the world turning. If you ever have to put your hands on another man, or bring harm to his home, you stop yourself and ask if this is really necessary, and if you don’t have an answer, you keep your hands to yourself, because fighting is sometimes necessary, but it should only happen because you have to, not because you want to.
—Miss Hasabe said there’s never a good reason to fight, not even if someone else hits you.
—Well, she’s both right and wrong. There never is a good reason to fight, but sometimes you’re left with nothing but shitty choices, and acting like a turd isn’t a turd won’t turn it into a sweetbar.
—Eww. Even if it did, I wouldn’t eat it.
—Nor should you Dari. Nor should you.
• • • • •
Time began to stretch as it progressed. On the Paracelsus and under the Eurydice dome, the day cycles had seemed shorter. Much like the night cycle of Eurydice, the lights had dimmed on the ship every night. It had been a clumsy artifice, but it had been enough to dupe the mind into a regimented schedule. Here, Cyrus found himself awake for hours on end, in greater need of the orange sun’s embrace than rest. At first he thought it was shear belligerence that kept him going, the need to avenge the death of his best friend, to absolve the wrath of his son, and to find a respite for these strange men and women who had accepted him and his friends without expectations.
Or perhaps there was expectation, only more subtle. They had treated him the same as they would have treated anyone else. There had been no hoopla, no fanfare, and yet, when they looked at him, they looked at him as if his mere existence meant hope. He had not realized it until he had come here, but it was the same look he had always seen in Darius. The look that he had wanted more than anything else to get from Feralynn, and it was in search of that look that he had signed the papers sending him here. And now, the light from the orange sun swelling his muscles, he knew that he had taken for granted the dearest thing he had ever known.
He had never noticed it before, but the inside of the compound seemed damp. Outside of the rays of the sun, there seemed to be a moisture that clung to his skin. He wasn’t sweating, but it did feel like he had become more sensitive to changes in humidity. Jang was working with Milliken’s datadeck, while the image of Darius was pretending to type at the holomonitor. It was funny to Cyrus how irritated Milliken could get by the persistence of the illusion of his son, but the illusion’s antics comforted Cyrus. If he had created something like that himself, discounting certain differences in character and idiosyncrasy, he would have had his own image act in the same manner. There was no such thing as a halfway fake, and if an illusion were to be created at all, it should be maintained with the utmost effort.
Jang was enthralled by his own work, and Cyrus had to tap him to get his attention. Jang looked up slowly as Cyrus spoke, “You spend the least time outside of anyone else.”
Jang’s bangs had suffused his entire face now, but when he was working at a computer, it was like the hair was transparent to him. He brushed it aside as he looked up from the deck. “Outside is good, but there are no computers out there, and there is work to be done.”
“Commendable, but I don’t want you to futz around in here until you get sick.”
“Trust me, I won’t stay in here too long, because I don’t want the ladies to miss me too much.” He smiled a facetious smile, chuckled through an exhaled breath, and began moving the stylus furiously across the deck again.
“Perhaps they are in need of some attention now,” Cyrus said, smiling a little himself. Jang set his stylus on the deck and then set the deck on a chair. He blew his hair from his face and his own expression changed to match the seriousness in Cyrus’s that the jest in his voice had not revealed.
“Sure, sure,” Jang said standing, “I think I could use a little sun anyways.” He stood and walked toward the iris.
“Just let anyone who asks know I’m in here,” Cyrus yelled behind him.
Jang nodded and raised his hand over his head in acknowledgement as he left.
“You seem tense, Dada,” Darius said standing from the holomonitor, “would you like me to lock the door?”
“Yeah,” Cyrus said, sitting where Jang had sat. Then he realized the awkwardness of the question.
“How could you know to ask that?”
“Whenever your real son had that expression, he always issued the door-lock command. I just figured you might have the same inclination.”
“I have a question, but I don’t know how to ask it.” Cyrus reclined in the chair but his shoulders were still stiff and his body held rigid against the back.
“The only way I know of is to open your mouth and speak,” Darius smiled and Cyrus, with a little difficulty, also smiled at the statement that could just have easily come out of his own mouth.
“Did Darius,” he paused for a moment and then reselected his words, speaking more deliberately, “did you,” he paused again as the hologram waited anxiously, “talk about me much?” Cyrus breathed a sigh, as if he were expelling air that had grown stagnant in his lungs.
“You were mostly all I talked about. Although it was different. Thoughts came freely because I was talking to you. I enjoyed our conversations before you left more than you know.”
Cyrus looked at the floor. His feet were still covered with the sand that had seeped into his shoes while he was training. “You know, I enjoyed them too.”
“I always thought you did. Even though most of the time you were getting in my ear about this thing or that. I was always into something.”
Cyrus smiled. “You had a knack for turning the most innocuous situation into a complete Fringe-riot.”
“You always knew the right thing to say though. Even when you didn’t know what to say.”
“I’m sorry.” The words seemed to snap off Cyrus’s lips before Darius could even finish his sentence.
“For?” Darius had a perplexed look on his face. It was a little exaggerated, but it made sense.
“For leaving you. For putting you through this.” Cyrus sat up in the chair, sliding to the edge as he indicated the room with a wide gesture, “It’s me who put you here. No one else.” Cyrus’s voice had raised to a volume that startled even him, but Darius seemed unaffected and, if it were at all possible, compassionate.
“You know, coming into this room day after day I realized something. I realized I didn’t become the Knight of Swords after any particular battle; I became the Sword Scourge the day you stepped onto the shuttle to Eros. And that led me to another realization—the realization that the second worse day of a person’s life is the day they realize their parents are irrevocably human.”
Cyrus could feel his eyes shaking but he steeled himself. This may have been a construct of the complex nanocomputer system humming lightly to itself on the other side of the room, but at this moment, as far as he was concerned, Darius’s eyes spoke truth to him as he sat on the edge of the chair—the figure before him was his son and he needed Cyrus to be strong as much as Cyrus himse
lf needed it. “If that’s the second worse day, what day could be worse than that?”
“The day that person refuses to get over it,” the inflection and the facial expression matched perfectly. “As you said time and time-squared times, I made my own choices, and just as you said, that and that alone made the difference. I still had nightmares, but they were brief. And even on the nights when they proved an insurmountable foe, the mirror never took up arms with them.”
“Not once?”
“Never. When I looked in the mirror, I saw the only man in the universe who could judge me.”
Cyrus nodded to himself in understanding, “Yourself.”
“No,” the contradiction came like an airlock tocsin, “You. War is war. It’s what happens when the gauntlet is thrown, when all bets have been called off, when courtesy has failed beyond redemption, and when acting like a lavpool isn’t a lavpool doesn’t make it pudding. Humans fighting humans on an interplanetary scale is an abomination, but so is bartering your beliefs for comfort. Something was amiss here—something still is—and I knew we could win. So I made the call Rex Mundi didn’t have the stomach for.”
“But look what happened. Instead, it was for naught. They tried to kill you. They ran you out of town. I wish I had taught you to be wiser.”
“And since when has Doctor Cyrus Tiberius Chamberlain considered selfish wise? Self-preservation, yes, but not once have I seen you run from a problem because you might get hurt.” Those words hit hardest of all. Darius may not have known any better, and certainly not his effigy, but Cyrus knew he had run from the only thing that had ever really mattered, and it burned the lining of his stomach. Darius took notice of Cyrus’s expression but continued. “Besides, the only way to stop whatever dominoes had been set to fall was for me to stay alive. For me to pass on the message to the only person I knew could maybe get at whatever is at the bottom of this hound’s pit.”
Cyrus looked at Darius. There were parts of the hologram that seemed artificial—not for lack of articulation on the part of the imager—every pixel had been color-matched, every line anti-aliased. The minutest of details had been rendered to perfect clarity, but the clarity was too perfect. Reality was hazy and indistinct—it had rough edges and was all-too often ruddy—and yet, in the midst of the awkward exactness of the overall image, Darius’s eyes boasted a veracity that convinced Cyrus of the sincerity of the simulacrum’s words.
“You know there was one thing I did run from. One problem I never knew how to solve.” Cyrus said, diverting his eyes from the eyes of the image.
“I know,” the answer caught Cyrus off-guard—the matter-of-fact inflection as perfect as if it had come out of a real mouth. “Mom.” That word shook the chair around Cyrus, generating gravity waves that pulled him back into the seat despite the tension in his shoulders.
“I just couldn’t tell what she wanted from me.”
Darius laughed and looked down at the floor. The image paused for a moment, exhaled in way that seemed ostentatious as it transmitted through the sound imager, and then he met Cyrus’s eyes again with the same substance as before. “All she wanted was you to be hers, like you had promised, but you refused to belong to anyone.”
“Not anyone.”
Darius paused, and then nodded his understanding. “Fair enough.”
Cyrus clasped his hands in his lap as he sat forward in the chair again. “So where do we go from here?”
“Well, my suggestion is you go back outside, train some more, and send Jang back in here so we can find a way to crack the Echelon satellite system.”
Cyrus stood, moved to leave, and then stopped. He met Darius’s eyes again and smiled. “Thank you.”
Darius himself stood and smiled in return. “No, thank you.”
Cyrus realized the words had a strange inflection. They had been spoken in Darius’s voice, but they rose and fell differently. As if someone else had spoken through him. “For what?” Cyrus asked, thrown off by the strange delivery.
“For allowing me to come as close as I possibly could to feeling emotion. I thank you both.” The image bowed theatrically, and as he stood, Cyrus swore he could see a glimmer on his cheek. Then Cyrus turned, the iris opened, and he left, hoping the guileless Ashan sun would clear away the glimmer on his own cheek.
Cyrus rushed into the Forum sweaty, metal staff in hand. He noticed the sweat seemed to evaporate instantly as the iris closed behind him. “Toutopolus said you found something,” he said to Jang and Darius as caught his breath.
Milliken was already inside, his broadsword still in hand, intently moving his stylus with his right hand over his datadeck as he, Jang, and Darius observed some hologram Cyrus could not see. Cyrus moved over to them quickly so he could view it himself. “What is this?” he asked as he stood next to the Darius image and let one end of his staff rest against the floor.
“It is what it looks like.” Milliken’s answer could have been perceived as snide, but tension often had that effect on his voice.
“But where?” Cyrus asked, looking down on the gold-topped white pyramid that spread across the floor at their feet, each corner marked by an obelisk several meters from the vertex, also white with a gilded pyramid at the top.
“Eight degrees and thirteen minutes north of the equator,” Milliken added without looking up from the datadeck. “The prime meridian runs bang through the center of it. The position of the pyramid is so precise, I found an error in our calculations, which were only off by four ten-thousandths of a second.”
“How did you…” before Cyrus could finish his question Jang was already answering him.
“Darius and I were working on a shadow-sync with the Ashan satellite system. On a test run, we found an odd microwave power signal that led us to this thing,” Jang informed.
“The Ashans built this?” Cyrus asked, pivoting his staff around the point where hologram of the pyramid touched the floor.
“I don’t think so, but I’m working on that now. The satellite is being difficult, and Jang’s algorithm keeps unsyncing,” Milliken snapped, dropping his sword with a clang.
“Well, would you rather get caught and taken back to that hound’s cage we escaped from, or worse?” Jang snapped back.
“Either way, it’s a pain in my ass,” Milliken snapped again, furiously moving the stylus on his deck.
“Wait,” Cyrus stopped his staff in mid pivot, “this thing was sending out a microwave signal?”
“No, it was receiving one,” Darius turned and answered. “We think the top of the pyramid is the rectenna and the base shape somehow helps diffuse or channel the energy.”
“The other interesting thing is that the edge of the Miasma rests inside the obelisks on the south side of the pyramid.”
A sudden impulse moved Cyrus to the holomonitor next to the main Xerxes unit, “Hmm,” he said more to himself as he rested the staff against the computer, sat in the chair, and began tapping frantically at the keypad. Darius walked over to the holomonitor and looked over Cyrus’s shoulder, eliciting a grimace from Milliken. “Asha’s precessional period is 16,392 Earth years. About 9,920 years have passed in the current period, which means in the next 6,472 years, the Miasma’s edge should rest here.” Cyrus emphatically hit a key and the light that was cast over the image of the pyramid shifted. It looked as if someone had moved the lamps in the room. There was no other clear difference until Cyrus pressed another key, and a fluorescent red line spread through the image, tracing a path directly through one of the vertices of the pyramid, across its center, and through the opposite vertex.
“What does it mean?” Jang asked, ruffling his coat.
“It means that this thing was most likely built 9,920 years ago, or some multiple of 16,392 years ago, well, that and plus 9,920 years.”
“Thirty-six!” Milliken belted jubilantly, the tension now gone from his voice.
“What?” everyone, including Darius, said in unison.
“Thirty-six precessional periods. T
he gold on the top, according to these readings, was laid approximately six hundred thousand and thirty-two years ago.”
“Which matches the dating of the underground city,” Darius added again.
There was a cold quiet in the room. It was a silence that caused the vibrations generated by the holoprojectors to thicken the air. “I don’t know about you guys, but this shit is scary as hell to me,” Milliken said, wiping his brow despite the chill.
“The microwave signal, where is it coming from?” Cyrus asked, turning in his chair to face the image.
“The source is shadowed, even on the restricted band, but we’ve run across five similarly shadowed signals, and they have all been what we think are Echelon bases or orbitals,” Darius added.
“We need to get Paeryl and Tanner in here, stat,” Cyrus said, standing from the seat and retrieving his staff.
“I think Paeryl’s holding a special evensong. He said not to disturb him.” Jang scratched at his forehead as Cyrus passed.
“I don’t care if he’s giving birth, he needs to see this. And we need Tanner’s brain. I’ll get Paeryl, you get Tanner.” Cyrus took his staff and left through the lab entrance.
Cyrus walked out of the compound with his staff, and began scanning the crater for Paeryl.
“I see you came prepared,” he heard to his right as the iris closed behind him. He turned to find a polished spear tip, glinting with orange light, the tip at his right eye.
“I don’t have time for games,” Cyrus said stepping away, but the spear tip followed him. He felt the anger filling his joints, expanding his muscles. The weapon pointed at him was across the line. He stepped in the direction he had been moving again and flipped his staff to his right, knocking the spearhead down. There was a crowd forming around them, but Cyrus barely saw it. Cyrus could only see the tip of the spear and the eyes of Six, who, if he didn’t stand down his weapon, would soon become Cyrus’s adversary.