Dusk (26 page)

“You see, it’s this new exercise called
minding-your-own-goddamn-business,” Cyrus looked up to meet
Winberg’s eyes. “You should try it sometime.”

“Well your nonsense might have been passable
on the ship, but down here, it’s gonna get someone killed. I’d say
that puts it right in the ‘my-goddamn-business’ category.”

“Then you watch your own back, and I’ll watch
mine.” Cyrus stopped, but then as Winberg was about to open his
mouth, he continued, “Seems to me like that might be easier for you
if you get out of my face.” Cyrus moved as if he were about to
stand, but Winberg grumbled and then walked to the window to look
into the artificially darkened night sky.

Cyrus sat back down and extended his leg
beneath the bunk to stretch it. Tanner, eyes puffy from limited
sleep, leaned over from the bed a bit, “A bit high strung are
we?”

“I don’t like the bend in his keel,” Cyrus
reached his hand beneath the bed to stretch his leg further.

“I hadn’t noticed,” Tanner smiled then
exhaled. “He does have a point though. This could get out of
hand.”

“As far as I’m concerned, it already is out
of hand.” Cyrus slid his leg out of the stretch, but kept his hand
underneath the bunk. The muscles in his forearm continued to tense
and relax and his body stayed turned more toward the bed even
though he focused his attention on Tanner.

“Maybe they will sort this out sooner than we
think,” Tanner said. The inflection in his voice was wispy, as if
he barely believed it himself.

“You and I both know better. This whole
operation is a lampoon. They keep playing with us. If they listened
more carefully, they could hear the truth. But I don’t give a damn
whether or not they hear. Bottom line is, I’m not staying here to
rot while they ‘sort it out.’” Cyrus’s eyes focused on
Tanner’s.

“And I would not expect you to. I’m just
saying, don’t jump into the fire just because you’re mad.” Tanner
held his focus but his gaze was not as sharp as his tone.

“What other reason is there to jump in a
fire? They keep at us like they might get somewhere, but they are
too monkey-minded to see there is nowhere to go. I’m not gonna let
them play with me until they get tired.” Cyrus knew the holovision
might not have been loud enough to mask his rant from their
captors, but he didn’t care.

“Your brand of bluster does not normally come
without impetus, but I am curious. How are you going to achieve
this egress, and where do you plan on going? We are in a giant
hermetic dome somewhere in the middle of a planet-wide desert.”
Tanner could see the corners of Cyrus’s eyes quivering.

“You don’t have to go along if you have
doubts. Just don’t get in my way.” Cyrus clenched his teeth and
kept his voice down, but his tone was biting nonetheless.

“Doubts? Why would I stay here? Besides, I’d
follow you into the fires of Hell if it came down to it because I
know you wouldn’t take anyone else into the fire rashly.”

Cyrus’s anger was no longer directed toward
Tanner, but the fire still burned within him. His fury lapped at
the walls of the material flesh that tried futilely to contain it.
Tanner and Cyrus sat there for a while wordless. Cyrus continued to
stretch, his hand still under the bunk, until finally Tanner lay
face-down on the floor next to him and began doing push-ups. After
his sixtieth push-up, Tanner sat up facing Cyrus, taking in deep
breaths. “Have you noticed it’s a lot easier to do push-ups here?
For a while I thought it was anxiety until I realized it was harder
to do jumping-jacks because the rhythm was all off.”

Cyrus turned from the bedside, pulled his
knees to his chest, and then cupped his left hand over his fist as
he pulled his knees into him with his forearms. “Remember, Asha is
smaller and slightly less dense than Earth. The gravity here is
about 87% of Earth’s.” He grumbled through the words, but the
tension in his voice was subsiding.

Tanner met Cyrus’s eyes again. They were
still ablaze, but more focused. It was clear they were calculating.
“You still want to leave?” Tanner asked, keeping his own voice
down.

“It’s more a
when
than a
whether-or-not at this point. I just need to sleep on it a few
nights to get my head in order.” After that, Cyrus crossed his
legs, spun out of his crouch into a standing position, and then sat
on the bunk with a creak. He kept his right hand in a fist over his
chest, concealing the bolt he had surreptitiously removed from the
bed. He then settled into the pillow, the bed thumping lightly
against the wall as the missing bolt allowed it to move under his
shifting weight.

• • • • •

Davidson was losing his mind. For the third
night in a row, the tapping in the walls kept him awake. It was not
constant, but as soon as he was about to fall into sleep, it would
start again—and sleep was already hard to come by in this place. It
had started two days before, when Milliken had been dragged off for
hours and had been asked inexplicable questions about some imminent
attack. Horribly confused, Milliken was of little use to them, but
he had received a righteous beating for his trouble nonetheless.
When they first laid hands on him, he had—so he said—managed to put
one of them down with an unsuspected kick to the groin, which had
only exacerbated his flogging. In the end—he said—he had walked out
stumbling, but the other guy had to be carried out.

Milliken had hobbled back into the room,
propped himself on Davidson’s bottom bunk, and had requested
Davidson trade bunk positions with him for a couple days. That
night, as Davidson rested on the top bunk in a haze that served
only to give him a false hope of attaining sleep, he was moored to
reality by a rapping within the wall. The noise was faint at first
but became louder. It seemed rhythmic, but not steady, which
convinced Davidson it was not mechanical. But what else could make
that noise?

• • • • •

Cyrus sat next to his bed facing the wall,
using the leg of the bed frame as leverage in his leg stretch. He
kept his left hand on the leg that rested under the shadow of the
bunk, apparently rubbing his ankle. Someone put a hand on his
shoulder. He turned to see Villichez stopping slightly behind him.
“I had been meaning to tell you, but I kept forgetting. I took the
liberty of taking over your holovision shift in your absence a few
days ago.”

Cyrus relaxed his stretch and adjusted his
left sock to stash the bolt he had removed again this evening. He
turned to face Villichez, continuing to stretch once he rotated.
“Discover anything?”

“Actually there was quite the interesting
history program in the middle of your furlough. It discussed some
of the origin of the civilization on this planet.”

“Like what?” Cyrus spread his legs slightly
wider, but he focused his attention on the old man as he sat on the
bunk next to him.

The bed creaked and shifted against the wall
as Villichez’s weight settled. “Well it was mostly an articulate,
but one-sided, rant about the iniquities of Earth and how the
emigration to Asha left most of those shortcomings behind. It
mostly talked about how the sampling of the first expeditions to
the planet eliminated religious and racial prejudices, which were
further avoided through the ban of leviance from Earth after a man
called Prolocutor Mundi was elected leader of Asha. Basically, the
only languages that really survived the exodus were Greek and a
form of Commonspeak called Ashan. It also seems none of the
original colonists held much stock in religion.”

“Well, that makes a lot of things make sense.
Although they seem to be, as far as I can tell, exceptionally
ignorant of life on Earth. Most casts that I’ve seen show Earth as
populated by idiotic monsters.” Cyrus relaxed his stretch then
shifted into another one.

“It seems to me the hatred they left on Earth
was replaced with a hatred for the place where they left it. The
cast suggested the citizens of Earth were parasites that had raped
the planet into a stagnant wasteland, and that Ashan civilization
was more evolved, for lack of a better term, because it arose in a
wasteland, rather than degenerated into one. It seems this hatred
manifested itself into a riot in the midst of the war that caused
most documentation from Earth to be destroyed, which over the
course of the five hundred plus years, I’m sure has directly
resulted in the ignorance you speak of.”

“What kind of moron destroys information?”
Cyrus scoffed.

“In my experience, it is usually the kind
that never really used it to begin with.”

• • • • •

Davidson closed his eyes, but the tap, tap,
tap, tap, tap… tap, tap, tap,
tap
… penetrated his skull,
arrested his brain, and drew him back to consciousness each time he
tried to sleep. It had been more sporadic the dome cycle before,
but now it persisted, and it seemed to persist the entirety of the
city’s artificial night. The sound made him restless. He stirred,
he tossed, he looked around the room, but no else seemed to pay the
noise any mind. Some seemed restless themselves, but no one seemed
agitated beyond their wits.

Finally, he appealed to the darkness,
“Milliken, are you awake?”

“Yeah,” wafted up airily from beneath the
bunk.

Davidson turned and hopped off the edge of
the bunk. His body was wearier than he had expected and his knees
could barely take the shock. He plopped down on the side of
Milliken’s bunk harder than he had expected and the metal frame
sent a jolt through his thighbones. “You hear that noise?” Davidson
asked beneath his breath.

“Yeah.”

“Is it keeping you up too?”

“I haven’t been able to sleep since I got
gaffed. I can barely hear the sound.”

“Every time I almost get to sleep it starts
pounding through my head. It’s driving me insane.” Davidson
realized it was harder to hear when he focused on keeping his own
voice down. He leaned toward the wall to see if it was still
there.

“Maybe they are doing it to try to break us?”
Milliken proposed, clasping his hands over his chest.

“I don’t think so.”

“It sounds a little like IPA signal code.”
Milliken sidled closer to the wall using his shoulders. He knew
their captors were probably monitoring them through fly-eye cams
and mics, and probably also through infrared, so he tried to make
his motions as natural and subtle as possible. “If it is, it’s
kinda choppy. It’s been going on for so long, the ball-biters must
not be able to hear it.”

Milliken sat deathly still in the bed.
Davidson tried to keep from moving, but his body seemed to be
shaking at a steady oscillation. It was hard to hear the tapping in
the wall over the pounding of blood through his temple, but he knew
the moment he tried to go back to sleep it would be all he could
hear. Then, as his breathing began to settle and his nerves began
to somewhat calm, he could hear the pattern despite the aberrant
rhythm. Tap, tap, pause, tap tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap,
tap
.
Pause. Tap,
tap
, tap, pause, tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
Tap
,
tap
, pause, tap,
tap
. And then shakily,
it repeated.

Evidently Milliken had translated the pattern
as IPA code because he began to mumble to himself, “Vuh… Vuh… yee.”
He stopped, counted under his breath, and then mumbled again, “Vee
guh ay… ay tsuh.”

“
Wie gehts
?” Davidson answered. It was
German, or so it seemed. “How are you?” he translated, letting his
words drift out on a gasp so as to avoid the room’s microphones.
Davidson slid closer to Milliken’s head and the wall, but did not
turn. If someone was watching them, he did not want to call
attention to himself. It seemed if they could hear the tapping, he
would have had more sleep, because they would have stopped it by
now. “Can we send?” Davidson said into his own hand, not sure if
even Milliken could hear him.

Milliken was still. Davidson was about to
repeat himself when he heard Milliken whisper, “Yeah.”

“
Nicht gut. Und du
?” Davidson said
into his hand. Not good, and you?

Milliken stopped for a moment, mumbled,
counted to himself, and then turned on his side facing Davidson’s
back. Somehow he used the hand supporting his head to tap the wall
lightly. Tap, pause, tap, tap, tap. As soon as he started, the
tapping on the other side stopped. Milliken continued. Tap, tap,
tap, tap,
tap
.
Tap
, tap,
tap
, pause, tap.
Pause. Tap,
tap
, tap, pause, tap. Tap, tap, tap,
tap
,
tap
.
Tap
, tap,
tap
, pause, tap.

There was a long pause. It seemed like the
silence that filled Davidson’s head had not existed in weeks.

Then another series of taps, longer this
time, in a somewhat awkward rhythm came back across the wall.
Milliken counted to himself a few times, and then reported, “Vuh
ay-ur d-uh. Yee kuh. Buh eh suh er. Zuh eye een. Ah muh. Duh eh-r.
Eh duh vuh ih-n tuh.”

“
Werde ich besser sein am der
Advent.
I’ll be better on the Advent.”

Milliken expressed his bewilderment, and then
nudged something into the wall on his own accord. There was another
pause, and then another series of taps.
Wir gehen aus
.

“We are leaving,” Davidson translated.

So it was a code, and someone in the other
group was planning some sort of escape on the Advent day they kept
mentioning on the holostreams. But who was it?

“
Wer ist dass
?” before Davidson could
translate, Milliken was already sending tapping.

The taps came back quicker this time.
“Cyrus,” Milliken mumbled, almost laughing. And then, to Davidson,
it all made sense. The Vanden Mittoren Milliken was questioned
about was not the name of a faction, it was a warning in
German—
Wanden mit Ohren
. Walls with Ears. Davidson began to
say something else into his hand, but Milliken kicked to shush
him—more taps were coming.