Dusk (45 page)

A long tacit arrested the room, but Milliken,
obviously flustered and unappeased by Cyrus’s diatribe, thrust his
back into the chair. “Well, what truth do we have that we do not
make for ourselves?”

Cyrus turned to face Milliken, the quivering
in his eyes must have been apparent. “We don’t need to
make
the truth, we
are
the truth. We cry because our world has
been stripped from us, but we should rejoice.”

Tanner himself seemed flustered and asked,
“Why?”

Cyrus continued, “Because we’ve been given
the chance to put the pieces together in the places they
want
to be—the places we never should have let them break
away from.”

“So then, what do you propose? Philosophical
edification provides comfort, put it will not provide sunlight. And
these people, as well as us when the stolen food runs out, will die
without it,” Torvald added, now somewhat flustered himself.

Cyrus was still distant, his voice still airy
and calm, “I think we need more raw data before we can decide
anything. As you said, there are more questions than answers.
Knowing how little we know is, as you said, edifying, but will
provide neither sunlight, nor a viable stratagem. In the meantime,
we gather information, and we train. Those guys that chased us out
of the Scar must have had their interests piqued.”

“Then why don’t we talk less and research
more, and you can stop pontificating and go do some pushups,”
Milliken snapped then immersed himself in his datadeck.

• • • • •

—
Dada, did you and grandpa ever talk like
this?

—
Well, yeah and no. Your grandfather was a very
quiet man. He didn’t talk as much as me, and every word he said
carried weight, so you listened because he wasn’t big on repeating
himself.

—
Did you call him Dada too?

—
No. I normally called him Dad or Pa. He seemed
to prefer Pa.

—
What was his name?

—
David. David Moriah Chamberlain.

—
Was he an astrophysicist too?

—
No, your granddad actually worked for a
living.

—
What did he do?

—
He calibrated and repaired the factory bots that
built lev drives. Evidently, he was very good at it because he was
a perfectionist.

—
Was he more of a perfectionist than you,
Dada?

—
Oh yeah. He was scary. He made me make copies of
all my deckwork so if I had any more than three mistakes, he would
delete it and make me start the whole thing over again.

—
Ouch.

—
Yes, ouch. One night, he deleted my deckwork
five times before I realized as far as my work was concerned, that
man may as well have been a machine.

—
I bet you hated that.

—
At first, I hated it more than anything in the
world, but as I got older, I could see what he was doing.

—
What was that?

—
He was determined to make me a better man than
him whether I liked it or not. When I was tapped for Laureateship,
he didn’t say much, he only said that it would be even harder from
there on out, but I could see it in his eyes. In his mind, I was
beginning to do the things he wanted and had never been given the
chance, and it swelled him up with pride.

—
He never got jealous because you were
better.

—
No, never. How could he? He and your grandma
were the main reasons I did succeed. When I matriculated into the
Arcology, I told your grandpa how much I appreciated him, and that
I didn’t know what I could do to repay him. He told me the best
thing I could do to repay him was to do the same for my own son.
That was also the first day he ever told me directly that he was
proud of me. You know, that night, when I was by myself, I
cried.

—
Were you sad?

—
No, the contrary. It was the happiest day I can
remember, because that day, even though I always knew it in the
back of my mind, I knew I was good enough, because David
Chamberlain saw me as fit to carry his standard.

—
Standard like rules to live by, or like the
things you have to capture in Conquest of Ages?

—
Ha, I think both, Dari.

—
Do you think you lived up to his standard,
Dada?

—
Well, I am proud of you, and I think one day,
you’ll do a fine job of carrying the standard yourself, so I guess,
yeah, I think I might have done okay.

—
Gee Dada, I didn’t really understand it when you
said it, but I think maybe now I understand what made you cry that
night. But it’s okay Dada, I kinda like it.

• • • • •

Cyrus felt the now common tingle in his skin subside
as he stepped into the room the Apostates affectionately called the
Forum. Cyrus ran through how much time had passed since he first
stepped through that circular doorway. If the notion of day cycles
had been distorted inside Eurydice, it had been blasted into
oblivion here. The Apostates counted from evensong to evensong,
their daily vigil of meeting with the elders in the thinning shard
of sunlight. The elders would fellowship and discuss issues while
the children played or slept in the shadows of the crater. They
still kept track of the hours and lumped them into chunks of
twenty-four, but the moniker of ‘day cycle’ seemed more and more
ludicrous as the sun, stuck in a never-ending sunset, demanded more
and more of Cyrus’s attention as his body adjusted to the Eos. “So
what’s our situation look like?” he asked, still thirsty for real
light.

“Same as it did yesterday, like balls on a
beta hound,” Milliken scoffed as he synced his datadeck with the
Xerxes system. After the patch cleared, he loaded the data of the
underground city they had discovered day cycles before. A five by
five-meter hologram of the strange city expanded in the center of
the room and rose up from the floor.

Davidson, still queasy after emerging from
Plato’s Cave two day cycles before, propped himself up as best he
could to see the image spread across the floor. Tanner, just
overcoming his own grogginess from emerging before Davidson had
entered, stood from his chair to get a better view. Jang was
confined to the sunlight, under the care the two women that had now
ushered all of them except Uzziah into Plato’s Cave. Toutopolus had
been in the Cave for the last thirty or so hours, and probably
would be there for another thirty more.

The door to the kilns and labs opened and the
image of Darius emerged from the hall beyond. Milliken leaned over
to Cyrus, who approached the image of the city to get a better
view. “Why does he do that? It freaks me out,” Milliken asked, his
voice still accented with anxiety.

“Well, if he learned from my son, I doubt
half-assing the image of being real is a part of his program.”

“Half-assed or not, it’s still freaky,”
Milliken whispered as Darius approached, hands clasped behind his
back, looking at the image of the city as if it wasn’t being
digitally transmitted directly into his—its—data grid. Milliken
furtively shook his head. Darius looked up from the image of the
cave, winked at him, and then craned his neck closer to the
hologram. “Were these buildings ever inhabited?” Darius asked with
an inquisitive yet serious look on his face.

Milliken moved his stylus across his datadeck
and the image zoomed in on a set of buildings. The buildings were
angular, mostly square, with crenellated roofs. Some of the larger
buildings had what looked like miniature versions of the smaller
buildings on their roofs. “It’s hard to tell from this scan. There
wasn’t enough time to gather acute details. However, from the lack
of accumulation of dust, it was either hermetically sealed before
they excavated it, or there was an extensive excavation of dust
after they cracked it open. It would have required enormous
manpower, even with the most advanced equipment, to extract a
half-million years of dust. Given the obvious desire to keep
whatever this is as quiet as possible, my guess is it was sealed.
That’s why they used the extraplanetary lasers.”

“I doubt the pilots of those fighters even
knew what they were protecting,” Uzziah chimed in to get a closer
look himself.

“How can you be sure of that?” Davidson
asked, sitting up more himself.

“Because I would not have told them if I was
their C.O.” Uzziah moved closer to the image of the building in
front of him. “These look familiar. I’ve seen building’s like these
before.”

“Ancient Mesopotamia,” Tanner said with
assurance, but with a perplexed look on his face. “They look
Babylonian, but something is also very different about them.”

“Other than the lack of monolithic slabs of
limestone, massive veins of quartz, and laser bits between the
Tigris and Euphrates on Earth?” Milliken asked facetiously.

“It’s not just that. The organization is very
different. It’s as if it was designed by an architect trying to
mimic
Babylonian architecture, but without the need for
practical placement. Irrigation, religion, and defense dictated
where and how things were built in Mesopotamia. Those things don’t
seem to figure into the design here.”

It sounded as if Milliken had giggled to
himself, but when everyone turned to face him, he looked more
serious than excited. “Speaking of design, look at what I noticed
yesterday.” Milliken maneuvered his stylus across the deck and the
image rotated so the roofs of the buildings faced Cyrus and Tanner.
The image mirrored itself on the side opposite Milliken, Cyrus,
Tanner, and Davidson so Uzziah and the Darius image would not have
to move. It then zoomed out along the z-axis of the city at a speed
that made both Davidson and Tanner reel. As it zoomed, it looked as
if the buildings were falling, swirling into some massive drain.
Tanner closed his eyes and reclaimed his seat on the chair as his
head lolled back against the headrest. When the city stopped
falling, Cyrus could see the arrangements of the buildings formed a
distinct pattern. Cyrus had assumed the moiré pattern he had seen
when they had first passed over the city was a trick of light from
the artificial sun interacting with the quartz, coupled with their
own high rate of speed. Those factors alone could have made the
buildings appear to undulate as they had passed over them. Now,
however, looking at the entire breadth of the city from an
impossible vantage point, it was clear the rhythmic pulse of the
buildings was due just as much to the layout as it was to a trick
of light and speed.

“It looks like one of those circles they used
to find in the cornfields at the turn of the millennium,” Davidson
mumbled as his eyes focused. The pattern looked like two swirls
that interlocked in the center, each swirl forming half of a
stepped aster that spread out in the eight cardinal directions. If
the lines of the pattern they formed had actually been lines and
not a trick of the eye played by the varied distances between the
buildings and the roads and the colors of the buildings themselves,
it would have made the aster look as if one half were drawn with a
solid, unbroken line, and the negative space left behind formed the
other half.

“The Hunab Ku,” Darius said as he looked on,
rubbing his beard.

“What?” Uzziah asked, not sure what the
hologram had just said.

“The Hunab Ku is an ancient Mayan symbol. It
is related to the Mayan calendar, but I don’t remember how.” Tanner
didn’t even open his eyes as Darius explained.

“How could he—you—know that?” Milliken asked
Darius.

“Balam Castenago, one of the engineers on the
J.L. Orbital, used it as a logo for his engineering company. He was
of Quiché descent. He called his company Xmucane Development. It
was called ‘the Hunab Ku’ for Ashan trademark registration
purposes.

Milliken opened his mouth as if to speak, but
then said nothing. Tanner, with his eyes still closed, spoke the
idea that must have frustrated Milliken to silence, “But the city
looks untouched, right? At least untouched before the Ashans got
there. So if no one lived there and it was zipped up like a
vapor-lock for hundreds of thousands of years, who in the hell
built it, and for what?”

“That’s what’s been scraping my brain for the
last week. We can’t even build something like this now, not even if
we combined Ashan and Earth technology, well old Earth technology.”
Milliken shook his head as if he were trying to shake out the
frustration. “No matter how you try to carve it, the timeframe
always breaks a chunk off.”

“Hmm,” Torvald grunted as he looked up from
his own work at the holomonitor connected to the Xerxes. He had
kept silent until now but seemed completely engaged. “Look at the
building shapes, Davidson’s maned lions, Tanner’s Temple, Cyrus’s
yellow sun. All these things are distinctly familiar to us, and yet
would be completely foreign to anyone who existed on Asha today,
six hundred years ago, or on Earth
or
Asha six hundred
thousand
years ago.”

“So what are you saying?” Uzziah stood up
rolling his shoulders back. To Cyrus, he looked unnerved, but it
would have been barely perceptible to someone who had not trained
with him.

“I’m saying the explication is more likely to
be found in things familiar to us, rather than in the unfamiliar.
My guess is that city has more to do with
Earth
than Asha.
Especially with the things Davidson and I uncovered in that
cave.”

• • • • •

Whether it was his body adjusting to the Eos,
the resurgence of his own faith, or the fact that he was again in
command of a dojo, Tanner was filled with a new vigor as he barked
the names of moves at his exponentially larger class.

The Apostates formed four lines of four and
tried their best to follow the commands as Sifu Tanner gave them.
Cyrus, Torvald, Davidson, Jang, and Toutopolus helped those who had
trouble, while Uzziah, still nauseous from his emergence from the
Cave, sat on the side basking in a sliver a light, trying feebly to
look healthier than what he felt.