Dusk (47 page)

—
So you’re saying the ends justify the
means?

—
No, Dari, I’m saying the means, in the case of
violence, are irrelevant. It’s the ultimate end that tells the real
story. For example, everyone at school knows that Gallager boy is a
menace. I’m sure even he knows, and for whatever reason, no one
does anything about him. They may as well teach him that his
actions don’t have consequences. He continues the same monkey
business day-in and day-out until someone gets tired of him and
talks to the monkey in a language he understands.

—
Getting his face bust open.

—
Exactly. And it wasn’t the means that Sergio
used that was the problem. It was the fact that no one put Terry in
check before those particular means were necessary. They should
have ended it well before that.

—
Maybe so, but Miss Hasabe says violence is never
the answer.

—
And yet she condones the Uni War. She only
railed Sergio and condones the War because she enjoys the ends the
War created, while the ends of Sergio’s actions meant she has to
clean up Terry’s blood and teeth and talk to parents in her
conference hour. If she didn’t want to see violence, she should
have set the axis straight before it came to it. Violence is as
necessary to life as anything else. When you clean your teeth in
the morning, it’s violent to the bacteria. Without some level of
violence, we wouldn’t have food to eat. Without some level of
violence, we couldn’t create this sterilized world that allows Miss
Hasabe to stand in front of a classroom and pretend it doesn’t
exist.

—
So you think violence is okay?

—
I think violence is a tool, and just like any
other tool, it has its uses and its misuses. And any man who wields
it irresponsibly, who doesn’t understand the nature of the tool
itself, will eventually smash his own hand into oblivion.

—
So, you think Sergio did the right
thing?

—
I think Sergio did what he felt he had to. I
think Sergio’s dad needs to lay in Sergio’s ear for a bit. But most
importantly, I think if Miss Hasabe wants to continue believing
violence only exists outside her classroom, she needs to put a
stopple on Terry before he aggravates people to the point where
they feel it’s necessary. Bottom line, you can’t eat a sweetbar
twice. You gotta handle a problem either at the beginning or handle
it at the end.

—
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 himself 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.”