Dusk (51 page)

“What sort of distraction will you need?”
Thendyr asked, fumbling with one of the holomonitors.

“I’m not sure yet, but it needs to be big,
because what they are hiding in that base got my son exiled and my
best friend killed. They have protected it for five hundred years,
and they will not let it go easily.”

Cyrus nodded, his own head heavy from the weight of
what he was asking. He looked up over the faces of the Apostates
who seemed much less disturbed than him by his request. He walked
to the iris and left everyone inside the vault to parlay while he
went to mull over his own thoughts. Paeryl had confirmed that the
degrees of separation between him and Darius were fewer than Cyrus
thought, but he could not tell just yet if that closeness, at this
place in time, was a consolation or a curse.

Cyrus sat on the mound looking out at the
peaks cradling the orange sun. The idea was ridiculous, but he was
sure the sliver of light strained by the promontories was
considerably smaller than it had been yesterday.

“Having second thoughts?” It took Cyrus a
moment to realize it was Jang behind him. He sat on the mound next
to Cyrus and looked across the valley himself. The Apostates went
on about their duties as usual, and as usual, they paid no mind to
the scientists perched on their thinking spot. Doree of Sevens was
the only Apostate who averted her attention from her weaving to
wave happily at the two. Jang smiled and returned the wave and
Cyrus nodded.

“She seems to have taking a liking to you,”
Cyrus said without much inflection, still transfixed on the
retreating wedge of light.

Jang chuckled to himself, “Must be the lab
coat I guess.” He ruffled the collar of his coat and ran his hand
through his now shoulder-length hair, brushing it from his
face.

Cyrus smiled, “You
are
looking pretty
stellar since you got it washed.”

Jang preened himself more blatantly, but
then, as if his original thought had come careening back into his
brain with the force of a meteor, his expression became starker.
Cyrus saw his expression and responded, “You know,” he paused as if
the words were stuck in his diaphragm, too heavy to be moved with
speed, “Villichez died when we escaped.” Cyrus looked back toward
the edge of the crater, “I went back to get him, but I couldn’t
stop it.”

Jang waited for Cyrus to meet his eyes, he
was about to open his mouth, but seemed to lose the words. He
brushed his hair to the side again and then blew air through pursed
lips. “The tough thing about artificial intelligence is that a
computer can’t mimic consciousness. It can mimic a human being’s
behavior, but not his thought process.” Cyrus seemed only partially
aware of what Jang was saying. Jang paused for a moment, afraid he
was losing Cyrus, and not even sure he could get through the gloss
that was forming over Cyrus’s eyes. “The avatar program is based on
Villichez’s and Winberg’s work on human consciousness.” Jang almost
winced when he invoked Villichez’s name, but he kept going. “They
set up a complex set of paradigms to mimic human behavior. It was
my job to program the processor to move through the algorithms so
fast that physical, emotional, and cognitive responses could be
made without making the user aware. We worked tirelessly to create
side-algorithms that mimicked ‘human’ responses when the system got
hung up. People worried about trying to defeat the halting
principle, but Winberg came up with a way to avoid it
altogether.”

The orange light seemed to turn Cyrus’s eyes
blood-red as he turned to face Jang again. Cyrus’s lips shifted
under the shallow curls of his beard and Jang realized he was
rambling. “The short of it is, if the avatar is modified the way I
think it is, if we run some subroutines to get the Xerxes to access
the Agamemnon database, we could get Darius to help us put the
pieces together in ways that we never could. You know, because
stubborn and closed-minded were algorithms we had to fake, they
aren’t inherent in the program, and therefore don’t restrict it
like they do us. So I think, if I’m right that is, this might be
the only way to save these people before the Echelon comes see us.”
Doree, finished with her weaving, looked over at them as she placed
the cloth in her bin as Jang added, “And honestly, I’m starting to
like it here.”

The crimson tint seemed to wane from Cyrus’s
eyes, but he only managed to nod. Jang nodded back, and then hopped
off the mound, trailing his lab coat behind him like a cape as he
moved toward Doree. As he secured his coat by the lapels, Jang
turned back to Cyrus, brushed his hair to the side, and smiled,
“You did save us all that day, more than once.” He then turned and
raised his shoulders up as he walked out of the shade and into
Doree’s embrace.

Before Doree and Jang could retreat to the shadows,
Cyrus called out, “Notify the elders. I think you may have found
our distraction.” Jang stopped, not sure that his idea had even
been a plan, but Cyrus continued, his spirit lifting as he spoke,
“We train for one Dhekad, then we mobilize. Get to work on
phreaking the comm-sat system, stat. I need to contact our friend
Denali.”

Torus Balfour Denali stood addressing his two
Hexads and four Pentangles at the conference table. He had begun by
speaking on the recent rash of Apostate attacks and on how a high
alert had been issued from the Prolocutor himself. He himself knew
that the Echelon would be called in to handle any large-scale
offensive, but he could not mention them in this meeting because
the existence of the Echelon was classified to anyone with less
than six vertices.

The Apostates had become so bold as to attack
Echelon units directly over the last Dhekads, and it seemed that
some other attack was imminent. Denali also briefed them on what
they had learned of the escape that had taken place on the Advent.
Apparently, they
had
been mistaken, and the men who had
escaped actually had been a team of scientists from Earth. He had
kept his men in the dark because, even though they had not
experienced much combat, the fact that they had been totally
defeated by eight scientists who had little, if any, military
training, would have sent their already waffling morale through the
baseboards.

He spoke of the Apostates’ tactics and how
his advisors thought the Apostates might find a way to attack
Druvidia, which Denali believed was nonsense because he was privy
to information that was classified to even higher vertices—the
Apostates were all infected by a disease that meant extended lack
of sunlight would be deadly to them. So, the information passed
down to him through this highly dubious Prolocutor was either
deliberate misinformation, or evidence that even the great and
elusive Echelon had no idea what was coming down the cable.

Denali had just regained the ability to speak
without pain a Dhekad ago. Most of the damage from Cyrus’s
unorthodox attack had healed, but his voice still crackled after
long speeches as his vocal cords had grown weak in the day cycles
he had not been allowed to speak. He stood to point out a possible
location of the Apostates base of operation on a hologram of Asha
above the conference table, but he was stopped as the door slid
open.

“Torus Denali, there’s a holo-sat
transmission for you. It is has a six-vertex caption.” Denali
looked at the others in the room and did not need to speak. The
Pentangles all stood simultaneously, dipped their heads slightly as
they crisply placed their hands over their hearts, and then lifted
their heads just as sharply before they walked through the door.
Denali nodded at the Quadrad that had delivered the message, and as
he too left the room, he could be heard radioing the message to the
dispatcher.

Denali sat, and a hologram appeared on the
table in front of him that made his blood stop in his veins. On the
table in front of him stood Dr. Cyrus Tiberius Chamberlain, the
eminent astrophysicist from Earth who staged an escape by setting a
room on fire and hanging from a dais by his very own neck.

“How are you gentlemen?” he said. The
greenish tint in his skin, indicative of the disease that afflicted
the Apostates, was clear even in the grainy holo-sat signal.

“What do you want?” Denali asked, reclining
in his chair. The Hexads seemed as flustered as Denali, who felt
this very transmission, despite what Cyrus had to say, was
insulting.

“Forgive me for being rude. How is your
neck?” Denali grumbled and inadvertently brushed his hand across
his throat, but before he could respond, Cyrus continued, “I have
been assured that your men cannot trace this holostream, but as I
do not have time to tarry, I will be brief.” Chamberlain folded his
arms in the image and focused on Denali.

“Get to your druthers Chamberlain so I can
tend my business.”

“For starters, that name is no longer welcome
to you. You and your monkey-boys can relate to me as the Knight of
Wands,” the image of a knight on a horse wielding a flaming staff
appeared, obscuring Cyrus. The knight reared back on the horse as
he spun the flaming staff over his head in a glowing blur. “I am
the father of the Knight of Swords and the vanguard of the Children
of Set.”

“Spare me the soliloquy, you...”

“Continue to test patience and I will
continue to test your ears. I have but one demand—return to me the
body of my murdered colleague from your necropolis.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I will set something on fire,” the knight on
the horse appeared again and pointed his flaming staff at Denali,
“and I guarantee it will be something that you will miss.”

The knight waved his staff and flames erupted
around him on the table until his image was obscured. Cyrus’s voice
persisted through the room. “Bring Dr. Villichez to the J.L.
Orbital at precisely the fourth hour of the twelfth DC Ketomuriox,
or I shall test more than your tolerance for oration.”

Denali yelled that no one made demands of
him, but the feebleness of his retort became clear as the flame on
the table faded into nothingness.

“What should we do,” Hexad Thule asked,
obviously trying to help Denali regain the dignity his outburst had
drained.

Denali breathed heavily to himself as he
massaged his throat again and then spoke almost to himself, “We
will do as he asks,” he almost stopped there, but the need to
reassert himself overwhelmed his tongue, “and we will wait for him
to make a mistake.”

• • • • •

—
Dada, you ever wish you had another
child?

—
Well, the Uni prohibits it in population
controlled areas.

—
I don’t mean another one like a second, I mean
like instead of me.

—
No Dari, why would I wish something like
that?

—
I dunno. Sometimes it seems like I give you and
mommy such a hard time. And sometimes mommy seems sad. Like
sometimes she doesn’t have anyone to talk to like you and me talk.
Maybe if I had been a girl…

—
No Dari, I definitely do not want another child.
Both your mother and I love you very much and would never trade you
for anything.

—
I dunno Dada. I want to be good. I mean I never
really want to be bad, but it’s hard sometimes. Like school is so
frustrating, and I try to deal, but before I know it, I’m getting
yelled at again.

—
I think that’s a part of life, Dari. We all have
our roles. I have to let you try and figure things out on your own,
but when you do make bad choices, your mom and I have to be there
to reset your kilter. If it didn’t work that way, no one would ever
grow.

—
So you’re saying that me being a clown fish
sometimes helps you grow too.

—
Exactly. There are things you come up with that
I never could imagine, and sometimes it’s good stuff, sometimes
it’s absolutely bunkus, but it’s always challenging. It’s stepping
up to the challenge that makes us grow, whether we want to or not.
But I would never wish you were something that you were not. I only
want you to be the best youyou can be. But sometimes, whether you
realize it or not, I do understand you, and I sympathize, but we
all need someone to get our butts on the lev sometimes.

—
You never need anyone to get your butt on the
lev.

—
I think your mother would beg to differ, but I
do have someone who gets me on the lev even when I don’t want
to.

—
Who’s that, mommy?

—
You.

—
But how Dada? I never make you do
anything.

—
Believe me, because of you I have done many more
things I should have done, but wouldn’t have.

—
Well, hopefully there will come a day where you
won’t have to.

—
I hope not. I like doing those things. You make
me a better man. From now until the end of days, for you I would
walk to Hell in a propylene undersuit, walk right up to the devil
himself, slap him in his face, and then stand there and wait for
his reaction.

—
Ha. That’s funny Dada, but I hope it never comes
to that.

—
Even if it did, Dari, I wouldn’t regret one
nanosecond.

• • • • •

There was a ringing in Cyrus’s ears that no amount
of yawning could remedy. At first, he had thought it was the field
created by the z-drive on the lev, but these gravity wave levs
didn’t create the same fields as the ones on Earth, and even his
sensitive ears should not have been able to pick it up. This was
something else—something from within. The more he thought about it,
the more he understood. All the dire situations he had experienced
here on Asha, and the handful he had been confronted with on Earth,
had all been brought to him. Some of those situations might have
had more diplomatic solutions, but each of them had, in some way,
been constructed by others. But today he was initiating contact. He
was bringing his fight to
their
lobby. And these were not
just Flying Monkeys. It wouldn’t just be reservists and volunteers
ordered to hold their fire. There would be highly trained,
methodical jobbers who had given up their own society for the power
that training and method afforded them—and they would kill to
maintain that power.