Dusk (64 page)

But something did matter. There was a
connection around him that he had not noticed before, perhaps
because there was only one time in his life he could remember
feeling it. A time that he had forgotten until this frozen moment
reminded him. It was the indelible consciousness of every life
around him. Of Milliken, Uzziah, Cyrus, the Apostates outside the
complex. Then, he realized it stretched farther than that. It
stretched out to Eurydice, Druvidia, the J.L., even back to Earth.
The sum total of all human consciousness somehow resided with him
in this timeless brainspace. It should have seemed foreign to him,
should have been a shock, but instead it was familiar, comforting,
because he understood that life, all life, began this way, or at
least it should. He found his memory of it very clear. It was the
same connection he had shared once before, although more acutely,
with his mother, before he was born. It was there, in that timeless
sanctuary, his soul, as it slowly melded to a growing body, had
felt this connection with the rest of humanity. It was amazing how
clear this was in his mind. He wondered if those that had been
unfortunate enough to have been born in pods had been afforded the
same comfort of knowing, at least for a moment, that they were a
part of something greater. And if the dread that whelmed his soul
had had any effect on his body in that eternal moment, he would
have cried for each of them, for they were the true apostates.

As far as Cyrus could tell, his eyes were
still open, but the world around him had shrunk into a pinpoint in
the distance. Cyrus felt completely disconnected from his body. It
was like dreaming, but at the same time drastically different. In a
dream, you still had a concept of self, but here, self was the only
thing that seemed
not
to exist. Instead, one was left with
everything, and everyone, else. Then, as suddenly as it had shrunk,
it expanded, and he was standing in a room that he could not see,
but he somehow intuitively knew formed two pyramids that connected
at the base and were inscribed in a sphere. He could not see the
sides, the roof, or the floor because, in this place, wherever he
was, sight did not exist. Even now, thrown here unexpectedly, the
simple question of what could and couldn’t be seen was absurd. Eyes
had no sway in this world.

He stood in the center of the concurrence of
the axes of the pyramids, and at the vertex directly in front of
him, impossibly, Cyrus could feel, standing in the center of his
own sphere, exactly who he had expected to find—his best friend,
Alexander Kalem.

• • • • •

—
So what’s this I hear about you getting into
fights at the tram stop?

—
It’s bunkus, Dada. Don’t worry about it.

—
Why shouldn’t I be worried about it? You’re
starting to get a reputation as some kind of hooligan, and it don’t
exactly rest on the axis with me.

—
I know Dada. That was the whole point.

—
I’m afraid I don’t follow, and you need to
explain it to me so I get it, or there’s gonna be arrears to
pay.

—
It’s all houndwash, Dada. A rumor to throw
everyone off the ave.

—
What ave?

—
I don’t wanna say.

—
You don’t have a choice, cuz I’m two steps off
taking your HoloStation Prime and selling it to a more honest
kid.

—
I did it to help someone, and they asked me not
to tell.

—
What is it that’s so important or bad you can’t
tell me?

—
I promised I would not tell.

—
Did you promise you would lose your
HoloStation?

—
You can take it if you want, but I think that’s
foul that you would sell it because you don’t believe me.

—
Dari, you haven’t been the most copasetic
student the last few months. You need to be straight-forward with
me so I can believe you.

—
Danny Silberman, the new guy from New York. His
nose started bleeding at the tram stop and he ran off. I went to
look for him and found him in the bushes by the recharge station.
His nose was bleeding, and he tried to clean it up, but some of it
got on his collar and he couldn’t really hide it. I tried to help
him, but at first he was like, ‘Get away from me,’ but after I
wouldn’t leave, he told me he had this disease that made his nose
bleed and made him hard-of-hearing in his right ear, and sometimes
it made him pee funny, and he said that was one of the things that
convinced his family to leave where he used to live, and he was
scared the jokes and stuff would follow him here if people found
out.

—
So how does this involve you?

—
I told him I would help him. I told him to go
running back to the tram stop and cry and not talk to anybody. And
then later, I came ‘round and sat on the opposite side of the bench
from him and looked bent. Then, before we got on the tram, I snuck
and told him to complain about me being a repo-giver but refuse to
tell people exactly what happened. I normally sit next to him on
the tram and in most of our classes, but we sat on opposite sides
of the tram and room and didn’t talk to each other all day.

—
All this so people would assume you
fought?

—
And evidently it worked. Nobody pulled me into
the office, but I bet they comm-satted you and asked you to talk to
me, didn’t they?

—
Yeah.

—
Because you adults always take what you see and
put it together to be what you want to believe. All someone has to
do is set it out on a plate and ring a bell and you run to it like
beta-hounds.

—
You watch yourself, Dari.

—
Well, it’s true. It’s the only reason why you’re
standing over me sideways right now threatening to take something
away from me to get me to say what you expect me to. To force me to
show you what you want to see.

—
Dari, I’m sorry if I didn’t believe you, but you
haven’t made it easy the last few months.

—
Fair enough. But, I may be a lot of things, but
I’ve never been a liar, and I’ve never been a stoolie, and if I
have to catch a couple degrees of heat to help a friend, well then
so be it.

—
So this was all an elaborate rumor?

—
I didn’t really even expect it to work, but the
beta… I mean Disciplinarian scarfed it up like sweetbars. It’s
amazing how willing people who call themselves authorities are to
believe their own back-wash. Especially when all they had to do was
open the nurse’s file on the datadeck.

—
I guess you do have a point. Sometimes when
something stinks, it is a lot easier to jump to conclusions than it
is to lift our own arms and smell ourselves.

—
Well, maybe you guys should smell yourselves
more often, cuz sometimes things stink more than you guys
know.

—
You do have a point, Dari.

—
Well, thank you for saying so.

—
Dari.

—
Yeah Dada?

—
I love you. And I’m sorry.

• • • • •

“Surprised to see me?” Alexander asked, looking
exactly the way he had looked when Cyrus last saw him. It was not
him, at least not his body, nor was it a projection. Cyrus could
not see him so much as he could feel him, and his mind filled in
the blanks.

“No,” Cyrus had very little to say. The
mélange that welled inside him forbade speech.

“You appear cross. Why such malice when
greeting an old friend?” Evidently, this conduit, limited in its
ability to convey basic senses, transmitted what other forms of
communication could not.

Cyrus, to anyone else, would have delivered a
snide retort, but here, his very soul bare before his best friend
and now worst enemy, could only manage naked thoughts. “You were
behind this from the beginning. You used my son. You turned him
into a monster. Why?”

“What cuts most deeply is that you can’t
bring yourself to even see the answer,” Kalem’s words were
melodramatic, but the Ark sent his emotions through as clearly as
his speech. Kalem was not hurt, he was smug, content, and most
disturbing of all, jubilant. “I did not need to supply your son
with the capital that matured him into the Knight of Swords. You
supplied all the raw materials for that. All it took was a
push.”

“But you lied to him. You lied to me. You
said you would take care of him.” Cyrus was not sure if it was the
detachment from the physical world or his own resilience that kept
him from crying, but he was sure, in this place, Kalem could tell
he wanted to—but it did not matter.

“Once again, the pot gives his grand treatise
on the blackness of the kettle. In your catalog of lies you have
missed the greatest lie of all,” his words came across as calm, but
Cyrus could feel the laughter behind them. And intertwined with the
laughter, there was something else. Something he had felt once
before, but had long forgotten. It was similar to what he felt for
Darius, for Tanner, for Villichez, but there was a distinctly
different flavor to it. It came from Alexander, and even though it
was muddied with a scathing twinge of hatred, it was not directed
toward Cyrus.

“Feralynn,” was all Cyrus needed to say, the
rest moved between them on its own.

“You took for granted what you had. What,
even after you squandered it, even after you left it behind for
your own desires, I could never have.” And now the space between
them was filled with anger, and it moved both ways.

“All this because you were spurned by my wife
after I left?”

“Still, at the very precipice above it all,
you fail to see. I didn’t do this because of her. I did it because
of
you
. Ruining her life was just one in a grand litany of
sins.”

“Numerous as they may have been, they were my
sins. Mine! Not Darius’s.”

“Well, you know what they say about the
father’s sins.”

And then a stream of laughter, as bitter as
it was unexpected, streamed back at Kalem from Cyrus. “And now
you
are the blind man who heralds the kettle’s retort.”

“You twist and wheedle as you always have,
but you cannot turn this conversation.” Behind his words was a hint
of something, almost like a scent, and one Cyrus knew all too
well—fear.

The laughter from Cyrus morphed into a fire,
caustic despite its lack of form, stoked by the ambient shroud of
betrayal that hang over both of them. “The conversation turned when
you found the vein of gold inside the Scar. You always loved to
play the martyr. That’s probably why Feralynn never took to you.
Because you could never bring your troubles directly to the man.
But the martyr’s robes, this day, are stained with the blood of his
victims. Because a true martyr never sees the fruit of his labor;
he doesn’t hide away so he can collect his spoils. And therein lies
the sordid truth. You didn’t sacrifice my son for something as
noble as the honor of my wife. You just used her as an excuse so
your liver could drum up the bile and rancor you needed to pull
this off. And at the end of the day, what does it amount to? Just
more digits on a cred stick. You have always wanted to be Rex
Mundi, the King of the World, but you were always too much of a
coward. In the scenario where you play the hero, I pay for my sins,
but you die in contentment five hundred years ago—and yet, here you
stand, alive and spineless as ever, floating around some dark,
distant star, waiting to reap the bloody crop you’ve sown.”

“Well...”

“Enough!” the force of the word dispelled
every emotion that moved between them. “I’ve heard all I can
stomach. Perhaps I should have paid more affection to my wife.
Perhaps I should have been less selfish, been a better husband and
father, but if any absolution for me exists, it will be in the
utter destruction of your miserable plot.”

“The seeds I have sown were in the wake of
your plow,” the words were shakier now, the laughter, the hubris,
lingering in a past that could not exist here.

“Perhaps, but when you return to Earth, you
will find your field fallow, and me standing there with salt in my
hand. Your pathetic plan you’ll find trampled beneath my boot, and
finally, Darius, my son, shall have his earth and water. Make
haste, little man. Do not keep me waiting.”

And then they were no longer connected. The sphere
folded into itself, and Cyrus, moored by some ethereal cable that
had escaped his awareness previously, was snatched back into his
lonely body, where, before his warped senses could reorient
themselves, he collapsed to the floor.

When Cyrus regained his senses, Tanner was
standing over him. “What happened?”

“My best friend. My brother. Kalem. He did
this to me.” Cyrus’s pupils adjusted to reveal a look of
bewilderment from Tanner and Milliken. “The Ark. It’s a
communication device, but it seems to link the users’ consciousness
without any kind of red shift or time lag. They must have
reverse-engineered it to make the Whisper Node.” Cyrus held his
head as he stood. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t feel stable either.
Whatever using the Ark had done to him had not quite subsided.