Dusk

by Ashanti Luke

  Cyrus did not know how to respond at first, but the joke seemed to lift the weight that had been building in his lungs and he laughed.

  “Not a single one of them needed approval for what they believed the world was, and what it should be. A man finds solace on his own terms,” Dr. Tanner added, turning his attention back to his ephemeris,

  “If he finds it at all,” levity was still in Cyrus’s voice, but his smile faded, “I guess I found the most focus—and solace—in my conversations with my son. He questioned everything. He kept me on my toes. And when I didn’t have the answers, I felt like I needed to find them, if not for me, for him.”

  “That sounds like as good a focus as any,” Dr. Tanner set the stylus back in its sheath on the ephemeris, set the ephemeris on the bed, and moved over to his desk. “So, shall we play?”

  “I thought you were never going to ask.”

  three

  • • • • •

  —How was school today, Dari?

  —I dunno. It was okay.

  —You sure?

  —Well, not really…

  —What happened?

  —Scott Seal and Terry Gallagher…

  —What’d those two lab monkeys do this time?

  —They kept calling me Scariest and Derrière and they said my name was stupid.

  —They did, did they? What do you think about that?

  —Kinda bothers me… I kinda dunno if they’re wrong or not this time.

  —Did I ever tell you where your name comes from?

  —No Dada. I thought you and mama made it up.

  —Well, King Darius the Great helped build one of the strongest empires in the history of the world, the Persian Empire. He didn’t gain the throne because of who his father was, or because of politicking. He gained the throne because he was good at what he did and because the people of Persia believed in him. Not only was he a great military leader even before he was king, he was a good leader during peacetime too because he allowed even the people the Persians conquered to do what they wanted and he didn’t try to change them.

  —What did he do to be such a good leader?

  —Some say it was because he had the blessing of the Ahura Mazda.

  —Don’t they make mag-levs Dada?

  —No, that’s a different Mazda. The Ahura Mazda was what the Persians believed was the supreme god and the creator of the world. Ahura Mazda had two children; Ormazd, who represented good and life, and Ahriman, who represented evil and death.

  —How could God have both good and evil children Dada?

  —Well, I think the Persians believed balance was more important than comfort.

  —I don’t know what that means Dada.

  —Hopefully, one day you will. The important thing is that your name represents a strong idea.

  —Yeah, I like that. But it’s still not like the other kids’ names. Proxy Instructors still mispronounce my name all the time.

  —People who don’t know you will always have problems with your name. It’s the people that do know you that will help add meaning to your name. But most importantly, it’s up to you.

  —What do you mean?

  —I mean if you live your life well, like Darius the Great, even if your name was Scariest or Derrière, when people will say it they will smile.

  —I hope it’s not cuz they’re laughing atme Dada.

  —Well, I guarantee, if you grow up anything like your Dada, the ones who dolaugh at you won’t do it for long.

  • • • • •

  Cyrus’s chest heaved, but it felt as if only hot, noxious air had entered his lungs. He coughed a long, dry cough and pushed feebly against the floor as a stream of drool escaped the corner of his mouth. The string of saliva, thick and elastic, danced its way to the floor in sync with the wobbling of his elbows as he struggled to his knees.

  “Again!” Tanner bellowed, his voice barely audible over the throbbing in Cyrus’s ears. Cyrus rose to his feet, head spinning from the effort, and snapped his body to attention. “Ready position!” Tanner commanded. Cyrus bent his arms at the elbow, balled his fists, and lifted them to his hips as the other men in the room attempted to do the same. “Fighting stance!” Cyrus thrust his back leg behind him. He could feel the weakness in his arms as he raised them into defensive position. His knee wobbled from fatigue and his thigh burned, threatening to cramp. Then, as Cyrus exhaled as deeply as he could, sweat dribbled away from his nostrils and he caught a telltale whiff of hydrochloric acid on someone else’s breath.

  Trying to hold it in only caused his esophagus to spasm more violently, as Dr. Kristoph Davidson, the ship’s botanist, charged with instituting an agricultural program on Asha, ejected his breakfast and lunch all over the fitness chamber floor. The stench washed over Cyrus like a fog and the cramp took over, sending him to the ground in the puddle of half-digested vitamins and amino acids. As Cyrus flopped gracelessly through the puddle, covering his upper body with the filth, Davidson’s deep green eyes looked apologetic, his tawny skin now pale, and his hard features now slack from exertion. He reached for Cyrus in a feeble attempt to help him up, but Cyrus stood on his own, kindly waving Davidson’s hand away. Cyrus coughed again, trying to eject as much of the stench from Davidson’s insides as he could. “Will these sessions always be characterized with pain and vomit?” Cyrus heaved more than asked, sweat spraying from his nostrils with his words.

  Still in his authoritative voice, Tanner answered, “Vomit, no; pain, yes. But the pain you will learn to love.”

  Struggling to stay in his stance, Dr. Milliken’s unkempt, reddish-brown hair fluttered, and sweat dripped from the ends. His normally rosy complexion was now so sanguine he looked as if he were developing a rash. His typical, worried-looking facial expression had been replaced with an expression of exhausted determination as he fought gravity and atrophic muscles to hold his current body position. He turned to face Tanner, who paced before him, Cyrus, Davidson, and Torvald as his voice quivered in time with his unconditioned thighs, “Exactly what kind of sadist are you, Dr. Tanner? Why are you torturing us?”

  “Firstly, in this dojo, makeshift as it may be, you will all refer to me as Sifu Tanner,” the consternation in his voice pressed against the padded metal walls that began to close in again as Cyrus struggled to his feet. “And in answer to your final question, I am torturing you so this brutal environment that we will land on in five years cannot.” Tanner moved over to Cyrus and adjusted the position of his ankle rather brusquely. “And as far as the question of my particular brand of sadism, it is the only brand you need fear.”

  “So you’re saying we should fear you?” Dr. Torvald asked, almost stumbling out of his own stance as he craned his neck to face Tanner. “That doesn’t strike me as very monk-like.”

  “You need not fear me. I,” he paused for theatrical emphasis, “am your friend, your colleague. What I meant Dr. Torvald, is that in this room, the only paradigm you need understand, is that when I hit you, you will fall—which means, when you bow at that door, Dr. Villichez and Dr. Fordham no longer exist. I, and only I, write policy in this place.”

  “So you…” Dr. Torvald began, but a stark bellow drowned out whatever came afterward.

  “Enough talk! Horse stances!” Tanner moved to the side of the three men, closer to Dr. Torvald.

  As Sifu Tanner passed outside of earshot, Cyrus mumbled to Dr. Milliken, “This man is a lunatic.”

  Cyrus turned to face forward, square his shoulders, and suddenly Dr. Tanner was in his face, eye-to-eye, close enough for Cyrus to smell his breath. He stood there for a moment and Cyrus felt something icy at the nape of his neck. It felt as if even his pores had stopped expelling sweat. Then Tanner turned. It seemed as if he had smiled as he moved to his spot in front of the line and dropped into his own horse stance, deeper and infinitely more solid than those of his students. He demonstrated a punch, crisp and firm, punctuated by a forceful ki’a erupting from his diaphragm. “This is a corkscrew str
ike,” he added after the echo subsided. “This is the first attack you will learn.”

  • • • • •

  The dinner table was busy with conversation as Cyrus sat at the seat Tanner had saved for him. For the last few week cycles, the mysterious unction that had served as the staple of their diet in the first month had been replaced with real food, or rather the most reasonable facsimile the Shipmate could produce. The space, mass, and limited supply of nutrients reduced the Shipmate’s palate to that of soybeans, wheat grass, and a breed of grape genetically altered to minimize vine length. But that palate and creative programming resulted in meals that were a welcome departure from the warm pints of viscous fluid.

  As Cyrus took his first bite, he marveled over the taste of the sizzling soy-steak that the Shipmate had placed before him. “How does the Shipmate make this taste like this?” Cyrus asked.

  Dr. Davidson swallowed his bite of pseudo-steak and chimed in before it had completely gone down. “The meat is made from a mixture of soybeans and wheatgrass, but the meat taste is a byproduct of the iron and fat supplements added to the food for balanced nutrition.” He smiled and basked proudly for a moment before returning to his steak with his shoulders a little higher than before.

  “I assume you had a hand in designing the nutritional program for the ship?” Cyrus asked as he put another bite in his mouth.

  “Actually, I only designed the hydroponic bed and the aeroponic nutrient delivery system, but I had to work closely with the nutritionists to maximize the quality and longevity of the rations. Also, I helped create a system that can easily be converted for use in the settlement.”

  “Excellent job indeed,” Dr. Villichez added. “I seem to have left most memories of steak behind in the whole Hyposoma process, but this is surely an excellent reminder.”

  Dr. Winberg finished churning a bite that had been almost too large for his mouth. “You wouldn’t happen to have a program for lobster bisque would you?” He laughed at his own joke, but the lines in his forehead bespoke a vein of seriousness in the comment. A few of the scientists laughed as others continued their own individual conversations.

  “So,” Villichez began with a tone of mediation, dragging the two-letter word longer than necessary, “who would like to open the table for discussion?”

  “I have a question,” Dr. Taewook Jang, the ship’s computer specialist, raised his hand beside his head. “The committee who chose the delegates for this expedition, is there any reason why they didn’t choose any women?” Dr. Jang brushed his hair over his shoulder as he lowered his hand.

  Dr. Winberg laughed openly at the comment. Bewildered by both the audacity and the intent of Dr. Winberg, Dr. Jang smiled a little and chuckled unenthusiastically as he exhaled. Winberg noticed the mixture of uncertainty and irritation that seemed to flutter the lapel of Dr. Jang’s lab coat momentarily. “I am not laughing at your comment, Dr. Jang. I am merely amused by the notion of men and women corralled in a giant stylus away from their families for five years.”

  “Well, what would be so bad about that?” Dr. Torvald questioned. “It’d be nice to have some estrogen on this craft to help break up the constant masculinity in this place. We’ve only been awake for a month and a half and the ship already seems like a locker room.”

  Dr. Koresh cleared his throat and let his fork clang against the table as he set it next to his plate, “Let me add, first of all, when backed into a corner or ‘crammed into a giant stylus,’ as Dr. Winberg put it, humans exhibit more monkey-like qualities than we would like to admit.”

  “What does that mean?” Dr. Milliken, normally a quiet observer throughout these dinnertime conversations, asked through his napkin.

  Dr. Winberg rested his forearm on the table and leaned on it to shift his weight in his chair. “What he means is arguments are not the only things caused by the volatile mixture of testosterone and estrogen. Under the pressures of sitting in this oversized bullet-casing for five years, plus the stresses of a year of pioneering, it would not be long before this entire expedition turned into an extended holovision melodrama.”

  Cyrus chuckled to himself as he shuffled through the spurious mashed potatoes in front of him. Winberg zeroed in on him almost instantly. “Something amusing on your plate Dr. Chamberlain?”

  “Well, I would argue holonovella drama is unavoidable under this type of stress, regardless of the number of vulvae present. I agree with your assessment, but I wonder, with the collection of Nobel Laureates and general braniacs we have assembled here, exactly long it would take this bullet-casing to turn into a full-blown Bacchanalia. Hell, you don’t need to know much Greco-Roman history to know it doesn’t really take fallopian tubes to have a Bacchanalia. Maybe we should synchronize our watches and start the countdown now.”

  “Dr. Cyrus Tiberius Chamberlain, must you always be so crass?” Dr. Villichez’s plate rattled briefly under the weight of a fist clenched around a fork.

  “I apologize,” Cyrus nodded his sincerity toward Dr. Villichez, and then laughed at his potatoes again, “I just wanted Dr. Winberg to know I was laughing with him, not at him. Not exactly dinner table fare though, admittedly.”

  Amidst a volley of mumbles and grunts erupted a barely audible, “Unless it is a Bacchanalia!” A wave of laughter spread across the table like a nova. Even Villichez, however reluctant, loosened his fist and allowed a smile to creep across his face. Cyrus could not tell where the comment had come from, but he noticed the bangs of Dr. Jang now hanging over his face, shifting as air passing on laughter escaped from rapidly contracting lungs.

  four

  • • • • •

  —How did the Math Finals go today Dari?

  —I don’t want to talk about it Dada.

  —That bad?

  —It was plenty fine at first, I had all the other Laureate candidates beat by like five hundred points. I had the highest score by one hundred points.

  —Well, what happened?

  —Genivere happened... again. Somehow she managed to make up over two hundred points in the last round. It was a slaughter Dada. I felt like I was standing still. I don’t know why I can’t beat her Dada. No matter how far I get ahead, she always seems to find a way. Always. What am I doing wrong?

  —Hmm… You know, once, a while ago now, I came to pick you up from Entrance School. You were no more than maybe four. You were a little small, even for your age, but you always played with the big kids. Even then you said the kids your age were dumb as lab rodents. Not sure how you knew what a lab rodent was, but you said it and meant it. But this particular day I showed up early to talk to your room steward. She seemed distraught because you had been playing with the older boys all day. They were actually already tapped as Novitiates; they were just waiting to matriculate. She took me to the playroom but we stayed in the observation lounge. As soon as I got there, I knew why she was disturbed. You looked like a chipmunk next to the other boys. They were just a little older than you are now. You were playing Police and Thieves, and for fun, they had pegged all the younger kids as thieves. One of the more heavyset boys was sitting on the two of your fellow thieves and you were hiding in a Styroprene box. They surrounded you with their hands in gun shapes and ordered you to come out. The box shook a little and they all got ready to give you the same treatment they gave the others. They fired off a round of warning shots, saying ‘Pow-pows, pop-pops, and bang-bangs’ And just as they seemed confident in their victory, you burst from the box. Styroprene flew everywhere. You vaulted off something that had been in the box, and with both hands shaped like guns, bellowed out ‘DOOSH, DOOSH, DOOSH’ carrying more bass than I think I have ever heard in your voice. The older boys were so startled and impressed that they played along. The chunky kid even got off the other two and clutched his chest as you fired two shots his way. They all collapsed to the ground in undeniable defeat, because they really didn’t know what else to do. If someone comes out of the box with bass in his voice like that, there isn’t much
else you cando.

  —Wow, I did that?

  —The room steward said she had never seen the thieves win against those boys, that they were too stubborn a set of bullies to ever admit defeat. I told her she didn’t have to worry about my son. Darius Chamberlain would always be all right—one way or the other.

  —I don’t feel all right right now Dada.

  —Well, the sting of defeat will do that—especially when victory has been snatched from its jaws by someone else.

  —What do I do Dada? How do I get all right again?

  —Maybe the next time, winning or losing, ahead or outnumbered, maybe you need to come out of the box with your DOOSH DOOSH guns, just to be sure.

  —Well, Dada, I wish it really was so easy as that.

  —Dari, I don’t think easy really has anything to do with it.

  • • • • •

  Cyrus sat in his room on the bed, ephemeris in his lap. He scrolled through data on the Van-Allen system on Asha. They would have to scan the atmosphere and magnetosphere of the planet and gather topographical information before making the final decision of where to set up camp. The Uni had also collected years of data from Earth, but Cyrus wanted to have a good idea of where to look before they even turned on the scanners.

  Just as he pulled up an image of the projected magnetosphere, the almost offensively pleasant door chime rang through his room. The intercom clicked on automatically. “Come in,” Cyrus called, pressing a button on his ephemeris to save his work.

  On his voice command, the door unlocked automatically and Dr. Tanner entered.

  “Hey,” Tanner began then paused, noticing Cyrus was sitting about a half-meter closer to the floor than he should have been, “What happened to your bed?”

  “Oh, I took the shock-absorbing frame and set it up against the wall. Supports my neck better. And I think the vibrations of the ship through the floor actually help me sleep.” Cyrus logged off his ephemeris and set it aside on his bed. “What brings you to my humble abode?”