by Ashanti Luke
—Why?
—Cuz, I’m not gonna sit there and take the blame and just soak in it when I didn’t do anything. I told Miss Hasabe there was gonna be a problem, but she and Disciplinarian Khoury and Dr. Postlethwaite didn’t wanna listen. I’m sorry Dada, I’ll be the bad guy, but I ain’t gonna be their escape goat.
—Scape goat.
—Whatever. It ain’t me.
—So how am I supposed to handle this?
—I dunno, Dada. You do what you gotta do, but I’m not apologizing.
—Well, I’m glad you told me before they called.
—I don’t think they’re gonna call, cuz they didn’t listen and they know they messed up. Dr. Postlethwaite didn’t know what to do after I slugged Terry. Terry started crying and he just sent us back to class. Maybe he knows if they had listened to me, none of it would have happened, and so he’s scared to call you.
—I’m sure that’s not too far from the truth.
—So am I punished?
—Well, what do you think your punishment should be?
—I don’t think I should get punished at all. This whole monkey hunt is punishment enough. But if they had listened to me when I told them, it never would have come down to this.
—Well, maybe your punishment is learning this lesson the hard way.
—What lesson is that? That principals are just as water-headed as school bullies?
—No, that no one listens to the man on the rostrum, not even the ones that agree with him.
—What the heck is a rostrum?
—Dari, mad is as it is, but you mind your tongue around me.
—Sorry Dada, but what is a rostrum?
—It’s those raised platforms like the Chancellor always stands on to give speeches. I think in ancient Rome, leaders used to stand on platforms made of pieces of the ships of their enemies. Either way, people cheer and praise, or they boo and hiss, but they never hear what he’s saying, they usually only hear what’s already in their heads, and they don’t believe it until they see it or feel it. By then, it’s usually too late. So maybe next time, find a better way to solve your problem; if there is one.
—I don’t know what better way I could have done it, Dada.
—Then, you’ll just have to live with the consequences, whatever they may be. I’m gonna comm-sat Dr. Postlethwaite and see if we can’t get this all sorted out. In the meantime, just keep your distance from that Gallager boy before he gets your Novitiateship revoked.
—I’ll stay away as best I can, Dada.
—So, we savvy on this?
—Kinda savvy. Still burns me up a little. I see what you’re saying, but it still don’t sit straight.
—Well, bounce it around until it does.
—It’s bouncing, but still comes up sideways. I mean, I’ll do what you say, but I’m never gonna be anyone’s scapegoat or escape goat ever again. And if they try and make me, I’m gonna stand on the rostrum and yell so loud even deaf men will hear me.
• • • • •
Cyrus breathed in deeply, and then held it, savoring the taste of consummate disbelief. “How?” he asked, ignoring the sliver of pain that spread across his torso as his lungs contracted.
Darius stood from his chair and walked over to Cyrus as the iris closed behind them. “I am deeply sorry, but I am not as I seem. I am merely an apparition of your son. A product of a computer system left behind to await your arrival.”
Cyrus looked through his tears at the room. At the back wall, there was a processor unit about three meters wide and a meter and a half high. It was an impressive piece of hardware; even the advanced Agamemnon unit on the Paracelsus, which controlled every function of the ship, included two redundant backup systems, and housed at least one copy of every accessible written work ever rendered to page or datadeck, was only about the size of a seat cushion. What could possibly need a processor that large? Cyrus thought to himself until he noticed the umbilical that led from the processor to the wall.
“You’re an avatar,” he expelled, draped in a veil of disappointment.
“Your son manipulated the interface created by your colleagues Dr. Jang, Dr. Winberg, and Dr. Villichez to accept freeform entries. He used the processor as an ephemeris and vigilantly made entries every day.”
“Every day?”
“It was easy. He combined the system with the avatar they had made of you when you left Earth. His vigilance has afforded me more than a few of his personality traits. Most importantly, it has afforded me the privilege of getting to know you,” the image bowed melodramatically but it seemed oddly sincere.
“But why?”
“Because he—I, if you don’t mind—need your help. Something is amiss in this place.”
Cyrus picked himself up and moved to the chair diagonal to where the image of Darius had been sitting. Cyrus waited until he was seated to speak, “Well, I have had more years of disillusionment than most mortal men have ever been afforded to help me learn to stop expecting to see what I expect to see.” The shear length of the sentence burned across his protesting sternum but he continued: the pain was sobering, “I have seen more today than in even all those years. It seems that precious little could surprise me more, and yet, I feel like I should know better.”
“There is something much larger than any of us going on here. I don’t know how far it goes back, but I know it goes back, at the very least, to the beginning of our time as colonists here on Asha.” The Darius image moved closer as he spoke.
“Explain.” Cyrus reclined to relieve the pressure on his exasperated muscles and joints.
“You know how the holocasts say I was exiled?” Darius’s likeness moved back to his chair and sat. His movements were graceful, dignified, and it made it hard for Cyrus to not see this image, this trick of photons of light, this manipulation of sound waves, as the son he had learned to love and admire as a better man than himself.
“Yeah, because the Knight of Swords—because you—were sentenced to death for the Defiance.”
“Well, you see, the interesting truth is that no pardon was ever issued. I was supposed to die on the first anniversary of the Defiance, but I escaped with the help of some Quadrads that remained loyal and some sympathizers—all prisoners. We fled to the first place where we could find shelter.”
“So you built this bunker here?”
“No, that’s the thing, we found this bunker here.”
“Some other colonists built it? What for?”
“No, stranger than that. It was too old for even that. When we analyzed the valley, we realized whatever this bunker was, it had been built before the crater was created. It had been a part of some existing structure that was destroyed by whatever created this impression in the surface.”
“So you’re telling me something or someone built this base before humans ever got here?”
“Precisely. Our equipment, even the stuff we stole later, wasn’t good enough for us to glean exactly how old this structure was, but in our efforts, what we did find was that somehow this structure housed everything we needed to survive in these impossible conditions.”
“Maybe, it’s low blood sugar or the overall weight of the day getting to me, but I don’t follow.”
“As we searched the system of caves connected to the bunker, we found an immense vein of coal, and we stumbled across what everyone eventually began to call the Eos.”
“The Eos?”
“It was the source of our awakening, our realization that the Ashans, even though they had left the wastefulness of Earth behind, had gone well beyond the limit marker in their arrogance. They were no more attuned with the universe than the enemy they had dubbed ‘terrasites’; they were just as materialistic, just as clumsy, and just as useless as the people of Earth, despite the fact they managed to live on uninhabitable ball of rock.”
“What could you possibly have found in that cave that makes all of that less a tirade than it sounds?”
“The Eos is a pat
hogen. We have had difficulty studying it because we have never had the proper knowledge base, but what we do know is that it lies dormant where a freshwater tributary to the ocean passes through a cavern we call Plato’s Cave. It infects the host organism as the organism enters the cave—the first of us to enter the cave became acutely ill, feverish, even convulsive. When the host would awaken, his or her thirst would be voracious, but those afflicted, would recover very quickly. We found, when they emerged, that the disease had given their skin a greenish discoloration. It became clear very quickly that their metabolism had been drastically altered. So long as those infected were exposed to frequent sunlight, they did not need to eat, their level of excretion was profoundly diminished, and sleep became more of a luxury than a necessity. It also pretty much eliminated menses in our women. But if they were out of sunlight for two days, they began to waste away. One man became trapped in one of the bunker rooms during a power outage. He had already been researching inside for a day and a half. It took us another full day just to get the door open. When we found him, he was just a desiccated husk. Evidently, stress and lack of water accelerated the degeneration.”
Cyrus mulled over the words in his head. He had been convinced that nothing more this day could surprise him, and although he was not taken aback by disbelief, the awe the words inspired kept him floored. “But the sun sets on this bunker every twenty-five years.”
“And every twenty-five years, these people migrate, just as the Ashans do. There is another valley, across the equator, called Avalon, which they migrate to when Set moves on. The Hierophants, like Paeryl, maintain a greater knowledge of technology than the others in the society, and they pass that knowledge down to their acolytes. They carry phylacteries as ceremonial ornamentation that allow me to gather information in the time that they do not reside here in Xanadu. However, the Echelon, the Ashan force that was organized to deal with us, does not know the location of this bunker, but they know the paths we would have to take to get to Avalon, and Avalon itself has been compromised.”
“So you know all this because you watch over them?”
“I gather information. Watching over them would imply that I could do something to help them; that I, in all my knowledge and wisdom, was not woefully inert.” A look of sadness spread across the face of the image before him, but then it subsided, quickly returning to the solemn expression from before.
“But these people here are your descendants, correct?”
“Well, yes and no. We liberated the families during one of the migrations, these people are their descendants.”
“Do they know you are here? I mean, all this,” Cyrus indicated both the holographic image of his son and the processing unit in one sweeping motion, “What should I call this?” Cyrus was calm, the awkwardness and inability to grasp everything at once lent a clear air of frustration to his words.
“Well, your son named the neural processor that generates this image and facilitates my programming the Xerxes Mark 917, I call myself Darius Prime, but honestly I would like you to call me Dari.”
Cyrus shook his head. It was a subtle motion that seemed a half-hearted effort to dispel some bug or web that refused to stop pestering him. He continued his line of questioning, as if the last statement from the machine did not exist, and never would.
“But it seems like they revere you, almost deify you. What is the link?”
“The link is I brought them here, away from the chains of technology and away from detachment to the only thing of any relevant importance.”
The hypocrisy of the statement rang through his mind like a peel from a distant carillon; and yet he understood. It was not the technology that was the problem, no more than a knife, a spear, or even a gun is a scourge by itself. All of these things could be used to feed, to heal, to protect. It was when the fear of these objects overwhelmed those who did not wield them, and when the necessary reverence to those objects was lost by those who did, that they became instruments of destruction. Cyrus remembered something Tanner had said in the dojo once, ‘no one appreciates breathing until they can’t do it anymore, and then its importance becomes lucid.’ Technology made things easier, but when things became so easy we were no longer reminded what life was on a daily basis, people remained detached until someone died; and even then, whatever epiphany they were afforded, was fleeting. Wasn’t that why he was here in the first place? He could no longer play the role of the colonist, or the pioneer he had expected to become, but ultimately, how was this any different? It was all fresh, it was all new, and in one day, every aspect of his very soul had been harrowed; and not only his breath, but the systolic rhythm of his heart, the life that he had narrowly escaped with, stood brazen and naked before him.
Perhaps something changed in his heat signature, or his stature, or the pause was longer than Cyrus had realized, but the image continued his point without a response, “I watch them through the fly-eyes and the phylacteries. They carry on the traditions they have handed down and developed throughout the centuries, some generated by me, but most of their own design. Maybe because they need a past that isn’t the diametrically opposite Eurydice or Druvidia, or maybe it’s just because they see something we are too stubborn to recognize. Either way, they have an affinity for melodrama, but they don’t worship me. They are too simple for that. I may be a martyr or a progenitor to them, but they unequivocally worship the sun that grants them life and hope in an environment that seeks to destroy them. Without it, they would certainly perish, and they are not too haughty to acknowledge that.”
The figure before Cyrus was an apparition, a zephyr, but he wanted to believe, he needed to, because he had lost so much. But the day weighed upon him like a yoke, a halter that dragged the Herculean weight of his life’s transactions behind him like a plow. Cyrus exhaled again, relishing the air he took in to replace it, even as his right side protested. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“Did you do the things they said you did?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because the war had started, and the job had been given to me to win it, not to play with Earth until they gave up. I struck when Earth felt they could wait us out.”
“But no path is that simple. Nothing boils down to just one base. At least not a base we can spit out in one sentence.”
“True again. Which leads me to why I need your help.”
“Explain.”
“Uncle Xander pulled some strings and made sure he and I received a charter for the Anemoi. When we got here, I worked as an instructor in Earth history for a few gyres before the levy sanction. The society of Eurydice proliferated to the point where migration upon sunset would have been a problem. The leviance from Earth was first stopped because of population problems. There was an abundance of resources and ore, but we could not produce accommodations fast enough. Earth was wrenching on the throttle to levy more people, but we had to slow down. I was advisor on Uncle Xander’s Council of Nine, under Rex Mundi, who was personally supervising the surveying of potential Druvidian sites because he had been an eminent environmental engineer on Earth. Right about when production began on the Druvidian project was when things began to go sideways. Uncle Xander was summoned to one of the survey sites, but was killed in an excavation accident. After that, all Druvidian construction projects were halted, and accusations of sabotage from Earth began to spread. There was a research ship called the Zephyrus. It was a star skimmer class ship built with newer gravity drive technology that was strong enough to counter the gravity well of dark stars. The intent was to use it to study a not-so-distant neutron star, but the ship was decommissioned, and the technology was taken by the Ashan government to engineer faster ships. Everything about the situation seemed off-kilter to me from the start, so I signed up as a military advisor. I organized the Archons, and after notice was taken of my strategic abilities, I was appointed by Rex Mundi as supreme commander of Ashan defense.”
�
�Why do you think Earth would sabotage Xander’s expedition?”
“Well, common belief was that they wanted to halt our progress, so that upon sunset, we would be forced to allow transports from Earth in order to rapidly colonize the sunside. From the onset, it seemed like keelrot to me. I personally believe Mundi had Uncle Xander killed—his death was too convenient for what Mundi was trying to do.”
“What was that?”
“Engender a schism against Earth.”
“So why did you go along with him?”
“Because going along was the only way I stood a chance of getting at what was going on at all. Life in Eurydice, however cosmopolitan, was still difficult, and Mundi had developed himself into a full-blown cult of personality. Besides, the Uni had begun to treat Asha like an imperial colony. They had started shooting down barrage ships like a cranked out Dad slapping his kids. That alone was hard to abide by. What side to be on was easy to decide, but it quickly became clear to me there were other problems. Firstly, the Druvidian project was going a little too slowly for all the resources we were putting into it. Secondly, I’m fairly certain Rex Mundi was an avatar.”
“What made you think that?”
“Well for one, his name was as arrogant as it was trite. King of the World? In a society dominated by sympathizers to the ancient Greek aesthetic, calling yourself Rex Mundi is like introducing yourself as Taskmaster to a slave. It wasn’t a name, it was a title, and it was diminishing to anyone who bought into it.”
“So why did they fall for it?”
“I don’t think they did fall for it per se. I think to an extent, most of Asha was in agreement with him from the beginning. As you say, they only heard what they wanted to hear, and he was happy to say it to them. Earth began sending more and more ships, but they were cut off from communications. We began intercepting them farther out. We placed asteroid grids in their deceleration lines, and because we could communicate faster because they were so far away from their High Command, it was easier for us to respond to their more powerful forces in a set place. After a team of Druvidian scientists developed a form of instantaneous communication called the Whisper Node, we mounted a counter attack on Eros and Mars to slow their attack. We had a set of spies planted to subvert their attempts to develop their own Whisper Nodes. Earth hammered at our forces, but we whittled away at their defenses, and we minimized our casualties, but their ranks seemed endless. Eventually they would have overpowered us, even though it seemed like we were gaining ground.”
