Dusk

by Ashanti Luke

  “My namesake never talked about how it felt, so I don’t know.”

  “Leaving the sun feels so dull now. Lifeless. Like a tomb. Honestly, it’s not so different than the way I felt every day before we left Earth—at least the way I felt when Dari was not around.”

  Davidson stepped into the room behind Darius’s image. “The info that we found, before you blindly jumped into the cave and infected yourself, shows that this Eos of theirs is harmless, depending on how you look at it.”

  Toutopolus rolled his chair over from the holomonitor, “Well it’s a form of parasitic bacteria, like rickettsia, the kind that caused typhus. It is speculated that human mitochondria was originally an organism similar to the rickettsia.”

  “Observing this Eos most certainly supports that idea. It tricks the cells in the body into absorbing it. Once there, it begins to photosynthesize and works along with the mitochondria. It contains its own DNA and transfers itself to offspring through female gametes just like mitochondria.”

  “The downside is, if you’re caught outside of the appropriate spectrum of light, it will go into its chemosynthetic phase and begin to breakdown the organelles of your cells.”

  “How long does that take?” Cyrus asked, a little worry in his voice, but comforted by the fact that the majority of the humans in this compound had already made the same choice.

  Davidson stepped from behind Darius, who made an effort to move out of his way as Davidson spoke, “As far as we can tell, about five to six days before the damage is irreversible.”

  “Why would it need a host? It has all the sunlight it needs here.”

  “For protection. Firstly, it goes dormant in moist, dark areas, which is why it is near the freshwater tributary here. Secondly, its DNA doesn’t mix up like ours when it replicates. There’s very little differentiation between generations. Again, like the mitochondria. It’s how we can trace humans to one common ancestor called the Mitochondrial Eve. Problem is, when something doesn’t differentiate its DNA, it’s easy to wipe out with one drastic environmental change. Humans can adapt to survive a variety of environmental changes, and our bodies protect our cells with the tenacity of a juggernaut. Also, the Eos’s nominal environmental temperature, when it is active, is about thirty-six to thirty-eight degrees. What better environment could it choose?”

  Milliken stepped up, holding his datadeck the same as when Cyrus last saw him. “There’s another concern that Torvald, Toutopolus, and I have been puzzled about. I didn’t get the time to ask about the coal before we left for the Scar, but it did strike me as odd.”

  “What was odd?” Cyrus had trouble following. Though his senses seemed incredibly sharp, even indoors, his mind was a little fuzzy from being out for so long.

  “Coal comes from decayed, heated, and compressed plant matter. From swamps that decayed eons ago. Coal is formed over a long time, through a geologic process that slowly removes moisture, hydrogen, and hydroxyl groups from the vein.”

  “So let me guess, it took about six hundred thousand years to form?” Cyrus posited, the fog in his mind dissipating by the moment.

  “Actually no. This stuff is anthracite, the best kind of coal. Most anthracite on Earth was formed in the Carboniferous period, which seems to be about the time it was formed here. That’s the confusing part. That city was hundreds of thousands of years old, but this coal began to form about three hundred million years ago.”

  The clarity returning to Cyrus’s mind was overshadowed by the impossibility of Milliken’s words. “Which would mean…”

  “There would have to have been a substantial amount of vegetation here hundreds of millions of years ago.” Torvald could not hold his answer to the end of Cyrus’s conjecture.

  Milliken continued with his treatise, “It also takes about ten to thirty meters of peat, which is formed when swamps decompose and die, to make a one meter thick vein of coal. Here we have about a four meter thick vein, and it seems to stretch beneath the surface for more than three K.”

  “What does all this mean?” Cyrus could not help grabbing his head. It seemed the trip to Asha was a never ending stream of shocking surprises.

  “That the Eos was not the first form of life here, not by a laser-shot, and Davidson and I are pretty sure the Bereshit Scar didn’t create favorable conditions on the planet, it ruined the conditions that were more favorable.” Milliken sat with his deck on the chair next to Cyrus.

  “So there were life forms here hundreds of millions of years ago?”

  “Well, don’t get your head bent just yet. It gets better. You see this complex?” Milliken indicated the structure around them with his hands. “The steel in here was formed about that same time, my guess is, it was somehow sealed against decaying and eroding elements before the Ashans found it,” Milliken continued.

  “My son and the Apostates?”

  “No, I mean the Ashans, any of them. The generators, the outlets, the sync connectors, the fly-eyes, all of them were installed well after this place was built. Darius here says some of the things had to be refurbished, but this place had been set up at least five years before he came here, and then was somehow forgotten about, even by the Archons.”

  Toutopolus now could not hold back his wonder over his own excitable puzzle piece. “Something else has been bugging me too. The lion statues in the underground city had manes. But we are reasonably sure maned lions didn’t appear on Earth until about 320 thousand years ago at the earliest. So if that city is as old as the scans say, why do the lions have manes?”

  Tanner seemed exasperated. “Too many questions. Not enough answers. How do we find the truth?”

  Cyrus began to laugh, and his laughter, more boisterous than most present had ever heard erupt from his lungs, startled them. Even the face and eyes of the Darius hologram mimicked everyone’s surprise.

  “What’s so funny?” Milliken asked, a hint of indignant disapproval in his voice.

  “What’s so funny?” Cyrus said, still chuckling to himself. He stood abruptly, looking around the room. “Isn’t it obvious. Look at us. All of us. We sit here, grown men, preeminent scientists of Earth, crying, as if our own world had not been a distortion of reality, of truth. We came here looking for reprieve; our loved ones were lost, but when the sting wore off, we remained in mourning. The adornment we had chosen fell apart at the seams, crumbled to dust. And again we cried, this time because we were naked, cold. Our truth had been taken from us.”

  He paused for a moment and looked around, but his laughter had long since faded. As he opened his mouth to speak again, the quivering in the corners of his eyes demanded pause, but he continued anyway, “What I realized on the trip back from the Scar is that we were wrong to be offended by our nakedness—the clothes do not make the man. Clothes are constructs, machinations. They are cheap gimmicks. Without them, we can be whatever we want to be, whatever we need to be. And yet, we sit here in this sterilized room, limbs flailing hopelessly at the ether as we plummet into the abyss, pissed to be damned because we have had the houndshit we used to clothe our world violently stripped from us. All the while, the only point we need to realize is that when the clothes, the illusions, the nonsense are all burned away, however violently, that we are left with nothing but the truth.”

  A long tacit arrested the room, but Milliken, obviously flustered and unappeased by Cyrus’s diatribe, thrust his back into the chair. “Well, what truth do we have that we do not make for ourselves?”

  Cyrus turned to face Milliken, the quivering in his eyes must have been apparent. “We don’t need to make the truth, we are the truth. We cry because our world has been stripped from us, but we should rejoice.”

  Tanner himself seemed flustered and asked, “Why?”

  Cyrus continued, “Because we’ve been given the chance to put the pieces together in the places they want to be—the places we never should have let them break away from.”

  “So then, what do you propose? Philosophical edification provides com
fort, put it will not provide sunlight. And these people, as well as us when the stolen food runs out, will die without it,” Torvald added, now somewhat flustered himself.

  Cyrus was still distant, his voice still airy and calm, “I think we need more raw data before we can decide anything. As you said, there are more questions than answers. Knowing how little we know is, as you said, edifying, but will provide neither sunlight, nor a viable stratagem. In the meantime, we gather information, and we train. Those guys that chased us out of the Scar must have had their interests piqued.”

  “Then why don’t we talk less and research more, and you can stop pontificating and go do some pushups,” Milliken snapped then immersed himself in his datadeck.

  twenty-two

  • • • • •

  —Dada, did you and grandpa ever talk like this?

  —Well, yeah and no. Your grandfather was a very quiet man. He didn’t talk as much as me, and every word he said carried weight, so you listened because he wasn’t big on repeating himself.

  —Did you call him Dada too?

  —No. I normally called him Dad or Pa. He seemed to prefer Pa.

  —What was his name?

  —David. David Moriah Chamberlain.

  —Was he an astrophysicist too?

  —No, your granddad actually worked for a living.

  —What did he do?

  —He calibrated and repaired the factory bots that built lev drives. Evidently, he was very good at it because he was a perfectionist.

  —Was he more of a perfectionist than you, Dada?

  —Oh yeah. He was scary. He made me make copies of all my deckwork so if I had any more than three mistakes, he would delete it and make me start the whole thing over again.

  —Ouch.

  —Yes, ouch. One night, he deleted my deckwork five times before I realized as far as my work was concerned, that man may as well have been a machine.

  —I bet you hated that.

  —At first, I hated it more than anything in the world, but as I got older, I could see what he was doing.

  —What was that?

  —He was determined to make me a better man than him whether I liked it or not. When I was tapped for Laureateship, he didn’t say much, he only said that it would be even harder from there on out, but I could see it in his eyes. In his mind, I was beginning to do the things he wanted and had never been given the chance, and it swelled him up with pride.

  —He never got jealous because you were better.

  —No, never. How could he? He and your grandma were the main reasons I did succeed. When I matriculated into the Arcology, I told your grandpa how much I appreciated him, and that I didn’t know what I could do to repay him. He told me the best thing I could do to repay him was to do the same for my own son. That was also the first day he ever told me directly that he was proud of me. You know, that night, when I was by myself, I cried.

  —Were you sad?

  —No, the contrary. It was the happiest day I can remember, because that day, even though I always knew it in the back of my mind, I knew I was good enough, because David Chamberlain saw me as fit to carry his standard.

  —Standard like rules to live by, or like the things you have to capture in Conquest of Ages?

  —Ha, I think both, Dari.

  —Do you think you lived up to his standard, Dada?

  —Well, I am proud of you, and I think one day, you’ll do a fine job of carrying the standard yourself, so I guess, yeah, I think I might have done okay.

  —Gee Dada, I didn’t really understand it when you said it, but I think maybe now I understand what made you cry that night. But it’s okay Dada, I kinda like it.

  • • • • •

  Cyrus felt the now common tingle in his skin subside as he stepped into the room the Apostates affectionately called the Forum. Cyrus ran through how much time had passed since he first stepped through that circular doorway. If the notion of day cycles had been distorted inside Eurydice, it had been blasted into oblivion here. The Apostates counted from evensong to evensong, their daily vigil of meeting with the elders in the thinning shard of sunlight. The elders would fellowship and discuss issues while the children played or slept in the shadows of the crater. They still kept track of the hours and lumped them into chunks of twenty-four, but the moniker of ‘day cycle’ seemed more and more ludicrous as the sun, stuck in a never-ending sunset, demanded more and more of Cyrus’s attention as his body adjusted to the Eos. “So what’s our situation look like?” he asked, still thirsty for real light.

  “Same as it did yesterday, like balls on a beta hound,” Milliken scoffed as he synced his datadeck with the Xerxes system. After the patch cleared, he loaded the data of the underground city they had discovered day cycles before. A five by five-meter hologram of the strange city expanded in the center of the room and rose up from the floor.

  Davidson, still queasy after emerging from Plato’s Cave two day cycles before, propped himself up as best he could to see the image spread across the floor. Tanner, just overcoming his own grogginess from emerging before Davidson had entered, stood from his chair to get a better view. Jang was confined to the sunlight, under the care the two women that had now ushered all of them except Uzziah into Plato’s Cave. Toutopolus had been in the Cave for the last thirty or so hours, and probably would be there for another thirty more.

  The door to the kilns and labs opened and the image of Darius emerged from the hall beyond. Milliken leaned over to Cyrus, who approached the image of the city to get a better view. “Why does he do that? It freaks me out,” Milliken asked, his voice still accented with anxiety.

  “Well, if he learned from my son, I doubt half-assing the image of being real is a part of his program.”

  “Half-assed or not, it’s still freaky,” Milliken whispered as Darius approached, hands clasped behind his back, looking at the image of the city as if it wasn’t being digitally transmitted directly into his—its—data grid. Milliken furtively shook his head. Darius looked up from the image of the cave, winked at him, and then craned his neck closer to the hologram. “Were these buildings ever inhabited?” Darius asked with an inquisitive yet serious look on his face.

  Milliken moved his stylus across his datadeck and the image zoomed in on a set of buildings. The buildings were angular, mostly square, with crenellated roofs. Some of the larger buildings had what looked like miniature versions of the smaller buildings on their roofs. “It’s hard to tell from this scan. There wasn’t enough time to gather acute details. However, from the lack of accumulation of dust, it was either hermetically sealed before they excavated it, or there was an extensive excavation of dust after they cracked it open. It would have required enormous manpower, even with the most advanced equipment, to extract a half-million years of dust. Given the obvious desire to keep whatever this is as quiet as possible, my guess is it was sealed. That’s why they used the extraplanetary lasers.”

  “I doubt the pilots of those fighters even knew what they were protecting,” Uzziah chimed in to get a closer look himself.

  “How can you be sure of that?” Davidson asked, sitting up more himself.

  “Because I would not have told them if I was their C.O.” Uzziah moved closer to the image of the building in front of him. “These look familiar. I’ve seen building’s like these before.”

  “Ancient Mesopotamia,” Tanner said with assurance, but with a perplexed look on his face. “They look Babylonian, but something is also very different about them.”

  “Other than the lack of monolithic slabs of limestone, massive veins of quartz, and laser bits between the Tigris and Euphrates on Earth?” Milliken asked facetiously.

  “It’s not just that. The organization is very different. It’s as if it was designed by an architect trying to mimic Babylonian architecture, but without the need for practical placement. Irrigation, religion, and defense dictated where and how things were built in Mesopotamia. Those things don’t seem to figure into the desi
gn here.”

  It sounded as if Milliken had giggled to himself, but when everyone turned to face him, he looked more serious than excited. “Speaking of design, look at what I noticed yesterday.” Milliken maneuvered his stylus across the deck and the image rotated so the roofs of the buildings faced Cyrus and Tanner. The image mirrored itself on the side opposite Milliken, Cyrus, Tanner, and Davidson so Uzziah and the Darius image would not have to move. It then zoomed out along the z-axis of the city at a speed that made both Davidson and Tanner reel. As it zoomed, it looked as if the buildings were falling, swirling into some massive drain. Tanner closed his eyes and reclaimed his seat on the chair as his head lolled back against the headrest. When the city stopped falling, Cyrus could see the arrangements of the buildings formed a distinct pattern. Cyrus had assumed the moiré pattern he had seen when they had first passed over the city was a trick of light from the artificial sun interacting with the quartz, coupled with their own high rate of speed. Those factors alone could have made the buildings appear to undulate as they had passed over them. Now, however, looking at the entire breadth of the city from an impossible vantage point, it was clear the rhythmic pulse of the buildings was due just as much to the layout as it was to a trick of light and speed.

  “It looks like one of those circles they used to find in the cornfields at the turn of the millennium,” Davidson mumbled as his eyes focused. The pattern looked like two swirls that interlocked in the center, each swirl forming half of a stepped aster that spread out in the eight cardinal directions. If the lines of the pattern they formed had actually been lines and not a trick of the eye played by the varied distances between the buildings and the roads and the colors of the buildings themselves, it would have made the aster look as if one half were drawn with a solid, unbroken line, and the negative space left behind formed the other half.