Dusk (10 page)

“Thank you for the invite, but I prefer
training in solitude,” Uzziah smiled the forced smile of a man who
had not been afforded many smiles in his life.

“You train in
Mao do Justo
?” Tanner
asked.

Uzziah’s eyes widened and he lowered his
paddle. He seemed more excited than surprised, but at the same
time, a little hesitant. “What makes you ask that?” he asked.

“For starters, the way you stand and carry
yourself says you’re not standard military. Also, the idea that you
will have to spend the rest of your life with shipload of eggheads
seems to be enough to unsettle you, but not enough to unnerve you.
That gives me the impression you’ve been in situations like this
before; situations where you have to spend a lot of time blending
in with people you don’t find so stellar.” Tanner folded his arms
and faced Uzziah, making eye contact across the court. “Also, this
expedition is too important to the Uni itself, and the stat
counters Earth-side would not have sent us off without a
chaperone.”

Uzziah rubbed his chin. The pause was brief,
but it was filled with something far more pleasant than tension,
yet entirely too charged to be called ordinary. Tanner and the
Commander maintained their eye contact until Cyrus broke the brief
silence. “Am I missing something here?”

“The Unified Nations’ Reconnaissance and
Infiltration Force trains their members in a specialized technique
that takes all of the more vicious elements of Jujitsu, Muay Thai,
and Krav Maga, all under the veil of Vale Tudo, and distills them
into a highly efficient and deadly martial art called
Mao do
Justo
. Apart from an obvious, and somewhat understandable,
distaste for the matriculated, I am sure Commander Uzziah’s
apprehension to training with us is due to the fact that he does
not want to alarm anyone with his hitherto social position on Earth
by exposing his highly characteristic martial training. Is that
about right?”

“You seem to have taken offense,” the
Commander said, a little more stern now, but disarmed.

“Maybe to the subterfuge,” Tanner relaxed
more himself, “but a man has a right to keep his past to himself
until it becomes important. Besides, there is no way you could send
a message to, or receive a message from, Earth as far as I am
aware, which makes spying on us is out of the question. And that’s
assuming I actually did buy into the false image of privacy on a
craft of this importance to humanity’s future.”

Uzziah laughed. It was a short-lived laugh,
but it was honest. “I knew there was something about you Tanner—it
was definitely not your Kantistyka game—but if there is anything I
did learn in the R.I.F., it’s to know when someone has you on their
gram, and above all else, to respect it.” The Commander raised his
paddle impatiently, “Now can we lay this game to rest, because
Villichez wants me to go to more of his little egghead dinners, and
I don’t want him giving me the stink-eye for coming in late.”

• • • • •

—
Dada, do you ever think we’ll cross the light
speed barrier thingy?

—
I think one day we might, but I’m not sure
how.

—
Why not? What is so hard about it?

—
Well, the amount of energy needed is a problem.
You remember what mass is, right?

—
It’s the amount of something in something. Like
how many molecules something has.

—
Exactly. The closer something gets to light
speed, the more mass it has. And the amount of energy needed to
push that thing is increased. Nothing in this universe the size of
an atom or larger can move at that speed because it would have an
infinite mass.

—
And that would mean you would need an unlimited
amount of energy to keep pushing it.

—
Exactly. Out of curiosity, why do you
ask?

—
Well, in class today, Miss Hasabe taught us
about electrons and protons and neutrons and stuff. And she sent us
a page on our decks that talked about how electrons can be in two
places at once if they are run through a slit. It also said that if
you tried to look at either side, the electron would kind of choose
that side because you looked at it. I was thinking that if
electrons could be in two places at once, why couldn’t a
spaceship?

—
Well, unfortunately, the bigger things get, the
less they follow those rules, and a spaceship is a lot bigger than
an electron.

—
Yeah that’s the same thing Miss Hasabe said. But
then on the ride home, I was thinking, what if we could make the
big thing forget it was big for long enough to send it through a
special kind of slit. If we could look at it once it went through
the slit, it would remember the way it was supposed to be, and also
it would have to pick that side.

—
You know, you may be on to something Dari. We
have known for some time now that energy and matter are really just
the same thing at different vibration levels.

—
Strings, right Dada?

—
Good, so I see you do pay attention.

—
Well, honestly you’re more interesting than Miss
Hasabe, but I like it when she talks about the things you talk
about.

—
We may not be able to make the matter forget
that it is matter, but really large objects exert a kind of
pressure on the universe around them, generating gravity. Near
gravity, matter acts a little differently.

—
So do you think, somehow if we could create
pressure like that on the space around the ship, we might be able
to make it do stuff it normally couldn’t do?

—
Yeah, maybe. But we would somehow have to create
an immense amount of gravity around the ship. We can create gravity
waves, but nothing I know of can do that in this day and
age.

—
Well, people find new ways to do stuff all the
time.

—
True, but it never seems to be when you want it.
But I guess if people didn’t get tired of wanting it, it would
never get invented.

—
Yeah, well, I think if you and I can think of
it, that someone somewhere else can too, and maybe they can build
it.

—
I’d like to think that Dari, but sometimes I
think it takes a simpler mind, not less intelligent, but less…
bogged down I guess, to get it right sometimes. Between the two of
us, I think we might be able to figure out anything given enough
time.

—
Yeah, me too… I like that idea, Dari and Dada
can figure out anything given enough time.

—
That does have a nice ring to it, doesn’t
it?

• • • • •

For the past few day cycles, the ship seemed colder
than ever. Cyrus found himself on many day cycles venturing to the
Activity Room just to feel the warmth of the suncasters. This odd
chill had kept him curled up in his bunk, tossing and frustrated,
until the notion of sleep seemed like an idle promise. He had made
his way to the codex to occupy his mind and settle the thoughts
that now shambled through his brain like refugees from some cold
war.

He sat at the datadeck looking for something
to read. There was someone else in the codex, at one of the
datadecks sheltered by a cubicle, but Cyrus took very little notice
of him. Whoever it was, as far as Cyrus knew, returned the favor.
Cyrus’s face was bathed in a cool green as the words scrolled by in
the air in front of him. He expanded the display field to include
synopses as the titles of various works of fiction scrolled by. He
searched this way for about an hour, disturbed at the fact that the
summaries he was reading were so trite there was an obvious
pattern. After a while, he realized there was a genre feature that
had locked him into the mystery genre. He used the feature to
switch to science fiction and flipped through a few titles before
he realized that just a minute or two of pseudoscience would
frustrate him well beyond his current point, and in deciding it was
not even worth the risk, he shifted to non-fiction. He selected
philosophy and cycled through works until one caught his eye—
The
Tao de Jing
, The Way of Life. The deck offered several
different translations other than its original Chinese, and even
five different Commonspeak translations. Cyrus selected the first
Commonspeak version and sat back in his chair as the holographic
monitor morphed into an image of a book and opened to the foreword
written by the translator. He repeatedly touched the upper outside
corner of the image and the page turned with each tap until he
reached the beginning of the actual text.

Cyrus perused the lines of each verse,
tapping his way through the pages. The words seemed particularly
insightful, and much less pretentious than he had, in his own
ignorance, expected. He tapped through to another page and verse
twelve grabbed his attention and held him there transfixed in
contemplation:
Colors blind the eye.Sounds deafen the ear.Flavors
numb the taste.Thoughts weaken the mind.Desires wither the
heart.The Master observes the worldBut trusts his inner vision.He
allows things to come and go.His heart is open as the sky.

Cyrus sat staring at the page, the words
swirling around the ether of his mind, spiraling and winding, and
as they wound, a hint of warmth sparked to life. As evanescent as
it was unexpected, the ember of hope was eclipsed by the mixture of
words and ideas that now clouded his thoughts. Whatever epiphany
had been imminent, was now lost in an unctuous gel of frustration
and doubt. Self-accusation took the place that had been opened up
for the lost revelation. He had taken his life for granted and had
given it away. In return, this cold, sterile coffin was what he had
received. What had been unclear to him before now rushed to the
surface like pus from a previously unnoticed abscess.

As sleep was well beyond his grasp now, Cyrus
attempted to center himself and continued to read. Suddenly, a
biting caterwaul severed the quiet of the codex. “Miching gesheki!”
Cyrus was yanked from his self-loathing by the outburst. Hairs
stood at attention as gooseflesh spread across his body. He had no
idea what those words meant, but they were far from exultation. As
Cyrus stood, someone pounded the desktop of one of the cubicles.
Cyrus moved toward the disturbance and noticed the previously quiet
person who shared the codex. Whoever the scientist was, he now held
his head in almost cartoonish distress as he mumbled some other
guttural curse at his datadeck.

Cyrus rounded the chest-high divider that
separated the cubicles from the rest of the codex. When the cubicle
became visible, Cyrus noticed holographic images writhing wildly on
the table top in front of the datadeck. The scientist at the
cubicle, with his shoulder-length hair and onyx-set pinky ring, was
now recognizable as Dr. Jang. “Are you okay?” Cyrus asked, keeping
his distance to lend privacy to Dr. Jang’s work.

Dr. Jang reeled around, both startled and
embarrassed. As he turned, he pressed a holographic button,
freezing the writhing figures in place. The figures in Cyrus’s view
were now distinguishable as armored men with spears who were riding
horses in a combat formation. Cyrus could see a mixture of fatigue
and anxiety in his eyes as Dr. Jang tried to form jumbled thoughts
into words, “I… I…”

Cyrus smiled, “My son plays that game a lot.
Conquest of the Ages, right?” The anxiety in Dr. Jang’s eyes
subsided and gave way to yet more fatigue. Dr. Jang let out a sigh
that turned into a chuckle as he turned and slid his chair back,
revealing the frozen battlefield on the table.

“I smuggled a copy of the software on board
and circumvented the lock-out codes. I’ve been playing while
everyone was asleep, but it appears now my secret is out.” Another
half sigh, half chuckle punctuated his sentence.

“Your secret is safe with me,” Cyrus said,
stepping forward to get a better view of the battle. “My son was
fond of the spaceship battles in the later levels, but I personally
prefer the Warring States Period of China levels.”

“Me too,” Dr. Jang’s eyes widened a little as
he faced Cyrus, “But I can’t seem to beat this particular level.
I’m outnumbered and the other army’s cavalry keeps cutting me to
shreds.”

“Let me see what you have,” Cyrus surveyed
the landscape and the resources. “So what is your goal? To just
defeat the other army?”

“If you can make it to the bases that are
farther up the gram and kill the general there you win, but the
cavalry always runs me down and decimates my forces.”

“Any idea what kind of garrison is in the
base?”

Dr. Jang moved his hand over the battlefield
and it quickly scrolled north, revealing a large wooden fort
nestled between two hills to bar passage between them. Archers were
mounted along the battlements and the fortress was manned by
infantry numbering at least that of the force Dr. Jang had at his
disposal. There were at least three mounted captains. There was
also one mounted officer with a gold lion face on his breast plate
and an ostentatious plume and two large streamers erupting from his
helm. “Let me guess, the guy with the big ridiculous hat is the
general you need to beat.”

“Yeah, and he’s no push-over either.
Honestly, I don’t know what general in his right mind would attack
under these circumstances.” Dr. Jang scrolled back to where the
cavalry were riding toward his men.

“Well, these circumstances give us the
perfect opportunity for attack because firstly, the enemy would not
suspect it, and secondly, they would be overconfident in their
numbers. We should focus on those things, and use them to our
advantage.”

“But how?”

“You have all your men lined up like British
Redcoats. These archers in the back, can you move them on top of
the hill along the pass between the fort and your current
position?”