Dusk (43 page)

“What was in the back room of the Temple?”
Uzziah turned in his chair to face them.

“Nothing,” Tanner answered, still
distant.

“But you said, ‘There were two of them.’ Two
of what?” Milliken turned to face him also.

“The Temple is supposed to house the Ark of
the Covenant. There’s supposed to only be one, and
that
was
supposed to have been on Earth.”

“How do you know there had been anything at
all if the room was empty when you got there?” Milliken sounded
indignant, but everyone knew he must have been feeling the same
weariness they all shared—everyone except Tanner who was obviously
more distraught.

“They were clumsy when they moved them. There
were scratches on the floor. There were also depressions left in
the floor where they had stood before they moved them.” Tanner’s
distance was haunting. He had always been the most composed of them
all, his presence alone calming in the face of duress, but now his
anxiety was unsettling.

“Depressions in the stone? How does something
sit in one place and leave a depression?” Cyrus winced as his pulse
pounded through his temples, squeezing his brain in a
vice-grip.

“Could be from vibration.” Milliken turned
back to the hologram and shifted through the image. “As I said,” he
added, “according to this scan, those aves were made around six
hundred thousand years ago. That’s a long time for something to sit
if it vibrates.”

“How is that possible?” Uzziah asked.

“How is
any
of this possible?” Tanner
belted out, more at himself than anyone else. Cyrus stood and put
his hand on Tanner’s shoulder but Tanner continued, unmoved. “How
do you put a sun in a cave? How could all that exist before any of
it was written down?”

“Well, maybe this isn’t time to play devil’s
advocate, but that artificial sun seemed like some sort of cold
fusion; a technology beyond our means, but not beyond our
understanding. And as far as writing things down go, things
existing and
then
being written about is typically the
logical progression.” Cyrus tried to keep the sarcasm out of his
words, but it must not have worked because Tanner scowled at him.
Cyrus continued to grasp Tanner’s shoulder to arrest his attention,
maybe squeezing it a bit too hard. Cyrus waited until Tanner turned
to look at him before he loosened his grip and continued,
“Remember, after the shock of it all, it’s all still here.” Cyrus
pointed at Tanner’s head. Cyrus began to speak louder as something
welled up inside him, “All this time, you held me—us,” he indicated
everyone else in the lev, “together with your composure whether we
shared the same beliefs as you or not.” Cyrus’s voice rose even
louder. “And through all that, did you ever believe your Bible
could stop bullets? Did you ever believe it could make the sun rise
or stop it from setting? Did you ever believe it could bring back
the dead?”

Cyrus’s chest heaved as he waited for an
answer.

“No,” Tanner was still dejected.

It seemed as if Cyrus was speaking to someone
standing outside the lev now. His cheeks and lips quivered with
each impassioned word, “Then explain to me how what you believe
today
, even in the face of everything we’ve seen, is any
different than what you believed
yesterday
, right here.”
Cyrus tapped Tanner hard over his heart. “So wallow in the shock if
you must, but as soon as you’re done, you let me know. Because
we’re gonna need every available mind to get to the bottom of this
ocean of monkey shit, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna let you
bow out before the rest of us do.”

Cyrus stood breathing heavily. His fists were
clenched and sweat was running into his beard. Then, when he
regained awareness of his surroundings, Cyrus retreated to the back
of the mining lev and closed his eyes, hoping lassitude would again
overwhelm his overzealous senses.

Cyrus shambled into the barracks and grabbed
Paeryl, pulling him aside even as Paeryl bellowed, “Are we
winning?” at the group as they entered. After Cyrus spoke to him,
Paeryl immediately called another man, older looking than himself,
and they both ushered Cyrus into a chamber they had previously not
been allowed to enter.

As soon as the door slid shut behind them,
the door to the lab area whooshed open and Davidson and Toutopolus
stumbled over each other in childlike excitement. They brought a
datadeck over to Tanner and Uzziah. “I think we’ve cracked the seal
on this Eos thing,” Davidson belted out, almost out of breath.

“Where’s Cyrus?” Toutopolus asked, a look of
impending horror replacing his excitement.

“I think he’s already made his decision,” Tanner
pointed to the forbidden door that was opening again. Two women
brought indiscernible items to the doorway, and Paeryl beckoned
them in.

“This cave is a sacred place. It contains the
life-blood of our existence,” the man Paeryl had addressed as the
Hierophant of Cups delivered in a soft, monotonous voice that was a
sobering contrast to Paeryl’s bombast. “The cave lives with us,
even outside these walls. It understands us better than we
understand ourselves.” The women who followed behind systematically
handed Cyrus a folded cloth and a small box. They moved down a long
corridor lit by dim, red lighting tubes. “You will present yourself
to the Eos as you were presented to this existence, naked and
wanting.”

The procession stopped, and it took Cyrus a
moment to realize they were waiting for him to remove his clothes.
He was a little reluctant, but in the dim light, he saw Paeryl nod
slowly, and then he thought of Darius. Whatever had brought Darius
to fratricide, however justified it may have been, whatever had
brought about the death of Alexander, was not going to be uncovered
easily, and whatever was in this cave that allowed these people,
what had allowed his son, to survive in this environment, was
paramount.

Cyrus removed his clothing and the Hierophant
collected them. “Alone and desperate you shall descend, but
fulfilled you shall emerge. You shall present yourself to the
waters and your fate shall find you.” The Hierophant shuffled a
deck of cards methodically then handed Cyrus five cards, each
covered in a sheath of plastic.

“Take these and find yourself.”

Cyrus took the cards, and as he turned to
face the pathway deeper into the cave, he felt another sharp pat on
his back.

His chaperones retreated, and for the first
time since he had been in that interrogation room, he felt utterly
alone. Cyrus stood there for a moment. His belligerence had
subsided, and now his stomach was tightening in on itself. He moved
forward, shuffling his feet along the smooth, cool floor. The path
was longer than he had expected, and he was sure he had walked for
fifteen minutes when, finally, he reached the wide chamber. The dim
red light cast an eerie hue and made the small pool in the center
of the room look like blood. The room itself had an odd, barely
perceptible scent of sweetness that resembled warm bread. Cyrus
expected the cold of the room to send a chill over his body, but
his gooseflesh must have been spawned from anxiety, as the chamber
proved warmer than the passageway.

As he moved to the edge of the pool, the
water itself shocked him. Not because it was frigid, but because it
was not as cold as it should have been. The water was only
lukewarm, but it was warmer than it should have been on its own
accord. There must have been some sort of hot spring here that
originated deep beneath the surface. Cyrus tested the floor of the
pool with his feet and sat down, unsure how long he would have to
sit or even what he was waiting for.

Inside the pool, Cyrus held the five cards in
his right hand beneath the surface of the water as he had been
instructed. He tried to clear his mind, but he could not help
thinking of Darius spending many hours each day chatting with a
computer, a distorted effigy of his father his only company. Darius
should have been there with him. Should have been there to help him
through everything he had gone through. The Darius hologram seemed
excited to see him, but what the Xerxes unit could not possibly
know was that it had recorded and reproduced a pain in Darius’s
eyes that only Cyrus could know, because he, and only he, had seen
that same look, had shared that same pain as he had boarded the
shuttle to Eros amidst the waves and smiles of the spectators who
had come to see the voyage off. And that is all they had been,
spectators. Cyrus smiled and he waved as best he could, but it was
houndshit, a jetwashed attempt at portraying the image everyone had
expected to see, feeble as the wills and minds that had made a
mission that should have been exploratory necessary to human
survival.

And the fury rushed into him again. Why did
he get on that shuttle? Why didn’t he turn around, spit in each of
the faces of the flag-waving, cheering throng that urged him to
walk away from the only thing he ever cared about for their own
selfish survival…

…but they weren’t the only ones that had been
selfish, were they? No, Cyrus didn’t get on that shuttle for the
good of the multitude that applauded as he left his own life
behind; it wasn’t for their livelihoods, the livelihoods of their
children, or their children’s children. He left because he—he—had
to. And now, here he was, faltering under the weight of sheaves
sown with his own hands. It was the fruit of his own pride. Pride
that had demanded his son’s penance—and what bitter fruit it
was.

He didn’t know how much time he had been there, but
his vision began to fade sooner than he had expected. His blood
seemed to chill even as his skin seemed to burn from the outside.
Sweat formed thickly on his brow, feeling more like blood that
perspiration, but he didn’t bother to wipe it away. His eyes became
heavy, as if the bloody sweat tugged at his eyelids, pulling him
deeper into the pool that seemed even bloodier as he sank in
deeper. And then, as his eyes closed, he was left with only the
sound of his own heartbeat thundering through his eardrums.

The landscape was immense. Cyrus was standing
on a tuft of land that seemed to be rising. The horizon slowly
bowed at the vanishing point as more and more nothingness crept
into view.

And then his legs thrust him forward. The
little girl was going to die. She was just on the other side of the
horizon, and she only had moments to live. The perspective of the
landscape shifted as he ran; he was descending the hill, but he
could not feel the pull that gravity exerted on his body, nor could
he feel the ground beneath his feet.

And then he was up higher, moving faster than
he ever could have moved on his own volition. And as the sun sank
below the horizon, the sky became impossibly black. Dark tendrils
of smoke billowed up where the sun had set, as if the sun itself
had crashed into the ground beyond the horizon, extinguishing
itself in a grand conflagration.

The billows forming on the horizon grew, and
even as dark as the starless, abysmal night was, they seemed
darker. The billows filled the sky as he rode harder, and as they
grew, the inchoate mass began to form more corporeal claws, teeth,
eyes.

The young woman was there, full of ennui as
before, seemingly oblivious to the abomination forming behind
her.

Then the dark form reared back, bared its
teeth, flexed its still forming haunches, and splitting the air
with a roar that shook the ribs in Cyrus’s torso, pounced on the
hapless woman.

As the beast came down around her, the
swirling cloud dissipated into a foul mist. The fog spread out
toward Cyrus and wafted around him as he rode, threatening to
consume him as well, but keeping its distance. The fog swirled and
grumbled, as if its hunger had not been satiated by the kill. A
pressure began to build behind Cyrus’s eyes, but he held it back
and continued to ride into the morass in abject refusal of the
obvious truth.

And then he reached her, and he saw the truth
had not been so obvious. The girl lay there in a perfect circle of
what Cyrus instantly knew to be blood. He was off the evanescent
steed now, standing on his own, and he could see her head, arms,
and legs placed on the edge of the circle at five equidistant
points. She was not dead, but she did not give the impression of
life. The flame in her that burned within all living things had
been reduced to embers, rendering her eyes glassy; her already
affectionless gaze was now as vacuous as the starless night above
them.

And there was a spear. At first it seemed
like she had been impaled through the skull by it, but it had not
harmed her. It sat there, perfectly perpendicular to the ground,
lodged in the earth, pinning a ring that pierced through the girl’s
ear lobe.

Cyrus ran to the spear and grabbed the shaft,
curious as to why the beast had left its prey here like this. He
yanked at the spear, and it took more effort than Cyrus expected to
pull it from the ground. A howling wind blew around him as the
vapor stirred again. Then Cyrus realized it was not the wind, but
the young girl screaming and pointing at the sky as she was freed
from her strange shackle. And as the scream dug deep into his ears,
curdling the fluid in his spine, he realized that the girl had not
been the prey at all.

Cyrus looked up to see the mist coiling
again, maw gaping, and horror transfixed him as he smelled the
acrid breath of the beast and marveled at its size. He flipped the
spear over in his hand to face the point upward, he let his knees
give beneath him, and as the ground pulled him in as the beast
lunged at him with another, eager bellow, Cyrus caught his own
weight, let out a cry of his own, and leapt spear-first into the
leviathan’s mouth.

• • • • •

—
Dada, how come you don’t wear the same fancy
clothes some of the other dads do?