Dusk (9 page)

Cyrus looked at the man as he spoke,
understanding the words and their meaning, but having difficulty
with what was underneath. “That’s a kind of morose position to be
in.”

“It is what it is. Strangely, I still miss
them. And I don’t miss the lady friends nearly as much as I
expected.”

“Lady friends?” Cyrus could not hold back
another smirk.

Dr. Jang leaned forward a little bit, the
lapel of his lab coat draping from his shoulders as he inclined,
“What, I don’t seem like a ladies’ man to you?”

“Honestly,” Cyrus laughed clearly this time
and with more levity, “no. But then again, I wouldn’t know what a
ladies’ man was if I had a shop manual and a holodeck
tutorial.”

“You do seem a bit of the man’s man type,”
Dr. Jang reflected on his words for a moment then qualified as
Cyrus’s brow began to furrow, “I mean, like action hero man’s man,
not boy’s boy man’s man—not that there’s anything wrong with either
of those, if you are one.”

“It’s okay. I know what you mean, even though
I don’t see it sometimes.”

“You don’t?”

“Nah, I’m usually just as scared, nervous,
and distraught as everyone else. I just tend to be belligerent
about it. Besides, most of the bite in me came from my mother.”

Dr. Jang looked past Cyrus’s head for a
moment. It seemed like he was looking past the wall as he twirled
the stylus faster in search of some elusive thought. “A little hard
for me to see I guess. My mother never said much until I either
defied or embarrassed her, the latter of which wasn’t very hard to
do. Then it was like you had turned on a nag faucet and had broken
the knob. Only thing I learned from her was how to whine, gossip,
and throw tantrums.”

Cyrus was a little uncomfortable listening to
someone speak of his parents in that way. Dr. Jang’s tone was more
matter-of-fact than disrespectful, but it was unnerving
nonetheless. “What patience I do have I learned from my father,”
Cyrus continued. “My mother was a juggernaut. She was the one who
got in enough people’s faces to make sure I was tapped when they
sent me to Freeschool, and even though Laureateship was unheard of
in my district, my father made sure I stayed on top of my game so
no one could find an excuse to kick me out. My parents didn’t
really push me, but my father taught me how to keep people from
pushing me back. And my mother taught by example how to push people
out of the way of what I deserved.”

“She sounds like a good person to have in
your corner.”

“Well it wasn’t always apples and sweetbars.
Once, when I was about eight or nine, I was playing in the
lev-run—back when people still had lev-runs in front of their
houses. I was playing with some other Novitiates. We were playing
with those Planetwars robots that turned into spaceships. I had
just bought a Tiberius Vauxhall, it had working lasers on its arms,
and it had little action figures that were supposed to be pilots
and engineers. Plus it was always my favorite because of my middle
name. I was so proud because I had saved creds from my allowance
and doing odd jobs for relatives to buy it. It was the first thing
I ever bought with my own creds.”

“I remember that toy. It had the little
button on the side that shot missiles out of its chest,” Dr. Jang
seemed excited by the memory as he lost control of the spinning
stylus, but quickly regained it.

“That’s it exactly. Well, a kid named Fenton
Thorougood was playing with us. He was maybe three years older than
the rest of us and still a Novitiate. He was long overdue for
Freeschool at the very least, and evidently he was self-conscious
about it because he was an absolute son of an uberhound. Anyway, he
said that my Tiberius wasn’t nearly as cool as his Dreadnaught. And
I said if he had Dreadnaught, he should bring it so we could have a
battle, knowing full-well they hadn’t released Dreadnaught and
probably never would because the cel-shade had already been
cancelled. He said he couldn’t bring it out because his mom
wouldn’t let him. I said his mom wouldn’t let him bring it out
because it didn’t exist.”

Dr. Jang laughed, “You were a little
snap-monkey even when you were a Novitiate.”

“My sharp tongue seems to have developed with
the onset of speech.” Cyrus tapped his stylus on the side of his
ephemeris and then continued, “So this got him riled up and he
started stomping around the lev-run with my Tiberius. At the height
of his tantrum, he held it over his head, screamed some obscenity
at me, and slammed it into the ground. It shattered into about
seven or eight pieces. I remember it like it was in slow motion.
One of the lasers came on and stuck, and a green dot danced across
the lev-run as half of the arm flipped onto the house. Tears welled
up, and I ran into the house bawling. My mother, who was as
omniscient as she was fear-inducing, had seen the whole thing, but
she went through the motions anyway. She asked me what was wrong
and I told her through a hail of tears that Fenton broke my
Tiberius.”

“What did she do?” excitement had caused Dr.
Jang to stop spinning the stylus now, and he was literally sitting
on the edge of his seat.

“She told me to go back out there and beat
his ass.”

“So did you?”

“Did I? I was scared out of my mind. I was
small for my age and he was big for his, so the three years
difference was just an added bonus. I told my mom that he was
bigger than me, and that I was scared of him.”

“And…”

“She looked me right in the eye—I can still
remember her face clearly—and said calmly, ‘Then get a stick.’”

“Wow, how do you respond to that?” Dr. Jang
was sincerely bewildered.

“Well, the tears stopped in mid bawl, and I
cycled through all the places where I could remember seeing
anything that could be classified as a stick. Then, when it hit me,
I turned, went to my room, and came back with a vid runner from a
broken gram my dad had thrown away. Y’know, back when they used to
project the gram from the three plastic bars? I would pretend I was
the Laser Knight with the blue light staff from Planetwars. So I
grab this thing, and it’s almost as long as I was tall, and I take
it outside. Can you believe this freebirth was still outside in the
lev-run?”

“So what happened?”

“I walked up to him dragging the vid runner
behind me. This kennel waste just stood there looking at me, like
the idea of me standing up to him was unheard of. That’s what
finally set me off. I grabbed the runner with both hands and swung
it like I was trying to knock his head from his shoulders. The
thing caught him right in his temple so hard he spun on his heels.
And it must have knocked some sense into him because he broke into
a run like that’s why he had turned in the first place.”

Dr. Jang was holding his chest now laughing.
“What did you do?” he spat out between laughs.

“I chased him all the way home. I mean like
more than half a K, waling his back with the runner the whole way.
That test dummy never bothered me again.” Dr. Jang’s laughter was
infectious and Cyrus was chuckling at the memory himself.

“What happened to the Tiberius?” Dr. Jang
breathed out at the end of a guffaw.

“It was done for. I tried to put it back
together, but it was never the same again, and my mother wouldn’t
let me throw it away for a long time. Every time I saw it, it upset
me, but I never cried about it again.”

“Wow, I wish I had stories like that. Most
exciting thing ever happened to me was I flipped my mag-lev in a
lev race once.”

“You wreck it?”

“No, that’s the thing, I had put an
Interceptor drive in it. You know, like the cops have?”

“The one that give you z-axis acceleration?
Aren’t those illegal?”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t the problem. The
problem was it was an illegal lev race, and the people I was racing
with didn’t know about the Interceptor. Thanks to the Interceptor,
they couldn’t beat me over the speed humps in the ave we were doing
the laps on. I had hustled them out of a keel-load of creds. I hit
a refuse bin that someone had moved into a blind corner on one of
the laps and lost my y-axis. Only when I flipped over, my lev just
floated there upside down.”

Cyrus’s mouth was open, his face frozen in a
look of confusion.

“What?” Dr. Jang was not sure what to make of
the face.

“I’m trying to figure out how that’s less
interesting than beating a Novitiate with a vid runner.”

“Actually it gets better. So they were about
to flip their lids—and these were some pretty serious ggangpe. I
mean cut off your hand and send it to your next-of-kin type guys.
And they speed over to me and I’m just floating there like
something out of an old time two-D sci-fi vid. So I hit the
throttle and flew out of there upside down. Well, apparently,
someone had called the sniffers on the comm and I fly past the
speed trap upside-down with four tweaked-out mag-levs behind me.
Evidently, the sniffers thought it was the race so they rounded
everyone up and hauled them in.”

Now Cyrus was laughing, holding his chest.
“So you got gaffled?”

“You see, that’s the thing, I had disabled
the sat-link in the lev so they couldn’t track me, and I flew into
the hovel district—still upside-down mind you—and hid inside a
bombed out factory. I was so freaked out, I didn’t turn the lev
right-side up until I got back into my own district.”

Cyrus inhaled deeply then exhaled to settle
his lungs as Dr. Jang finished his story. “You sure are a wonder.
How many times have you had run-ins with the magistrate?”

“None. They never catch me. My lev was too
fast and had too many dirty tricks on it—shifting license code, a
speedcam jammer, and I had a deck that would automatically make my
lev-rec look clean if they tried to access it within a kilometer of
my lev.”

“Never expected any of this from you. No
offense.”

“The sniffers never did either. That was the
beauty of the whole deal. I still contend, with the right set up, a
Metriculant could get away with murder in the Uni.”

“Or, at the very least, vehicular
manslaughter.” They both had a long laugh until the door opened and
Dr. Cohn and Dr. Hassan entered, engaged in their own heated
conversation.

Cyrus let his laughter subside as he
collected his ephemeris and moved to his regular seat. Dr. Jang’s
laughter left more quickly, and as Cyrus sat in his seat, Dr. Jang
stowed his own ephemeris under the table. “You okay?” Cyrus asked,
noting the change in Dr. Jang’s expression.

“Yeah, I was just thinking, the smell I’m
probably going to miss most of all, is the smell of peppermint air
freshener and ozone from a tweaked lev drive.”

Cyrus leaned back in his chair and grinned,
“I bet. But I’m sure you won’t miss the smell of coffee and
sweetbars on some angry magistrate’s breath.”

• • • • •

“Shouldn’t you be flying the ship or
something?” Cyrus scoffed, trying to catch his breath.

“The ship flies on its own beta monkey, at
least until we get planet-side, which is more than I can say for
all the flotsam you’ve been talking.” It took Commander Azariah
Uzziah longer than it should have to realize Cyrus was joking.

“Well, since I can’t let my game speak for
me, I guess I’ll just have to keep up the
pro se
flotsam.”
Cyrus lifted the Kantistyka puck into the air and prepared to
serve. It began to hum as it left his hand and it hovered on its
own. He swung his arm, trying his best to snap his wrist and not
use his shoulder as Uzziah had just instructed him, but he leaned
in too much and connected with the puck in an awkward swipe.

Cyrus and Tanner were losing two to four to a
solo Uzziah. And one of their two points had been because Cyrus had
botched a volley so badly that the Commander stopped to see if
Cyrus had injured himself.

The puck moved forward at an undesirable
speed and in a direction even less desirable. Uzziah ran up to the
puck and hit it back. It still moved as if it were underwater but
moved too fast for either Cyrus or Tanner to get his paddle in
front of it. Cyrus dove, extended his paddle, and connected with
the puck. It wasn’t a graceful dive, and Cyrus bruised something in
his leg when he landed, but the puck bounced up slightly then
hovered and settled back to chest height. Even though Tanner was
not fully acclimatized to the sport of Kantistyka, he moved with
all the agility of a race-bred uberhound. Without hesitation, he
sent the puck back toward Uzziah before it came back to full hover.
Agile as he was, his abilities were still sophomoric, and his
volley, albeit faster than Cyrus’s serve, missed its mark
completely.

Commander Uzziah almost overran the puck,
which was losing momentum as it reached him, but he spun his body
around completely and backhanded it. The electronic puck absorbed
some of the force and countered it, but the motion of the swing
carried it across the centerline at a constant, and rather swift,
speed. It was so swift that it sped past Cyrus and Tanner and came
to an abrupt stop just outside the boundary line of the court.

Tanner retrieved the puck and reared his arm
back to serve, but stopped before he swung his paddle. “You are
pretty sharp. Especially considering you came out of the Hyposoma
only a little while before the rest of us.”

“I hated what it felt like coming out of
there. It was like someone transplanted my brain into the body of a
sick and awkward thirteen year-old boy. I’ve been working out every
day cycle since I got out of that jetwashed machine.” Uzziah looked
like he wanted to spit, but he held it in. “Took the whole six
month cycles since to gain back half of what I lost.”

“You should come to train with us in my
martial arts class,” Tanner invited, relaxing his paddle. Cyrus
looked at Tanner as he spoke, noticing the slight raise of his
eyebrows and the little wrinkle on his forehead that formed when he
was hatching some plan in chess. It usually came to naught when
Tanner played against Cyrus, but Cyrus knew it was a sign that he
had to be on his best game. But here, Cyrus was bewildered at what
Tanner was playing at.