Dusk (44 page)

—
I guess suits and ties aren’t really my thing.
Why do you ask?

—
I dunno. I think mommy likes suits and ties and
stuff. Yesterday, when we went to pick up my Easter suit, she spent
a lot of time looking through the grown-up clothes. Maybe you
should put on a suit for mommy one day. I think she would like
it.

—
You know, I don’t think any of my suits even fit
anymore.

—
Why do people like suits so much? They are itchy
to me, and you gotta walk around like you’re scared of everything
so you don’t get dirty—all prissy like Genivere—that part’s
complete bunkus.

—
Well, maybe that’s part of it for me too. Do you
remember the story of the peacock and the puhuy?

—
Ha, of course. Puhuy is such a funny
word.

—
Okay, so what happens?

—
The birds all have their feathers in a bunch
because the bird god—what was his name?

—
Chaac.

—
Yeah, well he says they need to elect a new
king. The peacock feels like he should be king because he can sing
so well, but he is ashamed to nominate himself because his feathers
are all pasty and ratty. So he goes to the puhuy, who is all meek
and quiet and never comes out of his nest but has a beautiful set
of feathers. The peacock asks to borrow the puhuy’s feathers until
the election is over. The puhuy doesn’t really want to cuz the
peacock is kind of a jerk, but he does anyways.

—
Go on.

—
So the election day comes, and the peacock shows
up with his new fancy feathers and sings and all the other birds
are all wowed out. So the election goes down and they make the
peacock the king. And the peacock is all happy. The puhuy is so
ashamed that he’s all naked that he doesn’t even go to the
election. So the peacock just keeps the puhuy’s feathers cuz he
likes them so much and doesn’t keep his promise. The puhuy never
says anything, he just hides.

—
So what happens?

—
One day, Chaac is visiting the birds and sees
the puhuy all by himself. He asks him what happened to his
feathers, and the puhuy tells him the whole story. So Chaac goes to
the peacock and lets him keep the feathers, but makes him sound
like a dying duck when he tries to sing.

—
And what happens to the puhuy?

—
Nothing I guess, but he doesn’t get his feathers
back. I guess in a way, he kinda gets punished too.

—
Why?

—
I dunno. I never really understood that
part.

—
Well, I have an idea. I think it’s because the
puhuy just let the other birds slap him around and didn’t do
anything about it.

—
Shouldn’t the god protect him more then?

—
Well maybe, but what would their life have been
like then? You want me and your mom to follow you around at school
and make sure no one ever bothers you?

—
Eww, no.

—
Why not?

—
Cuz then I’d look like a big sissy.

—
Exactly. You see, from what I’ve seen, sitting
in your own little corner and keeping your mouth shut is one thing;
letting people walk all over you is something else. Bottom line,
meek is as it is, but if you don’t ever stand up for yourself, all
you’ll ever inherit is misery.

—
Okay, but what does that have to do with wearing
a suit?

—
Well, look at the peacock. All he did to get
elected was impress the other birds. No one even questioned where
his feathers had come from.

—
Well, isn’t being impressive important
too?

—
Sure, if something about you that helps you do
your job is impressive. The point is, the peacock looked fancy and
sang well, but deep down, he was still a turkey. Way I see it, if a
man can’t do his job in his underwear, he can’t really do his
job.

—
So you don’t wear suits cuz they make you look
like you can’t do your job?

—
No, whether I wear a suit or not, I’m gonna do
my best to do what I say I can do. I don’t wear suits cuz they are
uncomfortable, and I don’t want to walk around acting like a
sugar-coated sissy because I’m afraid to get dirty. If the suit
makes the man, he isn’t much of a man to begin with.

—
Maybe Dada, but they do make you look stellar.
Maybe sometimes that’s enough, at least for mommy.

—
Maybe you’re right Dari, but sometimes with your
mother it’s hard to tell.

—
Could be, but is there really anything wrong
with looking stellar?

—
I guess not, if you actually are
stellar.

—
Well, I think you’re pretty stellar Dada, so
maybe you should wear a suit more often.

—
Maybe one of these days the suit I don’t mind
wearing will find me, Dari, and then everyone will be
happy.

—
I think whenever that does happen, Dada, you’ll
look pretty stellar in it.

• • • • •

Cyrus stepped into the vault in the white linen robe
that had been given to him before he entered the cave. He appeared
weary and somewhat ill. The pallid light of the room set an odd
sheen to his brown skin, but as he moved closer, it became clear
that the odd, greenish-sienna hue was not due to any light in the
room, but to the color of the skin itself. Tanner made space for
Cyrus to sit on the chair, and Cyrus let his legs give, plopping
into the chair like a bag of dirty laundry. “You look ill.”
Milliken moved toward Cyrus to get a closer look.

“It’s the Eos. I felt like I was dying. For a
while I passed out and I was sure I was dead. When I finally awoke,
I was surprised that I felt relieved.” Cyrus exhaled, but his
breath was not as exasperated as Milliken would have expected. “How
long was I in there?”

“About fifty-five hours. Paeryl said that was
shorter than most.” Tanner leaned over to get a closer look at
Cyrus’s face, his eyes. The green tint in Cyrus’s skin and in his
irises made him look as if there were a soft light following his
every move from above.

Darius moved to the center of the room.
“Dada, how does the sun feel to you now?”

“Honestly, it’s hard to place. When I left
the cave, they had me stand outside and walk. At first I felt like
I was going to vomit, and then, it felt like... I dunno... like
coming home after a long, painful trip—only it never subsided.”

“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.”