Dusk (7 page)

—
People who don’t know you will always have
problems with your name. It’s the people that do know you that will
help add meaning to your name. But most importantly, it’s up to
you.

—
What do you mean?

—
I mean if you live your life well, like Darius
the Great, even if your name was Scariest or Derrière, when people
will say it they will smile.

—
I hope it’s not cuz they’re laughing atme
Dada.

—
Well, I guarantee, if you grow up anything like
your Dada, the ones who dolaugh at you won’t do it for
long.

• • • • •

Cyrus’s chest heaved, but it felt as if only hot,
noxious air had entered his lungs. He coughed a long, dry cough and
pushed feebly against the floor as a stream of drool escaped the
corner of his mouth. The string of saliva, thick and elastic,
danced its way to the floor in sync with the wobbling of his elbows
as he struggled to his knees.

“Again!” Tanner bellowed, his voice barely
audible over the throbbing in Cyrus’s ears. Cyrus rose to his feet,
head spinning from the effort, and snapped his body to attention.
“Ready position!” Tanner commanded. Cyrus bent his arms at the
elbow, balled his fists, and lifted them to his hips as the other
men in the room attempted to do the same. “Fighting stance!” Cyrus
thrust his back leg behind him. He could feel the weakness in his
arms as he raised them into defensive position. His knee wobbled
from fatigue and his thigh burned, threatening to cramp. Then, as
Cyrus exhaled as deeply as he could, sweat dribbled away from his
nostrils and he caught a telltale whiff of hydrochloric acid on
someone else’s breath.

Trying to hold it in only caused his
esophagus to spasm more violently, as Dr. Kristoph Davidson, the
ship’s botanist, charged with instituting an agricultural program
on Asha, ejected his breakfast and lunch all over the fitness
chamber floor. The stench washed over Cyrus like a fog and the
cramp took over, sending him to the ground in the puddle of
half-digested vitamins and amino acids. As Cyrus flopped
gracelessly through the puddle, covering his upper body with the
filth, Davidson’s deep green eyes looked apologetic, his tawny skin
now pale, and his hard features now slack from exertion. He reached
for Cyrus in a feeble attempt to help him up, but Cyrus stood on
his own, kindly waving Davidson’s hand away. Cyrus coughed again,
trying to eject as much of the stench from Davidson’s insides as he
could. “Will these sessions always be characterized with pain and
vomit?” Cyrus heaved more than asked, sweat spraying from his
nostrils with his words.

Still in his authoritative voice, Tanner
answered, “Vomit, no; pain, yes. But the pain you will learn to
love.”

Struggling to stay in his stance, Dr.
Milliken’s unkempt, reddish-brown hair fluttered, and sweat dripped
from the ends. His normally rosy complexion was now so sanguine he
looked as if he were developing a rash. His typical,
worried-looking facial expression had been replaced with an
expression of exhausted determination as he fought gravity and
atrophic muscles to hold his current body position. He turned to
face Tanner, who paced before him, Cyrus, Davidson, and Torvald as
his voice quivered in time with his unconditioned thighs, “Exactly
what kind of sadist are you, Dr. Tanner? Why are you torturing
us?”

“Firstly, in this dojo, makeshift as it may
be, you will all refer to me as
Sifu
Tanner,” the
consternation in his voice pressed against the padded metal walls
that began to close in again as Cyrus struggled to his feet. “And
in answer to your final question, I am torturing you so this brutal
environment that we will land on in five years cannot.” Tanner
moved over to Cyrus and adjusted the position of his ankle rather
brusquely. “And as far as the question of my particular brand of
sadism, it is the only brand you need fear.”

“So you’re saying we should fear you?” Dr.
Torvald asked, almost stumbling out of his own stance as he craned
his neck to face Tanner. “That doesn’t strike me as very
monk-like.”

“You need not fear
me
. I,” he paused
for theatrical emphasis, “am your friend, your colleague. What I
meant Dr. Torvald, is that in
this
room, the only paradigm
you need understand, is that when I hit you, you
will
fall—which means, when you bow at that door, Dr. Villichez and Dr.
Fordham no longer exist. I, and only I, write policy in
this
place.”

“So you…” Dr. Torvald began, but a stark
bellow drowned out whatever came afterward.

“Enough talk! Horse stances!” Tanner moved to
the side of the three men, closer to Dr. Torvald.

As Sifu Tanner passed outside of earshot,
Cyrus mumbled to Dr. Milliken, “This man is a lunatic.”

Cyrus turned to face forward, square his
shoulders, and suddenly Dr. Tanner was in his face, eye-to-eye,
close enough for Cyrus to smell his breath. He stood there for a
moment and Cyrus felt something icy at the nape of his neck. It
felt as if even his pores had stopped expelling sweat. Then Tanner
turned. It seemed as if he had smiled as he moved to his spot in
front of the line and dropped into his own horse stance, deeper and
infinitely more solid than those of his students. He demonstrated a
punch, crisp and firm, punctuated by a forceful
ki’a
erupting from his diaphragm. “This is a corkscrew strike,” he added
after the echo subsided. “This is the first attack you will
learn.”

• • • • •

The dinner table was busy with conversation
as Cyrus sat at the seat Tanner had saved for him. For the last few
week cycles, the mysterious unction that had served as the staple
of their diet in the first month had been replaced with real food,
or rather the most reasonable facsimile the Shipmate could produce.
The space, mass, and limited supply of nutrients reduced the
Shipmate’s palate to that of soybeans, wheat grass, and a breed of
grape genetically altered to minimize vine length. But that palate
and creative programming resulted in meals that were a welcome
departure from the warm pints of viscous fluid.

As Cyrus took his first bite, he marveled
over the taste of the sizzling soy-steak that the Shipmate had
placed before him. “How does the Shipmate make this taste like
this?” Cyrus asked.

Dr. Davidson swallowed his bite of
pseudo-steak and chimed in before it had completely gone down. “The
meat is made from a mixture of soybeans and wheatgrass, but the
meat taste is a byproduct of the iron and fat supplements added to
the food for balanced nutrition.” He smiled and basked proudly for
a moment before returning to his steak with his shoulders a little
higher than before.

“I assume you had a hand in designing the
nutritional program for the ship?” Cyrus asked as he put another
bite in his mouth.

“Actually, I only designed the hydroponic bed
and the aeroponic nutrient delivery system, but I had to work
closely with the nutritionists to maximize the quality and
longevity of the rations. Also, I helped create a system that can
easily be converted for use in the settlement.”

“Excellent job indeed,” Dr. Villichez added.
“I seem to have left most memories of steak behind in the whole
Hyposoma process, but this is surely an excellent reminder.”

Dr. Winberg finished churning a bite that had
been almost too large for his mouth. “You wouldn’t happen to have a
program for lobster bisque would you?” He laughed at his own joke,
but the lines in his forehead bespoke a vein of seriousness in the
comment. A few of the scientists laughed as others continued their
own individual conversations.

“So,” Villichez began with a tone of
mediation, dragging the two-letter word longer than necessary, “who
would like to open the table for discussion?”

“I have a question,” Dr. Taewook Jang, the
ship’s computer specialist, raised his hand beside his head. “The
committee who chose the delegates for this expedition, is there any
reason why they didn’t choose any women?” Dr. Jang brushed his hair
over his shoulder as he lowered his hand.

Dr. Winberg laughed openly at the comment.
Bewildered by both the audacity and the intent of Dr. Winberg, Dr.
Jang smiled a little and chuckled unenthusiastically as he exhaled.
Winberg noticed the mixture of uncertainty and irritation that
seemed to flutter the lapel of Dr. Jang’s lab coat momentarily. “I
am not laughing at your comment, Dr. Jang. I am merely amused by
the notion of men and women corralled in a giant stylus away from
their families for five years.”

“Well, what would be so bad about that?” Dr.
Torvald questioned. “It’d be nice to have some estrogen on this
craft to help break up the constant masculinity in this place.
We’ve only been awake for a month and a half and the ship already
seems like a locker room.”

Dr. Koresh cleared his throat and let his
fork clang against the table as he set it next to his plate, “Let
me add, first of all, when backed into a corner or ‘crammed into a
giant
stylus
,’ as Dr. Winberg put it, humans exhibit more
monkey-like qualities than we would like to admit.”

“What does that mean?” Dr. Milliken, normally
a quiet observer throughout these dinnertime conversations, asked
through his napkin.

Dr. Winberg rested his forearm on the table
and leaned on it to shift his weight in his chair. “What he means
is arguments are not the only things caused by the volatile mixture
of testosterone and estrogen. Under the pressures of sitting in
this oversized bullet-casing for five years, plus the stresses of a
year of pioneering, it would not be long before this entire
expedition turned into an extended holovision melodrama.”

Cyrus chuckled to himself as he shuffled
through the spurious mashed potatoes in front of him. Winberg
zeroed in on him almost instantly. “Something amusing on your plate
Dr. Chamberlain?”

“Well, I would argue holonovella drama is
unavoidable under this type of stress, regardless of the number of
vulvae present. I agree with your assessment, but I wonder, with
the collection of Nobel Laureates and general braniacs we have
assembled here, exactly long it would take this
bullet-casing
to turn into a full-blown Bacchanalia. Hell,
you don’t need to know much Greco-Roman history to know it doesn’t
really take fallopian tubes to have a Bacchanalia. Maybe we should
synchronize our watches and start the countdown now.”

“Dr. Cyrus Tiberius Chamberlain, must you
always
be so crass?” Dr. Villichez’s plate rattled briefly
under the weight of a fist clenched around a fork.

“I apologize,” Cyrus nodded his sincerity
toward Dr. Villichez, and then laughed at his potatoes again, “I
just wanted Dr. Winberg to know I was laughing
with
him, not
at
him. Not exactly dinner table fare though,
admittedly.”

Amidst a volley of mumbles and grunts erupted
a barely audible, “Unless it
is
a Bacchanalia!” A wave of
laughter spread across the table like a nova. Even Villichez,
however reluctant, loosened his fist and allowed a smile to creep
across his face. Cyrus could not tell where the comment had come
from, but he noticed the bangs of Dr. Jang now hanging over his
face, shifting as air passing on laughter escaped from rapidly
contracting lungs.

• • • • •

—
How did the Math Finals go today Dari?

—
I don’t want to talk about it Dada.

—
That bad?

—
It was plenty fine at first, I had all the other
Laureate candidates beat by like five hundred points. I had the
highest score by one hundred points.

—
Well, what happened?

—
Genivere happened... again. Somehow she managed
to make up over two hundred points in the last round. It was a
slaughter Dada. I felt like I was standing still. I don’t know why
I can’t beat her Dada. No matter how far I get ahead, she always
seems to find a way. Always. What am I doing wrong?

—
Hmm… You know, once, a while ago now, I came to
pick you up from Entrance School. You were no more than maybe four.
You were a little small, even for your age, but you always played
with the big kids. Even then you said the kids your age were dumb
as lab rodents. Not sure how you knew what a lab rodent was, but
you said it and meant it. But this particular day I showed up early
to talk to your room steward. She seemed distraught because you had
been playing with the older boys all day. They were actually
already tapped as Novitiates; they were just waiting to
matriculate. She took me to the playroom but we stayed in the
observation lounge. As soon as I got there, I knew why she was
disturbed. You looked like a chipmunk next to the other boys. They
were just a little older than you are now. You were playing Police
and Thieves, and for fun, they had pegged all the younger kids as
thieves. One of the more heavyset boys was sitting on the two of
your fellow thieves and you were hiding in a Styroprene box. They
surrounded you with their hands in gun shapes and ordered you to
come out. The box shook a little and they all got ready to give you
the same treatment they gave the others. They fired off a round of
warning shots, saying ‘Pow-pows, pop-pops, and bang-bangs’ And just
as they seemed confident in their victory, you burst from the box.
Styroprene flew everywhere. You vaulted off something that had been
in the box, and with both hands shaped like guns, bellowed out
‘DOOSH, DOOSH, DOOSH’ carrying more bass than I think I have ever
heard in your voice. The older boys were so startled and impressed
that they played along. The chunky kid even got off the other two
and clutched his chest as you fired two shots his way. They all
collapsed to the ground in undeniable defeat, because they really
didn’t know what else to do. If someone comes out of the box with
bass in his voice like that, there isn’t much else you
cando.