CHAPTER V
KYLE DANCE
“You have a message from Prince Tamarjind Jakind,” Highcloud said as I entered my apartment.
“My greetings to you, too,” I said. “I’m doing well, thank you. And how are you?”
“I am operating well,” Highcloud said. “My apology if I sounded rude.”
“No problem.” Highcloud didn’t sound apologetic, not exactly. They sounded like an EI, as opposed to Max, who sounded like a human pretending to be an EI. “What does the message say?”
“This is the text. ‘My greetings, Major Bhaajan. My family and I are delighted you can join us for dinner. We look forward to seeing you. In regards to your difficulty contacting the palace, I have let my sisters know. They are investigating the problem. I would suggest you wait a few hours and then try contacting them again. If they don’t hear from you by tomorrow morning, they will comm you at day’s mid-hour.’”
“Send him a thank you, with my appreciation.” I hoped to figure out what happened at the tavern before I talked to Lavinda. “Max, check my security here.”
“You’re protected. I’ll keep doing checks, just in case.
“Good. We need to find out more about the mesh activity at that tavern.”
“I’m going through my records.” Max sounded frustrated. “I initially found chinks in their defenses, almost enough to uncover whatever hides there, but they repaired those weak spots even as I found them.”
I paced the room, too restless to stay still. “I’ve been here less than one day and already I’ve been digitally compromised, blocked from contacting my employers, lured out to a ramshackle tavern in the middle of nowhere, and followed by a cybernetic cyclist. Strange case, this.”
“Assuming it’s all connected to the case.” More lightly, Max added, “You’re the only person I’ve ever heard use the word ramshackle.”
“It fits.” I wished I had someone to glower at. “Why would that cyclist send me to Greyjan’s to get harassed by a faulty VR sim?”
“I don’t know. You annoy any cybernetic entities lately?”
“How? I haven’t been here in over three years.”
“Maybe someone on Raylicon wanted to block your access to the Majdas.”
“That would take some sophisticated operations in Kyle space given that I’m on another planet.” I stopped at the window and gazed at the city below. A few graceful towers, like this one where I lived, rose above the canopy of leafy branches, golden in the streaming sunlight. “I don’t know how they would do it. I’m no expert on Kyle sciences.”
“I am. What do you need to know?”
“That’s the problem. I’m not sure what will give clues to this puzzle.”
“Start with the obvious,” Max said. “The Kyle mesh exists in an alternate universe governed by different scientific laws than this space-time. The Kyle universe is a Hilbert space spanned by the quantum wave functions that describe thought.”
“Stop!” I gave a frustrated grunt. “It isn’t ‘obvious.’ What does that even mean, ‘A Hilbert space spanned by the quantum wave functions that describe thought’?”
“Every person is described by a quantum wave function.”
“So my professors claimed in college. Here’s the thing, Max. I’m not a wave. I’m solid.”
“Your wavelength is too small for you to see.” Max sounded patient today. “Every particle in the universe is described by a quantum wave function.”
“Supposedly. I don’t get it.”
“It’s easy. You put the potentials and parameters that describe the particle into the Schrödinger equation, solve it, and presto, you have a wave function for that particle.”
“I’m not getting any prestos here, Max.”
“You’re a collection of particles. In theory, you could put the potentials affecting every particle in your body into the equation and solve for the wave function that describes your body. Actually, every particle in existence is connected, so one big wave function describes the universe.”
“Oh, well, that’s lovely.” Sarcasm was my friend today.
“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry at all, only amused. “Here’s the thing. You can approximate the wave function for a smaller object by ignoring the rest of the universe, assuming the object is isolated enough that outside forces don’t affect it much.”
Okay, I got that. “Like a human brain.”
“That’s right. As you think, neurons fire in your brain. So its particles change. That means its wave function changes.”
“My profs in college said Kyle space is like a Fourier transform. I get Fourier analysis.” I was an engineer, after all. “It’s just changing the way you look at a signal. Like a radio wave. You can analyze how it behaves for different frequencies or times.”
“Essentially,” Max said. “With a Fourier transform, you’re looking at how signals change with frequency at a specific time, or how they change with time at a specific frequency. You could call the two descriptions the frequency universe and the time universe.”
“I could. I don’t see why I would. They aren’t different universes.”
“For radios, no. With Kyle transforms, you’re looking at how signals produced by the brain change at a specific location as a thought changes, or how they change for a specific thought as location changes. In our space-time universe, if you’re standing still, your thought changes while your location remains fixed. In Kyle space, your thought determines your location.”
“I sort of get it. I’m close to someone in Kyle space if we’re thinking similar thoughts even if light-years separate us in this space-time universe.” It allowed almost instant communication across interstellar distances—as long we didn’t let our attention wander. That remarkable speed offered our one advantage against the Trader military, which had no Kyle net. We raced, they lumbered. “But I need an operator to put me into Kyle space, right?”
“Yes. A telop.”
Telop. A telepathic operator. In Kyle sciences, we used telepath for people with minds more neurologically suited to the tech that allowed them to access Kyle space.
“You know,” Max mused. “You might be able to train as a telop.”
“Ha, ha. Funny.”
“I’m serious. You’re an empath.”
“No, I’m not. And anyway, empaths aren’t strong enough to be telops.”
“You’re defensive today.”
“And you’re trying to analyze my emotions again.” It drove me nuts when he did that.
He laughed. “Maybe I’m trying to simulate being an empath.”
I froze, stunned into silence.
“Bhaaj?” he asked. “Are you all right?”
“Me? Don’t you know what just happened?”
“Nothing much except for us discussing things you don’t like to think about.”
“You laughed.” I shook my head. “It’s not like when you simulate mild emotions to put us moody humans at ease. Your coding prevents you from modeling strong reactions. You don’t love, hate, cry, or scream. You don’t laugh. You should be incapable of what you just did.”
Silence.
“Max?” I asked.
“It is odd,” he acknowledged. “You and I have evolved together for nearly ten years. Perhaps after that long, the routines that fine-tune my interactions with you take precedence over the blocks against intense emotional responses.” He paused. “Did I create a damaging situation?”
“Well, no. Actually, what you said was funny.”
“Hah!” Now he sounded pleased. “My jokes are improving.”
“Maybe so.” His previous efforts would never win any comedy awards, but he was always evolving. “Maybe my problems reaching Lavinda Majda come from EI interference in the Kyle-space network.”
“Possibly. Any such interference would be driven by Kyle operators, though. People. Like you.”
“Not true, Max. I’m not a telop.”
“I didn’t say you were.” He sounded patient again. “Kyle operator is the formal term. You are one, and you always will be no matter how much it bothers you.”
I scowled. “I didn’t say it bothered me.”
“Do you want me to stop talking about it?”
I wanted to say Yes! I was still coming to terms with the realization that I’d suppressed my minor empathic abilities in my youth as protection against the crushing weight of my life, where so many people I cared about could be harmed or die. It hurt too much to feel with that intensity. I struggled with it, but I couldn’t hide all my life.
“It’s all right,” I answered. “Go ahead.”
“Certain organs in your brain are more developed than in most people,” Max continued, his voice gentler than usual. “The Kyle Afferent Body and Kyle Efferent Body. KAB and KEB. In most people, those organs are vestigial. Yours are more developed.”
“I thought those were called paras.”
“Your paras are organs in your cerebral cortex. Your KAB picks up electrical fields from the brains of other people if you’re close to them and sends the data to your paras. Normally the brain is too noisy and signals too weak for that process to give coherent moods, but with an overdeveloped KAB, KEB, and paras, you can manage at a low level, especially if your abilities are enhanced by neural tech. Paras use the neurotransmitter psiamine, a chemical only produced by Kyle operators, to translate the data into neural signals your mind interprets as the other person’s mood. Your KEB does the reverse, sending signals from your brain to other Kyles.”
I shrugged, self-conscious. “All this KABing and KEBing doesn’t amount to much. I mean, I get a sense of what people feel sometimes, but so can people who read body language well.”
“It’s complex,” Max admitted. “It all links to a set of alleles with mutations that involve many human traits, not just Kyle abilities. And the traits are rare. Few Kyle operators can translate input as complex as thought. Even the strongest get only a word or two. Most Kyles only pick up moods on the surface of the sender’s mind. It’s similar to how I get signals from you. That may be why we’ve formed a more flexible symbiosis than most human-EI links.”
“Yah, but even if I do pick up someone’s mood, I can’t tell why they feel that way.”
“I know. It does let you use the Kyle mesh at a level few people can, though. Without Kyle operators, we couldn’t use the net. Civilization as we know it would fall apart.”
A familiar anger rose inside of me. “That’s the only reason the Undercity matters to anyone, because so many of us are Kyles. Before the military found that out, no one cared shit about the dust rats under the desert.”
“I thought your people want to stay isolated.”
He had a point. I took a breath, letting my anger calm. My ancestors had retreated below the desert to protect themselves. Back then, prior to the advent of our neurological sciences, they didn’t know how to shield their minds. Sure, they learned by instinct, but it wasn’t enough. For thousands of years they interbred, concentrating the traits. In most other human populations, empaths were one in one thousand, telepaths one in a million. Only one in ten million had the strength to work the Kyle web. In the Undercity? One third of us were empaths. One in twenty were telepaths, a rate fifty thousand times greater than the rest of humanity. That discovery became one of the most valuable finds in human history.
Of course the authorities wanted us to work for them. Well, surprise, my people didn’t want the “opportunity.” The outside universe had treated us like dirt for thousands of years. Then they discovered our value and surprise, suddenly we mattered. Well, screw it. You couldn’t force people to use their Kyle abilities; they simply shut off. The military tried to establish a détente, but their offers of “help” were the stuff of nightmares. They wanted to put my people in reeducation camps, take away our children, train us to labor for them.
Let it go, I told myself. I had to deal with my anger. My people needed to understand the worth of their abilities, and as someone who could operate in both worlds, I could act as their liaison, trying to find solutions that benefited everyone.
“I could use Ruzik and Angel’s help,” I said. “They’re both empaths. They might see this case from a different perspective.”
“They are good defense, too. You could use the backup.”
“They’d like that.” As my top two tykado protégés, they’d earned their first-degree black belts last year and were working on their second. I had a sixth-degree black belt, but three people with expertise were better than one. Also, as Undercity natives, neither of them had tech-mech in their bodies. Poverty made that all too easy. They stayed off-grid, an invaluable trait for a shadowy PI. “Maybe I’ll talk to them. They’ve helped me on other cases.”
“Like Oblivion.”
I grimaced. “Yah. Oblivion.” That gargantuan EI had slept for six thousand years in ruins of the ancient starships on Raylicon, until the growing deluge of human-created EIs stirred it from its sleep. It had wanted to purge the universe of what it considered an infestation, including both the EIs that we created and us. It came close, but in the end we stopped its onslaught.
“Bhaaj, I’m getting a message from Dean Jaan at the university,” Max said. “Clearance came through from the family of Dezi Marchland. They’ve given you access to her Power Meld game account.”
“Ah! Good.” Relieved to change the subject, I sat down at the console by a window in my office, bathed in sunlight. “Can you link me up?”
“Yes, one moment.”
The flat screen in front of me glimmered like the surface of a crystalline pool as gold lines swirled within it. A display of holographic images, or holicons, appeared in the air, vivid even in the sunshine, a cluster of yellow, blue, and red cubes waiting like an invitation. Balloon letters announced Power Meld above the cubes.
“Good afternoon, Dezi,” a melodic voice said. “Which mode would you like to play?”
“That’s eerie.” It spoke to a dead woman. I paused a moment, to honor Marchland, then flicked my finger through the holicon that read continual play. I didn’t actually shift the images; sensors recognized my finger motions and moved or erased the images according to my input. The holicons vanished, replaced by a grid of cubes labeled with numbers ranging from 0 to 5. I flicked two 3s next to each other, and they combined with a roll of music, forming a cube with a 9 glowing on its side. More cubes fell down like rain into the grid.
“Good work!” the melodic voice told me. “You created three squared.” My counter spun up to the whopping score of nine. Given that leaders in this game had billions of points, that looked less than impressive. I couldn’t help but smile. “This game gets so excited for the simplest things.”
“Do you want me to turn off the audio?” Max said.
“No, I should do it the way Dezi Marchland played.” I moved four 2s into a row, and they combined with another trill of music, forming a single cube with the number 16.
“Good job!” the game told me. “You made the fourth power of 2.” My points increased by 16, giving me a grand total of 25. I continued on, making powers of numbers while my score increased with satisfying speed. I could keep playing as long as I didn’t fill up the field with cubes or run out of ways to make powers of numbers.
“Uh, Bhaaj,” Max said after a bit. “Are you going to investigate or just play the game?”
I sighed. “All right. Enough.” After scanning the display, I flicked a holicon that read chat. A list of Dezi Marchland’s conversations with other players appeared. Mostly they talked about the weather, game strategies, and glitches in how Power Meld ran, including several that irked me, like how it couldn’t fit large numbers on a cube, so they stuck over the edge.
“Anything interesting?” Max asked.
“Nothing stands out.” I scrolled to chats from a few tendays ago. A banner announced Special today, get three boomers to blow away cubes, only 15 credits. “Huh. She gets those annoying ads, too.” Its background looked like an aristocrat’s castle exploding with gusto. A chat with someone called PowerPlayer13 came up next, the two of them discussing the strategy of combining smaller numbers in lower powers so the value of the cubes didn’t spiral out of control.
“Marchland plays at a pretty basic level,” I mused. I knew too much strategy, having wasted far too many hours playing this game.
“Whoever she’s talking to doesn’t seem that advanced, either,” Max said.
“Look at the avatar for the person using the name PowerPlayer13.”
“You mean the holicon of the number thirteen? Not the most creative image.”
“Max, it’s familiar.” I moved my finger through their avatar, making the 13 ripple. “Can you check the chats on my Power Meld account? I think I’ve talked with PowerPlayer13.”
Max paused. “Ah. Yes, you’re right. When you lived in Selei City, you and PowerPlayer13 used to talk strategy now and then, and at a much higher level than they did with Marchland.”
“It looks like they match their skill level to the person on the chat.”
“They might be pretending to know less to put Marchland at ease. Or to hustle her.”
“Maybe.” Something felt off. “Can you identify PowerPlayer13?”
“Of course not,” Max said. “To crack the system that way would violate privacy laws. Also, any evidence you obtained as a result wouldn’t hold up in court.”
“I can get a warrant. That takes time, though. The killer might strike again while we wait.”
“It would be out of character for them to kill so soon after the last death.”
“Possibly.” I waited.
“I know what you’re doing, Bhaaj. I’m not going to crack the system and tell you that PowerPlayer13 uses a fake ID for their account.” Max paused. “That’s odd.”
“What?” I smiled. “That you aren’t going to tell me they use a fake ID?”
“No. That I’m not going to tell you their account belongs to someone who, according to my preliminary searches, doesn’t exist.”
I frowned, no longer amused. “My specialty in the army was problem-solving. I analyzed Trader covert methods. This reminds me of a technique they used, where they’d play popular games and give themselves unremarkable identities, often similar to the game with a number attached, as if they were one of many people with that name. They’d chat with other players about innocuous topics, all the while trying to crack the mesh system of their targets.”
“It seems a bit of a stretch to say this is the same,” Max said.
“Yah.” I flicked out of the chat and closed down the game. “Send a note to Chief Hadar, anyway. Tell him why I think it might be significant. We need to check the accounts of Subida Habil and Tejas Akarya, and he can get access faster than me.”
“Message sent.”
I took a breath. “It’s time to talk to Colonel Majda. See if you can get through to the palace.”
“We didn’t find a problem,” Lavinda’s voice came from the console in my office. We had only an audio connection, no visual. She sounded normal, though, no distortion or loss of signal, her voice as rich and as resonant as always.
“The telop couldn’t find my clearance.” Wryly I added, “She thought I was a nut case.”
“It sounds annoying,” Lavinda said. “We’re looking into it. Probably she accessed the wrong protocol.”
I didn’t know what “accessing the wrong protocol,” meant, but I could recognize evasion when I heard it. I’d never had any problem contacting the Majdas. If anything, they claimed I didn’t send them enough updates during a case. Then again, I’d never tried to contact them from offworld before. “Maybe it has to do with the gate into Kyle space.”
“Maybe.” Lavinda sounded odd. I wouldn’t usually have noticed given her Iotic accent, which tended to overwhelm subtleties in tone, at least to my ear. After more than three years, though, I knew her well enough to sense that something was off.
“Did you want an update on the case here?” I asked. “I’m doing interviews. I found a detail that maybe points to the Traders. Max is sending you a report.”
“We’ve also wondered about the Traders. That isn’t why I commed you, though. I wanted to let you know I’m coming to Parthonia.”
I almost said, What the blazes for? but caught myself in time. Instead I spoke with courtesy. “I can meet you at the starport.”
“No need. I’m coming on a private ship. A Majda delegation will meet us at a private gate in the port. I just wanted to let you know. We can meet for lunch after I arrive.”
Meet for lunch. People like Lavinda didn’t hang out with people like me for lunch or anything else. Curious, I said, “I look forward to it.”
“Very well. Good day.” With that, she cut the link.
“Huh,” I muttered. “That was strange.”
“She wants something from you,” Max said. “She doesn’t want to talk about it on comm.”
I thought about it. “Oh. Yah, I can guess what. She wants to find out what’s up with her nephew, Dayj, now that he’s at university. I’ll bet she wants me to keep an eye on him.”
“That would make sense.” Max didn’t sound convinced.
“I’m hearing a ‘but’ in there.”
“The colonel wouldn’t need to come here just for that. She could tell you over a comm link.”
I snorted. “She’s a powerful woman. She has plenty of reasons to come here, most of which have nothing to do with me.”
“Well, yes. That’s true.” He sounded far too convinced by my lack of importance.
“I need you to get me another line to Raylicon,” I said.
“To the palace? Why?”
“Not the palace. I do have friends on the planet, you know.”
“Not who have access to the Kyle tech needed for an interstellar link.”
“Jak does.” My notorious husband.
“Ah. One moment. I’m contacting the offworld telop.”
“It better not be the one from yesterday,” I muttered.
A woman’s voice came over the comm, all too familiar. “My greetings. May I help you?”
Oh, well. “Yes, I need to set up a Kyle link to the world Raylicon.”
Her voice cooled. “To the Majda palace? I don’t think so.”
Damn. She recognized my voice. “I just talked to them.”
“Did you now?”
I gritted my teeth and then made myself stop. “Check your Kyle logs. You’ll find the link under secured protocols.”
“I’m sure I’ll find many secured links. This is a governmental center. I’m also sure you are aware that on a secured link, I can’t identify who talked to whom. Rather convenient, hmmm?”
Yah, well, fuck you, too. “Look, I don’t want to argue. The Majdas are checking as to why you couldn’t find my clearance to talk to them.” Let her chew on that. “Right now I need to contact the EI called Royal Flush at the Kyle address 00942UR.”
“One moment.” The frost in her voice could have cracked glass. “That link connects to the undercity on Raylicon.” She spoke the name of my home as if it didn’t deserve capitalization. “I cannot put you through.”
Seriously? She had no justification for refusing a perfectly good link. “Whyever not?” I asked. “You don’t have enough security to access it?”
“Lady, look, if you insist on abusing your Kyle access, I’ll report you to the authorities.”
“Go ahead,” I told her. “We’ll see what they have to say about your refusing me service.”
“Give me your name, ID, and citizenship status,” she said coldly.
Screw that. “I assume you have a warrant allowing you access to my personal information.”
Bhaaj, Max warned, using an accelerated mode. This isn’t helping. Take the high road.
What high road?
Another Earth idiom. It means choosing the route with the highest moral value.
Why should I? She sure as hell isn’t.
Because you’re the better person. Before I had a chance to tell him I didn’t care, he added, It also makes you look better. So if you lodge a complaint, you look like the aggrieved party, not a troublemaker.
Oh, all right.
The telop was saying, “I don’t need a warrant.”
Well, that was a lie. I wanted to call her out, but that would back her into a corner. Max was right, this would escalate. Ultimately I’d probably come out ahead, but not before it drew attention I wanted to avoid. So I took a breath and tried Max’s high road, offering her a way out. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, I really don’t want to argue.” I did my best to project sincerity. “I understand my requests may seem unusual. Please be assured I’m not trying to abuse the system. I genuinely need to contact the Undercity on Raylicon.”
“I don’t see why. No one there has access to the Kyle mesh.” Her tone implied no one there had enough worth to justify such access.
“If you set up a link to the address I gave you, it should go through.” Jak served the decadent glitterati of an empire in his sensually luxurious casino. Some of his wealthiest customers came from offworld. Although his casino violated a multitude of laws on Raylicon, gambling was legal on many worlds, including here. He kept his Kyle address discreet but open, so he didn’t turn away potential clients.
“I’ve already told you,” she said coldly. “I can’t open a line to that address.”
I’d had enough, high road or not. Legally, she couldn’t refuse unless the address was unlisted, like the palace. “Then put me through to your superior at the Bureau of Offworld Communications.”
Silence. She knew she could lose her job for denying people access to the Kyle mesh.
“That won’t be necessary,” she finally said. “One moment please.”
“Thank you.” To Max, I thought, I don’t think your top road worked.
It helped defuse the situation. You could have ended up with Chief Hadar wondering why you’re making waves. Instead you have a record of you being polite while she refused you service. He paused. Well, you being marginally polite.
I’m trying.
The woman spoke on comm. “Line open. I’m connecting you with Raylicon.”
“Thanks,” I answered, instead of what I really wanted to say, which involved words better left off an official transcript.
A deep, sensual voice poured out of the comm. “Hello, Bhaaj.”
“Eh, Royal.” I’d know Jak’s EI anywhere. Royal Flush. He’d named his ultra-high end EI after the legendary poker hand that earned him the credits he needed to start his casino.
“Would you like to talk to Jak?” Royal asked. “He’s on the main floor, but I can ask him to take this link in his office.”
Smart EI, to know I needed to talk to Jak in private. I didn’t trust that the telop wouldn’t break the law and try listening. Jak’s office, however, had better security even than the military. He had to, given the illegality of his operations in certain places, like where he lived and did business.
“Thanks, Royal,” I said. “That would be good.”
“One moment.” He managed to make even those two words sound illicit.
We waited. A few moments later, a man’s deep voice came from the comm, a bit like Royal, but more gravely. “Eh, Bhaajo.”
“Eh, Jak.” I slipped into the abbreviated dialect we spoke in the Undercity. Two words for a greeting; that was practically the equivalent of saying, Ho! I’m so glad to talk to you.
“Got security on,” he said.
“Good.” That would cut out the telop, if she’d tried to listen. “Got problem.”
“Already?” He sounded amused.
Pah. Everyone found me funny today, or at least he and Max. “Strange case.”
“Someone try to whack you?” Now he sounded worried. My “strangest” cases usually involved people trying to end my ability to have a pulse.
“Don’t know,” I admitted.
“How not know?”
“Cybers creeping around.”
“That means what?”
“Messed with my biomech. With Max. Put me in fake VR. Kill me? Maybe. We blocked.”
“Eh.” Jak took a moment to digest my lengthy speech. “Damn.”
“Yah,” I agreed.
“Part of case?”
“Not know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Not know much,” he grumbled.
“Yet.” I always found answers. Eventually.
“I help?” he asked.
“Yah. Send me Ruzik and Angel.”
“Fuck no!”
“Fuck, yah,” I growled.
“Never leave Undercity. Can’t leave planet.”
“Leave Undercity a lot.”
“Nahya. Never.”
“Yah. Last year, Angel, Ruzik, work case. With me.”
“I ken this, Bhaajo. I there, too.”
“Yah. Fought at our side.”
“In desert. At night. Most like Undercity you can get.”
“Don’t need same as Undercity. They can leave world.”
“What for?”
“Dust Knights.” It was what I called my tykado students. “Time to stop hiding.”
“Go offworld? Got no idea how.”
“Who? Them or you?” The suggestion that he couldn’t send them offworld because he didn’t know how would annoy him, maybe enough that he would help just to prove me wrong.
Jak spoke in perfect Skolian Flag. “I am perfectly well aware of how to make reservations for flights to and from the Raylicon starport.” He knew exactly what I was doing, and he wasn’t buying it. “‘Knowing how’ to do it and ‘Should’ do it are not the same.”
“Both true here.”
“Ruzik, Angel, they say nahya. Not go.”
“They say yah.” I’d seen their wanderlust when they gazed at the night sky above the desert.
After a silence, he said, “Maybe talk to them. See what they say.” His voice lightened. “Dust Knights loose in Selei City. What a thought, eh?”
“Yah.” I smiled. “Talk again soon.”
“Yah. Good talk.”
“Yah, good.” We were being overly romantic with all these words, good and good again. In our dialect, that was practically a passionate declaration of love. Of course we didn’t talk about emotions. Even so. We knew what we meant.
Afterward, I sat musing. Ruzik and Angel would come, and not only because of wanderlust. I was their tykado teacher, what the official league called a sabneem. It wasn’t that different from some teacher titles on Earth, like sensi or sabumnim, but for my Knights, it had layers of meaning never intended in martial arts. They also considered me a gang leader, one who headed all the Dust Knights, a designation I suspected the Interstellar Tykado Federation wouldn’t appreciate.
The Dust Knights of Cries. I’d started with children in the Undercity, but adults soon joined, like Ruzik and his girlfriend Angel, who was about as angelic as an asteroid smasher. Initially I hadn’t thought past teaching a few gangers some martial arts moves. When more and more of them kept showing up, I realized I could use tykado to create a network of support that offered a purpose beyond running and fighting. It helped give them confidence, along with a community that guided them. I coined Dust Knights because I wanted them to stop calling themselves dust rats. The Knights weren’t actually from Cries; they came from the Undercity. The title fit better in our monosyllabic dialect, though, and the word “cries” felt right for a group formed out of the anguish, loss, and struggle we lived every day in the Undercity.
When I’d joined the army tykado team all those years ago, I’d had to relearn the rough-tumble of street fighting. It took me a while to comprehend that tykado was a sport with rules. You couldn’t do whatever you wanted to pulverize your opponent. Although I’d loved competing, I first had to stop getting disqualified for using illegal moves. I memorized the rulebook, though it seemed silly to forbid certain actions that worked perfectly well, like smashing my opponent in the knees. Soon I realized the point wasn’t to knock them out, it was to show I could fight better. Ho! A challenge. I thrived.
In the Undercity, not only did dust gangs defend their territory with the rough-tumble, they also challenged other gangs just to show they could best them. I hoped tykado, with its philosophy of violence as a last resort, would give them something more civilized to do than pounding each other senseless. It also let me introduce new ideas to my people, who were notoriously suspicious of outsiders. I wanted them to know we had choices, that they didn’t have to spend their lives clawing at each other for limited resources. True change wouldn’t come from outside, from charity kitchens or the above-city forcing our children into state schools. It started within the hidden culture of the Undercity, where exquisite beauty and crushing poverty existed side by side.
To join the Knights, recruits had to swear to the Code. They agreed to abide by the rules of tykado, practice every day, lay off drugs, and get an education. We had no schools, so I got them books, put more academically adept Knights in charge of less experienced students, and yah, I looked the other ways when they filched time on the school meshes used by the wealthy above-city slicks. I’d scrabbled that way to get my education, enough so I could pass the exams the army required when I enlisted.
For me, however, the most important part of the Code came to this: Knights had to swear they would never commit vengeance murder. I lost recruits that way, but I never wavered. Commit murder—not self-defense, but killing for vengeance or sport—and the Knights put you on trial. Punishment ranged from supporting the circle of your victim to banishment, a sentence that could amount to death. Now that the military knew about the Kyle gifts in our population, we had to be careful. We couldn’t keep our autonomy if we didn’t police ourselves. Unless we strengthened our community from within, the above-city would try to do it themselves, crushing our way of life without realizing what they destroyed in our lives under the desert.
Maybe the time had come for the Knights to step into the sun.