Tyler directed the others to go back to work and took Erno into another room. This one had a cot, a pile of clothes, and bulbs of alcohol lying around. On a wall screen was a schematic of the colony’s substructure.
Tyler pushed a pile of clothes off a chair. “Sit down.”
Erno sat. “You knew about this place before we came here the night of the riot.”
Tyler said nothing.
“They asked me if there was a conspiracy,” Erno continued. “I told them no. Is there?”
“Sure there is. You’re part of it.”
“I’m not part of anything.”
“That’s the trouble with men among the cousins, Erno. We’re not part of anything. If a man isn’t part of something, then he’s of no use to anybody.”
“Help me out, Tyler. I don’t get it.”
“They say that men can’t live only with other men. I don’t believe that. Did you ever study the warrior culture?”
“No.”
“Men banding together-for duty, honor, clan. That’s what the warrior lived by throughout history. It was the definition of manhood.
“The matrons say men are extreme, that they’ll do anything. They’re right. A man will run into a collapsing building to rescue a complete stranger. That’s why, for most of human history, the warrior was necessary for the survival of the clan-later the nation.
“But the twentieth century drained all the meaning out of it. First the great industrial nations exploited the warrior ethic, destroying the best of their sons for money, for material gain, for political ideology. Then the feminist movement, which did not understand the warrior, and feared and ridiculed him, grew. They even persuaded some men to reject masculinity.
“All this eventually erased the purpose from what was left of the warrior culture. Now, if the warrior ethic can exist at all, it must be personal. ‘Duty, honor, self.’”
“Self?”
“Self. In some way it was always like that. Sacrifice for others is not about the others, it’s the ultimate assertion of self. It’s the self, after all, that decides to place value in the other. What’s important is the self and the sacrifice, not the cause for which you sacrifice. In the final analysis, all sacrifices are in service of the self. The pure male assertion.”
“You’re not talking about running into a collapsing building, Tyler.”
Tyler laughed. “Don’t you get it yet, Erno? We’re living in a collapsing building!”
“If we produce this virus, people are going to die.”
“Living as a male among the cousins is death. They destroy certain things, things that are good-only this society defines them as bad. Fatherhood. Protection of the weak by the strong. There’s no force here, Erno. There’s no growth. The cousins are an evolutionary dead end. In time of peace it may look fine and dandy, but in time of war, it would be wiped out in a moment.”
Erno didn’t know what to say.
“This isn’t some scheme for power, Erno. You think I’m in this out of some abstract theory? This is life’s blood. This-”
Sid ran in from the hall. “Tyler,” he said. “The warehouse door has cycled again!”
Tyler was up instantly. He grabbed Erno by the shirt. “Who did you tell?”
“Tell? No one!”
“Get the others!” Tyler told Sid. But as soon as Sid left the room an explosion rocked the hall, and the lights went out. Tyler still had hold of Erno’s shirt, and dragged him to the floor. The air was full of stinging fumes.
“Follow me if you want to live!” Tyler whispered.
They crawled away from the hall door, toward the back of the room. In the light of the wall screen, Tyler upended the cot and yanked open a meter-square door set into the wall. When Erno hesitated, Tyler dragged him into the dark tunnel beyond.
They crawled on hands and knees for a long time. Erno’s eyes teared from the gas, and he coughed until he vomited. Tyler pulled him along in the blackness until they reached a chamber, dimly lit in red, where they could stand. On the other side of the chamber was a pressure door.
“Put this on,” Tyler said, shoving a surface suit into Erno’s arms. “Quickly!”
Erno struggled to pull on the skintight, still gasping for breath. “I swear I had nothing to do with this,” he said.
“I know,” Tyler said. He sealed up his own suit and locked down his tiger-striped helmet.
“Brace yourself. This isn’t an airlock,” Tyler said, and hit the control on the exterior door.
The moment the door showed a gap, the air blew out of the chamber, almost knocking Erno off his feet. When it opened wide enough, they staggered through into a crevasse. The moisture in the escaping air froze and fell as frost in the vacuum around them. Erno wondered if their pursuers would be able to seal the tube or get back behind a pressure door before they passed out.
Tyler and Erno emerged from the crevasse into a sloping pit, half of which was lit by the glare of hard sunlight. They scrambled up the slope through six centimeters of dust and reached the surface.
“Now what?” Erno said.
Tyler shook his head and put his hand against Erno’s faceplate. He leaned over and touched his helmet to Erno’s. “Private six, encrypted.”
Erno switched his suit radio.
“They won’t be out after us for some time,” Tyler said. “Since we left that Judas-book of yours behind, they may not even know where we are.”
“Judas book?”
“Your notebook-you must have had it with you when the constables questioned you.”
“Y es. But they didn’t know what the download meant or they wouldn’t have returned it to me.”
“Returned it to you? Dumbass. They put a tracer in it.”
Erno could see Tyler’s dark eyes dimly through the faceplate, inches from his own, yet separated by more than glass and vacuum. “I’m sorry.”
“Forget it.”
“When we go back, we’ll be arrested. We might be banished.”
“We’re not going back just yet. Follow me.”
“Where can we go?”
“There’s a construction shack at an abandoned ilemenite mine south of here. It’s a bit of a hike-two to three hours-but what else are we going to do on such a fine morning?”
Tyler turned and hopped off across the surface. Erno stood dumbly for a moment, then followed.
They headed south along the western side of the crater. The ground was much rockier, full of huge boulders and pits where ancient lava tubes had collapsed millennia ago. The suit Erno wore was too tight, and pinched him in the armpits and crotch. His thermoregulators struggled against the open sunlight, and he felt his body inside the skintight slick with sweat. The bind in his crotch became a stabbing pain with every stride.
Around to the south side of Fowler, they struck off to the south. Tyler followed a line of boot prints and tractor treads in the dust. The land rose to Adil’s Ridge after a couple of kilometers, from which Erno looked back and saw, for the first time, all of the domed crater where he had spent his entire life.
“Is this construction shack habitable?” he asked.
“I’ve got it outfitted.”
“What are we going to do? We can’t stay out here forever.”
“We won’t. They’ll calm down. You forget that we haven’t done anything but spray a prank message on the dome. I’m a comedian. What do they expect from a comedian?”
Erno did not remind Tyler of the possible decompression injuries their escape might have caused. He tucked his head down and focused on keeping up with the big man’s steady pace. He drew deep breaths. They skipped along without speaking for an hour or more. Off to their left, Erno noticed a line of distant pylons, with threads of cable strung between them. It was the cable train route from Fowler to Tsander several hundred kilometers south.
Tyler began to speak. “I’m working on some new material. For my come-back performance. It’s about the
