Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 6: "Primary Colors"

Oliver and Sia met for coffee, a few weeks later.  Sia wasn’t much for drinking coffee, had never really understood the appeal of it, had never particularly needed it, having a generous store of energy within herself and never, say, having had to work overnight shifts, but sometimes one agrees to things that involve other things in a fairly nominal fashion, and while both of them ordered coffees and drank their coffees, the coffee is to be understood as pretext, which is how they both viewed it, too.  Sia watched as Oliver stirred in a generous amount of flavored creamer, hazelnut, and several packets of sugar, or whatever it was that was inside them, and snapped the cap back on, take a sip, make a face that seemed to suggest pleasure, but then, for the next few minutes, he left the cup untouched, and not a single word was shared between them.  She got the sense that Oliver was comfortable in such silences.

     “The first thing you’ve got to understand,” he eventually began, his right hand invariably drifting toward the cup, as it had been in the preceding silence, as he continued, “is that House Argos didn’t begin, so far as I know, with the vital information that became its very reason for existence.”

     “That sounds like a contradiction,” she said.

     “It probably is,” he said.  “Though I’ve found that very few things worth preserving remain consistent with their origins in their current state.”

     “That sounds philosophical,” she said.
     “That’s probably about right,” he said.  “This is the kind of job that gives you plenty of time to think.”

     “That’s all of them,” she said.  “I don’t trust anyone who isn’t constantly thinking.”

     “You’re probably right about that,” he said.

     “You can generally tell the difference,” she said.

     “I hate them, too,” he said.  “Although it’s probably not their fault.”

     “It’s safer to assume,” she said.

     “We had other mysteries,” he said.  “We.  They.  It gets a little complicated, as I’ve suggested.  This is a planet, as I imagine they all are, filled with mysteries of its own, and some of them led to dramatically dead ends, the kind of nonsense conspiracy that’s popular among the riffraff you no doubt waded through in your own efforts.”

     “Oh, definitely,” she said.

     “There’s always the one seemingly innocuous clue, though,” he said.  “In your case it was a single name, the pursuit of which led you to everything else.  Or me, at any rate.”

     “Duende,” she said. 

     “Yes,” he said.  “That’s generally how it works.  You find the one true thing, and it leads to everything else.  For House Argos, it was learning about the other houses.  How we got our naming scheme.”

     “Are you just going to come out and tell me things?” she asked.

     “That’s the idea,” he said.  The other houses.  The ones that belonged to them.  The Danab.  The descendants of that ancestor of yours.  The branch that led out into space.  There are still things we don’t know.  But they’ve visited often enough, they left breadcrumbs.  Our friend, the other day, is hardly the first.  I suspect she might think so.  There’s a generous amount of time to account for, hardly the kind for anyone to have kept a track of, not at her level.  Too desperate.  She knows something that scared her enough to do something rash.  She was alone that night for a reason, Sia.  And she should be.  We’ve been following those breadcrumbs for centuries.  Nothing humanity was ever ready to confront.  We can’t even agree on basic facts of known history.  We allow our interpretations to be colored by petty squabbles we inherited from people who were actually affected by them, but arrive in the present with no more relevance than something happening right now in someone’s kitchen halfway around the world, a simple decision about what to eat.  The kitchen they’re in right now, up there?  They’re discussing truly consequential matters.  All I have is fear, but it’s legitimate fear, Sia.  You found me.  I found you.  She found us.  That’s too much happening.  This isn’t just some coincidence, not anymore, not at this rate.  We passed the event horizon, and we didn’t even know it.  Not even us.  House Argos.  Humanity.  Even them.  The Danab.”

     “You’re kind of scaring me,” she said.

     “There’s really no point,” he said.  “What’s going to happen is going to happen.  That’s what a lot of us have been trying to accept.  House Argos.  There comes a time, an event horizon of its own, when a little knowledge turns into a dangerous thing, and then simply passes…back into knowledge again.  That’s the hardest thing in the world.  It transforms from information to action and back into information.  That’s the way of things.  That’s what the whole sum of the modern age has been struggling to comprehend.  It’s going to seem incredibly meaningless, soon.  That’s what we fear.”

     “But then it’ll just be another piece of trivia,” she said.

     “That’s the idea,” he said.  “Some turning points, though, are so big, they warp everything around them, utterly transforming the world, and in our struggles to accept that they’ve happened, we risk losing more than we should’ve gained.  This is going to be the biggest event in human history.  This is truly going to be…the war to end all wars.  The biggest fear, the biggest fiction we’ve been telling ourselves for more than a century.  A war between worlds.  We kept telling ourselves, any civilization sufficiently advanced to travel easily through the stars, would necessarily have been sufficiently advanced…to make such a notion meaningless.  For us.  For humanity.  Get what I’m saying?”

     “But you’re saying they’re us,” she said.

     “Exactly,” he said.  “That makes it a thousand times worse,” he said.  “In every way possible.”

     “I opened a real can of worms,” she said.

     “That’s generally why we’ve tried to keep a lid on it,” he said.  “People are too good at panicking as it is.  You don’t want them to know that the thing they’re actually going to experience, sometime into the future, is worse than anything they’re already imagining.  We play through those scenarios, at the office.  It ain’t pretty.”

     “Yeah, she said, “I guess.”

     “So that’s everything you need to know, except all the little details,” he said.

     “It was just the little details I wanted,” she said.

     “Sometimes a little knowledge is a terrible thing,” he said.

     “That seems like an oversimplification,” she said.

     “Probably,” he said.

     He drank his coffee at this point, seeming to relish it.  She found hers to be cold, which made it easier to drink.  The thing she’s always least understood was why anyone would relish it hot.