Duel Memory
Josiah lies awake watching the stars align in steady constellation. Here Hydrus, and there perhaps Tucana or Lupus. And again, in the distance, other stellar harbingers of obscure fate. Now he is seeing past them as if traveling at light speed, fathoms backward in spacetime. It is a journey into deep and universal distant memory. Josiah turns away from the sky and observes the child-sized robot sitting next to him. When he is ready, the device will be his scribe... taking on the burden of his memory. Transcribing his last will and testament. The will is simple because he has nothing left to give. His clothes are old and ragged. His once-treasured weapons rest now battered and there broken at his side. His tent is threadbare so that he can see the constellations through the fabric. Would anyone be there to receive what little he had left? Who would care when he was gone? Josiah considers these questions, but he knows the answer already. He turns back towards the constellations and a universe of obscure fate. My son, he says.
Without his weaponry, Josiah had come to rely on the power of his words. Rhetoric had saved his life before, and perhaps it could be used to save another life now. His last message might be used to make amends. On previous nights, the desert winds were crisp and cold. And Josiah felt unequal to the task of remembering. Somehow tonight is different. “Janus,” he says, speaking to the robot device. Buzz, tick, and whir. The machine blinks and gradually comes alive like sentient clockwork. “Record and transcribe,” Josiah continues. The android takes a moment to process its owner’s input. It stretches and unwinds, as if waking from a daydream, while initializing programs and executing commands. But even before the recording starts, Josiah’s eyes glaze over. His fingers twitch as if touched by the hand of painful memory. “My son,” he says again. His voice is weary on the words, “It was tradition.” He shakes his head and glances up at the stars before continuing. “To take the eldest son for such rites. It is tradition,” he says. “It was traditional.” The machine noises start to die down. The world is as still as silent. And into the silence, Josiah whispers: “I had no other choice. Today, the sun has long since set and it is no longer high noon. Even so, I still remember.” His hands tremble as he tries to wrestle back control from time, memory, trauma, and pain. He steadies himself to begin again:
I worry about the man that you’ve become and are becoming, Josiah says. I worry about the path that I may have set you on all those years ago, when you fought the duel in the arid desert.
He stares into the night. The sand dunes. The jagged rocks surrounding him. But he sees, as if it were yesterday, his child appearing distraught:
“Father,” The Boy looked up with tears in his eyes, “I will not fight.”
“We’ve come all this way. And you’ve been prepared.” He replied. “You will fight, and then you will come of age, as I did.”
“But he’s my friend,” the Boy said frantically, And I can’t”
“You will be strong now” Josiah reprimanded. “Because strength is all there is in life. And the weak do not survive. Might makes right, son” Josiah’s hands were firm and steady as he gave his son the treasured flintlock pistols that were to be his duel weapons. As the weapons’ heavy weight shifted from father to son.
And how the stars shone on that night. Like weeping angels. Tears glistened off the cold metal surface of the gun, as Josiah’s son took up his father’s cause– as he left and prepared to end his childhood and break the Lord’s sixth commandment: thou shall not kill.
“Maybe it was me, Josiah continues, speaking to the tiny robot. “Maybe you were lost even beforehand. I don’t know. But it perturbs me. Once, you would have chosen peace and mercy over power and might. On that night, before your first duel, I gave you bad advice and from then on it shaped your worldview.
And on the day of that duel... I remember how you walked, serene and dispassionate, like a statue of Buddha. And how you fought afterwards and were never the same again...”
“My son,” Josiah says, I am in the desert now, and the stars are angels that still weep. The constellations mourn like distant memory. Memory might be set in stone, but your future is still a choice. Will you make your own more merciful tradition? Will you become a better man than I? Because that is still within your power to decide.
His grip tightens on the robot’s hand. Wire-frail fingers frigid against cold, care-worn stone and metal. He watches the dying, fast-dimming flash and flare of the machine’s insignia.
There was a life before the barren desert. A home before his exile. He sees it in his companion’s stained reflection.
Sees the stars lie in silent tribute to battles fought in far distant places. See how they reach across from one end of infinity to touch the local sky, where fate is written? “Right makes might.... Decide while it is still within your power to choose peace...”
Josiah regards his battered weaponry, ragged clothes, and threadbare tent. He watches the tumbleweed wheel while he thinks about his legacy. “Decide,” he says. “Before it is too late to change.”
Grief and the sound of crackling gunfire. Keening. Wales. Women mourning, and children forgotten or forever changed in the aftermath of conflict, their lives lost to twilight rituals. Josiah sees his son fighting in the mele once more. And he looks away.
“Janus,” he says. “Erase recording.”
