“What do you think, Shig?” Kalico Aguila asked as her A-7 shuttle dropped into Donovan’s gravity well. Through the cabin windows on the command deck she could see the reddish glow as atmospheric friction built.
In the pilot’s seat ahead of her, Ensign Juri Makarov monitored the descent.
Shig had been oddly quiet—and more unusual, he’d had a perturbed expression on his usually placid face as he reviewed the hand-held holo that displayed Ashanti’s logs. He sat in the seat beside hers on the command deck. Normally, in the shuttle, he reminded her of a schoolboy, fascinated and delighted by everything. As if the shuttle were a new and magical marvel.
He didn’t look up as he casually asked, “Who is Derek Taglioni? Why did you ask specifically about him?”
“Derek’s a first cousin to Boardmember Miko Taglioni.”
“Ah, I see. The Boardmember is your superior and benefactor, as I recall.”
“That’s a mild way of putting it.” To change the subject, she said, “The way you reacted to news about these Irredenta, that’s not like you. Seriously, what set you off?”
Shig looked up from the holo display. “You must understand. The human brain is more of an analog rather than a digital organ. It’s plastic, and by that, I mean it can be molded, shaped by events. When traumatized, it will struggle to make sense of the violation. Attempt to reconcile and explain the insult. If the trauma is too terrible, the brain will grasp for disparate facts, string together unrelated—even impossible—data to create understanding in the new conditions. Give meaning to everything it has endured.”
“Sure. I understand how brain chemistry works. The bizarre things human beings will allow themselves to believe in an effort to cope.”
“These were Corporate people,” Shig reminded. “Families for the most part. People who were, and I quote, ‘well integrated’ in the Corporate system. They were educated, affluent, and prosperous families who lived their lives in secure and very comfortable upper-status surroundings. Had nice dwellings. Played by the rules and never suffered deprivation—let alone confronted a serious threat to their wellbeing. Living as they did in the center of the Corporate cocoon, they were coddled and protected. Call them the middle of the bell-shaped curve when it came to living the Corporate dream.”
“I’m well aware of the demographic,” she replied. “The Board wanted well-balanced families, the kind whose profiles didn’t indicate potential trouble when they reached the colony. Families who’d immediately and seamlessly integrate into colonial society.”
“Right,” Shig agreed. “Kindly folk who’d just do their jobs and expect to be taken care of in return. If they had any overriding passion, it was for their family and raising their kids. Perfect young trade professionals.”
Kalico stared out at the curve of Donovan’s horizon as the shuttle’s pitch changed; g-force pushed her down into her seat. “And then they come out of inverted symmetry. They’ve just spent two and a half years of ship’s time living inside cramped quarters. Their nerves are already frayed when they’re told that if they survive the next few months, it might be another seven years before they reach their destination. The hydroponics, designed for a four-year life span, can’t support four hundred and fifty people for another seven.”
“Things begin to degenerate. They panic. Some try to seize the ship, and Galluzzi seals them into a single deck.” Shig rubbed his brow with a nervous hand. “Galluzzi’s people recorded the condition of the stripped human bones that came down the chutes for hydroponics reprocessing. My suggestion is that you don’t mistake these reports for cozy bedtime reading. At least not if you want a good night’s sleep.”
“That horrible?”
“The transportees were dying of starvation. Each corpse represented protein, fat, and life. But what does it mean? How do you justify surviving by eating your companions?” Shig smiled wistfully. “In religious studies, we have a term: sacred abomination. It’s when something is so abhorrent and appalling, its very profanity makes its practice sacred. The ultimate reconciliation of opposites.”
“What do you mean by abomination?”
“The people locked on that deck were receiving insufficient rations. They were murdering men, women, and children. Their best friends. People they had lived with, laughed with, and knew intimately. Dismembering their bodies, stripping muscle from bones, removing and eating organs. Sometimes even the bones were smashed for marrow. Brains removed from skulls. How did they justify such atrocities? They made it a religious event. A form of communion.”
“Dear God.”
“And, of course, they understood that sex was the reconciliation of death. Its polar opposite. If you are going to celebrate one, you must pay tribute to the other.”
“Maybe I’ll skip the reading.”
“Suffice it to say that all those cheery, happy, normal, coddled-and-protected families suddenly found themselves trapped in the kind of violent and profane terror that shattered their psyches. The only way to survive atrocity was to commit even greater atrocity. And they did it year after year. Locked in that seeming eternal hell of Deck Three.”
She didn’t have to know the intimate details to understand, having spent too many hours on Freelander. Just the thought of the ghost ship made her stomach turn queasy.
Shig raised a finger. “And into the mix, you must throw agency: Batuhan. The charismatic leader who tells you that it isn’t your fault. It’s just the way the universe is. You aren’t an abomination but a divinely selected agent about to remake reality. Suddenly you are serving a higher calling. Sure, you murdered and ate babies, cut fellow human beings apart and drank their blood, but through that communion they are reborn into purity.”
“That’s creep-freaked.”
“That’s the religious mind at work in an attempt to rationalize and condone abject horror,” Shig replied. “Or have the lessons taught by Freelander eluded you?”
“Believe me, I was half expecting Galluzzi to tell me that, like Captain Orten on Freelander, he’d ordered the murder of all the transportees.”
“Fascinating, isn’t it?” Shig tapped fingers on his chin. “Aboard Freelander the crew developed their curious death cult, worshipping the ghosts of the people they murdered and threw into the hydroponics. On Ashanti, it’s the transportees who are murdering each other, who have developed their own cult. Leaves us wondering if this is random coincidence. Or, with a sample of only two, if there is something about being locked in a starship—faced with starvation, atrocity, and time—that triggers the religious centers of the brain.”
“So, what do you think they’ve become?”
“Smashana Kali.”
“Excuse me?”
“I think they have turned themselves into the most terrible manifestations of the Hindu demon-goddess, Kali. The black goddess who is descended from endless time, who decapitates her victims, drinks their blood, and wears the heads of the dead around her neck. By devouring her victims, she purifies them, and the world is reborn.”
“And what happens to Kali in Hindu texts?”
“She only ceases her rampage when she steps onto Shiva’s chest.”
“This is the twenty-second century! And we’re talking cannibals? Like some primitive forest tribe?”
“Just because it’s the twenty-second century, what makes you think human beings have become a different animal? Because we have The Corporation and space travel? People are still fundamentally nothing more than technologically sophisticated chimpanzees.”
“Back in Solar System we could reprogram them at a psychiatric facility.” Kalico mused. “Treat the madness.”
“We’re not in Solar System.”
“Shig, you’re the professor of religious studies, the proponent of ethical behavior, what do we do with them?”
“I haven’t a clue.”