Galluzzi watched through the port-side window as the A-7 shuttle dropped through Donovan’s stratosphere. The first red glow was forming on the shuttle’s nose and wings.
Beside him, in the middle seat, Shig was staring out like a boy on his first spacing. A look of absolute rapture filled the man’s round face; his grin, under other circumstances, would have been infectious.
Two days? It only seemed like a couple of hours.
Galluzzi had been shocked when he and Shig had finally stepped through the lock and into the PA shuttle. But then, that was Freelander for you. It screwed with time. Bent it, warped it, and stretched it out of shape.
What the hell had happened to him in there?
“She came to me,” he told Shig, finally having come to grips with the revelations in the script-filled corridor.
He hadn’t said a word after Shig found him weeping softly on the corridor floor. In an almost dissociative state, he’d allowed Shig to help him to his feet. Leaning on the short Indian, he’d let Shig lead him through the dark corridors of the Transportees’ Deck. The phantasms no longer frightened him. Freelander had its own physics, its own continuum. Call it proof that the theoretical physicists were right when they said that time was a human creation used to explain the changing relationship between subatomic particles.
“By she I assume you mean Tyne Sakihara?” Shig gave him a mild look.
Galluzzi stared absently at the clouds flashing by the window. “I watched them build the dome of bones. I was there, Shig. It was that clear. I mean it was a real out-of-body experience. And Tyne was talking to me the entire time. Am I crazy?”
“No more so than any of the rest of us.” Shig had a benign smile on his lips. “Freelander remains a mystery, and I suspect it always will. It exists as an enigma in our universe, part us, part other, and tainted by a physics we can’t comprehend.”
“So, is Tyne dead? She told me that life is only carbon-based molecules interacting with other molecules. That what we call thought is chemical and electrical impulses. So, if that was just me, imagining her . . .” He frowned, struggling for the words.
“Maybe she’s alive and dead at the same time?” Shig arched a bushy eyebrow. “She is right, you know. The science is clear: We’re biochemistry. The existence of the soul can neither be proved nor disproved through the scientific method.”
“And ethics? Morality?”
“Anthropologists will tell you they are constructs that serve an adaptive purpose when it comes to social relations with one’s fellows. That individual and group survival increases when there are rules and expected norms of behavior.”
Galluzzi fingered his chin as they dropped down over the ocean. “When it came to ethics, her exact words were: ‘Cling to whatever you have, Miguel. In the end, it’s the only thing that makes existence worth enduring.’”
“Was she a student of epiphenomenolgy to begin with?”
“No. But who knows what all those years in Freelander might have done to her before Jem put that bullet . . . Well, never mind.”
Shig’s smile was reflective of a deeper amusement. “Then it appears that First Officer Sakihara’s very appearance belies her epiphenomenal argument. But that said, I agree with her advice. No matter what one’s philosophical or religious compass would indicate, believing makes existence worth enduring.”
“She said that euthanizing the transportees was an act of kindness.”
“Given the fate of Freelander, what do you think? You have a most unique insight, having been in Jem Orten’s shoes.”
“He turned his transportees into corpses, I turned mine into monsters.”
“That assertion denies the Unreconciled any claim to free will. A power that, not being an omnipotent god, you do not have.”
“No, I suppose I don’t,” Galluzzi admitted as the shuttle braked, slowed, and settled on the PA landing pad.