“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.”
3
The captain’s lounge aboard Ashanti seated six. Located just down the central corridor from Astrogation Control, the lounge was a cramped room jammed against the curve of the Command Deck hull. One of the few perks of “officer’s territory,” it even had a small galley on the back wall. Not that ten years of ship’s time had left many choices except two: tea and ration.
Miguel Galluzzi—cup of said tea in hand—nodded to the rest as he entered, stepped around to the rear, and settled into the worn duraplast of his captain’s chair. On the one working holo, an image of Donovan spun against a background of stars.
In their long-accustomed seats, First Officer Turner sat at Galluzzi’s right, Benj Begay on his left. Second Officer Smart had the watch, so his chair remained empty. Michaela Hailwood hunched in the seat beside Begay’s. Finally, at the far end near the door, Derek Taglioni slumped in his usual place.
Galluzzi took their measure. Begay was descended from Native American stock. He was forty-five now, kept his hair in a bun tied tightly at the back of his head. His dark eyes were thoughtful as he fingered the line of his blocky chin.
Turner, who stood six-foot-five, was now in his fifties. A faint English accent still lurked in the man’s speech. Galluzzi couldn’t be sure, but Turner’s washed-out blue eyes seemed to grow paler by the year. Like all good spacers, he kept his head shaved.
Galluzzi’s gaze lingered on Michaela Hailwood, forty-seven. The lanky black-skinned woman had been born in Apogee Station. A curious origin for someone who would become chairperson of the Department of Oceanography at Tubingen University on Transluna. She headed the group of scientists dispatched aboard Ashanti to establish the first research station for the study of Capella III’s oceans.
Still slumped in his chair, Derek Taglioni had laced his fingers together. The man’s genetically engineered yellow-green eyes fixed on Galluzzi. Turns out that designers of fine haute couture on Transluna didn’t tailor their snazzy garments for longevity; Taglioni’s exotic clothing no longer looked natty and sharp. Derek, Dek for short, might have been in his mid-thirties, but given the medical benefits of being a Taglioni, who knew? Today his sandy-blond hair was combed over. The guy looked classic; his chiseled jaw even featured a dimple in the chin.
In the beginning—being a Taglioni—Dek had been a real self-inflated prig. Imperious. Demanding. But something about survival, about realizing that no amount of power or wealth made him any more valuable than a lowly hydroponics tech, Class III, had wrought remarkable changes in his personality and approach to life. The condescending arrogance had begun to break down during the transit. For years he’d even shaved his head like crew. But during those long months when it looked like they were all going to die? That’s when something fundamental had changed in Taglioni.