Unreconciled

by W. Michael Gear

  “Shit. And let me guess. Didn’t have the fuel to pop back out?”

  Aguila’s gaze thinned as she gestured down the bar to Inga. “Miracle and tragedy all in one. The miracle’s that they’re alive. The tragedy is what they had to do to stay that way for seven years in a ship that couldn’t feed them all.”

  “They murder the transportees like the crew of Freelander did?”

  “Might just as well have,” Kalico told her. “Captain Galluzzi sent his official log to Vixen, along with the Observer/Advisor’s reports. Shig and I gave them a quick scan. The transportees tried to take the ship. It got bloody. Failed. So Galluzzi had them sealed onto the transportee deck. And left them there.”

  “Bet they’re ready to get the hell out.”

  Shig glanced at her. “It’s just Galluzzi’s word, of course, but it may be a bit more complicated than that. If the good captain and the records are to be believed, things turned remarkably brutal among the transportees. Over the last six years they have apparently developed some sort of messianic cult based on the notion of controlled violence and eating one’s fellows as a reflection of the universe. At this stage we can only guess at the depth of the belief and its intricacies. If there’s good news, it is that there’s only about a hundred of them left.”

  Aguila added, “Just talking about it, Galluzzi broke into a cold sweat. The guy’s almost a basket case, and he’s scared. Really scared.” She shot Shig an evaluative look. “So much so that he sent me a private com just before we stepped off Vixen. Asked me to consider blowing up Ashanti as soon as he could get his crew off.”

  Shig’s round face puckered. “That’s a bit extreme, even for cannibals, don’t you think?”

  “Excuse me? Cannibals?” Talina asked.

  Kalico gave her a dead stare. “Think locked on Deck Three with insufficient food. It’s eat your neighbor or be eaten by him. One or the other.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Blowing up the ship would solve some of Galluzzi’s problems,” Shig mused.

  “Hey?” Talina asked. “What about the cargo? Ashanti’s holds must be full of things we need. Equipment. Parts. Seeds, maybe cacao, or cotton, or who knows what? And unlike Freelander it wasn’t lost in space for a hundred and twenty-nine years.”

  Aguila laid a 10-SDR coin out for Inga, saying, “My party tonight. Put whatever’s left on my tab.”

  “Thought I was buying,” Shig said. “That was the deal.”

  “How’s the vegetable market these days?” Aguila asked.

  “I sold a couple of squash last week,” Shig told her proudly.

  Shig made most of his income from his garden. One of the most influential men on Donovan, Shig Mosadek was also one of the poorest. He was a third of the triumvirate—the three-person government of Port Authority. Shig was the conscience, the public face, and liaison to the community. Yvette Dushane—a pragmatic woman in her fifties—did the nuts and bolts daily administration and record keeping. Talina Perez served as security chief, enforcer, and protector.

  Inga set a whiskey down before Aguila and placed a half-full glass of wine before Shig, saying, “My latest red from those sirah grapes they transplanted from Mundo Base.” Then she scooped up the coin, heading back down the bar before reaching up to credit Kalico’s account on her big board.

  Talina asked, “We’re not seriously blowing up a starship, are we?”

  “Of course not.” Aguila raised her whiskey and swished it around, inhaled, and took a sip. “Oh, that’s her new barrel. Much better than last month’s.”

  “So, remind me. That leaves us with how many traumatized maniac religious cannibal nuts?” Talina asked. “A hundred, you say? What are you thinking? Put ’em in the domes in the residential section? Let them rub elbows with us locals until they come back to their senses?”

  Shig studied his half glass of wine. “I think that would be a bad idea. At least given what we currently know about them.”

  “I can’t put them up at Corporate Mine,” Aguila said. “First, I don’t have the dormitory space. Second, we’re a pretty tight organization down there these days. If I drop a hundred soft meat into the mix, I’m going to have chaos. And who knows what kind of skills these people have?”

  “Not to mention that they eat people. That will go over big in the cafeteria,” Shig noted.

  “So that brings us back to some of the empty domes in the residential district.” Talina shrugged. “If they start to get out of line, it may take a couple of head whacks, but my guess is that between us, we can civilize them.”

  Shig held up his hand for attention. “I don’t think that’s wise, let alone an operative plan of action.”

  “Okay,” Talina told him. “Since when is having someone like me, Talbot, or Step coming down on a bit of misbehaving—”

  “I took the opportunity to read some of the ravings the Irredenta sent to Captain Galluzzi.”

  “The irrawho?”

  “The Irredenta,” Shig told her. “That’s what they’re calling themselves. That, and they often refer to themselves as the Unreconciled. The words attributed to their Prophets reek of demented religious fanaticism. These people believe that they have passed through a brutal selection, that they have been given absolute truth. That they’ve been chosen to possess the one true understanding of God and the ultimate reality of the universe. Worse, they’ve been locked away, isolated, and survived a most terrible winnowing. Events stripped them of their humanity. They committed atrocities, acts that abnegated the kind of people they were before the trauma.”

  “So what? Donovan is no one’s idea of a picnic,” Talina retorted.

  Shig softly said, “In my view, turning them loose in PA or Corporate Mine would be to unleash a calamity.”

  “Bit melodramatic, don’t you think?” Talina asked.

  Shig arched a bushy eyebrow. “After the rise of The Corporation, religious fundamentalism was suppressed, monitored. But think back to your security training. You must have run across historical references to fringe beliefs, fanatical interpretations of scripture. Millenarians. Radical cults. Most were led by charismatic individuals thought of as messiahs by their followers.”

  “Yeah,” Talina said, “but this is Donovan. That kind of silliness doesn’t last long here. You know how I’m always joking about the Buddha never existing on Donovan? ’Cause if he’d seated himself under a mundo tree, a nightmare would have eaten him. Same for a self-proclaimed prophet. They all digest the same in a quetzal’s gut.”

  Aguila had been listening; from her expression she’d been accessing her implants, scanning data. Now she said, “I side with Shig. If these people are as indoctrinated to violence and their holy cause as Galluzzi says and their writings indicate, turning them loose in either PA or Corporate Mine would be a major mistake at worst, horrendously destabilizing at best.”

  Shig dryly asked, “Do you really think that practicing cannibals preaching apocalypse can just move into the dome next door without repercussions?”

  “So? Leave them up on the ship?”

  Aguila’s wary smile rearranged her scars. “We want that ship. We need that ship. I’ve got a fortune in rare metals, clay, and gemstones in containers up in orbit. You’ve got shipping containers full of clay and plunder stacked seven-deep around the shuttle field. Maybe Turalon arrived on schedule back at Solar System last year. Maybe it didn’t. But Ashanti is coming in. If we can load her to the gills with wealth, ship her back to Solar System—even if we have to do it on AI—it’s another shot at long-term survival.”

  “We could lock the cannibals up with crazy old Tam Benteen on Freelander,” Talina mused.

  Aguila shook her head. “What? Compromise our only platform for freefall and vacuum manufacturing?”

  “You’ll have Ashanti,” Shig pointed out.

  “Not if we can convince someone to sp
ace her back to Solar System and make us all rich,” Aguila added. “Galluzzi really wants me to blow them up.”

  “Morally unacceptable.” Shig declared as he fingered his wine glass. Talina grunted in agreement.

  “Which leaves the planet. Maybe they’re crazy as the quanta. Maybe in the end, they can’t be reconciled with the rest of us. We won’t know until we can see for ourselves.” Aguila lifted her whiskey, studying the amber fluid in her glass. “Put them down at Mundo Base? Buy it from Mark Talbot’s family?”

  “Not that they’d sell,” Talina said. “And the quetzal lineage down there’s really hostile.”

  “Tyson Station,” Shig said. “Way out west. On that mesa top. Five domes. Just right for about a hundred people. Good garden space. Enough cisterns and capacity to handle a population that size.”

  “Never been there,” Aguila said.

  Talina sipped her stout. “Might work. Somebody needs to go out there. Check it out.”

  Aguila shot Shig a sidelong look. “You all right with that? I mean, given your moral imperatives, all that talk about freedom? About government staying out of people’s lives? Isn’t this a form of playing god? Making these decisions for those people?”

  Shig gave a half-hearted shrug. “One of the few tenants of government in a libertarian system is that the state should provide for the common defense. If these people arrived in our skies infected with some contagious disease, we would be within our moral rights to place them in quarantine for the protection of the general population.”

  “But this is a cult.”

  Shig’s eyebrows lifted. “And what makes you think that zealous adherence to a messianic religious cult isn’t just as dangerous as smallpox, rubella, or ebola?”

  THE PROPHETS

  I sit among the Prophets. The room we placed them in has come to be called The Temple. It used to be a recreation room, the walls surrounded by monitors and VR holo projectors long gone black and now decorated with drawings based upon the holy utterances. In places quotes that have passed the Prophets’ lips are written on the walls.

  This room, these three holy people, are the repository of Truth.

  Their beds are laid out in a triangle, and I sit in the exact center between them.

  At the top—in the position of honor—lies Irdan, once a specialist in the use and maintenance of scientific equipment like microscopes and centrifuges. He was the first who was called. As the sacred presence of the universe slowly possessed his body, took his coordination, and began giving him visions, the initial Prophecies passed his lips.

  Within days, Callista, young, dark, and insecure, was the second to be called. Her specialty was medical equipment: scanners, imaging machines, and diagnostic equipment. She’d started to stumble, her hands to twitch, as the universe took possession of her.

  Not another week had passed before Guan Shi, a plumber by trade, began to drop things. Started to stumble in her walk. Her speech grew slurred, her train of thought inconsistent. By then, we knew the signs of the calling.

  As the years have passed, the Prophets have fallen deeper and deeper into the universe. As they have, their voices have become more profound and ever more cryptic. I suppose this makes sense. Like newborn infants, we need to learn the language. A neonate does not immediately comprehend Shakespeare, Mak Shi, or Sophocles.

  What worries me as I sit here is that as the Prophets fall deeper into the universe, their health is deteriorating. They have no control over their bodies and can barely swallow when food is placed on their tongues. But even more ominous, these days I can rarely understand their Prophecy. Statements like, “Waa wass glick faa faa,” which Callista has uttered as I sit here, have no meaning to me.

  It begs the question: When the universe chooses a Prophet, does it inevitably suck them down and devour them, much in the same way as we consume the impure? Is their fate the most enviable of all? Or, is it that we—myself in particular—despite being the repository of so many lives and souls, are only capable of limited understanding? Perhaps I cannot learn the language past a certain level of comprehension, similar to a learning-impaired child whose linguistic abilities are forever capped at the age of five?

  In the former case, we are reassured, for we have others now—Shimal Kastakourias in particular—who have begun to show the initial signs of incipient Prophesy.

  If the latter—which is the nightmare that keeps me awake in the night—then I am unmanned by the possibility that I might not be capable of performing the daunting task for which I’ve been chosen.

  Irdan’s legs twitch; his sunken eyes flicker sightlessly as he says something that sounds like, “Thaaweenaah.”

  In that moment, I fear I am not only unworthy, but too stupid to comprehend the remarkable Truth that Irdan has just shared.

  If that is the case, I am a failure.

  I hang my head and weep.

  5

  The Taglionis were one of the few true dynasties in The Corporation. Back in the mid-twenty-first century, when it became apparent that national governments couldn’t be trusted with the responsibility of running the planet, the family had been instrumental in the establishment of Corporate control over the world economy.

  The algorithms had taken care of the rest. Remarkable what a settling effect comprehensive monitoring and perfect resource distribution had when it came to keeping the populace mollified and compliant. But then the Romans had figured out the rudiments clear back when it was just bread and circuses.

  Since the establishment of The Corporation, through adroit skills, a lack of preoccupation with ethics, and no little daring and guile, the Taglioni family had maintained its position on the Board of Directors. And that—in the face of competition from the likes of the Radceks, the Grunnels, the Suhartos, and Xian Chan families—took some doing.

  Derek had grown up as a well-connected and influential scion in the midst of the family’s treacherous web. Though they’d vied to dominate the power elite, his parents had been outmaneuvered from the start by Miko Taglioni’s mother and father: They’d had a lock on the Board.

  Nevertheless, Board politics being what it was, Derek and his other cousins had been kept in the wings, waiting, each constantly being groomed in case he or she should be called upon by the family elders to step into the role of Corporate Boardmember should anything happen to Miko and his immediate siblings.

  Yet here I am.

  Derek stood in the Crew Deck observation dome on Ashanti’s port side and stared at the now-familiar swirls and splashes of stars. He kept thinking back. How he’d thrown a petulant tantrum, told Miko that he was tired of being a sidelined ornament. That if he wasn’t given his due, he’d make it on his own.

  And Miko had laughed in his face.

  Hands clasped behind his back, Derek contemplated the interstellar majesty beyond the transparency. This day he wore a secondhand set of coveralls, the elbows and knees patched. Secondhand? And stained from the hydroponics lab? How far the mighty had fallen. At the thought, a dry chuckle broke his lips.

  “Something funny?” Miguel Galluzzi asked from behind.

  “Didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Just wanted to take a look outside before I call it a day.”

  Derek shot the captain a sidelong glance as the man took a position beside him. The captain’s gaze was fixed on the dot of light just to the right of Capella. He pointed. “That’s Cap III. Right there. In plain sight.” A pause. “So many times over these last endless years . . . well, I never thought I’d see this day.”

  “That’s what I was chuckling about.” Derek rocked on his heels. “I’ll remind you that I came on this trip in a fit of pique. If they wouldn’t give me what I wanted, I’d show them. I’d ship off for Cap III and make my own way, build my own empire.”

  Galluzzi gave him a wary glance. “So you’ve said. From the reports we’ve seen, D
onovan isn’t exactly Transluna. They’ve got less than a thousand people down there. And government is split between Corporate and this Port Authority. It’s starting to sound like growing a garden is the most successful thing a man can do dirtside.”

  “Aguila is the Corporate authority. If there’s anything for me, it will be through her.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t. Miguel, you come from a normal family. The Taglionis? We have a lot more in common with the Irredenta than we do with normal people. It’s just that we devour each other in more figurative terms. Looking back at who I was the day I stepped aboard Ashanti compared to who I am now? Well . . . I wonder why you didn’t step up when I wasn’t looking, shoot me in the head, and drop me down the chute to feed the hydroponics.”

  “Thought about it a time or two,” Galluzzi said. “You might think that being a Taglioni is an imposition, but family reputation isn’t without its rewards. It kept you alive back when you’d have been of more value to us as nutrients in the hydroponics vats.”

  Derek stared thoughtfully at the pinpoint of light that was Capella III. “I’m sorry I was such a miserable shit, Miguel. I just . . . well, I’m sorry.” He barked an amused laugh. “Pus in a bucket, imagine that. Derek Taglioni just apologized to another human being for being an asshole. Don’t let that get back to the family.”

  “You make it sound like a first.”

  “You may be most assured that it is.” Derek, lifted his chin. “We’re taught to never, ever, under any circumstance, apologize to anyone. To do so would imply that we were at fault. A Taglioni, you see, never makes a mistake.”

  “That seems a bit unrealistic.”

  “What does reality have to do with it? I have discovered—to my undying horror over these last seven years—that people can be such self-deluded idiots. Given what we’ve survived? The choices I’ve watched you make. It’s like having my skin ripped off to leave my naked quivering muscles and nerves exposed to a most painful truth.”