Unreconciled

by W. Michael Gear

  On the lower screen the drone continued its search, whizzing in and out of rooms, rising and falling as it inspected discarded personal items, old bits of clothing, looked under beds and into gaping closets. The rooms were rife with trash and abandoned belongings. Why were they leaving so much behind? Most of the light panels were dark. Looked like what was left behind in the poorer parts of Earth when a slum was cleared.

  Following along at the back of the exodus came young men in their twenties and teens, each bent under the weight of a crate, bundle, or duraplast container. Apparently, they were the porters for the few assembled belongings of the Irredenta.

  The drone buzzed, getting her attention. It was in the women’s locker room, hovering over a pile of five skeletons. Most of the soft tissue had been half-heartedly stripped off, leaving the still-articulated bones looking red and ill-used. The skulls had been chopped open, the brains extracted.

  “What do you make of that?” Talina asked.

  “Reminds me of what mobbers do to a person, but they’re a lot more efficient when it comes to cleaning the bones.”

  “You want to do anything about it?” Talina asked.

  Kalico shook her head. “Not now. Maybe later, after they’re planetside and safely contained at Tyson. There’ll be plenty of time to ask questions then.”

  At the companionway to the shuttle deck, people were filing down. The children, of course, had never encountered stairs. They were having a wonderful time, jumping down, step by step, giggles of laughter rising, smiles bending their scarified cheeks. Their bare feet slapped onto the treads.

  “You know the eye carved in Batuhan’s forehead?” Talina asked.

  “Yeah. That’s creep-freaked, isn’t it?”

  “Just caught the light right. Got a good look,” Talina told her. “Those three on the litters, they’ve got the eyes carved in their foreheads, too. But it’s just them. Batuhan and the three on the litters.”

  Kalico thought back to the interview she’d done with Batuhan. “You think they’re the Prophets?”

  “Could be. Something’s not right about them. And look, there, that young woman.” Talina pointed. “See the way she’s walking? Like she’s got issues with coordination. And she’s not the only one.”

  Tal was right. Something about the woman’s coordination was off. Intoxicated? No, this was different. Like impaired motor control. Might have been the result of a brain injury. Kalico kept seeing odd movements, loose steps, curious wobbles of the head. Or a rocking tremor of the hands.

  The continued sing-song chanting—the words being distinctly and purposefully slurred—sent a shiver down Kalico’s spine. With a gesture, she muted the sound.

  “We have a total count of seventy-seven,” the com informed.

  In the transportee quarters, the drone was continuing its search, only to stop at a collection of shoes in one of the rooms. They’d been piled, maybe a meter high. A carefully built pyramid with the toes pointed outward.

  “What’s that all about?” Talina wondered. “We told these people they needed shoes. And what are they doing? On top of being damn near buck-ass naked, every mother’s son and daughter of them is barefoot.”

  “Sent them an entire checklist for how to dress, what to expect.”

  “We dusted Tyson with slug poison, but that’s not one hundred percent effective. And stepping on the wrong invertebrate is going to get a lot of them bitten.” Talina made a face. “Thing is, it usually only takes once before the lesson is irrevocably learned.”

  The last of the Irredenta were descending the companionway.

  In the shuttle’s monitors, Batuhan strode imperiously past Dina Michegan where she stood before the hatch. His chair bearers had to fit the thing through the door and into the limited clearance between the first row of seats. At the hatch to the command deck, Miso snapped to attention, his helmeted head faced forward, but you could bet he was watching everything on the heads-up display inside his helmet.

  Batuhan took the chair in the middle of the first row, his bare toes not more than a foot from Private Miso’s armored feet.

  The chair bearers clambered around, bracing the “throne” awkwardly on the seats immediately behind Batuhan’s. People continued to file in; those bearing the litters carefully laid them on the deck where space could be found, thereby blocking the aisles.

  As the rest tried to crowd in, bedlam ensued, with people trying to step around the three litters, scrambling over seat backs, and chattering.

  But no one, Kalico noticed, crossed in front of Batuhan. The Mongolian tech sat motionless, back straight, head up, eyes forward as if he were a carved statue.

  To Kalico’s relief, none of the Unreconciled tried the locked hatch. No one brandished anything that looked like a weapon. The sensors picked up nothing that indicated an explosive was hidden on any person or in the various containers, bundles, and baskets.

  “Sergeant?” Kalico contacted Abu Sassi. “Looks like we’re about loaded. But before we seal the hatch, I need you to take a cargo net back and collect that pyramid of shoes.”

  “Roger that.”

  Talina gave off a weary sigh. “So far, so good.”

  “Yeah,” Kalico was rubbing nervous fingers over the backs of her hands. “Why do I have a really bad feeling about this?”

  20

  The sound of the shuttle lifting off had brought Dek wide awake. His dreams had been filled with forest and the smells of Donovan. In them, he’d been out there beyond the fence. Some intangible temptress—like a siren of old—had danced and beckoned him. Just a fleeting shape among the bushes and scrub. But the harder he pursued, the more elusive the phantom had become.

  He blinked, taking in the small and neatly furnished dome. The walls were stacked with books—the old-fashioned bound-paper kind.

  Shig had explained to him about the books: “These are old, valued because various preeminent scholars of religion have underlined passages and left notes in the margins. Oh, I have them in the implants.” He’d tapped the side of his head. “But when I open to a page in the Vedas, I have the thoughts of Ramanadas, Irrawiri, and Raja Sing right there, written in the margins in their own handwriting.”

  Dek sat up in the small bed—something called a futon; it folded out from a bench. Not the most comfortable thing he’d ever slept on. Shig had called it “surprisingly restful,” and after having spent two nights on the contraption, Dek suspected you never took an ascetic at his word when it came to basic creature comforts.

  Within a matter of moments, Dek had attended to his toilet, made the bed, and dressed. He chose the coveralls, figuring he might want to save the last of his “good” clothing.

  Stepping out into the day, he was surprised to find Shig bent over the plants in his garden. The short scholar had an old plastic gallon container labelled “mayonnaise” into which he was dropping green beans. Another quart container, by his foot, was already filled with blueberries from the bushes that were growing into the perimeter fence.

  “Good morning!” Dek called, blinking in the light.

  “Shuttle awaken you?” Shig asked.

  “How did I sleep so long?”

  “It’s the gravity.” Shig collected his containers and straightened. “And wholesome food. Not to mention being able to sleep in a proper bed after all those years in a starship.”

  Best not to tell him about the futon’s shortcomings.

  “Kind of early for the shuttle to be going up, isn’t it?”

  Shig shrugged. “They’re going to transport the cannibals down to Tyson Station today. Strange, isn’t it? As of the moment they step off of the shuttle, they won’t be the Irredenta. They’ll be their own people in their own place and responsible for governing themselves. Have to come up with a new name, I suppose.”

  “The Unreconciled.” Dek glanced covetously down at the green b
eans and blueberries. “That’s what they told us aboard ship. The Universe had picked them specially, and they would never find reconciliation with the rest of humanity until they had purified it.”

  Shig’s knowing brown gaze had picked up on Dek’s preoccupation with the beans and berries. “I suppose that given their history, reconciliation might be beyond hope. But what about you?”

  Dek laughed at the thought, heard his stomach gurgle with hunger. Screw him in vacuum, but ever since he’d set foot on the planet, he was always feeling as hungry as he had during those starvation months aboard Ashanti.

  “Shig, I can reconcile with anyone over anything.” His stomach sounded its discontent with greater volume. “Well, but for my nether regions.”

  The brown man raised his buckets. “I was just on the way to trade these to Inga. I think it’s enough that she’d give us both breakfasts. Care to join me?”

  As he matched pace, Dek said, “Funny, isn’t it? The way a man’s life changes. Were you to transport me back to Transluna, to the man I was, you wouldn’t recognize me. And seeing me, as I am now, they wouldn’t recognize me either. Me then. Me now. Same man? Or two different men? Begs the question: Do we ever really know ourselves? Can we ever define a constant whereby a person can say, ‘This is who I am regardless of the environment I’m in or the events I’m experiencing’?”

  “The mystics in the Eastern religions would tell you that you cannot know yourself until you break the bonds of samsara and experience moksha. Only then do the scales of illusion fall away, and even the notion of ‘self’ is discarded because it perpetuates duality.”

  “How does that work on Donovan?”

  They had stepped out into the main avenue, and Shig closed his garden gate. “Talina tells me that had the Buddha ever come to Donovan, he would have seated himself under a mundo tree. That the moment he did, a nightmare would have reached down with its tentacles, impaled him, and yanked him up into the tree to spend the next couple of months devouring him.”

  “Leaves me thinking Talina will never be a mystic.”

  Shig gave him a wide grin. “She has a young soul, one balancing between tamas and rajas. That’s darkness and passion in case you were wondering.”

  “She’s a most remarkable woman.” He remembered the way her eyes looked, how she moved. “Something about her . . .”

  Shig was giving him the eye, a slight lift to his left eyebrow. “She is our warrior. Being a society’s warrior sets a person apart. The warrior is the one who is called upon to do the distasteful, to act for the protection of others. But in Talina’s case, she has also been chosen by Donovan to be an intermediary. She is a bridge between humanity and the planet. A role that leaves her in even greater isolation. Because of that, she lives in constant fear.”

  Dek pursed his lips. “I know what that’s like.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Being a Taglioni means you’re always apart. Perpetually worried whether you’re worthy of the name. I think I see something Taglioni-like in Talina. Makes me wonder who she would be back in Transluna.”

  Shig’s curious look had intensified as Dek held the door to Inga’s; Shig led the way down the long flight of wooden stairs to the tables below. At the bottom, people called greetings, to which Shig replied with waves and cheery responses.

  He didn’t lead the way to a table, but to the bar stools, taking the one where Supervisor Aguila had sat, and indicating the empty stool to the left.

  Dek climbed up, noting, “I sense a definite hierarchy in the seating. You pick this for a reason?”

  Shig set his containers on the bar and indicated the empty stool beside him. “That’s Talina’s. Turn around. Look out at room. That’s what she does, resting her elbows on the bar behind her in the process. It’s how she looks out at her people.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because she can’t go back to Transluna. You asked who she’d be back there? She’d be a freak. A human contaminated with Donovanian genetic material. A warrior in a land of neutered and autonomous worker bees. The Corporation would destroy her. You must understand: The kind of people necessary to survive the vicissitudes and dangers of frontiers are not tolerated by the civilized and tamed.”

  “I see.”

  “I hear that you want to go out beyond the fence. That you want to learn how to live out there. That you’ve been asking about the Wild Ones.”

  At that moment, Inga appeared, hurrying down the bar and looking flustered. “You drinking or eating?”

  Shig gave the woman that remarkable beaming smile. “Good to see that business is booming. How are you today?”

  “Up to my ass in quetzals. What’s in the containers?”

  “Green beans. All that were ripe. Oh, and blueberries. Dek and I were wondering if you’d trade us for two breakfast specials?”

  Inga shot Dek a who-the-hell-are-you look, lifted both eyebrows, and chuckled. “Yeah, but don’t push your luck, Shig. If it were anyone but you . . .”

  With that she scooped up the containers and bulled her way back down the bar toward the kitchen.

  Dek spread his hands wide. “Yesterday I stood at the fence for what seemed like hours. Wejee puts up with me. Answers my questions. Says I should contact some of the farmers, that they’d trade labor for information. But, yes, I want to get to know the Wild Ones. I’ve heard of the Briggses, the Philos, the Shu Wans. And then there’s the prospectors. I figure I can work while I learn. Pay my way in this clap-trapping crazy free-market economy of yours.”

  “What would you do to get out there?”

  “Anything, Shig. You name it.”

  “Why?”

  “I feel it. Here.” Dek touched his breast. “Donovan, I mean. Like it’s a sort of presence.”

  “Odds are that a skewer, a slug, or a sidewinder will get you. Even with a knowledgeable guide. If you had someone like Tip Briggs and Kylee Simonov as mentors, I’d say you still had a seventy percent chance of being killed in the first week.”

  Dek took a deep breath. “But maybe I wouldn’t. What the hell, let me go, Shig. You can order it, can’t you?”

  Shig’s gaze softened, seemed to see right down into Dek’s soul. “I might. But say you do go, that you manage to make the deal with Donovan. You understand, don’t you? You’ll be just like Talina. Donovan will claim you. You’ll never be able to go back. No reconciliation with that old Derek Taglioni, let alone your family.”

  “That man’s already gone. I want to know who this new one will be.”

  “Even if it comes at a price?”

  Dek looked at Talina’s chair, a symbol of isolation. Smart man, this Shig Mosadek. “Nothing comes without a little pain, Shig.”

  “I’ll remember you said that.”

  21

  With his hands clasped behind him, Miguel Galluzzi stood in the observation dome and watched the Supervisor’s A-7 shuttle as it lifted from the bay. Capella’s harsh light gleamed on the sialon hull, the craft’s aerodynamic delta shining against the dark interstellar background. The sleek vessel turned gracefully, like a thing alive, and began to accelerate.

  Within moments it had passed out of sight, leaving only the empty majesty of the galaxy as it glowed in righteous splendor against the black.

  Righteous?

  Galluzzi snorted to himself, curious about the sudden emptiness that hollowed his core. Surprised at the intensity, he staggered to the side, tears welling in his eyes. His heart began to pound against his breast.

  He blinked, jaw quivering.

  They are gone.

  The notion left him dazed, reeling.

  What the hell was this? He’d never experienced the like. This sucking emptiness of body and soul. A vertigo of self—all whirling and disoriented. He swallowed against the sudden nausea, put a hand to his mouth.

&
nbsp; For long moments he sat half crouched against the side of the dome. Seemed he could barely get enough to breathe. That everything that he had been was looted away.

  They are gone.

  From the moment he’d learned of Ashanti’s arrival so far off course from Capella, in the wake of his decision to seal Deck Three, he’d lived in guilt, terror, and desperation. Every breath. Every beat of his heart. Each pulse of blood in his veins had been with the knowledge of the horror he’d unleashed upon his transportees.

  Now that living shame was gone.

  Deck Three was quiet, dark, empty. Halls, decking, and rooms that had shivered in time to the screams of murdered and butchered human beings now lay thick with ominous silence.

  Years of desperate yearning to deliver the Unreconciled to their destination—once an almost impossible dream—was now a fact. That terrible weight was lifted. It no longer lurked like a beast on his shoulder, exhaling its fetid stench into his waking thoughts, his nightmares, or deepest fears.

  They are gone.

  The reality should have left him ebullient. Filled with life and hope. It should have been freedom.

  Instead, Galluzzi just huddled against the transparency, his arms tucked tightly against his aching gut.

  I just wish I was dead.

  Out in the black, the endless patterns of stars mocked him in silence.

  22

  As the shuttle lifted from Ashanti’s bay, Talina kept her attention on the monitors that showed the main cabin. There, just behind that locked hatch, seventy-seven of the Irredenta sat, waiting. Some trembled with anxiety, others chatted in an almost manic fashion with their neighbors. Still others kept singing that oddly atonal, slurred-sounding song. Over and over, as if it were a mantra.