“Yo!”
“You’re in charge of the airtruck. Keep it secure. We might have to beat feet out of here, so do what you have to. And, Russ, as soon as we hit the dirt, get some drones in the air to keep an eye on things.”
“Roger that, Mark.”
Talbot set them down on the landing pad, powered down the fans, and asked, “Ready?”
“Yut yut!” came the call from the marines as they opened the door and began dropping to the ground outside.
Talbot climbed down, took Sheyela’s toolbox, and helped her to the ground. The Unreconciled were crowding around just beyond the marines, waving, calling excitedly.
“It’s just women and kids,” Anderssoni muttered.
“Fuck me,” Michegan growled uneasily. “I’ll never get over those scars. Who’d do that to themselves?”
The crowd parted, a man and woman walking through the press. The man was white-haired, a long ponytail hanging down his back. The scars gave his thin face a pinched look. The woman was tall, maybe late thirties, intricately scarred. Both were naked to the waist, and to Mark’s curious relief, they were both wearing shoes.
“I am First Will Petre Jordan,” the man introduced. Indicating the woman, he added, “This is Second Wife Svetlana Pushkin.”
“Call me Svetlana,” the woman added with a smile. “The formal titles really are a bit over the top. On behalf of the Messiah, we want to thank you for coming at such short notice.” She glanced askance at the marines in their gleaming armor, rifles at port arms. “The guns and soldiers won’t be needed. It’s just an electrical problem. Probably something simple. But we don’t have anyone left who can fix it.”
“The marines are just a formality,” Mark told her with a smile. “If you could tell us what the problem is?”
Again, it was Svetlana who extended an arm. “Something down at the collectors. If you’d come this way?”
To the people she added, “I know you all want to talk to the newcomers, and you have a thousand questions, but please, stay back. Maybe, when some of the suspicion has been allayed, we can truly welcome these people to our homes.”
Mark felt that warning bell go off. After Batuhan and the first impressions, this was just a little too good to be true.
Nevertheless, Svetlana and Petre started south, leading the way.
“Screw me with a skewer,” Sheyela whispered. “So that’s a cannibal?”
“Shhh.” Mark waved her down.
Svetlana had dropped back, seemed nonchalant as she matched Mark’s pace, apparently unconcerned about Muldare artfully staying between them. “So, you’re Mark Talbot, right?”
“Yeah. I’m security second for Port Authority.”
“I saw you when the Supervisor brought us down. We would have liked to have talked then, gotten to know you all, but you’ve got to understand, we were scared. After what had been done to us on that ship, we didn’t know what to expect.”
“Welcome to Donovan.”
“Yeah,” she shot him a grin. “This is like a paradise.”
“One that will kill you before you know you’re dead.”
“Oh, we’re taking precautions.”
“Half those women and kids following us are barefoot.”
“Mark, you’ve got to understand, we’re still trying to cope. Those kids have never had shoes. Didn’t need them in Deck Three. What we endured? Well, it’s going to take a while to come to terms with it. We’ve barely survived a holocaust. Probably be a while before we’re normal again.”
Amen to that. Aloud Mark said, “We’ll do whatever we can to help. Get you a start, at least. I lived on a station like this one down to the south. Everything you need is here. Use the radio. Call if you have questions.”
She indicated the marines who tromped along in their armor. “Listen, combat-ready soldiers don’t exactly send a reassuring message to our people. I know where the Supervisor is coming from, and I can only guess what that shit-sucker Galluzzi has told you. But if you’d give us a chance . . . well, maybe today can be a first step. You follow what I’m saying?”
“Sure. Just let us get your electricity fixed, and we’ll call it a win all the way around.”
She shot him a warm smile. “Then we’ll consider this the first step. What do you need from us? How can we help?”
“Just let us do our job.”
Svetlana crossed her arms under her small breasts and frowned as they passed the agricultural fields. “It won’t be easy for us. We’re not in the habit of trusting strangers. Any consideration you could show would be helpful.”
“One step at a time.” He knew the marines were monitoring their tech. Into his com, he asked, “Russ? What do your eyes in the skies see?”
“Not a thing, Mark. You’re definitely the center of attention, but it’s just a bunch of women and kids, most of the men are working in the fields, harvesting crops. Nothing that looks like a weapon anywhere. Looks to me like they’re good.”
It took Sheyela five minutes to bypass a fried circuit board. As she closed and latched the access door, she said, “Looks like, old as it is, it just couldn’t take the load. They’ll be good to go.”
As they started back, Mark’s com announced, “Mark? The men from the fields are headed in my direction bearing baskets.”
To Svetlana, he said, “My marine tells me that a bunch of the men are headed for the airtruck.”
“Good,” she answered. “It’s the only thing we could think of.”
“Think of what?”
“Fresh food. It may not be that noteworthy or valuable to you, but after years of ration, it’s the most valuable thing we have to offer as a way to express our appreciation for your kind help.”
Five minutes later, as he piloted the airtruck up from the landing pad, Talbot wondered what had just happened. Behind him, the marines crowded around baskets of green beans.
And yes, he understood the symbolic offering it represented.
So much for salivating cannibals.
Maybe they’d been overreacting to the threat from the beginning?
* * *
* * *
Vartan stepped up beside Svetlana and Petre as the airtruck sped its way eastward. The sound of its passing had long since faded. Now it was but a dot in the distance, barely visible against the clouds. Then it vanished.
“Well, what do you think?” Vartan asked.
Svetlana shrugged, rubbing nervous hands up and down the scars on her arms. “We could have been more convincing if the marines hadn’t been wearing that armor. Talbot was skeptical right up until we gave them those baskets of food.”
“That almost broke my heart,” Petre said with a sigh. “My mouth watered at the sight. I kept thinking what that lot would have tasted like broiled over a grill.”
“You did well,” Vartan told Svetlana. “Me, I’ve never been good at lying. Too much honesty in me, I guess.”
“It’s not like a lie, Vart,” Petre told him. “That’s the enemy. Deceivers. We owe them nothing but destruction.”
27
The small conference room midway down the hall in the Port Authority hospital was packed. Kalico Aguila sat in the chair just back from the door. Across from her, Talina Perez was listening to something in her head. Given her expression, it must have been Demon. The woman’s eyes had that penetrating, almost alien look that reeked of quetzal.
Dya Simonov was using her implants to scroll through a complicated holographic display Kalico couldn’t quite make out given her angle at the table.
And in the chair beside her, Lee Cheng was fiddling with some sort of protein that was projected in the air before him. He kept using his fingers to flip the projection this way and that as if studying the protein’s geometry.
Mgumbe, Cheng’s assistant, sat back in his chair, his fingers crossed. A pensive ex
pression gave his face a sagacious quality. Beside him, Iji Hiro, the Port Authority botanist, was doodling on his tablet.
Raya Turnienko came bursting into the room in a long-legged stride, her lab coat flapping behind. She abruptly pulled out a chair and dropped into it. For all the haste of her entry, she sat for a moment, staring as if at some distance beyond her mental horizon.
“What have you got, Raya?” Dya asked, breaking the woman’s almost trancelike stare.
Kalico shifted, curious as to what Raya’s big mystery might be. It wasn’t like it was a secret that the Unreconciled were cannibals—as tough as that was to comprehend in the twenty-second century.
“Cheng,” Raya said, “could you turn the display so that everyone can see it, please?”
He did, and Kalico got a good look at something that resembled a warped oval that had been bent out of shape. At the same time, Cheng said, “Is this it?”
“It is.”
Cheng blinked. “No pus-sucking way!”
“Way.” Raya replied flatly.
Talina, beating Kalico to the punch, said, “Fascinating conversation. Mind cluing the rest of us in?”
“Kuru,” Raya said without emotion. “A disease that vanished in the early twenty-first century. What you are looking at is called a prion. Specifically PrPsc, a misfolded protein that causes a form of transmissible spongiform encephalitis. It’s similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, though kuru has a slightly different etiology. In this case, transmission of the disease is via the consumption of infected tissues found in the human central nervous system. Particularly the brain. Though it can also be found in other bodily fluids.”
“Where did they get it?” Talina asked. “I mean, who passed it through screening back in Transluna?”
“Maybe no one,” Cheng said with a shrug. “Could just be a chance folding of the protein.”
Mgumbe grunted, said, “If they even screen for prions. It’s not like a whole host of cannibals are applying to The Corporation for space travel. It should have been extinct.”
Raya added, “Even if the prion was present in one of the transportees when he or she boarded Ashanti, most people have a genetic resistance against kuru. Paleoanthropologists have proven that our evolution is rife with anthropophagy. That’s the fancy word for people eating other people. Like for the last two million years. No matter how hallowed you think your ancestors were, go back far enough, and someone was chowing down on his or her fellow man.”
“You’re joking,” Kalico said.
“Not at all. According to the anthropological literature, cannibalism served four different functions: survival, ritual, political, and pathological.
“Survival speaks for itself: A dead body represents a lot of calories to a starving person. Ritual? As with the Fore people where kuru was first identified, they ate their dead ancestors as a sign of respect. Political cannibalism is what we see in places like the prehistoric American Southwest. There, if you rebelled against the rulers, they’d eat your family in front of you. And, finally, there’s pathological, like the psychiatrically disordered who kill, dismember, and eat their friends or lovers. The Unreconciled seem to have incorporated all four functions at once.”
Dya said, “Let’s get back to the initial infection and why it wasn’t detected back at Solar System. Where did this come from?”
Raya cleared her throat. “So whoever the original patient was, he or she might have lived a normal life. Never known the prion was in their system. When he or she died, the disease would have dead-ended.
“But there are two mutations on the 129th location on the PrP gene; if they turn up homozygous recessive, and the individual is exposed to the prion, they will develop the disease.”
“How contagious is this?” Talina looked grim, thinking no doubt of her time in contact with the Irredenta.
“You don’t want to handle any brain or body tissue from the infected. You don’t want to expose yourself to sores on their bodies. Nor do you want to stick yourself with anything contaminated by their blood or body parts. Oh, and if I were you, I’d be very careful if I got a lunch invite from the Irredenta.” Raya was back to staring at infinity.
“What about the Ashanti crew?” Kalico asked. “Are they in danger?”
Raya said, “Only if they ate infected Irredenta. The standard precautions taken in hydroponics would have been sufficient to protect them.”
Dya ran fingers through her blond locks. “I’ll send Galluzzi’s people an update. Ensure they take the appropriate measures as they sterilize Deck Three. As to hydroponics, the systems are designed to denature proteins down to their constituent amino acids. The design ensures that microviruses are rendered incapable of transmission, which should similarly denature prions. But be aware, prions are durable, long-lasting, and resistant to most simple sterilizations.”
“How do we cure this?” Talina asked. “Some vaccine?”
“You don’t,” Raya told her. “You saw their prophets. Those must have been the first cases. Their dementia is so advanced they’ve lost motor control. Remember how they were being fed? The trouble they were having eating? That’s because they can’t swallow. Their brains are full of lesions, holes, that will kill them within a month, I’d say.”
“And their prophecies?” Talina asked.
“The ravings of dementia,” Raya told her. “The slurred speech and disjointed words. Mumblings, jumbled utterances. Sometimes they’ll break out in laughter, other times, tears. Not the first time in human history that the demented were believed to be oracles, or to have a direct line to God, or whatever.”
Raya then added, “And there are others who are in the initial stages. Go back to the holo of the Irredenta leaving Ashanti. The ones lacking coordination? The trembling? The ones with odd facial expressions? Those are the early stages. Along with slurred speech. The patient has trouble with basic motor function.”
“Slurred speech?” Kalico mused. “Remember that eerie song they were singing?” She paused, putting it together. “I thought it was so odd that they’d pick a chant that mimicked being drunk or drugged. That they’d sing something like that with such enthusiasm. Bet it was one of the prophets who sang it first.”
Cheng, always the hard scientist, muttered, “Wait a minute. I mean, sure, things were pretty grim on Deck Three. But we’re supposed to believe that when these prophets started going crazy, saying demented things, that all the rest of the survivors just bought into it? I mean, there had to be somebody sane who said, ‘Wait a minute, this isn’t divine revelation, these guys are going clap-trapping insane.’”
“I wouldn’t doubt but you’re right.” Talina was squinting, as if picturing it in her head. “But it’s a traumatized population looking for answers. Wouldn’t surprise me if good old Batuhan himself wasn’t the one to sidle up behind the naysayers and whack them in the head. Probably noted the event by saying, ‘And such are the wages of disbelief.’”
“Believe or die?” Mgumbe rubbed his jaw.
“Religion has always flourished as a means of maintaining group identification, solidarity, and harmony.” Raya was staring at the prion holo where the oval-shaped protein was displayed, the fold running through its middle.
Kalico asked, “What happens when we tell them it’s a prion disease and not divine revelation? These are educated people, professionals, the kind who understand cause and effect in the physical world. It’s not like being Unreconciled is the only reality they’ve ever known. Surely we can appeal to the sane and intelligent among them to give up this crazy belief that they’re going to devour and thereby cleanse the universe.”
Dya had been thoughtful, tapping her fingers on the tabletop. Now she said, “I suspect you’re right. Most of them probably had that underlying skepticism all along. Probably went along with the belief. As long as they were locked away on Deck Three, they were surrounded by reinfo
rcement. What other reality was there?”
Dya lifted a finger. “But say that we show up, having done genetic scans from the samples we took as they got off the shuttle. We tell them: ‘These people will develop kuru and die of dementia. The rest of you are immune to the prion. There is no divine revelation. It’s just a simple illness.’” She paused. “What happens next?”
“They realize that they’ve been duped.” Cheng shrugged. “Go back to being normal people again. Problem solved.”
“Hardly,” Dya shot back. She glanced around the table. “They murdered, dismembered, and ate their fellow transportees. These were people they’d known intimately over the years that they were in transit. They committed acts of repulsive abomination. Scarified their bodies. And did you notice? Every woman is either pregnant or breastfeeding a newborn. And, reviewing the preliminary genetics, about half of the children are sired by Batuhan and—with a few exceptions—his four lieutenants.”
“So you’re saying Batuhan and his Chosen have preferred sexual access to the females?” Cheng leaned forward and frowned.
Dya fixed him with hard blue eyes. “I’m saying that there’s no ‘normal’ for any of these people. Sure, the sane among them are going to understand that what comes out of the prophets’ mouths is demented babble. What does that do to their feelings of guilt when they realize it wasn’t divine revelation, wasn’t the universe telling them it was all right to murder and eat people? Wasn’t God telling them to scarify their skin, or to surrender their bodies to Batuhan to sire his children? It was just a disease. Sorry.”
“So what do we do about it?” Talina asked.
Kalico rubbed her eyes, a growing sense of distaste down in her gut. “We tell them the truth.”
“That might split those people right down the middle,” Raya warned. “It’s not like they’re novices when it comes to murdering each other.”
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