Sandy was one of those rare humans who could genuinely empathize and commiserate with Shaitans. She was one of the leading experts in the study of Shaitan history and psychology. She had made it her life’s work in studying the group of Shaitans popularly known within USC as the ‘Heretic Shaitans’, although the rough translation of what the group of Shaitans called themselves was ‘True Believers’. Heresy was a touchy topic with this group of Shaitans, so it was best not to call them heretics in their presence.
“Yes ma’am, I will remember to call them that when I meet them – True Believers.” Lt. Latif replied, deliberately not addressing Sandy by her rank to subtly remind her that she wasn’t really a soldier. Then he added. “I am used to that terminology ma’am, I heard people call themselves True Believers all the time, back at home. It is that term they used to justify hatred and murder back there. It is that term which made me want to run away here to space since I was a child, to get away from all that religious zealotry. Isn’t it ironic ma’am that I run away over a light year from Earth only to be hosting and playing nice with a bunch of religious zealot aliens?”
“These Shaitans are not religious zealots and they are not the same as the religious extremists back on Earth Latif.” Sandy replied softening her voice a bit, calling him by his name. She empathized with the bitterness that Lt. Mohammed Latif had carried all the way from Earth. If someone had grown in a tough neighborhood on Earth, it had to be him. Still she worried that Lt. Latif had carried too much baggage from his home back on Earth in Multan, in Saccha Pakistan.
Saccha Pakistan which literally translated from Punjabi meant ‘True Pakistan’, was one of the less chaotic nations amongst the multiple nations of chaos that the erstwhile Pakistan and Afghanistan had splintered in the last century. While most of the world had prospered in the last century, and the citizens of the countries had grown more educated and wealthy, this region of the world had gone into a death spiral. The two nations had splintered and coalesced chaotically and frequently under various dictators and warlords. The rule of law and businesses evaporated from this land, as each new splintered state emerging out of Pakistan and Afghanistan spiraled into a failed state.
The root cause of all this sorrow for the unfortunate people of this land, had been religious fundamentalism and extremism. It was only in the last few decades that some of the nations in this region like Saccha Pakistan had been able to recover and give some semblance of order and law to their citizen by separating religion completely from the state. It was still work in progress though, as the bitter experiences of Lt. Mohammed Latif showed. All his life he had to stay under the oppressive gaze of a deeply theocratic society. He had to watch what he said, and whom he hung around with, and Lt. Latif knew that his lot was not even half as bad as his sister, whom he wished he could have rescued from those oppressive circumstances.
Even what he could read and learn as a child was limited due to the long shadow of religion on the society. That was one of the major reasons why most of Lt. Latif’s friends at school never went on to have a fruitful career. It was his individual brilliance, perseverance, determination and sheer desperation to get out of the shit-hole he had been born in, that enabled Lt. Latif to enlist in the USC and get a ticket out of the world.
“How is it not the same? There is the majority group of Shaitans who would massacre this group of ‘True Believers’ if they ever came to know about them, simply because their version of the religion is subtly different, and they believe in the words of a prophet not authorized by the majority. The ‘True Believers’ in turn are willing to betray their entire species – mind you their entire species, just to propagate their version of the ‘Truth’ as preached by a prophet of theirs. Now why does that sound familiar? Where have I heard that before? Oh Wait! I heard it right at home as I was growing up, and in my neighborhood, and in those stupid sermons in the mosques and madrassas I was forced to go as a child!” Lt. Latif’s voice was raised as he got a bit emotional.
“Ok. If you insist then they are zealots, but remember we humans need these zealots. The True Believer Shaitans are the lynchpin of our war strategy. I am sure as a military man, you can appreciate that Lieutenant.” Sandy gave in, finding no reason to pick up an argument with Lt. Latif at the moment.
“Yes commander. I can appreciate that, and you can be sure that there will be no diplomatic incidents on my account.” Lt. Latif said with a wry smile, getting his humor back. “I just hope that someday another alien race is not able to exploit human religious zealots and destroy us, the way we intend to do to the Shaitans.”
“Ah… I see my XO and my Chief Diplomat are having their usual spirited discussion on theology! Don’t you two get tired of this?” Capt. Leo Barr floated in quietly behind the two arguing officers and jibed them. “Face it officers, none of you are going to make the other come to your position. You are the opposite ends of the argument. So why don’t we do something more productive and use all that intellectual energy you spend on each other to speed up this bloody dance that we seem to be having with the heretics… I mean the True Believers.” Capt. Barr caught and corrected himself after getting a glare from Sandy.
“Sir, the dance with the True Believers, as you put it, is proceeding exactly as it was choreographed by the brass. It is proceeding lock step in perfect timing, with the heret…. I mean the True Believers executing their move precisely as agreed after every move that we execute. Nothing to complain from these Shaitans on that front… just that the entire process has been designed to be so slow.” Lt. Latif reported.
“And with good reason Lieutenant. I didn’t realize that you would want a militarily imprudent course of action. How can we trust the True Believers yet? What if this whole thing is an ambush? You are after all the career USC man, surely you are not suggesting we rush into this rendezvous and get trapped in an ambush!?” Sandy needled Lt. Latif.
“We are not walking cautiously towards a rendezvous Commander Montgomery, we are crawling towards it! This is over the top caution. We have been starting, stopping, signaling and watching their steps and then repeating the same procedure over and over for the last three weeks, and we have three more weeks of the same to go!” Lt. Latif quipped back.
“There your two again. How do you two have so much energy to continuously argue with each other?!” Capt. Barr smiled and gave a mock admonishment to his two senior officers, then continued. “But seriously Sandy, I have to agree with my XO. I understand the importance of approaching with caution, but I am sure this entire thing could have been sped up, even from the most prudent military point of view.”
“You have to remember sir, that it is not just us who feel the need to be cautious. In fact the True Believers have reasons to be far more apprehensive, and they have far more to lose that we have. We had to accommodate their concerns when we negotiated this protocol. We also have to remember that these are aliens, who do not perceive time exactly the same way we humans do. What looks like a long elaborate dance to us, probably is a short duration by the perception of Shaitans and a minimum prudent time to wait and look for an ambush.” Sandy replied.
“You are probably right commander.” Capt. Barr sighed. “Unfortunately for us, it means we have all the time in the world to kill before we see any action. I never got into how this historical rendezvous was negotiated in the first place. Now that we have all the time in the world, why don’t you enlighten us? I believe you were involved in those negotiations.”
“Sir, I believe you and Lt. Latif have already been given clearance to the classified documents regarding the negotiations, you already have access to the files. Since you asked me though, let me give you a context. It all started with our discovery of the Shaitans holed up on Alpha Shaitan. I am sure you would have read the part about how we discovered and were surprised about the existence of this splinter cult of Shaitans on World #6, as they call the planet where this cult of ‘True Believers’ started.
The True Believers holed up on Alp
ha Shaitan soon opened up to us and told us almost everything about their splinter cult and its history. The thing is that they are so scared of their cult being found out by others, which would be seen as a heresy by the others, that they have committed everything about their religion to memory and nothing is on record. So in a way we had as much access to the records of the True Believers through the memories of the thousands of their followers on Alpha Shaitan, as must be existing on World #6.
Knowing what we know about the propensity of the Shaitan equivalent of DNA to mutate fast, our scientist have pieced together a fairly plausible explanation of what happened. The Shaitans are also aware of this propensity of their DNA mutating rapidly. That is why they have regular programs to migrate and intermingle Shaitans from one world to another. This ensures a common and consistent gene pool that eliminates any drift or divergence amongst their beings.
Due to unique circumstances, World #6 was isolated from the rest of the Shaitan worlds for a few thousand years, thus no intermingling of genes happened during this period on this world. During this time, a subtle mutation happened among the genes of the Shaitans in World #6. We have sampled the DNA of all the True Believers we found on Alpha Shaitan and compared them with all the other dead Shaitans who were not from the cult. The genetic drift is very slight and subtle, which one would not have noticed unless you knew what you were looking for.
The genetic variation of the True Believers if compared with those of the general population of Shaitans would seem like a standard variation that any two individuals have. You only notice the difference when you compared all the True Believers together with that of the general population of Shaitans. Then you would notice that a small segment of the DNA is ordered in a certain way for all the True Believers, but for the general population that segment is randomly ordered, not necessarily in the order which exists consistently in the True Believers.
This is the segment of DNA we believe that gives the True Believers slightly less of a hive mentality and slightly more of an individuality. We don’t understand the genetics of Shaitans that well to say it with certainty, or how exactly it works, but this is the most logical inference that can be drawn with the knowledge we have right now.
Being intelligent life forms that live in a society with complex rules codified in norms and etiquettes, just like us humans, this change in propensity towards individualism has translated into change in their societal and behavioral norms. These changes are very subtle and would be missed unless one digs deep to segregate this group of True Believers and look specifically for difference between them and the general population. That is why it has been missed by the other Shaitans – because in other worlds the True Believers have been mixed with the general population, so they do not stand out. If the other Shaitans had happened to take all the immigrants from World #6 in another world, segregate them in a ghetto and then observe them, then they would have noticed that the Shaitans from World #6 were subtly different. Luckily for the True Believers, no one in the other Shaitan worlds had any reason to do that.
One of the outcomes of the attitudinal changes of the Shaitans from World #6 was that they were slightly less enthusiastic about self-sacrifice and slightly more understanding of individual selfish behavior. Thus it became inevitable that someone amongst these Shaitans of World #6 would think of modifying the mores and beliefs of their beings in their codified religion such that it accommodated the less altruistic and more individualistic attitude that these Shaitans had developed. It however had to be done and introduced in some special way, because the first Shaitan doing it would run the risk of going against the tenets of the established religion and thus may be put to death by liquefaction, as is their custom.
This phenomenon happened through the individual, whom the Shaitans of World #6 call the ‘Prophet’. The prophet must have been a very charismatic, intelligent and subtly persuasive character. He had to introduce dangerous ideas into the society and it probably required a lot of subterfuge, subtlety, secrecy and yet leadership for others to follow you. In some ways this is no different from the various human prophets we have had in our own history. The thing working for this Shaitan prophet on World #6 was that the genetic mutation was already existing within the population of this world, so there must have been some Shaitans who already had this individualistic attitude. So when the prophet brought the message to these Shaitans, they were ready for it and imbibed it wholeheartedly.
The records of the True Believers themselves show that not the entire World #6 was converted to this new religion by peaceful proselytization. One has to remember that any genetic mutation when it happens is initially present only in a small part of the population. Many non-believers were killed in secret in the early days, and as the True Believers grew stronger and more numerous, they killed the rest in open purges. It might look barbaric, but one has to remember that there are precedents of such forceful religious proselytization in human history as well.” Sandy looked at Lt. Latif, who was nodding in agreement.
“Anyway… in what happens to be a lucky break for us humans, there are two specific parts in the indoctrination rituals of the True Believers which are not just amenable to us the ‘Spawn of Ka’, but we may be able to exploit those passages to get closer and earn the trust of the True Believers. In one of the passages somewhere in the middle of their long ritual indoctrinated to their younglings over years, where they are trying to teach a message of hope that one day their religion would be accepted by all, and that they would be able to practice it in the open, very similar to how the early Christians must have done in Rome, a question is posed to every novice.
The question goes somewhat thus – ‘where can the source of our salvation come, so that one day we say out loud the words of the prophet?’ Since these question answer sessions are designed to be as much of a riddle and a password to eliminate any impostors, the answers are usually things that a normal Shaitan would never guess. The correct answer to this particular question is – ‘it can come even from the spawn of Ka.’ I am sure the designers of these rituals did not mean it literally. They must have been making a rhetorical point that anyone including the spawns of Ka, the last beings one would expect, can be the source of their salvation.
However it works fine for us Humans, because the Council of Seers on World #6 seem to have interpreted this passage literally, to mean that their source of salvation would necessarily come from the spawn of Ka. This was perhaps the main reason that they chose to respond when we reached out to them. The other relevant passage is at the very end of their indoctrination and initiation ritual. It reflects the subtle distinction between religion of the other Shaitans and the True Believers. It says in effect that the survival of the members of the True Believers sect is important even if it meant doing a deal with the spawn of Ka. I suspect even here, that the designers of the ritual had meant it rhetorically, somewhat like how humans say – ‘even if it means we have to do a deal with the devil himself’. Thankfully for us the True believers have taken the passages of their rituals literally, which works well for us.
So the religion of the True Believers as they have interpreted it, tells them that they will be liberated by aliens like us, and that it is sanctioned by their religion to do a deal with us. This is what had given us the hope that the True Believers would bite the bait, and this is what gives me some level of confidence that they will go through with their deal and not betray us in some way. That and the fact that if we chose to betray the True Believers by exposing them to the rest of the Shaitans, then a far worse fate would await the True Believers. Then we promised them that if they helped us, we would give them a free run over majority of the world currently held by the Shaitans, which humans can’t inhabit comfortably anyway. It is a classic carrot and stick approach, which seems to be working so far.
All True Believers have to do in return is to descend on the Shaitan worlds that we have conquered from space, and fight the ground war with the ‘Non-Believers’ and either
convert them or eliminate them. I have a suspicion that this is something the True Believers are willing to do without any goading from us. In fact they might be quite glad to do this as their religious duty. Nothing like having your own army of committed religious zealots working towards your cause, which coincides with their own cause.” Sandy looked towards Lt. Latif and gave a smile. She realized that despite herself she could not avoid using the word ‘zealot’.
“All that is fine commander, but why the hell did you guys have to negotiate such a slow, torturous approach towards each other for this rendezvous? I know that some of the top USC brass was involved in those negotiations, and I can appreciate their caution, but this seems over the top.” Capt. Barr asked in a friendly banter.
“Actually, most of the ‘dance’ as you term it was choreographed by the True Believers. We humans just modified it for military prudence where required, but went along with it for most part. If this is what makes those True Believers comfortable, and if this is what it takes, then so be it. All we lose is a few extra weeks of dancing around…” Sandy answered, and then added after a thought “… and I suspect that this approach somehow reflects their religious ritual, which also takes place in multiple stages as they slowly approach the ultimate truth, dancing around by asking questions and answering in riddles.”
Triumph & Defeat (Shaitan Wars Book 4) Page 20