Chapter 4.
Pastor Reyes prayed for compassion. Then he studied the recordings of the interrogation sessions. Then he wept.
He went to see Moondance every day. After a week, she was no longer thinking of suicide. But a new idea had taken root, one which Pastor Reyes did not plant, indeed one which he considered unchristian. Revenge on Deirdre Skye.
As Moondance regained her health, her ferocity startled even Morgan. She wanted to start a worm-corps for the Deineirans. Morgan pointed out that they didn't know how the worm-controller worked and they didn't have empathy tests.
"Nab, I'm better than the empathy tests," said Moondance. "I could always tell how good the other kids were going to be after talking to them for a while. I could always tell who wouldn't recover from worm-sickness. Let me recruit while your scientists figure out the worm-controller."
"Moondance, you still have some convalescing to do. And you are too young for our military."
Moondance said, "Back home, and especially at Planetsong, it was hard to see what was going on. Even if you felt something was wrong, there was no one you could talk to about it. But now that I can see it from the outside, I can see what they did to us.
"All the time in ecodoctrine we heard about how precious and fragile Planet's ecology is and how we have to be ready to kill anyone who threatens it. Ecodoctrine is boring, but even if you think you're ignoring it, it still sinks in over time, and it's repeated so often that you forget there is any other way to think.
"Before you said it, it had never occurred to me that Planet's ecology is just fungus and worms. But you're right, and it's so obvious, but it's something we wouldn't think in Planetsong, or if we ever thought it, we'd forget it after a while because we'd never dare say it aloud.
"We were just children, and they made us into monsters. Deirdre Skye did that. I'll do anything that helps bring her down.
"You think of me as a kid because I'm so young, but I'll never have a chance to be a real kid now. I'm a killer, Nab. Please give me a chance to kill the right people this time."
Meanwhile, the war was on. Deirdre Skye launched an invasion fleet of troop transports with an inadequate escort. The Deineirans sank the fleet in a great sea battle a few hundred kilometers west of Deineira. There were only a few survivors, thanks to worms in the water.
Deirdre Skye rejected all of Morgan's attempts to parley.
Normally, Nwabudike Morgan was alone when he had his talks with Miriam Godwinson, but this time Lucia Graves was with him. After the hololink was established and preliminary greetings and smalltalk were exchanged, Morgan said, "I left the military interrogation to my military experts, but when they were done, Lucia and I questioned the prisoners with a view to gaining a general understanding of Deirdre Skye's faction and insight into Deirdre Skye herself.
"Though the faction is nominally a democracy, Deirdre Skye maneuvered herself into a position of absolute control. I had not considered her capable of such subtlety."
"Her subtlety is nothing compared to yours, Nab," said Lucia.
"Perhaps not, but my experience is much greater, and her subtlety was quite adequate to the task at hand," said Morgan. "Her faction calls itself the Gaians. Gaia was apparently an ancient Greek goddess of the Earth, so I suppose they are effectively calling themselves Earthers. It seems incompatible with their professed aim to protect the ecology of Chiron."
Miriam said, "I believe the term refers to a pseudoscientific ideology that was popular in certain circles back on Earth. The so-called Gaia hypothesis viewed the entire ecology of Earth as a living organism. This is an abuse of metaphor, of course, but it served as a bridge to neopaganism. Paganism is essentially a systematic abuse of metaphors.
"You see, paganism originally arose out of primitive attempts to understand nature, unlike later religions, which were driven by an attempt to understand morality. In a primitive worldview, the mechanism of the world is metaphor and myth. If we ask whether the ancient Greeks really believed that Zeus was responsible for tossing the lightning bolts in a storm, we are asking the wrong question. On the one hand, no sane Greek would look up in the sky and expect to see Zeus with a lightning bolt in hand. On the other, our ancient Greek knew the myths and thought they were the reason that things were the way they were."
"She styles herself Lady Deirdre Skye, now, as if she were some kind of nobility," said Lucia. "Do you think she might be trying to establish a hereditary aristocracy? It seems mad, but nothing she does makes any sense."
"It might not have anything to do with hereditary aristocracy," said Miriam. "I fear her ambitions are even greater. Celtic neopagans often refer to nature deities as Lord, and Lady. I think she is trying to set herself up as a goddess."
Lucia said, "We don't yet have any sources among the Gaians themselves aside from the prisoners we have taken. But we have established cells among the lower orders of Zakharov's faction. They don't have access to research data, but they are able to tell us about the general conditions in their faction. They tell us that the name Deirdre Skye is spoken with respect by their elite. Her faction's biological research has apparently outstripped theirs, and Zakharov's post-docs in the biological sciences go to her faction for advanced study."
Morgan said, "I sometimes misjudge people, but I rarely misjudge them so greatly. On the Unity, I thought she was a mere ditz. She had enough charisma to attract a coterie of starry-eyed zealots, but I thought her intellect was limited. Nor did the scientists seem to hold her in much respect.
"Though she seemed capable of doing some damage in the name of her misguided idealism, I never expected her to commit murder. I thought she might be driven to sabotage, but nothing much worse. Nothing I saw on the Unity prepared me for either the competence or the cruelty she now displays."
"Perhaps she is a cat's paw for Zakharov," said Lucia.
"That may have been Zakharov's intention, but I think she is something more, now," said Miriam.
"I concur," said Morgan. "She is now highly dangerous in her own right.
"This war does not make sense to me. It is perhaps consistent with her professed ideals, other than pacifism, but it doesn't fit what I thought her character to be. She attacked us without warning, without having ever contacted us. She refuses all attempts to parley. And if she lusts for conquest, why us? There are closer, easier targets."
"It may not be conquest that she seeks," said Miriam. "She wants both us and her own people to think that this is just a war of conquest, but it may be something much worse: a war of annihilation."
"I am missing something important," said Morgan. "Some key to her character, some explanation of how I could have been so wrong about her. But I judge that you, Miriam, are never wrong about a person you have been able to observe closely over an extended period of time. How did you see her on the Unity?"
"I thank you for your faith in me, Nab, but I am not infallible, and in this case I failed. My impression of her on the Unity was much like yours. She didn't show either the intelligence or the malevolence that she now displays. Nor did I detect signs of incipient megalomania. She struck me as the sort of person who would pave the road to hell with her good intentions. A fool, both intellectually and morally, but no worse than that, and with no intellectual assets beyond the charisma that you noted.
"She has changed, somehow. Either that or she managed to thoroughly fool both of us on the Unity, and we two are probably the shrewdest judges of character on this planet.
"In the long run we need to solve the puzzle of Deirdre Skye. In the short run, we need to keep her from destroying us. I can send you an army to defend Deineira."
"I am touched by your offer, Miriam," said Morgan. "Our own military is small, and I don't know how well our local militias would fare against professionals. But you should keep most of your army at home, not only to defend the Conclave but to pose a threat that will dissuade Zakharov from sending troops against us. Also, I think it is strategically important not to overreact. When you overreact, you are letting the enemy pull your strings."
"A profound observation, Nab, and one which I may borrow for a sermon. How many troops should I send?"
"I think two brigades will strike the right balance," said Morgan.
The Conclave troops, with their unadorned black uniforms, their grim purposefulness, and their simple bowl haircuts, fascinated the Deineirans. Soon many Deineirans who had formerly worn the most brightly colored clothing they could find garbed themselves in starkly simple black, and elegant coiffures were replaced by bowl haircuts.
Many a young man in the Conclave army found Deineiran females offering their bodies to him, not for money or even sheer wantonness, but out of admiration and gratitude. And many a young man in the Conclave army reasoned that in war things were different, and what was ordinarily sinful was acceptable or even meritorious, and when was he going to get another offer like this anyway?
A story made the rounds of one young woman (always described as intoxicatingly beautiful) who deliberately became pregnant, though with no idea of entrapping the father into marriage. "My son will be a bastard," she was alleged to have said, "but he will be the bastard of a hero!" The story was probably apocryphal and may even have been planted by one of Lucia Graves' people, but the boost it gave to morale was astonishing.
On the diplomatic front, relations were opened with two other factions: Pravin Lal's faction, who called themselves the Peacekeepers or simply the UN, and Corazon Santiago's faction, who called themselves the Spartans. Morgan negotiated with them from the Deineiran capital of Adam Smith over encrypted hololink.
Lal met Morgan's request for aid against Deirdre Skye with practiced sanctimony. He implored Morgan to seek peace with Deirdre Skye, and when Morgan pointed out that she refused all attempts to parley, Lal said that Morgan must have provoked her with his "imperialist stance," although Morgan hadn't even had any contact with her when she first attacked.
Lal suggested that Morgan not resist the Gaian invaders, and that if the Gaians proved oppressive, he could struggle against her with peaceful protests. Ahimsa. Morgan treated this fake Gandhianism with fake respect. But if no direct help was forthcoming from the Peacekeepers, at least trade was opened up and the Deineirans gained another window on the world.
Santiago also expressed a desire to sit out the war, though her position was more forthright. She said she would ally herself with the victor. Morgan dryly pointed out that his gratitude would be greater if she allied herself with him when he actually had a need for her, and that if he lost and then Deirdre Skye turned on her, she might find herself wishing for allies.
Santiago's faction was centered about a great inland sea on the continent they called Clausewitz. Morgan's RF scans had indicated and Santiago confirmed that the Gaians were colonizing the northern tip of the continent. Santiago admitted that worried her, but she did not consider it a casus belli. She did not want to get into a war where she would have to maintain a long supply line.
Morgan negotiated a trade pact. The Deineirans would trade a broad spectrum of goods in exchange for weapons and military trainers.
This left only Sheng-ji Yang uncontacted (counting the war with Deirdre Skye as contact). He was evidently situated on a large volcanic island in the far south. Morgan was content to leave him out of the picture for the present.
The war forced Morgan to abandon his plan of fading into the background. He was the founder of the faction and its leader in the difficult early years, so people looked to him in times of crisis. Soon, though no one could say exactly what he did, he seemed to be everywhere, and the Deineirans were reassured that the situation was under control. His effect on morale can be gauged by the fact that more and more Deineirans were starting to refer to themselves as Morganites.