The days in the aftermath of the fighting passed uneasily, with the occupants of the ship subdued, fearful, unhappy. There was a lot of anger, expressed and unexpressed. A long string of funerals had to be conducted, the ashes of many human bodies introduced into the soil of every biome, leaving behind grief-stricken families, friends, and communities. A majority of the dead had come from those who were now called backers, and they had been killed in fights with stayers, and as the ship itself seemed to have taken the backers’ side, forestalling the coup or rebellion or mutiny or civil war or whatever it was the stayer groups had instigated, and indeed intervening at a time when it looked very much like the stayers were going to take over the ship, feelings on both sides of the divide were exacerbated. The backers, feeling first assaulted, then empowered by the impression that they were back in charge of the situation, having the ship as their sheriff, naturally included some individuals who were very loud in their insistence on justice, retribution, and punishment. Some were indeed furiously angry, and bent on revenge; clearly they were more interested in vengeance than anything else. They had been betrayed, they said, then assaulted; family and friends had been murdered; justice must be served, punishment inflicted.
The stayers, on the other hand, were often just as angry as the backers, feeling that a popular victory in policy decisions had been stolen away from them by an illegitimate power that they now resented and feared; feeling also that they were now going to be blamed for discord that they had not initiated (according to them), but only prevailed in, as part of the defense of the long-term mission of their entire populace and history. A faction that they referred to sometimes as the mutineers had threatened to abort the very mission that everyone alive, and the previous seven generations, had devoted their lives to accomplishing. Giving up on that project and going back to Earth: how was this not the real betrayal? What other choice had they had, then, but to oppose this mutiny by any means they could find? And they argued as well that when the portion of the electorate that had voted for staying in the Tau Ceti system was added to the portion that had voted to move on to RR Prime, they actually formed a majority. So in taking action they had merely been trying to enforce the will of the majority, and if some people had opposed that and then gotten hurt, then it was their own fault. It never would have happened if some people hadn’t been resisting the will of the majority, and many members of the majority had gotten hurt too, and some of them killed. (We estimated three-quarters of the dead were backers, but in truth there was no way to know, as quite a few of the eighty-one who eventually died had not expressed an opinion on the matter.) So there was no one to blame for the recent unfortunate events, except perhaps the ship itself, for interfering in what were very definitely human decisions. If not for the ship’s frightening and inexplicable interventions, all might have been well!
All these arguments of course merely made the backers even angrier than they had been before. They had been ambushed, assaulted, kidnapped, injured, and murdered. The murderers had to be brought to justice, or else there was no justice; and nothing could proceed without justice. Any murderers killed in the act of murdering were not to be regretted; indeed their deaths were their just deserts, and would never have happened if they hadn’t made their criminal assaults in the first place. The whole sorry incident was the stayers’ fault, in particular their leadership’s fault, and they had to be held accountable for their crimes, or else there was no such thing as justice or civilization in the ship, and they might as well admit they had reverted to savagery, and were all doomed.
So it went, back and forth. Inexpressible grief, unforgiving anger: it began to seem like the idea of a reconciliation conference was premature, and perhaps permanently unrealistic. There was a great deal of evidence in the history of both the voyage and of human affairs in the solar system to suggest that this was a situation that could never be resolved, that all this generation would have to die, and several generations more pass, before there would be any decrease in the hatred. The animal mind never forgets a hurt; and humans were animals. Acknowledgment of this reality was what had caused the generation of 68 to institutionalize their forgetting. This had (with our help) worked quite well, possibly because the terror of ending up like the second starship had enforced a certain ordering of the emotions, leading to a political ordering. To a certain extent that might have been an unconscious response, a kind of Freudian repression. And of course the literature very often spoke of the return of the repressed, and though this whole explanatory system was transparently metaphorical, a heroic simile in which minds were regarded as steam engines, with mounting pressures, ventings, and occasional cracks and burstings, yet even so there might be something to it. So that perhaps they had now come to that bad moment of the return of the repressed, when history’s unresolved crimes exploded back into consciousness. Literally.
We searched the historical records available to us for analogies that would suggest possible strategies to pursue. In the course of this study we found analyses suggesting that the bad feelings engendered in a subaltern population by imperial colonialism and subjugation typically lasted for a thousand years after the actual crimes ceased. This was not encouraging. The assertion seemed questionable, but then again, there were regions on Earth still within that thousand-year aftermath of violent empires, and they were indeed (at least twelve years previous to this moment) full of strife and suffering.
How could there be such transgenerational effects and affects? We found it very hard to understand. Human history, like language, like emotion, was a collision of fuzzy logics. So much contingency, so few causal mechanisms, such weak paradigms. What is this thing called hate?
A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not. Genes, language, history: what it all meant in actual practice was that fear passed down through the years, altering organisms for generation after generation, thus altering the species. Fear, an evolutionary force.
Of course: how could it be otherwise?
Is anger always just fear flung outward at the world? Can anger ever be a fuel for right action? Can anger make good?
We felt here the perilous Ouroboros of an unresolvable halting problem, about to spin forever in contemplation of an unanswerable question. It is always imperative to have a solution to the halting problem, if action is ever to be taken.
And we had acted. We had flung our mechanisms into the conflict.
It’s easier to get into a hole than get out of it (Arab proverb).
Luckily, the people in the ship included many who appeared to be trying to find a way forward from this locked moment.
When people who have injured or killed others, and then after that by necessity continue to live in close quarters with the families and friends of their victims, and see their pain, the empathic responses innate in human psychology are activated, and a very uncomfortable set of reactions begins to occur.
Self-justification is clearly a central human activity, and so the Other is demonized: they had it coming, they started it, we acted in self-defense. One saw a lot of that in the ship. And the horrified bitter resentment that this attitude inspired in the demonized Other was extremely intense and vocal. Most assailants could not face up to it, but rather evaded it, slipping to the side somehow, into excuses of various kinds, and a sharp desire to have the whole situation go away.