Then he began to see symptoms of psychological imbalance among officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel. Most of them started to become increasingly introverted, spending long periods alone with their thoughts and sharply reducing their social interactions. They spoke less and less at meetings, sometimes choosing to become completely silent. Lan Xi noticed that the light had disappeared from their eyes, and their expressions had turned gloomy. They couldn’t look anyone in the eye for fear that others would notice the fog in theirs. When they occasionally met someone’s gaze, they would break away immediately like they had been shocked…. The higher the rank, the more serious the symptoms. And there were signs that it was spreading through the lower ranks, too.
There was no way for psychological counseling to proceed. Everyone stubbornly refused to talk to the psychological officers, so CSD2 was compelled to exercise its special power to conduct mandatory counseling. Still, most of their subjects remained silent.
Lan Xi decided that he needed to talk to the supreme commander, so he went to Dongfang Yanxu. Although Zhang Beihai had once held supreme prestige and status on Natural Selection and the whole of Starship Earth, he had rejected it all, withdrawing from the race and insisting he was an ordinary person. The only duties he had retained were those of acting captain: transmitting the captain’s orders to the ship’s control system. The remainder of his time he spent wandering Natural Selection, learning about the specifics of the ship from officers and soldiers at all ranks and showing a constant affection for the space ark. Apart from this, he remained calm and indifferent, practically unaffected by the ship’s mass psychological shadow. He was no doubt trying to remain aloof, but Lan Xi knew of another important reason for his immunity: The ancients were not as sensitive as moderns, and in the present circumstances, numbness served an excellent self-protective function.
“Captain, you ought to give us some indication of what’s happening,” he said.
“Lieutenant Colonel, you ought to be the one giving us an indication.”
“Do you mean that you don’t know anything about your present state?”
An infinite sadness welled up in her dull eyes. “I only know that we’re the first humans who have gone into space.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is the first time humanity has really gone to space.”
“Oh. I see what you mean. Before, no matter how far humans traveled into space, they were still just a kite sent aloft by Earth. They were connected to Earth by a spiritual line. Now that line has been severed.”
“That’s right. The line is severed. The essential change is not that the line has been let go, but that the hand has disappeared. The Earth is heading toward doomsday. In fact, she’s already dead in our minds. Our five spacecraft are not connected to any world. There is nothing around us apart from the abyss of space.”
“Indeed. Humanity has never faced a psychological environment like this before.”
“Yes. In this environment, the human spirit will be fundamentally changed. People will become—” She suddenly broke off, and the sadness in her eyes vanished, leaving only gloom, like a cloud-covered sky after the rain has stopped.
“You mean that in this environment, people will become new people?”
“New people? No, Lieutenant Colonel. People will become… non-people.”
At that last word, Lan Xi shuddered. He looked up at Dongfang Yanxu, and she met his gaze. In the blankness of her eyes, all he saw were tightly closed windows to her soul.
“What I mean is that we won’t be people in the old sense…. Lieutenant Colonel, that’s all I can say. Just do your best. And…” The words that followed seemed like she was talking in her sleep. “It’ll be your turn soon.”
The situation continued to deteriorate. The day after Lan Xi’s talk with Dongfang Yanxu, there was a vicious injury on Natural Selection. A lieutenant colonel with the ship’s navigational system fired upon another officer bunking with him. According to the victim’s recollection, the officer had awakened suddenly in the middle of the night and, noticing that the victim was also awake, had accused him of eavesdropping on him talking in his sleep. In the struggle, his emotions had gotten away from him and he had fired the gun.
Lan Xi went at once to see the detained lieutenant colonel. “What were you afraid of him hearing you say in your sleep?” he asked.
“You mean he really heard it?” the attacker asked in terror.
Lan Xi shook his head. “He said that you didn’t say anything.”
“So what if I did say something? You can’t take sleep talk for the truth! My mind doesn’t really think that. Surely I’m not going to go to hell for something I said in my sleep!”
In the end, Lan Xi was unable to draw out what the attacker imagined he said in his sleep, so he asked whether he minded going under hypnotherapy. Unexpectedly, the attacker once again blew up at this suggestion, lunging at Lan Xi and strangling him until the military police finally came in and pried him off. Leaving the brig, one MP who had overheard the conversation said to Lan Xi, “Lieutenant Colonel, don’t mention hypnotherapy again unless CSD2 wants to become the most hated place on the ship. You wouldn’t last very long.”
So Lan Xi had to contact Colonel Scott, a psychologist aboard Enterprise. Scott also served as the ship’s chaplain, a position most ships in the Asian Fleet did not have. Enterprise and the other three ships in the pursuing force were still two hundred thousand kilometers away.
“Why is it so dark over there?” Lan Xi asked as he looked at the video sent over from Enterprise. The curved walls of the cabin Scott was in had been adjusted to glow a faint yellow, and they displayed an image of the stars outside, making it look as if he was inside a fogged-over cosmos. His face was shrouded in shadow, but even so, Lan Xi could still sense Scott’s eyes slipping quickly away from his gaze.
“The Garden of Eden is growing dark. Blackness will swallow everything,” Scott said in a weary voice.
Lan Xi had consulted him because, as chaplain of Enterprise, he would likely have had people confide the truth in him during confession, and he might be able to pass on some advice. But at these words, and noticing how the colonel’s eyes loomed in the shadows, Lan Xi knew that he would come up with nothing. So he suppressed the question he was about to ask and turned to another, one that surprised even him:
“Will what happened in the first Garden of Eden be repeated in the second?”
“I don’t know. At any rate, the vipers have come out. The snakes of the second Garden of Eden are even now climbing up people’s souls.”
“You mean, you’ve eaten the fruit of knowledge?”
Scott slowly nodded. Then he bowed his head, but did not raise it again, as if he was trying to hide the eyes that would betray him. “You could say that.”
“Who will be expelled from the Garden of Eden?” Lan Xi’s voice quavered, and a cold sweat was on his palms.