“Dragon’s Domain”
“John, if we ever do find a new place to live, and if we succeed, we’re going to need a whole new mythology.”
“Tony Cellini and the Monster? No.”
“Saint George and the Dragon sounds pretty flat, until you know the story...”
~Cmdr. Koenig and Dr. Russell
Tony Cellini, one of Alpha’s senior pilots, is having horrific nightmares. Dr. Russell is concerned, but Cellini is dismissive, offering no details. But he is reliving a horrible episode from his past, when as the commander of the Ultra Probe in 1996, he and his three shipmates encountered a graveyard of derelict starships from other civilizations in the vicinity of Ultra. Docking with one of them, they were attacked by a creature of Lovecraftian horror, a tentacled monster with a huge glowing eye. Only Cellini survived – and, upon his return to Earth, he found his report of the incident disbelieved, and himself under a cloud of suspicion of having killed his crew through error and incompetence. It was Koenig’s sympathy for him – they were close friends – that got him restored to active duty and assigned to Alpha.
Cellini’s nightmares have been triggered by the reappearance of the graveyard of starships in Alpha’s path, and he is determined to have a rematch with the creature. Dr. Russell, who examined Cellini upon his return years earlier, doesn’t believe his story, and even berates Koenig for his faith in his friend. Bergman is likewise skeptical. But it all comes to a head when Cellini succeeds in stealing an Eagle and docks with the old Ultra Probe, with Koenig, Russell, and a security team in pursuit.
The creature kills by entangling its prey in its tentacles and pulling it beneath itself, then dissolving its body with acid and ejecting the remains.8 Cellini furiously assaults the creature with an axe, only to be pulled beneath it and killed, just as Koenig and the others enter the ship.
Koenig intuits that the creature’s huge eye is its vulnerability and plunges the axe into it, killing it. The Alphans return to base, where Russell gives Cellini his long-sought vindication in a log entry, and discusses the incident with Koenig, musing that Cellini’s death has contributed to a new Alphan mythology.
Helena Russell’s invocation of St. George and the Dragon is, of course, apropos. That myth plays out much as Cellini’s story does – a vile creature terrorizes Silca, killing its inhabitants (including children) and demanding a tribute from the villagers in exchange for their lives – then amending the bargain to accept an annual human sacrifice, once their wealth is exhausted. When the dragon demands the beautiful daughter of the King of Selene as the next tribute, St. George of Cappadocia steps up, rescuing the princess and slaying the beast.
Though the story as presented above is a Christian myth dating to around the 11th century, it has pre-Christian origins. It has roots in the Greek myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece, the legend of the monster Typhon, Perseus and Andromeda, and others. In each, the story is that of a dragon to be slain and its potential victims to be rescued. The metaphor, Christian and otherwise, is Good vs. Evil.
The ancient struggle
It’s not the clearest of metaphorical targets: the concepts of Good and Evil aren’t nearly as universal as most people assume them to be. The Judeo-Christian cliché is, of course, God = Good! Satan = Bad! and that this proceeds to Good = Life and Evil = Death, and so on. God is love and kindness and light; Satan is pain and suffering and darkness. We therefore pursue and obey God, and abhor/flee Satan.
But this simplistic notion breaks down under even the most cursory inspection of the Hebrew/Christian texts, which present God as breathtakingly casual in the morality of his actions when it comes to achieving his ends, committing genocide with appalling frequency and indulging a vanity that causes even that of Narcissus to pale alongside it.
Even so, this is useful, because it separates “Good and Evil” from the domain of morality; “Good” becomes “Whatever God says,” even it is morally onerous, because God said it (which explains the Religious Right in US politics). This forces us to make some choices about what it is we’re really talking about; was Tony Cellini fighting his dragon as Good fighting Evil? Or was his struggle a moral one? And if so, what is the difference?
Before we get to that, we need to consider that any answer must necessarily be confined to a very small domain, in terms of what it addresses. We have to note that the concepts of Good and Evil aren’t even standard in human religion, let alone across our species, let alone across the universe. In Confucianism, for instance, Good and Evil aren’t even present as concepts; it is a religion focused on social relationships and how learned persons behave, without labels, the public good being the end pursuit. In Taoism, there is certainly a duality at work, but it confines itself to the embrace of compassion, moderation and humility as humankind’s aspirational virtues, and their absence as an undesirable state.
Closer to home, there’s Pyrrhonism, a Greek school of skepticism that Good and Evil do not exist in nature, as it were, but are relativistic attributes assigned with pure subjectivity. Put another way, a person/place/thing is good or evil based on the eye of the beholder – which, again, makes perfect sense in the context of the US Religious Right.
Reaching further from religion and more deeply into philosophy, there’s Spinoza, who defined Good as knowledge with positive utility, and Evil that which stands in the way of such knowledge. This is a definition we can easily imagine to be embraced by many of the Alphans we know (Victor Bergman in particular).
And, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche goes all in, rejecting all notions of Judeo-Christian morality altogether9 by defining the church’s concept of Evil as anything natural or of positive social utility that works in the favor of those the church opposes – and that those within the church practice a faux morality to begin with, parading a piety that is purely for social acceptance within the church.
And beyond philosophy, there’s science itself: the Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo suggests10 that Evil is a question of collective identity – that large groups of people (see “like-mindedness” in the previous chapter) can render Good and Evil interchangeable via nothing more than acquiescence to shared action in pursuit of a group goal. “Good” is “Whatever my group wants”, no matter the moral implications of the goal or the means by which it is pursued (and now we’re really talking the US Religious Right).
A galaxy of human morals?
All of this consideration of Good and Evil – and, by extension, morality – as concepts causes us to consider in turn that as humans contemplating the stars, we project our own ideas about these things onto an indifferent universe. Sure, in Trek and Star Wars and 1999 and Battlestar: Galactica and all the others, it’s us good-guy humans facing the evils out there in the darkness. But, of course, that’s as absurd as the premise of a mostly-humanoid galaxy itself. Our ideas about Good and Evil are our own, and projecting them onto other things – life here or elsewhere, even arbitrarily onto other human beings – is an empty and self-defeating pursuit.
Consider that the invaders in many sci-fi films are portrayed as evil, but that from their point of view – in, say, Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Independence Day – they are simply surviving. Or that often the visitors have nothing like what we would consider a morality at all, as in Arrival. Or that their moral rules exist, but are beyond our capacity to relate to them (Childhood’s End)...
...which forces us to confront the possibility that Tony Cellini’s monster may not have been a monster at all, beyond the deep, primal, Earth-bound nightmares through which we perceive it. It’s easy to view it as just a being surviving in the deep, taking nourishment from any available source. Cellini's battle wasn’t Good vs. Evil, then, or a moral struggle; it was simply a fight to regain himself.
Then again, perhaps the lesson of Tony and the Monster is that no matter how far into the void we travel, those deep, primal, Earth-bound nightmares go with us; that the best we can do is detach them from our perceptions of Good and Evil as points on a moral scale, and lean into Spinoza – embrace as Good that which advances our understanding, and reject as Evil that which blocks our path to understanding.
It’s easy to conceive this as the religion that suits Alpha best – and it’s not a bad direction for us here on Earth, either.
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