Guyen's cult
Guyen’s cult is the name used for the people who live aboard the ark ship Gilgamesh outside suspension and treat Vrie Guyen as a saviour. They are descended from cargo he woke to work the ship, and by chapter 5 they fill its spare rooms and bays in their hundreds, children included.
What they are called
Lain calls them “a cult he’s got”, and Holsten reaches the same conclusion alone: his captors wear gloves to handle him, refuse to meet his eyes and keep their distance, so he takes them for a cult and himself for a sacred offering. Elsewhere they are the votaries, the faithful, the congregation and Guyen’s people. The dead and injured of the fight in chapter 5.7 are counted as luckless followers of the Church of Guyen. Once their prophet is dead, Holsten calls them Guyenites.
Where they come from
Lain thinks the original cargo crew are long dead and the rest were “basically raised on stories of Guyen”. Every spell he spent in suspension produced a legend about his return, and she calls it messianic. Holsten guesses they are two or three generations on from the first waking.
Guyen tells it as a run of delays. He woke a crew with technical experience, the work always needed one more year, and one day half the people doing it had been born outside suspension. The next generation learned less, and the one after that less again, because nobody had time to teach. “They knew nothing but the ship, and me,” he says.
Appearance and way of life
They are thin, small framed and undernourished. Almost none of them cut their hair, which hangs past the shoulders, and one of Holsten’s keepers has his plaited and coiled in a knot at the back of his neck. They shave Holsten’s head to fuzz to mark him as one of the originals. Most wear robes of sheer grey cloth, the same cloth as their tents, though some wear shipsuits and a few have made armour from ship parts.
They live in a shanty town. Grey drapes, blankets and wall panels divide the old operations room and the Communications suite into territories barely wide enough to lie down in, in a ship with no weather. The adults have the look Holsten calls desperate tranquillity.
Their weapons are old tools remade: knives, and at least one long plastic rod with a blade melted into the end. At the ascension the crowd is mostly armed with knives, makeshift spears and maces.
Belief
Guyen is the saviour and the upload is the ascension, “my eternal duty that will enable me to guide my people forever, in this world and the next”. He promises to provide for them and to show them the way. When Holsten tells the crowd they will starve, they stay placid and take no notice. The bulk of them freeze when Lain puts a nail gun to Guyen’s head, seeing their prophet about to be struck down at the point of his transcendence.
In the fighting
Guyen’s followers keep Holsten in a welded cage in a shuttle bay and tell him nothing for twenty seven days. Then they set him to translate files on the upload facility, with no access to the ship’s systems, and feed him when he works. A rival faction takes him from them. After his meeting with Karst and Vitas, a band of them drops from a hatch onto Lain’s group with long knives, and he is carried off again: “the high priest of the Gilgamesh recovering his property”.
Hundreds of them, men, women and children, gather before the dais at the ascension. The fight starts when someone from Karst’s squad levels a gun at Guyen, and the crowd with its spears and knives goes for them. About twenty are down before Lain reaches the dais, a couple of Karst’s band and the rest followers of the Church of Guyen. Karst’s people clear out the survivors, much less exultant about the partial ascension than they expected to be.
After Guyen
Waking much later, Holsten still expects Guyenites to come for him, and finds the neat strangers who do wake him more frightening than the ragged robes of the cultists. They wear shipsuits, and they call themselves Engineering.
Unanswered questions
- What they call themselves.
- Who the high priest was, and whether the robed men who gave Holsten his orders were priests or officers.
- Whether the cult and Engineering are the same people. Holsten cannot tell “the commander’s cultists, or highly trained engineers or whatever they really were”.
- What happened to them after Lain took control of the ship.