Ex Machina

by Christopher L. Bennett

  All the nuclear missiles fired from Yonada have been collected and destroyed under Shesshran supervision. With Yonada’s supply of nuclear missiles exhausted and Dovraku’s movement broken, the Shesshran have grudgingly retracted their ultimatum and resumed normal relations with their Lorini neighbors—in no small part because of the continued Federation presence in this system. Said presence will include the resident S.C.E. team, which is currently verifying the continued stability of Yonada’s collapsed-matter core, and devising more modern methods of reinforcing it. Meanwhile, plans are under way to manuever Yonada into a higher, safer orbit. Plans are being discussed to paint Yonada’s surface white or cover it with reflectors, so that it will still be visible to those Lorini who wish to pray to it.

  McCoy woke up to the sight of Natira lying beside him, and wondered why he’d ever thought living alone was a good idea.

  She was already awake, watching him, and rather than speaking she simply smiled, pulled him against her, and proved she could still be eloquent without her usual oratory. Finally he broke the silence. “This is wonderful, Natira.”

  “For me as well, Leonard.”

  He was quiet again for a time, then finally said, “I’d be willing to stay… to give it a try. I think the Enterprise can get along without me. I can’t make any promises, but if you want me to…”

  She sat up, and lowered her head sadly. Her waist-length hair cascaded around her bare shoulders, hiding her face. “I do want you to, Leonard. But I cannot.”

  Puzzled, he sat up too, put a hand on her face, and turned it toward him. “What do you mean?”

  “The negotiations are delicate,” she said. “I have to prove that I am willing to heed the voices of the People, to join with them in finding our own path. I cannot risk appearing… intimate with the Federation.”

  “Politics?” McCoy rasped. “Is that what this is about?”

  “It is about finding an alternative to bloodshed, Leonard. We cannot have peace without trust.” She clasped his hand in hers. “Or without sacrifice. Please understand.”

  The hell of it was, he did understand. He wasn’t even surprised, though it did hurt nonetheless. The good of the People had always come first with her, even when she’d been wrong about how to achieve it. He should have known he’d always come second. “Well… I guess we’ll always have Paris.”

  She frowned at the reference, but let it go. “Perhaps it will not be the end, Leonard. You have far more than a year left to you now,” she smiled. “Perhaps someday…”

  He shook his head. “You won’t wait for me. You shouldn’t. You’ve got a world that needs repopulating.”

  “True,” she said quietly. “But I wish I could do it with you.” She grimaced. “Spock spoke of embracing opposing forces, creating balance between them.”

  “Yeah… that’s somethin’ he’s been learnin’ a lot about lately.”

  “If the People can balance the old and new, the secular and spiritual, then I should be allowed to balance my desires with my responsibilities!” She sighed. “But I cannot find a way. To achieve the greater balance, I must sacrifice the personal one.”

  “I think that is the balance,” McCoy said. “Knowing how much of each you can have, and how much you have to do without.” He spoke tentatively, for something was nibbling at the base of his mind, a thought trying to form, but just eluding him.

  She stayed silent for a moment, thinking. Then she turned to him, embraced him gently once again. “But I am being self-absorbed. You would have your sacrifices too, surely. Your ship, your crew, they need you, and it would not be right to take you from them.”

  He frowned. “I’m not so sure about that. I haven’t done the crew that much good. I’m out of touch, behind the times.”

  Natira smiled wryly. “One can always learn new things.”

  “Which is a lot of hard work, on top of all the other pressures of starship life… and I’ve gotten used to bein’ a low-pressure kind of guy. I—” He broke off. “Pressure… my God, that might be it!” Before he finished speaking, he was scrambling out of the bed, searching for his wrist communicator.

  “Leonard, what is it?”

  But he’d found the communicator under his crumpled uniform. Thank goodness it was audio only, he thought. “McCoy to Chapel! Chris, I think I know how to help Spring Rain!”

  * * *

  Reiko Onami was bewildered when she entered the medical lab to see Spring Rain suspended in the hyperbaric chamber, the readouts indicating a high-pressure, highly oxygenated environment. Her bewilderment turned to alarm and the beginnings of anger when she saw McCoy supervising the procedure. She made her way over to Chapel. “What the hell’s going on here?” she asked in a tense whisper. “I thought hyperbaric treatment posed too much risk of brain damage.”

  “Normally, it would,” McCoy interposed cheerfully. Onami had underestimated the old guy’s hearing. “But it’s amazing what you can pull off when you find the right balance.”

  “Balance?”

  “Leonard had the idea of combining the hyperbaric therapy with an injection of vasodilators and adrenergic inhibitors,” Chapel explained. “Basically, balancing very high oxygen pressure with very low blood pressure. That way, the superoxygenated blood flowing through her aeration membranes purges them of the toxins, but at such low pressure that only a little of the oxygen can make it through the blood-brain barrier.”

  Onami frowned. “But the air’s at high pressure.”

  “Outside her body, yes,” McCoy said. “Not inside her arteries. It makes for a pretty slow purging process, but it’s getting done.”

  “Hopefully,” Chapel went on, “once her membranes are purged, they can read the chemical ‘all-clear’ signals from the brain and wake her up.”

  Onami went over it in her head, and was surprised to find it made sense. She stared at McCoy. “That’s ingenious!”

  “Well, you don’t have to sound so scandalized about it!”

  “No, I mean—I—”

  Chapel smiled proudly. “There’s more to medicine than theory and book-learning, Reiko. I’ve never known a more creative medical mind than Leonard McCoy’s.”

  “Chris, you’re a doctor now, you don’t have to suck up to me.”

  “Oh, shut up, Leonard.”

  Growing serious now, McCoy met Onami’s eyes. “Still, you’re right. If I’m gonna be of use to this crew, I need to do some serious studying. Startin’ today, I intend to become such an expert on comparative alien physiology that… that I could write the book on it!”

  “Oh, really?” Onami said gamely. “Well, I’m going to hold you to that.”

  “You’re on, young lady!”

  “Doctor!” Chapel interrupted. “Her respiration is rising. Neural activity increasing!”

  All else was forgotten. “Lower the pressure as fast as you can! She’s amphibious; I’d guess she can handle a faster change than a human.”

  “Right, Doctor. It should take less than a minute.” As Chapel spoke, Onami looked at McCoy with surprise and growing respect.

  “And get some adrenaline into her, get that heart rate back up!”

  Soon, faint musical tones were echoing through the hyperbaric chamber, audible over the intercom. Her voder didn’t provide any translation—either it was having trouble compensating for the echoes, or she wasn’t saying anything coherent yet.

  “Ms. Spring Rain,” McCoy asked, “can you understand me? Do you know where you are?”

  “I hear again, I am again.

  The voices make me real.

  Where am I? Floating in the stars

  Just where I wish to be.”

  “I hope that’s just metaphor instead of confusion,” McCoy muttered, then turned back to the intercom. “Do you remember your name? Where you work?”

  “Spring Rain Upon Still Water, I

  Disturb the smooth and staid, and make

  More interesting sounds.

  “I work ’mid metal walls and
lights

  To find new tones with which a Spock

  Can weave enlightened songs.”

  “Ohh… kay, I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ”

  Onami was gasping with relief, blinking away tears. “Not her best poetry,” she laughed, “but she’s back!”

  * * *

  Kirk found Rishala in the temple, praying before the icon of Baima the Wise. He waited respectfully for her to finish—but after a while he realized she was taking an awfully long time. He fidgeted, torn over whether to interrupt, until finally he noticed her peeking at him from the corner of her eye and stifling a chuckle. “You knew I was here all along,” he accused with a smile.

  “I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist.”

  Kirk looked up at the white-haired icon. “May I ask a question?”

  “Of me, or of Baima?”

  “Of you.” She nodded. “Do you… hear her any differently, now that you know… what you know about her?”

  “The way I hear Baima, the way I understand her wisdom, is always changing. Just as I change, and the world around me changes. What good is wisdom that remains fixed?” She made her way over to the next icon, forcing Kirk to follow. “That’s the problem with your books and computer files, you know. It’s dead wisdom, preserved and mummified. It doesn’t breathe, doesn’t grow.”

  “That’s why we keep writing new books. There are always new ideas—and the old ones aren’t forgotten.”

  Rishala looked mildly chastened. “I suppose you have a point. We forgot a great deal about who we were.” She prayed briefly to Dedi the Questioner, then faced Kirk again. “But I fear people are already taking the books and files too literally. The children question whether Vari, Baima, and the others should ‘count’ as Creators. What do you think?” she asked.

  “I think… that asking questions is always a good thing. If you encourage them to question you, maybe they’ll also question what they read, and won’t embrace any point of view blindly.”

  “Good answer. Dedi approves.”

  “Thank him for me.”

  She paused a moment, perhaps to do just that. Then she turned to him again. “But he wants me to remind you that there’s still much work to do. Not everyone is happy with the new revelations, and the debates over what they mean to the People are just getting started. With Dovraku gone, and—I hate to admit—with Tasari gone, there’s less threat of open violence. But you haven’t solved everything just by restoring our history to us.”

  “I understand that,” Kirk said. “But at least you and Natira are working together to solve the People’s problems. So I’m confident that the People are in good hands.”

  She smiled. “You’re a sweet-talker, Jim.”

  “Only when it’s deserved.”

  “But what you’re saying is that you’re leaving Lorina.”

  “I have other obligations. Starfleet needs the Enterprise in service.” He hesitated. “I… hope you don’t feel I’m just abandoning your world again.”

  “No.” She stroked his shoulder reassuringly. “You did a lot to make up for your original mistake.”

  “I’m… happy to hear that,” Kirk said sardonically.

  “It’s just that…”

  He met her eyes. “What?”

  “You still have so much left to learn.”

  Kirk stared, then smiled modestly. “I always do. That’s why I have to go.”

  “More science,” she scoffed. “More learning about things, more material illusions. Where will you go to learn the truths that matter?”

  He grew thoughtful. “I have learned one thing that I wanted to share with you.” She looked at him curiously. “I… spoke to Will Decker’s mother over subspace. I asked her… questions it hadn’t occurred to me to ask her before, when I first notified her of her son’s… departure.” He paused. “Or questions I was too ashamed to ask. I tried to keep it brief, that first time. Just a few years before, I’d had to notify her of her husband’s death, and now…”

  “Yes.” There was infinite compassion and forgiveness in the syllable.

  “She told me… about a side to Will Decker that I’d never known. She sent me his letters, his journals. All I knew was a serious young Starfleet officer, by-the-book, driven, just like his father had been. Maybe he… assumed that was what it took to succeed in Starfleet. But his mother had been the one who’d raised him, and she’d inspired another side to him.”

  “A spiritual side?” Rishala ventured.

  “The man was a poet. I never knew that. He wrote about the unexplored potentials of the human mind. He was fascinated with the idea of expanding the mind, moving outside the body, joining with other minds. He was drawn to species with telepathic or empathic abilities—it was why he took a posting on Delta IV in the first place.”

  “Not Vulcan?”

  “He found Vulcans too… reserved in their approach to telepathy. They resisted the kind of… unity he was drawn to.” He continued slowly. “He believed that… if different species could combine their minds, their spirits… complement each other’s strengths, compensate for each other’s blind spots about themselves… it might let them sense new levels of existence. Maybe even reach them.”

  Rishala was silent for a time. “It seems he was right.”

  “That was why he was really in Starfleet. He was… searching for something, something that could give him insight into those higher levels. He wanted to learn about alien belief systems, to see how different species interacting might discover new truths.” He shook his head. “I was so blind. I thought he saw the Enterprise the same way I did, as a goal in itself. And of course, he did care about the ship herself. He was trained as an engineer, he supervised every step of the Enterprise’s refit. But I think that what mattered more to him was the opportunity the Enterprise represented. This crew was his great experiment, a chance to test his ideas about unity, about diversity in combination. He worked so hard on the ship because it was the crucible for his test, and he wanted it to be just right. But it was never about the ship to him. It was about what he hoped to discover.”

  Rishala nodded. “And that’s exactly what he found within V’Ger.”

  “I guess it was.” Another long pause. “When I spoke to Joan Decker this time, she didn’t sound like she was in mourning. She sounded… like she missed her son, of course—but she sounded proud of him. She sounded… satisfied.”

  She studied him. “And did you learn anything from that?”

  “Yes,” Kirk said. “I think I did.”

  Rishala grew wistful. “At least you can now be comfortable with the title you hold. I still have to be high priestess, and nothing’s happened to make me more comfortable with that. If anything, working with the state now, I’m even more of an insider than before, farther from my People. I miss being plain, ordinary Rishala.”

  Kirk took her hand. “I’m sure that you’ve never been ordinary.” She looked skeptical, but he went on. “I meant what I said before—the People are lucky to have you as their spiritual leader. I think they may even remember you… as Rishala the Wise.”

  She scoffed. “That’s Baima’s title. I don’t deserve it.”

  “I don’t know,” Kirk mused, looking between her and the icon. “I see a definite resemblance.”

  “Well,” she replied impishly, “you haven’t seen me naked.”

  Kirk wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Rishala chuckled at the look on his face, leaned forward and graced him with a long, gentle kiss. “You’ve been a good student, Jim Kirk. I’ve learned a lot from you. Now go up to your ship and be a galactic hero.”

  He shook his head. “I’m no hero.”

  “And I’m no saint. But does anyone listen?”

  * * *

  Rhaandarites didn’t have much in the way of funereal customs, it seemed. They just accepted death as part of the natural order of things, and didn’t go to any great trouble to deal with it. So Vaylin Zaand hadn’t put any specific requests on file. His memori
al service was a standard Starfleet affair: a no-frills ceremony in the torpedo bay, followed by a reception in the arboretum. As Zaand’s supervisor, Chekov had said the obligatory words at the service, but it had felt like boilerplate and the whole thing had somewhat blurred in his memory. That was odd; he would have thought the first time would stand out, would stay with him forever.

  That arrow going through his neck—that would stay with him forever.

  Chekov stood at one of the arboretum’s large windows, looking out on Lorina. He didn’t particularly notice the planet there, any more than he’d noticed the lush beauty of his surroundings, the sounds and smells of life pervading the chamber. He was too busy brooding on death. Russians had invented that. Or at least perfected it.

  “Lieutenant?” It was Kirk. Chekov turned; the captain stood beside him, with Sulu and Uhura flanking them like an honor guard. “How are you feeling?”

  Chekov turned back to the window. “I made the decision, sir. I didn’t have to. I almost didn’t… but I did. He was just a boy—and I gave the order that killed him.”

  “No, Pavel!” Uhura hugged him. “Believe me, I know how you feel. I recruited him for this crew. But it wasn’t you or I who fired the shot that killed him. And he knew the risks he was taking.”

  “I know all the arguments, Nyota. But I ordered him to his death.”

  Kirk’s eyes met his, reflected in the window. “Welcome to command, Mr. Chekov.”

  “I understand now, sir,” Chekov replied slowly. “Why you don’t want to let others take risks in your place.”

  “Yes.”

  A pause. “Still… it’s our job.”

  A longer pause. “Yes.”

  After a moment, Kirk turned to Sulu. “Speaking of command, Mr. Sulu… you really did do an excellent job back there.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And I think you know it, too. There’s something different about you, Hikaru… a gleam in your eye that I think I recognize.”