Strange New Worlds 2016

by Various

  “Your implication is predicated by a faulty premise. The Vulcans did not ‘wither,’ Admiral. And they are not ‘puppets.’ The propaganda that you have this young man spouting is rooted in Romulan fear.”

  When he defended me, Yalu, I was terrified. Somehow Kah or the admiral might have read my silence as consensus. Spock had positioned me as their victim, but their position demanded that he remain the victim, and so I spoke out in self-preservation. “They closed their eyes, horrified by violent emotions, Vulcan.” The word spilled out like a curse. And suddenly, I felt wrinkled and ugly and powerful all at once. Energy coursed through my arms and legs. My body joined with the admiral’s and Kah’s. Have you ever been caught up in communal emotion? It’s a feeling as close to mind control as possible. I literally began breathing heavily, matching their breaths.

  The admiral reached out and patted me on the knee and then took a swig from her flute. I smiled, grinning as a full-blooded Romulan. The presence of Spock counterbalanced mine.

  “Young man,” he began, hot breath spewing from his nostrils, “the Vulcan people repressed their tumultuous emotions to become something better, not to hide in fear. We are a people, like the Federation, who are striving to improve. Nothing is natural but the pursuit of self-improvement.”

  The admiral looked unsettled. So did Kah. I felt myself falling into the warmth of the Vulcan’s voice. I felt like a traitor. I had come to enjoy the taste and pride of Romulan words. This was insane. Kah offered me nothing but massacred followers, vaporized in the night, and she, the hawkish admiral, comfort, superiority, patriotism, purpose. As her lips parted to refute Spock, the room shook wildly. Disruptor fire and explosions roared beyond the room as the lights were replaced by darkness.

  When I awoke, smoke curved out from a burnt hole in Toreth’s chest. Everyone in the room was unconscious. Kah lay at her side, a similar crater simmering in his chest. Only Spock and I had survived. Two men in dark-purple armor burst into the room and dragged Toreth and Kah away. I imagined Kah’s son. His wife. Another death for the state.

  Voices floated loosely beyond the room. Dim emergency lights kicked in then, filling the room with a deadly, flat hum. Spock stirred. I didn’t know whether to restrain him as a prisoner or beg his forgiveness. I didn’t know, Yalu, who or what I was anymore now that I was removed from the game.

  The guards returned, giving me no time to think about this identity crisis. One led me into the courtyard, while the other lifted and carried Spock behind us.

  Outside, the night was heavy upon the planet. A shuttle’s exhaust warmed the ground in a soupy heat. I looked around and saw clearly that the guards were Reman. Reman!

  A bald, lean man stood at the center of the courtyard beneath the statue of the great Romulan engineer who designed the first warbirds. The man calmly gave orders to a few more Remans, and they went to work firing their disruptors at the statue’s head, knocking it clean off. It hit the ground, rebounding outward and almost knocking us to the ground as we approached.

  “Here’s their Reman prisoner, Shinzon,” reported the guard who held my arm.

  The man they called Shinzon stood in the shadow of the decapitated statue, and my eyes couldn’t quite decipher his face, for he did not look Reman at all.

  “Very good,” Shinzon replied. His voice carried a fresh, fearless authority. “I take it that our friend, Spock, is still alive.”

  “Yes, sir. Drugged by the Romulans.”

  He sighed with disgust. “Cruel. Take him up to the ship. I will get to know our Reman survivor while waiting for the next transport.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And tell Vkruk that we must have those Romulan engineers increase their pace. We need those transporters installed on the warbird as soon as possible. Take some Romulans off of the Scimitar project if you must.”

  And both my guard and the one carrying Spock entered the shuttle. Shinzon approached me, his hands clasped behind his back.

  “You’re not fully Reman, are you?”

  “Neither are you,” I replied.

  “Quite right.”

  “Are you human?”

  “You look with uncertainty. Have you never seen a human before?”

  “Never.”

  The shuttle’s engine roared to life as the vessel ascended.

  “What do you know of humans, Mister—”

  “—Troth.” I felt unnaturally at ease with the man. He had a calming grace that lulled me into a sense of acceptance, feelings I had just established with Toreth a short time ago.

  “Well?”

  “They’re part of the Federation, allied with the Vulcans, like Spock.”

  “Oh, Spock.” He smiled. “I love that old Vulcan. So gullible. I remind him of someone he trusts. I used that and offered him the promise of a Reman-Underground alliance to work against Romulan tyranny and conservatism. He would call it civil disobedience, social progress; I call it revolution.”

  “You knew about his meeting here?”

  He nodded. “Of course. We helped his people develop the plan. Then we tipped off the military in exchange for some powerful commanders’ loyalties in the new government—a Reman government.”

  I was stunned, Yalu. How had Spock misjudged his alliance with Shinzon? You should never rely on a creature of desperation. Remans are desperate. Shinzon, I later found out, was an accomplished leader in the Dominion War. He commanded a purely Reman detachment. They only accrued 4.7 percent casualties during the entire war. He was praised. Respected. And could not be silenced back to Remus. He surreptitiously gained the support of both the underground and the military to prevent his return to the mines. I don’t blame him. We all seek something better, at any cost, it would seem.

  “I’m impressed.” Again, the words sputtered from my lips. I stood, fists clenched, bodies around me again, but this time, I stood as a Reman man. “I’m half-Reman.”

  “A Romulan father, I suppose,” said Shinzon. “And an unwanted affair, no doubt.”

  “Two, actually; I have a brother.”

  “Used and violated. That is the life of our Reman brethren. But no longer.”

  Another shuttle landed.

  “We are both sons of other worlds—the perfect representatives of this new age on Romulus, an age of diversity, of equality for all, even for our maligned brothers and sisters back on Remus. Will you join me, Troth?”

  Another visionary. How could I deny him, Yalu?

  I ended up on Remus, in the mines, but this time with a disruptor holstered to my hip. I had just finished a whirlwind tour through the Empire at Shinzon’s side. He presented me as a son of Remus, born of Reman-Romulan blood, a symbol of the future. Yalu, this man could fill a room with his voice. It would breach the walls and windows and doorways until everyone in the room laughed and slammed their fists with drunken fervor.

  I was assigned a cell in the corridor where we had once lived. Our mother’s defeated, curled body still ached in my eyes, but when I entered the cell to which I was assigned, there hung Spock, a Romulan woman, and a Reman man. Spock sat on the dirt floor, arms raised, shackled to the wall. I reminded myself that this used to be somebody’s home before Shinzon’s revolution. I could hear his words: “And now those ‘cages’ on Remus will finally be acknowledged for what they are: prison cells. And we will finally be acknowledged for who we are: valuable individuals, rising from the shadow of an immoral empire!” His voice would swell. The veins in his head thicken. And we’d cheer and clap our throats and hands raw.

  But Spock now hung with raw wrists, worn green by metal cuffs clinging to the wall magnetically. A sinister hum from those cuffs slithered in and out of your conscious hearing after hours in the cell. I stood by the door. Green lights from the corridor flowered on the floor, coloring his naked feet. I never expected the effect his feet would
have on me. For in that moment, seeing the dirt caked between his toes and in the curves of his soles, the contrast with my childhood image of him wounded me somehow.

  “You’re a pretty boy.”

  The prisoner who mistook me for a boy was Zysin, a Reman soldier who murdered a whole mess of escaped Romulan prisoners under Shinzon’s command. They were merely being held until Shinzon could secure his influence over some colony. Now, Shinzon approved of, even glorified, violence in the name of revolution, but none that trained the Romulan eye to view us as beasts again. “Military might, strategy, war—these are the virtues all brothers of the Empire appreciate,” he explained. “Oh, we’ll exterminate your Vulcan problem because force, not its message of passivity, brings revolution.” We had stood, our blurred forms reflected in the marble floors outside the senate building as he won the support of a prominent female senator. “But unchecked savagery—we have already been strangled and mutilated into slaves by the government and press,” he continued. “I will support no philosophy that craves blood for blood’s sake, or loyalists will use that image to further the narrative of a just Reman oppression. We must control our own story, now. Right, Troth?”

  Zysin laughed. “The mighty Shinzon forbade you from speaking to us?”

  “No.” I looked him square in the eyes. Shinzon taught us to inspect a person through their eyes. Would they hold their ground, blink, or turn away? “Beaten for merely looking too long into the guard’s eyes, worked to starvation,” he had said, one evening before members of Spock’s underground. “I think it fitting that we hold our gaze on a person, let us become acquainted, intimate in the discomforting struggle for equality in the eyes of those who would see us as either brutish slaves or valuable individuals.”

  “Well, if you’ll get me something to write with and some paper—I know we aren’t allowed padds down here. I’d like to apologize to Shinzon for my behavior,” Zysin said. “I realize I endangered his whole revolution; I’d like to express my apology.”

  “Begging for forgiveness?” I had this vague feeling then that I was no better than poor Zysin. Instead of an apology letter, I told stories to buy my way into my oppressors’ graces. I turned from him, to escape his eyes. Silass, the woman whose arms hung from shackles beside Spock, was an accomplished Romulan astrophysicist and underground sympathizer. Last week, she was imprisoned for a few off-handed comments about Shinzon’s revolution made during a lecture. She taught mostly on solar mechanics, the life of stars, and aptly applied the stellar life-cycle metaphor in one of these “dangerous” lectures on the Hobus star: “As stars age, like Hobus, they burn brighter, hotter than ever, but eventually violently collapse in on themselves. This, in fact, reminds me of this Shinzon’s revolution, burning bright and hot and violent, collapsing the Empire and everything we value, but I digress.”

  Zysin ignored my jab and turned his attention to his fellow prisoners. “What do you think, Vulcan? Shouldn’t we be allowed to scribble on some paper while we rot?”

  Spock didn’t flinch.

  “You just going to rot there and take root?”

  “There seem to be no other options,” Silass replied.

  For a few minutes no one spoke, and Zysin hung limp, defeated.

  “There are always possibilities,” spoke Spock. His voice struck me again, but now at the base of my skull. If it were an aroma, it would have filled an entire house.

  “Who would have thought I’d end up shackled in a cage with a Romulan professor and this old Vulcan?”

  “You know who this is?” I asked.

  “The great Vulcan!” he mocked.

  “Great, indeed,” Spock muttered. His head hung low.

  “I know you mean to mock him, sir, but the great Vulcan,” continued the professor, “is a martyr for true peace and equality for the Empire and the whole Alpha Quadrant.”

  “He’s no martyr,” Zysin replied. “Not yet.”

  A hushed laugh tumbled from my mouth like a mistake, like drool slipping awkwardly over the bottom lip. Zysin had an unrepentant fire in his belly. His mouth amused me. My lips quivered with sarcasm and innuendo to spew. I realized how mimetic I had become. A survival instinct?

  “You’re correct. I misused the term,” Silass acknowledged, “but he is a symbol for those things, nonetheless.”

  “And what do those chains around his wrists symbolize, Professor?”

  Silass didn’t answer. Though Spock’s body wilted, his face remained placid, strong, resolute. His rigid face fascinated me. He always seemed certain. Toreth had shared his confident, elegant face. Both offered me that. But he seemed content with listening. His silence seemed active, a preamble.

  “They are rewards,” Spock finally whispered.

  Zysin laughed wildly. Even the other prisoners down the corridor cheered and growled at the hilarity of the statement. I relented and got some papers and pens from the administrator’s office. Shinzon had left cha’Ral in charge of the colony, and cha’Ral seemed relieved to see me, though his face strained to hide it.

  I had night shift. I stood in that cell with those prisoners for seven more hours, and, in the morning, gathered the pages they had written, folded them into my pants, and relinquished my rifle at the armory.

  Yalu, the next evening I ran furiously, slamming into walls and ricocheting off corners as I raced to grab my rifle, check in, and explode into the cell. What Spock wrote infuriated me. I had to challenge him. Everything that Shinzon and the Romulans had said about Vulcans was proven in his letter.

  “You wrote to me?” I growled behind gritted teeth.

  He did not look me in the eye. His mouth remained flat, controlled. Meanwhile, Silass and Zysin awoke from their drowsy stupor.

  I threw the letter in front of him.

  “You’re arrogant. Detached from reality. Naïve. You don’t know me,” I said, kneeling down to position myself in his drooping face. “You’ve disarmed everyone in your underground with your passive philosophy; you sentenced my brother to die in a cell just like this. You might be able to deny your emotions and lie to yourself, but you can’t deny reality. You can’t believe what you’ve written here, you can’t. I won’t be manipulated in this way.” Really, I was scared of his words. As they had seized me in the past and shifted my worldview, they, again, wrestled in me for control.

  I left and requested a different assignment. There were none available, but I convinced another Reman to switch with me. Throughout the night, I could hear Zysin and Silass speak with Spock as their Reman guard napped—a habit the other guards overlooked because we all remembered the woman as the granddaughter of Zon, the agitator. I could hear them through the walls, though.

  Zysin was the first to speak. “What did you write to the mutt?”

  I didn’t hear any reply for some time. I found myself nodding off here and there in the silence; my prisoners simply lay there, husks of former commanders and admirals who were imprisoned after Shinzon assassinated the Senate and took control of the government.

  But then he finally spoke.

  “I wrote about his brother,” Spock began, “a man worthy of these restraints.”

  “Worthy? Like it’s some honor!” replied Zysin. “Are you even here?”

  But Silass interrupted. “Please, explain.”

  “His brother, Yalu, escaped after the Dominion War and joined the underground on the Mubaut colony. After securing transport there to encourage and advise their members, I observed him lead men, women, and children through a very public, peaceful protest. I had always rejected this strategy, logically concluding that it would lead to unnecessary risk. They simply sat in a popular roadway which linked the colony’s economic sector to civilian housing—housing that rejected sympathizers and members alike. Yalu recited poetry and essays and soliloquies from the greatest Romulan literary voices and even some Vulcan a
nd human. His followers joined him, speaking specific lines in chorus. Well, this crippled commerce. I watched, fascinated. I did not join them, concerned that I would detract or distract from Yalu’s leadership.”

  “Rommie’s kill him?” asked Zysin.

  I sprung to my feet; you can imagine why.

  “No,” replied Spock, “injured. Romulan security beat and arrested the protestors. They were jailed, but released within several weeks. I met with him, offering to transport him and his followers off Mubaut. The majority declined to leave the fight for their homes. He, however, joined me. We shared our understandings of the moral sickness within the Empire. Healthy suspicion and inquiry decayed into a loss of stable truth, even moral truth. He spoke of revolution, but not in the streets or on the battlefields, or even in the Senate, but in the hearts of the public.”

  “Nonsense,” said Zysin.

  “A movement of peace, my friend, disarms the oppressor, within the context of history, before disarming them in the present. We needed to rise above the temporal and act with history in mind. Yalu understood. He knew that the fate of the underground and Remus was tangled together in a web of codependence.”

  I threw open the door to Spock’s cell and carefully walked across the dirt floor. I knelt before him, breathing heavily. “Shinzon said that your teachings have declawed innocent, politically unsophisticated Romulans. You would have them sit rather than take a stand against the tyranny of an oppressive government.”

  “Your Shinzon is unparalleled,” quipped Spock.

  I didn’t understand him at the time, but continued. “Maybe Yalu isn’t dead yet, but under your teachings, he will be.”

  “There he is!” exclaimed Zysin, amused.

  I stood and walked over to Zysin. “This man is a fool,” I began.

  “Hey!” he protested.

  “He knew Shinzon’s policy: fulfilling one’s duty to the revolution is life. It’s commitment. Failing your duty requires your life as recompense,” I said. I felt the words passing through my mouth. They felt alien, now, when applied to this living man.