Mikal is the null one we touched this morning? s/he asked.
Yes.
The small one does not answer, either. Are they all null except you?
It is theorized, Saavik explained, that all sentient creatures have telepathy, but only some have learned to use it.
We know this, Worm replied. Like many of the others, they do emit a certain kind of … static … but believe themselves to be null or nearly so.
Others?
Mikal felt as if he might burst out of his skin. Bad enough Mironova could read his mind better than a telepath, because yes, he was jealous—no, envious; there was a difference. But more than that, watching Saavik, so absorbed, and so beautiful in her absorption that he couldn’t take his eyes off her, he wanted to rush to her and wrap himself around her the way the Deemanot were and hold her to him forever.
Look at you! he thought, his thoughts so painful they almost squeaked. Whatever gods you or I or anyone believes in, look at you! I am so proud of you, so taken by you, I want to … I don’t even know what I want, except I wish this moment would last forever, even as I can’t wait for it to end!
Again Worm seemed to be listening.
He is not entirely null, the Deemanot reported, one tendril of mind studying Mikal. One does have to burrow beneath the static, though, and he has much to learn. But for now, tell us about this … Horta?
Saavik realized she had lost concentration, allowing Worm to access that long-ago conversation with Spock. Clearly, Worm meant no harm, perhaps hadn’t realized this was a private memory, and so she let the image flash from her mind to Worm’s.
Yes, we know this! Worm thought, hir glee unmistakable. We have seen its like!
The link broke abruptly, as did Worm’s embrace. Released from the coils that had supported her, Saavik staggered to her feet, bewildered. Had she understood correctly? The Deemanot receded from her, coiling and uncoiling about each other, communing with what seemed a sense of urgency. Carefully stepping over clitella and tails, Saavik made her way toward her companions. Mikal caught her as she stumbled, holding her close in spite of the slime on her uniform.
“Are you all right?”
She rested her head against his shoulder for a moment until her mind cleared and she remembered her dignity, pulling away and gathering herself.
“Report, Lieutenant,” Mironova said sharply, focusing her. “What did they say to you?”
“The Horta …” Saavik managed. “They say they have seen them, or similar beings. They find us familiar as well … and there have been many others.”
“It’s true they didn’t seem terribly surprised to see us the first time,” Mikal said, unable to take his eyes off Saavik, who almost seemed to glow. For their part, the Deemanot were still communing with each other, giving off a kind of subaural vibration, or at least that was what it sounded like to Mikal’s overlarge ears. “Obvioussly they’ve had visitors before.”
Mironova shook her head. “We can’t be sure of
that. It might be some glitch in our understanding. Saavik …”
“Captain, one does not ‘misunderstand’ in mind-meld. Certain nuances might need clarification, but it is not like learning a spoken language.”
Even before she finished her thought, the Deemanot began to unravel from their coil, and Worm came closer, hir three-meter length lowered to half height as s/he moved so as to appear as unthreatening as possible.
“Mikal …” Mironova cautioned.
“I’ll be good, promise,” he replied, finishing her thought.
Slowly, carefully, Worm began to coil about all three of them—first Saavik, whom s/he knew would not feel threatened, then Mironova, and finally Mikal. When s/he had them all in hir embrace, there was a chuckle in hir tone. Let us show you! Besides, we need to get out of the sun …
The concern about the sun was genuine. Deemanot were no more protected from direct sunlight than was a garden-variety earthworm, and their architecture reflected that, replete with tunnels and arches and overhangs wherever it rose aboveground. Up close, it was even more fascinating than the holos had suggested.
The central structure Worm led them to could best be described as a museum, an example of Deemanot construction at its finest. The outer walls were as smooth as the finest adobe, carefully encrusted in places with glittering semiprecious gems in swirling geometric patterns reminiscent of Celtic knotwork that suggested the intercoiled shapes of the Deemanot themselves.
“These designs must be visible from every point in the city,” Mironova marveled, examining a particularly exquisite mural of marcasite, jade, and turquoise splashed across a façade that loomed easily twenty stories above them. “But why go to all that trouble, if they’re blind?”
“To impress offworld visitors?” Mikal suggested. “Also, each variety of stone has a subtly different texture, at least to our calloused fingers. Their tactile sense is obviously much different from ours.”
“Which would provide an aesthetic experience we can only imagine,” Saavik reported, as always with her gaze more concentrated on the tricorder than the artifact she was examining, until Mikal put his hand over the screen. She scowled at him but closed the tricorder for the moment. “Each variety of stone gives off a different magnetic signature on frequencies that Deemanot physiology can read. While they cannot ‘see’ as we do, they in fact see in ways we cannot.”
As they followed Worm into the interior, along a floor of packed earth worn into a smooth and slightly grooved texture by the slithering passage of countless Deemanot before them, they noted the incredible hardness and sheen of the arched walls rising well above their heads.
“It feels as hard as marble,” Mironova said. “It’s even cool to the touch.”
Saavik shot Mikal a warning glance that suggested she might break his fingers if he prevented her from reopening the tricorder. “And yet it is the same ingested and egested soil that comprises every structure in the city,” she reported. “Indications are that the Deemanot secrete and mix different enzymes into different types of soil for different purposes.”
However strong their sense of wonder, what they saw in the “museum’s” main chamber reduced even the ordinarily garrulous Mikal to silence.
There was barely room to move among the artifacts showcased here, not in any order a humanoid might choose, but following sinuous pathways between displays designed primarily for their tactility, thus lending a rather jumbled, vaguely ordered disorder to the collection, or so it might seem to those who relied primarily upon sight and hearing to study the world around them.
Where someone accustomed to museums constructed by bipeds might expect high, if not vaulted ceilings, looking up one saw spirals leading up to ledges at different levels, each containing still more artifacts arranged in an order that no doubt made sense to Deemanot science and aesthetics but to their three visitors seemed bewildering at first glance.
“For one thing, we’d need climbing gear to reach them,” Mikal stage-whispered. “No staircases,” he explained off Mironova’s glare.
“I know!” she whispered back. “Though you might keep your voice down!”
“But they can’t hear—” Mikal started to say, looking to Saavik for affirmation. “Well, they can’t. So we aren’t being rude if—”
“It is possible they are reading our thoughts even without touching us,” Saavik said, which gave him something else to think about. Then something on a ledge just above their heads caught her eye.
“It’s a history,” Mikal said, once their eyes had grown accustomed to the near darkness, his voice echoing down dim passageways twisting off into mystery. Only Worm had accompanied them into the museum; the others had simply melted away into the general populace moving about the city streets, slipping in and out of doorways, tunnels, spirals moving up or down or sideways. Now their host waited patiently while hir guests studied the images on the walls.
They’d climbed to the ledge and found themselves in a fair-sized kind o
f rotunda not visible from the ground floor where they’d entered. On the perfectly circular walls (Saavik had of course determined this) was a mural depicting a variety of life-forms from other worlds. Plants, animals, things that might be both or neither, some of them familiar (“Is that a Denebian slime devil?” Mironova wanted to know. “There’s your Horta,” Mikal pointed out, “though whether they’ve actually met one, or just seen it in some other visitor’s mind …”), some not, bipedal humanoids from species no one in the landing party recognized to beings more unusual than the Deemanot themselves.
“Egypt, Babylonia, the Fabrini Book of the People, the Royal Museum of Epsilon Hydra VII, the lost library of Sarpeidon,” Mikal recited. “Every civilization that’s been able to draw has something similar, but how—?”
“Unknown,” was all Saavik could say, running her fingers—with Worm’s encouragement—over one curve of the wall. “The images are partly carved, partly colored in with pigments of an indeterminate composition.”
A portion of the wall that had heretofore been unadorned suddenly began to glow, and three holo-images seemed to etch themselves. First was a small, silver-haired female humanoid in a red Starfleet uniform. Flanking her, a taller, dark-haired female and a bald and tattooed male in practical coveralls made themselves evident.
Both the mechanism that created them and the images themselves seemed uncanny. They were almost photographic, yet with artistic flourishes as well. Saavik’s eyes, for example, seemed even larger than they were in life, reflecting whole worlds within them. Mironova’s cap of silver hair seemed spun of starlight, and Mikal’s tattoos were universes of color and energy. Each one’s personality was there somehow as well, impossible to describe—a texture, a flavor, a sound.
As they watched in silence, the images impressed themselves into a previously empty curve of the wall, becoming permanent even as the glow faded and the rotunda returned to its natural ambient light, which seemed to come from the material that formed the wall itself, since there was no other light source.
Worm, who while the images were forming had not moved from hir upright, S-shaped posture, now began to sway slightly, as if in time to some inner music. With a slight forward movement, hir “head” rested lightly on Saavik’s shoulder.
Does it please you?
“It is … extraordinary,” Saavik replied, aloud for the benefit of her companions, sensing somehow that Worm was the artist who had captured these images from her mind and imprinted them on the wall. “How—?”
In time, in time. Come, there is more …
There were other, lower chambers leading out of the rotunda, which had to be crawled to on hands and knees, if one were burdened with such appurtenances. The Deemanot propelled themselves by way of small attenuated setae on their undersides about a third of the way along their bodies from the mouth or head. When they stood upright, these small palpating hairs almost gave the appearance of chin whiskers, but their ability to propel the beings through any medium was remarkable, and in part explained how they could tunnel from place to place so quickly. Their visitors were considerably less agile.
“Anything for science!” Mikal grumbled, bumping his head, not for the first time, on the low clearance, convinced Mironova was being deliberately perverse in making them crawl instead of beaming them into the inner chambers.
“Come now, Mikal!” she said over her shoulder, scurrying along at a fairly quick pace ahead of him, a chuckle in her voice, obviously enjoying his discomfort. “You’ve got your wish. First contact should include immersing yourself in the Deemanot world as they do.”
“Indeed,” Saavik added behind him, “if I am not mistaken, not all outworlders are permitted into the lower chambers. It is an extraordinary honor.”
Surrounded, outnumbered, and needing all of his energy to keep crawling, Mikal conceded the point.
They were led by one of the smaller Deemanot, whom Worm introduced as Scolex (a nickname, s/he informed Saavik, who was beginning to think their true names had no analog in spoken language), who had suddenly appeared as if summoned (and most likely was, on a telepathic frequency even Saavik could not sense) from a newly dug tunnel in the side of one wall, and slithered merrily along in the forefront, with Worm bringing up the rear behind Saavik.
“No slime,” Mikal was muttering, but before either of the women could ask him what he meant, the tunnel, which through several twists and turns and not for the claustrophobic, had been leading inexorably down, suddenly opened out into one of the innermost chambers.
“Oh, my!” Mironova said, almost in awe, taking the liberty of leaning on Scolex’s proffered head to pull herself to her feet, flexing the kinks out of her lower back and allowing herself to drink in their surroundings. For some moments, as they once again waited for their eyes to adapt to the dim light, Saavik’s tricorder was the only sound.
“You were right, Saavik,” Mikal said at last. “The rotunda is meant to be a display piece for trusted out-world visitors, but this … place is designed for the Deemanot themselves. We’re seeing only a fraction of what’s really here. I’m guessing it would take years to decipher all of this and interpret it from a humanoid perspective.”
“I concur.”
“Then look, will you?” he insisted. “Look with your eyes and your heart and put the damned tricorder away!”
For once she did not argue, because for once she had to acknowledge that his was the better way.
Everywhere around them were … experiences … some visual, most tactile, many interactive in that, when they were touched, they moved or made a sound or suggested that they were emitting data designed for senses humanoids didn’t possess. Warmth, cold, changing textures, subliminal or hyperaudible movements told stories the visitors could only guess at.
The visuals alone were breathtakingly complex—snarls and tangles and Celtic knots, some even reminiscent of Mikal’s tattoos, which Scolex, once hir mission to lead them here was completed, had taken to tracing with hir mouth and the lightest of touches, curious and intrigued. No longer questioning how a blind Deemanot could “see,” Mikal stood very still and allowed the little one to explore.
“At a guess, s/he’s sensing a difference in the skin texture where the pigment was added,” he suggested, a slow smile lighting up his entire face. “Or using some extrasensory ability we don’t even have a name for.”
The two seemed quite taken with each other (“I swear the little one is purring,” Mironova whispered mischievously), and there was a contentedness on Mikal’s face, a decorousness in his posture and his movements that neither Saavik nor even Mironova had ever seen before.
Leaving him to his newfound friend, the two women continued their examination of the many rooms within rooms that constituted the Deemanot’s annals of their evolution and their history.
“Captain,” Saavik whispered, not even trying to contain the wonder in her voice, “I believe the entire history of the Deemanot is contained in these artifacts. It might take years to translate and study it.”
“I concur entirely, Lieutenant,” Mironova replied, her voice also soft. “Can you convey to our hosts that we wish to initiate such an exchange of information?”
“I have already done so, in our initial meld. Worm tells me it would please them to add us to their ‘interconnectedness with the universe,’ as s/he describes it. But first they require us to reopen the spatial rifts. Prior to our arrival, these were their point of contact with sources beyond their own system. Everything displayed in the rotunda at one time passed through those rifts or others like them. It is possible the Deemanot themselves did not originate on this world.”
“That may very well be, Saavik. But not everything that passes through those rifts is safe. That vine, for example …”
At the mention of the vine, Worm seemed to stand up straighter, as if listening, Mironova noticed.
“Can s/he read my thoughts without touching me?”
“For a time,” Saavik explained. “Commun
ing with me has left signatures—resonances, if you will—that will fade eventually.”
Worm began to sway again, and Saavik seemed to be listening.
“Worm wishes to apologize for the vine. S/he wishes to tell you that …” listening “… her people accepted it ‘on consignment,’ found it ‘not as advertised,’ and ‘returned to sender.’ I am not certain I understand the meaning, but—”
Mironova laughed. “I do. Humor, Saavik. I’ll explain later.” She looked directly at Worm then, confident her thoughts would be conveyed, even if her words could not be heard. “You have my word I will reopen the rifts if and only if our instruments determine that they pose no danger to your world. Convey that to hir, will you, Saavik?”
This time Saavik needed only to lay one hand on Worm’s head. Worm reciprocated by touching hir mouth lightly to one of Saavik’s ears, leaving a slight slime trail in her hair. The movement attracted Mikal’s attention and, giving Scolex an affectionate pat, he once again drew closer, mesmerized.
After a long moment, Saavik broke the link.
“As we surmised, the Deemanot’s prior visitors have come through the rifts. The concept of space travel in a vessel is unfamiliar to them, as is the ability to take scientific readings in space. Worm will discuss this with hir people, but we are permitted to study the rifts in the meantime. Also …”
Again she communed with Worm for a brief moment, to make certain she had understood. Scolex scurried past Mikal and joined them.
“… Scolex wishes to invite us to hir wedding.”
The comm unit in Tolek’s spartan apartment beeped unanswered. Waiting for him, unopened, were the last three data bundles Saavik had sent from Chaffee. He had not bothered opening them once T’Saan had given him new orders and he had sent his final subspace message to Chaffee. Friendless now that Lerius was dead, he had taken leave of his employer several weeks prior, so his absence had gone unnoticed by anyone.
Star Trek: Unspoken Truth Page 14
