by S P Somtow
“INITIATE THE SEQUENCE,”
RIKER SAID.
“Sequence reinitiated,” La Forge said. “Five minutes.”
The computer resumed the countdown. Four minutes, fifty seconds—forty—thirty—Three minutes, ten seconds—
“No!” Troi screamed suddenly. “No, no, no!”
She had reacted before even realizing what she was reacting to—a harrowing pang of loss and disillusion—a cry of pain that had lasted for millennia could not be heard because there was no organ of speech to cry out—the desolate, stifled wailing of a lost child.
“Is something wrong, Counselor?” Picard asked. “Trust me on this, Captain! Stop the sequence!”
Picard nodded. Riker held up his hand. Sequence on hold at two minutes, twenty-seven seconds, said the computer.
“Something is alive on that comet!”
S. P. SOMTOW
Based upon Star Trek: The Next Generation®
created by Gene Roddenberry
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this novel is dedicated to
the members of the Bangkok Opera Chorus,
who didn’t realize I was in the back of the hall,
typing away at this book, when I should have been
paying attention to them. ...
Contents
Part One: The Reluctant Ambassador
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part Two: The Machine That Was Mortal
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part Three: The Mortal That Was a Machine
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Part Four: The Planet That Waited for Death
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
About the e-Book
Part One: The Reluctant Ambassador
O bringer of death
I love thee,
O lord of destruction,
I praise thee, In thee alone
The circle closes
The end begins
The beginning ends.
Fire-breather, dark embracer,
Silence my heart
As it cries out in transcendent joy;
Still my last leap,
Snuff me out
At the climax of love,
For thou alone
Art my secret self,
And the shadow of my secret self,
And the love that is death.
—From the Book of Final Songs
in the Holy Panvivlion
Your Excellencies:
The advisory board on preliminary consideration of worlds for Federation status wishes to place the following document into the record. It’s been arriving in fragments; a quark star’s gravity field seems to be disrupting the subspace communication system. Nevertheless, we do feel that it provides valuable secondary insight into the Federation’s investigation. For your information, Dr. Halliday has been living quietly on Thanet for the last two years, gathering a not inconsiderable mass of information about their culture.
We’re going to leave you alone with the Halliday report, Jean-Luc. Take your time over it. But not too [6] much time, of course. We want you to decide what is right for yourself, and for the Enterprise, of course; but it also needs to be right for the Federation. There are issues that you need to wrestle with.
After the big conference with the senators and representatives, after the formal dinner, the dress uniforms, the delegates, the delicacies from remote star systems, it still boiled down to one man, one decision, and deniability.
Captain Picard had encountered so many new civilizations in his career. But he knew there was no magic formula for dealing with them. Each one was a microuniverse unto itself.
Halliday’s report, they told him, is sporadic, sometimes barely coherent. The man’s a genius, but he’s also insane.
I know the type, Picard thought, as he politely sipped the lightly fermented peftifesht wine, a Thanetian delicacy that Starfleet’s replicators had only just figured out how to create—tactfully substituting placebo ingredients, of course, for some of its more hazardous intoxicants.
Picard had dealt with eccentric field xenologists before, but the report of Robert Halliday, former professor of xenolinguistics at Cambridge University as well as erstwhile researcher into obscure Vulcan rituals (for which he had been expelled from Vulcan for carrying his research a little past the point of propriety)—suffice it to say that Halliday’s history was colorful.
[7] They had left him in a womblike cubicle to examine the documents. A young ensign informed him that more would be forthcoming as soon as the computer managed to transcribe their curious format—good old-fashioned handwriting.
Even the fact that the report was actually written on paper, using what Commander Data might have referred to as a human-operated analog inkjet device—a pen—was proof of the man’s eccentricities. But Captain Picard knew all about technophobes—he had, after all, grown up with one. It was just another detail to be filed away, added to the equation.
Calmly, he continued reading.
CONFIDENTIAL REPORT:
Dr. Robert Halliday’s field notes
The Transcript continues:
—have been hard at work translating the Panvivlion, the Thanetian Sacred Text, into some of the languages of the Federation. Oddly enough, it works very well in Klingon; much of the same rigid codification of honor and caste.
Came across a curious myth in the Seventh Book, which is called H
olokinesthanasionosis, which loosely translated means “the death and rebirth of the entire universe.” I don’t have it all done, but we might as well begin with this—Thanopstru, or “death-dealing star.” It’s rather [8] interesting how many of the oldest root words in the main language here seem reminiscent of the Greek and Sanskrit lexicon; but to speculate on that would be at best a digression; you must forgive the xenophilologist in me, sometimes the very sound of an alien word sets me off... but I was speaking of the myth.
Five thousand years ago and a day, quoth the sage Outrenjai, came a great thanopstru to the world, and the thanopstru is the eye of the almighty, and the hand of he-who-shapeth. And the thanopstru descended upon the world, and for a span of time did fire rain from the sky, to cleanse the darkness from men’s souls. And at the end of that span of time, all knowledge passed from the minds of those men who survived the holocaust, and they became as madmen, drinking blood and eating the brains of the dead. The wisdom that had accumulated over the last five thousand years was wiped clean, and now resideth within the treasure-chests of the dailong, who lie in the heart of the deep.
And he that had once been highest became lowest; and the power to rule passed into the hands of the one child who had shown no fear.
And that child spake, and said: We shall unlearn all that has been learned. For this is a new heaven and a new earth, and the laws of the universe are new laws.
[9] For all old knowledge is as useless tinsel; and for this, the almighty hath made the human race as a newborn babe, to begin the cycle anew; and he hath provided the thanopstru, to return once more when the cycle closes; for threescore and ten is the time of a man; but the time of an age of men is nine hundred and ten times threescore and ten.
And the coming of the thanopstru shall be signaled with visions and visitations. And sign of the moment of the world’s end shall be thus: there shall sound from the place of the most high a great death-knell, which is called the Bell of Shivan-SarZ.
Do not resist the thanopstru, but greet his coming with gladness and laughter; for death is not death, but the doorway to a new existence; everything that has ever happened will happen again, and everything that happeneth now is but an echo of an ancient happening; for all time is but a movement inside a stillness; as the hands of a clock seem to race against time, yet circumscribe a closed and unchanging circle, so creation itself; rejoice that you are born to die, rejoice in your place in the cosmos, rejoice in the dance of creation and destruction, rejoice, for time hath swallowed its own tail, and hath given birth to itself.
—the interesting thing about all this—well, it’s not much different from several human [10] cosmologies, such as the cyclic view of history of the ancient Hindus.
—that’s all fine and dandy, there’s a hundred fatalistic cycle-of-history cultures in every quadrant. And yet there’s something a little disquieting about this particular myth.
You see—and this may be a coincidence, for in a galaxy like ours with a trillion worlds, a trillion rolls of the dice, coincidences this monumental could occur—I’ve found evidence of a big natural disaster five thousand years ago. And then again, their entire civilization seems to have sprung full-grown out of nowhere ... like the goddess Athena from the head of Zeus—if you know your terrestrial mythology, which, somehow, I doubt.
Oh, yes, Dr. Halliday, mad as a hatter—I know what you people say. Let me continue.
It’s a two-pronged coincidence. Just as they discover (or, as their own mythology would say, rediscover) warp drive, just as they’re ready to join (or rejoin) the community of worlds, the five-thousand-year cycle rolls around. People start to go wild. They believe in the end of the world—they believe so thoroughly that computers on this world are programmed to reset their calendars to zero at the cycle’s end, there’s no way of even expressing in their language very easily the idea of a straight timeline—so this [11] end-of-the-world fever sets in, a cross between fatalism and “what-the-hell”-ism.
So what do you know? The prophecies are right. There’s a comet headed right toward Thanet, and nobody’s planning to beam out.
My suggestion is that the Federation do something.
“Well,” Picard said, at the breakfast conference the next morning, “I think that Dr. Halliday’s hit the nail on the head. The Federation should do something. You have decided to send me, that’s clear enough. You’ve also decided to leave my instructions very vague, because our actions may chip away at that which we all hold most sacred—the Prime Directive. To save their civilization is to destroy it.”
The round table had its share of ambassadors, admirals, and planetary governors. For half an hour, they had exchanged pleasantries; but there was an underlying tension.
Picard’s words were met with silence, with indecision.
“I suppose the operative word here is deniability,” Picard said softly.
And there was more silence.
It’s lonely to be a starship captain. That went without saying, was pretty much a cliché in the world of Starfleet. Space had its share of lonely moments: the endless starstreams, the dislocation of warping space-time, the silence between the stars; [12] but here, on terra fîrma, with the Golden Gate rising from the mist through the great bay windows of this conference room, it was possible to feel even lonelier.
At length, Picard said softly, “I will do what has to be done.”
Chapter One
Artas
LONELINESS.
For five thousand years he had floated, balanced on the boundary of the real and the dream. Who am I? There were times when the question made no sense to him at all; and then there were those other times, when images came, pictures of a paradise so achingly real that he knew they must have been true once.
A meadow of gray-green grass. A breeze. A deep blue sky. A dark, mysterious sea. Clouds, too, silver clouds fringed with gilt and purple; the moon that danced and the moon that wept. A twisted tower wrapped in vines that writhed as they sucked the vapor from the rock.
Warmth. A warm body pressed against his. A warm feeling, racing through blood and tendon and [14] tissue. A warm star bathing him in comforting radiance.
Where did these sensations come from? In the here and now, there was no warmth. The place he was in was cold. He knew it must be cold, even though he had no neurons with which to sense the cold; he had no bones to ache, no blood to freeze. But he still knew it must be cold, just as his barely conscious self was fueled by a memory of warmth, and he knew the absence of warmth to be called cold. He also knew he was not meant to remember this much.
Forget! Forget!
A stern voice. It reverberated within what must be his mind. He knew that the voice was there to be obeyed, that he had been created and programmed solely to show obedience to that voice, and that terrible things would happen if he listened to the other voices, the voices of warmth and comfort. He no longer remembered what those terrible things would be. Surely there was no worse punishment than this—eternal exile from the warmth.
Forget these images! Concentrate on what you are now! What are you? Say it! the voice intoned.
I am vengeance, he answered, I am death.
Death, said the stern cold voice. And what do you bring?
I am the bringer of darkness. For five thousand years that conversation had played itself over and over in the sterile wasteland that was now his mind.
And what else do you bring?
[15] Destruction.
And what else?
Death.
But what was death? Was this not death already, this endless journey through eternal cold, this sterile emptiness?
And how shall death come?
By fire.
But oh, he thought, how long until that fire? How long until that cataclysm shatters the frozen night? He longed for fire. Even though it might last only a minute before the end came, at least that fire would not be cold.
The fire will come soon enough, said the voice, at the end of the end
less journey.
Once, he thought, I ran in the hills. The light of two suns—a river of quicksilver—the dark eyes of a soft-spoken woman, and—
I had a name once!
No more.
I think I can remember it—I think I can—
Forget! Forget!
No! If I could only find the name—if only I could find the key to who I am again—and who these voices are—and—
Why? It will only give you pain.
But even pain would be better than—nothing!
Forget, child. Forget.
He traveled on, dreaming of warmth. The warmth had a name, if only he could remember it—he [16] himself had a name, if only he could dredge it out of the darkness within.
Forget, said the voice.
I’m trying, he answered, believe me. Trying to forget.
Chapter Two
Engvig
ACTING ENSIGN TORMOD ENGVIG could barely contain himself. To be on the U.S.S. Enterprise—to walk the corridors of the most celebrated starship in history—it was almost beyond belief for a young man who had spent his entire formative years in a small town in Norway most well known for its Viking Village Theme Park.
Until his prize-winning essay, and the tantalizing possibility of a coveted scholarship to the Academy, the only ships he’d ever been on were the longships they used in the Viking raid reenactment, attended by tourists from all over the Federation. This was hardly the same thing at all. Everywhere he went, there were these living legends just standing around; that very morning, no less a figure than Commander [18] Data had told him to straighten his uniform! He didn’t really know his way around that well yet, but that afternoon he managed to find himself in a bar.
It was jammed with people. There was so much to stare at; Tormod wanted to disappear into a corner and just observe. The heart-stopping panorama of deep space, the stars far thicker and more brilliant than the clearest night sky over the fjord—the unfamiliar accents of Ferengi and Klingon—the heady scents of alien concoctions hanging in the air—plenty of sensory overload for a country boy who once thought he’d have to live and die in Rissa.
