by S P Somtow
“That play they’re doing,” Adam said, “it’s a reenactment of the rebirth of the world. They have those all the time now, puppet shows, plays, cantatas, ’cause they all think the world’s gonna end in like six or seven days, moon-turns they call them, and they’re all kinda hysterical about it.”
“I do sense a certain urgency to everything around me,” said the commander.
“C’mon, Data, we gotta catch the ferry.”
They had reached a canal lined with temples. A dozen harpists strummed at the water’s edge. Adam translated their song:
[83] We greet the world’s death
With great joy,
Laughing, we embrace
The beginning and the end;
Eagerly we wait.
Halliday was already waiting for them with the rest of the away team. Small watercraft bobbed up and down as the canal broadened. Each craft contained a team of dailong hunters, young men in translucent wetsuits that gleamed, wearing elaborate headdresses that revealed their city of origin.
“Welcome, Data,” said Halliday. “You’re about to witness one of the more remarkable spectacles on Thanet—the hunt for the dailong.”
“The dailong are—a means of transportation, are they not?” Data inquired.
“More than that; they’re an obsession, a planetary sport, and a cultural icon.” Halliday beckoned to a passing skiff; it pulled alongside. “Hop in!” he said. Data and the boy climbed on. The boat was small, and powered, astonishingly, by oarsmen, who paddled with eerie precision as a drummer boy beat out a rhythm, singing:
Oi-oi-o! Oi-oi-o!
We come,
Little and puny,
We come to capture
The great beast of the deep.
Oi-oi-o!
[84] The oarsmen pulled toward the lock, which clanged open; dozens of the skiffs plowed through into the harbor, and the chorus of oi-oi-o’s resounded about them as the wind began whipping up the waves.
Simon Tarses was in his element—Mother had taken him sailing often when he was a child, which gave him something in common, thank goodness, with poor Engvig. The briny smell of the moist wind, the bracing chill of the water as it splashed up with the oars’ fall, the song of the drummer boys punctuated with raucous ululations ... This world was so alive, so vivid—how could they all be so willing to renounce it all, to accept an ending?
He thought of Kio. He wondered where she was now, whether she was still thinking about him. He had tried, and failed, to stop thinking of her. If only she weren’t so beautiful. The captain was right to reassign Tarses and his starstruck charge to the away team. One more day on the Enterprise and Engvig would have started asking the bridge crew for autographs. And Tarses would have been unable to resist kissing the ambassador’s daughter.
The oarsmen rowed rapidly. The boats were sleek, brilliantly engineered; they sliced through the waves with eerie precision. These people were almost like Vikings—Ensign Engvig’s ancestors, Simon thought. He remembered folktales about hunting the great whales amid the freezing northern [85] waters, with only one’s wits and the most primitive of weapons.
At the prow of each skiff sat a man or woman, each one cross-legged and apparently in deepest meditation. What were they doing? Each one wore flowing robes, and had an elaborate caste-mark on his forehead in the shape of a giant serpent—or perhaps a dailong. Some of them didn’t look like they should even be on the water; some were frail and withered, some mere children. On the skiff they rode on, this figurehead sat on a carpet whose patterned fibers rustled and twisted as he mumbled strange incantations. It was an old man, a hundred years old at least, whose face was battered and pocked like the canyons of an airless moon. His white mane streamed in the wind.
“Oh, him,” young Adam was explaining to Data, “he’s the dailongzhen, the man who will ride the dailong. It’s some kind of telepathy. Some people have it, some don’t. I have a bit of it, well, more an intuition really, you know. And it’s not really a Persian rug he’s sitting on; it’s kind of a half-sentient lichenlike thing that grows in the northern deserts; it acts as a telepathic amplifier.”
“Couldn’t have explained it better,” his father said.
“Learned from the best,” Adam said, grinning.
The oarsmen chanted. The boats, Simon realized, were in the shape of the dailong image he had seen in the ambassador’s quarters on the Enterprise. Which meant they were very close to that model [86] Viking longship that was such an eyesore in Simon’s quarters. Even the designs on the sails seemed the same, images of beasts and gods. About a hundred strong, the convoy moved in what seemed like anarchy at first; but Simon soon saw that there was an eerie pattern to the movements; the skiffs darted, listed, and wove in and out of each other in an elaborate choreography that only some god could see—or perhaps some monstrous sea creature.
Then came a cry—an elemental sound—thousands of oarsmen chanting in resonant unison as the waves crashed about them—dai-LONG! dai-LONG! All at once, the dailongzhens of each skiff stood up, arms upraised, and punctuated the chanting with savage whoops and shrieks. All the boats turned at once, and what had seemed chaos now became precision as they fell into position and bore down on a position far out to sea, halfway to the horizon—
—and when Simon looked to where Adam pointed he could dimly make it out, a sinuous, serpentine shape that rippled about the waves, impossibly huge, breaching the bright water—metallic rainbow colors cascaded about it—a shimmering aurora hovered above the sea—
dai-LONG! dai-LONG!
—a monstrous finned tail now, lashing the waves, and—
They were moving unnaturally fast. Simon [87] realized now that these were not the wooden oars of ancient times, but oars equipped with some kind of waldo that amplified the rowers’ strength. The sails did not rely on the wind but on a man-made wind generator. Indeed, he saw now with wonder, the hull itself was not true wood, but a simulacrum, and the sail had a glow that unmistakably indicated a radiation-based source of power.
They were slicing through the water now, speeding toward an island in the mid-distance, an island that glittered in the searing blue-white light of Thanet’s sun. Except that it was no island—no. The island was beginning to rear above the waters, and he could see eyes now, crimson, jewel-like. And in the distance, segments of the dailong’s serpentine body thrashed against the waters.
The island was the dragon’s head, and before he could fully register that fact his boat, skimming the waves, was pulling up alongside, and the oarsmen, chanting to steady their rhythm, were pulling up their oars and hurling them at the creature’s brow—the paddles were metamorphosing into harpoons with corkscrew points that whirred as they burrowed beneath the dragon’s skin—Simon saw sparks fly from the scales—he gasped—was this some blood sport after all, like the whale-hunts of the ancient past—senseless and cruel? The chanting grew in intensity as the skiffs pulled up and each team cast their weapons. The dragon did not seem to resist. A bloodred rheum oozed from its eyes, each eye as [88] large as a small shuttlecraft, the oily liquid spreading over the surface of the ocean.
“The dailong weeps!” one of the team members shouted. Presently the cry was taken up from all sides, over and over, a ritual mantra as the thick fluid seethed about the skiffs.
And all the dailongzhen, risen from their meditations, were now standing, making mysterious gestures at the dragon’s head. “What are they doing?” Simon couldn’t help asking.
Adam said, “They’re trying to establish a mind-link with the creature. The first dailongzhen to break through will be the first to mount!”
As he spoke, the old man at the prow went into an ecstatic frenzy. A halo shone about his face as a string of nonsense syllables erupted from his lips.
“He’s made contact!” Dr. Halliday said excitedly. “Data, Tarses, Martinez—this is quite the coup! Our team has won the right to enter the dragon’s mind. I had hoped this would happen, but I never dreamed it. An
d on the evening of the world’s destruction, too—what a thrill!”
“I thought the world wasn’t going to be destroyed,” said Simon.
“Maybe not,” said Halliday, “but you’ll never convince these people.”
As the old man shouted his incantations, the oars that had become harpoons changed function yet again, growing metal tendrils which linked together, [89] tightened, connected—building a causeway back to the skiff, a miniature suspension bridge.
“Very sophisticated,” Data said. “It appears to be bioengineering of some sort—perhaps utilizing a rapidly reproducing species of titanium-fixing bacteria—”
But before they could say more, the dailongzhen was already walking across, one arm raised skyward. And the crew of the skiff were following him, chanting, “He has conquered the beast! He has tamed the creature of the deep!”
“If you start worrying about titanium-fixing bacteria,” Dr. Halliday said, “you’re going to miss the whole spectacle. I scraped a few samples on the last hunt; I’ve already mapped their genome; it’s in the computer back at the mission. Don’t underestimate these people, Commander—their social structure may be in Earth’s Middle Ages, and their space travel may be antediluvian, but they do know how to splice a gene or two.”
Data was about to answer when a trapdoor opened on top of the dailong’s head. Simon hurried to join the Thanetians who were scrambling toward the dragon.
“It’s a machine,” Lisa Martinez was saying in awe.
“Machine or animal,” said Halliday. “The Thanetians aren’t terribly particular. After all, they believe that the entire universe is a machine—a machine that cycles back to its starting point every five thousand [90] years. They’ve got a sort of clockwork view of reality, don’t you see.”
Sentient or not, it was awe-inspiring. Almost enough to allow Simon to forget the expression on Kio sar-Bensu’s face when she had been forced to return to her world.
Chapter Ten
The High Shivantak
“DO NOT SPEAK of him again!” Kio’s father was berating her as the two of them waited in the antechamber of the High Shivantak’s audience hall. They had been waiting for perhaps an entire moon-turn—it certainly seemed that way.
“Father,” Kio said, “he never touched me in an impure way. He’s a Federation officer, Father—they have codes of honor, too, though you may consider them all to be barbarians. It was me, Father—I wanted him to!”
She had to admit that she rather enjoyed the look of horror in her father’s face. She hadn’t been able to get a rise out of him in years, and now, all at once, she was sending him into tizzy after tizzy. Perhaps he does love me after all, she thought.
“It’s not enough that I’ve been made to lose my [98] way in the Shivantak’s theological labyrinth like some laboratory rodent,” he said, pacing back and forth, “not enough that I’ve been unable to enter a proper state of inner calm so that I can receive the world’s ending with true joy in my heart—not enough that I’ve thought the unthinkable, I’ve actually suspected the infallible Shivantak of heresy—but my daughter has to choose this moment to rebel.” So distraught was Straun that he actually collided with the wall, knocking a sconce askew, spilling liquid fire on the polished jasper floor. An attendant hastened to scrub it, muttering a mantra of omen-aversion as she wiped the tendrils of cool flame with a gilded sponge.
“Father, Father,” she said softly.
A man had entered the antechamber. It was the High Shivantak’s chamberlain. He wore a robe of black anatir feathers, and held the Orb of Judgment in his left hand. His countenance was grim.
“Lord Kaltenbis!” Straun said, kneeling as was appropriate before one whose brow bore the caste-mark of M’Thartush. “When will he see me? There is so much to report, so many questions that need answering, questions that could undermine the very fabric of—”
“Silence!” Kaltenbis shouted. The orb glowed. “His Radiance will not see you.”
“He will not—”
“Not now, not, perhaps, ever, considering we are only a few moon-turns from the end of time. Yet, I [93] am to tell you that he has considered your report fully. And farther, I am to tell you that in my right hand”—he shook one flowing sleeve, and a sealed decree slid into his hand—“I bear your fate. This is—but you will already have grasped the implications from the glowing of my orb.”
Kio gasped. Suddenly her father’s discomfiture had assumed far more dire dimensions.
“Yes, it’s an edict of execution with a finding of heresy. Shall I read it to you? I’ll just go through the highlights: Straun sar-Bensu, being employed within the ecclesiastical demesne of the most high, etc. etc., stands condemned of contemplating the breaking of the great circle—”
“I?” said Kio’s father. “I? I was the most loyal believer until—why, the High Shivantak himself—”
“Absurd,” said the chamberlain. “You impute fallibility to the infallible—I should burn you at the stake with my own hands!”
Kio whispered urgently in her father’s ear, “Father, now you see how treacherous they are. You see that they’ve used you to keep their noses clean while you take the fall for daring to find out for them the thing they most want to know—the thing it’s forbidden for a citizen of Thanet to even think—they want to know if the Federation is telling the truth! Because, even if it destroys you and half the world—they want to cling to power! Half a world is better than none!”
She put her arms around her father’s prostrate body. He was weeping now, his face racked with [94] great sobs. Furious, Kio sprang to her feet. She looked the chamberlain right in the eye. “Look what you’ve done to him—look what you’ve done to this whole world—you are going to swallow the truth whole—and spit out a lie—you don’t believe a word of the Panvivlion. Hypocrite!”
“Don’t make things worse for us!” her father whispered hoarsely. “The shame of it—thank the great powers that the world will end anyway, and my being burned at the stake only shortens my life by a day or two.”
“Arise, Straun sar-Bensu,” said Lord Kaltenbis. “The decree of execution is but what I carry in one hand. But with the other I can give back what I shall have taken away.”
He shook his other sleeve: another decree. Deftly, he switched the orb into his other hand. The second decree was not bordered with red, the sign of the purifying flames of execution; it had a green border. And the seal of the High Shivantak was on that one as well.
“In my other hand,” said the chamberlain, “I have an alternate edict. The sentence of execution is hereby commuted until after the end of the world. Your honor is safe, as at that time you will have no goods to seize, no good name to besmirch. In return for these few days without shame, you shall continue to engage the Federation.”
“Engage?” Straun said, his expression of terror and despair turning into one of bewilderment.
But Kio saw what the lord chamberlain meant [95] right away. There had been two possibilities: the great truth of the Panvivlion, and its opposite—the unthinkable. Between these two incompatibilities there must be a middle way. A loophole.
“You want my father to save you,” she said slowly.
“We want him to continue to—examine the theological incongruities, to see if we can arrive at a more accurate interpretation of the Panvivlion,” said Kaltenbis.
“And what could he gain from that?”
“He will gain—his life.”
“I think my father will want more than his life. I think that he will want something higher—a change in caste.”
“But caste is decreed by birth!”
“The High Shivantak,” said Kio, “is the embodiment of the Panvivlion; the truth made flesh; he is infallible. Why can’t he just command a change?”
“I shall raise the matter with the High Shivantak,” said the lord chamberlain, and it dawned on Kio that a man so unaccustomed to questions easily crumbled in the face of a challenge. Even a challenge presented b
y an insignificant seventeen-year-old girl.
“Father,” she whispered, gently pulling her father back to his feet, “we’re going to have to revisit that Captain Picard again. And we’re going to have to keep our minds wide open.”
Chapter Eleven
The Comet
CALM RULED ON THE BRIDGE of the Enterprise. The officers at their stations, patiently monitoring the unfolding situation. La Forge was ready for the captain’s signal to unleash, with surgical precision, the mighty power of photon torpedoes on the rogue comet. Counselor Troi watched; though this was a routine operation, she had had a strange foreboding about it.
On impulse power now, the ship moved with an eerie majesty through a gaseous mini-nebula that, though its matter was so thinly spread out that, bottled up on Earth, it would be considered a perfect vacuum, here shimmered with the borrowed reflection of a far-off star cluster. Thanet’s sun, Klastravo, was veiled by the nebula, its light diffuse and mysterious.
[97] “Another star system,” Picard mused, “another civilization hurtling toward a doom perhaps created by its own folly—”
Truly, Troi thought, the human condition is a universal constant—everywhere we go, we see the same glories, the same frailties. She could sense the captain’s frustration.
“The comet, Captain,” said Commander Riker, glancing down at his array of computer information. “Closing in, trajectory as predicted.”
“On screen,” said the captain.
The image came into focus—a thing of lethal beauty. Its tail glowed against the starstream.
“Impressive,” said Riker.
What a welter of emotions that one word held, Troi thought. The boyish enthusiasm for the exotic phenomena of space—that was still there inside the mind of the mature commander, coolly sizing up his opponent. A man versus a space-borne object the size of a hundred starships.
