STAR TREK: TNG - Do Comets Dream?

by S P Somtow

  As Commander Data walked through the ship from stern to prow, it occurred to him that no one [135] could see him. They were looking right through him, these people, Thanetian in somatype even though they appeared to be on a different world. Yet it was different with Tarses, Dr. Halliday, Adam, and Lieutenant Martinez. They were moving among the sailors, smiling, chatting away in some native tongue. He had almost completed the decipherment of it, comparing it with millions of known language paradigms; his positronic brain was parsing, analyzing, breaking down phonemes, and reassembling the components of this language almost at the speed of light. Soon, bits of it were making sense.

  There were two layers of reality here; though he was perceiving this simulacrum all about him, he was also in communication with the bridge of the Enterprise.

  In one compartment of his mind, then, he was aware that Deanna Troi and the daughter of Ambassador Straun were preparing to board the thanopstru, and that they would soon be entering, in some way, the comet’s consciousness, which was linked through subspace to the great databases within the dailong.

  Two of the Federation’s party seemed vaguely aware of his presence.

  “Adam?” he said. “Lieutenant Tarses?”

  The boy stopped. He appeared frightened.

  “What’s wrong, Artas?” Simon said.

  “Nothing, Indhuon,” said the boy. “It’s just that—I think I just saw a ghost.”

  The names—and they were speaking the dialect [136] of this world. Data realized that the crew members had assumed roles in this ancient drama, and that they were perhaps only subliminally conscious of their own identities. Each was a hitchhiker inside an ancient soul. Data supposed that, as an android, he must be exempt from this.

  Or was each of the crew members experiencing this show differently—was each of the members aware of himself, yet unable to communicate with the Enterprise members inhabiting other bodies?

  He decided to continue gathering data.

  “Captain,” he said—no one reacted to the strange phenomenon of an alien creature touching a chest device and addressing the empty air—“we are on another planet. In a civilization somehow parallel with Thanet’s but not entirely congruent with it.”

  La Forge’s voice now in response: “Can you transmit any relevant data on the planet? Positions of stars and moons in the sky?”

  “Yes,” Data said. “Though I am subjectively experiencing this other world, I know that I am still actually interfacing with the dailong’s central nervous system. I should be able to access its databanks and fill you in.”

  The boy that looked like Adam continued to stare at Data.

  “Hush,” said Tarses-Indhuon, “there’s no one. Come.”

  “Are you a ghost?” the boy said.

  The wind was stirring as the boat was being [137] moored to the dock. Silently and efficiently, the crew began to file out into the harbor. And such a harbor it was! Boats shaped like a hundred mythical creatures plied the waters. A golden dome peered above the waves, and now and then, from one of a dozen mouthlike openings, a spacecraft would emerge; their ships were shaped like spiders, or butterflies with delicate, spindlelike antennae. There was a sunset—no, two sunsets—no, Data realized, the bloated, purplish sun was setting, the darker dwarf was rising; this was a world that survived precariously within the complex dance of a double star.

  “I am not a ghost,” said Data softly.

  “Come away, little one,” said the one who seemed to be Simon Tarses. “You’re talking to the wind again.”

  “I am not the wind,” Data said. But he became aware that there was a susurrant undertone to his voice as it emerged from his artificial larynx, and that perhaps it might seem to be the whispering of the breeze.

  The Tarses-simulacrum blinked for a moment, as if not sure whether he heard something. But he soon seemed to dismiss what he might have heard.

  Adam said, “But you know I can see things other people can’t see. That’s why I was picked for the dailong training program.”

  “And you are doing well at it,” said Lisa Martinez, who was wearing the flowing robes of a dailongzhen. “I think that there won’t be any problem progressing to the semifinals—an amazing find for [138] someone so young! Your mother and sister will be so proud.”

  They stepped onto dry land now. Everything around them was similar to, yet subtly different from, the world of Thanet. The rigid hierarchy was in place, Data noticed; everywhere there were caste garments, and some made automatic deference to others of superior standing.

  He heard the voice of La Forge now, echoing unnoticed in the air around him. “We’ve located the planet,” he said. “Well—what’s left of it, anyway.”

  “Tanith,” came the voice of Dr. Beverly Crusher.

  At that point, Dr. Halliday emerged onto the dock. He was wearing the most elaborate robes of all, and a headdress of monumental proportions. How appropriate that he had been incarnated here as so gaudy a specimen!

  Data continued his communication with the Enterprise. “We have all assumed the roles of historic personages,” he said. “Except for myself; I appear to have become a ghost.”

  The Adam-child, who was the only one who seemed to hear anything of Data’s utterances, said, “I always knew this ship was haunted.”

  Then there was another voice, echoing in his head: “This is better than the wooden roller coaster at the Academy’s museum of ancient amusements!”

  “You can hear me, Adam!” Data said.

  “There’s a bit of me inside this other kid—his name is Artas. The bit that is my [139] Adam-consciousness can communicate with you—and you can report what I see back to the Enterprise. I guess you’re the all-purpose interface around here, Data.”

  The voice of Dr. Robert Halliday then reverberated in Data’s mind, confirming Adam’s assumption. “Apparently, I am inhabiting the body of one of the great sages of ancient Tanith, a man named Hal-Therion sar-Bensu. He is a distant relation of Ambassador Straun.”

  “A relation?” Data asked. “But surely these are two different planets.”

  “Different the way two zygotes split from one might be? The worlds were sisters once. And as close relations often do, they fought. Bitterly and unrelentingly, for tens of thousands of years.”

  Starcraft were being launched from the golden dome that reared up from the heart of the city. He realized that almost all of the ships were aimed at a single coordinate.

  Thanet.

  On the bridge, a welter of information and images was being relayed as Captain Picard watched, and his crew analyzed.

  Tanith was a beautiful world and, apart from its strange orbit around a double-star system, could have been the twin of Thanet. But Tanith’s civilization was no more. Images of wasteland came flooding in from the ship’s computer as it verified Data’s coordinates.

  There were mountains sheared into plateaus. [140] Pockmarks of bombardments. Tanith’s atmosphere, once rich in oxygen, had become a soup of poisons. And the destruction was clearly man-made. Tanith’s death had been caused by a hail of comets—comets just like the one that was now heading toward Thanet. Comets that contained many types of destructive weapons, from primitive thermonuclear devices to viruses to the biological wherewithal for a kind of reverse terraforming—the metamorphosis of a friendly world into an uninhabitable deathworld.

  The horror of the present contrasted with the images that were being gleaned from Data’s transmission and which were appearing on screen. They were not images of the pinpoint clarity that would be produced by a Federation computer, but blurred sometimes, and sometimes fringed with a prismatic field; the mechanisms of image retrieval and transmission were clearly quite alien, and had the flavor of a biological origin.

  Meanwhile, there was Deanna Troi. She and the girl had already beamed aboard the comet, and a third series of images was being transmitted now, so that the bridge’s viewing area was now a jigsaw puzzle, the pictures complementing each other, contradictin
g each other too, sometimes.

  Picard watched as Deanna and Kio inched their way down the narrow corridor, their footsteps spiraling with the changing gravity. There was something about those walkways that reminded him of his own subjugation to the Borg—the dehumanizing horror of it lived inside him, would always be with him. [141] Even in his dreams of childhood, the idyllic vineyards of his youth, there was always a machine. Watching. Never letting go. What that child must be going through, Picard thought.

  The innermost chamber irised open, and he saw the child.

  I cannot weep. I cannot feel. I have no eyes. I have no limbs.

  But I see eyes. But I see limbs.

  They do not exist.

  I see a young boy floating. I see limbs. I see eyes. I see a tear roll down his cheek. Isn’t that you?

  Limbs? Eyes? Flesh is an illusion.

  Deanna wept.

  Data watched the sailors say their good-byes and leave the pier. A robot, hovering in the air, sang military slogans as it swam past them, passing out flyers that appeared to advertise a military draft.

  Thanetians are your foes, the robot sang. The only good Thanetian is a dead Thanetian.

  He found that with a bit of selective bank switching, he was able to read the thoughts of those characters in the drama whose bodies were also inhabited by the Enterprise crew members from the distant future and the members of the research team—Adam, Tarses, Halliday, and all the others were functioning as a sort of mirroring algorithm, [142] allowing the information expressed in the form of human thoughts to be read as word-based data.

  Now he was in Artas’s mind:

  Gotta hurry home. Where’s Mother? The big day coming soon. So much excitement. So much riding on it all. Don’t want to disappoint her. ...

  Hal-Therion sar-Bensu:

  Danger to the world. The boy is our great hope—perhaps our greatest.

  She was standing by the water’s edge, blowing the boy a kiss, a beautiful dark-haired woman with curiously intense eyes—

  “Mother!” Artas cried out.

  Data’s gaze followed the boy. His mother, he realized, was being played in this simulation by another member of the Enterprise.

  Artas ran through the crowd into the arms of Counselor Deanna Troi, laughing as she embraced him.

  A young girl stood beside Deanna, a girl with the face of Kio sar-Bensu; behind her, three fierce-looking women stood guard. She was watching the longship intently, waiting for someone. When Indhuon appeared behind his younger brother, she waved at him; but he averted his eyes.

  “I’m in,” Deanna said, “and seeing the ancient planet through the eyes of—the boy’s mother. Appropriate enough.”

  Picard listened, and behind him the ambassador sat, consternation written all over his face as the [143] multitasking viewscreens alternated between the viewpoints of various characters, all the images linked through the central conduit of Data’s mind. It was almost as though Data’s consciousness was editing the raw footage of these people’s lives into a continuous story with all the excitement of a well-written holodeck program. The other crew members, too, sat riveted by the story.

  “Now I’m in,” came Kio sar-Bensu’s excited voice. “Oh—this is beautiful—like a dream version of our world.”

  “Witchcraft! Heresy!” the ambassador muttered.

  “I’m someone very important here,” Kio continued. “This woman here is the mother of Artas, a boy everyone is calling ‘The Great Hope.’ But even she defers to me. And my father is—look, there he comes!”

  They saw him on screen now—wearing the face and somatype of Dr. Robert Halliday, but the robes of a very high official indeed—

  “A Shivan-Jalar!” the ambassador gasped. “They exist only in our mythology—why, the High Shivantak himself communicates with the spirit of one, within the holiest of holies, which only he can enter.”

  “So Thanet had a sister world once, a planet not too far away, who shared its culture,” Picard said.

  La Forge continued to report the results of his research. “Tanith,” he said, “doesn’t exist. What’s left is uninhabitable. The atmosphere is stripped away mostly, what’s left is poisonous gases, the oceans [144] evaporated, the continents pockmarked—I’ll put it on screen.”

  A collage of a devastated planet appeared next to the lush image of the seaport.

  “Can that really be the same world?” Picard said.

  “If those coordinates are accurate—or even relatively accurate,” La Forge said. “There’s no other world, dead or alive, that falls into that range.”

  Ambassador Straun was struggling to frame a question. “H-How—long ago—are the images we’re seeing?”

  “The ruined world is now, Your Excellency,” La Forge said. “The living images you’re seeing are—five thousand or so years—I can get an exact fix based on the positions of key stars in the simulated evening sky—five thousand point zero seven years old.”

  It hit them all at once. Picard saw that they all knew it. No one had to say it aloud.

  The people in those images had only a few days to live.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Angels

  ARTAS AWOKE. Today was the day he’d been waiting for. He was the fastest, the brightest. He had passed the penultimate test, and there was only one remaining.

  I am the one, he thought, who will redeem my people.

  Tanith’s striated sunlight streamed in through the screens. He rubbed his eyes. Yesterday was wonderful, he thought. I rode in the Great Shivan-Jalar’s private barge. His Multitude actually smiled at me—actually shared with me apiece of his private candy! He sat up, looked at himself in the mirror-pool at the foot of his bed, preening in front of his image. He was twelve years old, and by the end of the day he [146] hoped to win a great prize—the privilege of never seeing his thirteenth birthday.

  Then—something strange happened.

  The mirror pool began to shift and swirl. A kind of smoke started spiraling from it, and the reflective mirrorstuff started shimmering. Grumbling, he reached down to see if he could adjust the settings.

  And then, suddenly, there was another boy in the room, stepping out of the mirror pool. He wore alien clothing, no tunic but a double-legged second skin that hugged his legs, and an upper covering of the same stretch fabric. Embarrassed that he was not yet dressed, Artas quickly donned his tunic, with its clan markings, which told everyone who he was and let those who must defer to him know their place.

  The alien boy had no clan markings at all.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  The boy’s lips moved, but nothing came out. He seemed to be struggling with a shiny handheld device. His hands were not webbed.

  “Is this the final test that I’m supposed to undergo?” Artas asked.

  No answer.

  “Are you a haunting, sent by one of my rivals?” Again, no response. Artas knew that many of the boys he grew up with were now his enemies, so coveted was the position of great thanopstru.

  “Finally!” the other boy said. “I got a fix on the translation. This dialect of yours is Thanetian, but [147] it’s a very ancient form. I couldn’t get it to congruency right away.”

  “You’re a Thanetian?” Artas gaped. This was the ultimate horror—the enemy materializing in his very bedroom on the day of the final test!

  “No, no. I’m Adam Halliday. I—”

  Artas flung himself at the stranger, pummeling him with all the strength his boyish frame could muster. But there was nothing there—the alien boy was insubstantial. Artas found himself banging his fist against the wall.

  “Are you all right, Artas?” came a voice. His mother.

  Adam put a finger to his lips.

  “I—I think so, Mother,” the boy said.

  “I come from the Federation,” said Adam.

  “You’re just a dream, a figment of my imagination. They said I would dream dreams. It’s in the Panvivlion, you know. Why am I telling you
this? The Panvivlion probably sent you. You’re my quest vision. Naturally. I’ve got the race this afternoon.”

  “No, listen,” Adam said. “I’m a tourist, sort of. I’m eavesdropping on you, five thousand years in the future. You’ve already become the great thanopstru and—”

  “So I will win the race?” Artas could hardly contain his excitement. “I’ll be chosen? Everyone tells me I will, but—”

  “C’mon, Artas,” Adam said. “Listen. A bunch of us are watching your world through your eyes and [148] the eyes of people around us. But no one here knows it. It’s a computer simulation that approximates reality—I think. But this old Tanithian technology’s pretty advanced, so I don’t know whether what I’m seeing is really happening or if it’s really well simulated. Thing is, no one except you can see any of us.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I don’t know. Because I can’t help it. I’m sitting up here in a holodeck sort of a chamber inside a mechanical sea dragon, and I’m watching all this stuff happen to you people, and I just had to reach out. I don’t want you to die. Look, I’m having the same problems as you up here in the far future. I have this strong intuition thing that scares off everyone—except that android guy I met a day or two ago, he’s hard to scare ’cause he doesn’t have any emotions at all. You’re kind of like me. And you’re going to throw away your life.” Artas suddenly knew who this person was. He shuddered. “You’re Saraniu,” he said. “The tempter.” Artas thought of calling Indhuon, sleeping only a room divider away, but did not want to wake his brother, who had important things of his own to think about.