STAR TREK: TNG - Do Comets Dream?

by S P Somtow

  He ran.

  Catching up now—catching up—

  He could see the stranger’s face-—his own face.

  Then, for a split second, he was in a glass cage, and a dozen faces in one-piece jumpsuits were staring at him with pained, compassionate eyes. Then the vision faded.

  He wasn’t even thinking of winning anymore. All he was thinking of was running. Not here, not uphill in the burning suns’ light, but in the tall purple grass beside the ocean—not for an audience of millions but for himself alone—he ran.

  I am a comet.

  [177] Slicing through the emptiness. The lonely gray spaces between the stars. I am a comet.

  He ran.

  At the edge of time and space, the angel stood with outstretched arms, a mirror image of himself.

  Artas, the angel said.

  Are you my mother?

  No.

  But she’s the reason I’m running—she’s the reason I’m giving up my life—so she can be someone—so her caste won’t stop her from becoming anything she chooses.

  Oh, Artas, no, I’m not your mother—but—

  Someone like his mother, though, only with dark, haunting eyes and hair that fell in dusky ringlets—a strange half-smile—a woman he’d never seen before and yet who somehow knew him, understood his innermost thoughts.

  You must be an angel! he thought.

  He ran toward the angel, ran toward the warm embrace of love and light, but suddenly.

  Cold! Bitter, unforgiving emptiness! And rage, terrible rage, rage directed inward at himself, ripping himself apart, and—

  The eyes of the Shivan-Jalar.

  They seemed to penetrate his very soul.

  He closed his eyes. I’m dying, he thought. And fell prostrate at the feet of the high throne.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Instrument of Fate

  WITHIN THE LIMBO of the dailong’s simulation matrix, minds past and future revolved and intertwined with Data’s consciousness. Artas’s elation blended with Adam’s certain knowledge of the comet’s future. His mother’s pride and sorrow melded with Counselor Troi’s empathy and torrent of child-rage that engulfed her.

  As Artas looked up, the godlike countenance of the Shivan-Jalar was made brilliant by the confluence of the two suns’ radiance. He raised his arm; his hand held an orb of power, encrusted with precious gems, and containing a rare liquid, the ambrosia of the gods, which was refined peftifesht, a thousand times stronger than the brew [179] served in the taverns of the prostitutes’ quarter.

  “Artas,” said the Shivan-Jalar, his voice reverberant and strangely calm above the sea of cheering far below. “You have achieved what no other child has ever achieved in our five-thousand-year-old history. For though there is a footrace every year, and a thanopstru is selected each season to rides in honor at the head of the parade of honor along the sacred Boulevard of Righteous Hatred—you are actually going for a ride in the great comet. May the spirits of the five thousand who went ahead of you be always present to guide you in your holy mission.”

  Artas remained prostrate in front of the great throne. Except for that one moment, when he had stared right into the face of the most high, he had kept his eyes downcast, as was proper in the presence of the one who spoke in the place of all the gods.

  “Come closer, boy,” said the Shivan-Jalar. “Come—sit here. At the foot of the throne. I’m going to have a talk with you—and no one else shall hear what we say to one another.” He clapped his hands. Miraculously, the entire council retreated into the background. Guards came forward and clamped a wall of metal shields around the throne.

  “You will be the thanopstru. Do you know what that means? Do you truly, truly know, child?”

  “It means I will rain fire on our enemies, and they will perish.”

  “What do you know about Thanet?”

  “They are our enemies. We hate them.”

  [180] “And why, my son, why?”

  “It has always been so.”

  “But why has it always been so, my son?”

  “Because we hate the Thanetians. It’s our whole reason for being. The gods created us to hate each other—and to try to destroy one another. My teacher said the whole universe is about duality. I don’t know what that means, but I think it’s that we need to balance them against us.”

  The Shivan-Jalar nodded slowly. “In a few short hours you will undergo a metamorphosis that many have theorized about, but no one has truly experienced. The fact is, Artas, that no one knows what it will be like—only you will know, and no one alive today will be alive when you arrive to find out the things you will know.”

  “Why not, Holy Father?”

  “Because, my son, we cannot know for certain if we have yet conquered the speed of light. We have reached an accommodation with it, certainly; our drones, carrying weapons of mass destruction, will travel by a new superluminal drive, and be delivered to our enemies almost instantly. But a thanopstru needs the intelligence of a living brain to power it, and there is a warping that occurs at the moment when we cross the speed of light, something modern science has been unable to overcome—a flattening effect combined with an increase in mass almost to the level of infinity for one minuscule microsecond, enough to destroy a living thing. The transwarp drive in the thanopstru is an [181] experimental thing; it has never been tested. There are three possibilities. If the drive functions perfectly, you will arrive in the Klastravo system at the same time as the drones of lesser destructive power, and Thanet will be no more—this time without the possibility of recovery, for its very atmosphere will have been stripped away. Secondly, it may function well enough, but your consciousness may be destroyed on the way, so that there will be no one with the finely tuned reflexes and psychic control of the thanopstru’s quasi-neural functions; if so, the destruction wreaked by the thanopstru will be random at best, and the comet may even explode harmlessly in space, or fall into Klastravo and be pulverized. The third possibility is the strangest one of all to contemplate. What if the superluminal drive malfunctions? What if you are forced to travel at sublight speed, a five-thousand-year journey, toward a planet only partially destroyed by the drones?

  “Think of the irony of such a scenario! The world that you reach will already have been devastated by the drones, but you will destroy all that remains of it—any straggling remnants of humanity, any attempts by the Thanetians to regain the status of a civilized world. Your task, Artas, will have been the total annihilation of people five thousand years in the future, who may have no awareness whatsoever of this war, this ancient hatred—or whose knowledge of it may be only in the form of myth. Do you understand this? Could you contemplate such a possibility and not self-destruct in shame and horror?”

  [182] “I don’t need to understand this, Holy Father,” Artas said. “I am an instrument of fate. I will be the thanopstru.”

  “Yes, my son, you will. And thus it is that you must understand your destiny completely. We and the Thanetians are brothers, as the dark is brother to the light, and the day to the night. For eon upon eon this sacred war has been going on. You learned in school that this is the war that keeps the universe in balance, that it is as much a law of nature as gravity and the speed of light. You have learned about the five-thousand-year cycle and how it renews the cosmos. But the truth is far less clear-cut than that. The origins of the war are shrouded in mystery. One of us colonized the other; in my communication with the computers of past epochs, I have never managed to discover who came first. Some say the war began over a woman; some over an assassination. The five-thousand-year cycle exists because that is the time it takes to travel between our worlds—unless, somehow, the secret of faster-than-light travel ever gets solved completely, which, perhaps, has happened this time. Every five thousand years we crawl up from the slime, every five thousand years it seems that we get to the brink of awesome new discoveries about space travel—and then we launch our weapons.

  “Perhaps, one day, th
ere will be complete annihilation, and the cycle will end. Or perhaps the secret of the warp will come sooner in one cycle, and we will actually speak to our enemies face-to-face, and somehow it will end. Or perhaps there will be a time [183] when a new civilization is born out of the consciousness of the dailong that has no memory of the war at all, just vague legends. And yet somehow the war will go on, and the innocent will perish.

  “You cannot know what world it is you will destroy. You cannot know whether they will hate us, or even know who you are. Fate, that is all you must be. And you must accept that.

  “And before you accept godhead, you must comprehend it. You are blind fate, my child, you are the instrument of retribution upon the innocent as well as the guilty.”

  Artas could not truly understand what the Shivan-Jalar was saying. But he realized he might have five thousand years in which to contemplate its meaning, If he read the Shivan-Jalar’s meaning at all rightly, the Holy Father was telling him that the design of the thanopstru was flawed; that there was only a slim chance that it would all work as planned. The third possibility was the most likely—

  Five thousand was an incomprehensible number to the boy; it was, after all, as long as the entire span of recorded history.

  But Artas was full of pride, a pride that was also a little like pain. And then came the goblet of ambrosia, poured out of the orb; the wine had been fermenting within the orb for five millennia, and now it was time to drink. First came the ritual strangulation for four small werreti-beasts, and their blood was added to the goblet. Then the incantation to the seven war gods was uttered.

  [184] “Take this cup,” said the Shivan-Jalar. “And with the first draft, cast off your identity. Forget Tanith. Forget boyhood. Forget this beautiful world, forget the ones you love. Forget even the taste of this ambrosia. Forget all tastes, all sights, smells, sounds; where you are going is only the cold and the emptiness. Forget, Artas.”

  “I forget,” said Artas.

  And he drank deep.

  “Until Thanet is destroyed, you shall never sleep.”

  “I shall never sleep.” He took another draught of the bitter peftifesht.

  “You shall not sleep through the warping of space-time, not sleep until the moment comes when you shall set the machineries of death in motion.”

  “I shall not sleep.”

  “You shall not sleep even should the hyperdrive fail, and you be forced to fly the lonely journey in real time.”

  “No, I shall not sleep, for I am the thanopstru.”

  “The force that shall fuel you will be cold hatred, and hatred shall run in your veins instead of blood, and hatred will animate your every thought.”

  “I shall hate.” He drank again.

  “You are the emissary of fate.”

  “I am fate itself.” He drank.

  A strange coldness seeped into his limbs. Two guards lifted him up by his arms—a slip of a child he was, frail and impassive as the power of the fortified peftifesht took hold of him.

  “Are you forgetting?” the Shivan-Jalar said softly.

  [185] “I am forgetting,” said Artas, his voice settling into a strange monotone.

  “Do you have any last wishes?” said the Shivan-Jalar. “Soon you will speak no more.”

  “My mother,” he said. “Couldn’t she—couldn’t she be happy?”

  The Holy Father clapped his hands. Almost instantly, they brought his mother to him, carrying her on a perfumed bier; though she wore the insignia of the prostitutes’ caste, she was appareled in such luxury she could have been a queen, or a demigoddess.

  “Taruna es-Sarion,” the guard announced.

  “Let this be the last time you are called by that name,” said the Shivan-Jalar, raising his orb high. “For now you shall be called Taruna Batar Thanopstratis, the Mother of the Star of Death. Your image shall be placed at the entranceway to every Mnemo-Thanasium and High Temple in the world. And with this ritual deathblow”—he gave a command, and a guard rushed toward her with a scimitar, and pretended to decapitate her—”I end your former life, and bring you to a rebirth as a member of the high caste of Errolam.”

  The people around them gasped. Errolam was one of the highest of all castes, reserved only for the concubines of the highest religious authorities. Artas could see, through the veil of peftifesht-induced confusion, that his mother was in a transport of emotion. Perhaps she was to be the consort of the Shivan-Jalar himself! Vaguely, he could sense the excitement of all around; but the peftifesht was dulling his mind—he was [186] already withdrawing from the world of the senses.

  “Taruna s’Errolam,” said the Shivan-Jalar. “Are you content?”

  “Yes, my lord,” she said as she prostrated herself from her position on the bier.

  “And your son,” said the Shivan-Jalar, “shall be my daughter’s consort, for I see they are already much taken with each other.”

  “You do my family prime honor,” said his mother, and placed her folded palms to her lips in a gesture of gratitude.

  “Then kiss your child farewell.”

  Taruna descended from the litter. She took her child in her arms. Artas wanted to embrace her warmly, wanted to crush her to him, show her how much he loved her, how he had done this for her, not for any personal glory—but the drug was working fast now, and consciousness was becoming murkier moment by moment.

  “My son,” she said softly.

  Mother! he cried out in his mind, but she could not hear him.

  But five thousand years thence, another woman did hear. A woman not his mother, but who had felt his mother’s feelings—her elation, her bereavement.

  Who are you? he cried out in his mind.

  A single word, incomprehensible, reverberated in his head: Troi, Troi, Troi.

  And the other woman called to him through the chaos of space-time: Artas, Artas, do not weep.

  Chapter Twenty

  Devivement

  “THIS IS APPALLING,” Deanna Troi cried, and Picard, watching the spectacle unfold on multiple screens on the bridge of the Enterprise, could not have agreed more.

  Picard said, “Counselor, perhaps you should withdraw.”

  “No,” she said. “Captain, I have to experience this until the very end. I can’t analyze this situation with only half the information.”

  “Dr. Crusher?” Picard said.

  “It’s taking its toll,” said Beverly. “But her vital signs are still—viable.”

  Picard said, “Counselor, I’ll leave this to your own judgment. I know that you will pull out of this [188] cybernetic melding if you sense too much danger to yourself.”

  But Deanna did not respond; she had already re-submerged herself in the ancient story.

  There were steps to ascend; hundreds of steps, and hundreds of high officials in their robes of state. The smaller sun had crossed the face of the larger; the heat was almost unbearable. Artas, now clothed only in the translucent Cloak of the Invincible, was being carried up the steps by eight guards on a boy-sized golden shield. He lay as though dead.

  Indhuon, walking beside him, knew that his brother was not yet dead. There was still some human consciousness left in him, but soon that would be gone as his mind was joined to the greater consciousness of the thanopstru. Next to him was Ariela. He could scarcely believe he had gone from his humble origins to the consort-elect of the Shivan-Jalar’s daughter, but Artas’s supreme sacrifice was already bringing his family some of the greatest rewards one could achieve in this world.

  Above them, the shell of the thanopstru glittered against the face of the double sun, almost blinding; on the first step beneath it, the devivement cylinder, in which Artas would go to immortality. Once he entered the cylinder, the boy would be considered a god.

  And he would be brother to a god—and one of the most sought-after men on the planet.

  Indhuon watched as a doorway opened in the [189] cylinder. The honor guards lifted the shield up, and then the four nearest the cylinder knelt
down so that his brother could be slid into the tiny cavity inside. Within, Indhuon knew, coma-inducing gases seethed. Once his brother was completely sedated, tendrils of silicon-based pseudolife would begin to invade his body, slithering up into his brain, sharing his identity, stealing his soul and reprogramming it with nothing but the desire to kill.

  Now, according to the ritual formula, the relatives of the god would have to turn their backs on the boy, one by one. There were only two relatives present, of course; Indhuon knew that a man who gives a prostitute a child would never acknowledge such a thing, and so there was only his mother and himself, no band of weeping, proud relatives.

  He gripped Ariela’s hand, and broke away to stand beside the shield. His mother was there too. She had descended from her litter, and was standing over Artas’s face, resolutely holding back her tears. Her new robes of the caste of Errolam shimmered in the suns. A coronet of light swathed her luxuriant hair. My mother is truly beautiful, Indhuon thought. It was the streak of sadness in her, accentuating the darkness around her eyes, the hint of worry at the edges of her lips, that made her all the more beautiful.

  The turning of the back ceremony was to happen in order of age; therefore, Indhuon would be the last creature of flesh and blood to lay eyes on his brother’s face. After that, the cylinder would be [190] closed, as a coffin was closed before being consigned to the Mnemo-Thanasium. The former Artas would be dead and the god would be born.

  How must his mother be feeling? Indhuon thought. His mother—my mother.

  Deanna could hear Taruna’s thoughts, as clearly as if they were speaking face-to-face. She was thinking Yes, yes, I will be consort to a demigod now, it’s what I’ve always wished. I’ll try to forget the one I hugged, the one I sang to sleep—I’ll try to forget but I know I’m going to be haunted by it, oh gods, I remember the blast of blinding pain when I knew he was emerging from me, he was such a difficult birth, I remember holding him and he wouldn’t even cry, wouldn’t even make a sound, as if he already knew he wasn’t going to stay with me very long, as if to say Mother, Mother, don’t be too close to me—how I love you, my Artashki, my angel, my pride.