STAR TREK: TNG - Do Comets Dream?

by S P Somtow

  Though Deanna’s body was still in the heart of the comet, connected through Data and the dailong’s monstrous network of links to this distant events, her mind was right there in the ancient world; she could see the vibrant, colors of the city, double-brilliant and double-shadowed by the dance of its twin suns, she could see, through Taruna’s eyes, the boy, his hands folded across his chest like a Pharaoh about to be mummified; his eyes were still open, unblinking; they were windows into a yawning emptiness.

  * * *

  [191] And Taruna turned away from her son’s face, and now it was the brother’s turn. Indhuon stroked his brother’s face; already it seemed to have grown cold.

  “Good-bye, little brother,” he said.

  The cylinder closed.

  A primitive device of metal wires and pulleys hoisted it upright.

  In front of them, there was the thanopstru: a metallic sphere, its surface artificially pitted to resemble a natural object.

  Looking at the alien past through Indhuon’s eyes, Simon Tarses was interested in the workings of the thanopstru. As it rose up, a crystalline humming permeated the air, and from far below a collective murmur from the crowd swelled like a gathering ocean storm. There was nothing in this technology that appeared to resemble any device of the Federation. Whatever this was, it was an independent discovery.

  I wish I knew more, Simon thought.

  And then he heard, echoing through the conduit of Data’s mind, the response—So do I.

  Simon looked through Indhuon’s eyes and saw Ariela, and behind Ariela’s eyes he knew that the consciousness of Kio was present—and that Kio and Ariela shared a genetic connection that spanned many five-thousand-year cycles. That was the reason, no doubt, for the rigid caste system defined in the Panvivlion; it kept the families intact from cycle to cycle no matter who was lost.

  I wish I could kiss you, Simon thought.

  [192] But you can! came Kio’s thoughts.

  And suddenly he realized it was true, for the diplomatic necessities that divided Simon and Kio did not affect Indhuon and Ariela. Quite the opposite; everything and everyone smiled upon the union of the two Tanithians.

  Before he could finish the thought, it was happening. Indhuon and Ariela were clinging to each other. And the Shivan-Jalar, immersed in his recitation from the Panvivlion, didn’t move to stop them. They kissed, and thus it was that Simon and Kio also kissed, each finding the taste of alien lips strangely intoxicating.

  How strange it is, Simon thought. For years I’ve been haunted by an event that made me feel an outcast among people who were supposed to accept me. Now, among aliens, in an alien body, I feel a sense of belonging. There is something about this young woman that reaches only me. A secret message that has been written for me alone. That has waited for me on the other side of the galaxy, that would have gone unsaid if this one-in-a-trillion confluence of chance events had not occurred. It was almost enough to make him buy the Thanetian concept of total predestination.

  The thanopstru was now halfway up the sky, and the suns were setting. The pits and blemishes were invisible now. Artas was a sphere of light, glittering, brilliant, a new star burning blue-white against the deepening sky.

  Now, traditionally, would follow a night of celebration, a night for the downing of peftifesht and the [193] chewing of xakuna leaves. There would be merriment and laughter and Artas would be toasted in a million households. Sending death to Thanet was the supreme joy.

  It was then that Indhuon saw the strange lights in the sky.

  He could hear curious murmurings around him. The Shivan-Jalar’s council was pointing, staring. The crowd, far below, stirred.

  There were thousands of them, points of light that wove in and out of each other, multicolored, dancing, darting—

  “Thanet!” the Shivan-Jalar exclaimed.

  Simon, with his historical vantage point, knew right away what was happening. Thanet must be attacking. The five-thousand-year cycle was a thing of eerie precision. Who knew how many cycles had passed, how many times this self-destructive pattern had been played out?

  His reaction must have been severe, because it seemed to have bled through into Indhuon’s consciousness, and now Indhuon was blurting out: “They’re attacking us—the Thanetians are attacking us again!”

  “Again?” Indhuon noticed the Shivan-Jalar looking at him strangely, as, overhead, more lights speckled the darkling sky.

  Indhuon gripped Ariela’s hand. The Shivan-Jalar had actually descended from his high seat. He was within arms’ length of Indhuon, and the young man [194] knew that to touch the Shivan-Jalar was sacrilege—yet now it seemed no longer to matter. For the Shivan-Jalar was touching him—stroking Indhuon’s cheek, squeezing his arm, and Indhuon could see tears now, and he could only half-understand why this man, the holiest personage on the planet, would weep, would want to embrace him.

  “I thought,” said the master of the world, “that I alone was afflicted by visions of previous epochs—that I alone was able to penetrate the veil of darkness that separates us from the world of five thousand years ago-.”

  “Holy Father,” Indhuon said, as the first wave of deathstars exploded silently high above the atmosphere, flower-bursts of radiation—too far away yet to harm anyone. These were the premature blasts, weapons that had blown up too far up to destroy—a light show to augur the end. “I’ve only just begun to hear some inner voice—only now, only today. The voice identifies himself with a strange name: Simon Tarses. It is not a language I have ever heard—a language he refers to as Fe-de-re-shan.”

  “Then the scripture is fulfilled,” the Shivan-Jalar said softly. “The words in the Panvivlion are: When dusk falls on the world, the blind shall see, and the seeing shall see beyond; the deaf shall hear, and the hearing shall hear voices from the past and the future. I have claimed to hear voices, because my high office requires it; often what I said was an echo of an echo, a distorted quote plucked from an ancient text. [195] But suddenly, yesterday, there was a voice in my head too, one that identified himself as Bo-bha-lee-dei. He is a sage from the future, full of amazing wisdom, and when I see through his eyes I see wonders I have never imaged before. It is because of him that today I addressed my privy council and actually had the courage to make plain the doubts that war within me, doubts that will soon be stilled by the greatest silence man can know. What do your voices say?”

  “Holy Father,” Indhuon said, “they say that we are all going to die—and that our planet will be laid waste, forever this time.” And Indhuon marveled, because he who was most high was sharing his secret thoughts with a mere youth, even though that youth was brother to a god. “The creature called Simon Tarses speaks to me from five thousand years in the future—and he seems to know my brother by name—”

  “Which means that the race to build the perfect thanopstru is lost,” said the Holy Father, “and Tanith will not survive. They did it first. And ours will fail. Our hyperdrive is an illusion. Our scientists have created-—nothing! Our entire civilization has had no meaning at all!”

  “No, my lord!” cried Indhuon.

  And then Ariela spoke. “How can you say that, Father? You know that time levels all accomplishments. It says so in the Panvivlion. We’re lucky to have seen what we’ve seen. I’m lucky because even though we’ll be dead in a few minutes, I’m in love, [196] and my last kiss is going to be illuminated by the grandest fireworks display of all time, and—” She was racked with sobs, and Indhuon held her tight, feeling her slight frame thrust hard against him. Was this really love? There would be no more chances to find out. And so they kissed again, in public, forgetting all shame, and Ariela’s father said nothing.

  The god-king of Tanith only blinked back his tears.

  Far below, the mob was restless, but they did not yet realize the end was imminent; doubtless they thought the display in the sky was just the celebratory fireworks. Indeed, he could hear cheering and chanting of slogans—perhaps he was only imagining the undercu
rrent of unease.

  “They will know soon enough,” said the Holy Father. “Another two or three attack waves, and death will begin to rain down.” He motioned to the guards. The entire conversation had taken place within a small perimeter; the council, apprehensive, was not privy to it. They saw only a young man receiving unheard-of favor from the highest in the land, and Indhuon could see them chattering among themselves, still, even now, plotting for advancement, wondering who would next rise and fall in the Shivan-Jalar’s favor.

  The Shivan-Jalar placed his hands on the heads of his daughter and Indhuon. Ariela knelt down, and Indhuon, sensing a moment of great solemnity, went down on his knees beside her.

  “When you arise,” said the Shivan-Jalar, “you shall be one flesh, and joint heirs to all that is mine; [197] I declare that you are wed now, the last lovers of the world, the last beautiful thing we can produce to show that we, the Tanithian peoples, once possessed a noble civilization in a watery world in a remote arm of the great galaxy. Rise, my son and daughter. Rise and inherit what’s left of the world.”

  And from deep inside himself, Indhuon heard the voice of the creature named Simon Tarses whisper.

  “Mother.”

  He looked up. An acrid scent was seeping through the atmosphere. He knew that it was poison. Above, the deathstars were shooting back and forth, their trails spiraling, corkscrewing, weaving intricate patterns of destruction. He gazed at the parapets below him. The artificial mountain his brother had climbed to godhood was already aflame. Rivers of acid had become rivers of lethal fumes. Fire was running down the slopes. Men and women were ablaze. He could not hear the screaming clearly through the shield of force. It was all enacted in miniature. For a few moments, Indhuon had the perspective of a god.

  And he thought of his brother.

  For five thousand years, he would never sleep.

  Artas! she cried out in her mind—

  Her last thought was of her child in her arms—rocking him to sleep—humming an ancient lullaby—

  And the sky was burning.

  * * *

  [198] Far below, fire ran down the streets—the city was a burning skein—and the two lovers kissed, and through their lips two lovers of the distant future kissed also—for one pair, existence was ending; for the other, life was just beginning—

  The thanopstru sliced through the world’s atmosphere in an instant—and Artas floated in the half-world—his body was metal now, invulnerable—his nerves were of silicon—his eyes saw all around him through hundreds of photosensors on the comet’s surface—he hurtled through the emptiness—and Adam, still linked to the thanopstru’s consciousness, felt the power of it all, could feel the drunkenness of power and peftifesht coursing through his system—

  If a lonely boy with extraordinary talents were given the chance to be something this important, this potent—Adam felt Artas’s rage, too, how it was being channeled toward this one moment of destruction that must come, inevitably, this moment when a boy would have the annihilating power of godhead.

  And yet—

  Beneath that rage there was something else too.

  The loneliness.

  Adam remembered how he’d wandered the corridors of the institute, before his father had sent for him to come to Thanet; he remembered, too, walking the streets of Thanet all by himself, never belonging, always the outsider. He had seen deep into [199] Artas’s soul with even his limited empathie abilities. There was a reason he had been chosen to be linked to Artas. Perhaps it was the influence of Thanet’s fate-driven culture that made him think so, but the feeling ran deeper than that.

  A thousand kilometers over Tanith—two thousand—only in an instant it seemed. And then Artas saw—and Adam saw through Artas’s thousand eyes, the panels on the smooth surface of the artificial comet-First, the world itself.

  An ocean world; blue and white, cloud-wrapped, colors of moonstone and sapphire. The world’s six continents set in the ocean like emerald mosaic stones, tiny against the expanse of blue. Beautiful and doomed.

  It was beginning now. The oceanside metropolis set in the largest of the island continents was starting to glow. Artas could see pinpricks of blinding fire. And now the fire was spilling out of the city, running in rivulets across the continent. He knew that each rivulet must be a hundred kilometers wide for him to be able to see it here—a spiderweb of flame now, spreading, spreading—and the atmosphere was changing color, darkening, as a poison began to spread—thousands of shooting stars were falling into the atmosphere, igniting as they hit oxygen-Arias thought of his mother and brother—I sacrificed everything for them, he thought—my death was supposed to make her the most important woman in [200] the world—a saint, the consort of a god—and now—it’s come to nothing—nothing at all—

  Except—wouldn’t there be survivors? There always had been, if he understood what the Shivan-Jalar had been going on about in Artas’s last moments of being human.

  His rage grew.

  Then, out of nothingness—

  From between the twin suns it came—an orb of spinning light with a dozen tails—in moments it had grown from a point to a circle—

  The enemy’s thanopstru! Artas thought.

  He had to disengage the hyperdrive somehow, had to steer himself into a position to stop it! If I collide with it head on, he thought. Artas sent commands to the comet’s onboard nerve center. He worked the waldoes inside the comet’s chambers as easily as if they were his own limbs—he tugged at the new memories he was now connected to, pulling out specs and plans, trying to rig the computer to override its programmed pathway—

  “Behold,” the Shivan-Jalar whispered. “What a privilege it is to witness the world’s ending.”

  The privy council was gathered around the throne now, each of them prostrate, in awe, making a formal tableau of obeisance to the power of the gods. If any of them felt fear or panic, they had mastered it; the inevitability of death made panic meaningless.

  God for a day, Dr. Halliday was thinking, as he [201] peered at the burning minarets through the eyes of the Shivan-Jalar.

  For a moment, a single moment, Ariela was thinking as tendrils of poison began to slither into the holiest of holies. And she kissed her beloved one more time, trying to draw the moment out as best she could, but the poison was already corrupting her breathing, and the tears were beginning to spurt from the acrid fumes.

  The last thing Taruna saw, as the tide of deathlight swept across the sky—

  Artas, alone, forsaken, in the cold dark emptiness of space, and—

  The angel.

  “Save my son,” she murmured. The heat was unendurable.

  The angel stood there, against the burning city, a thousand times the height of a man, the angel with the dark ringlets and haunting eyes, the angel who had called herself Deanna—she stood there with her arms outstretched—

  “My son—you will be with him—in that desolate future—you must save him—promise me—promise me!” Taruna screamed.

  And the angel smiled an enigmatic smile before she dissipated and the fire consumed Taruna.

  The comet dodged! And swerved! I could smash headlong into him, Artas thought. But then I would [202] fail in my mission-—never to sleep until Thanet is destroyed. He steered the thanopstru back into the path of the enemy. Perhaps if I come so close that it has to change flight path or be destroyed—

  This was dangerous, so dangerous. The boys of Tanith had a game they played with their hover-boards, facing each other across a bridge, accelerating toward each other, seeing who would lose his nerve first—

  Artas did not understand. He knew only that the creature he had seen that morning—when he still lived in the alley of the pleasure women—was still with him. “Give me strength,” his mind whispered, “whoever you are, whatever—”

  The thanopstru was a large-scale weapon, designed to shatter a world—not to battle other star vessels at close quarters. It had a primitive system of shields and a few defe
nsive banks of energy beams that could be deployed, but they drew energy from the experimental hyperdrive.

  I can take him out, Artas thought.

  With a supreme effort, he wrenched himself off course and set an intersect flight path toward his enemy and—

  Lashed out, death beams that. seemed to come from a thousand fingers—

  He had grazed the enemy! The Thanetian thanopstru was spinning out of control. Artas drew more power, pursued—

  The Thanetian dodged. Artas darted.

  [203] The Thanetian began to tumble toward Tanith’s atmosphere and—

  Artas spun away.

  Was there another lonely boy inside that comet, programmed with implacable hatred?

  No time to think of that. Artas reversed course, plunged himself downward toward the gravity well, knowing in his heart that it was too late—

  The demon comet was a fireball—soon it would impact on the main continent—and Artas realized in moments he too was going to add to the destruction of his homeworld.

  The enemy thanopstru was on a collision course with Tanith, and nothing would stop it. It would activate. Everyone would die. Everyone.

  It was too late to save them. Only vengeance remained.

  Artas reached out with his nerves of silicon, his sinews of steel—reached into the comet’s core to pull out every erg of energy from its sputtering warp drive. He dredged up his last remaining strength. The gravity well was drawing him in. He tried to wrest himself away, like a wayward child struggling free from his mother’s arms. Tanith was his mother, holding on, calling his name, but Tanith was no more, and only hate remained.