by S P Somtow
[240] La Forge interrupted them. “We only have a few moments. Captain Picard is about to give the order.”
“Ballard is dead,” said Worf. “She died with honor. I believe that some of her remains may yet be recovered.”
On the bridge, the mood was solemn. On screen, the thanopstru was about to intersect the upper atmosphere of Thanet; in fifteen minutes, it would do so, and the friction of the air would cause its outer layers to glow like a second sun; it would be too late at that point to annihilate the comet, because the planet-destroying weapons within it would be triggered too close to the surface.
Deanna Troi stood between the captain and Commander Riker. Picard realized that she was more deeply conflicted than any of the others. For them, this was still a simple matter of saving an entire world; but she had seen into the heart of the weapon’s mother, had made promises to her—
“Counselor Troi,” Picard said mildly, “you may be excused if you like.”
“Thank you, sir. But I feel the least I can do is stay,” Troi said.
He patted her arm with a strong sympathetic hand.
Ambassador Straun had shed his diplomatic robes and was now wearing a simple off-duty jumpsuit; he looked well, Picard thought. His robes had dwarfed him; now he seemed more in command of his fate.
Kio sar-Bensu came rushing in, followed by [241] Simon Tarses. She ran to her father and embraced him. “Father, Father—I’m proud of you,” she said. She seemed radiant.
“Are you ready, Mr. La Forge?” he asked.
“Whenever you are, Captain!” came the voice of La Forge from down in engineering.
“In that case, you may commence the countdown upon my—”
At that moment, a very agitated Adam Halliday entered, followed by Commander Data.
“Captain, you gotta listen,” Adam said. “Data has an idea—an intuitive leap, actually. You should be proud.”
Data began to sing.
From his lips there came not the soft-spoken, overly grammatical utterance of an android, but something eerily different. It was the voice of an ancient woman, inconsolable at the loss of a child, and the song was the haunting melody of Taruna’s lullaby.
The melody began simply, but on the phrases copper ring, silver chain, crown of gold the music arced upward in an elaborate melisma. The voice cracked on the high notes; the very crevices of the song seemed filled with an ancient dust. This was the voice of Taruna, Artas’s mother—if she had lived another five thousand years, if every one of those years had been filled with longing for her lost child. Data had somehow imbued this unsophisticated folk tune with a timeless pathos.
Even Worf seemed visibly moved. Was he thinking of the parallels to some Klingon opera? Picard [242] knew immediately what Data’s plan must be. And he concurred with it.
“Open a channel to the thanopstru,” he said. “I think we need Artas to hear this song.”
“Yes, sir,” said Geordi La Forge.
On screen they saw the heart of the comet now, the boy in his tank, a close-up of his emotionless face and ever-open eyes.
“Begin the countdown,” Captain Picard said. “I am not holding up the mission—but you may proceed simultaneously with the lullaby.”
“Aye, sir!” came the voices of Data and La Forge simultaneously.
“Four minutes,” the computer said. “Three minutes, fifty seconds.”
“Counselor Troi,” Picard said. “What do you sense?”
Still that rage. The rage was like a roiling, twisting, red-hot cloud, billowing about, with the boy’s cold determination as its still small center.
Deanna reached out. She tried not to flinch from all that anger. She could feel the boy resist the probing of her mind-—after all, he had similar talents to her, that was one reason he had been selected for this task. She could feel him erect emotional brick walls to keep her out. And yet the walls were crumbling even as he shored them up.
Deanna said, “He senses a new trick, a new way to undermine him. He’s even angrier.”
[243] How could so much rage emanate from one mind? There had to be a breaking point—there had to be.
“He hears the music,” she said.
And the lullaby filled the air, on the bridge as well as in the heart of the comet. Toward the end the song soared up, strained for a high note that never came; and then the melody plummeted once more, ending in a lugubrious half-sigh.
“Your mother sang this to you,” Straun was telling his daughter, “when she rocked you in her arms—I haven’t thought of her in so long—I thought it was some quaint peasant song from her home island—I didn’t know—”
“I remember,” Kio said, and she was weeping.
“Twenty seconds,” the computer said. “Fifteen. Ten, nine, eight.”
Worf said, “Captain, there is a change in the thanopstru’s vector.”
Abruptly, on screen, the boy’s eyes closed.
“I feel sorrow,” Deanna said. “Loss.”
Truly, after five thousand years, the boy was allowing himself to feel grief for the first time. After the mindless and insensate rage—the mourning. And finally—
Tears streamed down the boy’s cheeks, melded with the thick nutrient fluid.
“I feel resignation—I feel—deeply hidden beneath the suffering—a kind of joy.”
How had this nugget of joy, of goodness, survived all that terrible programming? Truly, Deanna [244] thought, there is a core of goodness within the spirit of all sentient beings—no matter how much we may try to bury it in evil.
“Captain,” came La Forge’s voice, “there is a tremendous surge of energy coming from the comet—I think it’s ... reversing course by itself.”
“On screen,” said Picard.
The boy’s face faded. Now they could see Thanet floating against the starstream; Klastravo, its sun, burned far beyond. In the foreground, the comet was coming to a shuddering halt, moments short of hitting Thanet’s ionosphere.
“Captain,” Deanna said, “the rage is stilled. I’m feeling—sleep. The sleep of a child in its mother’s arms.”
“Stand down from destruct mode,” ordered Commander Riker as Picard nodded his assent.
The comet was changing direction. It was using the planet’s gravity as a slingshot, sending itself back out into deep space, away from Klastravo, away from death.
“Will he—die, Counselor?” Ambassador Straun asked.
Deanna closed her eyes. Although Artas was receding from her range, his emotions were so powerful, so amplified by five thousand years of solitude that they still infiltrated her psyche.
“I’m getting a stream of images—a field of billowing grass. An ocean. A wind. A boy running through the open meadow. The embrace of a woman. [245] It’s Artas. He’s sleeping,” she said. “He’s dreaming sweet dreams.”
As the thanopstru made its way toward the darkness, it appeared less and less like a weapon of death, and more and more like that eternal symbol of hope and of wishes come true—the shooting star.
“Permission to return planetside, Captain?” Simon Tarses asked.
“Unfinished business, Lieutenant?” Picard said.
“Aye, sir.”
“Now hear this,” Picard announced. “We are not meddlers—at least, never by choice. All unfinished business on Thanet is to be concluded by 0700 hours, at which point we will steal away and leave the people of this world to their own rebirth.”
There was a silence; then slowly, one by one, the crew members began to applaud, until, as the sleeping death star disappeared into blackness, the applause surged over Deanna’s senses like a tide, buoying her up, calming her fractured spirit.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Bells of Shivan-Saré
MOMENTS BEFORE THE END of the world, Simon Tarses and Kio sar-Bensu beamed into the grand forum in front of the High Shivantak’s citadel. It was as though they had not left. Everywhere were the celebrants, leaping, chanting, banging on timbrels and cymbals. The
sky was alive with fireworks exploding into shapes of exotic flowers and insects. From hot-air balloons above the square, orchestras of children blowing on giant seashells played enthusiastic, strident antiphonies. From the highest parapet, a lit window could be seen. As Kio and Simon squeezed their way through the tumult, they could hear people muttering that the High Shivantak would soon show himself—that the great Bells of Shivan-Saré would finally sound.
[247] “The bells?” Simon asked a man who was passing out zul cakes.
“They were built at the dawn of time,” said the old man, “and they will sound only in the moments before the destruction of the world.”
“Where are they?”
“Somewhere in the bowels of the High Shivantak’s palace,” he said. “You’re an alien, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you remain here with us. I see that it’s love that keeps you here, that makes you willing to brave the fiery baptism and rebirth.”
Simon blushed and looked at Kio, who was smiling shyly.
They kissed. And Simon remembered another kiss, another time.
“I was thinking about that too,” Kio said.
“You’re a telepath?”
“No. But sometimes—” The fireworks were coming thick and fast now, the sky was brilliant with patterns of gold, great gashes of neon blue and vermilion. “Sometimes we just think alike. I know you were thinking something like—five thousand years ago, maybe that was us, maybe we were those people in another life. Their lives fit us so readily, like clothes we’ve worn so many times that they drape to our bodies just so.”
“But—my culture doesn’t believe in reincarnation.” And Reincarnation. He hadn’t given it much thought before he met Kio, but now—It seemed like [248] a fine idea, the soul going on and on, from time to time, even from world to world.
“Stop! Listen.”
There came an ominous rumble, so deep-toned that it seemed to shake the very foundations of the plaza.
The crowd broke out into an uproar. The Bells of Shivan-Saré! It was time! The cycle was ending! As if at a signal, with astonishing precision and solemnity, the crowd fell prostrate, facing the topmost parapet of the High Shivantak’s palace.
“Look at them!” Worf said. “Utterly fatalistic.”
A wall of Ten-Forward, which normally showed a view of space around the Enterprise, was now transmitting images of the Shivantak’s citadel.
“As the view pans across the crowd,” Data said, scanning the viewscreen in far greater resolution than a human eye could, “I do note that two out of the thousands are not prostrate.”
“And who might they be?”
“Lieutenant Simon Tarses, and Kio, daughter of the Thanetian ambassador,” said Data.
Like a death knell, the Bells of Shivan-Saré boomed over the throng. The Thanetians lay with their faces flat against the ground, in a position they had learned in childhood.
The bell tolled. Data knew that its sound would be picked up and broadcast over the entire planet. Indeed, the computer was showing more scenes of Thanet now—a lone longship, its crew all prostrate, listening to [249] the knell on a primitive radio; a farm, with the herders lying down next to their klariots, who bleated and gamboled in the windswept grass—and back to the city.
And then it stopped.
The crew were silent, waiting to see what would happen next.
The fireworks ended.
One by one, all the lights in the city were blinking out.
The music was stilled.
Darkness fell on Thanet, a profound, primal darkness such as had been known only at the dawn of their civilization, before artificial illumination, before even the rediscovery of fire; and Data knew that this was the High Shivantak’s doing. He could not destroy the world, but he could turn off the world’s power switch.
The crew held its collective breath.
And in that moment of ultimate darkness, under the alien stars, Simon and Kio, perhaps the only people on the entire planet not bound by its past, embraced with the fervor of the young; they seemed to be saying farewell to childhood as well as to the old Thanet. In the stillness, Simon could almost hear the heartbeat of the world.
Then came another sound.
Simon broke away. In the pale starlight, he could make out shifting shapes. He knew that none of the populace had raised themselves up from the ground; they still awaited death. But something was going on [250] in the palace of the High Shivantak. There were rumblings. Clankings. Sounds like the shifting of giant gears that had not been greased in a thousand years.
What was happening? The very pavement was vibrating now, and then it began to ripple as though the paving stones were shifting, sorting and resorting themselves like the tiles in one of those ancient puzzle games.
Then came the thunder. Not thunder from the sky, but from the many-tiered palace of the High Shivantak. The crack of stone against stone.
“No,” Kio was murmuring, “It didn’t work—the world is ending anyway!”
He held her tightly.
Then, abruptly, there was light—
Picard entered Ten-Forward in time to hear the first death knell. He watched in fascination as the crowd fell to the ground. He too heard the strange crashing sounds. But from the vantage point of the ship, with its sensitive tracking devices and its ability to compensate for darkness by seeing far into the infrared, Picard and his crew members could see a great deal more than the denizens of Thanet could.
They could see that the seven-tiered citadel was transforming itself. Hydraulic devices were pushing up the sides, changing the lowest levels into towers with mushrooming minaret roofs. The tower that contained the Shivantak’s Holy of Holies was slowly descending to the ground. Parapets were folding like the wings of [251] butterflies. The ancient stones sighed as they shifted.
Data said, “The Shivantak’s palace was designed to reshape itself!”
“How old is that building?” Riker asked.
“The blueprints are encoded in one of the chapters of the Panvivlion,” Dr. Halliday said. “I’ll be damned—the sacred texts actually had a built-in escape clause, just in case no thanopstru showed up to destroy the world.”
“But did the High Shivantak know?” Worf said.
“Yes and no,” Picard said with a mysterious smile.
“How?” the Klingon asked.
“It all boils down to faith, Mr. Worf. Faith in our ability to keep our promise to protect his world—”
“And faith in his planet’s ability to protect itself,” Dr. Halliday finished.
“Look,” said Deanna. “The lights are coming back on in the city.”
Simon Tarses and Kio were still the only ones standing when the lights came on; and the people of Thanet were still on their faces, for no one had commanded them to rise.
But the square was not the same square. For one thing, the Holiest of Holiest had disappeared completely. Instead, there was a small house, little more than a cottage, in the center of a plaza; Simon recognized the house, which had once been the gleaming cupola that topped the highest tower in the city, the dwelling place of the god-king.
[252] He held Kio’s hand tightly.
Soft music began to play from unseen sources. The door of the house opened, and a man emerged. Simon had to squint to see him; the light that shone around the plaza, pouring from sources concealed within what had once been the palace, was searingly bright; his eyes smarted.
The man wore a simple white robe. He had long, unkempt white hair; he seemed immeasurably old. Simon remembered back on Earth, how some people used to depict God as an old man in a white robe—or sometimes it was Father Time who was depicted that way. This fellow, a little bent with age, was coming down the steps.
When he spoke, the new walls that had risen around them in the darkness reflected his voices, and his words echoed and reechoed; though his was the wheezing voice of an old man, it spoke with authority, and was audible to all.
&
nbsp; “Citizens of Thanet,” he said, “you have all died and now you are reborn. Look around you; the city is not the city. Search your hearts, and you will know that you are not as you once were. I was once the High Shivantak of this world, but now, as you see, my feet are touching the ground, and therefore I am no longer the most high. And my seat among the clouds has come down to the earth, that the scripture might be fulfilled, which says: ‘He that had once been highest became lowest.’ You have passed from one life to the next with your memories of the past intact and no sense of passing at [253] all save for a few moments of jarring darkness; this is the miracle spoken of in the Panvivlion, which says: ‘You shall be snatched up and returned to a world that is not the world.’ Rejoice, Thanetians. And do not weep, that I am no longer your leader. For the Holy Panvivlion decrees that power shall pass to a child, for ‘The power to rule passed into the hands of the one child who had shown no fear.’ There is in fact such a child among you. For though all of you remain prostrated, hardly daring to gaze upon me, there is one in the crowd who never prostrated herself, who faced the darkness boldly and without any terror of death at all—”
And suddenly Simon knew what must happen next. He turned to Kio. “He’s giving you this planet, Kio! A whole world, a whole new people, reborn, for you to lead—”
Kio said, “That’s ridiculous,” but as she said so, members of the crowd had begun to lift themselves up from the ground, and many began pointing toward her, and then one or two of the less timid approached, began to touch her, the hem of her tunic, even her cheek—and suddenly they had hoisted her up on their shoulders, and they were saying, “Your feet can’t touch the ground, you’re our new Shivantak now,” and they were carrying her toward where the old man was still standing, and someone noticed that Simon had been with her, and he found himself, too, being lifted up, being carried aloft, and the crowd was cheering now, he was riding the sea of Thanetians, like a dailong skimming the ocean.
[254] At the center of the plaza, Kio forced them to let her down. She went up to the High Shivantak, who immediately fell to his knees in front of her.
