Infinity's Prism

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Annika shuddered as she reviewed the alternate history files that Harry had shown her. “I can’t process this. I’ve been trying so hard to cope with the Borg memories and thoughts in my head…and this, this other me likes being a Borg! She calls herself Seven of Nine!”

  Harry tilted his head, studying the log image on the display sheet. “I like her fashion sense.”

  Annika glared, but Harry grinned back, letting her know he was just teasing to break the tension. He knew how much she looked forward to the day when she no longer needed to wear her dermal sheath under her clothes. Apparently this “Seven of Nine” had considered modesty and comfort irrelevant and had worn the body-hugging garment with nothing over it. Annika blushed every time she looked at the picture.

  “Her clothes are irrelevant,” Annika said, then caught herself and blushed. “I mean, what about her thoughts? Her feelings? Does she remember anything about Unimatrix Zero? About me, my whole life?”

  “You couldn’t remember her, either.”

  “There was no ‘her.’ Just a meat puppet for the Collective.”

  “Apparently there was more to her than you think. I don’t want to push you, but you might want to think about taking a closer look at your Borg memories. Maybe there’s something worthwhile there after all.”

  Annika pouted, then changed the subject. “What I can’t get over is how we ended up on the same ship in two different realities.” In the third one, the “Year of Hell” timeline, the Borg had also chosen “Seven of Nine” as a liaison with Janeway on the Borg cube she had visited, but that Seven had never been forced to beam aboard Voyager and so had never been severed from the Collective. She had probably died in the Groundskeepers’ Omega attack, if not sooner. “What are the odds?” She grinned at Harry. “Do you think we were destined to be together?”

  “It’s a nice thought, but I don’t think we’re ‘together’ in that other history.” In fact, the Harry of the “Seven of Nine” timeline seemed to be in a total rut—still a lowly ensign, still unattached, still languishing in Tom Paris’s shadow. Not that he blamed Tom for that, of course. He would give a great deal to be in a timeline where his best friend was still alive. But he wouldn’t give up Annika even for that.

  He contemplated the paradox. “Maybe it’s not such a coincidence. The logs from those other Voyagers say you were—Seven was—stored in an enclosed chamber in the heart of the cube. And she—you—seemed different from other Borg, with more personality and autonomy. Maybe there was something special about you, your function in the hive. That could explain why you were chosen as a liaison in those timelines, and that’s what led to you ending up on Voyager in one of them. As for here, maybe being in the heart of the cube is what let you and the others survive when it was crippled. And we both ended up with the Vostigye because they’re the ones who do the most to help out refugees. So it’s not such a coincidence.”

  She smiled. “But it was your ship that found me, Harry. I like to think that’s destiny. And don’t try to reason me out of it,” she said, putting a hand over his lips. “I want it to be destiny. I want it to be magic. Because Seven of Nine would hate that.”

  Harry nodded. “Okay by me.” And she kissed him, and he realized that she had been magical to him all along.

  B’Elanna flung the display sheet at the Doctor. It passed harmlessly through the hologram and shorted out against the force field across her cell door. “Why did you show me this?” she demanded.

  “I thought you might like to know things could be worse. You could be dead.”

  She turned away from him. “What’s so bad about that? At least Tom would be alive.”

  He came around to face her again. “Have you been taking your medications? Clinical depression is a chronic condition, and I’m seeing some rather overt symptoms.”

  “You think my pain is just a chemical imbalance? I lost everything that mattered to me. I killed innocent people. I almost killed my own friends. What makes you think I deserve to feel better?”

  “Oh, just my own Hippocratical reasons,” he gibed. His eyes roved over her, and she knew he was scanning her. These Vostigye mobile emitters had medical tricorders built in, and although the Doctor still used the face and voice of Lewis Zimmerman as a holographic interface for his humanoid patients, he no longer felt the need to mimic humanity to the point of wielding a conventional tricorder and scanner, one machine reading another machine in a triumph of conceit over efficiency. “Yes, your serotonin levels are disturbingly low. You’ve been a naughty girl.”

  She stared. “I’m in prison. What do you expect?”

  “I expect B’Elanna Torres to be intelligent enough to listen to her doctor’s orders,” he told her, morphing one finger into a hypospray and applying it to her neck, the drug being shunted from the pharmasynth unit in his emitter. “There. Your neurotransmitters should stabilize soon. Then you’ll only have to deal with your genuine guilt instead of the neurochemical exaggeration thereof. If you’re going to punish yourself, at least you should do it with your wits about you.”

  Her eyes thanked him for not trying to cheer her up. “So. These other histories. You’re still just a hologram aboard Voyager.”

  “So it seems. And in one, I’ve spent most of the past year off-line.” He shook his head. “I can’t imagine going back to only having one body, one locus of perception. It was so limiting.”

  “And I’m still chief engineer in one of them.”

  “And Mister Paris is still helmsman. You two are apparently quite the item there.”

  “But in the one where I died, he bounced right back and married Kes. The little slut. I always knew he had a thing for her.”

  “I’m sure it was after a respectable period of mourning.”

  “But in the other one, he didn’t get together with me until Kes left. Was I just leftovers to him?”

  The Doctor studied her. “Your neurotransmitters are still settling down. Your memories seem a bit compromised. As I recall, you two were flirting shamelessly with each other for months before we encountered the Groundskeepers. People were taking bets on when you’d finally stop deceiving yourselves and get on with it.”

  B’Elanna sank down onto the bench. “They were right. I should’ve admitted my feelings when I had the chance. Maybe it could’ve made a difference. Kept me out of this cell.”

  “Or it could’ve gotten you killed. Causality’s funny that way.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “My advice is not to dwell on it. There are countless realities out there, besides the ones the Groundskeepers have been able to access. They apparently can only access timelines that have branched off from ones they were already visiting at the time. There are bound to be realities out there in which we’ve all been destroyed, or were never born at all. You’ll just cause yourself needless anxiety by dwelling on alternate possibilities.”

  That’s easy for you to say, Doctor, she thought as he left the cell. But what else can I do when this reality is intolerable?

  “Am I going to lose you?” Neelix asked, his tone bordering on panic. He stared at Kes as though he expected her to begin shimmering out of corporeality at any second.

  She placed her hand on his. “Neelix, don’t worry. There’s no cause for concern yet.”

  “Yet. It took a few days for your symptoms to show up over there.”

  “They weren’t symptoms. They were part of a metamorphosis.”

  “Either way, I lost you. Or he lost you. Or he lost her. Oh, now I know why temporal physics gives the captain a headache!”

  Kes smiled. It all seemed quite simple and obvious to her now, but she could sense that he was in no mood for a detailed explanation. “I haven’t interacted as much with the Groundskeepers as I did in that timeline. So my powers haven’t been amplified nearly as much.”

  “But that Boothby—”

  “Is in human form. His telepathy is dormant. As long as I don’t have direct telepathic contact with the Groundskeepers or visit fluidic space, I s
hould be fine.”

  “But you were connected with the Doctor in fluidic space.”

  “And I have felt a bit more energized since then. Things are coming a bit more easily to me. But that’s all.”

  Neelix frowned. “You know, I hadn’t thought about it…but in that first timeline, you never had any power surge at all, did you? Even though you had about as much contact with the Groundskeepers as you did here.”

  Kes nodded. “I believe that’s because in that timeline, I hadn’t yet been exposed to the temporal energies that affected me later in life. When I came back to this timeline, and the other one that branched off from it, I must have still carried a residue of those energies even after the Doctor purged them. I think that made me more receptive to the psionic energy of fluidic space.” That, she believed, explained the difference in the way the Borg alliance had ended in the other two timelines. In the original history, which the crew was calling the “Krenim” or “Year of Hell” timeline, the alliance had proceeded as planned and the Borg had been given the nanoprobe weapon, with ultimately devastating consequences for the quadrant. In the other, the so-called “Borg” timeline, the temporal energy in Kes had made her more attuned to the Groundskeepers, so they had sensed the plan in her mind and sent ships to destroy Voyager. Whereupon the Borg cube had sacrificed itself to save Voyager and the nanoprobe data it bore, which had led to Seven of Nine and the other drones taking Voyager into fluidic space, which had triggered Kes’s metamorphosis into…something more, something that she could not quite identify even with all her enhanced abilities and knowledge.

  Something that had been forced to leave her friends, to leave Neelix, for their own protection. The thought that she might undergo such a metamorphosis herself was disturbing, however intellectually intrigued she might be by the prospect. She was happy with the life she had, and there were too many people who depended on her, professionally and personally.

  Most of all Neelix. Leaving him now would devastate him, and she couldn’t do that to him. Or to herself. Learning of the other timelines had just made her more committed to marrying him. At least he was alive in both the other main histories. In the original one, he’d suffered a similar crisis with his donated lung, but the Doctor had developed an effective replacement by that time; while in the other, he had actually died in an alien attack but had been revived by a Borg nanoprobe therapy that had apparently reversed the aging of his lung. But in both those histories, he had lost her, either to circumstances or to another man, and it seemed he hadn’t found anyone else. He deserved better than that. She was so eager to marry him and let the elogium take its course, but the crisis with the Groundskeepers had forced them to defer those plans.

  “Well,” Neelix said, “I’m not sure whether to be glad that happened to you or not. On the one hand, it made you the extraordinary woman you are today. But you were always extraordinary. And it could take you away from me forever.”

  “Ohh, Neelix.” She stroked his cheek. “Not forever. If my other self became what I suspect…I may not have been with you in body, but I promise you, I would always be with you in spirit. I’d find a way to watch over you.”

  She kissed him, and then she was with him in body for a good long time. Truth be told, she wouldn’t want to lose that any more than he would.

  Well, she would just have to avoid fluidic space at all costs. It was as simple as that.

  14

  “The field collapser is ready,” Kilana reported to the figure on the viewscreen. “However, the arrival of the emissary from fluidic space has altered the council’s plans. They are now assembling a diplomatic mission to try to make peace with these so-called Groundskeepers.”

  Minister Odala frowned. “Fools. Do they not see that there is no compromise where survival is at stake? The Scourge will not compromise, and neither must we.”

  “I agree completely, Minister. The Voth are truly a wise people.” Odala smiled beneficently, and Kilana bowed her head—as much to hide her own disgust as to pretend reverence. These Voth considered themselves superior beings, but they were just another breed of lowly solids, untouched by the transforming power of the Founders. Indeed, they were perhaps the most solid of all solids, utterly rigid in their way of thinking and brutal in their enforcement of it. They represented everything the Dominion existed to stamp out.

  Kilana quashed the fierce yearning for home that threatened to overwhelm her. She could not lose control now, not when dealing with the prickly Voth elder. “I assure you, I am doing everything in my power to persuade the council to deploy the weapon.”

  “Persuasion will not be enough. The Coalition council is too much under the influence of these humans. Their duplicity will be the downfall of us all. We must make certain the weapon is deployed. You must obtain it for yourself.”

  Kilana hesitated. “It would not be easy. The weapon is heavily guarded; I would probably lose several Jem’Hadar.”

  “So? Is that not what they are for?”

  Technically, that was correct. But Kilana had to admit that she had grown fond of her little band of Jem’Hadar over their years together in this benighted backwater of the galaxy. True, it had hardly been reciprocal. Jem’Hadar held Vorta in little esteem, obeying them only because they were the voice of the gods. Out here, sixty thousand light-years from the Dominion, Kilana no longer had the direct backing of the Founders, and maintaining her troops’ loyalty had been difficult. She had been bred by the gods as a diplomat, a seductress, a gentle persuader who disarmed her opposites with her vulnerable charm and delicate beauty. And such skills had served her well in dealing with races like the Rectilians and Gh’rrrvn. More importantly, they had let her cajole a Haakonian biochemist into devising a means of synthesizing the ketracel-white enzyme that the Jem’Hadar needed to survive. But her control over their white supply earned as much resentment as obedience from the Jem’Hadar, and in order to keep them in line—and to survive against the likes of the Krowtonan Guard and the Vidiians—she had needed to learn how to be tough, cold, and ruthless.

  She must have been fairly successful at it, for her Jem’Hadar had not killed her and had kept anyone else from doing so. Still, she felt that inbred timidity and softness every day. She had always thought it just a façade to confound the enemies of the Dominion. But the will of the Founders had shaped her entire being, and they had put it in her heart as well, as her experiences here had forced her to discover. For all her learned toughness, her skill at survival in these wilds, she would give anything to return home to the Founders’ embrace.

  Sensing her hesitation, Odala leaned forward. “You need not fear, Kilana. Once you have done this for us, you will know the benevolence of the Voth.”

  “You—you will send me home?” she asked, unable to keep the quaver from her voice.

  “Nothing would please me more.”

  Kilana had no doubt of that; Odala would like nothing more than to rid her backyard of all species who posed any threat to Voth domination, or their pathetic pretense thereof. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was their transwarp ships that could return her to the Founders’ embrace in mere weeks. At last, to be with her gods again! To know their guidance, feel their divine certainty, and never have to worry about making her own choices, making mistakes!

  She didn’t know how other species could tolerate it—how they could have faith in their imaginary gods when they never knew them except as an abstract presence. It was all just a matter of guesswork to them; no wonder they were so torn by religious strife and existential turmoil. Kilana had lived that way for only a few years, and she would give anything to end it.

  She smiled, able to tolerate politeness toward this bloated wretch because of what was in it for her—and because such pretense was what her gods had made her for. “Thank you, Minister Odala. I will obtain the weapon for you, and then we can all be secure in our homes. And the Dominion will be grateful for your cooperation; I’m certain we will wish to establish diplomatic relation
s with your people.”

  “We shall see,” Odala said, clearly dismissing the very idea. Kilana didn’t push; at this point, all that mattered was getting that ride home.

  But what would she find when she got there? Undoubtedly, the Founders would have replaced her with another clone, just as she had replaced the original Kilana upon her death. That Kilana would have all her memories up to her last upload before her abduction, and would have continued in her life, her role in the Dominion. In a sense, Kilana 3 had more of a claim to being the real Kilana than she, Kilana 2, did. Would she find herself in the same spot as the members of the Scourge upon their temporal duplication? Would she be required to fight her counterpart in some way to prove who was worthier? If so, she was certain the hard edge she had gained in the Delta Quadrant would bring her victory. But the Founders would probably not see it that way. It was Kilana 3 who had been serving their will, keeping current with their policies and the politics of the quadrant. The Founders might consider Kilana 2 an obsolete copy, corrupted by her years in the wild. Perhaps they would kill both her and her successor and integrate their memories into Kilana 4. Perhaps they would simply discard her as an aberration.

  She would have to prove her worth to them, then. Bringing them Voth transwarp technology would surely earn their favor.

  No. Even then, they would show her no gratitude; she had simply been an agent of their will. Either they would find some new role in which she could serve, or they would destroy her. Either way, she would never return to her old life.

  But either way, she would be back in the Founders’ embrace, serving their holy purpose. She would know again, at long last, what her place in the universe was.