Well of Souls

by Ilsa J. Bick

  Stunned, Garrett could only stare. “I’m,” she said, hating that the words came out in panicked little hesitations, like a subspace transmission awash with interference, “you…Ven, you…can’t…wouldn’t.”

  “I can. I would. I will. Rachel,” said Kaldarren, and the way he said her name, Garrett could almost believe, for a fraction of a second, that he didn’t hate her at all but was still, very desperately, in love. “Rachel, you can’t keep doing this. Please try to understand. I know you’re not a monster. I wouldn’t have loved a monster. At least, I don’t think I would, though we do seem to bring out the worst in each other. But what you do when you don’t keep a promise, that’s monstrous. That’s wrong. It’s not even humane. You have to make a choice. You chose against me once, against…us.”

  “I seem to recall that you chose against us, too,” she said, relieved that her mouth cooperated. “You filed for divorce, not I.”

  “Fair enough. But I chose to stop bleeding, Rachel. I chose to bring an end to one type of pain, and I exchanged it for another. Now you have to choose: your ship or your family. You can’t have both.”

  “What kind of choice is that? Your ship, or your family,” she said, the blood pounding a samba beat in her temples now. She scrubbed her forehead with her right hand, restrained the urge to start cursing, loudly. “Christ, Ven, you sound like a character from a cheap holonovel. What exactly am I supposed to do? I can’t just drop everything when things become inconvenient. There are some things, many things that happen aboard ship that require my presence.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as now, right now. My first officer’s away, and I’ve got no replacement, and I can’t tag my new ops, this woman named Bat-Levi, because she’s on psychiatric probation and that’s because she went a little crazy a while back, but she’s supposed to be really sharp even if she is a bit off, and…”

  She paused for breath. Kaldarren didn’t need the litany, after all. “Those are all good reasons why I, as captain, can’t just leave. Ven, you act like I have a choice. I don’t. I can’t delegate these things away,” she said, sidestepping the fact that, probably, she could, if she were wired just a little bit differently. “What kind of choice is no choice?”

  “No, Rachel, you do have a choice.” Kaldarren sighed.

  “Don’t you understand? You have a choice. You have choices. Your problem is that you simply don’t like the ones you have.”

  He was right, and she knew it. Damn him, but he’d cut right to the heart of things, like he always had, as if he really was reading her mind.

  Don’t be stupid; it’s not the telepathy. The man was married to you for seventeen years. Who better to know how you think?

  She said, “I want to talk to Jason. Can I speak with him, please? Try to explain? Please?”

  “And how do you propose to explain things, Rachel?” Kaldarren’s eyes were large and sad. “What can you possibly say that will make things any better?”

  And, much as Garrett hated to admit it, the man had a point.

  “Please, Ven,” she said again. “Please?”

  Chapter 2

  “Can we get on with this, please?” asked Lieutenant Commander Darya Bat-Levi. Her voice was strained, but her tone was still polite. “Please? I’ve just gotten off shift. I’m tired, it’s late, and while I appreciate you being willing to move my…appointment around to accommodate my duty schedule, I really would like to get this over with, if it’s all the same to you. So can we move things along, please?”

  And then she did move. A simple thing, crossing her right knee over her left leg. When she did so, there was a small click, the halting choke of a servo as the joint flexed, extended. The whirr and clack of machinery.

  Borg. Dr. Yuriel Tyvan felt his stomach clench. Borg. The thought was immediate and visceral, like a roundhouse punch to the solar plexus that has you wondering if you’ll ever breathe again. Tyvan’s mouth went dry, and his heart ramped up, the hairs prickling along the back of his neck. Borg.

  The Borg were the black maw of a tunnel, a long, dark corridor filled with inchoate sounds and images too chaotic to be called memories: the rippling of the deck beneath his feet and shuddering up his thighs, the high thin screams of the other refugees. Sweat tracking down his neck, soaking the back of his shirt. The acrid smell of his fear. The way his mother had clutched at his arm so tightly her nails ripped into his skin and left marks: a row of tiny crescent moons incised in red. They were the only remnants of his mother Tyvan had left—marks that had healed, and memories that would not.

  Now, of course, Tyvan knew that the first powerful jolt, the one that sent him reeling against a bulkhead and a stout, heavy girder crashing down to crush his mother’s back, was not a disruptor beam fired from a Borg cube. At the time, his mind gabbled in panic: Somehow the Borg had made it from the Delta Quadrant, tracked them down, and now they were going to die, and if they didn’t die, they would be assimilated…

  Now, after forty-three years, Tyvan knew that an energy ribbon, the Nexus, had destroyed the two ships, the Lakul and the Robert Fox, carrying the pitiful remnants of his civilization to safety. But he didn’t know about the Nexus until long afterward, when he and forty-six of his fellow El-Aurians were safe on the Enterprise-B, and his parents were dead.

  He appreciated the irony. Here he was on another Enterprise. He should have felt safe, but he didn’t. Tyvan never felt safe, knowing the Borg were out there, somewhere. Waiting. Biding their time. Machines were patient. Machines didn’t know guilt, or fear. Machines could wait—forever, if necessary.

  “Please?” asked Bat-Levi again, her tone testy now, and Tyvan blinked back to the present.

  Darya Bat-Levi was no Borg. The woman sitting in the overstuffed beige armchair—the chair he reserved for patients—was in her early thirties, and Tyvan thought she’d once been beautiful. She wasn’t beautiful now. An explosion and long exposure to theta radiation had taken care of that. A taut, shiny pink scar ran from her right temple to the angle of her jaw and trailed down into the hollow of her throat. The scar was so tight the right corner of Bat-Levi’s mouth pulled down into a lopsided grimace. Tyvan knew from Bat-Levi’s medical files that her hair had once been black. Most of it still was, except for a wide, silvery-white swath that ran from just above her right eyebrow and streaked over her ear like the tail of a dying comet. Her spine, from thoracic vertebra four on down, was a titanium implant. And there were the artificial limbs made of titanium alloy and polydermal sheaths: Bat-Levi’s legs, and her left arm and hand, the one whose fingers had no nails.

  Her body mass was now sixty-six percent metal, thirty-four percent everything else, give or take. That’s the way Tyvan figured it. Bat-Levi didn’t move like a Borg, or even look that much like a Borg. She squealed when she walked, though this meant that she needed to get her servos adjusted. (Tyvan thought she let her servos go on purpose, and he would get to that, all in good time, and probably tonight. There was method to his madness, too.) The medical engineers hadn’t been able to restore much in the way of sensation, but he knew that Bat-Levi felt pressure, and she felt pain. She needed pressure sense, or else she couldn’t walk, and she needed to feel pain, or she’d never know to pull her hand out of a fire. Her skin was pink, not a sickly grayish-white; she had a soul and emotions. Her mind—imprisoned in the body Tyvan was sure she cherished—was her own. Tyvan knew that Darya Bat-Levi didn’t have the foggiest idea who the Borg were, or even that they existed. Few in the Alpha Quadrant did. Yet.

  “Sorry,” said Tyvan. His fear had made his underarms damp with sweat, and perspiration crawled beneath his collar. “My mind wandered a bit there. The hour, I guess. I apologize.”

  “If you’d like me to come back another time,” said Bat-Levi, her tone hopeful. “I know I’m tired and…”

  “No,” said Tyvan, cutting her off. He watched her face settle into an expression just shy of sullen resentment. “I’m with you right now. This is your time.”


  “My time.” Bat-Levi mouthed the words as if they tasted bad. Her scar rippled as she clenched her jaw. “I hate when you psychiatrists couch things as matters of choice when there are none. Like I asked for this, like I came to you and said I really wanted to spend time in here.”

  “No one’s forcing you to talk about anything, Darya.”

  “Oh, no?” That tiny snick again, as she readjusted her spine, as if some bit of metal had snapped back into place. “I have to be here, don’t I? Five sessions, that’s the number, right? That’s as many sessions as you need to write up a report, recommend whether or not I can stay active. You and Starfleet and the Vulcan shrinks…you all agreed. A precondition to my coming back to duty: Keep an eye on the crazy woman. Doesn’t matter that I do my job just fine. You’re all just worried that I’m still crazy.”

  “I don’t know if the Vulcans think you’re crazy. I didn’t speak with your physician.”

  “But you read his report.”

  “Skimmed, actually: All doctors, even erudite Vulcan psychiatrists, tend to write summaries that verge on the incomprehensible. Anyway, crazy isn’t a word we use to describe patients anymore.”

  “And Starfleet?”

  “I don’t recall they used the word crazy, either. Someone—I believe it was Captain Nash—mentioned that you were troubled. Other than that, he said very nice things. But you know all this, Darya. You have the same access to your personnel files that I do. Besides, no one would have allowed you to return to duty if they thought you couldn’t handle it. Captain Garrett’s put you at ops. You think she would have done that if she thought you were crazy?” (Actually, Tyvan had no idea how Garrett felt. The captain avoided him like the plague.)

  “Whatever.” Bat-Levi held herself ramrod straight, and Tyvan wasn’t sure if this was because her spine was less flexible, or she was really that defensive. Looking at the way her black eyes flashed—a veritable semaphore of hostility—Tyvan decided on the latter.

  “You want to talk about how angry you are, in general?” asked Tyvan. He shifted in his chair, and he caught the squeal of leather. “Or how frightened you are?”

  Bat-Levi jerked, and a servo clattered. “I’m not scared. I’m not scared of anything.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Okay,” said Tyvan, and laced his fingers across his middle.

  The silence stretched for several minutes. An antique wind-up clock, with a brass disc pendulum, ticked, tocked, ticked. (He had a regulation chronometer that would ding at the end of their session, but he kept the clock because the face was circular and the sweep of the hands, round and round, was a reminder that life and the psyche were circular because the important things came up again and again.) Tyvan never took his eyes from Bat-Levi; Bat-Levi seemed to find something fascinating on the carpet. Finally, Bat-Levi looked up. “What?”

  “I was looking at your hand,” said Tyvan, deciding to go for broke. Besides, he was being truthful. “The artificial one.”

  He saw her flinch—and there was that squeal of servos again—then resist the temptation to hide the hand. “What about it?” she asked.

  “No nails. How come they forgot to give you nails?”

  A red flush bloomed along the underside of her jaw. “I…I don’t know. I never asked. Then, once I noticed, I decided it wasn’t important.”

  “Oh. Well, that was an oversight. Makes it that much harder for people not to stare.” Tyvan blinked once, very slowly. (His therapy supervisor once said Tyvan reminded him of a lizard drowsing on a rock.) “You’d think they’d want to avoid that.”

  “Avoid what?”

  “People staring.”

  “That? I don’t care. People are going to stare anyway, don’t you think? Nails, no nails, what are nails when you look the way I do?”

  “Well,” Tyvan’s eyes moved over her body as if taking inventory, “now that you mention it, nails aren’t that big a deal. Of course, I guess you were counting on that.”

  Bat-Levi’s jaw spasmed, pulling the scar along the right side of her face even tighter. It shone pink like the smooth skin of a naked rat. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Tyvan pinned her with a look. “I don’t buy that.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, oh, I don’t buy that.” He shifted his lanky frame (he was so thin, sitting for long made his tailbone ache) and ran a hand through cinnamon-colored hair that he knew needed a trim. “Look, you’re a smart woman. You’ve sat with shrinks before, right?”

  Bat-Levi pushed air out between her lips in a dismissive snort. “More than my share: first on Starbase 32 when they tried talking me into reconstructive surgery, then on Meir III at my parents’ place, and again on Vulcan. Want to know something?”

  “What?”

  “I liked the Vulcans best. They’re so logical, and they can be very passionate in their logic. But they know how to keep things in perspective, and I have to be honest here. Meditation and Healing Disciplines have helped more than all the cathartic theatrics you other psychiatrists seem to want.”

  “Actually,” said Tyvan, “I don’t want you to dissolve into a puddle of elemental protoplasm.” He stopped, worried that this sounded too defensive and thought that, maybe, he was. She’d spent a lot of time with psychiatrists; that was clear. He tried another tack. “You think you’ve figured me out.”

  “Sure.” Bat-Levi smirked, easy to do given the way the right side of her mouth curled. “Lull the patient into thinking you’re really not paying attention, that things are going along fine, then snap! You’ll be all over me like a Darwellian long-tongue slurping up an unsuspecting fly.”

  “I’m not paying attention?” asked Tyvan, knowing that he hadn’t been, not earlier.

  “No, I said you just looked like you weren’t. You’re very good at it. You looked a million kilometers away. But, you see, I know that you’re just waiting, watching for a chink in my armor.” She reached down with her artificial hand and gave one of her artificial legs a good thump. She clunked. “In my case, that’s apt.”

  Tyvan took a moment before he replied. “Wow, you are good.”

  Bat-Levi’s twisted smirk of triumph evaporated. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I started out asking you about your nails and your prosthetics, and now we’re talking about how good or not good I am at my job, and whether I measure up to other shrinks you’ve known. You’re very good at ducking.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bat-Levi said, and Tyvan could tell she was lying. Her face was too stony. On the other hand, maybe that was easy for her. All that scarring must make facial expressions difficult.

  Tyvan kept his tone mild. “Don’t be stupid, Darya. If you’re going to be stupid, you can leave. We both have better things to do.”

  Her black eyes widened and then shone with bright, unshed tears, and he saw he’d hit the mark. “You’re right,” she said, her voice dripping with bitterness. “I’m so stupid. So, okay, you want to talk about my nails, the way I look, my guilt, sure fine, go ahead, fine, make your point.”

  He paused. Then: “I never said anything about guilt, Darya.”

  She swallowed so hard he heard it. “Yes, you did,” she said, but her voice was smaller, a little timid. “Yes, you did. I heard you. You did.” She flared. “Anyway, so I’m feeling guilty. This is a surprise? It’s all over my profile. Yes, I feel guilty. Yes, I get depressed, and, yes, I’ve wanted to die. I’ve tried to die, and then when the Vulcans wouldn’t let me, I stopped trying. I decided that God meant for me to live and remember, so I’m alive and I do remember and I feel the guilt every single day of my life. And that’s the way it should be. That’s justice. There, is that what you want?”

  Tyvan was sure that if looks could kill, he’d have been in his casket. “It’s not a question of what I want, Darya, though you’re right. I’m not surprised. You love your guilt. You’ll hang onto guilt until the day you die.”

  He sa
w the first slight flicker of uncertainty in her eyes. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “I mean that guilt is a wonderful thing. It’s so expected. We assume that someone who survives or has, perhaps, been indirectly responsible for the death of a loved one ought to feel guilty for being alive.”

  “Oh, but I’m sure you see it differently.”

  Tyvan heard the sarcasm and knew that he’d struck a nerve. “That’s right. I think that guilt is a wonderful weapon. Guilt is like a mantle you use to cloak yourself from contact with other people. Guilt is armor, just like your body there; and guilt, just like your body, lulls everyone into assuming that guilt explains everything, so they leave you alone. What’s the expression? Walking on eggshells, pussyfooting around. Guilt is a marvelous way of making sure that no one sees inside your soul, or knows the truth. And you’ve gone one better.”

  “And how is that?” she asked, her tone not sarcastic now. She sounded like a scared little girl.

  Tyvan leaned forward, careful not to crowd her. “Darya, you’ve let yourself stay this way so you can keep everyone else at bay. You know how, way back, on Earth, they used to condemn people who’d committed certain horrible crimes to death?”

  Bat-Levi moved her head in a squealing, miniscule nod. “Capital punishment. That was abolished after the Bell Riots, three hundred years ago.”

  “Right. I’ve studied that period in Earth’s history, and particularly the history of capital punishment.”

  “Why? That’s so gruesome.”

  “Not if you don’t understand the concept. We El-Aurians never practiced capital punishment. Killing someone as the ultimate punishment? Yes, I suppose there’s some justice to it: an eye for an eye, that sort of thing.”

  Bat-Levi shook her head. “No, that’s wrong. See, I’m Jewish and…well, culturally, really, but my uncle is a rabbi. He said that even the old rabbis, from way back, understood that a literal interpretation of that law helped no one. Taking out eyes, chopping off hands: The old joke was the ancient Middle East must have been filled with one-eyed cripples.”