STAR TREK: Strange New Worlds II

by Dean Wesley Smith (Editor)

  “It’s about Dorvan V.”

  “What about Dorvan V?”

  “You visited Dorvan V on stardate 47751?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “We were assigned to evacuate the colony there.”

  “Did you complete this mission?”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “This is all in my logs.”

  “Just answer the questions, Captain.”

  Picard sighed. “The colonists refused to be removed from their home.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I tried negotiating with the colony leader, Anthwara—”

  “Negotiating. To remove him from the colony?”

  “Yes. But to no avail.”

  “No avail, you say?”

  Picard looked confused. “What are you after, Agent Lucsly?”

  [214] “Just the facts.”

  Another sigh from Picard. “Our negotiations were cut short when the Cardassians arrived. They pushed for a speedier evacuation. Push then came to shove. The Cardassians fired on the colony, then on the Enterprise. Needless to say, at this point, our negotiations with the Dorvan colonists became moot.”

  “And why is that?”

  Picard considered me with a look of incredulity. “Because we then went to war to defend Dorvan and its inhabitants.”

  I took a sharp breath and turned to my partner. He shook his head, confirming my thoughts: Picard knew nothing about the divergence.

  “Tell me, Captain,” I said, turning back to the screen, “did anything else out of the ordinary happen during this mission?”

  Picard hesitated, either trying to remember, or trying to formulate a story. “One of my crew ... actually a former crew member at that point, a civilian ... opted to leave the Enterprise and stay on Dorvan V.”

  “Why?”

  Again Picard took his time in answering. “He stayed to study with a being known as the Traveler. It was his intention to explore different planes of existence.”

  My jaw dropped. “Different planes of existence? That wasn’t in your log, Captain.” Had Picard used a phrase like “planes of existence” in an official log, the D.T.I. would have been on him like blue on an Andorian.

  “I didn’t feel it necessary.”

  I gaped at Picard, who just stared back at us, remorseless [215] and somewhat smug. Could it be he didn’t understand what he had done? “Planes of existence are not playthings, Captain. My whole adult life has been dedicated to the protection of this plane on which we exist, this space-time continuum. Every day, we have to fight against people like you, and Ben Sisko, and the rest of this Kirk-worshiping fleet, to keep the fabric of this universe from unraveling around us. But now, you tell us you set a member of your crew loose to meddle in other planes of existence, an act which could cause a cascade effect across the entire multiverse ... and you felt a log entry regarding such was unnecessary?”

  For a relatively long time (eleven seconds), Picard said nothing. I waited patiently, showing the Enterprise captain a stone face.

  Finally, Picard spoke. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting just a bit?”

  I slapped the monitor controls and wiped the scofflaw’s face from the screen.

  The Lakota arrived at Dorvan V four hours and forty-seven minutes later. Dulmer and I beamed down alone. Entering the settlement, modeled after the earthen structures built by the ancient tribes of the North American desert, was like walking into the past.

  My partner obviously got the same feeling. “I don’t like this place,” he said.

  “Mm-hmm,” I agreed.

  We walked to the middle of the village square. It was midday, and the Dorvan sun beat mercilessly on the planet. All the colonists had apparently sought refuge from the heat indoors.

  [216] “Where’s the government center?” Dulmer asked aloud. “None of these buildings have signs.”

  “No?” I flicked my eyes, noting a few pictographs here and there, but nothing in a recognizable language. I pivoted in place, examining the vista, and at the end of 360 degrees, I found myself staring into the chest of a giant man who had not been there before.

  “Hello,” he said, while I jumped back, nearly knocking Dulmer to the ground. Once I steadied myself, I took a better look at the man looming over us. He had a prominent brow, and his chalky-white skin nearly glowed in the intense sunshine, leading me to conclude he was not of Amerind descent. “You are the Federation investigators,” he said.

  I nodded. “I’m Agent Lucsly, and this is Agent Dulmer. And you are ... ?”

  “I am a Traveler,” he said with an enigmatic grin.

  “Well, Mister Traveler, we’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  He shook his head slowly. “I’m not the one to whom you want to ask your questions.”

  “Please cooperate with us, sir, or we will have to—”

  Before I could finish, Dorvan V had disappeared. I found myself floating in a void of pure black. Shocked, I went back on my heels, flailing my arms—but did not fall. There was no gravity, and yet there was no normal sense of weightlessness either.

  “What is this place?” I heard Dulmer say. He was trying to sound authoritative, but he was obviously as thrown by the sudden shift as I was. After a remarkably short period of disorientation (I cannot be sure how long), we both found an unusual sense of equilibrium.

  [217] “Let’s call it an alternate plane of reality,” the Traveler said, still smiling his same smile. “The person you want to talk to is here.” The alien pointed off to his left, and in the distance I saw a cluster of what appeared to be stars. The stars drew closer to us—or we drew closer to them; it was impossible to tell. As we were about to collide, the small lights consolidated into the form of a young human male. He looked up at Dulmer, and then me, contempt in his bright hazel eyes. Then he turned to the Traveler.

  “What are they doing here?” he demanded.

  “You wouldn’t listen to me,” the alien said. “Perhaps you will listen to them.”

  “They’re from Temporal Investigations. Bureaucrats,” the kid said. “They aren’t going to understand any more than you do.”

  “You said I wouldn’t understand because I wasn’t human. They are human. If you make them understand, then I will concede the matter to you.”

  The kid considered this, and then turned back to regard Dulmer and me. “So, how did you figure out what happened?”

  “We have our methods,” I answered. “The real question is, what exactly did you do, and why?”

  “I altered time, because the way things originally happened wasn’t right.” He said it with such casual defiance, I was sorely tempted to imprint his obnoxious face with my fist.

  “And who are you to decide which timeline is right and which isn’t?”

  “Who are you?” he retorted. “You know nothing about the other timeline. I do. Trust me, the entire Alpha Quadrant is better off, all because I changed one small event.”

  “Trust you? You mean like Joshua Albert trusted you?”

  [218] The kid froze, then his eyes narrowed. Before he could collect his thoughts again, I continued. “Yeah, we know something about the timeline after all, at least prior to stardate 47751.”

  “You’re a rather mistake-prone young man, aren’t you?” my partner continued. “The Nova Squadron incident. Your experiments with nanites and static warp bubbles.”

  “And let’s not forget the time you got drunk and built a force field around engineering to keep the regular crew out,” I added.

  “I wasn’t drunk; I was—” He cut himself off, scowling. “All that happened an entire lifetime ago. In the three years I’ve been here, I’ve learned more about the nature of time than you can even begin to comprehend! You have to believe me when I tell you that the real mistake was what happened in the original timeline.”

  The kid tried hard to sound commanding, but his overl
y intense demeanor and high-pitched voice almost made his speech laughable. I looked him straight in the eye and leaned in close, flagrantly violating his personal space. “You’re right,” I told him. “I don’t know the details of the original timeline. But here’s what I do know: it was the original timeline. The one that happened first, that was meant to happen. Now, whether you believe it’s a god or fate or some complex string of fractals, something causes the events of time to happen the way they do. Something bigger than anything we know, or that we can know. This new timeline was created by you, a human being, a mere mortal. I cannot abide placing the destiny of the entire universe in your hands.”

  The Traveler had his eyes on the kid’s face the whole while. “Do you see now?” he asked.

  [219] “They still don’t understand,” he whined. He almost sounded pitiful, but the last thing a genius mind with the power to alter the space-time continuum deserved was pity. Dulmer and I both reached out at once, grabbing each of his arms at the elbow.

  But the kid shook us off like our arms were cobwebs. His face turned red, and a low hum, like that of a warp engine, seemed to come from inside him, growing louder.

  “YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND!”

  Suddenly, my mind exploded with three years of history that had never happened. The two timelines coexisted in my mind, side by side, and I could compare them both. The Battle of the Border against the random torture of Federation expatriates. The solid, stable rule of the Cardassian Central Command against the embarrassing terrorist blows and upheaval following the rise of the Detapa Council. A relatively small Dominion presence in the Badlands against—

  And just as suddenly, I was back with the Traveler and the kid. The memories lost their solidity, but they were still there, like a cloud of smoke that would not diffuse and blow away.

  “You understand now,” the kid said, “don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Dulmer answered, his voice a hoarse whisper. For my part, all I could do was lick my lips and wait for the haze to clear.

  “And what you saw was just a fraction,” the kid said. “If you could see how events unfold in the future of the timelines—”

  [220] “But they cannot,” the Traveler interrupted.

  “No,” the kid said. “But now you know why I did what I did. Are you still going to stand there and pass judgment on me?”

  I turned to my partner, and he turned to me. Like the alien Traveler noted earlier, we were both human. Neither of us could have been unaffected by what we had experienced.

  He won Dulmer over.

  And with the look he was giving me, Dulmer was hoping I was won over as well.

  Again, I licked my lips. I took a deep breath and turned back to the kid.

  And the look on his face—so smug, so pleased with his superior knowledge and intellect—caused my good sense to return in a Biblical-style flood.

  “You’re damn right I am!” The kid reeled back as I exploded. “Everyone who tries to manipulate the timeline thinks they’re doing it for the best. The law of averages says about half of them are right. Well, I’m just a human being; I can’t make that call and stop only half. Either I preserve the original timeline or I chuck it all, and I’m not about to do that for the likes of you. In the name of the United Federation of Planets—”

  “God, no,” Dulmer groaned.

  —I demand that you return the space-time continuum to its original state!”

  The kid’s face fell. The alien considered him, taking no pleasure in the hard lesson his student had to learn. Then, he looked at me. “All will be as before,” he assured me. I nodded, keeping my eyes forward. I couldn’t look at Dulmer, though I could tell he was staring at me, making my ear burn red hot.

  [221] Looking down at his feet, the kid muttered, “You’re a fool, Mister Lucsly.” He lifted his head and stared me right in the eye. “I know I’m not a god. Neither of us are, sir.” Only then did I notice how much intelligence shone through those eyes. There was an intensity coming off him that made every hair on my body stand at attention.

  “But at least what I did was for benevolent reasons,” he said in a hissing whisper. “Will you be able to tell yourself the same?” He then grinned at me, baring all his teeth like a wild dog. The teeth were the last thing I saw before ...

  ... I sat at my desk, sipping a raktajino and scanning the latest reports. It was a gradual disorientation that came over me, like an early morning fog rolling in from the Bay, which then coalesced into memory.

  Random torture of Federation expatriates, against a six-day Battle of the Border.

  A weakened Cardassia in political turmoil, against a solid leadership united with the rest of the Alpha Quadrant against a common foe.

  And Gul Dukat’s alliance with ...

  I dropped my padd and turned to my desktop monitor, calling up the Federation News Service’s live feed. Reports were that the Dominion had attempted to detonate the Bajoran sun and destroy a combined fleet massed at the mouth of the wormhole. Meanwhile, the Jem’Hadar were scouring the demilitarized zone, on orders from Dukat to eradicate the Maquis.

  I just watched and listened, stunned, so totally absorbed that I didn’t even notice Dulmer enter. He noticed the monitor, shaking his head. “Hell of a thing to [222] happen, huh?” he said simply. Then he went to the replicator for coffee.

  He didn’t remember the other timeline.

  I uttered a silent curse as the boss entered a few steps behind Dulmer. “Just got a report from the Lakota, on the DMZ. Temporal distortions in the vicinity of Drovoer II—looks like someone’s playing with Paul Manheim’s theories again.”

  “Probably the Maquis, looking to change this past week,” Dulmer said dryly, quickly pushing himself up from his chair.

  I rose to the call of duty as well. I was a bit slower out of my seat than my partner, but I managed to stand nonetheless. I walked with him out of the office, heading off to Drovoer II, to preserve the timeline as the gods, or fate, or a complex string of fractals deemed it to be.

  I hoped to hell they knew what they were doing.

  I Am Become Death

  Franklin Thatcher

  I sit with my back to the ruins of Starfleet Academy, watching the sun set over what, two millennia ago, was called San Francisco Bay. The salt air, the offshore breeze, the brilliance of the cloud-streamed sky, the yellow sunlight: all these drew me to this place. It had seemed just the right place to come to die.

  But they had been waiting when I arrived.

  Damia speaks from behind me. “Father Data?”

  From the time I had first heard it, I detested the reverential term the Children of Soong had given me—detested it as much as the monument they had erected to Soong on Omicron Theta, where I and my brother, Lore, had been made. “What do you want?”

  “We have summoned a ship from this timeline to rescue you. It will arrive tomorrow.”

  She waits for my answer, standing behind me, silent as only an android can be. She came a thousand years to find me; she can wait another thousand for my answer.

  Jaris, my keeper—my jailer—these past dozen centuries, has chosen to explore the ruins, thinking his job admirably done. I had covered my escape so well that it took him a [224] thousand years to track me. But with time travel, he has been able to stop me, almost before I started.

  The timeship had appeared with hardly a whisper, the instruments of my own small ship not even detecting its arrival. As I stepped onto the weed-crazed pavement outside the ruined academy, I had, at first, taken Damia for human. But her all-too-easy shift of emotions, her not-quite-right choice of mood, made it all too clear. For all of the achievements of the celebrated Children of Soong, emotion for them was still a matter of hardware and programming, the precise simulation of emotion—but a simulation still. Jaris’s appearance a moment later confirmed my deduction and signaled the complete failure of my bid for death. On their belts they carried pencil-thin metallic rods: weapons, prominently displayed in a misguided attemp
t to guarantee my compliance.

  Without invitation, Damia sits down beside me to watch the sunset, her face a mask of emotion that unwittingly mocks my own feelings. Her expression is for my benefit more than hers, as if she is saying, look at me, Father Data, I have emotions just like you. But they are not just like mine.

  When Doctor Soong implanted the emotion chip in me so long ago, a strange sensation had overtaken me. The remembrance of Tasha Yar and of Lal, my doomed daughter, had filled me with & hollowness that I could not understand, a discomfort that I could neither isolate nor control. Eventually I identified it as grief, and developed subroutines to master it, to numb myself to it. Then came the death of Jean-Luc Picard, my mentor and friend; then of Geordi La Forge; then Troi; then Worf. One by one, all of my friends died. New friends, too, grew old and died.

  I became obsessed with the deaths of those I loved—[225] those already gone, as well as those still living. Who would be next? But no algorithm—no calculation—could predict, or prepare me. Eventually, I left starship duty, seeking refuge in the halls of academia. Even so, age gradually took all those who befriended me. Even Tana, after nearly sixty years of marriage, crossed that border to an unknown that I would never experience.

  In my grief, I began switching off my emotion chip, allowing the narcotic of emotionless machine intelligence to engulf me. But when I switched it on again, it was as if it had never been off. At last, I rid myself of the troublesome chip, destroying it so I could never be tempted to replace it.

  Only, that wasn’t the end of the matter.

  While the emotions produced by the chip had been artificial, I discovered that, even without the chip, there was still feeling. Over succeeding centuries, that feeling had grown deeper and more profound, until, at last, I knew that what I felt was true emotion, not merely its simulation: emotion born of a dozen human lifetimes of experience, of relating to those frail creatures to whom emotion was a gift too often taken for granted. At last, I knew what it was to be human.

  And I wanted no part of it.