STAR TREK: Strange New Worlds II

by Dean Wesley Smith (Editor)

  “I am Lore.”

  Research

  J. R. Rasmussen

  To: The Producers, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

  From: J.R.

  Re: Take this job and ...

  Dear Most Powerful Ones,

  The expense claim for my final research trip is attached. Two doctors’ bills will arrive in a few days; the studio’s insurance should cover most of it. The rest comes out of your pocket, Oh Powerful Ones. Enjoy the Beverly Hills prices.

  As of right now ... I’d cite day and date but I’m hazy from the temporal transport ... You are minus one researcher. I’m staying in the twentieth century until New Year’s Day takes it away from me.

  So what if I’m the world’s only time-traveling researcher? I can’t list it on my résumé. It won’t buy a mug of raktajino at Quark’s. It hasn’t helped my writing career.

  Mainly, this job is trouble. Big trouble. Painful trouble. I don’t care what the surgeon says about it being my imagination, the remaining Borg implants ache when the weather changes.

  [340] As for my final assignment, I brought back isolinear optical chips, two dozen of them. Yeah, a handful are crispy around the edges, but that’s what Jem’Hadar phased-energy blasters do. An inch to the right and it’d be me with overcooked edges.

  The chips hold Starfleet’s data on the final confrontation with the Dominion, including Sisko’s eyes-only report to the admiralty. You won’t believe how things work out. It’ll blow the ratings through the roof. You’re gonna love it.

  I know you wanted data covering a thousand light-years of Voyager’s journey, but the temporal transport took me to Bajor instead of the Delta Quadrant. I hope the next sucker who gets this job has faster reflexes than I do. Or you’d better find a way to precisely control up-time arrival.

  That’s what you get, working with purloined hardware. Real hard to get spare parts from the twenty-sixth century. That great-great to the umpteenth generation grandson of mine should of been horsewhipped by Picard instead of sentenced to do legitimate historical research. What kind of a name is Berlinghoff, anyway? Rasmussen I understand. But Berlinghoff?

  I have to admit, it was clever of Berlinghoff to stash the blueprints for the time-travel pod where he could get them after he convinced Starfleet’s headshrinks he was rehabilitated.

  If only he’d been clever enough to take the studio limo instead of driving to the meeting at Paramount. People in twenty-second-century New Jersey never heard of turn signals? (Did I thank you for the flowers you sent to the funeral?)

  And, yes, it was just as clever of you all to figure out how [241] to take advantage of the time-travel gizmo, after Berlinghoff landed it on my pool deck that night.

  Our trip to 1964 to talk to the Great Bird of the Galaxy was the most exciting day of my life. He adapted or adopted almost everything we suggested. Genius. Pure genius. Mostly on his part.

  Sorry, I’m rambling ... aftereffect of the transport, you know. Ahh, I remember the point of this memo.

  I quit.

  Feels good.

  Bungee jumping through the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries, bringing back details of the future ... it’s a story right out of a hack sci-fi novel. Maybe I’ll pitch it to a television network for a series. I’ll leave out the Star Trek parts, of course. Don’t want to infringe on the franchise.

  No way to use being assimilated by the Borg at Wolf 359. Longest week of my life, waiting for the automatic recall circuit to bounce me home. And you’ll dramatize all the juicy parts of Voyager’s return to Sector 001.

  Maybe something on the amusement park planet ... the “Fantasy Island” of the twenty-fourth century. Yeah, I could pitch that. ...

  Sorry, rambling again. Speaking of rambling, Mr. “Baby God” Crusher says hello. I ran into him and the Traveler, this time passing through the Celestial Temple. The Prophets like him; there’s no accounting for taste.

  Which brings me to why I quit. I had an encounter with an Orb, on Bajor. In my vision, Wesley and I were on Risa, getting close. Real close. You don’t pay me enough to get that close to Wesley Crusher, god-to-be or not. He talked about wanting to be a father, said the early twenty-first [242] century would be a great place for a child to grow up (before World War III, of course).

  And Berlinghoff asked me, several times, when was I going to have a baby, get the dynasty started, so to speak. If I weren’t terrified of spawning more time paradoxes, I’d get my tubes tied.

  Yours in celibacy,

  J.R.

  P.S.: The pod’s stowed under its tarp on Stage 17; the keys are under the mat. Live long and prosper.

  Change of Heart

  Steven Scott Ripley

  She morphs her hand into a sparrow, and through the void it flies to stab the Vorta in the chest. Beak pierces flesh, wings dash lungs. The Vorta’s heart bursts, the creature’s medium of rhythm laid to rest. The solid falls to the ground, puffs of pink carnacite dust billowing up from his body’s impact. She allows her sparrow-hand to fall with him, easily twisting the beak through his frail body, then with somewhat more effort and with a corkscrew motion she pierces his bulky surface suit, burrowing down into the hard earth beneath him. She shapes her hand into a turning bore to probe the arid layers of stratum. Bits of Vorta flesh, scraps of organ and bone, grind and disintegrate into microscopic flakes, mulch and fresh nutrients for this too-solid planet. Useless, really, but an encouragement for life: death is a complex process.

  She observes the face of the dead Vorta through the wide oval visor of his surface suit’s black helmet. Havok was his name. His eyes stare at nothing and appear opaquely purple, his white skin a dusky rose under the red dwarf sun’s naked light. His broad ears sharpen to knobby points. His facial expression is racked into what these solids call pain, rigor already setting in. She came to this planet to try to understand [244] his treachery, and now she has killed him. His body will slowly decompose in this hard, poisonous place. Perhaps he will be of better service to the cosmos as food for dust.

  She is jealous of the dead Vorta. Though she is no solid and incompletely understands these creatures, she suspects his death is close to what she calls life. The lack of conscious tasking so many solids fear, unity in a blanketing comfort of oneness, is so much better than traveling through these bitter lands. She ached for her return the moment she left her home, the Great Link, and she finds no joy in the world of solids, no exultation, no victory, no love. There is nothing here but blasts of icy wind that cut and separate, hollow echoes in a dark tunnel, biting and senseless. And what is she doing on this planet named Bleak Prime, tucked away in a forgotten corner of the Alpha Quadrant, with her arm plunged through a mad Vorta’s heart and probing deep into the planet’s mantled crust? But she knows. It is the frustrated magnetic attraction of her essential liquid self to the planet’s molten core, the draw of like to like. The moment of desire will pass: it always does.

  She withdraws her arm from Havok and turns away, stalking through the thick layer of chalky-pink carnacite dust that lines this canyon cul-de-sac’s floor. She briefly registers the geological anomaly: she has not seen such quantities of pulverized carnacite in a natural formation on Bleak Prime before. The ground-up stone is a quarter of a meter deep here. She kicks up salmon clouds of it as she passes through. Curious. On three sides of the large cul-de-sac, vomits of crumbled black stone lie in great slag heaps, piled at the feet of the tall, broken obsidian cliffs that crack and tumble with each new regional earthquake. Due to these, this canyon [245] gradually grows wider and more jumbled with glinting black slabs and shards, and one day soon the cliffs will be gone and some idiot geologist stationed here will think to reclassify the topography. She wonders why Havok chose this place to die, and what it could have possibly meant to him.

  She retraces their route down the ravine, not bothering to morph herself into a hawk or some other avian creature to fly back to the Flower. A long walk up the twisting ravine, at least an hour, but she must not be
seen by the inhabitants of Bleak Prime as her true self. Rather than take her usual solid form, the one so like their lost lamb, she has drawn herself into the shape of a Marmosan lherical for this mission, a third-sexer from the planet Marmosa and therefore an Objective Witness. No solid has died for her current guise; it is enough for her to assume a new personality. Simpler to maintain, given the dangerous situation she must observe. Oblette will not question the actions of an Objective Witness. The Marmosans, though now subjects of the Dominion, originally claimed this planet and have been allowed to continue to administer their judicial system, as well as the planet’s mining consortium. It is an effective cover for her. Or rather, lher, as the Marmosan third-sexers’ personal pronouns go, and when she interacts with Oblette and the others, she identifies with lher and lhe, and so on. It is expected; she must.

  The changeling draws near the mining complex, dubbed the Flower by the locals. An appropriate name for the refinery. Spoked with irregularly placed conveyor tubes for receiving raw ore from airborne shuttles and capped by a convex dome, the tower is an elegant testament to the ingenuity of the engineers who work here. The Flower’s lower stem is sheathed by hydraulic and electromagnetic cushions [246] rooted deep into the ground, and the tall structure sometimes sways and waves, not under a biting wind but when an earthquake rocks the vicinity. Clever solids, masters of their wretched worlds—or they try to be. One must grudgingly give them points for diligence.

  She turns back to observe a western vista, perched on a cliff’s outcropping at the top of the ravine trail. The planet is certainly an oddity. The local geologists call Bleak Prime a metallurgical wellspring, but the engineers stationed here call it hell. The upper surface blossoms with spindly pinnacles of multicolored minerals, ruby-red, emerald-green, quartz-yellow. Below these toothpick jewel towers, thrust up at tilted angles from mineral deposits far below the surface, lie what some call the mountains, the obsidian ranges and cliffs that rise and fall and rise again with quake-jarred frequency. Then the brainy foothills, pink lumps and clusters of carnacite, a deadly mineral composite in its natural state; for though the planet’s gravity and surface pressure are sufficient for solids to live here, the atmosphere is thickly choked with poisonous gases emitted by the carnacite, and terraforming has not beaten back the effect. And finally dust, stacked ribbons of hard, sterile earth separating the planet’s tortured core of mangled elements. All competing for dominance and failing, fractious under the swell of the planet’s lively magnetosphere, and every softly shadowed color tinged with blood under a hoary old heart of a red dwarf sun. The essence of bleak, some call it.

  The changeling finds she rather likes the place.

  She steps into the Rower’s stem and rides a delicate mag-lift petal up to the high dome. On the way up she morphs [247] herself out of her bulky surface suit, black stubby arms and legs sucking into the fleshy presence of Objective Witness Mariole. Anchet Mariole is fat and ugly as sin. The changeling enjoys this persona, the fear and respect lher presence commands from the workers here. Anchet is tripled-chinned, ears as severely molded as conch shells, gray hair a hatchet of bristles, eyes such stiletto slits no one can guess they have no color at all. Lhe wears the sharply cut, black uniform of the Objective Witness, but on rotund Anchet the suit resembles an enormous bell, ready to toll judgments.

  “Witness Mariole,” the fawning Vorta Oblette says, “we were just discussing whether or not to send out a rescue team for you.”

  Anchet steps off the open mag-lift platform and ignores Oblette, who soon falls behind as lhe strides across the amphitheater floor toward lher private suites. The blood-red glare of the surface is here replaced with what solids call normal lighting, a more democratic spectrum of colors. Dozens of awed workers peer and gape as Mariole rumbles along. Lhe passes pale, white-faced Vortas, friends and consorts of treacherous Havok, bored-looking Kellerun traders, cowed Marmosan engineers, a few gray-skinned Cardassian advisors, most likely spies for their co-opted government. There are no Jem’Hadar stationed here: they are needed on the war front. Lhe notes a sullen Vulcan or two—smart creatures, but not to be trusted. Anchet does not approve of Vulcans living and working atop the Flower’s dome, so high in the echelons of this planet’s mining consortium. They cannot possibly mean to stay; they have lived too long in the anarchy of freedom and Anchet can see the [248] danger in their dark slave eyes. Secret plots and schemes: perhaps Witness Mariole will sniff these out as well, before lhe departs.

  One of the Vulcans approaches as lhe is about to leave them.

  “Witness Mariole,” the Vulcan female softly asks, “where is Havok? Is he dead?”

  Anchet slowly swivels about. Lhe can hear sharp intakes of breath echo about the amphitheater, frightened whispers from the less foolhardy.

  “What,” Anchet says, lher voice slimy as cold porridge, “is your name, Vulcan?”

  “Bicek, lheric,” she says calmly, respectful enough to remember the proper form of address for a Witness. She does not appear frightened, only curious and troubled.

  “And why do you concern yourself with the death of a treacherous Vorta, Vulcan Bicek?”

  A sensible pause. It seems brave young Bicek has a sudden inkling of the peril she courts. She averts her face shyly, and the tip of a peaked ear peeps out from beneath her thick swath of black hair. Then her dark eyes gleam bright and she meets Anchet’s steady gaze. She has found the courage to speak.

  “It is not the death of a Vorta, lheric,” Bicek says, her voice carefully modulated to betray no emotion, “but the death of the wrong Vorta that troubles me.”

  Anchet Mariole stares at Bicek for a placid minute. Nothing disturbs the fat Witness, not even the idea that lhe has miscalculated. But that has yet to be proven.

  “Join me in my suites in half an hour.” It is unwise to ignore honest testimony. And lhe must admit it: under these [249] circumstances, surrounded by mad sycophants, the testimony of this Vulcan slave may be the only honest story lhe will hear.

  She morphs out of her persona the moment she is alone, longing for home. Her liquid self oozes across the cool flagstone floor of her chambers, content to be a shapeless pool for a while. Holding shape for extended periods does not tire her, for she is an old changeling and used to it. Or to be more precise, the process is not physically taxing for her: it does involve some spiritual effort. Lately she has felt reluctance to assume solid form during long missions. It is one thing to leap out of the Great Link and turn herself—for moments, moments—into a tiger or a triangle or a spray of exultant mist. That is pure joy, ecstatic separation with a tease of false danger, and soon she dives back into the fold and her people’s heaving oneness. In the Great Link all changelings are complete. But here she is nothing more than a drippy puddle on dry land, and to be a solid is to be a fake. They are all impostors, all the solids are. Even the Vortas.

  The strange behavior of the Vortas stationed on Bleak Prime is troubling. Her people anxiously await her report on this subject, and yet she is no closer to understanding the problem now than she was when she arrived. Just as the Jem’Hadar are genetically engineered to serve as warriors for their cause, the Vortas are grown and cut to act as unswerving servants for the Founders, beholden to them as to gods. Yet the Vortas of Bleak Prime, Havok and Oblette and the others, seem to have attained some measure of self-will, broken from the stamp of their genetic imperatives. How can this be? What is it about this planet that could cause [250] such a schism in the chain of command? She questioned Havok about it before she killed him, and he only stared at her blankly, as if she’d gone insane, and not he.

  She wonders if she has. Nothing here is as it should be. She is surrounded by spies and traitors on Bleak Prime: they color her thoughts, poison her will. The very air sparks with treachery here. But soon her job will be complete. Then she can go home and dance!

  A vibration tremors through her, the sound of Anchet’s suite bell chiming. She sighs and draws herself erect. Back to business. She
quickly morphs into form as she moves toward the western end of her chambers, where the Witness holds court and receives visitors. En route she passes a gilt-edged mirror hung on the northern wall. She happens to glance at it, and gasps aloud, stunned.

  A familiar and unexpected figure stares back at her.

  “Odo!” she says, horrified.

  She peers closer at her image. No, not him, though near like him. She has forgotten where she is and without thinking morphed into the form she usually assumes when dealing with solids. A female version of Odo glares at the polished surface, her tiny brown eyes open wide in surprise. A diminutive figure clad in a dusty golden robe, her short dark hair smoothed back into a rigid cap on her skull. Just as he wears his. She first chose this persona because she wanted to show Odo a reflection of his pathetic solid self when she visited him. She hoped it might shame some sense into him, and for a while, it did. Yet he has betrayed his people again and again.

  Now she can only laugh bitterly: the mirror trap she once hoped to set on him has sprung on her, it seems.

  [251] Annoyed at herself, she morphs into the obese form of Witness Mariole and steps into lher receiving alcove. An opaque western window glows luridly red from the harsh sunset outside. Anchet weightily spreads lher massive bulk into a wide-armed obsidian chair with a tall, forbidding back, decorated with stone-carved gargoyles from Marmosan folklore. Lher guests spend more time staring at those chiseled ogres than at lher ugly face. All the better.

  Time for the Vulcan’s testimony.

  Bicek stands at respectful attention before the Witness. The sun has almost set and crimson shadows in the room lengthen and blur, obliterating angles and swallowing up dim corners. A perfect setting for a tale of treachery.

  “I monitor statistical reports,” Bicek says, “and advise Oblette and the other scientists regarding efficiency techniques they might use to improve our mining output. I have found Bleak Prime to be a fountainhead of inspiration in that regard.”