“No!” Vina thought she screamed. Even thinking was becoming difficult now. She held out her hands to Theo to say, Take me out of here! Don’t leave me! If you’re going to die, I want to die with you!
With the last of his strength, he pushed her hands away, and slammed the door. There was an emergency release on the inside, but Vina couldn’t find it in the dark, and she wouldn’t have had the strength to release it in this gravity if she had. She would live or die in this small space, Theo’s kindly, loving face etched into her memory for as long as she lived. Curling herself up in a fetal position, arms wrapped around her knees, sobbing bitterly, she waited.
There was no way to calculate the odds against Columbia’s wobbly trajectory actually getting her close enough to Talos IV to attempt a landing, but she made it that far. Attempts to brake and bring her down slowly were less successful, and she began to break up at about sixty kilometers above the surface, low enough for chunks of fuselage and interior components to survive, scattering a debris field more than eight hundred kilometers long. Incredibly, two sections of the interior survived with only minor damage—the main library computer, and a refrigeration unit.
It splashed down and tumbled over itself into a long-neglected marsh, whose waters cooled its overheated surface with a great hissing rush of steam. A few meters farther or a slightly faster entry speed would have plunged it into the deeper waters of the river that fed the marsh, and the burned and broken Vina would have drowned. Instead, unconscious, damaged beyond the knowledge of most human medical technology, she lay unmoving within, still breathing, barely. The impact had warped the frame of the unit, bursting the door open, which provided her with needed oxygen, saving her life a second time.
The Talosians saved it a third.
They had watched the ship’s progress across the sky, surmised what it was, and noted where the debris would come to land. A scan of the debris field revealed the charred remains of numerous carbon-based life-forms, and one that showed faint life signs. A hover-sled brought several Talosians to the marsh where Vina lay. They would not locate the library computer or determine what it was until some days later.
Gentle hands of surprising strength eased Vina’s broken body out of its enclosure, wrapped her burns in cooling cloths, carried her in a sling to the waiting sled. A medical scanner revealed internal organs whose functions were similar to their own. But they were differently juxtaposed within the thoracic cavity, and the blood and tissue type were totally incompatible. Their subject could be rehydrated, sedated, and kept on life support, bones could be set, charred flesh peeled away, the ruptured organ they would later identify as a spleen could be removed, but there was no possibility of transplant or scar regeneration or even a blood transfusion.
The internal organs were salvaged and replaced in an arrangement compatible with Talosian physiology, stitched together in a way that made sense in terms of function, if not esthetics. The broken bones and the horrible burns would have to heal themselves, or not.
What the subject needed most was quiet, and mental techniques to bypass her pain. The conditioning began.
Eighteen years later, the Magistrate entered the room where Vina lay dreaming.
Pity, s/he thought, studying the humped spine, the spindly, uneven legs, the once-beautiful face crisscrossed with scars, that we had to work so quickly to repair her lest she die. Had we had more time, we might have gotten it right, tapped into her mind, if not her ship’s computers, to see what she should look like and effect it. Now the organs have healed in the places where we set them, the scar tissue solidified. There is nothing more we can do, except what I am about to propose to her now.
For eighteen years the human’s fantasies and dreams had entertained the entire remnant of the Talosian race, even as they sustained and succored Vina. But there were limits to what a lone human could provide them. The desire to rebuild, to reproduce more than the handful of grim offspring necessary to sustain their society, to return to the surface and return the Dream to its proper place in their ethos—as a supplement to, not a substitute for, life—required more. After eighteen years of sending Columbia’s distress call into the void, the opportunity had at last presented itself. It must not be allowed to slip away, and Vina’s involvement was key.
Vina, the Magistrate thought softly, and the human floated up from the depths of what she had been dreaming—an alternate timeline in which she had stayed on Earth, parted amicably from Theo, joined her father in his dance troupe, and was touring the Federation’s inner worlds to universal acclaim (that night’s performance was, ironically, Sleeping Beauty)—turned her face toward the deceptively frail, large-browed creature in the doorway, and spoke aloud.
“What is it?”
There is something we would like you to see…
The Magistrate showed her the “survivors’ encampment” that would lure the Enterprise to their world. Over the years Vina had entertained a thousand and one scenarios in which her crewmates had survived, and some looked not unlike this, though she would have afforded them more luxuries than these shabby makeshift huts, the ragged clothes. Most times she endowed them with a little city of their own, in a place where the radiation wasn’t so deadly, where they could coexist with the Talosians without losing who they were.
In some respects, it was what the Talosians might have wished for as well. Christopher Pike’s characterization of “a race of slaves” was made in haste and anger and without sufficient information. The Talosians’ goal, had more than a single human survived, would have been a captivity not quite so harsh as the one he envisioned.
But as Vina saw what her keepers had created on their own this time without her input, she questioned it.
“Why this? Why now?” she asked the Magistrate. “I’m past all this. I’ve finally gotten over what happened to me, and the others. Why bring them back, and like this?”
“There is something you must do for us…” the Magistrate explained.
Thus as the landing party beamed down into the clearing and looked about, orienting themselves, discovering that the mournful singing sound carried on the breeze was caused by the vibrating blue leaves of the hrigee plant—waiting in the wings like an ingenue worried about missing her cue, was Vina.
She looked them over from her vantage point, five humans and a Vulcan, wearing uniforms not unlike those the crew of Columbia had worn (did she dare hope they’d come from Earth?), wanting to study them all equally, learn everything she could about them, since they would determine her fate. But her eye traveled quickly over the Vulcan-looking one, the wry-looking white-haired human, the three interchangeable (in her eyes) youngsters with their equipment packs and their weapons at the ready, and focused on him.
Oh, yes! she thought. Yes, you. Please be real, and not an illusion within the illusion, yet another test of my abilities by my however-benevolent captors, but a flesh-and-blood man to wake the sleeping princess with a kiss!
She hated herself for what she was about to do. But the images of her lost crewmates had startled her. How had the Talosians known to age them to exactly the way they’d look now had they lived? It was cruel. Crueler still that her captors could do such things with their minds but hadn’t been able to help her tormented body when they found her. Eighteen years ago, she told herself. She had kept track, once she was conscious, ambulatory, able to take the first tentative steps, leaning on a Talosian’s arm, through the tunnels to daylight, to see the sky. Why she had insisted on seeing the sky she didn’t know, since she was doomed to never leave this place.
Focus on the here and now, she told herself, all her attention on Christopher Pike, once the Magistrate had briefed her. You mustn’t lose him. Everything depends on his seeing you as the woman of his dreams—nubile, vulnerable, quintessentially feminine. It is he or no one, because the chance of another Earth ship ever venturing this far is…well, no chance at all.
Terrified lest she fail, she found her voice. “You appear to be healthy and int
elligent, Captain. A prime specimen.”
Oh, good beginning! she chided herself even as the words were barely out of her mouth. You’ve been among the Talosians too long and have forgotten the nuances of ordinary human discourse. What now?
But the Magistrate had compensated by giving “Theo” the next line (“You’ll have to forgive her, Captain. She’s spent her entire life among a group of aging scientists”), and Pike was put off only for a moment.
And later, with his hand in hers (yes, real. The touch of a human hand after all these years! She wanted to weep with joy, but she had a job to do), she had led him toward the lift, light-footed, winsome, diverting him:
“Can you feel it?” she had asked him, alluring, gesturing toward something that wasn’t there, hoping the Magistrate or one of the others would supply some vision so irresistible that even if he didn’t find her attractive—though his eyes told her he did—it would be sufficient to stay him long enough, just long enough. “Here, and here…”
Is he really here? some corner of her mind still nagged at her even as the warmth of his hand reassured her, or have they conjured him out of my dreams? Because he is so exactly right, I cannot believe that in all the galaxy, at least the human parts—
No, wait, they couldn’t have—! Had they searched among the ships passing parsecs distant and chosen him especially because they knew he would please her?
They had come to know her at her most vulnerable. In the early months she had literally been reborn under their tutelage, lying in a darkened and especially warm room, formless as an egg in an incubator, her mind that of an infant struggling to learn a new language. They had learned all her secrets, focusing especially on the romantic entanglements of her past, seeking a common theme, a role model for her to choose from in order to best encourage her to propagate her species.
That her damaged and displaced internal organs might not be capable of such propagation had not occurred to them. Or did they, despite their amnesia about so much of their technology, have the capability to foster human offspring as they did their own, in vitro, floating in rows upon rows of little liquid chambers awaiting a need—a librarian or archivist or technician or even a magistrate who was dying and had to be replaced in order for the species to nominally continue—before their growth was accelerated and they were “born”?
How many offspring had they hoped to produce from a single human pair? Did they understand that there could have been but one generation, which could not interbreed? Had they even thought it through that far? Or had they scanned surrounding space for passing vessels until they found one captained by a human male who fit her ideal and, hoping she would lead the way, planned to lure the entire crew down one by one or in groups, to form a human colony?
The thought that they had chosen Christopher Pike expressly because she would find him irresistible filled her with horror, and she almost stumbled as she led him up the incline, hearing the lift approaching. Then the Archivist and the Librarian with their sleeping potion emerged and downed him and—No! she wanted to cry. It’s too soon; I’m not prepared for this! Too late. They had him now, the lift closing, moving downward even as the rest of his crewmates realized what had happened, too late. Too late.
And if he refused to cooperate? She tortured herself with this one last question. They would not let him go, in any event; of that she was certain. But if he refused her, what was gained? Instead of one desolately lonely human on this world, there would be two.
“You can begin with the obvious,” the Magistrate schooled her while they waited for the sleeping potion to wear off and for Pike to awaken in his cage. “Try to lure him with your sexuality. That, as we have read in the records, is usually the best approach in attracting a human male.”
“Oh, don’t believe everything you read!” she’d tried. Amazingly, she hadn’t lost her sense of humor in all this time, though she’d had little opportunity to keep it sharp.
“If that is inadequate, the appeal to pity is usually effective,” the Magistrate went on. “Or helplessness. The Damsel in Distress, I believe it is called.”
“I never was very good at improv,” she tried one last feeble joke. The Magistrate was impervious and, beyond hir, though she could not see them, Vina knew that the minds of other Talosians were watching, listening, waiting. It was all on her fragile, damaged shoulders. She forced herself to calm. “If he doesn’t want me…if I fail…” She was almost afraid to ask the question. “…what will become of him?”
“I would suggest,” the Magistrate said solemnly, turning on hir heel to walk away, “that you do not fail.”
They’d stacked the deck, skewed the outcome, by setting her down at first within his memory of the battle with the Kaylar on Rigel VII. Call it the Actor’s Nightmare in real time—she did not know the script, though at the sight of the huge, fanged creature with the deadly battle-ax searching for them, drawing ever closer, she learned it quickly enough. The voluminous skirts and silly soft boots hampered her; she’d have rather had hiking shorts and a decent pair of trainers, but the Talosians were not obliging.
Very well then, play the Damsel in Distress, barely able to run in such ridiculous clothes, though she did make some use of the oversized broadsword and a nasty spiked mace she found littering the floor of the castle once they reached it. But he kept rationalizing it, questioning her, looking for explanations instead of playing along.
She’d had to force the illusion, clumsily (she was a dancer; she was never clumsy) knocking something over to attract the Kaylar’s attention so the human would fight and stop talking at her, feel the illusion as he was meant to. After that, nothing to do but play her role, frail little female fighting off the twice-her-size Kaylar as best she could and, failing that, letting loose the obligatory scream.
She had always hated movie heroines who screamed. But more was riding on this than a part in the director’s next film, so scream she did. It spurred him to greater action, and he killed the Kaylar and the illusion ended.
That had been the easy part. But back in the cage, she’d fumbled her lines (“Why are you here?” “To please you”), come dangerously close to revealing too much, and she’d been recalled.
“No, don’t punish me!” she shrieked, then vanished. Appeal to pity, indeed.
Because that was another lie. The Talosians had never tortured her. At first, recovering from her injuries, she’d suffered horrible neuropathic pain, so that anytime she stopped dreaming her nerve endings would scream at her, and the pain in her head, a kind of psychic rebound syndrome, became unbearable. The only cure had been to re-immerse herself in dream, for years, until the pain at last subsided.
It was the memory of that pain she was trading on when she heard the Magistrate’s voice in her thoughts (Enough! Answer no more of his questions! The first illusion has failed to convince him. Retreat, now, and we will instruct you further!) and, just to assure authenticity, one of the Talosians had reminded her of past pain and she began to writhe and scream: “No, don’t punish me—!”
…and found herself back in her own chamber with the Magistrate looking on.
“There!” she said, more than a little out of breath. “Did I do a good job? Was I convincing? After all this time away from other humans, I wasn’t sure…”
The Magistrate was observing Pike on the screen following Vina’s disappearance, the dress she’d worn clutched in his hands. The human seemed distraught.
“You were excellent,” the Magistrate assured her. “He was completely taken in by you, if not by the memory of the battle. His desire to protect you has been enhanced. You have done well, for now.”
“God, I wish I felt better about it!” Vina cried. “I feel dirty, disgusted. No,” she said off the Magistrate’s mildly puzzled look. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Vina…if the experiment is to succeed, it is essential for our specimens to be happy.”
She had shouted then, fists clenched, wishing she could hit someth
ing.
“I’m not a ‘specimen’! Don’t you ever call me that again! I am human—as real, as important, as any one of you. More important in some respects, because you need me now as much as I needed you in the beginning.”
The Magistrate frowned slightly. “Without us, you would have died.”
Vina made an almost animal noise of frustration then. “And I can’t tell you how many times I wish I had!”
The Magistrate’s frown deepened. “Do you still feel that way now?”
She had to think about that. “Since I’ve seen…him? No. For the first time in a long time, I have something to live for.” She shook her head grimly. “But don’t make me regret it!”
A day later, she would have died for it, too. When Number One set her phaser for a forced-chamber explosion, and Pike ordered Vina back underground, she had refused.
“I suppose if they have one human, they might try again,” she’d said without hesitation, willing to sacrifice herself…for them, for him, for anything except a return to solitude.
Christopher Pike had seen many kinds of courage in his lifetime, but Vina’s moved him in a way no one else’s had, and he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Nor could he avoid the echo of another Talosian’s words:
“Your unsuitability has condemned the Talosian race to eventual death. Is this not sufficient?”
At the time, still angry (“And that’s it? No apology?”), he’d shrugged it off as not his problem. His obligation was first and foremost to his crew. He’d proven that when he’d ignored the first automated distress call. Without proof of survivors, his crew’s well-being took precedence. Only when the Talosians upped the ante by creating the illusion of the survivors’ camp had he relented.
Burning Dreams Page 22
