There was a fear among the Trill that any aliens posed a potential threat to the symbionts, who were fragile, defenseless creatures. Lela had heard, during her years of preparation for public service, that the contact with the Vulcans had led to a lot of changes in the government’s policies concerning the symbionts. Even the access to the pools was guarded now.
There had been no other contact with aliens except the Vulcans. Trill continued to keep itself isolated, rebuffing any attempt at contact by aliens entering the system.
But no ship had actually assumed orbit of Trill since the Vulcans had come.
“Has anyone contacted the ship?” she asked the scientist beside her. He shrugged.
Then Sitlas saw her. He was a slender man with dark spots that ringed his face and made him look exotic. “Lela,” he said.
She made her way toward him. He was an older, unjoined Trill, but he ran the space center with an efficiency that could not be matched.
“Sitlas,” she said. “What’s been happening?”
“We’ve activated the defense grid,” he said. “And we’ve sent the message.”
The message. It was a compromise that the council had made after the infighting that resulted from the Vulcans’ first visit. The message stated simply that Trill did not want contact with outsiders, and that all alien ships were asked to bypass the planet.
“Any response?” Lela asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “We don’t even know if they can respond. We’ve sent the message in all known languages.”
She looked back at the ship. She knew that the automated defense grid was monitoring it, as were dozens of large telescopes all over the planet. Yet the ship seemed remarkably unconcerned.
“You’d think if it got the message, it would leave,” she said.
He nodded.
“Sitlas,” someone said from the main control room. “We need you.”
“Let’s go,” he said to her. He had to ask her to come, she realized. She was the only government representative in the building. She followed him into the main control room.
It was smaller than the observatory, except for the screen which covered one wall. The ship looked even lighter and more feathery here, the glitter of its white sides artificially bright. There were dozens of people at consoles, all of them looking down, none of them focusing on the ship at all.
“Sitlas,” said a young man sitting behind one of the main consoles.
Sitlas went over to him. The young man looked at Lela as if she were a curiosity, then looked away. “We’ve gotten a response.”
“We’ve never had a response before,” Sitlas said. He pressed a spot on the corner of the console. An image filled with static and distortions replaced the ship on the screen. Lela could barely make out an alien covered in what appeared to be white fur, with long tufts rising out of its head. It did have eyes, though perfectly round and green, above what appeared to be a muzzle.
It spoke a language she didn’t understand, but something—clearly from the alien ship, and not from inside the space center—attempted a translation.
“Come in need. Have [undecipherable]. Will trade.”
Come in need. Lela frowned.
“Play them our message again,” Sitlas said to the young man.
“Wait,” Lela said. “Shouldn’t we try to clarify their message?”
“They’re talking about trade,” Sitlas said. He waved a hand. The young man pressed an area on his console.
“It didn’t sound that way to me,” Lela said. “Maybe we should try to translate this ourselves.”
“My orders are specific,” he said. “We’re to turn away all ships except those from Vulcan.”
“But he said they came in need.”
“His bad translation said that.”
Lela stared at Sitlas. After a moment, he looked away from her. “All right,” he said. “We’ll see if we can find out what he really said.”
She smiled. “Good.”
“The second message has been sent,” the young man said. “They aren’t leaving orbit.”
Lela sighed. “Maybe they’re in trouble.”
“Or maybe they’re just trying to see how serious we are about wanting to be left alone,” Sitlas said.
Lela stared at the ship up on the screen. “How serious are we?”
Sitlas said nothing, but she already knew the answer. The procedure was to send the message and then to ignore the encroaching ship. If the ship attacked, Trill’s defense grid protected the planet. So far, that had never been necessary. All the other ships passing within close range of Trill heard the message and continued on.
“I think anyone who is just interested in trade would be leaving right now,” Lela said.
“Perhaps,” Sitlas said. “But they’re aliens. Who knows what they’ll do?”
The ship was still orbiting the following morning. Lela called a meeting of the council, the first time she had ever tried anything like that. Junior members were not supposed to call meetings, but she felt that delaying any longer would be a serious mistake. She had learned, in lower level jobs, that the longer the people in charge waited to make a decision, the greater the chance of making a mistake.
She was the first to arrive at the council chambers. The building was one of the oldest in the city. A long narrow two-story section housed offices and a majestic corridor that led to the council chambers proper. The chambers were in a huge, oval shaped room—supposedly the largest room on Trill—with an opaque dome that rose several stories above the floor. The effect was one of light and power, of age and beauty. Whenever Lela entered through the ceremonial double doors, she felt as if she had stepped back in time.
In some ways, she had. One of the council’s many debates was on appropriating funds to build a new chamber, one more equipped to handle modern life. Lela knew that sometime in her lifetime—or more accurately, the Dax symbiont’s lifetime—a new chamber would be built.
She would fight to keep the old one.
Lela loved this room. It was here, when she had visited as a schoolchild, that she decided she would make her future in politics. Fortunately the standardized tests showed that her abilities bore this dream out. She was well suited to a career here, a career she had known she would love.
That love had not changed, despite the difficulties of being a council member. As she sat in the back, where the youngest members were required to stay, she dreamed of moving down to the more important seats. The leader’s podium stood at the very center of the room, rising out of the floor on antigravs and turning slowly whenever the leader spoke. The podium was made of acelon, a rare pearlescent material found deep within the ice caves. Before each member’s seat was an oval-shaped acelon desk that mirrored the opaque dome, making it look as if the council members sat behind pieces of the sky.
“Lela Dax.”
She turned. Darzen Odan stood in the doorway. He was an officious man who wore his hair long, hiding most of his spots as if he were somehow ashamed of them. He was as short as she was, and his dark eyes sparked with intelligence, an intelligence he often used to verbally assault anyone who opposed him.
“Perhaps you did not pay attention to your first year council training,” he said. “It is your elders who call the meetings, those who have been in the council for more than one lifetime.”
She straightened. Next to Odan, who had had at least seven hosts that she knew of, she felt like a child. She had felt that way around the joined when she had been unjoined, and now she felt that way with anyone whose symbiont had had other hosts.
Odan’s dark eyes glistened, as if he knew how she felt and was exploiting it.
“And yet you’re here,” she said.
“Only to remind you that you do not have the authority to call this meeting.”
She shook her head slightly, biting the inside of her cheek to control her temper. “Then I’ll go back to the space center and deal with the crisis myself.”
“Crisis?”
That had gotten his attention.
“There’s a ship orbiting Trill,” she said. “It arrived last night. Surely you’ve heard by now.”
Clearly he hadn’t. And if Odan hadn’t heard, none of the other members had heard either. She found this strange. They had so many sources within the political structure that they sometimes forgot there was a universe outside of it. Perhaps that was why Lela had the run of the space center; none of the other council members thought it mattered in the grand political scheme of things.
“If indeed there’s a ship orbiting,” he said, making it sound as if she were lying to him, “then it should be told to leave us in peace.”
“It has been,” she said. “The center sent its usual message, and the ship responded with one of its own. The center sent a message again, and the ship still has not left.”
“A message of its own?”
Lela felt her cheeks flush. He was toying with her. If this became important information, he’d have it, and he’d take credit for it.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I wish to discuss in front of the entire council.”
“Then I’ll call them to order,” he said. “None of them were going to come, not realizing, of course, that this is actually an important matter.”
She bit back her response. Showing him how easy it was to upset her wouldn’t help her in the council at all, “You might want to tell them to hurry,” she said. “This isn’t something that’s going to wait for the council’s usual slowness.”
He raised both eyebrows at her, as if surprised by her bluntness. Then he bowed slightly and went through the door into the corridor, leaving her alone in the chamber.
She let out a small breath. She hadn’t been this angry in a long time. But Odan always found a way to get to her. He’d hated her campaign—“The disenfranchised unjoined?” he’d said. “As if what they want really matters. Long lasting change, as you shall see, Lela, is what counts. Continuity over several lifetimes”—and like so many others, he disliked the fact that a fourth woman had made it onto the council.
Trill tradition demanded that men rule the council—joined men—as they had done for generations. Men’s roles and women’s roles were dramatically different when the first council was formed. It was believed then that a symbiont would go from male host to female host and experience vast differences between the genders—that this was necessary to become a well-rounded Trill. But the joined Trills soon realized that while the genders had their biological differences, and those differences did make for a change in perspective, those perspectives merged over the course of time—and many hosts. By the time a Trill had the memories of several lifetimes, half as a man and half as a woman, understanding the other gender’s perspective became relatively easy.
Despite the fact that Odan had been both male and female in his past lives, he honored tradition above all. He belonged to a more conservative party, one that believed rapid change—defined as any change that took place within two generations—was dangerous to Trill, and threatened the very life that he had sworn, as a councilman to protect.
Odan returned within a few moments, and walked past her down the stairs, taking his seat in the center of the chamber. For all his lives, he was himself a relatively new member to the council. Politics was something that had suited him only one other time in the past.
Lela remained by the door. She knew that Odan hadn’t told the others that he agreed with her. She suspected that his announcement of the meeting had left her out entirely. So she greeted everyone who came in, whether she got along with them or not, thanking them for coming on such short notice. Part of her felt ridiculous, as if she were giving a party and had only invited people she disliked. Some of them nodded, most avoided her, and the rest greeted her with nervous smiles.
Odan ignored the whole thing, waiting at his desk for the meeting to start.
Finally all of the seats were filled but hers. Dax crossed the back row, and sat down behind her desk just as Lytus, head of the council, crossed the lower floor. He was a tall, lanky man with the thinness of a scholar. In two quick steps, he took his place behind the speaker’s podium.
As soon as he touched it, the podium rose. It went high enough to be directly across from the center seats. Lela frowned. Lytus was stopping directly across from Odan. Lytus should have gone all the way to the top and stopped in front of Lela.
“I give the floor to Councillor Odan to explain the urgency of this meeting,” Lytus said.
Lela stood as Odan did, but she spoke quicker, projecting so that her voice echoed throughout the chamber. “Forgive me, Mr. Speaker,” she said, “but you should give the floor to me. I’m the one who called the meeting, although I did so improperly. Councillor Odan was kind enough to help me when it became clear that I had made a mistake in protocol.”
Everyone in the chamber was looking at her, some with horror, some with barely repressed amusement. Her move was a risky one. If Odan contradicted her, he would show the other council members that she was unimportant. He would make this issue his own, and possibly corrupt it. He would also take away what little power she had.
It would be the first volley in a protracted political war, one fought with polite corrections and subtle interruptions and quiet outright lies. Lela knew she could win this battle—she hadn’t told Odan everything and they both knew it—but she didn’t have enough resources or experience to win the war.
Of course, if Odan did play along, it would look as if they had formed an alliance, something that would disturb his followers.
Odan stared at her a moment too long. She found that she was holding her breath. His eyes narrowed, and she thought he would renounce her. Then he bowed gracefully, and she let out the air she had been holding.
“I yield my time,” he said in his most penetrating voice, “to our newest newly joined legislator, Lela Dax.”
His barbed politeness made her flush. She had underestimated him yet again. While yielding the floor, he had reminded everyone not only of her youth and inexperience—in life as well as politics—but of the fact that he did not necessarily approve of her.
She made herself nod at him, though, and smile as if they were old friends. “I thank my colleague Darzen Odan for his unselfish assistance in this matter,” she said, relegating him to the inferior position. “I had the good fortune to be at the space center last night when this crisis began. ...”
Within the next few minutes, she explained the orbiting ship, and its strange response to Trill’s leave-us-in-peace message. She concluded with:
“Esteemed members of the council, I am worried. The aliens’ response to our initial message was translated by their own programs to be this—‘come in need. Have’—and here what they said was something we haven’t been able to translate. Then they ended the message with ‘will trade.’ We are working on our own translation of their words, but have come up with nothing better yet. And we haven’t figured out what the missing phrase is. I checked before the meeting.”
The other councillors stared at her as if they couldn’t believe what she was saying. Not because an orbiting ship made them incredulous, but because she had brought this before them in the first place. Odan, who was still standing—apparently he hadn’t yielded all of his time—had a slight smirk on his face.
Lela gestured toward them all with her right hand. “I am concerned, as you should be, about the first part of their message. Come in need. We must find out if they’re orbiting us because they’re in trouble and they cannot go on.”
“If that is the case,” Lytus said, “then what does this will trade mean?”
“Perhaps it means they want some natural resource that they believe we’ll give them, for the right price,” Odan said. His comment was sly: Without saying anything he revived all the arguments against the alliance with the Vulcans. Lela saw the more conservative members of the council—the ones she knew disapproved of the Vulcans—nodding.
“We don’t know what any o
f it means,” Lela said. “We won’t know that until we contact them again. I worry that, because of our silence, a ship full of beings might be in trouble. They could be ill or dying in our orbit. We shouldn’t let our concerns for Trill outweigh our natural compassion.”
“And what if we discover that they are simple businesspeople?” one of the councillors asked.
“Or worse,” said another, “thieves.”
“They wouldn’t be thieves,” Lela said, “not and contact us this way. And we’d discover if they have other motives while they’re still in orbit. We will keep the defense grid on.”
Lytus hadn’t raised the podium to Lela’s level, apparently in silent communion with Odan. “If I understand you correctly,” Lytus said, “You would like us to send a new message to these aliens, asking them what they’re about.”
“Yes,” Lela said.
“You realize that violates the resolutions passed two decades ago, forbidding contact with any new species.”
“Except the Vulcans,” Odan said in his kindest voice. Another jab, reminding her that she hadn’t been a legislator then—that she had been little more than a child.
“Yes, I realize that,” Lela said. “But a resolution is not a law, and it can be changed with a simple majority vote. That’s why I brought this to the council. I think we have an obligation to make certain that these aliens are all right—”
“An obligation?” Lytus asked. “To whom?”
“To ourselves,” Lela said. “We cannot isolate ourselves forever.”
“Why not?” another councillor asked.
They all seemed to be staring at her, as if none of them could understand her concern.
“There are two reasons,” she said. “The first is that we should help other beings in need.”
STAR TREK: DS9 - The Lives of Dax Page 5
