Before they left Luthia, Keren had shown Shar a regional map of the Hebshu Peninsula, one of Vanìmel’s few land-based farming provinces. The two-dimensional version of the peninsula showed the trail as leading from the landing strip, cutting switchbacks across the steep mountain foothills, curving sharply near the summit, and dropping into the valley gap where they would make a swift descent into the peninsula’s chief agricultural region. Simple enough. For a nimble-footed tathrac, perhaps.
“I have the remote transporters activated, Keren,” Shar panted. “We could use them.”
Keren spun around and walked backward, never making a misstep. “Consider this part of your research. Firsthand understanding of the environmental conditions.” Laughing, she turned and skipped up the trail.
“And the farmers and herders have to bring their goods down this track to ship them?” Shar called. He couldn’t fathom any vehicle successfully navigating these ruts.
Keren, deftly picking her way around mud puddles in the path, laughed. “Our transporters don’t have the range yours do and weather conditions aren’t always ideal—atmospheric interference and all that. When the volcanoes go off there’s further interference—”
“And the most valuable resources you’re transporting are dairy products and animal hair, correct?” Food made sense. The value of the hair puzzled him, but Thriss had always accused him of being obtuse about fashion.
“Excuse me, Thirishar ch’Thane, you of many locks, could it be that the quantity of hair on your head impairs your brain function? Why do you think hair is such a status symbol among my people? If it were easy to come by, why would it be so prized?” She tossed her long braids to make her point.
“I apologize. Questions of commerce are lost on me. My friend Nog has a much better grasp of such subtleties than I do.” Drained, Shar paused and leaned back against a boulder. “I’m sorry, but I’m not used to this gravity—or the thin air at this elevation.”
Keren backtracked and joined him. She closed her eyes, threw back her head and soaked in the sunlight. “It’s always lovely after a storm. The skies are so brilliantly green they almost hurt to look at. And the smoke-wisps of clouds…I love it here.”
Ocean breezes blew steadily, tossing his hair, chilling his antennae. He, too, turned his face toward the sun, seeking warmth. “So why not live planetside?”
“Choices for Wanderers are sorely limited. I could have learned aquaculture or raised livestock. I could have tried to work my way up the ranks of the serving staff in a House or tried to find a noble lady to be my patron. None of those things appealed to me. As soon as I came of age, I left the House where I was raised and went to school on Luthia.”
“But you chose your life’s work. You didn’t have someone standing over you telling you what you could and could not do.” Shar cringed inwardly, remembering the series of arguments he’d had with Charivretha about going to the Academy before the shelthreth. Dizhei and her put-out sighs, Thriss pretending that she hadn’t been crying, Anichent spending longer hours in the observatory. Pleasing any one of them was difficult; pleasing all four was impossible.
“I want you to see something, Thirishar.” Throwing her cloak to the side, she untied her blouse cord and pushed the fabric down her arm, revealing her bare shoulder. She turned her back to Shar so he could have a clear view. Above her protruding shoulder blade, her gray-brown skin was rough with three scars each outlined in black dye. “When I was five years out of the water, they strapped me, facedown, on a board and burned those markings into my back with a surgical laser. To make sure the meaning was clear, they injected black dye into the scars. Every Wanderer female is so branded. It’s the Houseborn way of assuring that we are marked, set apart. That way, Houseborn males have no excuse. They can’t take a fertile Wanderer female as a consort and be deceived.” Keren pulled her blouse back over her shoulder and replaced her cloak.
“You see, Shar, my choices about what I can do with my life are limited. Could I ever do what you’re doing? Explore the universe? Travel far from my homeworld and find a different life somewhere else? Unlikely. Even here, I can’t take a consort. Not really, anyway.” She pointed out a moss-covered monolith in the distance, rising out of the surf, residual morning fogs not yet fully burned off. “Close by those rock formations is an entrance to a series of grottos. They’re only accessible by sea—and half the year, they’re submerged when the glacial runoff from the Pyoyong River comes from the mountains, but for centuries, Wanderers have used those caverns as spawning grounds.”
“I thought that—”
“Yes, Wanderer males are sterilized as younglings, but Wanderer females can’t be sterilized without sustaining permanent physiological damage. Too many Houseborn females want us as servants to risk killing us off. We’re compassionately force-fed hormones from our youth, supposedly preventing our reproductive systems from maturing. But the supplements don’t always work, like in my case, and so we submit ourselves to injections once we reach adulthood. But there are those of my sisters who don’t comply with the law and sneak away to mate with Houseborn males.”
“That’s not legal, either,” Shar observed. “The taboos for crossing castes are as old as your recorded history.”
“True. Houseborn males breaking the law are executed. Some pairs, however, are willing to take the risk. They can’t have an official union so they take a chance and share the one thing they can.”
Shar exhaled deeply. “This I understand.”
“What do you mean?” Keren asked.
“The lengths your sisters take to be with the one they love. The one they choose to love. How trying it must be for you.” He flashed to a memory of his own Time of Knowing, when he received the identities of his bondmates, how terrifying and exhilarating it was to find out who he would be bonded to. What if it was someone he hated? Or someone dull-witted and stupid? In hindsight, his youthful fears seemed simplistic.
“Ah! Ensign ch’Thane has a consort waiting for him back in the Alpha Quadrant,” Keren teased. “Tell me about it while we walk.” She dragged him to his feet and they resumed walking up the hillside.
“It’s a long story. Something we don’t usually talk about outside our species.”
“But you seem to come from such an open society,” Keren said.
“True, but even my people are unique within the Federation. Our physiology, our rigid social customs dictate that we keep to ourselves those issues relating to family life.”
“I’ve heard Ensign Juarez use the word ‘family,’ is that like a House?”
“A smaller unit-where adults nurture young who are usually related to them. Because most humanoids where I come from carry their offspring within them until they are ready to live semi independently, the identities of the parents are rarely in question. Such children can’t properly develop apart from their parents, unlike Yrythny.”
“It would be as if I returned from my year in the water to live with the consorts who laid me,” Keren clarified.
“Yes. Exactly,” Shar said, thinking for a brief moment that being raised in a large group—like the Yrythny younglings were—might be easier than being tied to a parent. Pleasing his zhavey was complicated, but he couldn’t imagine living his life without her.
“What about your family, Thirishar?” Keren prodded gently.
From his first night on Luthia, Keren had openly shared her life with him. The underground. Her career. Shar’s sense of fair play dictated that he ought to reciprocate. After all, wasn’t he prying into the most intimate threads holding their society together? He took a deep breath. “On my world, we don’t have ‘pairs,’ we have quads. I have three bondmates.”
“Three?” Keren looked surprised.
“Shathrissía, Thavanichent, and Vindizhei,” he said, seeing their faces flash before him as he said their names. “You have two sex chromosomes. Andorians have four sex chromosomes—we have four genders. It’s challenging for most two-sex species to delineate the
physiological differences between us, so we accept being called
‘he’ and ‘she’ rather than try to explain why those pronouns are an oversimplification.”
“What are you supposed to be called?”
Shar smiled and rapidly reeled off a series of Andorii words, enjoying the confused expression on Keren’s face as he said them.
“Do you mind if I think of you as ‘he’? Like Jeshoh is a ‘he.’” Keren asked sincerely, “I don’t mean any offense by it.”
“I’ve spent so many years away from Andor that I rarely think about it anymore. Sometimes, I even think of myself as ‘he.’”
“I don’t know what’s harder—not having any parents—as we Yrythny—or having four.”
Shar agreed, but felt that was a discussion for another time. “Among my kind, producing offspring isn’t as simple as a female laying eggs and a male fertilizing them, as it is with your people.”
Keren considered him thoughtfully. “I can imagine. Tell me about it. We have a long way to go.”
They had cleared another stretch of trail as they walked; Shar admitted to himself that talking had made the hike go faster. Why not?“In recent times, my people endured a horrific biological holocaust, resulting in wide-scale chromosomal mutations. More zhaveys miscarried; more offspring were born with trisomy or hexsomy complications. In short, reproduction became much more difficult, when it was learned that the window of an individual’s fertility had narrowed to a scant five years.
“Our scientists initiated a comprehensive gene-mapping project. Every family’s genetic history was decoded, recorded and added to a database. The scientists’ intention was to track genetic drift, to note when mutations occurred and to repair what abnormalities they could.”
“I see why the Other’s Turn Key is so fascinating to you,” she said.
Shar nodded. “It might be that the genetic engineering that allowed the Yrythny to successfully evolve might also be applied to shoring up Andorian chromosomal problems.”
Keren latched onto this idea of gene mapping, peppering Shar with questions. The more he talked to Keren, the more he hoped that this trip would help him locate the information he needed to help the Yrythny. Intuitively, he knew he’d find their answers written into the elegant helices of deoxyribonucleic acid, though gene mapping hadn’t readily yielded any solutions for his people. He explained this to Keren.
“In spite of science’s efforts to prevent or correct genetic disorders,” Shar went on, “our reproductive problems persisted; population numbers continued slipping.
“Another approach was taken: instead of trying to genetically engineer a way out of the problem, scientists used the database to match mates with the highest likelihood of success. When I was born, my genetic profile was matched with those of three compatible bondmates.”
Incredulous, Keren clicked her tongue against her teeth. “You didn’t choose your consorts?”
Shar shook his head. “And once the matches are made, our focus is on providing a stable homelife for a child, placing the child in a community where he can grow up naturally with his bondmates. Without knowing I was bound to them, I’d worked side by side with my bondmates in school—since I was two and three years old.”
“For all the trouble your people went to, I hope it worked.”
If only you knew how complicated that statement was, Shar thought, recalling years of classwork, all-night study sessions, papers and days on end of lab work, focused on just that question. But Keren didn’t need to know how the answer to her question had shaped his life. This time was about her world—not his. “Our population stabilized for a time, but in recent generations, new genetic ailments appeared. Weaknesses in certain chromosomal segments left us vulnerable to a host of maladies; these new mutations proved elusive to identify and fix. Bondmate matching has becoming merely a stopgap measure.”
“And so…” the sober expression on Keren’s face revealed that she expected what Shar would say next.
“Barring a permanent solution, we face extinction.” Why is it easier to say these things to Keren, a stranger, and not Nog or any of my other Starfleet colleagues? It felt good to say the words aloud, especially since he usually checked every word he said, being careful to shield his people from outsider curiosity. Not once had Keren made a face or snickered; Shar couldn’t say the same for several of his Academy roommates.
The unique dynamics of Andorian sexuality meant the most intimate parts of their lives could easily be misunderstood or exploited. In truth, Andorian familial structures demanded a far more conservative approach to sexuality than most humanoids employed. Shar had been amazed by the number of partners humanoids “tried on” before finding the right fit. Because his gender identity wasn’t easily quantifiable to those enmeshed in cultures that defined reproductive relationships by twos, it had been easier to rebuff interest expressed by his peers, either as a potential romantic partner or in his unusual physiology, than try to explain himself. Modesty was a natural outgrowth of his culture. Keren seemed to understand that.
The telling of his story lasted the duration of the hike and they arrived at Valley Gap about the time he’d finished. Finding a relatively dry spot in a hollowed-out tree root, they broke for lunch; Shar ate another ration bar, Keren brought bread and fruit. Sunshine broke through the towering evergreen forest canopy, dappling the scrub brush and carpet of fallen leaves in light and shade. Occasional wind gusts rustled the highest boughs sending dried needles and flaking bark scattering to the ground.
Keren turned to Shar, studying him. “Just so I understand what we’ve been talking about for the last hour, your life is oriented around creating a new life with your bondmates? Having offspring?”
“It’s supposed to be. Every choice was made to better facilitate my contribution to creating a child.”
“Supposed to be?”
“I have rather…radical ideas about how to help my people.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” She offered a toothy grin. “But surely such sentiments aren’t unique among your kind? Many must feel as you do.”
“Feeling as I do and acting on those feelings are very different things. I want to be brave enough to ask every question.” ‘But the answers are at home, with the shelthreth,’Zhavey had said. And risk losing an unprecedented opportunity? He recalled a story about a pharmacologist seeking a treatment for the nezti flu. Months in the lab yielded nothing. To clear his head, he’d taken a vacation. And while on that vacation, he discovered a rare plant that made the difference in developing a cure. To Shar, life was about countless intuitive choices, and listening to his inner voice had guided him surely. Choosing between Defiant’ s mission and the shelthreth was choosing between two correct choices. Shar had followed his intuition here, to Vanìmel. He now had to trust that in time he would find the answers.
“I can only imagine your claustrophobia,” Keren said.
“When I was younger, the stories my zhavey told me were moralistic parables and fables, praising the virtues of living for the needs of the Whole over the needs of the individual,” Shar said, walking beside Keren. “My life’s purpose is to live for the Whole. And yet, I believe that as an individual I can still make a contribution to the Whole.”
“In this area, Shar, we aren’t that different,” Keren said finally. “I’ve never known anything but a collective life. Now I want to know something else. I want to choose my own destiny. What I wonder, though, is why you haven’t done what your people want? Go home, start a family—and then once those obligations are met, you’re free.”
“Because no matter where I might go, I’d still be bound. My child’s life, my bondmates—the only way I can have the life that I choose”—maybe a life with Thriss, he amended mentally —“is if I help solve the problems facing my people.”
“I see,” Keren said. She pointed out the road ahead. “We’re only a short way from the valley now.”
From the gap, the whole valley panor
ama spread out like patchwork; neatly groomed fields, rows of vegetables, farm buildings in miniature, herds of shmshu grazing. A ribbon of water snaked through the land, reflecting silver in the noon sun.
“I think, Ensign ch’Thane, that the Other did bring you,” Keren said, quirking a half-smile.”
Shar didn’t feel compelled to respond, though his antennae vibrated inexplicably with an excitement. There are answers here, he thought.
Through an archway of densely foliated tree branches overhanging the road, Shar and Keren began their descent.
One advantage in dealing with Ferengi was their sense of pragmatism. Whatever was needed to do the deal was accepted without question. Nog hadn’t so much as creased his forehead when Vaughn had interrupted a trying diagnostic with a request for a private conference off the Avaril. He’d delegated the remaining tasks to Permenter and Leishman, and followed Vaughn down to the Core.
In a dark corner of the crowded casino, Vaughn waited for the server to fill his drink order before raising a finger to indicate that he wanted Nog to refrain from speaking. Taking out his tricorder, Vaughn surreptitiously ran a scan across the booth and table before relaxing. He pulled a chip-size device from a hidden fold in his jacket, pressed a button that started a light flashing and placed it between them on the bench.
“A signal-jamming device?” Nog guessed.
Vaughn nodded. “I couldn’t find any indication that there are listening or visual sensors in here, but if you’ve got good tech—”
“You won’t be able to detect them,” Nog finished for him.
“Right. This is a little something Starfleet Intelligence uses sometimes to annoy the Tal Shiar.” Vaughn accepted the drinks and a basket of snacks from the server, paid her with currency that M’Yeoh had provided them and turned back to Nog.
“Before I forget,” Nog said, “I wanted to tell you I sent our report to Colonel Kira this morning. It’s about three days late, but she’ll understand why when she reads it.”
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