The final member of their poker group, helmsman Pedro Ortega, looked confused. “You give out plants as wedding gifts?”
“A marriage is a living thing,” Phlox propounded to the young ensign. “It requires cultivation and attention to remain healthy—yet needs to be hardy enough to survive periods of deprivation and stress. Just like these vines. Plants such as these are traditional engagement gifts for friends of the family—a bit like your old human tradition of giving out cigars at births, though without the, ah, carcinogenic aftereffects. By accepting and tending them, you demonstrate your solidarity with the couple-to-be and their commitment to cultivating the marriage.”
Ortega hefted one of the bulbous plants gingerly, as if it were an unexploded bomb. “So . . . we have to keep these?”
“Oh, not indefinitely. Only until the wedding. Shouldn’t be more than, oh, four months.”
“Oh. Okay.” The young man did not look particularly reassured.
Sato was getting impatient to hear the rest of the good news. “So why is this particular husband-to-be so special?”
Phlox swelled with pride. “His name is Pehle Retab. He’s Antaran.”
Ortega looked around in confusion as the others reacted to the significance of that detail. “I don’t get it.”
Cutler did her job as science officer and provided the exposition. “The Antarans and Denobulans were old enemies. They haven’t had a war in three centuries, but the old resentments remained until about a dozen years ago.”
“It was Phlox who took the first step in healing the rift,” Hoshi added proudly.
“I played a small part, but not without reluctance, I confess,” the doctor added with more modesty. “But the fact that both peoples have taken to reconciliation so swiftly just shows how ready both sides were to move on.”
“But there’s still some bitterness on both sides, right?” Kimura replied, holding a stingvine pot and surveying their quarters for a suitable perch. “A Denobulan actually marrying an Antaran—that’s a statement a lot of people won’t be ready for.”
“Something Vaneel finds irresistible, I’m sure. Oh, she genuinely loves Pehle, but the symbolic value of the marriage appeals to her sense of iconoclasm immensely. I admit I wouldn’t have had the same courage, but it’s something I admire in my daughter.”
Hoshi moved to Phlox and put her hand on his shoulder, holding his eyes silently for a long moment. She could see that this was emotionally complicated for him, since his youngest son, Mettus—Vaneel’s closest sibling in age—was estranged from his family due to his own association with anti-Antaran hate groups. Sato realized, as Phlox must, that Vaneel’s choice was in part a direct repudiation of Mettus’s politics, a reminder of the one great rift in Phlox’s family that he might never heal.
After a moment, Phlox looked away, retreating from that complex truth. “Well, anyway, you’re all invited to the wedding, of course. I’ve already shared the good news with Captain T’Pol, and she’s confident that Admiral Archer will be willing to arrange Endeavour’s schedule accordingly, barring emergencies, of course.”
“We wouldn’t miss it,” Kimura said, still unable to decide where to put the stingvine. Sato took his arm and guided him to the end table in the starboard corner, where it fit perfectly. “Frankly,” the armory officer went on, “I’m still trying to get my head around Denobulan families. Each man has three wives, who have two other husbands each, who have two other wives each, and . . . how does that work?”
Phlox grinned widely. “When we Denobulans finally figure it out, we’ll let you know.” The group shared a hearty laugh, then sat down to play poker. “So tell me,” Phlox went on to Hoshi and Takashi as the latter dealt the cards with practiced grace. “When were you two thinking of setting the date?”
The cards went flying.
April 18, 2165
Ambhat City, Delta IV (Dhei-Lta)
Caroline Paris almost felt guilty.
Captain Shumar was up in orbit at the moment, giving some of Delta IV’s leaders a tour of the U.S.S. Essex—a stolid, dependable ship, but hardly the lap of luxury. Diplomacy demanded that the senior officer of the ship take the lead in negotiating with the planet’s senior officials for diplomatic and trade ties. Which left Paris, as his first officer, with the arduous task of touring Delta’s gorgeous capital city in the company of its extremely attractive mayor and his extremely attractive aides. She and her crewmates—science officer Steven Mullen and armory officer Ahn Chung-hee—had been forced to endure the sensory pleasures of its architecture, its cuisine, its street music (literally, for some of the pathways emitted melodic sounds as one strode upon them), and, most of all, its people. Extremely attractive, incredibly fit people who wore little clothing in these warm climes . . . and who had no inhibitions that the trio of humans had yet discovered.
“Now I know why the Horizon crew kept Delta’s coordinates to themselves,” Ahn murmured to Mullen as the group passed an open-air clothing bazaar where various Deltan customers were changing into and out of various graceful, scanty, and diaphanous robes, right out in the open without a trace of modesty—and leaving no doubt that their hairlessness was not limited to their heads.
“I see what you mean,” Mullen replied, his dark face split by a wide, bright grin. “Who would want to share this?”
Paris, like most people in Starfleet, had heard the lurid spacer’s tales of the Deltans ever since the E.C.S. Horizon had made first contact twenty-two years earlier: a race of bald but spectacularly beautiful humanoids with the unabashed hedonism of a Risian and the raw sexual magnetism of an Orion female. The Boomer crew had declined to reveal its location, offering implausible claims about humanity not being ready for the sheer sexual potency of the Deltans, which had only fed the suspicion that the whole thing was just another Boomer tall tale. Yet Essex had recently run afoul of an unpleasant, warlike bunch called the Carreon, who had obtained low-warp technology from another Boomer ship a decade ago and had begun using it to try to build an interstellar empire (which so far consisted only of a couple of uninhabited systems next to their homeworld). The Carreon had attempted to commandeer Essex and use it to strike at a neighboring race they declared their mortal enemies—a race whose description had matched the Horizon crew’s claims about the Deltans. After easily thwarting the Carreon’s rather primitive takeover attempt, Captain Shumar had decided to track the Deltans down and see what it was that the Carreon found so objectionable. Shumar’s general hail had evoked a friendly reply and an invitation for Essex to visit their planet, which they called Dhei, in the V2292 Ophiuchi system, which they called Lta. Apparently it had been Horizon’s Captain Mayweather who had simplified the compound name to “Delta.”
According to the Carreon, the Deltans were a race of effeminate weaklings who scorned the noble arts of war, yet whose technological superiority made them the greatest existential threat ever faced by civilization—beings repulsive to all good Carreon, yet able to lead good Carreon astray with their alluring ways. Digging through the oxymoronic propaganda, it seemed the Carreon’s animosity arose partly from a clash of cultural mores and primarily from their desire for several resource-rich star systems to which the Deltans had a prior claim by millennia. Delta was an ancient, advanced civilization, but its people had turned inward long ago, feeling their age of spaceflight had brought them all the answers they needed about the material universe. Now they led a more contemplative life, seeking higher, less tangible forms of enlightenment. But there was nothing ascetic about them; they celebrated passion as wholeheartedly as the Vulcans renounced it, seeing the flesh and its sensations as inseparable from the spirit.
And they made no effort to hide it from outsiders, as Paris and the others were discovering. Their tour of the verdant, open capital city now led them to one of its many lush park grounds, this one dominated by a wide, low stage on which a number of Deltans were participating in . . . Paris resisted he
r initial impulse to call it an orgy, for that implied something lurid and vulgar, while this was somehow more rarefied, a balletic piece of performance art. She felt intensely aroused as she watched, to be sure, but somehow it wasn’t for the conventional reasons. There was surprisingly little movement from the performers, and little effort to display their more intimate anatomy to the audience or demonstrate acts of prowess. Yet there was an almost tangible aura of very powerful emotion. Paris felt it from the crowd around her as much as from the performers: a deep sense of contentment and tenderness, like being in your true love’s embrace.
“Are you . . . feeling this?” she asked the other two humans tentatively, abashedly.
“The emotion?” Mullen replied, his voice quavering. “Yes. Yes, it’s . . .” He shook himself, trying to focus, and turned to Mayor Serima. “This is your empathic ability, isn’t it? We’re feeling what you feel.”
Serima’s strong bronze face brightened. “So you can feel it?” he asked, the melodic lilt of his language audible even through communicator translation. “Wonderful! The Carreon could not, so we were unsure if other species could. To know you have the necessary empathy is most heartening.”
“That’s one word for it,” Ahn chuckled, watching the show raptly.
A female aide of Serima’s—her name was Kuryala, Paris recalled—gestured toward the spectators, many of whom were joining in the festivities themselves, pairing or grouping with no evident selectivity regarding the gender, appearance, or quantity of their partners. “You are welcome to join in yourselves,” she offered, stroking Mullen’s arm. “Adding human voices to the chorus could generate stimulating and novel results.”
Mullen flushed. “I, uh, I appreciate the, um, invitation. But . . . I have someone back on the ship, and . . .”
“They are welcome to join too, if they wish,” Kuryala replied, her smile undiminished.
Paris felt the need to come to the stammering man’s rescue. “It’s kind of you to offer. But we humans . . . uh, we generally prefer not to be so public with our . . . choruses.”
“Ah, of course,” Serima said. “You prefer someplace free of distractions, so you may focus more intensely on the joining.”
“Something like that.”
“Well, we do have isolation chambers nearby for just such purposes.” He gestured toward a row of cabana-like structures along the edge of the park. Some of the spectator-participants in the show were breaking off from the audience in groups of two or more and availing themselves of the private enclosures—although Paris was increasingly convinced that the word “private” wouldn’t translate into Deltan.
The mayor took Paris’s hand, his big dark eyes transfixing hers. “I would be honored, Caroline, if you would demonstrate the human way of loving to me.”
Paris hadn’t been this overwhelmed by a male’s sexual invitation since she’d been fifteen and in the backseat of the school debate champion’s skimmer. She didn’t know what was coming over her. “I—I’m not sure this is wise,” she managed to get out. “There’s so much we don’t, um, know about each other. . . . Maybe there should be, uh, medical tests, or . . .”
“My people have reviewed the medical data from your ship. They’ve discovered no incompatibilities or causes for concern.”
“Yes, but there’s a protocol . . .” Why was she still talking? She would’ve preferred to stop at “Yes.”
“You’re right,” Mullen said, pulling away from Kuryala’s increasingly affectionate touch. “I should, um, I should stay objective. Just observe for—in fact, maybe I should go back to the ship.”
“Your loss,” Ahn said as Kuryala readily transferred her attentions to him. “Come on, Commander, where’s the harm? You feel it, don’t you? We’re safe here. We don’t have to be afraid or ashamed. Just . . . welcomed. Loved.”
He was right—she did feel it. What reason did she have to be afraid? “Well, it would only be polite to, uh, sample the local customs. Wouldn’t want to be . . . unfriendly . . .”
She trailed off as Serima escorted her toward the isolation chambers. Ahn seemed content to enjoy the company of Kuryala and another female aide right out in the open. She could almost feel their excitement at discovering what new sensations the human body had to offer. An excitement that she shared as she laid her hands on Serima and reveled in how easily his robes came loose. . . .
April 19, 2165
U.S.S. Essex NCC-173, orbiting Delta IV
When Captain Bryce Shumar arrived in sickbay, he found Doctor Mazril and Lieutenant Commander Mullen attempting to guide Caroline Paris back to her bed along the far wall of the gleaming white room. “You don’t understand,” she was telling them in a serene, reasonable tone. “I have to go back.”
“We discussed this, remember?” Mazril was a mature Tiburonian woman, bald with scalloped, elephantine ears and a row of small bumps running down the center of her forehead. “You need to stay here and rest.”
“Yes, I overheard that conversation, but I need to get back.” She pulled free of their grip and strode toward the exit, not even seeming to register that Shumar was in her path.
The captain caught her arm. “Commander.” She ignored him. “Caroline!”
“Who? Oh, yes. She needs to stay here and rest. We should let her.” She tried to pull free.
Seeing the urgency in the doctor’s eyes, Shumar tightened his grip. “Commander Paris, stand down!”
But she strove harder to get away. “Let me go! No! I need to go!”
Mazril and Mullen moved in, the latter getting a firm grip on her other arm. He and Shumar held her against her worsening struggles, wincing at her shrieks, until Mazril moved in with a spray hypo and administered a mild sedative. Her struggles subsided, but by the time they’d led her back to bed, she was sobbing abjectly. After a few moments, she drifted into an uneasy sleep, and Mazril led the captain and Mullen aside.
“What happened?” Shumar asked her.
“I’m afraid the commander got the lesser dose of it,” the doctor replied. She led him around the privacy curtain to the next bed, where Lieutenant Ahn lay motionless, a vacant stare on his lean face. “Ahn is in a complete dissociative state—practically catatonic. He doesn’t know who or where he is, he’s barely responsive . . . at this point I can’t be sure if he’ll ever come out of it.”
Shumar absorbed the news, only his British military upbringing keeping him stoic. “And Commander Paris?”
“She seems to be experiencing a form of depersonalization—a lesser dissociative disorder. She exhibits a detachment from her sense of self, as if her experiences were happening to someone else and she were merely a spectator. Her behavior suggests that she considers herself incomplete, that she will only be whole if she returns to the planet—or that she is still there and needs to escape from the illusion of being here. Her inability to achieve that goal provokes intense anxiety or depression, as you saw.”
“And will she . . . recover?”
“I would say her prognosis is good,” the Tiburonian replied. “Depersonalization disorder is treatable with cognitive therapy and medication. Even comforting personal interactions and physical or sensory stimulation could help to bring her back to her sense of self. But there are other complicating factors.” She moved to the main display and called up Paris’s scan results. “Her hormonal balance is extremely disrupted, as is Ahn’s. It resembles withdrawal from an addictive drug. This is possible to overcome as well, but it will not be easy for her.”
Shumar turned to the science officer. “Mister Mullen, what happened down there?”
Mullen seemed reluctant to speak. Mazril prompted him by saying, “Commander, my examination clearly shows that both of them have been engaged in intensive and prolonged sexual activity.”
The captain stared at Mullen. “Is this true?”
“Uh, yes, sir,” the younger man replied
. “It didn’t seem . . . that is, the Deltans were just so friendly and, and open. They seem so calm and intellectual at first, but sir, they make the Risians seem inhibited. I didn’t . . . join in . . . I have Melina, you know.” Shumar nodded. “But . . . the temptation was incredible. It took all my willpower to say no. There was just some . . . aura about them.”
“Nothing mystical,” Mazril told the captain. “Both Paris and Ahn—and Mister Mullen, to a lesser extent—have the residue of extremely potent attractant and appeasement pheromones in their systems and on their skin and clothing. These pheromones are very similar to those secreted by Orion females, but in this case they clearly come in both male and female varieties, given Commander Paris’s susceptibility.”
Shumar had heard enough. Clenching his fists, he took a long, rueful look at his damaged—his victimized officers. “Then that makes the Deltans twice as great a threat.”
Ambhat City, Delta IV
“Do you honestly expect me to believe this was a simple accident? You assaulted my people! Violated them! You may have damaged them for life!”
Mod’hira, prime minister of the Deltan Union, gazed up at Shumar with unwavering patience, her lovely dark eyes conveying deep sadness. “Please understand, Captain Shumar. We would never impose on an unwilling person. The fulfillment of the individual is sacrosanct to us—we would never seek to deprive another of it.” With her lilting voice and bronze complexion, she reminded Shumar of how his grandmother Parvati had appeared in his youth. She emanated the same sense of gentle kindness as well.
But his anger enabled him to resist that perception. “I’d find that more credible if not for my doctor’s findings about the pheromones you emit. I can feel you trying to influence me right now, so you might as well stop it.”
“I apologize, Captain. Our pheromonal secretions are a reflex, not a conscious choice. For us, it is a part of everyday life, and we can choose to respond to the stimulus, or not, as we see fit. Mayor Serima and his staff were unaware that your species was more . . . vulnerable to the effect.”
Star Trek: Enterprise - 017 - Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic Page 9
