by Tony Daniel
Valek remained standing. “Can I get you anything, Captain?”
“No, thank you,” Kirk said.
“Very well.” She took a seat and crossed her legs, leaving a good portion of smooth, porcelain-pale calf exposed.
“I’ll come to the point,” Kirk said. “The Excalbians have decided that if you don’t make your decision by tomorrow regarding their status, they’re going to present to you a declaration of intent.”
“What is it they intend?”
“To form their own governing entity,” Kirk said. “I think the current thinking is to call it New Excalbia.”
“Captain, where did you learn this?”
“Where do you think? Yarnek. He asked me to sign what he called a new Declaration of Independence for his people. It expresses a desire to form a sovereign entity among themselves, as free beings.”
“And where would the territory of this proposed nation be located?”
“They plan to take Zeta Gibraltar out of the Federation along with themselves,” Kirk said. “The science team would be permitted to stay, but the Excalbians would declare the planet as being under joint Excalbian-Federation law.”
“Sounds rather preposterous, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Kirk said. “They make some valid points. They have been yanked around a bit. Not by you personally, but by the people you work for.”
“They are also the people you work for, Captain.”
“In a general sense,” Kirk said. “But there is a clear chain of command that leads from me up through the Starfleet Command to the Federation Council’s Starfleet Guidance Committee. I do not take my orders directly from the Federation ambassadorial service, the Security Committee, or from any Council member who thinks it would be fun to move a starship around like a play toy.”
“Interesting points,” Valek said. “Did you sign this document?”
Kirk felt a hint of flush rise in his cheeks. “I did,” he said. “Washington-Yarnek was very persuasive.”
“You are aware that I could bring you up on treason charges and have you court-martialed should I wish.”
“You could try, I suppose,” he said. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Yes, I know,” Valek said. “I’m quite familiar with your record. Bureaucrats don’t fare well when they go up against James T. Kirk.” She gave a slight shrug. “In any case, I do not intend to do anything of the sort. Instead, I wish to consider your advice in this matter.”
“Listen to them.”
“To their demands?”
“It’s not a hostage negotiation, Valek,” Kirk said. “They came to me in good faith and asked that I approach you.”
“Why not come directly to me?” Valek asked. A stray bit of hair fell over her eyes, and she brushed it away.
She’s let her hair down, Kirk thought. It’s as black as midnight.
Kirk smiled, pointed at himself. “Good cop, remember?”
Valek nodded. “Yes, a logical move on their part. They are becoming more politically savvy and, dare I say, more human. I’ve come to the conclusion that, for all their power over the material world, they were quite naïve when they first left their planet. From my observations, it seems that they expected their request for sanctuary to be immediately granted. They were, in their own minds, practically gods when compared to us.”
“But now the human components have taken in more and more experience,” Kirk said. “They may have developed a different idea of what is in their best interests—and how to get it.”
“Precisely, Captain,” Valek said. “This is one reason I have delayed my decision. I wished to give the Excalbians time to know their own minds.”
“That is . . . wise, Valek. Kind, even.”
“Did you not expect it of me? Sarek himself taught me this: Wisdom and mercy are the fruits of logic. When there is discord, you will find irrationality at the bottom of it.”
“I must say, I had anticipated that you would take the most direct course and damn the subtleties,” Kirk said. “Pardon me for misjudging you.”
“Perhaps I would have, had I not spent ten years on Earth getting to know humans,” she said. “I have even had a human lover. Does that surprise you?”
It sure as hell does.
“But I thought . . . what about . . .”
“The plak tow?” Valek leaned forward, gazing more intently at Kirk. “I am aware of your previous acquaintance with the pon farr. It is part of your classified file, which I was permitted to review.”
“Great,” Kirk mumbled. “I wonder what other marks I have on my permanent record?”
“While most Vulcans refuse to discuss the pon farr,” Valek continued, “my compunctions in that regard have . . . loosened. Particularly with humans, who don’t find passionate rage and extreme compulsions while battling for a mate especially unusual.”
“But that still doesn’t answer my question,” Kirk said.
“I am a twin, Captain Kirk,” Valek said. “Vulcan twins seldom imprint, even when forced to take part in the bonding ceremony. Our infantile mental tie with our sibling takes the place of the imprint—only in the case of Varen and myself leading to extreme loyalty, and not the sexual act.”
“You’re free?” Kirk said. Spock almost killed me when the instinct asserted itself. And he would have, but for Bones’s bit of subterfuge. “Lucky you.”
“There is no such thing as luck, Captain. It is, however, a convenient fact, given that most of my work is conducted away from Vulcan.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Merely to explain my official actions to a valued colleague,” Valek said. “There are many aspects of human nature that have, upon deeper consideration, far more logic to them than most Vulcans give humans credit for.”
Kirk nodded. “I should be going,” he said. He stood, faced Valek. “I’ve made my report and recommendation. You are the civilian authority here. This is all politics now, and I’ve got a starship to run.”
“If I release you from your current orders,” Valek said. She stood as well.
“Yes.”
“Which I cannot do at this time,” she said. “Besides, you are still waiting for the report from your shuttlecraft reconnaissance to the nebula.”
“How the hell did you know—” Kirk smiled, shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You are correct.”
“We make an effective team, Captain,” Valek replied.
“Good cop, bad cop?”
“I believe the relationship is more complicated than that,” she said. “It would even not be out of the question for us to become friends.”
She reached out her hand. It took Kirk a moment to figure out what she was doing.
She wants to shake on it.
Kirk reached forward and took her hand in his. Her handshake was warm, firm. Unexpected.
And when the door to Valek’s quarters closed behind him, he had to admit he still didn’t know quite what to make of Special Representative Valek.
One thing he was certain of: he must not underestimate her.
She’s right that our relationship is getting quite a bit more complicated.
Despite himself, Kirk realized that he was rather enjoying the challenge.
* * *
Galileo casually hefted the device from the L’rah’hane ship in one hand, while gesticulating with the other. Spock was not particularly concerned at the Italian’s treatment of the artifact. Even if he dropped it, Spock doubted there would be any damage to the object. It might, however, hurt quite a bit if it fell on Galileo’s toe. He was wearing only sandals.
“I suspect it is attuned to certain quantum effects,” Galileo said. Benjamin Franklin translated from the Latin.
“I had come to the same conclusion,” Spock answered. In Latin.
Franklin began to translate, then caught himself and chuckled.
“Bless my soul, Mister Spock,” chuckled Franklin. “You seem to speak Latin as well as I.”
“My command of Latin is rudimentary, but it should be serviceable for our present needs.”
“Ah, eccellente!” Galileo said. “I have spent much time catching up on your language, Sir Spock: science and mathematics. For me, these are the speech of nature. I have been so busy learning them, I haven’t had time to assimilate the modern languages of men. The computer, she translates the technical material for me.”
“A fortuitous use of your time,” Spock replied. “What is your conclusion concerning the L’rah’hane device?”
“I am only making conjectures. There is still so much to learn.” Galileo moved the device in a swooping arc, as if he were playing with a toy. “The curves of the calculus! What a wonder. And partial differential equations! The language of nature, I tell you.” Galileo shook his head, smiling in what seemed to be awe.
“A conjecture from Galileo Galilei is worth the dead certainty of many a fool,” Franklin said.
Galileo seemed immune to flattery, even from a master such as Franklin. “I am troubled, troubled by this, however,” the Italian continued. He used a data wand to write several equations across an electronic blackboard display.
Fascinating, Spock thought. These are advanced topographic solutions. He is using the mathematics of Lorentz transformations to attempt to describe the device’s function.
Galileo, it seemed, was either a quick study, or the Excalbian within was supplying the acumen. Wherever it came from, the math itself was genuine. Spock studied the equations.
“Pardon me if I am not reading this correctly,” he said after a moment. “But you are predicting negative integer values for information transfer.”
“Correct! Absolutely correct, my Vulcan compatriot,” Galileo said, beaming.
“A negative information state is an absurdity,” Spock replied. “One cannot know less than nothing.”
“Precisely, precisely,” Galileo said. “The information is going somewhere and coming from somewhere. It only seems like there is a negative state.”
He made another flourish with his data wand. “Look! A two-part solution to the paradox.”
“The information is being displaced by changes in quantum gravitational states,” Spock said. “Information from this moment in this bit of space the device occupies is sent to one destination while information arrives from . . .”
“The future?” Franklin asked.
“This could be! This could be!” Galileo said. “And maybe also from a distance that is greater than the galaxy.”
“And, if so, it arrives instantaneously,” Spock said. “From a location that may very well be on the other end of our galaxy.”
“Quantum physics, she is whimsical,” Galileo replied. “Effervescent and beautiful, with a smile like the Mona Lisa. Leonardo, he senses this. His true mistress is the universe, you know!”
Franklin shook his head in wonder. “Do you think that’s what they use it for? Sending messages to and from the future, to and from distant galaxies?”
“I do not believe the L’rah’hane use it for either purpose,” Spock said. “A species that can predict the future would not find itself scrounging a living by piracy along the fringes of civilized space.”
“Good point,” Franklin acknowledged. “There was certainly no indication of anything of the sort going on while we were being brought aboard. Although I admit I was slightly more concerned with the constrictive shackles around my wrists and neck at the time and may have missed a detail or two.”
At the mention of shackles, Galileo frowned and his animated face became so instantly sullen that even Spock recognized that an emotional transformation had taken place.
The scientist muttered a curse in Italian, then turned his back on the viewscreen full of equations. “It all comes to nothing,” he said. “The moment you have a true and original thought, they lock you up and call you a heretic.”
“Surely you will acknowledge that times have changed, my dear sir,” Franklin replied gently.
“I acknowledge nothing,” said Galileo. “There is a darkness that follows all that we do. It will swallow us up in the end, and all endeavor will come to naught.”
Fascinating.
As far as Spock knew there was no record of the real Galileo experiencing emotional swings so extreme a Vulcan would notice. This behavior might be attributable to the underlying Excalbian mentality asserting itself.
And if that is true, Spock thought, then the mood swing might have its origin in a hidden threat the Excalbian is aware of that is very real indeed.
* * *
The scent of her.
Madame Emilie du Chatelet.
Voltaire’s lover.
The first translator of Newton’s Principia into French.
What in the great galaxy is she doing with a small-town sawbones like me?
McCoy held Emi against him in his bed. He was never going to look at his quarters quite the same way again, he knew. Even as he lay in such thought, he reflected that he was glad he’d learned that she used the ’fresher to annihilate her lice, and each treatment was good for several days.
He realized he should be wary in other ways as well. He’d called Jim Kirk out on some of his lovers. There had been clones, aliens, even a robot. But he doubted Kirk had ever slept with a rock being before.
Which was nonsense. She was a human in every way that mattered. Curiosity. Intelligence. Self-awareness. Love.
Joy at the wonders of science come to fruition that she had, somehow, against all hope, returned once again to witness. She took delight in his compendium of unusual biological scans, his collection of odd and alien medical instruments, his fascination with the living body.
His fascination with her living body.
“Emi,” he said. She rustled under the bed cover beside him, kissed his neck. “Emi, what’s it like being you? I mean, really? You know you can’t be her, the real Emilie du Chatelet. Is there some kind of dual awareness, some double vision, that you experience?”
She turned her head, gazed up at him with those green eyes. “Kiss me, Leonard.” He leaned over and did so.
“There is no ‘dual awareness’ in that,” she said. “I don’t know about that other Madame du Chatelet. I have memories of centuries of thinking, thinking, thinking, and arriving nowhere with my thoughts. There are perhaps brilliant Excalbians. I was not one of them.”
“Hard to believe. A species that can mentally transform matter.”
“Yes, but what did I do with this skill? Brooding. Petty political intrigues. You have no idea what it is like to spend a thousand years thinking in circles and getting nowhere.”
“I guess I do not,” McCoy said. “At least not the thousand years part.”
“Then, one day, I wake up and I am this brilliant woman. Yes, genuinely brilliant. The math that befuddled me before, it is clear. The calculation of a planet’s fall about its sun, this I can now perform. Where did this come from? Was it borrowed from a mathematician when the Enterprise or other vessels were scanned? I do not know. What I do know is that I like what I have become. I glory in it. I glory in what we do together.”
“It is rather glorious, isn’t it?”
McCoy sat up and leaned his back against the Enterprise bulkhead that served as his bed’s headboard.
“I know you are making a report on us,” du Chatelet said. She moved up, put her head against McCoy’s chest. “I came at first, maybe, to influence your report. Ask you to put in good words for us.”
“All I’m doing is medical evaluations,” McCoy said.
“Yes, I know,” du Chatelet replied. “It doesn’t matter. That’s all over now. Now I want to be Emilie du Chatelet. Live in this time, this moment. Make love with you”—he tilted her head up, kissed McCoy’s chin—“and learn, learn, learn new things. What I could never do before as an Excalbian. What they would not let a woman do before in my imaginary past. Now I can do it.”
“I think you will, Emi,” McCoy said. “Whatever
happens, I think you will.”
“I want to learn now,” she replied in a low voice, almost a whisper. “I want to learn what it is like to do this again and again.”
“Do what?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she took his hand and gently pulled him back down to her.
* * *
It wasn’t exactly a strike. It was more like a series of “sick days.” The Excalbians simply did not show up for “work”—their work being subjects of observation and questioning by the outpost scientists. After one planetary day, Commander Contreras was irritated. After two, she was incensed. After more than a week, she was beginning to despair.
“We’re going to have to close the base down if they don’t cooperate,” Contreras told Kirk. “Never mind our careers, what is going to happen to them? Don’t they realize that this study is their ticket to acceptance and perhaps even citizenship?”
“I’m not so sure they want citizenship any longer, Commander,” Valek said.
“Then what do they want?” Contreras said. “I’ve been with them for months and this play-acting has got to stop. These are nanotechnologically animate silicon-carbonate aliens, not human beings. You take off a coat, remove a tooth, or, as we’ve seen, confiscate a weapon, and the thing just grows back, springs back into existence within a few hours. Nothing about their appearance is real.”
“Yet they aren’t display mannequins, Commander,” Kirk said.
“I know that, Captain,” said Contreras. “But every time we attempt to communicate with whatever is underneath, we run into Napoleon, or Hildegard of Bingen, or George Damn Washington.” She spoke this last name more in frustration than contempt, gazing away from Kirk and the Vulcan representative.
“Commander, might I suggest that the Excalbians are not wholly aware of who they are anymore,” Valek said.
Contreras looked quizzically at Valek. “Go on.”
“They are stranded in this intermediate state. They cannot go back to being pure Excalbians, and yet their own memories are taken from other people—notably the captain here and other members of the Enterprise crew.”
