No Limits

by Peter David

  “Burgoyne? I saw your lights on,” a high, singsong voice called out. Sharanna, a diminutive woman with creamy gray skin and straight black hair, appeared on the open patio of Burgoyne’s suite. “I thought I’d stop by before the party—” She stopped in confusion at the sight of Burgoyne embracing Keeten Planx in the water. “Oh! You’re not alone…. You’re not dressed!”

  Burgoyne’s fingers tightened on Keeten. S/he hoped that Sharanna would be polite enough to leave. But Sharanna had been in this very pool with Burgoyne yesterday, as well as the night before.

  Her eyes blinked rapidly as her smile faded in realization. “Oh…Burgoyne!”

  A world of pain and resentment was conveyed in hir name. “Sharanna, I thought we were going to meet at the party later.” Burgoyne gestured to the Trill. “You know Keeten Planx.”

  “We’ve met,” Sharanna said faintly.

  At her tone, Keeten glanced at Burgoyne. They both knew that shore-leave romances were fleeting at best. But Sharanna was a higher-education student attending the tech school on Argelius II, so she wasn’t an ordinary resort pickup. Burgoyne had found her in one of the native dance clubs. S/he always did like to sample the local cuisine.

  “Sharanna,” Burgoyne said reasonably. “Are you all right?” S/he almost got out of the water, but was afraid that would embarrass the rustic woman even more.

  Keeten had no such qualms. He pushed himself up to sit on the edge of the pool. He seemed to care as little as Burgoyne about nudity. That was one thing s/he loved about joined Trill. They were mentally and emotionally free of the confines of gender, much like Hermats.

  Keeten asked politely, “Why don’t you join us for a swim?”

  “Me?” Sharanna stared from him to Burgoyne. “With you? I don’t think so!”

  With that, Sharanna turned and fled.

  “Sharanna!” Burgoyne jumped out of the pool and jogged after her. But she didn’t pause, slamming the door closed between them.

  Burgoyne felt sorry about hurting her feelings, but surely Sharanna hadn’t expected more than a fling with a visiting Starfleet officer? Yet her reaction indicated she had become emotionally attached. Burgoyne dejectedly trailed water back to the pool.

  “Now you’re not moving so fast,” Keeten commented.

  For a moment, Burgoyne thought s/he had messed up hir chances with the Trill, too. “I’m sorry. I think she misunderstood my intentions.”

  “Too bad.” A gleam rose in Keeten’s eye. “Something similar happened to one of my previous hosts, but that time the guy joined in. I have to say, it’s a highlight of my sexual memories.”

  “Well, you do get two in one with me,” Burgoyne reminded him, slipping back into the pool.

  “Maybe you should lock the door this time,” Keeten suggested. “Who knows how many other jealous lovers you’ve managed to pick up during your shore leave?”

  Burgoyne almost made a smart retort, but after Sharanna’s reaction, it was no joke. S/he climbed out of the pool and went to lock the door.

  Burgoyne almost got away clean from Argelius II. Keeten had been so much fun that s/he missed the late-night party in town. In the morning s/he commed Sharanna, but there was no answer. Burgoyne quickly recorded an apology, thinking it was better that way.

  Then Burgoyne checked out of the fancy resort with a lighter heart. As bad as s/he felt about the misunderstanding, s/he really didn’t want to go through a rehash of hir short yet intense affair with Sharanna.

  In the transporter room of the resort, hir foot was lifted to step onto the disk when Sharanna appeared in the archway. “Burgoyne 172,” she formally stated.

  Almost, Burgoyne said to hirself. S/he forced herself to turn and smile warmly at Sharanna. It wasn’t her fault that Burgoyne disliked needy, clingy lovers. “Sharanna! I tried calling you earlier. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “I know.” Sharanna stood away stiffly, her expressive mouth twitching as she tried to remain impassive.

  “I’m a traveling Hermat,” Burgoyne reminded her. “I’m not like the rest of my people. I thought you understood.”

  “I do.”

  Burgoyne was afraid Sharanna was about to burst out in some kind of tirade. She had been so self-sufficient a few days ago, but now she looked emotionally unstable enough to make a scene in a public transporter room. Burgoyne hated that.

  S/he glanced back at hir small traveling case sitting on the disk. “Excalibur is prepared to transport. But if you want to talk, I can tell them I’ve been delayed. We can go somewhere.”

  “No. I only wanted to give you this.” Sharanna handed hir a cylindrical pendant that hung from a silver chain.

  “Sharanna!” Now Burgoyne felt even more awkward with nothing to give her but apologies. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Take it.” Her hand jerked the chain, making the filigreed cylinder bounce.

  “Thank you.” Burgoyne held up the pendant. The cylinder was as long as hir finger with silver caps and tiny bars forming a cage. Inside was a bristling crystal. The sharply fractured prisms of the crystal caught the light, casting bright rainbow chips into hir eyes. “It’s beautiful! Is it a necklace?”

  “It’s from Rabolum, my home.” Sharanna had talked often about her frontier homeworld. Her government had sent her along with a group of young technicians to Argelius II to get much-needed training so they could improve the industrial base of their planet. “I’m part of the sacritorum caste, so I have access to these sorts of pendants.”

  “Sharanna, I can’t take this if it’s some kind of national treasure!” Burgoyne tried to press the pendant back into her hands.

  “It’s private, but they’re not all that rare on my planet.” For the first time, she faintly smiled. “I knew you’d like it, Burgoyne. Sometime when you’re alone, look into the crystal and think about me.”

  “Sharanna,” Burgoyne said helplessly. S/he wanted to plead that s/he never meant to deceive her into sharing lust. But Sharanna already knew that.

  “The transporter chief is waiting for you,” Sharanna reminded hir.

  Burgoyne stepped forward to hug her, but Sharanna turned away. Burgoyne got a shoulder in hir chest and a faceful of fine black hair.

  So s/he marched back to the transporter disk. Holding the gift, Burgoyne forced hirself to smile at Sharanna. Then s/he glanced at the transporter chief. Hir eagerness to get away must have been clear, because he hardly waited for hir nod before beginning the dematerialization.

  The transporter room faded into a sparkle of energized particles, and reformed as Excalibur’s main transporter room. Burgoyne enjoyed letting go during transport, relishing that glorious slide into nothingness. It felt thoroughly invigorating when s/he rematerialized.

  Along with the chief on duty at the terminal, Commander Shelby was waiting in the transporter room. “Welcome back, Lieutenant,” Shelby said briskly. “I hope your leave was pleasant?”

  “Er—yeah, it was great.” Burgoyne swept up hir traveling case, slinging Sharanna’s present over the handle. “You’ll never guess who I met, Commander. You should like this, since you served on board the Enterprise.”

  “Never play guessing games with a tactician,” Shelby reminded hir. “Who was it? Commander Data? Captain Picard?”

  “No, a little older than that.” Burgoyne grinned. “It was Chief Engineer Scott! I ran into him in a dive of a bar, drinking something he called ‘scotch.’ We talked warp engines for hours. That guy sure knows his stuff.”

  “You mean Montgomery Scott? Of Kirk’s Enterprise?” Shelby raised her brows.

  “I know that’s a bit before your time, Commander. But it seems like everyone who’s served on board Enterprise has a certain nostalgia for the old Constitution-class.”

  Shelby smiled, always the professional commanding officer, yet clearly trying to be friendly. That’s why Burgoyne encouraged her. Some of the crew were put off by Shelby’s forceful presence. But Burgoyne always like to give hir fellow crew memb
ers the benefit of the doubt. S/he had unearthed some real gems that way during hir Starfleet career.

  “Once you’ve settled in,” Shelby requested, “I’d like your assistance in creating a weekly maintenance schedule for the key engineering systems. Chief Engineer Argyle suggested you, Lieutenant.”

  “Sounds like a plan, Commander,” Burgoyne agreed. It was a quick change from Argelius II, but s/he was ready to get back to work. “Just let me drop off my gear on the way.”

  Shelby nodded to the dangling cylinder. “That’s pretty. Is it a souvenir?”

  “Something like that.”

  Shelby looked at hir more closely. “Are you well, Lieutenant? We could wait until later to begin.”

  “No, I’m all right. It’s just sometimes you get more than you expected from shore leave.”

  Burgoyne fell right back into the rhythms of being assistant chief engineer of the Excalibur and was so busy reconfiguring the constrictor coils on the warp core that s/he didn’t have time to think about hir vacation on Argelius II. S/he also had to catch up with hir friends on board. That cute lieutenant in hydroponics was still interested in having fun during off-duty hours. Whenever anyone asked about hir shore leave, Burgoyne told them about Chief Engineer Scott. S/he didn’t mention how hir sexual escapades had unfortunately gotten crossed.

  But one evening, after a hearty dinner and faced with nothing special to do, s/he noticed Sharanna’s gift draped over the table sculpture where s/he had tossed it that first day. S/he picked it up by the chain. Even though the lights were dimmed, bright rainbow sparks flickered from the faceted crystal. The detailing on the cylindrical setting was also quite fine. Burgoyne felt another pang at the thought of Sharanna giving up something precious. The pendant was so brilliant that it had to be special.

  Burgoyne turned it, watching the tiny lights flash, wishing that Sharanna could have enjoyed herself without getting overly attached. Burgoyne hadn’t seen it coming. Usually s/he had a good nose for anything that smacked of possessiveness or commitment. S/he had talked about hir roving ways and travels in Starfleet until it had to be clear. Sharanna was fine until she had stumbled on hir in the pool with Keeten….

  Then Burgoyne was standing in a strange house with windows on three sides. She had never seen the place before, but it felt right somehow. The interior held some low, beige furniture and glass tables with nothing to detract from the dramatic view. Purple, jagged mountains rose on every distant horizon, with varying tones indicating their relative closeness. Nothing could be seen in between except for the undulating ground frosted with lacy plants. The land was exposed, its dusty red and gray rocks poking through the crust. But it felt right….

  “I’m home,” s/he said experimentally. It was nothing like Hermat, but it felt like home.

  There was another scent layered above the dry, tangy breeze. Burgoyne’s nostrils flared as s/he turned. A female humanoid, that was certain. But s/he couldn’t pin down the undefined textures.

  Burgoyne followed hir nose into the adjoining room. There stood a female. Burgoyne couldn’t quite see her face but her voice sounded professional like Shelby’s. She spoke as if everything were perfectly evident. Yet as hard as Burgoyne tried, s/he couldn’t understand what the woman was saying.

  The emotions Burgoyne felt were the most important thing. S/he was tied to this woman. S/he could only go closer, s/he couldn’t pull away. This woman was hir partner, and they lived in this house together in domestic bliss—

  Burgoyne wrenched hirself away, every fiber of hir being resisting the lure of those feelings. That wasn’t hir! S/he would rather die than wither away in boredom with one woman for the rest of hir life.

  Panting, s/he sat on the sofa in hir own quarters on board Excalibur. S/he tossed the pendant away in disgust, not wanting it anywhere near hir.

  As Burgoyne gradually calmed down, s/he realized that Sharanna had laid a trap for hir. That little scene of coupled happiness was Sharanna’s dream, not hirs. Burgoyne wanted nothing more than variety and change—she was a rolling meteorite in space. That piece of hallucinogenic crystal had it all wrong.

  But after a while, Burgoyne was able to laugh about it. At least s/he didn’t feel bad about Sharanna anymore. Obviously a girl who could pull a prank like that could take care of herself.

  Yet the engineer in Burgoyne was curious enough to overcome everything else. How could the crystal invoke a hallucination without some sort of energy exchange?

  Burgoyne set up hir tricorder to record everything that happened. Taking a deep breath, s/he stared into the crystal again, counting off the seconds. S/he also braced hirself to feel that awful, stifling sensation of dependency on someone else.

  S/he thought it wasn’t working at first; then s/he found hirself back in that desolate house with hir shadowy partner. S/he was aware of what was happening, and this time s/he fought the fuzziness, trying to discover the identity of the woman. S/he expected it to be Sharanna. But the scene played out exactly as before, as if the tracks of hir vision had been permanently laid down the first time.

  When Burgoyne snapped out of it, everything was the same, except this time the tricorder was running. S/he eagerly checked the readings, but there were only nineteen seconds, exactly what s/he had counted, between the time s/he started looking into the crystal and when s/he shook hir head, reaching for the tricorder. But the vision felt as though it had lasted two minutes from beginning to end. Apparently it was all in hir mind.

  Burgoyne tossed the pendant into a drawer and tried to forget about it. S/he was a big Hermat and could handle it.

  S/he forced the image of that shadowy mate from hir mind and read the latest technical manual on Ambassador-class shield generators from cover to cover. Yawning, s/he eventually went to bed. But s/he couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t because of that unnerving feeling that s/he could actually be in a partnership. S/he decided it was anger at Sharanna for forcing hir to feel that way nonconsensually.

  Burgoyne had unfortunately run into some humanoids who culturally didn’t approve of free love. They restricted sex into certain strict categories that were considered to be “acceptable.” But Burgoyne had never lived hir life according to what other people thought. That was one reason s/he had left Hermat, because hir homeworld was claustrophobically closed. S/he had broken free so s/he could be completely true to hirself.

  Sharanna wasn’t going to have the last word.

  Burgoyne got up and put on an off-duty sarong and tank top. Holding the pendant gingerly by the chain, s/he went down to engineering. Everything looked the same, but there was no one around. That’s what s/he liked about gamma shift. A person could concentrate without distractions.

  S/he went into the diagnostic and repair room on the upper deck of engineering. The level-one diagnostic unit was empty. Often it was occupied by faulty phasers or components that were rigged for operation while an intensive scan was performed. Burgoyne knew this machine inside and out. If anything could figure out how Sharanna’s crystal worked, a level-one diagnostic would do the job.

  The pendant fit into the small slotted clamp. Burgoyne positioned it inside the imaging chamber and closed the hatch. When s/he could no longer see the crystal, s/he relaxed. S/he would likely have to trigger it again under the diagnostic for a complete reading, but s/he wasn’t looking forward to it. That deadly dull feeling made hir spine crawl.

  First s/he physically verified the operational test sequences. A diagram of the pendant appeared on the screen of the terminal. There were two major components—the cage and the crystal. The cylindrical cage was unremarkable; a mix of silver, tin, and various other minerals.

  The crystal, on the other hand, was unusual. Instead of a lattice of atoms, it was actually a crystallized energy field. That’s why hir tricorder had detected nothing. But if it was a stasis field, there could be something inside. Burgoyne had never seen a stasis field so tiny, or one that didn’t require a continuous energy source to be maintained. Internal quantum m
echanics could account for the generation of the energy field, but no system could be completely closed.

  It took some time, and Burgoyne had to open the viewport on the diagnostic unit and look at the pendant one last time, to get the key. S/he shuddered as s/he came out of the vision of the desert home with hir partner. S/he was almost gagging at the cloying, stupefying sensation of being stuck with one person.

  But s/he finally unraveled the mystery. The tiny stasis field wasn’t uniformly maintained. Every twenty-six-point-eight-seven seconds there was a pulse that allowed a few subatomic quanta to be released. These particles resembled chronitons, but with significant variations, including a shortened life span. The diagnostic unit designated them as chronometric particles.

  Chronometric particles were temporally charged. The diagnostic indicated that the particles decayed within thirty centimeters. When Burgoyne queried the diagnostic unit about how chronometrics would affect humanoid brains, the answer was: “Symptoms include sensory distortions, time displacement, and hallucinations.”

  It only took a simple computer query to get citations for chronometric particles. One Starfleet deep-space-exploration ship, the Equulus, had harvested chronometric particles from a temporal vortex nearly seventy years ago. The vortex was four light-years from an inhabited system, outside of Federation space at that time. Rabolum was the name of the fourth planet from the sun—Sharanna’s homeworld.

  So that explained it. The pulsed stasis field allowed enough particles to escape to induce a short-term vision. Sharanna’s sacritorum caste probably used pendants like this to control people on Rabolum, giving them visions that conformed to their cultural values. Burgoyne shuddered at the idea. At least s/he was well away from Sharanna.