Dark Mirror
Page 1
Captain Jean-Luc Picard moved carefully through the sinister duplicate of the Starship Enterprise.…
He stepped through a door, his phaser ready. A foot came shooting out, caught the phaser in his hand, and kicked it far away.
Picard grabbed the foot and yanked sideways, hard. There was a crash, and Picard threw himself in the direction of the sound. He felt a body, found a throat, seized it, and looked into the face of his attacker.
The face was a dark mirror of his own.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to the staff of Independent Pizza in South Anne Street, Dublin, where this novel was conceived in October 1991 over a large with extra cheese, extra sauce, pepperoni, and hot chilies, and a medium with extra cheese, double garlic, hot chilies, and onions, along with two bottles of Orvieto Secco and a whole lot of Ballygowan water.
Thanks also to Dave Stern, who returns unexpected phone calls from overexcited people standing in phone booths outside pizzerias.
HISTORIAN’S NOTE
This novel takes place sometime during the fourth season of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.
Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.
—Pascal
CHAPTER 1
There are some parts of space where even the human heart, eternally optimistic, finds it hard to feel itself welcome. At those outer fringes of the Galaxy that the humanities have just begun to reach, the starfield, which elsewhere lies in such rich streams and billows of brightness between the inhabited worlds, thins away and goes chill and pale. Here the starlight is only indefinite, faintly glowing—the million points of light near the heartworlds now dimmed by terrible distance and the clouds of dark matter between the stars to a vague cool fog, hardly to be seen except when one looks away from it. Usually the onlooker finds it hard to look away, forced by the sight to think how small even a galaxy is in the vastness, how tiny even the Local Group is compared to the darkness holding it, and all the other galactic clumps and supergalaxies; and which, beyond the bounds of mere spatial integrity, probably holds other whole universes as well, numberless, all of them subsumed into the greatest dark—that of entropy—which broods and bides its time.
In these, the deserts of space, the oases are few and far between. Once in a half a million cubic parsecs you might find a star that had struggled to bring forth planets in the barrenness and managed it—but for daunting distances around it, there will still be nothing but emptiness, and as background, only the shimmer of light that indicates the hearths of the crowded worlds. In the face of such contrasts that light becomes almost somber, speaking of its impermanence and newness in a universe where for unknown time unnameable darkness gestated, holding the light in it unborn, until the first great laugh, the outburst of newborn power and matter into the old thoughtful void.
Far up here, above the great Galactic Rift, that light seems most tenuous—the darkness not of dust or distance but of simple nothingness. Few sentient beings pass this way; observers are rarer than stars. But every now and then, something breaks the aridity of the dark desert. A distant gleam, a silver flicker, swelling, growing closer; like a memory sought for in a dark mind and suddenly recalled. If the observer had senses not dependent on something besides sluggish light to reflect and carry messages—tachyons, perhaps—they would see it grow and flash past them, touched with a spark of red on the port side, green on the starboard, and the letters NCC 1701-D dark on its hull. Then the memory is off again in the dark, with a trail of rainbow behind it, quickly fading, the legacy of its warpfield. Lone ambassador of the multifariousness of known worlds, here and gone again, out of the darkness, into the darkness: Enterprise goes about her business.
In his quarters, Jean-Luc Picard stood away from the canvas and glanced sideways for a moment at the darkness pouring past. He could almost feel it, the thickness of the dark: that strange, empty, but somehow heavy and oppressive quality that it had, this far out from the light and life of the more populated parts of the Federation. They were far out on the fringes, and the relative emptiness of things was chilling. It was at times like this that his thoughts turned elsewhere, to other imageries: warmer, slightly more reassuring—however subjective it was to feel that one needed reassurance in this dark. Picard knew himself well enough not to ignore such feelings, however ill-founded he might suspect them to be. At such times he gladly turned his mind toward home: the hearth of the mind.
He turned back to the canvas. Landscape was not usually something he attempted, and certainly not usually from memory. Which, when he realized it, had driven him immediately to try it.
It was a wood in the Luberon, not far from the vineyards of home. A sunny morning, in the earliest part of autumn: you could tell it from the trees—the green of the birches and oaks in that wood was not the fresh color of spring, but the tireder, resigned, mellowing green of trees whose leaves are thinking of turning. Here and there, in the dapple of the birches against the hard blue sky, you could see a leaf gone yellow, quietly treacherous to summer, starting the change. Typical of the way such things shift, subtly, leaf by leaf: their beginnings “small and hardly to be seen,” as the poet says, but seeming so great when we suddenly look up and notice.
Under them, beneath the marginally treacherous birches and oaks, pools of shadow, pools of light; and just there, in the shadow of an oak, but bright with a scrap of sunlight let down past a negligent branch, a little patch of brilliance caught hanging in the air: a butterfly. One of the brown woods butterflies with a broad white stripe, soaring down the glade between the trees. Nothing else stirring, no sense of wind in those trees, no movement, just the perfect still-mellowing heat of the very beginning of the time when the grapes would be ready: the perfect first moment of autumn, earth just beginning to calm to its rest for the year.
Picard stepped back and looked. The harsh blue of the summer south of France showed through the upper branches. Here and there, in the dim background, the feather of one of the windbreak pines showed through. Everything but the touch of light in the middle air, and the blue above the trees, was soft, indefinite: the ground, all littered with the brown of many years. He had been spending a lot of time on that ground, working to get it right. The wrong light, too much detail or too little, would make it all look false. He changed brushes, dabbed at the palette, scrubbed the brush drier, and touched a bit more light onto the butterfly’s wings, making it more golden, less white than it had been.
He stood away again and let his eyes go a little unfocused, the better to let his eyes evaluate the canvas. Light, warmth, a feeling of peace: the antithesis to everything out there at the moment.
His glance slid sideways. He thought of the great philosopher, there in his old home, all bounded by noisy streets, who looked out at the tram clanging by, and the bustle of the city in those days, and wrote, “The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me to death.” It took a man attuned to hear that silence, this silence, in such a place, through all the noise and clatter of civilization. Out here, it required no ear nearly so subtly attuned. Turn away from your work or play for a moment, and those clouds of stars reminded you just how small you were, and how far away from the things that you might love. Picard knew that the philosopher would equally have held that you’re no farther from those things than the vein of your neck: since you carry them within you, you and they are coterminous. Some might balk at the seeming contradiction. Picard merely smiled, knowing the ways of philosophers, and reached for another brush.
The door chimed. “Come,” he said.
Lieutenant Commander Data stepped in, paused. “I am not interrupting anything, am I, Captain?”
“Nothing of any weight.” Picard put the first brush he had selected down, chose another: narrowed, with the fanned edge. Data stepped around to look at the canvas, raising his eyebrows for permission. Picard nodded.
Data looked at it and said, “Ah. Ladoga camilla. Or Limenitis camilla, in the older Linnaean classification.”
Picard’s eyebrows went up, too, in surprise. “It’s that obvious?” There was barely a square centimeter of paint there, after all, and some only indifferent brushwork.
“The broken white stripe is a clear indicator, Captain.”
“Mr. Data,” Picard said, shaking his head, “I understand the delight of acquiring information. But you are in a unique position to agree with the detective that the mind is a closed room, with only so much space in which to store information. Whatever moved you to acquire information on Earth’s butterflies, when there might be information more important that required the same room?”
“‘Man does not live by bread done,’” Data said. “Or so Keiko O’Brien says. She recommends the butterfly as an excellent example of ‘the sound of one hand clapping.’”
Picard smiled slightly. “She’s probably right. At least, that’s one of
the few responses to the koan which makes any sense to me… though some would tell you, I must admit, that in a koan, sense is the wrong thing to be looking for. Meanwhile, I assume you had something specific to tell me when you came.”
“Yes, sir. Within the past hour the Lalairu main group hailed us. They estimate they will be within transporter range within another hour.”
“That’s excellent. Are the mission specialist’s quarters ready for him?”
“Geordi is overseeing the final stages of the installation now, Captain. He said he wanted to add some ‘bells and whistles’ to it.” Data looked slightly quizzical as he examined Picard’s canvas. “While I know that the specialist’s people are sonically oriented, I did not know that bells and whistles were of any specific value—”
Picard smiled. “I think Mr. La Forge means he wants to make sure that Commander… that the commander’s quarters have a little more than the usual fittings. Ask him to notify me when he’s done, if you will.”
“Certainly, sir.” Data spent a moment more gazing at the canvas. “Autumn?”
Picard nodded. “How did you judge that?”
“The white admiral does not achieve such growth until the late summer. Also, the lighting is suggestive of the increased declination of the sun in autumn, as is the leaf color. But the latter judgments are subjective and liable to confusion through individual differences in color perception. The butterfly, however, is diagnostic.”
Picard smiled to himself. “Butterflies have been called many things, but, I think, rarely that. Very well, Mr. Data. I’ll be along shortly. When you start the usual information exchanges with the Lalairu, my compliments to the Laihe, and I should enjoy speech with her before they pass on.”
Data nodded and left. Picard turned back to the canvas, surveying it, letting his mind drift for a moment as the butterfly seemed to drift down the glade between the trees. The warmth, the slanting light, and the silence, the sweetness in the still air among the trees where the late honeysuckle climbed: the Lalairu would visit such a place readily enough. But otherwise they would value it little.
The Lalairu was what they called themselves, though they were not one species, but an association of hundreds. Their language was a farrago of borrowings from the languages of many planets, grammatically bewildering, semantically a nightmare, and difficult to translate accurately, no matter how long you or the universal translator worked at it. They could perhaps be truly described, and uniquely so among Federation peoples, as a “race” in the older sense of the word—a group who shared a way of life by choice.