by Diane Duane
Riker was certain that the only reason they hadn’t been attacked so far was that the computer and crew on board the other Enterprise were busy analyzing this information, and using their own computer to incorporate and invent responses to it. It was a grim certainty, but as far as Riker was concerned, there was no reason that two couldn’t play at that game. For the past hour or so he had had a considerable amount of computer space freed for the business of analyzing and creating threat responses to the weapons array and capabilities of the other ship.
Riker was glad to have the information to work with, but battle with this other vessel was still going to be a nasty prospect. The other Enterprise had nearly 80 percent again their engine capacity and was hideously overweaponed—not only in terms of phasers and photon torpedoes, but in terms of other weapons he had never heard of. No matter, he would prepare his ship as well as he could. They would fight the good fight and make the other Enterprise sorry it had ever started this business.
He allowed himself a grin that he would not have allowed any of the crew to see at that point. If worse came to worst, and if there was any way to manage it, he would make sure that if his own universe was going to lose an Enterprise, so would this one. Symmetry, he thought ironically, must be maintained.
He rather welcomed the angry feelings, actually: they helped him avoid thinking about other things that would cause him too much pain and distract him from his work. Riker turned his attention back to the files he was presently perusing, the historical records Picard had been reading. It was definitely not a universe to choose to live in. He could fully understand the captain’s orders to destroy the ship should they be left with no other choice. All the same, he would not leave them over there—that much Riker would assure, whether they were dead or alive. If this ship was to be destroyed, her captain would be aboard her, whatever happened—he promised himself that.
And Deanna. He turned away in pain from the thought. Her attempts in the old days to teach him the Betazed mind-disciplines had never worked out well. Now he wished with all his heart that he had a bit more ability, that he’d tried harder—anything, so that he could possibly reach out to her perceptions and let her know that he was with her in mind, if no other way. She knows that anyway, he told herself. But did she really? At such times, the certainty would have been worth more than gold. But it wasn’t available. And you have more than a thousand other lives to look after as well, he reminded himself, as severely as he could.
The door chime went off. Visitors were the last thing he wanted at the moment, but there was nothing to be done about it. “Come,” he said.
Hwiii glided in. “Am I interrupting something, Commander? If so, I’ll come back later.”
“No, come in, Hwiii. Sit—” And even in his present mood, he had to laugh a little. “I was going to tell you to sit down.”
The dolphin turned that sideways grin on him. “It’s a common reflex,” Hwiii said, lowering his pad to a height just about a foot above desk height.
“How’s your work going?”
“It’s going well,” Hwiii said. “Mr. Data and I have been able to very closely categorize the overt qualities of this space. This is going to be extremely useful information when we get back home. Up until now, obviously we’ve never had any direct instrumental measurement of another universe’s physical and nonphysical qualities.”
Riker raised his eyebrows and smiled slightly at the absolute certainty of the “when,” but he was in no mood to argue the point. “I take it there’s something you need from me, then.”
“There is, Commander. I need to get out.”
“Out?”
“Outside the Enterprise for a brief period.”
Riker was mildly surprised. “Well, there’s no problem with that. I’ll have a shuttlecraft authorized for your use immediately. As long as you don’t go into warp—”
“No, Commander, I’m sorry: I was unclear. I don’t need a shuttle. I just need to go out by myself for a little while.”
“You mean EVA?”
“Yes, just for a little while. We have a saying, my people”—and the dolphin’s jaw dropped in a broader smile—“‘you might as well try to sing in air as judge direction out of water.’”
Riker could hardly begrudge a smile at that, either. “Mr. Worf and I possibly should have a talk with you in more detail about that. We have this thing called ‘opera.’”
“I should be delighted to find out a little more about it. And it’s true that in some matters the saying has become obsolete: even some of our own singing now has parts written for ‘airborne voice’—human specialists come to sing with us sometimes, these days. But the saying is still good in this respect: to judge a medium most accurately—the instruments can take one of my people only so far—for best evaluation of hyperstring structure and nature, I really need to get out there and feel it on me. The Enterprise, unfortunately, is of such a mass that it creates a certain amount of interference, distortion, in what I’m most desperately needing to sense. All the readings are inevitably colored by the mass in which they rest. I should like to get away—not very fan even a few hundred meters would be fine—and do some ‘fine-tuning,’ as it were, of perceptions and instrumentation.”
“Will it take you long?”
Hwiii swung his tail no. “No more than an hour. Can you spare me that long?”
“Is this in aid of your own research, or is this something that has to do with our present predicament?”
“Both! Sea alone knows, there are times when even the most assiduously pursued research needs to be put aside. I would do so gladly, but fortunately the two problems are swimming in pod at the moment. No, there are definitely differences in this space that seem to have nothing to do with hyperstring structure per se. I’m trying to follow those up. Without going into too much technical detail, hyperstring structure here seems to be both slightly more complex and slightly more… elastic is the best word I can use… than it is in our universe. If what Mr. Data and I suspect about the methods used to bring us here is in fact correct—if this information is in fact corroborated by what Mr. La Forge is able to bring back with him, once the other Enterprise’s computer cores have been penetrated—then we may be able to ensure against its happening again. I think that space in a given area of, say, this universe can be caused to infect, contaminate, influence, space in a congruent area of a neighboring universe, briefly—to cause the congruent universe’s hyperstring structure to become more ‘flexible,’ in tune with its own. So that a ship like ours might be propelled across the boundary.”
“Or sucked in,” Riker said thoughtfully.
“Sucked would be an adequate description, since energy tends to flow from areas of higher concentration to those of lesser, and the movement can be perceived as a suction on at least one side of the transaction. And if such a transfer was timed so that the hyperstring structure was more energetic on, say, our home side of the transfer and less energetic here, then everything in that area of space—and it wouldn’t have to be very large—would find itself drawn or pulled or sucked into the congruent space.” Hwiii shook his fins in a gesture Riker assumed was meant as a shrug. “It’s possible, but there are more tests I need to run, and the simplest and most conclusive of them will involve me getting out there in my skin.”
“Without a space suit?”
“No, Commander, I’m sorry: I was being idiomatic. I have a space suit—it’s in my luggage.”
“You have a maneuvering pack on that?” Riker said, slightly uneasy.
“Yes, sir, it’s quite well equipped. It’s the delphine form of the standard spacecraft maintenance and installation suit that they use at the Yards at Utopia Planitia. Manipulators and so forth are all installed.”
Riker thought about it. “All right, Commander. Just one thing. Thrusters or not, I would prefer that you be tethered.
That way, if for some reason we have to move quickly, at least you’ll still be inside the warpfield and mat
ching our velocity so that we can beam you in without any trouble.”
“I was going to suggest as much. Five hundred meters will more than satisfy my needs, if you agree.”
“Make it so. And let me know what you find out.”
“Absolutely I will.” Hwiii boosted himself up on his pad and started to back a little toward the door, then paused. Riker had let his eyes drop to the screen. “Something else?”
“Commander.” Hwiii paused. “I would hope not to be intruding…” “In what regard?”
The dolphin looked uncomfortable, but resolute. “You’re very troubled. I would intervene on your behalf.”
The phrasing struck Riker as odd: would not as a conditional but as a statement of intent. “Intervene with who?” he said, somewhat puzzled.
The dolphin let out a little blowhole-snort of laughter. “I wasn’t using the word in the personal sense. With the universe, I suppose. You are being greatly tried.”
“I wish you could,” Riker said somewhat ruefully. The dolphin hung there looking at him quietly. Will had a powerful urge to tell him to go away, and just as powerful an urge to confide in him. Who do you go to for advice, he thought, when the counselor’s gone? He had no time for Ten-Forward just now. The friend to whom he might most readily have turned, the fellow officer and professional whom he might have consulted in that capacity, and the mentor and command figure who was also good for advice—all three were missing. Worf—Riker smiled a little at his own thought. Occasionally Worf’s viewpoint was a little too alien to be of use in a given matter: this was probably one of them. And Data, full of knowledge as he was, was still a novice in emotional matters. But what kind of good advice is someone going to be able to give you who spends all his time underwater? said a snide voice in the back of Riker’s mind.
He knew the sound of his own hopelessness and ignored it. “I am troubled,” he said to Hwiii. “My commanding officer and two of my shipmates are absent in circumstances of extreme danger. And I’m particularly close to all those people.”
“But especially to one of them.”
“Gossip gets around, doesn’t it?” Riker said softly.
Hwiii swung his tail. “Observation is enough, Commander. Circumstances like these can be extremely painful. I honor your commitment.”
“You mean my bloody-mindedness,” Riker said softly, “to suggest that she—that I send my shipmates into a situation like this.”
Hwiii settled a little toward the desk, put a forefin out, and studied it thoughtfully for a moment.
“Intervene,” Riker said. “It’s an odd word.”
Hwiii blew a bubble of laughter. “Many of the aquatic peoples’ viewpoints tend to be… a little on the passive side, by human reckoning. Thought and discussion are usually considered superior to action, in our cultures. To do almost anything but eat, sleep, and sing is considered in some quarters to be ‘intervention in the business of the universe.’”
“Which is expected to manage it by itself, I take it.”
“Through our lives, yes…. The evening you came and shouted that dreadful word at me, I was singing. Mr. Data correctly identified the source.”
“The Song of the Twelve.”
“Yes. It’s hard to explain to someone not aquatically acculturated. We aren’t a great people for ceremonial, but some ceremonies we do enact at more or less regular intervals, or when circumstances seem to require it. The Song is one of those. It’s not so much a reenactment—though it does describe something that happened a long time ago—but a pro-enactment, you might call it. You can never tell quite how it’s going to end, even though there are general guidelines.”
“Is it a religious ceremony?” Riker said cautiously.
Hwiii looked thoughtful. “Well, it would be hard for me to say: I’m no expert in human religions, but—don’t they usually involve belief, and belief systems?”
“Often.”
Hwiii glanced at the chair on his side of the desk. “Well. Do you believe in that chair?”
Riker blinked. “I don’t know if it would make a difference if I did or not. The chair’s there.”
“That’s right,” Hwiii said very cheerfully. “It’s like that. Anyway, there are twelve parts to the Song—well, thirteen, actually, one part is more or less virtual. Some of them are potentially fatal.”
“There must not be a lot of demand for them, then,” Riker said, wondering what this was leading to.
“Oh, no, on the contrary, people fight for the right to sing them. Fatality isn’t always certain. There are always people who like to take that kind of risk, for the glory of it or the honor, or other personal reasons.” Hwiii shrugged. “Anyway, I had a partner who thought she might sing one of those parts.”
“One of the fatal ones.”
“Oh, yes. And she came to me for advice about it finally. I wasn’t quite sure what to say. It’s worse because I’m considered something of an adviser—because I do all this work with Starfleet, and a lot of work with humans.” Hwiii blew a small sound of bemusement. “Bear in mind, there are quite a lot of our people who don’t feel that we should have more to do with humans than we can help. Because of what you did to your cetaceans. To our cousins, as it were. Other alien races are another story, but some of us prefer to dwell on that old bad history. Now, my feeling personally is that you can’t live in the past forever, or you don’t get much living done—except dead people’s lives, and even they’re done with theirs. But all the same, here I was being asked because I was such an expert”—and the irony was now unmistakable—“whether I thought my best friend, as she was, should possibly go off and get killed. At the same time, I understood the ethical questions. You don’t sing the Song of the Twelve for entertainment; you sing it because it needs doing, because people need to be reminded who they are and where they came from. The Song does that. And if people forget who they are, they lose the nature of it. So I told her, absolutely, she should go away and do it.”
Hwiii was quiet for a long time.
“So what happened?” Riker said finally, intrigued.
“Oh, she lived,” Hwiii said, looking thoughtfully into some distance, probably one filled with water rather than air. “In fact, she got podded because of it, she and a couple of the other singers. They’ve settled up off the Carolinas somewhere.” His eyes came back to the here and now. “The point is, I know how you feel. Necessity is hard on love. But love is tough. It survives it… if you don’t assume it’s going to die.”
Riker looked at the smiling face and detected the somberness behind it. “Hwiii, I much appreciate it.”
The dolphin swung his tail sideways and headed for the door. “Keep your tail up,” he said.
Riker breathed out, smiled a small smile, and went back to his reading.
In that other ship, Picard strolled into engineering, with Barclay, who had come running after Ryder reported the incident with Wesley, right behind him. All around him, crewmen saluted. He returned the salute and sauntered on in, carefully keeping his astonishment out of view. He found he had erred in thinking of engineering as merely “as big as a barn”: it was more like a cathedral.
The main axis of it appeared to run at least halfway down the primary hull, lined on both sides, on several levels, by rows and rows of paneling, instrumentation, engine-status and shield-status readouts, all the paraphernalia of an engine room. In the middle of it, the “nave” as it were, where the power conduits would branch off to either side and service the warp nacelles, stood the huge tower of the main matter/antimatter exchanger, four times the height of the one on his own ship, piercing upward through several decks and downward through several more. With the ship running on impulse, the throb of the engines was much muted: only the occasional soft, shuddering boom ran through the great space. Everything was dimly lit except for various pools of light at workstations, and the light byproduct of the matter/antimatter exchanger. It was a cathedral indeed, a cathedral to Force, on a sheer brutal level that Pi
card had not thought possible.
“Now where do you think Mr. La Forge will be in all this?” he said to Barclay casually as they walked along.
“Probably down at the main status readouts, Captain,” Barclay said, “or in his office. We’ll look down there first.”
Picard nodded and walked along with him, looking around casually. It was still very odd to be in a version of his ship where you couldn’t tell immediately where someone was—but these people apparently felt that communication was a lesser priority, not a necessity. That by itself was so diagnostic of them…. Talking was not in their style. Bullying, yes; commanding, and then destroying if the orders weren’t obeyed. No discussion, no give-and-take: just take. Though it’s true, too, Picard thought ruefully, that among these people, communications like ours would be dreadfully abused. You could immediately find out where that person was that you wanted to assassinate, track his movements.
Barclay gestured with his chin toward the matter/ antimatter exchanger. “There he is, sir.”
They walked down the great open space through the soft murmur of machinery and crewmen attending their stations. The main status readout board was an overblown version of Geordi’s main board in engineering, this one positioned just in front of the matter/antimatter exchanger column, and looking uncomfortably like an altar to the great god Power. La Forge was leaning over the board, studying readings. He looked up, saw them coming, and hurried to come to attention and salute.
Picard simply stood and let him hold it for a long second or two before returning the salute, then moved around the board toward him, slowly.
