by Diane Duane
… could they? Perhaps this had been a test to see whether a Starfleet ship could be sucked out of her own universe—“included” into theirs—restaffed with matching crew and sent back… to pass as herself. The pretense couldn’t be kept up forever. But did they mean it to? And did they need it to? On one of these missions such as his Enterprise was running now, far out in the middle of nowhere, how often did a starship actually contact another ship, or planet? They might be out of touch with anything but Starfleet Command for weeks at a time, sometimes, depending on the distance, even months. Eventually the pretense would come apart—they would be ordered back into space where details about the crew were known, back to a starbase or back to Earth, even, for maintenance, for some other mission. Sooner or later someone would detect that crew members weren’t acting the way they should. And indeed that acting would be the worst part of it, for a crew from this universe. Spock’s note to his debriefing document was pertinent: that the only reason his captain and shipmates had survived their experience was because it was easier for a civilized man to pretend to be a barbarian than for a barbarian to pretend to be civilized. But even so, the pretense could be kept up for a good while. And during that time, someone willing to put his mind to it could find out all kinds of things about the Federation from the Enterprise’s computers, and from the regular data downloads from Starfleet Command. What could be done to one ship…
… could be done to more. There had to be more to what they were planning. Just that realization was enough to convince Picard that they had to be stopped, even if it meant destroying this ship with him on it.
But that might not be enough. If the Enterprise didn’t manage to get a warning home to its own universe, it would all happen again, at some other time, with some other ship, and heaven only knew what the end would be.
He got out of the shower, put on another uniform matching the one he had been wearing, reapplied the badge and medals, then went back into the room and just stood there a moment, trying to calm himself. An idea would come, if he could just keep calm. Something always came.
He looked around, trying briefly to identify any small differences between his own quarters and these. But every thing seemed unnervingly as it ought to be. Bed made, furnishings just as in his own quarters, nothing out of place.
His eye fell on the bookshelf. It was exactly as his old friends at home had warned him: there was no such thing as keeping “just a few books,” not even here on a starship, the most space-conscious and weight-conscious of environments. Still the books bred, no matter how carefully he tried to choose them: people gave him books as presents, or books leapt into his hands when he was on leave on strange worlds, as if they knew a sympathetic reader. Now he looked at the books suspiciously—but they were the same, just the same.
Or so he thought. He wandered over to gaze at them. Some of them were very much what you might expect in a limited collection of someone native to Earth: the complete Shakespeare, and the ancient King James Bible, there, he cheerfully admitted, more for the antique beauty of its language than for most of the contents: a pairing that Admiral Parry-Smyth had laughed at, when she had last visited, making an obscure reference to something called “Desert Island Discs.” The rest of the collection was suitably—possibly, the admiral had claimed, pathologically—eclectic: the three original-edition Dixon Hill books, of course: Murder in Camera, The Knowing Look, and Under the Sun. Then two of the venerable old hardcover Everyman editions of Kipling, Barrack Room Ballads and Kim. One of the first Centauri Press editions, a reprint of Glocken’s The Stars out of Joint; various others—a book of Restoration poets, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in the long-lost Cordwainer Smith translation, along with Rouse’s prose Iliad and Odyssey, and Hamilton’s peerless translations of Aristotle and the great comedies of Aristophanes. The Oxford University Press hardcover of Eddison’s Eriks Saga, next to a weary, broken-spined trade paperback of Little, Big; and so many others…. There was even a very late addition to the collection, a present from Will Riker just a month ago on his return from a leave trip to Hay-on-Wye—the Eyre and Spottiswoode edition of Colin Watson’s droll and acute Snobbery with Violence, the best (and, appropriately, the least snobbish) analysis ever done of the early Terran detective novelists. Everything here, all accounted for.
He found that this shook him as badly as everything else, the whole barbaric world outside the doors of his quarters. Who am I here, he thought, that what I see here can so completely match what exists back on the—back home?
“Computer,” he said softly. It chirped. “Read out record of present command,” he said, his mouth dry.
“Picard, Jean-Luc,” the computer said. “Assumed command ICC 1701-D Enterprise on stardate 41124, after destruction of previous command, ICC 2055 Stargazer, subsequent to victory at Battle of Maxia, stardate 33070. First action: destruction of Farpoint Station due to attack on ship by alien spacegoing life-form. Second action: enforcement action on planet Ligon II. Third action—”
“Stop. Nature of enforcement action on Ligon II.”
“South continent of Ligon II rendered uninhabitable by high-gamma fission-producing devices to induce planetary government to provide vaccine necessary to control plague on planet Stryris IV.”
They irradiated—we irradiated a whole continent? “How many casualties?” he whispered.
“Neutralizations estimated in excess of thirty million,” the computer said calmly.
The choice of words said everything. “Continue,” Picard said, and not because he wanted to.
“Third action: neutralization of Tarellian plague ship attempting to make landfall on Haven. Fourth action: recovery of stolen T-9 energy converter from Ferengii Alliance ship. Fifth action: prejudicial terraforming and orbital reconfiguration of Ferengii home planet. Sixth action—”
What did we do to them? Picard thought, shocked. While not exactly fond of the Ferengii, he felt that they had as much right to live untroubled as anyone else. He swallowed. “Computer—clarify intervention at Ferengii home planet.”
“Planet surface was cleansed of alien life-forms; later relocated to orbit around gamma Cephei prior to resettlement by approved species.”
He swallowed again. “Go on.”
“Sixth action: excision of hostile alien life-form on Rubicon III and incorporation of native species into Empire. Seventh action…”
It went on and on that way, and he made himself sit still and listen to it: the destruction of the Jaradan species, the murder of the intelligent inorganic life-form on Velara III so that the terraforming of that planet could continue, the punitive decimation of the Aldeans after their attempt to abduct Enterprise crew…. It was a long recitation, and when the computer finally fell silent, Picard was shaking with horror and rage.
He got up and started to pace, unable to keep himself still. At least, he thought, trying to force himself to calm, we should be thankful for small favors: they’ve never met Q. Or the Borg. Though he found himself wondering whether a meeting with the Borg might not have been good for these people—for this Empire as a whole—if the catalog of Enterprise’s pillagings, slaughters, planetary destructions, and other horrific actions was typical of this universe’s Starfleet. The Borg might even be beneficent by comparison, he thought bitterly. They might be cold and inhuman, but they aren’t sadistic or purposefully cruel.
That thought, that he would wish the Borg on anybody, no matter how they acted, so shocked Picard that he stopped himself in his tracks and just breathed in and out a few times, which his own Troi would doubtless have told him to do if she were there. Picard turned to the bookshelves, desperate for something dependable, some breath of plain clean air in this miasma of destructiveness and cruelty, and reached out to the Shakespeare.
It fell open, typically, at a favorite spot near the end of The Merchant of Venice. Despite his distress, he smiled at the sight of the page: Portia’s speech. The quality of mercy is not strained; / it falleth as the gentle rain from heav
en / upon the place beneath; it is twice blest; /it blesseth him that gives and him that…
He blinked. Expectation and familiarity had deceived him, for the words weren’t there. Or, no, some of them were, but—He scanned down the page.
POR. And hath this Shylock not such right to justice
as much as any other man in Venice?
Did not Antonio the merchant there
know well enough the rigor of the bond
when first its terms were named? Yea, though he did,
did he not laugh, and bind himself therewith,
no matter that he did not love the Jew?
Though justice be his plea, consider this:
that even so the Jew lent on his gold,
trusting the just completion of his bond.
And now Antonio comes, and mercy asks,
in lieu of justice in this noble court.
What, shall the weight of our old dreadful law
be bent by mere fond pity and soft loves,
the oak bowed while the reed stands by and mocks?
The quality of mercy must be earned,
and not strewn gratis on the common ground
as pearls for rooting swine, to any fool
who staggers eyeblind into his own folly
and cries, “Oh pity me!” Else mercy’s self
grows cheap and tawdry from her overuse.
SHY. O wise young judge, how do I honor thee!
Now, forfeiture: now justice, and my bond!
POR. Nor shall men trifle with our law’s sense,
seeking their own escape. Saith not the bond
‘a pound of flesh’? And who beyond child’s years
is such a fool to think that flesh is cut
without blood shed? Such wry and cogging thought
does but betray itself as treachery,
deception in the egg, addled ere hatched.
SHY. ’Tis very true: most wise and upright judge!
We trifle time: I pray thee, pursue sentence!
POR. A pound of that Antonio’s flesh is thine:
the law allows it and the court awards it.
And let what blood may in this surgery run
be interest on three thousand ducats lost.
SHY. Most learned judge! A sentence! Come, prepare!
Antonio being held, he cuts out his
heart and weighs it.
ANT. Oh, I die! A curse on all your heads!
SHY. Fie, such felons’ mouthings shall miss merely.
Nay, ’tis too much. Prithee, give it him back.
He throweth the excess back.
Horrified, Picard scanned back up the text of the play and found nothing but long humorous passages about the folly of people who entered into agreements and then depended on the putative kindness of the other parties. The whole play was seen as an example of the triumph of the state over the pettifogging of special interests and sentiment, and everything in it was as blatantly and sensationally done as anything in The Revenger’s Tragedy, with stage directions to match—in Jessica’s case, where Lorenzo betrays her and then laughs in her face, She runs on his sword and kills herself.
Picard swallowed, his throat gone dry, more betrayed by the black ink on the yellowed page than by anything that had happened to him so far. He turned the pages and found what frightened him more second by second: a Shakespeare horribly changed in all but the parts that were already horrible. Titus Andronicus was much as it had been. So was Macbeth, and oddly, Lear; but Picard paged through the latter and breathed out unhappily, almost a moan, to find one small part missing: that of Cornwall’s “first servant,” who tries to protect old Gloucester from having his eyes plucked out and is immediately killed—a matter of a few lines in the original, now gone completely. And the other two servants gone dumb, and not even a single voice raised, now, to protest the old man’s fate at the hands of Lear’s hateful daughter and her husband.
Slowly Picard shut the book, put it back, and looked mistrustfully at the Bible—and, beautiful language or not, decided not to pick it up.
Other books he did look at, briefly—just long enough to see that plots and other details were changed in some cases, not in others. The Iliad looked about as it should have. After its time, though, something seemed to have started—a slow, relentless moral inversion. Kindness, compassion, charity, seemed to have been declared a waste of time; greed, violence, the survival of the fittest—in this case, the most ruthless—seemed to have been deemed more useful to a species “getting ahead in the world.” The perfect government, in Plato, was now one in which “fear is meted out to the populace in proper proportion by the wise ruler.” Civic virtue soon only mattered insofar as it served self-advancement. Acquisition, especially of power, but also of material goods and wealth—having, and keeping, at whatever expense to others—seemed to have become of paramount importance. It was a ruthless world, enthusiastically embodying the worst of many traits that humanity had been trying to shake for millennia. Some that had been shaken, in Picard’s own world, remained in full and evil flower here. In one spot and another, a little light of virtue, a kind deed or moment of pity, still shone through the prose. Shakespeare was not wholly lost; Kipling, idiosyncratic as always, was still himself; so was Aristotle. But the closer the books came to modern times, the more corrupt their philosophies seemed—and even the oldest ones betrayed him abruptly, for at the end of this universe’s Iliad, Achilles killed old King Priam while the pitiable old man was on his knees before him, begging in tears for the release of Hector’s body for the burial rites. The one time in the poem when that terrible man showed mercy, Picard thought, closing the Iliad and putting it down; that one moment of awful pain and humanity… But not here, it seems. Not here. There was no question, now, why the horrible events of this Earth’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries had produced the result they did. They were, perhaps, the final flowering of all this history: not a turning point, as he had thought, or a watershed, but rather the final roar of an avalanche that had started slowly, thousands of years before, in the slow settling of layer upon layer of coldheartedness and cruelty onto the high ground of the nature of Man.
He was filled with pity and horror for all the innocent lives in this universe that suffered from the result of the difference; and pitied, too, the “conquerors,” the Empire and its allies, who imagined that they rode this whirlwind and were its masters. There must be something that can be done, he thought. Something to stop all this, the suffering, the wanton destruction.
But what…? He would have to try to find a way. Meantime, there was other business more desperate still. Picard went back to the desk and sat down at the computer again. “Computer, read mission instructions.”
“Retinal scan required,” said the computer voice. He leaned close, hoping against hope that his counterpart hadn’t had any injuries or surgery that he hadn’t also had. The light flashed red in his eye.
“Retinal scan confirmed,” said the computer, and the first screenful of data came up—
—and then the door opened, and Beverly Crusher walked in.
I thought I locked that, was the first thought that went through his head, closely followed by, Do I want anyone to see me looking at this? He brought his hand down on the console and cleared the screen. “Stop run,” he said to the computer.
He was annoyed enough to be about to ask the doctor when knocking had gone out of style, but something about her look restrained him. She came slowly over to his desk, wearing the expression of a tired woman, and looked at him. “You did get a good one there, didn’t you?” Beverly said, sounding slightly annoyed.
He shrugged. “I cleaned it up.”
“Yes, you saved me that much trouble. Well, come on down to sickbay and we’ll get you put right.”
They went out together. As they passed Barclay, Picard threw him a later-for-you look; in return, Barclay made an expression that seemed to say, “Nothing to do with me.”
“You’ll
have heard how I got this, then,” Picard said to Dr. Crusher as they came to the turbolift.
“I heard, all right. Not that he hadn’t been thinking of it for a good while, under the circumstances. I suppose he had to try it eventually.”
They got into the ’lift and it closed and took off. Picard looked at Beverly in slight disbelief, while Barclay carefully examined the ’lift’s ceiling. “You mean you’re not—concerned?”
“He knew the risks,” Crusher said, looking resigned. “If he’s going to try stunts like that… there’s nothing much I can do about it. And I’m not fool enough to try to save him from the consequences.”
You’re his mother! Picard was tempted to shout. He restrained himself. This place tended to bring out the desire to shout more strongly than usual. Instead, he said, “I’ve told Troi not to do anything further without my authorization.”
Beverly breathed out, a little laugh. “You think that’ll work this time? Well, you can never tell. I admit, I had a feeling you might not simply let her go ahead and kill him. He is of some value as an officer: he has a gift with the helm, and math, that’s true enough.” She breathed out and looked over at him. “But I think you’re just storing up trouble by letting him off. Eventually, he will come after you again.”
“Doesn’t the thought that he might succeed concern you?”
She shook her head slightly. “Well, granted, my own position would be affected. But I have a fair amount of goodwill stored up, and the ship can’t do without a chief surgeon…. Anyway, he won’t get another chance. It’s a surprise he got even one. What got into you? What on earth were you thinking of? Especially with Riker hot at your heels all through this to get his hands on your position, to get the credit and the glory for this mission? Did you think he was going to try to stop any attempt to assassinate you at this point?”
“I suppose it was foolish,” Picard muttered as the ’lift stopped. Barclay put his head out, checked the area, then waved them out.
