Star Trek: New Worlds, New Civilizations

by Michael Jan Friedman

  That, he tells them, his wrinkled chin lifted in an attempt at dignity, is why it is so hard to accept the charges against him.

  Unlike their stoic “cousins,” the Vulcans, Romulans are driven by their passions. This has inspired a harsh moral code that guides that society and a harsher penal code for even the most minor social infractions.

  The Romulan Right of Statement is as old as Romulan civilization itself, or so I’ve been told by the handful of Romulans who’ve deigned to speak with me. Before there were cities on Romulus or Remus, before there were praetors or proconsuls, Romulans charged with a crime had the opportunity to address the issue of their guilt or innocence.

  Interestingly, there’s no time limit placed on the Right of Statement. If the accused wishes to ramble for days and has the requisite fortitude, no one will attempt to stop him.

  There are analogies to this custom in a hundred other cultures and civilizations, not to mention Starfleet jurisprudence. For instance, both the Celotti and the Igaaren give their citizens a worldwide telepathic forum whenever they feel they’ve been slandered. And on Okapu VII, the privilege of verbal defense is extended not only to an individual but to his clones as well—no matter how many of them there might be.

  However, these are open societies, where a wide variety of personal freedoms are allowed to flourish. One doesn’t expect to see a Right of Statement in a repressed and regimented culture, where the agents of the Tal Shiar—the Romulans’ merciless secret police—seem poised to pounce on even the smallest transgression.

  Nonetheless, a strain of individualism seems to have survived among the Romulans. An agrarian-style air of independence still motivates them, compelling them to speak their minds.

  And they do.

  J’Kor frowns and falls silent—but only for a heart-beat. Then he goes on, speaking of terrible things.

  A rumor swept the praetorate, he says. There were those who wished to see the Romulan and Vulcan peoples unified into the single species they were reputed to be. J’Kor, who had no such wish at the time, tried to distance himself from the rumors.

  However, they eventually caught up with him. He was seized by the Tal Shiar, stripped of his title and his lands. His wife, he tells the assemblage with dark eyes painfully bright, was dragged from her house and killed. His daughters suffered the same fate.

  J’Kor too would have been destroyed, he says, but for the Reunification underground. Ironically, the movement that had caused his downfall became his salvation, and the people he had decried as traitors in the praetorate became his closest friends.

  For more than a year, he says, he worked with the movement, helping to spirit Romulan defectors across the Neutral Zone to the Federation. And all the while, he mourned the loss of his wife and daughters, not a day going by when he didn’t think of them. Then, finally, his cell was exposed and it became his turn to leave Romulus.

  That, he says, is how he came to this M-class world and joined a growing community of Romulan expatriates. But there’s more to J’Kor’s story.

  He had been living on this world, in this village, for nearly a year when the woman known as Ethara arrived. “I found her appealing,” J’Kor tells the assemblage soberly. “I believed she found me appealing as well. And I had mourned my wife for a long time, you see. It was time, I convinced myself, for a new beginning after all my travails.”

  J’Kor turns to regard a severe-looking female seated in the third row of stone benches. His eyes grow regretful under the jutting ridge of his brow. “I did not know she was betrothed to another when I approached her in her garden. Otherwise, I would not have been so …” He hesitates, seeking the precise word to describe his crime. “Purposeful.”

  Finally, J’Kor falls silent and takes his seat in the first row—the only one allowed to do so. His neighbors—also his judges mull over what he’s told them as the sun vanishes in a pool of bloodred light and the first faint stars emerge in the heavens. The shadows fade.

  By human standards, J’Kor’s crime was little more than a lapse in manners. But to the Romulans, with their rigid social guidelines, it’s a good deal more serious than that.

  Of course, it’s important to J’Kor that he not be found guilty. He hopes that his peers will understand the extenuating context in which he acted and have mercy on him. If they don’t, he’ll be ostracized from the community for a prescribed time—no small penalty.

  But to the other Romulans in this community of exiles, J’Kor’s guilt and innocence pale beside the fact that he exercised his Right of Statement. After all, as one of his judges told me earlier, “We’re far from home. Traditions must cast a longer shadow here than they did on the world of our birth.”

  BAJOR

  A WALK IN THE PATH OF THE EMISSARY

  The pilgrim’s path. Young and old consider walking in the path of the Emissary to be akin to taking a step closer to the Prophets. The devoted fill the roads. They are a respectful, joyous throng.

  They’ve been praying at the edge of the river in their fluttering orange robes for weeks now, their words mingling with the whispers that emerge from its blue depths.

  There are more than a hundred of them in all. They spend part of the day chanting the ancient atonal hymns, a few moments consuming the bread and spiced klemmen and water they’ve brought with them, and the rest in contemplation of the valley’s opposite slope.

  To the untutored eye, there’s nothing unusual about the vista, nothing to set it apart from all the other shaggy, green hillsides in this very fertile part of Bajor’s Kendra Province. It has a few bulges of light-gray rock, but they’re certainly common enough. And the scrawny timpok tree growing out of a crack in an outcropping is hardly what one would call remarkable.

  But to the hundred and more Bajorans who have planted themselves here in awe and devotion, those twelve hecapates of sloping land are nothing short of sacred … nothing short of miraculous. After all, this is the land the Emissary purchased before he joined the Prophets in the Celestial Temple.

  And when he comes back, or so the story goes, the Emissary plans to live out his days there.

  “More hasperat?” asks my guide, a herdsman named Geneb who’s singularly unimpressed by all the orange robes. He holds out another piece for me in a paper wrapper.

  I hold up my hand. “No,” I say a bit too quickly, “thank you.”

  The truth is that my mouth still smarts from my previous bite of hasperat, which tastes like fire in a pastry shell. Besides, I’m eager for us to be on our way. I say so.

  Geneb shrugs his bony shoulders. “Then let’s go,” he tells me, and leads the way downriver.

  It was only a few months ago, at the height of the war with the Dominion, that Captain Benjamin Sisko attended a tactical conference in the heart of Rakantha Province.

  Before he returned to Deep Space 9, which he commanded by agreement of the Federation and the Bajoran Provisional Government, a vedek named Oram invited him to take a side trip. Oram’s monastery in Kendra Province was several thousand years old and he thought Sisko might like to see it. Whether out of courtesy or curiosity, the captain accepted.

  They took a transport over the twisting spine of the lush Mennekaren Mountain Range, which divides hilly Kendra from the flat farmlands of Rakantha. Vedek Oram spoke of the furnishings in his monastery, which were even older than the building itself, and Sisko—who had a great respect for ancient things—seemed to enjoy the conversation.

  But as they crossed the Yolja River Valley, with the setting sun bathing it in a ruddy light, the captain found he couldn’t take his eyes off the place. It was as if his heart had been hidden from him all his life and he had only at that moment caught sight of it.

  Sisko saw himself building a house in this valley after the war was over. He saw himself being happy there, at peace with himself. It was more than an aspiration. It was like a vision.

  Seeing how taken Sisko was with the site, Vedek Oram asked the transport pilot to land and let them out.
Then, as the sky flamed with a magnificent sunset, he began walking alongside the river.

  “Where are you going?” Sisko asked, well aware that it would be night soon, and that it got cold at this altitude even in summer.

  “You’ll see when we get there,” the vedek told him.

  A few kilometers’ walk from the crowd of orange-robed worshippers, at a picturesque bend in the Yolja, Geneb and I come to a small inn with white stucco walls and a slanted wooden roof. According to my guide, it’s called The Emissary.

  It seems like a grandiose name for so simple a place. Then Geneb tells me it’s only been called The Emissary since Sisko and Vedek Oram spent the night there. Before that, it was called River House.

  Geneb asks me if I want to get a drink there—some spiced tea perhaps. I decline, though I can smell its pungent aroma beckoning from an open window. After all, there’s a lot more to see.

  We continue our trek alongside the river. The ground underfoot is sandy sometimes and covered with pebbles at other times. The pebbles make for slower going, but that’s all right. After all, Sisko and his friend the vedek had to put up with the same problem after they left the inn.

  Before long, the steep, green slopes of the valley fall away on either side of us and the Yolja flows a little more slowly. Its voice changes too, becoming more of a gurgle than a whisper. I inhale the sharp scent of nipujan bushes, which thrive at some of the middle altitudes, though I don’t see any—at least, not yet.

  As the sun climbs higher into the blue expanse of the sky, my throat begins to feel a little parched, and I wish I’d stopped to have some tea as Geneb suggested. Of course, I can easily dip my hands into the river and satisfy my thirst that way, but I prefer to pursue another course.

  Then I see it, up ahead in the emerald-green hills to my right—a squarish pile of pale, bleached rocks with the overgrown ruins of a red-stone village behind it. The pile of rocks has a wooden bar suspended above it on two upright pieces of wood. As I get closer, I see that there’s a roughly made binjana rope tied around the bar.

  Geneb points it out, but with a wave I dismiss the need for him to do so. I’ve seen enough pictures of the well to recognize it. It was the same one Captain Sisko and Vedek Oram encountered months earlier when they made this same pilgrimage.

  “You know the story?” Geneb asks me as we leave the riverside to approach the well. “The story of the well?”

  “I do,” I assure him. “Before they left Bajor in 2369, the Cardassians injected chemical pollutants into farmlands, lakes, reservoirs, and even seemingly insignificant country wells like this one. But when Sisko and the vedek arrived here, they were thirsty.”

  Geneb nods as we reach the well. “Then a herder, like myself, saw them from a distance and recognized Oram as a vedek. Approaching the travelers, he asked if he could bring them some water from the river, which had spilled from the mountains and was therefore untainted.”

  “But Captain Sisko declined,” I say. “He told the herder that he had gone toe to toe with the Jem’Hadar—and that he wasn’t about to back off from the possibility of a little Cardassian poison.”

  I run my hands over the smooth, worn stones of the well, then lean forward and peer down into the darkness. I don’t see much, but I feel and hear a breath of cool, moist air. Taking hold of the rope and picking it up a bit, I test the weight on the end of it.

  It’s manageable, even for someone like me who doesn’t leave his desk much. I begin pulling the rope and the weight up out of the well. After a while, I get to the end and see what I’ve been hoisting—a wooden bucket not much bigger than my fist.

  It’s full of cool, clear water. I take a sip and feel it wash through me. In my memory, no beverage has ever tasted better. I offer Geneb the bucket and he partakes of its contents as well.

  The writer in me wonders … is the story apocryphal? Did Sisko actually stop at this well, as so many others have since? If he stopped, did he drink? And if he drank, was it with the recklessness that the story suggests, or did he have reason to believe the water was safe?

  There’s no knowing for certain. But then, that’s the way of stories about the Emissary—they have to be taken on faith.

  Benjamin Sisko was half a broken man when he came to Deep Space 9 in 2369 to serve as the Federation’s presence in Bajoran space.

  It was just an assignment to him at the time, something to take his mind off the untimely death of his wife at the hands of the Borg. And at the beginning, he didn’t think a great deal of it.

  Then Kai Opaka, who was Bajor’s spiritual leader at the time, told Sisko that his arrival had a deep religious significance to the Bajorans—though she was unable to explain what she meant. It became a little more clear when she entrusted Sisko with one of Bajor’s mystical orbs, which helped him discover the now-famous Bajoran wormhole and the aliens who lived inside it.

  Drawing water from the well, a Bajoran woman explains, “My grandmother died during the Occupation, without ever knowing the Emissary. I was fortunate enough to know him, and I draw water from the well that quenched his thirst. It is a blessing from the Prophets.”

  Of course, the Bajorans didn’t think of it as a wormhole. To them, it was the Celestial Temple described in their holy scriptures, home of the Prophets who gave the orbs to them in ancient times. And by finding the Temple, Sisko had shown himself to be the Emissary of Bajoran prophecy—a messianic figure who would save Bajor and unite it for all time.

  As a human, and a practical-minded one at that, Sisko wasn’t comfortable with the sacred role that had been thrust on him. However, he tolerated it out of respect for the Kai.

  Eventually, a Bajoran poet who had visited the wormhole challenged Sisko’s title as Emissary. At first, the human was perfectly willing to recognize the poet’s claim, having never really believed he was the Emissary in the first place. But in time, Sisko realized that there was a void in his life—and when the wormhole aliens clearly stated that he was the Emissary after all, he began to embrace the role with new vigor.

  Other revelations followed in quick succession—including the fact that Sisko’s mother was possessed by one of the wormhole aliens. And when the war with the Dominion was over and Bajor finally emerged from its long series of travails, Benjamin Sisko—the Emissary—received his reward. He was called to the Celestial Temple to walk with the Prophets.

  Following the meandering course of the Yolja, Geneb and I see a small city rise in the distance—a cluster of graceful, cream-colored towers and decorative spires built on either side of the river.

  “Dinaaj,” Geneb tells me.

  “Dinaaj,” I echo, letting the name roll off my tongue.

  It was the Emissary’s destination, the place Vedek Oram had in mind when he and Captain Sisko began their trek. I estimate that it’ll take us a couple of hours to walk there, but I’m not in any great hurry. I try to picture Sisko and Oram traveling the same overland route, breathing the same mild, sweet air, shading their eyes from the same brassy sunlight.

  Before I know it, we’ve reached the city’s outermost precincts. The towers and the domiciles are small here, no more than twenty meters high, but still impressive in terms of the artistry that’s gone into them.

  As there’s no school today in recognition of Ha’mara, the holiday that celebrates the coming of the Emissary, children are everywhere in Dinaaj’s wide, tree-lined thoroughfares. Their cries of challenge or delight compete with the raucous chatter of tiny, black kinjun birds, who flutter from branch to branch with maniacal determination.

  “The marketplace is that way,” says Geneb, pointing down a narrower street that runs between two stately minarets into the center of town.

  We follow it. Before even a minute has gone by, we see a couple of young men carrying woven sacks over their shoulders. From the pungent scent that assails my nostrils, I’d say they’re carrying fresh kurna fruit.

  As we get closer to the market, we catch other strong scents—the creamy fragra
nce of ikassa bark, the sweet bouquet of y’rtana roots, the sour quality of noylib leaves. Also, we hear sounds—a melange of voices, high-pitched and deep, plaintive and proud, breaking like waves on a distant shore.

  The textures of the marketplace.

  A moment later, we come around a bend in the street and we see it—a huge, building-bracketed square full of colorful tables, perhaps a hundred of them arranged in a neat and orderly grid. One vendor sells purple fruit and yellow vegetables, another orange and brown festival blankets, still another custom-designed earrings.

  One wooden surface groans and bows under the weight of that morning’s sea catch, its silver and bronze scales glittering wetly in the sun. Another board bears stacks of blue-black mekkenda twists, which, when chewed, control the urge to sneeze in pregnant Bajoran women.

  Bajoran culture has flourished for almost half a million years. One of the things the Bajorans have obviously learned in that time is how to haggle. They wrangle over every last lita, even those who look prosperous enough not to have to do so.

  “It’s good to see the marketplace open for business again,” Geneb volunteers.

  “Was it closed?” I ask.

  “Not officially,” he says, frowning. “But during the Cardassian occupation, most of us were forced to leave Bajor. There weren’t enough of us left to conduct a proper market.”

  It occurs to me that Sisko showed up in 2369, just as Bajor’s expatriates and their families were returning to their homeworld. Many of them had lived on other planets all their lives, never even having seen Bajor. Could there have been a time in the Bajorans’ history when they were in more desperate need of an Emissary?

  “So … where is it?” I ask Geneb.

  He gestures and I follow him through the press of shoppers to the far end of the market square. The place is crowded and the negotiations animated, but no one shows even a hint of pique. Bajorans are nothing if not respectful of one another.