Forgive me for noticing, but the notion of Janeway being at fault for putting the Federation in harm’s way vis-à-vis the Undine appears to make you … well, angry.
Anger is irrelevant. I simply do not appreciate the idea.
You also seem to take it personally.
Would it really be inappropriate for me to take such an insult personally? Kathryn Janeway saved me from a waking nightmare. Although it was often a difficult and painful process, she restored my humanity to me. She deserves respect, not ignorant criticism. And she most certainly does not deserve to be blamed for Species 8472’s attacks against the Federation.
That’s probably true. But your anger suggests that you think somebody deserves the blame that’s been directed at Janeway, rightly or wrongly. Who do you think that might be?
I’m not certain I can see the relevance of your question. However, if I were to accept for the sake of argument that blame should be assigned for enabling Species 8472 to become an existential threat to us, then it would be most appropriately directed at the Borg collective.
Which you were still a part of when it started its war against the Undine—a war that eventually spilled over into the Federation’s lap.
Your historical analysis is facile and lacking in detail. But it is also essentially correct.
At the risk of getting too personal, it seems to me that you would sooner blame yourself than your former captain for the escalation of the Undine threat.
Nonsense. “Blame” is irrelevant, Mister Sisko. The universe and the circumstances that arise within it simply are what they are, and we must rise to face them as they are. It is just that simple.
Now, do you have any further relevant questions?
I hope so. I also hope I haven’t offended you.
Offense is irrelevant. The chronometer, however, is not. I have a great deal of work to do, so please get on with your questions.
All right. The ease with which the Undine took down the Borg collective and nearly exterminated it right after the two societies made first contact has always bothered me—as has the Borg’s ability to bounce back from that conflict, as they appear to have done from other “killing blows” they took subsequently.
I have devoted a great deal of study to those very subjects, particularly since the start of my tenure at the Daystrom Institute. However, you must remember that despite its impressive array of capabilities, not even Species 8472 is omnipotent. And neither is the Borg collective.
But the Undine were certainly powerful enough to teach the Borg a valuable lesson about survival. The Federation needs to find out precisely how the Borg managed the trick of not only enduring an Undine onslaught, but also recovering from it.
Be careful what you wish for, Mister Sisko. Humanity may yet have to learn those lessons the hard way, directly from Species 8472 itself. Even Starfleet Command appears to concede that point now, their recent experiences with the Borg having left them sadder but wiser—and more amenable to listening.
Point taken. But what I meant was that maybe the Borg could teach humanity a thing or two about survival should the Undine ever mount another large-scale offensive.
When they mount another large-scale offensive. Not if. But you are otherwise correct. Knowing everything that the Borg collective knows about fighting off Species 8472 would be invaluable to the Federation. I would favor striking such a deal with them should the opportunity arise.
Even at the risk of making another “deal with the devil”?
It is true that there would be a significant risk of the collective reneging on any such deal. The Borg are not known for their willingness to negotiate deals or engage in trade, after all. On those rare occasions when the collective does consent to such agreements, it often as not subjects them to unilateral modification. Dealing with the Borg in any capacity requires extreme vigilance.
But it isn’t out of the question.
Obviously, I cannot speak for the Federation’s policymakers. However, I can say that many Starfleet officers of my acquaintance would certainly be capable of grasping such an opportunity under the appropriate circumstances.
I suppose you might even say that your standing here now speaking with me can be seen as living proof of that.
You might indeed, Mister Sisko. You might indeed.
A smile creases her still supple face as she leaves her final answer hanging in the air between us before bidding me adieu in order to return to her labors—the eternal, never-finished work of a professional watcher. After all, for everything else Annika Hansen may be or may have been—scientist, engineer, and tactical adviser both to Starfleet’s admiralty and to the Federation’s top civilian officials—she is a dedicated seeker after portents of imminent attacks by the most lethal imaginable enemies, as well as opportunities to use the other foes’ tactics against them.
Her obvious sense of ex-drone’s guilt over having helped, however peripherally, to stir up the Undine hornet’s nest in the first place demands that she do no less.
As I mentioned earlier, Annika Hansen could have asked me to meet her for this interview beneath the mild, beneficent skies of Heronius II, rather than from a vantage point some four hundred thousand kilometers above the planet’s surface. But that was not her preference. It’s as though she wishes to keep the planet on which she lived and played as a small child at arm’s length, emotionally speaking, even after the passage of all the intervening decades.
But after having conducted a fairly lengthy conversation with this bluntspoken woman (lengthy by her standards, at least), I decide that her choice of backdrops for this meeting is an artifact neither of Borg detachment nor Olympian arrogance. Her perspective is a perfectly understandable one, especially for someone who has demonstrated as much concern for humanity’s safety and well-being as she has since her liberation from the collective. After all, it’s hard to imagine anyone who’d literally grown up in the thrall of the Borg having anything other than an outsider’s perspective on the human species—just as it is difficult not to look upon an inhabited, M-class world like Heronius II from such a lofty, isolated perch without also experiencing intensely the fragility and vulnerability of life in a cosmos so surfeited with inimical forces.
Whatever her watchfulness against both the Borg and the Undine may have cost Annika Hansen over the years, her unending vigilance still has yet to rob her—thankfully—of that lamentably rare perspective.
THE UNDINE
A VIEW FROM AN IVORY TOWER
EXCERPTED FROM A SPEECH DELIVERED BY KLINGON AMBASSADOR B’VAT BEFORE THE KLINGON HIGH COUNCIL ON
STARDATE 66248.2*
… My blooded warrior brethren, the Federation, and the tera’ngan [Earth humans], vulqangan [Vulcans], tella’ngan [Tellarites], and andor’ngan [Andorians] who were so instrumental in its misbegotten creation, have ever been enemies of the Empire, going back to the pestilence their Captain Archer visited upon our ancestors centuries ago! There can be no question that the time is ripe to invade their worlds, and to revel in the lamentations of their women and children! The time has come to scuttle their ’ejyo’ [Starfleet], to slay their so-called defenders in their tracks, to beard their craven so-called leaders in the very burrows that will become their ignominious, unmarked graves!
I understand those of you who may object to the timing, if not to the intent, of my appeal to the Council’s warrior spirit this day. Yes, we are presently at war with the romuluSngan [Romulans], and with the gorngan [Gorn] as well. But we are a warrior people. When was it ever not thus? War does not enquire after our convenience. It is the only way of life that assures we remain fully, completely Klingon! I trust I need not remind this august body of a fundamental, bedrock truth: tlhIngan maH! [we are Klingons!] We are deterred neither by the quantity nor the number of our foes.
Yet still, some of you continue to ask yourselves, “Is today a good day to die?” That is a fair question, though it is one that I must answer with another question. Is it not better to confro
nt and beat back an implacable foe? Or is it more desirable to allow that enemy to slowly annex our space, quietly choking off future avenues for Klingon conquest, all the while smiling and mouthing fanciful platitudes about peaceful coexistence?
“Is today a good day to die?” Perhaps the best answer I can supply to the question is this one: It is a good day for the Federation to die. Or, as the great Kahless said, “QamvIS Hegh qaq law’ torvIS yIn qaq puS.” [“Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.”]
JAKE SISKO, DATA ROD #P-28
Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, Earth
Professor Timothy T. Palmer is a tall, gangly man with an unruly mop of graying hair. His postdoctoral fieldwork in alien psychology and anthropology began half a century ago, when he was a junior member of a Federation exoanthropological team observing an Iron Age–level Vulcanoid culture on Mintaka III. Dr. Palmer learned early just how badly awry alien encounters can go (even when both sides have only the best of intentions) in 2366, when the highly rational yet fearful Mintakans tried to offer him to their gods as a human sacrifice. After that early near-disaster, Dr. Palmer’s career has encompassed dozens of far more successful alien contacts, culminating in his current posting as chair of Amherst’s Department of Exoanthropology—from which he propounds a decidedly unconventional, if not downright contrarian, view of the Long War against the Undine.
Although Palmer speaks quickly and has a no-nonsense air about him, he smiles and laughs easily as he strikes an old-style sulfur match against the desk, leans forward across a heaving sea of books and padds and papers to transfer a tiny, guttering flame to a second anachronism, a very handmade-looking briar pipe. Having spent a fair amount of time with bohemian types over the years, I’m familiar with the not altogether unpleasant sweet-acrid aroma of high-quality synthacco that soon permeates the small office. As Dr. Palmer turns to toss his spent match into the waste disposal slot, I notice the patches sewn onto the elbows of his jacket.
In keeping with his contrarian reputation, Dr. Palmer doesn’t wait for me to start asking questions.
Mister Sisko, it’s common wisdom these days to look at the Undine War as another “good war,” like the conflict with the Dominion, or even World War II. Even most academics have readily fallen into this “good war” trap.
“Trap,” Professor? I mean no disrespect, but what other way is there to look at it? The Allies had to defeat the Axis powers back in the middle of the twentieth century, just as the Federation had to defeat the Borg, the Dominion, and the Undine. I’m no lover of war, but you have to admit that we wouldn’t be having this conversation if the aggressors in any of those wars—including the Undine War—hadn’t been defeated.
Of course, of course. Setting aside the Undine for the moment, all the other wars you mentioned were at least arguably inevitable. Perhaps even noble. But the Undine civilization is not Nazi Germany, or Imperial Japan, or even the Borg collective. The ordinary dynamics of war that have motivated humans and humanoids for millennia simply do not apply to the Undine.
Which “dynamics of war” are you talking about specifically?
The need to acquire new resources and territory. Look, in the mid-twentieth century, the Axis powers of Germany and Japan stood in contention against the United States and the democracies of Europe on a finite globe. Territory and material wherewithal have sharply defined limits for nations bound to a single forty-thousand-kilometer-circumference globe. And perhaps more fundamentally, Earth’s World War II represented a clear-cut choice between freedom and tyranny. The planet simply couldn’t accommodate both the democratic ideology of the Allies and the authoritarian worldview of the Axis, since both had essentially the same need for expansion and growth. The same applies to the Borg collective, which had to engulf and devour whole worlds continuously in order to sustain the cancerous rate of growth to which it had become accustomed.
But the Undine are entirely different. They aren’t playing the same game at all.
I’ll give you that the Undine were a good deal more subtle than the Borg, with their preference for slow infiltration over quick conquest. But they seemed no less aggressive than the Borg. How were the Undine any different, really, or less of a threat?
The Undine posed a very real threat, no question—but only because we confirmed their worst xenophobic fears by enabling the Borg to defeat them.
You seem to be saying that the Undine War was our fault.
In a manner of speaking, it was. Look at it this way: the Undine certainly didn’t attack us because they needed to take anything we have. They have the run of an entire universe of their own, after all.* Like I said, war is usually about the need for expansion and resources. But not this war.
So the Undine wanted revenge?
Don’t make the mistake of anthropomorphizing the Undine. They aren’t human—or even humanoid, except when they morph themselves using extreme technological measures—and that means that their emotions and motivations might not be entirely congruent with our own, or even entirely fathomable. But they clearly didn’t attack us merely to raid our resources. Look, twenty years ago the Undine established that they had all the resources they needed to resist the Borg, and perhaps even to eliminate them once and for all. Or at least they did until Kathryn Janeway traded technology to the Borg—technology that left the Undine vulnerable as never before to a devastating attack by the Borg collective.
The Borg gave the Undine the first name we humans ever knew them by: Species 8472.
That’s right. “Undine” is Species 8472’s own name for itself, rendered in their own language—or at least it’s as close as any humanoid speech organ can come to pronouncing it. The word translates into Federation Standard, roughly, as “Groundskeepers,” which would seem to imply that they feel a sense of stewardship toward their home realm of fluidic space.
That’s ironic, considering all the destruction they’ve caused in our universe.
Perhaps not, at least from their own perspective. They see us as hungry coyotes who have threatened all life in their universe. They’re merely acting as lookouts and watchmen—watchmen who aren’t afraid to pick up their shotguns and open fire.
In spite of the nonaggression agreement Kathryn Janeway struck with them in 2375.
Janeway was dealing with only one small group of Undine, so that agreement was never binding on anyone beyond that small group. She never had the ear of the entire society, nor did she give us so much as an inkling of how many factions might have had to come to the negotiating table in order to secure a substantive, enduring peace with all the various Undine groups.
Maybe we and the Undine are simply too different from each other to permit a real, permanent understanding to develop. Maybe force is the only way to answer them if they ever come back.
I don’t think so. I truly believe that there’s something of us in them, and vice versa, if only by dint of the fact that humanity and the Undine are both sentient species. I believe that they’re connected to us on some deep if obscure level.
Judging from the vast biological differences between us and them, “obscure” might just be the mother of all understatements. For instance, the Undine DNA helix is a braid of three strands, compared to our two. They have at least five sexes. Their bodies produce enzymes that can literally eat human beings alive, from the inside out. And they’re too cantankerous to be assimilated by the Borg collective.* If the Undine are “connected” to us, it’s difficult for me to see how.
I’m not speaking strictly about biology, although it’s an at least anecdotally documented fact that the Undine are capable of falling prey to a certain… fascination with human and humanoid cultures.
Any species that has placed such a large number of deep-cover spies on Federation worlds has to know that a certain small percentage of their “sleeper agents” are always bound to get a little bit too comfortable while living undercover and end up “going native,” so to speak.
Perhaps, but the
phenomenon of sleeper agents “going native” is real and documented. It stands as evidence that at least some small patch of common ground might exist upon which to build a bridge between the two cultures. Even their native collective name of “Undine” presents us with a curious cross-cultural connection. I refer, of course, to the Undine from Roman mythology.
The water elementals?
Exactly. Undine, from the Latin noun unda, which means “wave.” And the Undine come from a place called “fluidic space.” What better home for water elementals who call themselves Undine? Not to mention the fact that their efforts to integrate our DNA into their bodies resonate with the myths in which the mythical Undine could gain a soul only by giving birth to a human child.
Couldn’t that be a simple coincidence?
We once believed that the plenitude of similar humanoid societies across the galaxy was merely the work of coincidence, too. We now know better, Doctor Hodgkin’s Laws notwithstanding.
But we’re digressing. To the Borg, the Undine were simply another nameless, numerically designated species. Yet another potential assimilation, and a prospective new notch on the collective’s belt. And to us—or rather to Janeway—the Undine were less than nothing. They were merely a means to an end. A bargaining chip that Janeway used to get her ship and her crew home from deep Delta Quadrant space a little more quickly than might have been possible otherwise. No wonder the Undine learned to fear and hate us as much as they have over the years since then.
Forgive me, Professor, but didn’t you warn me not to anthropomorphize the Undine?
I acknowledge that there are limits to scientific objectivity. It’s part of being human, I suppose. And remember, it’s not as though the Undine know nothing about being human, given the number of times they’ve infiltrated Federation worlds over the past couple of decades.
By disguising themselves as humans and members of other humanoid races.
ONLINE THE NEEDS OF THE MANY Page 4
