ONLINE THE NEEDS OF THE MANY

by Michael A. Martin

  Well, when you put it that way it sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it? But the truth is, it didn’t look like we had anything to lose by running strange ideas up the flagpole. Cestus III would have to face the prospect of mass evacuation once the Gorn and the Klingons officially went to war.

  And then Worf—Ambassador Worf, I mean—came to town.

  What was Worf doing on Cestus III?

  Cestus III wasn’t just a backwater Federation planet in those days, or a prime strategic target for both the Gorn and the Klingons. And it wasn’t just home to my brother and his family, or one of the hubs of my freight business. It had also become a diplomatic way station. So when Worf passed through the Pike City spaceport on his way to an emergency session of the High Council, he had some layover time that took him to the Pioneer Pub. Kornelius and I had a few drinks with him and pumped him for information from the Gorn diplomatic front.

  You “pumped” Worf for information about his job? And he talked? You must be talking about some other Worf.

  No. Ambassador Worf Rozhenko.

  What did you use on him, Romulan mind probes? Worf has got to be the least talkative person ever to have accepted a diplomatic post.

  He might not be very talkative, but he’s absolutely terrible at telling convincing lies of the “don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right” variety. Worf was evidently on his way back from a meeting with King Slathis and his new ad hoc “mediator,” B’vat. From what I was able to gather, Slathis had not only refused Ambassador Jean-Luc Picard’s offer to mediate, but he had also just shot down what amounted to Martok’s final truce offer. So except for a bit of official paperwork, the war was already just about a done deal. That was when Kornelius floated the idea of resolving the conflict via a single game of baseball—a contest between King Slathis’s own handpicked team of Gorn players and Kornelius’s Pike City Pioneers.

  Your idea sounded crazy when I summarized it a minute ago. And it still sounds insane when you talk about it now, even after all these years.

  Crazy ideas were all we had left, Jake. Cestus III was about to be caught in the Klingon-Gorn crossfire. Kornelius wasn’t about to just sit back and let that happen, and neither was I. Part of being a pioneer, I suppose, is standing your ground and fighting to protect your homestead when you have to, using whatever weapons are available—even when your only weapon is a baseball bat. I guess that’s also part of being associated with the Pike City Pioneers. Like I said, we didn’t appear to have anything to lose, so there was no reason not to swing for the fences, so to speak.

  You and Kornelius must have had a lot of confidence in the Pike City Pioneers.

  Sure. And why not? They were the cream of professional baseball on Cestus III. They’d taken the Cestus Series in ’eighty-two, ’eighty-six, and ’eighty-eight, and had just pulled out in front of the Northern Division in the ’eighty-nine season, which was already well under way. Besides, what could a bunch of awkward, shambling lizard-men know about fielding, hitting, pitching, or baserunning? Baseball is a game of finesse. And judging from the holoimages we’d seen—you know, the stuff that came from the transmissions the Metrons transmitted to James T. Kirk’s Enterprise over a century earlier—the Gorn moved like they were under water.

  So you ran your idea past Worf. He must have liked it. After all, he knew the game; he played with us against Captain Solok’s Vulcan team in one of Quark’s holosuites back in ’seventy-five.

  You know Worf. It’s hard to tell right away whether he likes an idea or not. All I know is that he presented our challenge to the Council, in person, while Kornelius and I made the exact same sales pitch to King Slathis, using Ambassador B’vat’s new diplomatic aide, Ja’rod, who would later end up in the KDF serving aboard the I.K.S. Kang, as a go-between.

  Ja’rod. Wasn’t that the name of the man who helped the Romulans launch their sneak attack on Khitomer when Worf was a boy?

  It was, though I didn’t know that at the time. The Ja’rod I’m talking about was the grandson of the man who sold out his people at Khitomer. He was really just a kid—but a kid with ambitions as big as his forehead, and an ego to match. Honorable, in an old-school Klingon way, but also a real schemer, as we’d discover later on.

  That’s not surprising, considering Ja’rod’s pedigree. His uncle, Duras, was the assassin who poisoned Chancellor K’mpec in ’sixty-seven and tried to take his place as leader of the Klingon High Council. Ja’rod’s mother was a woman named Lursa, who fought on the wrong side of the Klingon Civil War in ’sixty-eight. A year or two later, Lursa and her sister, B’Etor, started selling weapons to Bajoran terrorists. And not long after Ja’rod was born, both sisters were killed after they’d sabotaged the Enterprise.

  That family history is probably why Ja’rod’s life was what Kornelius described as “snakebit.” Ja’rod was working as a junior diplomat under B’vat—a job that must have looked like a good path toward redeeming some portion of his family’s badly blemished honor, or at least toward jump-starting an otherwise stalled career—while we were working out what the press eventually dubbed the Cestus Accords.

  The Cestus Accords. Peace through baseball. The trusty ash wood bat as an instrument of diplomacy.

  Baseball does have a way of inspiring cooperation, Jake. Our proposal to settle the conflict with a ball game somehow managed to get Martok, B’vat, and Ja’rod all on the same page, after all.

  How did that come about?

  Worf convinced the Klingon High Council to delay its planned invasion of Gorn space until after our challenge was either officially rejected or accepted by both sides, and—if accepted—played out to its conclusion. I heard that Martok initially pooh-poohed the whole idea, but decided to take advantage of it as a chance to gain extra time to get his forces deployed properly for the coming Gorn War. He sold the “baseball truce” to a majority of the High Council on that basis. Of course, Martok had seen the same images of that slow, clumsy Gorn captain that we had. So he expected an easy victory for the Pioneers, just as we did.

  And what exactly were the stakes that both sides agreed to?

  First, Slathis agreed to send a team of Gorn to play one game against the Pike City Pioneers. The winner was to gain a few specifically defined concessions from the loser, just as though he was signing the surrender documents that the loser always ends up having to ink after the end of a long, bloody war. The game just let both sides leapfrog over the really messy parts of the war.

  That sounds extremely civilized. But not very Klingon.

  Only because the Klingons didn’t think that the Gorn had any real chance of beating the Pioneers—and because a Pioneers victory would force the Gorn to accept a very Klingon-friendly border-revision treaty drawn up by Ambassador Jean-Luc Picard himself. On the other hand, a Gorn victory would have cost the Klingon Empire a half dozen border worlds that the Gorn Hegemony had been itching to annex for decades, and Slathis wouldn’t have to fire a shot to get them—assuming his team won, that is.

  If King Slathis never had any real intention of making peace with the Klingons, then why did he agree to this charade?

  Taking up our challenge was a public relations coup for Slathis. It made him look a lot more fair-minded than he really was. It helped him bolster the lie that he’d been negotiating in good faith all along, even though he was really just using the additional time the agreement had generated in exactly the same way that Martok was—that is, Slathis was preparing for a war that both leaders now saw as inevitable. And B’vat was happy to help the Gorn prepare their team—very quietly and discreetly, of course.

  I know that B’vat never had any love for Chancellor Martok. But why would he actively work to undermine an outcome that would have benefited the Klingon Empire?

  Because B’vat saw the game as an opportunity to deal Chancellor Martok a humiliating political defeat, without actually having to get his own hands dirty bringing it about.

  Did B’vat really think that a bunch of awkward rept
ilian bipeds who’d never played baseball before had a serious chance against a professional franchise like the Pioneers?

  Let’s just say that B’vat had discovered a few things about the Gorn that we hadn’t yet. Even though the Federation had had a few encounters with the Gorn over the years—I remember reading about the Enterprise dealing with an uprising on the Gorn homeworld during the Dominion War—we still didn’t know much more about them then than we did when Captain Kirk had to use improvised field artillery to survive his own Gorn first contact back in the twenty-third century, after the lizards had wiped out the original Cestus III outpost.

  It can take years to get good at playing baseball—and I’m talking about humanoids who don’t move like they’re under water. How much pregame training time did the Gorn team ask for?

  They only spent a few weeks preparing once we’d struck the agreement-in-principle. I had to scramble to delegate some of my upcoming freight runs so I could clear my schedule for Game Day and the few days leading up to it.

  The Gorns’ willingness to play sooner rather than later probably should have been our first clue that something wasn’t right.

  Do you think the Pioneers let themselves get complacent?

  That’s what Kornelius said afterward, even though he and I both knew how hard the team had worked over the years to stay at the top of the league standings—and how hard they kept working during the weeks leading up to Game Day. On the other hand, I can also remember Hughes Baptiste* telling the press that the Gorn couldn’t possibly touch us in “the Cross-Phylum Challenge,” and calling baseball “a mammal’s game.” And then there was Nancy Addison,* drinking gallons of that nasty-sweet blue drink that they brew on the Gorn homeworld. We got a case of it, thanks to a convenient “logistics error” committed by Ja’rod, who evidently wanted the team to be complacent, not to mention hungover. What was that horrible, syrupy stuff called?† Anyway, word had gotten around that the Gorn found it intoxicating, but Nancy discovered that it acted on humans like a stimulant. Maybe she and a few of the other players did get complacent after that, at least a little.

  But that changed pretty damned fast once Game Day finally arrived.

  When did you and Uncle Kornelius first realize that a victory over the Gorn team might not be quite the cakewalk that the Pioneers had imagined?

  Well, I can’t speak for Korny, but I knew the Pioneers were in for real trouble the second I caught my first real glimpse of the Gorn team from my seat in the Pioneers’ dugout. The Gorn had just arrived on Cestus on Game Day itself, after doing all their training off-world. Their Gorn team was quite a sight.

  The S’Yahazah City Talons.*

  Great name. It made them sound as though they meant business, which they obviously did. And the black-and-red uniforms were a nice touch, too, even if they weren’t uniforms in the traditional sense. More like big belts and sashes. Very impressive, even compared with the Pioneers when they were fully decked out in their green-and-orange home colors.

  I’ve seen holos of the game. The Gorn players were dressed like the native Britons who fought the occupying Roman Legions over two thousand years ago.

  The Talons uniforms, sparse as they were, had to have been designed for psychological impact as well as for the players’ freedom of movement. The Gorn managed to look “uniform” without covering up too much of their skin—those iridescent green scales of natural body armor that must have intimidated as much as they protected. Even their caps were cut away until they were just bills attached to extended straps pulled tightly around their huge, leathery heads. I suppose they did that so as not to cover up those scaly red crests that ran along both sides and down the middle of their skulls.

  Other than the head crests, what specifically was it about these Gorn that had you so worried?

  What wasn’t there to worry about with these guys? First of all, they didn’t bear much resemblance to the big, clumsy Gorn that Captain Kirk had tangled with. They didn’t move much like the Gorn we’ve all seen in the holos. Hell, with their bony, blood-colored head crests, they didn’t even look like any Gorn anybody in the Federation had ever seen. Sure, they had the big crocodile jaws full of razor-sharp teeth, just as you’d expect, but that was pretty much where the resemblance ended. And they didn’t have the silver compound eyes that had made Kirk’s Gorn such a weird, alien sight. Instead, their eyes were almost golden, and they had single pupils, arranged vertically, like a cat’s eye. They had only three fingers on each of their hands and feet, none of which were stuffed into baseball cleats, by the way. Those three fingers were a lot longer and more dexterous than the five we’d all seen in the old first-contact holos. With hands like that, gloves were redundant, not to mention impractical for players equipped with claws as sharp as old-time surgical scalpels.

  I suppose the Talons didn’t bother with batting helmets, either.

  They didn’t see the point. If you hit any of them with a pitch, they probably wouldn’t even have noticed.

  So it wasn’t until Game Day itself that you had your first serious exposure to the Gorn caste system.

  We learned a lot about that the hard way. But don’t get the wrong idea, Jake. We weren’t complete idiots. We already knew that some sort of caste system was operating in the Gorn Hegemony, since we were already better acquainted with the warrior caste than we’d ever wanted to be. And thanks to the reports we’d read about political upheavals on the Gorn homeworld during the Dominion War, we also knew about the political caste that ran the Gorn government. Most of us assumed that Gorn castes were just a way to deny special privileges to a majority so that a lucky few could enjoy them—you know, the way things were done in a lot of Earth’s ancient societies, only with lizard lords and lizard serfs.

  But the truth turned out to be a lot more complicated than that, didn’t it? More like, say, the system of D’jarra castes that was in use on Bajor before the Cardassian Occupation.

  Even Bajor’s D’jarras don’t really do justice to the Gorn caste system, even though both have very complex hierarchies based on profession—which adds up to lots and lots of highly specialized castes. And I think everyone imagined that however unequal the power relationships might have been between the castes, the highborn and the lowborn had to be identical apart from their status. I mean, whatever limits Bajor’s D’jarra system might have set on an individual’s social mobility, those things didn’t extend to the genes.

  Not so with the Gorn.

  No. We didn’t realize that some of the Gorn castes—or maybe all of the Gorn castes—had specialized physical characteristics. At least not before Game Day.

  I learned later that the Talons had all been drawn from the Gorn technological caste. But at the time, we had expected the opposing team to consist of a bunch of dangerous but sluggish and relatively slow-witted lizard-men.

  A team of snapping turtles was something the Pioneers could have handled. Instead, they found themselves going toe to toe against a squad of very clever, very sharp-clawed… velociraptors.

  How much of the game itself do you remember?

  Every damned pitch, Jake. I have a photographic memory for baseball, especially for the really important games. Maybe that’s one of the qualities of mine that drew your father and I together. Just don’t ask me to try to pronounce the names of any of the Gorn players. That’s a good way to give yourself laryngitis.

  Will you give us some game highlights?

  Well, the Pioneers recovered their composure pretty quickly after they’d all taken their first good, long look at the Talons. The Pioneers were professionals, after all. They represented the best the Cestus Baseball League had to offer, which at the time was the same as saying the best that baseball had to offer. And everybody on Cestus knew there were holocams present that would transmit this game all across the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.

  So the Pioneers and the nineteen thousand or so spectators who’d come to Ruth Field that day—it was still Ruth Field back then, Jake, so don’t c
orrect me—doffed their caps for the singing of the UFP national anthem, which was performed that day by a Sinnravian drad musician named J’Nat Cton. Even the Talons seemed to be trying to be good guests, putting their claws over their chests, if only for the benefit of the ranks of cameras that were trained on them. Besides, it was a beautiful, cloudless day. Perfect for baseball, despite the weird, surreal circumstances.

  Since they were the home team, the Pioneers took the field at the top of the first inning. Blaithin Lipinski was on the mound. She’d been pitching for a lot of years by then, but her arm was strong and she could still throw nearly fast enough to beat an impulse engine at full throttle. She’d built up a hell of a reputation by then, with a career total of five perfect games* under her belt.

  I wonder if she thought she might be about to pitch perfect game number six.

  I’m sure that thought crossed her mind—especially after she threw three innings’ worth of pitches without letting any of the Talons reach a base. But the Gorn batters weren’t failing to connect completely. They were hitting more than their fair share of foul balls. And every one of those turned yet another bat into a shower of hickorash† slivers. Halfway through the game the officials had to call a time-out to replicate more bats.

  Anyway, it became obvious to everyone right away that even the smallest player on the Talons’ roster could hit a hell of a lot harder than the strongest Pioneer could. They just hadn’t managed to hit the ball in the right direction—yet. Of course, that left everybody wondering just how much speed the Gorn baserunners would be able to get out of those scaly, velociraptor legs and the shoeless, clawed feet that were attached to them.

  Didn’t you get to see how fast they could move when they took the field?

  Not during the early part of their game, and that was probably deliberate on their part, to keep everybody wondering about the extent of their capabilities. They did all their prep and training on a Federation-inaccessible Gorn planet, probably for the very same reason. So the Gorn players always took their time walking out onto the field. They literally strolled to their field positions, even though their minimalist uniforms showed off reptilian muscles that looked like duritanium springs coiled up tight just beneath their scaly hides.