Or could it be because the dark days of the Undine War are now many long years behind her?
You served in Starfleet for thirty-five years before you began the government career from which you’ve only recently retired. Your perspective on the Undine War may be a unique one, Ms. Piñiero.
Possibly. But it’s a perspective that’s limited to a lot of meeting rooms in places like the Palais. And mostly on Earth, at that.
But it was time spent in the company of some of the most pivotal decision makers in the Federation, and during the most dangerous phases of the conflict. What was life like for you here on Earth’s front porch in those days?
For me? I didn’t really have any time for me, so it would be hard to tell you. It was meetings, meetings, and more meetings. Schedules, notes, minutes, and reports. But I had it dead easy. For President Bacco, it was acute duodenal ulcers and chronic insomnia. As much as I love Nan, I wouldn’t have traded places with her for anything.
For the world beyond the security screens of the Palais, I imagine life during the war years was pretty much like whatever you experienced in… where were you living then? New Orleans?
Close. Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. But most humans on Earth weren’t living on the bayou, so I don’t consider my experience typical.
I spoke with a lot of people from just about every imaginable walk of life during those years. It didn’t matter where you were living. Everybody was tense. Nobody had experienced anything like it since the early seventies, when a handful of Dominion shape-shifters brought our communal sense of paranoia to a rolling boil. Some people reacted to that stress pretty badly—including some highly trained, powerful people who really should have known better.
People like Admiral James Leyton, who tried to stage a military coup against President Jaresh-Inyo when he decided that the Palais had gone soft on enemy infiltrators during the years leading up to the Dominion War.
Leyton’s Coup of ’Seventy-two. Leyton’s actions had such far-reaching implications that it’s already become part of a nursery rhyme, the way the Black Death and Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot did.
Historians already seem to be pretty much of one mind on Leyton. They regard him as a traitor, no matter how noble his intentions might have been. Who knows, a hundred years or so from now “James Leyton” might replace “Benedict Arnold” as a synonym for traitor. But ever since the Long War ended, I’ve been thinking that maybe history ought to amend its judgment about Leyton.
I’m surprised to hear you say that, Ms. Piñiero.
Ugh. Please, you can call me Esperanza, as long as you let me call you Jake. “Ms. Piñiero” is what they call my mother.
It’s a deal.
Jake, I think what surprises you is that I don’t automatically spit when I speak Jim Leyton’s name.
I know there’s a minority school of political thought that considers Leyton a legitimate hero, and I don’t want to start a debate about that. Or offend you if that’s the way you see Leyton—
Jake, I’m the loyal former chief of staff to Governor Bacco, and later President Bacco, a reformer who took over after the almost two-term maladministration of Min Zife. So please, never make the mistake of confusing me with one of those reactionary neobirch* “the-ends-justify-the-means” culture warriors who seem to exist only to test the sincerity of the Federation Charter’s free-speech guarantees.
Of course not. It’s just that I thought that you’d have no truck with a traitor like Leyton.
Believe me, Jake, I don’t. Please don’t misunderstand me. What Leyton did was unconscionable, not to mention utterly incompatible with the Federation’s democratic ideals.
But I also think that history will conclude—someday—that Jim Leyton did us all a tremendous favor back in ’seventy-two.
By trying to seize power forcibly from a duly elected president?
By calling our attention to one of our society’s worst vulnerabilities: our own complacency. Our unexamined assumption that the Federation can only be dragged down to destruction by a sufficiently powerful external enemy, like the Dominion or the Borg.
When circumstances forced us to add the Undine to the Federation’s rogues’ gallery of would-be conquerors, the memory of our own behavior while we were under siege from our two worst previous adversaries was still fresh in the minds of everyone old enough to remember. Sometimes people revisited their own behavior during that time and said to themselves, “I’d do the same thing all over again.” Others looked back and had to confess, if only to themselves, that they weren’t exactly proud of the way they’d acted during a time of real crisis.
I think that we—the people of the Federation in general, but also the people of Earth in particular—handled ourselves much better during the worst parts of the Undine War than we had during some of the preceding crises. The vast majority of us made a conscious decision to listen to the better angels of our nature. And I think we owe part of the credit for that to Jim Leyton, for giving us a good, close look at the wages of fear.
So you still see Leyton’s act as a crime—but you also see it as a kind of cultural inoculation against our repeating some of our earlier mistakes during the Undine conflict.
An inoculation—that’s a perfect metaphor! I think I’m going to steal it.
Feel free. Which mistakes are you referring to, specifically?
Acting almost entirely out of fear was our principal mistake. I’ll give you an example: The Founder crisis of ’seventy-two started off with a Dominion bombing of a Federation-Romulan diplomatic conference in Belgium. The blast took twenty-seven lives in less than a second. But it also robbed us of something we weren’t even aware that we citizens of Earth had: our sense of invulnerability. Our belief that whatever dangers might lurk out there in the depths of space, we could be safe so long as we stayed here, on good ol’ terra firma.
I remember those times all too well. A lot of people wanted to climb into deep holes and pull them in after themselves.
The only problem was that there was no way to dig a hole deep enough. Fear can only take you so far. Even a fear-monger like Pascal Fullerton knew it, or he wouldn’t have said, “The gulf of interstellar space can no longer protect us.”
Even though it was wrong, Leyton’s Coup of ’Seventy-two was a completely understandable—and maybe even natural—reaction to that fear.
Understandable, sure. Natural? That I’m not so sure about. Calling Leyton’s actions “natural” is tantamount to calling Jaresh-Inyo’s much more measured approach “unnatural.”
And Jaresh-Inyo turned out to be right. He understood that turning Earth and the Federation into armed and armored police states wouldn’t make us any safer in the long run. He knew that a strategy like that would only do the Founders’ dirty work for them by forcing the Federation to change itself into something it was never intended to be: a collection of frightened souls motivated by suspicion, fearful that their neighbors and loved ones might really be monsters in disguise. Jaresh-Inyo understood how vulnerable we were to becoming so preoccupied with whispering campaigns and fear that we’d forget our birthright of civil liberties. We barely avoided becoming a planetwide warren of frightened rabbits who were willing to spend the bulk of their time spying on one another.
Correct me if I’m wrong, Esperanza, but you must have written at least a few of President Bacco’s more memorable speeches.
I may have helped her through one or two of the bumpier passages. I’m prepared to let her have credit for all the rest.
I agree with you that President Jaresh-Inyo was right to err on the side of civil liberties, even when that wasn’t popular in more hawkish quarters. But the electorate evidently didn’t see it that way—not even after the collapse of Leyton’s coup and the Dominion’s failure to trick Earth into effectively destroying itself.
And so it goes with inoculations—sometimes a vaccine can cause the very disease it’s supposed to stave off. It’s a calculated risk.
And don�
�t forget, we didn’t have the benefit of hindsight back in ’seventy-two. The bombing in Antwerp grabbed us by the throat and shook us. It forced us to face the fact that there was no way to avoid engaging with the rest of the galaxy. The only question was how to go about it, with a sense of hope or an attitude of fear. Earth spent the next few years staggering in a drunkard’s walk around the right answer, taking three steps toward it and two steps away each time.
Meanwhile Min Zife’s eight-year reign of error got under way—and nearly provoked the Klingon Empire into going to full-scale war against us before it was through. But even though we both seem to differ quite a bit from Zife politically, we ought to be fair to him. During his time in office we learned that there really were some very good reasons to be afraid.
There are always good reasons to be afraid, Jake. The only question is whether you’ll rule your fear or allow your fear to rule you.
That sounds a lot like something President Bacco said.
Another Profile in Plagiarism on my part. I hope it means that at least a little of Nan has rubbed off on me over the years. But we were talking about fear. Often entirely justifiable fear. Such as the fear that spread out across the planet like seismic waves after the Breen attack on Starfleet Headquarters in ’seventy-five.
The Breen had just joined the Dominion a short time before the attack.
And they seemed very eager to please their new shape-shifting overlords. The objective of their raid on San Francisco was to create fear, and lots of it, on the Dominion’s behalf. And they succeeded.
Of course, the fear the Breen brought us wasn’t quite the same as the general, unfocused dread that the Founders had created a few years earlier. It didn’t quite measure up to the fear that the person sitting right next to you on the hoverbus might be a shape-changing alien monster just under the skin. But it was pretty damned effective nonetheless; the image of Starfleet HQ and the Golden Gate Bridge both reduced to charred, twisted piles of rubble had a profound effect on everybody who was living on Earth at the time. Or anywhere else in the Federation, for that matter.
A lot of people living on Earth then were talking openly about moving off-world.
Sure they were. But surprisingly few actually followed through and relocated. I mean, despite what the Breen did to us, how could anyone be sure they’d be any safer anywhere else in the Federation while the Dominion War was still raging on across dozens of other systems in and around Federation space? We were vulnerable everywhere, or at least we felt that way.
And that brings me all the way back to your vaccine metaphor, Jake. The Breen attack was kind of a booster shot for the inoculation that Jim Leyton unwittingly gave us three years earlier. And it all added up to humanity’s eventual readiness for the coming of the Undine.
As I recall, the Dominion War left the Federation in pretty rough shape, and our Klingon and Romulan allies had pretty much the same experience, or worse. If anything, the Founders and their allies left us depleted.
But only materially, Jake. I’m not talking about cities and starships and infrastructure. I’m talking about the condition of humanity’s spirit. Our willingness to reach out to one another during times of upheaval and crisis. Our ability to work together toward a common goal—particularly when the stakes are high.
We’re damned lucky that the Borg didn’t launch a major assault while we were still sweeping up and binding our wounds after the Dominion War.
Amen to that. But even if that had happened, I think we would have gotten through it. Maybe. Somehow.
During the Undine War, Federation Council often didn’t bear much resemblance to the rosy picture of human nature that you’ve been painting today. The Undine had so many Federation representatives spooked that they wasted weeks of valuable time debating useless measures, like declaring the Undine to be unlawful combatants.
The Security Council got itself worked into a particularly vicious bureaucratic lather over the Undine’s many alleged violations of the Jankata Accord, specifically the section that reads, “No species shall enter another quadrant for the purpose of territorial expansion.”
But the Undine had never signed the Jankata Accord. That was a pact between the Federation and Cardassia, if I remember correctly. The closest the Undine ever came to inking a treaty with us was the informal cease-fire that Kathryn Janeway arranged with one small Undine faction back in 2375.
It was nuts, I agree. Like a Ferengi trying to pass a law against rain. Fortunately, Councilor Lynda Foley of Deneva managed to convince a slim majority to vote the measure down by pointing out that the Undine didn’t seem as interested in seizing territory as they were in preemptively wiping out humanity—along with all the other humanoid races in the Federation and beyond.
But I really hope you don’t expect that sort of stuff to make any sense, Jake. After all, we’re talking about the machinations of frightened politicians and political apparatchiks. What I was talking about was the human race, and its kindred species throughout two quadrants. The real, nonpolitical humanity that lay beyond the Council chambers.
Wait a minute. You were a politician once. Or at least a “political apparatchik.”
I was a lot of things, Jake. But I hope I was always a human being, first and foremost. And it was ordinary humans and humanoids—regular folk who raise families and build things, not those who are drawn to power and influence as ends unto themselves—who made the difference in the fight against the Undine invaders.
The Federation Council didn’t seem to think so back in the day. They were so worried about humanity cutting and running from the Undine that they actually drafted conscription legislation.
Legislation that turned out to be just more wasted time and misapplied energy. The Council badly misjudged humanity. It underestimated our capacity to trust one another, to rely on one another, to shoulder not only our own burdens, but the next guy’s, too. The way people did during the rebuilding of Merak II and Catualla after the Undine left those worlds mostly in ruins. Humanity had to summon the strength to soldier on from some deep inner wellspring, in spite of everything the Undine had tried to take from us.
The Undine must have been nearly as surprised as the Federation Council when ordinary people turned out to be the ones who rose to the occasion to drive them out. Never underestimate the power of pitchforks and torches, Jake.
It almost sounds like you’re saying that we owe a debt of gratitude to the Undine for helping us cultivate our better natures.
Not at all. I think of the Undine almost as a force of nature. You don’t thank a force of nature. You don’t thank the Black Death of a thousand years ago for reshuffling medieval Europe’s economic deck enough to finance the Renaissance and all the advancements it ushered in. You don’t thank the asteroid that smacked into the Yucatán sixty-five million years ago for wiping out the dinosaurs so that we primates could have a crack at walking upright, ruling the world, and building the fleets of starships that have enabled us to explore the galaxy.
Nevertheless, I suspect you’d agree with the notion that a little adversity, taken in just the right dose, can greatly sharpen a person. Or even a species.
We definitely owe something to adversity, no question. It tests us and keeps us strong. Science has known for centuries that people actually tend to grow healthier, physically, during tough times—even in times as tough as the Great Depression of Earth’s twentieth century. The people of that generation knew how to throw overboard any nonessentials that might distract them from the essential business of surviving and prospering. When push comes to shove, our generation can learn to live without its replicators and holodecks when the need arises. And we’re usually better for the experience—not that those are experiences anybody’s eager to repeat unnecessarily, myself included.
Anything that doesn’t kill us makes us stronger?
I’m not a big fan of Nietzsche, Jake, but maybe he had a point when he originated that thought. After all, with all the power and technology
the Federation has had at its disposal for so long, it would be easy for us to devolve into a civilization of indolent lotus-eaters. But as long as we’re willing to keep challenging ourselves, that’ll never happen to us. Particularly if we always remain willing to help out our fellow humans and humanoids, the way so many did all those years ago on Merak II and Catualla.
Maybe what Nietzsche should have written was, “Anything that almost kills you just might make you a bit nobler.”
At least until the Next Great Big Scary War.
Yeah, at least until the Next Great Big Scary War.
JAKE SISKO, DATA ROD #F-36
Nowhere in particular
Before I agreed to embark on this assignment, I decided to institute only one rule vis-à-vis any prospective participant: an insistence on fair play.
That didn’t mean that everybody was obligated to adopt whatever notion of truth I might find most appealing. Truth, after all, is highly subjective and elastic, particularly when one is dealing with such an emotionally charged subject as the Undine War, and so many years after the fact. Any attempt on my part to “steer” an interviewee toward or away from any particular “truth” would have been completely counterproductive, since what I wanted were the unvarnished accounts of some of those upon whom the war had had the most profound effects.
But that rule also applied to any participant who might have seen my work as an opportunity to etch his or her pet political talking points into the long-term emergent consensus of history. These were the ones who demanded to vet every question in advance—a demand that I always stood firm in declining as part of my commitment to keeping these chronicles honest and as free as possible of individual attempts to push history in any particular ideological direction. (Those prospective interviewees who either declined or ignored my meeting requests represented self-correcting problems, at least in terms of my aforementioned commitment to the integrity of the growing tapestry of personal stories I had begun weaving.) By enforcing this simple “fair play” rule strictly, I had hoped to assemble a wide range of personal stories from across the Federation’s ideological spectrum and beyond.
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