PRECHANCE TO DREAM Page 14

  “That’s why I’m calling, Captain. We’ll need maybe another hour to get it together.”

  Picard scowled. “I thought you expected to be done by now.”

  “Well, we would’ve been—but sensors just started picking up a big jump in energy cycling from Domarus.”

  “Energy cycling?” Arit repeated, not sure what Geordi meant.

  “Right,” Geordi said. “Production and utilization.”

  “Mr. La Forge,” Picard said, “do you have any idea what might be going on down there?”

  “Not yet, sir. But we’re doing our best to figure it out.”

  “Very well. Report to the conference lounge as soon as you are ready. Picard out.” He faced Arit, who had finally sat back down. “Captain, let’s cut to the heart of the matter. I want my missing shuttle and crew members back—and you need a home for your people. If I did not believe we could achieve both, I would not have invited you to remain on the Enterprise.”

  “And I wouldn’t have accepted if I didn’t also believe we could both get what we want.”

  “Well, then, this sounds like a promising start.”

  “A start,” Arit said wearily as she tried to rub the fatigue from her eyes. “That’s all we’re seeking, Picard—a place for a fresh start.”

  Beverly stared at the Teniran commander. “Then why won’t you let us help you find that place?”

  “It is not—” Arit began, then stopped, rubbing one lower fang against her upper lip as she sighed in frustration. “It is not an easy thing for us to reveal our vulnerabilities. You would understand if you knew our recent history.”

  “How can we know your recent history,” Beverly said, not without compassion, “if you won’t tell us?”

  “And, not to be insulting, Captain Arit,” Riker said, “but we already know your vulnerabilities. We know the condition of your ship.”

  “Perhaps you do, Commander Riker. But none of that changes the core of our dispute—you remain opposed to our goal.”

  “On the contrary,” Picard said with a raised finger. “We want to avoid any actions around Domarus that may hinder the retrieval of our missing shuttle and crew members, of course. But beyond that, our opposition is based solely on one point—the need to be certain that no sentient life forms already exist on Domarus Four. Now, you were absolutely correct when you said you have every right to keep your past confidential—”

  Arit cut him off, shaking her head as if trying to clear it. “And Commander Riker was right—you already know our weakness. And I can’t ignore the fact that you have not taken advantage of that knowledge.” She allowed herself an ironic chuckle. “Even if you were hostile, we don’t exactly have anything you could possibly want. It’s just dawned on me how liberating it is to realize you’ve got nothing left to defend.”

  Arit took a deep breath, paused at her internal crossroads, then chose her direction. “You were also correct, Captain Picard, when you said that we’ve traveled a hard road.”

  “Are you ready to tell us about it?”

  “Yes, I suppose I am,” she said with a nod, and she seemed relieved to be sharing the burden at last. “Unpredictable changes in our sun caused catastrophic climate changes that turned our farmlands to desert, brought on terrible rains that flooded the lowlands, whipped up devastating storms everywhere. Nothing could be done. Our scientists tried. The only fortunate aspect of the whole disaster was that we did have enough time to plan an evacuation of most of our people before Tenira became totally uninhabitable.”

  “How large a population?” Crusher asked.

  “Not large compared to many planets—about ten million.”

  “That is small,” said Riker.

  “That’s because our land masses are small compared to a lot of worlds, so we had to develop strict population control and balance long ago.”

  Picard frowned. “Ten million may constitute a small population, but it is a sizable evacuation. Where were you going to go with ten million people?”

  “Well, we were ready to split up and live wherever we could, hoping someday we could reassemble all our people—or at least their descendants—on one world. But then one of our trading partners, Ziakk, offered us a planet in their star system. A savage, untamed world—but habitable for people willing to put in a lot of hard work.”

  “They offered it to you, just like that?” Dr. Crusher asked.

  “So it seemed at the time. They wanted this planet developed, but they said they did not have enough Ziakkans willing to make the kind of sacrifices required of pioneers.”

  Riker sipped a steaming cup of coffee. “But you took it?”

  “There’s an old Teniran proverb, Commander Riker: ‘the starving beast can’t be too picky about whose garbage he eats.’ That’s a fair description of our situation. The Ziakkan offer looked like the answer to our prayers—a place all Tenirans could be together.”

  “But something obviously went wrong,” Picard said.

  “Yes it did, Captain. It turned out the Ziakkans didn’t want partners, they wanted slaves. Tenirans are not slaves,” Arit said with fierce pride. But she turned pensive again as she recalled the events that followed. “We declared our independence—and they declared war. Biological war. We had no time or resources to build adequate defenses . . . within six months, most of our people were dead. Including my husband.”

  “Attempted genocide,” Crusher said in a horrified whisper.

  “Very nearly successful. Those of us who survived realized we couldn’t win, so we fled. The Glin-Kale and her five thousand passengers are all that is left.”

  Beverly blanched as she tried to grasp the magnitude of the Tenirans’ loss. “Five thousand left out of ten million? That’s unbelievable, an unbelievable tragedy.”

  “But true. Now perhaps you can all understand why Domarus is so important to us.”

  After an awkward silence, Picard exhaled a contemplative breath and spoke softly. “The Federation will help you find a home, Captain. If not here, somewhere else. But I will offer you a promise: the Teniran people will not be doomed to wander.”

  “Gina, I thought you said we should hurry back to the ship.”

  “Oh, come on, Kenny—I want you to see this. It’s not like it’s out of our way.”

  Gina and Kenny were struggling to keep their footing as they made their way up through a steeply inclined section of the tunnels. As Kenny was about to press his argument against any detour, however slight, his right boot skidded on some loose pebbles and he flung a hand out to grab the cave wall for support.

  “Not that I’ve got any choice other than following you,” he groused.

  She gave him a smile of supremacy. “That’s right.”

  “So what’s so special that I have to see it?”

  “You’ll see.”

  He cocked his ear. “Sounds like a waterfall.”

  They reached the trail’s crest, then followed the gentle downhill slope. The echo of cascading water grew louder, approaching a roar. Without warning, Gina stopped and Kenny bumped into her.

  “Kenny—be careful—” she shouted over the thunder of the water.

  As she warned him, she tipped her flashlight down, revealing that the trail ended in a ledge no more than a meter ahead of them. Kenny gasped when he saw how close they’d come to tumbling over the rim. Then, when she widened her beam and fanned it out in the darkness, he simply gaped in wonder.

  The overlook opened onto a towering cathedral of rough rock, streaked with glimmering veins of minerals, reds and golds and greens and blues, in patterns of such astonishing geometry they almost had to have been planned. If the grotto had a ceiling, it was lost in the darkness hundreds of feet above them, far beyond the range of their searchlights. A silver ribbon of water tumbled over a similar ledge across the cavern, twenty meters away from where they stood, and plunged into an abyss so deep they couldn’t see the bottom.

  “So,” she yelled, “what do you think of my discovery? Pretty
incredible, huh?” With more than a little glee, she watched as Kenny blinked in amazement several times before he could answer. And she took pleasure from the fact he seemed to have lost all his fear of being underground. He actually seemed as awestruck as she had been when she found this place.

  “This is . . . wow!” he finally managed to say.

  Gina snickered. “You’re so articulate when you’re astounded.” Then she sighed. Never in her life had she seen anything like some of the wonders hidden deep inside this enigmatic world; it was just plain frustrating that she did not have the time to explore them properly. If she could summon up the nerve, she planned to ask Captain Picard for a return trip to Domarus—that is, if they ever got off Domarus. “I wish I at least had an hour to do a painting of all this.”

  “But we don’t. We’d better get going.” He paused and squinted into the darkness at something just above the lip of the waterfall. “What are those things up there?”

  “What are what things up where?”

  He pointed and she followed his finger. Then she saw them too—a pair of slowly twirling sparks of fire, one golden, the other a brilliant ice-blue, splinters of brightness pinwheeling in place above the narrow stream just before the falls. She immediately rose up on her toes with excitement. “Oooh, I don’t believe this! Two of them!”

  “Two of what? Have you seen these things before?”

  “Yeah—I mean, at least it looks like what Wesley and I saw near the shuttle. But we only saw one of them.”

  “One of what? What are they?”

  “I have no idea,” Gina called as she advanced right to the edge of the path, wishing she could get closer. “The one we saw disappeared before we had a chance to scan it with the tricorder.”

  “Whatever they may be, they are most intriguing,” a new voice said from behind them—Data’s voice, making them both jump.

  “Commander!” Gina gasped, clutching her chest and trying to calm her breathing. “If you weren’t an android, I’d think you were really ticked off at us.”

  “If I were not an android,” he said, “I would be. Your unauthorized excursions will not enhance your performance evaluations for this mission.”

  Kenny, who had been rendered speechless by Data’s surprise arrival, found his voice and pointed across the cavern. “Hey—look what they’re doing.”

  Data and Gina aimed their lights over just as the sparkles seemed to stall. But their stillness only lasted for a few seconds. Then the tiny energy motes burst into a frenzied dance that quickly became too rapid for the human eye to follow in detail. In their wake, they threw off streamers of colors that coalesced into a multihued helix, spinning and whirling and caroming off the cave-cathedral’s walls, seeming ever on the verge of changing, yet always holding its fundamental intertwined shape. A second helix formed, then another and another, and others after that.

  Ken and Gina, and even Data, stood transfixed by the luminous energy spirals as they spawned and linked, finally forming a vibrant grid that seemed alive as it filled the entire core of the grotto and enveloped the walls—yet leaving a buffer around the three starship visitors. Starting at the low threshold of their hearing, a chorus of clinks and jangles rose in both pitch and intensity, quickly drowning out the roaring waterfall and forcing Ken and Gina to cover their ears.

  Their android chaperon continued to listen and observe—Gina knew his sensory circuitry could simply compensate for the excessive input, probably without limit. She wished she could do the same.

  Simultaneous with the explosion of sound, the energy helixes blazed to a super-white brightness too painful for humans to watch. But Gina struggled to keep her eyes open against the overwhelming radiance because of what she thought she saw behind it—impossible.

  The walls of the grotto—solid rock—seemed to be running, transfiguring like molten ore. But she felt no heat at all. What’s happening here?

  She surrendered to the bright light, clamping her eyes shut, ducking her head and burying her face in her arms as she turned away and fell to her knees, ending up curled into a protective ball.

  After an interval that seemed like hours but was really only a matter of five seconds, Gina became aware that the sunburst had faded. She sat up and tried to look, but her eyes were slow to adjust after the blinding brightness she’d tried in vain to witness moments before. Her heart raced with impatience as she blinked deeply, waiting for a return of visual clarity. She felt Kenny next to her.

  “Are you okay?” he said, a quaver in his voice.

  “Yeah, I guess so. How about you?”

  “I’m all right, I guess. Are your eyes okay?”

  “Getting there.” As she spoke, it dawned on her that she wasn’t shouting. The waterfall thunder that had filled the grotto was gone, replaced by stunning, crystalline silence. There was no sound at all other than their breathing. What is going on here?!

  She felt Data’s cool strong grip on her arm as he helped her to her feet. He had picked up her flashlight and added that beam to his own, one in each hand, illuminating as much of the cavern as he could.

  Gina’s eyes finally accustomed themselves to the dimmer light, and she looked around. With a wide-eyed shiver, she discovered that the interior of the cavern had changed. The slope of the walls, the patterns of the mineral veins, it was all different.

  And the waterfall really was gone—without the slightest remaining hint that it had ever been there.

  Ko’s twirling slowed perceptibly as the realization set in: the live things still did not comprehend. Nor had she gained any understanding of them.

  Her companion felt Ko’s disappointment and made a halfhearted attempt to soothe it. :You tried your best, Ko. Perhaps Mog was correct. Perhaps they are not intelligent.:

  :I cannot accept that, Tef. They must be intelligent. They MUST be.:

  There was one observation that Ko kept to herself. This longer exposure to the mysterious visitors had given her the time to notice that there was something different about the tallest one. It was not like the two smaller ones, which seemed to be subservient to it. The colors she felt from the tall one were somehow cooler, less variable. Except for the fact that it seemed to behave in much the same ways as its companions, Ko might have doubted that the tall one was a live thing.

  Perhaps this different one is the key, she thought. She would not give up. She could not. But she knew her time was running out.

  With gulps of total disbelief, Gina and Ken stared at each other, then became aware that the two tiny sparkles that had seemed to precipitate the magical transformation were now hovering above them. The sparkles circled overhead, and Gina twirled in place with them, as if joined in some improvised ballet. Then they spiraled up into the darkness and vanished, leaving her lightheaded. Data steadied her with a hand on her shoulder.

  “Commander,” Kenny said, his voice once again husky with fear, “if those things—whatever they are—did all this to solid rock—what if they change all these tunnels around? We might never find our way back.”

  “That is a very real possibility, Mr. Kolker. In which case, haste would seem to be in order.”

  “In other words,” Gina said, “let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  JEAN-LUC PICARD held up a long loaf of bread, fresh from the oven, still warm to the touch, perfectly crusted yet soft inside. He broke off a hunk, and gave it to Captain Arit. The splendid and varied aromas of baking filled the tiny boulangerie—the sweetness of the pastries, the hearty smell of the bread—and brought a smile to Picard’s face.

  The baker behind the counter was a tall, barrelchested old fellow with white hair and a bushy moustache that remained incongruously dark. As usual, he had accented his florid complexion with powdery streaks from the flour on his hands. In his childhood, Picard had wondered if everything in Henri’s house, including his wife and gaggle of children, were similarly streaked. The old baker reached for a giant mitt and, with a proud flourish, slid
another fresh rack of bread loaves out of the big oven at the back of the shop. The heat of the oven produced beads of sweat that trickled down through the powder on his face. “Jean-Luc,” he called as he patted away the dampness with his white sleeve, “how is it?”

  “Wonderful—c’est toujours delicieux, Henri,” Picard said with a reminiscent grin. “Can I pay you next time?”

  Henri replied with a short burst of staccato laughter that set his belly and jowls aquiver. “Just like when you were a boy, eh, Jean-Luc? Toujours un petit polisson!”

  “What did he say?” Arit whispered, feeling a bit left out.

  “He said I was always a little rascal. When I was a boy, I would stop in here every week and pick up a loaf of bread. I would always ask if I could pay next time, and Henri would always say yes.”

  “And did you pay next time?”

  Picard turned sheepish. “I’m ashamed to say I didn’t. But Henri and my father were good friends, and I am quite sure Henri got his share of free wine from our vineyards.” They reached the door and Picard opened it, tripping the little bell mounted overhead, causing it to jingle a merry farewell.

  “Merci, Henri. Au revoir.”

  The jolly baker waved. “Au revoir, Jean-Luc. Come back soon, and say hello to your family for me!”

  The two spaceship captains exited onto the cobblestoned main street of the sleepy village, nestled in a gentle valley between rolling hills. Vineyards spread into the distance in every direction.

  “What did you say the French word for ‘bread’ is?” Arit asked.

  “Pain,” Picard said, pronouncing it “pan,” with the inaudible French “n” swallowed at the end. He listened approvingly as she repeated it. “Very good.”

  “So is the bread,” she said, swallowing the last bite.

  He handed her half of the rest of the loaf and took a bite from his own chunk. As villagers on foot or riding bicycles went about their business, Picard and Arit strolled past shop windows shaded by awnings, then stopped at a sidewalk café and sat at a table facing the street. A pretty young waitress with raven hair and blue eyes appeared with two stemmed glasses and a bottle of red wine. With a flirtatious smile at Picard, she poured for them, then moved on to other tables and patrons.