That was not a question Spock had expected. “I am not sure what you mean, sir.”
“We came in here, four and a half years ago, and upended a people’s whole way of life. We… exposed the computer behind the curtain, showed them that their belief system was a fraud, and then we just… left. Went blithely on our way on the assumption that we’d changed their lives for the better.”
“We did save their lives, Captain. And the lives of the three billion, seven hundred and twenty-four million Shesshran then living on Daran V as well.”
“But was I wrong to assume that my responsibility ended there?” Kirk asked, turning to face Spock. “I thought exposing the Oracle would solve their problems. Instead it just seems to have created a whole new set. I knocked down the certainties they had, but I didn’t think about what to replace them with.
“And it’s not just here, Spock. Time and time again, I’ve triggered major changes in people’s ways of life. I destroyed Landru and Vaal. Ended the Eminians’ computer war. Freed the slaves on Triskelion, helped bring down the Reich on Ekos, set up a syndicate on Iotia. Saved the Yonadi, the Chenari, the Pelosians.” A pause. “Armed Tyree’s people.
“Every time, I believed I was acting for the greater good. Preserving lives, fixing other people’s tampering.”
“You were,” Spock said.
“Maybe so. But was it enough? I set these changes in motion—didn’t that give me a responsibility to stick around and see things through? To help them deal with the consequences of what I did?”
“You did not simply abandon them, Jim. Often you left personnel, such as Mr. Lindstrom, behind as advisors. In other cases you notified Starfleet, which sent its own teams of advisors.”
“So I washed my hands of the problem and went on my merry way. I hardly ever bothered to check up on any of the worlds I’d interfered with.”
Spock pondered. “I was always under the impression that your intent was to minimize the extent of your interference. Contrary to popular opinion, you have always been very sensitive to the right of other beings to self-determination.”
“Giving them the right to choose, yes. But dropping a bombshell on them and then… haring off to parts unknown as fast as I can?” Kirk shook his head. “It feels like… like accidentally getting a woman pregnant, and then leaving her to raise the child alone. Of course she should have the right to make her own decisions, raise the child as she sees fit. But that doesn’t absolve the father of some degree of responsibility. He should at least… take an interest in his son’s—his child’s life. At least be there if he’s needed.”
Spock stepped closer and spoke carefully. “Your… analogy is flawed, Jim. You did not abandon your responsibilities to Dr. Marcus or her son. She chose to keep you unaware of your son’s existence. And once you did discover it, she asked you to stay out of his life.”
Kirk gave a small, wistful smile. “I know that, Spock. It’s not the same situation. And I know the choice was hers. Still, whatever the circumstances, it just doesn’t seem right to make a profound difference in someone’s life, or in a people’s way of life, and then just go away and never look back. Surely that can’t be the only way to respect their right to choose.”
“We are a Starfleet crew, Jim. We go where our missions take us.”
“Missions of exploration, Spock. Shouldn’t that mean more than just a quick survey? How much can we really learn this way, trying to visit as many new worlds as possible, and barely taking the time to learn about each one in any detail? How can we understand the consequences of our choices if we only have a superficial picture?”
He returned to the viewports, looked down on Lorina again. “I consider myself a student of history, Mr. Spock. I know… the kings of England and can quote the fights historical. But I fear that sometimes I’m too quick to judge an alien culture by what I see in the here and now, and not to consider… all the history that went into creating it. You can’t see a culture deeply enough without that. Can’t understand the forces that drive it, the nuances that lead to the different ways of thinking its people can have.
“On Yonada I saw a people… shackled under a yoke of deception, a rogue machine leading them to their doom. I took care of the machine, but I failed to understand that it wasn’t the source of their belief system, just an expression of it. A means of enforcing it. It was created to serve a purpose that already existed. It arose from forces that were already part of their culture.
“Those forces are still there, Spock, and they’re responsible for the chaos down there. If we’re to have any hope of resolving this… we need to understand where it all came from.”
“ ‘It all,’ sir?”
“Why the Oracle was created,” Kirk explained. “Why the Creators—the Fabrini who built Yonada—chose to control its population in this way. Why they… lied to their people for ten thousand years, but intended all along to reveal the truth to them at the end of the journey. How much of Oracular doctrine was part of the lie, invented as a means of control, and how much was there already, as part of Fabrini culture and belief.
“From what I’ve seen, and what Lindstrom tells us, there are a lot of different religious sects among the Lorini. We need to find out what their common ground is. If we want to bring the factions together in peace, we need to find something they can all agree on.
“That’s your mission, Spock. I want you to go to Yonada and access the Fabrini data archives. I want you find out everything you can about the history of Yonada, the answers to these questions. And… any other questions I’m overlooking.”
“That will be a considerable undertaking, Captain,” Spock said thoughtfully. “To do such a task with any real thoroughness would take hundreds of scholars studying for generations.”
“A number of scholars have been working on it for four and a half years now—that’s a start, at least,” Kirk said with a shrug. “And who knows, maybe the Yonadi had their own historians.”
“Whose work would have been constrained to hew to approved dogma.”
“Still, it could tell you something. Even by what it doesn’t say. Just read between the lines.” Kirk smiled. “You’re pretty good at doing that with me.”
Spock quirked a brow. “Perhaps, sir. But you are generally quite easy to read.”
Kirk was taken aback. “Mr. Spock, I’ll have you know I’m a master of the bluff!”
“Jim… remember to whom you are speaking. The Vulcans invented the poker face.”
* * *
If Vaylin Zaand lived to be four hundred, he would never understand how humans ever got anything accomplished.
Maybe longevity was exactly the problem, the young Rhaandarite mused as he strolled along the balcony of the rec deck, observing the interactions of the mostly human crew members around him. Humans were so short-lived, with such abbreviated childhoods; they hardly had any time to assimilate any reasonable-sized body of rules and principles. So their behaviors tended to be erratic, impulsive, lacking in structure. On top of which, their frontal lobes were so underdeveloped that they had limited memory or analytical capacity for social rules, little judgment or impulse control, and a language too simple even to have the vocabulary needed to categorize their relationships and interactions, let alone explain how to manage them. It was no wonder their history was so full of conflict and intolerance, when they had so little ability to relate to one another.
Yet somehow they had managed to build things like this starship, and the Federation it represented, despite those limitations. Zaand reminded himself that his elders had had good reasons for initiating the Starfleet exchange program. The fleet was the closest thing humans had to a disciplined social structure, and the elders had felt that certain of their young could benefit from time spent within its relatively simple hierarchy. What Zaand was not inclined to dwell on, and what the elders had not shared with Starfleet, was that it was the less gifted of their young, the ones too slow in assimilating the massive body of Rhaandarite behav
iorial rules, who were assigned to the exchange. Zaand was well aware that he was a slow learner. After 85 years he should have mastered the fifth tier of fractal interpersonal dynamics, but he was still laboring on the third. Indeed, his very discomfort with the thought of his slowness was itself a symptom of same, since by now he should understand how to integrate his awareness of his inadequacy into his self-construct and manifest it outwardly in the appropriate degree of humility. No deception of self or others, no confusion about where he stood in the order of things, just smooth, efficient emotional functionality.
But living among humans certainly wasn’t helping him master the higher tiers. They couldn’t even manage to get the first tier right. Case in point: down below, Lieutenant Commander Sulu was engaged with Crewman Uuvu’ it in a form of ritual combat involving long, narrow-bladed weapons and metal-mesh masks, while Lieutenant Chekov and Chief Petty Officer DiFalco looked on, conversing casually with each other and both the combatants. It was a complete hodgepodge of rank, gender, species, and affective relations. Why were the officers fraternizing on such an equal footing with the enlisted personnel? Why was Sulu seemingly unaffected by DiFalco’s proximity to Chekov, a potential rival male, when he was so clearly interested in her himself? For that matter, why did Sulu show no sign of being aware of his own interest in DiFalco? And DiFalco didn’t seem sensitive to the tension Chekov showed toward her friendship with Sulu, which the lieutenant saw as a threat to his long-term companionable association with the lieutenant commander. By the Elders, couldn’t they even read each other’s subtext?
Still, he had been sent here to learn, and hopefully he could divine something from the observation of this complex muddle. Noting that other off-duty crew members were also watching the ritual combat, Zaand figured he could watch unobtrusively from closer range, and so made his way down to the main level. At the side stairs, he had to pause to let Crewman Ki’ki’re’ti’ke by in the other direction, for the Escherite’s horizontal, segmented body took up most of the stairway. “Going down to watch the clash?” Kick asked, swiveling his short-stalked eyes out from under their bony protective crests to peer up at Zaand. “I’m going up to get a better view. A body gets tired of looking up at everyone else….”
The floor of the rec deck could be reconfigured into multiple forms, with raised platforms, game tables, and modular seats rising up from its carpeted orange surface as needed. Right now the forward section of the deck, just under the large monitor screen, was flattened out to accommodate Sulu and Uuvu’ it’s competition. Zaand made his way around to the front to get a better view, squeezing his way past an Aurelian’s wings and an Arcadian’s tail, and ending up next to the alcove that displayed images of earlier Terran vessels named Enterprise. He was absently pleased to note that the display had been corrected since the ship’s hasty launch, when the image of Jonathan Archer’s Enterprise had been inadvertently replaced with that of an unused prototype based on Vulcan ships of the same period.
Zaand filed that detail away and turned his attention to the bladed combat. Uuvu’ it was pursuing the fight with typical Betelgeusian ferocity. His reach was considerably longer than Sulu’s—’Geusians approached the size of an adolescent Rhaandarite, while Sulu was no bigger than a fifty-year-old—and his boots were off, allowing him to splay his talons for better traction and balance. Yet while those advantages clearly didn’t make it easy for Sulu, the lieutenant commander was holding his own, and showed no trace of concern. Indeed, he was even carrying on a conversation with Chekov. “So I told her I’d never really thought about it.”
“What do you mean?” the lieutenant asked with that odd accent of his. “Of course you’ve thought about it!”
“Okay, I’ve mused about it, let’s say. Had it floating around in my mind. But that’s not the same as seriously thinking about it.”
“Hikaru, you’ve told me more than once that you wanted to be a captain someday.”
“Sure—and when I was a kid, I wanted to be D’Artagnan.”
Chekov scoffed. “You wanted to be D’Artagnan when you were thirty. From the look of it, you still do.”
Zaand saw Sulu’s guard drop fractionally, and Uuvu’ it evidently saw it too, for he made a fierce lunge, his long reach appearing to guarantee that his weapon would make contact while keeping him out of range of the lieutenant commander’s. But Sulu twisted gracefully aside, evading the point of the blade and letting the crewman’s momentum carry him right into the tip of the weapon which Sulu had brought into position with preternatural speed. The computer beeped, DiFalco cheered, and the ’Geusian whipped off his mask in anger, chirruping some shrill phrases which the translators declined to render. “You were lucky that time,” Uuvu’ it insisted. “Rematch?”
Sulu chuckled as he raised his mask. “Maybe later, Hrrii’ush. I don’t have your stamina.”
Chekov was frowning now. “So… are you saying you don’t want to command?”
“No, I’m not saying that. Just that it isn’t something I’ve ever thought about in any detail. It’s been a ‘someday’ kind of thing, you know? I haven’t made any specific plans, or tried to figure out what kind of a captain I wanted to be.”
“Well, that part’s obvious,” Chekov said. “Like Captain Kirk, of course.”
Sulu shook his head. “Nah. Captain Kirk’s one of a kind. I’ve learned a lot from him, of course… but copying him is something nobody else could pull off. I’d have to find my own way.”
“Don’t think of it that way,” Uuvu’ it said, clapping Sulu on the back. “What you want is to try to be better than Kirk. What good is an example if you don’t try to outdo him?”
Predictably, DiFalco stood up for the captain. “You just can’t compete with a record like Kirk’s. I mean, he just saved the whole Earth!”
“For now,” Uuvu’ it replied. “Sooner or later every planet gets it. You’d be better off ditching yours and living among the stars like us.”
“Don’t listen to her, Hikaru,” said Chekov. “I’m sure you’ll save plenty of worlds.”
But DiFalco had noticed Zaand’s presence. “And how about you, Zaand?” she challenged. “What do you think it takes to be a good captain?”
Zaand could tell that she wished to confront him about his misgivings toward Kirk. That was overt enough that even the humans could read it, judging from their own reactions. He wasn’t sure how to respond to the overture. She was enlisted while he was an officer, which made her his subordinate in that sense, but as a sexually mature female she was entitled to his deference. Also, he was an outside spectator to a social interaction in which she was already a participant, again placing her at higher status in the exchange. So that gave him a certain obligation to respond to her request; yet conveying an opinion that he knew would offend her would be a breach of the deference she was owed. And Standard simply didn’t have the syntax to let him craft a response that would strike the optimal balance between these conflicting demands.
So he fell back on what the humans would call a neutral response, though their use of “neutral” encompassed many gradations of relative partisanship. “I’ve never thought about it. My people aren’t cut out for command as you define it.”
“Now, that I don’t understand,” Lieutenant Chekov said. “I know the Rhaandarites’ reputation. But if you’re so good at following orders, then there must be people on Rhaandarel who give them. Right? Unless you all just sat around for millennia waiting for some other species to come along and tell you what to do.”
Oh, dear. His direct superior had expressed a misconception. Would it be insubordinate to contradict him? Except he seemed to recognize that his premise had flaws and wanted them corrected. So in this case contradiction would be obedience. “We never really needed to be told what to do. We just… know. The universe is structured. Everything follows rules, and there’s a right way, a natural way to do anything. Even those of us who give instructions to the rest are simply… divining the natural order of things,
recognizing what actions are dictated by a given situation. It’s just a higher tier of obedience.”
“By the book, huh?” DiFalco asked. “No wonder you think Kirk’s a bad captain.”
“I know he’s been successful. I know you all respect him, and I don’t mean to show disrespect for your views. But his record looks to me like it’s… random. I can’t understand how his procedures could be successful. I’ve heard some people call it ‘luck,’ but I don’t believe there is such a thing.
“Captain Decker, though—he followed the rules. He understood the ‘book’ and used it with great skill. I think that would have to be what makes a good captain.”
“The book is a useful set of guidelines,” Chekov said, shrugging. “But you can’t live your whole life by the rules—it will straitjacket you.”
“With respect, sir, I see it the other way around. The rules… they give you a solid framework to build on. Wherever you are, if you can see where you stand in relation to the rules, then you can follow them to anywhere you need to be, use them to find solutions you never would’ve thought of on your own.” He spoke with growing enthusiasm, trying to make them understand that the rules gave him a sense of control, not confinement. “Without them, you’d just be drifting around randomly, and wouldn’t stumble across the solutions you needed except by sheer chance.”
“But that’s where intuition comes in,” said Sulu. “It lets you make leaps to the right answers, and get to them faster than you could if you had to take it one step at a time.”
“But what if you leap and arrive at the wrong answer? How can you tell?”
Uuvu’ it gave a wry chirp. “By whether you get killed or not!”
“I think that’s exactly my point.”
“Ffah. Decker was a fine man—I liked him. But he was a dreamer.”
DiFalco stared at them. “A by-the-book dreamer?”
“Perhaps the worst kind,” the ’Geusian said. “Oh, he was full of fresh ideas, new approaches, in theory. Couldn’t put them into practice without plenty of time to work out the ramifications, analyze all the issues. He was a man of thought, not action. Kirk, though—this is my kind of captain. He doesn’t waste time analyzing or worrying about rules, he just charges ahead.”
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