“Most of the researchers have been Lorini,” Spock observed, “and have grown up accepting the assumptions of their culture. And most of the Federation researchers have been more interested in Fabrina’s past and Lorina’s present. Yonada’s history was a low priority for them.”
For his part, Uuvu’ it was wondering why everyone else was so surprised. All things were ephemeral. Even worlds, even stars.
“Has there been any word on Spring Rain?” Sara asked.
“Her condition remains unchanged,” Spock replied. “She is stable, but unconscious. Rest assured I will keep you all informed if this should alter.”
All things were ephemeral. Maybe the others could cope with Spring Rain’s condition better if they accepted that, as ’Geusians did. As Uuvu’ it had had to accept it ever since he’d reached puberty and been driven from his pride-ship by stronger males, forced to wander until he could win acceptance on a new ship. It was the rite of passage all ’Geusian males had to go through, and not every one managed to win a place on a ship of the Diaspora—at least, not one he was willing to settle for. Like many males in that position, Uuvu’ it had decided to gain experience in some other species’ fleet, in hopes of gaining sufficient skill, experience, and strength of character to return and ultimately win the right to form his own pride. Here on the Enterprise he’d found two other ’Geusian males in the same position, and had been engaged in friendly rivalry with them for the leadership of their extemporaneous mini-pride, with inconclusive results. Win or lose, he was having fun, and either way it wouldn’t last. Eventually he’d go back to the Diaspora, win a pride, sire lots of kids, and die; or else he’d die in uniform before he got the chance. Sooner or later everything ended; all that mattered was how hard you fought against the end, and how much fun you had doing it. Spring Rain was a fighter, driven from her own pride in a way, but determined to overcome all setbacks. Uuvu’ it was betting heavily on her recovery. Or would be, if anyone dared to bet against her.
“Meanwhile,” Spock went on, “we still have much work to do. Some of our assumptions appear to have been incorrect, but this does not prove that the Oracular religion arose in response to the ecological collapse. We need more evidence.”
Uuvu’ it studied the relief map on the viewscreen and had a thought. “The mountains! They were forbidden by the Oracle. Scan them for signs of habitation.”
Spock nodded, and the others on the sensor team input the parameters. “It is a creative thought, Mr. Uuvu’ it,” the Vulcan told him, “but I have my doubts. Yonada’s simulated mountains are steep and craggy. While Betelgeusians may find such heights agreeable due to your ornithoid ancestry, most humanoids would choose to reside in flatter regions.”
“Still, there’s much we could find in the mountains. Consider: if the priesthood did take over, there must have been those who played on the opposite side. They lost, of course, but if they had any sense of strategy at all, they would’ve sought the high ground. And maybe not just in hope of winning—maybe to keep defeat from being total.”
Spock furrowed his brow. “You suggest that they may have hidden cultural paraphernalia there to protect it from the purges.” Given the lack of documentation of an earlier system, it was clear that if it had existed, the new regime must have tried to purge all evidence of it.
“As you said, steep and craggy. Lots of nice hidey-holes.” He bounced in his seat. “If the scans from here aren’t enough, permission to do some mountain climbing, sir. I’m itching for a bit of exercise.”
Spock lifted a brow. “Judging from your behavior in response to past ‘itches,’ Mr. Uuvu’ it, perhaps it would be best if you could satisfy this one away from the ship.”
* * *
TO OUR CHILDREN
…[I] speak on behalf of the Free People of the Ship-World Yonada… [i]n the hopes that our heritage will still be preserved, as the Builders intended [when they] created this great vessel….
Our forebears did not appreciate [respect?] the Builders’ wisdom…. [They] squandered our resources…[resulting in] massive famines and death on a terrible scale. The survivors were left to fight [for the] scraps that remain…. We all share in the blame… [for] giving the fanatics an excuse….
Now they remake Yonada into a prison whose bars are implants in our heads, [whose] warder is a machine they dare call Oracle, whose walls are the ignorance they would [create?]… [They believe] that if we forget, if only the Oracle remembers and guides our quest, then we can no longer endanger it with our folly….
[Perhaps] they are right in this belief, though I believe they are not…. [If we are] lost in [archaic? primitive?]superstition, I fear we will be unable to ward off future catastrophes…. Either way, our writings, our art, our science, our… the intent of the Builders… deserve to be known by our descendants—if not on Yonada, then perhaps on [the world we] will one day reach, if luck is with us. Therefore we hide away these works salvaged from the burnings, in this and other locations, and hope that at least some…
“That is all of the text that survived,” Spock told Natira once she finished reviewing the translation on her desk monitor. “Accompanying it were several hundred books and various artworks in similarly decayed condition. We have dated the archive to approximately five thousand six hundred years ago.”
“So the Oracle did not exist before then?” Natira asked, stunned by the concept. She’d accepted years ago that the Oracle’s teachings had been a fiction, but she’d assumed the Creators had imposed them at the beginning of Yonada’s journey. To discover that the Oracle hadn’t even existed at the beginning, that Yonada had a whole lost history… It was still too much to absorb.
Spock folded his hands behind him as he stood before her ornate desk, an antique imported from Argelius. “We know the central computer existed from the beginning,” he said, “since it is depicted in the Book of the People. The name given to it in the Book can be translated as either ‘oracle,’ ‘teacher,’ or ‘guide,’ so this is ambivalent. The Book does convey its information in a somewhat religious tone, but not to the extent of the culture you were raised in, Governess. The concept of a religious Oracle did exist in Fabrini culture, and some of the texts in the cache do refer to a pre-existing Oracular religion on Yonada, but they are unclear on whether that religion held political power, so far as we have been able to reconstruct. It is difficult to draw any conclusions at this stage.”
“But the texts do seem to indicate that the government of Yonada was previously secular in nature,” countered Soreth, who stood to the side observing the rest. His cool Vulcan aspect seemed somehow colder when he turned it on Spock.
“At least it was at the time they were written,” Spock clarified, seemingly unaffected.
“No Oracle,” Natira repeated. “And no Instruments of Obedience… the People lived on the surface and knew it was a ship… how could all this have been forgotten?”
Lindstrom spoke up from where he stood beside Spock. “Normally it wouldn’t be easy to suppress this much knowledge so completely. But with the Instruments, the Oracle could detect any efforts to pass it along, and punish or kill whoever tried it. So those people who remembered the way things were would’ve had to take the knowledge to their graves, with their children none the wiser. I guess when the priesthood took over, they decided even their successors shouldn’t have the secret—or maybe they just wrote the Oracle’s enforcement procedures too well and it even kept them from passing it on. The knowledge could’ve been completely lost inside a couple of generations.”
“The text says there were other hidden caches of knowledge,” Natira said intently.
“Yes,” Spock replied, “but our searches have turned up nothing. It is possible that most or all of the others were found and destroyed. Even this one has largely deteriorated, due to the less than ideal manner in which it was stored. No doubt the rebels assembled it in haste and made do with what they could find.”
“What was Yonada like?” Suddenly she needed
to know, to get some picture of this latest truth which the Oracle had stolen from the People. “Was it beautiful? Did the People act and speak freely? Could they choose their mates, choose their leaders?”
“We don’t have a complete picture yet,” Lindstrom said. “Some of the references are contradictory. The books are from different times, different points of view. But it looks like Yonada was having problems with its biosphere for some time. There are generations’ worth of references to famines and droughts, a lot of elegies to the dead.”
“The Creators did not build Yonada as well as they thought,” Natira said with some bitterness. So much for their omnipotence.
“Even so, it was an extraordinary achievement,” Spock said, “especially given their level of technology, to construct a biosphere that could remain habitable at all after ten thousand two hundred years.”
“And as our anonymous rebel said,” Lindstrom added, “the generations before him—or her—wasted their resources and mistreated their environment.”
“But if they knew it was an artificial world, surely they understood the urgency of preserving it?”
“From what I read in the texts, I think they understood the danger but had become jaded about it. They’d gone through centuries of crisis, and earlier attempts to restore the environment hadn’t been successful. So the People became skeptical that anyone had the answers about how to preserve the biosphere, and just decided to hope it’d sort itself out. So yes, they were free to make their own decisions, but free people don’t always make good decisions.”
Natira stared at him. “Surely you do not suggest that the Oracle’s alternative is better!”
Lindstrom shrugged. “It looks like overkill from where we’re standing, but I can understand a desperate people on a dying generation ship believing that it was their only hope of survival.”
“But I am sure,” said Soreth, “that they did not anticipate it causing problems for a society that no longer faces that crisis of survival.”
Natira smiled up at Soreth, though she knew it would be lost on him. The elderly Vulcan had been an invaluable advisor to her, so wise and clear-headed, a paragon of Federation enlightenment. No one had been a more staunch supporter of her efforts to bring the People into the modern age, even though the Prime Directive limited the assistance he could provide. True, he was stern and unsentimental— but the People’s misplaced sentiment for their past brought more harm than good. “You are right, Commissioner. This is no historical curiosity, but an atavism that imperils our lives today. We must release this truth to the People immediately, and expose once and for all the fraud behind the fanatics’ pious rhetoric.”
“That might be premature, Governess,” said Spock. “I must stress that this is a preliminary interpretation based on fragmentary evidence. There are still a number of inconsistencies and anomalies. The cache contains few texts from before six thousand years ago, and those that it does contain are either badly decayed or are more recent copies of dubious authenticity. And although the texts are incomplete, not all of them seem to corroborate the hypothesis we have presented.”
“Scholarly quibbles,” Natira replied. “We do not have the time to indulge them. The fanatics have lost support among the People since their attack on the school. They are weak, and now we can undermine their support further still by exposing the falsehoods which they preach.”
Lindstrom stepped forward intently. “It might have the opposite effect. A lot of people besides the extremists are religious. They aren’t just following what Dovraku preaches, they have their own deeply held basis for belief. You release this and it could be seen as an attack on the foundations of their faith. It could turn them back against you.”
“The People have accepted new truths before,” Natira said with confidence. “They accepted that Yonada is a ship, because they could see that truth with their own eyes.” She gestured at the monitor. “We have here more tangible truths of the way things were. When we show them to the People, yes, those who are blinded by fanaticism will deny them, but the mass of the People will not.”
“I really think you’re underestimating the depth of their faith, Governess.”
“And you underestimate their capacity for reason,” Soreth countered. “As always, you show more affinity for the irrational impulses in society. But the Lorini have already made great strides in overcoming those impulses.”
“Governess, most people can’t just toss aside a lifelong belief like an old rag. People can’t be converted unless they already have a reason to want to convert.”
“You forget,” Natira said, beginning to find him tiresome, “that I was the high priestess of my whole people. I was as devout as any could be. And yet I readily accepted the truth when it was shown me.”
“Then you must not have been truly committed. You must have had some prior—”
She rose and skewered him with her glare. “I will thank you not to question my commitment again, Mr. Lindstrom! Your only commitment is to your theories and your romantic notions and your incessant lecturing. You have no idea what it is to be responsible for the life and… and death of others!” She stopped herself, pushing away the pain that knotted inside her. “My commitment now is to fight those who threaten our peace and safety. Now I have a weapon with which to attack them. And I will use it. The People will know the truth of the World!”
* * *
Pavel Chekov had always had a bit of an identity problem.
He knew most people would be surprised to hear that. “Chekov?” they’d say. “He’s the guy who’s fanatical about being Russian. End of story.” True, Russia was his home and his heritage, the template against which he judged the universe. His accent, admittedly, may have been something of a muddle thanks to a Lithuanian mother and a well-traveled nanny, but he knew where his heart resided. His mind, though, was another matter. Somehow he never quite saw things the same way as the people around him. Home in Russia, the motherland made tough and bitterly practical by the loss of so many of her children, he’d always been told he was too much of a dreamer, an idealist, his head in the clouds. But when he’d come to Starfleet Academy, people called him a cynic, a humorless fatalist. When he’d fallen for Irina Galliulin, she and her friends had found him too conservative and military, and he’d tried to loosen up, but never managed to meet their approval. But once he’d gone on to the Enterprise, he’d been deemed rebellious, a chronic wise guy and nonconformist. That rebellious streak had served the ship well when he’d led a charge to retake engineering from Khan’s supermen, an effort which had failed but still earned him a transfer to bridge duty soon thereafter.
For a while, he’d felt he was managing to fit in, at least once he’d migrated from sciences over to navigation and had gained the friendship of the easygoing Sulu. And Kirk himself had been somewhat betwixt and between: a rational hothead, an empathetic warrior, the fulcrum balancing the extremes of Spock and McCoy. Through his example, Chekov had begun to feel that being caught in between might be a tenable position after all.
Then Irina had come aboard, more rebellious than ever with as little evident cause as ever, and Chekov had immediately swung back to the opposite end of the spectrum, as humorless and proper as a Starfleet recruitment poster. Afterward, once he’d realized what he’d done, he’d been ashamed of himself for not trying harder to see things her way. It had thrown him off balance again, left him unsure of his place. Some months later he’d taken a leave of absence, turning the nav console over to Lieutenant Arex from the night shift, and gone to find Irina again, to try to make things right. Chekov didn’t like to dwell on that; suffice it to say, it had been an abortive experiment and had convinced him that he was better off on the Enterprise. Arex had been offered a transfer and promotion anyway, so Chekov had returned to the ship and stayed with it until the Pelos incident and the end of the voyage.
But with the ship in drydock awaiting its turn in the refit schedule, and looking at maybe two to three years before it cou
ld go out again, Chekov had found himself a newly minted lieutenant needing to make some career choices. He’d opted for security training, because it was good experience for a command-track officer, and also because he figured it was a place where his Russian sense of caution would fit right in. But once again, he found himself told that he was too idealistic, too unwilling to make the tough choices and define acceptable losses. His instructors and fellow cadets either didn’t believe in Kirk’s proclivity for pulling rabbits from hats, or didn’t think Chekov had a snowball’s chance on Venus of duplicating it.
So now he was back on the Enterprise, a tough, cautious, pragmatic chief of security, and Sulu and Uhura were relentlessly on his case (in their affectionate way) about how cynical and paranoid he’d become. They were still his best friends, but he didn’t really feel he fit in with them as well as he once had. Especially when Sulu was spending so much time with DiFalco and Uhura was so busy with her crew-liaison duties.
As for his fellow security professionals—well, fitting in wasn’t an issue when he was the commander. He was supposed to be at a certain remove from the others. And they accepted him because of his position. He hoped a deeper bond would form in time, that he could earn their trust and loyalty, but that remained to be seen. For now, at least, he was starting to feel reasonably comfortable in his role of security chief.
At least, he had been until today. Today he and his team were patrolling the Lorini underground tunnels with Security Minister Tasari and his team, hunting for terrorists. This wasn’t something Chekov found particularly comfortable. Part of it was just being in this tight space again, one that the potential enemy knew far better than he did. Chekov preferred to fight on his own turf. It had worked against Napoleon, Hitler, and Li Kwan, after all.
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