Ex Machina

by Christopher L. Bennett

There is another path, said that other voice again. The joining. Sensations flooded their minds, and Spock was sure they could only come from the Voyager. The blending of selves, logic and passion and will merging, wrestling, finding the ever-shifting balance between them. Not isolation, not oblivion. No mathematical purity or simple answers. Diversity in combination, making a glorious mess. Making peace with each other, and thereby with themselves.

  Logic and passion and will… It was a balance Spock had already known, already been a part of. He shared his own experiences: the doctor whose passion forever clashed with Spock’s logic, each of them keeping the other from losing his way; and the captain who held them both together, took their clashing energies and focused them into decision, into change.

  Yes, the joining, Spock told Dovraku. But not the one you had in mind. The joining cannot be forced. It has to come from making peace. You are at war, Dovraku, with yourself and with your world. You must reconcile with both. As must we all.

  I cannot reconcile with… that. A flash of the memories behind the wall of scars, a hesitant glimpse immediately turned away from. I cannot live with that.

  It is all you can live with, for it is a part of you. That is something which you will either deal with or not. Whether you do that, how you do that, is your journey, and frankly it makes no difference to me. But your war with the world outside ends here. You will make no one else pay for your personal demons.

  Now it became easy to override the Oracle. Dovraku was far from cured of his madness, but his grip was broken. The fanatical certainty which had made his every wish real within the meld was gone, and without it the Oracle’s similarly monovalued perception was easier to resist. Spock had choice, and he exercised it. He was eager to free himself from this meld, but there were a few loose ends he had to tie up first.

  * * *

  “Sir,” Uuvu’ it announced, “computer control is back! Shutting down transporter now.”

  “Good job, Hrrii’ush!”

  “Ahh… of course. It was nothing.” He did a double-take at another readout. “And every one of the missiles has just shut down. They’re adrift and no longer receiving telemetry.” If only he could think of a way to take credit for that too….

  * * *

  Moredi was getting weak. He feared he would pass out soon and be unable to guard the prisoners. And the herbal antiemetic which he had been given before entering that hot, cramped compartment on the shuttle was starting to wear off, and the painful burns and sores on his skin were growing worse, and he was coughing up blood. He didn’t know how much longer he could endure.

  Dovraku had assured him it wouldn’t take this long— that his suffering would be brief and would end with his admission into the new paradise which the Great One and the Oracle would create. And if the Great One said it, then it was true. So Moredi did not understand why he was being allowed to continue suffering, and why Dovraku and the Oracle were not ascending. Instead they merely stood there, bridged together by the Vulcan’s touch, not moving or speaking, not glowing or transforming.

  Moredi felt a wave of dizziness pass over him. He gathered himself quickly, just in time, for the godkiller had spotted it and was tensing to make a move. “Try it, devil,” Moredi said, gesturing aggressively with the crossbow. “Please, give me an excuse to—”

  “HEAR ME, MY FOLLOWERS.”

  The Oracle spoke! Moredi looked around him in awe. “COME FORTH INTO THE TEMPLE,” the booming voice intoned. Moredi hesitated—what about the escaped prisoners who controlled it now? But the voice spoke again, more commandingly. “COME!”

  Exchanging confused and anticipatory looks, Moredi and his fellow true believers moved through the opening into the main temple. The ex-prisoners stood there, still armed, but looking confused, hesitant to act for fear the Oracle would strike them down. Moredi covered them with his own weapon, and a standoff quickly ensued. Looking around, Moredi decided that as the senior one present, he should be the one to speak. “Uh, we are here, great Oracle of the People!”

  “LOWER YOUR WEAPONS.”

  Moredi was taken aback. “But—”

  “LOWER THEM. NOW!”

  It made no sense—but this was the Oracle speaking. He hesitantly nodded to the others to comply, but then he asked, “But what of Dovraku, great Oracle? What of your ascension?”

  “DOVRAKU IS A FALSE PROPHET. HE MISLED YOU FOR REA-SONS OF HIS OWN. YOU WILL SURRENDER YOURSELVES TO STARFLEET SECURITY PERSONNEL, WHO WILL TAKE YOU TO A MEDICAL FACILITY FOR TREATMENT OF YOUR RADIATION POISONING.”

  Starfleet? Surrender to the Oracle’s killers? How could this be? And how could Dovraku be false? He had promised Moredi that the towers would fall, that the bitch Natira would be slain, that he would be elevated to paradise. He had been the One who would bring about all that was right and just and good. It could not have been a lie!

  Moredi stepped forward, confronted the altar angrily. “Why do you forsake us, O Oracle? We were promised greatness! We were promised that the World would be cleansed, that the faithful would be reborn! Where is our new World? Where is our paradise?”

  The Oracle was silent for a time. Then, at last, it spoke:

  “I AM NOT PROGRAMMED TO RESPOND IN THAT AREA.”

  Then a lightning bolt struck Moredi, and he knew no more.

  * * *

  Despite Kirk’s instructions to stay a safe distance behind, Natira had come forward to the maintenance tunnel’s exit, observing the events clandestinely. She had been prepared to act if the opportunity had presented itself, but she had also recognized her own limitations. As Leonard might say, she was a stateswoman, not a soldier. So she merely observed. When she’d heard the Oracle’s familiar, booming voice—a voice she now hated for the blind way she’d obeyed its every word for so many years—she’d been horrified. But its words this time had surprised her greatly. By the time she heard the thunderclaps from the temple, she’d realized that Spock must have somehow taken control of it within the meld.

  She came forward tentatively, in time to see Dovraku slump unconscious to the control room floor. Spock’s hand remained in contact with the Oracle’s core processor. Kirk approached, concern on his face, and called, “Spock? Spock! Come out of it!”

  The Vulcan blinked and gave his captain a nonchalant look. “It’s quite all right, Jim. I have the situation well in hand. I was merely… exploring.”

  Leonard had been kneeling by the body of young Ensign Zaand, but lowered his head in recognition that he was too late. Natira understood how it hurt him, on a personal level, to be unable to ward off death another time. But he held the feeling within and went on with his job, moving over to Dovraku and scanning him. “He’s catatonic,” Leonard said, and looked up at Spock. “What in blazes did you do to him in there?”

  “I merely showed him what it was he was truly fighting. Apparently he could not let go of that fight. But at least his battle is no longer directed at anyone else.” Spock studied Dovraku contemplatively and a bit sadly. “He craved nothing more than to escape his bodily existence. It seems he has achieved that goal. But I do not think it will bring him any peace.”

  “I’m oddly untroubled by that,” Kirk said, as the rest of the ex-captives began filing in from the temple beyond. “Mr. Chekov, take Dovraku to sickbay, under guard just in case. And… take care of Ensign Zaand.”

  “Aye, sir,” the security chief said somberly. As he and McCoy turned to that work, Kirk turned back to his first officer. “And the Oracle?”

  “On standby. And proving quite cooperative.”

  His cavalier tone, considering what he was discussing, made Natira angry. She strode forward to confront Spock. “Why did you take such an enormous risk?” she demanded. “Why not simply destroy the Oracle and end the threat?”

  “I knew it!” Kemori cried. “Nothing has changed—you still wish to destroy the things most sacred to the People!”

  Natira replied in outrage. “I was the one whose willingness to make concessions enabl
ed these talks to proceed in the first place! The treachery came on your side!”

  Sonaya stepped forward. “In fact, Governess, it came from me,” she said with an odd mix of assertiveness and shame. “I was weak, and afraid of Dovraku. I told him of our secret plans and agreed to let him smuggle his people here. None of the others knew.”

  “Very well,” Natira said after a moment. “Then you shall be arrested for treason. Where is Tasari?”

  “I’m afraid,” Dumali told her, “that the Oracle killed him.”

  Natira was stunned. The loss of the man evoked surprisingly little feeling, but the murder of a government minister was an outrage. “There,” she finally said. “You see? It is a menace!”

  “It is a tool,” Spock said. “Dovraku reprogrammed it to do his bidding. As you evidently heard, I did the same some moments ago, via more direct methods.”

  “It is a dangerous tool which Dovraku nearly used to destroy us all.”

  “And before that,” old Paravo said, “it was our guide, our protector.”

  “It enslaved us!”

  “It kept us alive. And linked us to the Creators.”

  “This,” Spock interposed, “is why it must not be destroyed.”

  “Of course,” Kirk said, exchanging a look with him. “The Oracle is an ancient and powerful symbol to your people. Destroy the machine and the symbolism remains. All we’d do is wipe out any chance that the mass of Lorini could ever trust the Federation, or your government. It would escalate the civil war, not end it.”

  “Correct. Surely the events of the past weeks should demonstrate that this conflict cannot be ended by acts of destruction. The Oracle is at the root of all that divides you and defines you as a people. You must make peace with it if you are to make peace with each other.”

  “It is nothing of the sort,” Soreth interjected. “It was imposed by a single faction to enslave the rest through superstition. It does not provide a link to the Creators, for the builders of Yonada did not create it.”

  “In fact, Commissioner, that judgment is premature,” Spock told him. “Mr. Lindstrom and I have uncovered evidence to the contrary. Additionally, my meld with the Oracle enabled me to… experience its databanks more directly. It has given me deeper insight into their contents, and I believe I have uncovered some very salient data pertaining to Yonada’s history and origins.”

  “Tell us,” Natira said.

  “I am not prepared to say anything for certain at this point. However, I may have discovered the location of a lost data archive here on Yonada.”

  “Lost?” Kirk asked.

  “Or perhaps… purposely misplaced, to prevent its destruction in the initial purge. It is not referenced in the current version of the primary plans, but I… sensed its absence in the Oracle’s limited awareness of itself. One might compare it to a missing tooth. If I am right, it is what we have been searching for: a databank containing records from the first forty centuries of Yonada’s journey. I have its location; it is deep underground and therefore likely to have been better protected from cosmic-ray damage. With your permission, Captain, I shall take Mr. Lindstrom and Ms. Uhura there immediately.”

  “Well, Spock, we’ve all been through a lot…. I’m sure they’d like to go back to the ship and rest—”

  “If it’s all the same to you, sir,” said the elegant dark-complexioned woman, “I’d be happy to go.”

  “Me too,” said Lindstrom. “Are you kidding? Uh, sir.”

  Natira faced Spock. “And what do you expect to find?”

  He raised a brow. “Only the facts, Governess. What they mean will be for you and your fellow Lorini to decide. But at least you will have valid information on which to base those decisions.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I’m a fragment of the day.

  If I weren’t, who’s to say

  Things would happen here the way

  That they happened here?

  —Stephen Sondheim

  Project Yonada Construction Complex Fabrina orbit

  Year 126 Unified Calendar (7954 BCE) Yonada launch minus 8 days

  TOMANERU VARI couldn’t stop staring at the sun.

  Ganidra was a dull red sore in the heavens, swollen across a quarter of the sky. Most of its volume was tenuous gas, not even as dense as Fabrina’s thinning air; but it was hot, and close, and it boiled the planet’s air and water off a little more every day. Inside it, dimly visible at the center of that rubicund mass, was the bright, hot core—a time bomb counting inexorably down to detonation. Keeping an eye on it didn’t make it any more or less likely to go off, but still Vari couldn’t resist.

  The Tishiki—the silvery winged creatures who lived in the destination system—had spoken in their messages of a sun so small and bright and white that you couldn’t look at it long without damaging your eyes. A worthwhile tradeoff, Vari thought, for living in a system whose star was still young. One day, he hoped, the descendants of the Fabrini would live there too. He’d spent the past sixty years striving to ensure that they would. But Ganidra was a treacherous star, and Vari lived under the constant fear that it would explode before Yonada could make its escape.

  It was not an irrational fear. Ganidra had been dying since before astronomy was advanced enough to understand the life cycle of a star. Vari reflected on how terrible it must have been for those scholar-priests who had first discovered the impending fate of their sun. Just as they were beginning to harness the new powers that the Scientific Awakening had provided, just as philosophers and fiction writers had begun to contemplate the great future achievements their society had stretching before them, they had found themselves cheated of that future. Just as they had finally begun to understand their world, they’d learned it was doomed to die.

  Even then, there had been no certainty that the sun would not explode at any moment. The panic had been horrible, once the scholar-priests’ vain efforts to keep the secret had failed, a casualty of their own despair. In time, the Fabrini (those who’d survived the chiliastic chaos) had learned to live with their imminent doom. Some had resigned themselves to it while others had fought desperately to escape it somehow, if only by sending forth probes to preserve their legacy for alien eyes and ears (or whatever their equivalents might be) in some distant future. In time the scientists had even provided a limited measure of comfort, determining that the star was still in its carbon-burning phase and thus would not go supernova in the immediate future. People no longer had to go to bed each night not knowing if they would ever wake.

  But over a year ago, the heliologists had reported that Ganidra had begun fusing neon. They couldn’t pinpoint exactly how long ago it had entered that stage, since solar neutrino readings were faint and difficult to measure precisely, and the thermal and electromagnetic changes took time to propagate to the surface. But it meant that the star’s life expectancy was now only a few years at best, maybe less. By now, nearly every Fabrini was well versed in the sordid details of their sun’s impending death, and Vari tortured himself with them every day. Any time now, he thought for the millionth time, the neon in the degenerate core would run out and oxygen burning would begin. Within a year of that, the last of the oxygen would be exhausted, all of it fused into magnesium, silicon, phosphorus, and sulfur. Ganidra wasn’t massive or hot enough for the silicon to be fused into iron, so at that point the fusion would stop. But the residual thermal radiation would be so energetic that it would disintegrate all those nuclei, the photons blasting their protons and neutrons apart, undoing twenty million years’ worth of nucleosynthesis in a matter of seconds. In that dense, energetic froth of particles, the freed protons would collide with the cloud of free-floating electrons that permeated the degenerate core, merging with them to become neutrons and sopping up the only remaining source of pressure preventing the core’s collapse. The core would instantly fall inward on itself until the center reached the density of neutronium. With the neutrons essentially touching each other, the inner core would sto
p collapsing and rebound slightly. The still-collapsing outer core would collide with it at half the speed of light—and bounce, flying outward in all directions at nearly the same speed, forcing all the star’s atmosphere out ahead of it. In hours, nothing would be left of the star but a neutronium husk much smaller than Yonada. And Fabrina—its people, huddled in their tunnels underground—would have no warning. They would… well, the reason Vari obsessed on the physics of the core collapse was to avoid thinking about what would happen to the people.

  Tomaneru Vari had spent his life trying to save a segment of the Fabrini people, only to find himself a member of the one generation which knew for a fact that the world would end in their lifetimes. The project was so close to success, and yet so close to total failure. Ganidra probably wouldn’t explode in the next eight days, the heliologists were reasonably sure of that; but Yonada was a massive object and would take years to accelerate out of the danger zone. The supernova could happen while Yonada was still too close to get away. To lose it all so close to salvation would be unbearable.

  “Why?” he asked aloud. “Why did Tilu put us here?”

  Beside his reflection in the window, Minakeli Baima’s turned to study him. “I thought you didn’t believe in Tilu.” She made a gesture of reverence as she spoke the name of her god.

  “Tilu, the Creators, the settlers from the stars, whoever it was that put our people on Fabrina. Why choose a world that was so close to death already? Why not put us on Lorina in the first place? It’s not so far, not for beings that can reshape worlds.”

  The elderly Oracle shrugged, jostling the ponytail of snow-white hair that floated behind her in the microgravity of the construction complex. “Many of my colleagues like to say it was a test.”

  “A test.” Vari scoffed. “What deity would be so cruel as to put its subjects through sadistic tests just to see if they could survive them? Are we nothing but laboratory animals?”

  “I never said I believed it.”

  “Besides,” Vari admitted, “if it were true, it would mean we failed. Out of all the Fabrini, we only save forty million, if even that many.” He turned his gaze to the arid, sunburned sphere below. Only a few wisps of cloud remained to show it had any atmosphere at all. “How many millions have already died, from the riots and revolutions, the mass suicides, the pointless wars? How many thousands have died in building Yonada? How many thousands more have died just trying to make the journey up here?” With such a vast migration, accidents were inevitable. But there were also renewed riots, started by those who couldn’t accept the results of the selection process. They weren’t the best and brightest, weren’t young and fertile, didn’t have any special skills, didn’t add anything further to the ethnic and cultural diversity of Yonada’s population (which would probably blend into uniformity anyway over the millennia of the journey), but they were willing to smash things and kill people, and believed that was sufficient qualification to survive.