“All lives end, Tomaneru. All that endures of them is their posterity, their legacy. Thanks to your unwavering strength, those have a chance to live on.”
Vari afforded her a faint smile of gratitude, which was all he could muster. “I’d feel better about our chances if you were coming with us, Keli. I’ll never share your beliefs, but I’ve always found your wisdom invaluable… not only in bringing the people together, inspiring them to believe in the project… you’ve helped me too.”
She clasped his shoulder. “I know, Neru. You don’t have to tell me.”
“You deserve to be told. And you deserve to come with us. Be our Oracle.”
“We’ve been through this. The Oracle of Yonada will need to be able to pass on all the knowledge of Fabrina to its people, down through the generations. A human Oracle could never have as much knowledge at her fingertips as an AI can.”
“You could consult the AI at any time. A living face, a living voice would—”
“Would speak for one point of view, one culture. It’s an inherent weakness.”
“You’ve never suffered from it. You’ve always been open to new ideas, other beliefs. You’re the only one who got all the faiths to cooperate in this.”
Baima shook her head, remembering to do it slowly so as not to confuse her inner ears. “Of course I have my biases. Here I have a dozen other points of view to argue with, to force me to stay on the middle path. If it were just me, without that balance, I couldn’t fairly speak for all the Fabrini.”
Vari smiled. “You’d have me to argue with.”
She ruffled his hair, the way she had when he’d been a little boy. He was sure she still thought of him that way, and she was the only person in the world that he’d tolerate it from, because she treated children with more respect and reverence than she showed for most adults. “And I will dearly miss having that, Neru. But I am old. I have more past than future, and I’ve contributed all I can to Yonada.” She turned her gaze down to the world below. “Fabrina has only a few years left, and so do I. So it makes more sense for me to stay with those left behind. They will need spiritual guidance more than your Yonadi will.” Tears filled her eyes, gently, undramatically, and bunched into small clear globes. “They are in chaos now. Destroying each other, destroying all we have built… wasting what time they have left. They need someone to help them find peace.”
“If they don’t kill you first.”
She shrugged again. “Either they will or Ganidra will. Or time will. It makes little difference now.”
Vari shook his own head, considering Fabrina. “So much pointless death. So much I’ve been responsible for myself. How many fanatics and saboteurs have we had to kill to protect Yonada?”
Baima looked at him intently. “Are you finally showing remorse for the harshness of your methods?”
That brought a glare. “You surely don’t think I’ve wanted to do any of it.”
“No. But I’ve never heard you question it before.”
“I regret it. I don’t question it. The obedience implants are necessary. It’s a closed, carefully balanced environment. We can’t risk disruptions. So those who can’t obey the laws on their own will have to be restrained. And if they persist, if they will not learn, then… well, they bring it on themselves. And the millions are protected. They have to be protected, at all costs.”
“At all costs,” Baima echoed. “I’ve heard some argue that the implants should be placed in everyone. That the only way to be truly sure of safety is to stop potential offenders before they start. Would you go that far?”
Vari was humbled. “All right… I exaggerated. But maintaining peace requires a balance of incentive and penalty, you know that. They will have their faith, their Oracle to unite them, to teach them and inspire the best in them. But when its example fails…”
“I know. I just fear what may happen if later generations don’t share your understanding of the judicious use of power.”
He laughed without humor. “I fear that, and many things more, Keli. A great many things can go wrong in a journey of millennia. And I am certain that Yonada will not escape all of them. We flee from hardship by facing hardship, and if our distant heirs do reach Lorina, they will face many hardships of their own, no matter how perfect and beautiful that world looks from here. And any one of them, or any combination, could mean the end of the Fabrini people forever.
“You see why I don’t believe in Tilu?” he went on with a smirk. “I’m being generous. To say I believed he put us here would be to say I considered him a sick, sadistic bastard. It’s kinder to dismiss him as a metaphor.”
She didn’t take offense. “Yet still you give Yonada an Oracle, and make the priesthood a branch of its government.”
“Metaphors can be useful. You know I’ll do anything to improve our chances of survival. I don’t believe, but the masses do, and if I want to save them I have to save that as well. Faith… in anything… is a source of strength, of hope. It keeps people going.”
Baima tilted her head. “Odd words from such a cynic. Tell me, Tomaneru, what is the faith that has kept you going for all these decades? That has brought you to the brink of saving the Fabrini from extinction?”
Vari thought long and hard. Then he stared at the sun again. “The only thing I have faith in… is that I’m not going to let that bitch Ganidra take my people down without a fight.”
“But you must believe the fight is worth waging. Otherwise you wouldn’t have fought so long, and so well. You’re too ornery to admit it—you can’t take off that armor around your soul for a minute—but you have faith in our people, and in what we can build if we keep striving together. And that faith can accomplish great things, Tomaneru.”
He looked at her askance. “Even if I don’t believe in Tilu?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Baima smiled. “He believes in you.” She kissed him on the forehead, and his breath caught in his throat because he knew it was the last time. “And so do I.”
* * *
“… But inevitably, over the millennia, a certain complacency set in,” Lindstrom said. His narrative had been a bit long-winded, Kirk thought, but he’d managed to hold the attention of Natira, Rishala, and the others gathered back here in the conference chamber to continue negotiations. “The political structure became ossified, driven more by maintaining its power than maintaining the builders’ original priorities. The scholar-priests had reduced their educational system to a set of tests that taught nothing but the ability to pass the tests, and had no connection to real-world issues. The Oracle was marginalized. Its lessons about the long-lost homeworld were seen as irrelevant, and its advice about maintaining Yonada became tarred with the same brush. So the procedures for preserving the biosphere were neglected, and eventually that led to drought, famine, economic collapse… which of course led to revolution.
“Now, that’s where the new backup databank ends. We think it was intentionally ‘lost’ to protect it from destruction by the revolutionaries. The rest of the story is reconstructed from the texts, oral histories, and archaeological evidence we’d previously uncovered, but the new information gives us more context for understanding all of that.
“The ironic thing is that the new regime rejected everything seen as old-guard, including both the Oracle and the government that had marginalized it. They shut down the Oracle’s voice, tore out its interface consoles, burned the books that didn’t fit their view of things and rewrote the others. They set up a secular state as a reaction to the corruption of the priesthood.
“But they didn’t have any better solutions to the environmental crisis than the old regime did. In fact, their rejection of the Oracle made them less able to cope with it, since their proposals for managing resources were based more on politics than science. They only worked as stopgaps at best, and sometimes failed miserably, creating worse economic crisis and famine. It was only a matter of time before another revolution happened—well, there were several attempts,
but until one succeeded. And not surprisingly, this set of revolutionaries blamed the secular way of life for the crises, calling it unruly and immoral, and they decided a return to the old beliefs was the only way to save Yonada.
“Now, here’s where it gets really interesting—I think so, anyway—but I’ll let Lieutenant Commander Uhura explain.”
“Thank you, Christopher,” Uhura said. She rose, and her clear, melodic voice filled the chamber. “What we think happened is that when these fundamentalists took over, they reactivated the Oracle and read its intelligence files in order to understand how the Creators had intended Yonada to be run. But what they didn’t realize was that the language had been changed.
“When the secularists had taken over six centuries before, when they’d purged the culture of ideas they didn’t like, one thing they’d done was to ‘modernize’ the language, to rewrite the dictionaries to fit their ideological views. It’s something that revolutionaries often do with languages, on planets throughout the known galaxy. They’ll ‘purge’ the language of foreign elements, or modernize its vocabulary, or replace its alphabet with one from a culture they like better, or whatever they think will bring it more in line with their beliefs and hopes for their society. In Yonada’s case, they changed the meanings of words having to do with religion and with the Oracle. They gave those words the connotations of dogma, oppression, and cruelty, in order to vilify the old ways. They made it sound as though the Instruments of Obedience had been intended to punish blasphemy rather than serious crimes.
“So when the new regime went back to read through the old texts and find how the original religion had done things, they didn’t know their interpretation of it was distorted. They read words which they believed were describing a strict, harsh, intolerant system, and assumed that was the way the Creators had intended it to be.”
Spock picked up the narrative now. “More than that—this interpretation, intended to condemn the old ways, actually fit the new rulers’ needs and assumptions perfectly. They felt— perhaps with some justification—that the laxity of the past had nearly doomed Yonada, and they wished to impose a strict, disciplinarian regime. Ironically, the antireligious propaganda of the previous establishment gave them the justification they needed. As is generally the case with fundamentalist movements, what they claimed to be the pure, original form of the religion was in fact a contemporary interpretation in response to contemporary circumstances and filtered through contemporary values and definitions.
“What resulted was the system all of you grew up with. The Oracle was reprogrammed to suit the new ideology. The Instruments of Obedience were implanted in all Yonadi, not just convicts, and programmed with a set of laws that regulated thought and speech as well as actions. This effectively quelled subsequent attempts at revolution and enabled the remarkable stability of the fundamentalist regime.”
“We’re still not entirely certain why they chose to suppress the knowledge that Yonada was an artificial world,” Lindstrom added. “Maybe, as was claimed in the mountain archive, they didn’t want to trust anyone but the Oracle with the task of maintaining the biosphere. Maybe they just figured knowledge was power and the less knowledge the masses had, the better.”
“But that is not important now,” said Natira. “What this means… is that the Oracle was never meant to oppress us, to deceive us.”
“On the contrary,” Kirk said. “It was meant to provide a voice to every point of view, to be a common ground for all Fabrini.”
“And maybe,” Rishala suggested, catching Natira’s gaze, “it can be again.”
Soreth looked skeptical. “But what of this Vari and Baima and their colleagues, passing themselves off as deities?”
“They did nothing of the kind,” Spock countered. “At least, there is no evidence of that in any of their reconstructed writings. Their inclusion among the Creators was a folk belief that emerged in subsequent centuries.”
“Of course, just because they didn’t claim to be Creators doesn’t mean they weren’t,” Rishala said.
“To all indications,” Soreth told her admonishingly, “they were flesh and blood Fabrini.”
“The People are the flesh and blood of the Creators. It’s simply a matter of perspective.”
“Not so simple,” Kemori countered. “Many of my constituents resent the idea that Vari, Baima, and the others were mortal men and women. They will see even this new evidence as another attempt by the state and the Federation to undermine their faith.”
“I’m sure they will,” Kirk interposed firmly. “There’s no way you’ll ever get everyone to agree on the meaning of history, any more than you’ll get them to agree on religion. History,” he went on thoughtfully, “isn’t the past, it’s the interpretation of the past. And every generation, every faction will form its own intepretation.” He smiled. “You could say we all create history in our own image. History, religion, philosophy… logic,” he added with a wink at Spock, drawing a glare from Soreth, “they’re all tools we use to deal with our problems and our needs. And we all have different needs, different problems, different goals. The only way you’ll get universal agreement is to stick punishment chips in everyone’s brain—and even then it’s only on the surface, and people either find subtler ways to disagree,” and he nodded at Rishala, “or they let it fester until something snaps.
“It’s not a problem if some of the People disagree with the state—as long as the state respects their right to disagree, and lets there be a dialogue.”
“And that will be the case from now on,” Natira said. “I have been too unwilling to listen before, but I promise that will change.”
“Let us be pragmatic here,” Soreth cautioned. “You cannot revert to the way things were. If you wish to survive and build a viable civilization, it will require innovation, scientific thought, an adaptable political system.”
“And we can have those things,” Rishala said. “The people want to advance, to move beyond the strictures of life in Yonada. We want the benefits of Fabrini medicine and technology. We want a free society. But we want it to come from us, from our own traditions. We want to be able to build that future on the foundations of our own past, to have it be a continuation of our own identity. We don’t want to borrow it from the Federation.”
“That is what we want too,” Soreth insisted. “We are forbidden to impose anything on you.”
“And you haven’t imposed, Commissioner. But you have judged. You’ve assumed that the secular path your people took was the only one that could work for anyone else. And so you’ve implicitly endorsed a state that did the same, and alienated those you sought to help.” Rishala looked to Kirk. “I’ve discovered that I made some mistakes myself. I’ve learned that all Fedraysha, maybe even most, aren’t like that. But I think, Commissioner Soreth, that the People’s relations with the Federation would go more smoothly with a different representative.”
Soreth’s brow shot up. “In my defense,” he said slowly, “given what was known about the Oracular system, I could not have come to any other conclusion about its compatibility with freedom.”
“But you did know,” Spock countered, “or should have known, that there were other religious traditions among the People. Traditions which were unorthodox or even subversive by the standards of the latter-day Oracular system. You failed to consider that they might be an avenue toward reconciliation between the two sides… that secular and spiritual—reason and passion, if you will—could find common ground,” he added with a small, satisfied smile. “This is simply… illogical. True peace cannot be attained by rejection, by exclusion, by repressing or denying those forces you wish did not exist. It requires embracing those forces, understanding them, and finding balance with them.”
“Such… balance… is not always possible to achieve.”
“But the chances are better if the parties involved have confidence in their ability to succeed.”
“I have that confidence,” Natira said.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Thataway.
—James T. Kirk
Captain’s Log: Stardate 7447.5
In the interests of facilitating the Lorini peace process, Commissioner Soreth has agreed to step down from his posting here. He will be returning to Federation space on board the Enterprise. He’s expressed his intention to spend most of the trip in private meditation—which will probably be the most comfortable thing for all concerned. Meanwhile, the Lorini have asked Lieutenant Commander Lindstrom to sit in as mediator of the ongoing peace process. I’m certain his ability to relate to all the different points of view involved will make him an excellent choice for the role.
Dovraku remains in a catatonic state and has been remanded to Lorini authorities, after being treated for radiation poisoning. Two members of the team that infiltrated Yonada died despite Dr. McCoy’s best efforts, but the rest are recovering in Lorini custody. Many of the remaining members of his movement are still in hiding, but community leaders are cooperating in efforts to bring them to justice. Mr. Lindstrom feels that many of those on the periphery of Dovraku’s faction will simply vanish back into the general population, but will no longer pose any significant threat.
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