A silky female voice said, Aquilleus Minor nebula, and a dark green circle appeared around a cluster of stars floating above Kol’s head. The projection zoomed in, providing close-up detail of the stacks of dark dust and cool gases rising like stalagmites out of the nebula. Ultraviolet light from nearby stars lit up the celestial gases wreathing the towering stellar nursery in gold. Text, readable to Harry, scrolled beside the nebula, and included recognizable chemical formulae for the matter found in the nebula.
The silky voice continued. Pararonsian asteroid belt. This time, when the projection zoomed in, Harry wasn’t surprised. After a few moments, the text scrolling began and it became apparent that the Rutillian offered asteroids rich in tyrillium ore and other heavy metals. His other chips included another nebula and several dead moons.
q whispered in Harry’s ear that the real prize in the Rutillian’s bet was the asteroid belt—the rest was showy, but not too valuable. “We should be glad that his bet was so conservative,” she concluded. “We won’t be eliminated straight out.”
Kol’s bet was similar to the Rutillian’s save that he threw in at least half a dozen Keys to Gremadia. Harry startled at the revelation of the chips after having witnessed back on Voyager what disastrous events had been unleashed by Captain Janeway’s possessing the Monorhan’s Key to Gremadia. How Kol could so casually toss in items that held such power and meaning for “lesser” life-forms gave Harry insight into the Keeper’s personality that he hadn’t had before. It was as if he saw the universe as a theoretical construct whose pieces were to be shuffled around a board—like in a game of Trinity. Where was the Keeper’s moral compass? Harry dared a direct look at Kol. The Keeper lifted his eyes. Any hint of vivacity had vanished: all emotion had become opaque. Now he understood why simply finding Kol wasn’t enough. Based on what Harry observed from the Keeper, he wasn’t sure if Kol could be persuaded to care about their current dilemma by words alone. He had to trust that q had a plan to get through to him. If nothing else, he was learning, through this experience, to disregard his former assumptions and realize that what he thought he knew to be real could conceivably be light-years from the truth. Harry sighed deeply.
q entered their bet into the slot. When he saw their chip pile decrease by half, it took a great deal of self-control to stop from questioning the wisdom of q’s choice. But she seemed to know what she was doing, and what Harry knew about Trinity could fit in a thimble.
The dealer turned to the Rutillian. “What are the match terms?”
Without hesitating, the Rutillian said, “A three-side match.”
q smirked.
Harry leaned over and said, “What’s so funny?”
“Stop being such a worrier, Harry,” she replied, but there was lightness in her voice he hadn’t heard since they’d entered Fortis. “Pay attention, though. You’ll be taking a turn soon.”
“What!?” Harry whispered.
q brushed him aside with a wave of her hand.
The dealer activated the computer. After the dim light of the stars, the flashing white table lights hurt Harry’s eyes. Several seconds later, the house’s pyramid appeared. All three teams breathed a sigh of relief: they had all matched three side slots with the house. An illuminated outline appeared beneath each of the matched slots. Six slots on each pyramid game remained unlit.
Kol requested a four-slot match, any direction.
Theoretically, Harry wasn’t sure what the likelihood of success was—he still hadn’t figured out a satisfactory probability model—but what he could calculate didn’t favor any of them. Moments later his concerns bore fruit: none of the teams made a complete match. Kol and q made a two-slot match. The Rutillian matched three. Four unlit slots remained on q and Kol’s boards; three remained on the house’s board.
The losing teams owed a penalty; the dealer poached a chip from both Kol and q’s team. Two of the Keys to Gremadia vanished from off the board and one of q’s nebulae was circled in silver—the house’s color. The Rutillian’s loss amounted to one of his dead moons.
As Harry understood it, q and Kol both needed to contribute more chips to the pool if they wanted to remain in the game. Both teams had four unlit slots to play against the computer’s three remaining slots. The only possible outcome for q and Kol at this point was to survive to play a second round: neither of them could beat the house or the Rutillian. Theoretically, however, the Rutillian could still lose or tie both q and Kol.
q slipped one chip into the slot and requested a two-slot match, any direction. Kol met her bet and thus stayed in the game. If both of them matched, they would continue playing. Moments later, the computer flashed their fate.
Harry swore that q shuddered with relief when they made the two-slot match. So much for a sure thing, he thought. Kol, too, made a match and stayed in the game. Because the Rutillian matched only one slot, he gained only one chip from the house—hardly a confidence-building win. The dealer indicated the Rutillian’s win, a pulsar, by circling the blinking star in green. Seconds later, a chip—the deed to the pulsar, Harry guessed—popped out of a slot beside the Rutillian’s chair.
“Have fun betting that waste of space,” q said, sneering at the Rutillian from across the table.
His yellow eye twitched.
“What do you mean by that?” Harry whispered in q’s ear.
“That star’s hardly worth the hydrogen it’s made of. Not a significant gain.”
The Rutillian pointed a finger at the blinking star.
The bright white explosion had the blinding brilliance of a supernova. Harry shielded his eyes with his arm and waited for the light to fade before raising his head.
“What-I-think-just-happened-didn’t-just-happen,” Tom said, his compressed speech barely intelligible. “Right?”
Skin blanched, q leaned backward in her chair so both Tom and Harry could hear her sotto-voce reply. “He destroyed the pulsar.”
Her voice had a tone of incredulity that worried Harry. “You mean he destroyed the representation of the pulsar.” His mind rejected the notion that thoughtful, highly advanced beings would find entertainment in the arbitrary obliteration of stars.
“No, I mean he destroyed the pulsar—a real star—somewhere in the Pretagen quarter. I need a drink. Does anyone else need a drink?” she said, her effort to sound flippant and casual failed miserably. With a trembling finger, she touched a button on the table and a tall, smoking mug emerged from beneath. “You want one of these?” When a wide-eyed, decidedly paler Tom shook his head, she took a long pull off the rim and then wiped her mouth on her hand.
Harry was still trying to wrap his brain around the idea that the Rutillian, with a point of the finger, could wipe out a star. “Why’d he do it?”
“Because he can,” q said, and took another, longer drink from her mug. “And if that doesn’t give you an idea of what we’re up against here, I don’t know what will.”
Openmouthed, Harry collapsed back into his chair, still trying to comprehend the implications of such power. He couldn’t shake off his stupor through the whole second round of building the pyramid. This time, when q asked both him and Tom to slot the pieces earned off two of the rolls of the dice, Harry hardly bothered to put any thought into his choice. Harry still was in a fog when the betting began. Because the Rutillian was the only player who had earned anything off the last round, he opened the betting. The now-familiar starscape appeared, and as the green circles were drawn around stars and planetary systems, Harry wondered which of these would succumb to the same fate as the pulsar.
Next up, q placed their team’s bet. One by one, her chips went into the slot. Their stack was down to almost nothing.
“Here, take this,” Tom said, and slipped the metal box containing Monorha to q. “It’s good luck.”
She nodded and added the box to their bet. “If Kol wants to stay in the game, he has to pony up the goods. We’ll break him faster that way—he’ll be forced out of the game and we’ll have a s
hot at convincing him to leave with us.”
Across the table, Kol slid his chips into the slot.
A circle appeared around a Class-M planet. The zoom-in view showed a serene world that seemed familiar to Harry. The text narration began scrolling. When he saw “Ocampa” among the garble he rose from his seat and whispered, “No.”
The room stopped.
q reached back, grabbed Harry by the sleeve, and pushed him back down into his chair. “Stay out of it, Harry.”
“You said he wouldn’t risk Ocampa!”
“This isn’t your fight,” q said through gritted teeth.
“Listen to her.” Tom placed a reassuring hand on his arm, but Harry could see that his friend was every bit as distressed as he was.
Raking her hair with her fingers and fidgeting in her chair, q appeared to be attempting to calm down, though not successfully.
Harry glared at Kol across the table as if by a look he could force the Keeper to awaken from his indifference. You are part Ocampan! He wanted to shout.
Kol’s eyebrows knitted together; his eyes flickered between q and the planet Ocampa.
“What are you thinking?” q asked coldly. “I mean, I’ve defended you. I’ve had your back all this time, and for what? So you can be a bastard like that guy over there?” She jerked her thumb at the Rutillian.
Kol fixed his stare on q, the shadow of a frown darkening his face; he remained silent.
“If you can callously throw away something I know matters to you, you’ve gone past the point where I even care what happens to you. Good riddance. I hope the Nacene get you—you deserve it.”
“Is there a problem?” the dealer said smoothly.
Straightening her jewelry, q touched the panel and another drink appeared. “Problem? No problem. Why would you ask? Let’s resume play, shall we?” q tipped back her glass and sucked down her drink to the dregs.
Harry crossed his arms across his chest. He’d be damned if he went along with this charade. There had to be another approach. Maybe q could take out that bastard Rutillian. Snap her fingers and reduce him to smithereens…
As if he could sense Harry’s thoughts, the Rutillian’s grotesque glowing yellow eye fixed on him. The hairs on Harry’s arm prickled.
“Game play will resume,” the dealer said.
Like the last time, the Rutillian chose a three-side match. Because it was the first round, all of the teams matched three slots easily, allowing them to breeze through to the next round. The win forced the house to add to each player’s coffers just enough to instill a sense of confidence—or that was how Harry read the table. Lure in the prey with a promise of more to come, then snap the trap.
The dealer was saying something, though Harry couldn’t understand what. Nor did he care. Probably Kol choosing how many slots the teams would need to match. It was all so much choice and chance that he’d given up trying to beat the system.
Until now, he’d happily played along with q’s plan because he didn’t believe he had another choice. And admittedly, there was his personal interest. But now…now he’d lost the stomach for it. Tilting back his chair, he studied the stars projected on the ceiling above him. So which of you are going to be blown up because a pandimensional being decides to play dice with the universe? The pinpricks of white starlight against the blackness of space reminded him of the view from Voyager’s bridge. Homesickness beset him. He’d been so caught up in the throes of infatuation, he hadn’t given Voyager much thought since they arrived at Fortis. Damn that Q!
Feeling eyes upon him, he tore his gaze from the starscape. Both Tom and q looked expectantly at him. He couldn’t figure what they might want from him and said so.
“You get to select the next match,” Tom said.
Harry blinked. “I don’t want to.”
“That’s not how the game works,” q said, sighing deeply. “I chose last time. You choose this time. Tom chooses next time, assuming there is a next time. This is why we play as a team; otherwise one player shoulders all the risk.”
Exhaling a lungful of air, Harry then gnawed his lips. “I don’t have a clue.” Shaking his head, he said to q, “Use that marvelous Q-ness you omnipotent types brag about to give me a clue.”
“That’s not how it works,” q said. “Choice—”
“—and chance,” Harry finished for her. He could continue to protest, though from the look on the dealer’s face he suspected that if he did so his team would forfeit the bet. He glanced at the game board. The first round had illuminated three slots. The second—Kol’s bet—had illuminated two left-side slots. None of the teams had won the second round so each had forfeited a small number of minor credits. All credits with the level of Ocampa’s value remained on the board. Harry studied the colors, the lights, imagined what his best odds were and came up with nothing.
Harry considered his choices. What would Tom do in this situation? He wasn’t a logic gambler, he was an emotional gambler. Tom would make a meaningful bet based on a personally significant fact or just gut instinct. The system—or lack of one—worked pretty well for the pilot. While Harry wanted to run all the scenarios and crunch the numbers, Tom gave a lot of credence to personal intuition.
Only one aspect of this damnable situation felt intuitive: his personal tie to Ocampa, Kes.
Harry smiled. His gut told him he was in the right place. “Three-slot match.” He’d known Kes for just a bit more than three years, but since 3.2 wasn’t an option, he rounded down.
q twisted back to look at him. He didn’t need to hear her say “Are you sure?” because the dubious expression in her eyes told him she thought he was making a mistake.
The dealer repeated Harry’s request, waited for Harry to confirm it, then initiated the house reveal. Lights flickered and pulsed across the table. Harry drilled his eyes on their pyramid. His arms hung at his sides, hands clenched into fists that he pumped up and down with the rhythm of the lights. “Come on, Kes, don’t let me down….”
Hand in hand, the Nacene Exiles formed a ring around Monorha’s outer atmosphere. Phoebe, of course, had taken her position at the head of the Circle. She had organized her followers according to their strength, making certain that weakest among them stood between the strong. Their efforts would not be foiled by the vulnerable. She would do to them what had been done to the Enaran if necessary.
Once all the Exiles had assumed their places, Phoebe reached out to them, gently penetrating the barriers that defined their individuality. One by one, she separated them from their rigidly held grasp on their singular states and invited them to flow into her. In return, she flowed into them until they became a greater whole. The gloriousness of the energy intoxicated Phoebe. Since Exosia, she had never approached such a complete, pure state of being. She shared the magnificence of this with the others, promising that such sensations would be endless once the gateway had opened.
As one Exile ceased to be alone and joined the many, another was brought into the Circle, and so on until each of the survivors had been fused together. For a time, they remained in this state of wholeness until an equilibrium had been attained. What they were about to undertake required perfect unity and an exact exercise of will.
On Phoebe’s cue, they began exploring the life force of the planet Monorha. Much satisfaction filled the Circle as they recognized elements of long-forgotten comrades and allies buried in the memories of plants and animals—in the elements of soil, rock, and air. We will take you home, the Circle promised. We will restore you.
The Circle’s will poured into the spaces between atoms, gaining knowledge of all the planet’s matter and energy. Soon the Circle understood the intricate, inexorably entwined vibrations that created the music that sang the planet Monorha into being. Because this place came from the Nacene, the familiar refrains tantalized them with possibilities of home and the music of Exosia. The Circle explored until all knowledge of Monorha was shared among them. They accepted the knowledge, made it part of their core be
ings. With that final task completed, the time had at last arrived for the Circle to create the Key.
The will of the Circle converged on Monorha. With knowledge of the song, the song could be changed. The Circle closed subatomic spaces, compressing particles together, transforming an atom. The energy created from fusing particles together rippled into adjoining particles until a cascade of transformation was under way. The Circle coaxed the process along, guiding the music to suit their needs. Momentary discord was expected as Monorha’s subatomic structure underwent a dramatic metamorphosis, but the Circle would restore harmony. They would take the life force of every entity on the planet and create a dazzling symphony.
The first energy wave emanated from the planet, infusing the Circle with new power to continue their task.
The Key would not be formed instantly. Collapsing a planet took time. But what was time except a limitation imposed on the Circle by this primitive dimension? Few of these restrictions would hamper the Circle for long.
Exosia awaited them.
Tom shot a glance at Harry at the mention of Kes.
The lights stopped. The house pyramid glowed warm red, yellow, and orange.
The knot from his throat moved to his stomach, rolling around like a lead meteor. Dropping his head, Harry groaned aloud. He couldn’t bear to witness the catastrophe.
He’d failed to match.
I was so sure, Harry thought. I just knew it was the right thing to do…how could we have lost? Over and over, he reviewed his choice. He had felt guided. This wasn’t possible!
“This is the last time I trust corporeal life-forms to do anything,” q muttered under her breath.
Harry dared a glance up at the starscape. All the chips had been shifted over to the Rutillian. He shook his head, trying to understand the implications. A moment later, he realized that Kol must have lost too. Unless Kol had more chips, he was out of the game too.
The Rutillian linked his hands together, flexing his thick, clawed fingers.
Harry stopped breathing; neither Tom nor q made a sound either, all of them watching the Rutillian’s next move.
String Theory, Book 3: Evolution Page 28