Data reset the board with the efficiency of an automated construction drone. “I understand, Captain. You believe your proficiency in three-dimensional chess is a result of your recent mind-meld with Ambassador Sarek, who is, himself, a grandmaster many times over.” As quickly as that, all the pieces were restored to their starting positions. “Though the intrinsically unpredictable nature of probability theory, or ’dumb luck,’ as it is called, tends to put me on a more equal footing in games of chance, such as poker, I would look forward to a fourth round of chess with you. The opportunity to play a challenging game of logic with a human is one I am not often presented with.” Data patiently waited a few moments for his captain’s reply. “I mean no disrespect by that.”
Picard gazed at the multilevel chessboard. Without conscious thought, a flood of opening strategies swept through his mind as if the logic of the game were instinctual to him.
“Sir? Is something wrong?”
Picard jerked his head up. “Poker?” he said. Had Data mentioned something about poker?
The android was most solicitous. “It is a card game, sir. I play each Thursday night with my fellow officers. If you recall, we have often invited you to join us.”
The captain looked up to the ceiling of his ready room, trying to remember something about poker. Picard rubbed at the side of his face. He could still feel Ambassador Sarek’s fingers there, on the katra points of his nervous system. The effects of the mind-meld still trembled within him, though the maelstrom of emotions that had raged through him yesterday had now dwindled to slight, recurring eddies. But still his mind dealt with disturbing flashes of detailed knowledge of the ambassador’s life. A Vulcan would know how to deal with this, Picard told himself. A lifetime of training in mind-control techniques would permit the easy setting aside of information obtained from other minds. And there were other minds. Sarek had mind-melded with hundreds of different beings in his more than two centuries of life, and the echoes of the psychic force of all their collective experiences now also reverberated within Picard.
“Captain Picard?” Data said more emphatically. “Shall I call Dr. Crusher?”
Data’s familiar voice brought a moment of clarity. Picard shook off a sudden visual image of the red-tinged mountains of Sarek’s walled estate—not his. The only property in which Picard had an ownership interest was located in France. Picard tugged at his uniform to smooth nonexistent wrinkles.
“No, Mr. Data, I’ll be fine. It’s just that … from time to time I find myself overwhelmed by an unexpected memory from Ambassador Sarek’s past.”
Data observed Picard carefully. Picard understood his purposeful gaze.
“But the memories are lessening in both strength and frequency,” Picard said firmly. “Both the ambassador’s wife and Dr. Crusher have agreed that there will be no long-term, detrimental effects.”
“I hope that that is true,” Data said. “It has been my observation that emotions can be confusing and dangerous when allowed to develop out of control.”
Picard smiled at Data, and this time the expression came naturally. “And yet you still wish to experience them.”
Data took on a thoughtful expression, one of his subroutines, Picard knew, designed to help the android relate to humans by providing subtle body-language cues to his thought processes. “It is, as the ambassador would say, a most illogical goal, but one to which I aspire, nonetheless.”
“You sound as if you’re halfway there already,” Picard said with amusement, mixed with a sudden burst of friendship for his officer, a feeling he shared to some extent with almost all of his command staff, but which, like Sarek, he too often allowed to remain hidden. Since he had first taken command of the Enterprise, almost three years earlier, Picard had enjoyed watching Data’s growth as a … person. There was no other word for it. To watch that complex intellect wrestle with ideas and ideals that most humans took for granted helped Picard see the universe through fresh eyes, innocent eyes. At the age of sixty-one, he realized he needed that rejuvenating experience more often. It was a law of nature that when growth stopped, stagnation set in. For now, the Enterprise helped Picard keep that law at bay. But it was always out there, circling, like predatory norsehlats worrying a herd of vral, waiting to pick off the old and infirm.
Picard blinked, momentarily distracted. “Mr. Data, would you happen to know what a norsehlat is?”
Data responded without hesitation. “A nonsentient predator native to the southern, high-mountain deserts of Vulcan, filling a similar ecological niche to that of the Terran wolf.”
“I see. And a vral?”
“In context with norsehlat, I would presume the word vral is a plural form of vralt, which is a nonsentient herbivore, similar to a Terran mountain goat, again indigenous to the same areas of Vulcan as is the norsehlat, and thus its prey.” Data cocked his head. “Are you experiencing another of Ambassador Sarek’s memories?”
“No, not a memory, really. An allusion. Referring to animals of which I have no personal knowledge.” Picard found that innocuous aftereffect much easier to deal with than the torrent of anguish that had stricken him in the first hours after his mindmeld. “It is a … most fascinating experience.”
“Indeed,” Data commented.
Picard stared at his operations manager for a moment, experiencing a strong feeling of déjà vu. Something about the conversation, something about seeing Data on the other side of a three-dimensional chessboard … Picard could almost put his finger on it … almost grasp that memory … almost—
His communicator chirped. Picard tapped it. “Picard.”
Riker’s voice emerged from the tiny device. “Sorry to disturb you, sir, but Ambassador Sarek’s party is ready to beam to the Merrimac.”
Picard stood. “On my way, Number One. I’ll meet you in the transporter room. Mr. Data, please relieve the commander.” Data left the ready room as Picard opened the storage compartment in which a folded dress uniform lay ready. Three days ago, when Ambassador Sarek had beamed aboard, Picard had had such hopes for their meeting. More than any being now living, Sarek had shaped the Federation, guiding it in its transition. Under his direction, it had evolved over the past century from an expansionist cobbling-together of idealistic, often unrealistic worlds eager to forge an unprecedented alliance without a clear idea of how that could be accomplished, to a mature and stable institution for which each new admission was a further infusion of strength for the integrated whole.
In standard English, the Vulcans called that basic precept IDIC, one of the most profound philosophical cores of the United Federation of Planets. The acronym meant Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Simply put, it was a celebration of how simplicity could arise from complexity.
In physics, the matching term was “the self-organizing principle,” perhaps the most basic condition underlying the universe’s existence. Simply put, it was the tendency for replicating systems to arise from the chaotic conditions of the fractal boundaries that separated domains of high and low energy.
In high-energy domains, physical bonds could not form. In low-energy domains, physical bonds once formed could not be broken. But somewhere between the two extremes, in the flux of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, there existed domains where a balance could be achieved. And it was the same in the Federation, thought Picard with a sense of satisfaction, both in the institution and the role he played in maintaining it.
In the universe at large, between those domains of high and low energy, galaxies had coalesced like jewels on the cosmic strings formed in the first instants of the universe’s birth. In those galaxies, stars had condensed, then burst into life, shedding energy on their planets, creating pockets of still more boundary domains, neither too hot nor too cold.
In those domains, molecules had formed that could survive the more minor fluctuations of local conditions. Among those molecules that were good at surviving, some could replicate duplicates of themselves. Not perfectly, for that would lead
to stagnation, but im perfectly. For in imperfection, Picard believed, as did the Federation’s scientists, there was room for improvement; room for improvement inevitably brought change; and what was life but change—the constant shuffling of attributes and abilities to insure that life would continue, even to the extent that life on a planetary scale would evolve the capacity to affect the planetary environment such that it remained a suitable habitat.
Thus on a planetary scale, there was no distinction between life and habitat. Life itself and life’s home were like space and time—they could not be thought of as independent entities, only as different reflections of each other.
More and more, Picard knew, the restrictive use of the phrase “on a planetary scale” was being questioned by Federation scientists. Even “systemwide scale” was not broad enough for them. “Galactic scale” was better, for as life begat intelligence and intelligence begat technology, life spread forth from its origin points to propagate into more domains, creating more habitats.
But as Picard had discussed with Will Riker, in one of their frequent philosophical debates, even thinking of life and its influence on a galactic scale was increasingly viewed in some quarters as missing the point. As in all things in the science of cosmology, at some point the study of the very large inevitably led back to the study of the very small, just as the analysis of the very complex uncovered the very simple principles from which complexity emerged.
Derived from that research, Picard had learned, there was a realization that was slowly spreading through the worlds of the Federation. He found he was almost ready to grasp it himself, like searching for a single misplaced memory a hairsbreadth out of reach. It was the notion that the self-organizing principle, the most simple principle in nature, which had led to all the forms and structures of the universe, also had its mirror in the affairs of intelligent beings.
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. In sociology and politics as it was in physics. From the simple came the complex. From the complex came stability.
Picard believed the founders of the Federation had understood this intuitively. The horror of the Romulan War had truly been the last lesson in valuing life, in all its disturbing complexity, that humanity had needed to learn.
Those who had inherited the founders’ Federation had struggled to keep intact what had been forged at such cost. The first contact with the Klingon Empire in 2218, only fifty-seven years after the Federation’s birth, had been a trial by fire. But in that trial, what had been created in the Earth city of Paris in 2161 revealed its true strength. Through all the dark years of conflict with the Klingons that followed, until the rapprochement of the Khitomer Conference of 2293, all-out war did not break out between the Empire and the Federation.
The Federation had entered a new phase. It no longer reacted simply by learning from its mistakes, it took action, truly going where no one had gone before, by learning from its triumphs.
Picard, who had not been born until 2305, twelve years after Khitomer, was a child of the new century, the era the poets had called “Technology Unchained,” when quality of life became paramount for all beings, not just an elite.
He had grown up in LaBarre, a small Earth city a short distance from Paris where the president of the Federation Council kept his official offices. Paris was a city continually enlivened by the constant stream of alien diplomatic missions. The Federation had been as much a part of young Picard’s early life as had the pastoral charms of his home’s vineyard and winery, each an unquestioned condition of life which, to the child’s mind, had always existed, indistinguishable from the constancy of the sun or a parent’s love.
Those two images of sun and parents played in Picard’s mind as he felt the turbolift carry him to Deck 6 and the transporter room Sarek’s party would use. The sun: a force of nature, blind and unthinking. Love: a force of sentience, but equally primal.
Even in Sarek Picard had felt the unity that had arisen from the acknowledgment of emotion as essential to life—the same unity that linked the Federation to the universe it inhabited until, like space and time, like life and habitat, the two were inseparable.
Picard stepped through the sliding doors of the transporter room with a revelation in his mind, created from the images of the sun and the Federation of his childhood—two extremes: the logic of Vulcans, the passion of humans. Perhaps neither one could ever have achieved alone what they had achieved together. Humans a domain of high energy, where structure could never form. Vulcans a domain of low energy, where structure once formed could never change. But together, on the boundaries of their separate domains, from the fractal chaos of their meeting and desire to work together, a new system had come into being.
Riker was already waiting in the transporter room and Picard could see him give his captain a curious look. He realized that the excitement of his thoughts must be showing on his face. Real excitement. Because what had just come to mind was not the result of his own thought processes—it had arisen from that part of Sarek that was still within him. What Picard knew now, all Vulcans knew. The exchange was exhilarating. He made a mental note to add these thoughts to his next discussion with Will.
“Captain?” Riker said. He stood in the center of the room, even more imposing than usual in his long dress coat. The rest of his question about the captain’s well-being went unasked. No doubt because of the presence of Transporter Chief O’Brien and Lieutenant Patrick standing off to the side.
“I am having a most … unusual day,” Picard explained to his first officer. “Impressions from Sarek’s mind are still … making themselves known to me.” Picard saw in Riker’s expression the same concern Data had voiced in his ready room. “But it is not a distraction from my duties,” Picard reassured his first officer.
Riker marginally relaxed. He gave Picard a quick, sardonic smile. “Be careful what you wish for, sir.”
It took Picard a moment, but then he understood Riker’s comment. Just after Sarek had beamed aboard, Picard had told Riker and Counselor Troi that he had looked forward to sharing Sarek’s thoughts and memories, his unique understanding of the history the legendary Vulcan had made.
At the time he had stated his expectations, he was feeling disappointed. Sarek’s aides had preceded him—Sakkath, a tall and characteristically dour Vulcan, and Ki Mendrossen, a human and senior member of the Vulcan diplomatic corps.
The aides had explained that Sarek’s age would prevent the ambassador from undertaking any social functions that would normally be part of the honors given a visitor of his rank. The negotiations Sarek would be concluding with the Legarans—after ninety-six years of patient effort on the ambassador’s part—were too vital to the Federation. Picard had understood, but had been disappointed that he would not have a chance to renew his acquaintance with the ambassador, whom he had met years earlier at the wedding of Sarek’s son.
But in the days that followed, Picard learned the truth behind the aides’ concern for their ambassador. Sarek was suffering from Bendii Syndrome, a rare affliction that occasionally struck Vulcans over two hundred years of age. He was losing his ability to control his emotions. Although Sarek was surreptitiously buttressed in his attempts by the telepathic powers of Sakkath, the end result was that the ambassador’s confused emotions bled out to the crew of the Enterprise, leading to a series of altercations, fistfights, and even acts of insubordination.
With the meeting with the Legarans absolutely unable to be changed, the only chance Sarek had had to maintain his selfcontrol had been put forward by his human wife, Perrin. She had come to Picard’s quarters to suggest the captain share a mindmeld with Sarek. Picard had agreed and the elder Vulcan then, for a few hours, had made use of Picard’s self-discipline and iron will—vital tools for this final stage of negotiations to be conducted on board the Enterprise herself.
But Picard, in turn, had been left with Sarek’s emotions unchecked—the pent-up rage and regrets of centuries, the unspoken love, unvoiced anguish, th
e soul-crushing despair of approaching, inevitable death. There had been good reason why the Vulcans of millennia past had chosen to suppress their emotions —they were too powerful. The strength of them, even filtered through a mind-meld, had crippled Picard for most of a day, leaving him racked with tears, shaken by fear and anger.
Yet without question the exchange had been worthwhile. Sarek had successfully concluded his negotiations with the Legarans, and the benefits of that achievement would be incalculable to the Federation
In the end, as Riker’s smile had suggested, Picard had also received all he had hoped for from the voyage from Vulcan to Legara IV, but not in the manner he had anticipated.
Picard reflexively smoothed his coat and turned to watch the door expectantly. “They’re almost here,” he said. “Remarkable. It’s as if I’m still in some kind of telepathic contact with him.”
“Perhaps you should talk to Deanna about your experiences,” Riker suggested, facing the closed doors with his captain.
“I intend to, Number One. As soon—”
Picard stopped talking as the doors slid open. But it was the ambassador’s aides who entered, accompanied only by two duty officers. Neither Sarek nor Perrin was with them.
Riker stepped forward with a hint of unease that only Picard could detect. “Will the ambassador be joining you?”
But Picard put him at ease as he suddenly understood the reason for Sarek’s absence. “It’s all right, Will. The ambassador is letting us say our good-byes first, as he has noticed that his presence at such times can prevent people from speaking freely,”
Riker considered that. “Quite gracious,” he conceded.
“I hope your journey aboard the Merrimac will be uneventful,” Picard said to the ambassador’s aides.
Sakkath, in deference to what a human would expect to hear, stated the obvious in reply. “With all the pressures of the conference behind him, I believe I can help him maintain his control until we return to Vulcan.”
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