The Higher Frontier

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “I know,” Sulu said. “We didn’t make the effort to think about them until this happened. And now they’re all but gone. I feel terrible about it … but at the same time it feels like a sham to feel terrible about people I barely ever thought about in the first place.”

  On Sulu’s left, Uhura nodded. “I hear a lot of people wondering if we allowed this to happen through our neglect. The Andorians and the Federation Council are insisting that it was the Aenar’s own choice to stay isolated, that we were only respecting their wishes, but that rings hollow now.”

  Sulu shook himself and straightened, firming his resolve. “All we can do is find whoever did this and bring them to justice. Make sure it never happens again.”

  “Whoever did this,” Chekov echoed despairingly. “A ‘whoever’ that left no traces of their passage, no DNA on the scene, no clue to their motives.”

  “That they’ve found so far,” Sulu added. “Once we get there, I’m sure Mister Spock and Doctor McCoy will turn up something the others have missed. It’s what they do.”

  Chekov tilted his head. “True. Possibly they even have an excellent chief of security to spearhead the investigation.”

  Uhura chuckled. “I’m sure Hikaru didn’t mean to devalue your talents.”

  “Th-that’s right,” Sulu stammered, trying to cover for himself. “After all, that goes without saying.”

  “Hmp,” Chekov replied, giving Sulu a mock-skeptical look.

  The exchange brought some much-needed levity to the trio’s somber mood. Over the past few years, ever since Sulu had gotten serious about pursuing the command track and been named the Enterprise’s second officer, he and Chekov had been in a friendly competition to see which one would make captain first. Typically, though, Chekov had pursued the competition more determinedly, striving to prove himself at every opportunity, while Sulu had been content to take it slowly and steadily, wishing to make the most of the opportunity to learn from an exceptional commander like James Kirk. As a result, Chekov had already earned promotion to lieutenant commander, matching Sulu and Uhura in rank for the first time in their careers. But this had not goaded Sulu to strive harder to surpass him, for he was too happy for his friend and pleased that the three of them were finally equals.

  “Happy birthday!”

  The cry from below and the ensuing laughter drew the trio’s attention. They turned and looked down over the balcony rail to see a group of engineering personnel bringing out a birthday cake for Marko Nörenberg, a technician from damage control. The three officers exchanged a wistful look, reminded that life always went on in the face of tragedy. The crew was not insensitive to the magnitude of what had happened; but facing death and destruction was all too common an occurrence in the lives of Starfleet personnel, and this crew had learned the importance of keeping up their morale, the better to stand ready so that further loss of life might be prevented.

  The three officers made their way down from the balcony via the side stairs, spent a few moments mingling and congratulating Nörenberg (though Uhura lightly slapped Chekov’s hand when he reached for a slice of cake, reminding him that there was only so much to go around), then strolled through the main atrium, taking in the various activities of the off-duty crew. Rixil, the Edosian medtech, was playing a jaunty three-handed tune on his Elisiar keyboard, while the Megarite oceanographer Spring Rain sang along sweetly in her polyphonic voice. T’Nalae, a young Vulcan astrophysics specialist, was leaning her tall frame over the keyboard, grinning and moving her head in time to the music. Sulu was aware that T’Nalae was a member of the V’tosh ka’tur minority of Vulcans that rejected Surak’s philosophies and embraced their emotions; but even now, two months after she’d come aboard, the sight of a Vulcan showing emotion so openly still induced the occasional double take. As second officer, Sulu was aware that T’Nalae could be defensive about the crew’s reactions to her. The fact that she seemed to be enjoying herself, bonding with the others, was a good sign.

  Meanwhile, Devin Clancy from flight deck ops was engaged in some sort of dance competition against Crewman Ki’ki’re’ti’ke in time with Rixil’s music, though Sulu had no idea how one would judge a dance-off between a bipedal human and an eight-limbed, centipede-bodied Escherite. Nearby, Rahadyan Sastrowardoyo from xenoethnography was putting on a show of magic tricks, and was apparently about to try sawing Joshua Vidmar from security in half with a plasma cutter. “This might tickle a bit,” he advised. Sulu was afraid to watch what happened next. Although two of the audience members, Chief Onami and her girlfriend Ensign Palur, seemed to be cheerfully wagering on his survival.

  “Aha! Let’s settle this man-to-man!” The familiar chirping cry came from Hrii’ush Uuvu’it, the Betelgeusian petty officer, and Sulu moved toward it to see what his energetic friend was up to now. Uuvu’it had always been competitive; like most of his people in Starfleet, he’d enlisted in the hope of gaining achievements that would earn him status and mating rights in a Betelgeusian argosy. Within the past year, both of the other ’Geusians in the crew had achieved that goal and moved on, leaving Uuvu’it increasingly insecure and driven to prove himself. He’d recently transferred from sciences to security in search of worthy challenges, but that hadn’t made him any less hypercompetitive in his everyday life.

  To his amused astonishment, Sulu saw that Uuvu’it was facing off with communication tech Cody Martin in some sort of eating contest. Between them was a large plate holding a massive heap of some kind of rice-and-vegetable dish resembling Japanese chahan, a prodigious hill of food at the summit of which a small, colorful banner had been inserted on a long wooden skewer. The two petty officers were taking careful, calculated scoops from its sides with large spoons, and Sulu realized that the goal was to eat as much as possible without toppling the banner. It seemed an uncharacteristically subtle challenge for Uuvu’it, especially given how hyperactive he was these days, but the tall, hairless, blue-skinned semi-avian chirped confidently through his beak-like speaking mouth as he chewed with his fierce-looking eating mouth below it and positioned his spoon carefully for his next move in the game. “I will be the one to stand atop this hill,” he boasted.

  Despite his bluster, though, Martin’s hand proved steadier, and it was Uuvu’it who toppled the banner a few bites later, forcing him to tip his spoon upward and concede defeat. “Too bad, Hrii’ush,” Sulu said, clapping him on his wiry shoulder. “Maybe next time.”

  “Not to worry, Commander.” His confidence unbroken, Uuvu’it stood and raised a finger skyward. “As my mother’s mother always said: I am the one who …”

  Sulu tuned out the rest of Uuvu’it’s boast, partly from long practice, but mainly because his eye was drawn to the group that had gathered on one of the raised platforms near the front of the rec deck, in front of the display of past vessels named Enterprise. Four human members of the crew crouched there in white robes, holding hands and communing with heads lowered. Sulu knew them all, of course: Ensign Daniel Abioye from engineering; the burly, shaven-headed ecologist Edward Logan; the dainty archaeologist Jade Dinh, instantly recognizable from behind by her silky, waist-length black hair …

  And Marcella DiFalco.

  Sulu shook off his moment of tension at the sight of the brown-haired chief petty officer. It had been two and a half years since their loose romantic involvement had ended, more than enough time for both of them to move on. It had been a mutual decision. Sulu had come to feel that it was inappropriate for the second officer to have even a casual relationship with someone under his authority, particularly an enlisted crewperson. Yet he had, perhaps, been a bit disappointed that DiFalco had accepted their breakup so readily. It turned out that while he had been drawn more toward command, the young navigator had been drawn into something quite different.

  2275

  “ ‘New Humans’? What’s new about them?”

  Marcella DiFalco gave a self-deprecating smile in response to Sulu’s question, picking idly at her chicken Parmesan as
she and Sulu shared lunch in the mess hall. “I admit it’s a bit of a grandiose name,” she said. “But … well …” She started again. “You know I’ve always had kind of a high esper rating, right?”

  Sulu blinked, surprised at the shift of subject. ESP or esper ratings—a measure of psionic potential in humans, named for the old term “extrasensory perception”—had been a fashionable thing in human psychological circles ever since contact with the Vulcans two centuries before. Back then, Vulcan society had stigmatized its people’s telepathic gifts, but the Vulcans had still been aware of psionics as a scientifically provable phenomenon, using methods far more legitimate than the clumsy, easily defrauded experiments that humans had conducted in the previous century. Working with the Vulcans, scientists at Duke and Heidelberg Universities had developed a means of testing humans for psi potential, and over time, assessments of “ESP ratings” and “aperception quotients” had become a routine part of psychological and educational assessments—even though they were usually all but meaningless. Most humans, including Sulu, proved to have virtually nonexistent esper levels, while moderate test quotients often represented nothing more than heightened sensory acuity, spatial awareness, or synesthesia. Even those with high esper ratings had little more than heightened intuition or occasional faint extrasensory awareness. But a tiny fraction of humans had proven capable of genuine telepathy when properly guided to cultivate their potential—to the surprise of human scientists who had believed such phenomena to have been thoroughly debunked by previous experimentation. And so the testing continued, in the generally vain hope of discovering an extraordinary gift.

  In all his life, Sulu had encountered only a handful of humans with active telepathic abilities. Two of them, his former crewmates Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner, had possessed fairly high esper ratings but no overt psionic gifts until the Enterprise’s encounter with the mysterious negative-energy barrier at the edge of the galactic disk a decade ago. That incident had somehow supercharged their brains, causing an exponential surge in their psi abilities to unprecedented levels—and leading to their deaths when they had proven unable to handle the temptations of their new powers. Sulu still got a chill at the memory of Mitchell’s eyes glowing silver, his temples graying as if the carefree, boyish navigator had been replaced by some aloof Olympian elder looking down with scorn on the mortals below.

  Aside from those two—and the similar case of Charlie Evans, a youth somehow imbued with psionic abilities by the incorporeal Thasians to let him survive on their world, and having even worse impulse control with his enormous powers than Mitchell—probably the only naturally powerful telepathic human Sulu had ever met had been Doctor Miranda Jones, the human prodigy who had needed to be trained on Vulcan to control the strong telepathy she had possessed since childhood. He had met her only briefly, but he had gotten the impression of a lonely, isolated woman who felt forever set apart from humanity—which might have explained her willingness to live the rest of her days among the Medusans, a species as far removed from humanity as he could imagine.

  Those encounters had driven home to Sulu how rare true psionic ability was in humans, and so he’d come to think of esper ratings as little more than pseudoscience. The pride DiFalco took in her own moderately high esper rating of fifty-six, and her belief that her extrasensory potential gave her a special intuition as a navigator, was something he’d seen as merely an endearing personality quirk. So he wasn’t quite sure how to respond to her question without slighting her obvious sincerity. There seemed to be a new excitement in her since she’d returned from shore leave on Deneb Kaitos IV, and it clearly had something to do with these “New Humans” she’d just mentioned.

  Despite his best efforts, she caught his hesitation. “I know you’re skeptical about it, Hikaru, but just hear me out. The people I met on Deneb IV were extraordinary.”

  “But you mean these ‘New Humans.’ Not the native telepaths.”

  “They were there to study with the Denebian adepts, but they were human, yes.” She paused, taking her time to choose her words. “The New Human movement started to emerge a few decades ago among human espers. According to them, the number of humans with high esper ratings has been rising since we figured out how to measure the ability. Projecting backward, it’s as if genuine psi abilities only started to emerge two or three centuries ago. Some people wondered if it was a mutation introduced in the Eugenics Wars or World War III, and there were a few paranoid musings about Vulcan experimentation … but the New Humans took a more spiritual view. They believe that, by making contact with other worlds and achieving peace and unification among ourselves, humans have finally begun to mature as a species. To expand our minds and souls in new ways that let us make stronger connections with each other, and with the universe itself.”

  “Or maybe it’s just a statistical artifact,” Sulu countered gently. “We’re finding more espers because we’re improving our ability to look for them.” He kept the other possibility to himself. Critics of the esper tests had long argued that wishful thinking had compromised their scientific value, leading to an erosion of standards that had allowed some of the old psychic pseudoscience to get mixed in with the genuine research, leaving the testing process increasingly susceptible to false positives.

  “That might’ve been a valid possibility,” DiFalco said. “Until V’Ger came.”

  Sulu was only momentarily startled. The advent of V’Ger nearly two years before had been an extraordinary, terrifying, profound event in the eyes of many. The vast alien probe—an altered and evolved form of the twentieth-century Voyager 6 space probe, rebuilt by incredibly advanced cybernetic aliens into a sentient entity seeking to merge with the Creator it expected to find on Earth—had emanated a mental presence so powerful that telepaths all over the Federation had felt it coming. Its near-annihilation of humanity, followed by its spectacular ascension beyond its physical form and its departure to explore higher realms of existence, had been interpreted by many people on Earth and beyond as a religious or spiritual experience. The initial wave of cultish fervor was dying down now, but there were still those who made pilgrimages to Earth in hopes of feeling some spiritual or psychic connection to V’Ger, some trace it had left behind.

  It was therefore no surprise to Sulu that these “New Human” spiritualists had latched on to the V’Ger mystique as well. Even their faint psi potential might have allowed them to sense V’Ger’s presence in some way, so it stood to reason that they would feel influenced by it.

  DiFalco must have seen the play of thoughts behind Sulu’s eyes—in the normal way, not psychically—because she added, “Don’t give me that look, Hikaru. This is a documented phenomenon. In the past two years, humans with esper potential have begun manifesting new abilities. Our ratings have been increasing. I got retested on Deneb—Hikaru, my esper rating’s up to seventy-two, and my AQ’s up to twenty over eighty-six! And the New Humans … I was able to sense their emotions, even hear their thoughts when we concentrated together as a group. I’ve never been able to do that with other espers before. Something has changed.” She shrugged. “It’s like … like V’Ger’s ascension triggered something in us.”

  “In human espers.”

  “Yes. Maybe when it ascended, when it expanded its consciousness to a higher plane, the energies it sent out had an effect on esper minds. Sparked a new evolution.” She gave a self-effacing smile. “I don’t mean to suggest we’re anywhere near ascending like V’Ger and Captain Decker did, but maybe we got a boost just from basking in their glow. And it’s up to us to embrace it, to develop our new gifts and advance further.” She leaned forward. “Since I got back, using the techniques the New Humans showed me, I’ve already been able to connect psionically to other espers in the crew, like Ed Logan and Jade Dinh. They’ve felt it too—this is something real. Human potential is infinite, Hikaru. And we’re just beginning to unlock it.”

  Sulu suppressed a twinge of jealousy, reminding himself that he’d been
ending things with her anyway. Edward Logan had always been a bit of a flake, professing to be a follower of Deltan spirituality and shaving his head to mimic their appearance—something that seemed more like appropriation than reverence to Sulu, though he had no idea what a Deltan would think of it. He’d always suspected that Logan’s true interest was more in the Deltans’ sexual openness than their spirituality. But Marcella was her own woman, and her sex life was no longer his concern.

  “Well,” he said hesitantly, “I’m glad you’ve found a … connection. It makes me feel better about … stepping away.”

  She took his hand. “It’s fine, Hikaru. You have your path to command, and I have mine to … I still don’t know what.” She grinned. “But exploring the unknown is why we’re out here, right? And I really look forward to discovering where my path leads.”

  2278

  By the time Uhura and Chekov rejoined Sulu, a small crowd had congealed loosely around the four white-robed New Humans on the platform—a tentative assemblage of people curious to see what they were doing but hesitant to intrude. But the four opened their eyes in eerie synchronicity, and Chief DiFalco turned her head to smile at the lookers-on. “It’s all right,” she told them. “We’re doing this in public because we welcome participation.”

  Uhura took a step closer. “Is this a vigil for the Aenar?” she asked kindly.

  “Partly,” Edward Logan replied. “A commemoration of the lost, and a show of support for the survivors.”

  “We and they are family, in a way,” Jade Dinh added.

  “But it’s more than that,” DiFalco said to the growing crowd. “This is also a meditation on hope—the hope brought by the impending arrival of Ambassador Kollos and Doctor Jones. They’re also part of the family of telepaths, but our differences with the Medusans have been a difficult obstacle to surmount. Now this tragedy has given us a reason—”