by Various
But in the cool night, those chilled boulders beneath our backs, we’d slip our heads out the flap in the tent and look up. The sky! It hung speckled and deep—the endless direction of a sky was alien to us. Columns of smoke seemed to reach out and dissolve into that black ocean. It crashed on the shores of our imagination, tempting us with a silent roar.
Beneath that sky you smiled, always smiling. While I wrestled the question that we were born to bear as sons of two worlds, Remus and Romulus: Does the galaxy mean anything to a slave born in a dark hole? Or do we mean anything to the galaxy?
“You might be right.” You always acknowledged my perspective.
I was always wrestling—a violent word for my violent hunger—and your attention validated me. Even when we were little boys in the mines, sifting debris from crystal in the dilithium refinement plant, I’d chatter away for sixteen hours. Stories and theories and rumors—each aimed beyond Remus. Lavish palaces and hulking starships and adventures made me itch. We grew, and so did the itch. But eventually that itch became something else. Something in me began to decompose, then burn—as if life could flourish on Remus’s dark side. And when that frustration twisted across my face, you never trivialized those feelings.
“They’re afraid,” I repeated, “the stars would lure us. Yalu! They can’t have slaves—”
“—slaves hungry for more than food,” you said. You knew my words as if they were scripted. And maybe they were. But you listened, and I kept talking, working to understand who we were and why—what my words meant, if they were real. They compelled me to speak them; they freed me from silence. You thrived in quiet; you learned from it, drew strength from it. But for me, in it, the itch festered.
Before the Romulan military plucked us from the Reman mines to fight their war, the Romulan administrator of Remus’s mining colony, a man named Jun cha’Ral, hired us to write and transmit status reports concerning dilithium quotas and supply requests back to Romulus. I never understood why he gave us that opportunity. He simply appeared at our cell one evening after our sixteen-hour shift. He knelt down; our mother laid in her cot, her face pressing against the grimy walls.
“The Senate’s slashed our budgets,” he explained, his broad, oafish body tangled in a lattice of shadows. “So, you’re both going to live in the big office. Suppose I have to get your reading and writing up to standard.”
We were speechless.
“A couple of fatherless mutts like you don’t belong here anyway.”
We looked back at our mother. You smiled: our lives as grunting slaves had ended! My wet eyes clung to our mother, the frayed folds of her old shirt. Back arched toward us, her head still, as if she were asleep; I knew she couldn’t’ve been. How could she be? A Romulan was here to take us! She would not even look at us. You saw opportunity; I cursed everything: our paralyzed mother, that Romulan slaver.
The stories she told us about our Romulan father crippled me then. Heart stopped. Lungs tight, fiery. How he would skulk into her cell, her aching body spread weak on her cot after an eighteen-hour day in the mines. He’d want her. And we resulted from those exhausting nights. How could she let her boys leave like this without a tremor of anger or resistance?
You see, I hated Romulans. The hate wasn’t pure, though; the comfort and education in the Romulan administrator’s office sculpted that itch into a burn. I felt suffocated, trapped in that mining pit.
“Genius!” I’d exclaim, lost between sarcasm and admiration. “They plant their slaves on a planet that doesn’t rotate, sealing generations into darkness. What’s hidden in the dark doesn’t dirty the morality of their shining empire, I suppose!” And you’d nod, laughing gently, for this epiphany weeded up through my thoughts weeks before and would undoubtedly sprout again.
When we monitored the colony’s transmission array, chatter from Romulus filled our ears. And we found that few on Romulus even knew that we existed. As far as the public knew, Remus was a prison mining colony for their worst criminals. Those criminals, we figured, were our Romulan guards who beat us, kept our people hungry, and used our women. Even our savior, Administrator cha’Ral, glowed dimly in light of this revelation.
You cried silently, but my arms shook at my sides as we walked to our room. Something cracks and splinters in a man when he doesn’t see himself in another’s eyes. The guards barely acknowledged a Reman, except as cattle. We pass in the tunnels; their eyes bounce away. Would anyone on Romulus see me to even bounce their eyes?
“These poor men,” you said. I hated you for sympathizing with the criminals.
“Poor men?”
You nodded, wiping tears across your face with the backs of your hands. “They’re forgotten, like us.”
“They exist,” I mumbled. “We can’t be forgotten, because we don’t exist!” And my burn flamed into bitterness.
“Not true.” You always steadied me in truth. “That Vulcan man’s speech.”
I sighed, frustrated. I hated being challenged, especially with truth. “Spock?” Before today’s transmissions cut out, the one Vulcan voice on Romulus filled a lecture hall.
“He’s from the Federation. I believe he knows about us,” you assured me. “A just society,” you said, wearing a playful, deep voice, “can’t thrive on the forgotten backs of disposable people; eventually the foundation crumbles into what’s hidden—that’s what he said.”
I folded both arms across my chest and growled something at you about those being empty words that’ll fade. But you knew differently. You knew that if that Vulcan could speak those words over and over again, we’d be dragged into the light.
Before we left for war, my bitterness tricked me into unlacing the opportunities that I had—changing everything I saw into an impediment. I would actively confront Administrator cha’Ral, and, for a while, he tolerated my insubordination.
“You’re just a lousy criminal,” I charged. “What gives you the right to lord over me? I’ve done nothing immoral.” I had just discovered the vocabulary of moral philosophy while eavesdropping on another university lecture transmission. “The only natural law I’ve broken is being born on this sunless rock. I should be the administrator. You should be out there in the dirt.”
Usually, he smiled and assigned me a day in the mines. You hated when I became so combative, but we both knew punishment was mere theater. He protected us.
But I finally crossed the line after he found me trying to transmit some juvenile letter I wrote to expose the “villainy” of the empire to the whole galaxy.
He threw me, personally, out of the administration building, shouting, “I gave you this opportunity! I thought that the Romulan half of you could become more.” There was something quivering behind his words, almost disappointment. And now the guards saw me, but only as cha’Ral’s discarded Reman pet. But I wasn’t really Reman. I had become more.
The next night, a hooded figure walked passed our cell’s door, dropping a bundled package. A package meant ownership. Someone meant for me to have something other than ragged clothes and a dim cell. Honestly, I always thought you, Yalu, sent the books that sagged heavily in the bundle. Our mother curled toward the wall, again cradled in her cot, sleeping or weeping, I wasn’t sure. But suddenly power trembled through me. I felt unmoored, ready to explode from the room, even the planet, by the thrust of this feeling. I anticipated the words.
While you continued working in the administration building, eating three meals a day, I would devour those books. Their bindings frayed. Flowering stains colored most pages. Cold, wet dirt in a fresh pit—that’s what they smelled like. I actually found the smell oddly soothing. I felt rooted in something real. In those pages, dozens of people spoke directly to me about things that mattered. Some books even had miscellaneous scraps and torn pamphlets forgotten between their pages.
Spock, the Vulcan man we heard, wrote one of those p
amphlets. It seized me.
As I write to you, my elbows lean against an old bar. Imperfect, scratched gloss smears its surface. Gray haze snakes around me and the patrons. A few graying Romulans congregate in the corner. Clanking glasses and low, calloused voices rumble.
I came here to write this letter to you because there were whispers, rumors, that this establishment’s owner sympathized with Spock’s underground movement on Romulus. It is a dangerous thing these days to associate with the movement, especially with the breakdown of the government after Shinzon’s coup d’état and the power vacuum filled chaotically by factions of military and Tal Shiar commanders who grope at their beloved empire’s corpse.
I sat here, sipping an ale for a while before I began. I finally have a voice; ironically, what can I say to you, brother, that you didn’t already know. You knew who I could become well before I did. That’s why I figured you sent me those books. Spock’s pamphlet set me straight, though. He saved my life. But so did you, twice, at least.
If you weren’t my librarian, then the first time was on that stony field during the Dominion War. I remember lying in our tent alone. My shoulder burned, wet, bandaged, and throbbing mad. A Jem’Hadar grazed me earlier that morning. Even now that wound’s twisted wrinkles ache when I sleep.
There is nothing more hateful than a Jem’Hadar soldier: the scaly skin, the horns, the dark-obsessive eyes. They rise and consume a hillside as if some far-off floodgates had burst and out spilled a flexing, unflinching wave. A Reman army had no chance. Bred to kill, Jem’Hadar had no identity beyond “soldier.” Killing fulfilled them; drugs sustained them. The Founders wisely subjugated them through drugs and breeding. You, of course, wept for them, seeing them as kindred victims. At least, I’d argue, the Jem’Hadar had clear purpose and recognition—they were infamous. Even a Reman’s purpose and identity were clear. But who or what was a child of a Reman woman and a Romulan father? When our mother gave birth to you, Yalu, I watched and tasted her disgust at your spindly Romulan hair, matted and black. I saw myself through her eyes then. I couldn’t understand what I felt. Our wide, pointed ears, however, marked us as odd Reman mutts. The guards would call us “ear-mutts.” It’s a wonder our mother chose to carry us to term, knowing the life ahead of us.
I must write this quickly. Loyalists to the old order at this bar might beat a Reman to reclaim a sense of patriotism. So, the first time you saved my life: You reached into our tent, my wound fresh, and dragged me to our commander’s command center, a troop transport serving as Romulan living quarters beside the rows of Reman troop tents atop that stony field. The commander sent hundreds of Remans to die as mere distractions to allow a Romulan squad to tear holes with explosives in Jem’Hadar transports. The tactic worked; it only took the sacrifice of more than two hundred Remans.
At his desk, the commander swept his hands with grace and skill through holographic terrain that depicted this barren world—prime real estate for the Dominion to establish a foothold in Romulan space. We stood, watching his hands sculpt the troops and bombers, encircling, then swallowing the enemy. And as we stood there, Yalu, I was hypnotized. Beauty. Precision. Expression. A low hum settled in the room. In there, my wound cooled to a gentle ache.
Two officers stood on either side of the commander’s desk. Their eyes bore down on us as if we threatened the commander’s life—it must’ve been our wide, Reman ears. But they were looking at us.
When he finally acknowledged us, he didn’t look up. “Yes, Yalu?”
“Commander,” you began, “my brother, Troth.”
The commander remained focused on his holograms.
“And,” you continued, “he has a perspective that’ll amuse you.”
“Yes?”
“He hates Remans.”
He looked up, smiling.
“Hates Remans?”
You nodded and looked back at me with an expression that said, here is another opportunity for something more. You turned back to him.
“Yes, you know our lineage.”
“And you’re my liaison to the Reman troops for that fact.”
“Well, my brother offers himself as entertainment for you.”
He snapped to his feet, moved around his desk, and walked directly to face you. I stiffened, fearing that this was the end. No Reman approached a Romulan commander with anything novel like this. He had a strict, arrogant power curving the bones of his face. Throughout our campaign on this planet, I was a mere photon hovering between his hands; now, you wanted me to entertain him? I didn’t know what I had to say to a Romulan. Could he even hear a Reman? His eyes lit when you said I hated Remans. But I didn’t, exactly—I just hated the not-living of being unseen.
“Well,” he began, moving to me. “Reman workers sustain the empire, so I hate Remans as much as I hate the beasts of the field. They’re perfectly good at being Remans, but you’re half-Reman—”
I nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Well, isn’t that confusing, growing up hating half your identity?”
“Yes, sir.”
He laughed, looking back at the officers that stood by his desk.
“Gentlemen, what we have here is a Muddled Mongrel!”
They all laughed. You began laughing, glaring at me. Laughter, at first, dripped hesitantly from my lips, until it rolled out as boisterously as the commander’s had.
“Well, Muddled Mongrel, let’s hear something amusing.”
I opened my mouth and said the first thing that came to mind, a story the guards would repeat whenever I argued about freedom and fairness: “You want to help the Reman out. You really want to give him a chance to be free, but look what happens when you do that. Take Zon, for example. You know Zon, right?”
The commander nodded. “The Reman agitator who the colony’s administrator let escape.”
“Yes. Zon escapes, and what does he do first?”
I let the question fill the room.
“In primal desperation, he scurries through the wilds of Remus’s dark side, fingers crusted over with dirt, finally reaches the lighted side, bone thin, and guzzles down sewage-tainted water from some abandoned outpost. Then dies.”
The room was still.
“Zon proved one thing: you can take the Reman out of the filth, but never the filth out of the Reman.”
Their laughter weighed heavily on me, but I could feel the tension rippling off them. I knew, then, what you’d done for me, and I hated you for it, Yalu.
“Very nice,” said the commander. “I am Commander Tholon. I am certain you know of me, but not my name nor my passion for entertainment.” He looked to you. “Your brother must have sensed my frustrated boredom—there is no variety in war beyond its meticulous game. Especially this war. It is passionless, mere defense-ism. A struggle of survival, not the expansion of our political sophistication, our complex, penetrating mendacity. We are destined to hold this quadrant to Romulan standards of civilization. Not defend our ailing neighbors, but I digress.”
“I’d be happy to help, Commander,” I said with feigned enthusiasm.
“Life demands variety, my Reman friend.” A sculpted grin hardened his face; his gaze isolated me, leaving me feeling vulnerable, naked. But seen. I had to earn his trust or his respect, at least.
“Like any good Romulan, I’ll speak and leave the truth to you, sir.”
The grin softened. “Subcommander Shonu, have the cook prepare a meal.”
“Yes, commander.” He left the shuttle with urgency.
Still fixated on me, he ordered his other officer to retrieve my things from my tent. My chest tightened. In my tent, tucked in the folds of my blanket, I kept Spock’s pamphlet that I had devoured again and again for years now. We were permitted no personal belongings aside from a blanket, disruptor, tent, and uniform. But Spock inhabited me as a third voic
e in my identity. I cringed at being found with such anti-Romulan, anti-Reman rhetoric. But proud deception and insinuation, I learned, were honored hallmarks of Romulan virtue—as both challenge intellect and fortitude. So I grinned, letting my eyes hint at my transgression.
Later, his officers brought in a table, food, ale, chairs. We were given fresh uniforms; we were overwhelmed by the treatment. The meal served, Tholon personally poured each of our ales, saying, “You’re very fascinating, Yalu, Troth.” He began pouring an ale for his subcommander at his right hand and moved slowly around the table. With each step, each probing glance, I prepared my next move in what I supposed was a game of move-countermove.
“Brothers, born of two people: a race of the shadows and a race of the Star Empire—heirs simultaneously to concealed slavery and ancient nobility.”
The ale fizzled coolly, reaching up the edges of your glass. Its soft hiss triggered that embittered itch, transforming it. I felt almost new, somehow. Tholon saw into and defined the tension I felt.
“I am curious: To which heritage do you most closely identify?”
You wisely thanked him for your ale and spoke: “I’ve taken my oath of loyalty to you, Commander. We won’t survive today’s conflict without each individual’s loyalty.”
He began pouring my glass. “So, loyal today. I appreciate your precise diction, Yalu. A Romulan trait, I assure you.”
It was my turn.
“Since Romulus doesn’t recognize Remans as citizens, I am left my Romulan heritage only.”
“An impressive, if scathing, response,” he replied. “Do you enjoy Romulan ale?”
“I’ve never known the freedom to drink it, sir.”
Your face froze in horror. Was I to cross the line again? I feared his countermove. My skin began to darken, a creeping darkness that reached up my Reman veins like wiry fingers. But your eyes, Yalu, your eyes calmed me, reminded me of being thrown from the administrator’s office.