by Diane Duane
TWENTY-ONE
At Noon the next day, the plaza was full. The next morning, when Bloodwing landed there again—quite cautiously, off to one side in a space pointedly prepared for it, and in company with one of Enterprise’s shuttlecraft—the whole place was simply packed full of people.
Kirk and Spock and Scotty and McCoy got out, as did Uhura and Chekov and Sulu, all in dress uniforms. K’s’t’lk followed them, ununiformed as usual. The group looked around at the crowd, who eyed them with curiosity, but not nearly as much as Jim had been expecting.
“What’s our percentage of the gate?” McCoy muttered.
“Shush, Bones,” Kirk said under his breath.
They walked toward the doors of the Senate; the crowd parted for them. As it did, one of the side hatches of Bloodwing opened, and Ael’s crew came out, one by one, all in Grand Fleet uniform. They formed up into a double corridor between Bloodwing and the doors.
Then Ael came out, also in Grand Fleet uniform, but without the marks of rank, and in her hands she held the Sword. At the bottom of the ramp she paused for a moment, looking around. Then she walked briskly down between her people, who saluted with fists to chests in the old way as she passed.
At the doors, Ael and the group from the Enterprise met. Jim smiled at Ael. She smiled back, though a little somberly. “I think they are ready for us,” she said.
“Then let’s go in.”
Ael went to the doors. Slowly they swung open.
There, in its many concentric rings, the Senate sat. Every Senatorial seat was full. But missing were the seats held by almost all the Praetors. Of the twelve, only Gurrhim tr’Siedhri stood in his place, rising as all the others did as the Sword reentered the chamber. Gathered all around the rings of Senatorial seating were a great crowd of noble House Rihannsu, politicians of every stripe, and members of families influential in business and public life. These stood silently and watched, and all their eyes were on what Ael carried.
Behind her, walking up slowly into the center of that great gathering, Jim saw something most unusual start to happen. He motioned with his hand to his people, and all of them stood still where they were. All around the circle, the Senators and all the rest who stood there to watch were beginning to drop to their knees as Ael passed. Jim had never seen such a gesture from Rihannsu before. It seemed illegal, somehow.
Ael walked up to the dais where the Chair still sat, unhurt. She held the Sword up in front of her, and for the space of several breaths it was the focus of every eye in that place. The sunlight that fell through the piercing of the dome onto the Sword seemed to illuminate everything else but the curve of that black sheath. Ael looked at it with a terrible, edged satisfaction, and slowly put the Sword back down across the arms of the Empty Chair.
Then she stood away, and turned.
The people on their knees did not get up.
“It is done,” Ael said. “It is over.”
Many eyes looked up at her from all over the room, but no one moved.
Ael began to look disturbed. “What are you waiting for?”
Gurrhim rose. “I believe they look for some word as to what part you will take in the remaking of the Empire.”
Ael’s eyes widened. “We have many things of more import than that to consider at the moment. There are two planets’ worth of battle damage to repair, thousands and thousands of Rihannsu dislocated in the uprisings who must be housed. Fires to put out, roads and public works to rebuild—”
“And a people to be led,” Gurrhim said.
Ael stared at him. “Ah, no. Gurrhim, are you mad? The doctor’s medications have unseated your wits at last. Your children will be furious with me.”
“His children,” one of Gurrhim’s sons said, coming up beside his father, “are in complete agreement with their father. And enough of talking around your name as if you weren’t here, no matter how many times it might have been written or burned. T’Rllallieu, enough of your prevaricating! You have done your part so far. Now you must do the rest of it!”
There was a mutter of agreement from around the floor. Ael looked from face to face of those nearest her, and in all cases looked away again hastily—the expression of a woman who does not like what she sees, and seeks a better answer elsewhere. “Doubtless I will take some small part—”
“You will not!”
Quite a few people looked around in shock as the youngest of all the Senators got up off her knees and came out of the crowd to stand there looking at Ael. And then she turned to the rest of them.
“Will you let her off so easily?” Arrhae cried. “She has risked everything, again and again, for your sakes. She deserves better at our hands! She has given us back our mnhei’sahe, she has taken back the sun for us to live under again, and driven off the shadow that has spread over us all this while, sapping our strength, killing our pride. She has brought her fate upon herself, and are we mad to let her escape it?”
The rest of the crowd was starting to get up off its knees now. The closest of them started to move in toward Ael a little. She moved just slightly, once, like a woman who felt she wanted to run, but she held her ground.
“We are an Empire,” Arrhae said. “Perhaps it is time now we had an Empress.”
There was silence at first. Then a very subdued mutter. Then the mutter grew to a grumble, and the grumble to a roar. “The Empress!”
It was a word Jim had never heard before in Rihannsu, and he glanced to one side and saw McCoy say it once, softly, under his breath, trying it out: “Llei’hmnë.”
Ael looked horrified beyond belief. “This is nothing but a road to tragedy. You are dooming yourselves! We are never best led when only one leads.”
“But never before did so many choose to be led!” Arrhae said. “You are no Ruling Queen. Nor will be! We know you too well. Her way was to order others where she herself would not go. That’s not what you have done.”
“It is the sheerest folly!” Ael said. “No possible good can come of such power concentrated in only one pair of hands!”
“It would never be such,” Gurrhim said, “and you know it. We would look to see the legislative powers restored to their old puissance. If they had an Empress looking over their shoulders to make sure their jobs were being done correctly, then such would be all to the good. And as for the rule of the many, too much we’ve seen of late how those many may pull in three or twelve different directions, each serving his own interests at the expense of the others’ and those they represent. Perhaps the little Senator here is right. Perhaps it is time that we went down a new road.”
“The Empress!” some of the people in that vast hall began to shout again. “The Empress!”
Once more the scattered shout turned into a roar. Ael looked helplessly over at Jim. He returned the look.
“This can only be an error!” Ael cried over the noise. “The blood of your brothers is on my hands today. To make such a decision now—”
“It must be made now,” Gurrhim said. “You know what danger it brings our people not to be ruled. For the moment, an Empress is what we need. You proved yourself apt enough to war. Are you afraid of failing to manage the peace?”
Jim thought he could see the answer to that behind her eyes, and he entirely understood it.
After a moment, she held up one hand. The shouting dropped off to silence; this too seemed to unnerve her. “We will hear what the captain says,” said Ael.
“Me?” Jim took a few steps forward, looking around. “I don’t think they need to hear me. Sounds like they know what they want. You, though—” He walked up to her. “You’ve known for a long time what you wanted. Your people, free to make their own choices, rather than being dragged into them. Now it sounds like they’re making a choice. You’ve devoted your whole life to bringing about this set of circumstances, in which they could choose their own road. Now—” He smiled. “—suddenly you’re going to part company with them again? I don’t think so.”
She was stan
ding close enough to him now that she could be heard even when she spoke very softly. “Jim,” she said, “you are serving me very ill, after all my good usage of you in the past.”
Suddenly someone else was standing beside Jim. “Oh, you think so, do you?” McCoy said, speaking as quietly as Ael had. “Well, you’d better just be quiet now and take your medicine, because you’ve brought this on yourself. Admit it: you didn’t think it through, did you? Oh, you saw this moment, all right! You saw the Sword back on its chair again, and all the rotten politicians and plotters and schemers chucked out on their kiesters, and then you had some hazy image of how it would be afterward—good politicians somehow magically rushing into the vacuum left by the old ones.” McCoy snorted. “Wishful thinking of the first order, Commander. You’d never fight a battle that way. Whatever made you think you’d be allowed to just fade away afterward?”
Jim, looking sideways, thought that it was a good thing his back and McCoy’s were presently turned to the great assembly gathered before the Chair; that way none of them could see the sarcastic look McCoy had fixed on Ael. She looked from him to Kirk. “I would have thought that was what happened to old soldiers in your world,” Ael said, sounding a little forlorn. “And what in your world or mine is a ‘kiester’?”
“We’ll discuss that another time,” Jim said. “Meanwhile, think, Ael. Stay in office long enough to get things stable, and then bow out if you have to. But things are very broken loose right now, and they need you. More to the point, Starfleet needs you. You, sitting here, are the only one who can ensure that they’ll leave you alone until you can put things back together again. And the Klingons will, too. You can always abdicate later.”
She shook her head, more in indecision, Jim thought, than negation. “‘Office!’ You heard them—you heard what they want to call me! I will not—”
“Ael,” Jim said. “Remember the Fizzbin tournament?”
She blinked at him.
“Change the rules,” Jim said. “If you’re the first Empress of the Rihannsu, you get to change the rules. In fact, you get to invent them. Invent a new game!”
He watched the thoughts moving around behind her eyes—or at least he tried to. It was always a chancy business, trying to anticipate what Ael was thinking. Perhaps aware of his attempt to assess her thought, she bowed her head.
Then she looked up. “All of you,” she said to those who were still on their knees, “stand up. I will not be one of these bow-and-scrape rulers who judge their own power by how much they can see of their subjects’ backs.”
The shouting started again, especially among Ael’s crew, and in many cases, the shouting was composed as much of laughter as of praise.
“I will not sit in that chair,” Ael said. “Someone fetch me another, and put it to one side. In that I will sit.”
She sounded fretful, like someone being held to a bargain they never intended to keep. “Captain?” Spock said.
Jim glanced at him. “Would you excuse me for a moment?” Spock said.
“Huh? Sure, Spock, go ahead.”
Jim watched with some amusement as the Senators on that side of the chamber rustled about a little, as Gurrhim went down among them and then went out of the room. A minute or so he came back with a chair not too dissimilar from the one across which the Sword lay.
McCoy let out an annoyed breath. “I thought I told you no lifting.”
Gurrhim chuckled and ignored him, putting the chair down by the Empty one. Ael turned and was about to sit down in it, when a voice said, “One moment, madam.” Spock’s voice.
Everyone turned to look. Then suddenly there was a great pushing back out of his way among those who were gathered nearer the doors, and many of the Senators craned their necks to see what was coming—and stepped back when they saw.
Through the middle of the Senate came Spock, holding something dark in his hands. The whole room rose as they saw it and recognized it as what it was: another S’harien, his family’s heirloom, cousin to the Sword itself. Spock stopped in front of Ael as she stood in front of her own chair, and held the sheathed sword up.
Around them on the Senate floor, dead silence reigned. In a single swift and economical gesture, Spock unsheathed the S’harien. In all that sudden quiet, the sound echoed fiercely, and the light from the piercing in the roof glinted blindingly on the steel. In Spock’s hands, the sword looked most improbably deadly.
Then he sheathed it again. “Madam,” Spock said, “it is better that these two should be together. Let one be for the past, if you will, and the other for the future. The one may rest, and the other may be used.”
A hiss and whisper of wonder went up among the people all around, then a patter of applause that grew slowly to a thunder, and then a roar of approval and cheering. Spock held the sword out.
Very slowly, Ael took it. She hesitated, as if calculating something; then she bowed her head to Spock, and sat down.
In the continuing roar, the rest of the attending Enterprise crew walked up to the throne—for so it was now—to greet her. Jim came up first, and reached out to take her hand.
“Not here,” Ael said under her breath, giving him a look. “Are you still unclear what that means among my people?”
Jim grinned, dropped his hand, and sketched her half a bow. “Congratulations,” he said, “Empress.”
She bridled, though she tried to conceal it somewhat. “This is all your fault,” Ael said under her breath.
“Guilty as charged,” Jim said.
“I am going to see to it that you are duly punished by Starfleet,” she said. “With something more onerous than admiralty, if such exists. If I must suffer, by my Element but I shall see to it that you do too.”
Jim’s grin got broader. “And our relations were getting off to such a good start. We’re fighting already.”
“You two cut it out,” McCoy said from behind Jim, “or I’ll separate you.”
They both turned an amused look on the doctor. He gave them an innocent look. “You hesitated a little there,” Jim said, glancing at Spock, who had stepped back.
“I was making a new rule,” Ael said. “How much an Empress bows to diplomatic representatives.”
Jim nodded in approval. “You’ve got a lot of that ahead of you today. Is this about right?” And he tried the bow again.
Ael tilted her head to one side. “A little insolent. But I am in a forgiving mood.”
“Then we’ll head out for the moment,” Jim said, “and let you get on with it.” He smiled at her, and turned away.
“Twenty hundred,” he heard McCoy say to her behind his back. “Be there or be square.”
The Empress of the Rihannsu nodded to him, smiled demurely, and beckoned forward the next group of those who waited to greet her.
The Enterprise crew all walked out together. “Spock,” Jim said quietly, “do you think your father’s going to approve?”
“He approved some months ago,” Spock said, “when I first suggested the possibility.”
Jim gave Spock an astonished look. “Some months ago?” He shook his head. “How could you possibly have known?”
They made their way out into the plaza. “Some threads of history,” Spock said, “can seem surprisingly predictable when one examines them from a sufficient distance to perceive gross detail in the pattern. Perhaps I should simply say that our people are closely enough related that we have some patterns in common, and I saw a very Vulcan thing happening here: the best person for a job finding themselves thrust into it.”
Jim nodded as they got into the shuttlecraft. “And your father concurred.”
“Some time ago, as I said. In any case, that gesture will say more to the reconstituted Empire, and to the people of these worlds, about the intentions of the Federation toward them, than any number of treaties could.”
Sulu buttoned up the shuttlecraft as everyone got settled. “And now,” Jim said, “we watch this whole part of space remake its alliances and shape itself
into something new.”
“We can only hope,” Spock said, “that the new shape becomes superior to the old.”
“Or remains that way,” McCoy said.
“Ever the cynic, Bones,” Jim said as the shuttlecraft lifted off.
“Time passes, gentlemen,” McCoy said, “and everything changes in time. But for the moment, we’re off to a good start. Let’s enjoy it while we can.”
Jim nodded and leaned back, and the shuttlecraft leapt through the atmosphere toward the airlessness of space, with Eisn shining golden on her hull.
That night there was a celebration aboard Enterprise, as usual. Jim was at the heart of it, but he was hardly the guest of honor. That privilege was being reserved for another. At any rate, there were many other guests to see to—visitors from Tyrava and Kaveth and the rest of the Free Rihannsu fleet, curious Senators, various other prominent Rihannsu.
The guest of honor was late, but that hardly bothered Jim, considering that tardiness is royalty’s prerogative across the known universe. When she finally showed up, the crew welcomed her with cheers, and then got on with their usual business of eating and drinking and engaging with their guests.
Jim watched with interest as she paused, not far from the door, and went down on one knee. It took him a moment to see what was transpiring—the crowd near the frontmost buffet table was in the way—but some of his crew were standing further from the table than they would normally have needed to. When the press of people parted, Jim saw Ael deep in conversation with what some people might have taken for some kind of igneous outcropping, but was actually Lieutenant Naraht.
He smiled to himself as he saw her lay a hand on that bright stony hide, saw the Horta shuffle and wriggle under the touch with a touch of uncertainty, a wriggle that was in a way charmingly like a puppy’s. He didn’t quite understand what special thing there seemed to be between Ael and Naraht, but it struck him at the moment as just another manifestation of what Enterprise seemed to bring out in people—the ability of the wildly diverse to come together and make of its multiple selves far more than could have been reasonably expected. But maybe that’s the secret, he thought. We expect more…