by David
scrambled backward, widening the circle
considerably.
Well, that didn't work. What does it
take? In as mild a tone as he could
produce, Worf asked all of them, "Why
can't I get any of you to truly attack
me?"
A young woman spoke up angrily from the
circle. "That's not the way we do things."
The others nodded in agreement.
"You said you were going to teach us how to defend
ourselves against the M'dok if they attack us on
the surface again, but now you want us to do the
attacking!" the woman accused him.
Worf could sense their frustration and anger.
Anger, he thought. We already know they're as
capable of that as anyone else. Jenny de
Luz found that out. So why can't they learn
to control and focus that anger when needed?
"It's not that I want you to do the attacking,
as you put it. I had intended to start with a
demonstration of defense--my defense against your
attack. That's the way I was taught
self-defense, and that is the way I'm trying
to teach you. When you see how easy it is for me
to defend myself against you, you'll be encouraged.
You'll want to learn the techniques I know."
The woman spoke again, thoughtfully this time.
"It's true that a student who admires his
teacher's knowledge is motivated to acquire that knowledge for
himself," she pointed out to the others. "Perhaps we
should try."
"Excellent," Worf said loudly. "All
right, then. Y." He pointed to the young woman this
time, ignoring Ingerment, for he could tell that the
young man was trying to avoid his eye now.
"What's your name?" he asked her.
"Nadeleen."
"Nadeleen, do you have any younger brothers or
sisters?"
"Three."
"Good. Do you find me frightening,
Nadeleen?"
"No, not really."
"You don't?" Worf asked with some
surprise.
He drew in a breath, expanding his huge
chest, spread his arms out, his fingers curved
into claws, and bared his teeth.
"Now?" he roared.
Nadeleen stepped back, and the circle of
seated Tenarans widened again.
"Yes!"
"I'm a M'dok!" Worf yelled.
"I'm attacking your family! I'm about
to murder and eat your baby broth--"
That was as far as he got. Nadeleen's fist
shot toward his eye. Worf was so surprised that
he almost waited too long to move. Just in time,
he knocked her arm aside. Still moving, he
pivoted on one foot, hooked the other behind
Nadeleen's legs, grabbed a handful of her
blouse, and kicked her feet from under her. He
used his hold on her clothes to lower
her gently to the floor of the gymnasium. Even
so, she was pale and shaking as she climbed to her
feet. Worf smiled as unthreateningly as he
could and said, "Thank you."
Ingerment said belligerently, "So what did
all that mean? You were a M'dok, and she
attacked you, and you knocked her down. Then you
would have killed her and eaten her!"
"You weren't listening, Ingerment," Worf
said. "My whole point is that I'll teach you
to do what I did. That way, if I had been
the Tenaran and Nadeleen had been the M'dok,
I would still have been the victor. I would have had the
M'dok helpless on the ground." The Tenarans
looked at each other in surprised agreement.
Pursuing the momentary advantage, Worf
said, "Now, why don't you all get to your
feet, pair off, and I'll teach you how to do
what I just did to Nadeleen. There are a lot
of other techniques you also need to learn, but
we'll start with that one."
The rest of the afternoon went well. After some
initial clumsiness and hesitation, the Tenarans
began to treat the exercise as a game and took
to it with increasing enthusiasm. For a while, this
meant an excess of horseplay, but Worf,
who was at first annoyed by it, was able to channel it
in the end.
He was bone-tired when the day ended. His
Tenaran students seemed, if anything,
invigorated. They laughed and chatted happily
and said goodbye to him cheerfully. Worf managed
to maintain a friendly smile and to respond to their
farewells appropriately, but behind the
facade he was trembling with fatigue. He
could not understand it. The physical work had been
slight compared with what he was used to in his
regular holodeck workouts, those martial
simulations he used to keep himself in physical
condition and fighting shape.
Nadeleen was the last to leave. She waited
until all of the others were gone, and then she
approached Worf. "I still have one big question,"
she announced.
Worf sighed. Naturally. Moral
philosophy. Nonviolence as a way of
life. "And that is?"
"Your demonstration at the beginning of the
class, when you threw me to the ground. You said that
showed how you could defend yourself against a
M'dok. However, you know that had I been a
M'dok and not a human, even if you had thrown
me down hard, I'd have been back on my
feet in an instant, attacking you again.
They're much stronger than we are, very
resilient, very aggressive. They go crazy
with a kind of blood lust."
Worf mentally apologized to her. "I was
going to raise that very matter tomorrow afternoon. Thank you
for asking me this in private, instead of in
front of the class, but I'd actually like for you
to ask me the very same question tomorrow, first thing, in
front of everyone else."
Nadeleen looked surprised, then agreed
and walked away toward the exit. When she
reached it, she paused to let two other people enter
the gym first Jenny de Luz and Gaius
Aldus.
Worf greeted them with a pleased smile.
"I was about to beam up. You caught me just in
time."
Gaius said, "We thought you might like to come with
us to see a Tenaran play, Lieutenant.
Jenny and I just heard that there's one being performed
here in the city this evening."
"I've been watching Tenarans play all
afternoon," Worf rumbled.
Jenny laughed at the disgust in his tone.
"Believe it or not, sir, this play tells
about some great battle in their distant past. Or
so I've been told."
Worf grunted. "Very surprising. I will
attend." After a moment, he added, "Since
we're both off duty and not on board ship,
I'd prefer it if you'd call me Worf."
J enny was delighted. Suddenly the forbidding
Klingon warrior seemed almost human to her.
She thought it wise not to tell him that, however.
The theater was much like a theater on a
ny
developed world, Worf thought. Tiers of seats
for the audience faced a stage with proscenium and
orchestra pit. Overhead, Worf assumed,
but hidden from the audience, would be the machinery for
lighting and for raising and lowering sets and equipment
used for special effects.
Members of the theater crew roamed around the
stage completing the setting for the opening scene.
Apparently the Tenaran theater tradition did
not include the use of a curtain
to hide this from the audience.
As the seats filled with eager Tenarans,
chatting happily with each other and waving to friends
in the audience and stage crew, Worf turned
to Jenny, sitting to his right, and said, "Form
follows function. We could be on Earth, and it
would look almost identical."
"Or Meramar," Jenny said, nodding.
Sitting on Jenny's other side, Gaius
Aldus added, "Or my world. Except in
Graecia, where our theater originated. The
Graeci have deliberately retained the archaic
format, and even give many performances in
renovated theaters from ancient times. A few
years ago, the old annual competition was
revived in Athenae. All plays are given
in the ancient language with the proper forms and
costumes. Even the subject matter is
drawn from their ancient mythology." He
laughed. "It's almost as if the Roman conquest
of Graecia had never happened. Which, I
suppose," he added, "is exactly the
point."
Jenny said, "Sounds a bit silly to me."
Gaius turned to her. His face was alight
suddenly with a fascination Jenny had never seen
there before. "Oh, no! Sometime, you must come
to Athenae with me and see it for yourself. It's
magnificent! No true Roman should miss
it. They were our true forefathers, you know, not the
primitive tribes of Latium--our
cultural forebears, I mean. We fight
wars our own way, and that gave us control of our
world. But everything that's best in us, we got from the
Graeci."
Worf knew from his reading that Gaius was
expressing an opinion that the ancient
Romans had held. Or tried to convince
themselves was true, he corrected himself. It
enabled them to think of themselves as something other than
mere barbarian conquerors, which was how the
Greeks really saw them.
Still, he found himself fascinated by an empire
of warriors and conquerors that could give such
praise to the civilization they had displaced.
While Jenny and Gaius talked to each other,
Worf thought The Klingons of the old days
could never have been so generous to those they conquered.
Nor could most human cultures.
In spite of the orchestra pit, there
was no music--at least, not with this play. The
stage crew simply finished setting the stage
and strolled off as the actors strolled on.
Worf glanced sideways and saw Jenny
watching in fascination, fully prepared to enjoy
the presentation. Beyond her, Gaius watched with the
analytical frown of the connoisseur.
The action began. More actors came on the
scene, and the stage was full of villagers
discussing with concern the arrival of a band called the
Lawless Ones. They shared stories about the
crimes and atrocities Lawless Ones had
committed in other saavtas, and what they might
do when they arrived in theirs.
The crowd became more and more agitated and began
calling for the saavta leader. Finally a
distinguished older man arrived on the scene and
settled the crowd. The leader began his speech,
talking about the danger they all faced and the
difficulty he had in making his decision.
Finally he announced that they would fight for their
saavta, and a stunned silence descended on the
crowd, who then began murmuring their fear and
disapproval.
Gaius was startled by their reaction.
Certainly there was no alternative to fighting,
even for the Tenarans. He watched as the leader's
men devised a lottery and chose eight men,
who stood before the saavta. The leader praised
them in turn for their achievements and past
contributions to their people.
The older man handed the chosen warriors
weapons--either sharpened "fighting sticks" or
heavy axes. He commended them again and
expressed his sympathy at the loss of their
honor.
Gaius started again. Surely there was no
greater honor than the defense of one's people.
As the eight men were ushered out, a young girl
broke from the crowd and rushed to the youngest of the
warriors, a barely adolescent boy. She
cried and clung tightly to him until she was
finally pried away, shrieking as the warriors
exited.
Then the scenery was changed quickly to indicate
a forest. The eight warriors entered the stage
disheveled, their clothing spotted with blood.
The battle had obviously been waged and won
offstage. Worf grunted his disappointment.
As the men began speaking, it became
clear to Gaius that they were not making plans
to return to the village. They called themselves
"men without honor" and denounced themselves as
murderers. Now that they had killed, they could
never return to their people and would have to live alone in
the forest.
Gaius watched the play's final scene with
mixed emotions. He understood the importance of
personal honor, as all Magna Romans
did--suicide was still a common practice
to restore lost honor. But for Romans,
honor was inextricably bound with battle, with
fighting and killing when necessary. For Tenarans,
apparently, killing in self-defense meant
loss of honor.
As if reading his thoughts, Worf commented, "A
most curious system of honor."
Gaius nodded. Curious indeed. How could
they change a people who lost their honor when they
lifted a sword? And would they want to?
To Worf, food was something one consumed
to keep one's body functioning optimally, not a
source of pleasure. Solitary by nature,
he had also found it difficult to adjust to the
human habit of treating the eating of food as
a central part of a larger social ritual.
However, over the years he had learned
to tolerate that ritual and even, occasionally,
to enjoy it. Since he enjoyed the time he spent
with Jenny and Gaius, when Gaius asked their
opinion of the restaurant, Worf said quite
honestly that it was as good as any he could
remember.
Gaius was openly pleased. "Well, it's
not what would be considered a feast by a patrician
Roman, of course, like Captain Sejanus,
but by my standards it's just fi
ne."
"I'm surprised that the old distinction between
patrician and plebeian survives in the
republic," Worf said.
Gaius looked a bit embarrassed. "Not
officially, no. That is, people with patrician
blood don't get special favors. But
unofficially, a lot of the old thinking is still
around. I was brought up to consider the
Volcinians, and especially Sejanus'
family, as my natural masters." He
laughed. "That's not in line with proper
republican thinking, I know, but it's
pretty deeply ingrained in some of us."
"I understand," Worf said. "Old
traditions die slowly. The class
structure, the warrior ethos, respect for
imperial rights and privileges--it's the
nature of men to adopt those ways easily and
give them up with difficulty. It requires
a conscious, deliberate effort." After a
pause he added, "It's the nature of
Klingons, as well." He noticed Jenny's
surprised stare and said, "Did you believe I
wasn't capable of such abstract thought, de
Luz?"
Jenny looked away quickly, then back, and
said, "Well, uh, some of us have wondered about
you. Specifically, if you're really as
different from the rest of us as you ... Sorry."
"As I look," Worf completed for her.
He felt a moment of sadness, a sense of his
alienness. "Yes and no," he answered
obliquely. "Nature and nurture, and the
interaction of the two. I am Klingon
by nature, but only part Klingon by nurture."
"My own world has a warrior heritage,"
Jenny said thoughtfully. "How odd that we've
all ended up in Starfleet."
Gaius shrugged. "Civilizations pass beyond
the need of the warrior ethos for anything but
self-defense. Even Worf's people eventually
reached that point."
"Now, if only the M'dok would get there,"
Jenny said. "And the Romulans, and all the
rest of them."
"The Romulans," Gaius said thoughtfully.
"They fascinated us when we first heard of them.
You can understand that, I'm sure. But the more we
learned about them, the less they seemed like us."
Worf nodded and added, "From what I've
observed of you and the other Magna Romans,
Gaius, the true similarity is between Magna
Romans and Klingons."
Gaius was clearly pleased at the
comparison.
Jenny said suddenly, "Then that's another thing
the three of us have in common--Roman or
similar origins. My ancestors were brought