Burning Dreams

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  “He offered to stay, offered to marry her. She sent him packing, and he didn’t fight her. Kept an eye on me from a distance after that, until we moved to Elysium. He sized Heston up and knew he was a recipe for disaster, so for the first time in his life he committed to something, and stuck around.”

  The chair continued to move forward. He hadn’t imagined it—the path beneath them did slope gradually upward through a number of labyrinthine twists and turns, occasionally branching off in other directions, though they stayed on the main path, the walls marked at intervals with glyphs Pike took to be numbers, directions—to where? Why not take the ’lift? Why not create the illusion that they were going somewhere instead of actually making this arduous journey? He sensed this was important, and didn’t question it.

  “Go on,” the Magistrate urged him.

  “That old affair, the affair that created me, was the subtext that I overheard that day when Charlie and Willa were talking in the kitchen. But without knowing the background, I was too young to understand it.”

  He could sense, rather than see, the Magistrate nodding in comprehension. “Human relationships are quite complex, and very different from ours.”

  “I’d like to know more about yours,” Pike said suddenly. “It seems to me I ought to learn as much about you as you are about me.”

  “So you shall,” the Magistrate assured him, still pushing the chair, perhaps a little faster than before. Was that daylight up ahead? Were they headed for the surface? “Presently. But please continue with your thoughts.”

  “What else is there to say?” Pike wondered. “I wasn’t angry with Charlie for leaving. He saw it as an act of cowardice, but I didn’t. No, I was angry with him for not telling me sooner—oh, maybe not while Heston was still around, but after. After the fire, on the way back to Earth, once I’d agreed to stay with him and Hobelia—at any time along there, he could have said something.”

  “Did he give a reason why he did not?” the Magistrate asked.

  “He said he believed events should just take their course without his interference. The only reason he spoke that day at the river was because he’d realized either one or both of us could have died aboard the Aldrin, and he wanted to set things right.”

  “So you blamed him for being human?” the Magistrate observed.

  Inwardly, Pike was scowling. “What would you know about that?” he said a little crossly. “I’ll give you points for irony, though. Yes, I was judging him, and not kindly. And when my commission on the York came through, I grabbed it. Cut my leave time short with the excuse that I was headed out on a long mission and I wanted to get to know the ship and her crew better than I’d had time to on the Aldrin.”

  “So you left matters unfinished?”

  “Another debris trail,” Pike admitted.

  The light up ahead proved to be natural daylight, the mouth of a large tunnel that had perhaps at one time been the entrance to a mine or an underground rail system. Pike thought he could discern the faint impression of a rail bed. It led at an angle toward what might once have been the bank of a river, long since silted over with natural and manufactured debris. On the other side of the river was a sight that caught his attention and held it so that he could not look away.

  14

  2267: Talos IV

  The first time the Enterprise landing party had gone in search of survivors of Columbia, they’d beamed down in a valley surrounded by mountains, mountains that hid the devastated city beyond. Had they had time to look further, they might have noticed from a certain perspective a ruined spire or two thrust skeletally into the sky, but they had been in haste and quickly overwhelmed by the Talosian illusions, and in as much haste to depart once the mission was over. Here, now, Pike could see in this one city a microcosm of what the ancient war had wrought worldwide.

  He had been to many worlds, encountered many species, marveled at their technology and the sometimes improbability of their architecture, yet one thing had always impressed him—a certain familiarity about the way sentient bipedal oxygen breathers built their cities. From the evolution of city-states into nations, continental unions, and finally to the Earth which met the first alien visitors a century and a half before Pike was born, the patterns were similar and, to the son of an architect, easily identifiable. Was he surprised to find that this Talosian city was not dissimilar?

  Did it have a name? Had it, like human cities, been built around a central fortification, expanded outward from a water source, or spread in a grid to the length and breadth of the land allotted it, either by natural boundary or by legislative mandate? From where Pike contemplated it, it seemed to do all three, yet it was his thought that if he could have walked those streets—climbing over rubble in places, avoiding twisted metal or shards of shattered glass in others, the way he’d clambered over the beginnings of the works-in-progress Willa had made on Earth and elsewhere—he would know somehow which places were the centers of power, and which were the homes people made for themselves, simply by the shape of things.

  “How bad are the radiation levels?” he asked for want of something to say. The emptiness of the place disturbed him. A wind he hadn’t noticed on his first visit here howled across the open space between the city and the tunnel entrance where he and the Magistrate sheltered, and in the city he could see things moving. A blind or curtain flapping in a paneless window? A door half off its hinges swaying crazily, ceaselessly, for hundreds of thousands of years? Or only his imagination suggesting things that couldn’t possibly be? From this distance, he couldn’t be sure.

  “The structures have been assessed as safe,” the Magistrate replied. “It is only the organic aspects—the soil, the water, what flora have been able to survive or mutate—that remain toxic.”

  “That’s easy enough to fix, you know,” Pike said. “I’d like to go closer, see it from the inside if possible.”

  “We have preserved thought records of what once was,” the Magistrate suggested gently. Was it possible even s/he was saddened by what s/he saw? “But as we have not ventured extensively within except to take radiation readings, there is nothing more current.”

  Mentally, Pike shrugged that off. “I can view the records later. I’d like to see the reality now. Isn’t that what you brought me up here to see?”

  “What was the war about?” he asked after a small eternity, standing within a small illusion—the illusion that he could still stand and walk and move—within the larger reality. He and the Magistrate stood in what was left of a vast plaza that had once been ringed about with tall buildings. He’d have been content to remain in the reality of the imprisoning chair, but the Magistrate wished him to stand beside hir, so he had acquiesced to that much.

  “What are all wars about?” the Magistrate mused. “Territory, resources, ideologies? In the end, are they not all about fear? ‘You have and I want’ or ‘I believe and you must accept.’ In truth, it was so long ago, we no longer remember, or care.”

  “Well, that’s a beginning, I suppose,” Pike suggested, not entirely believing hir. There would be plenty of time to talk about it later. “When you realize none of those things are worth fighting over, maybe that’s one reason to stop fighting.”

  His boots were dusty with walking through the inch or two of fine grit covering the cut and dressed flagstones of the plaza (some sort of highly polished stone, he saw, crouching and brushing some of the gray-white grit away—marble or granite or something else fine-grained and attractive). Lumpish shapes—sculptures, he supposed—of wrought metal and carved stone were scattered here and there and also covered with that layer of whitish grit. Beyond the sculptures, devastation.

  Turning slowly a full circle around, Pike counted what was left of seven structures, or was it eight, arranged around this central plaza. Some looked as if they had simply sighed and crumbled into rubble, resigned to death. Two in particular appeared to have died screaming, tons of structural steel and the thousands of lives they’d contained twi
sting and burning and howling in protest as they went.

  And as far as the eye could see, the rest of the city was the same.

  “There are tunnels,” the Magistrate said, reading his thoughts. “Once they comprised our transportation system, a rather elaborate system of pneumatic tubes of which we were quite proud, extending from city to city all over our world. After the wars, they became our subterranean world, the world you are familiar with. When you spoke of humans leaving debris in your wake…”

  “You’ve made your point,” Pike acknowledged grimly. “We’re all fallible, and we all make mistakes.”

  He stood up and tried to brush the dust from his hands. Some of it scattered in the fretful breeze, but the rest still clung to him, and he found himself trying to brush it off his trousers, anxious to get rid of it, illusory though it was.

  “Its composition is interesting,” the Magistrate said, hir head tilted to one side, studying him. “The bulk of it is manufactured—the components of the buildings that were destroyed. The rest is…organic in nature.”

  Pike understood. A course on early weaponry at the Academy had taught him about the nuclear shadows of Hiroshima—a human life reduced to shadow on a flight of steps—the instantaneity of death, witnessed worldwide, at a place known as Ground Zero, the fallout of the Third World War. The dust on his hands, even in illusion, was all that remained of countless Talosians.

  No consolation in knowing they had been born and died millennia before he was born. They should not have died like this.

  What was it the Magistrate had said? Resources, territory, ideologies, indeed. He couldn’t imagine so advanced a species fighting over resources or territory.

  “Ideology, then,” he said.

  “Indeed.”

  Did he only imagine he heard the Magistrate sigh? The familiar shimmer in the air which indicated an illusion was ending blurred Pike’s vision for a moment, and he was back in his chair, the Magistrate pushing it—not easily—through the accumulated grit, out of the plaza and back toward the cave. The air shimmered again, and Pike found himself in the Talosian city as it once had been.

  Some sort of conference was taking place. A room perhaps the size of the Federation Council chamber, round as all conference rooms seemed to be (to eliminate shadows and corners assassins could hide in?), held perhaps a thousand Talosians, all in the same silver robes as those Pike had met in reality, all seated at long curved tables arranged in rising tiers around a central nexus where seven of their fellows sat facing outward toward them. On the curvilinear walls around them, hundreds of screens showed more Talosians observing and participating in the conference on a video feed.

  The conspicuous difference between this and any humanoid conference Pike had ever witnessed was the silence.

  The Talosians communed entirely by thought. If Pike looked closely he could see the veins in their huge crania throbbing, some placidly, others almost frenetically. He took this to mean they were arguing, though their faces remained serene.

  “You are correct,” he heard the Magistrate’s voice somewhere, like that of a narrator in an interactive video. “The war was a war of thought. Dream had already become more important to us than reality—an addiction, if you will. Our society was already showing the negative effects of it—structures falling into ruin, machines into disrepair. There was no incentive for anyone to fix anything, when all one had to do was shrug it off and slip back into Dream.

  “Yet some were disturbed by the disintegration. It was they who suggested we needed new blood, so to speak. Slaves, not to put too fine a point on it, from lesser species who could not share our power of mind unless passively, whom we would train to do our work for us.”

  “Just like your original plan for Vina and me,” Pike said incisively.

  The Magistrate did not answer.

  “So this ‘war of ideas’ turned into a war of weapons,” Pike guessed, still watching the superficially serene conference in the illusion, realizing now how much violence seethed under its surface. “How did that happen?”

  “Not simply, and not all at once,” the Magistrate said. The conference scene faded, and Pike found himself…nowhere.

  When he “returned,” to find himself back in his chair, the Magistrate was pushing it over what remained of a paved road leading away from the city, back toward the tunnel. He felt as if several volumes of Talosian history had been force-fed directly into his memory. In effect, they had. He suddenly had a violent headache.

  “Our Physician will teach you techniques for the headache,” the Magistrate assured him. “The amount of data you have been given is small, but we did not want to overtax you on the first attempt.”

  “Very thoughtful of you!” Pike said wryly. What the “small” amount of history data told him was that for all their superior mental powers, the Talosians who had begun the war had been just as hidebound and fanatical as humans had been in their ancient past.

  “None of us starts out intending to do harm,” he said, finding himself in the odd position of trying to console a Talosian. “Most of us just put one foot in front of the other until the day we die. Some few have a vision, a desire to leave a legacy.”

  “As you did?” the Magistrate suggested.

  “Maybe.” Pike thought of a conversation he’d had with an unattainable woman just weeks before the accident that had brought him here. “It’s like Vina said—we should never take our days for granted, assume we have an unlimited number of them. Being as long-lived as you are, I don’t imagine that’s easy for you to understand.”

  “Not entirely,” the Magistrate said, bringing the chair to a halt at the mouth of the tunnel. Was it possible s/he was winded from the effort? “Do not assume we have no understanding of mortality. You cannot know what it is like to lose all but a remnant of your people.”

  “Hadn’t thought of it quite that way,” Pike said.

  “However, your life is not over, Christopher,” the Magistrate reminded him after a thoughtful silence. “Here it can be whatever you wish.”

  “Yes, it can, can’t it?” he mused.

  “There is, we have observed, a tendency in the human toward regret, toward reliving those parts of the past that are painful. This we have discovered in the literature stored in your Enterprise’s logs, and in you and the female as well. You will only allow yourselves the escape of the pleasurable after you have relived the pain. But once you have finished with your early memories, found your catharsis, perhaps you will expand your repertoire as the female has.

  “In this reality, you can save your mother from the fire. You can see to it that she is never even in danger. Even that she never marries Heston Prescott, but remains on Earth with you…”

  “And we all live happily ever after?” Pike mused. In spite of himself, he could see it—a patchwork of memories of Willa he’d clung to all these years, stitched together with if-only and might-have-been. What would Willa look like now, seasoned to a handsome eighty-something, still active, perhaps still designing cities on some far-flung world?

  Was it coincidence that the Magistrate had angled the chair so that he could still see the ruined city? What would Willa have done with it? Probably rolled up her sleeves and gone to work. If he let his mind go there, he could almost see her, standing in that ruined plaza surrounded by a gaggle of Talosians, blueprints in one hand, the other waving gracefully as she sketched in the air her visions of what they would build here and here and here, where the fountain would go, and the gardens, and perhaps a memorial to the dead and—

  The thought grieved Pike, and he dismissed it.

  “Uh-uh. No thanks. I’ve seen what that kind of wishful thinking can do…I can see it here, all around me. Instead of dreaming, you might have taken your city back.”

  “We had to wait for the radiation to dissipate. Surely you can see that.”

  “Or you could have devised methods to get rid of it and been out here a thousand years sooner, if you’d had a little initiative.�
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  He wondered if his words were too harsh, but since the Magistrate could read them in his mind regardless—

  “It is that initiative which we lack,” s/he admitted, apparently unperturbed by Pike’s vehemence. “It was what we found so admirable in your species from the first.”

  “You sure had a bizarre way of showing your admiration!”

  Wrong thinking is punishable, right thinking will be as quickly rewarded. You will find the combination an effective one.

  “The last vestiges of the mind-set which led to the wars,” the Magistrate acknowledged wryly. “And the arrogant assumption that because your brain had evolved differently than ours, it was perforce inferior. In your absence, we have rethought that. We should not have attempted to coerce you the first time. For that we apologize. We had not hoped to have a second chance…”

  “You’ve given me a second chance as well,” Pike reminded hir. He couldn’t help thinking of his own primitive reactions, from attempting to strangle the Magistrate, to allowing Number One to set her phaser on self-destruct. To this day he didn’t know if she meant it as a bluff or not. “Neither side acquitted themselves all that well the first time around.”

  The Magistrate’s smile was benevolent. “Then perhaps at last we can work together.”

  Work? Pike hadn’t even considered that. Enured to the idea of immobility, his dynamic spirit tamed, he’d expected to squander the rest of his years in dream—far preferable to what would have been his fate on Starbase 11, but an end, not a beginning.

  He looked at the ruined city and saw it as it once was, as it could be again. He thought of what Willa would have done. Could that kind of energy be found in two ruined humans and a handful of Talosians? What would it hurt to try?