“So you don’t think he’s serious about your marriage?”
“No, that’s just it—I know he is. That’s why it’s just so frustrating. Before, back on DS9, I always knew he was devoted to me, but circumstances just kept keeping us apart. I just thought that back here on Earth, things would be…easier.”
“So your marriage can only work when the conditions are perfect? Sounds like a pretty fair-weather relationship to me.”
“No, of course that’s not it.”
“Then what is it?” Boothby asked piercingly. “If you don’t think your marriage is in trouble, what’s upsetting you about his little jaunts? Don’t you want him to help out? You think he should just sit back, mind his own damn business?”
“You make it sound so terrible.”
“Well, how should it sound? You tell me.”
Keiko sighed, making the windsingers squeal a bit. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t feel this way about it. Miles is right; the work he’s doing is important. And I don’t know anyone who’s better qualified to do it. I just…wish it wouldn’t happen so often. I hoped being back on Earth would be like it was when I was growing up—peaceful and safe and serene.”
“And then you came back to San Francisco and found the aftermath of a war zone.”
Keiko acknowledged it silently. “It was like coming to DS9 all over again. The devastation, the loss, the pain all around us. I didn’t want to have to endure any more of it. But Miles threw himself right into the thick of it. Again. Every day he was away, dealing with the aftermath. And every night it was all he would talk about.
“And it just keeps coming back, over and over. I just feel so helpless, like I can’t get away from it!” Unthinkingly, she snapped one of the windsinger’s slender stems. The wiry filament cut into her fingers, drawing blood. “Oh! I’m sorry,” she began, but Boothby was already pulling out his pocket first-aid kit, tending to her cut and ignoring the broken plant.
“Seems easy enough to fix,” Boothby said as he sprayed the wound with antiseptic sealant. “Just ask Miles not to talk about it. Find other topics. Join a book club or something.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Why not? Is he that hard to shut up?”
“No, that’s not—I mean, that’s not the problem.”
Boothby met her eyes. “Then what is it that makes you feel so helpless?”
She realized where he was leading her. “The crises themselves. It’s not that Miles is doing something about them,” she said, discovering it as she said it. “It’s that I’m not. My city, my planet, is in trouble, my neighbors are hurting, and I can’t do anything to help them. My husband is an engineer, a builder—a soldier when necessary—he can do something substantive about these disasters. I can see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice—he has a purpose. He’s scared, just like the rest of us, but he handles it because he knows how he can help. But I’m just a botanist. What can I do to help in a disaster, or a war? What can I do aside from sitting around and being afraid for the people I care about?”
Boothby quietly finished tending to her hand, and then gave it a surprisingly tender squeeze, matched by a rare smile. Then he grunted and turned back to his work. “You ask me,” he groused, “the Breen gave me quite enough to do when they attacked. This place was in ruins. All my plants died from the fires, the radiation. Trees I’d tended my whole life, that I’d grown up with, blasted to kindling. Rare specimens from a hundred worlds vaporized. And did the Breen care? Hell, no. The plants never did anything to them, but they killed them all anyway, just innocent bystanders that got in the damn way.
“That’s the part of war people don’t talk about much. Sure, the loss of life is horrible—the Breen took a lot of my friends that day. And the property losses, okay, those are bad too. But it’s a damn sight easier to rebuild a lecture hall or an office complex than it is to regrow a Gordian oak or a sahsheer crystal. And who got stuck doing the hard part? Me, that’s who!” Boothby shook his head. “Humph. I should talk—at least I still have a breathable atmosphere to do my work in, and soil that isn’t poisoned. Other worlds the Dominion invaded, they weren’t so lucky. Look at Cardassia—it’ll take decades for all the dust and the smoke from the fires to settle out of the atmosphere. Their plants are starving for light across the whole planet. The acid rain is poisoning the water, too. A century from now there might be nothing alive on Cardassia larger than a vole. Who’s going to clean up that mess? That’s what I’d like to know.”
Boothby turned back to his work, muttering under his breath, while Keiko pondered silently. Then she hugged him and kissed his cheek. “Thank you, Boothby—you’re a lifesaver.”
Chapter
6
Faulwell had gotten the translation algorithm to a point where normal conversation with the Shanial was possible. The rendering was only approximate, not to mention delayed, since Bart was filtering it through his tricorder and modifying some of the translator program’s word and grammar choices. “Trust me, it’s better this way,” he’d insisted. “Our grammars are so different that a more literal rendering would just be too awkward. Good translation is more about capturing the overall sense of the material, choosing whatever phrasing conveys that sense best even if the specific words are very different.”
“Come clean, Bart,” Pattie had joked. “You’re just trying to give yourself more to do.”
Still, Faulwell’s system seemed to work, though Gomez was concerned about what might be lost in the translation. “We never knew of other worlds,” Matriarch Varethli told them. “The ceiling hid them from us.”
“Ceiling?” asked O’Brien. “Have they always lived indoors? No, that’s silly, how do you evolve indoors?” He corrected himself. “Underground, then?”
“I’m not sure the word came through right,” Faulwell said. After some discussion with the Shanial, he reported, “I think she means clouds. Sounds like their world has a dense, constantly clouded atmosphere. They couldn’t see the stars.”
“But you know about the stars now? About space travel?” Gomez asked.
“Yes,” said Designer Rohewi, the darker-hued male who was apparently Varethli’s partner, though whether professionally, politically, or personally was unclear. “The Nachri came through the clouds. We learned from them that other worlds existed, that vessels moved between them.”
“But they didn’t just bring knowledge.”
“No,” Varethli told them, her four arms (upper legs?) twitching in agitation. “They killed many Shanial. They sought to align us in one direction.”
“Sorry,” Faulwell interposed, “I think that’s a metaphor for trying to conquer them.”
“They wanted our technology,” Rohewi continued. “We and they did not progress the same way. They, like you, used subspace for travel, to find new worlds for their growing population. Our population grew as well, but we made our own new territory by creating subspace pockets.”
Rohewi, apparently the lead engineer of the Shanial and innovator of much of their subspace technology, began to explain the specifics. It wasn’t long before the engineers caught on to the nature of the microwarp bubbles. “Like a subspace compression,” O’Brien grimaced. “Just great. I’m tiny again. I hate it when that happens.”
“But how could they have warp technology without spaceflight?” Corsi asked.
“I can see how they might just have a knack for it,” Faulwell mused. “With their flexible sense of direction and movement, their ability to reconcile opposites, I bet they have an intuitive understanding of the subspace dimensions, the way they’re curled up inside space and vice versa at the same time.” The others stared at him in surprise. “What? I’m a linguist surrounded by engineers. I listen to the jargon and pick up the meaning.”
Apparently there was a whole network of microbubbles, externally encased within stabilizing crystals, yet connected to each other through subspace wormholes, one of which the team had passed through to reach this city, the hub of t
he network. “The Nachri wanted the microbubbles as a weapon,” Rohewi explained, “to smuggle armies and fleets, or destroy cities through their reexpansion.”
“We would not do this,” Varethli said. “To destroy those you disagree with, rather than finding a new way forward for both, is insane.”
Gomez smiled. As Bart had said, their multivalued logic kept them from seeing things in black-and-white terms. If two sides clashed over something, they could just reorient their perspectives and negotiate a settlement. It apparently made for a very peaceful society.
“We sought a common orientation with them, but they would not change direction. The Nachri began to destroy our world! They thought it would make us do what they wanted. But this was a direction we could not move in. So we turned inward. We encased what we could within subspace pockets, intending to hide within them until the threat was gone.”
“So you’ve been living in these pockets for two hundred years?” Sonya asked.
“No,” replied the designer. “Resources and power are finite. And we knew our world would take millennia to recover. We compressed the time dimension as well.”
“You mean…for you, hardly any time has passed?”
“Days.”
Gomez’s eyes widened. That meant that the devastation these people described, the destruction of their entire world, was not something that they’d studied in the history books—it was a firsthand experience, the memory still fresh. Something was indeed being lost in the translation—the anguish and grief the Shanial must be enduring. She couldn’t read their body language, so she’d had no idea. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “We, too, have suffered many great losses in recent times. Though nothing as great as what you’ve lost. I…” She trailed off. She had no idea what she could say to them that could sound remotely meaningful.
“Gratitude,” Varethli said simply.
“But the course has altered,” Rohewi said. “Time is uncompressed again. The emergence of one pocket back to the outer universe has reconnected the network to normal timeflow. And clearly we are not on Shanial anymore.”
“What caused the pocket to emerge?” O’Brien asked.
“An abrupt power leakage into subspace weakened the stabilizing crystal. We do not know the cause.”
“May I take a look at your readings? I have an idea about that.”
Once O’Brien got a feel for their readouts, it didn’t take long. “Just as I thought—looks like they were hit with the Breen’s energy-dampers. These crystals we’re in must’ve already been in San Francisco when the attack happened.”
“Probably in the museum,” Abramowitz said.
“My God,” Gomez said. “How many of these crystals were there?”
“We only managed to generate sixteen,” Rohewi replied.
“And have the others suffered similar power drains?”
“Yes. We are searching for a way to reverse them, with no success.”
“We believed it was a Nachri attack,” Varethli added, “which is why we reacted defensively to your entry. But now we see it is you who needs defense.” She paused, dealing with unreadable emotions. “We mourn the loss of life our accidental emergence caused.”
“Not your fault,” O’Brien assured them. “We’re all just delayed victims of a war that already ended. That’s the way war always is—goes on killing long after the fighting’s supposed to have stopped.”
“But the tragedy will be far greater,” Rohewi said, “if we cannot halt the power drain of the other crystals.”
“You said it,” Pattie chirped. “If a complex this size underwent instant reexpansion, the blast would totally destroy San Francisco—and blow enough dust and smoke into the stratosphere to cause a global ice age.”
“Wait,” said Rohewi, studying his readouts. “The other crystals show anomalous readings.”
“Are they about to rupture?” Gomez asked.
Rohewi absorbed the data for a moment. “Borderline, but holding. They seem to be in motion, but something from outside is damping its effects.”
Abramowitz turned to Gomez. “Do you think Scotty and the others have found them?”
But Gomez addressed the designer. “You said the other crystals. Not this one?”
“No. We remain stationary.”
“We need to get in contact with our people right away. Can you arrange that?” she asked the Shanial.
“You must return to the facility you came here from,” Rohewi told her. “Sending a signal through our warp field would require altering its geometry, and it is too tenuous to risk that.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
“May we accompany?” Varethli asked. “Perhaps by combining our knowledge we can solve this crisis. We have only just discovered the richness of the universe beyond our clouds—it would be tragic to die before getting to explore it.”
“It’s always tragic to die,” Gomez muttered. “All right, come on.”
The matriarch and the designer came up alongside her as she strode toward the exit. Despite their bulk, they made excellent time, and she had to jog to keep up. She tweaked the antigrav suit a bit to reduce her weight some more. “Is there really a Federation of hundreds of worlds, coexisting in peace?” Varethli asked.
“Yes, there is.”
“And all these peoples are different?”
“Well, most of them are humanoid like us, but yes, there are many different kinds.”
“Amazing. When we entered these pockets, all we knew of was the Nachri and their empire. Now there is a great union of worlds in which the Nachri play no part. While we have locked ourselves away, standing still in time, so much has happened, so much has changed. Perhaps we were too hasty to cut ourselves off from the universe. It is not as dark a place as we had thought.”
Gomez chose not to argue the point. She simply fell back to the rear of the group, and let Faulwell and Abramowitz monopolize the Shanial. But soon O’Brien fell back alongside her. “The gravsuit working okay, Commander? I saw you fiddling with it earlier.”
“It’s fine, Chief. Thanks.” She let him see the readouts on the wrist panel, knowing a fellow engineer would need hard data.
O’Brien nodded approvingly at the readouts, but kept pace with her. “It’s always something, isn’t it, Commander? Goes with the job, I guess. Do well fixing one crisis, they send you to fix the next one. Some reward, huh?”
“It never ends,” Gomez murmured, more to herself than to him.
“Be glad it doesn’t,” O’Brien said, catching her eyes intently.
“What?”
The chief fidgeted. “I don’t mean to intrude, Commander…but I’ve known people who…well, after suffering a loss, or a bad crisis, they…maybe were too ready to see it end. To give up.”
“‘To take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them’? Is that what you mean?” Gomez smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Chief. I’m not suicidal. I’m just….” She searched for a word. “Stuck. I feel like the Shanial—frozen in place while the universe is going by around me. I want to get back in motion again, but I just don’t see how.”
“Sure you do. Just take one step forward, then the next, and so on. You’re just not letting yourself do it.”
“And what would you know about it?”
He shrugged. “Been there. I once…well, I once went to prison for twenty years.”
Gomez stared. “Chief…I haven’t known you twenty years.”
“It was a virtual prison—twenty years of memories dumped into my brain in a few hours. But it felt real. By the end of those few hours, I was a changed man. I’d gotten used to thinking I’d lost everything. And I…well, let’s just say I sank into some pretty deep despair.
“Then I came out, and I found the life I’d lost was still there. I could have it back—my wife, my daughter, my friends, my career, my youth, everything. But the despair still had its grip on me, and so I didn’t reach out to take it. I even—” He broke off.
Gomez shared an understanding look with him. “I guess it got pretty rough for a moment or two.”
“Yeah,” he acknowledged. “Anyway, well, I’ve never had much use for headshrinkers, but I have to admit, Counselor Telnorri did help me understand how depression works—how it tricks you into thinking there’s no hope, blinds you to everything you’ve got in your favor. And I realized something else, too—life’s short, and you never know how long happiness will last. So you need to make the most of every moment you have. Don’t let yourself miss opportunities—don’t let yourself fall into a rut, or worse.”
“That’s just it,” Gomez said. “I thought I’d learned that already, after Sarindar. It was even that decision that made me…” She sighed. “Made me start things up with Kieran again.”
“So you tried it that way, and it ended badly. It’s no wonder you’d have second thoughts after that. But let me ask you something, Commander: Did it end that way because of anything you did wrong?”
“No,” Gomez had to admit. “There was nothing I could’ve done.”
“There you go. The problem wasn’t in your approach—so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
He makes it sound so simple, a part of Gomez scoffed. But she was beginning to recognize that voice for what it was. That’s because it is simple, she told herself. You can’t succeed if you don’t try—so you might as well try.
She gazed up ahead at their newfound friends, who were chatting enthusiastically with Faulwell and Abramowitz, pumping them for information about the galaxy. “Look at the Shanial,” she said. “They lost their whole world, just days ago by their count. And yet they’re excited about all the new worlds they’ve suddenly discovered.”
“I guess it’s like Mr. Faulwell said. They don’t see much difference between backward and forward. So a setback can become an advance, with just a little shift in perspective.”
“Do you think humans can learn that?”
O’Brien smiled encouragingly. “I’ve seen it happen.”
Aftermath Page 7