“Your Holiness,” Naquase said as she made a slight adjustment to the small but conspicuous cam she wore on the right side of her head. “My audience would very much like to hear your thoughts about the coming Romulan threat.”
The unlined face of Lian Hua An Gyatso, the eighteenth incarnation in the unbroken line of enlightened beings known across the planet and beyond as the Dalai Lama, displayed an attentive, thoughtful expression as she walked beside the journalist, her saffron robes gathered tightly about her. Then she came to a stop, placed her hands behind her back, and stared at the horizon.
After a lengthy pause, the wad of bubblegum that had temporarily paused in its agitations inside the Enlightened One’s mouth issued a resounding crack. The sharp report echoed like an old-style pistol shot across the sea of seventh-century paving stones that fronted the elegantly ornate four-story temple and quite possibly rattled the teeth of the small, mixed group of human monks and Vulcan wisdom-seekers that Naquase had seen meditating as she’d passed through the willow grove in the walled enclosure called the Jowo Utra.
A look of confusion abruptly wrinkled the teenaged Asian girl’s otherwise unlined countenance. “You want my thoughts about the what now?”
This response brought Naquase up short. The last time she had met the one tagged with Buddhism’s most revered title, the person in question had been a wizened old man whose quiet, studious manner had made his status as the carrier of seventeen lifetimes worth of experience and wisdom genuinely plausible, even to a nonbeliever.
The current Dalai Lama, however, had not only just placed Naquase’s admittedly tenuous regard for Buddhism’s axiom of reincarnation in serious jeopardy, but had also made the journalist speculate that the teenager might be living proof that the universe was ruled by a supreme being whose wicked sense of humor included a penchant for practical jokes. After all, hadn’t Voltaire once said that God was merely a comedian playing before an audience that was afraid to laugh?
“The Romulans,” Naquase repeated with a patience that she hoped did not yet sound as labored as her breathing felt.
A look of recognition suddenly crossed the young holy woman’s face, and she chewed her gum again several more times, making loud smacking sounds in the process.
“Oh. Yeah. Romulans. Sorry,” she said, still chewing. “Spiritual enlightenment and stuff doesn’t leave me a whole lot of free time to look at the news, y’know?”
Easy, Keisha, Naquase thought, casting her eyes momentarily upon the dignified and beautiful gilt-roofed structures that dominated the center of the ancient, twenty-five-thousand-square-meter temple complex. This place made it through the reign of the Bönpo king and the Mongol raids. It’ll survive until the monks find Dalai Lama Number Nineteen.
“That’s perfectly understandable, Your Holiness,” Naquase said, not wishing to risk alienating either her interview subject or the billion-plus Buddhists who might hear her words.
“You’re talking about those new aliens or whatever that nobody’s actually seen yet,” the Dalai Lama Lian said, just before loudly cracking her gum once again.
Naquase nodded even as she struggled to avoid staring in appalled fascination. “The Romulans, Your Holiness. They’re already keeping the United Earth government and Starfleet intensely busy right now making war preparations. Even sight unseen.”
“Oh, yeah,” Her Holiness said. “By the way, could you just call me Lian from now on, instead of using all this ‘Your Holiness’ stuff?”
Naquase paused to swallow. It seemed to be getting harder to keep her breathing under control. “All right. Um, Lian. How will the Romulan threat affect you and your... adherents?”
“You mean, how will the Romulans affect us as pacifists?”
Naquase quickly concluded that this girl was a lot smarter than she appeared to be. Of course, she’d almost have to be. “Exactly,” she said.
Dalai Lama Lian Hua An Gyatso put her hands together before her, her neck and shoulders bobbing in a motion halfway between a bemused shrug and a prayerful bow.
“My take on these Romulans is probably quite a bit different from yours,” she said at length.
“Really?” Naquase said, once again surprised. “You’re familiar with my work?”
Lian popped her gum. “Well, like I already told you, I only get to, you know, take a peek at the news every once and a while. But it’s not as though the monks keep me walled up in a tower someplace. Does that surprise you?”
Naquase shook her head. “Not really. But I am surprised to hear that your take on the Romulans differs so much from mine. Are you endorsing United Earth’s policy of sending our Starfleet and MACO forces to build garrisons across the galaxy?”
The Dalai Lama coughed and sputtered, then paused for a moment to recover her breath. “Sorry. You almost made me swallow my gum there. No, of course I don’t want United Earth to turn the galaxy into, you know, some sort of armed camp. But I don’t think we’ll get anywhere by, you know, trying to hide under the bed, either.”
“Then it sounds as though you believe that fighting is going to be inevitable.”
“The only thing that’s inevitable is fear,” the young holy woman said. “Especially when the thing you’re scared of is something you haven’t even seen yet. But maybe the only reason we’re all so scared right now is because we still haven’t seen the face of this, you know, boogeyman or whatever the Romulans really are.”
“We already know that they’re hostile. Calder II, Alpha Centauri, and Tarod IX taught us that.”
The new Dalai Lama half-shrugged, half-bowed again. “Actually, all we really know is that the Romulans, you know, attacked those places. But what we don’t know is why.”
“Does the why of things really matter all that much when the stakes are life and death?” Naquase said. “Maybe even life and death for an entire sentient species?”
“Maybe the why is the only thing that does matter,” Lian said. “I mean, maybe the Romulans are, you know, acting out because all the human settlements we’re always setting up Out There are scaring them. ’Course, we won’t ever be able to figure that out if all we do is run away.”
“Are you saying that United Earth may have no choice other than to face the Romulans?”
“Face ’em, yes. Fight ’em, no. If the Romulans are, you know, the thinking creatures we like to believe we are, then we’ll work something out.”
Naquase smiled. “Maybe we’re actually on the same page on this issue after all, Your Holiness.”
“Lian,” corrected the Dalai Lama, snapping her gum.
“Lian. Sorry.”
Looking somber, the young holy woman said, “We’re only almost on the same page, though. I mean, I can remember you saying we probably never should have started, you know, spreading out into the galaxy in the first place.”
Naquase nodded. “Let’s just say I’ve had my doubts about that ever since the Xindi attack.”
“Same as a lot of people. But we prolly shouldn’t be making any jeye-normous decisions about the future while we’re afraid. And didn’t having starships and people out there, on the frontier or whatever, head off a follow-up attack that would have blown up the whole planet? We found a way to head the thing off other than, you know, war, because the Xindi seem to think the same way we do.”
“Point taken,” Naquase said. “But what if it turns out we can’t deal with the Romulans on that level? What if we end up having no choice other than fighting to the finish in order to survive?”
Naquase knew that she wanted peace fervently. But she also knew she was no pacifist, at least in the sense that she’d meekly allow an enemy to slaughter her people merely to maintain some state of ideological purity. On that issue, at least, she knew that she and Buddhism’s most revered spiritual leader had to part company.
Apparently lost in thought, the eighteenth Dalai Lama pulled a tissue from the pocket in the front of her robe and spat her gum into it. It was only after the holy young woman had
tucked the tissue away that Naquase noticed the cool fires blazing in her dark eyes.
Those fires directly evoked the memory of her predecessor’s gaze. When she spoke, the words sent a chill down Naquase’s spine that had nothing to do with the cold morning air.
“Then the human race isn’t half as smart as we like to think it is.”
Enterprise, en route to Earth
”Then the human race isn’t half as smart as we like to think it is,” the eighteenth Dalai Lama said, exhibiting a wisdom far beyond her apparent years.
Seated before the communications console on Enterprise’s quiet bridge, Ensign Hoshi Sato quietly absorbed the final two minutes of Keisha Naquase’s latest report from the home front, watching the video on her station’s flat screen and taking the audio in through her earpiece. She felt reasonably confident that humanity wouldn’t disappoint Earth’s reputedly most enlightened soul.
But the Romulans might be a different story, she thought.
An amber light began flashing on her console at that moment, prompting her to tap the adjacent incoming message button, followed by the standard acknowledgment signal control. Then she turned toward the bridge’s center, where Commander T’Pol was seated in the captain’s chair staring over Ensign Travis Mayweather’s shoulders at the starscape displayed on the forward viewer.
“The Andorian transport vessel Gankerev has just hailed us,” Sato said. “They anticipate docking with us within the hour, and I have acknowledged.”
“Thank you, Ensign,” the Vulcan said. “Ensign Mayweather.”
Travis turned his chair away from the starscape until he faced both T’Pol and Sato, his face as expressionless as the Vulcan’s. “Commander?”
“I understand that the purpose of our rendezvous with the Gankerev is not merely to bring us additional supplies,” T’Pol said.
“That’s right, Commander,” the pilot said with a tense but otherwise affect-free nod. “I’ll be going aboard her before she leaves. The captain of the Gankerev has agreed to ferry me to my next assignment, so I should be aboard Discovery in time to help with her launch from the San Francisco yards three weeks from now.”
Thanks to all the quiet and not-so-quiet private conversations she’d had with Travis since the Kobayashi Maru incident about his future career plans, Sato was intimately familiar with Discovery, the still-under-construction fourth starship in Starfleet’s warp-five-capable NX-class. The recent escalations in Earth’s defense posture resulting from Vulcan’s decision to play “hands off” regarding the Romulans had forced Starfleet to pull out all the stops in hastening Discovery’s readiness for space.
T’Pol nodded to Mayweather in emotionless acknowledgment. “If you wish to leave the bridge now to make your final departure preparations, I will call Crewman Beaton to take your post for the remainder of your shift.”
“That won’t be necessary, Commander,” Travis said with a shake of his head. “I’m off duty in forty-five minutes anyway, and I’m already packed and ready to go.”
Despite Travis’s repeatedly stated determination to leave the service of a captain he’d claimed no longer to believe in, Sato realized that even now she held out the irrational hope of bringing about a lastminute change of heart regarding his decision to leave. Not even the awkward silences at the party that she, Malcolm, and Doctor Phlox had thrown in his honor yesterday afternoon—a somber crew-mess gathering from which the captain had been excluded at Mayweather’s specific request—had convinced her that keeping Travis aboard Enterprise wasn’t really the lost cause it might appear to be. Hoshi had simply chalked Travis’s emotional distance up to the boomer habit of avoiding overly emotional farewells, a fact of life to anyone born in space and reared in the itinerant, socially isolating business of interstellar cargo.
She took heart, at least, in the fact that Captain Archer hadn’t been on the bridge at this moment to hear his outgoing helmsman speak so casually of leaving Enterprise behind forever.
Three-quarters of an hour later, as she watched him leave the bridge with scarcely a word, Hoshi wondered if Travis could have kept such a tight lid on his emotions had Archer walked in.
TWENTY
Thursday, September 11, 2155
New Byzantium, Alpha Centauri III
DESPITE THE PRESENCE of a teeming crowd hundreds deep, the first thing that Gannet Brooks noticed as she entered the spaceport lounge was the peculiar pattern of shadows that the destination display screen cast across the highly polished tile floor. Courtesy of the Alpha Centauri system’s bright but setting yellow “A” star—whose horizon-distended light painted the scene beyond the polarized tarmac observation windows, beneath both the dimmer “B” star and the red dwarf Proxima’s comparatively dim stellar pinpoint—those shadows fell simultaneously in multiple directions under an unwinking electronic display that read DESTINATION: EARTH.
The next thing that seized Brook’s attention was the raw fear she saw in the eyes of so many of the people who waited here for the incoming Earth-bound transport. Despite their brave talk, these people—like the apparently narrow majority that had decided instead to remain behind to defend their homes and businesses—were all terribly afraid. This fear was of a quality that Brooks had never observed before, not even during the aftermath of the horrendous Xindi sneak attack of ’Fifty-Three, during which a swath of particle-beam destruction from a tranquil spring sky obliterated some seven million human souls in a matter of seconds.
No. The fear she observed today was different on some fundamental level. Even though the families she saw huddled in the lounge—men, women, and children clutching duffels, blankets, food containers, and toys as they waited anxiously for the transport ship upon which so many had pinned their hopes of escaping the implacable harm that was coming—were as human as she was. They were as human as those survivors of the Xindi assault who had subsequently sutured a deep scar on Earth’s global psyche, principally by getting right to work stitching up a planetary laceration that stretched from Florida to Venezuela.
It wasn’t that the survivors of the Xindi attack on Earth hadn’t been scared, of course. Brooks remembered the fear quite vividly, could still smell and taste it, particularly on occasions such as these, when fearful people surrounded her. The ’Fifty-Three attack had driven some into radical xenophobic fraternities like Terra Prime, which had employed terror tactics in a thankfully failed effort to rid the Sol system of all extraterrestrials—and in the process had nearly succeeded in destroying the Coalition of Planets, along with its promise of galactic peace.
We weren’t any less afraid then than any of these people are right now, Brooks thought after she had finished conducting a brief interview with a careworn, middle-aged man named Manfred who had told her he intended to stay and fight, come what may, once the transport arrived and his wife and two little daughters were safely aboard it. We were just less inclined to start talking exodus after the Xindi hit us. Or to send our children light-years away just to keep them safe.
She moved on to speak with a shell-shocked-looking woman in singed clothing who identified herself as Charis Idaho. Ms. Idaho had little to say other than that she had just lost nearly every member of her immediate family in a Romulan attack on a freighter convoy, a disaster that had occurred two days before. Brooks breathed a silent prayer of hope that neither Manfred nor any of his loved ones were about to suffer a similar fate.
“Mom’s going back to Earth, at least until all this blows over,” said a wiry, prematurely hardened teenage boy who stood beside the chair upon which Charis Idaho was perched like a frightened bird. The boy, who Brooks belatedly realized was Charis’s son—and perhaps the only other surviving member of the Idaho family— had a hypervigilant, only-barely-restrained manic air about him, and his clothing looked as distressed as his mother’s. He stared at Brooks for a moment from behind shaggy blond brows with eyes grown old before their time, then looked away, retreating behind a quasi-military emotional wall.
“Your
mother’s going to Earth,” Brooks said, careful to prod gently. “Aren’t you going with her?”
Charis’s eyes grew huge and moist, supplying Brooks with a definitive answer before the boy found the words to respond.
“I’m taking the Delta Pavonis transport an hour from now,” he said, staring off in the direction of the setting “A” star.
“Delta Pavonis,” Brooks repeated. She knew that the Delta Pavonis system lay about nineteen light-years away from Earth, though she wasn’t quite certain how far it was from the Centauri colonies. “What’s at Delta Pavonis?”
“Basic MACO training,” he said, standing a little straighter as he spoke. Although he was tall for his age, at that moment he looked to Brooks like a little boy playing soldier.
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 20