by Jeffrey Lang
“Dabo?” Alice asked. “Or roulette?”
“Craps,” Lal said. “It was craps.”
Moriarty tipped his head to the side and lifted an eyebrow. “How do such refined young ladies as you two know so much about such dreadful games?”
“They’re only dreadful if you’re bad at them,” Alice explained.
“And you wouldn’t be,” Moriarty observed. “Either of you.”
“No.”
“No.”
He chuckled. “It was poker. A variant called Texas hold ’em. Regina was . . . she was . . . extraordinary.”
“Did you play in a casino on Orion Prime?” Lal asked excitedly.
“My dear, we played everywhere, including Orion Prime back before Orion Prime was Orion Prime. Before you and your father relocated there.” He nodded. “Yes, I do know all about Noonien Soong and the empire he created and how your father inherited it.”
“How could you know?” Lal asked. “My grandfather was an extremely clever man.”
“He was,” Moriarty agreed. “And a bit of a rogue, but, at heart, not a criminal, which is what I was created to be. Criminal genius trumps rogue genius. Remember that.”
“I will,” Lal said obediently, sitting back and folding her hands in her lap. “But please tell me, when did you finally understand that your life was fictional?”
Moriarty flinched as if he had been slapped. “Ah,” he said. “Yes, that. That was a dark day. Yes, I will tell you about it. You may be interested to know that, in a very real sense, you were there.”
“I thought I might have been,” Lal said. “Pray continue.”
“All right,” Moriarty said, lowering into his chair. He ran his fingers through his hair, then rested his chin on his balled fist. “The first thing you should know is that while only two years passed out here in what you call ‘the real world,’ in my world—the world that was more real to me than anything you could imagine—considerably more time had passed. I do not know if your father had programmed the memory in this manner or if the speed time passed was somehow dependent on our—how shall I say it?—attention. It is one of the many questions I intend to ask Mister Data should he find us.”
“He will,” Lal said. “Have no doubt.”
Moriarty smiled indulgently. “It is very touching to see a child have so much trust in her parent. My daughters—my Sophia and my Gladys—they trusted me.” He lowered his head and his eyes disappeared in a gloom of shadows. “In the end,” he murmured darkly, “I did not warrant it.”
A timeless time
Sophia, the elder, had decided she wanted to learn to make strawberry cake. Gladys, the younger, mocked her sister’s ambition. “We have replicators,” she said. “The finest that can be had. They can make anything you’d ever like from any planet you could visit, including some that aren’t even there anymore.” Gladys folded her arms in triumph, dazzling twelve-year-old wisdom shining forth for all to observe. “Why waste your time making something you could simply ask for?” And, to demonstrate, she tilted her head back and pitched her voice just so. “Mrs. Hudson?” she asked.
“Yes, Gladys,” the house’s domestic program responded from the middle distance.
“I would like some strawberry cake.”
“I will ask your mother’s permission,” the always-dependable Hudson responded. “But, assuming she is agreeable, are you asking for a cake—as in, a layer cake—or a tart—as in, something on a flaky crust?”
“Mmm. They both sound delicious. I suppose I was thinking of the former. That is what you’re talking about making, isn’t it, Sophie?”
Sophie, who was imagining her sister in the oven along with the cake, said, “Yes.”
“Yes, the former, Mrs. Hudson. Please ask Mama if she’s amenable.”
“I will do so, dear. Anything else?”
“No, thank you.”
The program signed off with a sound very similar to a portly middle-aged woman clicking her tongue in agreement.
Gladys grinned. “What could be easier?”
“But not so satisfying,” Sophia rebutted, “as knowing how to do it yourself. What if we suddenly found ourselves on a world where there were no domestic programs? We’ve been to those, you know, before you were born. Slow zones, places where they don’t have the technology. Do you remember the one world, Mama, back when I was still very small and Gladys was just a blob . . . ?”
Sophia addressed her question to her mother, who was curled up on her small couch in the corner of the drawing room just off the kitchen. Regina had been trying to finish up the reference section for a short treatise she had been preparing about the reproductive cycle of a particularly bizarre genus of Arterrean lotus—her passion for botany had overtaken her again—and had only allowed herself to be drawn into her daughters’ melodrama because a text she required was in her office. Eventually, she would task one of them to retrieve it for her, but, to pay the toll, like a good mother, she would indulge them. “I do, my dear, though I seriously doubt that you could since you were little more than a blob yourself. I expect any memories you have are simply recycled stories you’ve heard your father and me sharing with guests.”
“No, Mama, truly—I remember it clearly. We had a cook you called Charlie because you couldn’t make the glottal sound. He was from Arcturus and he taught me how to count to ten in Arcturian . . .”
“You’d have to split your tongue down the middle to speak Arcturian,” Gladys interjected.
“I wouldn’t,” Sophia retorted. “I have a gift for languages. Father says so.”
“Father said you have the gift of gab,” Gladys jabbed. “I don’t think that means what you think it means.”
Sophia rushed at her sister, brandishing the cookery book she held like a cudgel. Regina was on the verge of issuing an order to desist when James entered from his office. “Could we please keep it down to a dull roar?” he pleaded. “How is anyone meant to get any work done with all this fuss and nonsense?”
“Gladys is mocking me!”
“And Sophia is being vexing!”
Moriarty turned to his wife. “Which is worse? Mockery or vexation?”
“They’re both tiresome.”
“Perhaps they should be sent to their rooms without their dinner?”
“Mrs. Hudson wouldn’t be able to bear it. She’s making a strawberry cake and would hate to see it go to waste.”
“Strawberry cake?” Moriarty rubbed his hands together and grinned with anticipation. “Why would that go to waste?”
“But wouldn’t you enjoy the cake more if someone made it with their own two hands?” Sophia asked, returning to her original point.
“That depends,” Moriarty said. “Did the baker wash her hands before she started baking? I can recall a young lady of my acquaintance who had quite filthy hands yesterday afternoon.”
“I was helping Mother in the greenhouse! I told you—!”
And then, quite unexpectedly, the universe was folded in half.
Sophia screamed. Gladys crumpled to the ground in a heap. Regina, the calmest and most composed person Moriarty had ever known, his comrade on more perilous adventures than he could remember, groaned low in her throat and pressed her hand to her stomach, repressing the need to retch. “What?” Regina moaned. She tried to stand, but failed. “James . . .” She reached out to her husband with her other hand, but Moriarty was fixed to the spot, numb, though some heretofore unknown sixth sense screeched inside his head, telling him that something was terribly, terribly wrong.
As suddenly as it had descended, the sense of dread and numbness lifted. Moriarty felt all of his joints locking back into place. He extended his hand, pushed forward on one foot, and shifted his weight. The distance between himself and his daughters was cut in half. With another stride, he knew he would be beside them, lifting them, embracing them, but, no, he didn’t reach them. Instead, with the next step, the remaining distance was halved and then, with the next, the remaining dista
nce was halved, and then again and again and again. . . . He strode in the wake of Zeno, but Moriarty never reached his daughters, never touched them again, never saw Sophia’s smile of delight or was able to enjoy the wrinkle of concentration at the corner of Gladys’s mouth the moment before she solved a math problem. When he arrived at the spot they had been in, finally, an eternity of eternities later, he could not reach them because they were gone, or, more specifically, they had never existed. Moriarty’s daughters were erased from the universe without as much as a whisper of regret. The girls weren’t even granted the dignity of a pop left by a collapsing vacuum when they vanished.
The hair on the back of Moriarty’s head stood on end as he felt the universe attempt to realign itself. A percentage of it, he knew, was gone. No, not gone. Had never existed. He and his wife were in the half that somehow was maintained, but the girls were not. Beside him, on the floor, his Regina sobbed and sobbed, her mind and heart torn asunder, her soul trapped in the fluctuations of memory: she remembered them; she didn’t; she remembered them; she didn’t.
Inside his chest, a door slammed shut. He cauterized his heart. Moriarty would remember his daughters, but he would not, could not, mourn them.
“Were they ever really here?” Regina wept, curled into a ball at his feet.
“Yes,” Moriarty replied coolly, feeling the universe shift around them. “And no.” With an effort of will, he made his spine straight and walked to the front window. Outside, the city was in chaos. Some citizens walked to and fro in a daze while others raced about like madmen. The wife of the local butcher ran down the street carrying the bloody corpse of a small child in the crook of her arm while brandishing a cleaver in her hand. In the back of his mind, Moriarty ran calculations involving the likely relationship between the child’s demise and the implement.
“Can we get them back?” Regina asked.
“Yes,” Moriarty said, and felt the certainty rising up inside him like a geyser. “It’s mine. This universe: It’s mine. To do with as I please.” And it was true. He knew it. He was certain.
“Bring them back,” Regina said, and wept.
“I will. I will. But first . . . but first . . . so much work to do.”
A placeless place
“What happened?” Lal asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Alice asked. “The Enterprise. The D. It fell out of the sky. It fell down and went ‘Boom.’ I believe your father had something quite inappropriate to say about that.”
“Yes,” Moriarty agreed. “Quite correct: My universe fell down and went boom.”
The Daystrom Institute—The Present
Albert Lee rose from the stool next to his worktable and twisted his head from side to side. Tiny air pockets formed in his synovial fluid and then collapsed in a symphony of cavitation. He rubbed his lower back, sore from bending over for too long, and shuffled across the room toward his tiny domicile’s front door. He didn’t lift his feet, so his slippers left narrow, roughly parallel trails in the wool carpet. Albert massaged the fingers of his right hand with his left hand as he moved, trying to ease some circulation back into the cramped fingers. It didn’t seem to matter how much anti-inflammation medication he took, his knuckles still became swollen if he spent too much time doing delicate work. Medical science had all but eliminated rheumatoid diseases, but they couldn’t do anything about simple joint pain. The most fundamental things were the hardest to fix.
Standing before the front door, Albert lightly patted his bushy mustache, then he reached up to pat the patches of wispy hair on either side of his rounded dome. He couldn’t remember exactly when he had last bathed, but he decided it probably didn’t matter. His visitors were engineers, too, so they understood how it went sometimes. You get caught up in a project and a certain amount of maintenance goes to hell.
He tapped the lock pad with a slightly trembling finger and the door slid open. Two men were standing on his front step, both of them old colleagues, one of whom he had not expected to ever see again. “Hello, Commander La Forge. Hello, Mister Data. Was one of you going to knock or were you planning on standing out here until I went out for groceries?”
La Forge blinked and stared down at him. “Nice implants,” Albert Lee said, turning and walking back into his house.
“Uh, thanks . . . ?” La Forge said.
“You boys come on in. Close the door behind you. They have some big flying insects here. You forget about that kind of thing on a starship—bugs. They get into everything. Want some coffee?”
Albert heard La Forge follow him into the house, followed by Data’s much softer tread. He turned back to look at the android. “It is you, isn’t it, Data? I mean, who else could it be? But you look different.”
“I do,” Data replied. “As do you.”
“I got older. It happens. As I recall, you got dead. That did happen, didn’t it? It happened after I left the ship, so I can’t be sure what did or didn’t happen. Starfleet lies about things.”
“I did, Mister Lee. Or, rather, I was. I got better.”
“Well,” Albert said, turning back to look more closely at Data, “I’m glad to know it. I was sad when I heard about you. I always said you were one of the good ones.”
“Thank you, Mister Lee.” Data glanced over at La Forge. “I always said the same about you.”
“Call me Albert. No reason to be formal, seeing as we’ve both retired our commissions.”
“How do you know I retired?”
“You don’t walk like an officer anymore.”
Data smiled at this. Actually smiled. Not a fake, not an imitation, but a genuine, heartfelt smile. Albert was mildly unnerved by it. “What do I walk like now?”
“Like me,” Albert said. “Like a civilian.”
“I don’t think I want to hear what I walk like,” La Forge said.
“Probably not.” Albert continued on his path to the kitchenette. Stacks of dirty dishes were piled precariously around the small sink. He had an indifferent attitude toward cooking and eating, but he positively despised cleaning up. Albert lifted an ancient French press of noble lineage from amid the debris and checked to make sure it was clean. “So—I repeat the question—coffee?”
“That would be great,” La Forge said with a groan. Something in the tone of voice made it clear that the chief was running on fumes. Albert had seen him like this a few times back in the engine room of the Enterprise-D, but the pitch was a little different. In the old days, there was always a note of elation in La Forge’s voice, like the high priest on festival days, even when a situation was as dark and dire as it could be. Reality as we know it threatened? All hands in peril? Commander La Forge faced it all with a smile. Albert would have even said “with a twinkle in his eye,” except you couldn’t see his eyes because of the damned VISOR. This was different: La Forge was experiencing doubt, which was just about the only thing that could puncture his Buddha-like calm.
La Forge pointed at a pile of debris that had swallowed one of the easy chairs and asked, “Can I move that? I need to sit.”
“Sure. Just put it over there.” Without looking, Albert waved at a corner of the workroom. “Try to keep everything more or less in the same order. It’s my filing system.”
“Uh-huh.”
Albert popped the top off the coffee canister and scooped a handful of dark black beans out into the mill. Normally, he had the proportions worked out, but he wasn’t used to making brew for guests. He asked Data, “You having some, too?”
“If I may.”
“You may.” Doing the math in his head, he asked, “Does it do anything for you?”
“The caffeine, you mean? No, but I enjoy the taste.”
Albert closed the canister and fired up the kettle to boil the water. “You’ve changed.”
“I have,” Data said. “But you haven’t. Not very much.”
“Older.”
“You were already old,” Data said. “Back on the Enterprise. Oldest crew member by a cou
ple of decades as I recall.”
“I carried my weight.”
“No one ever said otherwise. Least of all me. Especially,” Data said, cocking an eyebrow, “since I was among the youngest.”
“Except for Wes,” La Forge commented.
“And he was not a crew member,” Data said. “At least not officially.”
“Uh-huh,” Albert said, watching the kettle water coming to a boil. He was tempted to hold his hands over the flame and try to loosen up his joints. “This is all highly enjoyable, gentlemen. Us getting together and having a bit of a nostalgia-fest. Old shipmates and all. Except . . .”
“Yes?” Data asked.
“Neither of you two has so much as said boo to me since I left Starfleet more than ten years ago. And, frankly, I don’t think you liked me very much when I was there.”
“That’s not true,” La Forge protested, though, to his credit, not assiduously.
“I lacked the capacity to either like or dislike you, Albert,” Data said. “But, in retrospect, I believe I would have liked you very much. You are a . . . singular character.”
Albert felt a bit of self-righteous wind leave his sails. “Well . . . hmph. Thank you.” He rubbed his hands together, then looked down at them. Still strong, he decided, but trembling just a bit. He glanced up at Data, who, if anything, appeared younger and stronger than he had the last time Albert had seen him. It didn’t seem fair. “I always liked you, too. You weren’t like the rest of them. You always seemed ready to . . . to have a chat when you had time. You seemed to have a sense of how wonderful it all was.”
“I am not sure if that is true,” Data said, “but if you believe my friend Geordi did not feel that way, you are deeply mistaken.”
Albert turned to look over at La Forge, who was looking directly back at him. The implants really did suit him. “Maybe,” he conceded. “But he was an officer.”
“So was I.”
“Not quite the same. An exo works for a living.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But that is irrelevant, since, as you said, I am a civilian now.”
“And you need my help.”
Silence descended. No one protested, but no one agreed, either.