When he reached the square columns, the wide doors to the council chambers opened. The Fazi had said the doors would open at a specific time. Apparently, the Enterprise team was right on schedule. Archer never broke stride, moving inside as if he had been here a dozen times before.
The great room was as light as the outdoors had been. He had expected a momentary adjustment, going from the bright sunlight to the dim interior, but the Fazi seemed to calibrate their interior light to match their sun’s rays. How typical. The light came from the ceiling. Archer glanced up without moving his head, and noted that there were no obvious lighting fixtures. The light coming through a thousand different holes was diffuse and powerful at the same time.
Archer continued walking with purpose, following the instructions he’d been given. He walked straight ahead, into a large chamber, where a dozen Fazi sat in a half circle, each the exact distance from the next.
In this room, the jasmine smell was stronger. Small burners placed on pedestals sent a thin column of smoke into the air. Even with the smoke, the light in here was as strong as it had been everywhere else. There were no shadows in this place, no way for something or someone to hide. Even the smallest expression would be visible.
Up close, the Fazi did not surprise him. Archer had already seen images of them provided by Hoshi and T’Pol. The Fazi were humanoid, like most of the aliens Archer was familiar with. In fact, he would have mistaken them for human if he had seen them first on Earth.
There were only a few differences. All of the Fazi facing him had coarse white hair and sideburns. They were also shorter than humans. The tallest Fazi never exceeded five feet six inches tall.
He probably looked like a giant to them.
The Fazi did not acknowledge him. If they were surprised at his appearance or the appearance of his crew, they gave no sign. They simply watched as Archer found the spot on the floor that Hoshi had told him to go to.
The polished stone floor was painted in half circles, shrinking smaller and smaller to a dot away from the council bench. Archer stopped exactly on the center spot of the large room.
Behind him his people stopped at the exact same moment, as if they had practiced the move. Then they all bowed as he remained standing straight. So far so good.
Directly in front of him, one of the Fazi councilmen stood. “I am Councilman Draa.”
The Fazi spoke in his own language. The translator held by Hoshi translated his words.
The councilman did not even break sentence at the words coming from the translator. “I represent the Fazi High Council and the Fazi people.”
“I am Captain Jonathan Archer of the Starship Enterprise. I represent the people of the planet Earth.”
Archer waited now for the Fazi Draa to speak. Hoshi warned him a number of times to only speak in the same length of sentences and on the same topics as the councilman addressed. But what those topics might be, Hoshi had had no idea.
“This is an historic day,” Councilman Draa said, “for the Fazi people.”
“It is also an historic day for the people of Earth,” Archer said. He felt constrained by this structure. He wanted to talk with them, not parrot their words.
But he didn’t want to scare them either. Maybe, over time, they’d get used to human impulsiveness.
After Archer spoke, Councilman Draa sat down.
The silence in the large council chamber seemed to grow with every second. Archer had no idea what he was supposed to do next. And he didn’t dare turn around and ask Hoshi’s opinion. So he simply stood there, facing the council, keeping his head up and his body still.
All of the Fazi councilmen stared at him.
The seconds ticked past.
The silence in the chamber unnerved him more than the silence outside had. He couldn’t even hear the sound of anyone else breathing. Did this place somehow muffle noise? He could hear his own ragged breath, and he suspected everyone else could hear his pounding heart.
Why didn’t anyone speak?
Weren’t they curious?
Didn’t they want to know about the aliens in front of them?
Didn’t they want to know about Earth or the starship?
Why didn’t they ask what he was doing here?
Maybe their lack of curiosity explained their lack of art, music, and identifiable culture. Maybe it even explained the lack of evidence of war.
He wanted to pace. It took all of his strength to remain still. He hadn’t realized what a restless person he was until he was faced with these precise, immobile beings, who seemed so content with silence and inaction.
The Fazi weren’t even looking at him. At least not directly. They seemed to be staring beyond his team at the open doors. The jasmine-scented smoke continued to rise, but it was the only thing that moved in the entire room.
For some reason he had expected more. He had never expected silence, and neither had Hoshi or T’Pol, or they would have warned him.
Did he dare speak?
Did he dare turn and walk away?
Which would be the worst sin? He had no idea, and now he understood why both T’Pol and Hoshi wanted him to study these people more. These were very weird folk.
Archer stood there staring straight ahead. The Fazi council sat staring back, their dark eyes and light faces framed by their white hair and sideburns. It was as if a dozen short statues were staring at him. Didn’t they even blink?
Archer could feel a drop of sweat starting to ease down the side of his forehead. The old saying about never letting them see you sweat popped into his mind, but he didn’t dare move to brush away the drop.
Seconds more ticked past, becoming an eternity.
Maybe they were now waiting for him to say something, to explain why they were there, the reason for this visit. He was the one, after all, who had said he was coming here, and when.
Every moment seemed to stretch.
This was agony. He knew he had to do something and do it quickly. Either speak or turn away.
Turning away would accomplish nothing as far as he was concerned. He was here to make contact with this race, to possibly form a future alliance. And that wasn’t going to be done by walking away.
He took a shallow breath, gathered himself and broke the silence. “Councilman Draa, High Council of the Fazi people, the people of Earth have—”
Wrong choice.
As if pulled by the same string, all the councilmen rose, turned their backs on Archer, and disappeared into doors behind their chairs before the last word he had spoken died into the high ceiling.
“Nice meeting you,” Archer said as the doors behind every chair clicked shut.
He turned around. Hoshi’s face was as white as a sheet and Trip was doing everything in his power to hold back a grin. Reed and Mayweather both looked stunned.
“I think that went well,” Archer said, heading between them and toward the big door leading back to the shuttlepod.
Trip snorted.
Reed made a choking sound.
Archer doubted Hoshi was breathing.
Outside he headed across the open and very empty plaza, his people in the same formation behind him. The sun was warm on his face, the breeze light and gentle, and the air felt wonderful.
“Nice day for a walk,” he said, just loud enough for Trip to hear beside him.
“I wonder what they’d do,” Trip said, his voice just loud enough for Archer to understand, “if we went for a stroll around the plaza, looking at the architecture.”
“I think I’ve already done enough damage,” Archer said.
“Yeah,” Trip said, clearly barely containing his laughter. “But it was a great speech.”
TEN
EXCEPT FOR A FEW LOW-KEY JOKES, NO ONE SAID MUCH AS they came back through the decontamination process and headed for the bridge. There, T’Pol looked up from the navigation table when they entered. She had an expression of disapproval on her face. Archer had expected it. He just hadn’t expected to agree with
her.
He had purposely not brought her to the meeting with the Fazi. He had wanted this to be an Earth-based first contact, not a Vulcan one. But she had watched everything through the vid-cam recordings of the proceedings, just like they had agreed.
Apparently she now thought even less of him than she had before.
He squared his shoulders and passed between the railings, down the single step to his captain’s chair. He didn’t sit, however. The restlessness he had felt on the planet had grown.
Meeting another species should have been easy. After a few nods to cultural differences, the goals should have been the same. Hello. How are you. I’ll tell you about my culture if you tell me about yours. Simple as that. A few questions, a few answers, and then the discussion would be under way.
Or not.
He’d read about the first contact between the Vulcans and the humans. Even factoring in the Vulcans’ native reserve, the first contact had gone like that. Some superficial discussion, a mild disagreement about music and food, and then some give-and-take. The give-and-take ended pretty early in the proceedings, of course, since the Vulcans believed that an inferior race shouldn’t share their knowledge, but in the beginning it must have been glorious.
Inferior race. Well, he’d helped with that stereo-type again, hadn’t he?
Archer put a hand on the cool leather back of his chair and watched the rest of his team rejoin the bridge. Everyone seemed subdued and no one met T’Pol’s cool gaze. They all felt the mission had failed, just as he did. So, he supposed, it was time to get those feelings into the open.
“Someone want to explain to me what happened down there?” Archer asked.
“You insulted the Fazi High Council,” T’Pol said. Of course she spoke first. She hadn’t even been down there and she was offering her opinion. She hadn’t heard that awful silence or smelled that strange jasmine. Even though the air on Enterprise was bottled, Archer was happy to breathe it again. In some ways, it felt like home, a concept he doubted T’Pol understood.
“Yeah,” Archer said. “I got that much. Kinda hard to miss when a group of aliens turns their backs to you.”
He hadn’t meant the sarcasm to be so pronounced, but he had to keep control of this discussion. These were his people. He could communicate with them.
He hoped.
“What I’m trying to figure out,” he said, “is exactly what I did to insult them.”
“You spoke out of turn,” Hoshi said. She had folded one hand over the other and was watching him from her station. The tension he had noted on the planet was gone; apparently, she had expected the worst and it had happened.
Archer felt a surge of anger and he suppressed it. He wasn’t angry at his crew. He was angry at his own impatience. They had warned him to wait, and he hadn’t. His actions had blown this first contact, not theirs, and they didn’t deserve to be punished for his mistake.
“What was I supposed to do?” he asked. “No one said anything else, so I couldn’t respond. And it would have been rude to turn around and walk away.”
“In our culture, yes,” Hoshi said. “In theirs, leaving would have been better.”
T’Pol nodded slightly.
“Why?” The frustration in his voice was clear, even to his own ears.
“The meeting was over,” Hoshi said.
“Not for me it wasn’t,” Archer said. “There was a great deal I wanted to talk about.”
“Apparently, they didn’t want to talk,” Hoshi said. “They probably lack a protocol for dealing with outsiders. They greeted you, then expected you to leave.”
“Without asking any questions? Without learning about us?”
“How does a society that structured learn?” Reed asked. The question might have been rhetorical.
Archer frowned at him.
Reed shrugged. “They have dictates for everything. I presume they would also have dictates for learning. Protocols, procedures. A certain rhythm to the way that things are done.”
“And I’m supposed to just know this?” Archer asked.
Hoshi sighed. “I should have guessed it. I mean it was right there before us.”
“We needed more study,” T’Pol said.
“If the culture has so much structure that they haven’t even figured out how to deal with outsiders,” Archer said, “no amount of study in the world is going to tell us that.”
“After time,” T’Pol said, “we would realize those protocols were missing.”
“We would?” Archer said. “How much time?”
“Study like this can take years,” T’Pol said.
“If we spent years on one planet,” Archer said, “we’d be wasting our time.”
“I disagree,” T’Pol said. “Caution is always preferable to haste.”
He stared at her. She tilted her head, her dark eyes cool. Her cap of brown hair hadn’t moved when her head had, but the new position made her pointed ears more prominent. The superficial differences between humans and Vulcans were slight as well, masking the truly deep disagreements they had about the way they viewed the universe—and themselves.
“You value caution too much,” Archer said.
“And your haste is what got you into this situation,” T’Pol said.
Archer turned away from her, looking instead at Hoshi. “Okay. We’ve already established that the Fazi had put me between the proverbial rock and hard place. We don’t know if they would have been insulted if we left before they did either.”
“Not for a fact, no,” Hoshi said. “But a lot of their rules center around speech. Action seems prescribed as well, but not to the same extent. Before we left, I mentioned the rules of the High Council. They were clear. No one could speak out of turn.”
“But they can leave out of turn,” Archer said, his head spinning.
“I don’t believe that leaving was out of turn,” Hoshi said. “If this had been a normal away situation, I could have told you that.”
“But, because we were following Fazi rules, you couldn’t speak up,” Archer said.
“Right,” Hoshi said.
He spread out his right hand. “Rock.” Then he spread out his left. “Hard place.”
“More study—” T’Pol started.
“T’Pol.” Archer made his voice sting with command. “You’re coming dangerously close to violating a rule of the bridge. Don’t nag the captain.”
“I hadn’t been informed of that rule,” T’Pol said with great dignity.
Archer grinned at her. “See my dilemma? And how long have you Vulcans been studying humans?”
Her eyes narrowed. He had gotten to her. That pleased him on a small, petty level.
“The insult,” Hoshi said, ignoring Archer’s interaction with T’Pol, “was not in your words, but in the act of speaking itself. Since it was out of turn, the Fazi had no choice but to leave as they did.”
“How do these people get anything done?” Archer asked, forcing himself to take a deep breath and calm down.
“By the book, it would seem,” Trip said. “And if it’s not in the book, you have to wait until it is.”
“Exactly,” Hoshi said. “A society of complete control, both in structure and language.”
Archer sighed. Then he glanced at the screen. The planet looked so innocuous, so familiar. The way that the Fazi faces had looked familiar. The way that Vulcan faces looked familiar.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me this. Did I do all right with the greeting?”
Hoshi smiled. “You did fine, Captain.”
“So there is some hope,” he said, circling around his chair. After a moment he sat in it, then stared at the planet again. Maybe this was more important to him than it was to the Fazi. Maybe they didn’t care about visitors from the sky. Maybe they lacked curiosity in the way that Vulcans lacked emotion. Maybe they had buried their own curiosity so deep they couldn’t even access it anymore.
No one answered his hope remark. He’d expected T’Pol to disagree. M
aybe she was afraid she’d stepped over a protocol she didn’t understand.
Archer suppressed a smile. His mood was improving. He leaned back in his chair. “All right. How do I take my foot out of my mouth with these people?”
“Give me another day and I might be able to tell you,” Hoshi said. “With T’Pol’s help.”
Archer glanced at the Vulcan subcommander.
Her level gaze met his. “You already know my opinion on continued study,” she said.
“I believe I do,” Archer said, letting a bit of that smile out. “One more day.”
She gave him a nod that was nearly a bow. From his position near the lift, Trip grinned. He seemed to like T’Pol’s discomfort as much as Archer did.
“But this time,” Archer said, “I want to be included every step of the way. I don’t think I can handle another silence like the one with the High Council again.”
“Like a bad date, huh, Captain?” Trip said.
Mayweather made a strangled noise that sounded suspiciously like a suppressed laugh.
“I wouldn’t know,” Archer said. “Is it?”
Mayweather leaned forward, his shoulders shaking. T’Pol watched them in silence.
Reed wasn’t paying attention at all. He was frowning at the screen near his station. “Captain?”
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
“With your permission,” Reed said, “I would like to continue to investigate the race living on the southern continent. Something about them doesn’t quite make sense.”
No one had mentioned the race on the southern continent. Archer wasn’t even certain the rest of his crew was looking at them. He frowned at Reed.
“A hunch, Lieutenant?”
“More like an anomaly,” Reed said. “It feels like I’ve seen something that doesn’t quite figure, but I can’t pinpoint it.”
“There’s a ton of stuff about this planet that is plain weird,” Trip said. “Just add it to the pile.”
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