by Diane Duane
“Ddoya,” said one of the fighters standing nearby, a man named Terph, “they can’t be here yet. It’s too soon.”
“It could be a trick,” said Lais, the other.
Silence, and then another queep.
The five of them looked at one another. No more sound was forthcoming, for the sound was the one realtime noise made by the narrow-bandwidth subspace transmitter-receiver until it was instructed to play. The receiver did not produce output in realtime. It took a coded digital squawk no longer than a millisecond, decompressed it, decoded it, and played it on command, recording and sending outgoing messages the same way. It was how their group kept in touch with the hundreds of others scattered through the caves, and they did not overuse it for fear of detection.
Ddoya got off his chair, knelt down beside the transmitter-receiver. He touched its controls in a coded sequence, and the transmitter’s decode lights went on.
“The ships are coming,” whispered the voice from the narrow-bandwidth subspace transmitter. “Repeat, the ships are coming. This is a multiple sighting, multiple confirmed. Relief will be with you within ten standard days. Events to follow will most likely cause the Fleet to withdraw. Prepare to emerge in force. More details are packed with this squirt. Unpacking now.”
Ddoya looked up at them his stolid face suddenly alight with excitement. For a few moments he was as speechless as the rest of them. “Well,” he said finally. “We’d better get everyone together to discuss this in the morning. Meanwhile, let’s get back to planning the next raid.”
They smiled at one another, a little more fiercely than usual. Mheven looked over at her mother and smiled. “So you were right,” she said. “We are going out. All of us. But meantime, let’s get caught up on our sleep.”
They walked off together. But this time, as they went, Mheven’s heart was pounding. Enough of her people had died waiting for this day when it would start, when they would not be fighting alone. Enough of them had died trying to bring it about. She herself might yet die in these next few days. But all the same, she smiled. And as she and her mother slipped back into the darkness of their sleeping place, Mheven wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t hear the same whisper.
Freedom…
In the rec room that evening, Ael looked up out of the great windows at the stars pouring past and let out a small sad breath. The time when she might freely enjoy this spectacular view was swiftly coming to an end. Soon enough, she thought, I will be staring into a tactical display again, concentrating on objects moving in space much more slowly, relatively speaking, than the stars. I should enjoy this while I can…as far as possible.
She glanced around. All about her, various crewpeople sat and chatted, or gamed, as usual. Off in a small conversation pit nearby, Scotty and tr’Keirianh and K’s’t’lk were conversing with energy, occasionally waving hands or jointed glittering limbs in gestures strangely reminiscent of those which young Khiy and Mr. Sulu had been using the other day. Lieutenant Commander Uhura was leaning over the back of one of the settles that formed the back of the pit, asking K’s’t’lk something. The answer came back in a bright spill of music, but oddly, with no words that Ael could hear. Curious, Ael started strolling their way, and a discreet rumbling accompanied her, like a boulder trying to roll along without making too much of a racket.
Ael had to smile, though the smile was doubtless somewhat edged with irony for a perceptive viewer. “Mr. Naraht,” Ael said, “this duty must be a trial for you. Doubtless there are many more interesting things for you to be doing.”
“Not at all, Commander,” the Horta said, shuffling his fringes about a little as he came up alongside her. “Everything here is interesting.”
“Surely you are putting a brave face on it,” Ael said.
“Madam,” Naraht said, “if you’ve ever lived in the crust of a planet with nothing to do but eat rock, and nothing to do after that but listen to your ten thousand siblings eat rock, and then listen to them talking about having eaten rock—after a while, anything else is interesting.” His translator module emitted that rough, gravelly sound that seemed to be laughter, and his fringe tendrils shivered. “And when you notice that weird creatures who don’t eat rock, or even talk about it much, are wandering around the place, they and their affairs are likely to become, by comparison, very interesting indeed.”
Ael raised her eyebrows at that. Amid some human and Rihannsu laughter, she saw Uhura straighten up and head off purposefully, as if in search of something. “Might you not be overstating the case, Lieutenant? Most of us think our ordinary home life is boring. And your people, Mr. Spock tells me, are a most intelligent and complex species.”
“Far be it from me to argue with Mr. Spock,” Naraht said. “My mother would come down on me like a ton of ore if she found out. But, Commander, intelligence doesn’t necessarily imply culture.”
Ael chuckled. As they came up to the conversation pit, Ael leaned against the back of one of the higher-backed semicircular settles on one side, glancing down with slight affection at tr’Keirianh. He was oblivious, concentrating on something Scotty was saying to K’s’t’lk. “…downright heretical, lass,” Scotty said, “in the merely physical sense rather than the physics one.”
K’s’t’lk sighed a long, jangling sigh, like a set of wind chimes out of sorts. “The distinction is strictly artificial,” she said. “Or rather, it’s a perception problem. The law of general relationships says—” She started singing again, a very bright precise sequence of notes. When she finished, after about ten seconds, tr’Keirianh, sitting with his head tilted slightly to one side, said, “I believe I nearly heard it that time. Perhaps the difficulty is with the way our people handle tonalities. But I am no musician. I never had any interest in music when I was younger, and nowadays I have little time, though I admit the inclination is forming—”
“For what, Giellun?” Ael said.
Her master engineer looked up at her with some amusement. “The commander is teaching us the basic elements of Hamalki physics notation, khre’Riov,” he said. “Or trying to.”
“’Tis an exchange program, Commander,” Scotty said. “She’ll teach us this, and we’ll teach her poker.”
“And Khiy and Aidoann and I will teach her aithat,” tr’Keirianh said.
Ael shook her head. “Elements send we all have time for all this,” she said, “but, Mr. Scott, of your courtesy, what in the worlds is ‘poker’? The translator suggests an iron stick. But I think I have found one of its blind spots; I don’t think you speak of such.”
A slow grin began to spread over Mr. Scott’s face. “Poker is a game,” he said.
Giellun’s expression became somewhat more wicked. “If I understand Mr. Scott’s description correctly,” he said, “it is, like aithat, a way of equalizing the distribution of the crew’s pay throughout the ship.”
“Ah, me,” Ael said. “Given our current circumstances, perhaps this would be useful.” Though she wondered, for aithat, a gambling game based on the careful calculation of odds and the distribution of counters and tiles of fixed value among the players, already served that purpose. “But it is not a strategy game then, like your schhess.”
“Not in the same way—”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Commander, am I interrupting something?” Uhura said from behind Ael.
Ael turned. “Not at all,” she said, and then blinked in surprise, for Uhura was carrying a ryill, a particularly handsome one, maybe a century or so old, to judge by the patina on the inlaid wood, and well-cared for. “Air’s name, where did you come by such a fine instrument?”
“The lute is Mr. Spock’s,” Uhura said. “He lends it to me occasionally. I was hurting my throat trying to match some of these higher notes K’s’t’lk’s been producing, and if I want to learn how to at least communicate date and time coordinates in Hamalki, I need to be able to produce the sounds some other way, for practice purposes anyway.” She sat down in the pit next to K’s’t’lk and began tuning t
he ryill for the octave she wanted. “The physics I’m in no hurry about, but the syntax and structure of the language shouldn’t be too far beyond me. K’s’t’lk, would you give me one more example of the one you did just before I left?”
K’s’t’lk emitted one short burst of sound, a chord, followed by a short phrase that seemed to be in a major key, about five seconds long. Uhura finished adjusting the ryill’s drone control and then mimicked the phrase. The tone of the ryill was excellent. Ael suspected that her estimate of its age was correct, for it was using the relatively old form of solid-state audio inlays, which gave a warmer, more intimate sound to the bass “stringing.”
“Very close,” K’s’t’lk said. “Einstein might not understand it, but I do. Add a note a fourth above the high note in the drone.”
Uhura played the sequence again. “There you are,” K’s’t’lk said.
Scotty was shaking his head. “Lass, if they’d put E=mc2 to me that way when I was young,” he said, “no telling where I’d be now.”
“In a first chair at the Mars Philharmonic, possibly,” K’s’t’lk said, and laughed. “Not that we couldn’t still have used you in that capacity on Hamal. Sometimes I think Bach was one of us who took a very wrong turn and got born on Earth by accident…”
“Did I miss the folk singing?” said a voice from behind Ael. She smiled and turned to see the captain there.
“We are folk,” tr’Keirianh said, “but the commander here has been doing most of the singing.”
K’s’t’lk chortled again and then launched into a long syncopated phrase full of sudden leaps up and down a very oddly assembled chromatic scale. Ael glanced at tr’Keirianh, curious to see if he made anything of it; to her it sounded like someone dropping a box of broken glass. Uhura frowned and started repeating the phrase, more hesitantly than the last time. The captain raised his eyebrows. “Marsalis?”
“Hawking,” K’s’t’lk said. “The equation for working out the rate of evaporation of black holes.”
“I should know better than to ask,” the captain said. “Commander, might I borrow you for a moment?”
She inclined her head to him, then raised a hand to tr’Keirianh and the others and stepped away. Behind her, K’s’t’lk was saying, “All right. Here’s an easy one—”
“What was that?”
“The formula for Planck time.”
“Can I have that again? I missed it…”
Ael walked back in the direction of the great windows with the captain. Mr. Naraht remained behind for the moment. Very quietly, the captain said, “I just wanted to let you know that I’ve had one more word with the commodore. Unfortunately, he’s not willing to be swayed on this. Starfleet is very insistent that you be taken out of the area while negotiations are ongoing.”
“Well, I suppose I can understand that,” Ael said. “But of course it will not be Enterprise that accompanies us.”
“No,” Jim said, “of course not. Ortisei will go with you.”
“Well,” said Ael, “once again I show myself a prophetess, though in these circumstances it takes little accomplishment to manage it.” She glanced up at the great windows again. “But I appreciate your effort on our behalf. We will, at least, be able to keep in touch in the usual fashion.”
“I’m going to have to be careful about that,” the captain said. “Communications to and from all our ships are likely to be carefully watched, I think, and clandestine messaging could be misunderstood.”
Ael nodded.
“Either way, we’ll see to it that very frequent reports of the meetings, and anything else germane, reach you every day. And one other thing. The Romulan group has now been met by the first two escort ships. We’ll all be at the rendezvous point within five hours.”
Ael nodded again. “I will remain here just a little while longer,” she said, “and then head back to Bloodwing. There is still a great deal to make ready.”
He nodded too, looking tired—more tired than she could remember seeing him since the two of them had been surrounded by the blood and phaser fire of Levaeri V. He feels the weight of what is about to happen, she thought, and the fear, even as I do. I wish I could give him some assurance of how things will go, but that is not in my power. Any more than it is in his gift to give such assurances to me.
“I have a ton of paperwork to deal with,” the captain said, “and I’ve been getting behind. Bearing in mind what we’re going to be going into, I’d better get it sorted out before things heat up.” He looked up again, met her eyes. “Commander, should I not see you again before things start…”
She bowed to him, three breaths’ worth, then straightened. “No long farewells as yet, Jim,” she said, then had to smile. She had never quite got used to calling him that with a straight face.
The captain grinned at her, understanding. Then he departed, lifting a hand in casual salute to the commodore across the room. That man’s eyes went from the captain to Ael, rested on her a moment, then turned away again to the windows and the view of the ships pacing Enterprise through the night. Ael looked at the commodore for a few seconds longer. He was a likable man, Ddan’ilof, but cautious, reserved, like one new to high command and still slightly nervous of its weight and pressures; also a man who, it was plain, did not trust her. Ael had caught one or two glimpses of him looking at her and the captain while they had been speaking, once or twice, earlier this evening—not being obvious about it, but watching them all the same, with a quiet, assessing look.
Her own crew had thrown her a few looks like that over the past couple of months. They hadn’t voiced any suspicions, naturally, but the looks had been there. Even after everything Bloodwing had been through under her command, it still came hard for Rihannsu to trust aliens, and the closer they became, in some cases, the harder her crew seemed to find it to trust them. There was irony in it, for Bloodwing had suffered more from the treachery of other Rihannsu than from any alien. Command back on the Homeworlds, and various members of her own crew, had been blades enough in Ael’s side, and in the sides of those aboard Bloodwing who had honored their oaths, held their mnhei’sahe, and served her until Levaeri V and past it, out into the darkness of uncertainty and homelessness. Now they were the crew of a ship without a fleet, and a commander without rank. And yet they serve me, she thought, while wondering if they may still be further betrayed by their own.
While I wonder if I may be so betrayed as well…
The heavy rumbling sound came up slowly behind her as Ael looked up at those big windows. The stars poured by, and far nearer than they, two of the three other starships presently accompanying Enterprise rode off her starboard, sleek and silent and dangerous-looking in the shifting starlight shimmering on their hulls. It was not as if Enterprise did not have the same general look, but to Ael, at least, she no longer seemed dangerous.
And that perception, she thought, may eventually prove fallacious. Beware…
The rumbling died back to a faint shuffle. From across the room there was another bright spill of notes, scaling quickly upward into a kind of melodious crash, followed by Uhura’s and tr’Keirianh’s and Mr. Scott’s laughter. Time to go, Ael thought, while I am still in good cheer. She glanced down. “Mr. Naraht,” she said, “perhaps you would be good enough to accompany me down to the transporter room.”
“My pleasure, madam.”
She had to chuckle, for he actually said llhei, bypassing the translator installed in his voder pack. “Very strange it is,” she said as they left together and headed for the cargo lifts at the end of the corridor, “to find the seeming essence of Earth so mutable. Do you study languages, then, as well as sciences?”
“It’s all part of biomaths, Commander,” the lieutenant said. “Life needs language to understand itself, and the more language, the better. The translator is a tool, but sometimes it’s more fun to get straight down into the matrix of thought and wallow—even if it does taste strange at first.” There was a pause. “As for stone being
so immutable, what about magma, then?” No question; the voice was smiling. “That’s one of the few things I miss. It’s been an age since I had a swim.”
Ael stared at him as they went. “In lava?”
“We had a swimming hole,” Naraht said. “When we were big enough, our mother took us. Oh, that first dive into the fire…” As they paused outside the lift, Naraht shivered all over, and Ael realized with astonishment that the gesture was one of sheer delight. “How scared we all were. And how silly we were to be scared. It stung a little, but it was worth it.”
She got into the turbolift, and Mr. Naraht, with some difficulty, shuffled in behind her. The doors shut. “Deck nine,” she said, and off it went, obedient. “Lieutenant,” Ael said, “I ask you to forgive me if I transgress. But your people are a wonder to me—as if you were an aspect of my own folk’s way of looking at the universe, of one of the Elements, indeed, suddenly come real. And it makes me wonder, how do your people see that universe? Not the physical parts of it, I mean. What lies beneath?”
He shuffled around a little, turning, almost as if to look at her. “It’s odd you should phrase it that way,” Naraht said. “‘Beneath.’ We know well enough what’s at the heart of our planet—of most planets. The pressure, the heat and density. But what if that were an idiom for something else? A heat that scorches but doesn’t burn—the pressure so great it becomes total, the whole weight of being pressing down, with yourself at the center of it, accepting it, thereby defining it, creating it, eternal. The inexpressible richness, the transcendent temperature, down there in the deepest places beneath and within, the depth that never ends, increasing, crushing us into reality—” He paused, as if to recover himself. The diffidence Ael was used to hearing in his voice had been missing. “I’m still learning the language for this,” Naraht said then. “I may be learning it for hundreds of years, while I talk to other people, learning what they think…so I can better find out what I think. It’s frightening, a little, like that first jump into the lava. Afterwards you wonder why you waited so long, but it’s still hard to go where your fears take you. Or where they would, if you let them.” He paused. “Sometimes I think that’s why I came here,” Naraht said, more quietly. “I was afraid of the emptiness—first the air, and then the dark above it, the places where almost nothing was solid. But I said to myself, ‘I’ll jump anyway…’”