POWER HUNGRY

by Howard Weinstein

  “Tritt,” Durren said to his nervous companion, “don’t take your eyes off him. If he tries to get away, shoot him.”

  “Shouldn’t we burn his uniform?” Tritt asked.

  “You couldn’t,” said Riker. “It’s flameproof. Besides, I’m kind of fond of it.”

  “Forget the damn uniform,” the young Thiopan said. “I’m starving.”

  “Mikken, you’re always starving,” Durren complained.

  “We haven’t eaten since before daybreak. We have to eat something before we cross the Sa’drit.”

  Durren acquiesced. “But make it fast.”

  Durren fell back to Riker’s side as Mikken led the way along one of the narrow streets, looking for a booth that sold food. Durren resumed his soulful humming, and Tritt trailed so close behind that Riker could almost feel the blaster muzzle in his ribs. Except for Durren’s humming, they walked in silence. Riker noticed that there were precious few luxuries on sale here—utilitarian clothing similar to what he’d been given, baskets and sacks, harnesses and halters for livestock, well-used pans and pottery, and some tools and hand weapons. Mikken finally found a food stall to his liking, apparently by following the trail of the tangy aroma of sizzling meat. On an open grill, charred nuggets were interspersed on skewers with chunks of fruits and vegetables, the flames in the pit hissing and flaring as juices dripped down.

  Riker’s stomach rumbled. “How well do you treat your prisoners?”

  Durren nodded to the stall keeper. “We’ll take four.”

  Riker gratefully accepted the food-laden stick. He was so hungry, he didn’t care much what was on it. He cared even less after his first bite—whatever it was, it tasted great. “Thanks.”

  Once more, Durren avoided addressing him directly. “You are not a prisoner.”

  “I’m obviously not free to go.”

  “Let’s move on,” Durren said, ignoring him again.

  As they left the cooking stall, Riker’s attention was snagged by a scene at the adjacent booth. A woman with an infant in her arms pleaded with a man seated on a wooden bench under a sagging canopy. The man on the bench was fat and self-important and his lips were thinned to a disdainful line.

  “Can’t you see my baby’s dying?”

  Riker stopped. His escorts made no immediate effort to move him. No one else seemed to be paying much attention to the desperate drama being played out between the woman and the unsympathetic man, as if a dying baby was totally unremarkable. Two other painfully skinny children clung to their mother’s hips, fingers gripping her threadbare clothing like tiny claws, eyes hollow with fear.

  “Yes, I can see that,” the fat man replied. There was a border of kindness around his words, but the words themselves were neutral, as if he had to keep them untainted by any hint of compassion. “He’s not alone.”

  Riker drew closer and saw the baby in her arms. It wasn’t moving. Even the eyes were unblinking. It was wrapped in a tattered remnant of a blanket. Tiny feet stuck out, bones covered by sallow skin. The face had none of the roundness of a baby’s face. Instead, it looked like the face of an old man, withered and wintry and worn, cheekbones and chin stretching shrunken skin. Its chest twitched shallowly as lungs did their minimal best to keep the match-stick body alive.

  Alive—it never had a chance to live. Riker listened, drifting still closer.

  “But you have the medicine he needs. Please—”

  “Too many need it. There’s not enough. We have to save the ones who are still alive.”

  “He is alive.” The woman thrust the baby at the man on his bench.

  But his arms remained folded as if any unfolding would unseal a judgment already delivered. “Even if I could help, could you pay?”

  She drew the spindly baby back to her breast and her head bobbed. “Yes, yes, I can pay. Whatever it takes, you can have it.”

  “You don’t have anything.”

  “I have my children.”

  Riker’s mind reeled in horror. He knew what the woman was about to say.

  “I’ll give them to you if you’ll save my baby.”

  “They’re not worth anything. There’s no more slave trade. And they’re too young to work.”

  “They can work! Save my baby with your medicine—I’ll buy my children back later. Please!”

  “Forget the baby. Save the others.”

  “Please!” Her plea became a keening cry. It cut into Riker’s heart, but Tritt and Mikken took hold of his arms and pulled him away.

  “Why wouldn’t he save that baby?”

  Durren shook his head. “No time to be saving babies. Have to save the ones that can help now.”

  “How do you know that baby wouldn’t have helped someday?”

  Mikken stared at him. “That baby dies today or he dies next week. He’ll never reach ‘someday.’ ”

  “If you can’t guarantee life for infants, what future do you have?”

  “If we don’t save this planet from the destroyers and their new ways,” Durren said, his jaw tight, “there won’t be a future for any people on Thiopa—old, young or unborn.”

  “Don’t you understand?” Riker said. “We’ve got enough medicine to save all the babies like that one. We brought it to help you.”

  “You brought it to give to the government.” Mikken spat. “And they’ll never give it to us.”

  “Not unless we deny everything we believe in,” Durren said. “Would you give up all of your truths if that’s what it took to buy survival?”

  “Knowing the people on the other side of the bargain lied to you all the way before that?” Mikken added.

  “No. Nobody should have to do that. But there’s got to be another way.”

  “There is,” Durren said. “Get rid of the oppressors.”

  “What if you can’t?”

  “Then we shall die trying,” Mikken said with finality.

  They continued walking and munching on their food. Tritt dropped a piece of meat in the dirt and Mikken whirled on him. “Hey! Be more careful, idiot.”

  “Calm down,” Durren said.

  Mikken’s face reddened. “This stuff costs too much to waste it like that.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Tritt stammered. “D-d-don’t call me an idiot.”

  “What do you want him to do, Mikken—pick it up and wash it off?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It hasn’t come to that, not yet.”

  “Not yet,” Tritt echoed, keeping Riker’s bulk between him and his angry partner.

  “Durren,” said Riker, “where the hell are we? You said I’m not a prisoner, but Tritt’s not about to let me get away. So you can at least tell me that much.”

  “Crossroads.”

  “This town’s called Crossroads?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is Crossroads located?”

  “You’re in the Endrayan Realm,” Durren finally said.

  “That’s the desert quarter.” Riker waved a hand to indicate their surroundings. “All this suffering. There’s nothing like this in Bareesh.”

  “What do you think this war is all about, Riker?” said Mikken with a sneer. “All this is because the government wants to wipe out the Sojourners and everyone who might support us.”

  “Has Crossroads always been like this?”

  Durren shook his head. “Never had too much rain in these parts. But before the weather changed, there used to be enough rain and snow in the mountains to water the fields.”

  “All these people—where did they come from?”

  Durren chewed the last piece of fruit off his skewer and discarded the stick. “Farms and other towns. They left dried-out dirt behind, hoping to find a better patch somewhere else . . . or at least enough food to fill their hungry bellies.”

  Riker took a grim breath and shook his head. “Our cargo ships have everything you people need to end all this suffering. What about a cease-fire? Maybe that would be enough to get the government to distribute the relie
f supplies.”

  “You’re dreaming, Riker,” Mikken said, the set of his jaw hard and harsh.

  “What about other places?” Riker wanted to know. “Are other areas like this?”

  “No,” Durren said.

  “Surely other places are enduring the same drought.”

  “But they don’t harbor Sojourners.”

  “Almost everyplace else,” Mikken said, “the cowards caved in to Stross’s genocide plans.”

  “Genocide? They’re killing people who disagree with the government?”

  “Not killing people,” Durren clarified. “Just their traditions, their identities. It’s called Fusion.”

  “We heard about that. What is it, exactly?”

  “Making everybody talk, think, eat, and act the same.” Durren shrugged. “In some places it doesn’t matter. In some places people don’t believe in anything anyway. But we do, and the Sojourners’ way is the right way, the only way to save Mother World.”

  “You were in Bareesh,” Mikken said. “You tried to breathe that foul soup they call air. The old ways, from the Testaments . . . they can get us back to when the world was pure, when it was clean.”

  “T-t-tell him about the circle,” Tritt said, as he carefully nibbled a chunk of fruit on his skewer.

  “Circle?” Riker repeated.

  “That’s what we believe in,” said Durren. “Circle of life. The Hidden Hand leads us on the path . . . it’s a circle. No beginning, no ending. Just goes on forever. But everything that’s happened to the world since Stross tried to change it, all the new ways—well, the circle’s broken.” He opened his hands to present all that was around them as proof. He took Mikken’s skewer and drew two figures in the dirt, one a full circle, the other incomplete, with its line veering off uncertainly. “That’s where Stross is leading us. We go that way, we lose the circle, can’t ever get back on, keep going that way and soon all the life on Thiopa will disappear.”

  “Let’s go,” Mikken said. “The sooner we get back, the sooner we can see what Riker’s worth.”

  “What I’m worth?”

  “How much your Captain will pay to get you back.”

  Riker knew the probable answer to that—nothing. If he was a hostage, Captain Picard’s hands were tied by Starfleet regulations. While it was permissible for a starship commander to talk with hostage-takers, the line was drawn at ransom. Some discretionary leeway existed, allowing for the possibility that, under certain circumstance, beings driven to such extremes really did have legitimate grievances that had never been given appropriate attention. A captain who became tangled in such cases was prohibited from rewarding kidnappers by paying with goods or favors for the return of crew members or diplomats. However, upon unconditional release of any and all captives, a commanding officer would be free to offer a hearing, without prejudicial backlash resulting from the initial hostage situation.

  That last part had always piqued Riker’s curiosity. How many ship’s captains were capable of totally setting aside all rancor and chatting with hostage-takers as if nothing had happened? Picard could, he felt certain, as long as no blood had been shed or serious damage inflicted to persons or property. And if these Sojourners did indeed have legitimate grievances, they would never find anyone with a more open or fair mind to hear them out than Jean-Luc Picard. Riker decided to do what he could to encourage the Sojourners to take advantage of such an offer should Picard extend it to them.

  For now, though, he would keep all that to himself. Durren, Mikken, and Tritt were obviously not the leaders of the Sojourner movement. “Where am I being taken?”

  Durren grunted. “You’ll know soon enough.”

  Captors and captive walked toward the outskirts of what appeared to have been a busy town in the past. There were signs that the marketplace which was now concentrated into a few narrow blocks had once filled every street. But the farther they got from the hamlet’s heart, the more of the two- and three-story stone buildings were abandoned and boarded up. A few were nothing but collapsed rubble. According to Mikken, they were the result of bombs planted by government agents in the earlier days of the conflict over Stross’s Fusion policy.

  Such paramilitary forays had been only sporadically successful, and they were often costly, since government agents rarely made it out of Endraya alive. Once the drought hit the planet, ruining Endrayan agriculture, government policy toward the Sojourners changed radically to the current starvation campaign.

  On the outskirts of the little town, they reached a rail line running past a loading platform a few hundred meters long. The line consisted of one wide rail mounted on a track bed raised about two meters above the ground. A single car, apparently built of cannibalized parts, sat waiting. The wheelless chassis, seven or eight meters long, hugged the guide track, but the passenger compartment was an amalgam of different shapes, heights, and colors. It had openings instead of actual doors and windows, and it was battered and rusting.

  But it worked. The Thiopans and Riker climbed up a short ladder hanging over the side of the car, and Durren turned on a humming motor. Within seconds, the car levitated a few inches above its guide rail and moved away from the loading dock, floating smoothly on an electromagnetic cushion.

  “A little more comfortable than the first leg of my trip,” Riker quipped.

  “For us, too,” Durren agreed.

  “Who built this system?”

  “The government, about thirty years ago. The Nuarans, really.”

  “Seems like a big project to take you out to the middle of nowhere.”

  “They used it to bring minerals and ores back from the mines and quarries out in the desert,” Durren said, his eyes sad. “That was one of the turning points. They ripped the heart out of Mother World . . . butchers. After about ten years, there was nothing left to take.”

  “What happened?”

  “They left. Closed the mines. When the Sojourners moved back out to the Sa’drit, we found this line abandoned. We put some pieces together and made it work.” He shrugged. “They would bomb it sometimes. We rebuilt it.”

  Riker scanned the badlands around them, the rock and dirt and dust and sand. “Doesn’t look as if it was ever the easiest place to live.”

  “It wasn’t,” Durren said. “Always hotter and drier than most of Thiopa. But the Endrayans managed, even before Evain started preaching about the old ways.”

  “How?”

  “How did they live here? By working with the world and not against her. Simple.” He pointed out to gray hills. “Look . . .”

  Open pits scarred the ashen land like fatal wounds inflicted so long ago they were past bleeding. “That’s what the Nuarans did?” Riker asked. He got no reply, but he didn’t need one. The sorrow in Durren’s voice, the anger in Mikken’s eyes, told him what he needed to know.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” Riker said. Durren looked at him. “If there’s nothing out here that anybody wants, why has Stross declared war on Endraya?”

  “Because of us. Because we won’t give up our right to live the way we want.”

  “Durren,” Tritt suddenly shouted. “Stop!”

  “What?”

  “Out th-there.”

  The track bed ran past a watering hole, which was nearly dry. But a handful of large animals were lying on their sides in the mud. Durren throttled the motor back to reduce speed. “They’re dead, Tritt.”

  “N-n-no—I saw them move. I g-g-got better eyes than you.”

  With a sigh, Durren brought the rail car to a full stop. Tritt jumped down and trotted across the few hundred meters to the pond. The others watched but made no move to follow.

  “Why are you letting him do this again?” Mikken complained.

  “Means something to him.”

  “What’s he doing?” asked Riker.

  Mikken scowled in annoyance. “Putting the ealixes out of their misery.”

  “The water,” said Durren. “The government and the Nuarans
used it up, made the weather dry it up—or poisoned it.”

  “We found out about the poison when people drank the water and died,” Mikken said. “Toxic dumping from the mining operations. But the animals can’t test for toxic waste, so they drink it and die. Except sometimes, they’re not quite dead and Tritt has to stop and kill them. He gets along better with animals than he does with people. So he feels he has to do this whenever he sees some that aren’t dead yet.”

  “Not an easy way to die, drinking poisoned water,” Durren said softly. “Eats your insides. I’ve seen it happen to people.”

  They could see Tritt shooting the dying animals, but the sound of his blaster was too faint to be heard over the drone of the wind and the hum of the motor. He walked back over the scrub weeds and low dunes and climbed up the ladder. Durren pushed the throttle to midspeed and the car leaped ahead.

  * * *

  The captain’s seat was, for the moment, empty. In fact, so was the whole center well of the bridge. The three seats normally occupied by Picard, Riker, and either Counselor Troi or Chief Medical Officer Pulaski were all empty. As ranking officer, Lieutenant Commander Data was nominally in charge. But with no pressing crisis, he simply remained in his low-slung seat at the Ops console up near the viewscreen. He seemed preoccupied with running calculations on his computer terminal. Ensign Crusher glanced across from his adjacent station.

  “What’re you working on, Data?”

  “A theory, Wesley. But I lack certain information. I shall try to get it from Dr. Keat when I return to Thiopa.”

  “When are you beaming down?”

  “As soon as the captain returns to the bridge.”

  Wesley watched the planet that filled the main viewer. “I don’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “How anybody could let outsiders turn their planet into a toxic dump.”

  “Shortsightedness.”

  “I guess. In one of my history courses I learned about how we humans almost turned earth into a polluted mess, and we didn’t even need any advanced aliens to help us.”

  Data’s head bobbed owlishly. “Yes, humans have a long record of self-inflicted disasters. It is amazing your ancestors survived long enough to develop space-flight.”