by Diane Duane
“Yes, sir,” Hwiii said. “And thank you much for your welcome.”
“Are you sure you don’t want some more caviar?” Picard said gently.
The dolphin glanced at him, that mischievous look in his eye again. “Another pound or so would be nice.”
They went about their business for the next few days in an unremarkable fashion. Picard noticed with amusement how quickly the crew stopped giving second glances to the dolphin swimming down the corridor. Hwiii seemed to spend most of his time in engineering anyway, surprising amounts of time. Picard sometimes began to wonder when he slept, and Geordi began to complain about it.
Picard caught Geordi in Ten-Forward one evening, looking rather haggard and smelling slightly of fish. “The problem is that he’s so concentrated,” Geordi said. “He’s—don’t misunderstand me, Captain, he’s absolutely amiable, he’s a pleasure to work with, competent, knows his subject inside out—but he’s just—” Geordi shook his head. “He’s collimated, like a phaser beam. When he’s in the middle of his work, you couldn’t distract him for a second. He can’t be distracted—he just goes straight for the throat of the problem, whatever it is.”
“I should think that would be more of an advantage than anything else,” Picard said, sipping his tea.
Geordi smiled wanly. “It might seem that way at first. But if there’s one thing human beings do when they’re working, it’s that they stop working. They do something to break the tension or the concentration every now and then: a joke, an aside. Hwiii doesn’t do that. It’s like he’s on rails, running right at the question in hand. Or fin.”
“Perseverance,” Picard said. “I take it the work you’re doing is going well.”
“We’ve got most of his equipment hooked up now. We’re getting good readings, he says. I’m still getting an idea of what he means by ‘good’—half the time it seems to mean blank files.” Geordi chuckled. “But we’re in a situation here where lack of data can be as diagnostic as solids full of it. In between times, he’s been helping Commander Riker with his subparticle hunting—seems that the technology that the Lalairu are using with hyperstrings is somewhat similar and can be altered to our purposes. He’s made some changes in the sensors for us.”
“Well, I’m glad he’s making himself useful.”
“It’s getting him to stop, Captain, that’s the problem. He’s having a sleep cycle now, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I must admit, he is a fount of information: it’s an education just listening to him while he talks. Or sings—you can’t help hearing the notes, they resonate through his waterjacket. The engineering crew like it.” Geordi smiled. “I can’t say I mind it myself. The funny thing is, some of the song turns out to be some kind of delphine opera. He says he doesn’t have a great voice, but the singing runs in the family.”
“An opera buff. You’d better keep him away from Worf. But I didn’t know there was any opera back on Triton.”
“Something like it, apparently. Or I may have misunderstood him: it was hard to tell whether Hwiii was describing theater or a ceremony of some kind—or just live performances of some sort of passion play.”
Picard nodded and sipped at his tea again. “I had been wondering—”
He stopped.
Something was happening.
Abruptly, everything seemed peculiarly dim. Was it his eyes? Picard blinked, found nothing changed—but at the same time became suddenly certain that his eyes were not at fault.
The effect persisted, got worse, a darkening and squeezing shut of everything around him, as if he were closing his eyes to sneeze. No, as if everything around him were closing its eyes to sneeze.
Then it cleared away. He put his tea down, blinked for a moment, and rubbed his head. “That was odd.”
Geordi looked at him. “You felt something?”
“Did you?”
Geordi nodded. “Something like—I don’t know: everything dimmed out for a moment.”
“Dimmed out for you?”
“Not light,” Geordi said. “Not a decrease in intensity as such. Not visible light, anyway—just—everything went attenuated, somehow.”
Picard looked around. Other people, at other tables, were looking slightly confused, too, blinking, glancing around them. “Did you feel that?” he said to the ensign at the next table.
“Something, sir,” she said. “Something—I thought I was going to sneeze.”
Picard touched his badge. “Picard to Crusher.”
“Crusher here,” the doctor said. “Captain, did you just feel something odd?”
“Yes. How many others?”
“Half the ship, it seems.”
“What was it?”
Crusher laughed ruefully. “I had just stood up, and I thought it was orthostatic hypotension—a fall in blood pressure from standing up too fast. That produces transient dimmings of vision like what I had. But it wasn’t that… not when so many people felt it at once.”
Picard thought about finishing his tea, then stood up frowning. “Very well, out…. Sorry to put you straight back into the traces, Mr. La Forge, but this is too odd. I want level-one diagnostics run on all ship’s systems. And I want a department chiefs’ meeting in an hour.”
“Yes, sir,” Geordi said, and headed away. Picard paused to look out the windows. The stars slipped by as usual, seemingly untroubled. Everything seemed perfectly normal. Am I overreacting? he thought. We all seem fine now.
But the memory of that dimming reasserted itself. Not so much a dimming, but—what was it Geordi had said? An attenuation. Things themselves going dark and strange, rather than his perception of them.
Picard made his way out hurriedly, heading for the bridge.
* * *
He had just seated himself and was having a look at reports from around the ship. Everyone seemed to have experienced the strange hiatus, but no one had experienced any ill effects.
This left Picard feeling uneasy. “Mr. Data, check Federation records for any incidents of this sort.”
“I have already done that, Captain,” Data said. “There are no such incidents on record as such. I have scanned using homologues for phrases being used by our own crewmen to describe the experience. There are none.”
Picard frowned. “Keep working on it.”
“Ensign Wooldridge to Commander Riker,” said a voice suddenly.
Riker touched his badge. “Riker here, Ensign.”
“Sir,” said a young male voice, “I’m down by the mission specialist’s quarters: the dolphin gentleman. I think you’d better have someone come down here. He’s awful loud in there, and he’s not answering his door. I’m not sure he’s well.”
Faintly, in the background, they could all hear a high, eerie wailing.
“How long has this been going on?” said Riker.
“I’m not sure, sir,” Wooldridge said, raising his voice slightly over the racket. “I just got off shift. I had been in my quarters to change, and I was heading to Ten-Forward, when I came by here and heard him. He’s been at it at least since I came by—ten minutes or so.”
“On my way,” Riker said, glancing at Picard. The captain nodded. “Mr. Data, with me. Dr. Crusher to the mission specialist’s quarters immediately, please.”
From right down the hall from his quarters, it was very plain that something was the matter. A great flood of untranslated Delphine was ringing out down the corridor; not entirely an unpleasant sound, for there was melody in the fluting whistles, squeaks, and shrills of it, and a kind of rhythm as well. But at the same time, independent of the sound, there was such an edge of distress on the song that it made you twitch to listen to it.
Riker and Data came up outside the doors; Dr. Crusher came along toward them from the other direction. Data tapped the entry chime. There was no response—the piercing song merely went on, uninterrupted, from inside.
“What’s the matter with him?” Riker said. “What’s happened to his translator?”
“I do not kn
ow,” Data said, listening.
“What is that racket?” Crusher said, getting out her tricorder.
Data put his head to one side. “It is part of the Song of the Twelve,” he said, “a cetacean epic sung-poetic work in which an ensemble of—”
“Dolphins singing lieder,” Riker said, cutting him off. “Spare me.” He gestured at the door. “Override it.”
Data touched in a combination on the nearest access panel. The door slid open, and Riker saw, to his relief, that the force field inside was still holding the water in place. They gazed in through it.
Hwiii was there, swimming around and around in circles. Riker was suddenly, horribly reminded of old vids he’d seen from when zoo animals on Earth were still kept in tiny enclosures that literally bored them out of their minds: the dreadfully repeated behaviors, heads swinging back and forth again and again in never-changing patterns, beasts pacing back and forth until they dropped from exhaustion, what minds they had now long gone. But at the same time, the song still pouring forth from Hwiii didn’t seem to be the kind of sound a dolphin would make when it had gone mad. Then again—
Riker turned to Crusher. “Vital signs?”
She shook her head as she examined her tricorder’s readings. “His blood enzyme levels are indicative of great stress, but other than that, no neurological damage that I can see.”
“Then why is he like this?” Riker said softly. “What’s going on? What caused this?”
His mind went back to that momentary flicker of darkness. He had been talking to Lieutenant Hessan, laughing back at those laughing eyes of hers, and suddenly—
“Wooldridge noticed this, what—twenty minutes ago?”
“That would be approximately correct,” Data said. The song scaled up in urgency, and all at once it became a bit too much for Riker. He turned, touched his badge, said, “Riker to Commander Hwiii!” then put two fingers in his mouth, leaned close to the wall of water for maximum effect, and whistled at the top of his lungs.
The dolphin almost matched his whistle a second later, with a shriek of equal volume, one that made them all wince. But then he slowly stopped circling, coasting to a stop, and just hung in the water for a moment—then rose to the top of his quarters to take a breath.
They waited. After a few seconds he drifted down again to the doorway and hung there, looking at them with a rather stunned expression from behind the wall of water. “Commander,” Hwiii said weakly, “that was vile language.”
“My apologies,” Riker said, “but you weren’t behaving in a way that suggested sweet reason was going to do much good right then.”
“No,” Hwiii said, sounding ashamed, “I suppose not. It’s just that it was such a shock—” He stared at Riker. “How can you be so calm?”
“Calm isn’t high on my list at the moment, believe me,” Riker said. “We’ve had a very odd occurrence in the last hour or so.”
“I’ll say we have,” Hwiii said. “You felt it too, then. We’re lost!”
“What?” Crusher said.
The dolphin looked at her in distress. “Can’t you feel it?”
“We all felt something a little while ago,” Crusher said, “but what it was, we can’t say.”
“Ship’s systems show no change in status,” Data said. “All readings, navigational and otherwise, seem nominal.”
“Commander, Mr. Data,” Hwiii said with dreadful intensity, “we are lost. I can feel it in my tail. We’re not—” He fumbled for words, and Riker found it odd to watch a being usually so precise now floundering. “We’re not where we were.”
“Will you get into your suit, Commander,” Riker said, “and come up to the bridge with me and explain that—since you’re the only one around here who seems to have any kind of explanation for what’s happening?”
“Gladly,” Hwiii said. But his voice still had an uncertain sound to it, almost the sound of a child, abruptly lost in some immensity, and very much wanting some adult to take his hand and tell him things are going to be all right.
Some minutes later, on the bridge, Hwiii was looking critically over Data’s shoulder while he brought up detailed readings of their coordinates. “I’m so embarrassed about that,” Hwiii said quietly to Data. “I don’t usually come all overreligious in moments of crisis.”
“I was going to ask whether there was some specific significance in the passage you were singing,” Data said, “but that will have to wait. Here are our present coordinates, with course projection. Here are the twelve Cepheids within scan, with their spectra. As you see, they all match their nominal ‘fingerprints,’ though RY Antliae is showing about point five percent above its baseline at the moment. Here is the master navigational grid, and as you see, our course is as predicted.”
Picard stepped down to look, too. “Our location at the moment is exactly what it should be, considering our past course and speed,” he said. “As you can see, the computer confirms the location as well.”
Hwiii laughed at that, an unhappy sound. “Yes, but these instruments don’t know any better since they’re judging by strictly physical guideposts like Cepheid variables.” He looked over at Picard. “Captain, I see the readings, and I can vouch for the validity of the instruments’ readings since I’ve been working so closely with them the last few days. But”—and he swung his tail in one of the delphine gestures of negation, a downward slap—“we are not where we seem to be. This is not the way space feels, not the way it felt two hours ago. We are somewhere else that looks like here—if you follow me.”
Picard’s mind abruptly went back to what the Laihe had been saying, or trying to say. “Some kind of—shift—”
Hwiii had made his way up to one of the science stations and was busy at it with his manipulators, reconfiguring it.
“If I understand you correctly,” Picard said slowly, “are you suggesting that we have somehow dislocated ourselves into a congruent universe?”
Hwiii laughed, looking up from the controls for a moment. “Captain, I only wish we had done it ourselves! If we had, we might at least have been prepared for it. I was on my sleep cycle, and everything was fine. Then—can you imagine waking up and suddenly finding yourself in some place that your senses tell you is a strange country, a different planet, even—but one that nonetheless looked exactly the same as where you were before you fell asleep?”
Troi looked over at him. “The effect would be much like that of one kind of psychotic break in a human,” she said. “The sudden loss of familiar associations—or the certainty that where you were is not where you are. A terrible disorientation.”
“The only problem,” Hwiii said, “is that I have something concrete on which to base the experience.” The display he had brought up was presently scrolling by in great blocks of a Delphine-based numerical notation, an adapted binary. “It doesn’t mean much this way. Wait a second—”
The silver tentacles of the manipulators danced across the keyboard for a moment, then the display shifted to show something that might have been a very tangled knot or braid.
“This is a very crude representation of the major hyperstring structures in the space where we were about two hours ago,” Hwiii said, “before I took my last set of readings for the day and turned in. Now this”—he worked for a moment again—“is the same space—I’m scanning the same cubic now—but look.”
The second display fitted itself down over the first one. The curves and twists of the bright lines were a close match, very close indeed, but not quite. Here and there some loop or curve stuck out farther than the original, curved differently, crossed another’s path sooner, or later, than its partner in the original scan. “A very close congruence, I would say,” Hwiii said, his voice a blend of triumph and alarm. “Not quite exact—out by about three percent, I’d say off the fin. This isn’t something you have senses for,” he said to Picard, “but I felt it as soon as I woke up—and felt it all over me, a derangement of my people’s most basic sense.” He sounded ashamed agai
n.
“Commander,” Picard said gently, “I think you had reason to be upset. Let it pass; if I woke up suddenly and found myself seeing the world so out of joint as you seem to have, I daresay I might have made some noise myself.” He shook his head. “Yet at the same time, this universe seems overtly physically the same as our own.”
Hwiii swung his head from side to side, the one gesture humans shared with dolphins. “How far the congruences will stretch, Captain, I wouldn’t pretend to know.”
Picard sighed and said, “Well. Now that it’s established that we’re here… how do we get back?”
Hwiii looked over at Geordi, who had joined them. “Until we know how we got here,” Geordi said, “that’s hardly a question we can answer.”
“Well, get to work on it,” Picard said. “This is beginning to make me twitch.”
And then they all jumped as the whoop! whoop! whoop! of the intruder alarm shattered the quiet of the bridge. Worf hurried to his station, brought up a display, examined it: “There is a security breach in the computer core! At access station two.”
“Get a team down there on the double,” Riker said, “and join them.”
“Aye, sir.” Worf touched his console, spoke a few words, and went out of the bridge at a run.
CHAPTER 3
Give me a shot of access station two,” Riker said to the lieutenant who moved up to take Worf’s console.
“I’m going down there,” Picard said, and headed for the ’lift. Riker opened his mouth and then shut it again, for the security team would beat the captain there by long enough to get their job done. Still, his mouth quirked in a slight smile at the sight of the man leaving the bridge, a man very much in search of answers and unwilling to take “no” for one.
Worf met his team coming out of the ’lift on deck ten, the best of the shift—little slim Ryder, dark Mirish, and tall blue Detaith—his pick for a situation in which there might be physical trouble, for all of them looked unlikely to be able to stop it, and all of them most spectacularly were. “Mr. Worf—”