by Diane Duane
Worf frowned. “I am not in the mood for The Merry Widow at the moment. I have enough problems.”
Riker shook his head. “Nothing like that. Remember I told you there were some aspects of opera that you hadn’t yet investigated fully?”
“That is so,” Worf said, looking doubtful.
“Program Traviata One running,” the computer said mildly to them as they approached the door.
“Good,” Riker said. “Open.”
The door slid open, and a roar came out. It was not applause. It was the sound of many voices crying for someone’s blood. Worf looked at Riker with a bemused expression; Riker grinned at him. They stepped in, the doors shut behind them.
It took Riker’s eyes a few moments to get used to the dark. He suspected Worf’s were adjusting faster, to judge by his glance around him, amused, and his slight grin. Slowly the gilded obscurities of the great old opera house of La Scala came into being around them. They were up in one of the second-tier boxes on the right side of the house, and down below them, faintly illuminated by the light of the stage, people in evening clothes were standing in their seats, even on them, throwing things at the stage and howling imprecations.
“I told you we ought to discuss violence in opera,” Riker said. “This seemed like a good time.”
“I thought you meant in opera,” Worf said, looking down in mild astonishment as two men in white tie began a fistfight. Several ladies around them fainted decorously; other ladies, and various gentlemen, began betting on the outcome—at least it looked like it, as money was changing hands.
“We are in,’” Riker said with a grin, and sat down, leaning on the railing in front of the box. “Or as ‘in’ as we need to be. I confess, though, I’m curious: does it ever get like this at the Great House at tl’Gekh?”
Worf shook his head, looking down at the stage with delight. The set and flats, depicting a fashionable nineteenth-century salon, were rapidly becoming splattered with broken eggs, and tomatoes better suited to pasta sauce than to salad. Shattered cabbages lay about, and the occasional, doubtless symbolic, lemon. “There are occasional duels,” Worf said, “but they take place outside. These days no one would dream of disturbing the performance so.”
“Even when it was terrible? The tenor was, this night. Pietro Dominghi, it was. He won’t come out now—listen to them yelling for him!”
They listened. The cries were not so much for Dominghi as a whole performer, but for the man in pieces. “Wait till the carabinieri show up,” Riker said. “Then you’ll see something.”
They watched the police show up and plunge into the crowd. The crowd’s reaction seemed to indicate that they considered this a private riot, not one that just anyone could join. Without hesitation they turned on the carabinieri, and soon policemen were flying in all directions, crashing among the seats, several of them even being tossed out of the lower boxes and into the aisles.
Riker watched Worf with satisfaction. The Klingon was twitching slightly in sympathy as blows went home, looking down at the huge fracas with cheerful approval. “These people are true warriors, and this is great art.”
“You think this is art,” Riker said, “wait till the performance gets started again.”
It took some minutes, of course, but the diva in question chose her moment perfectly, a period a few breaths long in which the rioting had paused for its own breath. In crimson lace and an awesome jet-black mantilla, holding in one hand an oversize fan depicting the Judgment of Paris and in the other a Baccarat bell-goblet full of champagne, the great Irish-Czech soprano Mawrdew Czcgowcz strode out into the brief lacuna of sound and the vegetable-laden stage. With the fan she imperiously gestured at the conductor for him and his people to stop crouching in the pit as if they were about to be shelled. They obeyed, as much to their own surprise as anyone else’s. She whispered a word or two to them; the conductor hissed the same word to the orchestra as they put themselves back in order. Toscanini tapped for the downbeat, and the orchestra plunged into the heady rhythm of the prelude to the Sempre libera.
“Follie” Czcgowcz sang, “FOLLIE!”—each cry loud enough to stun anything with ears. The police and the rioters together stopped fighting and fell silent, staring at the consumptive apparition now moving in a graceful whirling dance among the splattered eggs and the cabbages, beginning to sing in ecstatic upscaling cadenzas of the delights of living free, no matter how short the life was.
“Now there is crowd control,” Riker murmured, but Worf was whispering the words of the aria along with Czcgowcz, lost in the moment. Riker smiled. Czcgowcz plunged along with abandon to the “giaoure!” passage, and only then did Worf turn to him, on the high B flat, and say, “She is in great pain!”
“No, no, that’s just the way she takes her highs.” He remembered his grandfather saying to him, “She sounds like a vacuum cleaner, but that’s just the way she is.” Riker smiled as Czcgowcz headed for the end of the aria, the optional E natural above high C hanging fire, and she hit it and held it in full chest, possibly in violation of several natural laws. There were involuntary shrieks of pain or disbelief from around the opera house, and here and there tiny chiming noises as a few prisms of the Waterford crystal hanging about the houselights shattered in the onslaught of sound. Wild applause went up, a roar as full of praise as the earlier one had been of bloodthirstiness; and Czcgowcz flung the Baccarat goblet at the nearest flat, where it shattered, and bowed herself down to her skirts, among the wild shrieks of approbation and delight. Even the fistfights that shortly started again had an abstracted air about them. Worf applauded wildly, grinning over at Riker.
“More?” Riker said. They reviewed all the best ones—first that evening at the Paris Opera in 1960 when the fighting started in the middle of a performance of Parsifal, something to do with an accusation about the tenor and what was going on out of sight in the bottom of one of the swan boats; then the great Metropolitan Opera Riot of 2002, when the holographic special effects malfunctioned in the middle of the new production of the Ring, and the critic from the Times was tracked down and spray-painted by enthusiasts unknown shortly after the appearance of the morning edition containing his review; then the cloned-Bernstein revival of West Side Story on Alphacent in 2238, at which the composer’s clone, gone insane from unnoticed single-bit DNA errors, started firing a phaser into the audience in his outrage at having been revived.
“I think I can do better than that,” Worf said, and began instructing the computer to retrieve the hard-video storage of the 28844 production of X and Y, in which the soprano had declared her family in a blood feud with the tenor’s due to a salary dispute and had killed k’Kharis onstage, before his aria was finished (etiquette usually mandated letting the performance end first).
“Sounds like a good one,” Riker said.
“There were three days of street fighting, and the government fell,” Worf said with some relish. “And then—”
“Data to Commander Riker.”
Riker looked at Worf with a resigned expression and shrugged. “Riker here, Mr. Data.”
“Our probe is within range of the other Enterprise,” Data said, “and we are receiving signal leakage per Mr. La Forge’s prediction. I think you will want to see this.”
“We’re on our way.”
When they came onto the bridge, everyone else on it who could possibly spare an eye from his or her duty was gazing at the main viewscreen with expressions ranging from horror through frightened fascination. Riker swung down to where Data sat at his console, working carefully over the controls. “You’re recording all this, of course.”
Data nodded, glanced up at the screen again. It had been showing a corridor, empty when Riker came in, looking no different from one of their own corridors. Now the view shifted to show a different hallway, with some crewmen in it, going about their business. Their uniforms were odd—one-piece uniforms, more or less duplicating the look of the familiar two-piecers, but the collars were cut uncomfortabl
y high for Riker’s tastes, and the uniforms’ colors were extremely somber, the maroon gone a dark blood-russet, the green gone green-brown. Some few crewmen wore sashes of some silver or gold material around their waists, an odd and barbaric splash of brilliance against the darkness. But odder, and more ominous to Riker, he noticed that every one of the passing crewmen was armed. Phasers mostly, particularly large and threatening-looking ones. But there were a few knives, as well, and one crewman, a gray-skinned hominid from some species Riker didn’t immediately recognize, went by wearing at his waist, unsheathed, something that most closely resembled a machete.
“Naturally we cannot read directly from ship’s optical-fiber communications with the present equipment,” Data said to Riker as he worked, “but the comms system RF backups are running concurrently, and even quite marginal leakage from them can be read without too much trouble—though that will change if the ship’s shields go up.”
“That they’re not up now,” Riker said with some relief, “would seem to imply that they feel themselves to be safe and undetected… so far, anyway.”
“I would concur,” Data said. “I am currently ‘piggybacking’ an active internal scan presently being conducted aboard the other ship. Unfortunately, since this surveillance is passive, we are unable to choose what location in the other ship we view. But I am logging RF-transition frequencies and optical output and input data for each view we get. With random factors operating in our favor, we should be able to return to a given established view later, at least while the eavesdropping probe remains in range and undetected.”
I hate it when even Data admits we need luck on our side, Riker thought. “If they show any signs of detecting it,” he said, “I want it out of there on the double. I don’t want them getting their hands on any of our technology. Destroy it if necessary.”
“Understood,” Data said. For a few seconds, the screen was again empty of crewmen, showing an empty corridor. Then it changed view again, to a different hallway this time, looking down toward a turbolift.
“I am uncertain whether the scan we are seeing is being directed by someone aboard the ship or is an automatic function,” Data said. “But one thing is certain: this Enterprise has many more internal visual pickups than our own does. There are the usual video pickups associated with personal viewscreens and data readout locations, as well as the basic security surveillance system in high-security areas like engineering and the computer cores… but also many more, spread throughout the ship, even in crew quarters. Moreover, those appear not to be under the control of the occupants. The implications are… distressing.”
“No kidding,” Riker said softly as the view changed again, engineering this time. Crewmen moved about their work with what seemed to him more intensity than necessary. No one he had so far seen on this ship seemed able to move with any kind of ease. But why should they? Riker thought then. When anyone might be looking at you, anytime, to see if you’re doing your job—and if you’re not… He shook his head, thinking about the fear of punishment that Deanna had reported in “Stewart.”
“You’re keeping tabs of the names and ranks of anyone who shows up in this scan, of course,” Riker said.
“Of course. So far we have seen forty-four crewmen whose presence is duplicated aboard our own ship, and only five who are unknown. This would closely approximate—”
The view changed, and Data broke off in midsentence, staring along with everyone else. It was the bridge. At least, the shape was the same, and the general structure of it. But there were differences.
It was darker. Their night? Riker thought, then shook his head, doubting it. Paneling and furnishings were in the same sort of gunmetal gray as the exterior of the ship, with lines of paler gray being used more as highlighting than anything else. The computer installations around the upper tier, too, were different. The engineering station was about as it should have been, but mission Ops and the science stations were much reduced, and combined with engineering. Every other station in the upper tier, from the starboard lifts to the main viewer, was now part of a long sweep of weapons-control consoles, with crewmen standing at them, unnervingly vigilant. Riker stared at those consoles, with tree upon tree of power-level readings and weapons status readouts; he thought of the kind of phaser power and photon torpedo loads this vessel must be carrying… and he felt like shuddering.
It was not just the emphasis on weaponry: it was that combined with the general look of the bridge, for though dark, it was also much more luxurious than his own Enterprise’s. The three center seats, empty at the moment, had a plush, easy-chair look about them, and the centermost of them, the captain’s chair, looked more like a throne than anything else. You were plainly meant to enjoy sitting in them, at the heart of all this deadly power. Just as plainly to Riker, you were meant to enjoy using it.
The broad back of one crewman had been turned to them until now, while he studied one of the science consoles. Now he turned toward them, back to the security console—also much enlarged, so that the curve of it ran much higher and farther along the back of the center seats than in Riker’s own ship. Now he drew in breath at the sight of the man, for he hadn’t recognized him without the characteristic sash. It was Worf. He looked the same as always. Except, Riker thought. That face wore even more frown than usual, and it was graven deep, a settled look. Pain, Riker thought.
He glanced over at his own Worf, who was looking at his counterpart with an expression of which Riker could make nothing.
“Discommoded?” Riker said softly. Worf shook his head, not answering. “Data, can we get sound?”
“Not without losing vision,” Data said. “This mode of surveillance will permit us only one sort of bandwidth at a time—sound is carried on another channel. I would have to switch.”
Riker opened his mouth to tell him to try it—then shut it again as the captain’s ready room door opened.
The shock that went through him, even though he had been expecting to see this man since Deanna’s report, was still horribly unsettling. I don’t walk like that! was his first thought. Well, possibly he himself didn’t—though now he had doubts—but this other Riker plainly did. The man who had come out of the ready room now stood for a moment looking at the main viewer, then turned to one of the crewmen at the weapons-control boards and snapped some question or order.
The crewman turned and answered quickly. Riker looked at the other Riker’s face, and now he did shudder, he couldn’t help it. Their faces were identical: this was the face he saw when he trimmed his beard in the morning. And regardless, he hoped no one ever saw this face on him. There was a curl to the lip, another of those worn-in frowns, that made this other Riker look like a thug. He remembered his mother, a long time ago, saying, Don’t make those faces, your face will get stuck that way, and one of his command-psych instructors at Academy saying, I don’t have to ask you how you are: I can tell just by looking at you. Do you really believe that twenty years or more of your emotions and basic outlook telling your facial muscles how to behave, eighteen hours or so a day, doesn’t leave any traces? It takes time… but it’s just like water on stone, and just as impossible to erase once it’s done… except by changing the mind inside the face. And sometimes not even then.
Riker looked at his counterpart’s face and tried to imagine what could make a man’s face, his face, into something like this… then shied away from the prospect. Instead he shifted his attention to the man’s uniform. It was different, again, but in a new way: it was sleeveless, the black vee yoke that normally ran over the shoulders cut off to leave the muscular arms bare, and the short tunic was belted at the waist with another of those woven-gold sashes, supporting a big nasty-looking phaser on one side, and a ceremonial-looking dagger on the other. The knife seemed to be a recurring motif: in uniforms, and—Riker noticed with shock—even on the doors to the turbolift, where the Starfleet parabola was etched into the paneling—with a square-handled dagger neatly impaling it.
Tha
t other Riker sat down in the center seat and looked thoughtfully at the front viewscreen, said something else to the single form minding the conn console: Wesley Crusher. Riker couldn’t clearly see Wes’s face from this angle, but the ensign turned slightly and made some answer. Apparently the other Riker was satisfied: he sat back in that thronelike chair, pulling at his lower lip.
“No Data,” Worf said from behind Will.
Riker shook his head. “Not aboard, you think? Or just somewhere else?”
“We have no way of telling as yet,” Data said. “I am trying to devise a way to get at the other Enterprise’s crew roster, but frankly, I doubt I will be able to manage it by this means. I suspect Mr. La Forge will have to help us with that when the away team goes over.”
Riker shook his head. “Any way to tell where this particular scan is being run from?”
Data shook his head again. “If I were reading this signal from the optical comms network, it would have the usual packet-header information on origin and so forth. But the RF network is usually used for emergencies only and does not employ the headers.”
Data stopped again as the turbolift doors opened, and someone came in. Riker’s jaw dropped, and he stood up in astonishment.
“My God,” he whispered.
Deanna Troi stood there, a little behind Worf, coolly looking the bridge over. It’s not just faces that change, Riker found himself thinking, as much in horror as in wonder. The Deanna Troi he knew, true to her training, tended to be nonthreatening, held her body and her vocal and mental attitudes in neutral ways that invited others to reach out. But this woman—she stood there erect and dangerous-looking, not trying in the slightest to minimize the effect. She carried herself like a banner, like a weapon. Like an unsheathed knife.