by Diane Duane
The vision apparently died with him. His father, the ambassador, was assassinated shortly thereafter by another Vulcan eager for the job. Picard had his suspicions about that assassination as well.
Picard paused his search, rubbed his face with his hands, and sat in the darkened room, in the glow of the screen, considering. For one who knew how to read the records—for bureaucratese had changed little from his own universe to this one—there were signs that Spock had indeed “considered it” as he promised and had attempted using various means, mostly subtly, to shift the Empire away from the blind cruelty of its course. And though one man, standing in the right place with a lever long enough, can move a planet, Spock’s lever was too short, the fulcrum was too close, or… Picard shook his head. Any one of a number of variables was out of joint. Whatever, he failed, managing only to push the inevitable collapse of the Empire further into its future. The Empire went on, not realizing what his own universe’s Kirk and that universe’s Spock had known or come to know: that an empire based only on conquest is, tactically if not ethically, top-heavy and will eventually collapse under its own weight.
Picard stopped for a little while then, sitting there, his chin on his hands again, and thought. He could understand Kirk’s motives: they were no different from his own. He saw waste, suffering, folly, and wanted to change them, to stop them; but he may not have understood enough of the huge inertia of the force against which he himself wanted to strain… wanted that other Spock to defy. For two and a half centuries the Empire had known no motivation except survival by exploitation. Picard remembered something his own Beverly Crusher had said to him once, about human psychopathologies: “If you’re going to take a behavior away, you’d better have something superior to put in its place. Otherwise in about ten minutes you get a relapse.” Spock had tried to substitute a different behavior, but there was no way to convince a mostly human Empire that logic and forbearance, even the prickly kind of forbearance that a Vulcan would have recommended, were better than expansion. Expansion had worked for them for a long time. They saw no reason to stop. They would go on as they had started.
But at the same time… Picard shook his head. What are these people doing in this situation, he thought, where we find them today? It’s been hundreds of years since, in this universe, anyone explored anything for pleasure, for the delight of knowledge. That whole school of thought is discredited now. Why are they here?
He stared at the screen for a long time. Then, in the unchanging darkness, a thought occurred to him. If there had suddenly been some difficulty in expansion… “Necessity is a mother,” he remembered Geordi misquoting to him once. Even the most hardened behaviors could be shifted when there was no choice.
To the computer he said, “Display map of the Empire as of one hundred standard years ago. No: concurrent with the year of Spock’s death.”
The screen cleared and showed him a great, irregular blob of space, superimposed over the graceful curves of the outflung arms of the Galaxy. Against the Galaxy as a whole, it was small, surely no more than 6 or 8 percent of the whole. But it was still a very, very large amount of space. Earth was only roughly at its center: the major axes of exploration, or exploitation in this case, followed along the thickest drifts of stars in the arm, and the blobby amoeba shape bore little or no relationship to the shape of the Federation as he understood it for the same period.
“Go forward ten years,” Picard said. The blob increased its volume, protuberances jutting out irregularly over its whole surface. The space involved was about 10 percent bigger.
“Go forward ten years more.” Another increase, this time slightly bigger, again reaching along the galactic arm, outward toward the sparser stars, two-thirds of the way out toward the rim.
“Continue in ten-year increments until the present.”
The image on the screen became a nested set of glowing amorphous shapes. Each time, the percentage of expansion grew larger and larger. The last ten years’ expansion was the largest of all, including in its area of growth an area equal to nearly the entire size of the Empire eighty years before.
But there was a problem. The Sagittarius Arm, the arm of the Galaxy in which Earth and, in his own universe, the Federation and the Klingon and Romulan empires and all other known species lay, was not directly connected to the Galactic core by anything but gravity. As other arms of the Galaxy had done in the past, it had been “sprayed” off the main mass of the curving, churning greater arm, like a droplet flung away from the main stream of a fall of water. The arm would later meld back into the main stream of the Galactic whirlpool again, or bisect and the pieces meld with other adjoining arms, but this would take hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years.
For now, the Sag Arm was discrete. Its size was so great that, in terms of the life span of most sentient species, it could make little difference whether it was connected to anything or not. The two time scales involved were too disparate. For federations and empires concerned with expansion on a modest scale, the problem didn’t really arise.
But this Empire’s scale of expansion had nothing to do with modesty, and everything to do with their perception of their own survival, their viability. Each decade, the amount of space explored had grown and grown. Not exploration for knowledge or pleasure, for adventure even, but simply for survival and the pursuit of policies a hundred years old now and too ingrained for those who executed them to see any way out.
Now, Picard thought, for the first time with a touch of pity, I understand the awful overengining of starships in this universe. When all you had to do, when all you knew how to do, was find new worlds to conquer, and conquer them, you needed speed and power more than anything else. And longevity. Heaven only knew how long some of these ships’ missions actually were. Some of the farthest-traveling ships, if he was any judge, might have been traveling for—he shook his head. Thirty years? Forty? He shook his head, wondering whether in such cases assassination of officers above you might not actually be understandable. Either because you were tired of looking at them and dealing with their behavior for year after weary year, or because you could see no other way of advancement.
He saw now the nature of the trap into which the Empire had fallen. From what little he had read of its history, he could understand quite well what had happened. They had spread as widely as they could through the Galaxy and conquered everything in sight They had subjugated every sentient species, destroyed all the ones that would not submit or were too alien to negotiate with them or couldn’t understand at all what the Empire wanted. They had now succeeded in exterminating, or dominating, almost all life with which they had come in contact. And at the end of it all, they had been stopped, not by any ethical or moral force, uprearing in indignation… but by the simple, quiet, patient dark, in which everything ended sooner or later.
Beyond the edges of the now-separated Sag Arm, in all directions, reached great starless deserts of empty space—well, empty enough for Picard, though Hwiii might argue the point. The emptiness reached out on both sides—twelve or thirteen thousand light-years to the next arm in either direction. Above the arm, and below it, was nothing—unless you counted the Magellanic Clouds, a million and a half light-years to the Galactic south. The arm itself was cut off from its coreward “parent” branch by a gap thousands of light-years wide. The Empire had been quarantined by the Galaxy itself. Picard looked at the map, judging the time it would take to cross even the smallest of those gaps, toward the core. Even with their engines, he thought, with their durability—even with ships running smaller crews, such as this one—no ship from the Empire can now possibly reach any new, inhabited world in less than ten years. Possibly twenty… and at high-warp speeds.
And even these ships won’t take that for long. He shook his head. For these people, there are literally no more worlds to conquer.
He remembered Worf saying, “How can it be otherwise?” This was the final truth of the prophecy at which Kirk and Spock had each arr
ived independently: an empire based solely on expansion fueled by conquest will conquer until it dooms itself… and this one had.
They had nowhere else to go. They had looked out into the darkness and finally seen the whirlwind they would soon reap. They had spent more than a hundred years teaching all their people the ruthlessness that had to be channeled into conquest. When there was nothing left to exercise that ruthlessness upon, those people would turn upon each other. The Empire would tear itself apart, die at its own hands, mad.
But they were survivors. Picard knew—few better—the lengths to which desperation will drive any organism, and an organization sooner than a single man. He stood up and walked slowly over to those windows, ignoring again the sight of the disordered and empty bed. In the past decade, or two, the Empire must have been brought most forcefully to this decision as it came up against the walls of darkness and knew there was no piercing them… not with any technology they would yet have for hundreds of years. Transilience, a starship that is here one moment and there, five thousand light-years or more away, the next, was possible in theory, but hedged about with such formidable theoretical problems still that they would not achieve it before the Empire fell.
So, desperate, grasping at straws, they must have started looking down other paths, other tunnels in the maze. And someone, Picard thought, someone reading history, came across some few references to some other universe, into which some of their own people had accidentally fallen long ago, and from which they were sent back. He suspected that the debrief that those officers performed on returning to this universe, though spotty as to detail, would have been indicative enough of a fertile place to start work. A parallel universe, structurally the same as theirs, as technically advanced—but a weak, soft place by comparison, crippled by ethic, populated, in essence, by sheep, to judge from the behavior of the people in the starship they saw. It was an unexploited place, unconquered—for from what little their misplaced landing party had been able to tell, the people over there weren’t the conquering type. All that was needed was to find a way to produce, on purpose, the effect that once happened as an accident, and without needing other identical personnel or equipment to be transferred in the other direction at the same time.
Picard shook his head, thinking of the vast amount of mind and money and time and talent that must have been spent on answering the questions, sorting out the theoretical problems, and finally the technical detail that resulted in those great hulking boxes downstairs in engineering. They had solved the problem. They had, by (he had to admit) splendid use of the information that had fallen into their hands, created a whole new world, a world of worlds to conquer…
… starting with Enterprise. The pity and the anguish that rose up in him now were a match for his anger at the attack on his own world, his own ship. This place cannot be left this way, he thought. The innocents here deserve a life freed of this tyranny. But how? How?
He was back up against the problem of inertia. “One man cannot change the future,” Spock had apparently said to Kirk. “But one man can move the present,” Kirk had replied. There, as so often in his career, he had been right. Give me a place to stand, that ancient scientist had said. But you needed a lever long enough, and the right place to stand. Spock, able as he was, had not been able to do it.
There was this, though—the time of Spock’s prediction was eighty years closer than it had been. The whole system was now inherently less stable, more prone to being disordered. With less effort? Picard wondered. But not until I get α few more answers. Who is the lever? Where do I stand?
He stared at the screen for a long time; then the door chimed. He blanked the screen and stood. “Come,” Picard said.
The door opened. Outside in the corridor, the lights were dimmed, whether because of one of the transient power failures, or the presence of ship’s night, he wasn’t sure. Either way, from the dimness, a darker shape moved in, graceful. He caught the swing of the glittering fabric, the metal of the harness and the gleam of the knife, and, very soft, the faint gleam of the light above his bed catching in the dark eyes. It was Counselor Troi.
CHAPTER 13
“Captain,” the counselor said. Picard sketched her a small half-bow and began rummaging in his mind for poetry—though right now he suspected that she would see in his mind not much more than a great sense of melancholy and distress.
“You’re having trouble sleeping,” she said. “I could feel it right up on the bridge.”
Her tone was gentle enough, but there was a broad streak of innuendo—if kindly sounding—right down the middle of it. He chose to ignore it for the moment and gestured her to a seat.
She ignored the gesture and sat comfortably on the end of the bed, leaning back on her straightened arms and looking at him. Those dark eyes dwelling on him were full of a speculative expression.
“A great feeling,” she said, “of dislocation, of stress. They did warn us that this would happen. An occupational hazard of the situation when we know that there are other… selves, like ourselves, out there. Curiosity is hard to stifle.”
“I would suppose so,” Picard said, “otherwise you would hardly be here.”
“Yes, well… It’s my business, after all, to keep an eye on the officers. To make sure they’re functioning at maximum efficiency. But there are a couple who have been having problems.”
He glanced at her.
“Yes. You and Beverly have had a little… disagreement, shall I call it?” She smiled a little at his sudden uncomfortable look. “It would have been difficult to miss. Her dreams were full of it.”
“Oh,” Picard said, abruptly glad that he had not been able to get any sleep. Heaven only knew what might have come out then when the mind was unguarded.
“The distress, the fear—it would be difficult not to feel them, especially in a sleeping mind. You should be careful how you frighten her, Captain. A frightened doctor can lose you crew out of carelessness… or spite.”
He walked away, feeling uneasy, knowing that the subject of Wesley Crusher was still between them. “Captain, perhaps it’s time for the two of us to come to some kind of agreement.”
“What kind of agreement, Counselor?”
“I’ll be frank with you. You are in deep trouble. Your mission is in crisis. Our timetable is already thrown considerably out of shape. Starfleet Command is not going to take kindly to this situation if it’s informed.”
“And you would have to inform them, of course.”
“Of course.” Her smile was the smile of someone who had been waiting for a specific position of strength for a long time and now finally finds herself in it. “We’ve been working at cross-purposes for a long time, you and I. I know that pride of yours—very few know it better. The mere fact of having to have a security officer whose authority runs near to yours annoys you. It always has.”
“There’s no point in being annoyed about something which is, after all, Fleet policy,” Picard said softly.
“Why, that’s quite true. And I’ve never had any doubt that you’ve been quite aware of that.”
“Never mind that, Counselor. Put aside the ‘soft words’ for the moment. I believe that regulations in this situation require you to notify Starfleet… do they not?”
“Well, normally, indeed they do. But communications can always be”—she shrugged slightly—“delayed.”
“I would have thought that the present state of the ship’s computers would have guaranteed that,” Picard said a little sourly.
To his growing concern, she smiled at him. “Oh, there are ways around that. Many of my functions, for good and proper reasons, don’t have anything to do with the main computer or go through it—lest in an accident situation like this”—did she put a little more twist on the word accident than should have been there?—“the contents should be compromised. Now, on the other hand… a certain amount of delay to prevent misunderstanding can be quite helpful—and the situation may well resolve itself at that poi
nt.”
She looked at him almost coquettishly. Picard, finding himself actively hating the role he needed to play at this point, started to move slowly toward her, his hands behind his back, looking at her with an expression that suggested he might have some interest… an interest that was at the moment the furthest from his mind. “And what circumstances,” he said, “would be required to engender this ‘helpful delay’?”
He got quite close to her, looking down into those great dark eyes; they really were extraordinarily beautiful—With the skin he made him mittens, Picard thought carefully, made them with the fur side inside, /made them with the skin side outside, /he, to get the warm side inside, /put the inside skin side outside.
“Well,” she said, “your little disagreement with the doctor… it’s been coming for a while now, Wesley aside. Certainly it seemed as if the situation would become increasingly stable over the last few years, as events receded in time. But there was a factor that neither of you thought of. As Wesley’s grown up, increasingly she’s seen his father in him. During his childhood the likeness was minimal, but now it’s getting stronger every day. She has that image, recalling the man she lost, in front of her eyes for a good part of every day. And she’s been given a fair amount of leisure, maybe too much, to reflect just what she did lose.” The counselor’s eyes flicked up to his. “What you took from her.