by Diane Duane
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…’”
Ael nodded. “I see,” she said. And after a moment she said, “I was half afraid to come here once, too. But I had no choice.”
“Only half?” Naraht said.
Ael chuckled at that. “Earth you are indeed,” she said, “and as such you see through stone readily enough with time. This noble ship—how I regretted, once, walking its corridors while being unable to bring it home to the Imperium in triumph as a prize of war.”
“But that changed,” Naraht said.
“It did,” Ael said. Not even to him, personified Element or not, would she say just how. But what she now valued most about the Enterprise—most paradoxically, with an eye to the ship’s many past encounters with Bloodwing—was its sense of being a sort of haven of peace. Though of course there were parts of it she still found most uncomfortable to be in; sickbay, particularly, and—
Ael swallowed. “Stop,” she said. The lift paused. “Destination?” it said.
“Madam?” Naraht said. “Is there a problem?”
Ael stood there, turning the idea over in her head for a moment. To her horror, she could find no good reason to reject it. “Mr. Naraht,” she said, “perhaps we might make one stop before we leave.”
“Certainly, Commander.”
“Deck five,” Ael said.
Off the lift went again, and presently its doors opened. Having had the idea, now Ael stood there frozen for several seconds. Embarrassment, though, finally moved her. She got out, Naraht rumbling along behind her, and stood in the corridor for a moment to get her bearings; it had been a different lift she had used the last time. Then she walked down the corridor, her heart pounding, to the door she remembered all too well.
Naraht did not comment, simply shuffled himself up against the wall to wait. Ael touched the signal beside the door.
“Come,” said the voice from inside.
She went inside; the door closed behind her.
Spock looked at her in considerable surprise and got up from the seat behind his desk, where he had been sitting with fingers steepled, gazing at something on the desk viewer that Ael could not see. “Commander,” he said.
“Mr. Spock,” Ael said, “I have interrupted you at meditation, I see. Please forgive me.” She turned to go.
“There is no need,” Spock said. “The meditation was not formal. How may I assist you?”
Ael opened her mouth, but could find nothing to say.
If this astonished her, she could only wonder what Spock must think of it. He showed no sign of surprise, though, and merely pulled out a chair from the other side of the desk. “Please, Commander,” he said, “sit down.”
Ael sat in that chair, though it cost her some effort. She had sat in it once before, and the memory was still not scarred over sufficiently to touch without discomfort.
Her eyes slid up to the S’harien hanging on the wall, a curve of darkness all too like the one across the chair in her cabin, which she could feel looking at her, these days, more than ever. There is your excuse, her mind whispered to her. Your last chance—
“I have a problem, Mr. Spock,” Ael said. “I have put off dealing with it for some time. It occurs to me that the most likely solution is unique, and that you possess it.”
“A description of the problem would assist me,” Spock said.
Ael swallowed again. “Starships,” she said, “are not the only hardware my people have purchased from the Klingons of late.”
“It would be only logical to assume as much,” Spock said.
“Indeed. After Sunseed and the DNA acquisition project were stolen, there appeared a sudden enthusiasm for that piece of equipment known as the mind-sifter. It apparently has become very popular among the intelligence forces of the Two Worlds, for Rihannsu have no defense against it. And even though our own Fleet sees to it that those of us who command are given buried mental protections similar to your own command conditioning, even those would not suffice to protect us against the Klingon tool.”
Spock nodded. “I believe your assessment is correct.”
“One must plan for all eventualities,” Ael said. “Worse may yet come to worst. Logic suggests that circumstance or accident might yet cause me to fall into their hands.”
“I cannot deny that, Commander.”
“Spock,” Ael said, “I will be open with you. The stakes in this game have greatly increased since I first began to play. Where only my own life was involved, and those of Bloodwing who have sworn themselves to me with full knowledge of the continuing risk, I have been willing to depend on my own resources. But now many more people, well-intentioned but perhaps ill-informed of the dangers of aligning themselves with me, are becoming involved, and I must hold them in mind as well. I have no desire to betray those on the Hearthworlds and among the colonies whom I know are engaged in the struggle about to begin. Yet I may not be able to avoid doing so, if my enemies succeed in preventing me from ending my life before they do their will with me. Should this happen, those who would continue the fight after my death would have no chance to do so. My destruction would mean theirs as well, and that of their families and very likely even their acquaintances. Therefore…”
Spock waited.
“I would ask,” Ael said, “whether there is among the mind disciplines one you might be able to teach me quickly, one that would allow me to make that end if other, more straightforward means are denied me. Or one that simply would make information I hold forever inaccessible to those who would use it against the ones who would continue the fight. I understand that this might be impossible…”
“Speed and the disciplines are usually incompatible, Commander,” Spock said. “However…”
Now it was her turn to wait. She was afraid, but she would not allow fear to dictate her actions. Her need, or rather the need of those who looked to her to be protected from the Empire, was too great.
Spock was very still. At last he turned back to her. “Commander,” he said, “it is possible that you might be taught. There is one condition in which speed does not obtain as an issue.”
Ael swallowed. “Mind-meld,” she said.
A silence fell again.
“I remember,” Ael said, “th
e technique that you mentioned Captain Suvuk of Intrepid had used after being captured by the personnel at Levaeri V, to prevent my people extracting his command codes from him. Kan-sorn.”
“It could be taught,” Spock said. “But there are other disciplines that might benefit you more, most specifically against interrogation. I have had some personal experience in this regard.”
And then he was silent again.
“But there is a problem,” said Ael.
“There are certain…ethical constraints,” Spock said. “There are constraints against teaching the disciplines, any of them, to those who have not committed themselves to—”
“Surak’s strictures for peace,” Ael finished for him, softly, and smiled a rather ironic smile. “Always Surak comes between our peoples, at the end.” She stood up, glancing once again at the S’harien that hung on the wall, and turned away. “Mr. Spock, I am sorry to have interrupted you to no purpose. Please excuse me.”
She was moving toward the door when he put out a hand and touched her arm. The sudden unexpectedness of it shocked Ael to the core. She stood as still as if she had been struck so.
The hand that Spock had raised now fell. “It has occurred to me,” Spock said, very low, “more than once, of late, that there may be more than one road to peace.”
Ael looked up into that still, unrevealing face and thought she saw more revealed there than Spock intended. “If I err in my judgment,” Spock said, “the price will be mine to pay, for a lifetime. Yet you too have paid a high price for your actions of late, yet have not regretted them.”
“Imprecision, Mr. Spock,” Ael said softly. “Bitterly indeed I have regretted my actions—some of them. Yet given the chance to repeat those actions, I would not do otherwise. Could not. Mnhei’sahe is its own reward—though sometimes that reward cuts deep. But what use is a sword that will not cut?”
It was Spock’s turn now to glance up at the S’harien, then back at her. “I do not think I err,” Spock said. “Commander, if you consent to this—”
She sat down again, trying to find calm. Spock slowly clasped his hands and stood still for a moment, the expression starting to go in-turned; but his eyes were dark with concern, with final warning. “I must apologize to you in advance for any discomfort I cause you and for any lack of clarity in the transmission,” he said. “I am not trained in the teaching of these techniques, though others have trained me in them. It is possible I will blunder.”
“I have no concern in that regard,” Ael said. Nonetheless, she was holding herself very still, determined not to tremble.
It is absurd. We have done this before. There was no harm done.
And I trust him.
He circled around behind the chair where she sat. This was the worst part, and Ael fought for calm. Very precisely his fingers positioned themselves over her nerve junctions, then touched her face. Ael took one long, shuddering breath and closed her eyes as, very slowly, another view of the world began overlaying itself on her own.
My mind to your mind. My thoughts…to your thoughts.
It had seemed impossible before, terrible, like insanity encroaching—another’s voice in her own mind, another presence that spoke with her own voice, somehow thinking thoughts that were not hers. But they were slowly becoming hers. Slowly the sense of difference between herself and the other was dwindling. The back of her mind shrieked in protest at the loss of difference, but Ael was in no mood for it, and the terror receded.
…easier this time…
Yes, the answer came. Our minds are drawing together. She could feel the congruencies establishing themselves, similarities interlocking, differences respected and incorporated into the nearly established wholeness. Closer still—the whole compacting, slipping into phase—
Our minds are one. As if she needed telling now, with the flare of union, the astonished fire of synapses momentarily blinding her, a storm of thought and memory, the two streams of thought rushing together like two rivers in spate, eddies whirling and pouring into one another, a great rush of starfire and darkness, knowledge and uncertainty—
She saw now why her people had lost this art so long ago. Had the people of the Crossing, so enamored of pride, individuality, difference, their own chosen insularity from the rest of the species they left behind, come to reject this forced sharing-of-being as too high a price? Too undermining to the cherished sense of lonely individuality? For here, despite the vast gulf that separated her life from this other one, her upbringing and tendencies and her whole cast of mind, what was plain here was how alike, how very alike she and this other were, a great wash of similarities and resonances had risen to drown the differences. And the question arose before her: Why in the Elements’ names did we give this up? Why did we walk away?
First see where you are. What must be done will become plain.
She stood in a darkness that shivered around its edges with red fire, and occupying the heart of the darkness was her other self’s mind as it might appear in its solitary state, a cool but frighteningly complex weave of intellection, logic, and peace all interleaved with and woven into an equally complex, barbed, interconnected tangle of emotion, passion, and old buried violence. The logic was not an overlay, but a network, a matrix in which the older, dangerous substrates were embedded, held and managed, broken up and made relatively safe—though preserved for when they might be needed. This dangerous landscape leveled itself out before her as she gazed, while the force that held it all inside, the mind and will that bound it all up, watched to see what she would do.
She stepped out into it, over it, knowing that in so doing she would lay herself progressively more bare. The raging heat and aridity at the heart of that other worldview smote her with every step, tyrannous, partly a longing recollection of Vulcan’s terrible heat, partly a paradigm for revelation, disclosure, layers of meaning burning and peeling away, revealing what lay beneath.
She gasped, but nonetheless moved forward over that dark and savage landscape, gazing down into its fires, and not so much seeing what lay within, but being seen by the source of the fires looking up and out at her. It perceived the image of Rihannsu space wrapped around her like a cloak, a great sweep of thousands of cubic light-years held all in mind despite its size, for after many years’ service she knew it intimately. All that immense darkness was strung through with the implication of forces moving, men and minds and ships, though the knowledge was fragmentary, and all that space seemed to burn now with the sense of frustration at what was missing, what needed yet to be known. More was coming—when would it come?—it was not enough.
The anger will keep you from seeing clearly what must be done. You must let it go.
She pushed herself through the stifling heat and the darkness, feeling the layers of her own anger and terror burning away. It came hard, but for her people, for her own people on Bloodwing and for the innocents on ch’Rihan and ch’Havran and the colony worlds, she must have this, would have this, no matter how she suffered.
As if from out of the fires beneath her the glimpse erupted into her consciousness: the furious faces, shouting into hers, and at the edges of her mind, something tearing, pressing in, ripping at her as if with hooks.
She staggered on, unable to believe the intensity of the pain. It came and went in great bouts and waves, every one leaving the mind tenderer than the one before, and with an awful feeling of being raped, intruded into, that most intimate and secret place torn at and gored, ultimate violation—
Do not allow the circumstances to distract you. The mind-sifter is simply a mechanism that performs mind-meld without permission. It can be defeated in two ways. The first, by disengaging the pain, by denying it permission. The second requires a higher level of accomplishment. The first is accomplished by completely mastering the emotion: distaste, anger, but mostly fear.
She shuddered all over. There. You see how the fear of what the pain will do is as bad as the pain itself, if allowed to persist. But both can be mastere
d—
—there again, the leering faces, roaring with amusement, the questions, like hot iron, like cruelly spiked and unbearably heavy weights, pressing in intolerably from every side. She cried out in anguish. It seemed worse to feel it through him, with the experience reflecting back and forth inside their joined mind, doubled, quadrupled, than it would have felt had it simply been happening to her. She fought back against what was happening, tried to hold the pain at a distance.
You are reacting incorrectly. His instructor, or him? There was no telling; that meld was this meld…This is not about resistance. The pain is part of what is really happening. To deny the truth is illogical. To accept it is the beginning of mastery. The pain must be accepted, and mastered, second by second, each second anew.
She struggled along through the ever-increasing burning, and suffered with him as he tried to achieve mastery in this most terrible situation, tried, failed. But tried again. And failed again, and tried again. And this time achieved it, finding his composure and adapting the techniques his instructor had shown him so long ago, not trying to stop the pain but accepting it wholly, including it, letting it pass through him, like a phaserblast through air; it vanishes, and the air closes around its path and is the air again, unbroken, untroubled. A flood of near disbelief, following the first second that the technique worked. But it had worked, though the next second the pain reasserted itself in all its fury. Again the air opens, includes it, lets it go by; and there is no pain. Again the pain; the air lets it pass; there is no pain…
There is no pain.
She fastened on that phrase, hope flaring in her, for now she felt his experience as he did, knew for sure that he had done it, had survived, and with his mind and his secrets intact. But there is more to it than that, the other self said. The words do not describe what you are making happen, but what has already happened. Resistance is not how the pain is overcome. Resistance implies that there exists something else that must second by second be resisted. This phenomenology will defeat you, leaving you at the mercy of the pain. But to master the pain, it must be included, accepted. Then it vanishes, then there truly is no pain.