Part 12 (1/2)
But not quite the whole truth...
”What the devil are you talking about, Sarek?” he asked, putting on his best puzzled frown while surrept.i.tiously laying what he hoped was a restraining hand on Scotty's arm. ”Scotty and I've known you for thirty years. Your son is one of our best friends.”
Watching Sarek's eyes closely, Kirk was virtually certain he saw a flicker of reaction but couldn't tell if it was surprise, anger or disbelief. Sarek-his Sarek-had always been even harder to read than his half-human son, and this version was obviously no easier.
”Explain,” the Vulcan said. ”I have no son, and, to the best of my knowledge, I have never seen either of you until a few moments ago.”
”What is this, some kind of Vulcan mind game?” Kirk asked, escalating his frown to a scowl. ”d.a.m.n it, Sarek, there's more than enough craziness going on without you pretending not to know us!”
”To what 'craziness' are you referring?”
Kirk snorted, chancing a sideways glance at Scotty to see if the engineer was on board yet. ”You mean besides you beaming us into some kind of high-tech dungeon for no reason? Where do I start? For one thing, there aren't supposed to be any Borg within thousands of pa.r.s.ecs, but there they are. Worse, they just appeared, quicker than a bird-of-prey can decloak. Where'd they come from? For another, what kind of s.h.i.+p is this Wisdom? That is where we're being held, isn't it? You said it was an 'Alliance' s.h.i.+p, whatever that is. Did Vulcan pull out of the Federation when Earth wasn't looking and start its own- ”
”I a.s.sure you I am not playing games of any kind,” Sarek interrupted. His voice was still under tight control but his face was beginning to take on a pallor Kirk had never seen on a Vulcan. ”Tell me what you were doing when you say the Borg vessels 'appeared.'”
Kirk let out an exasperated sigh but inwardly he exulted. ”We were investigating that thing back there, that ribbon of energy,” he said, giving his voice the angry impatience of someone being forced to waste his time answering foolish questions. ”Whatever it is, it's already destroyed at least two s.h.i.+ps and killed hundreds of people. We were trying to get a closer look at it, trying to find out what it is, but mostly we were looking for a way to get rid of it before it had a chance to incinerate anything else!”
”The Vortex,” Sarek said, half turning to the viewscreen behind him and entering a series of commands into the control panel beneath it. A moment later, the screen was filled with the now familiar maelstrom of crackling energy.
Visual aids, no less, Kirk thought as he nodded with feigned impatience. ”If that's what you Vulcans call it, yes, that's what we were trying to get a good look at. We were observing it from what we thought was a safe distance when... something happened. That thing-the Vortex-must've reached out and done something to us. For a second, it flickered, and the next thing we knew, there were those two Borg s.h.i.+ps. Obviously, we weren't inclined to stick around to see what they were up to.”
”Do you have sensor records of the events you describe?”
”We'd just gotten there, Sarek. We were just getting set up when things went crazy. Now are you going to tell us what the devil is going on? And why you're treating us like strangers? Or enemies, even?”
Sarek turned abruptly back to the screen. ”Here,” he said as his fingers tapped in more commands, ”is an enhancement of what one of our observation platforms recorded in the vicinity of the Vortex at the time you say the Borg s.h.i.+ps appeared.”
The image of the Vortex vanished, replaced by a motionless starfield. Within seconds, something flickered into existence and vanished, but it was enough to draw their eyes to that spot on the screen. A moment later, the object appeared again and again faded, but this time Kirk recognized it, and he didn't have to fake his look of astonishment.
It was the G.o.ddard.
Another appearance, another fade, and finally it remained, solid.
”It would seem,” Sarek said as the image of the G.o.ddard froze on the screen, ”that you are the ones who appeared out of nowhere, not the Borg.”
Which should not have been a surprise, Kirk realized abruptly. From his and Scotty's point of view on the G.o.ddard, this entire universe had suddenly appeared around them, brought into existence by something Picard had done far in the past. It was only logical that, from this universe's point of view-from Sarek's point of view-Scotty and he were the ones who had come into existence, suddenly and inexplicably.
Which would, Kirk realized with relief, fit perfectly with the idea that he had been trying to hint at-the idea that the G.o.ddard had accidentally been transported here from an alternate reality, perhaps by some side effect of the energy ribbon, which looked to be the only thing that existed, unchanged, in both universes. If he could sell that idea to Sarek-or better yet, if Sarek came up with it himself-it would then be only logical for Scotty and himself to try to find out where and when the two realities had parted company. Scientific curiosity would demand it. They could simply lay out the history of their reality and compare it to the history of this reality, with particular emphasis on when and where the Borg first appeared.
Kirk put a look of suspicion on his face as Sarek turned away from the screen to face them again. ”I thought you said you weren't playing games with us, Sarek,” he said accusingly, gesturing at the viewscreen. ”Then what the devil do you call that?”
”It was precisely what it appeared to be: a record of your arrival. What we have yet to determine is where you arrived from and by what means you traveled.”
Kirk snorted. ”We didn't arrive from anywhere. Unless it's from a whole different universe, a sane universe where- ”
He stopped abruptly, scowling at Sarek. ”Is that what you're trying to tell us? That we are from a-from an alternate universe? That's ridiculous.”
”Under normal circ.u.mstances I would agree, even though our scientists have long suggested that realities alternate to our own could theoretically exist. However, the circ.u.mstances I find myself confronting now are hardly normal. That you came from an alternate universe appears, in fact, to be the only logical explanation-if, that is, you are telling at least an approximation of the truth when you say you have known a Vulcan named Sarek for three decades.”
”And if those images you showed us are real.” Kirk shook his head stubbornly. ”Look, Sarek- ”
”The images are quite real, I a.s.sure you. As are these.” Once again Sarek's fingers darted across the controls and the image on the viewscreen changed. The miniature G.o.ddard vanished and was replaced by- Earth.
But not an Earth Kirk had ever seen before.
The shapes of the continents and oceans were instantly recognizable, but all traces of green and blue were gone, as was the pristine white of the clouds Kirk had seen from orbit a thousand times. Continents and oceans from pole to pole were smothered in a mottled brownish-yellow haze streaked with cancerous gray clouds.
”This is the last image we have of Terra before the Borg erected a sensor s.h.i.+eld around the Terran system,” Sarek explained. ”The transformation to a Borg world had been underway for several years at that time. It has almost certainly been completed in the century since.”
Kirk's stomach knotted. He had long since accepted the likelihood that, in this universe, Earth was a Borg slave world, a part of their so-called collective, but until that image appeared on the screen, his acceptance had been at a sanitized intellectual level, the way one can intellectually accept the reality of the bodies buried beneath the neatly mown gra.s.s and flower-bedecked headstones of a cemetery without actually visualizing the decaying bodies in the darkness below or considering the grisly mult.i.tude of ways they had died. But now the image of the actual dying Earth-a murdered Earth-shattered the fragile barrier between intellect and emotion and brought with it a vivid image of the grotesque Borg cubicles he had seen in the G.o.ddard's briefing program. For a moment all Kirk could see in his mind's eye were the zombie-like faces of the friends and family he had left behind on Earth, now nothing more than cyborg slaves that had once been human but now retained only enough of their humanity to be aware of the nightmare in which they were trapped.
If any of them had even been born in this universe.
This universe that had come into existence at the very moment when he should have been going out of existence, consumed by the nucleonic fury of the Vortex.
His stomach knotted even more painfully in a sudden spasm of guilt. Was the logic he had outlined to Scotty both facile and faulty? There was no way, it said, that his own rescue could have caused this universe-shattering change. It had to be something that Picard and that other Enterprise had done, centuries further back in time.
But no one truly knew what kind of logic governed the rules of time travel. No one even knew if such rules existed.
Above all, there was the disconcerting ”coincidence” that the changes had occurred-the Enterprise-B had vanished, the Borg cubes had appeared-in virtually the same instant Scotty had s.n.a.t.c.hed him out of the path of the Vortex.
The everyday logic of cause and effect had plenty to say about that. However, if you got deep enough into the mathematics of quantum physics and all the other arcane disciplines that theoreticians dabbled with in hopes of learning how the universe really worked, you would find evidence that even normal time-whatever ”normal time” was-didn't necessarily have to flow in one direction only. That which was cause when time flowed in one direction became effect if time flowed in the opposite direction. Overlay that with the mathematical descriptions of warp drive and slingshotting through high intensity gravity fields, and theoreticians in even the most ivory of towers could only speculate on how it all would apply to the so-called ”real world.”
All of which was several light-years over his head and even over Scotty's, not to mention the heads of virtually everyone else he had ever known. As far as Jim Kirk was concerned, it all came down to a resounding: ”Who knows?”
And what it all led Kirk to was the inevitable question he had been avoiding since the moment he had learned what this timeline contained: If I were to go back and pitch myself into the Vortex, would that put things back the way they're supposed to be? Would it rescue those billions on what had once been Earth from the Borg h.e.l.l it had become?
If he was certain that that was the case-and if he could get out of this seemingly escape-proof prison-he would do it in an instant. Not gladly, not even without regret, but without hesitation. He literally couldn't live with himself if he didn't.
But what if, he couldn't help but think, his being saved from the Vortex wasn't the key? What if he'd been right all along? What if it was Picard's doing, not his and Scotty's? Or something different altogether, unrelated to either of them? What if he allowed himself to be plunged into the Vortex and the timeline continued unchanged, ignoring his sacrifice altogether?
Or what if the timeline did change-but into something even worse?
No, the time might come when they would know enough to say with certainty that his own death was required to set things right, but that time hadn't come yet, not by a long shot, not until they found out what Picard and that other Enterprise had done.
But in order to find that out-in order to do anything-he had to get Sarek to let them out of this cage.
”It looks like you're right, Sarek,” Kirk said somberly, for once not having to disguise or exaggerate his true feelings when he spoke. ”This is an alternate universe, one in which our whole world has been destroyed. I hope you won't mind if we try to find out why.”
With an eagerness she hadn't felt in centuries, yet with an almost equally intense uneasiness, the woman calling herself Guinan waited on the D'Zidran's bridge for the Enterprise to come within transporter range.
She had lived with the ghost of the one who called himself Picard for more than four hundred years. Until a few minutes ago she had a.s.sumed it had been a dream, despite the fact that her people seldom dreamed. It was likely a result of her many years on Picard's world, she had often told herself. Humans were-had been-a dreaming race if nothing else, and it wouldn't be the first time she had temporarily acquired traits of the races she observed and listened to. Some inner part of herself, she had always suspected, was listening as intently as her outer sh.e.l.l, temporarily adapting itself to different worlds in ways that made her observations, her ”listening” more... complete.
After all, what better way to understand a race than by not only partic.i.p.ating in the conscious lives of its members but by also emulating their generally more honest inner lives? This would have been particularly useful on a world like Earth, where inner and outer lives were often so different as to be almost irreconcilable.
But this particular dream had been so vivid that for decades she had had only to close her eyes for it to return and play itself out on the russet glow of her lowered eyelids.