Part 7 (1/2)
The Mortal That Was a Machine There shall come in the last days of the world a Thanopstru, that is to say, a Bringer of Death. And this shall be his sign. He shall s.h.i.+ne in the night sky like a sun, yet be tailed like a meteor. Brighter than the dancing moons shall he s.h.i.+ne, and the last days will be rich with the rus.h.i.+ng of dailong in the seas, and joyous with dancing. Be of good cheer. Ye are doubly blessed, who live in the days of the Thanopstru.
And in moments of terror or hards.h.i.+p, ye shall recite over and over the holy name of the Thanopstru, and from the certain knowledge of the coming cataclysm, you shall draw comfort, you shall find stillness without your troubled hearts.
-From the Holy Panvivlion ONCE MORE, CAPTAIN PICARD was poring through those field notes, trying to glean some bit of information they could fix on, something to explain the mysteries of Thanet.
And once more, the problems seemed to get more and more convoluted, the more one delved into them.
He looked up: he found himself face-to-face with Guinan. Somehow, she had known he needed to speak with her.
He said, ”Look, it's easy to say, don't touch their belief system, don't upset their civilization. But then, I start thinking.
”If a man is dying of an incurable, painful disease-if he's suffering, if science cannot help-and he decides to pull his own plug-that's one ethical dilemma. But if he's in the prime of life, if he has nothing holding him back except an illusion-if he has so much left to give to the rest of the world, so much potential, so much art and literature, so much beauty-is it right to strip away that illusion?”
”Your call, Captain,” Guinan said softly.
”I know it is,” Picard said, and turned back to Halliday's field notes, feeling once again- ”The aloneness,” Guinan sighed. ”Yes, I know.”
CONFIDENTIAL REPORT:.
Dr. Robert Halliday's field notes The transcript continues: Last week, I went to a thanhalyrion, which is a sort of wake for the end of the world. There was more singing and dancing than you can imagine, and what amazed me was that, within the rigidity of their cla.s.s structure, there seemed to be more than a little fluidity. There was an intoxicating liquid called peftifesht wine, which made everyone very merry but seemed to have the side effect of relaxing the caste system.
At precisely seven minutes after the hour of Karambe Ascendant (the Thanetians measure time by the complex rhythms of their many moons) a beautiful woman-a virgin, I was told-emerged from an inner room into the atrium.
There was a sweeping spiral staircase in the middle of the courtyard that seemed to lead nowhere. The staircase leaned; it ended on a tiny parapet that overlooked the ever-present sea. Well, the celebrants immediately fell into a trancelike state when the virgin entered, and they immediately began to whisper, over and over, like a mantra, the word thanopstru. Well, words are just air, but you cannot imagine how terrifying it is to hear this word whispered, in unison, by a hundred people, rhythmically, almost like zombies.
The chanting crescendoed; it was more than a whisper now, it was a thunder-roar, and the young woman mounted the parapet, and suddenly, maybe it was a break in the clouds in the night sky, maybe it was a moment preordained by their astronomers, but there appeared at the zenith of heaven this glowing, many-tailed star-a comet, I suppose-and the virgin leaped into the sea.
And then the chanting stopped, and there was silence for a very long time as everyone at the party drank an entire goblet of peftifesht-and another, and another-while I, an alien and a xenoanthropologist, eager to etch every moment of this bizarre ritual onto the clay tablets of my consciousness, did not drink, and was perhaps the only halfway sober person in the entire courtyard.
Here's the strangest part: I know the girl jumped. I saw her dive, heard the splash when she hit the waves. Yet an hour later, when I asked the other witnesses how they felt about the death of one so young, they denied the whole incident! Indeed, there was such a legend of a virgin suicide in their mythology. A beautiful story, they said, but it was of the past, not the present. And, they a.s.sured me, it was fiction, not fact.
The Thanetians live in a world that in their own minds is fleeting, illusory; they do not believe that the real is real. This is in conflict with the Federation which is, on the whole, materialistic; the spiritual is often kept to one side. So, for all I know, n.o.body saw a young woman leap to her death. For all I know, they all edited it out of their collective thoughts; we need to have this peftifesht a.n.a.lyzed; I will include a sample in my next physical reports package-a.s.suming the planet is still here in a month.
I think I actually will down a goblet of that peftifesht before I start on the next chapter of these field notes.
”Computer,” said the captain, ”what's in the peftifesht?”
”Water, mostly,” said the computer. ”Water, simple carbohydrates, a few trace elements.”
”Nothing that would get anyone drunk,” Picard said, thinking of the vineyards of his childhood home-lost now, lost.
So even their native intoxicant worked by the magic of illusion, of autosuggestion. Culture was the primary imperative, not chemistry. The mind was master, not the world beyond.
He took a sip of the synthetic peftifesht. It was cool, a little cloying-and not intoxicating in the slightest.
Chapter Fifteen.
To Save a World ”HE HAS SO MUCH to tell us,” Deanna said, back on the Enterprise. ”I have to go back in. There has to be a way to save him.”
In the conference room, the atmosphere was serious. There was a profound conflict here; the Federation had standard rules for adjudicating such conflicts, yet these were sentient beings-a few million sentient beings-whose civilization and serf-image were at stake.
Picard had agreed to let the amba.s.sador and his daughter sit in on the meeting. The hours, of course, were ticking away. It seemed only minutes ago that they still had two days to figure out what to do. Now it was down to a few hours. He had sent in technicians-he hadn't dared risk sending Troi in again yet-and finally the s.h.i.+p's doctor.
”Dr. Crusher?” Picard turned to Beverly, who had just made a brief trip to the comet's heart, and who now appeared somber and dejected.
She said, ”I've a.n.a.lyzed the boy's cell structure, the hard-wiring of his neurons to the silicon-based nervous system of the comet itself-and I've got to tell you, there's no way to free him. His brain has been soldered into the computer that runs that infernal weapon. It's appalling.”
Picard watched the amba.s.sador, whose fists clenched and unclenched on the table. What he must be going through, he thought. It's all unraveling-everything he ever held to be ultimate truth. ”You're saying that to remove the boy from the weapon would be-”
”To kill him, Captain,” said Dr. Crusher.
”And yet,” said the captain, ”the needs of the many-” He was quoting the ancient adage that a great hero of the Federation had once uttered, giving his life for the life of his s.h.i.+p-all knew those words by heart, and all honored them.
”It's true,” said Worf. ”Yet honor demands that we exhaust all possibilities before allowing death to occur needlessly-”
Picard said, ”Mr. La Forge?”
”Beverly is right, Captain,” La Forge said. ”We can't separate the boy from the comet without severing vital neural links. He's part of that thing now, a cyborg as it were.”
Picard shuddered, remembering a time when he too had been joined to a great machine-a machine intent on destroying all individuality, all true sentience in the entire galaxy.
”But we'd just be killing him,” said Counselor Troi, and Picard understood that she, of all the crew members, had actually felt what the comet felt, had been one with its emotions.
”As he would kill millions of others,” Picard said, with relentless logic.
”Captain, there's a margin of safety still. An hour, half an hour-to find out what we need to know. We don't know what world this comet is from or why the boy welded to the machine is so clearly Thanetian in species. We ought to know these things.”
Before we destroy him, Picard added silently. He winced. Perhaps the child's death was inevitable, but he would be d.a.m.ned if he wouldn't use every resource and every moment at his disposal to change the boy's fate.
La Forge spoke up suddenly. ”Captain, Commander Data is contacting us from the planet's surface-just beneath the surface, actually.”
”On screen,” said the captain.
Data's face formed where there had been a sea of stars. He was seated-no, enveloped-in a chair that seemed to be made of flesh, with tentacles writhing about his arms and feet. Behind him, other members of the Enterprise away team, as well as Dr. Halliday and his son, seemed similarly tethered to a wall. The room resembled an organic version of a control room in a stars.h.i.+p.
”Captain,” said Data, ”the largest fauna on this world are not natural creatures at all. They are some kind of elaborately bioengineered cyborg, and they seem to contain records, racial memories, of Thanet's history beyond the five thousand years the Thanetians have themselves recorded. It seems they have been expecting us-or someone, at any rate. This technology parallels the holodeck technology, except that the neurons fired are of living tissue rather than inorganic in origin.”
The bridge crew looked at their comrade on the screen, and then at each other, in wonder.
”Captain, I believe we are on the verge of understanding why this thanopstru has been launched to destroy Thanet. I am a.s.similating information as quickly as my positronic brain paths will permit. A few more hours ought to illuminate everything. There seems to be-some kind of communication between the dailong and the comet-one is controlling the other-it is uncertain which. We are seeing the past right now. With astonis.h.i.+ng verisimilitude. We were wrong about this world in many ways. It is not primitive at all. In fact, we are sensing the biography of the very life-form inside the comet now-and we are living through a simulacrum of its actual lifetime, five thousand years ago.”
”I knew nothing of this!” said the amba.s.sador. ”Does the High s.h.i.+vantak perhaps know something we do not know? Is our entire culture-an artificial construct?”