Part 8 (1/2)

Thanet.

On the bridge, a welter of information and images was being relayed as Captain Picard watched, and his crew a.n.a.lyzed.

Tanith was a beautiful world and, apart from its strange orbit around a double-star system, could have been the twin of Thanet. But Tanith's civilization was no more. Images of wasteland came flooding in from the s.h.i.+p's computer as it verified Data's coordinates.

There were mountains sheared into plateaus. Pockmarks of bombardments. Tanith's atmosphere, once rich in oxygen, had become a soup of poisons. And the destruction was clearly man-made. Tanith's death had been caused by a hail of comets-comets just like the one that was now heading toward Thanet. Comets that contained many types of destructive weapons, from primitive thermonuclear devices to viruses to the biological wherewithal for a kind of reverse terraforming-the metamorphosis of a friendly world into an uninhabitable deathworld.

The horror of the present contrasted with the images that were being gleaned from Data's transmission and which were appearing on screen. They were not images of the pinpoint clarity that would be produced by a Federation computer, but blurred sometimes, and sometimes fringed with a prismatic field; the mechanisms of image retrieval and transmission were clearly quite alien, and had the flavor of a biological origin.

Meanwhile, there was Deanna Troi. She and the girl had already beamed aboard the comet, and a third series of images was being transmitted now, so that the bridge's viewing area was now a jigsaw puzzle, the pictures complementing each other, contradicting each other too, sometimes.

Picard watched as Deanna and Kio inched their way down the narrow corridor, their footsteps spiraling with the changing gravity. There was something about those walkways that reminded him of his own subjugation to the Borg-the dehumanizing horror of it lived inside him, would always be with him. Even in his dreams of childhood, the idyllic vineyards of his youth, there was always a machine. Watching. Never letting go. What that child must be going through, Picard thought.

The innermost chamber irised open, and he saw the child.

I cannot weep. I cannot feel. I have no eyes. I have no limbs.

But I see eyes. But I see limbs.

They do not exist.

I see a young boy floating. I see limbs. I see eyes. I see a tear roll down his cheek. Isn't that you?

Limbs? Eyes? Flesh is an illusion.

Deanna wept.

Data watched the sailors say their good-byes and leave the pier. A robot, hovering in the air, sang military slogans as it swam past them, pa.s.sing out flyers that appeared to advertise a military draft.

Thanetians are your foes, the robot sang. The only good Thanetian is a dead Thanetian.

He found that with a bit of selective bank switching, he was able to read the thoughts of those characters in the drama whose bodies were also inhabited by the Enterprise crew members from the distant future and the members of the research team-Adam, Ta.r.s.es, Halliday, and all the others were functioning as a sort of mirroring algorithm, al lowing the information expressed in the form of human thoughts to be read as word-based data.

Now he was in Artas's mind: Gotta hurry home. Where's Mother? The big day coming soon. So much excitement. So much riding on it all. Don't want to disappoint her. ...

Hal-Therion sar-Bensu: Danger to the world. The boy is our great hope -perhaps our greatest.

She was standing by the water's edge, blowing the boy a kiss, a beautiful dark-haired woman with curiously intense eyes- ”Mother!” Artas cried out.

Data's gaze followed the boy. His mother, he realized, was being played in this simulation by another member of the Enterprise.

Artas ran through the crowd into the arms of Counselor Deanna Troi, laughing as she embraced him.

A young girl stood beside Deanna, a girl with the face of Kio sar-Bensu; behind her, three fierce-looking women stood guard. She was watching the longs.h.i.+p intently, waiting for someone. When Indhuon appeared behind his younger brother, she waved at him; but he averted his eyes.

”I'm in,” Deanna said, ”and seeing the ancient planet through the eyes of-the boy's mother. Appropriate enough.”

Picard listened, and behind him the amba.s.sador sat, consternation written all over his face as the mult.i.tasking viewscreens alternated between the viewpoints of various characters, all the images linked through the central conduit of Data's mind. It was almost as though Data's consciousness was editing the raw footage of these people's lives into a continuous story with all the excitement of a well-written holodeck program. The other crew members, too, sat riveted by the story.

”Now I'm in,” came Kio sar-Bensu's excited voice. ”Oh-this is beautiful-like a dream version of our world.”

”Witchcraft! Heresy!” the amba.s.sador muttered.

”I'm someone very important here,” Kio continued. ”This woman here is the mother of Artas, a boy everyone is calling 'The Great Hope.' But even she defers to me. And my father is-look, there he comes!”

They saw him on screen now-wearing the face and somatype of Dr. Robert Halliday, but the robes of a very high official indeed- ”A s.h.i.+van-Jalar!” the amba.s.sador gasped. ”They exist only in our mythology-why, the High s.h.i.+vantak himself communicates with the spirit of one, within the holiest of holies, which only he can enter.”

”So Thanet had a sister world once, a planet not too far away, who shared its culture,” Picard said.

La Forge continued to report the results of his research. ”Tanith,” he said, ”doesn't exist. What's left is uninhabitable. The atmosphere is stripped away mostly, what's left is poisonous gases, the oceans evaporated, the continents pockmarked-I'll put it on screen.”

A collage of a devastated planet appeared next to the lush image of the seaport.

”Can that really be the same world?” Picard said.

”If those coordinates are accurate-or even relatively accurate,” La Forge said. ”There's no other world, dead or alive, that falls into that range.”

Amba.s.sador Straun was struggling to frame a question. ”H-How-long ago-are the images we're seeing?”

”The ruined world is now, Your Excellency,” La Forge said. ”The living images you're seeing are-five thousand or so years-I can get an exact fix based on the positions of key stars in the simulated evening sky-five thousand point zero seven years old.”

It hit them all at once. Picard saw that they all knew it. No one had to say it aloud.

The people in those images had only a few days to live.

Chapter Seventeen.

Angels ARTAS AWOKE. Today was the day he'd been waiting for. He was the fastest, the brightest. He had pa.s.sed the penultimate test, and there was only one remaining.

I am the one, he thought, who will redeem my people.

Tanith's striated sunlight streamed in through the screens. He rubbed his eyes. Yesterday was wonderful, he thought. I rode in the Great s.h.i.+van-Jalar's private barge. His Mult.i.tude actually smiled at me-actually shared with me apiece of his private candy! He sat up, looked at himself in the mirror-pool at the foot of his bed, preening in front of his image. He was twelve years old, and by the end of the day he hoped to win a great prize-the privilege of never seeing his thirteenth birthday.

Then-something strange happened.

The mirror pool began to s.h.i.+ft and swirl. A kind of smoke started spiraling from it, and the reflective mirrorstuff started s.h.i.+mmering. Grumbling, he reached down to see if he could adjust the settings.

And then, suddenly, there was another boy in the room, stepping out of the mirror pool. He wore alien clothing, no tunic but a double-legged second skin that hugged his legs, and an upper covering of the same stretch fabric. Embarra.s.sed that he was not yet dressed, Artas quickly donned his tunic, with its clan markings, which told everyone who he was and let those who must defer to him know their place.

The alien boy had no clan markings at all.

”What are you doing here?” he said.

The boy's lips moved, but nothing came out. He seemed to be struggling with a s.h.i.+ny handheld device. His hands were not webbed.

”Is this the final test that I'm supposed to undergo?” Artas asked.