Do Comets Dream? Part 1

Do Comets Dream?

by S.P. Somtow.

Part One

The Reluctant Amba.s.sador O bringer of death I love thee, O lord of destruction, I praise thee, In thee alone The circle closes The end begins The beginning ends.

Fire-breather, dark embracer, Silence my heart As it cries out in transcendent joy; Still my last leap, Snuff me out At the climax of love, For thou alone Art my secret self, And the shadow of my secret self, And the love that is death.

-From the Book of Final Songs in the Holy Panvivlion Your Excellencies: The advisory board on preliminary consideration of worlds for Federation status wishes to place the following doc.u.ment into the record. It's been arriving in fragments; a quark star's gravity field seems to be disrupting the subs.p.a.ce communication system. Nevertheless, we do feel that it provides valuable secondary insight into the Federation's investigation. For your information, Dr. Halliday has been living quietly on Thanet for the last two years, gathering a not inconsiderable ma.s.s of information about their culture.

We're going to leave you alone with the Halliday report, Jean-Luc. Take your time over it. But not too much time, of course. We want you to decide what is right for yourself, and for the Enterprise, of course; but it also needs to be right for the Federation. There are issues that you need to wrestle with.

After the big conference with the senators and representatives, after the formal dinner, the dress uniforms, the delegates, the delicacies from remote star systems, it still boiled down to one man, one decision, and deniability.

Captain Picard had encountered so many new civilizations in his career. But he knew there was no magic formula for dealing with them. Each one was a microuniverse unto itself.

Halliday's report, they told him, is sporadic, sometimes barely coherent. The man's a genius, but he's also insane.

I know the type, Picard thought, as he politely sipped the lightly fermented peftifesht wine, a Thanetian delicacy that Starfleet's replicators had only just figured out how to create-tactfully subst.i.tuting placebo ingredients, of course, for some of its more hazardous intoxicants.

Picard had dealt with eccentric field xenologists before, but the report of Robert Halliday, former professor of xenolinguistics at Cambridge University as well as erstwhile researcher into obscure Vulcan rituals (for which he had been expelled from Vulcan for carrying his research a little past the point of propriety)-suffice it to say that Halliday's history was colorful.

They had left him in a womblike cubicle to examine the doc.u.ments. A young ensign informed him that more would be forthcoming as soon as the computer managed to transcribe their curious format-good old-fashioned handwriting.

Even the fact that the report was actually written on paper, using what Commander Data might have referred to as a human-operated a.n.a.log inkjet device-a pen-was proof of the man's eccentricities. But Captain Picard knew all about technophobes-he had, after all, grown up with one. It was just another detail to be filed away, added to the equation.

Calmly, he continued reading.

CONFIDENTIAL REPORT:.

Dr. Robert Halliday's field notes The Transcript continues: -have been hard at work translating the Panvivlion, the Thanetian Sacred Text, into some of the languages of the Federation. Oddly enough, it works very well in Klingon; much of the same rigid codification of honor and caste.

Came across a curious myth in the Seventh Book, which is called Holokinesthanasionosis, which loosely translated means "the death and rebirth of the entire universe." I don't have it all done, but we might as well begin with this-Thanopstru, or "death-dealing star." It's rather interesting how many of the oldest root words in the main language here seem reminiscent of the Greek and Sanskrit lexicon; but to speculate on that would be at best a digression; you must forgive the xenophilologist in me, sometimes the very sound of an alien word sets me off... but I was speaking of the myth.

Five thousand years ago and a day, quoth the sage Outrenjai, came a great thanopstru to the world, and the thanopstru is the eye of the almighty, and the hand of he-who-shapeth. And the thanopstru descended upon the world, and for a span of time did fire rain from the sky, to cleanse the darkness from men's souls. And at the end of that span of time, all knowledge pa.s.sed from the minds of those men who survived the holocaust, and they became as madmen, drinking blood and eating the brains of the dead. The wisdom that had acc.u.mulated over the last five thousand years was wiped clean, and now resideth within the treasure-chests of the dailong, who lie in the heart of the deep.

And he that had once been highest became lowest; and the power to rule pa.s.sed into the hands of the one child who had shown no fear.

And that child spake, and said: We shall unlearn all that has been learned. For this is a new heaven and a new earth, and the laws of the universe are new laws.

For all old knowledge is as useless tinsel; and for this, the almighty hath made the human race as a newborn babe, to begin the cycle anew; and he hath provided the thanopstru, to return once more when the cycle closes; for threescore and ten is the time of a man; but the time of an age of men is nine hundred and ten times threescore and ten.

And the coming of the thanopstru shall be signaled with visions and visitations. And sign of the moment of the world's end shall be thus: there shall sound from the place of the most high a great death-knell, which is called the Bell of Shivan-SarZ.

Do not resist the thanopstru, but greet his coming with gladness and laughter; for death is not death, but the doorway to a new existence; everything that has ever happened will happen again, and everything that happeneth now is but an echo of an ancient happening; for all time is but a movement inside a stillness; as the hands of a clock seem to race against time, yet circ.u.mscribe a closed and unchanging circle, so creation itself; rejoice that you are born to die, rejoice in your place in the cosmos, rejoice in the dance of creation and destruction, rejoice, for time hath swallowed its own tail, and hath given birth to itself.

-the interesting thing about all this-well, it's not much different from several human cosmologies, such as the cyclic view of history of the ancient Hindus.

-that's all fine and dandy, there's a hundred fatalistic cycle-of-history cultures in every quadrant. And yet there's something a little disquieting about this particular myth.

You see-and this may be a coincidence, for in a galaxy like ours with a trillion worlds, a trillion rolls of the dice, coincidences this monumental could occur-I've found evidence of a big natural disaster five thousand years ago. And then again, their entire civilization seems to have sprung full-grown out of nowhere ... like the G.o.ddess Athena from the head of Zeus-if you know your terrestrial mythology, which, somehow, I doubt.

Oh, yes, Dr. Halliday, mad as a hatter-I know what you people say. Let me continue.

It's a two-p.r.o.nged coincidence. Just as they discover (or, as their own mythology would say, rediscover) warp drive, just as they're ready to join (or rejoin) the community of worlds, the five-thousand-year cycle rolls around. People start to go wild. They believe in the end of the world-they believe so thoroughly that computers on this world are programmed to reset their calendars to zero at the cycle's end, there's no way of even expressing in their language very easily the idea of a straight timeline-so this end-of-the-world fever sets in, a cross between fatalism and "what-the-h.e.l.l"-ism.

So what do you know? The prophecies are right. There's a comet headed right toward Thanet, and n.o.body's planning to beam out.

My suggestion is that the Federation do something.

"Well," Picard said, at the breakfast conference the next morning, "I think that Dr. Halliday's. .h.i.t the nail on the head. The Federation should do something. You have decided to send me, that's clear enough. You've also decided to leave my instructions very vague, because our actions may chip away at that which we all hold most sacred-the Prime Directive. To save their civilization is to destroy it."

The round table had its share of amba.s.sadors, admirals, and planetary governors. For half an hour, they had exchanged pleasantries; but there was an underlying tension.

Picard's words were met with silence, with indecision.

"I suppose the operative word here is deniability," Picard said softly.

And there was more silence.

It's lonely to be a starship captain. That went without saying, was pretty much a cliche in the world of Starfleet. s.p.a.ce had its share of lonely moments: the endless starstreams, the dislocation of warping s.p.a.ce-time, the silence between the stars; but here, on terra firma, with the Golden Gate rising from the mist through the great bay windows of this conference room, it was possible to feel even lonelier.

At length, Picard said softly, "I will do what has to be done."

Chapter One.

Artas LONELINESS.

For five thousand years he had floated, balanced on the boundary of the real and the dream. Who am I? There were times when the question made no sense to him at all; and then there were those other times, when images came, pictures of a paradise so achingly real that he knew they must have been true once.

A meadow of gray-green gra.s.s. A breeze. A deep blue sky. A dark, mysterious sea. Clouds, too, silver clouds fringed with gilt and purple; the moon that danced and the moon that wept. A twisted tower wrapped in vines that writhed as they sucked the vapor from the rock.

Warmth. A warm body pressed against his. A warm feeling, racing through blood and tendon and tissue. A warm star bathing him in comforting radiance.

Where did these sensations come from? In the here and now, there was no warmth. The place he was in was cold. He knew it must be cold, even though he had no neurons with which to sense the cold; he had no bones to ache, no blood to freeze. But he still knew it must be cold, just as his barely conscious self was fueled by a memory of warmth, and he knew the absence of warmth to be called cold. He also knew he was not meant to remember this much.

Forget! Forget!

A stern voice. It reverberated within what must be his mind. He knew that the voice was there to be obeyed, that he had been created and programmed solely to show obedience to that voice, and that terrible things would happen if he listened to the other voices, the voices of warmth and comfort. He no longer remembered what those terrible things would be. Surely there was no worse punishment than this-eternal exile from the warmth.

Forget these images! Concentrate on what you are now! What are you? Say it! the voice intoned.

I am vengeance, he answered, I am death.

Death, said the stern cold voice. And what do you bring?

I am the bringer of darkness. For five thousand years that conversation had played itself over and over in the sterile wasteland that was now his mind.

And what else do you bring?

Destruction.

And what else?

Death.

But what was death? Was this not death already, this endless journey through eternal cold, this sterile emptiness?

And how shall death come?

By fire.

But oh, he thought, how long until that fire? How long until that cataclysm shatters the frozen night? He longed for fire. Even though it might last only a minute before the end came, at least that fire would not be cold.

The fire will come soon enough, said the voice, at the end of the endless journey.

Once, he thought, I ran in the hills. The light of two suns-a river of quicksilver-the dark eyes of a soft-spoken woman, and- I had a name once!

No more.

I think I can remember it-I think I can- Forget! Forget!

No! If I could only find the name-if only I could find the key to who I am again-and who these voices are-and- Why? It will only give you pain.

But even pain would be better than-nothing!

Forget, child. Forget.

He traveled on, dreaming of warmth. The warmth had a name, if only he could remember it-he him self had a name, if only he could dredge it out of the darkness within.

Forget, said the voice.

I'm trying, he answered, believe me. Trying to forget.

Chapter Two.

Engvig ACTING ENSIGN TORMOD ENGVIG could barely contain himself. To be on the U.S.S. Enterprise-to walk the corridors of the most celebrated starship in history-it was almost beyond belief for a young man who had spent his entire formative years in a small town in Norway most well known for its Viking Village Theme Park.

Until his prizewinning essay, and the tantalizing possibility of a coveted scholarship to the Academy, the only ships he'd ever been on were the longships they used in the Viking raid reenactment, attended by tourists from all over the Federation. This was hardly the same thing at all. Everywhere he went, there were these living legends just standing around; that very morning, no less a figure than Commander Data had told him to straighten his uniform! He didn't really know his way around that well yet, but that afternoon he managed to find himself in a bar.

It was jammed with people. There was so much to stare at; Tormod wanted to disappear into a corner and just observe. The heart-stopping panorama of deep s.p.a.ce, the stars far thicker and more brilliant than the clearest night sky over the fjord-the unfamiliar accents of Ferengi and Klingon-the heady scents of alien concoctions hanging in the air-plenty of sensory overload for a country boy who once thought he'd have to live and die in Rissa.

This had to be the Ten-Forward lounge, celebrated in song and story-it had even made its way into The Second Volsunga Saga, a controversial epic poem in Old Norse that continued the adventures of ancient heroes into modern times. I'll just stay nice and invisible, Tormod thought, and try to do the osmosis thing.

There was a slight feeling of disorientation; he blinked; the panoramic vista was suddenly quite different now; where there had been stars there were delicate skeins of streaking light. But no one seemed to notice-they all just went on drinking and chatting. The miracle of warp drive, and to these people it was as humdrum as a change in the wind at sea.

"Well!" It was a woman's voice, rich and comforting. "I'm glad someone hasn't lost his sense of wonder."

"You read my mind!" he blurted out. Then he turned to see yet another Starfleet celebrity, Deanna Troi, leaning against the wall and smiling at him. "Oh ... excuse me. Of course you read my mind. You're-ah-I used to read about you."

He searched for words, was once again-as often in the past two days-at a loss. How could he tell her how he pored over every encyclopedia, every simulation, even old-fashioned printed books, for every detail he could glean about this ship, its crew, its fabled missions?

"I don't read minds per se," said the counselor. "But I do sense-your wonder. It's a beautiful thing. Why, you're blushing, Ensign. Have you met the captain?"

Only then did Tormod notice that she was standing next to his childhood idol, the man whose exploits he had followed in the news and in all those romantic s.p.a.ce travel memoirs and adventure simulations as a boy. "Oh, my G.o.d," he managed to stammer, "I used to have a holographic collector card of you."

"Ah yes." Captain Picard winced slightly. "The Heroes of the Federation series. I don't know why they let them talk me into being on one of those."

Mortified, Tormod realized he had forgotten to call the captain "sir."

"It's all right," said the counselor, once again uncannily plucking the very thoughts from his mind, "I'm sure the captain will overlook it, just this once." And she winked at him. Winked at him! Almost as if he were one of them!

"Engvig, isn't it?" said Captain Picard. "They're sending them to me rather young, aren't they?"

"Well, sir, I-well, I wrote this essay, you see, and I won a prize that includes becoming an acting ensign and writing up a-"

"Yes, I know, I read your essay. Congratulations on your temporary commission, young man; I a.s.sume this a.s.signment will give you the self-confidence you will need when you begin your studies at the Academy in earnest."

Once more, Tormod was taken aback. He could only stammer out, "Sir."

"Shall we give the young man a bit of a thrill?" the captain went on. "I know you probably believe we're going to be running around saving the universe every five minutes, but our presence in the Klastravo system is going to be merely ceremonial, I'm afraid. Still, why don't you wait on the Thanetian amba.s.sador at the dinner in his honor this evening? He's got a child your age; perhaps you could practice diplomacy of a more informal sort. Help conduct a short tour, that sort of thing."

Tormod could hardly believe his ears. "But sir, I barely know the Enterprise myself yet."

"Then it will be a great journey of discovery for the two of you. You'll report to Mr. Ta.r.s.es at nineteen hundred hours; he'll brief you."

"But sir-"

"Filing a protest, Ensign?"