Do Comets Dream? Part 4

"How dare you!" Straun cried. "Isn't it enough that you've shamed me in front of my daughter by forcing me to stoop to-violence? Isn't it enough that you've sown the seeds of doubt in her, so that she can no longer face the end gracefully, with quiet stoicism and pride?"

"Captain," said the young girl, "I demand-I don't know, political asylum!"

"I didn't mean to-I was telling her about some of Earth's ancient history-the Cold War, people defecting, that kind of thing," said the young man forlornly. "I didn't realize that-"

"Mr. Ta.r.s.es, we will discuss this later in my ready room. Dismissed." The young upstart left. Straun silently promised himself that he too would have words with Ta.r.s.es. Later.

Captain Picard put his hand on the girl's shoulder. She continued to stare defiantly at her father, but Amba.s.sador Straun was not inclined to back down.

Gently, the captain said, "Kio, your father is an amba.s.sador, and we are in the process of establishing diplomatic relations with your world; perhaps now isn't quite the time to-"

"A world that is about to be destroyed. You're never going to succeed in blowing up the comet," said the girl. "My father is a fanatic. He'll sabotage your plan. He'll subvert even the High Shivantak himself-"

"Heresy!" shouted the amba.s.sador with all his might.

"Heresy, he says," said his daughter. "Well, then ... if not political asylum ... I claim religious persecution. I don't believe in the inevitability of the end of the world ... and my father is trying to force me to die for my beliefs."

"Kio," Picard said softly, "you must go with your father. I cannot interfere with the traditions of your people."

"Cannot?" she said, as slowly she moved toward Straun, looking away when he tried to embrace her. "You already have. I wish, oh, by the Panvivlion, I wish you had never come."

For the first time that day, Amba.s.sador Straun agreed with his daughter. Change had come at the eleventh hour, bourne by this mighty ship.

Change!

Nothing had ever changed on Thanet.

The universe is a dance. The cycles follow each other with the regularity of-no! Nothing has ever changed on Thanet, Straun found himself saying over and over in his mind, as though the repet.i.tion of that axiom were enough to counter the clear evidence that change had finally come.

And Straun was afraid.

Part Two

The Machine That Was Mortal Do not resist The one who shall come For the one who shall come Is father and mother to you And son and daughter as well; You are all part of the chain of being As the dailong, engendered deep beneath the sea, Rises from the mists to serve you And retreats beneath the waves When his time is come; You are all as the dailong, Called by G.o.d, Sent back by G.o.d At the proper time.

-From the Seventh Book of the Holy Panvivlion.

CAPTAIN PICARD, once more, was alone with the report. Halliday had the unerring knack of putting his finger on that which was most troubling to the Federation, that which the Federation most wanted to avoid coming to grips with.

For the Prime Directive, beautiful as it was, was an idea, not a law of nature.

It had taken millennia for this idea to be shaped, and yet it was still as fragile now as it had been when first formulated. So many things worked against it: avarice, human desire, megalomania, even love.

Picard read on: CONFIDENTIAL REPORT:.

Dr. Robert Halliday's field notes Dr. Halliday's report resumes with more translations from the Panvivlion, and his commentary: As far as I've been able to figure out, the Thanetians have seventeen basic castes, each of which is divided into hundreds of subcastes, and the amazing thing is they keep it all straight. Every caste has its own ritual greetings, its own respect language, and its own dietary restrictions. The dietary restrictions, in particular, are spelled out with astonishing strictness in the Book of the Forbidden, the lengthiest section of the Panvivlion. I have been working on one such segment, and this gives the general flavor: "Of the flesh of the he-klariot, no part shall be partaken of that lieth betwixt the organs of digestion and the organs of breath; for such tissues are the exclusive right of the priestly clans. But of the she-klariot, such flesh may be freely eaten, provided that four ceremonial sips of peftifesht wine are taken between each bite, and that the she-klariot hath not been known to have had carnal congress with any male of a species other than its own."

The klariot is small mammal, about the size of a Denebian possum. By the way, its flesh is very delicate, and it's not perhaps that surprising to an aesthete such as myself that the various bits would be so jealously argued over in a religious text; imagine, if you will, a really fine filet mignon with a hint of caviar and a sort of musky aftertaste.

The truth of the matter is that it is so hard to ascertain the correctness of the diet, and the stigma attached to making a mistake is so severe, that there have developed special restaurants and grocery depots for each caste, and even the large hypermarket chains that cater to all have separate exits and entrances for the seventeen major groups. It would seem to me that replicator technology would make a lot of sense in this culture, since the entire Book of the Forbidden could be programmed into it. However, there is a section of the Book of the Forbidden that implies that the use of replicators might not be religiously acceptable.

The Thanetians attach great importance to their laws, their hierarchy; ceremonial forms of address are used even in the home, among close relatives; and the first question asked of a stranger is often "Where do you sit?" a way of finding out what level to a.s.sign to the person and what forms of address to use. Indeed, a formal living room is designed more like a very wide staircase than the flat floors we are used to; and those of higher caste automatically gravitate to the highest step.

I have tried to find out the origins of this tradition, and have been told only that it is lost in the mists of time.

However, we have already determined that "time" on Thanet only goes back five thousand years; those mists are more in the nature of an iron curtain, completely separating this present civilization from its past.

I do not feel that such a sophisticated hierarchy could just have sprung from nowhere; I welcome the arrival of Federation savants who would help in gathering material. I particularly welcome the suggestion that Commander Data might join my efforts for a while. For while his physical form is human enough that the natives would not fear to give him information, his powers of deductive reasoning would undoubtedly be more than human. ...

"Computer," Picard sighed, "inform Dr. Halliday on Thanet that an away team will be there very shortly. Including, as he requested, Commander Data."

Chapter Nine.

Thanet ADAM HALLIDAY WAS ONE of the only humans on Thanet, and certainly the only human child. That should have made him very precious, but in practice it made him a loner. His father was often so wrapped up in his research that they barely spoke for days at a time; sometimes Adam wished he hadn't come along, that he had stayed at the inst.i.tute with the other kids. At least there would have been people his own age. Well, sort of. They weren't kids exactly at the inst.i.tute. They had special talents, which made them bad company.

Adam too had a special talent. More than one. For one thing, he had a Betazoid great-grandmother, which, he was often told, accounted for his occasional flash of intuition. For another, he was a genius.

The best thing about Thanet was the fact that Adam was special. He wasn't a member of any caste-his off-world status made him acceptable everywhere. He could literally go anywhere in the city, walk into any shop, speak to anyone at all. And everyone wanted to be nice to him, pet him, stare at his unwebbed hands, run their fingers through his reddish hair.

Being special was the worst thing about Thanet too. He wished he could have a friend. Perhaps, today, he finally would; the Federation was sending down a team to look over his father's research.

They were arriving right now. They had just beamed into the courtyard. It was night, but the Moon That Sings flooded the stone walls, making the silvery flecks-a mica-like mineral-sparkle. They materialized next to a small shrine of Yarut, the love G.o.d, the epaulets glistening on their uniforms. Adam hid behind the well as his father emerged from the dilapidated hostel the Federation had acquired as its research headquarters.

Dr. Robert Halliday waddled out and greeted the guests with a wave. "Welcome, welcome," he said, "it's not often we get visitors here at the End of the World."

"But Dr. Halliday," said the one with the strangely rubbery skin and funny eyes, "this is not the End of the World at all; indeed, the Enterprise has come here to prevent that very thing."

"Irony, Mr. Data," said Adam's dad, "a little gallows humor."

"I see, Dr. Halliday," said the man.

Adam couldn't help giggling a little. This man was very literal-minded. Halliday shuffled over to the well and pulled out the boy. "My son," he said. "I asked him to help greet the new guests, but he prefers to play the spy."

"Ah, the famous Adam Halliday," said the man his father had called Mr. Data.

"I'm famous?" said Adam.

"It is rumored," said Data, "that an eight-year-old boy by that name at the Metadevelopmental Inst.i.tute once scribbled out an astonishing proof of Fermat's Theorem on a piece of rice paper. ..."

"And," his dad added, "in fit of pique at being denied his favorite pudding, swallowed the paper! Oh yes, that's my son all right. A genius manque, but a genius nonetheless."

"Well, since you know so much," Adam sniffed, "I've figured out who you are, too-you're that famous android. And you're even smarter than me."

"That is very perceptive of you, Adam Halliday," said Commander Data, taking the backhanded compliment in his stride. "Allow me to introduce the rest of this away team. Lieutenant Lisa Martinez is a science officer on temporary a.s.signment, an archaeologist and philologist-"

"I much enjoyed your treatise on the use of glottal stops in the regional dialects of the Klingon Empire," said Martinez, shaking Adam's father's hand.

Halliday made a dismissive gesture. "A trifle," he said. "But I've been working on something a lot more significant-I'm translating James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake into Ferengi. Those people could use a little light entertainment."

"Well, son," said his father, "why don't you show the commander around the city later? Then Martinez and I can chatter through the night about obscure dialects. As for Mr. Ta.r.s.es -you don't seem very happy."

"I believe he is suffering from what humans metaphorically call a 'broken heart,' " said Data, "although cardiac arrest does not appear to be imminent."

"Nothing that a good pizza can't cure, young man!" said Halliday. "Shall we dine?"

The child, Data thought, was a curious phenomenon. That evening, at dinner, he had not spoken at all; but the next morning, as he showed the commander through the crowded cobblestoned streets of the metropolis, he chattered so rapidly that even the android had trouble parsing the nuances of his speech patterns.

"See," Adam said, "up there, the endless zigzagging steps all the way up that artificial mountain-that's the High Citadel, and the High Shivantak lives inside it. He never goes out. He's like a kind of king, pope, and living Buddha all rolled into one. Did you enjoy the pizza last night? Dad sends in his food column, you know, the one under that pseudonym, he sends it in religiously to that magazine; he always has time to describe a meal, even when we're investigating the mating rituals of cannibals or something. Along those walls, those cloth drapes, they're the entries to the different food halls of the different castes, you see, they're all color-coded. Toss that beggar a coin. Don't worry, he's not as sick as he looks, they have a union and a special subcaste of their own."

A theater on wheels, pulled by two-headed quadrupeds, rolled slowly by, and on it two actors intoned and juggled simultaneously, while an eerie music blared from a quartet of instruments that looked like a cross between trumpets and cabbages. Children rushed after them, shouting epithets, singing along with the music. They paused for a moment when they saw the boy and the android, and then they started chanting, "Aliens, aliens," not viciously, but with a kind of lilting curiosity.

"Don't mind them," said Adam. "They come from the clan of theater children, and they spend their whole childhood learning to imitate others. Look." Adam held up his hands, wiggled his fingers, clapped, and scratched his head. The sequence was taken up by all the kids, and pretty soon there was almost a weird sort of ballet going. Adam stopped; they all stopped; and presently there were gales of giggling.

"Intriguing," Data said, uncertain of what he had witnessed.

They were descending now; the streets sloped downhill; indeed, everything in this city was full of slopes and stairs, for everyone had a need to be higher or lower than someone else; it was in their culture. For ease of movement, the streets had escalators, banks of them; those for the upper castes were inlaid with colored stones and cunningly wrought intaglios of the faces of G.o.ds and demons; the lower castes' escalators were plainer, and were crammed with people: merchants with cages full of squawking birds, pleasure women with their eyes heavily painted with gold dust, newsboys barking out the latest information from quaint little handheld monitors strapped to their arms. It was dawn, but several moons still danced among aurora-like veils of light.

"That play they're doing," Adam said, "it's a reenactment of the rebirth of the world. They have those all the time now, puppet shows, plays, cantatas, 'cause they all think the world's gonna end in like six or seven days, moon-turns they call them, and they're all kinda hysterical about it."

"I do sense a certain urgency to everything around me," said the commander.

"C'mon, Data, we gotta catch the ferry."

They had reached a ca.n.a.l lined with temples. A dozen harpists strummed at the water's edge. Adam translated their song: We greet the world's death With great joy, Laughing, we embrace The beginning and the end; Eagerly we wait.

Halliday was already waiting for them with the rest of the away team. Small watercraft bobbed up and down as the ca.n.a.l broadened. Each craft contained a team of dailong hunters, young men in translucent wetsuits that gleamed, wearing elaborate headdresses that revealed their city of origin.

"Welcome, Data," said Halliday. "You're about to witness one of the more remarkable spectacles on Thanet-the hunt for the dailong."

"The dailong are-a means of transportation, are they not?" Data inquired.

"More than that; they're an obsession, a planetary sport, and a cultural icon." Halliday beckoned to a pa.s.sing skiff; it pulled alongside. "Hop in!" he said. Data and the boy climbed on. The boat was small, and powered, astonishingly, by oarsmen, who paddled with eerie precision as a drummer boy beat out a rhythm, singing: Oi-oi-o! Oi-oi-o!

We come, Little and puny, We come to capture The great beast of the deep.

Oi-oi-o!

The oarsmen pulled toward the lock, which clanged open; dozens of the skiffs plowed through into the harbor, and the chorus of oi-oi-o's resounded about them as the wind began whipping up the waves.

Simon Ta.r.s.es was in his element-Mother had taken him sailing often when he was a child, which gave him something in common, thank goodness, with poor Engvig. The briny smell of the moist wind, the bracing chill of the water as it splashed up with the oars' fall, the song of the drummer boys punctuated with raucous ululations ... This world was so alive, so vivid-how could they all be so willing to renounce it all, to accept an ending?

He thought of Kio. He wondered where she was now, whether she was still thinking about him. He had tried, and failed, to stop thinking of her. If only she weren't so beautiful. The captain was right to rea.s.sign Ta.r.s.es and his starstruck charge to the away team. One more day on the Enterprise and Engvig would have started asking the bridge crew for autographs. And Ta.r.s.es would have been unable to resist kissing the amba.s.sador's daughter.

The oarsmen rowed rapidly. The boats were sleek, brilliantly engineered; they sliced through the waves with eerie precision. These people were almost like Vikings-Ensign Engvig's ancestors, Simon thought. He remembered folktales about hunting the great whales amid the freezing northern waters, with only one's wits and the most primitive of weapons.

At the prow of each skiff sat a man or woman, each one cross-legged and apparently in deepest meditation. What were they doing? Each one wore flowing robes, and had an elaborate caste-mark on his forehead in the shape of a giant serpent-or perhaps a dailong. Some of them didn't look like they should even be on the water; some were frail and withered, some mere children. On the skiff they rode on, this figurehead sat on a carpet whose patterned fibers rustled and twisted as he mumbled strange incantations. It was an old man, a hundred years old at least, whose face was battered and pocked like the canyons of an airless moon. His white mane streamed in the wind.

"Oh, him," young Adam was explaining to Data, "he's the dailongzhen, the man who will ride the dailong. It's some kind of telepathy. Some people have it, some don't. I have a bit of it, well, more an intuition really, you know. And it's not really a Persian rug he's sitting on; it's kind of a half-sentient lichenlike thing that grows in the northern deserts; it acts as a telepathic amplifier."

"Couldn't have explained it better," his father said.

"Learned from the best," Adam said, grinning.

The oarsmen chanted. The boats, Simon realized, were in the shape of the dailong image he had seen in the amba.s.sador's quarters on the Enterprise. Which meant they were very close to that model Viking longship that was such an eyesore in Simon's quarters. Even the designs on the sails seemed the same, images of beasts and G.o.ds. About a hundred strong, the convoy moved in what seemed like anarchy at first; but Simon soon saw that there was an eerie pattern to the movements; the skiffs darted, listed, and wove in and out of each other in an elaborate ch.o.r.eography that only some G.o.d could see-or perhaps some monstrous sea creature.

Then came a cry-an elemental sound-thousands of oarsmen chanting in resonant unison as the waves crashed about them-daiLONG! daiLONG! All at once, the dailongzhens of each skiff stood up, arms upraised, and punctuated the chanting with savage whoops and shrieks. All the boats turned at once, and what had seemed chaos now became precision as they fell into position and bore down on a position far out to sea, halfway to the horizon- -and when Simon looked to where Adam pointed he could dimly make it out, a sinuous, serpentine shape that rippled about the waves, impossibly huge, breaching the bright water-metallic rainbow colors cascaded about it-a shimmering aurora hovered above the sea- daiLONG! daiLONG!

-a monstrous finned tail now, lashing the waves, and- They were moving unnaturally fast. Simon realized now that these were not the wooden oars of ancient times, but oars equipped with some kind of waldo that amplified the rowers' strength. The sails did not rely on the wind but on a man-made wind generator. Indeed, he saw now with wonder, the hull itself was not true wood, but a simulacrum, and the sail had a glow that unmistakably indicated a radiation-based source of power.

They were slicing through the water now, speeding toward an island in the mid-distance, an island that glittered in the searing blue-white light of Thanet's sun. Except that it was no island-no. The island was beginning to rear above the waters, and he could see eyes now, crimson, jewel-like. And in the distance, segments of the dailong's serpentine body thrashed against the waters.

The island was the dragon's head, and before he could fully register that fact his boat, skimming the waves, was pulling up alongside, and the oarsmen, chanting to steady their rhythm, were pulling up their oars and hurling them at the creature's brow-the paddles were metamorphosing into harpoons with corkscrew points that whirred as they burrowed beneath the dragon's skin-Simon saw sparks fly from the scales-he gasped-was this some blood sport after all, like the whale-hunts of the ancient past-senseless and cruel? The chanting grew in intensity as the skiffs pulled up and each team cast their weapons. The dragon did not seem to resist. A bloodred rheum oozed from its eyes, each eye as large as a small shuttlecraft, the oily liquid spreading over the surface of the ocean.

"The dailong weeps!" one of the team members shouted. Presently the cry was taken up from all sides, over and over, a ritual mantra as the thick fluid seethed about the skiffs.

And all the dailongzhen, risen from their meditations, were now standing, making mysterious gestures at the dragon's head. "What are they doing?" Simon couldn't help asking.

Adam said, "They're trying to establish a mind-link with the creature. The first dailongzhen to break through will be the first to mount!"

As he spoke, the old man at the prow went into an ecstatic frenzy. A halo shone about his face as a string of nonsense syllables erupted from his lips.

"He's made contact!" Dr. Halliday said excitedly. "Data, Ta.r.s.es, Martinez-this is quite the coup! Our team has won the right to enter the dragon's mind. I had hoped this would happen, but I never dreamed it. And on the evening of the world's destruction, too-what a thrill!"

"I thought the world wasn't going to be destroyed," said Simon.

"Maybe not," said Halliday, "but you'll never convince these people."

As the old man shouted his incantations, the oars that had become harpoons changed function yet again, growing metal tendrils which linked together, tightened, connected-building a causeway back to the skiff, a miniature suspension bridge.

"Very sophisticated," Data said. "It appears to be bioengineering of some sort-perhaps utilizing a rapidly reproducing species of t.i.tanium-fixing bacteria-"

But before they could say more, the dailongzhen was already walking across, one arm raised skyward. And the crew of the skiff were following him, chanting, "He has conquered the beast! He has tamed the creature of the deep!"

"If you start worrying about t.i.tanium-fixing bacteria," Dr. Halliday said, "you're going to miss the whole spectacle. I sc.r.a.ped a few samples on the last hunt; I've already mapped their genome; it's in the computer back at the mission. Don't underestimate these people, Commander-their social structure may be in Earth's Middle Ages, and their s.p.a.ce travel may be antediluvian, but they do know how to splice a gene or two."

Data was about to answer when a trapdoor opened on top of the dailong's head. Simon hurried to join the Thanetians who were scrambling toward the dragon.