Life had to go on for the surviving members of Shar’s bondgroup.
“Have they let Dr. Tarses speak with them?” Ro said. “Or changed their minds about letting him perform an autopsy?”
Phillipa shook her head. “They let Simon in tonight, just before he went off-shift. He visited on the pretext of checking on the stasis chamber they’ve borrowed from the infirmary. But that’s allthey’d let him do. For me, they wouldn’t even open up the door to their quarters.”
Shar’s quarters,Ro thought. The rooms where the despondent Thriss had taken her own life. Where two of her soul mates still maintained a vigil, two long weeks later.
“Do you feel they’re dangerous?” Ro said at length, recalling how Anichent had charged at her, lunacy shining in his cold gray eyes.
“Anyone that overwrought always has the potential to be dangerous, at least to himself. But when the person in question is an Andorian, that makes things even more volatile.”
“In other words, I’d better maintain the guards I posted outside Shar’s quarters.”
Phillipa nodded, but looked apprehensive. “As long as they stay out in the corridor, and a few doors away. Like I said, those antennae can be pretty sensitive, especially to the EM fields produced by phasers. That said, my sense is that they’re likely to refrain from any further, ah, demonstrative behaviors.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because they have each other. And grief shared is grief halved.”
Ro wanted to believe that. But she understood only too well the impulse to spread grief around, the way nerakflowers scattered themselves on the wind beside the River Glyrhond.
“Maybe I should make another stab at talking with them,” she said, recovering her padd and walking toward the security office door with it. Phillipa followed her out into the corridor, her brow scored with consternation.
“I don’t think that’s such a great idea, Ro.”
Ro stopped in front of the turbolift just as its doors opened. “You just finished explaining that they wouldn’t talk to you because you’ve got too much empathy.”
Ro stepped inside, treading on Phillipa’s response as she moved. “That’s an accusation nobody’s ever made about me.”
The turbolift doors quietly closed on Phillipa’s wordless you’ll-be-sorryexpression.
Standing in the habitat ring, Ro looked down the corridor to her left. Four doors away, Corporal Hava stood at parade rest, his hand near the butt of his phaser. Ro turned her head to the right, where Sergeant Shul Torem stood quietly an equal distance away in the opposite direction. Somehow, the grizzled veteran managed to appear both relaxed and vigilant.
Clutching a padd tightly in her right hand, Ro was uncomfortably aware of her own weapon’s conspicuous absence as she pressed the door chime before her.
“Go away.”
It was Dizhei’s voice. Though the gray duranium door muffled it considerably, Ro could hear the underlying rawness.
“Go away. Whoever you are.”
“It’s Lieutenant Ro,” Ro said, relieved that Anichent hadn’t been the one to answer the door. “I’m here on official business.”
A long beat passed before Dizhei spoke again. She sounded calmer now, though she seemed to be trying very hard to rein in her emotions. “Please, Lieutenant. We do not desire any visitors right now. Anichent and I will contact you. Later. When we are ready. After Shar returns.”
Ro was quickly growing tired of conversing through a metal door. “Shar isn’t due back from the Gamma Quadrant for several more weeks. I understand your grief, Dizhei. And you already know that I respect your people’s funerary customs. But I have regulations to follow and reports to file. Certain things need to be resolved, sooner rather than later.”
The heavy gray door stood as mute and inert as a Sh’dama-era stone monolith.
After nearly half a minute, Ro broke the silence. “How does Anichent feel about speaking with me? I’ll only need a few minutes of his time.”
More silence. Ro’s spine suddenly felt as though it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen as a thought occurred to her: What if Anichent wasn’t merely being reclusive?
Perhaps he couldn’tcome to the door.
“Dizhei? Open the door now. Please. I really need to speak with Anichent.”
Nothing.
Ro gestured toward both guards, who responded by quietly drawing their weapons. She hated that things were coming to this. But she had to know what was going on behind that metal slab.
Tapping her combadge, Ro said, “Computer, security override at the personal quarters of Ensign Thirishar ch’Thane. Authorization Ro-Gamma-Seven-Four.”
The door slid aside and Ro entered the room, holding herself bowstring-taut. Hava and Shul followed a few paces behind her.
The air was moist, and hot as summertime in Musilla Province. The darkness of the small main room was broken by the flames that danced atop a pair of tall, pungent-smelling candles. Countless bejeweled pinpoints adorned the emptiness beyond the large oval window. Between the candles, at the room’s spinward edge, stood a bier surrounded by the faint bluish glow of a large stasis chamber. Thriss’s corpse, clad in a simple white gown, lay in state atop the bier, per Andorian custom. The pale cerulean light that bathed the body gave it an oddly lifelike aspect, as though Thriss were merely sleeping and might be awakened by an errant footfall or a creaking deckplate.
In spite of herself, Ro made a special effort to be silent as she stepped toward the two figures who knelt before the bier. She stood for a long moment behind them, allowing her eyes to adjust to the wan candlelight and the room’s fluttering, crepuscular shadows.
She watched Anichent and Dizhei in profile, observing that they both seemed to be in a deep meditative state. They looked tired and gaunt, their nondescript Andorian prayer robes draped over their bodies like sails. Ro couldn’t determine whether they had continued cutting their flesh, as they had begun doing immediately after Thriss’s death. Their eyes were closed, their limp antennae draped back across disheveled white hair. Neither of them acknowledged her presence. Ro couldn’t tell whether they were indeed sharing their grief, or if each was trapped in some solitary emotional purgatory.
Thanks to a briefing Phillipa had given her, Ro felt she knew at least the basics of Andorian biology and funerary customs. Because their species’ reproduction depended upon all four members of a bond, the death of any one of them was a terrible blow to the survivors—and often produced some extreme grieving rituals. Obviously, neither Dizhei nor Anichent seemed able either to let go of their lost love or to go on with their lives. They wouldn’t prepare Thriss’s body for interment or even allow a proper autopsy. Before any of those things could happen, all three surviving members of their sundered marriage quad had to assemble in shared grief beside Thriss’s body. Therefore, they were determined to await Shar’s return, consuming only water—and interacting with no one—until that day.
No matter how far off that day might be.
If not for their tangled white manes, blue skin, and antennae, Dizhei and Anichent might have been a pair of Bajoran religious acolytes, beseeching the Prophets for guidance. Ro had always felt somewhat detached from—not to mention bemused by—the fervent religious beliefs of many of her fellow Bajorans. Her father’s murder at the hands of Bajor’s Cardassian oppressors had taught her that piety and a concussion grenade nearly always got better results than did piety alone.
The self-abnegation on display before her stirred up some of the conflicted feelings the Bajoran faith frequently roused within her. And even though she knew that it was useless to judge another culture’s practices against those of her own, the sight roused an even deeper, more fundamental sentiment.