“It’s a huge, wild beast,” Marden explained. “Many legged, and with a massive, heavy skull, horned on the top. Almost like some kind of Earth dinosaur, I think. Anyway, this story that my father’s family passed down, for generations, was about the time a graliphaattacked his family’s village. Just came in out of the jungle and ran around in a blind rage, berserk, smashing huts, killing with abandon. The people were taken by surprise—they lived with graliphasin the jungle all the time, but none had ever charged the village like this. They couldn’t do much to fight back—it was all they could do to try to stay out of its way. It cut a swath through the village and then left, back into the jungle it had come from.”
“Sounds kind of like those stories of rogue elephants,” Will suggested. “How they’d sometimes attack Indian villages.”
Marden nodded. “Very much like that. Except this thing was at least twice the size of any elephant. Or, that’s how my grandfather tells the story, anyway.”
“What did they do? The villagers.”
“They picked up after the attack. They buried their dead, they tended to the wounded, they rebuilt their homes and fortified the log wall around the village. Then they went into their culturally prescribed mourning period. For days, they mourned the dead, weeping and laying offerings at their graves. This was, grandfather said, how his people honored their dead.
“What they didn’t do was go after the gralipha.And six days later, it came back. It tore through the brand new fence like it was paper, and ran amuck again. More homes fell, more people died. Children and the elderly and those hurt in the first attack, especially, because they couldn’t dodge it in time.”
“That’s terrible,” Will said.
“It was. My grandfather can barely hold back the tears when he tells the story. Some of his ancestors—mine too, I guess—died in these attacks.
“But this time, the villagers reacted differently. They left the rebuilding and the mourning for later. They organized into hunting parties and they followed the path the beast made when it left the village. They tracked it. When they caught up to it, there was a terrible battle. More lives were lost. The thing swung its head and its horns gouged and tore at the villagers. Their weapons were just primitive spears and arrows and slings—they could barely penetrate its tough hide.
“They didn’t give up, though. They continued the fight. Eventually, their weapons found tender spots—the eyes, the roof of the mouth, the base of the neck. They brought the mad graliphadown, and they killed it, even though the cost was high. Because this was the only way they could guarantee that it would not return to their village later.”
Will understood. He shifted his position, sitting cross-legged on the bed with his spine straight. “So Endyk Plure is your gralipha,” he said.
Marden nodded. “He’s rampaged through the village once too often. If he’s not stopped at the first opportunity—that means now, tonight—there’s still the chance that he’ll escape and come back. His forces might be closing in on the Pegasuseven now. The authorities on Candelar IV said they wanted the Federation to take him so he’d get a fair trial, and so the mobs wouldn’t storm the prison, but I’m convinced that they were just as worried about Plure’s troops coming to his rescue.”
“You could be right,” Will admitted. “Although I doubt that Plure’s forces would want to risk an attack on Starfleet. Against the Candelar system—and I don’t mean to be dismissive, just realistic—they were tough guys. But that’s a pretty backward system. Against Starfleet, they’d be schoolyard bullies facing down real adults with real firepower. They wouldn’t have a chance. And the thing about bullies is, they only like to fight the weak. They usually leave the strong well enough alone.”
“Possibly,” Marden said. “But even if they don’t come for him, I won’t be convinced that he’ll never escape until I see him dead with my own eyes. And it wasn’t just ancient ancestors that he killed on Handihar, but family. My grandfather’s two sisters, and their entire families. There are just too many reasons for him to die, and none that I can see to let him live.”
“Except your career, and the oath you swore to uphold Federation law,” Will pointed out.
“That’s one argument, Will,” Marden said. “I’m just not sure it’s a good enough argument.”
Will had felt something nagging at him while Marden told his story, and now he remembered what it was. A story of his own, from his younger days, that might also be applicable. He closed his eyes for a minute, knowing that to do so was to risk falling right to sleep, but wanting to get the story straight in his mind before he started telling it. And when he did, it all came rushing back to him, as clear as if it had been yesterday.
It had been his fourteenth summer, he recalled. Valdez, still a small town, sat at the edge of one of the greatest wilderness areas in North America, but even so, he was beginning to feel constricted, limited, and impatient to see more of the world. But halfway through the summer, there was an event that promised diversion, and he welcomed it.
A campsite in the nearby wilderness had been attacked by a grizzly—a rogue, one of the campers said, enormous and vicious. The bear had torn though the tents, upending food lockers, and maiming one of the campers. The remaining campers—there had been, Will recalled, eight in all-had survived, and determined that someone needed to kill the bear before someone else was hurt. Some of the local people in Valdez volunteered to find the animal, agreeing that a rogue grizzly could be bad for their community and needed to be put down.
Will’s father was one of the volunteers. Will insisted that he should be allowed to go along. His father argued, but not very energetically, and he changed his mind more easily than Will had even anticipated. So they each got a phaser rifle and they joined the hunting party leaving from the campground early on the morning after the attack.
As they walked through the forests and meadows of the wilderness area, weapons at the ready, alert for any signs of the bear, Kyle Riker was more talkative than usual. “This is nice,” he had said. “I mean, not the idea that we have to kill a grizzly before it kills one of us. But being out here in the sunshine and the trees, with a blue sky over our heads, a father and son together ... we don’t do this sort of thing often enough, Will. We never have. My fault, I guess, and I’m sorry.”
He had stopped in the middle of the trail then, and laid a hand softly on Will’s shoulder—the kind of physical contact that was rare between this father and son. “I’m sorry for a lot of things,” he had said. “More than you can imagine. I hope one day you’ll understand why I’ve done things the way I have. I hope I’ve made some good choices, even when they haven’t seemed like it. A day like this, being out here with you—Will, you’re a man, look at you! I’m sure there are still things you need to learn, but I’m not so sure that I can teach them.”
He had gone quiet then, more like the father that Will was used to, the one who kept his feelings bottled up inside as if they were poison, and they had continued tracking the bear. When they’d lost the trail for a while, Will had found it by scouting in ever-wider circles until he cut across it, and Kyle had clapped him on the back. “You’ll be fine, Will. You’ll be just fine,” he had said. Will hadn’t realized then—hadn’t realized until just this moment, sitting in his quarters on the starship Pegasuswith Marden Zaffos, what Kyle had meant by that. He had known then that he was going to leave, going to abandon Will to his fate. The way Will handled a gun, the way he cut bear track—those were pretty meaningless skills, in the greater scheme of things, but somehow Kyle Riker had decided that they meant Will was mature enough to make his own way in the world.
They had, later that day, found the bear. She had a den, and when the hunting party approached she had growled ferociously and lunged at them. But several of the hunters fired at once, and the bear fell without any human casualties.