Yet it wasn’t truly competition, she realized. Melodically, rhythmically, even thematically, it merged harmoniously with her song rather than clashing. Cham wasn’t trying to drown her out or sabotage her. He was simply adding a voice of caution to the chorus, making sure all sides were heard. In a way, Aili thought, he was even reinforcing her point: even dissenting voices could be part of a single song. An argument didn’t have to be about silencing or sabotaging the opposition; it could be a cooperative act, a way to participate in seeking a resolution to a conflict. Cham wanted the other side to be heard, but only to facilitate a healthy debate.
And maybe, she realized, to give her an opening to address his concerns. “I understand your fear—your dread of losing all you have,” she sang. “That dread is known to us, more so than you could ever dream.”
Aili dug deep down in herself, calling on her memories of the ordeal the Federation had faced at the hands of the Borg. She reached for all the emotions she’d buried away at the time and since: terror for the survival of herself, her ship, her world; grief at the deaths of friends and crewmates; shock, anguish, and sheer incomprehension at the devastation of entire worlds, the elimination of entire civilizations from the cosmos. She knew the squales could not comprehend the events, but she sang to them of the emotions—emotions she’d never let herself face this directly. It was painful, harrowing, and her voice often faltered, but her squale chorus compensated, making her vocal distress a part of the music. When she could not go on, their singing trailed off into a long, sustained chord, a dirge for the dead. It gave her time to gather herself before she went on.
“Like you today, we faced the end of our entire world.
We could have bowed to panic, helped to tear that world apart.
Instead, we let our fear inspire us all to stand as one.
To join in greater chorus, even with our enemies,
And sing a louder, richer song than any could alone—
A harmony that won out over chaos and discord,
Resolved the darkest movement in our cosmic symphony,
And let us start anew, transposed into a brighter key.”
But something was still missing. Aili didn’t feel she’d sold it enough; Cham’s counterpoint was still present, his skeptical melody creating an unresolved chord. The Borg invasion, the loss of worlds—however movingly she sang, it was too abstract for them. As drained as she was, there was one more corner of her soul she had to bare for them.
“Still, there is loss, I know. My grief will be an overtone
In every joyous song to come. For they’ll be incomplete.
They’ll lack a certain voice that I will never hear again.
Miana, sister, lost when I was but a little girl.”
She told them of Miana, of how she had blamed her mother for her death, turning her grief into rage in order to avoid facing it. She faced it now as she never had before. Despite her emotional and vocal exhaustion, she pushed on.
“In all my songs thereafter, Void has sung one of the parts.
But Void must not become the loudest singer in the song,
As it became for me. I feared the loss and pain so much
That I became the cause of loss and pain to my own kin.”
She confessed it all, not hesitating to make herself un-sympathetic. Her purpose could not be served by anything less than brutal honesty. And she needed to drive home the theme of how fear could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By singing of how her own fear of hurting her children had cost her a loving family life, she hoped to underline how their panicked efforts to protect their world would bring just the opposite result.
“We act in fear because we wish to change the course of Fate,
Believing we can stop the surge of oceans if we try.
But if we swim against the Song’s inexorable flow,
We may just smash ourselves upon the shores of death and pain,
Destroyed by our misguided fight against that very doom.
“There is no shame in fear, unless we let it make us deaf.
We’ve all known fear and loss; we need to heed each other’s song
And add the voice the other lacks, fill in the aching void—
Not swim alone in fear until we lose our very selves.
Together, we can bring the Song back into harmony.”
She wasn’t sure it was enough; she was afraid it was hokey, sentimental rubbish. And her voice was raw and failing; she couldn’t imagine it sounded very pretty to the squales.
But she must have poured her soul into it, for she could hear a change in the squale chorus. Cham’s counterpoint had modulated, synchronizing with her part of the song and allowing the chord to resolve at last. It was his way of showing that she’d won him over.