“It’s trying to speak, sir,” said Pava.
Ignoring the warnings of his subordinates, Riker moved close to the shuddering alien. He had come here full of rage, not knowing until this instant what he might do to the person he held responsible for all this, for Deanna.
His thoughts had frightened him, so he had put them in a box. He knew he would do something and that he might regret it and he hadn’t cared. Of all the fears he’d ever had to master, the loss of Deanna, the real permanent loss of her touch and smile, of her presence inside him, was the worst he could imagine. So he didn’t. He put it in the box as well and sealed it tight. It was the only way he could live this life and live with her at the same time.
After all their escapes and adventures he even began to think that maybe, just maybe, they had the sort of luck that would always allow them to cheat the reaper.
Then they decided on making a child and the boxes opened their lids, spewing all that fear inside him again like an uncapped geyser. Some days it was so awful he couldn’t look at her.
He knew it was irrational and he knew he couldn’t ever let her feel the brunt of it. So he had used techniques he knew to keep her out, techniques she had taught him.
It had opened a chasm between, and if he relaxed for one moment, he knew he would fall in. The idea of losing her or, worse, losing any child they had made, hung over him like a headsman’s blade, and nothing he did could make it dissipate.
Now it had happened. She was gone. These Orishans and their dangerous tinkering had done to her what they had done to Charon, and someone would answer for it.
Only, looking at this mutilated creature writhing gently in its web of cables, all he could feel was pity.
What sort of mind could have conceived something like this and then made it acceptable, even desirable? What sort of fear had these Orishans felt to do this to one of their own?
He lowered his phaser and reached out a hand to gently caress the Orishan’s cheek. It shuddered again dramatically, perhaps unused to physical contact, but then grew still.
“You are just flesh,” it said in its low clicking voice. “Only flesh.” It seemed surprised. What had it expected?
He bent close to it then, stroking it gently as he would an injured child. He tried to speak to it, to make it understand that all this could have been avoided, that there was still the danger of the expanding wave to thwart and the rest of his crew to save. Could it, would it, help them?
“Titan to away team,”came Tuvok’s voice in his ear.
“Go ahead, Commander,” said Riker.
“We are receiving a signal from the Orishan vessel, sir,”said the Vulcan. “ I believe they are logs. Sensor data, schematics-the vessel is uploading its entire datastore toTitan.”
“Thank you,” said Riker, smiling down into the Orishan’s destroyed face.
“Fear,” it said. “Why is there always so much fear?”
The Orishan convulsed, a bone-wrenching tremor that set its body shaking as if caught in a storm, and then went still. Rriarr scanned it and confirmed that it was dead.
There was no mistaking the cheers that rippled through Titanas her systems, most significantly her warp core, returned to nearly fully operational status.
The Orishan database was full of information that was either totally alien or, if not alien, impossible to implement with Titan’s technology, but what they could use, they did, and to amazing effect.
The condition of quantum flux that existed in this system that so confounded Starfleet technology was simply the norm for Orisha. Almost all their science was based on manipulating or drawing power from the flux in some way, and many of the tricks they learned served Titanas well.
The consensus from his officers was to evacuate as soon as possible, to get Titanwell clear of this system and its effects. Then they could contact Starfleet and any local spacefaring races about how to check or reverse the expansion of the wave of quantum flux.
The Orishan database had given them some ideas on the subject of collapsing the wave in on itself with a series of counterpulses directed at what some were now calling the Eye of the storm.
Leaving was the right thing to do. Orisha was gone. Charonwas gone. The Ellingtonwas gone. Once the flux wave reached its sun, the rest of the system would go too. In fact, Titanwould be cutting its escape close to the bone if they left within a few hours.
Riker knew the prudent course, what the manuals required him to do, but as he and Doctor Ree examined the body of the dead Orishan pilot, he wasn’t sure the prudent course was the one he wanted.
“Suicide, sir,” said Ree, looking up from his autopsy. “This female released poison into her body from her own stores of venom.”
“She killed herself,” said Riker. Ree only cocked his head and watched his captain mull. “Why? The fight was over.”
“May I suggest, sir, that this may be precisely why she did it?”
“What do you mean, Doctor?”
“From your account of her logs, this poor creature allowed her people to modify her this way in order to make contact with their deity,” said Ree, sealing the corpse again and sliding it into a cooling bay for quick freeze. “She made contact. Perhaps it proved unsatisfactory.”
“That thing isn’t a god,” said Riker.
“I was under the impression that we don’t know what it is,” said Ree. Riker snorted.
“You don’t think it’s really a god, do you?” he said.
“My beliefs are immaterial,” said Ree. “Pahkwa-thanh do not see ourselves as separate from nature, Captain. We have many deities, hundreds, and all of them are equally enmeshed.”
“I’m surprised by that,” said Riker. “Your species isn’t noted for its esoteric lifeview.”
“We do not promote our beliefs,” said Ree as he sealed up the samples of the Orishan poison and secured them for later study. “They are ourbeliefs. They inform us. Do you see?”
Riker wasn’t sure he did. As he watched the doctor run his long slender digits through the sterilization field, he wondered about his home planet and the raptorlike carnivores who were its dominant species.
He had seen Ree eat-live animals if he could, raw flesh when he couldn’t-and it indicated a homeworld of extreme violence, at least by human standards. But Ree was, with the possible exception of an android Riker had known for many years, the most gentle, even serene being he’d ever met. Was that the result of Ree’s nature, or was he implying that the nature of the apparently aggressively pantheistic Pahkwa-thanh faith was somehow responsible?
“We do not separate in this way,” said Ree when the question was put to him. “Instead let us consider: What is the function of belief in any deity? It is an attempt to better understand the universe, to see the order and structure that defines it. It is, in essence, the beginning of scientific inquiry. In my experience, deities bind societies; sometimes they define them. So, we must ask ourselves, what definition did this Eye of theirs inspire in the Orishans? How did its presence inform them?”
Why? Why is there always so much fear?came the wisps of her voice in his memory.
Riker thought about it. He thought about the Klingons, who had supposedly killed their troublesome gods only to elevate their murderer to a nearly divine focus of worship.
He thought about the Bajorans, whose deities were certainly real and present but so obscure and alien that it was a wonder that either group could interact with or understand the other. Yet they seemed to.
He thought about the Q Continuum, whose members were possessed of seeming omnipotence, omniscience, and, in at least one case, functional omnipresence. Even they didn’t claim to be gods, but if the Q weren’t, who was?