Cohesion

“What happened to the Key?”

  “No one knows exactly,” Pad said. “When Dagan died, they figured it had something to do with his death and the earthquakes and the Eye turning blue, so they stuck it in a box and hid it. Supposedly, it got handed down from sire to child for a long time, but then the Fourteenth Tribe got pretty thinly distributed and it disappeared.”

  “And did the Fourteenth Tribe disappear?”

  Pad shook his head. “Fortunately, Dagan had emphasized the importance of education, especially language, so a lot of the tribe ended up knowing more about math and languages than almost anyone else. Soon, it got to be that the other thirteen tribes needed them, so they allowed them back into the cities, but never too many and never outside the prescribed areas.”

  “And their numbers grew?” Seven asked.

  “Yeah. Slowly. Then, round about my great-grandsire’s time, there was even talk of the Dagan followers establishing their own city again. But then something else happened.”

  “Which was what?”

  “Their rih-hara-tan, a woman named Klyrrhea, got the idea that if they were really serious about their beliefs, if they really believed in Dagan’s visions, they shouldn’t just be hanging around Monorha. Someone, Klyrrhea said, should go out into space and look for Gremadia.”

  “Truly?” This was an interesting twist. “Was space travel considered a radical concept?”

  Pad shook his head. “Not really. People back then knew that it was possible. We’d even begun launching probes and the first ships. But what Klyrrhea proposed was doing something in a big way. Fortunately for her, she had Gora on her side.”

  “Gora?”

  “Yeah, Gora. Scientist. Genius. Guy was two hundred cycles ahead of his time. There was no one like him. He knew more about engineering, about rocketry and propulsion systems…” His voice tapered off in awe and envy. “If we had someone like that with us now, Monorha wouldn’t be having the problems we are.”

  “Impressive,” Seven said. “So he built a ship for Klyrrhea.”

  “The Betasis,” he said. “Big enough to carry ten thousand people. I’ve seen pictures of her. She was a beauty. Too bad Klyrrhea didn’t live to make that journey.”

  “Interesting,” Seven said. “But I was under the impression that Monorhans did not name their ships. I believe I heard Captain Ziv say that.”

  Pad snorted. “No, we don’t. Not after what happened to the Betasis. She was the first one with a name and the last. After her, naming a ship was considered bad luck.”

  “The ship came to a bad end.”

  “They managed to make it out of orbit,” Pad said. “But you know I should probably let Kaytok tell you this part.”

  “Why?”

  “Didn’t I say before?”

  “Say what?”

  “That Gora was his grandsire.”

  * * *

  The situation on the bridge sorted itself out as quickly as it could, but it was at least half an hour before Janeway felt she had a clear grasp on everything that had been happening. The exhaustion was hitting her hard now, despite the Doctor’s drugs. The drugs…She’d pay for that soon. Never mind that, Janeway thought scoldingly. Keep it together. Keep awake. Work the problems.

  But there were so many of them.

  Two medics were carefully lifting the Monorhans onto stretchers. Both Sem and Ziv were unconscious, though neither appeared injured. “After the medics have looked her over,” Chakotay told the medic, “put Sem in the brig. And make sure there’s a psionic dampening field erected aroud her cell.”

  “Is that how she tampered with the autopilot?” Janeway asked. “Psionically?”

  “That’s our best guess.” Lowering himself into his chair, he asked Janeway, “How’s your back?”

  Janeway rubbed her tailbone, which still tingled from the bone knitting. “Okay,” she said, straining desperately to sound reasonable, then moved her hands to her collarbones. She could still feel Sem’s hands around her neck. “But I could use a cup of coffee.”

  “I’m fairly certain,” Chakotay said, “that would be a terrible idea. If you were wound any tighter, you’d disappear into another dimension.”

  “How would that be worse than the way things are now?”

  Her first officer grinned. “I’d be all alone.”

  Unable to resist, Janeway smiled in return. “Okay, fine. Tea, then.” Looking around the bridge, she saw order was reestablished, and thought, On to the next thing. “What can you tell me about the situation with the Doctor?”

  “Only that there’s something wrong with the holoemitters,” Chakotay reported. “We haven’t been able to track it down yet.” His expression turned sour. “It’s pretty disturbing, Harry says, the legs just standing there without a torso.”

  “Can’t you just shut down the entire system?”

  “We’re afraid to try. Harry is concerned that we won’t be able to reintegrate the…the parts.”

  “So until then?”

  Chakotay shrugged. “We hope nobody trips over him. Them.”

  Tom Paris barely choked back a snorting laugh.

  “Keep your mind on your station, Mr. Paris,” Chakotay said.

  “Sorry,” Tom said. “Tickle in my throat.”

  Janeway almost chuckled herself, but returned to business. “Meet me in astrometrics in ten minutes,” she said. “Get Harry out of sickbay, too. We need to consult.”

  “About that, you mean,” Chakotay said, pointing at the viewscreen. “About how we could possibly be seeing the Blue Eye in subspace.”

  She nodded. “Call Joe Carey, too, and ask him if he can tear himself away from the engines.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “And how’s Tuvok? We’ll want him there, too.”

  “I just spoke to him from sickbay. The radiation hit him hard, but he’s conscious now and wants back on active duty.”

  “Let him. We’ll need him.”

  “Done,” Chakotay said. “Any chance I can talk you into going to your office and closing your eyes for ten minutes?”

  “Do you have a crowbar to open them back up again if I do?”

  “I think B’Elanna took our only crowbar with her on the away mission.”

  “Then maybe just that tea.”

  * * *

  Chakotay pointed at the ball of roiling energy on Astrometric’s main screen, and said, “So you’re telling me that’s the Blue Eye.”

  “As it appears in subspace, yes,” Janeway replied. She turned to look at Tuvok and Harry who, despite being near exhaustion, stared at the uncanny sight, utterly engrossed.

  Tuvok said, “This is completely contrary to any understanding we have of subspace.”

  “Precisely,” Janeway said. “But then, everything about this system is contrary. Complex life should not have developed so close to a white dwarf. Subspace should not be so warped and folded. Natural laws governing matter shouldn’t be so radically different. Nothing fits right. Why is that?”

  “You have an idea,” Chakotay said.

  “I have a suspicion,” Janeway replied. “I think something unprecedented happened here a very long time ago and when it was all over, someone or something tried to patch it back together again and make it look ‘normal.’”

  “Why?” Harry asked. “For what purpose?”

  “I don’t know,” Janeway replied. “Though having dealt with some of the transcendent, transdimensional beings we’ve met, I know their motives are often beyond our comprehension. Let’s just say it happened and go from there.”

  “All right,” Chakotay said. “A patch. And we’ve become trapped underneath it—caught in the threads, as it were.”

  “Right. The fold or conduit we’re in, it’s part of a web of energy that holds this system together.”

  “And the Blue Eye,” Tuvok said, taking up the metaphor, “is a pin.”

  “Correct. It pierces through different levels of the universe and holds everything together.” Janeway turned back
to Chakotay and saw that he not only understood what she was suggesting, but accepted it.

  “All right,” he said, “so in order to escape, we have to loosen the pin.”

  “That’s where I’m going. We have to shrink the white dwarf, kill it, stop the radiation.”

  “Which will save the Monorhans,” Tuvok said, nodding his approval.

  “And if we shrink it enough,” Harry said, “we can slip out in the gap.”

  “Precisely.”

  Chakotay sighed resignedly. “It’s a wonderful idea: shrinking a star. Any ideas how to do that?”

  “There’s only one way I know,” she said. “We have to make some trilithium.”

  Chapter 16

  “Gora, my grandsire,” Kaytok began, “was an unusual person. Unusually intelligent, unusually persuasive, unusually…unusual. You could say that he was the most famous person in his generation.” They trudged along in silence for several seconds and B’Elanna wondered if she was supposed to make some kind of comment.

  “You must have admired him very much,” she said.

  “I didn’t know him well enough to admire him,” Kaytok replied, then snorted and kicked a small rock with the toe of his boot. B’Elanna, surprised that the Monorhan could see well enough to target a stone, let her visual receptors relax to human-normal and saw the eastern sky was beginning to grow lighter. “I won’t go into all the background details,” Kaytok continued, staring intently at the patch of ground a meter before them. “It’s all about religion and not a little about politics. I’m really not the person to give you an impartial account.”

  “Don’t worry about being impartial,” B’Elanna said. “We all have our stories.” And, she added silently, you only have a little more time to talk. They were less than two kilometers from the shuttle now.

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Kaytok said. “But there aren’t many like mine. My grandfather helped convince a lot of people that they should leave the planet and find a lost city built by…well, that’s the part they always had trouble explaining. Built by who? Built for what? And what would everyone do when they got there?” He threw his hands up in the air. “But enough people had heard this story enough times that they never doubted it would be a great idea to go there.”

  “That’s impressive,” B’Elanna said, and meant it. “How many people are we talking about?”

  “Not everyone who wanted to go could go,” Kaytok explained. “Space travel is difficult—I guess you know that—and the very old were asked to stay behind. Also, people in poor health, though I think Gora might have promised some of them that he would figure out a way to come back and collect them after he made it to Gremadia.”

  “The mythical city?”

  “Right. He’d come back and get them because in Gremadia they’d be able to cure any ailment these people might have. See how it works?”

  “Sure,” B’Elanna said. She understood perfectly: Kaytok believed his grandfather had been some kind of trickster or confidence man. “But I’m guessing he managed to get a lot of people to come with him.”

  “Almost ten thousand.”

  B’Elanna whistled appreciatively: a ship that could carry so many people. She had, of course, seen bigger in her time, but these had been massive transports moving the immense replicators and gigakilos of raw material used to create colonies virtually out of thin air. “What happened to them?”

  “Nobody really knows,” Kaytok said. “They left orbit successfully. They made it past the Blue Eye, which was considerably less active than it is right now, and then the radiation from the Eye made it impossible to communicate with the ship. Not that many people wanted to.”

  “Not you?” B’Elanna asked. “Not your parents?”

  “My sire—Gora’s third child—went along. My mother stayed here with me and my sister. She didn’t think going off into space with two young children was a good idea.”

  That may be the understatement of the year, B’Elanna thought, but kept the comment to herself. She had never thought very highly of the practice of Starfleet allowing families to travel on the Galaxy-class ships. They walked for several minutes while she waited for Kaytok to say more, but he seemed lost in his memories. Finally, growing impatient, she said, “You still haven’t explained how Sem fits into all this.”

  “I’ve been trying to find the words to explain,” Kaytok said. “This isn’t something I talk about a lot.” They walked on in silence for a hundred meters before he continued. “After Gora and his ten thousand departed and we didn’t hear anything from them for a while, everyone who stayed behind started to pretend that nothing had happened.”

  “Including your mother?”

  “Eventually,” Kaytok said. “Yeah, her too.” A defensive note crept into his voice. “You have to understand what it was like. When Gora was here, everything must have sounded very reasonable, but after he was gone, it was just…just…”

  “Embarrassing?”

  “Right. Embarrassing. I wasn’t sure if your species understood that emotion.”

  “Why wouldn’t we?”

  Kaytok replied, “Because you can’t sense each other the way most Monorhans can.”

  “Well, we do understand it. Some of us very well. I know something about being part of a family where one of the members was a perpetual embarrassment.”

  “You’ll have to tell me later.”

  “Maybe. After you’ve finished the story about Sem.”

  “Right,” Kaytok nodded. “Sem. Okay. The short version: When I met her, she was the only person who ever acted like my grandsire wasn’t a complete lunatic, like he might have had some worthwhile ideas.”

  “But I thought that’s what you’d thought.”

  “By that time, I’d come around a little. His ideas didn’t seem so crazy, especially because by this time the environment had begun to disintegrate. Sem liked to listen to my stories about him, even asked to see some of his notes and programs.”

  “You said this was back in your…what do you call it? University days?”

  “Yes, when I was a scholar, where people from different tribes, different cities, mingled freely. Sem was a special case, of course, because she was in training to be a rih-hara-tan.”

  “That’s like a priestess,” B’Elanna said.

  Kaytok shook his head. “I’m not sure what that word means. The translator can’t find a word that means the same thing. She was in training to become the leader of the tribe. Yes, that involves religion—I get that connotation from the translation—but it’s much more than that.”

  “How did you meet someone like that?” B’Elanna said. “Wouldn’t she be kept safe, kept away from…?”

  “The people she would serve?” Kaytok asked. “No, it doesn’t work that way here. And, besides, she wasn’t the only potential rih-hara-tan. Each tribe has several. They’re trained from birth, but no one knows who will be selected until the previous one dies or resigns.”

  “Oh,” B’Elanna said. “I see. That’s very…sensible.”

  “I’m glad you approve,” Kaytok said, not without sarcasm. “So, anyway, yes, we were both young, which is the excuse I use for how stupid I was.”

  “Why were you stupid?” B’Elanna was beginning to regret pursuing this line of questioning. Kaytok was getting increasingly agitated as he continued his tale, but curiosity had taken hold, as well as an intuition that Kaytok’s past was somehow entangled with the problem Monorha currently faced.

  “Because I should have figured out that she was just using me,” he said, head bobbing on his long neck. “One day, she left her dataset on and her personal log was open.”

  “Her personal log?” B’Elanna asked, almost amused. “You mean, like a diary? You read your girlfriend’s diary?” Some things are the same all over the galaxy, she decided.

  “I thought she meant me to,” Kaytok said, struggling to sound reasonable. “You have to understand—Sem was a very controlled person. She didn’t do things by acciden
t.”

  “What did it say?” B’Elanna asked.

  “I don’t remember exactly,” Kaytok said. “This is all a long time ago. But essentially what it was about was that she hadn’t found something she was looking for, that she was tired of trying to find it and was weary of me.”

  “‘Something’?” B’Elanna asked. “You mean, like an emotion, an attachment, or do you mean a thing? It sounds like you’re talking about the latter.”

  “When I read it, I thought she meant an emotion, but later I wasn’t so sure. When I finally got over the hurt, when I saw what kind of person Sem was after she became the rih-hara-tan, I had to wonder. There were stories about her searching historical records for clues to the whereabouts of the Key to Gremadia.”

  B’Elanna’s tricorder pinged as they crested a hill. Down below, in a long, flat gully that she now realized must have once been a riverbed, she saw their shuttle. A half-dozen Monorhans were stationed around it, each of them looking outward.

  “Uh-oh,” Kaytok said, squatting down so as not to be silhouetted against the brightening sky.

  B’Elanna knelt beside the Monorhan. “Who are they?” she whispered.

  “Emergency Council police.” Kaytok grunted unhappily. “Any ideas?”

  B’Elanna considered the situation, but before she could speak her mind, she felt another consciousness rise up inside her. Go talk to them, Seven said.

  Why? B’Elanna thought.

  Why not? They know who we are. The Emergency Council believes we are trying to assist them.

  But they’ve been lying to their own people, B’Elanna thought.

  They do not know that we know this.

  What about Kaytok?

  A friendly local who was good enough to feed you, then bring you back to your vessel.

  B’Elanna considered her options. She did not want to leave Kaytok alone out here in the middle of nowhere if for no other reason than they still needed him to figure out what to do with the shield generator. “Do any of these Emergency Council people know what you look like?”

  “No reason why they would,” Kaytok replied.

  “All right,” B’Elanna said as she rose. “Then come on down with me. The bugs in my head say we should go talk to these gentlemen and convince them they have no reason to keep us from the shuttle.”