Текст книги "Catalyst of Sorrows "

Автор книги: Margaret Bonanno

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She had already noted several things. Zetha lacked the pronounced upswept brow ridges that so many Romulans, including Cretak, possessed. But there were as many Romulans, Uhura thought, mindful of Charvanek and Tal and the smarmy, double-dealing Nanclus, who did not. She also wore her hair longer than the rather unflattering unisex pageboy that the Romulan military, at least, seemed to favor. Her movements were quick, wary, catlike, as if she were accustomed to always being on guard; the impression, to Uhura’s experienced eye, was that this was not just a result of training, it was hard-won and from life.

She would submit her young charge to a more formal debriefing after this, but for now, a walk in the garden would win her confidence and make it easier for her to talk.

“So it’s about an illness,” Uhura said carefully. “Something that resembles the Gnawing, which once killed half your people. How did your…employer…get this information?”

“Our own doctors cannot analyze this, cousin,” Taymor told Cretak, his breath coming short. “Or else they will not. You know the situation.”

“Of course,” Cretak said. “If your governor decides to spend the medical budget on new uniforms for his personal guard, he tells the people that suffering is good for the soul. In the larger scheme the Praetor buys warbirds, and our medical technology remains primitive. To suggest he do otherwise is deemed disloyal. You do not look well, cousin.”

“I am not, Kimora. Those who contract this die within days. I’m at the country house, and I’ve sent the servants away. I wanted to tell you while I was still coherent. I have already sent you the evidence, in the diplomatic pouch so it will not be scanned or irradiated. You’ll get it on the next incoming courier. It’s all I can do.”

Cretak struggled to keep her distress from showing on her face. In childhood she and Taymor had been as close as siblings. To think that she would never see him again…she placed her hand on the screen beside the image of his face, as if that would offer him comfort.

“Who else, Taymor? Kaitek, the children—?”

“So far, no. I am apparently the only one from my family so affected. Which is why I say this smacks of something unnatural. The Gnawing is legend, two thousand years old and, with what we know now, curable. But this…this is evil…” Taymor was overcome by a paroxysm of coughing. There were flecks of green on his lips when he could speak again. “All my love, cousin. Farewell…”

Cretak stared at the blank screen in despair.

“She did not tell me that, Lady,” Zetha replied, remembering her dignity and turning her face away from the sun and back toward her questioner. “Only sent me to tell you what she knows.”

“So I’m to accept her word, from your mouth, that an ancient illness which once killed almost half the Romulan people has been reawakened in a form that kills everyone it affects, and which may be artificially created?”

“Not my word, Lady,” Zetha reached her small hands inside her cloak and took a chain from around her neck, “but this.”

“Hold out your hand,” Cretak had said abruptly, holding something in both of her own.

Instinct said don’t,but Zetha did anyway. The object in question was a locket on an intricate chain, a death locket. She had seen such in the display windows of the pawn-shops on Jenorex Street when times were hard, cleverly disguised as medallions bearing a family crest, but with a secret compartment in the back to hold some relic of the deceased, most likely a lock of hair, sometimes braided like a bracelet. Some of these lockets were quite ornate, crusted with gemstones, others unadorned but intricately wrought, their value in the workmanship. This was one of the latter.

“Put it on,” Cretak instructed her in the same cool tone. “Be careful with it.”

Poisoned?Zetha wondered. Or, more likely, wired, fitted with a small transceiver that will record my every sound, every move.Nevertheless, something about the strength of this woman, her self-confidence, made her obey. Where with the Lord she had questioned everything, with Cretak she obeyed.

“It stays with you until you arrive where I am sending you. You give it to one person and one person only. No subordinates, no intermediaries, no helpful fellow travelers. If anything happens to keep you from this person, that object goes with you, day and night, until death do you part. If you open it you will die, and I will instruct you in what to say when you deliver it so that it is not opened too soon. If you are in harm’s way and know you are about to die, you destroy it, and I will tell you how. Any questions?”

“I am to tell you not to open it except within a medical steri-field,” Zetha said now, in the careful singsong she adapted when reciting the words Cretak had taught her. “It contains biomedical material from those who have died, which may still be highly contagious.”

The locket was beautiful, almost as big as the palm of Uhura’s hand, but the touch of the cold metal coupled with Zetha’s words about contagion made her hand tingle, and she had to suppress an urge to fling the object into the bushes as if it were a scorpion. She waited for common sense to overcome fear, then enfolded the locket in her fingers, her mind racing.

Operational triage: What to do first. Get this to Medical at once. Entrust it to Dr. Crusher, with instructions. Attempt to verify everything she’d just heard by contacting her Listeners on the other side. And then—

And then figure out what she was going to do with Pandora’s box now that she’d delivered her message that there are evils loose between the stars, and the head of Starfleet Intelligence must attempt to stop them. Uhura took a deep breath and steadied herself.

“Are you hungry?” she asked Zetha.

Ravenous would have been a better word. Uhura and Lieutenant Tuvok watched from behind the mirror wall as Zetha polished off a meal that would have done a longshoreman proud, then went back to the replicator for seconds.

“What do you make of her, Mr. Tuvok?” Uhura asked quietly, always interested in the Vulcan perspective. Early in his Starfleet career, Tuvok had done some undercover work for Intelligence, and Uhura was familiar with his credentials. He had also come to her with Hikaru Sulu’s highest recommendation, and that was worth its weight in latinum. Examining his record since his return to Starfleet, Uhura could see that even his long leave of absence to pursue Kolinahrhad not dulled his skills or tarnished his loyalty. He would be a strong asset for her team.

Tuvok canted his head slightly as Vulcans did when they were studying something, his usual seriousness deepening into a slight frown.

“Female vulcanoid, age approximately twenty Earth years. Height approximately 1.6 meters, weight approximately forty-eight kilos. Color of eyes, green, color of hair, dark brown, distinguishing marks, none apparent…”

Was it only Uhura’s imagination that as Tuvok spoke, the young woman stopped shoveling food in with both hands and raised her head imperceptibly, as if she sensed another, and nonhuman, presence? There was no question she had known at once that the mirror wasn’t just a mirror, and that she was being observed from the other side. But did she also sense by whom? No,Uhura thought. That much I’m imagining.

“Freckles,” she said when Tuvok was done, watching Zetha finish her second helping and, with a sleight of hand almost too quick to see, secrete an apple and two uneaten spring rolls in a pocket of her travel cloak against future contingencies, conditioning, perhaps, from not always knowing where her next meal was coming from. “Surely you noticed the freckles. And she’s built like a Balanchine dancer.”

She could see Tuvok searching his memory for the reference and coming up blank. Vulcans, she knew, hated to admit they didn’t know something.

“I am not familiar with the reference,” he said at last, grudgingly.

“Nor should you be, Lieutenant. George Balanchine was a ballet master on Earth a few centuries ago. He believed the perfect female body for the dance was one that was exactly the height and weight you described, but with legs proportionately longer than the torso. Balanchine would have adored this one.”

“Indeed.”

“But you said ‘vulcanoid,’ not Romulan.”

“Is she Romulan, Admiral?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Uncertain merely on appearance. If I could engage her in conversation, I might be able to learn more. A mind-meld, of course, would ascertain her identity definitively.”

“I doubt the latter will be necessary,” Uhura said, moving away from the mirror wall and indicating that Tuvok should do the same. “But she came to me from the other side of the Zone, and the person who sent her used the code words ‘Pandora’s box.’ ”

This was a reference Tuvok recognized. “Indeed?”

“I’m not saying she’s a security risk, but I’m asking you to debrief her with your usual thoroughness, and take her in hand for the course of this mission. Not so that it’s obvious, but—”

“Understood. Now, as to the nature of the mission—?”

Uhura motioned him out of the anteroom and let the door lock behind them. “In my office,” she said.

She offered him coffee, real brewed arabica, not synthesized, ground fresh every morning from beans grown on the slopes of Mount Kenya, not far from her grandparents’ summer house. Tuvok accepted, tasted, nodded appreciatively. Uhura put her own cup down and got to the point.

“Tell me what you know about something the Romulans call the Gnawing.”

“An ancient illness,” Tuvok said carefully. Vulcans were always careful in addressing anything to do with their distant siblings and the reasons for their separation. “Rumored to have arisen among those who chose to leave Vulcan at the time of the Sundering. I know no more than that.”

“It killed upwards of fifty percent of those who settled on Romulus,” Uhura told him quietly.

“Indeed?” Tuvok’s eyebrow went up. He seemed about to question the number, but decided against it. “Nevertheless, to my knowledge, it is an ancient illness. There have been no serious outbreaks since the Sundering.”

“There are now,” Uhura said.

Chapter 3

History, it is said, is written by the victors. But what of a war where there is no victor? Who writes the history then?

The pundits refer to the split between Vulcan and Romulan, between the followers of Surak and those who could not accept his teaching, as the Sundering. As if it were as quick and clean as an amicable divorce, the two parties deciding that, no longer having anything in common, it was time for them to part. Or, perhaps more likely from the Vulcan perspective, as if severing a diseased limb from a healthy body and casting it aside.

It is no dishonor to the memory of Surak to say that he and his philosophy were less than perfect. And it is a lesson of more than one planet’s history that even the most inspired of reformers cannot foresee all possible long-term outcomes of their reforms.

Outworlders know of Vulcan only what Vulcans wish them to know. Vulcans speak in lofty phrases of a history “shrouded in antiquity…savage, even by Earth standards,” and few who are not Vulcan presume to question them further, grateful perhaps that beings of such intellect and physical strength—and telepaths at that—have chosen to suppress all that potential for violence beneath a veneer of logic and civilization. Easier to assume that those who could not tolerate Surak’s reforms simply boarded their ships without a glance back and quietly, if bitterly, left the planet.

But did they go all at once or over decades, years, generations? Was there only a handful of ships, or did vast armadas fill the skies above the arid and unforgiving mother world? Did all who went go willingly, or were some forced into exile, and by what means? Were families, friends, lovers torn apart?

And what of those who stayed behind? Did they buy the official story, that both sides would be the better for it, that it was not an end but a beginning? Or did some, even as the ships departed, too late, have second thoughts?

Postulate a civilization that had spaceflight technology millennia before humans did, but almost lost it all to the terrible violence that led to the rise of Surak. Rebuilding from a fragmented culture—the shattered statues at Gol speak eloquently in their silence, their offspring extant in the masked and ax-wielding entourage that accompanies every traditional Vulcan marriage ceremony—surely they vowed to employ whatever means necessary to guarantee that such destruction would never occur again.

Beware of those who think and speak in absolutes. “Never” is a very long time, and at what cost? The ahn-woonand the lirparemain. Vulcans may murmur of ritual and custom, but small wonder so few outworlders are invited to the wedding. The scowling, bare-chested guards with their faces obscured by beaklike masks are impossible to ignore, difficult to explain.

Were they present at the departure as well, these guards, ranks of armed and uncompromising sentries, making certain everyone who was meant to get onboard the ships of the Sundering did so, with no opportunity to turn back? It is a thing no outworlder may know.

Because the question remains: If the Sundering was amicable, by mutual agreement, why was all communication severed once the ships were gone? Why were the distant siblings sent off into the void and never heard from again? Was it their choice to turn their faces from the mother world and never look back? Or were they so instructed?

There is an obscure novel of the last century, written by a non-Vulcan, which purports that the ships of the Sundering were fitted with no means of communication beyond simple short-range radio for ship-to-ship communication. Some sources say they lacked even that. Yet given the resourcefulness of the Vulcan mind, could they not have jury-rigged something with which to communicate long-range, back to the world they had departed?

Unless they had been forbidden to do so. Or any attempt to communicate with anyone back on Vulcan was jammed at the source.

In any event, the silence was absolute, and the Sundered, whether over the course of months or generations, whether free and clear to navigate or beset by ion storms, food shortages, hostility from those whose space they blundered into, internecine squabbles, ended their journey on Romulus.

Did all of the Sundered get that far? Did some perish along the way? Did some venture off in other directions, find other worlds, or disappear without a trace? This can only be conjectured. What is known for certain is that those who remained on Vulcan saw the ships off into the sky, returned to their houses, and went about their lives under the aegis of logic, a logic that did not dwell overmuch on what might have been.

Perhaps they spoke of those who had departed, perhaps not. But it is interesting that such a characteristically curious people were so remarkably incurious about what might have happened to their distant brothers in the centuries between. Was the silence, indeed, absolute, or did their ships sometimes pass in the night? Or if, when Romulus and Earth were at war, the Vulcans looked down their noses when asked and replied, “We don’t know who these people are,” was it at least partly true?

What drove the distant siblings away? Perhaps nothing more than fear of the monolithic society Surak’s teachings would inspire. They knew the Vulcan mind. Did they fear that, having decided to embrace logic, Vulcan would become some great monochrome sand-colored boredom, which they could not abide?

For how was one to define emotion against logic? Were only the “negative” emotions like anger and sorrow included in the roster of what it was now necessary to suppress, or were all emotions suspect, dangerous, in need of suppression? And was the individual to be trusted to take charge of her own emotions, or would there be outside enforcement, thought police patrolling the streets searching for violations, coworkers spying on their colleagues, children on their parents?

What about literature, art, music? Who was to decide whether a piece of music was “logical,” a painting “emotional”? Or were those forms to fall under blanket interdict as well? As it turned out, they did not, but how were the early dissidents to know? The definition of what was deemed “illogical” was too broad, and thereby too narrow, for some to bear.

Humans who suppress all emotion become either mystical or mad. Had the Sundered tried the way of logic at first but, seeing too many of their fellows fall to madness, decided it was better to leave? Was there nowhere on the world that they could live in peace? Whose idea was it to pack themselves off on a trajectory to nowhere, and forever?

Doubtless there are histories on Romulus, at least, which record that part, but they are not accessible to the average citizen. And if the Vulcans knew, they were not sharing. “Lost when the ships were lost,” is the official story even today.

Whereas the history of life on Romulus seems to have begun, and almost ended, with the Gnawing.

There are plenty of brave little children’s stories about the early settlers in their hand-me-down clothing who stood on a rise overlooking a valley burgeoning with green and growing things beneath the light of a gentler sun, the stars of a different sky. The artwork accompanying these stories is often quite evocative.

The stories tell of the brave pioneers using the hulls of their ships as shelters from the too-frequent rains on their strange new world as they learned to forage the native materials to build rudimentary housing and supplement their dwindling food supply. Some of the teaching materials deemed acceptable for adolescent readers are a little darker, featuring epic struggles with native predators, unforeseeably indigestible plants, lightning and floods and deadly windstorms, through all of which, of course, the Indomitable Spirit of the Romulan People inevitably triumphed, leading naturally to the Dawn of the People’s Empire. But if one reads carefully, one notices a considerable gap of years between those early days and the ascendancy of that almighty Empire.

That gap is not spoken of. It holds too many horrors. Too many things went wrong.

There was the climate, for starters. Why did they choose to settle here, when it was so different from the world they’d known? Did they choose, or was it chosen for them? Had they run out of fuel or gone off course, had their instruments told them this was the only habitable world in their path and they had best make do? Was there damage from the Jeltorai asteroid belt that meant they had to make landfall, and soon?

There is some suggestion that they didn’t even know at first that there were twin worlds. Perhaps they landed here and thought it was all there was. Was there debate or even revolt, one group who said “We will land here,” who simply shouted louder than the ones who said “But what about the weather”? If it was recorded anywhere, no one knew where to find it.

Where Vulcan was hot and dry and rain was such a rarity that, even in their logic, Vulcans would stop what they were doing whenever it fell to go outdoors and marvel at it (apparently, as more than one human wag had put it, not having sense enough to come in out of the rain), it rained overmuch on most of this new world for the well-being of those whose origins were desert.

There were doubtless some among the early settlers who rejoiced in pointing out the benefits—a longer growing season, no need for irrigation, no food shortages regardless of how their population increased. It had not occurred to them that lungs evolved over millions of years for the desert might find breathing difficult in a place where the weather alternated between hot and humid and cold and damp. It was difficult to grow food and build cities or even walk about when you were battling fungal infections, skin rashes, and airborne allergens, and felt most of the time as if you were drowning. Trudging about under an alien sun or, more often, finding it obscured by ominous cloud cover, wiping runny noses and scratching dermatoses, few noticed the symptoms of the Gnawing, until it was too late.

First came the headache and shortness of breath, followed by an annoying dry cough and loss of appetite. Light and sound became painful, clothing chafed the skin. There was dizziness, sometimes double vision, always chills and fever. Even the strongest were unable to work or think or even stay on their feet; they took to their beds and tried what cures they knew, but nothing worked.

The cough became persistent but still nonproductive, meaning it did not free the throat or lungs of whatever was attacking them. As the lung tissue broke down, some coughed up blood. They were the lucky ones. Eventually their lungs would fill with fluid and they would slowly drown, spared the symptoms of the later stages.

Those whom the cough didn’t kill faced nausea, vomiting, agonizing joint pain, a rigidity in the muscles and the spine that made it impossible to bend, to turn the head. Contemporary physicians described some victims’ flesh as literally stiffening to the consistency of wood.

By now the fever was so high it boiled the brain; victims babbled and raved, had to be tied down to keep from harming themselves or others, assuming they had not been abandoned by those fearing the contagion themselves. Some died then, others when the lymph nodes in their necks enlarged so greatly that their throats closed and they strangled, all this within a day or two of the first symptoms. Those who survived beyond this faced the worst of all: the rash.

It wasn’t really a rash, but the pooling of blood beneath the skin, signifying that the capillaries were disintegrating, internal organs liquefying. By then the only hope was for death, and soon.

Worst of all was the solitude. The rudimentary clinics the settlers had been able to set up before the illness struck were soon filled to overflowing, with medical staff dying almost as quickly as their patients. Those stricken in their homes were abandoned there; no one wanted to risk contamination. Whole families were sometimes sealed up in their houses, the living along with the dying and the dead. Corpses were dumped in common graves until there was no one left with the strength to bury them; the last of the dead were heaped up and burned or left to the scavengers where they lay.

When it was over, one out of every two healthy adults had died. The incidence of death among infants, children, elders, and the sickly was never accurately measured. Later statisticians estimated that if fewer than one hundred more of the entire population had died, the Sundered would have gone extinct, lacking enough viable members to breed a new generation.

When it was over, it was referred to simply as the Gnawing, a demon which inhabited the body and consumed it from within. Those few who survived it passed like wraiths among the healthy, possessed of a hunger that could never be satisfied. No matter how much they ate, they never recovered the strength and muscle mass lost to the fight against the disease.

The etiology was eventually traced to a bacillus native to the soil of Romulus whose spores, like those of tetanus on Earth, could lie dormant, encapsulated, surviving extremes of temperature in the driest soils for a century or more, until activated. Had the simple act of turning over the soil to plant crops disturbed them? Or was it that combined with the amount of wind and rain that year, the temperature, the angle of the sun, the position of the planet in its orbit, evil spirits, the wrath of unknown, offended gods?

And once disturbed, infiltrating the lungs of the farmer in his field, absently rubbed into a minor cut on the hand of a clerk in the village, ingested by an infant crawling along the floor, how did it become contagious, passing from host to host?

Perhaps if they had studied this more closely, those early Romulans might not have suffered from the fear of the thing millennia later. But once the Gnawing was over and the last victim disposed of, a kind of societal amnesia took hold. No one took the trouble to develop a cure, much less a vaccine, no one followed up on the anecdotal realization that some very few of their number were immune, and could pass among the suffering without so much as a cough.

When, down the centuries, an occasional outbreak was reported in a rural area, usually among school-age children, antibiotics were administered, and no one died. Grateful for that, the average Romulan followed the news report and then moved on, unaware.

Unaware that the parent bacteria could under certain circumstances mutate into a virus. Unaware that that virus could mutate further and integrate itself into a survivor’s DNA. Unaware that that DNA had further mutated down the millennia so that some descendants were immune, carriers of something that might by now be benign, or not.

Some precautions were taken. Whenever new plots of land were cleared for farming they were first examined for the bacillus which, mysteriously, could no longer be found. Samples of the original organism were kept in stasis in medical facilities in the most secure locations, just in case. In case of what, no one dared say.

The Gnawing is not written in the children’s stories, but every child knows it as they know their own fingerprints, the color of their eyes, the caste they were born to. It isn’t just a matter of hearing it from the adults (“Eat up all your viinerine,there’s a good child; if you don’t eat, you won’t be strong, and you might catch the Gnawing”); it is simply known. It is in great measure what makes Romulans what they are.

Some Earth historians insist that the Renaissance in Europe could never have occurred without the Black Death to reduce the population ahead of it. No telling on how many other worlds something similar might be true.

Those who survived the Gnawing beheld the universe with a jaundiced view in more ways than one. The disease had atrophied the nictitating membrane which had protected their eyes from solar flares on Vulcan, and literally changed the way they looked at color. To the alien eye, Romulan cities seem gray, Romulan clothing drab. Among the genes the virus altered were those governing visual perception. Where a human or Cardassian might see gray, Romulans now saw many colors, which meant that bright colors often disturbed them. Only certain shades of red could soothe, not unexpected for a species whose blood was green.

As for the psychological impact of all of this, if the survivors were xenophobic, could they be blamed? Thereafter anything which approached from the outside might be construed as an attack. When there is no off-switch for the fight-or-flight mechanism, one becomes a Romulan.

Other species found them arrogant. Were they not entitled? Take a Vulcan’s intellect and send it into exile, alone in its own company for however long, set it down on a world entirely different than anything it has heretofore known. Allow it to barely establish itself on its new world, only to be all but buried alive in corpses. Task such a species with a sickness, seemingly out of nowhere, which kills every second person it touches, and you frighten it, humble it, grind its face in the dust. When the sickness passes, those who remain, the taste of dust in their mouths, the stench of death in their nostrils, will never be the same.

Now observe as these people burn their dead and shake off the ashes and establish a civilization, only to find themselves bracketed by the rapacity of Klingons on one side and the sloppiness that is humanity on the other, and dare call it arrogant? Or only Romulan?

“There are really only two kinds of Romulan, you know,” Pardek told Cretak once, in one of his frequent avuncular teaching moods. She was very young then, and one of his newest aides, eager to please him in whatever way she could. Pardek had been married seemingly forever even then, so it wasn’t a matter of that. He was one of those men who cherished power above all else, even wealth and sex. What he really needed was a pair of young, unspoiled ears to listen to him.

“Truly, Lord?” Cretak had responded, humoring him, but also curious. “And what are they?”

“There are those who like things just the way they are and will stop at nothing to keep them that way, and those who understand that change is the natural order of the universe, and one must change with it.”

“I see,” she said, amused at the very idea that it could be so simple. “And which are you?”

“Why, the latter, of course! I am a simple man, Cretak, so lacking in guile it’s a wonder I ever made it into politics. I shift with the tides and follow the times, always. There is no mystery to me at all. But you, you are the mystery. Which kind of Romulan are you?”

She didn’t even have to think of an answer. “I believe I am as committed to growth and change as you are, Lord.”

Pardek had smiled indulgently. “Ah, but you’re young yet. We will see if age and experience have their way with you.”

Her conversation with Pardek was still fresh in Cretak’s mind a few mornings later when she awoke beside Koval.

She propped herself up on one elbow and studied his face. He was feigning sleep, but she knew him well enough by now to tell it was only pretense. He was so seldom himself, it was safer to assume he was always pretending.

He has a weak chin,was her first thought. Why did I never notice this before? Then again, even the kindest of my kin say my jaw’s too strong. If we had had children, would they have favored him or me or something halfway between?

The match would have been an acceptable one. She and Koval were of the same caste, children of the intellectual and military families who made up the outer circle that protected the inner circle of the imperial court and who, of course, aspired by either marriage or accomplishment to be permitted into that inner circle someday. When and how had their society ossified into these rigid little boxes? Vulcan society, while nominally a meritocracy, also had its subtle class distinctions; it was a given that the old, propertied families wielded most of the true power. But Romulan society had subdivided into castes within castes, each ringed about with customs, laws, and taboos which made it all but impossible to escape from one into another.