“Not yet,” the woman said.
“Have you thought of just asking me what it is you wish to know?”
The Romulan shook her head. “Information flows both ways, Ambassador. Simply by asking my question, I will be providing too much information about myself.”
“Madam, I am your captive. What good will information do me?”
The Romulan thought that over.
“May I ask your name?” Spock prompted.
“You will know it when you remember it.”
“Fascinating,” Spock said.
“You have the same effect on me.”
Spock decided he had nothing to lose by forcing the issue. “Ask your question.”
The Romulan gave his immobilized hand a squeeze. “Given a choice between love and death, why do you so often choose death?”
Spock stared up at her, convinced that was only the preamble to a more specific inquiry.
But after several moments of silence, he realized that was, indeed, her question.
For the first time, Spock wondered about the mental state of his abductor, so he answered carefully.
“I am not aware of having chosen death over love in the past.”
“On the mountainside, you could have chosen Saavik.”
Spock narrowed his eyes. Whoever this woman was, he was beginning to suspect she wasn’t Romulan after all.
“That was an illusion.”
“No,” the woman argued. “It was sensory input directly fed to your brain, indistinguishable from those signals processed by your own eyes and ears, pressure receptors, olfactory nerves, pleasure centers.”
“Except,” Spock pointed out carefully, “the situation itself was not logical, and thus unreal.”
The woman shook her head as if confused. “Love and logic?”
Spock was utterly baffled by the conversation. “Madam, am I to understand that you have abducted me for philosophical reasons, not political ones?”
“Ambassador, I have abducted you to save you. To save Romulus and Remus. To save Vulcan. The Federation. The Klingon Empire. The four galactic quadrants, all worlds known and unknown. Life itself.”
Spock’s logical decision tree underwent a sudden pruning as he realized the woman was insane.
“Save us from what?” he asked politely.
She smiled sadly at him, as if she saw through his attempt to humor her. “From your loneliness. From your despair. From your…ignorance of the true reality of existence.”
Spock had dealt with fanatics before. Indeed, it was remarkable that the unsettled conditions on Romulus had not resulted in many more irrational movements achieving prominence.
The secret, he knew, was not to challenge a fanatic’s beliefs, but to gently inquire about them, showing one to be open to enlightenment, encouraging the fanatic to see a chance to bring another into the fold.
“You speak of things I do not understand,” Spock said, “and it is not my intent to cause offense. But may I ask, with respect, what the true reality of existence is?”
For a moment, Spock could see that his tactic worked exactly as he had planned. The woman’s smile transformed, going from a pained and solemn expression to beatific transcendence.
She reached out to stroke his cheek, as if blessing him.
Spock waited for her to define the nature of her insanity, confident he could then work within her belief system to achieve his freedom.
“Ambassador,” she said softly, “the true reality of existence is everything that is around you, that you do not see.”
Spock blinked as it seemed her hand, so close to his face, had gone out of focus. He concluded his eyes were dry. He made his inner eyelids slide out to better lubricate his corneas, but when his vision cleared, her hand was even less distinct, as if it were dissolving into something black and formless.
“The true reality of existence,” she said, “is the Totality.”
And with that single word, Spock knew.
“Norinda…” he said in a strangled gasp as the breakdown of the woman’s hand continued, dissolving into small black cubes that dissolved again into smaller cubes, and smaller, until what had once been her flesh roiled like a cloud of dust.
“Good,” Norinda whispered seductively. “You remember.”
Then the living dust swept into Spock’s nostrils and past his lips to suffocate him far more efficiently than any Reman soldier could, and he faced death once more at the hands of a woman he had met more than a century ago, and whatever she was, she was anything but insane.
8
S.S. CALYPSO, STARDATE 57483.3
On the cramped passenger deck of the Calypso, Picard paused at the small metal door of his cabin, quickly looked up and down the narrow, conduit-lined corridor to check for any unwanted observers, then carefully ran his finger along the edge of the door’s upper surface.
He felt the delicate ridge of the tiny thread he had left there ten minutes earlier, when he had left to use the shared sonic shower and head. That meant his cabin had not been entered. He was safe from Joseph for another day. Or, at least, another few hours.
Picard placed his palm against the security lock and the cabin door clicked open. He stepped inside, remembering to duck his head. A week ago, on the first day of this voyage, the first two times he had stepped inside his cabin he had banged his head, the second time hard enough to require Beverly to use a plaser to reduce the swelling. But after that jarring reminder, he had finally learned his lesson.
And the truth was, he enjoyed it.
The cabin, one of the ship’s two VIP suites according to Admiral Janeway, was barely four meters long and three meters across, and had been intended for two passengers, with fold-down bunks, a small desk and smaller wall cabinet, most of its storage space already filled with two emergency vacuum suits. And the whole cabin fairly resonated with the constant drone of the Cochrane generators only four decks below.
Even as a cadet on survival training missions to Charon, Picard had not had quarters as minuscule and as austere as this. But after decades on starships with broad, well-lit corridors, plush carpet, antinoise technology, gymnasiums, theaters, concert halls, even social lounges, the conditions on this small ship brought back something Picard suddenly realized had been missing from his life and his career—the romance of space travel.
Over the years, he had undertaken the obligatory holorecreations of the early days of exploration beyond the Earth. He had spent three days in an Apollo command module and landed at Tranquility Base with Neil Armstrong. He’d spent a week—all the time he could spare one vacation—on the Ares, living and working with its crew on their five-month voyage to Mars. And he had hot-bunked with the crew of Jonathan Archer’s Enterprise as that fabled ship had made humanity’s first harrowing foray into the Delphic Expanse.
And each time he had emerged from those pioneering adventures, he had felt an indefinable sense of loss.
But not on this ship.
He only wished his reasons for being here were more positive. If not for young Joseph Kirk keeping all the adults on their toes, the entire voyage thus far would have been little more than a somber, weeklong funeral service.
Picard pulled his oversized civilian communicator from the pocket of his terry robe, then switched off the robe’s current, making its fibers lose their repelling charge and thus collapse in on themselves so that the robe took less storage space. Children, he realized, were the force that kept death at bay. Was it wrong of him to think that this late in his life, they might still be an option for him and—
