Dark Mirror (2 page)

Far up here, above the great Galactic Rift, that light seems most tenuous—the darkness not of dust or distance but of simple nothingness. Few sentient beings pass this way; observers are rarer than stars. But every now and then, something breaks the aridity of the dark desert. A distant gleam, a silver flicker, swelling, growing closer; like a memory sought for in a dark mind and suddenly recalled. If the observer had senses not dependent on something besides sluggish light to reflect and carry messages—tachyons, perhaps—they would see it grow and flash past them, touched with a spark of red on the port side, green on the starboard, and the letters NCC 1701-D dark on its hull. Then the memory is off again in the dark, with a trail of rainbow behind it, quickly fading, the legacy of its warpfield. Lone ambassador of the multifariousness of known worlds, here and gone again, out of the darkness, into the darkness:
Enterprise
goes about her business.

In his quarters, Jean-Luc Picard stood away from the canvas and glanced sideways for a moment at the darkness pouring past. He could almost feel it, the thickness of the dark: that strange, empty, but somehow heavy and oppressive quality that it had, this far out from the light and life of the more populated parts of the Federation. They were far out on the fringes, and the relative emptiness of things was chilling. It was at times like this that his thoughts turned
elsewhere, to other imageries: warmer, slightly more reassuring—however subjective it was to feel that one needed reassurance in this dark. Picard knew himself well enough not to ignore such feelings, however ill-founded he might suspect them to be. At such times he gladly turned his mind toward home: the hearth of the mind.

He turned back to the canvas. Landscape was not usually something he attempted, and certainly not usually from memory. Which, when he realized it, had driven him immediately to try it.

It was a wood in the Luberon, not far from the vineyards of home. A sunny morning, in the earliest part of autumn: you could tell it from the trees—the green of the birches and oaks in that wood was not the fresh color of spring, but the tireder, resigned, mellowing green of trees whose leaves are thinking of turning. Here and there, in the dapple of the birches against the hard blue sky, you could see a leaf gone yellow, quietly treacherous to summer, starting the change. Typical of the way such things shift, subtly, leaf by leaf: their beginnings “small and hardly to be seen,” as the poet says, but seeming so great when we suddenly look up and notice.

Under them, beneath the marginally treacherous birches and oaks, pools of shadow, pools of light; and just there, in the shadow of an oak, but bright with a scrap of sunlight let down past a negligent branch, a little patch of brilliance caught hanging in the air: a butterfly. One of the brown woods butterflies with a broad white stripe, soaring down the glade between the trees. Nothing else stirring, no sense of wind in those trees, no movement, just the perfect still-mellowing heat of the very beginning of the time when the grapes would be ready: the perfect first moment of autumn, earth just beginning to calm to its rest for the year.

Picard stepped back and looked. The harsh blue of the summer south of France showed through the upper branches. Here and there, in the dim background, the
feather of one of the windbreak pines showed through. Everything but the touch of light in the middle air, and the blue above the trees, was soft, indefinite: the ground, all littered with the brown of many years. He had been spending a lot of time on that ground, working to get it right. The wrong light, too much detail or too little, would make it all look false. He changed brushes, dabbed at the palette, scrubbed the brush drier, and touched a bit more light onto the butterfly’s wings, making it more golden, less white than it had been.

He stood away again and let his eyes go a little unfocused, the better to let his eyes evaluate the canvas. Light, warmth, a feeling of peace: the antithesis to everything out there at the moment.

His glance slid sideways. He thought of the great philosopher, there in his old home, all bounded by noisy streets, who looked out at the tram clanging by, and the bustle of the city in those days, and wrote, “The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me to death.” It took a man attuned to hear that silence,
this
silence, in such a place, through all the noise and clatter of civilization. Out here, it required no ear nearly so subtly attuned. Turn away from your work or play for a moment, and those clouds of stars reminded you just how small you were, and how far away from the things that you might love. Picard knew that the philosopher would equally have held that you’re no farther from those things than the vein of your neck: since you carry them within you, you and they are coterminous. Some might balk at the seeming contradiction. Picard merely smiled, knowing the ways of philosophers, and reached for another brush.

The door chimed. “Come,” he said.

Lieutenant Commander Data stepped in, paused. “I am not interrupting anything, am I, Captain?”

“Nothing of any weight.” Picard put the first brush he had selected down, chose another: narrowed, with the
fanned edge. Data stepped around to look at the canvas, raising his eyebrows for permission. Picard nodded.

Data looked at it and said, “Ah.
Ladoga camilla
. Or
Limenitis camilla
, in the older Linnaean classification.”

Picard’s eyebrows went up, too, in surprise. “It’s that obvious?” There was barely a square centimeter of paint there, after all, and some only indifferent brushwork.

“The broken white stripe is a clear indicator, Captain.”

“Mr. Data,” Picard said, shaking his head, “I understand the delight of acquiring information. But you are in a unique position to agree with the detective that the mind is a closed room, with only so much space in which to store information. Whatever moved you to acquire information on Earth’s butterflies, when there might be information more important that required the same room?”

“‘Man does not live by bread done,’” Data said. “Or so Keiko O’Brien says. She recommends the butterfly as an excellent example of ‘the sound of one hand clapping.’”

Picard smiled slightly. “She’s probably right. At least, that’s one of the few responses to the koan which makes any sense to
me
… though some would tell you, I must admit, that in a koan, sense is the wrong thing to be looking for. Meanwhile, I assume you had something specific to tell me when you came.”

“Yes, sir. Within the past hour the Lalairu main group hailed us. They estimate they will be within transporter range within another hour.”

“That’s excellent. Are the mission specialist’s quarters ready for him?”

“Geordi is overseeing the final stages of the installation now, Captain. He said he wanted to add some ‘bells and whistles’ to it.” Data looked slightly quizzical as he examined Picard’s canvas. “While I know that the specialist’s people are sonically oriented, I did not know that bells and whistles were of any specific value—”

Picard smiled. “I think Mr. La Forge means he wants to
make sure that Commander… that the commander’s quarters have a little more than the usual fittings. Ask him to notify me when he’s done, if you will.”

“Certainly, sir.” Data spent a moment more gazing at the canvas. “Autumn?”

Picard nodded. “How did you judge that?”

“The white admiral does not achieve such growth until the late summer. Also, the lighting is suggestive of the increased declination of the sun in autumn, as is the leaf color. But the latter judgments are subjective and liable to confusion through individual differences in color perception. The butterfly, however, is diagnostic.”

Picard smiled to himself. “Butterflies have been called many things, but, I think, rarely that. Very well, Mr. Data. I’ll be along shortly. When you start the usual information exchanges with the Lalairu, my compliments to the Laihe, and I should enjoy speech with her before they pass on.”

Data nodded and left. Picard turned back to the canvas, surveying it, letting his mind drift for a moment as the butterfly seemed to drift down the glade between the trees. The warmth, the slanting light, and the silence, the sweetness in the still air among the trees where the late honeysuckle climbed: the Lalairu would visit such a place readily enough. But otherwise they would value it little.

The Lalairu was what they called themselves, though they were not one species, but an association of hundreds. Their language was a farrago of borrowings from the languages of many planets, grammatically bewildering, semantically a nightmare, and difficult to translate accurately, no matter how long you or the universal translator worked at it. They could perhaps be truly described, and uniquely so among Federation peoples, as a “race” in the older sense of the word—a group who shared a way of life by choice.

They were travelers. No one knew how long their huge cobbled-together ships, in families or smaller groups, had
been roving the far fringes of known space. Indeed they seemed to know, and frequent, parts of it that no one else did, but good navigational information about those places was difficult to obtain from them because of the equivocal nature of the Lalairsa language as regarded spatial location. Coordinate systems the Lalairu understood, but they had one of their own that seemed to change without warning, so that directions given in it didn’t always work for outsiders. In any case, they were rarely interested in giving
tizhne
directions. That was their word for people who lived on planets. It was faintly scornful, but affectionate regardless—a term the Lalairu used with the air of someone talking about a relative’s baby who was unwilling to come out of its playpen. Other space travelers they would deal with, trade with, meet with cordially enough, but there was always a feeling of a barrier between them and you, a sense of some choice that in their opinion they had made more wisely than you had, so that they felt faintly sorry for you.

True, they were free: rarely had a people known such freedom. The Lalairu’s total lack of connection to the planetbound cultures left them free to go anywhere they pleased, trade with everyone. They made no alliances, no treaties, suffered no entanglements: they would take the Ferengii’s goods as readily as the Federation’s or the Romulans’ or anyone else’s. In return they traded rare plants, animals, minerals, manufactured commodities, things elsewhere unseen and unknown—and afterward they vanished into the unknown again, to appear later in known space when and where they pleased. The only thing to be counted on with them was that the Lalairu did not miss appointments they had made, whether to trade or just to meet with you. They were not missing this one, either.

Picard spent a few minutes cleaning his brushes and getting the pigment off himself—he had never been able to break himself of the habit of smudging the canvas with his
thumb when he wanted the shading exactly right. He was in the middle of pulling out a uniform tunic when the communicator chirped: “
Captain
?”

It was Data again. “Yes?”

“
Mr. La Forge has completed his work on the mission specialist’s quarters, and the commander will be beaming over shortly
.”

“Excellent. I’ll go down and greet him. Picard out.”

He found Chief O’Brien working thoughtfully over the transporter panel when he got down to transporter room six. “A problem?” Picard said.

O’Brien shook his head. “Just some fine-tuning. The commander wears a field generator for protection in our environment. While the transporter’s field analysis routines are pretty thorough, I don’t want to take the chance of disrupting his suit.”

Picard put his eyebrows up and waited. After a few more moments, O’Brien was satisfied. “Transporting now,” he said, and touched the controls.

Out of the glitter and the whine of the transporter effect formed a shape hovering about four feet above the floor, horizontal. The shimmer faded away. Resting on a flexible levitation platform was what looked like a dolphin in an inch-thick coating of glass. At least, it looked that way until the dolphin swung his tail in greeting, and the “glass” moved and rippled slightly, revealing itself as a skin of water being held in place around the dolphin’s body by a small envirofield generator strapped around that tail. The dolphin whistled, and his universal translator output said, “
Bonjour, M’sieur Capitaine; permettez bord
?”

Picard smiled. “
Oui, et bienvenue, M’sieur Commandant
! Did you have any luggage?”

“It went to cargo transporter five,” Mr. O’Brien said. “It’ll go to the commander’s quarters from there.”

“Very well. Commander, would you like a look at them?”

“Very much, thank you.” The dolphin downstroked with his tail, arching his back a bit, and the negative-feedback mechanisms in the levitator pads matched the gesture, flexing the pad so that the dolphin seemed to swim through the air down off the transporter platform and toward the doors. “Before you ask, Captain,” the commander said, “it’s ‘Wheee,’ or at least that’s close enough. The rest is just a family nickname—part of the official name, but not particularly necessary.”

“Thank you,” Picard said, slightly relieved: the issue of how to pronounce the commander’s names had been causing him concern since he first looked at his Starfleet record. Hwiii ih’iie-uUlak!ha’ was one of the cetacean members of the Starfleet navigations research team, a delphine native of Omicron Five’s oceanic satellite, nicknamed Triton Two by an early Starfleet researcher who, after a prestigious university career at Harvard and the Sorbonne, had signed on with Starfleet to continue “clean-hyperstring” studies in deep space—preferably as deep as possible. After several years spent posted to starbases on the fringes of Federation space, Hwiii had requested a sabbatical to get even farther out and, on its granting, had arranged to hitch a ride with a passing Lalairu vessel on its way to the empty space above the Great Rift. Such a spot was perfect for his chosen work, investigation into the nature of subspace hyperstring structure: space uncontaminated by stars, planets, even dark matter—all of which could render equivocal readings that, for greatest usefulness, needed to be absolutely certain.