Dark Mirror (32 page)

It had taken Picard a good while to prepare himself for the sleep he knew he needed. He had forced himself to it finally, done the various small exercises that he had learned over many years, setting the “mental alarm clock” to wake him after four hours. Then he lay down, in a bed that to his mind still felt slightly warm from the body of Beverly Crusher. It was almost certainly an illusion, but he couldn’t get rid of the image.

And still sleep eluded him. After a while, he got up and went over to the desk, sat down, and brought up his terminal there.

His own computer was one of the installations that he had required the nanites to spare. He had had some questions to which he had not yet found answers. Some answers Picard had guessed and wanted corroboration for; about others, he had no idea.

“Scan for records on Spock, Commander, Starfleet,” he had said.

“Spock, Commander,” said the computer, and began reading out a service record that sounded like that of someone who had entered wholeheartedly enough into
what the
Enterprise
of that time was doing: intimidation, plunder, destruction. A long time it went on, then something odd happened. After a given stardate, that Spock was transferred off the
Enterprise,
at his own request; but the record said the transfer was “prejudicial”—meaning that someone on the ship wanted to get rid of him. Picard could guess who. That universe’s Kirk had come back, found the secret of his great weapon—an alien device called the Tantalus Field, useful for making people vanish abruptly—had been compromised; in fact, given to Spock. As well, to judge from his own Kirk’s debriefing, that other Kirk’s “captain’s woman” had suffered something of a change of loyalties.

Picard sat there with his chin on his fist, considering the ramifications. He still remembered, quoted verbatim, Kirk’s final conversation with that Spock, daring him to be the “one man with a vision” who could change the brutality of the Empire before its victims finally rose up and destroyed it. Spock, according to Kirk, had estimated it would take two hundred-odd years for that to happen, and Kirk had invoked “the illogic of waste” as his reason for Spock to try to stop the present-day slaughter and to try to change the Empire into something more benevolent. The Vulcan to whom Kirk had spoken had been profoundly skeptical about the possibilities and had said only, “I will consider it.”

To judge by this record, he had done more than consider it. He became a power in Starfleet, and in other ways as well. For a short time, people who frustrated his drive toward increased personal power vanished abruptly. He began to move—covertly at first, Picard suspected, then overtly, as confirmed by the documentation—to try to change the Empire’s methods of dealing with subject species, conquered worlds, arguing that, logically, power benefits from benevolent use. For a while there was an uncomfortable shift and wash of opinion around him at
Starfleet, like the tide just before ebb or flow. Spock pressed his advantage in Starfleet Command, rising to the Admiralty. There was a period of some months when he seemed to drop out of notice—the records merely stated that he had been posted to a desk job—something affiliated with his father, the Vulcan ambassador. And then…

Picard shook his head. It seemed as if he pushed something, someone, too hard. His living quarters at Starfleet were raided; evidence was found there, the records said barely, of treason. No detail was given on what might have been considered treasonable.
Was something planted on him?
Picard wondered.
Or did someone decide they had better use for the Tantalus Field than he had? And
there was the enmity of his old captain to be dealt with as well—an old unhealed sore of disaffection and rage that had been festering since Spock left the
Enterprise.
Indications were that Kirk, embittered by his former first officer’s rise to power, may have been behind the charges, trumped-up or otherwise, that sent Spock to his death. He was court-martialed and executed some twelve years after another Kirk had dared him to be the one man with a vision.

The vision apparently died with him. His father, the ambassador, was assassinated shortly thereafter by another Vulcan eager for the job. Picard had his suspicions about that assassination as well.

Picard paused his search, rubbed his face with his hands, and sat in the darkened room, in the glow of the screen, considering. For one who knew how to read the records—for bureaucratese had changed little from his own universe to this one—there were signs that Spock had indeed “considered it” as he promised and had attempted using various means, mostly subtly, to shift the Empire away from the blind cruelty of its course. And though one man, standing in the right place with a lever long enough, can move a planet, Spock’s lever was too short, the fulcrum was
too close, or… Picard shook his head. Any one of a number of variables was out of joint. Whatever, he failed, managing only to push the inevitable collapse of the Empire further into its future. The Empire went on, not realizing what his own universe’s Kirk and that universe’s Spock had known or come to know: that an empire based only on conquest is, tactically if not ethically, top-heavy and will eventually collapse under its own weight.

Picard stopped for a little while then, sitting there, his chin on his hands again, and thought. He could understand Kirk’s motives: they were no different from his own.
He saw waste, suffering, folly, and wanted to change them, to stop them; but he may not have understood enough of the huge inertia of the force against which he himself wanted to strain… wanted that other Spock to defy.
For two and a half centuries the Empire had known no motivation except survival by exploitation. Picard remembered something his own Beverly Crusher had said to him once, about human psychopathologies: “If you’re going to take a behavior away, you’d better have something superior to put in its place. Otherwise in about ten minutes you get a relapse.” Spock had tried to substitute a different behavior, but there was no way to convince a mostly human Empire that logic and forbearance, even the prickly kind of forbearance that a Vulcan would have recommended, were better than expansion. Expansion had worked for them for a long time. They saw no reason to stop. They would go on as they had started.

But at the same time… Picard shook his head.
What are these people doing in
this
situation,
he thought,
where we find them today? It’s been hundreds of years since, in this universe, anyone explored anything for pleasure, for the delight of knowledge. That whole school of thought is discredited now. Why are they
here?

He stared at the screen for a long time. Then, in the
unchanging darkness, a thought occurred to him. If there had suddenly been some difficulty in expansion… “Necessity is a mother,” he remembered Geordi misquoting to him once. Even the most hardened behaviors could be shifted when there was no choice.

To the computer he said, “Display map of the Empire as of one hundred standard years ago. No: concurrent with the year of Spock’s death.”

The screen cleared and showed him a great, irregular blob of space, superimposed over the graceful curves of the outflung arms of the Galaxy. Against the Galaxy as a whole, it was small, surely no more than 6 or 8 percent of the whole. But it was still a very, very large amount of space. Earth was only roughly at its center: the major axes of exploration, or exploitation in this case, followed along the thickest drifts of stars in the arm, and the blobby amoeba shape bore little or no relationship to the shape of the Federation as he understood it for the same period.

“Go forward ten years,” Picard said. The blob increased its volume, protuberances jutting out irregularly over its whole surface. The space involved was about 10 percent bigger.

“Go forward ten years more.” Another increase, this time slightly bigger, again reaching along the galactic arm, outward toward the sparser stars, two-thirds of the way out toward the rim.

“Continue in ten-year increments until the present.”

The image on the screen became a nested set of glowing amorphous shapes. Each time, the percentage of expansion grew larger and larger. The last ten years’ expansion was the largest of all, including in its area of growth an area equal to nearly the entire size of the Empire eighty years before.

But there was a problem. The Sagittarius Arm, the arm of the Galaxy in which Earth and, in his own universe, the
Federation and the Klingon and Romulan empires and all other known species lay, was not directly connected to the Galactic core by anything but gravity. As other arms of the Galaxy had done in the past, it had been “sprayed” off the main mass of the curving, churning greater arm, like a droplet flung away from the main stream of a fall of water. The arm would later meld back into the main stream of the Galactic whirlpool again, or bisect and the pieces meld with other adjoining arms, but this would take hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years.

For now, the Sag Arm was discrete. Its size was so great that, in terms of the life span of most sentient species, it could make little difference whether it was connected to anything or not. The two time scales involved were too disparate. For federations and empires concerned with expansion on a modest scale, the problem didn’t really arise.

But this Empire’s scale of expansion had nothing to do with modesty, and everything to do with their perception of their own survival, their viability. Each decade, the amount of space explored had grown and grown. Not exploration for knowledge or pleasure, for adventure even, but simply for survival and the pursuit of policies a hundred years old now and too ingrained for those who executed them to see any way out.

Now,
Picard thought, for the first time with a touch of pity,
I understand the awful overengining of starships in this universe. When all you had to do, when all you knew how to do, was find new worlds to conquer, and conquer them, you needed speed and power more than anything else. And longevity.
Heaven only knew how long some of these ships’ missions actually were. Some of the farthest-traveling ships, if he was any judge, might have been traveling for—he shook his head.
Thirty years? Forty?
He shook his head, wondering whether in such cases assassination of
officers above you might not actually be understandable. Either because you were tired of looking at them and dealing with their behavior for year after weary year, or because you could see no other way of advancement.

He saw now the nature of the trap into which the Empire had fallen. From what little he had read of its history, he could understand quite well what had happened. They had spread as widely as they could through the Galaxy and conquered everything in sight They had subjugated every sentient species, destroyed all the ones that would not submit or were too alien to negotiate with them or couldn’t understand at all what the Empire wanted. They had now succeeded in exterminating, or dominating, almost all life with which they had come in contact. And at the end of it all, they had been stopped, not by any ethical or moral force, uprearing in indignation… but by the simple, quiet, patient dark, in which everything ended sooner or later.

Beyond the edges of the now-separated Sag Arm, in all directions, reached great starless deserts of empty space—well, empty enough for Picard, though Hwiii might argue the point. The emptiness reached out on both sides—twelve or thirteen thousand light-years to the next arm in either direction. Above the arm, and below it, was nothing—unless you counted the Magellanic Clouds, a million and a half light-years to the Galactic south. The arm itself was cut off from its coreward “parent” branch by a gap thousands of light-years wide. The Empire had been quarantined by the Galaxy itself. Picard looked at the map, judging the time it would take to cross even the smallest of those gaps, toward the core.
Even with their engines,
he thought,
with their durability—even with ships running smaller crews, such as this one—no ship from the Empire can now possibly reach any new, inhabited world in less than ten years. Possibly twenty… and at high-warp speeds.

And even
these
ships won’t take that for long.
He shook his head. For these people, there are literally no more worlds to conquer.

He remembered Worf saying, “How can it be otherwise?” This was the final truth of the prophecy at which Kirk and Spock had each arrived independently: an empire based solely on expansion fueled by conquest will conquer until it dooms itself… and this one had.

They had nowhere else to go. They had looked out into the darkness and finally seen the whirlwind they would soon reap. They had spent more than a hundred years teaching all their people the ruthlessness that had to be channeled into conquest. When there was nothing left to exercise that ruthlessness upon, those people would turn upon each other. The Empire would tear itself apart, die at its own hands, mad.

But they were survivors. Picard knew—few better—the lengths to which desperation will drive any organism, and an organization sooner than a single man. He stood up and walked slowly over to those windows, ignoring again the sight of the disordered and empty bed. In the past decade, or two, the Empire must have been brought most forcefully to this decision as it came up against the walls of darkness and knew there was no piercing them… not with any technology they would yet have for hundreds of years. Transilience, a starship that is here one moment and
there,
five thousand light-years or more away, the next, was possible in theory, but hedged about with such formidable theoretical problems still that they would not achieve it before the Empire fell.

So, desperate, grasping at straws, they must have started looking down other paths, other tunnels in the maze. And someone, Picard thought, someone reading history, came across some few references to some other universe, into which some of their own people had accidentally fallen long ago, and from which they were sent back. He suspected
that the debrief that those officers performed on returning to this universe, though spotty as to detail, would have been indicative enough of a fertile place to start work. A parallel universe, structurally the same as theirs, as technically advanced—but a weak, soft place by comparison, crippled by ethic, populated, in essence, by sheep, to judge from the behavior of the people in the starship they saw. It was an unexploited place, unconquered—for from what little their misplaced landing party had been able to tell, the people over there weren’t the conquering type. All that was needed was to find a way to produce, on purpose, the effect that once happened as an accident, and without needing other identical personnel or equipment to be transferred in the other direction at the same time.