Star Trek: The Original Series - 082 - Federation (25 page)

As if in answer, Riker finally replied to Picard. “Sorry for the delay, Captain. Commander Tarl is here beside me and I think we should go ahead and make our deal with her. But I also think you should probably take a look at the artifact yourself, just to confirm its… condition.” Picard looked to Troi. “He’s concealing something, Captain.

Extremely powerful emotions of… discovery.” “But no sense of danger?” “Absolutely none.” “Commander Riker,” Picard said, “could you move into range of the optical sensor?” “Certainly, sir.”

As Picard asked his next question, he saw Riker, La Forge, Worf, and Data step in front of the artifact. Tarl was with them.

Two other Romulans were at the side.

“Lieutenant Worf,” Picard began, “as security officer, have you any objections to my coming aboard the Romulan vessel?” Tarl frowned in disgust at the question. But Worf stepped tbrward.

‘Absolutely none, Captain. The vessel is secure.” Troi confirmed the Klingon’s statement. “He is convinced there is no threat, sir. I pick up no sense of coercion or mind control of any kind. However, I do get the impression that they have obtained some knowledge which they do not wish to share with Commander Tarl.” Picard stood up and tugged at his tunic. “How extraordinary.

What do you suppose they’ve found over there?” Troi smiled at her captain indulgently. “There’s only one way to find out, sir.” Picard understood the amused expression she wore. It was.just that for all the wonders the Enterprise encountered, he sometimes felt a prisoner upon her, his well-being so fervently guarded by Riker and the rest of the crew. But now, to be free to go aboard a Romulan vessel, to take part in something of obviously great import, he felt such elation that he really was embarrassed to consider what his counselor might think of him if she sensed the depth of his emotional response. He wondered if she knew how frustrated he so often felt to merely be an observer and advisor during his colleagues’ adventures.

No need to be embarrassed,” Troi said, proving his point. “I think you should do what Will suggests and go over to the vessel.”
‘I look forward to it, Counselor, very much. Alert the transporter room. You have the bridge.” ‘Wery good, sir.” Then Jean-Luc Picard walked up the ramp to the aft turbolift, trying to imagine what could intrigue his crew even more than a piece of Borg technology. As he did so, he had a sudden wave of misgiving, even of danger. Yet, upon reflection, he could discover no reason for it, other than some deep-seated feeling of distrust for the Romulans, a distrust which he was suddenly surprised to find was not his own.

Then Picard smiled in the privacy of the turbolift as he realized the source of the unease he felt. Somewhere deep inside of him, a small part of Ambassador Sarek, the best part, he hoped, was giving him warning.

The Romulans were not to be trusted.

LAZY EIGHT RANCH, MICAH TOWNSHIP, CENTAURI B II Earth Standard: Early April 2117

Zcfram Cochrane removed the woven hat from his head and let the early evening breezes of the secondary winter dry the moisture there. His scalp was bare, darkened from the suns, spotted with age, ringed by shaggy gray locks. Monica had teased him about the look, said it had made him seem quite the authentic gentleman farmer. But Cochrane knew the style reminded her of her grandfather, Sir John, gone these many, many years. So much had gone with him, then and now.

“Mr. Cochrane, sir?” Cochrane recognized the voice. Montcalm Daystrom had arrived from the Foundation. The youth was Cochrane’s personal assistant, a promising student, part of the family. But he was twenty Earth years old, seventeen Centauri, and like all the first children of this world, treated Cochrane with a respect and deference that made the old scientist cringe and wonder when he had stopped being a person. Instead, somewhere in the past decades, he had somehow become an icon, a symbol for this brave new era of humanity.

Cochrane could hear Micah Brack laughing at that label, even as he thought it. No era of humanity was new, according to Brack.

Simply a succession of new skins for old ceremonies. Cochrane missed his friend. No word of his fate had ever come back to him, though he doubted a man of Brack’s age would still be alive.

Looking at Montcalm’s far too solicitous smile made Cochrane also think that the first children of Centauri could stuff it, and he told Montcalm so.

But Montcalm only smiled and stepped closer to Cochrane. He was used to the fabled scientist and his ways, both in the lab, where the young man excelled, and in Cochrane’s private life, where more and more he needed an extra pair of arms. Together, student and teacher, they stood on the crest of a rich purple-green hill from where the Landing Plains stretched out to the edge of the Welcoming Sea. At this point midway in the planet’s bizarre orbit in the ternary system, Centauri B was setting even as Centauri A rose. Centauri C, as always, was nothing more than a bright star, lost among the alien constellations, and the sea shimmered on the horizon with light of two different hues coming from two different directions.

Monica had loved this view. So had Cochrane. But now that its splendor continued without her, he begrudged each day it renewed itself, each day that it increased his time alone. “The guests have arrived, sir,” Montcalm said.

“Guests,” Cochrane muttered. Was there no other name for those who had come to attend a funeral? Why not mourners? Why not victims?

“May I assist you?” Montcalm asked. He held out a powerfully muscled black arm. Growing up under high gravity had produced a generation of weight lifters here. The medical facilities in Micah Town worked round the clock to develop the technologies and treatments these children invariably required as they reached their fortieth Earth birthday and their strained hearts began to rebel against Centauri B IFs gravity. But the answers were locked in their cells, needing only a slight medical coaxing to come out and protect them, so their lives were safe. As Cochrane had thought fifty-six years ago, when he had first set foot on this world and done the unthinkable by removing his breathing mask to taste alien air without ill effect, humanity was meant to go to other worlds unencumbered—though his sinuses still troubled him each primary winter, when the planet was exposed to the light of a single sun and the plains exploded with temperate vegetation and a convulsion of flowers.

Standing before that view, Cochrane didn’t move away from Montcalm. He knew the young man meant well, though Cochrane would be damned if he’d admit it. Here on this world, his home, Cochrane had come to accept his age and his infirmities, mostly through Monica’s good humor and patience, and it was with that humor and acceptance that he took Montcalm’s arm and began the long walk back to the farmhouse. That welcoming white building, trimmed in green, had been Monica’s delight as well. Its facade was real wood, shipped from Earth at a horrendous cost no one would ever reveal, a gift from the newly formed world government to the man who had created the conditions for Earth’s dramatic recovery from World War III, though that recovery continued still.

Natural wood remained a luxury on Centauri B II, a world where rigid trees had not evolved. Engineered forests of Earth pines had been planted for fuel and cellulose production, but it would be decades still before there was a sustainable forest system which would allow the harvesting of trees for decorative purposes.

Monica had understood the rarity of the gift Cochrane had been given. She had sketched the clapboard design for their house herself, overseen its installation, even sanded and painted sections of it on her own, to make it perfect for him.

And she had made it perfect. Everything she had done for him had been perfect.

Cochrane felt tears slip down his cheeks. How could she be gone from this world when so much of it reminded him of her?

How could her youth have fled before he himself had died, almost thirty years her senior?

What had drawn him to her at first, Cochrane still didn’t know.

Love, he supposed, though he didn’t really understand that emotion any bel;ter now than when he had been young. They had survived Battersea together. They had escaped the Optimum and found safety on the moon. Sir John had recovered there, in Copermcus City. The scar on Monica’s face had faded.

Cochrane’s shattered ribs and punctured lungs had been made whole.

They had shared so much, Cochrane and Monica, that by the time their wounds had healed he supposed it had been inevitable they would feel themselves bound together. She had returned to Alpha Centauri with him, to finish her medical training at the colony’s first and only medical facility. She had been granted her degree here, one of this world’s first. Sir John had given her away at their wedding and had become an astronomer again, establish-ing the colony’s first observational outpost in his final, most productive years.

As those years and more had passed, Monica had always set aside time in her own life to listen to Cochrane, and to pay attention to him as no other had before her, and late at night as he dreamt of his role in the horror that had unfolded on Earth, thirty-seven million people dead in a war that had consumed the world like no other, she had held him and told him that he had done enough, that it had not been his fault.

Whatever he had meant to her, and he had never really understood why she had chosen to share her life with him, she had let him carry on. The superimpellors grew faster, sleeker, more efficient, the result of a thousand minds at work on the secrets of continuum distortion. While Monica had pursued her medical career on Alpha Centauri, Cochrane had ridden those new engines to other worlds, met other intelligent creatures, marveled at the similarity of their DNA and suspected, like half the scientists he knew, that some deeper pattern was afoot in the universe, or at least in this section of the galaxy.

And Monica had always been waiting for him when he returned, keeping him focused, understanding, paying attention.

Until two days ago.

Cochrane’s feet dragged along the dusty path leading from the ridge to the farmhouse. He could see the vehicles of the guests parked near the barn. Wheels had become passd on Earth, where’ energy had passed into a golden age of fusion reactors and sarium krellide batteries with virtually limitless energy density. But here in the colonies, cars and trucks and carriers still rolled and bounced along the unpaved roads on spring tires. Monica had said that in a hundred years, the entertainments of Alpha Centauri’s frontier days would depict wheeled vehicles in the same way the old flat movies of the American West depended on horses and wagons to show how times had changed.

She had always been looking to the future, the future she said Cochrane had created.

For that devotion to him, he had accepted her love, for though he had never understood why she loved him, never had he ever doubted her enthusiasm. In return, he hoped he had at least given her adventure, at least fulfillment. She had wept the night she had met the Vulcanians with him. She had thanked him for that, for including her in a moment in history when everything had changed because of what Cochrane had done. The Vulcanians, though some called them Vulcans, even now were negotiating closer ties with Earth, and Cochrane knew his gift of superimpellor research to those aliens had in part convinced them of what they would call the logic of the situation.

And now both Sir John and Monica were gone from his life.

The dust of Earth to the dust of Alpha Centauri. It had happened before, Cochrane knew, and would happen again, this merging of the worlds through death. But once again he felt the sting of self-doubt without his wife, and feared he had been selfish once more—taking more from her than he could possibly have given.

Never had he ever felt he had done enough. Never.

“They’re gathered out back,” Montcalm said as they passed the parked vehicles.

Cochrane knew why his guests were there, and not inside. He had planted fig trees in the back. Legend said it was under a fig tree that the Buddha had sat when he had received enlightenment.

Cochrane liked the story and understood why Brack had told him about the trees. Newton had had his apple. Cochrane some nameless oak or elm in a suburb of London. And now, who knew who else would sit under trees on a hundred different worlds in the future. thinking new thoughts, receiving new enlightenment?

Because of Buddah, Micah Brack, and Zefram Cochrane, there were fig trees on Alpha Centauri waiting just for that moment.

They passed a carrier whose flywheel hummed deep within it, the linear motors over its wheels still ticking as they cooled. It had a symbol of the scales of justice crookedly affixed to the door. The Centauri B II police force had arrived.

Cochrane remembered the way Monica had laughed at Sergei’s vehicle—the whole colony’s police force dependent on a single, used farm vehicle. Cochrane actually enjoyed that dependence, the fact that the whole colony could depend on just a single officer of the law in a single, slow-moving vehicle. Sergei spent more time working at the power station than he did as a police officer. There was no real need for police here. The lack of crime on the colony worlds had once given Cochrane hope that perhaps there were some parts of human nature that had been left forever in the past, burned in the fires with the ashes of the Optimum.

Sergei waited for them in the doorway of the farmhouse, hat in hand, looking glum through his immense walrus mustache. He approached Cochrane and Montcalm, hand extended, mouthing his sorrow and his regret and speaking of his respect for Cochrane’s wife. Cochrane didn’t hear a word. He still could not believe Monica was no longer with him, that she wasn’t just on her way back from the clinic, smelling of antiseptic, anxious to slip out of her whites and share with him the adventures of her day and his. Surely these words Sergei said were meant for someone else to hear.

Cochrane knew that in his younger days, full of energy, full of his questing spirit, he had always wanted to be alone, always appreciated solitude, yet now in these latter years, when he had been granted his wish, he knew he was no longer desirous of solitude. He wanted to hear Monica’s soft voice again. He wanted to— “—wasn’t an accident, sir.” The last four words exploded in Cochrane’s mind. He blinked at the colony’s lawman. “What did you say?” he asked.