The Lost Era: Well of Souls: Star Trek (5 page)

Tyvan heard the sarcasm and knew that he’d struck a nerve. “That’s right. I think that guilt is a wonderful weapon. Guilt is like a mantle you use to cloak yourself from contact with other people. Guilt is armor, just like your body there; and guilt, just like your body, lulls everyone into assuming that guilt explains everything, so they leave you alone. What’s the expression? Walking on eggshells, pussyfooting around. Guilt is a marvelous way of making sure that no one sees inside your soul, or knows the truth. And you’ve gone one better.”

“And how is that?” she asked, her tone not sarcastic now. She sounded like a scared little girl.

Tyvan leaned forward, careful not to crowd her. “Darya, you’ve let yourself stay this way so you can keep everyone else at bay. You know how, way back, on Earth, they used to condemn people who’d committed certain horrible crimes to death?”

Bat-Levi moved her head in a squealing, miniscule nod. “Capital punishment. That was abolished after the Bell Riots, three hundred years ago.”

“Right. I’ve studied that period in Earth’s history, and particularly the history of capital punishment.”

“Why? That’s so gruesome.”

“Not if you don’t understand the concept. We El-Aurians never practiced capital punishment. Killing someone as the ultimate punishment? Yes, I suppose there’s some justice to it: an eye for an eye, that sort of thing.”

Bat-Levi shook her head. “No, that’s wrong. See, I’m Jewish and ... well, culturally, really, but my uncle is a rabbi. He said that even the old rabbis, from way back, understood that a literal interpretation of that law helped no one. Taking out eyes, chopping off hands: The old joke was the ancient Middle East must have been filled with one-eyed cripples.”

“And how did they resolve the issue? I thought that the orthodox of your many religions were pretty rigid about these things.”

“Rigidity isn’t confined to Earth. But, to answer your question, the rabbis got together and decided on how to compensate people for loss, damages, things like that. So instead of losing your eye, you might pay what that eye was worth. There were only a few crimes that merited the death penalty. Murder was one of them, but all that finally died out on Earth centuries ago.”

Good, good, keep her talking, keep her working with you.
“You have any theories on that?”

“On why capital punishment went away?” Bat-Levi thought. “I guess because dying isn’t the most awful thing that can happen to a person. Personally, I think ...”

“What?”

Bat-Levi gave him a frank look. “I think that the minute right
before
you die, when you know that this is it and there’s no going back, that’s got to be the worst.”

“Really? You think that knowing you’re about to die is worse than death, than not existing anymore?”

“Not if you believe in some religions. You have to take an afterlife on faith.”

“Do you believe in an afterlife?”

Bat-Levi hesitated for an instant. “No, not in the Biblical sense, if that’s what you’re driving at. On the other hand, Jews don’t really believe in a heaven or hell.”

“What do they believe?”

“I can’t speak for every Jew, but I do know that devout Jews believe that your soul is really just a piece of God. You’re renting it for a little while, that’s all. In the end, when you die, your soul goes back to God. I guess you’d call it a kind of Oversoul.”

“So, no hell? No condemnation for eternity?” Tyvan sat back and laced his fingers over his middle, but he was acutely aware that their time, for this session anyway, was running out, and he wanted her back, like this, willing to work
with
him. “So how do people pay for their sins, in that religion?”

Bat-Levi gave a queer half-smile. “I guess it depends on your definition, doesn’t it? On what constitutes payment? Can I ask where this is going?”

“I was just thinking. We were talking about your nails, and then your body, and
you
mentioned guilt, and I ...” Tyvan shrugged and shook his head in a
you-got-me
gesture. “Well, I was just wondering how you were paying, that’s all.”

“Paying.”

“Right. For your brother Joshua,” he said, as if she needed additional information.

Bat-Levi made a tiny sound—a clicking noise in the back of her throat that Tyvan knew was not a servo but the sound a person would make when she’s trying not to cry. He waited her out. The clock ticked, tocked.

Finally, Bat-Levi cleared her throat. “You have an idea about that.”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do. You see, I think you’re right. I think that dying isn’t the worst punishment sometimes. You said it yourself: It’s that awful, terrible instant before, when you
know
and you’re more frightened than you thought you could ever be and still be alive. Don’t you humans have the expression
scared to death?
Except this is just plain scared. Pure, unadulterated, searing terror: imagining the possibilities, facing that everything you ever believed in may be a lie and that there’s simply nothing but blackness, darkness. Something you can’t even compare to sleep because at least when you sleep, you dream.”

“What does that have to do with me?
I’m
not going to die.”

“But you’ve tried.”

“I mean I’m not
now.
Trying, that is.”

“No?”

“No, I’m sitting right here. I’m alive. I’m back at work. I’m living.”

“Precisely. You’re alive, Darya, but that’s not the same as living. You’re alive, but that’s because you’ve condemned yourself to life.”

“No,” said Bat-Levi, swallowing hard, “no, I don’t want to hear this.”

Tyvan pushed on, knowing that time was running out but not wanting to lose the moment.
Careful, careful, not too fast, give her space, give her time.
“Your brother is dead, and you’re going to make sure everyone knows that you were responsible. You want people to look at you and see a monster. Only you’re hiding in there ...”

“I’m not a coward,” said Bat-Levi. She clenched her fists, and Tyvan was reasonably sure that her left hand—the one without nails—could probably rip his heart right out. “I am
not
a coward. Suicide is the coward’s way. I’m alive.”

“And you think that makes you brave? You think that parading around your guilt is bravery? No, Darya, no, it takes more bravery to dare to be happy again, to leave your guilt behind. It’s braver to
live
than simply be alive.”

Bat-Levi’s laugh was bitter, almost a snarl. “You’re like all the other doctors, shaking their heads and
tsk-tsk
ing over poor, benighted Darya Bat-Levi. Such a beautiful woman, and
now
look at her.”

“This has nothing to do with beauty. This has to do with parading your inner ugliness. I’m not suggesting that you run out and change. I want you to understand your choices. So let’s look at the facts. You refused evacuation to Starfleet Medical. You refused every single reconstructive surgery, every offer of synthetic skin grafts. Ten years have passed, and even though better, more lifelike prostheses are available, you have those.” He indicated her artificial legs and left arm. “You limp, and you don’t need to. You have scars you don’t need to keep. You wrap yourself in guilt you don’t require, because it’s easier.”

“Don’t tell me what I need!” The words erupted from Bat-Levi’s throat in a hoarse shout. Spit frothed at the corners of her mouth, and the cords bulged in her neck. “Do you think I
want
to live like this? Do you think I
enjoy
looking like a freak? Do you?”

“Yes, Darya,” Tyvan began, but then there was a soft ding as their session time ran out, and his heart sank.

Bat-Levi heard the sound, too. “That’s it.” She jerked herself from her chair, pushing back on the cushions until she tottered to her feet, her prosthetics protesting. She stood, swayed, pulled her body around for the door. “I’m done, I’m out of here.”

“Darya.” Tyvan was on his feet, cursing himself for his timing which was rotten, rotten, he should have paid closer attention to the time, what an idiot! “Darya, wait, I don’t want you to leave like this ...”

“But I do.” Bat-Levi glanced back, her face contorted into a mask of rage and grief. “I do, and I will. It’s my life, Doctor, and I will do with it as I please. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be back, but when it’s my time and not a second before. For now, write whatever you have to, say whatever you want, but I’ve put in my time, and there’s no regulation in the universe that says I have to sit here one second more.”

“Darya,
please
,” Tyvan said, but she had turned aside and was through the door. Her servos squealed, the door hissed, and then she was gone.

Tyvan let out his breath in an explosive sigh. “Great,” he said to the air, to no one in particular. Sinking back into his chair, he propped the points of his elbows upon his knees and held his forehead with both hands. “Good job, Tyvan, you idiot, bravo. That was perfect timing, just perfect.”

He sat then and listened to the ticking of his clock and thought long and hard about life and cycles and time.

Perfect timing.
Commander Samir al-Halak dragged his forearm across his face, mopping away sweat with the sleeve of a camel-colored tunic that was open at his throat and showed off the olive color of his skin.
Just perfect. Somebody, please,
tell me, what
was I
thinking when I detoured to Farius Prime? I could’ve been swimming in Lake Cataria. Ani and I could be making love, right now, in the grass under a cool night sky. So what in God’s name was I thinking?

Halak hadn’t wanted to come to Farius Prime at all. His plan had been to spend his R and R with his lover, Anisar Batra; their plan had been to leave
Enterprise
together and go to Betazed. He and Batra had planned the trip for weeks; she’d coordinated her leave with
Enterprise’s
other paleogeneticist, and he’d gone to Garrett with his request for R and R a good month before. Their plan had
not
included a detour to the Maltabra City bazaar on Farius Prime, and the plan most certainly had not involved coming to Maltabra in high summer, when the weather was more miserable than usual and the air so humid Halak felt as if he were pushing through soggy gauze curtains. That the plan had changed—that he’d snuck off the ship early and that Batra had,
somehow,
tracked him to Farius Prime and was dogging his heels at this very moment—just made Halak hate everything about Farius Prime more than he already did.

The central bazaar of Maltabra City stretched for two kilometers in every direction, so there was no way around it: precisely what the city’s planners had in mind. The bazaar was always packed, and the air heavy with the mingled aromas of sweat, mint tea, rancid broiled kabobs that had sat for so long under a hot afternoon sun that the vendor had more bluebottle flies and Terellian swarmmogs than customers. An occasional breeze carried a metallic odor of salt and wet aluminum from the Galldean Sea, six kilometers due east. There was the overlapping babble of humans and humanoids and assorted aliens all shouting in different languages and at the top of their lungs; the whispered exchanges of drug dealers looking to score; the pleas of their clientele, desperate for a hit of that planet’s prime commodity, red ice. And there were colors: the brilliant turquoise sky and the searing white of sand and stone so bright Halak blinked back tears, and the customers, who ran the gamut of the “naturals”—Orions in their native green and the sky-blue of the Andorians—to more ambitious (and audacious) body dyes, fur, or scales.

Halak dodged around a Katangan merchant haggling with a jade-green Orion man about the cost of a liter of alpha-currant nectar—
“But at that price, you’re asking me to take food from my children’s mouths, no, no, what do you take me for?”
—and planted his right foot squarely into a stack of beaten copper pans spread on an indigo blanket. The pans belonged to a wizened Bilanan woman (from the northern continent, so she had seven facial knobs, not four) wrapped in a blood-red caftan with gold embroidery. The stack collapsed with a resounding crash, and Halak staggered, felt his ankle twist, and then a bolt of pain rocket to his knee.

“
Here
now!” the Bilanan said, outraged. Even her facial knobs quivered. “There’s people trying to make an honest living!”

“Sorry,” said Halak, not really meaning it but just wanting to make the woman be quiet. Digging into a leather pouch he wore around his waist, he tossed the Bilanan a few coins. “That covers it, right?”

“Don’t you think that makes everything all rosy,” said the woman, snatching up the coins. Reeling in a leather cord that dangled around her neck, she dragged a pouch from some nether region of her caftan, dropped in the coins, closed the purse tight by tugging at the cord with her teeth, and let the pouch fall back into the folds of her garment—and so quickly the money was gone before Halak blinked. “Don’t you go thinking ...”

Halak didn’t stay to hear the rest. Hobbling away from the woman, he elbowed his way deeper into the crowd, his right ankle complaining with every step.

Behind, he heard Batra say, “Samir, you’re limping.”

“It’s nothing.”

“But don’t you think you ought to take it easy?”

“No,” said Halak, throwing the word over his shoulder. “I
don’t
think. And right now I don’t want to know what
you
think either.”

Instantly, he was overcome with remorse. He stopped, turned, and looked down at his companion. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I didn’t ask you to come, I didn’t
want
...”

“Well, that’s just too bad,” said Batra, her voice sounding a little watery. “That’s just too damned bad. How
dare
you treat me that way? Only cowards bully.”

Halak bit back a reply. She was right, and, not for the first time, he marveled that she was the only woman he knew who could make him feel as if he were about ten years old. It wasn’t that she was very imposing. Anisar Batra was a tiny woman, with a long shock of shimmering raven-black hair that she wore up when she was aboard ship, and almond-shaped eyes the color of chocolate. Normally, those eyes held nothing but love. (Sometimes she got a little annoyed with him, and then they seemed to shoot phaser beams, set to kill. All right, maybe that was when she was a lot annoyed. What she saw in him was anyone’s guess. Halak knew he wasn’t particularly handsome or tall. In fact, he had the compact build of a well-muscled wrestler, something that came in handy when a man had a temper, and Halak
had
a temper. On the other hand, they’d been lovers for six months, and Halak didn’t intimidate her in the slightest. It was one of the things he loved about her.)

But he didn’t want to fight with her, and Halak saw that her eyes were liquid with unshed tears of surprise and hurt. But she was good and blistered, too; her copper-colored skin was turning a shade the near side of maroon.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, chastened. “It’s just that you don’t understand.”

“Don’t I? Well then,” Batra said, folding her arms over an emerald-green, short-sleeved choli that showed off her trim waist and a sparkling garnet tucked in her navel, “maybe you’ll just explain it to me.”

“There’s nothing to explain.”

Batra gave a breathy laugh that wasn’t really a laugh at all. “Oh, no? Let me refresh your memory,
Commander.
What
I
recall was that
we
—emphasis on the
we
—made plans to take our R and R
together
,” she said this very distinctly, as if she were speaking Vulcan to a Klingon tourist who hadn’t the foggiest. “As I recall, we had no intention of setting one toe on Farius Prime, much less traipsing around a dusty bazaar, under a hot sun. We said Lake Cataria. Betazed? That ring a bell?”

“I’m not stupid, Ani.” Halak scooped a hand through his crop of close-cut black curls and blew out. “I was going to meet you on Betazed sooner or later.”

Batra arched one black eyebrow, her left. “Emphasis on later, I’m sure. We were supposed to leave together. We were supposed to be having that serious talk two people who supposedly love each other usually have when they’re trying to decide if they can stand each other’s company for the long haul.”

“I can stand your company, Ani.” Halak’s lips twitched, and he tried not to smile.
(God, no, then he’d get a lecture about how he wasn’t taking her seriously.)
“You’re just a pain in the neck.”

She didn’t smile. “Yes, I am your particular little pain, and you wouldn’t have it any other way. So you want to explain why you’ve been looking to ditch me ever since I showed up at Starbase 5?”

“Because I wasn’t expecting you. And how did you find me, anyway? I didn’t leave word where I was going.”

“Woman’s intuition.”

Halak barked a laugh that sounded as if he’d cracked a dry branch over his knee. “Farius Prime is the
first
place a woman thinks about? Come on, Ani, that’s no answer, and you know it. How did you find out?”

Batra licked her lips, and for an instant, it crossed Halak’s mind that she might be getting ready to lie.

“Well, I just
did
,” she said, tersely. She mopped her forehead with the back of one hand. “Look, it’s too hot to stand here, arguing. What difference does it make, anyway, and especially now? I’m here, I’m hot, I’m thirsty, and my mouth has so much sand my teeth are getting a nice buff and shine. I think it’s high time we get someplace cool, and I buy you a drink. Don’t you agree?”

“No.” His ankle was killing him. “I don’t want a drink. I just want to ...”

“Good,” said Batra, linking her arm through his. She pulled him toward the nearest café. “I’m parched.”

They made Halak check his phaser at the door. Batra’s eyebrows headed for her hairline when she saw the weapon.

“Personal carry. No regulation against that.” Halak gave a half-shrug. “You never know.”

She didn’t reply. They ordered then drank in silence, and Halak had almost finished with his second Saurian brandy when Batra said, “Penny for your thoughts.”

Halak shook his head. “They’re not worth that much.”

“Samir, are we going to talk about it?”

Halak lifted his glass to his lips. “No.”

“Are you like this all the time, or do you practice a lot when you’re alone?”

“Actually, I save it all up for you,” said Halak, and then drained the rest of his drink. He craned his neck, peering around Batra for the waitress.

“Probably because I’m the only one aboard patient enough to put up with you.”

“No, you’re the only one aboard
lucky
enough.” Halak’s eyes swept the café. The interior was very dark and close, smelling of mint tea, sugary roasted almonds, and the sour tang of Trakian ale. Halak spotted one of the cafe’s waitresses: an Atrean, dressed in a tight weave of hip-hugging silver mesh that began below her be jeweled navel and ended at a spot barely brazing the underside of her buttocks; silver strappy sandals that threaded up to mid-calf; a mane of silver hair that coiled in strategic swaths over her breasts; and very little else. Halak whistled, and when she looked his way, he pointed to his glass and held up a finger.

“You really need another?” asked Batra.

“You’re not going to let us leave until we talk. I’m apt to get dry.”

“Uh-huh,” said Batra. She sipped at a tall glass of iced Molov mint tea. “Well, we could talk about your leaving
Enterprise
without me. Or we could talk about why we’re on a planet with no redeeming virtues.”

Halak snorted, a humorless exhalation through his nose. “I don’t like either of those topics.”

“Well, I ...” Batra began but stopped when the Atrean expertly tacked a napkin to the table with a fresh glass of brandy and retrieved Halak’s empty. The woman lingered a moment longer, bending so that her hair had to adjust by curling and rethreading itself, like a mat of snakes, to keep her breasts covered up. Even so, Halak got a good glimpse before the Atrean straightened, flashed a tiny smile to Halak, and turned on her heel, her long shank of hair flaring to reveal the small of her naked back. Halak’s head swiveled to watch her go.

“Well, I want to know,” said Batra, reaching across and taking Halak by the chin. She pulled his head around but let her fingers linger over the raised ridge of a thin white scar that skittered over his left jaw. “And I want us to make it to Betazed in one piece.”

Halak grabbed her hand and pressed his lips to her fingers. “We’ll make it. We would have made it faster if you hadn’t followed me.”

Batra retrieved her hand. “But I have and we’re here. You want to talk about that?”

Halak took a sip of the strong orange liquor, swallowed, and inhaled through his teeth against the burn. “Ani, if I had wanted to tell you, I would have. I know that we’ve been together now for some time ...”

“Six months. Half a year.”

“Half a year. But in every relationship there has to be privacy. Even telepaths have places in their minds they keep locked.”

“Everyone has a right to privacy. But there’s a difference between privacy and secrets. The way I see it, this is about you keeping secrets.”

“What secrets are you referring to, Ani?”

“You want me to make a list?”

Halak gave a mirthless laugh. “That many? We only have a week’s leave.”

“Okay, then how about you and I? Where do we go from here?”

Halak reached across the table and took her hands in his. “I know where
I’m
going—to Betazed with the woman I love. Now, as I recall, I asked you a question about two weeks ago. It was the same question I asked you several months ago. Both times, you said you wanted to think. Well, you’ve thought and I’ve waited. You want to tell me now?”

Even through the haze, Halak saw the color rise in Batra’s cheeks. “No,” she said. Her eyes drifted to the table. “Or, maybe ... I don’t know. It’s so sudden. When you asked the first time, we’d only known each other two months.”

“Ten weeks.” Halak gave her hands a squeeze. “Four weeks longer than I needed to know for sure. But I didn’t want you to think I was an impulsive guy.”

“Oh, never that.” Her eyes still didn’t meet his. “No, I know you’re not impulsive, Samir. You may be opinionated, and you’re lucky Captain Garrett ...”

“Let’s not talk about Garrett, all right?” Halak softened the admonition by running the fingers of his right hand along the back of her left. “We’re off duty, Lieutenant. Your hair is down, the choli’s on, and I’m sitting across from the most beautiful woman in the quadrant.
Enterprise
is far away, and I’d like to keep it there, if you don’t mind. This is supposed to be
our
time.”