3

2267: Talos IV

“No!” he shouted, and sat up suddenly. Instead of fire there was only a soft breeze blowing sand onto the blanket and its occupants. Pike had leapt to his feet, brushing it off his arms and legs as if it burned him, before he remembered where he was.

“It’s all right,” Vina said, stroking his arm to comfort him. “You were dreaming. It’s gone now.”

“No!” Pike said again, suppressing a shudder. “It wasn’t a dream. They’ve got the memories wrong. It didn’t happen that way!”

Then again, how did he know he hadn’t been dreaming? He’d dreamt about the fire ever since it happened. But this time… one minute he’d been telling Vina about Elysium, and then…

He didn’t remember falling asleep, hadn’t been aware of her leaving him to go for a swim, but apparently she had. The bright blue swimsuit that matched her eyes and not incidentally the color of the sky at zenith, was damp and clinging to her in all the right places, and her hair hung in wet tendrils against her neck. What was the difference between sleeping dream and waking dream in this place?

“Tell me what you were dreaming,” Vina coaxed him as he looked around for the light robe he didn’t remember bringing down to the beach, yet knew somehow would be rolled up in the duffel bag he didn’t remember either. He slipped the robe on without tying it, but refused to sit beside her on the blanket again.

“I-I don’t remember,” he lied, wondering if she could tell it was a lie, or if the Talosians could. He and Vina didn’t know each other well enough for that yet.

“It isn’t working!” he said, angry and frustrated. “I can’t give in to the illusion. Are either of us really here? How do I know I’m not just imagining you, and you’re actually off somewhere else lost in an illusion of your own? What if one of us wants to do something, go somewhere, and the other doesn’t?”

Only then did he notice that the sand was just a little too hot under his feet to be comfortable. Annoyed, he moved to stand on the blanket, then sat back down, defeated. The sheer joy of being able to feel anything again, even pain, should be sufficient to-No! he thought, more angry at himself than anyone else. Don’t get sidetracked! Focus! It wasn’t about this illusion, this illusory here and now, but-Vina sighed, looking down at her hands. “I was afraid this would happen.”

Before he could ask her what she meant, she also got to her feet, walking away a little, distancing herself from him the way she had all those years ago, as if only by avoiding proximity to him could she collect her thoughts; the hot sand didn’t seem to bother her. Or maybe, Pike thought, she’s chosen herself a different illusion. She could be in another place entirely.

“It might take them a while at first to adjust to the particular… patterns of your thoughts. Remember, they have to sustain the initial illusion-that we’re both young, strong, healthy humans-all the time. That’s hard enough for them at first. Whenever we summon a memory, an illusion inside the illusion- “

“- it’s more of a challenge,” Pike suggested not unkindly, wanting their minders, as much as Vina, to know he appreciated what they were trying to do for him.

“Exactly,” she said. “There’s also… the feeling that you’re still fighting them, resisting. It… jangles things. That’s the best way I can explain it.”

“Are they telling you all this?” he wondered.

She nodded. “In a manner of speaking. It’s hard to explain. You’ll understand it better after you’ve… acclimated.”

“All right.” He held out a hand to her, inviting her to sit beside him again. “I have a reputation for occasionally being… impatient. At least that’s one of the more polite words that’s been applied to me over the years. So what should we do? Stay in the ‘present’ for now?”

Vina seemed to be listening to something. “Not necessarily. I think they have things under control. Yes, in fact…” she sat beside him, easing her body against his. “Everything’s okay now. You can continue your memory, if you like.” When he seemed reluctant to go back that far again, she laced her fingers through his and glanced up at him out of the corners of her eyes. “So, I see I had a rival….”

“Here and here, Magistrate,” the Archivist indicated, though the pattern of the readout was self-evident to all those gathered around to observe the monitor set into the cave wall, as well as to those accepting the transmission of thought from a distance. “These indicate the neural pathways in the forebrain where the subject’s earliest memories are stored….”

How long had it been since they had ceased to think of each other as individuals with names, referring to each other instead by their function-Magistrate, Archivist, Physician, Technician, Provisioner and so on? Not that any of them had only one function; the necessity of living underground for hundreds of millennia required each of them to participate in a number of tasks. And there was more than one designee per category, though given the importance of the task of sustaining the humans in their illusion, each of those gathered here was the primary-Magistrate-1, Archivist-1, and so on-of their class. Each had been assigned or had assigned themselves-it had been so long ago no one could remember-a dominant task by which they were named, so that they had become one with their function.

Archivist-1, working with hir own staff as well as with Technician-1 and hirs, had begun with Vina’s neural pathways and some of the ancient machinery, cobbling it together with components they had scavenged from the scattered bits of Columbia, and they were now able to track human neural pathways almost as readily as they could their own. Almost, because they had long since abandoned the practice among themselves, when the telepathy became paramount.

Centuries of exposure to the radiation from the war had altered their own neural pathways to such an extent that the weak psionic power with which most of them were born had been enhanced a hundredfold. There was no surviving Talosian who was not able to communicate purely via telepathy with every other.

Most humans were not so gifted. Perhaps the female Vina’s intuition about certain things was as powerful as it got. As for the male, he gave off a different kind of energy.

The Magistrate studied the readout, and could see it.

“Will he need to relive these memories, Magistrate?” the Archivist wondered, hir temples pulsing, an expression-subtle, as all Talosian facial expressions had become in the wake of their telepathy-which might have been concern touching the corners of hir eyes. “The memory of fire seems to particularly unsettle him.”

“Are you suggesting he might find the memories damaging,” the Magistrate wondered for all to hear, “or instructive?”

“Perhaps both, Magistrate,” the Archivist admitted. “We are uncertain. Which is why I asked.”

When, the Magistrate wondered, had they, all of them-because their minds were linked in such a way now that any thought affected all of them-ceased to think of the two human subjects as, well, subjects, as creatures, which was to say inferiors, and begun to think of them as coequal? It was a puzzlement. Much of the Talosians’ certainty about what they were doing and why had been challenged by the arrival of Christopher Pike thirteen years ago. Now that he was among them once again, the dynamic he brought to the equation would have to be considered very carefully.

They had had eighteen years to study the female. Would it take as long to learn the intricacies of Pike? Each of the humans individually was a challenge, but there was also a synergy between them which…

The Magistrate formed a decision s/he knew would be acceptable to the others. The intertwining of so many minds working separately, yet in cohesion, one might almost say collusion, after all this time, made certain thoughts unnecessary.

What the humans brought was randomness, which evoked uncertainty. Uncertainty, after all this time, might almost be welcome.

“His thought processes will be voluntary,” the Magistrate announced. “We will merely facilitate. Should he need these memories, we will provide them. If he finds them painful, he can choose to abandon them. We will not commit the error we made the last time. This time, we will not interfere.”

Let him talk, Vina told herself. Just listen. There will be plenty of time for your story, if he’s interested, and if not you can go to a place where you can imagine that he is.

She had made her peace with the Talosians in the interregnum between Pike’s departure and his return. She still, no matter how often she touched him, heard his voice, marveled at him, wasn’t entirely sure he was really here. She would let him talk, until she herself was comfortable with this new dimension. So to keep the conversation light but challenging, she teased him.

“A rival? No, you didn’t, not really,” Chris said, noticing as she knelt beside him that her hair smelled of salt water and sea air. “I was only nine.”

“But you know what they say about first loves,” Vina reasoned, lacing her fingers through his. “They’re the ones you never forget. She broke your heart.” Her next words were flirtatious. “And apparently gave you a lifelong fascination with blondes.”

“What blonde? Maia was a redhead. She was a chestnut; her coat was the color of an Irish setter’s. When she’d just been curried, she gleamed.”

“Not the horse!” Vina protested, digging her elbow into his ribs. She wanted to weep with joy. Talosians were always so serious; she missed human playfulness most of all. She was a natural tease, and hadn’t had a worthy sparring partner since Theo. Don’t think about Theo! she cautioned herself. That’s dangerous territory, even now!

“Oh, you mean the girl- !” Chris said, as if he’d only just figured it out. He wondered if Vina was ticklish, deciding to find out.

She was, and so was he, and they ended up chasing each other along the beach like a couple of kids, running into the surprisingly warm surf and splashing each other until they were both out of breath and they could almost hear the music swell as he took her face in his hands and they sank to their knees at the tide line as if they had been choreographed and…

And for the first time since he’d arrived, Christopher Pike forgot that everything he and Vina did was being watched.

It was too grandiose to be called a beach house; it was more of a villa, with half a dozen bedrooms, each with its own balcony and private bath, overlooking half an acre of landscaped gardens planted with native flora resistant to the salt air. Vina led him barefoot up the deeply carpeted staircase against his protests.

“We’re soaking wet! And we’re getting sand all over everything!”

“It’s all right!” she giggled. “I’ll program the servitor to clean the carpets while we shower.”

“Shower?” he echoed her, finding himself tugged into a marble-lined, glass-enclosed real-water shower unit big enough for two people, with multiple spray heads at several levels. His senses awash in luxury (What was that aromatic bubbly stuff she was rubbing all over him?), he remembered that the one thing he liked least about space travel was the sonic showers. This was more like it.

As they toweled each other off afterward, Pike realized it could be this way forever if he wanted it to be, just the two of them alone in this place. Or they could people it with a few dozen of their friends and throw a party every night. Or they could go someplace different every night, together or separately. Who was to say whether Vina was really here, or whether she’d gotten bored-the beach house, after all, had belonged to her aunt in real life-and perhaps gone off on some newer, less mundane adventure?

The thought that they could both be here, yet lost in separate illusions instead of with each other, or not, or sometimes, and that through all of this their thoughts remained separate so that when the other spoke it was always a surprise, and wrapped around all of these realities was the reality of their true damaged bodies, and the Talosians, outside them, watching them, yet inside the illusions they created, all at the same time, made his brain hurt.

Stop overthinking it! he warned himself, following Vina down the stairs, which had in fact by now been vacuumed free of sand, though he hadn’t heard a sound, and into the kitchen, where she ordered hot soup from the food dispenser, which was exactly what he suddenly realized he wanted. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that the long table in the dining room had been set for two, and vague but delectable aromas told him the soup was only the beginning, but he would savor all of this one increment at a time.

“Tell me more,” she coaxed him. They did not repair to the dining room, but stood leaning against the kitchen counter smiling at each other over the edges of their soup mugs like mischievous children. “I’m listening.”

Is there anything more appealing, he wondered, finding the soup too hot to taste just yet, than a woman who hangs on your every word?

2228: ELYSIUM

At first glance, Elysium City was little more than a cluster of glorified Quonset huts, dwarfed by the landscape surrounding it. As the shuttle ferry brought the Prescotts downplanet from the ship, Chris had his face pressed against the port, looking for landmarks.

Oceans and rivers and lakes began to take shape once they’d passed through the spun-sugar clouds. Long stretches of grassy plain and forests of stunted, scrubby trees alternated with lava fields where nothing grew. And there were volcanoes, lots of them.

They were everywhere, some linked together like beads on a string, some sprung up alone in the middle of otherwise flat plains. Most were inactive, their cinder cones softened by trees and brush; some of the taller ones were even snowcapped. But here and there one smoked fitfully, others steamed softly like cooling teakettles, and Chris’s eyes widened as he watched one spewing a slow trickle of incredibly hot orange-red lava into a nearby lake, where it set up a roiling cloud of steam and twisted and hardened almost instantly into dense, grotesquely shaped black rock. Though the shuttle ferry was a good kilometer above the pyrotechnic display and her thick clearsteel ports shut out any ambient noise, Chris swore he could hear the bubbling hiss of liquid turned to stone.

The ferry pilot had deliberately taken the long way around to give the newcomers a bird’s-eye view of their world. Now he banked and headed for the planet’s only city. After what they’d just seen, the sight of human-built creation seemed almost anticlimactic.

Begun in a bowl-shaped valley ringed about by rolling hills, some of them with the distinctive cinder cones of still more inactive volcanoes, Elysium City was planned to expand into those hills, then be connected to the outlying homesteads by paved roads and pneumo-tubes as well as aircar routes.

Over the ensuing months, clearsteel-and-transparent-aluminum high-rises would spire upward like growing crystals even as the urban infrastructure spiderwebbed outward toward the horizon in all directions. Buildings would grow overnight like mushrooms, fitted together like gigantic children’s construction sets out of prefab units brought downplanet from where they’d been stored in orbit. No matter how many times he watched the process, Chris never got tired of it.

One minute he’d be looking up at an empty Elysian sky, tinged a slightly greener blue than the sky of Earth, dotted with small puffy clouds. Then a tiny dot would appear just where his mother, coordinating the effort from a small Starfleet-issue comm unit in her palm, had promised him it would.

As he tilted his head back, squinting against the sun, the dot grew larger and larger, taking shape as a shuttlecraft carrying a modular construction unit under its belly, which it would maneuver into position for the waiting robots to snap into place in whatever configuration was designated for that site-a shopping mall, an office building, school or apartment complex.

There were no schools on Elysium yet; in fact the Council hadn’t decided, given how far-flung the inhabitants were, whether children would be required to attend school in an actual classroom, or could conduct all their lessons through the teletutor. As long as his lessons got done somehow, Chris was free to scramble about the building sites, following Willa up a lift or down a tunnel to see close-up how things took shape.

Best of all, there were no Neworlders here; they’d all gone off to the remoter regions to live far away from a city that they, not surprisingly, condemned as not Natural. Chris only ran into them occasionally when one or two stopped by the ranch to express their disapproval of what Heston was doing there.

Heston had chosen a homestead far enough from where the city was expected to ultimately expand, but close enough to commute by aircar. A house and barn had been built of prefab units similar to the ones forming the city. Heston had chosen the spot especially because of the thermal vents.

“See those?” he’d asked Chris the day they arrived, as if anyone could miss the bizarre-looking lava formations, like dozens of petrified gopher runs, striating the landscape every few meters. Where they differed from gopher runs, aside from being harder than basalt, was that some of them steamed slightly.

“Uh-huh,” Chris answered, as the two crouched in the low-growing grasses that covered the ground as far as he could see. He laid his palm against one of the lava tubes and found it a little warmer to the touch than was strictly comfortable.

“Thermal vents from a volcano five kilometers from here,” Heston explained. “Elysium has several sources of energy already-solar, wind power, fuel cells, but I’m going to try something different, something they’ve been using in Iceland for centuries… volcano power. It’s a natural for this world. Did you know you could set up a greenhouse on top of a thermal vent and grow pineapples and bananas during the coldest winter?”

Chris shook his head, fascinated.

“Well, I’m going to do much more than that. I’ve designed a gizmo that will provide all our energy, read the weather, measure the water table, even warn of earthquakes, all from the power of a single volcano.”

“Don’t they have all that stuff in the city?” Chris wanted to know.

“Most of it,” Heston conceded. “But I’m working on designs for the individual homesteader, so we won’t have to be dependent on the city for anything.” He stood up and turned slowly in a circle, surveying the open land around them. “Someday this homestead will be its own little universe. We’ll grow all our own food, create all our own energy, and there’ll be herds of horses running wild in the hills, living on the native grasses, as far as the eye can see. Oh, and the hot tub-did I mention we’ll have a hot tub?”

He said it with a nudge and wink, which made Chris chuckle.

“Can we have a pool, too?” he wanted to know.

“You want a swimming pool? You’ve got one,” Heston said, waving his hand as if he could make it appear in an instant. “We’ll make it look like a natural formation-oh, say, over there by that tumble of rocks, with its own waterfall….”

“What if the volcano erupts?” Chris asked. The valley the ranch was set in was ringed around with low hills, but they looked older than the ones around the city, and none of them were smoking. The volcano must be behind them, he figured, but was that far away enough?

“It won’t,” Heston said confidently. “Starfleet engineers have been monitoring it for over a decade. They can work backward and forward and project when it might erupt again. Long before it does, I’ll be able to harness it.”

“Harness it?” Chris echoed him, thinking of horses.

“You’ll see,” was all Heston would tell him, going off to tinker with the generator that, if he was to be believed, would do just about anything.

Chris spent a lot of time hanging on the split-rail fence watching Maia and the other mares exploring their new paddock beside the barn. They’d been brought here and awakened from stasis and seemed none the worse for wear. They would be happier, he hoped, once Heston turned them loose in the hills, though he knew he would miss Maia. For now the barn was open to the mild air, but once Heston got his invention running, it would be as comfortable as the ranch house-cooled in summer, heated in winter, bright with natural light from skylights built into the roof.

Chris stroked Maia’s neck as she nuzzled him, her sweet breath blowing in his hair. He wished his stepfather would teach him to ride, but Heston was possessive of his horses.

“They’re not pets,” he’d pointed out. “They need to get acclimated to their new surroundings, and I don’t want them overexcited,” he’d said, but Chris wondered if that was the real reason. Heston himself rode one of them out sometimes to survey the property. Chris had overheard him telling Willa, “Yeah, I know he’s a rugged kid, but he’s only nine. Maybe after the first run of foals, but not now.”

That would be more than a year from now, Chris realized, wishing he had the nerve to just grab hold of Maia’s mane and swing himself over the top rail and onto her back. But he sensed that would really tick Heston off. And he wasn’t sure he could do it without falling off. Maybe, he thought, after the foals are born, he might let me have one.

The thought would have to sustain him for now. He gave Maia a final pat, climbed down from the fence and went off to run wild through the tall grass, waiting quietly for the native critters-birds and lizards and some sort of small furry hopping quadruped whose name he didn’t know that looked like a kangaroo rat with a platypus bill-or skipping stones across the small creek in back of the house where Heston had joked about a swimming pool, or hiking halfway up the nearest inactive cinder cone until Willa caught sight of him and called him down. He figured it would take him all summer to explore every corner of his new world.

“It’ll never fly!” Cotton Jonday announced, watching Heston tinker with the interface for what he’d informed their Neworlder neighbors would be the state of the art in thermodynamic environmental control systems. He and his son seemed to have come all the way over to the Prescott homestead just to criticize Heston’s latest creation.

“If I’d wanted it to fly, neighbor, I’d have given it a propulsion system,” Heston retorted, just to annoy Cotton, which he’d discovered was surprisingly easy to do.

The Gizmo, as Heston had dubbed it, stood in a clearing halfway between the house and the barn. While Heston tinkered, Cotton and his son Flax stood around with their hands deep in the pockets of their bib overalls, barely contained sneers on their faces. Chris and Silk watched from the porch, barely stifling their laughter.

Silk, Chris had learned, was Cotton’s niece. She’d been allowed to tag along, apparently no longer forbidden to associate with the Prescotts, as long as her uncle was curious about what Heston was up to, and she’d decided she and Chris were friends again.

While they watched the interplay between Heston and the Jondays, Chris had opened the back of Silk’s cell phone to see if he could get it to interface with his comm unit.

“Settling your family in so close to active thermal vents isn’t safe,” Cotton went on doggedly, kicking at the dirt with the toe of his boot. “There’s gases coming out of those clefts that can kill you and your livestock with you.”

“That’s largely misinformation, neighbor. And on the odd chance that this particular beast turns out to be flatulent…” Chris and Silk both snorted and poked each other with glee. “… that’s what this is for.” Heston tapped the face of one of the banks of gauges on the device and it presented him with a series of readouts. “Measures everything. Temperature, pressure, exact composition of escaping gases-which are captured by the array over here…” He bobbed and wove amid the maze of conduits with practiced ease. “… and broken down to the molecular level here…” Ducking under and around. “… and converted into energy here.”

“Reducing Nature to its molecular components isn’t Natural….”Cotton began.

“My friend, every time you sit down to the dinner table, that’s exactly what you’re doing!” Heston cut him off, squinting against the sun, a socket wrench in one hand and an oily rag in the other. “If you didn’t, you’d have starved to death at your mother’s breast and wouldn’t be here annoying me today.”

Chris and Silk couldn’t hold it in any longer. They laughed until they were weak, noticing too late that Cotton had heard them and turned on his heel, heading for the porch, his sullen overgrown son in tow. The two of them suddenly grew very serious.

“I’ve designed thermal capture systems for entire cities!” Heston called after Cotton, trying to distract him before there was an incident. “I think I can manage to do the same for my own household.”

But Cotton was not to be diverted. He loomed over the two on the porch. “You find this amusing, do you?” he demanded of Silk, not even looking at Chris.

“No, sir…” Silk began, but Chris intervened.

“She wasn’t laughing, sir. It was me. She sort of… caught it from me. You know, contagious, like yawning.”

Cotton jerked his thumb toward their car, an old-fashioned contraption with an internal combustion engine. Where he found the gasoline to run it was anyone’s guess, though Heston had been heard muttering something about “chicken heads.”

“We’re leaving now,” he said, and Silk, not daring to look Chris in the eye, reluctantly jumped off the porch, braids bouncing.

“You forgot your… um… cell phone!” Chris called after her, dropping it into her palm with a wink that said he’d rigged it so that from now on she could use it to talk to him.

“Good-bye, Christopher!” she called out over her shoulder. Chris could see Heston watching them, a slow grin spreading over his face, whether at Silk, who hadn’t yet been entirely corrupted by the Neworlder philosophy, or at Chris’s standing up to Cotton, Chris wasn’t sure.

“Designing something on a computer’s one thing!” Cotton repeated his recurring theme as he slammed the door of the antiquated vehicle. “You softhands try to do anything in real life, you invariably make a mess of it. And the climate’s wrong for them horses!”

“We’ll see about that!” Heston called after him as the car sputtered off in a hydrocarbon haze.

“Silkie and Seepy sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G…”

Children’s singsong rhymes, especially the mocking ones, endure down the centuries, and were just as stinging in Chris’s time as they might have been for his great-great grandfather. The first time Silk called him on her cell phone, he could hear Flax teasing her in the background. He felt his fists clenching.

“Has he been singing that since the day you were here?” Chris asked. His commscreen showed only static, since Silk’s phone didn’t have visual, but her voice came through loud and clear. So, unfortunately, did Flax’s.

“He’ll get bored soon,” Silk said, not exactly answering the question. “His brain’s too small to hold more than one thought at a time.”

But Chris didn’t laugh as Silk had hoped he would.

“I bet if I was there, I could make him stop!”

Lately he had decided he liked Silk. He was ten now, after all, and finally taller than she, and not as squeamish as he had been when he was only nine. He wished he could finish the fight Flax had started on the ship almost a year ago.

“Did your father get the Gizmo running?” Silk wanted to know.

Heston’s my stepfather, Chris wanted to say, but let it go. “Uh-huh.”

“Uncle Cotton says he knows why your mares won’t conceive….”

Chris wondered if he should pursue that, but decided against it. For one thing, getting the mares to breed was Heston’s problem, not his, especially if Heston wouldn’t let him have a foal. For another, he hadn’t noticed Cotton Jonday being right about much of anything so far. And third, Heston was hardly ever around, and when he was, he was preoccupied and barely listening.

As Chris had hoped, most of the time Heston was somewhere else on the planet, planting trees, changing the course of rivers, setting off controlled magma releases from some of the volcanoes in order to take the pressure off earthquake faults. Willa either worked from home or took Chris with her into the city, so he had his mom back, but he wished the homestead wasn’t out in the middle of nowhere, or that more settlers would move close by. The Neworlders’ farm lay on the other side of the foothills, but there was no one else for kilometers. The other kids he’d been in touch with on Earth were out of reach to anyone who didn’t have a subspace communicator, and even that would take weeks. Except for his illicit conversations with Silk, Chris spent an awful lot of time in his own company.

The novelty of his new home had worn off, and he kept wishing for something exciting to happen.

That was when the earthquakes began.