Star Trek, page 14
“Please don’t be.” She put her warmer-than-you’d-think hand on his arm a moment, then removed it just as quickly. “People seem so afraid to engage in frank conversations with me. Even my friends.” She grinned, as deeply as the construction of her face would allow. “I relish such connections.”
“Oh, okay.” He was relieved that he hadn’t offended her. After he entered the recalibrations she’d wanted, he asked, “See anything on the port scan yet?”
“I do not.” Airiam barely glanced at that screen. “But I believe our preliminary, less attuned, scans suggested that area would be clear.”
Rhys was still considering what she’d said about her friends. “May I ask a personal question I’ve never wanted to bother you with?” Before she could respond, the lateral starboard sensor recalibration finished and a blip of data appeared, and just as quickly disappeared. “Did you see that? Deck eight, section twelve.”
Airiam checked the screen, then reran the scan. “Whatever was there no longer registers.”
Another flash appeared on the screen and Rhys moved to zoom in on it, but again it disappeared. “That one was deck nine, same section.” Rhys forced out an annoyed breath and tightened a fist against the console’s edge. “Something must be wrong with the relays. A rolling glitch.”
“I shall check.” Airiam brought up the diagnostic screen. As she started running tests, she said, “What was your question?”
“The Starfleet database just lists you as Lieutenant Commander Airiam.” Rhys kept glowering at the sensor display for the decks where the anomaly had appeared, searching fruitlessly for the blip to return. “Why just the one name?”
“Ah,” she said knowingly. “On the Europa, people always asked me that, but you are the first on Discovery.” When she noticed Burnham close by, she leaned toward him and whispered as best she could. “Not even the captain has inquired.” Straightening again, she continued her diagnostic. “Airiam is a badge I wear, as much as this.” She touched her hand to the Starfleet insignia on her chest. “It is an homage to the old me, but a symbol of the new.”
“How so?” Still paying attention, Rhys wondered if what the sensors picked up could have been a type of transporter signal, but when he scanned for signs of such use, found none.
“As I recovered from the accident,” she said as they worked, “with much of my old self replaced with my new self, my visual, aural, and vocal augmentations needed attuning. Before extensive configuration, Airiam was all I could say of my name. Due to how my new systems are connected, for a time it was also all that I would answer to. My given name had become foreign to my fresh ears.”
His throat closing in empathy, Rhys only managed to croak out another “Oh.”
“I chose to stay with my new name, as a symbol of the different person I had become. It was an attempt to keep myself from looking too far—and too often—backward.”
Perhaps because he found her positivity so dear, or because he realized he might not be so lovely a soul as she, had he gone through the same ordeal, Rhys felt his chest tighten with emotion. He kept it from his voice as best he could, not wanting to embarrass her. “Do you recognize your birth name now? I mean you can say it, and answer to it?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’d like to know it. If that’s okay?”
“Miriam.” Her lips turned up in the closest he’d ever seen her to a beaming grin. “Rhymes with Airiam.”
With a laugh, he choked up and wiped at his eye before an actual tear came out right there on the bridge. “Both are lovely.”
“Thank you, Gen Rhys. I like your names too.” She closed the diagnostic screen and returned to the sensor calibration controls. “I can find no errors in the lateral starboard sensor arrays on decks eight or nine.”
“Damn,” he said. “Then what did I see?”
“Not a sensor glitch,” Airiam assured him.
“I’m not sure which bothers me more: the idea we’ve been boarded by intruders we can’t scan for, let alone see, or that Mister Stamets and someone who says he’s from another universe are the only ones who can.”
“Do you disbelieve their claims?” Airiam asked.
Rhys shook his head. “No, but from a tactical point of view, what they say is disconcerting.”
“If it was an intruder, they can traverse the ship with a speed our scanners have difficulty following. I will inform the captain that those decks need security attention and suggest tricorders may still be of more use.”
* * *
When Paul Stamets returned to engineering, the damage-control team had nearly finished. Nilsson, he noticed, had been tidying up those sections the teams had yet to get to.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said as he scooped up a toolbox that had been removed but not returned to its compartment. “Damage-control teams seem to repair one kind of damage and create another.”
The toolkit back in its place, and the damage-control personnel filtering out, Stamets approached the cultivation bay. The doors parted for him and beyond lay the stuff of his nightmares. Not merely sporeless Prototaxites stellaviatori, but no Prototaxites stellaviatori at all.
Nilsson stepped in behind him, the expanse of the empty bay shocking her as well. She muted a gasp that barely escaped. “Damn.”
With a twinge of pain, Stamets shuddered. It wasn’t cold—in fact the cultivation bay was humid and warmer than the rest of the ship. And yet, the instinctive overwhelming sensation he had sent a shiver down his spine.
“Do you sense anything?” he asked, narrowing his eyes as if he might see the shapeless wisps again.
She looked around the bay, then back to him. “No. Should I?”
He motioned her back toward the lab. “Get your tricorder.” Stepping forward, Stamets searched for … what? He wasn’t sure. He cocked his head, as if to hear something, but other than the normal ship sounds, the empty chamber was maddening in its silence.
By the time Nilsson was back, the feeling was gone. Resisting the urge to pull the tricorder from her hand, he let her scan the room. Waiting was a slow climb to annoying.
“Just those same residual energy flux patterns we recalibrated for.” She showed him the readings.
“Where? Specifically.”
“All over,” she said, encompassing the empty bay in one arm wave.
Nilsson curved toward the door but Stamets grabbed her arm and pulled her back in. He would have described his feeling as eerie, but the sensation was more than that. “Scan it again,” he told her in an urgent whisper.
She activated the tricorder and after a moment its humming changed in pitch, then an alert flashed on the screen.
“They’re here,” Stamets said, his voice quiet as he glared into the hollow compartment that once housed his personal mycelial forest.
Nilsson whispered back, “Who?”
“The ‘others.’ ” He twisted around and gestured for her to join him in the lab again. As the bay door closed, he said, “Alert the bridge. Send them the tricorder data.”
Nilsson hailed the bridge and reported what they discovered. Captain Burnham’s singular order was to get “more answers,” so she returned to Stamets with a shrug. “You heard the captain. Now what?”
He thought a moment. “I’ll need a sample of the dust from my EV suit—”
Nilsson held up a small vial. “Collected and ready to be processed.” Off his puzzled expression, she added, “From the EV suits, before they hit decon.”
“Perfect.” He grabbed the vial and placed it in the analysis bay. Keying in a sequence on the console, Stamets reminded himself to breathe as they quickly began their investigation to figure out what the dust from the yeel tree actually was.
As the information slowly played across the screen, Nilsson drew close. “That’s interesting. Looks like some of the properties I’ve seen in Basidiomycota samples.”
Taken aback, Stamets felt a wave of pride wash over him. “You read the mycology books I gave you? I like you just a little bit more today than yesterday.”
“And,” Nilsson added, “without trying to be teacher’s pet, I’m pretty sure I remember that some species of Basidiomycota are pathogens.”
“Not all,” Stamets said, continuing to be impressed, “but yes, some. To both plants and animals. I wonder which the JahSepp qualify as?” Suddenly he found himself distracted by the same feeling he’d had in the cultivation bay—a sense something wasn’t quite right. Were “the others” back?
Almost as soon as the impression struck him, it was gone. Like a window had opened and then closed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he murmured. “Everything.”
As Stamets buried himself in the data again, there was a pull on him that was inexplicable. He wanted to talk with Culber. He didn’t believe in fate, but his connection to the doctor was undeniable. He wasn’t sure how he had missed it the first time they met. Except they hadn’t, really. He had met the Culber who belonged to this universe and never got past that brief encounter … so he never knew what he was missing. Now that he did, he wondered if given a second chance he would make the same choice again.
14
“You’re here, aren’t you?” When Culber turned, Ephraim the tardigrade was by his side on the biobed. At a significantly smaller size than usual, though, so he could sit easily beside him.
“To you, I am, yes.”
“How do you do that?” Culber asked, indicating his size by dropping a leveled hand from one point to another.
“A mental projection of my physical form is still just a mental projection.”
Culber pointed his chin toward Commander Landry, who stood—refusing to sit—next to the biobed opposite them. “Why not to anyone else? Other than me and Paul.”
“ Our connection,” Ephraim said, moving his topmost arms in a circle, “is more than they can perceive or conceive.”
“I get why Paul can see you—or maybe feel you is more accurate—but how can I?”
“This plane connects us all.” His arms spread wide. “You are of this.”
Blowing out a frustrated breath, Culber bent back his neck, then twisted back and forth, trying to stretch out its tension. “I don’t know what that means.”
“I know you don’t,” Ephraim said with great sincerity. “But you have and you do and you will again.”
Culber chuckled ironically. “I would give anything if you never said that ever again.”
His puckered mouth seemed to emit a chitter, an Ephraim laugh. “I know you would. And—”
“Stop.”
“It wasn’t my intention to cause you anxiety.” Rolling his upper body, Ephraim seemed to demure. “I thought I was being humorous.”
“Most people do.” Culber pursed his lips, and noticed that Landry was watching him, her expression quizzical.
“Am I people?” the tardigrade asked.
With much of his Starfleet career spent on deep-space missions, Culber didn’t hesitate to answer. “Of course. ‘People’ doesn’t necessarily describe only human beings. It’s a word that just means sentient beings, really. Generic, if you know what I mean.”
“I believe I do.” Pausing to consider it, Ephraim tapped his claws against themselves, alternating arms in a pattern that didn’t seem random. “I do not communicate with words, as you conceive them, but they’re an interesting concept.”
“Ever?” Culber felt confusion play across his face, and thought Landry must have noticed that as well. “How do you know you like the name Ephraim if you don’t use words?”
“I can hear. I like its sound.”
“Do you like music?”
“All things,” Ephraim said, spreading his arms wide again, seemingly to suggest the universe.
“That’s not an answer,” Culber said.
The spiky protrusions on Ephraim’s head vibrated softly, and because he wasn’t actually there, his bewilderment was more felt than seen. “What is not music?”
“Do you mean, ‘what is music?’ ” Culber asked.
“What is not music?” Looking around, from the sickbay bulkheads and consoles to the sleeping, recovering patients, and even to Landry, on whom he didn’t linger, Ephraim said, “All of these are expressions of music. Are they not to you?”
“No.” Culber shifted his weight and reached for his training. “But, there are people with something called synesthesia. They perceive the data from sense experience as … more. They may hear something as anyone else would, but also see it as colors.”
“Do you have this quality yourself?”
“No, I don’t see music. I just enjoy its sound. It can make me feel things, think about things, but that’s about it.”
“But everything is music,” Ephraim insisted.
Culber realized this was the most pleasant, calmest discussion he’d ever had with the tardigrade. Then again, he didn’t really remember the vast majority of them. “Nice music, I hope.”
“Often.” Ephraim curved slightly, toward Landry. “Not always.”
Recognition? While it was a different Ellen Landry than Culber had known, there was only one tardigrade they knew of. Therefore only one Ephraim, he assumed. “In my memory, she hurt you and you killed her,” Culber whispered, despite no one being able to hear him.
“I know this moment.” The tardigrade wasn’t exactly dismissive, but it was clear that the “melody” of that event had been discordant.
“But here … she’s alive.” Culber searched Ephraim’s expression for some reaction, or rather he tried to feel whatever emotion was being projected.
“She is alive,” the tardigrade agreed. “And she isn’t. She will be again, and she won’t.”
The more time Culber spent on Discovery, the more his mental faculties returned. He found he had a clarity that had been sorely lacking on the mycelial plane. Now, able to examine the tardigrade more clearly, the doctor began to understand some of the being’s nature. If Ephraim traversed the multiverse, then he, as perhaps the singular being who could do so, would see other beings in a completely different way. “You understand that to her, this is her life? Her only life. And the one you killed … she’s just gone.”
“Are you sure?” The tardigrade’s tone was thick with emotion, perhaps akin to regret.
“Yeah, pretty sure.” There was a time he’d have replied that he was absolutely positive. But his experiences of late, the ones he could remember, had Culber wondering if he was dead, or had been and was now alive again and … very little of it yet made sense. If there was a linear progression of events that might help give him certainty, it was elusive to him.
“I am sorry for that one,” Ephraim said after a somber pause. “But not for this one.” He snapped a claw toward the Landry just meters away.
“As difficult as the concept of a multiverse is for us,” Culber said, “I think so is the concept of a single universe for you.”
“There is no single universe.”
“But we can only experience one universe at a time.”
“And this makes you sad?”
“No,” Culber said. “How could it?”
Ephraim’s upper body rolled around and the emotion he broadcast felt foreign. “How could it not?”
For a long moment, they sat in silence as Culber considered the question. “I had a patient once,” he finally began, “who was born to a telepathic race, but didn’t have the ability herself. There’s a stigma among her people about such an inability. She could work, she could learn, she could laugh and love. But she was pitied.”
“This story is sad,” Ephraim said.
“Yes, it is. When she was nine years old, she wanted to be ‘fixed’ with a procedure that was supposed to give people a limited telepathy. An implanted stimulator would trigger certain neurotransmitters that— Well, I suppose the details aren’t important.”
“Did it fix her?”
“I advised against the surgery. But she’d had a friend who was going to get the procedure too, and her parents wanted her to try, and … she just wanted to be like everyone else.” A wave of melancholy washed between them, creating emotional eddies that Culber could actually feel.
“Did it work?” Ephraim was almost childlike in how he listened to a story. Full of curiosity and hope.
“It was …” Culber took a shaky breath before continuing. “She’d never experienced telepathy before, so her brain couldn’t interpret the information it received. It was all noise. Had she had years of training and practice, maybe she could have made sense of it … but she was only nine and thought the operation would instantly make her ‘normal.’ Those who didn’t have the ability rejected her because she’d turned her back on them. And those she wanted to be like still didn’t accept her.”
“Then it didn’t help her,” Ephraim morosely concluded.
“I wouldn’t say that, either. What she ultimately learned is that she wasn’t broken in the first place. She eventually deactivated the stimulator and never used it again. She lost her desire to be anything other than who she was.”
“But she isn’t telepathic,” the tardigrade lamented.
Culber shrugged. “Neither am I. Most sentient beings aren’t. We don’t miss what we never had.”
“This person,” Ephraim said, indicating Ellen Landry with a gesture, “she is much the same as the one who hurt me.”
“Do you have feelings about that?” Culber asked. “Do you want to hurt her?” As Ephraim was only telepathically present, the question wasn’t a concern for Landry so much as a point of curiosity.
The tardigrade shuddered. “I never want to hurt anyone. Like any living entity, I have instincts and I reacted.”
“Do you know what those instincts are?”
Chittering thoughtfully, Ephraim seemed uncertain. “I suppose only once they come into use.”
“I guess that’s true of us all.”
Ephraim’s mouth puckered and he radiated happiness again. “Then I am a people?”
Smiling lightly, Culber nodded. “You certainly are to me.”
* * *
