Chapter Twenty · The Threnody

New Beltane — Present Day

From orbit, New Beltane looked like a place that had never been told anything bad.

Picard stood at the bridge rail and watched it fill the main viewer, a green-gold world with broad calm oceans and a single large continent laid across its middle like a hand. The farmland was a patchwork, squares of ripe gold and dark furrowed brown, stitched together by thin silver canals. Small white towns sat in it like scattered salt. On the night side, a few thousand lights glowed. In fourteen years, four thousand people had made a home here, and every line of it said we meant to stay.

At the southern tip of the continent, a hair's width above the horizon, a faint pale rim lay across the land like frost.

"That is the drift front," Data said quietly, at his shoulder. "Visible in the infrared and the low ultraviolet. The effect is optical. Light bends slightly as it crosses the boundary. It appears to shimmer."

"How far has it moved?"

"Six kilometers in the last two hours. It is accelerating."

"I see." Picard turned. "Mister Worf's replacement at tactical will monitor the front continuously. Commander Riker, you have the ship."

"Aye, Captain."

The face that resolved on the secondary screen was weathered and brown, with the creased squint of a woman who had spent thirty years looking across fields. She was in her sixties, gray hair tied back, sleeves rolled to the elbow. A cup of something steaming sat at her elbow. She did not look like a person who had been told she was about to lose her town.

"Administrator Marsh."

"Captain Picard." Teodora Marsh's voice was dry and level. "I'll tell you now I'm not a fan of Starfleet showing up in my sky unannounced. But I've had three weeks of humming and two days of Admiral Sorokin's people telling me not to worry, and I can see that front on my own sensors. So. What do you want from me?"

"Your help," Picard said. "I must ask you to evacuate the colony."

"All of it."

"All of it. As quickly as possible."

She did not flinch. "How many days?"

"Hours," he said. "We estimate thirty-one before the front reaches the outer settlements. It may be fewer."

She drank her tea. She set the cup down with great care. "There are four thousand two hundred and sixty-one people on this planet. A third of them are kids. I have nine hundred hectares of wheat a week from harvest. I have a hospital with thirty patients, including eleven who can't be moved without a transport bed. And I have a colony charter that says no one gets forced off a Federation world by an unnamed threat. You're going to have to tell me what it is."

"I cannot tell you what it is. I can tell you what it does."

"Then do that."

He told her. He told her about the drift, the front, the changed constants, and what had happened to a dead man in a drowned dome and a station that had torn itself apart. He did not soften it. When he had finished, Teodora Marsh was silent for some time, looking at something just beyond the edge of the screen.

"You're telling me it won't hurt anyone," she said at last. "It'll change them."

"I am telling you I do not know what it will do. I know it has not yet reached a population."

"And that's the part that frightens you."

"Yes."

"Good," she said. "It should." She stood. "I'll ring the bell. You'll have every hand in the colony. But I'm telling you now, Captain, half of them won't go without a fight. My people have grain in the ground."

"I will do what I can to persuade them."

"Do better than that." A dry, weary look. "Persuade me. I've got the hardest job in the world, and it's convincing a farmer to leave his field."

The grange hall in Haven held six hundred, and by noon it held seven.

Picard stood at the side of the stage with Marsh and watched them come in. They filed through the double doors in their work clothes, in boots and canvas and flannel, with the stooped easy gait of people who had spent their lives bending over something living. They smelled of earth and diesel and drying grain. They did not talk much. They found their seats on the long wooden benches, and settled, and looked at the stage, and the quiet in the room had the weight of a thing that had been decided before it began.

"They're not going to like it," Marsh said, low.

"No."

"You can't make it pretty."

"I do not intend to try."

"Good." She glanced at him. "They'll know if you do. They've been lied to by a great many people with clean boots."

She walked out to the lectern, and rapped on it once with her knuckles, and the room went still.

"You know why we're here," Teodora Marsh said. "I'll not dress it up. Starfleet's told me we've got to leave. All of us, off-world, in about a day and a half. There's a thing in the south that's going to cross this continent, and it doesn't care what we've planted." A low sound moved through the benches. "I've got a man here who's going to tell you what it is. I've listened to him. I think he's honest. You can decide for yourselves."

She stepped aside.

Picard crossed to the lectern. It was a plain wooden thing, worn dark at the edges by decades of elbows. He set his hands on it and looked out at the seven hundred faces, brown and creased and watchful, and found that he had no speech. He had written one, in the turbolift, and it had been a good one, and it left him now like a sail going slack.

"My name is Jean-Luc Picard," he said. "I command the Enterprise. I am going to tell you what I know, and then I am going to tell you what I do not, and the second list is longer."

A man in the third row folded his arms.

"Five days ago, a thing was found on a mining world that I will not name. It is an artifact. It is very old. It changes the physics around it. The effect is small at first and grows. It has been growing since before any of us were born, and it began growing faster the day it was found." He kept his voice quite level. "There are others like it. One of them lies in a ruin in your south, which you called the Kettle. It has been awake for three weeks. You have been hearing it."

"The humming," someone said.

"Yes."

"My kids sing it," said a woman near the back. "In their sleep."

"I know." He met her eyes. "I am sorry."

A silence. He could hear a shuffle of feet, a creak of benches, the tick of the old clock above the stage.

"I do not know what it will do when it reaches you," Picard said. "That is the first thing I do not know. I have seen what it does to a field of wheat. I have seen what it does to a stone. I have seen it reach a man, in a place far from here, who was alive when it began and was not afterward. It does not seem to be cruel. It does not seem to be anything. It simply proceeds."

"Then why leave?" It was a deep voice, rough and unhurried, from the far corner. An old man had risen, white-bearded and huge in a flannel shirt, with a shotgun slung from one shoulder. He did not seem to notice that it was inappropriate. "If you don't know what it'll do. Maybe it won't do anything."

"It may not," Picard said. "I would be very glad to be wrong."

"But you don't think you are."

"No, sir."

"Why not?"

"Because I have asked myself that question every hour for five days," said Picard. "And every hour, I have found that I would rather be the man who left too soon than the man who stayed too long."

The old man stared at him. Something moved in his face, not agreement, but a kind of grudging recognition, the way one farmer might look at another across a fence.

"Will we get our fields back?" said a young woman in the second row. She had a child on her lap, a boy of perhaps four, asleep with his mouth open.

It was the question he had been dreading. He had considered several answers. He had rehearsed three. Looking at the sleeping boy, he found that none of them would do.

"I do not know," he said.

The hall was silent.

"I wish that I did. I should like to tell you that you will be back by the next planting. I should like to tell you that we will fix it, and you will plant your wheat, and in a year it will all be as it was." He drew a breath. "I cannot. I can tell you that I will try. I can tell you that I have a woman on my ship who is cleverer than any person I know, and a crew who would go through fire for her, and that between us we have not yet lost. I can tell you that I will not leave this system until I have done everything in my power to give you back your home." He paused. "That is all I can promise. It is less than you want. I am sorry."

For a moment, nobody moved.

Then a woman near the front, a stout gray-haired woman in an apron, rose slowly to her feet. She did not say anything. She looked at the stage for a time, and then she turned to the people on either side of her and said, quite calmly, "Well. I'll start packing the kitchen."

Someone laughed, a cracked, wet, startled sound. Someone else began, quietly, to cry. A man stood, and then another, and the benches creaked, and the low rustle of the room became a murmur and the murmur became a movement, as the whole hall began, without drama, without argument, to get up.

Marsh was beside him. "That," she said, "was very nearly the worst speech I've ever heard."

"I am aware."

"It's the only one they would have believed."

He nodded. He found that his hands, on the lectern, were not quite steady, and he took them away.

The old man with the shotgun had not moved. He stood in his corner as the hall emptied around him, a large still figure in a flannel shirt. When the room was nearly clear, Picard went to him.

"Mr. Amundsen," Marsh said. "This is Captain Picard."

"I know who he is." The old man looked down at him from a good six inches above. His eyes were pale, hard, and not unkind. "Good speech. I'm not going."

"I had understood that."

"My wife's in the east field. Forty-one years, this autumn. I put her there myself." He said it plainly. "I'm seventy-eight. I've got a few seasons left, if I'm lucky. I'm not going to spend them in a tent on a ship, wondering what's become of her."

"I will not attempt to order you."

"Wise."

"I will ask you to take this." Picard unpinned his combadge and held it out. "It is a communicator. If you change your mind, at any hour, you have only to touch it and say my name. I will have you out in ten seconds."

The old man looked at the small gold badge in Picard's palm. He did not take it at once.

"I'll put it on the mantel," he said at last.

"That will do."

"Don't expect me to use it."

"I do not." Picard closed the old man's hand around it. "But I should like it to be there."

Amundsen studied him a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, and put the badge in his shirt pocket, and went out of the hall into the thin bright afternoon without looking back.

The colony roster arrived on Vash's padd as she stepped onto the transporter pad.

She had meant only to scan it. Four thousand names, sorted by settlement, with ages, occupations, medical flags. A list of people she was about to walk among and try to save. She thumbed down through it without reading, the way a person scans a menu in a language she half knows.

Then she stopped.

Dalca, Renata. Age 71. Educator. Harrow's Reach.

The transporter's hum rose. The room brightened. She did not move.

"Vash?" Tobin said from the pad beside her. "You all right?"

"Fine." It came out thin. "Give me a second."

She read it again. The letters didn't change. Educator. Harrow's Reach was the northernmost of the outer settlements, thirty-five kilometers north of the old stone circle the colonists called the Kettle. A school, a chapel, a general store, and a long low hall where the harvest dinners were held. She knew that because she had read about it, in a message she hadn't answered, sent two years ago, that she had meant to answer and had not.

Dear Vash. I have retired at last, to a world with no ruins and plenty of children. You would hate it. You should come anyway. I'm teaching history to twelve-year-olds and they are a far tougher audience than any tomb. Write to me.

She hadn't written.

"Energizing," said the transporter chief. The world went gold.

Harrow's Reach was a town at the edge of the world.

It lay on a low rise above a river, a single street of pale wooden houses with steep roofs and wide porches, each with a kitchen garden going to seed. Beyond the last house, the fields began, endless, golden, moving in the wind like a slow sea. Dust hung in the air in long bright streamers. She could hear a church bell tolling, steady and unhurried, somewhere to the east.

And beneath it, very faint, a sound she knew.

The square was full. A hundred carts, a hundred families, a long slow line snaking toward the green and white tents that Starfleet's transport teams had raised on the commons. Babies crying. Dogs barking. An old man sitting on an overturned crate with a shotgun across his knees, arguing in a low steady voice with a very young ensign. The ensign wore one of the gray harnesses Geordi had run off the replicators overnight. So did everyone from the Enterprise. The colonists wore sun hats. She found she couldn't look at any of it directly. It was too ordinary.

"The school," she said to a passing woman with a child on her hip. "Where is it?"

"End of the street, past the chapel. Why?"

"I need to find the teacher."

The woman looked at her, and at the dirt on her borrowed uniform, and at Tobin and Data and Dara behind her. "Renata's there," she said. "She won't leave. Not until the last of her kids is through the line. She's been shouting at the ensigns for an hour."

Vash started to laugh. It came out as something else. "Yes," she said. "That sounds right."

The school was a long low building of whitewashed timber with a slate roof and a bell in a little cupola. Its door stood open. Inside, forty children sat in rows on the floor with their coats buttoned and small bags on their laps, in the solemn, glassy stillness of children who had been told to be quiet by someone they loved. At the front of the room, with her back to the door, a tall thin woman was writing names on a slate in quick white chalk.

She had short cropped hair, white as salt. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow. There was chalk on her trousers, chalk on her forearms, and a smear across one cheek. She was seventy-one, and she stood like a woman of forty, straight-backed, deliberate, every movement a little sharper than it strictly needed to be.

"Renata," Vash said.

The chalk stopped.

The woman didn't turn at once. She stood perfectly still, her back to the door, and Vash saw her shoulders rise once and fall. Then she set the chalk in the tray, dusted her hands on her trousers, and turned around.

Renata Dalca had eyes the color of river water. She looked at Vash for a while.

"You've come to my school in boots," she said. "I'll have to ask you to take them off."

"Renata—"

"No. Wait." The eyes were bright. The voice was perfectly level. "I have thirty-eight children in this room who need to be in a line by five o'clock, and I am not going to stop and cry in front of them. You're going to stand at the door and help me count heads, and when the last of them is through, I'm going to decide how I feel about you."

"All right."

"Good." She looked at Tobin, at Data, and at Dara, taking each of them in with a single sweeping, appraising glance. "And you've brought friends. What a lot of them." The glance lingered, for a moment, on Dara. "You'll be the linguist. She wrote about you. Four years ago. She filled three pages."

Dara colored, faintly. "I'm Dara Liang."

"I know exactly who you are." Renata smiled, dry and small. "Get in line."

It took two hours. They moved the children out in rows of ten, hand in hand, each row with an adult at its head and an ensign at its tail, to the long low tents on the commons where the transporters waited. Renata called each name twice, once at the door and once at the line. She missed none. She checked each face, straightened each collar, and said something small and private to every child, and every child smiled. By the time the last row went out, the light was low and gold, and Vash's voice had gone hoarse.

"Thirty-eight," Renata said, looking at her slate. "And two more who were sick at home and went through this morning. Forty. That's the school." She set the slate on the desk. She stood for a moment with her hands flat on the wood, head bowed.

"Renata."

"Give me a minute."

Vash waited.

When Renata finally raised her head, her face was wet, and her eyes were furious. "Two years," she said. "I wrote twice, and once, and once again, and every time I thought, she's in a hole somewhere, she'll write when she surfaces. And then I thought you'd died. And then I thought, no, I'd have heard. Someone would have told me. And then I stopped thinking about it, because it hurt, and because I'm old, and that's what old people do."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't you dare say that."

"I am."

"I know you are. It's a terrible thing to watch." Renata wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "I taught you to be better at it than this. I taught you that a thing you don't say aloud is a thing you've decided not to have."

"I know."

"Do you?" A long, searching look. "Because you look like a woman who's had that put to her recently."

Vash almost said yes. She found she could not. She stood in the empty classroom, in the dusty golden light, and all the words she had been holding for two years went out of her like breath.

Renata sighed. She crossed the room, and took Vash by the shoulders, and held her out at arm's length. "You're thin," she said. "You look like you haven't slept in a week. And you're hearing it too, aren't you? The sound."

"You hear it?"

"We've all heard it for three weeks." Renata's voice dropped. "It started at night, under the floor. Then the dogs began to howl at it. Then the children." She let go. "The children hum it. All of them. Even the ones who are too young to talk. They sit at their desks, and they draw, and they hum. I thought it was a game. I thought they'd picked it up from each other. I've been a teacher for forty years, Vash, and I know what a thing the children pick up looks like. This isn't one."

She went to her desk. She opened a drawer, and drew out a stack of rough paper, and held it out.

Vash took it. It was a child's drawings, dozens of them, in crayon and pencil and charcoal, made by a dozen different hands. She looked at the first. A scribble of loops. A spiral that turned back on itself, again and again, like a hand drawn by someone who had never seen a line end. She looked at the next, and the next. The same shape. The same looping line.

In the last, a child of perhaps eight had drawn a circle of tall standing stones, and in the center of it, a figure with her arms raised.

"They've been drawing that for two weeks," Renata said. "The Kettle. The old stone circle in the south. The children call it the Singing Place. They all know the figure. They say she's waiting for someone to come."

Vash stood still. Behind her, in the doorway, she heard a sound, a small sharp intake of breath, and turned.

Dara stood on the threshold. Her face was bone white. She was looking at the last drawing, at the small crayon figure with its arms raised, and her lips were moving very slightly. Vash couldn't hear what she said.

She didn't need to.

She had watched Dara's mouth move like that once before, over a pale ring at the edge of a chasm of fire, and had told herself it was a prayer for safe passage.

She hadn't asked.