Part Three — The Spreading Silence · The Threnody
Chapter Twenty-Four
USS Enterprise-D — Present Day
Renata's left hand lay on the white blanket, and it wasn't a hand.
It was still the shape of one. Five fingers, a palm, a wrist with the blue veins standing out. But the skin had gone clear as glass from the knuckles up, and within the clearness, very fine and pale and exquisitely regular, small rings hung in the flesh like frost in a window. They turned, slowly, in the sickbay's soft light. Where they moved, they chimed. It was barely audible. A sound like a fingertip drawn round the rim of a glass.
Vash sat beside the bed and didn't touch it.
"The process has stopped," Crusher said, from the foot of the bed. She kept her voice low. "It stopped the moment she left the zone. The conversion reaches to the wrist. It has not spread, and I do not believe it will." She put her padd down. "I can't reverse it. I can't even describe what I'm looking at. But I can tell you that it isn't hurting her. She has no pain. Her arm is otherwise healthy. And she woke twice in the night and asked about the girl."
"Is the girl all right?"
"She's fine. Her name is Ana. She's in the nursery with three other children from the school. She asked if her teacher was going to be all right."
Vash nodded. She didn't trust her voice.
"Vash." Crusher's face was gentle. "She threw a child out of a burning building with a hand that was turning to glass. She'll be fine. She is, frankly, a good deal tougher than either of us."
"I know."
"Do you? Because you're sitting here as if somebody is going to take her away."
"Someone was," Vash said. "Someone tried. And I wasn't fast enough."
She stopped. The silence in the sickbay held. On the bed, the old woman stirred, made a low sound, and turned her head on the pillow. Her eyes opened. They were the color of river water. They went to Vash, and lingered, and the ghost of a dry expression crossed her face.
"You're crying on my blanket," Renata said.
"I'm not."
"It's wet."
"It's a leak in the ceiling."
"Hm." Renata closed her eyes again. "You always were a terrible liar."
Vash laughed. It broke in the middle. She pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth, and Crusher, with a tact she wouldn't forget, found something urgent to do at the far end of the ward.
The comm chirped at her elbow. Picard's voice, quiet. "Vash. Data has completed his verification. I would like you in the science lab."
She looked at the hand on the blanket. The small pale rings turned in it, and sang.
"I'm coming."
They were waiting for her.
The lab had been cleared. Geordi stood at the long bench with his arms folded. Data stood opposite, a padd in both hands, in an attitude Vash had learned to read as dread. Picard sat in a chair at the side of the room. He hadn't moved when she came in. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at Dara.
Dara stood at the far end of the lab beside the Cirrus Key. She was very pale. She wore the same rumpled jacket she had worn for two days. Her notebook was in her left hand, closed, pressed flat against her ribs. Her right hand was bare. She hadn't put on a glove since Ke'Thara.
"Mr. Data has found an anomaly in my calibration," she said.
"Mister Data," Picard said. "Please."
"Yes, Captain." Data turned to Vash. "I have conducted three independent analyses of the activation sequence Ms. Liang prepared for the Cirrus Key. The first two matched her calculation. The third was run with a different set of assumptions about the Key's internal dampening. It is inconsistent."
"Inconsistent how?" Vash said.
"The frequency Ms. Liang has specified is approximately four percent higher than the Key's dampening resonance would suggest." Data's tone did not change. "A shift in that direction would not produce a damping effect. On the evidence of the accelerant signatures we have recorded at other sites, a shift of that magnitude, in that direction, would instead reinforce the orb's broadcast. It would not stop the drift. It would accelerate it."
The room went still.
Vash felt the cold drop arrive in her stomach, slowly, like a stone settling in a well. She had been waiting for it for three days. She had known it was coming since a pale ring in a cradle of fire, since a dark corridor and a low voice humming. But knowing was not the same as hearing it said aloud by someone who could not lie.
"That has to be an error," Dara said. Her voice was calm, and the calm was a beautiful thing, a perfect copy of exactly the note that Vash would have believed a week ago. "I used the same fragment pattern I've used at every site. If there's a discrepancy, it's as likely to be in Data's model as in mine."
"I have run it three times," Data said. "The discrepancy is consistent. I would also note that this is not the first calibration you have provided in which my independent analysis and your translation have diverged in the same direction. It is merely the first in which the divergence is large enough, and the stakes high enough, that I have judged it necessary to report before we proceed."
"You're accusing me of—"
"I am reporting a measurement," Data said, gently. "I am not assigning a cause."
Vash crossed the room. She did it slowly, because she didn't trust her legs. She stopped a meter from Dara, close enough to see the pulse in her throat, and looked at the small bound notebook pressed flat against her ribs.
"Show me your working notes," she said. "The actual pages. Not the scan you gave Data. The book itself."
"Vash—"
"Show me."
Something crossed Dara's face. It wasn't guilt, or not only guilt. It was the look of a woman who had been carrying a weight alone for a while, and had just, without warning, been allowed to set it down.
She held out the notebook.
Vash took it. It was warm from her hand. She opened it on the bench, under the lab's hard light, and turned the pages.
She had seen the first ones before. The groove pattern from the plinth, copied stroke by stroke, looping and returning. The Ke'Thara glyphs. The phrase from the Vault. Dara's small neat hand ran across every page, line after line, year after year, four years of work on six continents. It was a beautiful book. It was the book of a woman who had loved her craft.
Near the back, she found the line that had stopped halfway across the page on Doria Minor.
The dashes were gone. The sentence had been finished, in the same careful hand, in pencil. Vash read it aloud, quietly, and each word was a small cold stone.
"When the voices are sung in their ordered course, the door opens, and the Choir comes home."
Nobody spoke.
"That's the translation," Vash said. "From Doria Minor. You wrote it in the chamber."
"Yes."
"You had the whole thing. The first night."
"I had the first half in the chamber. I finished it that evening, in the loading bay." Dara's voice was very level. "I didn't show you because it wouldn't have shown you what you wanted to see. It would have shown you the truth. And I didn't think you were ready to hear it."
"Try me."
She told it standing up, with her hands at her sides.
It took a long time. She spoke slowly, without stopping, with the clear, quiet, almost gentle diction of someone who had rehearsed this in an empty room a hundred times. Vash listened, and didn't look away, and didn't interrupt, and later, when she tried to remember the words, she found that she had forgotten most of them. What she remembered was the shape.
A woman of twenty-four, at a university on Cestus III, reading a line of a dead language that no one had ever translated. A line that looked, to everyone else in the department, like a scribble. To her, it looked like a voice. A small circle of scholars and amateurs, meeting in a rented hall, who had pieced together a story out of fragments. A people who had been dying. A people who had sung a door in the dark, and waited, and never been answered.
"They're not gone," Dara said. "Not the way we've all been treating them. Some ancient tragedy, to be studied and contained and quietly forgotten. They're waiting. I've felt it every time I've touched that orb. Not a threat. Not a monster. A grief so enormous it built an entire people's hope into a single patient signal, reaching across the death of everything they knew, for the smallest possible chance of coming home."
"People are dying, Dara," Vash said. Her voice cracked. She forced it back. "Seven people. Real people. On a real colony. Not a line in a fragment."
"I know." It was the plain, unguarded honesty of it that finally broke something loose in Vash's chest. "I know exactly what it costs. I watched it happen. I was in that hall, Vash. I held that woman's arm." Dara's eyes were bright and wet and didn't leave her face. "I thought it would be a mercy. I thought I'd be able to watch it and bear it, because it would be a kind of birth. And it wasn't. It was a horror. I've never seen anything so horrible in my life."
"Then how can you—"
"Because I can't stop believing it." Her voice cracked then. "That's the thing. That's the thing I can't make you understand. I stood in that yard and watched a good man turn to glass and I thought, this is wrong, and I thought, it's so beautiful, and I thought, they're so close. All three, at once. And I hated myself, and I couldn't stop. I wish I could tell you I was lying to you all this time out of malice. It would be so much easier. I'm not. I believe this. I have believed it for ten years. I don't know how to stop."
"The calibration," Picard said.
It was the first thing he had said. He hadn't moved from his chair. His voice was quiet.
"Was it deliberate?"
Dara was silent a breath. "I don't know," she said.
"Ms. Liang."
"I don't know, Captain. I sat down last night to write that sequence. I wrote it. I checked it. It was perfect. It was the most careful thing I've ever done." She swallowed. "And it was wrong. And I didn't see it. I've been through it forty times. I can't find the place where I decided. I think—" She stopped. "I think I've been listening to it so long that I can't tell the difference between what I'm working out and what I'm being told."
The lab was silent. Vash could hear the small, steady, patient hum of the Key in its cradle, somewhere to her left. She could hear Geordi breathing. She could hear, very faintly, at the edge of hearing, the sound that had followed her across half a dozen worlds.
She looked down at the notebook.
It was open to the last page. The final leaf, below the completed sentence, was covered in tiny marks. She looked at them without seeing them. A column of shorthand. A row of Dara's careful sketches of the seven-note phrase. And in the margin, repeated a dozen times down the edge of the page in small faint pencil, a little figure. A curl. A loop that turned back on itself, and curled again, and in the curl's heart a smaller curl, and in that one a smaller still. It was the kind of doodle that a hand made when its mind was elsewhere. Beside it, Dara had written, in the faintest pencil:
decorative?
Vash looked at it for perhaps two seconds, without knowing why.
"Captain," she said. She closed the notebook. Her hands were shaking. "I think you'd better do whatever you have to do."
"Yes." Picard rose. "Ms. Liang, you understand that I cannot permit you further access to the artifacts, and that I must confine you to quarters, under guard, until this is resolved."
"I understand."
"Mister Data. Please summon Lieutenant Kell and a security detail."
"Yes, Captain."
"For what it's worth," Dara said. She did not flinch. She looked only at Vash. "I never fed information to Kestrel, or to Grethis, or to anyone. Whatever's leaking out of this investigation, it isn't coming from me. I only ever touched the Keys. I needed you to keep gathering them. I needed the picture complete. The same as I told you days ago, except for the reason I didn't tell you, which was that a complete picture, activated correctly, was always going to bring them home."
Vash stared at her. The way she said it, plainly, with no attempt to defend herself, made it impossible to disbelieve. Which meant, somewhere on this ship, or on the one that flew beside it, there was someone else whose name she didn't know.
The security detail arrived. They were gentle. Dara rose without resistance. At the door she paused, turning back to look at Vash, and there was nothing in her face of triumph, and everything of grief.
"I'm sorry it's you who found it," she said. "I never wanted it to be you."
Then she was gone. The lab settled into a silence that was heavier than the one that had opened it. Vash stood with the notebook pressed against her chest and looked at the Cirrus Key, sitting pale and patient in its cradle, its calibration aborted a half-second before it would have cost them everything.
"She pulled Renata out," Vash said, to nobody.
Nobody answered.