Chapter Thirty

USS Enterprise-D — Present Day

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She came aboard alone.

That was the thing that struck Vash, afterward, when she tried to remember the scene in order. The Romulan commander stepped off the transporter pad into the corridor outside the observation lounge with no escort and no weapon. She wore the dark green uniform of the Tal Shiar with a cloak pinned at one shoulder, and carried nothing but a single flat padd under her arm. She walked past Worf, who stood at the lounge door with his cane and his scowl, as if he were a piece of furniture. She stopped in front of Picard and inclined her head.

"Captain."

"Commander Tal." Picard did not offer his hand. "You asked for a private conversation."

"I did. I would also like to stand. It has been a long day." She looked round the lounge, at the long curved window and the scatter of chairs and the pale gold light of the awakened star. "Your ship is very clean."

"Thank you."

"Mine is not. It is full of people who are afraid." She said it flatly, without self-pity. "Shall we begin?"

They gathered at the long table, Picard, Vash, Data, and the Romulan. Kestrel had been asked to wait outside. Vash could still see him through the lounge's glass wall, standing in the corridor with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor, a man who had had his ship taken from him two hours ago and had been told not to make a scene.

Vrenna Tal set the padd on the table and did not open it.

"I will begin with an admission," she said. "I did not follow you for seven days to learn whether you were a fool. That is what I said, and it was true, but it was not the reason. I followed you because I wished to find out whether you could hear it."

"The tone."

"Yes." She laid both hands flat on the table. "Not one Romulan has ever heard it. Not in two thousand years. We have guarded five of the eleven sites. We have sealed them, patrolled them, buried them under garrisons and forbidden any citizen of the Empire to approach. We have done it without understanding why. The old Senate called them cold doors. The priests said they were the tombs of a people who had died of their own silence." A faint twist of her mouth. "We have no records older than that. We have no way to know what we were protecting. We only knew that the sites were wrong, in some way our instruments could not name."

"You could not hear it."

"No. Not one of us, until Dr. Rovar, and I believe it took being spoken to directly. But your people could. And the moment your Starfleet found the first Key, our listening posts began to detect you. The traffic. The silence of Consortium agents who could not be traced. The changes in the drift readings." She looked up. "Three months ago, the Tal Shiar's Directorate of Antiquities sent a team to the Cradle."

Vash felt her pulse quicken. "A team."

"Eleven. A scholar, six technicians, four soldiers. Dr. Dhael Rovar led them." Her eyes didn't move. "They arrived. They landed. They descended into the central chamber. And for nine days, they transmitted. Detailed reports. Photographs. A record of everything they found."

"And then?"

"The transmissions stopped." Vrenna drew a long, careful breath. "A fortnight later, one of them walked out of the desert at the edge of the plateau. Dr. Rovar. He had been without food or water for six days. He had no memory of the last three weeks. And he could not stop humming."

Nobody spoke. Outside the window, in the gold light of the star, the dead world turned, and the seven towers on its plateau glowed steady and white.

"He lived for eleven days," Vrenna said. "He was very calm. He was very gentle. He kept telling the doctors that it was beautiful." She stopped. "I had him in my care. I sat with him at the end. And I will tell you what he said, as nearly as I can, because I have not been able to tell anyone else, and it appears to me that you are the only people in the galaxy who might understand it."

She touched the padd. It lit, and a small bright waveform appeared on the table's surface. A voice came out of it, thin and weak and slurred, speaking in Romulan. Data translated, quietly, a half-second behind.

"There are two seats. They face each other. Between them is a third place, and it is empty. It is the seat of the voice. You cannot sit in it. You must stand on either side, and sing across it."

"They are not weapons. I want to say that. I wanted to tell them, but I couldn't make my mouth. It is not a weapon. It is a conversation. They are asking something. They have been asking for forty thousand years. And they are waiting, so patiently, for someone to answer."

"The answer is not yes."

"I think the answer is not yes. I think there is another answer, hidden, in the ornaments. I couldn't read it. I wasn't able to hear it. I am only a Romulan." A pause, and a broken little laugh. "But the walls know it. The walls remember someone who tried to say it."

"It's very beautiful. I wish you could hear."

The recording ended. The lounge was silent.

Vash found she was gripping the edge of the table. Her knuckles were white. She looked at Picard, and saw that his face had gone perfectly still, the look of a man who has been handed something he has been waiting for without knowing it.

"The ornaments," she said.

"Yes."

"He knew about the second line."

"He knew there was something." Vrenna took the padd back. "He could not say what. But I had him examined by every specialist in the Directorate. They told me his brain was healthy. They told me he had simply been spoken to. And I understood, then, that I had spent my entire career guarding a thing I did not comprehend, and that the one man who did had died in my arms telling me it was beautiful."

"What do you want, Commander?" Picard said.

"I want to reframe, Captain." Her gray eyes were steady. "You have been thinking of this as a threat. A lock to be picked, a weapon to be disarmed, a catastrophe to be averted. It is a very natural way to think. It is also, I believe, wrong. A threat is an enemy. An enemy can be fought." She folded her hands. "What Dr. Rovar described is not an enemy. It is a people. They are sincere. They are asking for something they believe is theirs, and they are not cruel. They are patient. And you cannot fight patience with a phaser. You can only answer it."

"You are suggesting that we negotiate."

"I am suggesting that you reply." She leaned forward. "There are eleven sites. Eleven Keys. Forty thousand years of preparation. A signal that has run unopposed since before your species learned to speak. And in all that time, in all that machinery, in every line of every score, there is exactly one thing that has not been tried. Nobody has said no."

"No one has been able to."

"Because no one has been allowed to." Her voice dropped. "The second line, Captain. The ornament. Someone built a no into the structure, and hid it where no one would listen. Dr. Rovar heard the walls remember. Your archaeologist heard it at the Kettle. It exists. And it is not an act of war. It is a refusal, offered in the only language the Choir has ever respected."

"A duet," Vash said slowly.

"Yes. Two stations. Two voices. One that answers, one that dissents." The Romulan looked at her. "I cannot hear it. I cannot sing it. My people cannot. But you can, Ms. Vash, and I am told that your captain has a very good ear."

Picard made no reply. His eyes were on the window.

"You have eight hours," Vrenna said. "Perhaps seven. Your Mr. Grethis has completed his broadcast, and the star is lit, and the towers are glowing. I have seen the numbers. At the present rate, the Cradle will reach activation in a little under eight hours. After that, there is no instrument to argue with. There is only the door."

"And if we fail?"

"Then I will fire."

She said it quite simply. She reached into the fold of her cloak and drew out a small black cylinder, no longer than her hand, and laid it on the table between them. It was matte, seamless, entirely without ornament.

"This is a key," she said. "Not to anything of theirs. To a device aboard my flagship, which the Directorate designated Last Instrument. It is a quantum singularity charge. It is, I am told, capable of collapsing a main-sequence star into a black hole in under four minutes. It has never been used. It was designed for a single purpose." Her eyes didn't leave Picard's. "I am authorized to use it on the Cradle's sun if the signal completes. I will take eleven thousand Romulan citizens in the nearby colonies with it. I will take, I think, a good deal of this sector. I will do it, if there is no other choice, because I believe that the only thing worse than the end of a world is the opening of a door onto it."

"You would destroy the system."

"I would destroy it rather than let it be used." A slight, dry, bleak smile. "I should much prefer that you did something cleverer."

Vash stared at the little black cylinder. It looked like nothing at all. She thought of a hall full of voices. She thought of a woman with ink to the wrists, standing in the front rank, not singing.

"Why are you telling us?" she said.

"Because I am tired, Ms. Vash." The Romulan's voice was quiet. "I am tired of guarding doors I cannot hear. I have spent my life in service to an Empire that believes the only answer to the unknown is to bury it. I have buried a great deal. And I have discovered, in the last seven days, that there is one thing I would rather do." She paused. "I would rather let someone ask."

Nobody moved.

"I will hold the Consortium," she said. "I have two more warbirds arriving in two hours. Grethis will not be able to approach the plateau without my consent. I cannot hold them forever. I can hold them for six hours." She stood. "I will give you six. At the end of the sixth, I will put that cylinder in my console, and the Empire will have done what it has always done."

"Commander." Picard rose, slowly. "I should like to thank you."

"Do not. If you succeed, you will have saved my people. If you fail, you will have given me the right to destroy yours." She turned. "I am not generous, Captain. I am merely curious. It is the only vice the Tal Shiar permits."

She went out. The door closed behind her.

Vash sat for a while, looking at the place where the black cylinder had lain. Then she looked at Picard.

"A duet," she said.

"Yes."

"Two voices."

"I believe so." He gazed out at the star. "Vash. I have not told you. I have something aboard my ship that I have kept for a very long time. A flute. It was given to me by a man who lived a life I never lived."

She went still.

"I do not know whether it is of any use," Picard said. "I only know that I once played a melody on it that I did not learn in this life. And I have never been able to forget it."

"Jean-Luc."

"I should like to try."

She studied him. He stood with his hands behind his back, in the gold light, with the star he had come across the dark to stop burning in the glass behind him, and he looked, for the first time since she had known him, entirely unguarded.

"Yes," she said. "I think you should."