Part Four — The Cradle · The Threnody
Chapter Thirty-One
The Cradle — Present Day
The flute lived in a plain wooden case at the bottom of a drawer, under a folded uniform and a book he had not opened in years.
Picard took it out in his quarters and sat on the edge of the bunk with it across his knees. It was a minor thing. A little over a foot long, carved from a pale close-grained wood, with five finger holes and a mouthpiece worn smooth by a hand that was not entirely his own. The wood had darkened with handling. There was a hairline crack near the foot that he had never noticed until a week ago, in a mirror, by accident, and had not been able to stop noticing since.
He had taken it out perhaps a dozen times in as many years. Always alone. Always in the evening, with the door locked, and always with the same slight tightening in his chest, the feeling of a man opening a letter from a place that no longer existed.
He set it to his lips.
The first note came out quiet and a little unsteady. He held it. The second was clearer. By the fourth, the melody had found him, as it always did, without his having to look for it: slow, simple, rising and falling, a tune that belonged to a man who had grown old on a world that had burned and left nothing but a song. He did not play it all. He played a dozen bars, and stopped, and sat with the flute in his hands in the silence that followed.
"I thought I'd find you here."
Vash stood in the doorway. She had come without a sound. She wore a plain dark jacket over a gray shirt and had tied her hair back with a strip of cloth, and she looked, he thought, like a woman about to walk into a cold sea.
"I did not hear you."
"You weren't meant to." She came in and sat on the desk chair, turning it to face him. "That's the tune."
"Yes."
"It's lovely."
"It is not mine." He turned the flute in his hands. "I have never been certain that it was a tune at all. I think it was a person. A whole life, folded small enough to fit in a few bars."
"Whose?"
"A man's. He had a wife. A daughter. A garden. He lived for forty years on a planet that had already died." He smiled, thinly. "I was there for twenty-five minutes, by the ship's clock. I do not know how to explain the rest."
She was quiet. He watched her take it in, with the slow unhurried attention that made her the best listener he had ever known. She did not say it was impossible. She did not say she understood.
"You think it'll work," she said.
"I think it is the only instrument I know how to play." He raised the flute. "I do not know how to sing. I have not the voice for it. But a tune is a tune, and a line is a line. If there is a second voice that must be answered, I believe I can answer it."
"And if you can't?"
"Then I shall have tried." He watched her. "That has always seemed to me to be rather the point."
She laughed, short and soft, and put out a hand. For a moment he thought she was reaching for the flute. She laid her fingers lightly on his wrist instead, and left them there.
"You're the least reckless man I know," she said, "and you're about to walk into a dead world with a wooden pipe and a Romulan on a leash."
"Yes."
"I want you to know I think it's a terrible plan."
"I want you to know that I am in complete agreement."
She did not move her hand. He did not move his wrist. Outside, in the gold light of the awakened star, a Romulan warbird turned over the plateau like a sleeping hawk, and neither of them looked at it.
They went down at 0214, by shuttle, in the shadow of the warbird's wing.
The plateau came up through the viewport in a long gray swell, forty kilometers of dead stone under a sky the color of old brass. No wind. No cloud. The light from the reborn star fell on it in long flat bars, and every shadow was razor-sharp. At the center, black against the gold, the seven towers stood in a ring.
Worf had counted them twice. "Four kilometers high. Each. Spacing, two hundred meters." He leaned on his cane, jaw set. "They are glowing."
"They are singing," Data said.
It was true. Picard had known it before the android spoke. The sound was on his skin now, a low, vast, warm vibration, as though the plateau itself had become the soundboard of an enormous instrument. It was not loud. It did not need to be. It rose from every direction at once, a thousand voices holding one chord, and it had a quality that he had not heard before, a note of effort. As if a thing long asleep were stretching, in the dark, for the first time in forty thousand years.
He felt the pull. He did not say so. He felt it in the muscles of his throat, a faint insistent ache, the wish to open his mouth and let something through. He kept his lips shut and his jaw tight. He counted his breaths.
Beside him, Dara had gone quite still.
She sat in the third seat with her wrists in the shuttle's soft restraints, a precaution Picard had insisted on and Worf had carried out with a grim and silent delicacy. She wore a borrowed jacket. Her hair was pinned back. She looked at the towers through the viewport with an expression that was neither longing nor fear. It was a kind of attention so complete that it had stopped being an emotion at all.
"Do not," Worf said, very low.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You are humming."
"Am I?" She stopped. A flush came up under her skin. "I'm sorry. I didn't notice."
"You will notice," said Worf, "or I will."
She nodded. She folded her hands in her lap, and Picard watched her press her lips together with an effort that was almost painful to see.
Geordi's dampers hummed at their hips, tuned to the Cirrus Key. They were not rated for this. He had said so twice, in a voice that did not invite argument. They'll take the edge off. That's all. If you feel it start to pull, take that as information.
The shuttle touched down on the plateau's southern lip, three hundred meters from the nearest tower, beside two Romulan transports that had landed an hour before. A cordon of dark-green figures stood along the ridge in a long perfect line, disruptors held across their chests, faces masked, without a word between them. Their commander, a lean gray man with an officer's sash, saluted Worf with a precise nod and said, in clipped Standard: "Commander Tal's compliments. The approach is secure as far as the first terrace. Beyond that, we cannot follow."
"Why not?" Vash said.
"We cannot hear it," the man said. "We do not know where it begins."
It was Tobin who saw them first.
He had walked on ahead of the party with a scanner and a spool of cable, as he always did, and stopped dead at the foot of the nearest tower. He stood with his face tilted upward and his scanner hanging forgotten from his hand. By the time Picard caught up, the others had gathered behind him, and nobody was speaking.
The tower was not stone.
Close up, it was a shaft of translucent crystal, rising out of the plateau like a cathedral spire, a nested tower of rings each a few meters across, each turning against the next with a patient slowness. It glowed from within, a soft pearly white, and in the glow, suspended at different heights in the lattice, were shapes.
Figures. Human-sized. Romulan-sized. They hung in the rings with their arms slightly raised, heads tilted back, mouths open. Their outlines were clear. He could see the shape of a shoulder, the line of a jaw. He could see, on one of them, the faint tracery of a uniform. They had been translated, ring by ring, into the crystal of the tower. They were still, and they were luminous, and each of them wore an expression of such perfect, tranquil joy that Picard felt his chest close like a fist.
"Eleven," Data said quietly. "Seven here. Four in the next tower. These are the members of Dr. Rovar's team."
"Are they alive?" Worf's voice was rough.
"I detect no vital signs. I detect a resonance consistent with the neural patterns of the individuals, preserved in the lattice. I do not know whether that constitutes life."
"They're singing," Vash whispered.
Picard heard it then. Beneath the great chord, threaded through it, a line of eleven voices, small and clear, each one distinct. He could not make out the words. He did not need to. The sound was joy. It was pure, undimmed, uncomplicated joy, the sound of a person who had been very afraid for a very long time and had been told, gently, that she could stop.
"Oh, God," Tobin said. He had gone gray. "Oh, God. They're happy."
Dara made a small noise. Picard turned. She had stepped toward the tower, her bound hands lifted, her face turned up to the figures in the crystal with a look so naked, so grieved, so close to ecstatic, that he was moved to stand between her and it. She did not seem to see him. Tears ran down her face.
"Dara," Vash said sharply. "Dara. Look at me."
It took a moment. Then Dara blinked. She looked down, and at Vash, and at the cable on her wrists, and the look in her face broke and fell, and what was left was only exhaustion.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "It's so easy. It's so easy, Vash. They look so happy. They don't have to carry it anymore."
"I know."
"I want to want it. God help me, I want to want it, and I know it's wrong."
"I know. I know." Vash took her by the shoulders, gently, firmly, and turned her away from the tower. "Come with me. You don't have to look at it. You only have to walk."
She cut the cable from Dara's wrists herself, at the head of the spiral. Worf watched the knife. He made no reply. Picard did not forbid it.
Tobin left them there. He went off along the ridge with Lieutenant Kell and four security officers, toward the place where Kestrel's transport waited, and did not look back at the towers.
The entrance lay at the center of the ring, in the shadow of the seven towers.
It was not a door. It was a descent. A broad shallow spiral, cut into the plateau's gray stone, wound down into the dark in a long slow curve, wide enough for twenty people to walk abreast. The walls were smooth and black. Every few meters, set into the stone at the height of a man's hand, a small carved curl glimmered faintly gold.
"Ornaments," Vash said. She had stopped at the first one, and ran her finger around it, tracing the loop, the smaller loop within it, the smaller still. "Every few steps. Dara, do you see?"
"I see them." Dara's voice was low and steady. She had recovered some of her color. "They're not in the first line's pattern. They're a second set. Someone carved them on the way in." A pause. "They're pointing down."
"Where does it end?"
"I think it ends where it begins."
The descent took twenty minutes. The air grew colder. The great chord of the towers faded behind them, muffled by stone, and in its place rose something else, a single deep resonant tone, like the lowest pipe of a cathedral organ, steady, vast, unbroken. It grew as they went down. By the time the spiral flattened, Picard felt it in every bone of his body, and he found that he was walking in time to it, one step to a beat, as men march to a slow drum.
The passage ended in a wall of black stone, twenty meters high, carved in a continuous looping spiral from floor to ceiling. In its center, at the height of a woman's hand, was a hollow in the stone, shaped like a palm.
Dara stepped forward. She did not ask permission. She laid her bare right hand in the hollow, and the stone, very slowly, began to open.
It did not slide. It unfolded, ring after ring, the great curved wall peeling back upon itself like the petals of a flower, until the way beyond stood open, and a warm golden light came pouring through.
They stood on the threshold, and none of them spoke.
The chamber was vast. It was a bowl, a half-kilometer across, carved in perfect concentric tiers like a great round theater. Each tier held row after row of seats, carved from the same black stone, hundreds of thousands of them, rising in tier on tier toward a domed ceiling lost in gold haze. It was an auditorium. It was a hall. It was a place built to be filled by a number of people that no mind could count.
At its center, on a round dais of pale stone, stood two seats.
They faced each other across a distance of perhaps eight meters, simple tall chairs of the same black stone, each one carved with a looping line. Between them, in the middle of the dais, was a circle of bare floor, unmarked and unadorned. It was about the width of a person's outstretched arms. It was a little brighter than the stone around it. It was empty.
The seat of the voice, Picard thought. You cannot sit in it.
Around the dais, set into the floor in a ring, eleven small sockets gleamed in the golden light, each the size of a man's fist, each waiting. He knew, without being told, which of them would take the Ke'Thara Key, which the Cirrus. He knew where the Kettle's would go, and the Ashfall ring, and seven more beyond.
And on the far wall of the chamber, high above the highest tier, in a niche carved into the black stone, someone had left a mark.
It was a figure. A bas-relief, no taller than a man, carved so finely that it seemed to breathe. A woman, standing in the front row of an imagined choir, her face turned toward the dais, her mouth closed. Her hands hung at her sides. They had been stained, with some dark pigment, to the wrist, and the stain had never faded.
"That's her," Vash whispered. "That's the one in the dream."
"She is the only portrait in the room," said Data.
Nobody answered. In the long golden stillness of the Cradle, with the great slow tone rising around them like the sea, Picard looked at the small silent figure in the wall, and understood that she had been standing there, with her hands stained and her lips shut, for forty thousand years, waiting for someone to look up.