Chapter Thirty-Three · The Threnody

The Cradle — Present Day

"Kestrel cut it," Tobin said. "The uplink's dead. The tone's dropped an octave across the whole plateau."

Vash stood at the top of the Cradle's lowest tier with the comm pressed to her ear and didn't move.

"Is he—"

"He's alive." Tobin's voice was thick. "Kessel got him out. Dr. Crusher's team is with him now. He took the feedback through his right arm. They don't know yet how bad." A pause. "He told Kessel to tell you something. Kessel's not... He can't say it. He's sitting on the ground. He says he'll tell you when you're out."

"Tell him I'll be out."

"I will."

She lowered the comm. She stood for a moment with her eyes closed and her hand flat against her ribs, and let it go through her: the old narrow face in the lamplight at Cirrus, the crooked smile, the voice saying I'd like to put mine down. It went through her like a cold wire. Then she put it away, in the place where she put the things that would have to wait, and opened her eyes.

"All right," she said. "Let's begin."

The Cradle was ready.

It had taken the better part of an hour. Geordi's voice had come down through the long spiral from the Enterprise in short, hard, rapid bursts: coordinates locked, I've got a pattern on the dais, I'm bringing it down in four, three, two. And not a moment too soon, Captain. The field hit the bay walls an hour ago. The transporter's gold had spun up in the empty circle at the dais's center, and when it cleared, the orb hung there, a hair's width above the stone, dark and dense and quiet, exactly as it had hung in a hand-cut room on a dead mining world a thousand lifetimes ago.

It didn't hum. It listened.

Dara had set the Keys. She had done it on her knees, one at a time, in the golden light, with the notebook open at her side and her bare hand shaking only slightly. The Ke'Thara Key, cracked and silver, into the fourth socket. The Cirrus Key, whole and pale, into the ninth. The Ashfall ring into the second, where it seated with a faint clear chime. The Kettle's socket she had filled with a sliver of root no larger than a coin, which Data had taken from the tree's chamber and hadn't thought, until an hour ago, to mention. Dara had received it in both hands as if it were holy.

"It's the only way to include it," she said. "It can't come. But a piece of it can stand for the rest."

"Will it accept that?"

"I think it will accept anything that's offered honestly."

Dara unclipped her damper harness and set it down beside the ninth socket. "It interferes," she said. "With the Keys." Nobody argued. It seemed a reasonable thing to say.

Seven sockets remained empty. Vash looked at them.

"What about those?"

"They're linked." Dara stood and brushed the dust from her knees. "The ones we've visited are enough to address the rest. The network's one thing, Vash. It's always been one thing. When the right voice sings through the right doors, the answer goes everywhere at once."

"You sound very sure."

"I'm not." Dara's smile was thin and tired. "I'm only the one who's read the most of it."

She closed the notebook. She turned it over in her hands, once, and then held it out.

"Take it."

"You'll need it."

"I've got it by heart. I've had it by heart for ten years." Her eyes were very steady. "But I want you to have it. If I do something strange, down here, don't stop to ask why. Don't try to pull me back. Promise me."

Vash regarded her. "What do you think you're going to do?"

"Nothing. It's only that I don't trust myself near it. I've stood this close to it before." She looked at the orb, and at the empty golden space around it, and Vash saw the Pull move across her face like the shadow of a hawk. "I'd rather you promised."

"I promise," Vash said, and hated the sound of it.

Picard took the east seat. Vash took the west.

They were simple chairs, tall, black, carved all over with the looping line. When she sat, the stone was warm. It fitted her the way a hand fits a glove it has worn a hundred times. Across eight meters of golden air and the dark patient sphere in the middle, she saw Picard lift the flute to his lips and settle his shoulders in the posture of a man who has made up his mind.

Behind them, the great bowl of the Cradle rose in its tiers, empty, silent, huge. Worf stood at the entrance with his cane and his phaser, a dark small figure against the black. Data stood at the dais's edge with his tricorder. Dara knelt by the ninth socket, her hands pressed together in her lap.

"Mister Data," Picard said. "Are we in synchrony?"

"The structure is ready, Captain. The first line will begin when Dr. Liang gives the signal. You will follow the first line on the flute. Ms. Vash will answer in the second." A pause. "I should say that I do not know what will happen."

"Neither do I, Mister Data."

"I felt it would be correct to say so."

"It was." Picard's mouth twitched. "Thank you."

Vash looked at the notebook on her knee. The last page lay open. A dozen small curls ran down the margin, each one pale and exact. She had practiced it for six hours, in a corner of the shuttle, while the plateau's chord beat against the hull. She had it by heart now, the way you have the sound of your own name. A slow, low, turning figure, each phrase folded inside the one before.

She didn't trust her voice. It was a thin plain thing. She had asked Dara, in the shuttle, whether it mattered. Dara had looked at her for a moment and said, "It isn't the sound. It's the meaning. It only has to be true."

"Whenever you're ready," Dara said.

Vash drew a breath.

Picard began.

The flute was thin and clear and unbearably ordinary. It rose out of the golden quiet of the chamber in a single pale note, and held, and fell, and rose again. It wasn't the tune he had played in his quarters. It was a line she had never heard, long and slow and plain, a melody in four notes that climbed and turned and climbed again. Dara had hummed it to him over the shuttle's comm, bar by bar, until it was in his hands. It was the first line. It was the question. It was the long rising phrase that every voice in the Choir had once sung together.

It sounded, played alone on a wooden pipe in an empty room, impossibly lonely.

The orb stirred.

It didn't move. It changed. The dark sphere in the middle of the dais began, very slowly, to brighten. A faint blue-white glow rose in it, as if a candle had been lit inside a lump of coal. The Keys in their sockets answered. The Cirrus Key flared. The Ke'Thara Key sang. One after another, around the ring, the sockets lit, and the pale light spread out across the floor in thin bright lines like the veins in a leaf.

Picard played on. His eyes were closed. His face, in the blue light, was stripped of everything but concentration.

Now, Dara mouthed.

Vash opened her mouth.

It came out low. Lower than she had expected. It came out of her chest and her belly and the soles of her feet. It was a slow, strange, turning figure, a line that went down where the flute went up. It didn't match the melody. It didn't fight it either. It moved beneath it, quiet and steady, the way a river moves beneath a bridge. It curled inward. It returned. And as it returned, it opened a little, and a smaller curl opened inside it, and a smaller still.

She felt the chamber lean.

It was a strange sensation. Like a great breath being drawn. The golden air went still. The Keys' light thickened. The sockets sang, one after another, and the notes they sang were hers, her own phrase, handed back from each in turn a little changed, a little deeper, a little further inward. The curl turned in the air above the dais, visible now, a thin bright spiral of light, going down and down into itself, and in its center the orb burned like a star.

Picard played. Vash sang. The two lines ran together across the empty air, one climbing, one folding, and somewhere between them, in the place that no one could sit, a space opened that was neither of them.

It was a silence. A deep, wide, listening silence, the kind that follows a question, and she understood that it was waiting.

Then the Cradle woke.

It came from the tiers.

She heard it before she saw it. A faint sound at the edge of hearing, a whisper, a stirring, like a vast crowd settling into its seats. She turned her head, still singing, and looked up.

They were there.

They filled the chamber from the dais to the dome, row on row, tier on tier. They weren't solid. They were figures of pale blue light, translucent, barely there, seated on the carved black stone in their hundreds of thousands, and each of them turned a calm grave attentive face toward the center. They did not move. They didn't speak. They were so many that she couldn't see the end of them, and so quiet that she could hear the flute's thin note falling among them like a pebble into a lake.

The Choir, she thought.

She didn't stop singing. She didn't think she could. The cell at her hip gave a thin electronic whine and went dark.

Something was happening to the light. It was blue now, and cold, and old, and falling from every direction at once. The faces turned to her. She felt each one find her, one after another, like hands settling on her shoulders. They weren't hostile. They weren't even curious. They were glad. They were so glad. A whole people, unimaginably old, who had been calling into the dark for forty thousand years, and had finally heard a voice.

Good, they said. It wasn't a word. It was a warmth in her chest. Good. You came.

She felt the Pull then, the old one, the long slow tide, in its full strength. It didn't push. It invited. She felt the great first line reach out of the tiers toward her, the long rising phrase, so natural, so right, so easy to join. She had only to change her note. She had only to turn the curl outward instead of in. She had only to stop refusing, and everything that had hurt would stop.

She held the line.

It was the hardest thing she had ever done. She felt her voice shake. She felt the curl try to unfold, to open into the great chord, the way a fist wants to open. She thought of a hall in the wind, and a hand turning to glass. She thought of a small crayon figure with her arms up. She held the second line with everything she had, and through the shining dark of the tiers a single face turned toward her that was not like the others.

It stood in the front row of the nearest tier, a small slight figure, her hands at her sides. They were stained to the wrist.

She didn't sing. She had not sung for forty thousand years.

She looked at Vash across the blue, and her face was very old, and very calm, and very tired, and she lifted one hand, palm out, and held it there.

Not yet, said the hand. Wait. Listen.

Vash's voice broke.

Behind her, very far away, someone was screaming her name.