Part Four — The Cradle · The Threnody
Chapter Thirty-Four
The Cradle — Present Day
"Commander!"
It was Worf. She knew the voice, the iron in it, the way it had never once in eight days been raised. It came from the mouth of the chamber, a long way off, and it was not a warning. It was a roar, the cry of a man who has run out of every other kind of sound.
She did not turn. She couldn't. The second line was a rope she was climbing, hand over hand, and to let go of it for a heartbeat was to fall. She held the curl. Across the dais, Picard played on with his eyes closed, the flute a thin pale thread in the blue air, and she saw his shoulders go rigid at the sound but not the pipe falter. Good, she thought. Good. Don't turn.
Behind her, the sound of boots on stone. A great many boots. Then a soft, cheerful, entirely unhurried voice, drifting down through the tiers like a man calling across a garden.
"Please, Commander. I have no wish to alarm anyone."
Grethis.
She did not hear what Worf said. She heard the dry crack of a disruptor, then a second, then the dull clatter of something heavy falling on stone. She heard Data's voice, calm and very quick: "Mister Grethis, I must ask you to withdraw." And the answer, light, amiable, almost kind:
"I am afraid I cannot. You see, Commander, I have been doing some arithmetic."
The flute stopped.
It wasn't a failure. It was a held breath. Picard lowered the pipe a hand's width from his lips and turned his head, and she saw his face in the cold blue light, gray and strained and entirely lucid. He didn't look at Grethis. He looked at her. A single steady look across eight meters of burning air. I'm here, it said. Go on. Then he raised the flute again and began to play.
But the chamber had shifted. She felt it in the stone beneath her, in the chair under her, in the very air. The Choir had heard the voice behind them, and had turned.
The vast blue tiers rippled. Faces lifted. The figures nearest the entrance, two hundred thousand of them, seated in their perfect rows, turned their heads as one toward the small bright figure coming down the aisle.
He was dressed for travel. A long dove-gray coat with a great many pockets, a cap of soft black fur, a padd in one hand and an expression of mild scholarly pleasure. Six Consortium agents followed him at a distance, half-conscious, gray-faced, moving like sleepwalkers. Beyond them, in the entrance, Worf lay on one knee with his cane across his thighs and blood on his temple. Data stood over him with a phaser.
"Captain Picard," Grethis said. "I hope you will forgive the intrusion. I have been following the proceedings from my flagship. It has been a very remarkable evening. The star is lit. The uplink is cut. And you have, if I read the instruments correctly, introduced a second line into the Choir's composition."
Picard played.
"That is a pity." Grethis came to the foot of the dais. He did not climb it. He stood at its edge with his small hands folded, looking up at the orb with the open delight of a man at the opening of an opera. "It is a very fine piece of musicianship. I do not say it is not. But it will make my notes worthless. All eleven hundred of them. The whole market, gone, in the space of one aria." He sighed. "May I ask you, with the greatest respect, to stop?"
The flute did not falter.
"I thought not." He raised his voice. It was warm and clear, and it carried. "Honored predecessors."
The chamber went still.
It was a different stillness. Vash felt it settle across the tiers like a hand across a candle. The Choir had been waiting, very patiently, for forty thousand years, and now a voice had addressed it directly, and it turned its attention to the speaker with a courtesy that was almost shy.
"I am Grethis, of the Vantir Trade Consortium," he said. "I represent a great many parties who have an interest in your enterprise. I have come to propose a partnership."
What do you want? the Choir said.
It didn't say it in words. It said it in a rising chord, soft, curious, unhurried, a single question ringing out through the gold and the blue. Vash felt it through her chair. Grethis flinched. His eyes went wide. His mouth opened and closed.
"I..." he said.
What do you want?
"Everything," said Grethis, and laughed, a small shaky laugh. "I want everything. It is a very simple answer. I am a simple man."
Yes, the Choir said. It was warm. It was generous. It was so willing. You may have it. We will give you everything. Will you come?
He stared up into the tiers. He wore, for a moment, the expression of a man who has reached for a coin and found, closing his hand on it, the whole sea.
"Everything," he whispered. "Everything you have?"
Everything we are.
And Vash, who had hated him for a fortnight with a clean and uncomplicated hatred, watched Grethis the Ferengi hear, for the first time in his life, an offer he couldn't price.
It was grief. That was what came down to him across the tiers. Forty thousand years of it, whole, unmitigated, undiluted, a pure unbroken sorrow so vast that there was no ledger it could be written in. It did not ask for anything. It simply was, and it poured over him, and he stood in the middle of it with his hands open and his lobes gone pale, and said, in a small hoarse voice that was nothing like his own, "Oh."
He sat down on the edge of the dais. He put his hands over his face.
The agents behind him stood quite still.
Now, said the Choir, to Picard.
It came out of the tiers like a wave. Hundreds of thousands of voices rising at once, the great sustained assenting chord of the first line, enormous, golden, inviting. It swept over the dais. It swept over Picard's flute. She saw him lean into it, reflexively, as a man leans into a high wind, and then the pipe was gone. She couldn't hear it. There was only the chord, and in the chord, every note of the first line that he had played, taken up and carried, lifted by a hundred thousand voices into a surge that felt like a door being thrown wide.
The last measure was coming.
She could feel it, a pressure building in the stone. The great phrase had been climbing for forty thousand years, and it was nearly at its top. In the last measure every voice in the hall would draw breath together and sing the resolving chord, the homecoming, and the door would open, and the Choir would come home across the dead of everything, and a young and unstarted universe would be unmade to receive them.
Hold, she thought. Hold the line. She held the curl until her throat tore. She felt it begin to fray. The Pull was a flood now, a river, and her voice was a stick in the current, and the weave took it and bent it, and the curl began, gently, to turn outward.
"Vash!" Picard's voice, hoarse, from somewhere. "It's resolving! The last note!"
"I know!"
"Someone has to hold it!"
She knew that, too. She had known it since the dream. It was the last thing the woman at the front of the hall had done: a held note, a half-beat past its time, the single act of dissent that the Choir could not absorb. But it needed a voice that was inside the weave, a voice the Choir would hear as its own. Not hers. Not Picard's. They were outsiders. They couldn't hold the chord. They could only sing against it.
"Dara," she said. It came out of her in a croak. "Dara."
Dara was already moving.
She had risen from her knees by the ninth socket with the golden light on her face and her bare hand open at her side. Her damper harness lay on the stone behind her, unclipped, its cell dark. She crossed the dais without hurry. Vash saw her walk past Grethis, who did not look up. She saw her pass between the two chairs, through the shimmering blue lines that ran across the stone. She saw the orb, which had risen, at some point, out of its hollow, and hung now at the height of a woman's chest, blazing white, leaving beneath it the small bright circle of bare floor.
The seat of the voice.
"Dara," Picard said. "No."
"I promised," Dara said, to Vash, without turning. "You promised, too."
She stepped into the circle.
The light struck her like a hand. Vash saw her stagger. She saw her head go back and her arms lift, slowly, from her sides, in the posture of a child receiving a gift. The Choir's chord rose around her, and she stood in the center of it, in the white eye of the storm, and every face in the tiers turned toward her with a joy so enormous that it was almost unbearable.
Home, said the Choir. Home. Home. Home.
"I know," Dara said. She was weeping. She was smiling. "I know. I've wanted to come home all my life."
Vash couldn't move. She couldn't stop singing. She sang the curl, turning and turning, a thread of sound against a wall of light.
"I'm so sorry," Dara said. She said it to the tiers, to the vast shining gathering of the Choir, to the whole slow, patient, unbearable weight of their longing. "I'm so sorry. It isn't yours. It was never going to be. There's someone already there. They're only just starting."
Please, the Choir said.
"I know." Her voice cracked. "I know. And I'd give you anything. I'd give you my whole life. I'm going to." She drew a breath. "But not that. Not yet. Not yet."
She opened her mouth and sang.
It was a single note. The last note of the first line, the one that every voice in the hall was straining toward, the resolving chord. Dara sang it clear and pure and perfectly in tune, the true note, the Choir's own. And as she sang it, she held it.
One beat. Two. Three.
She held it past its time.
The weave hesitated.
Vash felt it. They all did. The great vast chord, poised on the brink of its resolution, caught, as a stair catches a falling foot. A single voice in the center of the Cradle had held a note a hair past its time, and the Choir, which couldn't bear a dissonance, which was made of nothing but agreement, stopped.
The silence was complete. Hundreds of thousands of faces, turned to the dais. A whole people, hanging in the moment before a word.
"Now," Dara said. She was not singing any longer. Her lips had barely moved. The note was somehow still sounding, held, fixed, shining in the air above her like a lamp. "Vash. Now."
Vash sang.
She had sung the curl for eleven minutes. It had been a thin thing, a thread against a river. It was not thin any longer. It rose out of her with all the force of a thing held back, low and slow and turning, and the Keys took it. Cirrus, Ke'Thara, Ashfall, the sliver of the Kettle, one after another around the ring, each one ringing as it passed, and the curl went round and round the circle, down and in, down and in, a spiral of light narrowing toward the center.
It reached the orb.
And Picard, who had lowered the flute, who had stood motionless for ten seconds with the pipe pressed to his chest and a look on his face of utter horror, lifted it to his lips. He played. He didn't play the first line. He played something else. A thing that wasn't in any score. A tune of five notes, simple and clear and aching, that rose and fell and rose again like a breath, like a life, like the long slow sentence of a man who had lived forty years on a dead world and had never once lost his courage.
It was not the answer. It was the accompaniment. A human voice, offered honestly, to hold the line.
The curl entered the held note.
She would never be able to describe what happened.
She tried, afterward, a dozen times, in a dozen different ways, to a dozen different people. She talked about a door, a hinge, a river reaching the sea. She talked about the held note opening like a hand, and the curl turning through it, and the whole vast ancient chord of the first line, the long rising question, inverting. Folding in upon itself. Passing through its own center and out the far side, so that what had been a call across a gulf became, in a heartbeat, a release. It didn't resolve into homecoming. It resolved into something else.
The tiers stood up.
They rose all at once, with a long, soft, rustling sound, like leaves. Hundreds of thousands of figures of blue light, rising from their seats. They didn't look at her. They looked at the center of the dais, where the orb burned, and where, in the white circle beneath it, a small dark-haired woman stood with her arms lifted and her face tilted upward, holding a note.
A voice spoke.
It wasn't the Choir's. It was small, and clear, and singular. It came from the front row of the nearest tier, from a slight figure with her hands at her sides, stained to the wrist. She had stepped forward. She had opened her mouth. She had been silent for forty thousand years, and she had a great deal to say, and she said it, in a voice that carried through the stone and the light and the long gold dark, to every ear in the room.
We were not of one mind.
It went through the Choir like a bell.
We were not of one mind, and no one was ever told. I could not say it. The weave would not carry it. I hid it where no one listens, in the ornament, in the turn at the end of the line, and I held a note a half-beat too long, and I did not know whether anyone would ever come.
You came.
You listened to the ornament. Thank you.
Tell them they were not wrong to be afraid. Tell them they were not wrong to want the door. Tell them only that it does not need to open onto a place already full. There is a way through. It is not home. It is further.
And tell the ones who stood silent, that they were counted. And that they were right.
She lifted her hand.
She didn't wave. She turned it, palm out, as she had done in the dream. And Vash understood, at last, what the gesture had been all along. It wasn't wait. It wasn't listen. It was the oldest sign for farewell.
Go, said Vessa. Go through. It's all right.
And the Choir went.
It was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. It was the last thing she ever heard that she couldn't describe. A vast soft sighing, as of a great wind going out of a great hall, and the tiers dissolving, rank by rank, into light. Each figure didn't vanish. It opened, like a flower. It lifted away, a single bright mote, and rose toward the center of the dome, where a seam of white had appeared in the gold, a narrow shining door.
They went through it one by one. Hundreds of thousands. A river of them, pouring up and out and away into a place she couldn't see. She saw the faces as they passed. They were not smiling. They were weeping, every one, with a plain and open wonder, and every one of them looked down at the dais as it went, at a small woman in a white circle with her arms raised, and bowed.
Vessa went last.
She came down the tiers, slowly, to the foot of the dais. She stopped in front of Dara. She reached out her stained hand and laid it, very gently, against Dara's cheek.
Dara's eyes were closed. She was still holding the note. She was still, impossibly, smiling.
Let go, said Vessa. You've held it long enough.
Dara let go.
The note fell silent. The light went out of the orb. The great white seam in the dome closed like an eyelid, and the golden glow of the Cradle faded into a dim and ordinary gray, and the figure of the last of the Choir turned, and walked up through the empty tiers, and was gone.
Dara swayed.
Vash was on her feet before she knew it. She crossed the dais in four strides and caught her as she fell. She was light. She was so light. She lay across Vash's arms with her head back and her hair undone and her face turned toward the dark ceiling, and the smile hadn't left it.
"Dara."
"Is it quiet?" Dara whispered.
Vash listened. There was no tone. There was no chord. There was no sound at all but the small slow settling of stone in a vast empty room, and the soft hiss of her own breath, and under it, far off, a faint, steady, ordinary drip of water somewhere in the dark.
"Yes," she said. "It's quiet."
"Good." Dara's eyes opened. They found her face. "That's... I'd hoped it would be."
"Don't talk."
"I did hear it, you know. At the end. All of them. Every one." Her breath caught. "They were so grateful, Vash."
"I know."
"I'd like to have..." She closed her eyes. "I'm not sorry. About the last part. Only the rest."
"I know," Vash said. She was weeping. She didn't remember starting. "Dara. Dara."
"You were a good teacher," said Dara. "The best I ever had."
She didn't say anything else.
Somewhere very far above them, the plateau began to shake.
Vash didn't hear it at first. She sat on the cold stone of the dais with Dara's head in her lap, and Picard's hands on her shoulders, and his voice saying her name over and over, very gently, from a great distance. Data was speaking. Worf was shouting. The orb, which had been hanging in the center of the dais since the beginning of the song, was a dark dull sphere again, and as she watched, a hairline crack ran across it, and then another.
"Ms. Vash," said Data. "The Cradle is destabilizing. The structure was a single instrument. It has completed its function. I estimate that it will collapse in nine minutes."
"We can't leave her."
"We will not leave her," Picard said.
He bent. He gathered Dara in his arms, carefully, as a man lifts something that he has been entrusted with, and rose, and looked at Vash across the dying light.
"Come," he said. "It is finished."
She looked at the orb. It was splitting now, slowly, in a web of fine white lines. She looked at the empty tiers. She looked at the small bas-relief in the far wall, the figure with the stained hands, whose face had changed. It was smiling.
She picked up the notebook from where it had fallen. She put it inside her jacket, against her chest.
Then she stood, and followed him out.