Part Four — The Cradle · The Threnody
Chapter Thirty-Six
Starbase 12 — Present Day
Admiral Sorokin kept him standing for the first ten minutes, and Picard, who had been kept standing by better admirals than she, made no complaint.
The conference room on Starbase 12 was cold and gray and windowless, with a long table of pale composite and a wall of screens showing nothing. Across from him sat the Judge Advocate General's representative, a thin, careful man named Aldous Reyes, with a padd and a face designed by committee. Beside Reyes sat a woman from Diplomatic Corps whose name Picard had been told and had forgotten. At the head of the table, her silver hair cropped close and her hands folded on a closed folder, sat Sorokin.
"Captain Picard." She did not look up. "I have read your report."
"Thank you, Admiral."
"I've read it three times. I've read Commander Riker's, and Captain T'Vel's, and Dr. T'Sai's. I've read the transcript of the Romulan commander's transmission, which was obtained, I'm told, by a Starfleet listening post in a manner I've chosen not to examine." A pause. "I've not slept."
"I regret that."
"Do not regret it. Regret is a luxury. I have a hearing in three hours, and I want to know, before I walk into it, what I'm allowed to say."
Reyes cleared his throat. "Captain, you crossed the Neutral Zone."
"At the express invitation of an Imperial commander, under Article Nine of the Treaty of Algeron."
"Which has been invoked twice."
"Which has been invoked three times. Counting this one."
Reyes opened his mouth and closed it again. The woman from Diplomatic made a note.
"You were ordered to hold at the border," Sorokin said.
"I was."
"You didn't."
"I held at the border for approximately six minutes. Then an Imperial warbird invited me to proceed." He met her eyes. "I believe the Admiral was unavailable at the time."
Something happened at the corner of her mouth. It was gone before it could be named.
"You are aware," said Reyes, "that you have taken a Federation flagship into hostile space, engaged in an unsanctioned negotiation with a foreign military power, and destroyed what appears to be the single most significant archaeological and strategic asset in the history of the Alpha Quadrant."
"I am aware of the first two. As to the third, I did not destroy it. It destroyed itself, having completed its purpose. I would add that the alternative was the loss of eleven thousand Romulan citizens, four thousand Federation colonists, and a good deal more." He paused. "I was not able to find a means of preserving the site that did not also preserve the signal."
"That is a convenient position."
"It is the only one I have, Mister Reyes. I am afraid I have found it persuasive."
Sorokin raised a hand. "That will do."
She opened the folder. She turned a single page. In the cold light of the room her face was lined and very tired, and Picard saw, with a small, sharp pang, that she had put on her best uniform.
"Here is what will happen," she said. "I've spent the last two days in rooms with people who would like to hang you. I have, I believe, persuaded them otherwise. Starfleet will issue a formal reprimand, for acting outside the scope of your orders. It will be entered in your file and it will stay there. Starfleet will also, privately, and without any record, acknowledge that your judgment was sound." Her eyes did not leave his. "The Council will classify the entire affair under the highest security designation. The Cradle, the Choir, the orb, the Keys. None of it will be spoken of. None of it will be taught. It will exist in the Fleet's memory as an incident in the Keldan Reach, and in no other form."
"I see."
"The Consortium's collapse has already been announced. The notes are worthless. Mr. Grethis's entire fortune has been seized, and he has been charged under eleven separate statutes, including the colonial homicides. He has declined counsel." A faint pause. "He asked to be taken to the sea."
"The sea?"
"He said he would like to see a very large body of water. He said he had never had the time." She closed the folder. "He is being transported to Tantalus V. It isn't a place with a coast."
Picard did not answer. He thought of a small man sitting on the edge of a dais with his hands over his face. He found that he did not hate him, and that he could not forgive him, and that the two facts lay beside each other without any conflict at all.
"Lieutenant Commander Voss has entered a plea," Sorokin said. "He will serve twelve years. I attended the hearing." Her voice did not change. "I've never been so ashamed of anything in my life."
"Admiral."
"Don't." She held up a hand. "I'm telling you so that you will know. I'm not asking to be comforted."
"I was going to say that you have been of great use to me."
She studied him. Her gray eyes were very steady.
"That," she said, "is the most unwelcome thing anyone has said to me this week."
"There is a matter," Picard said, when the others had gone.
They were alone in the long cold room. Sorokin had not risen. She sat with her hands flat on the closed folder, and her head a little bowed, and the stillness in her was the stillness of a woman who has been holding herself upright for a very long time.
"Ms. Vash."
"Yes."
"She was not mentioned in your summary."
"She wasn't." Sorokin's mouth thinned. "Captain, I regret it. I've tried. But she is a civilian. She is a retired treasure-hunter with a file as long as my arm. The Council won't consent to having her name associated with a classified discovery. The Cartwright Foundation will be told that the survey on Doria Minor found nothing of scientific interest. It's the only thing that can be said."
"She found it."
"She did."
"She spent four years. She gave up, I think, a great deal more than that." He kept his voice even. "She went into a lava cavern with a bolt driver. She stood across a dais from a hundred thousand voices and refused them. And you propose to inform her that her contribution has been erased."
"I propose to inform her that it has been sealed."
"It is a distinction without a difference."
"It's the only distinction I have." Sorokin's voice rose, for the first time. "I'll not pretend to you that it is fair. It isn't fair. It's a very ugly thing. But if her name is on that report, the Romulans will want her. The Consortium's creditors will want her. Every government in the quadrant will want her. She won't have a day's peace for the rest of her life." She drew a breath. "I am doing her a kindness. It's a very bad kindness. It's all I have."
Picard said nothing for a moment.
"There is one name," he said at last, "that I would ask you to place on the record."
"Whose?"
"Dara Liang." He took a small folded sheet from his tunic and laid it on the table. "She was the first person in the history of any species to translate the script of the Choir. She died at the climax of this affair, holding a note that saved four thousand lives. She was also, I should tell you, the reason it began." He met Sorokin's eyes. "She was a believer. She lied to us for five days. She was deeply, terribly wrong about a great many things. And at the end she was right about the only thing that mattered. I would like it entered, in whatever place the record permits, that she did it."
Sorokin looked at the paper. She did not touch it.
"There's a classified archive," she said slowly. "A very small one. The Fleet keeps it for its dead. The names that can't be spoken, and the ones that must not be forgotten." A long pause. "I believe it could be entered there."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me, Jean-Luc." She studied him. For the first time in all their long acquaintance, her voice held something that was not control. "I'm so tired of this. I'm so tired of there being things that can't be said."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"I am beginning to," said Picard.
New Beltane had been given back to the wind.
Vash stood at the edge of the long gold field outside Harrow's Reach with her hands in her pockets and watched the grain move. It was a quiet afternoon, the sky high and clear, the light slanting low across the stubble. There were no ringing bells. There was no tone. The wheat that stood still in the fields was ordinary wheat, brown and gold and bending under the breeze. In the far distance, along the horizon to the south, a long pale line marked the place where the drift had stopped, a thin, glassy, shimmering scar, motionless, silent, six kilometers wide.
"It'll take a decade to clear," Teodora Marsh said. "Maybe longer. The geologists say the ground's stable. The Federation says it's safe. My people say they're going to wait and see." She looked at the horizon. "I think they're right."
"Will they come back?"
"Some." Marsh's mouth was dry. "Not all. There's a lot of grief in this ground. But the harvest is still standing, and a harvest doesn't care whether you're ready." She turned. "Come on. They're waiting."
The memorial stood on the rise above the river, where the little graveyard had been. The oaks had gone to glass. The stone wall was a pale, ringing, translucent line, and in its center, where the gate had stood, someone had set a plain tall slab of local granite. A few hundred people stood before it in the long light. They didn't speak. Many of them carried loaves of bread.
On the slab, in neat plain letters, someone had cut seven names.
Vash read them slowly. Per Amundsen. Marit Holm. Daniel Okoye. She had counted fourteen faces in a doorway once and eight coming out, and she knew the rest without reading. She read on, to the end of the sixth, and the seventh.
Below them, in a different hand, cut more recently and a little more deeply, was an eighth.
Dara Liang.
She stood still.
"I asked for it," Marsh said. "I told the stonecutter. I told him she wasn't one of ours, and he said, 'She's on the list of the people who pulled our people out.' I said that's right." The old woman's voice roughened. "Renata told me what she did. She went in after her. She'd no need to. She'd no reason. I've lived on this world fourteen years, and I know what a stranger's worth. I think she's one of ours."
Vash found she couldn't speak. She nodded. She went on nodding for some time.
"Excuse me."
A small voice. She looked down. A child stood at her elbow, a girl of nine in a clean blue dress, with dark hair in two plaits and a very grave face. She held something in both hands.
"Are you the lady who sang?"
"Ana," said Marsh, gently.
"Yes," Vash said. She knelt. "I suppose I am."
"Miss Dalca says you were brave." The girl held out her hands. In them, flat on her palms, was a small bunch of wheat, tied with a bit of blue yarn. Every stalk was gold. Every head was whole. "I picked this from the field this morning. It's ordinary. I checked." She looked up. "I thought you could put it on the stone."
Vash took it. She felt the dry papery stems under her fingers, the small hard weight of the grain. She rose. She crossed the grass to the slab, in the hush of the watching people, and laid the wheat at the foot of the eighth name.
She didn't say anything. She stood there for a time with her hand flat on the granite.
You were a good translator, she thought. It wasn't what she had meant to think. You were a very good one. You're the only person I've ever met who could hear the whole thing, every word, and love it anyway, and still say no.
The wind moved. In the gold field behind her, the wheat bent, and rose, and bent again. It made a soft dry sound, a long low whisper, like a great many people breathing out at once.
It was only the wind. She listened until she was sure.