Strange New Worlds 2016 (15 page)

“Well, if you’ll get me something to write with and some paper—I know we aren’t allowed
padds down here. I’d like to apologize to Shinzon for my behavior,” Zysin said. “I
realize I endangered his whole revolution; I’d like to express my apology.”

“Begging for forgiveness?” I had this vague feeling then that I was no better than
poor Zysin. Instead of an apology letter, I told stories to buy my way into my oppressors’
graces. I turned from him, to escape his eyes. Silass, the woman whose arms hung from
shackles beside Spock, was an accomplished Romulan astrophysicist and underground
sympathizer. Last week, she was imprisoned for a few off-handed comments about Shinzon’s
revolution made during a lecture. She taught mostly on solar mechanics, the life of
stars, and aptly applied the stellar life-cycle metaphor in one of these “dangerous”
lectures on the Hobus star: “As stars age, like Hobus, they burn brighter, hotter
than ever, but eventually violently collapse in on themselves. This, in fact, reminds
me of this Shinzon’s revolution, burning bright and hot and violent, collapsing the
Empire and everything we value, but I digress.”

Zysin ignored my jab and turned his attention to his fellow prisoners. “What do you
think, Vulcan? Shouldn’t we be allowed to scribble on some paper while we rot?”

Spock didn’t flinch.

“You just going to rot there and take root?”

“There seem to be no other options,” Silass replied.

For a few minutes no one spoke, and Zysin hung limp, defeated.

“There are always possibilities,” spoke Spock. His voice struck me again, but now
at the base of my skull. If it were an aroma, it would have filled an entire house.

“Who would have thought I’d end up shackled in a cage with a Romulan professor and
this old Vulcan?”

“You know who this is?” I asked.

“The great Vulcan!” he mocked.

“Great, indeed,” Spock muttered. His head hung low.

“I know you mean to mock him, sir, but the great Vulcan,” continued the professor,
“is a martyr for true peace and equality for the Empire and the whole Alpha Quadrant.”

“He’s no martyr,” Zysin replied. “Not yet.”

A hushed laugh tumbled from my mouth like a mistake, like drool slipping awkwardly
over the bottom lip. Zysin had an unrepentant fire in his belly. His mouth amused
me. My lips quivered with sarcasm and innuendo to spew. I realized how mimetic I had
become. A survival instinct?

“You’re correct. I misused the term,” Silass acknowledged, “but he is a symbol for
those things, nonetheless.”

“And what do those chains around his wrists symbolize, Professor?”

Silass didn’t answer. Though Spock’s body wilted, his face remained placid, strong,
resolute. His rigid face fascinated me. He always seemed certain. Toreth had shared
his confident, elegant face. Both offered me that. But he seemed content with listening.
His silence seemed active, a preamble.

“They are rewards,” Spock finally whispered.

Zysin laughed wildly. Even the other prisoners down the corridor cheered and growled
at the hilarity of the statement. I relented and got some papers and pens from the
administrator’s office. Shinzon had left cha’Ral in charge of the colony, and cha’Ral
seemed relieved to see me, though his face strained to hide it.

I had night shift. I stood in that cell with those prisoners for seven more hours,
and, in the morning, gathered the pages they had written, folded them into my pants,
and relinquished my rifle at the armory.

Yalu, the next evening I ran furiously, slamming into walls and ricocheting off corners
as I raced to grab my rifle, check in, and explode into the cell. What Spock wrote
infuriated me. I had to challenge him. Everything that Shinzon and the Romulans had
said about Vulcans was proven in his letter.

“You wrote to
me
?” I growled behind gritted teeth.

He did not look me in the eye. His mouth remained flat, controlled. Meanwhile, Silass
and Zysin awoke from their drowsy stupor.

I threw the letter in front of him.

“You’re arrogant. Detached from reality. Naïve. You don’t know me,” I said, kneeling
down to position myself in his drooping face. “You’ve disarmed everyone in your underground
with your passive philosophy; you sentenced my brother to die in a cell just like
this. You might be able to deny your emotions and lie to yourself, but you can’t deny
reality. You can’t believe what you’ve written here, you can’t. I won’t be manipulated
in this way.” Really, I was scared of his words. As they had seized me in the past
and shifted my worldview, they, again, wrestled in me for control.

I left and requested a different assignment. There were none available, but I convinced
another Reman to switch with me. Throughout the night, I could hear Zysin and Silass
speak with Spock as their Reman guard napped—a habit the other guards overlooked because
we all remembered the woman as the granddaughter of Zon, the agitator. I could hear
them through the walls, though.

Zysin was the first to speak. “What did you write to the mutt?”

I didn’t hear any reply for some time. I found myself nodding off here and there in
the silence; my prisoners simply lay there, husks of former commanders and admirals
who were imprisoned after Shinzon assassinated the Senate and took control of the
government.

But then he finally spoke.

“I wrote about his brother,” Spock began, “a man worthy of these restraints.”

“Worthy? Like it’s some honor!” replied Zysin. “Are you even here?”

But Silass interrupted. “Please, explain.”

“His brother, Yalu, escaped after the Dominion War and joined the underground on the
Mubaut colony. After securing transport there to encourage and advise their members,
I observed him lead men, women, and children through a very public, peaceful protest.
I had always rejected this strategy, logically concluding that it would lead to unnecessary
risk. They simply sat in a popular roadway which linked the colony’s economic sector
to civilian housing—housing that rejected sympathizers and members alike. Yalu recited
poetry and essays and soliloquies from the greatest Romulan literary voices and even
some Vulcan and human. His followers joined him, speaking specific lines in chorus.
Well, this crippled commerce. I watched, fascinated. I did not join them, concerned
that I would detract or distract from Yalu’s leadership.”

“Rommie’s kill him?” asked Zysin.

I sprung to my feet; you can imagine why.

“No,” replied Spock, “injured. Romulan security beat and arrested the protestors.
They were jailed, but released within several weeks. I met with him, offering to transport
him and his followers off Mubaut. The majority declined to leave the fight for their
homes. He, however, joined me. We shared our understandings of the moral sickness
within the Empire. Healthy suspicion and inquiry decayed into a loss of stable truth,
even moral truth. He spoke of revolution, but not in the streets or on the battlefields,
or even in the Senate, but in the hearts of the public.”

“Nonsense,” said Zysin.

“A movement of peace, my friend, disarms the oppressor, within the context of history,
before disarming them in the present. We needed to rise above the temporal and act
with history in mind. Yalu understood. He knew that the fate of the underground and
Remus was tangled together in a web of codependence.”

I threw open the door to Spock’s cell and carefully walked across the dirt floor.
I knelt before him, breathing heavily. “Shinzon said that your teachings have declawed
innocent, politically unsophisticated Romulans. You would have them sit rather than
take a stand against the tyranny of an oppressive government.”

“Your Shinzon is unparalleled,” quipped Spock.

I didn’t understand him at the time, but continued. “Maybe Yalu isn’t dead yet, but
under your teachings, he will be.”

“There he is!” exclaimed Zysin, amused.

I stood and walked over to Zysin. “This man is a fool,” I began.

“Hey!” he protested.

“He knew Shinzon’s policy: fulfilling one’s duty to the revolution is life. It’s commitment.
Failing your duty requires your life as recompense,” I said. I felt the words passing
through my mouth. They felt alien, now, when applied to this living man.

“I was trying to save—” Zysin began.

“Trying to conceal your failure by murdering the prisoners,” I accused. “You panicked.
Self-deception. You might as well be a Vulcan.” I couldn’t stop myself—confrontation,
this Romulan game of words, distracted and steadied me. Repeating the words, I hoped,
made them true.

Zysin hung his head low.

“You are right, if sitting were passive,” Spock began, “but your brother has taught
me that sitting is quite active, a violent act, in fact, just like telling a story.”

I felt accused. My stories used every Reman, while they withered in darkness. I couldn’t
breathe. I looked at Zysin. My eyes didn’t bounce away, like the guards, but I didn’t
see him as a Reman brother, a former slave—only as the pathetic cartoons from my stories.
I had reshaped my own perception of reality to survive. And I felt rudderless, hollowed
out.

The striking collision of metal shook the cell. Dust and dirt rained down. The lights
quit and their restraints unclasped; the hum of the magnetic locks grew silent. My
chest caved in, and I doubled over, my rifle suddenly sticking in my sweaty grip.
Zysin stood, laughing.

“The prisoners you’ve been charged to guard are about to break out,” he said snidely.
“What’s your duty now?”

My eyes flashed at him, sweat gathering in the space between my ears and eyes. I raised
my disruptor, but knew I couldn’t get myself to fire on Spock or the others. I felt
paralyzed, faceless, but suddenly too visible. Suspicion, pride, revolution, deception,
equality—they collapsed in on themselves within me. Yalu, you seemed to become someone,
but I sputtered deeper into ambiguous darkness. The room shook again. Prisoners began
shouting. I pressed the disruptor’s emitter beneath my chin, not knowing if I’d do
it.

“Do not harm yourself.”

I didn’t want to!

Spock remained still, sitting against the wall.

“We are not going anywhere.” He fixed his eyes on Zysin. I could see Zysin’s fantastic
confusion.

“Look, I realize to an old radical like yourself that this cell, those cuffs, are
some sick reward, but not to me.”

But Silass spoke up too. “Sit down, Zysin. You don’t want this boy’s blood on your
hands.”

Spock saw me clearly, and in his eyes, I saw myself, quivering, waiting. I lowered
the rifle from my jaw, and it made a quiet thud into the dirt.

“My fellow prisoners, please remain in your cells. Do not attack the men and women
who guard you. They, like you and I, are prisoners themselves.”

Their guard awoke, but she simply remained still, her fingers clutching the trigger
of her disruptor.

“We must preserve the lives of these guards, my friends,” said Spock. “Heroic sitting,
one could say.” A thin grin creased his face. And I fell to my knees.

With what seemed like a secret burden, Spock spoke. “For years, I negotiated the space
between the public and the Senate, working to transform the system to allow for Vulcan
teaching within Romulan society. While meeting with the underground by night and with
senators by day, I ignored the image’s ability to inspire an emotional response, and,
therefore, I ignored a knowledge that Vulcans devalue.”

He shook his head and paused.

“I am not the great Vulcan, Troth,” he said plainly, forcefully even. “Your brother
taught me that change must be modeled. If peace and restraint is the lifestyle, it
must be lived, publicly.”

“Heroic sitting,” I repeated.

“Indeed. When one consciously sits in a den of lions—to make a human allusion—that
is courage, that is active resistance. And that image of your brother, the children
and women, beaten by officers of the government—that image inhabits the Empire forever.
He harnessed the emotional resonance of that image to spark suspicion and public outcry,
something that never occurred to me—something both Romulan and Reman.”

You were heroic, Yalu.

The doors swung open and this is where our paths, brother, crossed for the final time.
Shinzon had engaged the Federation’s flagship, dying in the process. The underground
formed a temporary government along with the few military commanders who had suddenly
regretted their alliance with Shinzon. Your voice rang through the prison. You called
for everyone to head for the Reman hangar bay, that relief and transport shuttles
would be waiting.

The scramble through the prison, into the mines, up through the administrator’s office,
the mine shaft, and into the hangar was frantic. Elbows stabbing. Women knocked to
the ground. We feared without reason. There was that group consciousness again. We
simply ran like rabid dogs for the grounded ships. Spock didn’t, though, and neither
did his newest convert, the professor. Zysin disappeared in the crowd. I felt the
hot, wet current of bodies carry me toward the transports that lay staggered across
the hangar. No grass beneath my feet, just dirt. That’s all a lightless rock gives
you, and I was certainly glad to be free of the planet, although just hours before
I thought I
was
free of it.