From: Kenneth Field (envision_at_fidalgo.net)
Date: Fri Dec 28 2007 - 15:36:57 PST
"Part of the Ship; Part of the Crew"
(continues from Taylor's "101")
"What do you think of my solution?" -- Spock, "The Wrath of Khan"
"Oh, my." -- Kirk, "Generations"
Location: Unknown
Stardate: Unknown
Scene: Unknown
It was a vast expanse of white, and for a time he drifted there, feeling nothing, thinking nothing, seeing nothing. But then he remembered who he was.
Or who he had been.
"I was once a man," he said.
Immediately, he found himself standing on a white plain that stretched off in all directions, its horizon almost indistinguishable in the distance. He had two legs and feet, two arms and hands, a body, a face. But the only break in this immense stillness was his own voice speaking.
"I was Gene McInnis," he said, "of Starfleet."
As if his words or his thoughts made an actual difference, he found himself clothed in colorful garb, a uniform of sorts, though the color seemed to alternate from teal to red and back again without warning. The pips at his throat, however, were those of a full Commander. Two gold, one black.
Then the featureless plain itself changed both color and substance, and he recognized the place where he stood. The Promenade on the GATE. Shops lining the way, all shuttered and closed, the walkways empty, the lights all subdued as if on "powersave." Stillness again, except for his own presence.
"Hello!" he called. "Is anyone there?"
His voice echoed back at him.
"There, there, there, there," growing more and more faint with each repetition.
He walked the Promenade for a long time. It might have been days. It might have been minutes. There was no way to tell. He never got hungry. He never got tired. The Promenade seemed to go on forever, his footsteps making quiet echoes in the empty structures all about him.
Then without warning, something changed.
"You are the McInnis," said a voice behind him.
He turned and discovered a familiar face.
"Captain Sharpa," he greeted the Tamarian, his first commanding officer from the USS SUTTNER.
"A man without a country," the Tamarian observed in one of his inimitable allusions.
Gene McInnis was unsure who his former CO was referring to at that moment, which seemed pretty normal considering who he was talking with.
"What's happened to me?" he asked, unable to retrieve anything from recent memory that made any sense.
"You are the McInnis," said another voice.
When he turned again he found another commanding officer, Captain Isabella Rochelli, also of SUTTNER fame.
"And you are here with us," she *almost* answered another of his questions.
Sharpa placed a gentle hand on his shoulder and smiled at him. Isabella took one of his hands.
"Join us in the Temple," she suggested.
But even as she did so, he knew that he had a choice in the matter. And he knew who these people from his past really were.
"You are the Prophets," he stated. "And I'm dead."
"What is dead?" asked a third voice who turned out to be green-skinned Kalilah Nixa/Layne, another shipmate from the SUTTNER and USS EIDOLON. He expected her to call him "Eugene" as she always had, and it felt odd when she did not.
"He was linear," a fourth voice explained. The fourth voice was his old engineer, the designer of the USS EIDOLON, Tim Layne. "Now he is not linear."
Kalilah nodded in understanding, as did Sharpa and Isabella.
"How did I die?" he asked them.
--------------------- =/\=
Scene: Bonviva/McInnis Quarters
The shapeshifter snatched the palm phaser from his hand, struck him in the center of his chest. He felt bones shatter, felt the shards drive into his heart as he flew backwards over the sofa and crashed into the wall.
"But there can't be two of us, now can there?" the Founder said as it pressed the booby-trapped firing button.
Gene felt all the wind that had been knocked out of him come back in a hot gust that set the couch on fire and crushed him against the wall with it.
-------------------- =/\=
Scene: Unknown
They all looked at him expectantly. There were more of them now. He recognized Naia, a fellow student from ACT in STARFLEET ACADEMY, some from the SUTTNER, others from the EIDOLON, and still others from the GATE. Then there were some familiar faces he thought of whenever he remembered BAJOR.
"Ach, boy, how are ya?" asked his Grampa Devlin.
"Grampa?" Gene asked, surprised that his voice sounded the way he remembered it as a boy back on BAJOR.
"It's really me, boy, not one of your blamed Prophets."
The Prophets didn't seem insulted by the old man's comment. They seemed utterly patient. Utterly at peace.
"What the hell's going on?" Gene wanted to know.
"Well, for starters, boy, ye've gone and got ye'self killed," the old man sighed. "Puts kind of a crimp in your plans for the future, I'd say."
"What is the future?" Syllan Shadowcloak, late of the decimated EIDOLON, asked.
"Don't bother the boy right now," the old man snapped. "He's got some pondering to do. He'll be with you in his own good time."
The crowd of people who looked like all of his friends but were someone else entirely nodded and went back to patient waiting.
"I remember dying," Gene said with a sigh, as if all of the rage and sorrow had drained out of him and left him empty. "What about ...," he started to say, his eyes coming up to lock on his grandfather's.
"They'll have to get on as best they can," the old man sighed as well. "Life holds no guarantees. We all must dance like there's no tomorrow," his Scottish brogue seemed muted by the circumstances.
"What happens now?" he wanted to know.
"What do you want to happen now?" his grandfather looked him over carefully. "Aside from being alive, you seem to have some alternatives."
"You once said our family had a life debt to the Daoine Sidhe, to serve them."
"True enough. But I'm doing that ... as long as I am able. And in any case, I dinna die. They came for me. You can't go to them. You're entirely dead."
"Then what is left to me?"
"Join us in the Temple," suggested one of the Prophets who looked a lot like Mendar Talev, the Ops officer of the EIDOLON.
Gene looked at him.
"I can't join you," he said with a hint of the anger he had once felt at the abandonment of the Bajoran gods. "You cut us off from all we hold dear."
It might have been his imagination, but he thought the Prophets looked chagrined at his accusation.
"The Temple is closed to those who profane it," Kane told him.
"The Temple is closed to everyone," Gene corrected him, "profane and devout alike. You closed the Celestial Temple. People died! Families were pulled apart. The GATE itself hangs in the balance. You know the Dominion. You know what they are capable of doing."
"We know the Dominion," Xana spoke up from the crowd.
"Please," he whispered, staggered by the appearance of his "wife", "anyone but her. You drive the knife too close."
The Prophet who had appeared as Xana stepped back into the gathering, and he lost sight of her. He felt her absence with pain that transcended even death.
He knelt there before them, his grandfather at his side, and he begged them.
"With all my heart I beg you, do not abandon your children here on the GATE. They need you. They need each other. You are the bridge ... the long road made short ... the river that gives us life. Open the doors to the Temple."
His grandfather helped him to his feet. The Prophets turned to each other, speaking quietly in words he was only beginning to understand. It might have been a few minutes. It might have been years. Time did not move in this place. Gene found that he was losing a sense of the passing of time. That all times were "now." That all places were "here." His grandfather seemed content to stand with him in silence as the Prophets spoke amongst themselves.
Finally, as one, they turned back to him.
"The doors of the Temple are open. This is the GATE. We are the Bridge. We are the long road made short. We are the river bringing life. Join us?" his Tamarian Captain offered a hand.
Gene McInnis was sorely tempted. He looked at his grandfather, then looked back and shook his head.
"I have another task, another duty. I will come to the Temple when I may. Will it be open to me?"
"Always," Isabella Rochelli intoned.
-------------------- =/\=
Scene: McInnis/Bonviva quarters
The couch had been pulled back away from the bulkhead where it had been thrown. Gene McInnis rolled to one side and stood up. There was blood on the carpeting, and a dark burned area outlined where his body had lain. The blood and the body had been his. He simply stood there for a moment and looked about himself.
He saw one of his counselors, Nurunyon, the Caitian, rummaging about in the debris, finding his journal and trying to carefully turn the pages with one claw. He didn't speak to the leonine counselor. There was nothing to say.
Gene McInnis left those quarters and walked the corridors. He never actually gave it much thought, but he guessed that no one could see him. He could see them, though everyone else seemed a bit transparent to him, as if they were the ghosts, not him. Everything was still. With all the people moving about him, there should have been a great deal of noise. But there wasn't. It was completely and utterly silent. He watched people speaking, but he couldn't hear them. Little by little it became more and more difficult to see them as well.
Except for some.
Some of these people were like himself. Much more solid, it seemed to him. All bewildered, wandering about in a daze. He noticed they were moving bit by bit down toward the docks, and he followed them, not so much out of curiousity, though he was curious enough, but simply because it was something to do.
He didn't recognize anyone he knew among the wanderers, at least not directly. None of the senior staff were with them. And he began to understand who they all were. These were the dead. Like himself. Vulcans, Bajorans, Klingons, Jem'Hadar, even the Founder he'd destroyed. They all walked toward the docks. He went with them.
On the docks all semblance of normality vanished.
One of the great doors was open, and he should have been able to see space through it. Instead, there was a flat black sea sprinkled with stars and their reflections. Floating on that dark abyssal plain was a ship. He couldn't describe it, though he knew it was a ship of some sort. It might have been a Klingon design; it might have been Bajoran or Terran or Bolian. It had aspects of all designs. But Gene knew what it was, and so did everyone else walking toward it.
It was the ferry to the afterlife.
There was a creature standing at the foot of a gangplank. Gene couldn't have described this creature either. It was there and it was not there. It looked humanoid; it looked nothing like a human. It spoke; it was utterly silent. He joined the line and walked up to the being.
"Who are you?" he asked when it was his turn.
The creature seemed surprised a moment. Mostly, the dead just trudged past.
"Why do you care?" it asked back.
"I like to know things," Gene McInnis answered.
It looked at him.
"I have many names."
"Any I would recognize?" Gene asked.
"Fek'lar. Charon. The Boatman."
Gene looked about at those who were dead.
"Need any help?" he asked.
The creature chuckled.
"Sometimes. The dead are sometimes confused. Some need guidance."
"I can do that," Gene said.
"Yes," the creature nodded. "You can."
Gene stepped out of line, turned and walked away from the Boatman and his ferry. He turned away and walked back into the GATE, knowing that he would walk the GATE all the rest of his days and nights, guiding the dead to their places.
He was satisfied with that.
-------------------- =/\=
NRPG: So say we all.
-------------------- =/\=
Kenneth Field
envision_at_fidalgo.net
aka Lt. JG Mowree Nurunyon
aCNS/GS-2
aka Tomas' Alexei Vukovic
covert BORG infiltrator
currently under deep cover
aka Maury R. Tee
Professor of English (Retired)
Proprietor of "Impulse Drives,"
a little shop of horrors
GS-2, Promenade
aka Commander Gene McInnis, deceased
formerly CNS/GS-2
"To gently lie and prove the lie true ... everything is finally a promise ... what
seems a lie is ramshackle need, wishing to be born." -- Ray Bradbury
From HyperNews_at_youth.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Feb 17 2008 - 03:10:49 PST