Strange New Worlds 2016 (14 page)

“Quite evocative,” the admiral observed.

I stopped, listening to Spock’s breathing. It was still, constant, but a subtle grinding
betrayed him. And when I looked over to him, anger subtly creased his forehead.

“Continue, Troth,” ordered Kah.

“Well, what do you do? Fear inspires innovation. This weak, flailing body in the dirt
was the much-beloved Surak. He created an entire culture of liars by lying to the
early Vulcans. He protected them from their fears. And if he could fool enough of
them, he could create a society of weak, self-deceived creatures who, instead of sitting
around in dim, dry holes, would sit comfortably, arrogantly, atop cushioned benches
beside the amber glow of their candles and logic.”

“And what of us?” the admiral asked.

“We,” I began without thinking, “you, sprang up from those same deserts, wrestled
yourselves out of the sands and braved the galaxy, skeptical of Vulcan weakness, their
self-indulgent deception.”

“Well put, Reman,” she said. “I’m impressed with him, Kah. He could be a powerful
Reman voice to wield.”

Kah felt important. “You’ll be the voice and face of Remus, Troth. Now that the war’s
exposed your people to the public, we’ll need you.”

“You and the Vulcan are quite alike,” Toreth began. “Voices used by the Empire—one
to denigrate, the other, to expose traitors. Troth, you’re opportunistic, and I commend
you for it, but, Spock, what does your logic say about all this?”

“It presents a growing countercultural movement within a stagnant empire, Admiral.”

Her laughter seemed controlled, feigned, breathless in that moment. She looked down
in her lap and grinned. “It is your stagnant Federation who need our help in their
losing fight against the Dominion.”

“The Federation, Admiral, is not being judged. I am,” he said, frustration gurgling
in his throat. “I may, however, infer that all of this has been engineered simply
to arouse an emotional response. A humiliation. A most fascinating exercise, for you
have already won, Admiral—slaughtering Romulan citizens—yet you know that you have,
in fact, done nothing to curb the reach and growth of the underground. If you shatter
that glass,” he said, pointing to her flute of ale, “its pieces will easily be swept
away, but the idea of the glass remains unless you dispose of every individual who
has seen a glass. Change will come, Admiral. It is inevitable. History only requires
one individual to summon change.”

She gripped her chair’s armrests, clawing them with her finely manicured nails. “The
Romulan Star Empire will not wither away into facile, Federation puppets!”

“Your implication is predicated by a faulty premise. The Vulcans did not ‘wither,’
Admiral. And they are not ‘puppets.’ The propaganda that you have this young man spouting
is rooted in Romulan fear.”

When he defended me, Yalu, I was terrified. Somehow Kah or the admiral might have
read my silence as consensus. Spock had positioned me as their victim, but their position
demanded that
he
remain the victim, and so I spoke out in self-preservation. “They closed their eyes,
horrified by violent emotions, Vulcan.” The word spilled out like a curse. And suddenly,
I felt wrinkled and ugly and powerful all at once. Energy coursed through my arms
and legs. My body joined with the admiral’s and Kah’s. Have you ever been caught up
in communal emotion? It’s a feeling as close to mind control as possible. I literally
began breathing heavily, matching their breaths.

The admiral reached out and patted me on the knee and then took a swig from her flute.
I smiled, grinning as a full-blooded Romulan. The presence of Spock counterbalanced
mine.

“Young man,” he began, hot breath spewing from his nostrils, “the Vulcan people repressed
their tumultuous emotions to become something better, not to hide in fear. We are
a people, like the Federation, who are striving to improve. Nothing is natural but
the pursuit of self-improvement.”

The admiral looked unsettled. So did Kah. I felt myself falling into the warmth of
the Vulcan’s voice. I felt like a traitor. I had come to enjoy the taste and pride
of Romulan words. This was insane. Kah offered me nothing but massacred followers,
vaporized in the night, and she, the hawkish admiral, comfort, superiority, patriotism,
purpose. As her lips parted to refute Spock, the room shook wildly. Disruptor fire
and explosions roared beyond the room as the lights were replaced by darkness.

When I awoke, smoke curved out from a burnt hole in Toreth’s chest. Everyone in the
room was unconscious. Kah lay at her side, a similar crater simmering in his chest.
Only Spock and I had survived. Two men in dark-purple armor burst into the room and
dragged Toreth and Kah away. I imagined Kah’s son. His wife. Another death for the
state.

Voices floated loosely beyond the room. Dim emergency lights kicked in then, filling
the room with a deadly, flat hum. Spock stirred. I didn’t know whether to restrain
him as a prisoner or beg his forgiveness. I didn’t know, Yalu, who or what I was anymore
now that I was removed from the game.

The guards returned, giving me no time to think about this identity crisis. One led
me into the courtyard, while the other lifted and carried Spock behind us.

Outside, the night was heavy upon the planet. A shuttle’s exhaust warmed the ground
in a soupy heat. I looked around and saw clearly that the guards were Reman. Reman!

A bald, lean man stood at the center of the courtyard beneath the statue of the great
Romulan engineer who designed the first warbirds. The man calmly gave orders to a
few more Remans, and they went to work firing their disruptors at the statue’s head,
knocking it clean off. It hit the ground, rebounding outward and almost knocking us
to the ground as we approached.

“Here’s their Reman prisoner, Shinzon,” reported the guard who held my arm.

The man they called Shinzon stood in the shadow of the decapitated statue, and my
eyes couldn’t quite decipher his face, for he did not look Reman at all.

“Very good,” Shinzon replied. His voice carried a fresh, fearless authority. “I take
it that our friend, Spock, is still alive.”

“Yes, sir. Drugged by the Romulans.”

He sighed with disgust. “Cruel. Take him up to the ship. I will get to know our Reman
survivor while waiting for the next transport.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And tell Vkruk that we must have those Romulan engineers increase their pace. We
need those transporters installed on the warbird as soon as possible. Take some Romulans
off of the Scimitar project if you must.”

And both my guard and the one carrying Spock entered the shuttle. Shinzon approached
me, his hands clasped behind his back.

“You’re not fully Reman, are you?”

“Neither are you,” I replied.

“Quite right.”

“Are you human?”

“You look with uncertainty. Have you never seen a human before?”

“Never.”

The shuttle’s engine roared to life as the vessel ascended.

“What do you know of humans, Mister—”

“—Troth.” I felt unnaturally at ease with the man. He had a calming grace that lulled
me into a sense of acceptance, feelings I had just established with Toreth a short
time ago.

“Well?”

“They’re part of the Federation, allied with the Vulcans, like Spock.”

“Oh, Spock.” He smiled. “I love that old Vulcan. So gullible. I remind him of someone
he trusts. I used that and offered him the promise of a Reman-Underground alliance
to work against Romulan tyranny and conservatism. He would call it civil disobedience,
social progress; I call it revolution.”

“You knew about his meeting here?”

He nodded. “Of course. We helped his people develop the plan. Then we tipped off the
military in exchange for some powerful commanders’ loyalties in the new government—a
Reman government.”

I was stunned, Yalu. How had Spock misjudged his alliance with Shinzon? You should
never rely on a creature of desperation. Remans are desperate. Shinzon, I later found
out, was an accomplished leader in the Dominion War. He commanded a purely Reman detachment.
They only accrued 4.7 percent casualties during the entire war. He was praised. Respected.
And could not be silenced back to Remus. He surreptitiously gained the support of
both the underground and the military to prevent his return to the mines. I don’t
blame him. We all seek something better, at any cost, it would seem.

“I’m impressed.” Again, the words sputtered from my lips. I stood, fists clenched,
bodies around me again, but this time, I stood as a Reman man. “I’m half-Reman.”

“A Romulan father, I suppose,” said Shinzon. “And an unwanted affair, no doubt.”

“Two, actually; I have a brother.”

“Used and violated. That is the life of our Reman brethren. But no longer.”

Another shuttle landed.

“We are both sons of other worlds—the perfect representatives of this new age on Romulus,
an age of diversity, of equality for all, even for our maligned brothers and sisters
back on Remus. Will you join me, Troth?”

Another visionary. How could I deny him, Yalu?

I ended up on Remus, in the mines, but this time with a disruptor holstered to my
hip. I had just finished a whirlwind tour through the Empire at Shinzon’s side. He
presented me as a son of Remus, born of Reman-Romulan blood, a symbol of the future.
Yalu, this man could fill a room with his voice. It would breach the walls and windows
and doorways until everyone in the room laughed and slammed their fists with drunken
fervor.

I was assigned a cell in the corridor where we had once lived. Our mother’s defeated,
curled body still ached in my eyes, but when I entered the cell to which I was assigned,
there hung Spock, a Romulan woman, and a Reman man. Spock sat on the dirt floor, arms
raised, shackled to the wall. I reminded myself that this used to be somebody’s home
before Shinzon’s revolution. I could hear his words: “And now those ‘cages’ on Remus
will finally be acknowledged for what they are: prison cells. And we will finally
be acknowledged for who we are: valuable individuals, rising from the shadow of an
immoral empire!” His voice would swell. The veins in his head thicken. And we’d cheer
and clap our throats and hands raw.

But Spock now hung with raw wrists, worn green by metal cuffs clinging to the wall
magnetically. A sinister hum from those cuffs slithered in and out of your conscious
hearing after hours in the cell. I stood by the door. Green lights from the corridor
flowered on the floor, coloring his naked feet. I never expected the effect his feet
would have on me. For in that moment, seeing the dirt caked between his toes and in
the curves of his soles, the contrast with my childhood image of him wounded me somehow.

“You’re a pretty boy.”

The prisoner who mistook me for a boy was Zysin, a Reman soldier who murdered a whole
mess of escaped Romulan prisoners under Shinzon’s command. They were merely being
held until Shinzon could secure his influence over some colony. Now, Shinzon approved
of, even glorified, violence in the name of revolution, but none that trained the
Romulan eye to view us as beasts again. “Military might, strategy, war—these are the
virtues all brothers of the Empire appreciate,” he explained. “Oh, we’ll exterminate
your Vulcan problem because force, not its message of passivity, brings revolution.”
We had stood, our blurred forms reflected in the marble floors outside the senate
building as he won the support of a prominent female senator. “But unchecked savagery—we
have already been strangled and mutilated into slaves by the government and press,”
he continued. “I will support no philosophy that craves blood for blood’s sake, or
loyalists will use that image to further the narrative of a just Reman oppression.
We must control our own story, now. Right, Troth?”

Zysin laughed. “The mighty Shinzon forbade you from speaking to us?”

“No.” I looked him square in the eyes. Shinzon taught us to inspect a person through
their eyes. Would they hold their ground, blink, or turn away? “Beaten for merely
looking too long into the guard’s eyes, worked to starvation,” he had said, one evening
before members of Spock’s underground. “I think it fitting that we hold our gaze on
a person, let us become acquainted, intimate in the discomforting struggle for equality
in the eyes of those who would see us as either brutish slaves or valuable individuals.”