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Dunwoody smiled. “For our sake, let’s hope so.”

Silently, I added my hope to his own. Then I turned back to the monitor, eager to learn all I could about the tyrannical Abinarri.

Madigoor

“AND WHAT DID you learn?” asked the Captain of the Kalliope.

“Yes,” said Flenarrh, “what?”

“A great deal,” Picard said. “It seems the Abinarri were originally a rather wild and iconoclastic people.”

“A nation of hermits,” Dravvin observed.

“More or less,” Picard confirmed. “Time and again, their primitive attempts at civilization were brought down by anarchy and lawlessness.”

“Not unlike my own people,” Hompaq grumbled.

“Actually,” said Picard, “the ancient Abinarri make early Klingons look polite and reserved.”

Hompaq’s eyes narrowed. “You lie.”

“I do not,” Picard assured her. “They were utterly savage, capable of the most heinous acts one can imagine. It was not unusual for an early Abinarri to kill his mate or his children over a shortage of food. Cannibalism not only ran rampant, it was the preferred diet in some places.”

“Lovely,” said Robinson.

Picard glanced at him. “Indeed. It was only after long years of chaos and unrestrained brutality that a strange, new caste emerged among the Abinarri. The data we had didn’t tell us how or why, but it did say these people were known as the Lawmakers.”

“Apt,” said Bo’tex.

Dravvin rolled his eyes. “If rather obvious.”

Picard continued. “The Lawmakers decided that their people were incorrigible. Unless an elaborate system of laws was instituted, the Abinarri would simply destroy one another.”

“And how were these laws to be enforced?” asked Flenarrh.

“At the point of a spear,” Picard told him. “At least, at first. But after a while, the laws simply became the laws, and people obeyed them. Again, our information was incomplete on this point. But two things were clear to us: Chaos gave way to order, and civilization thrived.”

“By all accounts,” Bo’tex remarked, “a good thing.”

The gecko blinked. No doubt, he thought so, too.

“In any case,” Picard said, “the Abinarri came to understand the world around them as never before. They produced superior scientists and philosophers, painters and musicians …”

“And writers?” the Captain of the Kalliope suggested.

“Those as well,” said Picard. “But the Lawmakers who had eliminated the earliest obstacles to civilization and were therefore still venerated were needed less and less as time went on.”

Robinson grunted. “No doubt, a difficult pill to swallow.”

“So difficult,” Picard noted, “that the Lawmakers refused to recognize the fact. Instead, in the grand tradition of self-perpetuating institutions, they went on creating law after superfluous law. Before long, they had rendered the Abinarri system of justice nearly impossible to understand and even more impossible to apply.”

The Captain of the Kalliope frowned. “I can only imagine what this did to personal freedoms.”

“As you suggest,” said Picard, “it trampled them. It ground them down, spit them out, and made people forget they ever existed. Finally, the time came when there were no Abinarri behaviors left to be prescribed, no Abinarri freedoms left to curtail or regulate.”

“And?” Flenarrh asked, apparently sensing there was more.

“And,” said Picard, “that was the day the Lawmakers looked up and gazed greedily at the heavens.”

Robinson sighed. “It’s an old story, I’m afraid. When you’re finished oppressing your own people, you set your sights on oppressing others. On my world, we called it colonization.”

“A good analogy,” Picard mused.

Dravvin eyed him. “I take it the Abinarri had begun to explore space by that time?”

“Yes,” said Picard, “though they had yet to make contact with other self-aware species. Under sudden pressure from the Lawmakers, their stellar expansion program was drastically accelerated. All Abinarri resources and technologies came to be focused on the noble effort to find sentient beings on distant worlds.”

Robinson chuckled mirthlessly