Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [105]
Picard sat there with his chin on his fist, considering the ramifications. He still remembered, quoted verbatim, Kirk’s final conversation with that Spock, daring him to be the “one man with a vision” who could change the brutality of the Empire before its victims finally rose up and destroyed it. Spock, according to Kirk, had estimated it would take two hundred-odd years for that to happen, and Kirk had invoked “the illogic of waste” as his reason for Spock to try to stop the present-day slaughter and to try to change the Empire into something more benevolent. The Vulcan to whom Kirk had spoken had been profoundly skeptical about the possibilities and had said only, “I will consider it.”
To judge by this record, he had done more than consider it. He became a power in Starfleet, and in other ways as well. For a short time, people who frustrated his drive toward increased personal power vanished abruptly. He began to move— covertly at first, Picard suspected, then overtly, as confirmed by the documentation—to try to change the Empire’s methods of dealing with subject species, conquered worlds, arguing that, logically, power benefits from benevolent use. For a while there was an uncomfortable shift and wash of opinion around him at Starfleet, like the tide just before ebb or flow. Spock pressed his advantage in Starfleet Command, rising to the Admiralty. There was a period of some months when he seemed to drop out of notice—the records merely stated that he had been posted to a desk job—something affiliated with his father, the Vulcan ambassador. And then …
Picard shook his head. It seemed as if he pushed something, someone, too hard. His living quarters at Starfleet were raided; evidence was found there, the records said barely, of treason. No detail was given on what might have been considered treasonable. Was something planted on him? Picard wondered. Or did someone decide they had better use for the Tantalus Field than he had? And there was the enmity of his old captain to be dealt with as well—an old unhealed sore of disaffection and rage that had been festering since Spock left the Enterprise. Indications were that Kirk, embittered by his former first officer’s rise to power, may have been behind the charges, trumped-up or otherwise, that sent Spock to his death. He was court-martialed and executed some twelve years after another Kirk had dared him to be the one man with a vision.
The vision apparently died with him. His father, the ambassador, was assassinated shortly thereafter by another Vulcan eager for the job. Picard had his suspicions about that assassination as well.
Picard paused his search, rubbed his face with his hands, and sat in the darkened room, in the glow of the screen, considering. For one who knew how to read the records—for bureaucratese had changed little from his own universe to this one—there were signs that Spock had indeed “considered it” as he promised and had attempted using various means, mostly subtly, to shift the Empire away from the blind cruelty of its course. And though one man, standing in the right place with a lever long enough, can move a planet, Spock’s lever was too short, the fulcrum was too close, or … Picard shook his head. Any one of a number of variables was out of joint. Whatever, he failed, managing only to push the inevitable collapse of the Empire further into its future. The Empire went on, not realizing what his own universe’s Kirk and that universe’s Spock had known or come to know: that an empire based only on conquest is, tactically if not ethically, top-heavy and will eventually collapse under its own weight.
Picard stopped for a little while then, sitting there, his chin on his hands again, and