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By Root 997 0

thought. He could understand Kirk’s motives: they were no different from his own. He saw waste, suffering, folly, and wanted to change them, to stop them; but he may not have understood enough of the huge inertia of the force against which he himself wanted to strain … wanted that other Spock to defy. For two and a half centuries the Empire had known no motivation except survival by exploitation. Picard remembered something his own Beverly Crusher had said to him once, about human psychopathologies: “If you’re going to take a behavior away, you’d better have something superior to put in its place. Otherwise in about ten minutes you get a relapse.” Spock had tried to substitute a different behavior, but there was no way to convince a mostly human Empire that logic and forbearance, even the prickly kind of forbearance that a Vulcan would have recommended, were better than expansion. Expansion had worked for them for a long time. They saw no reason to stop. They would go on as they had started.

But at the same time … Picard shook his head. What are these people doing in this situation, he thought, where we find them today? It’s been hundreds of years since, in this universe, anyone explored anything for pleasure, for the delight of knowledge. That whole school of thought is discredited now. Why are they here?

He stared at the screen for a long time. Then, in the unchanging darkness, a thought occurred to him. If there had suddenly been some difficulty in expansion … “Necessity is a mother,” he remembered Geordi misquoting to him once. Even the most hardened behaviors could be shifted when there was no choice.

To the computer he said, “Display map of the Empire as of one hundred standard years ago. No: concurrent with the year of Spock’s death.”

The screen cleared and showed him a great, irregular blob of space, superimposed over the graceful curves of the outflung arms of the Galaxy. Against the Galaxy as a whole, it was small, surely no more than 6 or 8 percent of the whole. But it was still a very, very large amount of space. Earth was only roughly at its center: the major axes of exploration, or exploitation in this case, followed along the thickest drifts of stars in the arm, and the blobby amoeba shape bore little or no relationship to the shape of the Federation as he understood it for the same period.

“Go forward ten years,” Picard said. The blob increased its volume, protuberances jutting out irregularly over its whole surface. The space involved was about 10 percent bigger.

“Go forward ten years more.” Another increase, this time slightly bigger, again reaching along the galactic arm, outward toward the sparser stars, two-thirds of the way out toward the rim.

“Continue in ten-year increments until the present.”

The image on the screen became a nested set of glowing amorphous shapes. Each time, the percentage of expansion grew larger and larger. The last ten years’ expansion was the largest of all, including in its area of growth an area equal to nearly the entire size of the Empire eighty years before.

But there was a problem. The Sagittarius Arm, the arm of the Galaxy in which Earth and, in his own universe, the Federation and the Klingon and Romulan empires and all other known species lay, was not directly connected to the Galactic core by anything but gravity. As other arms of the Galaxy had done in the past, it had been “sprayed” off the main mass of the curving, churning greater arm, like a droplet flung away from the main stream of a fall of water. The arm would later meld back into the main stream of the Galactic whirlpool again, or bisect and the pieces meld with other adjoining arms, but this would take hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years.

For now, the Sag Arm was discrete. Its size was so great that, in terms of the life span of most sentient species, it could make little difference whether it was connected to anything or not. The two time scales involved were too disparate. For federations and empires concerned with expansion on a modest scale, the problem didn’t really arise.

But