Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [72]
He knew the sound of his own hopelessness and ignored it. “I am troubled,” he said to Hwiii. “My commanding officer and two of my shipmates are absent in circumstances of extreme danger. And I’m particularly close to all those people.”
“But especially to one of them.”
“Gossip gets around, doesn’t it?” Riker said softly.
Hwiii swung his tail. “Observation is enough, Commander. Circumstances like these can be extremely painful. I honor your commitment.”
“You mean my bloody-mindedness,” Riker said softly, “to suggest that she—that I send my shipmates into a situation like this.”
Hwiii settled a little toward the desk, put a forefin out, and studied it thoughtfully for a moment.
“Intervene,” Riker said. “It’s an odd word.”
Hwiii blew a bubble of laughter. “Many of the aquatic peoples’ viewpoints tend to be … a little on the passive side, by human reckoning. Thought and discussion are usually considered superior to action, in our cultures. To do almost anything but eat, sleep, and sing is considered in some quarters to be “intervention in the business of the universe.”“
“Which is expected to manage it by itself, I take it.”
“Through our lives, yes. … The evening you came and shouted that dreadful word at me, I was singing. Mr. Data correctly identified the source.”
“The Song of the Twelve.”
“Yes. It’s hard to explain to someone not aquatically acculturated. We aren’t a great people for ceremonial, but some ceremonies we do enact at more or less regular intervals, or when circumstances seem to require it. The Song is one of those. It’s not so much a reenactment— though it does describe something that happened a long time ago—but a pro-enactment, you might call it. You can never tell quite how it’s going to end, even though there are general guidelines.”
“Is it a religious ceremony?” Riker said cautiously.
Hwiii looked thoughtful. “Well, it would be hard for me to say: I’m no expert in human religions, but—don’t they usually involve belief, and belief systems?”
“Often.”
Hwiii glanced at the chair on his side of the desk. “Well. Do you believe in that chair?”
Riker blinked. “I don’t know if it would make a difference if I did or not. The chair’s there.”
“That’s right,” Hwiii said very cheerfully. “It’s like that. Anyway, there are twelve parts to the Song—well, thirteen, actually, one part is more or less virtual. Some of them are potentially fatal.”
“There must not be a lot of demand for them, then,” Riker said, wondering what this was leading to.
“Oh, no, on the contrary, people fight for the right to sing them. Fatality isn’t always certain. There are always people who like to take that kind of risk, for the glory of it or the honor, or other personal reasons.” Hwiii shrugged. “Anyway, I had a partner who thought she might sing one of those parts.”
“One of the fatal ones.”
“Oh, yes. And she came to me for advice about it finally. I wasn’t quite sure what to say. It’s worse because I’m considered something of an adviser—because I do all this work with Starfleet, and a lot of work with humans.” Hwiii blew a small sound of bemusement. “Bear in mind, there are quite a lot of our people who don’t feel that we should have more to do with humans than we can help. Because of what you did to your cetaceans. To our cousins, as it were. Other alien races are another story, but some of us prefer to dwell on that old bad history. Now, my feeling personally is that you can’t live in the past forever, or you don’t get much living done—except dead people’s lives, and even they’re done with theirs. But all the