Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [23]
The Dooglasse speaker nodded. “Yes, perhaps on the world below. We may explore together?”
“We will hail you again in a short time,” Picard said, knowing that he needed some discussion with his officers. He found himself liking the Dooglasse speaker on the screen, and it was difficult for him to believe that this life form might be one of the unchanged ancestors of the Borg. Again, the coming destruction of the sphere elicited pity in him for the races that would perish—races that no one would ever know had perished.
Q, he recalled, had once warned humanity that the universe was not for the timid, for it came with no guarantee that it would always be fair. A few years earlier in Q and Horta years, the Book of Job had warned humanity that the universe was not for the timid, for it came with no guarantee that it would ever make sense.
He raised his hand in farewell and the screen blanked; and he reminded himself again: Where there is life, there is hope—not as something that followed inevitably from the mere fact of life, but strongly from life’s refusal to “go gently into that good night,” as the poet said. It just wouldn’t go, wherever it could. In whatever way possible it filled the niches of nature, lit up with intelligent self-awareness, and reached out to create its own niches. Life prevailed.
“As we Horta have learned,” Captain Dalen said in the Darwin’s small conference pit, “the prevalence of genetically compatible humanoid life in the galaxy—at least in our experience of it so far—is strong evidence that indeed one ancestral race arose, then dispersed, leaving countless colonies and centers of intelligent life behind in various solar systems …”
The face of Data appeared on Dalen’s screen. “Perhaps it was that very dispersal,” Data said over the link, “that precipitated the decline. Vulcan, Klingon, human—their cultures all seem to have cultivated an amnesia about their common origin.”
“Except perhaps for a hint, here and there, in ancient religious texts,” said Captain Dalen. She was about to say something else, but instead she cut the thought short, shifted her weight on the floor, and gazed at Captain Picard, who was seated on a cushion across from her. The Horta had no need of chairs or saddles for themselves in this conference room, but Picard and his two humanoid officers looked comfortable enough on their cushions. Conference screens jutted out from the floor in front of all of them. Troi, the female humanoid, leaned toward her small screen.
The captain of the Enterprise looked at the Horta strangely, as if he were about to shiver. He gave the image of .the android on his own conference screen the same look.
“Maybe we should not think of it as a decline,” Picard said. “Perhaps they thought it best to spread themselves thinly, to insure a long-term run of diversity. One might see that the peoples of the Sphere are also spread thin, in a smaller but not as beneficial version of our humanoid galactic Diaspora.”
“Or,” Riker said from the bridge of the Enterprise, “maybe the galactic dispersal was an attempt to flee something, an old enemy. It may be that this Sphere is the first and last of its kind, coming into existence right at the time of a dispersal of races, perhaps even precipitating it.”
Above the conference pit, a viewscreen showed the neutron star, wrapped in slowed time. It was so massive that a teaspoon of it outweighed the Darwin and the Enterprise put together, yet it was wider than most starships, and, as it spun at thousands of revolutions per second, it appeared to drag little frames of time and space after itself with the same ease that tornadoes swept up pebbles and grass.
Captain Dalen had learned that all humanoid species, at some point in their history, had come to believe in a Great Father, or a Great Mother, who had created the universe and watched over it. She had come to regard this as a quirk unique to warm blooded, placenta! species; but as she watched the screen, she observed that on opposite sides