Intellivore - Diane Duane [40]
Picard shook himself out of his reverie and continued. “After absorbing the information Mr. Data turned up last night, I kept feeling as if the idea of moving planets was familiar somehow. I went through all the scientific records and couldn’t find anything germane.”
“So you looked into the folklore instead,” Pickup said, with an expression that suggested she would be hitting herself repeatedly in the head if she were in private.
“There are three citations in the Thompson index,” Picard said. “And two out of the three are native to this general area of space.”
He gestured at the screen again. “That first citation is from a source on Twenty-nine Persei VI and dates back about a hundred years. It’s a very brief reference to a story about a space traveler from an alien species—it doesn’t say which one—who simply reports having landed on a planet that then started to move out of the system in which it was located. The alien then fell into a coma and died.”
At that Dr. Crusher, who had been sitting quietly at one end of the conference table, glanced up but said nothing. “One commentator in the Chrestomathie,” Picard said, “cross-referencing to this motif, remarked on the similarity of this story to some old medieval tales from Earth, about sailors who accidentally land on a whale, mistaking it for an island. The whale then dives, either killing the sailors or leaving them in the water and very confused.”
“I just bet,” Riker said under his breath. “
The third citation,” Picard said, “tells of a moving planet full of ‘evildoers’ which was destroyed—though the word used is killed—by the Organians.”
Ileen raised her eyebrows and whistled softly. “There’s a weird one,” she said. “Talk about ancient history. When’s the last time we heard anything from them?”
“Quite a while back,” Picard said. “We seem to have been left to get on with our business after their old prophecy came true, that one day we and the Klingons would be working together.”
“So,” Captain Maisel said, “the archetype, if that’s what it is, has been heard of. Fine. But there are other things disturbing me. I keep hearing that guy’s voice saying, ‘Don’t take my life, don’t take it.’ ” She shook her head. “It gives me the creeps.”
She was not alone: that voice had been haunting Picard last night as well. He leaned back to look out the conference room windows at the stars sliding by outside. “There,” he said, “is exactly where the second citation comes in. Another piece of the puzzle … and maybe with everything else now on the table, it makes sense. I checked that citation very carefully last night. It comes from One Twenty-three Trianguli Three-A and Three-B—”
Clif looked at him. “The Romulan homeworlds?”
Picard nodded. “You do hear a lot of strange stories in a career in space,” he said softly. “Way back in the Stargazer days, I heard this one in a bar after a meeting of an archaelogists’ conference. It was very odd, so odd I made a note of it. Then, later, I found it more or less duplicated in a citation in the Motif-Index.”
He turned back to the table again, folding his hands and studying them. “A lot of Romulan clans,” he said, “have stories going back to the time when their parent species left Vulcan, or purporting to go that far back, anyway. This story says the ancestors of the Romulans left Vulcan in a fleet of seven pre-luminal ‘generation’ ships, having identified the One Twenty-three Tri system as a possible candidate for settlement along with several others. Their first couple of planetfalls turned out to be unsuitable for some reason or other, and they kept on going.