Kahless - Michael Jan Friedman [0]
This story takes place in the eighth year of Jean-Luc Picard’s command of the EnterpriseD-after the events chronicled in All Good Things … and prior to those described in Star Trek Generations.
Michael Jan Friedman Port Washington, New York February 1996
PROLOGUE
In ancient times, there was a road here.
But that was more than a thousand years ago, long after the end of the so-called heroic age. The rolling terrain had long since been claimed by flowering brush and snaking vines and a dense forest of gray-and-yellow-streaked micayah trees.
Which made it all the more difficult to excavate, thought Olahg, as he watched a half-dozen workmen finish clearing a stand of micayah with their hand tools.
They could have used disruptors, but this forest was prized by those Klingons who lived in the vicinity, and it wouldn’t be a good idea to cut down any more of it than they absolutely had to.
The clerics of Boreth, of whom Olahg counted himself a member, had plied the High Council for years to obtain permission to dig here. If they hoped to excavate other sacred sites, other locations where Emperor Kahless had walked, it was critical that they treat this place with respect.
By the time the work crew was done with Olahg’s appointed, twelve-meter-square plot, the micayah were gone. So were the mosses and shrubs and flowering plants that had grown in the spaces between them. All that was left was the pungent smell of micayah sap, unraveling in the wakening breeze to the shrill protest of distant treehens.
The foreman of the crew stood up straight. Turning to Olahg, he grinned through his sweat and his long black beard. A Klingon’s Klingon, he had a brow heavy with thick hornlike ridges.
“How’s that, Brother? Clean enough for you? Or shall I cut the rest away with a dagger?”
The initiate swallowed, dismayed by the foreman’s gravelly voice and broad shoulders. “It is clean enough,” he confirmed, and watched the crew move to the next designated section, where another cleric awaited them.
Olahg sighed. He had never been one for confrontation.
Nor was he built for it, with his skinny limbs and his slight, fragile frame.
Certainly, that quality had not made his life easy. It had caused him to fall from favor with his father rather early in his youth, and all but ensured him a desk job in some deadly-dull Klingon bureaucracy.
Then, several months ago, Olahg had heard the Call.
He had hearkened to the small, insistent voice within, which had urged him toward the teachings of the legendary emperor Kahless.
It was the Call that had brought him to the planet Boreth and its shadowy mountain monastery, and placed him in the company of the other clerics. And it was the Call that had convinced him to spurn worldly things, embracing a life of pious contemplation instead.
Olahg had fully expected to spend the remainder of his worldly existence that way-sitting around a smoking firepit with his brethren, seeking visions in the scented fumes. He had grown comfortable with the prospect. He had even convinced himself that he was happy.
However, only a few weeks after his arrival on Boreth, the wisdom of Kahless began to lose its appeal. Or perhaps not the wisdom itself, but the rather austere way in which it was handed down to Kahless’s disciples.
He came to long for a more personal relationship with the object of his admiration. He yearned for an audience with the great, glorious Kahless himself-or, failing that, the being made from Kahless’s genetic material who had been named the Empire’s ceremonial emperor a few years earlier.
But petition as he might, Olahg could not seem to win such an audience. He was told time and again that Emperor Kahless was too busy, that his duties kept him away from Boreth-though when that changed, he would surely visit the monastery.
When he could find the time.
Even though it was in that monastery that the clone had been created. Even though it was the community of clerics on Boreth to whom the emperor owed his very existence.
The idea was a festering wound in Olahg’s soul. He