String Theory_ Fusion (Book 2) - Kirsten Beyer [49]
The sadness of the spectacle he was witnessing was as overwhelming as it was inexplicable. The chaos of their movement shuddered through him, as the song began to lose its coherence. He could make out the shapes of those who had fallen. The others danced on, oblivious of the carnage.
Finally the truth hit him. This was not a dance. This was a battle. There were no directed-energy weapons. The forms he had earlier thought to be people did not actually possess arms or legs for punching or kicking. Nonetheless, the violent frenetic masses swarming the plain were obviously capable of inflicting mortal wounds upon one another. Their rage and hatred of one another was palpable.
“This was the beginning of the end,” a soft voice whispered beside him.
Turning, he saw a Monorhan male standing beside him on the ridge. Although he had never met him, Tuvok knew him in an instant. His name was Naviim.
“Are you the one who brought me here?” he asked.
Naviim’s dark gray eyes clouded over momentarily.
“In a way. You heard our call… sensed the urgency… but you would not have been capable of helping us.”
For the first time since the music had taken hold of his mind in sickbay, Tuvok found it relatively easy to focus. It seemed that his mind was, once again, his own.
“The music… is that the call you refer to?”
Naviim’s long jaw dropped slightly as the edges of his mouth crept upward and his ears flattened against his skull. Tuvok recognized the Monorhan smile.
“What you experienced as music contained much of our truth. Your mind interpreted the call in a way that brought order to the dissonance. There are mathematical properties to music that underpin some of our truth. You are fortunate that your exposure to complicated musical patterns gave you this context. Our telepathic gifts were different. When we came and the first of us were exposed to the gift, our sense of the emergence came not in sound, but overwhelming feelings of fear and danger.”
“Where am I?”
“Your body is on Gremadia. But you are no longer merely the sum total of your biological processes and simple matter. Your body is no longer relevant. What you are becoming… is all.”
“I do not understand,” Tuvok replied simply.
“Nor will you, for a time. But surely you sense that you are no longer what you once were?” Naviim asked.
Tuvok took a deep breath, bathing in the cool clear peace that the ability to separate thought from emotion gave him. Searching deeper, he was suddenly aware of the truth of Naviim’s words. He was no longer lonely… because although the music was gone, he was not alone. Blossoming within him was something new. He did not fear it, though its alien presence was faintly disconcerting. Instead, he considered it dispassionately, not as something that should not be there. But as a thing that in some impossible way… by taking the place of the music… completed him.
“You are Monorhan,” Tuvok observed. “Are you also on Gremadia?”
“I was, and am, though not as you see me now. I was the last taken. As such, it falls to me to welcome you to your new life. You see me now in the only form that your limited mind can still accept. It will not always be so.”
Tuvok was intensely curious. Yet somehow he grasped intuitively that the answers he would have of Naviim were already within him… that in time… he would know all. For the moment, he was content to allow the mystery to unfold.
“What is this place?” he finally asked.
“You are experiencing a memory of us. I have not visited this place in a very long time,” Naviim replied.
A split second later Tuvok felt a white-hot searing pain slice into his head.
Do not resist.
He heard the words clearly, though the largest portion of his mind denied their truth. That which caused pain must be resisted. Logic dictated that if there was something he could do to prevent this, he should. The instruction of the voice flew in the face of that logic. And