String Theory_ Fusion (Book 2) - Kirsten Beyer [83]
In her mind, Janeway saw herself examining the speck. As she did so, she found herself standing right in front of the speck. Reaching out, she grasped it in her hand and began to turn it one way and another, hoping to see some hint of what Phoebe was suggesting. Janeway visualized all 246 of the elements known to Federation scientists and imagined that they were contained within the palm of her hand. She saw their atomic structure. She had committed them to memory years ago and knew them the way a child of seven knew their multiplication tables.
“Closer,” Phoebe demanded, and somehow Janeway knew that in this place even her thoughts were not her own.
She forced herself to see the atoms of the elements contained in the palm of her hand, the protons and electrons circling the nuclei of the atoms. Tiny circles zoomed in their stable orbits in a timeless dance that came as close to perfection as Janeway could possibly imagine. But her mind rebelled at the thought of anything beyond this. Certainly there were smaller, subatomic particles, and even as she thought this, she saw them weaving among the identifiable pieces of the atoms before her.
“Closer,” Phoebe said again, and Janeway had to force herself not to send the atoms spinning in a fiery ball of anger toward her.
With a deep breath, she tried again, allowing the atoms to disintegrate until all she was holding was a ball of darkness. After a moment she said, “There’s nothing here.”
But just as the words escaped her lips a tiny wisp of light burst from her hand and began to dance all around her. She looked again at her palm and dozens of similar threads exploded forth, coiling and unraveling to join the first in its chaotic movement.
“What is this?” Janeway asked.
Phoebe smiled.
“The beginning,” she replied.
Tuvok knelt before the fire. The subject of his meditation was the Vulcan principle of the Kol-ut-shan. Roughly translated, it meant infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
As the flames jutted and peaked, he considered first their motion, and then the chemical reactions that permitted this motion. He then considered the life of the fire. He contemplated its existence in its potential forms; the wood that fueled it and the oxygen that sustained it.
He resisted the urge to reach his hand into the fire. He recognized the childish and illogical nature of the thought, but some part of him honestly believed that he could touch it without coming to harm. He heard the rustle of the robes of the Vulcan master who watched patiently behind him.
Tuvok knew this place. He was a young man in the Temple of Amonak. His father had brought him to the temple weeks earlier when he had confessed in a moment of weakness his desire to abandon logic and reason in favor of an emotional attachment to a young woman that all but consumed him.
The master was displeased. He knew Tuvok’s thoughts, sensed their disorganized and fragmented nature, and strained with the force of his own discipline to impose structure and rigidity upon his young charge’s mind. Tuvok felt the intense pressure weighing down upon him and took a deep breath, determined to begin again.
Infinite diversity…
The flames rose higher, their tempestuous motion a matter of calculable chemical conflagrations.
… in infinite combinations.
The pile of tinder beneath the fire was composed of shards of wood taken from dozens of different trees native to Vulcan. He separated each piece of wood in his mind, saw their source in a natural state, and examined the faint differences in the way they burned.
To understand the fire was to know the fire was to control the fire. His thoughts were like the pieces of wood that burned. They too could be separated, examined, and placed in a logical order. Logic and order were the gateway to the mastery of his passions,