The Red King - Michael A. Martin [131]
“Dismissed, Mr. Tuvok,” Riker said, smiling.
“Thank you, sir. All of you,” Tuvok said, then turned and exited the ready room.
As the ready room doors hissed closed on Tuvok’s retreating back, Riker realized he had finally, at long last, found that elusive perfect epigram for Titan’s bridge dedication plaque.
Chapter Twenty-two
AULD AERTH, STARDATE 57071.0
Frane shivered under a fog-obscured late-afternoon sun that supplied distressingly little heat. He looked out across the blue-green bay toward a series of large rocks, upon which several large, wet, black creatures made an apparently vain effort to sun themselves; some of them made strange barking noises as they turned their broad bellies toward the waning rays. Above them, white-winged birds circled lazily in the sky, screeching and chattering.
The sight was unlike any he had ever seen before, and yet somehow exactly as he had imagined it would be. He felt the cool soil—so different in texture from the gritty, volcanic sands of Oghen or any of the other old M’jallanish worlds—beneath the toes of his bare feet. The vegetation was green here, rather than bluish, though he had seen some flowering plants that looked almost exactly like the sweet-smelling portangeas of home.
“So what do you think of this place?”
Frane turned, reminded by the voice that he was not alone, and that this was not merely some dream of Auld Aerth. He saw the large, gray-haired man walking toward him through the manicured grass, his shoulder-length locks set into gentle motion by the light breeze. Now that he had taken the time to get to know Admiral Leonard James Akaar, he didn’t find him nearly so intimidating as he had initially.
“It’s…cold,” Frane said, shivering again. He drew his simple penitent’s robe even more tightly about himself, though it did little to keep out the chill.
Akaar laughed, a deep, rhythmic sound that wouldn’t have been out of place in an Neyel space vessel’s Efti’el compartment. “You might be surprised how common that complaint is. According to local legend, an ancient human writer once said that the coldest winter he ever experienced occurred here during summertime. Welcome to San Francisco.”
Frane recalled what he had been told all his life about the progression of Auld Aerth’s seasons; it was currently the dead of the ancestral homeworld’s northern winter, a month and several days past the solstice.
“Regardless of the weather, Admiral, this world is truly beyond my imaginings,” Frane said to Akaar. He pointed out to the sea.
“I hope you and your people will get to know it well,” Akaar said. “After all, it is more your birthright than mine.”
Frane nodded, though this was a difficult concept for him to get his mind around. Being Neyel, Frane was genetically human, though his people resembled no terrestrial racial group owing to their many genengineered traits. Akaar, however, hailed from an entirely different world and heritage, despite his almost completely standard human appearance.
Frane’s eyes were drawn back across the bay, to the strange, intermittently barking animals. “What are those noisy black things?” he said, pointing toward the rocks with the spade-shaped tip of his tail.
Akaar peered across the water and smiled. “Seals. They like to sun themselves out there.”
Frane didn’t understand. “But I saw them go below the water. They breathe both water and air?”
“They are marine mammals. I sometimes regard them as a kind of compromise between people and fish. In fact, according to some very old Earth legends, there used to be creatures known as mermaids that were half-woman and half-fish. When sailors observed the seals at a distance, they sometimes mistook them for mermaids.”
Frane pulled his loose-fitting sleeve up and looked at the bracelet that had been handed down through nine Neyel generations, all the way down from the sainted Aidan Burgess to him through his multigreat grandmatron Vil’ja. He finally located one particular small metal charm.
He held it up so that the admiral could see it.