Star Trek - NF - 12 - Being Human Read online

  "You're saying she didn't take it well," said Soleta.

  "That's putting it mildly. But I survived! And I joined Starfleet, and I made friends, or at least thought I did! But the suspicion, especially from you, Zak... investi-gating me..."

  "I was right to do so," Kebron said stiffly. "There were x-factors in your past... the fact that we found ourselves under assault by this 'goddess'..."

  "I had no control over mat!"

  "You were the cause of it."

  "Zak," spoke up Soleta, "let it go."

  He looked down at her. "He-"

  "Zak... for me... let it go. There's nothing to be done about it now. And we need to be together on this." Soleta looked from one to the other. "Correct? To-gether?"

  Kebron and McHenry stared at each other for a long

  moment. Nothing was said, until the silence was broken by

  McHenry saying, "Lift, resume course."

  "You two are impossible," said Soleta as the turbolift continued on its way. "Mark... look... if you really want to be of help... I'm still having trouble analyzing the energy emissions from this sector. They still defy analysis. I am proceeding on the assumption that your

  god friends are responsible, but the specific technical

  parameters... I'm still having difficulty with them. If you could ask-"

  "My god friends? Soleta... they're not my friends. They are the bane of my existence, all right?"

  "I... apologize."

  "Never mind," he said, rolling his eyes. "I'll see what I can do."

  Moments later, it had reached McHenry's destina-tion on deck seven, and he stepped off. The last thing he saw was the suspicious way in which Kebron was watching him.

  The moment McHenry was gone from sight, Soleta said with thinly veiled annoyance, "That could have gone better. Happenstance places the three of us to-gether in a turbolift, and we wind up sending off McHenry angrier than he was before. He needed us, Zak. He needed his friends." "He has new friends."

  The turbolift slid to a halt. The doors opened and Soleta started to walk out... but she paused in the door, turned to Kebron, and said, "Tell me, Zak... if someone isn't en-tirely forthcoming about themselves... if they're some-thing other than people think they are... does that automatically make them a threat to the ship? For in-stance... if I were other than I appeared to be... then I would be a threat?" "But you're not," he said. "But if I were-?"

  He stared at her for a long moment. "Are you saying you are?"

  "I'm not saying anything, Zak," she said evenly. "It

  would be nice if I could say anything. That is, after all, what friends are able to do with one another. Perhaps you should start investigating me, just to be sure."

  She stepped back and allowed the doors to close, leaving Kebron alone.

  He stood there in the center of the lift as it sped down to the security work out room, where he was originally heading. As it did so, he tapped his combadge. "Kebron, requesting direct link to computer."

  "Working," came the computer's voice.

  "Access personal log, Lieutenant Zak Kebron."

  "Accessed."

  "Memo to self," he said neutrally. "Investigate Soleta."

  ii.

  Mark McHenry was wondering how things could possi-bly get any worse when he walked into his quar-ters... only to see Artemis standing there.

  She had one hand on her hip, the other upraised. Her cape was hanging off one shoulder. Otherwise, she was naked. The curves of her body, her breasts, all of it was exactly as he remembered from years gone by. And his reaction was also just as he remembered from the very first time she'd appeared to him that way: barely re-strained panic.

  "Remember when men carved statues of me appear-ing this way?" she asked.

  Quickly he crossed to his bed, yanked the covers off, and tossed them around her shoulders. She didn't seem

  to pay any attention as he did so, speaking as much to herself as to him. "They would linger over every detail," she said wistfully. "Every sinew, every line. They would treat it lovingly, attending to it as if their lives depended upon getting everything exactly right..."

  "Yes, those were the days," he said, and then moaned as the cover slipped off her to the floor. So he got his bathrobe from the closet and drew that around her. She seemed more amused than anything else over his at-tempts to cover her nakedness. "Artemis, what are you doing here?"

  "I am here to seduce you," she said matter-of-factly. "Am I succeeding?"

  "You shouldn't be here. If there's things you want to discuss, you should be discussing them with Captain Calhoun..."

  She made a dismissive gesture. "That one? He is so... dull! So pompous, so serious... and scheming, always scheming. I can tell. Zeus was like that some-times."

  "Was? He's not around anymore?"

  She didn't bother to clarify what she'd just said. In-stead she drew the robe more tightly around herself. It accentuated the lines of her body that much more. Quickly trying to keep his mind off her body, he said, "Uhm... Soleta... our science officer. She's trying to analyze this section of space and having no luck."

  "I have very little interest in such matters," she said, looking utterly bored. "If you wish, I will ask Thoth to speak to her." And before he could pursue that offhand comment, she looked at him with a tinge of sadness. "I

  will be honest with you, Marcus. In, some ways... you seem unhappy to see me."

  "Only 'some' ways? Artemis-"

  "You know... you were so adorable in the days when you called me 'Missy.' "

  "Yes, I remember those days," he said sharply. "They were the days when you drove my father out of the house and out of my life."

  She looked at him for a long moment, as if trying to decide whether she should say what was on her mind. Finally, very softly, she told him, "He would have left anyway, Marcus. Eventually. He was unhappy. He had a wandering soul... much like yours, truth to tell. You, however, managed to channel it into positive and useful

  directions."

  "Have I?" he asked sourly. He leaned against the wall, hanging his head. "I've been doing some reading... on your brother. On the earlier known encounter with him. You seem much more powerful than he was."

  "I am," she said simply. "As are the others."

  "Why is that?"

  She tilted her head, regarded him with an expression both curious and amused. "Why do you care?"

  He took a deep breath. Lying wasn't his strong suit. He knew he was walking a fine line: trying to determine the things that the captain needed to know, without wanting to seem too labored in his inquisitiveness. "You go and tell the captain you want me to be your 'interme-diary.' Your representative. Well, representatives get asked questions. Lots of them. If there's things I don't understand, then there's gonna be things that other peo-

  ple don't understand. And if I can't come up with res-sonable answers, then people will figure that I'm either ignorant, or that I'm hiding something. Neither attitude is going to do any good."

  She considered that for a long moment. As she did, he found his gaze drawn to her. Damn, she was attractive. He had always been able to perceive her, even as a young boy, even when she was invisible to others. But the full, soul-aching beauty of her... that was something he'd only been able to appreciate when he'd gotten older. There had been a time when the merest thought of her was enough to cause him to tremble with desire right down to his very core. He had thought that time was long gone, but now he was wondering just how wrong he might have been.

  "He... stopped believing," she said finally.

  McHenry couldn't help but feel that was an odd thing to say. "Believing... in what?"

  "In himself. In us. He isolated himself from us, Mar-cus. You see... collectively, we are able to draw energy from... well... each other," she smiled. "We have an endless capacity for doing so. As a result, we know no boundaries, have no limits in what we can accomplish. When Apollo wrapped himself in his depression, he ef-fectively cut himself off from
the rest of us. Severed himself from the energies that we provide one another, that we can uniformly generate. So he sought... alter-native means of energy. Fashioned a sort of... of 'bat-tery,' I suppose you would call it. Once that was destroyed, however, he was utterly vulnerable. Indeed, he could barely hold himself together at all at that point. He simply lacked... the..."

  She stopped, looked down. And McHenry, to his as-tonishment, saw the slightest bit of moistening in her eyes. "Artemis... ?"

  Artemis seemed annoyed at herself, and determinedly wiped the wetness from her eyes. "He was my brother, Marcus. As... as foolish as I sometimes considered him to be, he was my brother, and I do miss him. You'll forgive me if I choose not to dwell on this any further. It is... upsetting to me." She cleared her throat. "Have I satisfied your curiosity in this matter?"

  "In this, yes. But there are others..."

  "Oh!" she said in loud frustration. She wasn't so much walking around McHenry's cabin so much as she was stalking it. McHenry took a few steps back, trying to stay out of her way. He'd never felt his quarters were es-pecially small before, but they certainly seemed cramped now. "This is absurd! Marcus, I was standing naked here, waiting for you. Men have lost their lives simply for getting a fleeting glimpse of that divine nakedness which you drank in in full measure. And all you wish to do is talk! You were more man when you were a boy!"

  "When I was a boy I didn't know enough to ques-tion," McHenry replied. "Being a man means thinking with something other than your... impulses. Gods are supposed to be omniscient, so I'd think that you shouldn't have trouble understanding that."

  "Very well," she said, draping herself over a chair. She extended one perfectly toned leg from beneath the robe. "What else do you wish to know?"

  Feeling that it would probably better suit the mood- her mood, especially-McHenry went down on one

  knee in front of her. He did so in a casual manner, but to a "goddess" he would come across as a supplicant, and she would probably find that attitude of his quite prefer-able. "This whole golden age you keep talking about. What is it, exactly? You've been so vague..."

  "Ah." She seemed to perk up, preferring this line of in-quiry. "That, my dear Marcus, is indeed a very legitimate question. To be honest, it is something of an oversight on my part that I did not make that clear in our previous meet-ing. Perhaps the attitude of your captain distracted me. He is not what I would consider a very receptive individual."

  "He's better when you get to know him... and when you're not trying to kill him."

  She nodded in a distracted manner. "Hmm. I sup-pose so."

  "So... the golden age..."

  "Yes, yes." She brought her other leg down. The robe opened slightly and McHenry quietly rearranged it so that he would be able to keep his mind on the matter at hand. "May I assume, Marcus, that you have heard of... ambrosia?"

  "That's..." He paused, remembering. "That's... the 'food of the gods,' right?"

  "Correct," she said.

  "Isn't that supposed to be the stuff that gives you im-mortality?"

  Artemis laughed lightly. "According to myths, yes As you know, not all myths are literally accurate... but on the other hand, many of them have some basis in fact. This happens to be one of the latter. We are virtu-ally immortal by our nature, my dear Marcus. But all

  things tend to wear out, break down over time. Nothing is immune from entropy... not even the Beings. Am-brosia is a... a vitamin, if you will, that we have devel-oped. There is nothing magical about it. The ingredients can be found in nature, or synthesized by your own de-vices. It is our desire to give ambrosia... to you."

  "To me?"

  "To humanity. To mortals. To your Federation," she said, her voice crackling with excitement, her eyes wide as if she could see a mental image of herself and her fel-low "gods," moving from person to person and handing out this key to immortality. "Ambrosia will not affect you in precisely the same way it does us. Nevertheless, the impact it will have on your way of life will be noth-

  ing short of epoch-making. It will bring people to full wealth, slow down the aging process so that they'll prac-tically live forever. Not only that, but it will expand their mental capabilities, make them achieve things that previ-ously they would not have thought possible to achieve."

  He stared at her, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. "You're serious about this."

  "Why would I not be?"

  "But... aren't there potential dangers? This stuff..."

  "There will be no dangers. There will be nothing hid- den." She shrugged. "We have no need to hide anything."

  "Yeah, I know, I saw that when I first walked into my

  quarters."

  Her laughter at that was soft and musical. "Very

  amusing, Marcus, and I suppose I had that coming." Then the laughter faded and she took on a very serious attitude. "The reason we would be hiding nothing, in

  terms of the composition of ambrosia, is that we would be working in tandem with your Federation and its tech-nology to mass-produce ambrosia. So your people would be privy as to what went into it. Again, nothing would be hidden."

  "I just... I'm having a bit of trouble believing that you're going to be that open about it all," McHenry told her. "I mean, let's face it, you folks do have this habit of moving in mysterious ways. Hiding out in Olympus, let-ting humans twenty-five hundred years ago believe that you were gods when you... well, you're more than human, but..."

  "Less than divine?" She shook her head, looking nos-talgic. "When your people were youthful, ignorant of the true nature of the universe, we could not be candid with them as to our nature for the simple reason that they never would have been able to comprehend it. I mean, after all," and once more came that musical laugh, "when we first encountered your ancestors, they were under the impression that the Earth was the center of the universe! That the sun, the stars, everything, re-volved around them! A more egocentric bunch you could not possibly imagine! So how could we explain to them about life on other worlds? How could we dis-abuse them of the firmly held belief that everything radi-ated from, or related to, the little dirtball they called Earth? No, Marcus, every aspect of our interaction with them had to be simplified to the point that they could un-derstand it.

  "But now... now, Marcus, your species has grown up. You can better comprehend us, just as a child, grown

  to adulthood, can better understand the nature and

  thinking of his parents."

  Something, however, was still not falling together for McHenry. He still felt as if there was a piece missing. "And... what do you get out of it? The Beings?"

  "The same thing that we did in our first interaction with you," she said matter-of-factly, as if it should be the most obvious thing in the world. "The appreciation of a

  grateful people."

  Now McHenry felt he was close to something. "Ap-preciation in what sense?"

  "The usual sense. Appreciation. Gratitude. Regular recognition and acknowledgment..."

  And McHenry suddenly started to laugh, very loudly and very boisterously.

  Artemis' face clouded a bit. Clearly she was not thrilled with McHenry's reaction. "What is so amusing, Marcus?" she said stiffly.

  He managed to stop laughing long enough to say, "You... you want to be worshipped! Just like your brother! I don't believe it!"

  "Don't be absurd."

  "You do!"

  She drew her legs up, tucking her feet under herself, al-most making her look as if she was withdrawing into a protective mode. "Apollo wanted to turn back the hands of tune," she admitted. "He wanted to overlook a millennium of human achievement He thought that the crew of the Enterprise would set aside its personal goals in exchange for a simple, bucolic life of raising sheep, playing pipes, and worshipping him. He was... unrealistic. We, on the

  Pefer David

  other hand, are not endeavoring to suppress your goals. In-stead we want to help you achieve them by making you as close to divine as can reasonably be
done. In exchange, we are asking only that you revere us, bless our names, thank us daily for the incredible boon that we have given you. For Hera's sake, Marcus," she said impatiently, "we're not asking you to go out and sacrifice goats in our name. To be honest, we never wanted that, even back in the days when that was being done. It always seemed a tragic waste of a perfectly good goat. Now if you feel compelled to equate gratitude with worship, then you are of course free to do so. Tell them we wish to be worshipped, if you think they will comprehend that more readily."

  "I think there's going to be serious problems no matter which way we go with this," McHenry said. "I can tell you right now that most races will not accept this offer on faith. They will need to understand what's in it for you."