It took only seconds for the tricorder to lock on to clean water within a short distance of the tree line. Xiong walked the jungle’s perimeter until he found a less heavily overgrown area that he could penetrate. Under the intense glow of moonlight, the jungle forest was a study in contrast—a chiaroscuro of shimmering leaves and vines over a deep background of blackness. The coordinates on his tricorder led him to a thick vine; the readings indicated that clean water was inside. He slung his tricorder at his side, grabbed the vine with both hands, and snapped it open. Warm, clear water spilled over his hands, and he lifted the vine to his mouth and drank. A faintly sugary taste lingered after he had finished. Another scan with the tricorder confirmed that the plant was rich in sucrose. Good to know, he thought with a smile. If I’m stuck here long enough, maybe I’ll make syrup.
Now that he had learned where to get clean water, his only serious remaining challenge was finding something to eat. He changed the tricorder’s settings and began looking for anything that resembled fruits, vegetables, fungi, or animals. After several minutes he became convinced that he had set the device incorrectly—because nothing other than simple green plants, molds, and bacteria registered on its sensors.
“That can’t be right,” he mumbled as he verified that the tricorder’s settings were as they should be. Everything about the device checked out. He ran the scan again, searching the jungle, the beach, and the ocean…and he found nothing. No land-based animal forms. No birds, no fish, no insects—nothing that registered as an animal life-form of any kind. More distressing, there were flowering plants but no sign of any bearing fruit or vegetables.
“Well,” he said to his tricorder, “that limits my menu, doesn’t it? Guess I’d better get used to eating green salads.”
Xiong had visited young M-class planets before; he knew that some worlds, early in their development, boasted vegetation long in advance of animals. Why would such a primitive planet be so important to the Shedai? he wondered. Why would they go to such lengths to defend a star system whose only habitable planet has no higher-order life-forms? He shook his head and prepared a more encompassing scan. I’ve got to be missing something here.
On a hunch, he ran a full-spectrum search for traces of the Taurus meta-genome and any recognizable sequence from the Shedai carrier wave. Seconds after he started the scan, his tricorder’s display flooded with data. It had detected an enormously complex and powerful energy signature that contained patterns that he realized matched each of the known samples of the meta-genome; it used the carrier wave as a repeating pattern and seemed to come from every direction and everything that he scanned.
It’s everywhere, he realized. Every plant…the air…the water…the rocks. This pattern’s in every bit of matter on the planet. He made a few adjustments and directed the tricorder’s sensors toward the moon overhead, to analyze its reflected light. It’s even coming from the star itself.
Xiong had no idea what the pattern was, but he knew that it had to be studied. He wondered how much of it he could record on the tricorder’s memory disks. If I dump all its stored data and overwrite my logs about the Tholian ship, I might be able to document a fraction of what I’m reading here.
He wiped the nonessential data from his tricorder and started making a record of the waveform, which he decided to name the Jinoteur Pattern. I’ll probably come home with less than one-tenth of it, he knew, but that’ll be a hundred times more than what we had yesterday.
Shocked by the Apostate’s account of his exile, Theriault asked, “They banished you? For disagreeing with them?”
“Their voices are many, and ours are few,” he said. The Apostate had come ashore much diminished in stature, though he was still a few meters taller than Theriault. Reduced to a less titanic scale, he nonetheless remained impressive. Wrapped in flowing raiment of colored light, he hovered more than a meter above the ground, and his voice continued to resonate and tremble the ground.
She seized upon his choice of words, which she understood implicitly that he had learned from her mind while she had slept in his healing care. “Ours? Others feel as you do?”
“My partisans,” he said. “Standing against more than twice their number, they are only barely outmatched. But we are the victims of a conspiracy of numbers…a tyranny of the majority. In this manner our people have succumbed to stagnation.” A sweep of his hand peppered the air above the pond with countless incandescent, stationary motes of light. “Ten thousand star systems we governed. Trillions of lives did we direct.” He declared with majestic pride, “This was the Shedai.”
The young science officer gazed upon the impromptu star map with wonder and curiosity. Until today, she had thought that the Federation, with more than one hundred star systems counted as members, was a massive astropolitical entity. Ten thousand star systems, she marveled. It would have constituted a sphere of control greater than all the known Alpha Quadrant and Beta Quadrant political entities combined.
“How could you govern something so vast?” she asked. “The travel times across those distances must have been incredible.”
With the flick of one spectral digit against a mote of light, the Apostate made the glowing speck flare—and at the exact same moment, another mote at the far side of the pond flashed in unison. “Our voice is instantaneous,” he said. He flicked the same mote again, and a different counterpart in a far-removed corner of the cavern pulsed in sympathy. “Our will is done regardless of distance. Form is an illusion; our power resides in our word, and our word is given by our voice.”
Theriault was awestruck. “You’re capable of instant teleportation across distances that great?”
“Only our voice,” said the Apostate. “Only our will. Forms are transitory. We leave them behind.”
Sensing that this was an important detail to clarify, she asked, “You shed your bodies?”
“The subtle body is freed from the crude prison of the corporeal,” the Apostate said—and, as if to underscore his point, his glimmer faded, and his humanoid figure evaporated. Before she could ask if he was still there, a warm billow of air passed by her, and another humanoid figure made of plasticized water ascended from the pond. “Physical forms are shells,” said the Apostate’s liquid avatar, “to be used as needed and then set aside.” His body of water bubbled furiously and erupted into a cloud of mist, which then reassembled itself into the radiant, looming figure it had been only moments before. “Matter exists to serve the will.”
She began to understand. “So…when you move to another world, you let go of whatever body you’re in, and you transmit yourself—just your consciousness.”
“Yes,” the Apostate said in a rare moment of brevity.
“How?”
He turned his gaze upward, toward the opening in the cavern ceiling, then looked back at Theriault. “I will show you.” As he drifted away in a straight path above the pond, a narrow bridge of stone appeared from the water beneath him. “Follow me.”
Theriault cautiously traversed the stone bridge until it reached the center of the pond, directly beneath the opening high overhead. There the bridge ended at a broad circular platform. As soon as she stepped upon it, the bridge behind her sank back under the water. Above her, the Apostate glowed like burnished bronze in sunlight. Transfixed by his beauty, it took Theriault a few seconds to realize that the ceiling of the cavern appeared to be growing closer. Then she looked down and discovered that she was being lifted on a swiftly rising pillar of stone, whose ascent was as gentle as that of an inertia-dampened turbolift. Looking back up at the Apostate, she asked, “You can control this place?”