He replied, “I am this place. This world…is Shedai.”
The platform lifted her into the blinding rays of the sun. She lifted her arm to shield her eyes and squinted into the white glare…and then she saw it: a city. It was unlike anything she had ever seen before. Long swoops and towering curves defined the architecture. Delicate fluted causeways linked massive, organic-looking structures, like strings of wire uniting cathedral-sized conch shells. Shades of aquamarine and verdigris blended in epic swaths across the façades. Slow streamers of rainbow light danced through the spaces between structures, like earthbound auroras.
A lush valley surrounded the strangely biomechanoid pastel metropolis, and in the distance rolling hills and ragged cliffs bordered the valley. No fewer than six large rivers flowed toward the city, which straddled the valley’s grand basin. The sky was streaked with shredded clouds separated by slashes of hazy daylight stretching from the heavens to the jungle canopy.
“It’s beautiful,” Theriault said, in a voice that felt much too small to praise such a wonder.
A rippling image followed the Apostate’s hand as he swept it across the landscape before her. “Aeons ago, our Colloquium filled this valley. Our voice gave us hegemony.” He directed her attention to a massive dome that topped the highest structure in the city. “Our voice spoke through the First Conduit…our word was law.” The vision of the city’s ancient grandeur faded away, and melancholy mixed with anger infused the Apostate’s tone. “Then came the awakening.”
Fearful of provoking him, Theriault timidly asked, “Awakening of what?”
“Of our voice,” he said. “The revolt of the Kollotuul. It was a rebuke we earned with our hubris.” A sphere of fire encircled her and the Apostate, but the absence of any heat helped Theriault realize it was just another of his illusions. They seemed to be gliding above a rocky surface pitted with volcanic crevices and bubbling pits of sulfur.
“Hundreds of millennia ago we found them,” he said. “Mindless vermin graced with a gift beyond their ken.” From several of the fiery pits emerged scorpionlike arthropods, glowing like embers in the superheated environment. “Their minds could link when they made physical contact. Such a precious talent…and fate wasted it on scavengers.”
When the beings passed beneath Theriault’s feet, she recognized the faceted shapes of their orthorhombic component structures. Just as early primates had exhibited features that marked them as evolutionary cousins of what eventually became Homo sapiens, these small skittering creatures were, to Theriault’s trained eye, unmistakably Tholian.
“The Shedai brought the Kollotuul’s potential to fruition.” With an almost fatherly pride he added, “We taught them to speak in our voice. As our voice.” The sphere of flames faded to reveal the image of a Shedai conduit populated with the primitive Tholians, all writhing in a steady stream of dark charged plasma. The Apostate’s elegiac bitterness returned. “They repaid us in fire.”
She and the Apostate hurtled forward and emerged into a black void. Orbs drifted past them, images of planets glowing like coals beneath ashen blankets. “When the Kollotuul awakened, they retained much of our knowledge. They did not revere us for making them sentient—they feared us, hated us.” A ghostly image of a city laid waste replaced the darkness, surrounding Theriault with a vision of millions of humanoids lying slain in the streets. “Using our own Conduits, our own voice, those first awakened ones roused all their kin. In the span of a thought, the Kollotuul turned our weapons against us. A thousand worlds perished instantly, a war within a breath.”
Liberated from the illusions, Theriault found herself standing on one of the high ramparts of the city, at the far end of a sliver-thin bridge that led to the great dome of what he had called the First Conduit. A stiff breeze fluttered her blue minidress. Overhead, the sky blackened. Clouds heavy with rain crowded together and flashed with heat lightning.
The Apostate stood beside her, cloaked now in a vaguely humanoid shape of translucent dark glass. His voice, though still deep, now had a merely human scale. “We did not think of ourselves as tyrants,” he said, sounding a note of profound regret. “Membership in our union was voluntary. Worlds that joined with us received many boons. Our Conduits defended them from attack. Our science cured all known diseases. We could rescue planetary ecologies from the brink of collapse or engineer new ones. For those who lived beneath our aegis, immortality was all but assured.” He looked away toward the First Conduit. “But for the Kollotuul, that was not enough.”
“But you admit that you’d enslaved them,” Theriault said.
The Apostate bristled. His voice was sharp and defensive. “They were not sentient when we yoked them to the Conduits. They were beasts of burden.” Calming himself, he continued, “When they awakened, they attacked our worlds. They could have asked for freedom; instead they chose to be our enemies.” He stepped away from her, out onto the narrow bridge. She followed him. “The Kollotuul banded together, harnessed our power to build ships, and fled our space,” he continued. “In the aftermath, we struggled to govern our far-flung territories—but without the Kollotuul to amplify our voice, the most distant worlds fell beyond our influence. Over several millennia our sphere of control diminished. Our hegemony fractured and fell.”
Theriault noticed as they walked that the Apostate’s feet did not actually make contact with the surface of the causeway. Rather he appeared to glide above it, as though he were pantomiming the act of walking solely for her benefit.
“As our former glories began to pass away and a new order of powers started to rise in the galaxy,” he continued as though recounting some simple matter, “some of our number took on mundane forms and moved among the petty and ephemeral. Others followed the Maker into a slumber of the aeons, as if the galaxy would be content to grant them quiet, dreamless sleep. I chose to spend my millennia in quiet exile…in reflection.”
In the middle of the precariously thin walkway, he stopped and turned back to face her. She made the mistake of glancing down at the chasm under her feet. They were hundreds of meters above the ground. Fighting to keep her balance, she looked back up at the Apostate. “Now the whole gang’s back in town, huh?”
He was unnervingly still. “As I foretold ages ago, they could not rest when they felt their power in another’s hands.”
“The Conduits,” she blurted out as the first wayward droplets of rain teased her face. “Starfleet woke them up when it started experimenting on the Ravanar Conduit.”
“Its song filled the heavens,” he said, “but the only ones who could hear it were us…and the Kollotuul.”
The motive for the Tholians’ ambush of the Starship Bombay at Ravanar became clear to Theriault.
“And your people created the meta-genome,” she said. “We always find them together. Why?”
“Seeds,” he said. “A foundation upon which to build our future hegemony.”
She glanced down again and felt a slight spin of vertigo. “Could we, uh, keep walking, please?”
The Apostate moved his feet in a convincing approximation of ambulation and floated ahead of her on the causeway, toward the cluster of huge shapes in the heart of the city. As they neared the other side, she mustered the courage to ask, “Now that your friends are awake…what are they doing?”
He reached the other side, stepped clear, and waited for her to join him under an arched overhang before he replied, “They have gathered here for the Colloquium.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“A discussion,” the Apostate said. “About the future of this galaxy—and how they will shape it to their liking.”
“Oh, galactic domination,” she said in her most irreverent tone of voice. As a steady gray rain began to fall in pattering torrents, she flashed a goofy grin at the dark, godlike being to her left. “And I thought we were in trouble.”