Hi, I've not posted in this section before but I thought I'd have a go at this month's challenge. I hope you enjoy it!
The Song of the Phoenix
“Guinan, I think I’ve found something!”
As the familiar cry rang out, for about the twentieth time that week, she allowed herself a slight smile. Putting her book aside, she stood up to come and see, not for a moment expecting that he really had finally unearthed what he was looking for. Although he’d been slowly getting closer through his painstaking methods – and, despite being extremely tempted on a couple of occasions to offer a couple of hints, she was determined that he must find it himself – he was still on only the very edge of the probable site, and the El-Aurian figured that it would be at least another week before he unearthed it. Scrambling up the edge of the earthworks, she wondered what the red herring would be this time – an old, twenty-first century iPad like last time, or maybe one of the discarded weapons from the last war, still armed, or maybe even one of those strange plasticky cases with a big yellow M still faintly discernable on it, whatever that had been for.
Much to her surprise, though, when she did reach the peak and look down into the wide expanse of the dig site, she found that he had moved quite away from where he had spent much of the time so far diligently scraping away at each square meter and where, even now, an abandoned spade and survey padd lay marking the spot of his morning’s efforts. Over on that side, his fellow workers were now leaving their own tools as, hearing his cry, they began to approach the figure who was, once again, scrabbling away with his hands in what seemed to be a quite uncharacteristic frenzy of excitement. Up to now Guinan had thought him reserved and almost Vulcan-like, but there was nothing Vulcan about the way he was pawing the ground, his hands shaking in his eagerness to dig further. As she approached, he looked up again, sweat glinting off his hairless brow, his eyes shining and alive in a way she had seen in few Terrans since she had returned to this planet.
“It’s here,” he said. “I have it.”
And, as she looked over his shoulder at the small area he had cleared of earth, she realised that he did, indeed, have it. The chrome of the metal was duller than she remembered, the paintwork faded almost to imperceptibility, but there was no doubt about it. As he continued to clear away the dirt the crowd around him, of whom he seemed almost completely unaware, began to murmur in excitement. One, a slightly nervy fellow, stepped a little forward and, squinting against the bright reflection, tried to read the legend.
“N... X... 1?” he tried.
“No, no.” Again he looked up, his face now wearing a wide smile of almost child-like pleasure. “N –I - X. Phoenix. Look.” And as he dug away some more, the E began to appear beneath his fingertips, and the murmur became a collective cry of delight, which quickly gathered momentum and became a spontaneous round of applause. Guinan, struck by how much the emotion of the moment was affecting even her, joined in, before laying her hand on his shoulder, for a reason she didn’t quite understand.
He’d done it. Despite what everyone had said, he’d really done it. He’d found the Phoenix.
Later on, as Barclay, Hawk and others began working over the area with their spectrometry equipment, which pointed now at the right direction could discern quite easily over how wide an area the ruins were spread, he sat on the edge, watching them, taking a well earned break, his head caked in a mixture of sweat and dirt, his expression one of complete contentment. Next to him Guinan sat, watching him as he watched his workers, wondering quite what had happened.
“Now we’ve found it, of course, things can move forward,” he was explaining. “I have a man in San Francisco, a real engineering genius, who I’ll get to look over the wreckage, find out what went wrong.” He turned to Guinan, a look of determination on his face. “Find out what went wrong. This time... this time it will be different.”
Guinan smiled at him. “Maybe it will,” she said. Then she leant forward. “But tell me...” nodding with her head to the long-forgotten spade and padd which still lay where they had been dropped, “what made you suddenly dig over there?”
For the first time that afternoon his look of pure happiness dropped as a slight frown of puzzlement crossed his face. He thought for a long moment, staring ahead at Barclay and the others, but not, Guinan knew, really seeing them. “Do you know,” he said. “I... don’t know.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Guinan, I’m not by nature a spiritual man and yet...” his voice sunk almost to a whisper. “It’s as though... it was singing to me. Telling me to come to it. Calling to me.” He leant back in his chair, voice matter-of-fact again. “That must sound absurd to you.”
But when he looked at Guinan, he found that her expression, too, had changed, and that now her eyes too were deep in reflection. “Actually,” she said after a moment, “you know, Jean-Luc... it doesn’t sound absurd at all...”
They are the El-Aurians, known throughout the cosmos as a race of listeners. They listen. Most who meet them think that simply means they are the go-to guys when one is feeling a bit down in the dumps; few if any realise that it is far more elemental, more profound, than that. For it is not just fellow sentients to whom they listen, but the very galaxy itself. In a way that even they don’t fully understand, they are attuned to the cosmos’s very being, its soul – they can sense its moods, its feelings, when it is happy and content – and when it is not. Those who develop their skills fully can hear a star when it laughs, tell when a moon has fallen in love, feel a planet crying out in terror. And more: when they hear such things they cannot leave them be, no more than a mother can leave her newborn when it yells out in the night. The El-Aurians cross space, usually alone, sometimes in groups, tending to the universe’s pain, putting right what once was wrong. Often, they do not even know why they do what they do, they just know what must be done. They are a race of listeners, but few know what that really means.
And so it was that, some three centuries before, by the locals’s reckoning, Guinan’s father had listened, and heard something he feared greatly, and had journeyed to a dark, lonely corner of the galaxy few had visited before. One who had, strangely enough, had been Guinan herself – she’d been, by her own admission, a wild child, and had liked to go where few others dared, including the planet Terra. It was known as a particularly barbarous world, populated by a savage, unsophisticated people who spent their time coming up with ever more powerful ways of annihilating each other. It was this reputation that had drawn the rebellious Guinan, eager to break free of the stultifying strictures her studies had placed on her, in the first place. To the surprise of both her and her father, who had fully expected his daughter to be killed the moment she set foot on the hellish surface, she had not only lived but positively thrived. In amidst the bloodshed and horror she had found those who tried to elevate themselves above their own violent natures, had realised that there was more to existence than simple battles for supremacy, had, in their own strange way, listened too to the sounds of an existence that was trying to tell them there was far more that they could do. Her father didn’t believe her, of course, when she returned – he said she was indulging in that dissembling subversion she seemed to revel in so much, purely to try and provoke him. He didn’t believe the Terrans could ever rise above their primitive ids, and it was with an almost malicious triumph he had told his daughter, many eras later, about the sudden scream he could hear coming from what she thought was such an enlightened planet. He had dared her to come back and show him the goodness in a people now shattered after the most apocalyptic war in their long history, to see where the scream had come from. And, to his surprise, she had accepted.
And so it was that they had found themselves in an area of the planet known as Montana, standing in a tall, thin structure the builders called a “missile silo” next to a tall, gangly and faintly smelly representative of the Terrans. Zephram Cochrane. A letch, a drunkard, a mercenary (virtually the first thing he had asked Guinan’s father was how much he could give him for his project.) He might also, Guinan had whispered to her father gently, be a genius. Her father thought this unlikely. Most of the time Cochrane couldn’t even stand up, let alone think great thoughts, which made what the three of them were now standing by even more of a miracle. Ten years previously “the Phoenix” would have been a symbol of terror, a weapon with such an awesome capacity for destruction that only a handful of them had ever been made (even a race as barbarous as this isn’t completely stupid), and which had all but decimated the planet’s population. But now it stood here, thanks to this silly, brain-addled specimen of humanity, as possibly the greatest invention in the Terran’s sad, stupid history.
It was the Phoenix that had sung to them.
On that both Guinan and her father agreed. Sadly, it was the only thing they agreed on. The Phoenix scared her father, scared her deeply. Somehow this man, this insignificant, stupid man had happened upon one of the great fundamentals of galactic society, the faster-than-light drive. It was recognised across the cosmos as a mark of civilisation, the moment a world’s beings finally crawled out of the primordial ooze and proved themselves enlightened enough to join the likes of the Vulcans, the Andorians and the Organians in the great game. But the thought of the Terrans bringing their unique combination of violence and ignorance onto the galactic stage terrified Guinan’s father. He believed the Phoenix was singing out in fear, the universe’s way of saying “Stop them, before it’s too late!” That this Cochrane had chosen to fashion this momentous device out of an old weapon was just the icing on the cake, the final confirmation that the progress of the Terrans must be stopped before it was too late. It was to stop itself becoming an instrument of destruction once again that her father believed was the reason why the Phoenix had sung to them. And now, as he stood beside the unsuspecting Cochrane, who was, as usual, thoroughly inebriated and struggling to focus, he was determined to salve its fear.
“See, fing is,” slurred Cochrane, gesturing with a hand clutching a half-empty bottle of the local ferment, “I fink it’s fine. In fact,” he tried to draw himself up to his full height over her father, to impose some kind of physical authority, only to sway alarmingly and have to grab hold of his target for support, “I’m SURE is fine. Tis.”
Her father gently eased him against a wall, then bent down to look at the open system hatch once more. Inside, the tip of a crude matter/antimatter mix chamber, dormant at present but shortly to be filled with the intermix needed to achieve warp speed, poked out. “I really do think you should look at it again,” he said patiently, soothingly, almost seductively. “It is, after all, the very heart of the ship. You won’t get to that Hawaiian island if it begins leaking, now, will you?”
He knew he’d touched a nerve. All this oik had been able to talk about the past week, ever since they had insinuated themselves into his inner circle, was about how this ship was going to make him a fortune, and what he was going to do with it, a plan which seemed to revolve mainly around tropical islands, booze and large numbers of scantily clad females. If anything was going to convince him to look again, it would be the prospect of losing sight of so pleasant a goal. Cochrane, frowning, took the bait, almost slumping down onto the walk next to him to peer again into the murky chamber.
A little way away Guinan watched the two men, feeling ashamed. She knew that her father was a good man, and believed that he was doing the right thing, but she did not, could not agree with him about this. To her, the Phoenix seemed as though it were crying out in joy, as though it had been rescued from a life of destruction and was born anew as an avatar of peace rather than war. But, as she watched her father exert his influence over poor, defenceless Cochrane – for the El-Aurians are not just good listeners, but also at making others listen to them – she knew that she would do little to stop him. He was her father, and must be respected. She watched then, as, slowly, over the course of half the day and another two bottles of liquor, her father slowly and patiently convinced Cochrane that his configuration was not correct, that to attempt a launch with the mix chamber in that state would be tantamount to suicide, and that only if the Terran followed his instructions would his dreams of bikini clad lovelies and endless Pina Coladas come to fruition. Desperately she wanted Cochrane to resist, to say no, he knew what he was doing, but her heart sank as, finally, and even more unsteadily than he had been before, the scientist started to unscrew the missile’s plating, and follow her father’s advice. At one point, just as the last panel came off exposing the ship’s engine core, Cochrane looked up, and he and Guinan briefly fixed eyes. He stared at her, and she heard him, his soul, asking, “Is this right? Am I doing what I should?”
And Guinan did not say anything.
Soon after they watched, safe behind their vessel’s heavily ionised protective shielding, as the Phoenix rose from beneath the earth on her first, and only voyage. Through the viewscreen Guinan watched as the other Terrans, far too close for their own safety, whooped and cheered as the vessel left the earth, their weary faces, dirtied with the legacy of twenty years’ of misery, smiled for the first time in their lives as this symbol gave them finally a reason to be hopeful. To this day Guinan could see their expressions, frozen in time, suddenly illuminated by a harsh, unforgiving white flare, as the antimatter manifold, the one her father had convinced Cochrane was fitted improperly, slipped, disconnected, and in one millisecond released its hellfire unto the world. The initial shockwave consumed the entire forest, crushing all life within it, and even the El-Aurian ship complained as the fallout threatened its shielding. As the hull clattered with the sound of thousands of pieces of twisted metal and burnt flesh raining down upon it, her father turned to look at her face, wet with tears, and said softly, “It’s for the best. The needs of the many.”
That day, only one ship left the confines of the planet Terra, and it wasn’t the Phoenix. Shortly thereafter, as they were leaving the planet’s solar system, they ran into a Vulcan scoutship, who asked for their observations of the people on the third planet. Her father had sniffed dismissively and described them as “an illogical race who can barely use stone tools.” The Vulcans had thanked them, and plotted a course around the system.
The Song of the Phoenix
“Guinan, I think I’ve found something!”
As the familiar cry rang out, for about the twentieth time that week, she allowed herself a slight smile. Putting her book aside, she stood up to come and see, not for a moment expecting that he really had finally unearthed what he was looking for. Although he’d been slowly getting closer through his painstaking methods – and, despite being extremely tempted on a couple of occasions to offer a couple of hints, she was determined that he must find it himself – he was still on only the very edge of the probable site, and the El-Aurian figured that it would be at least another week before he unearthed it. Scrambling up the edge of the earthworks, she wondered what the red herring would be this time – an old, twenty-first century iPad like last time, or maybe one of the discarded weapons from the last war, still armed, or maybe even one of those strange plasticky cases with a big yellow M still faintly discernable on it, whatever that had been for.
Much to her surprise, though, when she did reach the peak and look down into the wide expanse of the dig site, she found that he had moved quite away from where he had spent much of the time so far diligently scraping away at each square meter and where, even now, an abandoned spade and survey padd lay marking the spot of his morning’s efforts. Over on that side, his fellow workers were now leaving their own tools as, hearing his cry, they began to approach the figure who was, once again, scrabbling away with his hands in what seemed to be a quite uncharacteristic frenzy of excitement. Up to now Guinan had thought him reserved and almost Vulcan-like, but there was nothing Vulcan about the way he was pawing the ground, his hands shaking in his eagerness to dig further. As she approached, he looked up again, sweat glinting off his hairless brow, his eyes shining and alive in a way she had seen in few Terrans since she had returned to this planet.
“It’s here,” he said. “I have it.”
And, as she looked over his shoulder at the small area he had cleared of earth, she realised that he did, indeed, have it. The chrome of the metal was duller than she remembered, the paintwork faded almost to imperceptibility, but there was no doubt about it. As he continued to clear away the dirt the crowd around him, of whom he seemed almost completely unaware, began to murmur in excitement. One, a slightly nervy fellow, stepped a little forward and, squinting against the bright reflection, tried to read the legend.
“N... X... 1?” he tried.
“No, no.” Again he looked up, his face now wearing a wide smile of almost child-like pleasure. “N –I - X. Phoenix. Look.” And as he dug away some more, the E began to appear beneath his fingertips, and the murmur became a collective cry of delight, which quickly gathered momentum and became a spontaneous round of applause. Guinan, struck by how much the emotion of the moment was affecting even her, joined in, before laying her hand on his shoulder, for a reason she didn’t quite understand.
He’d done it. Despite what everyone had said, he’d really done it. He’d found the Phoenix.
Later on, as Barclay, Hawk and others began working over the area with their spectrometry equipment, which pointed now at the right direction could discern quite easily over how wide an area the ruins were spread, he sat on the edge, watching them, taking a well earned break, his head caked in a mixture of sweat and dirt, his expression one of complete contentment. Next to him Guinan sat, watching him as he watched his workers, wondering quite what had happened.
“Now we’ve found it, of course, things can move forward,” he was explaining. “I have a man in San Francisco, a real engineering genius, who I’ll get to look over the wreckage, find out what went wrong.” He turned to Guinan, a look of determination on his face. “Find out what went wrong. This time... this time it will be different.”
Guinan smiled at him. “Maybe it will,” she said. Then she leant forward. “But tell me...” nodding with her head to the long-forgotten spade and padd which still lay where they had been dropped, “what made you suddenly dig over there?”
For the first time that afternoon his look of pure happiness dropped as a slight frown of puzzlement crossed his face. He thought for a long moment, staring ahead at Barclay and the others, but not, Guinan knew, really seeing them. “Do you know,” he said. “I... don’t know.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Guinan, I’m not by nature a spiritual man and yet...” his voice sunk almost to a whisper. “It’s as though... it was singing to me. Telling me to come to it. Calling to me.” He leant back in his chair, voice matter-of-fact again. “That must sound absurd to you.”
But when he looked at Guinan, he found that her expression, too, had changed, and that now her eyes too were deep in reflection. “Actually,” she said after a moment, “you know, Jean-Luc... it doesn’t sound absurd at all...”
*
They are the El-Aurians, known throughout the cosmos as a race of listeners. They listen. Most who meet them think that simply means they are the go-to guys when one is feeling a bit down in the dumps; few if any realise that it is far more elemental, more profound, than that. For it is not just fellow sentients to whom they listen, but the very galaxy itself. In a way that even they don’t fully understand, they are attuned to the cosmos’s very being, its soul – they can sense its moods, its feelings, when it is happy and content – and when it is not. Those who develop their skills fully can hear a star when it laughs, tell when a moon has fallen in love, feel a planet crying out in terror. And more: when they hear such things they cannot leave them be, no more than a mother can leave her newborn when it yells out in the night. The El-Aurians cross space, usually alone, sometimes in groups, tending to the universe’s pain, putting right what once was wrong. Often, they do not even know why they do what they do, they just know what must be done. They are a race of listeners, but few know what that really means.
And so it was that, some three centuries before, by the locals’s reckoning, Guinan’s father had listened, and heard something he feared greatly, and had journeyed to a dark, lonely corner of the galaxy few had visited before. One who had, strangely enough, had been Guinan herself – she’d been, by her own admission, a wild child, and had liked to go where few others dared, including the planet Terra. It was known as a particularly barbarous world, populated by a savage, unsophisticated people who spent their time coming up with ever more powerful ways of annihilating each other. It was this reputation that had drawn the rebellious Guinan, eager to break free of the stultifying strictures her studies had placed on her, in the first place. To the surprise of both her and her father, who had fully expected his daughter to be killed the moment she set foot on the hellish surface, she had not only lived but positively thrived. In amidst the bloodshed and horror she had found those who tried to elevate themselves above their own violent natures, had realised that there was more to existence than simple battles for supremacy, had, in their own strange way, listened too to the sounds of an existence that was trying to tell them there was far more that they could do. Her father didn’t believe her, of course, when she returned – he said she was indulging in that dissembling subversion she seemed to revel in so much, purely to try and provoke him. He didn’t believe the Terrans could ever rise above their primitive ids, and it was with an almost malicious triumph he had told his daughter, many eras later, about the sudden scream he could hear coming from what she thought was such an enlightened planet. He had dared her to come back and show him the goodness in a people now shattered after the most apocalyptic war in their long history, to see where the scream had come from. And, to his surprise, she had accepted.
And so it was that they had found themselves in an area of the planet known as Montana, standing in a tall, thin structure the builders called a “missile silo” next to a tall, gangly and faintly smelly representative of the Terrans. Zephram Cochrane. A letch, a drunkard, a mercenary (virtually the first thing he had asked Guinan’s father was how much he could give him for his project.) He might also, Guinan had whispered to her father gently, be a genius. Her father thought this unlikely. Most of the time Cochrane couldn’t even stand up, let alone think great thoughts, which made what the three of them were now standing by even more of a miracle. Ten years previously “the Phoenix” would have been a symbol of terror, a weapon with such an awesome capacity for destruction that only a handful of them had ever been made (even a race as barbarous as this isn’t completely stupid), and which had all but decimated the planet’s population. But now it stood here, thanks to this silly, brain-addled specimen of humanity, as possibly the greatest invention in the Terran’s sad, stupid history.
It was the Phoenix that had sung to them.
On that both Guinan and her father agreed. Sadly, it was the only thing they agreed on. The Phoenix scared her father, scared her deeply. Somehow this man, this insignificant, stupid man had happened upon one of the great fundamentals of galactic society, the faster-than-light drive. It was recognised across the cosmos as a mark of civilisation, the moment a world’s beings finally crawled out of the primordial ooze and proved themselves enlightened enough to join the likes of the Vulcans, the Andorians and the Organians in the great game. But the thought of the Terrans bringing their unique combination of violence and ignorance onto the galactic stage terrified Guinan’s father. He believed the Phoenix was singing out in fear, the universe’s way of saying “Stop them, before it’s too late!” That this Cochrane had chosen to fashion this momentous device out of an old weapon was just the icing on the cake, the final confirmation that the progress of the Terrans must be stopped before it was too late. It was to stop itself becoming an instrument of destruction once again that her father believed was the reason why the Phoenix had sung to them. And now, as he stood beside the unsuspecting Cochrane, who was, as usual, thoroughly inebriated and struggling to focus, he was determined to salve its fear.
“See, fing is,” slurred Cochrane, gesturing with a hand clutching a half-empty bottle of the local ferment, “I fink it’s fine. In fact,” he tried to draw himself up to his full height over her father, to impose some kind of physical authority, only to sway alarmingly and have to grab hold of his target for support, “I’m SURE is fine. Tis.”
Her father gently eased him against a wall, then bent down to look at the open system hatch once more. Inside, the tip of a crude matter/antimatter mix chamber, dormant at present but shortly to be filled with the intermix needed to achieve warp speed, poked out. “I really do think you should look at it again,” he said patiently, soothingly, almost seductively. “It is, after all, the very heart of the ship. You won’t get to that Hawaiian island if it begins leaking, now, will you?”
He knew he’d touched a nerve. All this oik had been able to talk about the past week, ever since they had insinuated themselves into his inner circle, was about how this ship was going to make him a fortune, and what he was going to do with it, a plan which seemed to revolve mainly around tropical islands, booze and large numbers of scantily clad females. If anything was going to convince him to look again, it would be the prospect of losing sight of so pleasant a goal. Cochrane, frowning, took the bait, almost slumping down onto the walk next to him to peer again into the murky chamber.
A little way away Guinan watched the two men, feeling ashamed. She knew that her father was a good man, and believed that he was doing the right thing, but she did not, could not agree with him about this. To her, the Phoenix seemed as though it were crying out in joy, as though it had been rescued from a life of destruction and was born anew as an avatar of peace rather than war. But, as she watched her father exert his influence over poor, defenceless Cochrane – for the El-Aurians are not just good listeners, but also at making others listen to them – she knew that she would do little to stop him. He was her father, and must be respected. She watched then, as, slowly, over the course of half the day and another two bottles of liquor, her father slowly and patiently convinced Cochrane that his configuration was not correct, that to attempt a launch with the mix chamber in that state would be tantamount to suicide, and that only if the Terran followed his instructions would his dreams of bikini clad lovelies and endless Pina Coladas come to fruition. Desperately she wanted Cochrane to resist, to say no, he knew what he was doing, but her heart sank as, finally, and even more unsteadily than he had been before, the scientist started to unscrew the missile’s plating, and follow her father’s advice. At one point, just as the last panel came off exposing the ship’s engine core, Cochrane looked up, and he and Guinan briefly fixed eyes. He stared at her, and she heard him, his soul, asking, “Is this right? Am I doing what I should?”
And Guinan did not say anything.
Soon after they watched, safe behind their vessel’s heavily ionised protective shielding, as the Phoenix rose from beneath the earth on her first, and only voyage. Through the viewscreen Guinan watched as the other Terrans, far too close for their own safety, whooped and cheered as the vessel left the earth, their weary faces, dirtied with the legacy of twenty years’ of misery, smiled for the first time in their lives as this symbol gave them finally a reason to be hopeful. To this day Guinan could see their expressions, frozen in time, suddenly illuminated by a harsh, unforgiving white flare, as the antimatter manifold, the one her father had convinced Cochrane was fitted improperly, slipped, disconnected, and in one millisecond released its hellfire unto the world. The initial shockwave consumed the entire forest, crushing all life within it, and even the El-Aurian ship complained as the fallout threatened its shielding. As the hull clattered with the sound of thousands of pieces of twisted metal and burnt flesh raining down upon it, her father turned to look at her face, wet with tears, and said softly, “It’s for the best. The needs of the many.”
That day, only one ship left the confines of the planet Terra, and it wasn’t the Phoenix. Shortly thereafter, as they were leaving the planet’s solar system, they ran into a Vulcan scoutship, who asked for their observations of the people on the third planet. Her father had sniffed dismissively and described them as “an illogical race who can barely use stone tools.” The Vulcans had thanked them, and plotted a course around the system.
*
