Title : The Lake Of Fire
Author : ‘Goji’ Rob Morris
Series : ST:TOS
Type : Episode Follow-Up
Part : 1/1
Characters : Pike, Pike-era TOS crew
Rating : PG13, for harsh imagery and philosophic discussion
Summary : Six months after the events on Talos IV, Captain Pike again finds himself trapped in a place he does not and cannot believe in. Can he save himself?
The Lake Of Fire
by Rob Morris
He jumped from rock to burning rock, the absurdity of it all singeing him as badly as the smoking brimstone. Were this really the place it pretended to be, he knew would not be jumping about, or be permitted to do so.
“You referred to this as a fable from my race’s childhood. By and large, I’m not frightened of fables.”
Above him, hidden in shadow but with an unmistakable, almost bifurcated, buzzing voice was the Talosian Keeper.
“Fables have resonance for a reason. The most terrible Klingon fable has their Dread Kahless returning in disguise and leaving in disgust as he finds no fit warriors to drink with. The most terrible Vulcan one has children found wandering in the desert, and then taken in and given food, till it is found that these children are from the clans of Those Who Left, rather than embrace Surak. Do you think species merely pull frightening images from the ether? Your fables are your own flesh and blood. So it is for the afterlife called Hell, Christopher Pike.”
Captain Pike’s patience was already gone.
“I am a rational man! I believe in neither Heaven nor Hell!”
The Keeper waved his frail hand. The rocks and the ground vanished from beneath Pike.
“Yet they believe in you. In the absence of your belief, which then will choose to embrace you?”
The fetid water below turned to fire as Pike fell. To his own shock, he began to cry out.
“Don’t let me fall! Not down there! I don’t want to see what’s down there. Burn me or devour me, but don’t make me see what’s in that...”
---
USS ENTERPRISE, LATE 2255
Pike awoke in Sickbay, surrounded by Number One, Doctor Boyce, and Lieutenant Spock. He failed to stop saying the final word from his nightmare.
“Lake.”
The young Vulcan was the first to speak.
“Since the Captain has regained consciousness, I will ask to withdraw. Commander?”
Number One nodded in assent.
“Permission granted, Lieutenant. Your discretion in this matter is to be commended, and its persistence will not go unappreciated.”
After a glance at Pike just quick enough to reveal more than business-like concern, Spock left to resume his duties. If Christopher Pike had to guess at the Vulcan, he had less work ciphering out the concerns of his First Officer.
“I’ll be fine, Number One.”
“With all respect, Captain, I will leave such judgments to be rendered by Doctor Boyce. My own shift, extended due to your incapacity, begins soon, and I must prepare for it. Sir.”
The tough crispness was there in her, as always. But along with it came something new, and quite unexpected. Number One was angry at her commanding officer for allowing himself to become ill. It was very well hidden, and yet it was there, no mistake.
“Dismissed, Commander.”
When she had left as well, and Boyce had cleared the area of other medical personnel, Pike allowed his composure to slide.
“Talk to me, Philip. How did I get here?”
Boyce also showed annoyance.
“You broke your word to me, Chris. The nightmares never stopped, and they are obviously getting worse. Captain Pike, tell me. Do you somehow labor under the notion that starship commanders are exempt from the need to keep their heart rates and blood pressure within the vibrational rate of the universe they occupy?”
“Watch it, Doctor.”
“No, Chris. *You* had better damned well watch it. If Spock had brought you in as much as ten minutes later, your systems would have been in such a state as to demand my invocation of the CMO’s final prerogative. You know the one that, once you enact it, things are never the same? That’s how close you were, Captain. For good measure, had he been thirty minutes later, I would have been toasting Number One on her new command.”
Pike didn’t bother to dispute the prognosis. The cold, clammy sweat that covered his body gave best evidence of its correctness.
“Spock brought me here? But I was in my quarters.”
“Yeah. Quarters that you had covered by audio dampeners set at grand max. But while those things cover noises, they don’t create zones of perfect quiet. Spock heard the feedback, bless those desert-spawned ears of his, then paused and heard past the noise they were meant to cover.”
“My door was locked.”
“He pushed past it, and literally scooped you up. You were on the floor.”
Pike winced, and not merely because of his physical condition.
“Then the entire crew knows.”
Boyce shook his head.
“Spock told anyone who saw him that you had slipped and struck your head on your dresser. Which you may have, for all I know.”
“Phil–are you telling me that a Vulcan violated his commanding officer’s privacy, broke a lock, and lied, almost all in the same breath?”
“Chris, Spock explained it away with logic. There was no reason, at least yet and to his mind, for the crew to know that its leader was incapacitated, and in fact every reason to keep this from them until it should become necessary. He called what he did a choice, based on the needs of the many, as it related to the few, and the one. But mind you, I didn’t buy a word of it.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Every captain sees it happen. One crewmember holds them in a higher regard than anyone else. In some cases, it’s almost a mythic regard. No matter where that crewman ends up, even if they later walk with kings, that captain’s impact on their life and career never fades. I thought you’d picked up on it, Chris. Spock is that way about you.”
Pike waved a dismissive hand.
“Hogwash. Vulcans are not sentimental idiots, like too many of us poor Terrans.”
“Chris, do you honestly believe that an absence of visible sentiment also means its non-existence? Would it help you accept it, if I told you that Bob April also had such a crewman?”
“April never seemed the type. His whole crew held him in exactly the kind of regard you’re talking about.”
Boyce came to realize not one but two errors on his part.
“Well, perhaps that’s why his fortunes went in reverse on that one sad young man. Name of Aaron Cartwright. But congratulations are in order, Captain Pike. You very nearly dragged me off topic. So now, with all trivia set aside—“
Doctor Boyce stepped within three inches of his superior’s face, and it seemed a position he would not yield without armed escort.
“Tell me what is in those nightmares you’ve been having!”
“Is that a demand from the Chief Medical Officer, Doctor?!”
“No! It’s a demand made by a friend, who wants to help his friend but can’t, till he knows what’s afflicting him. Chris, if you don’t make me aware of what you’re fighting, you render me unable to help you, and for a physician, there is no greater wrong.”
To Boyce’s surprise, the normally unyielding face of Christopher Pike suddenly showed real fear.
“Phil, in my dreams? I go to Hell. Hell as real as you, me, Number One or the Enterprise. All the dreams of Dante, Milton, King, Gaiman and Sirrom can’t match the Hell I saw. The Keeper is there, but he’s not interested in breeding me. Only taunts. I am scared out of my mind in these nightmares, and then I wake up disgusted that a 23rd Century man of my intellect and experience is tortured by the stuff of revival tents and medieval purges.”
Boyce had a quick analysis.
“Flashback. Much like certain perception-altering narcotics ‘repeat’ on the user, sometimes for decades, the forced perception shifts the Talosians made you endure are intruding upon your reality in the here and now. I’m sorry, Captain. I feel like I should have anticipated something like this.”
Pike showed that he did not fully accept this explanation.
“But why Hell? Why not Vina as an Orion woman, or gentle picnics on Earth? Those things I feel a part of. I’m neither religious nor anti-religious. I have no use for chants made to an invisible sky-father, but I never proselytize the way some atheists do. The premise and imagery of Hell has never meant anything to me.”
Boyce had Pike’s favorite drinking glass at the ready, albeit with simple ice water instead of something harder. To the captain, it was very, very welcome.
“Chris? Obviously, something has changed.”
Refilling his captain’s already-empty glass and this time adding a bit of lemon for taste, Philip Boyce tried to pin that something down.
“What was your religious upbringing?”
“There wasn’t any. Doctor, I was not rebelling against strict parents, nor am I the product of dinner-table mockery of the beliefs of others. It wasn’t avoided, and it wasn’t embraced. In the Pike household, religion simply...wasn’t. About that, I have no regrets.”
“No regrets?”
“Not a one.”
Boyce quickly upset the captain’s certainty.
“What about questions?”
Pike made an uncharacteristic effort at feigning ignorance.
“Questions like what?”
Boyce was having none of this.
“Questions, sir, like just what happens after Christopher Pike draws his last breath?”
If the doctor had made an error in his method of approach, it was in giving his clever, sharp commanding officer an adversary, however mild, to combat.
“That’s simple, Doctor. He ceases to exist. He doesn’t wander the decks of the Enterprise, or seek spectral revenge, if he was murdered. When it all goes away, so do I. So do you, and so does everything that has ever lived.”
A sort of wistful confidence had come back over Pike, as though a recalcitrant planetary leader were on the verge of learning his lesson. Boyce found this to be small evidence of recovery, and more likely indicative of the building of a facade.
“If that’s the case, then tell me why, of all the images the Keeper assaulted you with, is Hell remaining in your dreams?”
Pike’s response was fast in coming, though it showed no quickness of wit.
“There’s no denying that it’s a potent, primal image. As a species, we only left all that unthinking nonsense behind relative minutes ago. Is it a stirring image? Of course. The rulers of ancient Earth needed that sort of thing to keep people under their thumb. Heaven and Hell were trotted out as carrot and stick, to keep the state’s territories expanding. Do the will of the former, or go to the latter. Zero-One. Just like primitive computers, and just as useful for controlling the populace and keeping track of whoever might dare to say that the sovereign was a corrupt animal, using the shadow of something that wasn’t there to justify every last sin they supposedly hated.”
“And you are so sure that there was and is nothing there and that there never has been?”
“In fact, Doctor Boyce, I can prove it.”
This seemingly grandiose claim struck Boyce silent, so Pike went on.
“Did Christ ever ask that bloody Crusades be made in his name? Did Mohammed ever direct young people to expend their lives for no other purpose than to create fear? When Surak said that his people should seek the path of control, did he really mean that they should live in mortal fear of their emotions? I once interrogated a Klingon defector who claimed that Kahless The Unforgettable would regard wars merely for territorial expansion as a sign of the fall of Creation itself. Yet all these leaders to some extent have been said to have been touched by the divine, or been divine themselves.”
Boyce shook his head just enough to show that he didn’t follow this.
“Well, don’t you see? Look at all the misery caused by misguided followers of these men. A standard argument, some might say. But therein lies my proof. If these men truly had some aspect of the divine in them, they would have foreseen the pain their words would bring when twisted. That they did not means that they were in fact, merely men, and that the *spark* some claim to have touched them most pointedly does not exist. Moreover, until this whole train of thought about an overseeing God is shut down, dupes and idiots will continue feeding at that trough, waiting for the next disaster to invoke it once again, once more seizing on fear to reignite a fire that should have died millennia ago.”
“So it’s as simple as all that?”
“It really should be. A divider, a narcotic, and a way that tyrants keep power. The very embodiment of anti-intellectualism. Book-thumping bigots running things and ruining them as far back as one cares to look, and not only on Earth. I truly pity the poor fool who still feels the need to talk to the Unseen Hand. Because they may as well be talking to their own, or doing something else with their hand, as far as I’m concerned!”
Boyce gave his captain the very coldest glare their friendship would ever see.
“For the record, I am one such poor fool. I talk to the Unseen Hand at least twice a day and constantly if we have wounded in here. I don’t do it out of fear. I don’t know why I do it. It’s so easy to diminish and belittle people’s beliefs, Chris. It’s harder to figure out the big questions, and despite my own not-absent intellect, those questions do come. You do realize that some of the greatest thinkers in Human history are among those poor fools you deride?”
Pike found himself in a very bad position.
“Phil, I never meant to offend you.”
Boyce helped his friend up, and towards the Sickbay door.
“It’s probably best we don’t talk now, sir. But I will say two things: For someone who doesn’t proselytize their beliefs, you surely got a rise out of me. And for someone who supposedly has no questions about what comes after this life, you surely have some interesting dreams.”
“Phil, please. How will I get through this, If I can’t speak to you about it?”
“Chris, you have a little under four hundred people to speak to on this ship. Talk with them. You may find an answer there.”
Pike seemed to find no comfort in the prospect of this quest.
“Sartre said that Hell is other people.”
Boyce smiled a bit as the door shut.
“Yet the worst punishment a prisoner can endure is to be put in solitary confinement.”
The captain made his way back to his quarters, the mere idea of asking even those in his senior staff such questions shaking him almost as much as the imagery of Hell.
“The solitary life is sorely underrated, Doctor.”
----
In the dreams of the Keeper and Hell, Pike’s very best verbal arguments and tactics, and these were some of the best anywhere in the galaxy, were routinely brushed aside before he fell into the lake of fire. Tonight, things would prove no different.
“You can’t send me into that pit. I reject the notion that this is at all possible, even in a world of illusion.”
The Keeper never showed the slightest sign that he was impressed with this show of defiance.
“You will explain. And then you will fall. Again.”
“Fine, then. You cannot send me into this pit, because there is no Heaven, no Hell, and No God! From the first massively bosomed Earth-Mother pottery in humankind’s dawn to the Hammer Of Thor through to the wasteful millennial beliefs of a few hundred years ago, it is one and all a sham!”
“Hmmm. Describe your objection to the existence of God.”
Pike literally felt the ground solidify beneath him, and the flames begin to go away.
“Where do I start? No–I have it. Who is this God? He sits above it all, issuing orders for all of creation from his perch that, by definition, very few are granted access to. He is purposely apart from those that worship him, all the while deciding who lives and who dies, talking the talk of caring for those in his charge, but in truth, being cold and aloof. His presence is said to be everywhere at once, and yet, where is he?”
The Keeper nodded.
“A ruler who sits above in a place restricted to the chosen few, apart from those he has charge over and professes to care for, always at a distance from them. I can show you the face of such a one. Would you know him better?”
“Go ahead. Show me what just isn’t there. I’m betting it’s beyond your power, even in this place, and even in a dream.”
The Keeper moved his head as though to laugh, and said two literally damning words.
“You lose.”
Once more, the ground fell away, and the lake lay below Pike. Yet for a moment, it did not catch fire, and he was suspended above it. The lake was crystal clear, and its waters became both reflective and magnifying. Pike’s own stunned face was gigantic before him.
“Behold, the false God, who stands apart from his charges, so concerned about dignity and appearance he cannot even walk among them for extended periods. There is a place for false gods, Christopher Pike. For those who try to supplant the one, true God and fail, as they must always fail. Enter it now. Enter it forever.”
As always, the lake caught fire, and Pike plunged into it, screaming. Beneath the waters, he glimpsed something. Something that made his entire being recoil.
------
Captain Pike awoke, and ran to the refresher to be sick. What he had so briefly glimpsed beneath the lake had a name, and this name meant both Accuser and Adversary. He said it as his insides finally settled enough to stand up.
“Satan.”
The man in the mirror had no cloven feet or horns. Yet Christopher Pike spoke to him as though to an enemy.
“I better not *ever* hear you speak to Phil Boyce that way again. Arrogant idiot!”
He would wager, and in this case he would not lose, that Boyce would forgive him fairly rapidly. Doctors were odd, tending to forgive slights more readily than injuries their captains forced them to repair and then repair again. Forgiving himself was harder. Pike had known that he was speaking to a religious man, albeit one quiet about the subject. So why, he wondered, did he unleash that invective, the likes of which had little purpose but to offend?
“Did I want him to challenge me?”
Maybe, reasoned Pike, beliefs unexamined were simply not beliefs worth having, no matter what those beliefs said. Perhaps, just as the very religious found their faith challenged, so might those who had kept religion at a distance.
*The dark night of something I don’t even believe in. Yet those dreams are real enough*, he thought. So was his need. Following Boyce’s advice would involve some fancy footwork, though. He could not simply go out and about, consulting his crew at random.
---
Author : ‘Goji’ Rob Morris
Series : ST:TOS
Type : Episode Follow-Up
Part : 1/1
Characters : Pike, Pike-era TOS crew
Rating : PG13, for harsh imagery and philosophic discussion
Summary : Six months after the events on Talos IV, Captain Pike again finds himself trapped in a place he does not and cannot believe in. Can he save himself?
The Lake Of Fire
by Rob Morris
He jumped from rock to burning rock, the absurdity of it all singeing him as badly as the smoking brimstone. Were this really the place it pretended to be, he knew would not be jumping about, or be permitted to do so.
“You referred to this as a fable from my race’s childhood. By and large, I’m not frightened of fables.”
Above him, hidden in shadow but with an unmistakable, almost bifurcated, buzzing voice was the Talosian Keeper.
“Fables have resonance for a reason. The most terrible Klingon fable has their Dread Kahless returning in disguise and leaving in disgust as he finds no fit warriors to drink with. The most terrible Vulcan one has children found wandering in the desert, and then taken in and given food, till it is found that these children are from the clans of Those Who Left, rather than embrace Surak. Do you think species merely pull frightening images from the ether? Your fables are your own flesh and blood. So it is for the afterlife called Hell, Christopher Pike.”
Captain Pike’s patience was already gone.
“I am a rational man! I believe in neither Heaven nor Hell!”
The Keeper waved his frail hand. The rocks and the ground vanished from beneath Pike.
“Yet they believe in you. In the absence of your belief, which then will choose to embrace you?”
The fetid water below turned to fire as Pike fell. To his own shock, he began to cry out.
“Don’t let me fall! Not down there! I don’t want to see what’s down there. Burn me or devour me, but don’t make me see what’s in that...”
---
USS ENTERPRISE, LATE 2255
Pike awoke in Sickbay, surrounded by Number One, Doctor Boyce, and Lieutenant Spock. He failed to stop saying the final word from his nightmare.
“Lake.”
The young Vulcan was the first to speak.
“Since the Captain has regained consciousness, I will ask to withdraw. Commander?”
Number One nodded in assent.
“Permission granted, Lieutenant. Your discretion in this matter is to be commended, and its persistence will not go unappreciated.”
After a glance at Pike just quick enough to reveal more than business-like concern, Spock left to resume his duties. If Christopher Pike had to guess at the Vulcan, he had less work ciphering out the concerns of his First Officer.
“I’ll be fine, Number One.”
“With all respect, Captain, I will leave such judgments to be rendered by Doctor Boyce. My own shift, extended due to your incapacity, begins soon, and I must prepare for it. Sir.”
The tough crispness was there in her, as always. But along with it came something new, and quite unexpected. Number One was angry at her commanding officer for allowing himself to become ill. It was very well hidden, and yet it was there, no mistake.
“Dismissed, Commander.”
When she had left as well, and Boyce had cleared the area of other medical personnel, Pike allowed his composure to slide.
“Talk to me, Philip. How did I get here?”
Boyce also showed annoyance.
“You broke your word to me, Chris. The nightmares never stopped, and they are obviously getting worse. Captain Pike, tell me. Do you somehow labor under the notion that starship commanders are exempt from the need to keep their heart rates and blood pressure within the vibrational rate of the universe they occupy?”
“Watch it, Doctor.”
“No, Chris. *You* had better damned well watch it. If Spock had brought you in as much as ten minutes later, your systems would have been in such a state as to demand my invocation of the CMO’s final prerogative. You know the one that, once you enact it, things are never the same? That’s how close you were, Captain. For good measure, had he been thirty minutes later, I would have been toasting Number One on her new command.”
Pike didn’t bother to dispute the prognosis. The cold, clammy sweat that covered his body gave best evidence of its correctness.
“Spock brought me here? But I was in my quarters.”
“Yeah. Quarters that you had covered by audio dampeners set at grand max. But while those things cover noises, they don’t create zones of perfect quiet. Spock heard the feedback, bless those desert-spawned ears of his, then paused and heard past the noise they were meant to cover.”
“My door was locked.”
“He pushed past it, and literally scooped you up. You were on the floor.”
Pike winced, and not merely because of his physical condition.
“Then the entire crew knows.”
Boyce shook his head.
“Spock told anyone who saw him that you had slipped and struck your head on your dresser. Which you may have, for all I know.”
“Phil–are you telling me that a Vulcan violated his commanding officer’s privacy, broke a lock, and lied, almost all in the same breath?”
“Chris, Spock explained it away with logic. There was no reason, at least yet and to his mind, for the crew to know that its leader was incapacitated, and in fact every reason to keep this from them until it should become necessary. He called what he did a choice, based on the needs of the many, as it related to the few, and the one. But mind you, I didn’t buy a word of it.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Every captain sees it happen. One crewmember holds them in a higher regard than anyone else. In some cases, it’s almost a mythic regard. No matter where that crewman ends up, even if they later walk with kings, that captain’s impact on their life and career never fades. I thought you’d picked up on it, Chris. Spock is that way about you.”
Pike waved a dismissive hand.
“Hogwash. Vulcans are not sentimental idiots, like too many of us poor Terrans.”
“Chris, do you honestly believe that an absence of visible sentiment also means its non-existence? Would it help you accept it, if I told you that Bob April also had such a crewman?”
“April never seemed the type. His whole crew held him in exactly the kind of regard you’re talking about.”
Boyce came to realize not one but two errors on his part.
“Well, perhaps that’s why his fortunes went in reverse on that one sad young man. Name of Aaron Cartwright. But congratulations are in order, Captain Pike. You very nearly dragged me off topic. So now, with all trivia set aside—“
Doctor Boyce stepped within three inches of his superior’s face, and it seemed a position he would not yield without armed escort.
“Tell me what is in those nightmares you’ve been having!”
“Is that a demand from the Chief Medical Officer, Doctor?!”
“No! It’s a demand made by a friend, who wants to help his friend but can’t, till he knows what’s afflicting him. Chris, if you don’t make me aware of what you’re fighting, you render me unable to help you, and for a physician, there is no greater wrong.”
To Boyce’s surprise, the normally unyielding face of Christopher Pike suddenly showed real fear.
“Phil, in my dreams? I go to Hell. Hell as real as you, me, Number One or the Enterprise. All the dreams of Dante, Milton, King, Gaiman and Sirrom can’t match the Hell I saw. The Keeper is there, but he’s not interested in breeding me. Only taunts. I am scared out of my mind in these nightmares, and then I wake up disgusted that a 23rd Century man of my intellect and experience is tortured by the stuff of revival tents and medieval purges.”
Boyce had a quick analysis.
“Flashback. Much like certain perception-altering narcotics ‘repeat’ on the user, sometimes for decades, the forced perception shifts the Talosians made you endure are intruding upon your reality in the here and now. I’m sorry, Captain. I feel like I should have anticipated something like this.”
Pike showed that he did not fully accept this explanation.
“But why Hell? Why not Vina as an Orion woman, or gentle picnics on Earth? Those things I feel a part of. I’m neither religious nor anti-religious. I have no use for chants made to an invisible sky-father, but I never proselytize the way some atheists do. The premise and imagery of Hell has never meant anything to me.”
Boyce had Pike’s favorite drinking glass at the ready, albeit with simple ice water instead of something harder. To the captain, it was very, very welcome.
“Chris? Obviously, something has changed.”
Refilling his captain’s already-empty glass and this time adding a bit of lemon for taste, Philip Boyce tried to pin that something down.
“What was your religious upbringing?”
“There wasn’t any. Doctor, I was not rebelling against strict parents, nor am I the product of dinner-table mockery of the beliefs of others. It wasn’t avoided, and it wasn’t embraced. In the Pike household, religion simply...wasn’t. About that, I have no regrets.”
“No regrets?”
“Not a one.”
Boyce quickly upset the captain’s certainty.
“What about questions?”
Pike made an uncharacteristic effort at feigning ignorance.
“Questions like what?”
Boyce was having none of this.
“Questions, sir, like just what happens after Christopher Pike draws his last breath?”
If the doctor had made an error in his method of approach, it was in giving his clever, sharp commanding officer an adversary, however mild, to combat.
“That’s simple, Doctor. He ceases to exist. He doesn’t wander the decks of the Enterprise, or seek spectral revenge, if he was murdered. When it all goes away, so do I. So do you, and so does everything that has ever lived.”
A sort of wistful confidence had come back over Pike, as though a recalcitrant planetary leader were on the verge of learning his lesson. Boyce found this to be small evidence of recovery, and more likely indicative of the building of a facade.
“If that’s the case, then tell me why, of all the images the Keeper assaulted you with, is Hell remaining in your dreams?”
Pike’s response was fast in coming, though it showed no quickness of wit.
“There’s no denying that it’s a potent, primal image. As a species, we only left all that unthinking nonsense behind relative minutes ago. Is it a stirring image? Of course. The rulers of ancient Earth needed that sort of thing to keep people under their thumb. Heaven and Hell were trotted out as carrot and stick, to keep the state’s territories expanding. Do the will of the former, or go to the latter. Zero-One. Just like primitive computers, and just as useful for controlling the populace and keeping track of whoever might dare to say that the sovereign was a corrupt animal, using the shadow of something that wasn’t there to justify every last sin they supposedly hated.”
“And you are so sure that there was and is nothing there and that there never has been?”
“In fact, Doctor Boyce, I can prove it.”
This seemingly grandiose claim struck Boyce silent, so Pike went on.
“Did Christ ever ask that bloody Crusades be made in his name? Did Mohammed ever direct young people to expend their lives for no other purpose than to create fear? When Surak said that his people should seek the path of control, did he really mean that they should live in mortal fear of their emotions? I once interrogated a Klingon defector who claimed that Kahless The Unforgettable would regard wars merely for territorial expansion as a sign of the fall of Creation itself. Yet all these leaders to some extent have been said to have been touched by the divine, or been divine themselves.”
Boyce shook his head just enough to show that he didn’t follow this.
“Well, don’t you see? Look at all the misery caused by misguided followers of these men. A standard argument, some might say. But therein lies my proof. If these men truly had some aspect of the divine in them, they would have foreseen the pain their words would bring when twisted. That they did not means that they were in fact, merely men, and that the *spark* some claim to have touched them most pointedly does not exist. Moreover, until this whole train of thought about an overseeing God is shut down, dupes and idiots will continue feeding at that trough, waiting for the next disaster to invoke it once again, once more seizing on fear to reignite a fire that should have died millennia ago.”
“So it’s as simple as all that?”
“It really should be. A divider, a narcotic, and a way that tyrants keep power. The very embodiment of anti-intellectualism. Book-thumping bigots running things and ruining them as far back as one cares to look, and not only on Earth. I truly pity the poor fool who still feels the need to talk to the Unseen Hand. Because they may as well be talking to their own, or doing something else with their hand, as far as I’m concerned!”
Boyce gave his captain the very coldest glare their friendship would ever see.
“For the record, I am one such poor fool. I talk to the Unseen Hand at least twice a day and constantly if we have wounded in here. I don’t do it out of fear. I don’t know why I do it. It’s so easy to diminish and belittle people’s beliefs, Chris. It’s harder to figure out the big questions, and despite my own not-absent intellect, those questions do come. You do realize that some of the greatest thinkers in Human history are among those poor fools you deride?”
Pike found himself in a very bad position.
“Phil, I never meant to offend you.”
Boyce helped his friend up, and towards the Sickbay door.
“It’s probably best we don’t talk now, sir. But I will say two things: For someone who doesn’t proselytize their beliefs, you surely got a rise out of me. And for someone who supposedly has no questions about what comes after this life, you surely have some interesting dreams.”
“Phil, please. How will I get through this, If I can’t speak to you about it?”
“Chris, you have a little under four hundred people to speak to on this ship. Talk with them. You may find an answer there.”
Pike seemed to find no comfort in the prospect of this quest.
“Sartre said that Hell is other people.”
Boyce smiled a bit as the door shut.
“Yet the worst punishment a prisoner can endure is to be put in solitary confinement.”
The captain made his way back to his quarters, the mere idea of asking even those in his senior staff such questions shaking him almost as much as the imagery of Hell.
“The solitary life is sorely underrated, Doctor.”
----
In the dreams of the Keeper and Hell, Pike’s very best verbal arguments and tactics, and these were some of the best anywhere in the galaxy, were routinely brushed aside before he fell into the lake of fire. Tonight, things would prove no different.
“You can’t send me into that pit. I reject the notion that this is at all possible, even in a world of illusion.”
The Keeper never showed the slightest sign that he was impressed with this show of defiance.
“You will explain. And then you will fall. Again.”
“Fine, then. You cannot send me into this pit, because there is no Heaven, no Hell, and No God! From the first massively bosomed Earth-Mother pottery in humankind’s dawn to the Hammer Of Thor through to the wasteful millennial beliefs of a few hundred years ago, it is one and all a sham!”
“Hmmm. Describe your objection to the existence of God.”
Pike literally felt the ground solidify beneath him, and the flames begin to go away.
“Where do I start? No–I have it. Who is this God? He sits above it all, issuing orders for all of creation from his perch that, by definition, very few are granted access to. He is purposely apart from those that worship him, all the while deciding who lives and who dies, talking the talk of caring for those in his charge, but in truth, being cold and aloof. His presence is said to be everywhere at once, and yet, where is he?”
The Keeper nodded.
“A ruler who sits above in a place restricted to the chosen few, apart from those he has charge over and professes to care for, always at a distance from them. I can show you the face of such a one. Would you know him better?”
“Go ahead. Show me what just isn’t there. I’m betting it’s beyond your power, even in this place, and even in a dream.”
The Keeper moved his head as though to laugh, and said two literally damning words.
“You lose.”
Once more, the ground fell away, and the lake lay below Pike. Yet for a moment, it did not catch fire, and he was suspended above it. The lake was crystal clear, and its waters became both reflective and magnifying. Pike’s own stunned face was gigantic before him.
“Behold, the false God, who stands apart from his charges, so concerned about dignity and appearance he cannot even walk among them for extended periods. There is a place for false gods, Christopher Pike. For those who try to supplant the one, true God and fail, as they must always fail. Enter it now. Enter it forever.”
As always, the lake caught fire, and Pike plunged into it, screaming. Beneath the waters, he glimpsed something. Something that made his entire being recoil.
------
Captain Pike awoke, and ran to the refresher to be sick. What he had so briefly glimpsed beneath the lake had a name, and this name meant both Accuser and Adversary. He said it as his insides finally settled enough to stand up.
“Satan.”
The man in the mirror had no cloven feet or horns. Yet Christopher Pike spoke to him as though to an enemy.
“I better not *ever* hear you speak to Phil Boyce that way again. Arrogant idiot!”
He would wager, and in this case he would not lose, that Boyce would forgive him fairly rapidly. Doctors were odd, tending to forgive slights more readily than injuries their captains forced them to repair and then repair again. Forgiving himself was harder. Pike had known that he was speaking to a religious man, albeit one quiet about the subject. So why, he wondered, did he unleash that invective, the likes of which had little purpose but to offend?
“Did I want him to challenge me?”
Maybe, reasoned Pike, beliefs unexamined were simply not beliefs worth having, no matter what those beliefs said. Perhaps, just as the very religious found their faith challenged, so might those who had kept religion at a distance.
*The dark night of something I don’t even believe in. Yet those dreams are real enough*, he thought. So was his need. Following Boyce’s advice would involve some fancy footwork, though. He could not simply go out and about, consulting his crew at random.
---
