The Garden of the Executioner
His councilor, an unusually serious Denobulan female, had been reluctant to tell him the bad news. He was a Betazoid, and he would have known, regardless, even if such “Reaching out” was intrusive and contrary to his healing process.
“There was an incident on your world, Juri. Eventually you will find out, and we will not be dishonest with you. This will not be easy to hear, but you must. Your governor committed mass murder..” She began explaining the story that was already being discussed across the Federation, the tale of half a planet murdered by Kodos. Normally, discussions of the outside were kept to a minimum at the clinic. But there was no way to avoid this. There was no way to soften the blow. Later he would appreciate her honesty, her directness.
But the shock of it, what it meant, removed all his progress. The minds came screaming back to him. He thought he heard voices of the dead, his family and friends, from light years away, ghosts demanding comfort and condemning him for not being there. He screamed. He thrashed about, and had to be restrained from attempting to jump from a balcony.
Mildly sedated by a nurse unfamiliar with Betazoid physiology, Juri’s mind disconnected from his body, the anchor he required to keep grounded, to not loose his mind in a stormy sea of thoughts and emotions around him. Into this panicy maelstrom he sought any quiet port. He retreated into the mind of a koi slowly swimming in a decorative pond outside the clinic. It was quiet in the koi. Life made sense, it was dull but comforting. And so he retreated there, and did not come back out for years. Catatonic to the outside world, he lived through the senses of a fish in a pond on Earth.
His last conscious thought was part of an old Earth Buddhist chant he once heard a fellow patient repeating one night, in universal translated Vietnamese, “No eyes no ears no nose no body no mind.” It was almost so, for he felt and heard only the sound of falling water, the footsteps echoing off the stones, saw the sun, smelled the plants and food. He felt balance and electricity far away in organs he could not name. None of the stimuli he comprehended. None hurt him.
One day the fish became ill, old before Juri arrived, its body gave way to old age, as most living things did. Juri knew before the visiting veterinarian had scanned his medical tricorder over the pond and told the saddened caretaker “I’m sorry.”
“I am dying.” it was not his own realization. It was that of the fish. Unspoken and worldless, but an acknowledgment, a basic sentience of its own. The power of it pushed Juri back into his body forcefully, years of floating in the pond leaving him disoriented and dazed. He recovered quickly enough, tearing out tubes and monitors and taking the lift down in his hospital robe to where the the pond was located, in the atrium.
The veterinarian put his hand upon the caretaker’s shoulder saying, “I’m sorry.”
The Denobulan doctor was gone, returned to her home planet several years before. The new specialist was a Vulcan, who had hurried down once he had seen Juri take flight. Of all of this Juri had no idea as he stood there getting used to being human again. The voices had stopped. He had control of his faculties. He grieved for the dying old fish, his host, and on some level, who he had been for a short lifetime.
“I am ready to go home.” he said to anyone who could hear. “But I think I need a little more time.”
“I agree.” the Vulcan said, walking up to meet him, giving him the Vulcan salute. “On both points.”
* * *
Walking together on the campus of the clinic, Doctor Sononitar apologized one day, for the mind-meld he’d performed without the other’s permission. Under the circumstances, Juri understood. The Vulcan had understood what Juri had been forced to do, and kept the particulars of that finding to himself, while assuring the other staff that Juri was in a self-imposed self healing, which was true enough.
“I believe you have progressed enough to leave this facility. You checked in on your own volition. Therefor it would be unethical to hold you back. Still, I would caution against returning to Tarsus IV.” his doctor warned him, at the time. “You will be forced to deal with many complicated emotions and thoughts.”
“The situation has been over for some time. Many of the survivors have left. I do have survivor’s guilt. I know it. But I also know I can make a difference to the colony’s survival. I can be of use there, in some capacity. I am no use to anyone here, and Betazed was never my home.” besides, he said mustering a grin, “To use the human expression, ‘I have been a big fish in a small pond’ for too long.”
The Vulcan raised an eyebrow, nodding before continuing to walk. That was as close as his species generally came to acknowledging humor. “Juri, I have been and shall continue to be your care provider, regardless of where you go. You can reach me for consultation whenever you require it, though I ask you to be aware of the differences in time, as I do maintain meditation and sleeping hours.”
* * *
A new transport, the Manoa took him to his old homeworld. It shown like a jewel in the light of its star, Tarsus, as they made standard orbit and prepared the disembarking shuttle. It had never been a raging success of a colony. Only eight thousand people, few of the them stayed for long.
He remembered that human woman he had worked with briefly and had awkwardly tried to flirt with. He had not bothered to ask her relationship status, he’d just made a wrong assumption about the look she gave, the feeling he thought she’d emitted. Then her little boy came running up behind her one day when they both happened to be in the town square for a festival, with a keen look at this black eyed man talking to his mother. He said, chin jutting out, “Hey mom, are we gonna talk to dad on the holo tonight?”
She almost looked apologetic, “No Jim, you know he’s on duty too far away for that, right now.” She excused herself. The boy, Jim actually looked back and gave a cocky half grin to Juri. You didn’t need to be a telepath to read “Not with my mom, you don’t.”
Juri wondered if Winona and her son left the planet before Kodos had killed half the small population. If they survived, they probably moved on. Starfleet families never sat still. Many of the survivors had left too. The Federation was dealing with the settlement’s government on the possibility of settling new people on the world. The Fed would get its way, eventually, and the newcomers would outnumber the old, until the ones like him would just be a small minority, the ones who remembered a time before Kodos, when it was a good world untainted, capable of solving its own problems. Before the food shortage proved that was totally false.
The shuttle departed soon, crossing the terminator into night. They landed by starlight in the nearly empty town’s space port. No one greeted him. He noticed more people boarding to depart than had stepped off the shuttle. One of those stars overhead was perhaps Sol, even if he could not see it. He felt like calling his doctor and therapist, the patient Vulcan, but he refrained. He was holding it together.
His house was still there, a small barrel-vault structure built to last with minimal care. Automated systems had taken care of the garden. Automated systems had mostly taken care of the interior. The air was fresh enough. The dust was something he’d take a rag and mop to in the morning. He should not be tired, but he was. Warp-lag. He regarded his bed with satisfaction. He peeled back the dusty duvet, stripped out of his clothes and lay down on the bed, improvising his traveling cloak as a blanket, looking up though the sunroof to the stars he had just left behind.
He was a fish in the pond. Garden plants surrounded his small abode. They gave him shade. At night when the sun went down there were the stars, ripping from the surface of the water overhead. There were voices. There was not enough food. Half the fish would be taken to an auditorium and vaporized with terrible weapons. Four thousand koi forced into the same spot. “I am dying” they thought.
He woke up with a start.
“I should have been here. I was weak. I should have toughed it out, not went to that clinic. Maybe I would have known. I could have warned someone.” he said these things out loud.
“Hey.. are you alright?” he saw a beam of light, but reached out, felt minds. They meant him no harm. He turned on the lights, sitting up.
Two people in regular clothes. Not the old security uniform of the colony, nor Starfleet’s garish colors.
“It’s our turn on town watch. We saw someone had broken into Juri’s home, and had to check it out.”
“We sure didn’t think it would be Juri breaking into his own home!” the other said
They both said “welcome back, friend.”
Mavis and Irgom. He’d worked with them both in the old days. Mavis was a human and Irgom was.. he wasn’t entirely sure and had felt too embarassed to ever ask. They lived together, though whether it was romantic or something else, again Juri never had asked. He jumped up to hug them, filled with emotion then remembered other species’ issues with nudity by the alarmed feeling they both gave off. He threw his coat back on. He didn’t care at that moment if they’d heard his nightmare delirium earlier. He knew he was exorcised of it, somehow, or beginning to be.
“We were glad you weren’t here.” Mavis said.
“We kept track on you, for a long time. But we figured you got better and never came back, like a lot of folks.” Irgom added.
“I got better.” Juri agreed. “But I’m staying. I want to help. We’ll talk about it in the morning. I’m stopping by for free breakfast from you two tomorrow. Price for busting in without a warrant.”
* * *
He was old now. Like the koi, he’d eventually give in to what time was doing to his body. But not for awhile, if he had anything to do with it. Tarsus IV was thriving now. The new population centers were far from the original settlement. They didn’t have the historic stain of this place. S.S. Manoa still arrived regularly and probably would for decades. The little town was rebuild, quiet and yet well connected, the best little secret in the quadrant.
Kodos had eventually been discovered, many years ago, by that smirking kid Jim, all grown up now. Juri had never learned the full details about it, and didn’t want to. It was a chapter closed, and that was enough. He did like reading about the exploits of the famous Jim, though. He just wished the news would mention Captain Kirk was from Tarsus IV. The place needed good press.
Outside of town, in the killing fields, there was a memorial to the 4,000 victims. In a rational, sane world, there were no such thing as ghosts. They had never been proven, scientifically. Most Betazoids rejected the idea, but not all. There were some who felt any echo of continuance, especially those cut off violently, might drift, patterns of telepathic energy unable to complete their life journey.
As he grew older, Juri was definitely in that small group of believers. Sometimes he could hear a thought, sense a feeling, connected to nothing. It might be his mind playing tricks. That was all right.
He’d taken up gardening, learning its art and skill, taking courses after his regular job until he one day became the caretaker for the memorial. Part of it was a large park area, with gardens representing the horticultural traditions of the cultures of those who had been murdered.
At the center of it was a calm serene pond. Stocking it with koi had been Juri’s idea. If a stray thought or presence needed to take comfort for a few years in one of the slow moving carp, what of it? The sun was setting over the gardens. They’d be looked after long past his own leaving. That was good. But he had plenty of life left in him. He admired the gardens, not as the gardens of an executioner but for the life they contained and celebrated.
His councilor, an unusually serious Denobulan female, had been reluctant to tell him the bad news. He was a Betazoid, and he would have known, regardless, even if such “Reaching out” was intrusive and contrary to his healing process.
“There was an incident on your world, Juri. Eventually you will find out, and we will not be dishonest with you. This will not be easy to hear, but you must. Your governor committed mass murder..” She began explaining the story that was already being discussed across the Federation, the tale of half a planet murdered by Kodos. Normally, discussions of the outside were kept to a minimum at the clinic. But there was no way to avoid this. There was no way to soften the blow. Later he would appreciate her honesty, her directness.
But the shock of it, what it meant, removed all his progress. The minds came screaming back to him. He thought he heard voices of the dead, his family and friends, from light years away, ghosts demanding comfort and condemning him for not being there. He screamed. He thrashed about, and had to be restrained from attempting to jump from a balcony.
Mildly sedated by a nurse unfamiliar with Betazoid physiology, Juri’s mind disconnected from his body, the anchor he required to keep grounded, to not loose his mind in a stormy sea of thoughts and emotions around him. Into this panicy maelstrom he sought any quiet port. He retreated into the mind of a koi slowly swimming in a decorative pond outside the clinic. It was quiet in the koi. Life made sense, it was dull but comforting. And so he retreated there, and did not come back out for years. Catatonic to the outside world, he lived through the senses of a fish in a pond on Earth.
His last conscious thought was part of an old Earth Buddhist chant he once heard a fellow patient repeating one night, in universal translated Vietnamese, “No eyes no ears no nose no body no mind.” It was almost so, for he felt and heard only the sound of falling water, the footsteps echoing off the stones, saw the sun, smelled the plants and food. He felt balance and electricity far away in organs he could not name. None of the stimuli he comprehended. None hurt him.
One day the fish became ill, old before Juri arrived, its body gave way to old age, as most living things did. Juri knew before the visiting veterinarian had scanned his medical tricorder over the pond and told the saddened caretaker “I’m sorry.”
“I am dying.” it was not his own realization. It was that of the fish. Unspoken and worldless, but an acknowledgment, a basic sentience of its own. The power of it pushed Juri back into his body forcefully, years of floating in the pond leaving him disoriented and dazed. He recovered quickly enough, tearing out tubes and monitors and taking the lift down in his hospital robe to where the the pond was located, in the atrium.
The veterinarian put his hand upon the caretaker’s shoulder saying, “I’m sorry.”
The Denobulan doctor was gone, returned to her home planet several years before. The new specialist was a Vulcan, who had hurried down once he had seen Juri take flight. Of all of this Juri had no idea as he stood there getting used to being human again. The voices had stopped. He had control of his faculties. He grieved for the dying old fish, his host, and on some level, who he had been for a short lifetime.
“I am ready to go home.” he said to anyone who could hear. “But I think I need a little more time.”
“I agree.” the Vulcan said, walking up to meet him, giving him the Vulcan salute. “On both points.”
* * *
Walking together on the campus of the clinic, Doctor Sononitar apologized one day, for the mind-meld he’d performed without the other’s permission. Under the circumstances, Juri understood. The Vulcan had understood what Juri had been forced to do, and kept the particulars of that finding to himself, while assuring the other staff that Juri was in a self-imposed self healing, which was true enough.
“I believe you have progressed enough to leave this facility. You checked in on your own volition. Therefor it would be unethical to hold you back. Still, I would caution against returning to Tarsus IV.” his doctor warned him, at the time. “You will be forced to deal with many complicated emotions and thoughts.”
“The situation has been over for some time. Many of the survivors have left. I do have survivor’s guilt. I know it. But I also know I can make a difference to the colony’s survival. I can be of use there, in some capacity. I am no use to anyone here, and Betazed was never my home.” besides, he said mustering a grin, “To use the human expression, ‘I have been a big fish in a small pond’ for too long.”
The Vulcan raised an eyebrow, nodding before continuing to walk. That was as close as his species generally came to acknowledging humor. “Juri, I have been and shall continue to be your care provider, regardless of where you go. You can reach me for consultation whenever you require it, though I ask you to be aware of the differences in time, as I do maintain meditation and sleeping hours.”
* * *
A new transport, the Manoa took him to his old homeworld. It shown like a jewel in the light of its star, Tarsus, as they made standard orbit and prepared the disembarking shuttle. It had never been a raging success of a colony. Only eight thousand people, few of the them stayed for long.
He remembered that human woman he had worked with briefly and had awkwardly tried to flirt with. He had not bothered to ask her relationship status, he’d just made a wrong assumption about the look she gave, the feeling he thought she’d emitted. Then her little boy came running up behind her one day when they both happened to be in the town square for a festival, with a keen look at this black eyed man talking to his mother. He said, chin jutting out, “Hey mom, are we gonna talk to dad on the holo tonight?”
She almost looked apologetic, “No Jim, you know he’s on duty too far away for that, right now.” She excused herself. The boy, Jim actually looked back and gave a cocky half grin to Juri. You didn’t need to be a telepath to read “Not with my mom, you don’t.”
Juri wondered if Winona and her son left the planet before Kodos had killed half the small population. If they survived, they probably moved on. Starfleet families never sat still. Many of the survivors had left too. The Federation was dealing with the settlement’s government on the possibility of settling new people on the world. The Fed would get its way, eventually, and the newcomers would outnumber the old, until the ones like him would just be a small minority, the ones who remembered a time before Kodos, when it was a good world untainted, capable of solving its own problems. Before the food shortage proved that was totally false.
The shuttle departed soon, crossing the terminator into night. They landed by starlight in the nearly empty town’s space port. No one greeted him. He noticed more people boarding to depart than had stepped off the shuttle. One of those stars overhead was perhaps Sol, even if he could not see it. He felt like calling his doctor and therapist, the patient Vulcan, but he refrained. He was holding it together.
His house was still there, a small barrel-vault structure built to last with minimal care. Automated systems had taken care of the garden. Automated systems had mostly taken care of the interior. The air was fresh enough. The dust was something he’d take a rag and mop to in the morning. He should not be tired, but he was. Warp-lag. He regarded his bed with satisfaction. He peeled back the dusty duvet, stripped out of his clothes and lay down on the bed, improvising his traveling cloak as a blanket, looking up though the sunroof to the stars he had just left behind.
He was a fish in the pond. Garden plants surrounded his small abode. They gave him shade. At night when the sun went down there were the stars, ripping from the surface of the water overhead. There were voices. There was not enough food. Half the fish would be taken to an auditorium and vaporized with terrible weapons. Four thousand koi forced into the same spot. “I am dying” they thought.
He woke up with a start.
“I should have been here. I was weak. I should have toughed it out, not went to that clinic. Maybe I would have known. I could have warned someone.” he said these things out loud.
“Hey.. are you alright?” he saw a beam of light, but reached out, felt minds. They meant him no harm. He turned on the lights, sitting up.
Two people in regular clothes. Not the old security uniform of the colony, nor Starfleet’s garish colors.
“It’s our turn on town watch. We saw someone had broken into Juri’s home, and had to check it out.”
“We sure didn’t think it would be Juri breaking into his own home!” the other said
They both said “welcome back, friend.”
Mavis and Irgom. He’d worked with them both in the old days. Mavis was a human and Irgom was.. he wasn’t entirely sure and had felt too embarassed to ever ask. They lived together, though whether it was romantic or something else, again Juri never had asked. He jumped up to hug them, filled with emotion then remembered other species’ issues with nudity by the alarmed feeling they both gave off. He threw his coat back on. He didn’t care at that moment if they’d heard his nightmare delirium earlier. He knew he was exorcised of it, somehow, or beginning to be.
“We were glad you weren’t here.” Mavis said.
“We kept track on you, for a long time. But we figured you got better and never came back, like a lot of folks.” Irgom added.
“I got better.” Juri agreed. “But I’m staying. I want to help. We’ll talk about it in the morning. I’m stopping by for free breakfast from you two tomorrow. Price for busting in without a warrant.”
* * *
He was old now. Like the koi, he’d eventually give in to what time was doing to his body. But not for awhile, if he had anything to do with it. Tarsus IV was thriving now. The new population centers were far from the original settlement. They didn’t have the historic stain of this place. S.S. Manoa still arrived regularly and probably would for decades. The little town was rebuild, quiet and yet well connected, the best little secret in the quadrant.
Kodos had eventually been discovered, many years ago, by that smirking kid Jim, all grown up now. Juri had never learned the full details about it, and didn’t want to. It was a chapter closed, and that was enough. He did like reading about the exploits of the famous Jim, though. He just wished the news would mention Captain Kirk was from Tarsus IV. The place needed good press.
Outside of town, in the killing fields, there was a memorial to the 4,000 victims. In a rational, sane world, there were no such thing as ghosts. They had never been proven, scientifically. Most Betazoids rejected the idea, but not all. There were some who felt any echo of continuance, especially those cut off violently, might drift, patterns of telepathic energy unable to complete their life journey.
As he grew older, Juri was definitely in that small group of believers. Sometimes he could hear a thought, sense a feeling, connected to nothing. It might be his mind playing tricks. That was all right.
He’d taken up gardening, learning its art and skill, taking courses after his regular job until he one day became the caretaker for the memorial. Part of it was a large park area, with gardens representing the horticultural traditions of the cultures of those who had been murdered.
At the center of it was a calm serene pond. Stocking it with koi had been Juri’s idea. If a stray thought or presence needed to take comfort for a few years in one of the slow moving carp, what of it? The sun was setting over the gardens. They’d be looked after long past his own leaving. That was good. But he had plenty of life left in him. He admired the gardens, not as the gardens of an executioner but for the life they contained and celebrated.
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