A Mountain Between Two Men

Posted on 01 May 2013 @ 11:52pm by Trisant Myrddin

3,239 words; about a 16 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 4, Liyar's Office
Timeline: MD 05 - 0903 hours

[ON]

The doors 'tween Liyar's office and the passageway parted as soon as the command to enter was given. From the passageway, a voice accented by Bajor's Dakhur province asked, "Was it you?" Heralded by the question, Trisant Myrddin stalked into the office. He walked chest first, with his shoulders rolled back. "Did you do it?" Trisant asked.

Legs crossed and back straight atop his desk, Liyar opened his eyes. The numbers floating idly in his mind stilled and dropped to the floor, dissolving in spatters of rain. The Bajoran stellar cartographer took their place, rising up from intangible shadows. Feet on the ground, stuck in mud, solid. A peculiar, excitable agitation followed him through the door. Liyar stretched his fingers over his knees. "That would depend on what it is you believe I have done," Liyar answered, deep and steady.

"You..." Trisant started to say, but the vowel became elongated, and then he trailed off completely. The gaze of his grey eyes softened on Liyar and all of the expression drained out of his face. His jaw nearly went slack. Trisant blinked heavily, and he said, "You're sitting on your desk."

"Yes, Mr. Trisant. I am doing this," Liyar agreed, pressing his fingertips together. He picked up a small stick from the jumbled pile of things he was sitting on and snuffed out the flame in the asenoi beside him, curling incense and smoke through the air.

Trisant not only followed Liyar's movements with his eyes, he even turned his head as if that would help him understand. "Can't be good for your back," Trisant muttered, and then he coughed when a puff of the smoke wafted his way.

Liyar regarded the Bajoran thoughtfully. "Sitting," he said curiously, unfolding himself from the desk in spindly, spidery movements, setting himself on his feet and stretching his fingers. He returned to his chair, opening the terminal on his desk. "Is there something you require."

Stepping closer to the desk, Trisant pressed the flat of both palms against the smooth surface. "When I reported to the stellar cartography lab," Trisant said, "The stars were wrong. They weren't stars at all. Someone replaced the stars on every surface of the lab with..." --he hesitated as confusion clouded his tone-- "Numbers."

The Vulcan blinked several times in a row. Two days? Three days ago? Tarinol clouded his memories, shrouded them in mist. Globules and splotches of shapes moved in his mind. Vaguely behind the veil the golden threads of information, patterns. Statistics. Gigantic, sprawling maps. Stars and routes. Rojar. MS1. Not his office, not a hologrid? Stellar cartography? His face shifted quixotically, and he stood once more. "Yes," he lied, covering the fact that he only barely remembered at all. "Yes. I will fix it."

"No," Trisant said, but it came out more stridently than he intended. Planting his hands on his hips didn't help either. Trisant stopped. He closed his eyes, and tried to choose his words more carefully. When he opened his eyes, all that came tumbling out was, "I mean, no, don't fix it. It's-- the numbers-- I can't pretend to understand-- but they're beautiful."

Liyar's eyebrows drew together. That was not the usual reaction. More like get rid of your foolishness. He eyed Trisant askance momentarily and then tapped a button on the terminal, calling up the smaller map and swiveling it so Trisant could see. Planets and systems overlapped with intersecting gridlines, each with velocity, trigonometry, placements, trade routes, allocations, divisions. These delved further beside the bigger numbers, flowing into algebraic functions, equations describing equations. Graphs beside them all indicated varying levels of labor, power, food, water, atmosphere and colonization potentials. "It resembled this?"

"Yes," Trisant replied. There was more enthusiasm in his nod than in his statement of fact. Trisant's eyes bore into the characters on the display, as he made himself comfortable in the chair opposite Liyar. "That exactly," Trisant said, "But what is its meaning?"

"It is Rojar," Liyar replied. A simple answer to an infinitely complicated question. "These are relevant planetary statistics from the telemetry gathered by the initial probe launch. It will become clearer in time." The numbers there were thinner, less involved. "The rest of it is how each planet and resource deposit will affect the Federation and other Alpha-quadrant powers. Who needs what, how they will get it. Colonies, allocations, competition, negotiation, the impact of scavengers or pirates." He indicated each separate cluster of numbers around one planet, but each of them followed the same pattern. He pursed his lips. "Why?"

"It's a fairy tale," said Trisant with some small satisfaction. His gaze was locked on the display and he leaned closer towards it. There was a hint a reverie in his voice to suggest he might not have even been responding to Liyar's question exactly. "It looked like a fairy tale."

Puzzled, Liyar lowered himself back into his chair and rested his chin on his hands, elbows on the desk. He too had always thought there was more to economics than boring calculations. It was, in his opinion, how the universe worked. Economics in numbers, in people, like viewing cells in a microscope. A delicate balance of everything. Motivation, intent, purpose. "A fairy tale," he repeated. "A short story invoking folklore and fantasy."

Trisant nodded, but then a fecund silence grew between them. Trisant began to notice a hint of a whiff of Liyar's puzzlement, and he looked away from the display only to study the Vulcan's face. Trisant's intent grey eyes couldn't find much there, but he made an inference all the same. "Ah," Trisant said, "I grew up in a refugee camp. Economy is fantasy."

Liyar's fingers knitted together and apart as he pondered Trisant's words. Refugee camp. The fingers separated again. "In my experience, it is foundational." Whether the foundation was a crumbling hut or a soaring skyscraper. He tapped a few buttons on the display screen and moved in closer to the moons orbiting RII. "I want one of those planets," he said unceremoniously. Beside them were more totals. Atmosphere, quality of life, maximum containment, geological activity, weather, proximity to other planets.

"You want. A planet?" Trisant asked haltingly. His voice was thick with emotion, but that emotion was not surprise. Rather, he sounded curious, and delighted, and impressed that this solitary being before him could think big thoughts like wanting an entire planet. While Trisant's eyes continued to study Liyar closely, the timbre of surprise crept into his voice: "What for?"

"RII-RXCVI," Liyar said, zooming in on one of the planetoids. "Class-K. Geoinactive. Habitable zone. It could easily support a population of at least ten thousand people. Half of MS1's population. Reduce the load. Less violence. Less struggle. The resources there could sustain a viable, self-contained economy for at least three years. RII-RLXVII. Class-P. Habitable zone. It would take more resources. EVAs, heat. Any Romulan would suffer in that environment. But it could realistically hold quadruple the amount of people on MS1. Its size alone would mean the ability to separate opposing groups and reduce conflict." He gestured to the display in its entirety. "There are many candidates. RII-RII, RII-RI; ideally, I would be interested in one of them, but I am not a fool."

The finer points of Liyar's plans were lost on Trisant. "M-S-1," he said softly. The Bajoran's eyes clouded over as his focus drifted away to the Citrin camp on Gemaris V, drifted away to MS1, and then he came back again to Liyar and his impeccable diction. Trisant watched Liyar's lips, and then he said, "This fairy tale. It began with the destruction of Romulus and Remus... And you want a planet. For them." --Concern mounted in his timbre-- "Does that mean you know? Is it true what that journalist? With the handsome tattoos? Reported about MS1's potable water?"

"Raifi Zaren," Liyar supplied the Trill's name with a nod. "It is true, yes," he answered gravely. He brought up MS1 on his display and the various charts and graphs he'd been calculating. He swiveled it to the side so Trisant could see. Every single bar was in the low-zone. "The t'chak is practically worthless. They have very few resources to compensate for this. Replicators, food, water, power," he said, tapping the knife edge of his hand against the desk on the last three words. "In the Federation we live in what most would call a self-sustaining economy. Replicators do most of our work, robots, transporters." His eyes found the replicator at the other side of the wall in his office. "Poverty and hunger are relatively unknown. This is a group of people who have no replicators. That means no food, no supplies. No medical kits, no metal, no wood. What they do have is donated or mined from the planet, but these are sick people. Their employment is crippled. People cannot enter the workforce and they cannot exit. It is stagnant. People fight, hurt one another, riot, get sick and die of bacterial infection due to the poor climate. They are traumatized people. Mining for ore on the level that is required to create a functional network for them would take decades. They do not have the fortitude. No resources. Very little water. Generator power, SEUs." Liyar looked up. He expected, of course, that Trisant would brush him off, as everyone but Zaren had done over the last two years. "Not a particularly uplifting fairy-tale," he finished. "But one of these planets could solve at least half of that problem. Reduce the coagulation of population, build pressure domes with suitable atmosphere, resources that can be excavated by the additional survey teams who come here, to give the Romulans the ability to trade and do business again."

This time, Trisant's eyes didn't wander from Liyar. The Bajoran folded his arms over his abdomen and he sat back in his chair, but his attention wasn't divided away from Liyar. Trisant followed the shapes Liyar's lips made and the words that came. Resources on a planetary scale were too abstract a thought for Trisant's imagination. It sounded like text books and holographic images to him. But this, hearing about dehydrated people without the nutritional fortitude, or hygiene resources, to fight off infection, this hit Trisant where he lived. Sounding far more bitter than any Starfleet personnel should do, Trisant remarked, "I don't recall the Federation donating a replicator to my community... Have our diplomatic policies changed overmuch?"

Liyar looked at him sideways. "What makes you think the Federation is donating replicators?"

In return, Trisant narrowed his eyes on Liyar. "If not through the Federation," Trisant asked, "How will you get them a planet?"

"Indeed," Liyar concurred with a single nod. Trisant had very effectively described Liyar's biggest hurdle. "MS1 is not a priority for the Federation. In fact, none of the allocations lists I have seen thus far have included MS1. I am going to try knocking on their door. As you say." He rested his chin against the tips of his fingers. "The Federation responds to very specific stimulus. Our people, they do not know why they should care, so they do not. Donations are helpful, but a colony cannot survive on donations alone. Not people who can barely function, let alone properly use what they have. Most especially not in a Federation that is unused to the concept of needing resources." How many times in a day did people say they lived in a post-scarce society, that they wanted for nothing, that his life's work was irrelevant? That hunger and poverty had been eliminated? It was an apathetic and Federation-centric view. "I will get that planet."

After nodding at each of the points Liyar had communicated, Trisant focused his eyes down on the desktop. A slight curl came to the edge of his lips and his brow furrowed in concentration. Guilelessly curious, Trisant asked, "What specific stimulus most effectively mobilizes the Federation then?"

"Sight. Sound. Touch. Seeing devastation, feeling it, in front of them. Most species operate on selective bias. A person cannot devote one hundred percent of their attention to every plight. That would be overwhelming," Liyar explained. "Most care only about what directly affects them. Even the most compassionate person will remain distanced from other things." He blinked slowly. "Eliminating distance. Showing them what is happening. That these are individuals, the same as them. It could easily be them. Their families. Their friends. Showing them that their contributions, their actions, have a direct effect on the situation."

Trisant nodded at Liyar's words in all seriousness, but then he spoke in a tongue-in-cheek timbre. "Are you talking about kidnapping the families of the Federation Council," Trisant asked, "and relocating them to M-S-1?"

He pursed his lips, possibly in amusement. It was difficult to tell. "It would certainly provide them with some crucial experience."

Smirking at that, Trisant only shook his head lightly at the absurdity of that line of thought. Launching off parallel from it, Trisant supposed, "Could our very own FNN journalists become more effective at making one feel as if one was kidnapped to M-S-1?"

"If the FNN itself cared, I imagine they would be rather effective," Liyar replied, leaning forward on his elbows. "While Mr. Zaren is certainly a proponent of MS1, his colleagues do not share his enthusiasm. One person screaming in a dark room reflects a void." He moved his head and shoulders very slightly in a Vulcan-like shrug. "Trija Natyal has a more urgent focus, and I suspect Jool Fenta is more concerned with her enormous hairstyle," he said in a boring monotone.

"Ah," Trisant said in response to Liyar's tone of voice as much as in response to his words. He nodded, as if he only then reached a new understanding. Rolling his shoulders back, Trisant said, "You're going to do nothing."

"The immediate plan is far less extravagant," Liyar admitted. "Mr. Zaren and myself are attempting to organize a team of scientists and doctors to better understand an event called psionic backlash. I believe that is partially responsible for why the Romulans are devolving on an interstellar level. Even getting the remaining Romulan population to a state where they are able to mentally start rebuilding would be a benefit. Resources and property can only go so far. The problem is compound. I do fully intend to do my best to acquire this planet." He realized that he might just have been talking past the point where Trisant was interested in listening to him, and blinked, before falling silent over his terminal.

Trying to piece it all together, Trisant crossed his arms and continued to watch Liyar's lips closely. "You're... saying the Romulan refugees' inability to rebuild," Trisant asked with a popped eyebrow, "is... psychosomatic?"

"No," Liyar shook his head. "Psychosomatic indicates a psychological problem which affects the body physically. Telepathic trauma is entirely physical." Liyar straightened in his chair. "As we have noticed in the stable relocation centers elsewhere, the Romulans continue to devolve. In my home province there is a Romulan settlement. They are sheltered, jobs, medical care, food, water. We encourage them to be independent. Half of the time V'Ket officers are breaking up riots. We have noticed a tendency in bonded individuals to be free of these issues, which suggests that it is related to the unconscious telepathic trauma of losing so many lives. It is dual problem. They are not being provided with enough resources, and when they are given resources," he gestured a hand, trailing off. "MS1 was originally given enough supplies to be economically independent for five years," he explained. "As you can see, that did not happen. Mr. Zaren and I hope to isolate the cause, neurologically, economically, sustainably; and take steps to begin to alleviate it."

"That..." Trisant said, but he seemed to lose sight of his intention almost immediately. He shook his head and got it back. "...Sounds like a mountain between two men. Is Starfleet supporting your personal investment into this cause?"

"They have not said no," was Liyar's diplomatic answer. "Our team is largely comprised of the civilian sector. Medics, scientists, economists, trade sources, politicians. Starfleet has demonstrably proven that they have little interest in the matter. Once we are able to categorically provide real statistics and irrefutable proof, Starfleet will likely step up. Until that time, civilian efforts are essential."

Having underestimated how much support this pursuit had garnered, Trisant nodded at Liyar's words with dawning understanding behind his eyes. "Has your team made much progress?" Trisant asked.

"Thus far we are in the process of recruitment," Liyar answered. "Twenty-six doctors and scientists were just dispatched to Kaitan in order to set up a perimeter to begin studying it as a control group, and to provide essential medical care. The rest were sent to MS1. Another group of Adepts and economists are working to better understand the dissemination of resources and how their behavior is affecting their viability both in Kaitan and MS1."

"Well then," said Trisant, but the wideness of his eyes and his inflection said something more like, 'quite an impressive operation you have here'. He looked down at his knee, as he noticed he was tapping his foot on the floor rhythmically. Trisant looked Liyar in the eye, and he asked, "What can I do?"

Liyar had been thinking about that for a while as they spoke, realizing that he'd invested quite a lot of time into his explanation. If Trisant were truly interested in the matter, his support could be extremely valuable. "As a member of Starfleet, your approval of our efforts would go a long way when it comes to public consumption," Liyar started. "However, as a scientist, you may be of more practical value." He tapped a button on his terminal and turned it over for Trisant to see more clearly. "There are over 80 moons and planetoids in this system that could have potentially habitable environments. The criteria for such planets is more limited. They need to be geologically stable. They need to be self-sustaining, they need to have resources which can be excavated by implementation teams prior to any settlement's arrival. I have made a list of about five planets so far that are theoretical possibilities, but I am not a scientist. Your assistance in this matter could prove very useful."

"That wouldn't be too far off from what I'm working on now," Trisant said with some eagerness. "I would need to change my project scope, or write a new proposal, but I can't imagine Lieutenant Panne would refuse an analysis like that, on the face of it. And even if she does... There are... options."

"Your efforts would be greatly appreciated," Liyar replied sincerely.

"Send me your criteria and the planetoids you're considering," Trisant said. He smirked in far more bold a manner than he might normally do to telegraph to the Vulcan that he was speaking figuratively when he said, "I'll write you a story."

[OFF]

Lieutenant (JG) Liyar
Diplomatic Officer, VDF/SDD
USS Galileo

Petty Officer 1st Class Trisant Myrddin
(Played by Andreus Kohl)
Stellar Cartographer
USS Galileo

RSS Feed