And now with this happening, her potency starting to fade . . . she could never tell Navaar about the supplement, or she’d never live it down. To be losing her natural potency while her older sister was still—
“Wait,” she said to Honar-Des as he showed her out of the exam room. “Navaar’s already on these pills, isn’t she? She gets a little performance boost of her own to stay on top, doesn’t she?”
Honar-Des looked terrified. “Please, Mistress . . . I’m obligated to keep all my mistresses’ medical information confidential. I beg you not to make me reveal . . .”
She laughed. “Don’t worry, little man. You just told me what I need to know. Get back to your patients.”
Honar-Des thanked her abjectly, ignoring Jofirek’s loud demands that the doctor pay attention to him now. D’Nesh left in a better mood, reassured that she could still make men grovel at her feet. Where seduction failed, there was always cruelty. If anything, she enjoyed that even more.
June 9, 2164
Mount Dleba Observatory, Rigel V
“This is where Rigel began.”
Rehlen Vons, assistant director for Rigel V, gestured proudly at the antique telescope mounted in its carefully maintained brass fittings. “It was through this very telescope,” the craggy-faced Jelna exomale went on, “that Lovar Dleba first detected the fires that the Zami of Rigel IV used to manage and clear the forests of their world. Her studies over the ensuing years confirmed the regularity and design behind the fires, and eventually she refined the instrument enough to detect the smaller fires of their permanent settlements and migratory bands. This proof that intelligent life existed on their neighboring world inspired Jelna science and engineering as we sought to develop the means to communicate with our neighbors. In time we realized the natives of Four were not advanced enough to detect us in return—but within two centuries of Dleba’s discovery, a robotic probe bearing her name made the first landing on Four and sent back the first images of the Zami people.”
“Incredible,” breathed Lieutenant Samuel Kirk. “It took humans over three hundred and fifty years between Galileo’s first telescopic observations and the first robot probe landing on Mars.”
“Maybe if we’d had proof of intelligent life on the world next door,” Travis Mayweather told Pioneer’s historian, “we’d have been motivated to develop spaceflight faster, too.”
“But we did assume there was intelligent life on Mars for centuries,” Kirk replied. “Remember Percival Lowell’s so-called canals? We didn’t abandon the idea until the space probes of the nineteen sixties revealed the truth.”
The first officer shrugged. “Assuming is one thing. Actually seeing it? That’s always a stronger motivator.”
“Very true,” Vons replied. “But that was only the beginning. Over the generations that followed,” the pale-haired assistant director went on, “the Jelna established ongoing trade relations first with the Zami, and later with the Chelons of Rigel III. We shared our technology and medicine in exchange for the local goods and the unique art and literature of each species. Naturally there were turbulent times—cross-species diseases, political oppression, wars—but through those hard lessons, the Rigelians learned the value of trade without judgment, cooperation without cultural domination. We learned to respect one another’s autonomy and freedom of choice, and it only brought us closer. The Trade Commission oversaw a peaceful, prosperous Rigel system for over a century and a half before the Coridanites made first contact.”
Kirk traded a look with Mayweather, aware of the bias that informed the board member’s account. As the most junior member of the board of directors—Sedra Hemnask’s assistant, filling in for her now that she was en route to Babel—Vons had been tasked with the assignment of shepherding Pioneer’s crew on their fact-finding tour. Yet he had made it clear enough that, unlike Hemnask, he was skeptical of the benefits of Federation membership and reluctant to abandon the Commission’s traditional laissez-faire policies.
True, it was Hemnask herself who had gone to represent the RTC at Babel. But Babel was the Federation’s side of the equation. The Rigelians would conduct their own vote on the membership question. And Vons’s attitude, alongside the skepticism of Directors Zehron and Tenott, made it clear that Pioneer’s crew would have to make a strong case for the Federation. But that struck Kirk as a good sign. A healthy, open debate could be very beneficial for social progress.
Not to mention that it would make his account of this historic event that much livelier. Generally, a Starfleet historian’s job was to study the recorded history of the alien worlds they visited—and Beta Rigel was a mother lode in that regard, three distinct planets with their own independent histories as well as a millennium of mutual interaction. Yet Kirk now had the opportunity to write new history as it happened.