A/N: I've been editing. No plot changes, but maybe a few better (clearer) word choices. Still a few too many adverbs but that was how I wrote in 2007 and I'm trying to stay tru(ish) to that version of me. July 11, 2021.
Fake Plastic Trees
Ten Forward was bustling. Celebration was in the air. The ship was now in orbit around Ark11.
The party had burst into a carnival. (Riker allowed the tumblers to spread festive anarchy in the ship's corridors but he drew the line at fire jugglers.)
A live concert had cranked up. In just a few days, instruments stuffed at the bottom of lockers had been rediscovered and hidden talents brought to the fore.
The hard months which had preceded this day hadn't been forgotten, but it was as if the crew had permission to express optimism. Their experiences weren't being swept aside – if anything, they had surfaced in many of the songs people had discovered.
The crew had embraced an array of music (not exclusively Terran) and in doing so had found a way to deal with the buried feelings of guilt Riker and Troi had discussed days ago. The crew had been given a positive outlet to embrace those feelings.
War and conflict were common themes but had equal footing with other types of songs. Apparently there wasn't a love song that had never been written.
Riker marveled at the millennial ability to regurgitate itself and its messages over and over again.
Everywhere he went on the ship, he heard upbeat tempos, acrobatic rhymes and uplifting melodies.
The millennial anthropologist was in the thick of it.
She had been called upon to join several musicians in Ten Forward. "One last song" kept turning into "just one more", until Sudamen had showed up, and like an unwelcome ion storm, attempted to put an end to the game.
"We'll be beaming planet-side in half an hour, Lark," he yelled from the door.
He gave Riker a curt nod when he saw him.
Like an impatient parent, Riker thought. Not that anyone else was caring.
"Just one more – we promise," Lieutenant Chafin from stellar-cartography pleaded. The six-foot-six Terran looked odd, begging his case.
Sudamen snorted, catching Riker's eye again as he made a face. There was an element of theatricality to the whole act.
Data's theory had ended their interest in Sudamen, and Riker had given up trying to engineer an informal interview with the man. However, the first officer still considered the Caldosan peculiar, and nothing he did today dispelled that assessment.
"Oh, all right." Sudamen threw his hands in the air. "What about that awful Radiohand song you are always playing – Fake Spastic Breeze?"
Again, the Caldosan glanced at Riker.
Riker did a double-take.
"You know perfectly well the song is called Fake Plastic Trees, Sude ... and anyway." Lark looked less than enthusiastic. "As much as I love it, are you sure that's a good song to go out on?"
Sudamen stared at Riker as he spoke. "The way you sing it, Lark ... it's perfect."
She shrugged. After a quick conference with her band, she addressed the room.
"When their second studio album was released in 1997, Rolling Stone magazine called it the first album of the new millennium – so maybe it's appropriate to play a Radiohead song. This one comes from a little earlier in the 90s though. It's sort of sad and soaring at the same time – bittersweet. A bit like playing one last song for you guys.
"A green plastic watering can
for a fake Chinese rubber plant
and fake plastic earth"
Lark was right. The song was bittersweet. It didn't fit the mood – but its sadness was hypnotic.
A waiter leaned on the counter, chin resting on hand. A young ensign in front of Riker swayed on the spot. A seasoned science officer stared into her cocktail glass.
But the first officer was studying the great bear of a man who stayed glued to the wall by the door. They stared at each other.
"She lives with a cracked polystyrene man
who just crumbles and burns ..."
Sudamen lifted a fist to his chest.
Riker rubbed his eyes. It was a message. It had to be. Damned of he could make sense of it.
Riker made to approach him, but the big man shook his head. Creases marked his forehead where his brows had pulled up. He glanced around.
"She looks like the real thing
she tastes like the real thing–
my fake plastic love"
As the melody swelled and the door behind him slid open.
As if time had slowed a thousand fold, Riker watched Troi enter the room. Intensity radiated off her. She was a hunter. She rounded Sudamen and he flinched. But both men were surprised when she turned away. He wasn't her prey. She scanned the rest of the room.
When her gaze rested on the singer, she went rigid. Riker watched as her eyes widened and her expression twisted in horror. He felt her shudder of pain. The pain went through her – through them – like fire. He blanched, fearful an image from one of his dreams had come to life. Troi did not move.
Lark was in her own world, oblivious to the scrutiny. Her final lines, devastating:
"It wears me out
It wears me out
And if I could be who you wanted
If I could be who you wanted
All the time, all the time"
And, just like that, the song ended.
The crew whooped and stomped its approval, up on their feet and filling the floor.
Troi broke out of her trance. He saw her confusion. The song had scarcely died before Lark threw a significant look at her impromptu band. She grabbed the mic and its stand again.
"I refuse to end on that note." She pounded the base of the stand into the stage. "Management can go screw itself."
So this is what they mean when they say a crowd goes wild.
The band had maniacal grins plastered over their faces. Lieutenant Chafin branded his own special look of devilry as his fingers started swiping deep, fat notes from his guitar and his foot went down on a pedal.
"I don't want to be crippled and cracked
Shoulders, legs, knees and back
Ground to dust and ash
Crawling on all fours
When you've got to feel it in your bones"
The introspective singer was gone – replaced with a frenetic, rasping, swooping musician set to raise the stage with her performance. The band was loving every second of it.
Troi looked lost and sick and blissful.
Riker knew what it meant. Her empathic sense had returned and she was being flooded with the emotional torrent in the room. Perhaps after her impairment it was too much? He felt her being overwhelmed. People were dancing around her – and not the stately, elegant dances she was comfortable with. The euphoric frenzy burning up the room might be an overload.
He watched her expel a breath. She was still staring at Lark.
He was about to push his way through the crowd to reach her, when he noticed Sudamen again. The Coldasan brushed past Troi, jostling his way to the stage. He threw a final glance at Riker before the song ended abruptly, reducing the audience to a madhouse.
With another sharp look at the Enterprise's first officer, the Caldosan squared his shoulders, nodded at Lark and pointed to the door with a jerk of his hand. She got the message. The crowd parted for her, sweeping Troi backwards. And, just like that, Lark and the big man disappeared.
She had understood Sudamen implicitly.
If only I could too, Riker thought. Six times the man had looked at him – deliberately.
He was about to step to Troi, determined to understand the drama that had just played out, when he saw her hand flick to her comm badge. He saw her lips move but missed what she said.
She threw him one last look of – exasperation, maybe – and headed to the door.
Riker lay in his bed, resting fitfully for three hours before he decided to stop playing the charade.
He got up hours before his shift, he went to the gym, he showered. He read, he reviewed as much information as they had on the dead impostor, on the Fleur-de-lys, and on the Bounty, trying to find the strings that tied everything together.
After three nights of blissful, precious sleep, his unwelcome night time visitor had returned.
He sat motionless for a half hour, staring at the tongue barb he had found in Sem's pocket: the one gift in his rotten dream. For he had woken up knowing, the barb and its earring mate had a truth to communicate. The dream was the last thing he wanted to remember, but now it was reaching out to him, daring him to look within himself for answers.
Steeling himself, he leaned back and closed his eyes – trying to recall exactly what he had seen.
No matter how it started, no matter where he was – be it in the humidity of the Jalaran Jungle or the cold of an Alaskan glacial valley – she would always come. She would always drape her arms around his neck, run her fingers across his chest, let her hands travel over his body, and set him quivering while he tried to control his desire for her.
In the early hours of this morning, he had failed.
As he presses her hard against a marble column and, as her legs encircle his hips, drawing him into herself, and they move up and down, she gasps exultantly – her cry echoing in the cavernous room.
It isn't any place he has ever been to or seen, but his dream sense tells him it is an old place. Its hush and awe not broken by, but amplifying – in its high-vaulted ceiling – the ecstasy in this woman's gasps.
They slide down the column, clinging to each other. As he stares up, knowing a peace he has no right to, she lays light kisses over him, and he realizes the room is not empty – among the many columns, artifacts are arranged on stands and under glass covers; a white headband, a scrap of paper, a piece of vine, shards of vase – all on display.
He murmurs to her, calling and asking her to look; her head lifts, wonder in her eyes as she takes in the gallery. Then she faces him.
She is just as confused as he is. And when his eyes meet hers, finally, pandemonium is unleashed.
Under his hands, her skin begin to boil and hiss; flesh roiling and steaming. He scrambles back suddenly, sickened. She opens her mouth and lets forth a howl, drawing away from him. Orange flames erupt from her palms – her hands held out in supplication. Transfixed he watches as the flames travel and lick her arms, unrelenting in their hunger. He can do nothing – the weight of his own disbelief rendering him motionless. Before him she ignites, cracked and blackened as the fire consumes her wholly. But her eyes – holes, really – never leave his; the horror on her face, a mirror of his own.
And he can feel nothing of it.
He does nothing as she disintegrates, slowly blackening the white marble floor with ash. An unexpected noise startles him. He watches in disbelief as huge doors open and Data, leading a class of school children, skip through the room – ignoring him as he pulls sheets from nowhere around himself – and stopping at each artifact. The children's faces form big Os as Data speaks – his lips moving in random patterns – not mimicking the singsong chant that is the only thing Riker can hear, repeated over and over and over again.
"William was a bad man
William was a thief
William came to my house and stole a piece of me
William was a bad man
William was a thief
William came to my house and stole a piece of me
William was a–"
He puts his hands to his ears.
But when he closes his eyes, the memory of burning Troi brands herself in his mind. Better to keep his eyes open and look at the black ash. Until a shaft of light from an overhead window falls all-too-obviously on something tiny and silver in the dust.
Dream Riker feels himself moving forward on hands and knees, preparing to pluck the antique tongue barb from the floor. An unexpected shadow falls over him.
A large shape bends and claims the prize for himself.
"Tsk, tsk," says the Caldosan, blowing the ashes from his hand and watching them flurry and float. In the light, they glitter like a showman's trick to draw the eye.
"Tsk, tsk, Mr Riker," he says, holding the barb up to his face, rolling it between his thumb and finger.
He takes a sweeping look at the room before his face snaps in front of Riker's. Dream Riker gets a mouthful of hot, stale breath on his cheek. For a parsec they look at each other.
Dream Riker jolts, recognizing something in the man's sad eyes; they reach an understanding. Then, with melancholy in his voice, the big man starts to whisper.
Riker strains to hear.
The voice strengthens. "A mausoleum ... a mausoleum ... a mausoleum ..."
Around the hall, Sudamen's voice echoes louder and louder, until Riker bolts upright, Sudamen's final message ringing his ears: "A mausoleum ... this museum is a mausoleum ... this museum is a mausoleum."
Fake Plastic Trees, by Radiohead
Bones, by Radiohead
There was no place in this chapter for a nice dream. Poor Riker.
