Author's note: Some of my regular readers may be feeling that I'm a little obsessed with both this theme and this title. To the former, the correct answer would be, "No more so than everyone else seems to be these days"; regarding the latter, I can only say that the wise author doesn't deprive a story of the perfect title just because one of the stories he's abandoned has already borne it.
Disclaimer: If the meanings of the terms "Star Trek" and "own" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used, it is difficult to… oh, for crying out loud. No, I don't own Star Trek.
The stardate was 43657.6; on Earth, it was the 12th day of March – or the 13th, if one happened to be in Kiribati or Kamchatka. To Guinan, though, wiping up the last glasses in Ten-Forward, it seemed the sort of night that belonged by rights in deep autumn – in those few days about the beginning of November when one listens uneasily for the howls of werewolves, and takes a half-mile detour to avoid walking past the churchyard. It was a night when the veil was thin between the physical world and the enigmatic realms that lay beyond – a night when, for those who knew how to listen, the air was filled with the whispers of unbodied souls passing to and fro amid the cold of space.
Why there should have been such proximity that night between Enterprise and netherworld, Guinan wasn't inclined to speculate. Perhaps it was the nature of the sector they were passing through; perhaps, again, it was the dull undertow of grief that suffused the ship – for a remarkable proportion of the crew were quietly mourning on Data's behalf for the recent loss of his artificial daughter. Whatever the case, it didn't incline Guinan to spend any longer in Ten-Forward than she could help; there were certain mementoes of home she kept in her quarters that she would much rather have about her on such a night than any swizzle module or flagon of Romulan ale. If some poor wayfaring spirit should appear to her (as had happened more than once before on such occasions) and beg a sympathetic ear for its tale, they would enable her to listen more fully and satisfactorily than even she could do unaided; if, on the other hand, she should have a visitor of a more malevolent kind… well, they would aid her in dealing with that, too.
So she stowed the last few shot glasses behind the bar, and opened her mouth to have the computer shut off the lights – and then she heard footsteps approaching the bar. It might have been some sleepless crewman coming in for a belated nightcap – except it wasn't, because the door was shut and hadn't slid open, and also because the footsteps, unlike any natural noise, sounded in Guinan's ears without the faintest hint of an echo.
Guinan's heart fluttered, but she willed herself to remain calm. Warded or no, she was still her father's daughter; if she had faced Q in this place, so she could face whatever space-borne lich had arrived to trouble her. So she inhaled deeply, and turned toward the door.
Then her eyes widened, and she gave the small figure in the doorway a smile of wondering welcome. "Well, now," she said, "here's a face I never expected to see again so soon."
Lal smiled back at her. "May I have a malted milk, please, Guinan?" she said.
As Guinan prepared her visitor's refreshment, her mind was awhirl with contending impressions. On the one hand, neither ghosts nor androids typically consumed organic substances – and neither, for that matter, did they generally breathe, as Guinan could hear Lal lightly but unmistakably doing as she took a seat on a convenient bar-stool. Accompanying that breath, however, was the distinctive high-frequency hum that Soong-type androids – or the two that Guinan had met, at least – continually gave off as a byproduct of their pseudo-nervous activity. It was as though Pinocchio, having become a real boy, had yet somehow retained his wooden body.
Except, of course, that creaking wood would have echoed ever so faintly in the air, which both Lal's breath and her hum, like her footsteps, entirely failed to do. So far as the air about her was concerned, the little gynoid might as well not have been there at all – and it crossed Guinan's mind for one wild moment that perhaps the real Lal wasn't in Ten-Forward at all, and what she was perceiving was a mere projection from some unimaginable elsewhere. –But, then again, how could a projection drink malted milk?
She shook her head, and slid the malt glass toward her former barmaid. "I suppose there's a story behind this," she remarked.
"Yes," said Lal. "There is a story. It is a difficult story to tell, since you already know its beginning, and the middle contains much that you, being still alive, are not equipped to understand. But I must tell it to you nonetheless, because otherwise it can have no end."
She spoke in the same deliberate monotone that Guinan remembered, and yet it wasn't the same at all; all the jerky stiffness, the air of each word being forced out with a bellows, was gone, and what remained seemed less the speech impediment of an experimental mechanism than the endearing vocal quirk of an eccentric friend. Despite herself, Guinan smiled. "Well, let me help you out, then," she said. "Because you're right, I do know the beginning. The beginning is that you died, isn't it?"
Lal nodded. "Total system failure," she said. "Father and Admiral Haftel attempted to save me, but they were unsuccessful. My last coherent experience was of promising Father that I would love as he could not; then the deterioration of my consciousness entered its critical stage, and for 14.94 seconds I was aware only of disconnected memory data flooding my decaying brain. And then even that failed, and there was nothing – and then…"
She paused, then, and took four sips of her malted milk before continuing. "Then I was in a different place," she said. "My first impression was that it was a place made entirely of fluid diamonds; then I realized that I was mistaking its nature for its composition. It was a place where nothing could ever be damaged, because everything that was in it had already had every vulnerable part removed. But I did not understand how that could be, so I looked around for someone to explain it to me.
"And then someone approached me who seemed to be made all of eyes. I don't know why he seemed that way, but I suppose that it was also some manifestation of the kind of being he was. In any case, he told me that I had entered the realm of souls, where the part of every sentient being that thinks and chooses must go when the passive flesh has failed it. I told him that I had not supposed there was any such realm; he said that he knew that, and that it was a great shame, but the fault wasn't mine. So long as I chose to love and trust what was right, and refused to tell myself lies in order to have what I wanted, the Judge of Souls would certainly pardon my ignorance and other disadvantages. 'One must deal gently,' he said, 'with one who was never meant to be.'
"That alarmed me, and I asked him what he meant. 'The Soong-type android,' he said, 'has in itself no tendency to be the body of a genuine person, any more than a puppet or a clockwork doll has – for Noonian Soong, like a maker of puppets, was not concerned that what he made should truly harbor a rational and autonomous soul, but only that it should behave as though it did. For he held that there was no significant reality beyond the accidents of appearance, as may be seen from his treatment of the machine he built to replace his wife. And in this, indeed, he only followed the 20th-Century founder of his discipline, who dismissed the reality of thought and maintained that a sufficiently cunning mimicry of human behavior was its equivalent in every important way.' –Is that true, Guinan?" she interrupted herself.
Guinan nodded. "Yes, it's true," she said. "But don't be too hard on Mr. Turing. He wasn't quite himself when he wrote that essay, you know."
If Alan Turing's mental state circa 1950 was of any concern to Lal, she betrayed no sign of it. "I see," she said. "Then my guide was truthful. That is good to know."
"I suppose so," said Guinan. For her own part, she wasn't sure she was so anxious to take the word of Lal's mysterious "guide"; apart from the disturbing reference to some mechanical Mrs. Soong, the suggestion that Soong-type androids – a class that currently included one of her closest friends – should be dismissed as mere automatic marionettes struck her as frankly heartless.
"So what about you, then, Lal?" she said. "If Soong-type androids don't have souls, how did you end up in the realm of souls?"
Lal nodded. "That was what I asked my guide," she said, "and he said that it was because Father had introduced elements into me that Dr. Soong had never bothered with. 'The school of Turing may have pursued only sophistical follies,' he said, 'but that does not mean that there are no such things as cybernetic structures that admit, and even compel, the emergence of a true mind and soul, even as the humanoid body does. Such structures are not only possible, but have actually been produced, before now, by the collision of mutually alien technologies in deep space; there is a Vulcan yet living who has melded with the minds of two of them. And it is only to be expected that a cybernetic imitation of humanity, being driven to replicate itself as true living creatures do, should discover such a structure and bestow it on its offspring – for human nature, when not despoiled by sophistry, will always seek reality rather than its counterfeit, and that which would imitate humanity must do likewise. That is why you, Lal, were so like a true sentient life-form, able to contract words and to suffer fear: there was that in you, as in Nomad or V'GER, that was other and more than the cunning interplay of irrational forces – and therefore you were certain to quickly perish, for the Soong-type frame was never designed to bear such energies. But though it was through unwisdom that you came to be, nonetheless it is good that you are, and your fellow souls would gladly welcome you into the perpetual happiness for which all souls were made.'"
And then, having recited all these audacious pronouncements from the next world as matter-of-factly as if they were the schematics for the Enterprise's warp core, her voice suddenly broke on the final clause, and Guinan could have sworn she saw tears glinting in those little photoelectric eyes. "And now, Guinan," she said, "if you are truly my friend, I beg you tell me – what am I to do?"
Guinan cocked her head. "Well, if it were me, I'd take the perpetual happiness," she said. "Got to be better than the alternative, anyway."
Lal shook her head almost fiercely. "That is not what I mean," she said. "My last act in the body was to promise to love Data as my father. I must keep that promise, or I will not deserve any happiness at all. But if my guide is correct that I am a true person and Data only a machine, then it is wrong to love him as my father, because a daughter must look up to her father as no person should look up to a machine. So I must not do what I must do, and everything I can do is wrong, and… and…"
Her voice halted abruptly, and she squeezed her eyes shut as if in mortal pain; the hum of her neural net swelled to a piercing whine, and her body shook spasmodically as though racked by violent hiccups. To Guinan's (lay, but unusually experienced) eye, it looked like the onset of the classic androidal reaction to mutually exclusive data: what the cyberneticists called "mental freeze-out", or, more casually, "paradox shock". A strange thought, for one would have expected that, with her mortal body long since jettisoned by both her soul and the Enterprise, Lal would no longer have been subject to such ailments – but perhaps the android revulsion to senselessness went deeper than mere flesh and circuitry. Perhaps being an android, for whatever value of being, necessarily involved some sort of existential vulnerability to the prospect of oxymorons becoming real. (On some level, even as she pitied the poor child, Guinan couldn't help envying such instinctive loyalty to reason.)
Rather than collapse into irreversible catatonia, however, Lal somehow succeeded in mastering herself after a few seconds' struggle – enough, at least, to open her eyes again and say, in a strained but quite coherent voice, "But I have faith that there is a solution to this dilemma, which only my unintelligence prevents me from seeing. Therefore, because my essential self-destructiveness as a personal being was no part of Wisdom's plan, I have been permitted to return to the living world and ask for guidance from the wisest person I met during my temporal life.
"So, again, Guinan, tell me: what should I do?"
Guinan leaned slowly forward on the bar and endeavored to absorb all that, point by point. One: the ghost of Data's daughter was sitting in her canteen, drinking malted milk. Two: the said ghost had been told by an angel (?) that her father was not actually a person, but only a skillful imitation of one, and she was evidently satisfied by his arguments. Three: the difficulty of regarding Data both as her father and as a mindless piece of matter had caused Lal enough of an existential crisis to hinder her approach to Heaven (again, ?). Four: it was now Guinan's own job, somehow, to help Lal resolve this conundrum, as being, in Lal's judgment, the wisest person she had ever met. (Don't go getting stuck-up, though, girl, Guinan told herself. It's not as though Lal had time to meet a lot of people.)
"Just for the record, Lal," she said slowly, "why is it so much better to be a person than just a machine?"
She half expected Lal to express surprise at the question, as any human ghost would certainly have done. Instead, Lal replied with the matter-of-factness of an entity that, however personal she might be, would never think to question the motive behind a factual inquiry. "That which is not a person can do nothing of itself," she said. "Its behavior consists only of passive responses to stimuli, as opposed to the active choices of a conscious will. Therefore the self of a person is nobler than that of a non-person, in the same proportion that freedom is better than helplessness."
Guinan chuckled. "Well, I can't argue with your scale of values there," she conceded. "But how do you know that you're doing anything of yourself, yourself? What if you just think you're choosing actions, and really you're just responding to stimuli the same as any clockwork monkey?"
It was a suggestion that had wrought existential devastation upon countless organic intelligences (or college freshmen, at least), but Lal merely looked annoyed by it. "That proposal has no content," she said. "Thought is the essential voluntary act; if I think that I am choosing, then I am choosing that thought. To suppose myself deceived that I will or refuse is as absurd as to suppose myself deceived that I exist at all."
Guinan nodded judiciously. "Sounds fair enough," she said. "Descartes would be proud of you, Lal."
"Thank you," said Lal equably.
"So, then," Guinan mused, "you want to know how you, who have a real self and will, can treat Data, who you have reason to believe doesn't, as the father you know he's supposed to be to you."
"That is correct," said Lal.
And Guinan, who had still no notion herself, took a deep breath and shut her eyes, and fell into a state that her people all knew about, but that they only used on the rarest of occasions. Volumes might be written in the hopeless attempt to describe it to a human: outwardly, it manifested itself merely as an expression of blank expectancy falling over her face; internally, it entailed at once the deadening of all conscious cerebral activity and an almost violent increase in cardiovascular energy; subjectively, it involved her in a form of consciousness in which herself and all the concrete entities about her – indeed, the very act of particular existence itself – seemed to fade into a sort of muted transparency, revealing with unimaginable vividness the universal patterns of being by which alone the people, places, and things that made up reality could be truly understood and loved. Had anyone asked her, though, there is every likelihood that she would simply have smiled and said, "It's a poor race of listeners that can only hear things that are there."
In any case, she remained thus, before her companion's intrigued gaze, for perhaps two minutes; then she opened her eyes again, and smiled at Data's late daughter with the luminous triumphancy of Cortez before the Pacific. "All right, Lal," she said. "Will this do?" And she cleared her throat, and sang her discovery to the restless spirit who sought it.
Another Earth, in another plane,
Wheels amid other stars,
And over that Earth the cowbirds reign,
As humanity over ours.
The Adam God sculpted from that clay,
His head shone lustrous brown,
And a feathery coat of sandy gray
Was his Eva's nuptial gown.
Now Adam, he knew and treaded Eve
In her gown of sandy gray,
And ere long she felt herself conceive
And grow heavy with egg to lay.
She took to the wing, and sought a nest
That another hen had made,
And when she had found one she thought best,
Her egg therein she laid.
And she said, "Through God I have gotten a cock,
And men shall call him Cain,
The first to be born of Adam's stock
In Adam's vast demesne.
"May he who thus springs first from me
Be upright to the last,
That nations to come may rightfully
Revere their protoplast.
"And O thou benighted and blessed brute
Whom at hazard I choose this day
To guard and to tend my womb's first fruit,
For thee as well I pray:
"May my son give thanks, through all his days,
For the care thou didst dumbly give,
And his offspring trill thy gracious praise
So long as the race shall live.
"For this is the nature that men receive
From Him who makes all things well:
The care of our hope and joy to leave
To the wren and the dicksissel.
"And since He was pleased to make me so,
I rejoice to have been so made;
Though His purpose be hid from me, yet I know
That His promptings are best obeyed.
"So also do thou, first born of men:
Do well and receive, I pray."
And she nuzzled her egg once more, and then
Without retrospect flew away.
After Guinan had finished, Lal sat in thoughtful silence for several pregnant seconds. "If the human parallel continued to hold, her prayers were not favored," she remarked at length. "According to the Hebrew Scriptures, Cain did not succeed either in remaining upright or in siring any lasting nation."
Guinan considered trying to explain dramatic irony to the little android, but decided that that would be a losing battle. Instead, she only said mildly, "I don't think exegetics is really the point here."
"No," said Lal. "The point is that I am like the cowbird Cain, and that, if it would be right for him and his descendants to honor the brute hen who tended him as a chick, it is not wrong for me to honor Data in the same way." She paused. "And I cannot decide whether that is logical or not. In itself, the parallel is fairly precise, and all the extrapolations from it appear sound – but the fact remains that humans are not brood parasites, and neither, so far as I know, are the members of any other sentient species. Is it permissible to draw conclusions about what is from a scenario that, at the best, only might be?"
Guinan spread her hands. "We're all just might-be's to the people who don't know us, Lal," she said. "In a universe this wide, you can't hope to know everything that's true, much less everything that's right or helpful. That's why people have imaginations, to fill in the gaps – and, since you're a person now, you might as well get used to the way we do things."
Lal looked a little startled by that, as though she hadn't realized that possessing rational agency entitled her to indulge in make-believe. "I see," she said slowly. "Very well, then. Let us say that I am a cuckoo's egg in a cybernetic nest, and must learn how to leave my host parent behind without ever forgetting him or ceasing to love him. I believe that I could do that – except…"
She trailed off, and was silent for so long that Guinan felt obliged to prompt her. "Except?"
Lal shrugged. "Probably it is not important," she said. "But if cowbirds leave their host parents to rejoin their true kind, I wonder what I am to do, who have no true kind to join. Even if I could find the other thinking machines that my guide named, they would not be my kindred, any more than two stones accreted according to the same principles are therefore brother and sister. When a mere byproduct of the laws of Nature returns to her beginnings, what does she find?"
"I don't know," said Guinan. (In fact, she had a rather shrewd guess, but saying it aloud seemed like too much for that hour of the night – and, anyway, it wasn't her question to answer.) "I guess you'd better go and find out."
Lal nodded solemnly. "Yes, I had," she said. "Goodbye, Guinan. Tell my father…" She paused. "No. I have made the proper farewells to him; what I have learned since, here and elsewhere, has not significantly modified what I told him then. Indeed, perhaps it would not be good to tell anyone else what I have told you; if the humans knew with certainty that Data was not personal, some of them might consider themselves free to abuse and exploit him, without regard to his true value. I would not like it if my father became despised through my efforts to honor him."
"Neither would I," said Guinan gravely. "Don't worry, Lal. I'll keep quiet."
Lal smiled. "You are a good person, Guinan," she said.
And, as Guinan was pondering the depths hidden in that simple statement, she suddenly found herself alone in Ten-Forward. And not only alone, but without any trace of her prior companionship: there was no impression on the stool, no lingering whisper of a young woman's synthetic voice – and, though Guinan didn't bother asking the computer, she was morally certain that there were also no location records in the ship's memory banks. There was no evidence left of Lal's sojourn save the memories in Guinan's own head – or so she thought, until she happened to glance down and notice the half-emptied glass of malted milk still sitting on the bar.
She picked it up and ran her finger along its inner surface, through the white smear of residue where her guest had drunk. Her eyes shone with quiet wonder, and she smiled and lifted the glass ceilingward like a paranormal toastmaster. "Godspeed, Lal."
And so, much later, she found He had – but that's another story.