“What do you mean, Doctor?”

  “From your account of her logs, this poor creature allowed her people to modify her this way in order to make contact with their deity,” said Ree, sealing the corpse again and sliding it into a cooling bay for quick freeze. “She made contact. Perhaps it proved unsatisfactory.”

  “That thing isn’t a god,” said Riker.

  “I was under the impression that we don’t know what it is,” said Ree. Riker snorted.

  “You don’t think it’s really a god, do you?” he said.

  “My beliefs are immaterial,” said Ree. “Pahkwa-thanh do not see ourselves as separate from nature, Captain. We have many deities, hundreds, and all of them are equally enmeshed.”

  “I’m surprised by that,” said Riker. “Your species isn’t noted for its esoteric lifeview.”

  “We do not promote our beliefs,” said Ree as he sealed up the samples of the Orishan poison and secured them for later study. “They are ourbeliefs. They inform us. Do you see?”

  Riker wasn’t sure he did. As he watched the doctor run his long slender digits through the sterilization field, he wondered about his home planet and the raptorlike carnivores who were its dominant species.

  He had seen Ree eat-live animals if he could, raw flesh when he couldn’t-and it indicated a homeworld of extreme violence, at least by human standards. But Ree was, with the possible exception of an android Riker had known for many years, the most gentle, even serene being he’d ever met. Was that the result of Ree’s nature, or was he implying that the nature of the apparently aggressively pantheistic Pahkwa-thanh faith was somehow responsible?

  “We do not separate in this way,” said Ree when the question was put to him. “Instead let us consider: What is the function of belief in any deity? It is an attempt to better understand the universe, to see the order and structure that defines it. It is, in essence, the beginning of scientific inquiry. In my experience, deities bind societies; sometimes they define them. So, we must ask ourselves, what definition did this Eye of theirs inspire in the Orishans? How did its presence inform them?”

   Why? Why is there always so much fear?came the wisps of her voice in his memory.

  Riker thought about it. He thought about the Klingons, who had supposedly killed their troublesome gods only to elevate their murderer to a nearly divine focus of worship.

  He thought about the Bajorans, whose deities were certainly real and present but so obscure and alien that it was a wonder that either group could interact with or understand the other. Yet they seemed to.

  He thought about the Q Continuum, whose members were possessed of seeming omnipotence, omniscience, and, in at least one case, functional omnipresence. Even they didn’t claim to be gods, but if the Q weren’t, who was?

  Then he thought about Orisha and what he knew of its people. Whatever the Eye actually was, its presence had tortured an entire civilization for millennia. Either with actual cataclysmic violence or with the perpetual threat that such violence might be visited upon them at any moment, the Eye of Erykon had taught its people only one lesson.

  Fear.

  He pictured the flux wave now expanding out from the Eye, sweeping over entire systems, destroying them, yes, but before that destruction, infecting them with the very same fear that had ultimately killed Orisha.

  He suddenly found the idea of that intolerable. This thing had to be stopped, and it had to be stopped here and now.

  He’d argued with Deanna about the Prime Directive, about the consequences of abandoning the rule book on a whim.

  “Sure, jazz is improvisational,” he would say when she would inevitably toss up his love for the form as an example of the beauty of stepping outside. “But there are still rules.”

  “No one is telling you to abandon them,” she would say. “Only that you’re always at your best when you are interpreting them in your own way.”

  She was right. He loved her and she was right.

  “Captain?” said Ree as the other turned and moved to exit the autopsy area. “Are we finished here?”

  “Not quite yet, Doctor,” said Riker. “But thank you for the talk.”

  “It is an extremely powerful, extremely delicate network of space fold devices,” said Ra-Havreii as he and Modan continued to struggle with the alien controls.

  “Not a warp field?” said Vale, deciding that the seated position might be best for riding out these damned quakes.

  “Not exactly, no,” said Ra-Havreii. “I presume you know the difference?”

  Vale did, and it didn’t bode well. Space folding was monumentally dangerous under the best conditions.

  “What does it mean, Xin?” said Troi.

  There was a pause as Ra-Havreii asked Modan to move to an adjacent console and translate the pictograms there. She rattled off something that Ra-Havreii apparently understood but which was just so much babble to Vale and Troi.

  “What it means, Counselor, Commander,” he said, picking up where he’d left off, “is that the Orishans have been aggressively folding the space around this planet.”

  “Define aggressively,” said Vale, not at all sure she wanted to hear it.

  “The Spire generates a folding field large enough to englobe the planet,” said Ra-Havreii. “There are eighteen identical Spires dispersed around Orisha, each generating folds of the same dimensions.”

  “You mean simultaneously?” asked Vale, scarcely believing it. Ra-Havreii took the time to look back at her and nod before joining Modan at the second console. “That’s insane.”

  “What is it meant to accomplish?” Troi asked.

  “They call it the Veil, yes?” said the engineer. Modan was back at the first console again, translating the new symbols that flickered on the viewing screens. “This implies they are trying to cover something. Since the fields encompass the planet…”

  He didn’t have to finish. The Orishans had wrapped their planet in multiple, fantastically large space folds in an effort to-what? Space folds were for travel. These were stationary, centered around a single set of points in space-time. And why eighteen of them?

  Then it hit her. This had never been an attempt to create interstellar travel. It was an attempt at a cloak, one big enough to hide an entire world.

  “There’s more, Commander,” said Modan.

  “Spit it out, Ensign,” said Vale. She was doing her best not to hate Modan, but it wasn’t easy. Every time she looked at the golden metallic flesh, all she could think about was Jaza.

  “The folds are reacting with each other,” said the Selenean. “The interaction has caused the fields to link into a single four-dimensional object.”

  “A tesseract,” said Troi in a small voice. “We’re inside a tesseract.”

  “I’m guessing that’s worse than the space folds,” said Vale.

  “Monumentally,” said Ra-Havreii.

  All at once the tremors stopped. Modan and Ra-Havreii stepped back from their respective consoles with identical masks of relief on their faces.

  “Tell me that’s it,” said Vale, getting to her feet and brushing the dust out of her hair. “We’re done, the Veil is offline, and we can concentrate on getting the hell off this planet. Tell me that.”

  “We’re not finished, Commander,” said Ra-Havreii.

   Of course we’re not, she thought. Things can always get worse.

  “Tesseracts are objects that exist both inside and outside of normal space-time,” he said. “Their contours can, with precise mapping, be used to navigate temporal jumps.”

  “Which is what happened to us when we passed through the field, Chris,” said Modan, sounding too much like Jaza again. “When the computer beamed us out, the tesseract split the transport beams like light going through a prism. You materialized here, a few days before Titanarrived. Najem and I ended up in the distant past.”