Alliance of Persuasion — Data and Ard'rian Pivot to a Public Plea
Plot Beats
The narrative micro-steps within this event
Data and Ard'rian form an alliance, pivoting from failed diplomacy to direct public persuasion.
Who Was There
Characters present in this moment
Bitter toward Gosheven's stubbornness but determined and quietly compassionate, willing to convert private dissent into public action.
Ard'rian bluntly challenges Gosheven's rhetoric as nonsense, questions Data about bypassing leadership, then offers her practical help and solidarity by extending her arm and accompanying him offstage.
- • Support Data's effort to persuade the colonists and thereby protect lives.
- • Undermine Gosheven's monopoly on authority by converting private dissent into organized action.
- • Practical survival and collective safety trump unyielding attachment to symbolic sites.
- • Grassroots persuasion led by trusted locals can break entrenched leadership resistance.
Uncertain and susceptible to emotive appeals, caught between ancestral loyalty and fear of annihilation.
The Colonists (as a civic constituency) are not physically present in this exchange but are the intended audience of Data's new plan; their undecided sentiments are assessed and become the target of the forthcoming direct appeal.
- • Preserve community integrity and ancestral claims if possible.
- • Seek reassurance about safety and leadership direction in the face of external threat.
- • Authority of local leaders like Gosheven should guide major community decisions.
- • An evacuation would be a profound cultural sacrifice and is therefore a last resort.
Righteously indignant with wound pride beneath the calm—anger toward outsiders and fear of dishonoring ancestors.
Gosheven physically cups water from the pool and mounts an emotional, ancestral defense of the colony, points to the hills as proof, rejects Data's logic, and storms off, ending the private negotiation.
- • Preserve the colony's claim to the land and its traditions.
- • Prevent any action that would force abandonment of ancestral sites or communal memory.
- • The colony's physical sites (aqueduct, graves) are sacred and inseparable from identity.
- • Any surrender (evacuation) equals erasure of the sacrifices of past generations and is therefore unacceptable.
Controlled and resolute; mild frustration at Gosheven's irrationality but steady commitment to duty and preservation of lives.
Data delivers a calm, clinical warning about the Sheliak's uncompromising intent and the futility of armed resistance, assesses Gosheven's stance, then decides to bypass him and appeal directly to the populace.
- • Convince enough colonists of the necessity of evacuation to prevent forcible removal.
- • Circumvent an obstructionist leader to achieve a practical, life-saving outcome.
- • The Sheliak will enforce their treaty and will use force if necessary.
- • Rational persuasion of the people can avert bloodshed if leadership is bypassed.
Objects Involved
Significant items in this scene
The aqueduct pool serves as a tactile emblem in Gosheven's rhetoric: he cups its water to embody ancestral labor and sacrifice, converting a mundane resource into proof of historical claim and moral authority during the confrontation.
Location Details
Places and their significance in this event
The line of hills is pointed to by Gosheven as a visual anchor for his ancestral claim; it functions as an offstage, immovable witness invoked to legitimize refusal to evacuate.
The Ancestral Burial Mountain is specifically named as the resting place of Gosheven's grandfather and thereby personalizes the abstract claim of sacrifice, turning policy debate into a matter of kinship and sacred duty.
Main Street (represented by the pumping station canonical entry) functions as the public spine where this private negotiation plays out; it is the communal thoroughfare that anchors ritual, leadership, and imminent civic decision-making.
Narrative Connections
How this event relates to others in the story
"Gosheven's symbolic gesture with the water contrasts with Data's destruction of the aqueduct - both using the colony's water supply as symbols of their arguments."
"Gosheven's symbolic gesture with the water contrasts with Data's destruction of the aqueduct - both using the colony's water supply as symbols of their arguments."
Key Dialogue
"GOSHEVEN: It's not water. It's blood and sweat -- the result of a hundred and forty years of combined effort. This isn't a town. It's a monument to every man, woman, and child who has lived and died on Tau Cygna Five."
"DATA: The Sheliak will not accept humans on their planet. And they will not hesitate to use force to remove you."
"ARD'RIAN: (a smile) Don't you mean "if we can convince?""