Blood and Water — The First Rift
Plot Beats
The narrative micro-steps within this event
Gosheven cups water from the pool, transforming it from a simple substance into a symbol of generational sacrifice and colonial identity.
Data attempts logical persuasion about Sheliak threat, met with Gosheven's unshakable resolve to fight rather than abandon ancestral land.
Ard'rian challenges Gosheven's stance as irrational, marking the first fracture in colonial leadership.
Gosheven storms away after declaring resistance, forcing Data to consider alternative strategies.
Who Was There
Characters present in this moment
Bitter toward Gosheven's obstinacy but quietly hopeful and resolute when choosing to act with Data; personal loyalty shifts toward preserving lives.
Ard'rian challenges Gosheven's romanticized account as nonsense, reacts bitterly to his stubbornness, then quickly pivots to practical support, offering to accompany Data and help persuade the populace.
- • Undermine Gosheven's hold on the community by offering an alternate path
- • Assist in persuading colonists to accept evacuation to prevent loss of life
- • Gosheven's attachment to ritual and memory is endangering the community
- • Practical, grassroots persuasion can change public opinion where formal authority fails
Calmly indignant — pride and stubbornness mask fear; his rhetoric channels duty and grief rather than practical calculation.
Gosheven cups water from the aqueduct and speaks in measured, evocative terms about ancestral sacrifice. He publicly rejects Data's warning, insists on resistance, gestures toward the hills, and then deliberately leaves, abandoning further debate.
- • Assert and preserve his moral authority over the settlement
- • Prevent evacuation and maintain communal continuity tied to ancestral memory
- • The colony's identity and legitimacy are rooted in ancestral sacrifice and must be honored
- • Leaving would dishonor past sacrifices and cede the land to external forces
Externally calm and resolute; internally urgent — he translates assessed risk into decisive action despite social friction.
Data provides a clinical warning about the Sheliak's unwillingness to tolerate humans and the inevitability of force. He listens to Gosheven's rhetoric, recognizes the political impasse, and resolves to bypass the leader to address the populace directly.
- • Convince a sufficient number of colonists to evacuate to save lives
- • Find a practical route around obstructive local leadership to effect compliance
- • The Sheliak will enforce their treaty and pose an existential threat to the colonists
- • Rational argument and convincing the people can overcome political obstruction if he can bypass Gosheven
Objects Involved
Significant items in this scene
The aqueduct's pool functions as a sacred prop: Gosheven cups its water and uses it as proof of collective toil and ancestral sacrifice. It anchors his rhetoric, serving symbolic weight that transforms a factual refilling of water into an emblem of lineage and claim.
Location Details
Places and their significance in this event
The distant line of hills functions as a visible referent for Gosheven's appeal — a geographic backdrop that he points to in order to authenticate ancestral claims and to justify staying despite existential danger.
The ancestral burial mountain is invoked specifically as the resting place of Gosheven's grandfather; its presence converts personal loss into civic duty and hardens his refusal to evacuate, tying private grief to public policy.
The main street and its pumping/aqueduct area act as the stage for the confrontation: a public, everyday place where political authority is performed and contested, allowing Gosheven to turn a practical object into a communal totem while Data reframes the discussion as an emergency.
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: "It is water, a substance composed of two atoms of hydrogen --""
"ARD'RIAN: "Don't you mean 'if we can convince?'""