Hwiii

File:DolphinInSpacesuit.jpg

Hwiii

(Full name Hwiii ih'iie-uUlak!ha'.) Despite his appearance in a Star Trek novel, apparently a character who has some knowledge of the Song of the Twelve.

In the Star Trek novel Dark Mirror, Hwiii is a bottlenosed dolphin who is also a navigations specialist working with the Starfleet navigation research team, and a native of Triton Two, a ocean-covered moon orbiting a world called Omicron Five. His specialty is in hyperstrings and their use in navigations. He comes aboard the starship Enterprise after having been working closely with a space-traveling species, the Lalairu, on deep-space hyperstring studies.

Hwiii sings a lot -- casually, while working -- and states during some work with Geordi LaForge in Engineering that singing "runs in his family": Geordi tells Captain Picard at one point that what Hwiii has been singing is "some kind of delphine opera... Or I may have misunderstood him: it was hard to tell whether Hwiii was describing theater or a ceremony of some kind -- or just live performances of some sort of passion play." Later, during an instance of distress (secondary to the Enterprise slipping unexpectedly into the Mirror universe), Hwiii breaks out into what Mr. Data describes as "part of the Song of the Twelve...a cetacean epic sung-poetic work...".

In a later conversation with Commander Riker, Hwiii very succinctly describes the Song to him, and tells Riker that he had a "partner" who once was considering singing "one of the fatal parts" in the Song - possibly that of the Silent Lord. The conversation sheds no light on the issue of whether Hwiii himself is a wizard. But it is interesting that several times in his conversation with Riker he uses the word "intervention", one of the words wizards routinely use to discuss or describe a certain class of spell (as well as other actions carried out with wizardly intent but not necessarily requiring that one do a wizardry).

The implication would seem to be that the universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation, being a distant "successor" to today's modern world, also includes wizards and wizardry -- but that the culture of 23rd-century Earth remains astahfrith. Hwiii's language to Riker regarding the Song has, to the reader who knows about wizardry, a rather circumspect sound to it; and Hwiii does not mention either wizardry, or the Song's specifically wizardly aspects.

This is (as far as can be ascertained) the only instance in which DD has inserted crossover material from the YW universe into another universe not her own. She has previously stated that Hwiii's character was written as a present for the well-known scientific and astronomical artist Rick Sternbach, an old friend who was involved for years with Star Trek: The Next Generation and its successor series. Rick's pre-Star Trek art often included dolphins in spacesuits: and in the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, which Rick wrote with Mike Okuda, he stated that dolphins and orcas were working with Starfleet in navigation research. Paramount later removed this detail from the ST:TNG bible, but DD apparently liked it and wrote Hwiii into Dark Mirror as a sort of consolation prize for Rick.