A Call to Darkness - Michael Jan Friedman [7]
“Hah!” chortled Danike, one of Akaythyr’s neighbors. “His wit never fails him. His harp may be plain wood, but his tongue is purest silver.”
Homer smiled, laid his harp aside and stood. He was tall for his era-a couple of inches taller than Geordi, in fact. “You are too kind,” he said, smoothing out his robes. He took a deep breath, let it out. “The orchards smell perfectly wonderful. Would anyone care to help a sightless old man wend his way through them for a little while?”
Normally, that kind of honor would have fallen to the evening’s host. But Akaythyr looked at Geordi instead.
“Why don’t you accompany our guest?” he asked, grinning with all the generosity Homer had assigned to him. “After all, you come from so far away to hear him-or so you say.”
This wasn’t something Geordi had specifically programmed into the holodeck computer. It was a pleasant surprise.
“Well… sure,” he stammered. “Absolutely. I’d be honored.”
He stepped up to the long chair on which the bard had been sitting. Offering his arm, he placed Homer’s hand on it.
“Thank you,” said the bearded man. He allowed Geordi to lead him as they made their way around the chair and then past one of the torch pedestals. “I see you’ve had some experience with the sightless. You guide me well.”
Sure, Geordi mused. The blind leading the blind.
“Some,” he said, by way of a response.
As they left the hall through the space between two columns, the fragrance of the orchards became stronger, almost heady. There were four steps between the floor of the great room and the ground; they descended them.
“Watch out for the bottom step,” said the poet. “There’s a crack; don’t catch your sandal in it.”
Geordi looked down. Sure enough, there was a crack along which the stone had separated. He avoided it.
“I’ve been here at Akaythyr’s many times,” explained Homer. “I know my way around a bit.”
“I see,” said Geordi. It wasn’t until after he had said it that he realized how it might have sounded-under the circumstances. “That wasn’t a joke,” he added.
The poet nodded. “I know. And don’t worry-it happens all the time.” A pause. “So-what is it about you, Geordi? You’re different from the others, aren’t you?”
They were walking up a dirt path that bisected the slope of a dark hill. On either side of the path, there were fig trees arranged in neat rows.
Geordi shrugged. “Not so different. I just come from… somewhere else.”
“Somewhere far, I understand.”
“You could say that.”
“And yet you come to hear me sing. Don’t they have bards where you come from?”
Geordi laughed. “Plenty of them. But none like you.”
Homer grunted. “I appreciate the compliment. But there is more to it than that, isn’t there? Something you want to ask me, perhaps?”
Had he put so much of himself into the program? Or was the computer just that good at extrapolation?
Geordi swallowed. “I guess I’m just… I don’t know. Curious.”
“As to how I do it? How I describe things I’ve never actually seen?”
“Something like that.”
It was the bard’s turn to shrug. “That’s any storyteller’s problem, whether he has the use of his eyes or not. To sing of the gods, who reveal themselves to no one-despite accounts to the contrary. Of heroes long dead. Of events that happened far away. Just because you’ve never witnessed them doesn’t mean you can’t imagine them.”
Geordi had never thought about it quite that way. He said so.
“There are worse faculties to lose than your sight,” said Homer.
“Such as?”
The poet sighed almost imperceptibly-a slight flaring of his nostrils. “Such as your ability to remember, my friend. Memory. It’s your life, your identity. Without it, who are you? What are you?”
Geordi watched the old man’s face. Was that a hint of pain he saw in the regions around Homer’s eyes? Was the bard of bards, in his latter years, starting to forget things?
It was certainly possible. In this era, senility was still