All Good Things__ - Michael Jan Friedman [38]
The doctor sighed and looked down at the primary-colored choctoq pieces on her side of the table. “I was so wrong.”
“About what?” asked the ambassador.
“About Data,” she answered. “When I was on the Enterprise, I really believed he was just a fancy bucket of bolts. After all, he wasn’t a biological entity, and I didn’t think there was any other kind. But I’ve been accessing his Starfleet personnel file from time to time, and I see now that I was off the mark.” She grunted philosophical-ly. “Way off.”
Lwaxana regarded her. “You ought to tell him so. I bet he’d like to hear it from someone like you. Someone he respects.”
Pulaski nodded. “Maybe I will. I don’t know about him, but it’d sure as Shadrak make rn’e feel better.” She paused. “In fact, maybe I’ll pay a little visit to the Enterprise. I’ve got some time coming, and—”
The Betazoid leaned forward and shook her head. “Not right now, dear,” she said in a hushed tone.
Lwaxana looked around to make sure no one else in the rec room was looking. Then, satisfied that they had some privacy, she went on.
“The Enterprise is on a secret mission,” she explained. “At the Romulan Neutral Zone. There’s some sort of anomaly there—whatever that is.”
The doctor eyed her. “But if it’s secret, how do you… ?” And then she answered her own question. Telepathy.
The ambassador smiled. “It pays to hang around with an admiral now and then. You never know what you might find out.” Suddenly, the smile disappeared. “Of course, I wouldn’t want any of this to become common knowledge. Deanna would kill me—and Riix knows, the poor girl has enough problems. Did I tell you she’s still unmarried?” Pulaski grinned. “Yes, ma’am. I believe you did.”
Lieutenant Reginald Barclay heaved a long, tremulous sigh as he remembered the details of his recent transfor-mation.
“Actually,” he said, “it wasn’t so bad being a spider. I mean, I wasn’t really aware of what was going on. I just had this general… I don’t know, perception, I guess you’d call it… that things had changed. That they’d slowed down, somehow. Or that my reactions had speeded up. And… oh, yes. Then there was that other thing.”
He turned to look at Counselor Troi. As ever, she was gazing at him sympathetically from her chair on the other side of the room.
“You mean the appetite for flies?” she suggested nonjudgmentally.
He nodded. Even now, it was hard for him to think of one without salivating just a little. “Yes. That.”
The counselor smiled. “As I’ve told you before, Reg, what you’re feeling isn’t at all abnormal. Everyone on the ship was affected by that protomorphosis disease. And everyone—myself included—has some unsettling memories of what happened to them while they were devolving.”
He grunted. “Yes, but not everyone on the ship had the disease named after him.”
Troi looked at him. “Dr. Crusher did that as a matter of scientific tradition. If you want her to change it…”
He pondered the possibility for a moment, then shook his head. Now that he thought about it, he sort of liked the idea, even if it did imply that he was to blame for the whole epidemic.
After all, it guaranteed him a certain immortality. For hundreds, maybe thousands of years, Federation doctors and scientists would be speaking of Barclay’s protomorphosis syndrome in reverential tones.
That is, if the Federation was still around. The way things were going, he wasn’t so sure that would be the case.
“I guess the spider thing isn’t what’s really bothering me,” he confessed. “Or even the fact that I’ve had a disease named after me.”
The counselor had known that all along, of course, though she hadn’t said so. That’s how she worked, he mused.
Now, for instance, she was waiting patiently for him to tell her what the real problem was. Finally, he spoke up.
“It’s this mission,” he explained. “The anomaly that’s been discovered in the Devron system… all those Warbirds that the Romulans have sent to the Neutral Zone.” He tried to