Caretaker - L. A. Graf [52]
"Does he provide your meals, too?"
Despite the edge in Torres's voice, the Ocampa doctor smiled while he led them off the plaza toward a sea of neat, gray tables. "In fact, he does. He designed and built this entire city for us after the Warming.
The food processors dispense nutritional supplements every four-point-one intervals." He looked at his own plate with a wistful tip of his head. "It may not offer the exotic tastes some of our young people crave these days, but it meets our needs."
Whether that said more about the Ocampa's needs, or about their Caretaker's sensitivity to them, Kim didn't care to speculate.
A monitor as long and tall as Voyager's main viewscreen hung above the sprawl of tables, sprinkling the subterranean darkness with gentle images from a world these people could never have known from the insides of this huge stone tomb. Oceans and rivers flowed in idyllic splendor beneath a ripple of soothing music; forests and prairies melted softly over the watery images, until some small foraging rodent dominated the screen as it dug through a carpet of autumn leaves. All around the eating zone, placid Ocampa studied the ever-changing pictures with almost hypnotic intensity.
Kim nodded at the screen as he slid into a seat the doctor offered.
"Is this how the Caretaker communicates with you?"
Glancing in the direction of Kim's nod, the doctor shook his head and sat as well. "He never communicates directly. We try to interpret his wishes as best we can."
"I'm curious..." Kim forced his eyes away from the weirdly captivating images, only to find himself drawn to a bank of similar screens on the opposite end of the alcove. He made himself focus on the Ocampa doctor instead. Torres remained stubbornly fixated on her food. "I'm curious to know how you've interpreted the Caretaker's reason for sending us here."
The doctor twirled what looked like a fork in the midst of his mash in an oddly human gesture of introspection. "We believe he must have separated you from your own species for their protection."
Torres slammed her utensils to the table with a crash. "Their protection?"
"From your illness." The doctor glanced uncertainly between them as Kim reached across to close his hand around her wrist.
"Perhaps he is trying to prevent a plague."
"We weren't sick until we met your Caretaker," Torres pointed out.
Kim squeezed her wrist--hard--and earned a vicious glare from Torres right before she twisted effortlessly out of his grip and crushed his own hand in her fist. Refusing to give her the satisfaction of seeing him in pain, he ignored the discomfort as best he could and asked the doctor, "Why would he send us to you if he thought this is an infectious disease?"
"He must know we're immune. From time to time, he asks us to care for people with this disease. It's the least we can do to repay his--" Torres released her hold on Kim to lunge across the table toward the doctor. "There have been others like us?"
The doctor jerked back in his seat, blinking in surprise. "Yes..."
"Where are they?"
He straightened carefully, and looked Torres firmly in the eye as he pushed the remnants of his meal to one side. "Your condition is very serious," he explained, carefully, as though thinking hard before he chose each word. "We don't know exactly how to treat it." He looked from Torres to Kim with a certain grim steadiness. "I'm afraid the others did not recover."
Chapter 13
Tuvok realized he should have anticipated problems when Neelix's warbled "Come in!" answered his signal at a volume below what human ears could have heard. Removed by several rooms, he instantly deduced from the slight Doppler shift and loss of harmonic complexity. And distracted by some other attention-intensive activity. Tuvok determined that he lacked sufficient data to speculate as to the nature of that activity, so let himself into Neelix's quarters as requested under the assumption that Neelix was not averse to interruptions.
The inside of the cabin