Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [14]
They waited. After a few seconds he drifted down again to the doorway and hung there, looking at them with a rather stunned expression from behind the wall of water. “Commander,” Hwiii said weakly, “that was vile language.”
“My apologies,” Riker said, “but you weren’t behaving in a way that suggested sweet reason was going to do much good right then.”
“No,” Hwiii said, sounding ashamed, “I suppose not. It’s just that it was such a shock—” He stared at Riker. “How can you be so calm?”
“Calm isn’t high on my list at the moment, believe me,” Riker said. “We’ve had a very odd occurrence in the last hour or so.”
“I’ll say we have,” Hwiii said. “You felt it too, then. We’re lost!”
“What?” Crusher said.
The dolphin looked at her in distress. “Can’t you feel it?”
“We all felt something a little while ago,” Crusher said, “but what it was, we can’t say.”
“Ship’s systems show no change in status,” Data said. “All readings, navigational and otherwise, seem nominal.”
“Commander, Mr. Data,” Hwiii said with dreadful intensity, “we are lost. I can feel it in my tail. We’re not—” He fumbled for words, and Riker found it odd to watch a being usually so precise now floundering. “We’re not where we were.”
“Will you get into your suit, Commander,” Riker said, “and come up to the bridge with me and explain that—since you’re the only one around here who seems to have any kind of explanation for what’s happening?”
“Gladly,” Hwiii said. But his voice still had an uncertain sound to it, almost the sound of a child, abruptly lost in some immensity, and very much wanting some adult to take his hand and tell him things are going to be all right.
Some minutes later, on the bridge, Hwiii was looking critically over Data’s shoulder while he brought up detailed readings of their coordinates. “I’m so embarrassed about that,” Hwiii said quietly to Data. “I don’t usually come all overreligious in moments of crisis.”
“I was going to ask whether there was some specific significance in the passage you were singing,” Data said, “but that will have to wait. Here are our present coordinates, with course projection. Here are the twelve Cepheids within scan, with their spectra. As you see, they all match their nominal “fingerprints,” though RY Antliae is showing about point five percent above its baseline at the moment. Here is the master navigational grid, and as you see, our course is as predicted.”
Picard stepped down to look, too. “Our location at the moment is exactly what it should be, considering our past course and speed,” he said. “As you can see, the computer confirms the location as well.”
Hwiii laughed at that, an unhappy sound. “Yes, but these instruments don’t know any better since they’re judging by strictly physical guideposts like Cepheid variables.” He looked over at Picard. “Captain, I see the readings, and I can vouch for the validity of the instruments’ readings since I’ve been working so closely with them the last few days. But”—and he swung his tail in one of the delphine gestures of negation, a downward slap—”we are not where we seem to be. This is not the way space feels, not the way it felt two hours ago. We are somewhere else that looks like here—if you follow me.”
Picard’s mind abruptly went back to what the Laihe had been saying, or trying to say. “Some kind of—shift—”
Hwiii had made his way up to one of the science stations and was busy at it with his manipulators, reconfiguring it.
“If I understand you correctly,” Picard said slowly, “are you suggesting that we have somehow dislocated ourselves into a congruent universe?”
Hwiii laughed, looking up from the controls for a moment. “Captain, I only wish we had done it ourselves! If we had, we might at least have been prepared for it. I was on my sleep cycle, and everything was fine. Then—can you imagine waking up and suddenly finding yourself in some place that your senses tell you is a strange country, a different planet, even—but one that nonetheless looked exactly the same as where you were before you fell