Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [37]
He glanced over at his own Worf, who was looking at his counterpart with an expression of which Riker could make nothing.
“Discommoded?” Riker said softly. Worf shook his head, not answering. “Data, can we get sound?”
“Not without losing vision,” Data said. “This mode of surveillance will permit us only one sort of bandwidth at a time—sound is carried on another channel. I would have to switch.”
Riker opened his mouth to tell him to try it—then shut it again as the captain’s ready room door opened.
The shock that went through him, even though he had been expecting to see this man since Deanna’s report, was still horribly unsettling. I don’t walk like that! was his first thought. Well, possibly he himself didn’t—though now he had doubts—but this other Riker plainly did. The man who had come out of the ready room now stood for a moment looking at the main viewer, then turned to one of the crewmen at the weapons-control boards and snapped some question or order.
The crewman turned and answered quickly. Riker looked at the other Riker’s face, and now he did shudder; he couldn’t help it. Their faces were identical: this was the face he saw when he trimmed his beard in the morning. And regardless, he hoped no one ever saw this face on him. There was a curl to the lip, another of those worn-in frowns, that made this other Riker look like a thug. He remembered his mother, a long time ago, saying, Don’t make those faces, your face will get stuck that way, and one of his command-psych instructors at Academy saying, I don’t have to ask you how you are: I can tell just by looking at you. Do you really believe that twenty years or more of your emotions and basic outlook telling your facial muscles how to behave, eighteen hours or so a day, doesn’t leave any traces? It takes time … but it’s just like water on stone, and just as impossible to erase once it’s done … except by changing the mind inside the face. And sometimes not even then.
Riker looked at his counterpart’s face and tried to imagine what could make a man’s face, .his face, into something like this … then shied away from the prospect. Instead he shifted his attention to the man’s uniform. It was different, again, but in a new way: it was sleeveless, the black vee yoke that normally ran over the shoulders cut off to leave the muscular arms bare, and the short tunic was belted at the waist with another of those woven-gold sashes, supporting a big nasty-looking phaser on one side, and a ceremonial-looking dagger on the other. The knife seemed to be a recurring motif: in uniforms, and—Riker noticed with shock—even on the doors to the turbolift, where the Starfleet parabola was etched into the paneling—with a square-handled dagger neatly impaling it.
That other Riker sat down in the center seat and looked thoughtfully at the front viewscreen, said something else to the single form minding the conn console: Wesley Crusher. Riker couldn’t clearly see Wes’s face from this angle, but the ensign turned slightly and made some answer. Apparently the other Riker was satisfied: he sat back in that thronelike chair, pulling at his lower lip.
“No Data,” Worf said from behind Will.
Riker shook his head. “Not aboard, you think? Or just somewhere else?”
“We have no way of telling as yet,” Data said. “I am trying to devise a way to get at the other Enterprise’s crew roster, but frankly, I doubt I will be able to manage it by this means. I suspect Mr. La Forge will have to help us with that when the away team goes over.”
Riker shook his head. “Any way to tell where this particular scan is being