Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [7]
“Shift unbearable reality nature life, inturn frightened stars inworlds population loss shift lacktime losstime migration tizhne mystery major safe haven … suggest similar stars inworlds have exit departure lacktime losstime benefit.”
“If I understand correctly that you’re heading back into more populated areas,” Picard said, “then we wish you well on the journey. Our patrol duties lie in this area for a good while yet.”
The Laihe’s head swiveled from side to side, like that of someone who’s sure you must be speaking to someone else. “Shift unpredictable dataless uncertainties dangerous!”
That Picard thought he understood. “I thank you for your concern. The uncertainties are our business, though: there are few things more important to us, though they can be dangerous, as you say.”
The Laihe looked at him mournfully. “Departure imminent, data dump imminent, locations safety, wellwish.”
“We would appreciate all the data you have,” Picard said. “Please feel free to requisition anything from our data libraries that you may feel would be of help to you. And thank you again for your concern. We’ll do our best to look into this problem.”
The Laihe nodded—that gesture she knew and understood—and raised a foreleg. The screen winked out, leaving a view of stars, and the dim-lit sparks of the many Lalairu ships lying thousands of miles away, ready to go into warp.
Picard turned away from the viewscreen and sat down thoughtfully in his seat. “Now what did you make of that?” he said to Riker and Troi.
Troi shook her head. “Certainly she was distressed, Captain. And she became more so as she got into the technical details … as if the more concretely she considered the problem, the worse it became to her. But she obviously seems intent on getting herself and her people out of here as quickly as possible.”
“Suggestions?” Picard said, glancing from Troi to Riker.
Riker shrugged. “Hard to make an evaluation without understanding the science involved … or, after a statement like that, even which parts of science are involved.”
“The translation problem, yes …” Picard sighed. “As soon as he’s settled, I’ll ask Commander Hwiii to see if he can make more sense of the Laihe’s concerns. There may be idiomatic material in her statement that the computer couldn’t correctly analyze. We’ll have a briefing when he’s made his own assessment. Meanwhile, we continue as scheduled. How is the data acquisition going?”
Riker tried not to make a face, and Picard caught him at it and smiled slightly. Their present mission was a little dry for Riker’s tastes, though Picard knew Riker was as much for the acquisition of pure knowledge as anyone else. Starfleet had sent them up into this empty area partly to do research on the energy emissions from their arm of the Galaxy as a whole. In particular, they were to seek corroboration for the presently mooted theory that the Galaxy occasionally threw up from its core and inner arms immense jets or prominences of charged matter, contributing (among other things) to the structure and movement characteristics of the Galactic arms, possibly even to the increased or altered genesis of stars in areas where the “prominences” of matter and energy fell back into the Galactic disk. The Enterprise’s usual exploratory duties were, of course, to parallel this research, but up here in the empty dark, there was precious little to explore, and Will was itching for something more interesting to occupy his time.
“Slowly, Captain,” Riker said with a wry smile. “And it’s not just me saying that. The traces of the “matterspouts” we’re looking for are going to be very slight, even if we should happen to run right into one. You’re talking about space so empty that it would make a comet’s tail look crowded by comparison. Subatomic particles scattered one to a cubic terameter—not much more closely. And places where the spouts once were are going to look much the same, except for very specific muon and antimuon decays— assuming we