Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [79]
He got out of the shower, put on another uniform matching the one he had been wearing, reapplied the badge and medals, then went back into the room and just stood there a moment, trying to calm himself. An idea would come, if he could just keep calm. Something always came.
He looked around, trying briefly to identify any small differences between his own quarters and these. But everything seemed unnervingly as it ought to be. Bed made, furnishings just as in his own quarters, nothing out of place.
His eye fell on the bookshelf. It was exactly as his old friends at home had warned him: there was no such thing as keeping “just a few books,” not even here on a starship, the most space-conscious and weight-conscious of environments. Still the books bred, no matter how carefully he tried to choose them: people gave him books as presents, or books leapt into his hands when he was on leave on strange worlds, as if they knew a sympathetic reader. Now he looked at the books suspiciously—but they were the same, just the same.
Or so he thought. He wandered over to gaze at them. Some of them were very much what you might expect in a limited collection of someone native to Earth: the complete Shakespeare, and the ancient King James Bible, there, he cheerfully admitted, more for the antique beauty of its language than for most of the contents: a pairing that Admiral Parry-Smyth had laughed at, when she had last visited, making an obscure reference to something called “Desert Island Discs.” The rest of the collection was suitably —possibly, the admiral had claimed, pathologically—eclectic: the three original-edition Dixon Hill books, of course: Murder in Camera, The Knowing Look, and Under the Sun. Then two of the venerable old hardcover Everyman editions of Kipling, Barrack Room Ballads and Kim. One of the first Centauri Press editions, a reprint of Glocken’s The Stars out of Joint; various others—a book of Restoration poets, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in the long-lost Cordwainer Smith translation, along with Rouse’s prose Iliad and Odyssey, and Hamilton’s peerless translations of Aristotle and the great comedies of Aristophanes. The Oxford University Press hardcover of Eddison’s Eriks Saga, next to a weary, broken-spined trade paperback of Little, Big; and so many others. … There was even a very late addition to the collection, a present from Will Riker just a month ago on his return from a leave trip to Hay-on-Wye—the Eyre and Spottiswoode edition of Colin Watson’s droll and acute Snobbery with Violence, the best (and, appropriately, the least snobbish) analysis ever done of the early Terran detective novelists. Everything here, all accounted for.
He found that this shook him as badly as everything else, the whole barbaric world outside the doors of his quarters. Who am I here, he thought, that what I see here can so completely match what exists back on the—back home?
“Computer,” he said softly. It chirped. “Read out record of present command,” he said, his mouth dry.
“Picard, Jean-Luc,” the computer said. “Assumed command ICC 1701-D Enterprise on stardate 41124, after destruction of previous command, ICC 2055 Stargazer, subsequent to victory at Battle of Maxia, stardate 33070. First action: destruction of Farpoint Station due to attack on ship by alien spacegoing life-form. Second action: enforcement action on planet Ligon II. Third action—”
“Stop. Nature of enforcement action on Ligon II.”
“South continent of Ligon II rendered uninhabitable by high-gamma fission-producing devices to induce planetary government to provide vaccine necessary to control plague on planet Stryris IV.”
They irradiated—we irradiated a whole continent? “How many casualties?” he whispered.
“Neutralizations estimated in excess of thirty million,” the computer said calmly.
The choice of words said everything. “Continue,” Picard said, and not