Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [30]
Picard glanced at Captain Dalen, who sat on the floor at his side. It had been necessary to tell the Dooglasse everything, even if that meant shattering all of their myths and misconceptions about the ceiling at the end of their universe. They had seemed so eager to break out of their ignorance—or their innocence—and they possessed the means to at least leave the Sphere before the neutron star arrived.
“You are,” Picard said to Jani, “already somewhat acclimated to the idea of ‘outside.’”
“Yes,” Jani replied, “I see it, I think of outside, but—”
“What can be outside the universe?” another of the Dooglasse asked.
“Are you saying that the heavens are no more than—”
“I see a sky, and you show that I am inside a ball?”
The Dooglasse were all chattering at once; he could no longer make out their questions.
“Stop,” Captain Dalen said suddenly. The Dooglasse abruptly stopped talking and leaned toward the Horta officer hi unison.
“I have lived through the paradox of the outside,” Dalen went on. “I myself come from a race who once lived beneath the surface of our world, believing that there could be nothing beyond it. Space was something we created as we made our tunnels and passages, not something vast outside our world that was filled with stars and galaxies. Had the human beings—the ones like this Picard—not come to my planet, we would be burrowing still and creating space and running out of space to create.”
Jani made a motion with one of his arms. To Picard, it looked as if the Dooglasse was telling Dalen to continue.
“The real universe,” the Horta said, “is a finite yet unbounded sphere whose center is everywhere and whose edge is nowhere. “You can move outside your Sphere, you can step outside it and view it. But no one can step outside of the much greater sphere that we call the universe.”
Dalen continued to speak, telling the Dooglasse of the stars and galaxies and the true scale of what lay outside the universe of their Sphere. Even through the alien expressions, Picard could easily recognize both understanding and disbelief in their faces and subtly alien body language, convincing him even more that humankind indeed shared a distant human kinship with the Dooglasse.
Captain Dalen paused. Picard watched the audience of Dooglasse. The look that came into Jani’s face, and into the faces of some of the others, was that of children who had heard a most horrific story but still wished for the story to continue. He and Dalen, Picard thought, had read to them from the true Book of Revelations, with the worst still to come.
He waited until he felt they were ready to hear the rest, until all of them were looking expectantly at him. “There is more,” Picard murmured. “This is very hard for me to say, and it will be much harder for you to hear. You will have to leave the Sphere you have always thought of as your universe. “You will have to travel outside of it if you are to save yourselves, because your giant Sphere—your universe—will be destroyed in.eleven of our days.”
They were silent for so long that he wondered if they had understood him, and then they began to talk among themselves, clearly distressed, and a mournful, keening sound came into their voices. First, they had been faced with what could only be called metaphysical dislocation, and now they had to deal with the terror of doom.
But they would be able to leave, Picard reminded himself1. He had told them so, they were accepting it, and now he and Dalen would have to start working them up to constructive action as quickly as possible.
CAPTAIN’S LOG, STARSHIP ENTERPRISE
IMPACT