Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [41]
This then was why Guinan had come in with the Feynman, to remember any beings whom she found here. Nothing more, nothing less than this. It was a piece of nobility to be savored.
To Dream in the Sea of Sorrows
PICARD STOOD NEAR GUINAN on the south bank of the canal. The first alien squid had swum away, but another had come to rest alongside the bank and gaze up at them with its large eyes as it weaved signs with its tentacles. Guinan knelt on the bank, folding her legs under herself, never looking away from the alien.
Picard suspected that the squid was communicating with Guinan both with its tentacles and with some sort of telepathy. He could not tell if she was replying to the alien somehow or simply listening to what it had to tell her.
Two other squid darted toward them, then fled. “They had a dream,” Guinan said softly, “or perhaps I should call it a hope.”
“And what was this hope?” Picard asked.
“Space travel. It’s an ancient dream for them, Jean-Luc, because they are a very ancient people, so old that their own origins are only distant shadows lost in the past. They were old when your species was young, when my people were young. They do not even have names for themselves, or for their race.”
Their silent alien companion slipped under the water and vanished. “Sea swifts,” Picard said. Something about these beings reminded him of the small birds he used to see swooping over his family’s vineyards in the summers. “We’ll make a name of our own for them. I’ll call them the sea swifts.”
What they really were, and where they came from, he thought, was anybody’s guess. It seemed highly doubtful that they could have evolved from the Great Scott Sea all by themselves over the course of a hundred thousand years.
“This Dyson Sphere,” he said to Guinan, “is becoming more and more of a puzzle.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Here’s one possibility. This world inside Dyson is some sort of vast cosmic zoo assembled by accident, and our sea swifts are a mere remnant— maybe pets—from one of the lost civilizations that have presumably been blundering into the Sphere ever since it was abandoned, getting trapped inside with their ships, with no way to get back out again, and therefore continuing, as it were, this great experiment.”
“Pets, Jean-Luc?” Guinan asked, with a tone of amusement in her voice.
Picard smiled gently but did not reply.
Suddenly, in the distance, about twenty kilometers away, something bright and shiny broke the surface of the sea. Picard watched as the glittering object grew, swelling until it had become a new island in the chain, an island larger than the Darwin.
He narrowed his eyes and saw then that the new island was only the tip of the alien artifact that had so suddenly appeared. Behind its transparent walls, he could glimpse figures moving.
Guinan got to her feet and hurried toward the— should he call it a ship? Picard asked himself. He hastened after her, abruptly realizing that all of his smug assumptions about the squid people, the sea swifts, had been entirely mistaken.
CAPTAIN’S LOG, STARSHIP ENTERPRISE
IMPACT MINUS: NO LONGER APPLICABLE SUNSET MINUS: 1-3 DAYS EGRESS: AS SOON AS POSSIBLE
The sea swifts have made an ark for themselves. That was what I saw when their ship rose from the water. They have loaded thousands of their kind inside, along with thousands of exotic animals, two-by-two, inside.
Inside of what?
The … “ship” was glittering and transparent and made out of glass. No. Not made out of glass, Guinan pointed out Grown out of glass. It had been built in the shape of a giant starfish with five thick, fingerlike legs. No. Not built, Guinan reminded me. It had been grown. Like the glass spicules of certain sponges back home on Earth, or the shell of a nautilus, it had been grown. The inhabitants of the Great Scott Sea were planning their escape inside the skeleton of a giant sea creature.
Guinan was right. They knew a great danger was coming, and had been planning, with great care, a possible escape route for at least some small number of their kind. But it became