Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [49]
“Jail cells?” Troi said in wonderment.
“No,” said Picard, “a zoo!” And for a moment, and then for another, the captain of the Enterprise began to understand the Horta captain’s need to finish the task at hand, to solve one puzzle before moving onto the next. The screens showed a sudden movement forward and starboard. As far as the eye could see, a thick white vapor was rising off the sea, rising only waist-high. In the direction of the islands, the vapor rose skyward in a dozen whirlwinds, and
the black clouds gathering on the horizon provided a stark contrast for them. The sky, in that direction, appeared to be full of ghostly white worms.
“Now would be a good time to leave?” said the Horta.
“Another good safety tip,” said Picard, as five kilometers off the starboard bow a waterspout twisted sideways and tore a hole in the canopy of cloud cover, letting brilliant red sunlight shine down, ever so briefly, on the porcelain city. It was the last these islands would ever see of the sun, until the moment it climbed down through the stratosphere and sat upon them.
The Fallen Sky
IT WAS HOT. Picard could almost feel the sun pressing in on him. It was an illusion, of course. Knowledge of the conditions outside the Darwin gave his imagination leave to insist that it was hot here—against the reality of the ship’s climate-controlled bridge.
He leaned forward in his saddle at the Operations station as the Horta pilot at his right moved her fingerlike rocky extrusions over her console. As the vessel finally lifted from the ocean, kindling temperature was reached, at which point waterspouts grew into actual tornadoes and heavy swells began to form.
“Picard to Riker,” Picard murmured.
“Riker here.”
“We are fully operational, and rising through the atmosphere.”
“Glad to hear it, Captain.”
From an altitude of ten thousand kilometers, the world below became a flat white plain. Picard realized that he was staring at streamers of warm mist rising over millions of square kilometers of ocean, pushing gently—ever so gently, at first—outward and outward from the place he had just left. A hundred thousand kilometers higher, Picard thought he could distinguish the outline of the Great Scott Sea’s nearer shore.
Far up the inner hull, just barely visible, was a thin scratch marking the path taken by the old world across a lake and a forest. At least, he thought it was visible, without the aid of magnification; but the longer he looked, the harder it was to see, and he began to wonder if the destruction he had witnessed in real time, through subspace channels, might not yet be visible without the probe because the light now reaching the Darwin from the inner surface was still several minutes old. A quick mental calculation told him that more than enough time had passed, that the scratch should be visible to him; but like so much else in Dyson, it was swallowed by Dyson’s immensity.
He called up a telescopic view and … and there it was: The core had stretched like an egg and broken, leaving behind a yolk of gold and liquid platinum the size of Lake Superior. Behind the core, vast splashes of atmosphere were crashing back again upon the land, cooking deposits of colorless methane into clouds of black sugar. The sky, in that direction, rained caramel and microdiamonds.
Guinan had come to the bridge. She left the lift, came to his side, and stood there gazing at the viewscreen; her usual contemplative expression was replaced now by awe. “The question,” she said, as if reading his thoughts, “comes down to the old sin of pride.”
Picard looked at her quizzically.
“You wanted to believe we could save Dyson, that we could change its course,” Guinan continued, “but that belief, no matter how well-intentioned, turns out to have been rooted in the old conceits of pride and hope. You were right to think of the Darwin as little more than an intruding virus here. We are saviors of nothing. The Dyson Sphere was not built for us, does not operate by our standards of right and wrong, and so long as we stay out of the way and do