Dyson Sphere - Charles R. Pellegrino [58]
“It has gone quantum,” Data announced. “Dyson’s gravitational field is… virtually nonexistent.”
Quantum. Smaller than any of the blood cells that flowed in his veins… smaller than a virus particle—Dyson, the whole thing … smaller than the diameter of a proton. Picard hunched slightly forward in his station, with his arms folded across his chest, as if he were trying to keep warm. And there was a coldness in him, a chill born of the realization that the greatest object ever constructed had just sunk from view, leaving him adrift in unfulfilled expectations. Adrift, alone, abandoned?
No, he told himself. He was adrift, but not alone. Something was out there, and it was coming his way.
And it knew his name.
Locutus…
“Data?”
“Captain, there is a Borg vessel at the limits of our sensor range.”
So, it was not over yet.
“What’s it doing?” Picard asked.
“Nothing at all, Captain.”
Picard sat back and considered, then gazed at Riker. Number One was wearing his cautious, annoyed look. “Perhaps all of our assumptions were not wrong after all,” Riker said.
Picard found himself agreeing, in a way: “Relativity and dimensional folding aside, I’d say even a clock that isn’t running would have to be right twice a day.”
Riker shook his head. “Thanks, Captain.”
Picard watched Data put an enhanced view on the screen, showing an ever so faint optical distortion in the place where Dyson’s center had been.
“I’m thinking about the assumption we came to when the neutron star first appeared,” Riker continued, “about how some distant remnant of the Dyson engineers—perhaps the Borg—might have been trying to destroy something in its past that could be of benefit to us. Something in the Sphere.”
“Whatever it was,” Picard said, “we didn’t find it.”
As he spoke, the Borg cube disappeared in a wash of subspace distortion. Either it had been destroyed somehow, or it had sped off in a hurry, fleeing faster than any Borg ship had hitherto been clocked. Simultaneously, the tiny distortion on Data’s display finally pulled the hole in behind itself. The Sphere had left no footprints, quantum or otherwise; but Picard could not shake the feeling, the deep instinctive knowing, that the Borg had disturbed a sleeping tiger … and it was now following them.
It might very well be very far from over, he thought. But of one thing he was certain: The Sphere’s example—its future significance for Federation thinking—would not be easily exhausted. It represented what was “merely” an early, perhaps even sinful attempt at cosmic engineering, an extravagant effort by an intelligent species to change the face of the cosmos. The human mind, so recently out of its cradle, still boggled at the idea of remaking a galaxy, or an entire universe, nearer to its heart’s desire. Against human wishes, the universe might very well be a “sorry scheme,” as the poet said; but human desires were still too vague to know what to want. Knowledge, love, a graceful life? But when the day of self-knowledge arrived … what then?
And for a moment Picard feared the wishes that waited to conflict with those of humankind.
Epilogue
The Fabulous Riverboat
CAPTAIN DALEN OPENED the aft hatch and tractored onto the roof of the Darwin. A dozen of her crew had gone out ahead of her. They stared at the Engford, the sky, the sea, the beings the humans had named the sea swifts. They let the sun warm their hard backs. They breathed deep of Dyson’s air.
The air … the water … the Horta captain tried to form for herself an estimate of how many days, or weeks, the shockwaves from the old world and the Great Scott Sea would take to reach her from various distances in the Sphere, and whether or not they would have, by that time, diminished to little more than loud bangs.
She stiffened, reluctant to dwell on the question, but drawn irresistibly to finishing the calculation, once she had begun it.
Then into her icy black veins flowed blood. She had arrived at an answer the blast from the Great Scott Sea, dissipating across a radius of more than one hundred million kilometers—more than