Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [13]
“Deanna, it was a dream,” he told her soothingly, cupping her hand under his.
Her voice dropped to a whisper. “But it wasn’t,” she insisted. “At least … not entirely.”
He believed her. Deanna Troi was the quintessence of professionalism and not given to the flights of personality often displayed by her Betazoid race. Without a pause he asked, “Have you asked the computer to trace the names?”
Troi lounged back in her chair, finally relaxing. “Computer off.”
The holograph gave an electrical snap, sucked down into a tiny core of light like a balloon suddenly losing all its air, and winked out.
“Have you?” he prodded.
“I suppose I’ll have to.”
“Why do you say it that way?”
“I don’t like to give in to dreams.”
Riker gazed at her, dubious.
Without giving him time to formulate a response to that, she asked, “Bill, what do you think? Do you think I might utilize my talents better in some other way?”
“You don’t mean leave the ship, do you? You aren’t thinking about that.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “if that’s how I can best serve the Federation.”
Desperation struck him. As much as he had-yes-avoided her, as afraid as he was that their past liaison would cloud his effectiveness as first officer, the prospect of her vanishing from his life suddenly cut him like a blade. “Don’t you like it here?” he asked, careful of his tone. “Don’t you like starship duty?”
“Oh, I like it very much,” she said. “Oh, yes, very much. But there are times … can you imagine what it’s like to stand on the bridge and realize I have nothing to do?”
With another shake of his head, Riker tapped a finger on the table and blurted, “Can I imagine it? I don’t have to. It’s the legacy of first officers the universe across. If you look up first officer in the marine dictionary, it says ‘do not open till crisis.’ Listen, it takes time for a new position to evolve. When we actually turn to exploratory missions, I think you’ll find yourself up to your chin in work. Keeping us sane in deep space-that’s hardly nothing. A ship’s psychologist is second only to the chief surgeon on deep-space missions.”
She smiled softly at his sincere effort, and murmured, “Where does that put the ship’s telepath?”
To this, Riker had no ready answer.
Troi sensed his concern and forced up a partial smile to ease his worry. She fell into his wide blue eyes as she had so long ago, and crashed through them just as the holographic cruiser crashed through its patch of blue sea. How could she make him understand? Could any human understand how uneasy she was, all the time? She knew people were uncomfortable around her because they thought of her as a kind of voyeur, always peeking through the keyholes of their thoughts. Mind slut, some called her. Many avoided her, so she had always tried to be more businesslike and stoic about her extremely businesslike talent-and even that practice had backfired.
Cold, they called her. An unfeeling mind slut.
How could she tell him that a crowded corridor was an empty place for Deanna Troi? Barren and lonely. She made such an effort to hide inside herself that she had become insulated from everything but their eyes, accused of a crime she refused to commit. Among her own people she could no longer go unrestrained; having built her discipline almost obsessively, she could no longer drop it for the short times she spent among Betazoids. Thus lost in both communities, misinterpreted by each as too aloof, she had become a woman of feelings who walked forever alone.
Even now she hid those truths from William Riker and his gentle waves of concern.
She swallowed imperceptibly and parted her lips. “Now I ask you-what’s the matter? What disturbs you?” She could both sense and see him weighing whether or not to tell her what he was thinking, then almost immediately he changed his mind.
“I don’t like to see you experiencing hurts that aren’t your own,” he admitted. “It doesn’t seem fair.”
“It’s my nature,” Troi told him. “My heritage from my mother’s people. It’s the nature of telepathy.