Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [27]
Inclining his head, Riker offered, “But I saw those forms closing in on you. I didn’t know what they intended.”
“You needn’t have done your Olympic pole vault on my account,” the captain said. “A simple word of warning would have been sufficient.”
Squaring his shoulders-but not too much-Riker proclaimed, “It’s my job to protect you, sir.”
“Yes, I know that’s the official story,” Picard said. “When you’ve come back alive as many times as I have, you’ll earn the right to have someone look after you as well. I’ll thank you to allow me the dignity of taking my own punches from now on. Dismissed.”
“Geordi, look at this. Geordi, look at that. Geordi, tell us what this is made of. Geordi, look through walls like Superman. Sure, no problem, I’ll look. All I am is what I look through.”
“Take it easy,” Beverly Crusher murmured as she adjusted the tiny filter on the miniaturized low-power sensory compensator in LaForge’s visor. “You know, you should have a medical engineer doing this.”
“No thanks,” the young man grumbled, blinking his flat gray unseeing eyes at her, trying to imagine what she really looked like-really.
“And you should have rested after what happened on the bridge,” she told him evenly. “You can’t ask your body to power this sensor system to that level without letting yourself rest. That’s why it hurts you so much, Geordi. You’re unremitting.”
He nodded his cocoa-dark head in her general direction and said, “I don’t mind the hurt. I can’t just leave my post. But somehow I expected a little more appreciation from people who were stationed on Enterprise. I just assumed anybody who could get assigned to this ship would be a little more up to date than the run-of-the-mill ship’s crew.” He closed his eyes tight against the pounding headache and rubbed his hand across them, waiting for the medication to work. “Riker just expected me to tell him. It’s not that easy. I can’t just glance at things like you can. I can’t just pop out with words for the sensory impulses that make my brain act like a computer interpreter. Do you know that at close range a computer with a sensory readout can’t match me? It’ll miss or misinterpret things, because a machine doesn’t understand things like I do.”
“That’s because it doesn’t have the intuitive sense for interpreting what it sees,” Crusher told him placidly. “You should be proud of that.”
“I am,” he insisted. “But I didn’t know what those forms on the bridge were any more than anybody else did, including Mr. Riker. When people look at me, they don’t see me. They just see that thing.” He cast his hand in her direction, encompassing all of her and the item she held.
“They don’t understand,” the doctor said, “and you can’t expect them to. They aren’t going to understand how much it takes out of you to make this visor work.”
“I know!” he shot back with a frustrated slap of his hand on his knee. “I know … but it’s hard to be reasonable sometimes, specially when everybody’s kicking off a Geordi-what-do-you-see. They don’t know what it took to learn to interpret all the information I get out of every square inch I see. I’m not a machine, doc, you know? My brain wasn’t made to do this. It’s not like I look at a thing and a dozen little labels appear to tell me what it’s made of. I had to learn what every impulse meant, every vibration, every flicker, every filter, every layer of spectral matter … people don’t know what it takes out of me to say, ‘I don’t know what it is.’ “
Crusher stopped her adjusting and paused to gaze at him, suddenly moved by her ability to simply do that. Because he was blind now, without his prosthetic, he didn’t see her pause. He didn’t-couldn’t-see anything. And she was glad of it.
“It’s not easy, you know,” he went on. “It took years of retraining-painful retraining-to make my brain do this. A human brain is never meant by nature to do what mine’s doing. And every time I have to say, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’ it