Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [16]
Her gaze swept, without lingering, past the yumi, the seven-foot-long bamboo/waxwood/carbon-fiber composite bow leaning in a corner of her cabin. It was the instrument she used in the Japanese art of Zen archery. She had learned the art from a Master before entering Starfleet Academy. It was the reason for her oft-rumored abnormal accuracy with a phaser and tranquility in the face of danger. But she no longer consciously thought about her personal achievements or strengths. A sense of ego was anathema to the practice of Zen archery.
She tabbed her door panel. The door swished open. She entered the corridor, took two steps. Ahead, a box-like metal shape came careening around the bend and then stopped dead, hovering at eye level, a few paces away. It regarded Shikibu with a dark camera eye. Shikibu stared back.
The device matched Riker’s description of the mechanical intruders. In Shikibu’s mind it became nothing more than a target, no different than the straw targets she used for archery practice. She quieted her thoughts into a stillness like the smooth surface of a lake untroubled by winds. Her sense of self disappeared. There was no longer a separate Shikibu or phaser or target.
Her ears registered a rising whine coming from the metal box. This elicited no special emotion in her. Her hand had already closed of its own accord on her phaser button. Like snow dropping off a leaf, her arm seemed to find its own moment to move. She raised the phaser and tracked with the metal box as it made a sudden lateral movement. Her finger pressed the phaser button spontaneously.
Normally the one-eye could intercept the brain waves that signaled the intent and direction of a human’s attack. But Shikibu didn’t consciously think about her shot before it was fired, thus the one-eye could react only to what it sensed as psychomotor nerve activity and to what it saw directly. It managed to move but caught a bit of the phaser energy on its side, jarring its aim as it fired its own blast of radiation at Shikibu’s head. It wobbled crazily and had to set itself down on the deck.
Shikibu collapsed; her limbs had turned to gelatin. She was still conscious but the half-dose of radiation had stunned and confused her by vibrating the water molecules in her brain. A paroxysm of nausea seized her. After it passed she still couldn’t understand what had happened or what she should do. She didn’t recognize that camera-eyed metal thing resting on the deck nearby, now rising to hover near her.
But she did feel a strong desire to go back to her cabin. She half-crawled, half-rolled back to her door. Her limbs wouldn’t work properly. She ordered the door to open and dragged herself across the threshold. A moment later the door hissed shut behind her.
A minute later the one-eye recovered its “wits.” Though still mechanically sound, it had lost the information in its temporary memory store, including all memory of Shikibu. It glided away and continued about its business.
Shiva danced the dance of the universe, his wild hair streaming about a face that was beyond bliss and pain. In one hand he held flames of destruction, in another, the drum symbolizing time and creation. His third hand was in a position meaning “elephant,” the opener of the way, and with his fourth hand he gestured “fear not.” In his streaming locks could be seen the crescent moon of birth, the skull of death, and the flower of the datura.
As Wesley watched this image from Hindu mythology, this dance of creation and destruction unfolding on his computer screen, he likened it to the dance of subatomic particles, with their births, deaths, and continual exchange of energy—the fire from the explosion that created the universe.
This comparison was not entirely his own. The computer had told him that as far back as the mid-twentieth century, physicists had found, in the concept of Shiva and in other Eastern ideas, eloquent metaphors for quantum and relativity theory, the uncertainty