Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [33]
But this was no place from which to command the ship. He touched his communicator.
“La Forge to Worf.”
“Worf here.”
“My cabin fever’s running high.”
“It is still not safe for you to attempt transit to the bridge. The route cannot be guaranteed secure from one-eyes.”
“How about the battle bridge?”
“Same problem. I can’t ensure your safety anywhere outside Engineering.”
“Worf … we have to balance the risks. Some risk will be necessary.”
“The consequences,” the deep Klingon voice said, gaining a decibel, “if a one-eye were to scan you, or kill you, are unacceptable. You are the only key officer whom the one-eyes have not yet scanned. You have more engineering knowledge than anyone on this ship. Your—”
“Okay, Worf.”
“Thank you. One moment, I’m getting some new reports.”
While he waited, Geordi’s VISOR showed him a sudden increase in heat of a hundredth of a degree reflected off a nearby bulkhead. Someone or something was coming into the room.
The constant threat provided by the intruders on the ship had made him jumpy. He found himself rising quickly out of his chair and turning to confront the visitant.
“Chops!” he said.
For that was who had entered. Dorothy “Chops” Taylor, Geordi’s most valued maintenance engineer.
As always, she looked a little wild. Her hair was as freeflowing as regulations permitted and there were hints of improbable colors in it, along with the first hint of gray. Her hands, with their metallic finger pads, flexed with everpresent, almost manic energy. The unconventional picture was completed by the dark visor which covered her eyes.
Chops was blind. Because of the particular type of congenital damage to her brain, she could not be fitted with a functional VISOR like Geordi’s. Instead, she “saw” through the sensor pads on her fingers.
Her freewheeling personality was a deliberate attempt to offset the despair of her childhood.
Nearly forty years ago a race known as the Sadalsuudians, from Beta Aquarius V, made exploratory contacts with ships from the Federation. The Sadalsuudians appeared friendly. What they really wanted was not diplomatic relations but some living human reproductive cells. After the Sadalsuudians had stolen the cells they wanted, they withdrew to their own planet, got the human sperm and human egg together in vitro, and grew a human embryo as a means of observing alien genetic principles, though they had a poor understanding of genetics in general, including their own.
The result of the experiment was Dorothy Taylor. She turned out blind. The Sadalsuudians hadn’t intended that, but they treated her as cruelly as their own native blind. On their planet, there was a huge population of birth-defect handicapped natives who had been forced into underclass status.
Dorothy Taylor was exhibited publicly. She was “degraded as a new kind of “inferior” being, an alien with a “mutation.”
But one of the scientists who studied her saw things differently than other Sadalsuudians. He was far ahead of his time. He was the only one who had realized that the first life on his planet, the first tiny chain of nucleotides and sugars, must have been a kind of mutation on the random patterns around it, and that all subsequent evolution was also a result of mutation—of some organisms accidentally turning out a bit differently than their forebears and finding an advantage in their difference. If there had been no mutations on the first form, then all life on Beta Aquarius V would be nothing more than tiny replicating chains of nucleotides and sugars, no different than the very first. Life itself was mutation.
The scientist had tried to publish his findings but was ignored. The Sadalsuudians couldn’t bear to relinquish their attitudes about their “mutated” undercaste. The scientist found he couldn’t change these attitudes of ignorance but he managed to set one handicapped person free. He turned Dorothy back over to the Federation during a diplomatic contact.
When Geordi met Dorothy she