Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [53]
The shaving seemed to go on forever. He could feel the warmth of Smith’s body as she leaned over him. She was a living being, and she was going to annihilate another living being. If he was right in his assumptions, his body would still be alive, and would eventually be given a new personality, but he, Jean-Luc Picard, would be dead.
He looked at the woman’s green eyes which were only partly visible behind the flickering rasters. Strangely, her eyes seemed sad, full of regret. At first she avoided his stare, but then she paused for a moment and looked right at him.
Picard thought he saw pity there, the first he’d seen since he’d been in CephCom.
“Yes, you are different,” Picard said. “You don’t believe in what you’re doing.”
She didn’t react at all, and Picard wondered if her protective headphones were filtering out what he said.
She continued with her work.
Her shaver buzzed like a steel fly.
He caught her eye again, for just a moment, but she looked away quickly. She clicked her shaver off and put it away.
Picard focused all of his perception on her, the last living being he would ever see.
She didn’t belong here. She had a visible insecurity, a vulnerability. She knew that she didn’t know everything.
Picard thought she might be his means of escape, at least from imminent death, if only she would take her damned helmet off. But what good would that do if the sensing gear in the room picked up everything they said?
Smith slowly rose from Picard’s side, went over to the cart, and put the shaver back in the drawer. Picard couldn’t tell if her motions were indeed slow or if his sense of time was playing tricks on him.
She pulled the cart by its handle. It rolled on hard black rubber wheels. Now it was right next to him, filling his sight. He saw the dials, oscilloscopes, and switches. He even saw the numbers on their graduated scales.
She took the jack-ends of two cords and plugged them into sockets in the wall near the bed.
Picard felt his breathing speed up.
He stared at Smith’s face, prayed for her to look at him again.
She flicked a switch on each of the rack-mounted components. Picard could see the scopes light up, hear the little cooling fans starting to blow.
She picked up the cap-like thing, and paused. Picard willed her to doubt what she was doing, and for a moment he thought she really was wavering. Then he realized she was just inspecting the electrodes.
She smeared conductor on the electrodes and then she put the cap on his head, seating it firmly. Through his scalp he could feel the sticky conductor, and the hot electrodes themselves. She picked up a roll of thick white tape from the cart and tore off a strip.
She met his eyes again, just for a moment, then she put the tape over his mouth, and turned toward the cart.
She hadn’t seemed affected by the plea Picard knew was in his eyes.
A terrible thing occurred to him. What if Troi had been right all along, more right than she knew, about the way he kept his emotions in check? What if now in this last moment he was too cold to make this executioner feel enough pity to spare him? Maybe this was his hamartia, his doom waiting for him all along like an unnoticed face in a crowd in some huge painting …
Picard closed his eyes, heard himself breathing, heard his blood roaring.
Then he heard the sound of a switch being pulled, and, immediately afterward, a buzzing sound.
He waited. He felt no change.
Smith pulled the tape off his mouth and went back to her machines. The buzzing stopped.
Had it already happened? Was it instantaneous?
Maybe it wouldn’t work on him.
He needed a way to test his brain. What would never have survived a Rampartian brainwashing?
A line, the final moment of Leopold Bloom’s fictional journey, a story so often censored, came to him.
“Going to a dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.”
It was as reverberant as the day he first read it.
Picard