Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [63]
Altogether, she went through dozens of books without being aware of time or of the other Dissenters.
At a certain moment she looked up and saw the huge pile of books that she’d looked through and cast down next to her.
Gunabibi and Coyote were putting more books down for her to look at, assembly-line style. Troi hadn’t even been aware of their help.
Then she realized that all the other Dissenters had gathered around to watch her.
Odysseus laughed. “I’m sure we’re all glad that you’ve taken such an interest in the literature of Earth. Is there something we can help you find?”
Troi looked at the scattered books, some of them wet, some of them falling apart but for makeshift string bindings, some of them just falling apart.
It took another few moments for her to remove her attention from the question of the Other-worlders and place herself mentally back with the people around her. They waited patiently.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I should have remembered how precious these books are to you. I hope I didn’t damage them.”
“Don’t worry,” said Odysseus, “Coyote was watching you as sharply as a … coyote. He made sure you weren’t hurting anything—at least no more than was necessary to find what you needed.”
“But I shouldn’t have hurt them at all.”
Coyote, who was standing next to Troi, spoke up.
“Deanna, what good would they be if nobody read them? Now did you find what you needed, or will it be necessary to unpack everything?”
At first she thought he was being sarcastic. Then she realized he was quite serious; the Dissenters were ready to let her look through every book they had, no questions asked.
“I think I’ve seen what I needed to see,” she said. “There was something I’d misunderstood, but now I think I understand. Thank you.”
“You are welcome, as a fellow Dissenter,” said Coyote, as he and Gunabibi started to pack away the books.
Troi waited for them to finish. She hadn’t told them the whole truth. Actually, she didn’t fully understand what she had just discovered.
If the Other-worlders were mythological characters that had somehow gotten stuck in her mind, characters of great vividness that she was compelled to remember and imagine, then why?
Perhaps they were actual living beings of some kind that had a will of their own?
And what about Crichton? If the Other-worlders were not aliens, and were in fact characters from literature and mythology, then was Crichton, the Director of Cephalic Security, guilty of the supposed crime he was charged with eradicating—the “crime” of imagination?
Troi again strained to remember what had happened that day on the Enterprise with Oleph and Una, just before she first experienced the Other-worlders. But her amnesia still covered that memory like a blanket of fog.
The Dissenters finished hiding the books and were ready to go. They stood for a moment, their stillness in contrast with the rush of the river.
Troi guessed they were saying good-bye to the caves. Some kind of era was ending. Dissenters had lived down here for two hundred years. Maybe these were the last.
Odysseus was the first to move.
The group followed the broad-shouldered, bearded man. After some slow climbing through broken scree, they emerged at a flat place, where the river rushed past a smooth concrete wall, the nether-surface of CephCom itself.
There would be no more time for Troi to solve the mystery of the Other-worlders.
Chapter Thirteen
THE BLIND WOMAN standing before the assembly bench played its microwelder like a musical instrument. Geordi stood nearby to check her progress.
It was a sonata of love and fury, as intense as her ecstasies with her guitar. The Cyclops-buster machine was taking shape with time-lapse rapidity under her sensor-tipped fingers. Geordi knew this struggle to save the ship had a personal dimension for Chops.
For her, a progressive musician, Rampart was the great destroyer of all art—the Censor. She’d been known to put her life on the line to defy it. Once, before she joined Starfleet, her band accepted an