Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [89]
The sadness of the situation overwhelmed her, and she tried to weep, but couldn’t. The sadness itself began to dry up. Her emotions were petrifying.
In another moment all emotions were gone. Nothing and nobody mattered to her. All that was left was a hard, dry rock of continuing awareness.
She watched a group of mythical characters pull a CS man from under an overturned jeep. Proteus turned himself into a stretcher for the injured man. Troi saw another figure, nearby, with his back turned to her.
The man turned in profile for a moment and Troi saw that it was Odysseus.
As she watched him she felt a slight pang of emotion—the most basic possible emotion—reawaken in her. It was a desire to live, a desire that he should come and help her.
He walked away from the jeep and was gone from Troi’s view. But a few seconds later he came back and looked across the field of rubble, directly at her.
Troi strained to move, to make some kind of sign, but it was futile.
He noticed her anyway. He walked toward her, weaving his way around the piles of wreckage.
When he reached her he stood looking at her face for a long time.
He appeared slightly different in facial structure and dress than when she had last seen him. Yet it was unmistakably the same man. It was as if the specific aspects of the person she had known were diminished and a more universal Odysseus had emerged. This was Homer’s Odysseus, the immortal, mythical Odysseus.
His myth-character was much the same as the man Troi had known—the resourcefulness, the endless fearless questing across the wide seas and the limits of the known and the unknown.
“I know you, do I not?” he said. “From some other place or time?”
He stared uncertainly at her.
“And wasn’t I prophesied to meet you again? … Well … I can see you can’t answer me.”
He began to pull the chunks of earth and wood off her.
“If it’s so, I know how to free you. I know how to reawaken the woman-trapped-as-a-statue. Pygmalion the sculptor did it once. With his touch he warmed the stone, and the stone softened into flesh.”
He picked up a flat piece of wood and used it to fan the dust off her. When she was clean, a perfect, polished, poised stone image that looked as though it should have stood in a museum, he put down the plank and knelt next to her.
He touched her wrist, and squeezed it gently.
Slowly, her skin began to tingle where he touched it. It felt as a limb feels when it has slept and then been awakened by the tide of circulation,
All the cells in her hand seemed to come alive. She could feel blood moving through the veins.
His hand moved up to her shoulder and squeezed it. The shoulder became soft under his touch. The warmth spread. She could move the arm. The sensation was so divine she wanted to utter some word or sound, but still she had no voice.
He moved his hands to her face, stroked her cheek and her hair.
Now she felt her entire body reawakening. The sensation was so intense, so electric, that she had to shut her eyes tight and couldn’t breathe for a moment.
Then the transformation completed itself and she breathed and moved her limbs.
Emotions came back in a rush. She was supremely, inanely happy and sad at the same time. She let it flow.
Then she realized Odysseus wasn’t touching her anymore.
She opened her eyes.
She was alone, lying on her back, staring at a night sky, a blue nebula with stars behind it.
A delicious warmth bathed her body. For a minute she just looked at the stars and enjoyed the feeling of being physically and emotionally alive. Some place inside her had been tapped and had released a secret, an inner conflict.
Then she became aware of voices around her. She moved her head and saw that she was in the middle of a circle of CS men and one-eyes. Crichton stood near her. A CS guard knelt beside her, his hand still cuffed to hers. Picard, Data, and Riker were still handcuffed as well.
She saw that she was still on the bridge, near the actual spot where Odysseus had died.
She understood that there had been no invasion by mythical