Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [91]
Her words became a voice-over for shots of the Dissenters being herded into their cells by the CS.
Coyote passed close to the camera and Troi could see a gleam in his eye. He didn’t seem defeated at all.
“Captain,” said Troi, “I was with these people after I became separated from the away team. They protected me and got me into CephCom.”
She wished she could do something for them. Maybe the captain wanted to as well. But there was no chance of helping them. The Prime Directive prohibited such meddling, and Troi had seen the wisdom of non-interference demonstrated over and over again. Any positive change on this planet would have to be made by the people themselves, not by the intrusion of a paternalistic hand.
Troi heard the conference room doors swish open. She looked up and saw two diminutive people enter. They looked like children but had the bearing of adult life-mates. She remembered them as Oleph and Una.
They came directly over to Troi.
“May we discuss a professional matter with you in front of others?” asked Una gravely.
“It seems to have involved your crewmates as well as you,” added Oleph.
“Yes, please do,” said Troi. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, in fact. What did we do during those hours we spent together? I have the most stubborn amnesia.”
“That’s what we wanted to talk to you about,” said Oleph. “We visited Earth not long ago, and as ethnographers we traveled all over that planet, recording fiction, myth, speculation, and all forms of creative imagination. We used our favored medium, something like your holography, except the images, sounds and so forth are played directly into the brain of the viewer. Virtual reality.”
“Well, as a counselor you wanted to view our ethnographic movie. We told you that sometimes, rarely, a life-form has trouble with the medium after they experience it. They find the movie stays in their mind and plays back later, in fragmented flashbacks and dreams.
“You insisted on viewing our movie anyway. You watched the whole thing straight through, all four hours,” Oleph concluded.
“And with the most enthusiasm afterward I’d ever seen,” said Una. “You said you’d be doing further research, and I took it to mean that you were going to do it right away. You left our cabin, and that was the last we saw of you.”
As they spoke, the memories of the meeting broke free and rose into Troi’s conscious mind.
“I must have blocked it out because of some kind of shock, when the flashbacks occurred,” said Troi. “A way of trying to suppress the trauma, I suppose. Was there something in your movie about a statue of a woman that comes to life?”
“More than one,” said Una. “There was The Winter’s Tale, Pygmalion, a Tlingit Indian story, and some others as well.”
Troi could now remember seeing these in the movie, along with Sekhmet, Tezcatlipoca, and all the rest of the cast of Other-worlders.
She knew what the next question had to be. Possibly the key to it all.
“Did you ever show Crichton your ethnographic movies?”
Oleph and Una looked blankly at each other.
“Who is Crichton?” asked Una.
“The Director of Cephalic Security on Rampart.”
“We’ve never met anyone on Rampart, have we?”
“No, my sweet.”
Troi felt disappointed. It was as if she had opened a series of Chinese boxes, one within the other, but the final, smallest box, holding the kernel of the mystery, had remained stubbornly locked. While she sensed that she was closer than ever to finding the key to that last box, she knew she couldn’t very well hold up the ship and the investigative machinery of Starfleet just so she alone could pursue a riddle.
Una and Oleph came closer to Troi, reached up with little pink toddler hands, and clasped her own hand.
“We just wanted to say, in case we don’t see you again, Counselor, that we’re sorry.”
“You don’t have to be,” said Troi. “It seems I took the risk willingly.”
A startling thought occurred to her, It came out of nowhere and had the crystalline elegance