Intellivore - Diane Duane [22]
There was a soft chirp from the screen. Crusher looked out of her office toward one of her staff who was standing by the bed with an instrument in his hands and a “yes or no?” expression on his face. “Half a second,” she said, and went out.
When she came back, her face told the story. “That’s it,” Crusher said. “His dorsal heart just stopped for the third time, and his ventral one hasn’t been working for the last hour. I told Mike not to bother with another restart; it serves no purpose.”
Picard nodded sadly.
Crusher sighed and sat down in her chair. “Captain, if you’re looking for a fast diagnosis from me, I don’t have one for you. We’ll get started on the autopsy right away. Jim, have you got time to spare?”
“Plenty. I’ll gown up.”
“Analysis is going to take a while, Jean-Luc,” Crusher said. “When I run into a clinical picture this barren, I don’t like to rush. If you’ll check with me tomorrow about this time, I may have some initial indications for you. But I have to say, I can’t guarantee much of anything.”
“All right, Doctor,” Picard said, getting up. “Let me know if anything of interest comes up before then.”
He went out past the Alpheccan, glancing only briefly at him as he passed. It might have been a trick of the somewhat subdued lighting in sickbay, or the dark complexion, or something about the way the Alpheccan’s face was shaped, but Picard could not get rid of the impression that that face wore the faintest shadow of a smile. Coupled with the dark, empty eyes, it was an uncanny effect. He went out, turning the situation over in his mind. One more mystery … one more among too many, for so early in the mission.
… I don’t like it. Snug in your quarters with a book, or down in the holodeck, mysteries could be pleasant enough. But this far out in space, out here in the empty places, they could turn lethal with great speed.
He headed for the bridge, where mysteries at least unfolded themselves in better lighting.
An hour or so later, Picard sat in his ready room, finishing a very belated lunch and reading the material that Mr. Worf had managed to compile for him on the Third Submission colony.
It made interesting and rather distressing reading. The group seemed to be on a planet of 60 Ophiuchi, a planet called Errigal. Errigal itself had been settled by humanoid stock, though from very different origins: Andorians and humans.
The migrants’ dominant faith was called Dahna by its adherents. It was a faith with a profound certainty of its own rightness—something Picard had noticed all too many religions possessing. Worse, from Picard’s point of view, this particular faith taught that the natural universe was a pure and unpolluted place, but that the doings of sentient creatures polluted it.
Picard sat back in his chair and sighed, listening briefly to the faint bubbling of the aerator in the fishtank, and wondering at the bizarre logic of this worldview. The Dahna Andorians were sure that the universe should have remained lifeless, that the stars should have burned in pristine glory, their planets untroubled by the arrogant, destructive, semifungal growth known as life. Such a universe, untroubled though it might be, struck Picard as a deadly dull sort of place … not that the one he inhabited was perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. Nonetheless, the Dahna adherents saw the incursion and pullulation of life through the universe as a horrible error. Some of their religious writings eagerly described the possibility of time travel, in terms of evolving a missionary society whose business would be to trace back, to the dawn of time and life, the