Intellivore - Diane Duane [23]
Lacking time machines, the Dahna adherents’ goal became to take themselves far away from other cultures and life, to live in the plainest way possible, enjoying life as little as they could, creating nothing—for creation was blasphemy, part of the dreadful tumorous tendency of life to reproduce itself—and in all ways trying to achieve a lifestyle that mostly involved sitting still, subsisting, and waiting to die.
Picard’s second cup of tea got cold, and the fishtank bubbled on, the lionfish inside it bumping incuriously against the glass and gracefully waving its tan-and-cream-striped spines. It was no wonder, Picard thought, that such people would see him as practically a demonic figure, and the Enterprise and her sister starships as symbolic of everything they stood against—of doing and being in the universe, of asserting one’s own right to exist and to work out what life should be, what was worth desire and passion and energy. All those things were evils to them. I must take the greatest care to be nonjudgmental about this, he thought. But he had a feeling this time he was going to find it harder than usual.
“Captain?” Data’s voice sounded tinny through the filter of the commbadge.
“Yes, Mr. Data.”
“We are within sensor range of Boreal.”
“Very well. Advise them that a small party will be over to visit within the hour.”
“Sir,” said Data, “they seem disinclined to host guests.”
“I understand that,” said Picard. “But let them know that they will have them.”
When the transporter’s light died away and the singing whine went silent, Picard, Worf, and Troi found themselves in a surprisingly big, airy space.
Picard looked up at a big curving metal sky, set at intervals with lighting panels that shed a cool light over everything. The total effect was of an omnidirectional glow: shadows struck in all directions, and they were faint, washed out by closer sources of illumination. Here and there a clump of blocks made a “housing development” or tiny hamlet. Elsewhere were small patches of green—gardens, lawns, groves of hydroponically sustained trees—and patches of color that indicated plants from worlds where the chlorophyll had preferred other colors than green.
Near where the landing party stood was a clump of trees that could have been mistaken for a small park. There was even a park bench, and sitting on it a man watching them. Troi glanced at him, then turned around casually to look at another grove of trees surrounding what were probably several living blocks. “Here’s our host, Captain,” she said softly, “if that’s the word I’m looking for.”
The man on the bench got up, came to them. He was tall, fit-looking, extremely handsome, and to judge by the lines in his face, in his mature years, though exact age was hard to tell. He was a pale-complected, dark-haired man, dressed in a simple beige coverall and a frown.
He stopped a short distance away from them, as if they might have some sort of contagious disease. “You’re Captain Picard,” he said.
“And you, if I’m not mistaken, would be the team leader.”
“Yes. Captain, I can’t really say that we appreciate your effort in following us here. For my own people’s sake, I’d thank you to keep your own visit here as brief as possible. I have their spiritual welfare to consider as well as their physical well-being, and stopping for this meeting with you has required energy expenditures we weren’t planning.”
“I will keep things as brief as our concerns make possible,” Picard said, and they began to walk along a path that wound through several small groups of living cubes.
As they walked, Troi looked over into another little patch of parkland. There were some children there, but they were not running or playing; they sat, very still and quiet, looking down at the grass. The whole place had that same kind of breathless quiet about it, unbroken by any