Intellivore - Diane Duane [33]
“If they need this much care,” said Riker, “then it makes more sense to rig a group care area in one of the cargo spaces or a shuttle bay. I’ll see to it.”
“Do so, Number One,” said Picard. “We’ll start beaming the casualties aboard all three ships once accommodation space has been prepared.”
“Captain,” Dr. Crusher said, “bearing in mind the uncertainty of what’s going on here, I would strongly suggest that everyone who beams back goes through the decontamination filter. Also, I would like a forensics team over here.”
“Already on their way, Doctor,” Riker said. “This whole scenario looks too much like a locked-room murder mystery. No murder, but plenty of mystery.”
Crusher looked around at the unmoving bodies of the Boreal colonists who were being gathered together by various away team members and the medical staff who had already beamed over. “Mystery has its moments,” she said, shaking her head. “But as for the rest of it, I’d say there might be some things that are a lot worse than murder.”
Picard called a meeting of all three ships’ department heads a few hours later, when the work of moving the Boreal colonists was finished. They gathered in one of the larger conference rooms, a very sober and concerned-looking group indeed.
“Status of Boreal?” Picard said.
“The ship is much as you found it when you visited, Captain,” Data replied. “Data in its computers seem to have been unharmed, though in view of recent findings this evidence may be unreliable. It must be said, however, that so far the computer log throws very little light on what has happened here. Crewmen working in C&C or at other camera-supervised posts are seen sitting or standing at their duties, and then suddenly they slump down and become comatose, as we found them.”
“Do any of the ship’s records show any sign of the larger vessel?” asked Picard.
“No, sir,” said Data, “and again this makes me suspect that the recordings are somehow being tampered with, practically at source.”
Picard nodded. “Can we have a medical assessment, please?”
Crusher and Spencer, of Oraidhe, were sitting together with the doctor from Marignano. All three looked concerned and embarrassed.
Crusher began. “Our three medical teams have spent the past several hours in triage on the four hundred twenty-eight people we brought back. None of them is showing any higher cortical function at all, neither reaction to sensation nor even what we would regard as thought.”
She shook her head. “Their brains are plainly mature. They show all the correct clinical signs of people who have led active and intelligent lives. Development is correct for age and somatype; children’s brains show varying and correct states of growth, depth of sulcae, and other strictly physical signs, but those brains are not working.”
“It sounds as if you’re saying that something has wiped these people’s minds clean,” said Picard.
Dr. Spencer sat back in his chair and sighed. “Captain, it seems that way. But we might be wrong. The problem is that, even now, when we talk about consciousness, we don’t yet know where it lives. We’ve gone through a hundred different theories in the past two hundred years. There have been times when people thought that all thinking and memory were physically located in the brain, and of course some kinds of memory are. But by and large, those have nothing to do with personality. ‘Located’ memory tends to be limbic memory, closely tied to senses like smell. But the issue of consciousness, personality, where your knowledge of yourself might live … we still have no certain answer for that.
“And we’re left here with a problem that reinforces, painfully, how little we know. These brains, these minds, should be working. The people on that ship should be walking around, or at least sitting up in bed, able to tell us what happened to them. But nothing works, except for autonomic