Intellivore - Diane Duane [34]
“Can they be helped?” asked Picard.
There was a long, long silence as the three doctors looked at one another. “Captain,” Crusher said at last, “the only key we’ve been able to find to that question lies in the Boreal people’s associational networks themselves—the networks a mind uses to transfer and store information inside itself. Though they may not be physically located, we can look at the physical connections the networks use for short-term function. We can’t see exactly what information is held there, or in what condition, any more than we can see electricity in a wire—but if you hold the wire, you’ll find out fast enough if there’s a current running. What we know about these ‘wires’ in the people from Boreal is that many of them are showing some damage to their ‘insulation,’ the sheaths of the protein myelin that covers many of them. Some of those sheaths are showing an unusual kind of derangement, as if the molecules had been partially or completely dissociated by some discharge of force.”
“Is there any physical effect that can produce such a reaction?”
“There are several,” said Dr. Spencer. “But we can’t find any indication that any have been used. However, the suggestion would seem to be that those networks are lost. In those with the worst damage—most of them, interestingly, are children—it seems plain that those brains will never again be able to work the way they did before all this happened. Whatever this was.”
“What we have here,” said Dr. Crusher, staring at the table, then looking up with her eyes flashing, “are four hundred and twenty-eight people who will have to be cared for for the rest of their lives. It is almost as if something left the hardware of their brains largely undamaged, but erased the software … their intelligence, their minds.”
Everyone sat quiet around the table for a little while. “I wonder,” said Data, as he worked at the small information console down at the end of the conference table, “whether erased is necessarily the correct word.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had asked the computer to compile a series of excerpts from the Boreal’s computer logs and tapes, and any other outputs that might have been salient for the time period we are examining,” Data said. “There were several odd outbursts from various crew members during the period of time when the Boreal might have been under attack. It is worth noting here, by the way, that there is no evidence of the larger vessel in any of Boreal’s tapes or logs. Apparently the colonists were taken quite by surprise. But these excerpts, as closely as I can determine, would seem to coincide with the earliest part of the time envelope at which the Boreal and the larger vessel would have met.”
He touched a control and looked up at the screen. Everyone followed his glance. They found themselves looking into Boreal’s C&C: a very plain, utilitarian place, screens and banks of controls and a few places to sit, but mostly people standing, almost all of them wearing the plain gray or beige coveralls of the sect. The camera did not move; people wandered back and forth through its ambit as they went about their business, murmuring a word to each other here and there: “Almost there.” “What’s the time check?… . “Have you got that last set of readouts?”
Then, suddenly, almost outside the view of the camera, someone stopped. A young man, blond, sharp-faced, paused just at the fringe of the pickup, looking thoughtfully off into the middle distance—or so it seemed. He shook his head, and then slowly, slowly collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. He folded down to the floor, lingered on his knees for a moment, then, loose-limbed, dropped the padd he had been carrying and simply fell over sideways. Some people at the table jumped slightly at the sound his head made as it struck the floor: Spencer nodded a little and looked at Crusher. “The compressed fracture I mentioned to you,” he said.
There were soft sounds all around the pickup: things being dropped,