Intellivore - Diane Duane [36]
“Come on, Ileen,” Clif said, standing up. “I can use a break myself, at the moment. Look, I’ll take you out to dinner.”
“Oh? What’re you going to feed me?”
“A new delicacy I found out about,” he said, and looked sidelong at Picard, “called hardtack.”
“Sounds interesting,” said Captain Maisel. “Let’s go.”
Picard sat quietly for a couple of moments, watching them go. Then he got up and took himself off to look for Beverly.
He found her in the cargo bay. It was normally a big, empty, cavernous, well-ordered place, all crates and containers stacked neatly, awaiting delivery or eventual use by people aboard ship. Everything had now been moved out, though, and instead Picard found himself looking at what closely resembled a field hospital.
He caught sight of Dr. Crusher about halfway across the huge room and slowly made his way across to her, stepping quietly between the rows of emergency mattresses that had been laid on the floor. On each one, wearing a coverall, lay a person. As Picard passed one of the mattresses, someone in an ensign’s uniform came to its occupant—a young blond-haired woman—and turned her carefully from her right side onto her left. There was a horrible looseness about the way her arms moved, flopping over like a doll’s, and for a moment, in the middle of the turn, vividly blue eyes stared, empty, up into lights the woman couldn’t see. Her pupils contracted a bit, but nothing else moved.
Picard swallowed and made his way over to Beverly. She was holding her scanner over a tall, prone man whom Picard looked down at and recognized, with a slight shock, as the team leader; that face, animated if hostile, was now lying relaxed. And was that a twist of a smile? All very strange. All the rage gone, all the irony and cynicism that had lived in the face, all smoothed away. Picard didn’t like the new expression at all.
Beverly looked up, nodded at Picard. “Is it anything urgent?” she said.
Picard shook his head. Dr. Crusher looked for a moment more at her medical tricorder, shut it, and looked all around the room, with an expression of helpless pain. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, Jean-Luc,” she said, glancing at the rows and rows of people. “I really don’t know.”
After a moment she began to walk down one of the rows, looking at the floor, not at any of the people, and Picard went with her. “A long time ago,” she said, “when I was just starting my training, they were taking us around to various facilities to show us the way various kinds of medical treatment were being implemented for people with different kinds of problems. I was”—she laughed at herself—”a pretty tough cookie, or I thought I was. They showed us all frightening things—things that really upset some of the other students—and they didn’t bother me. I was kind of proud of that. Then, one day, they took us to a school for people with mental disabilities. Very young children, mostly. Some of them were well enough to ride around on little trikes or say a few words. Some of them weren’t that well at all. Most of them weren’t. There was a big playroom, and there were children there who simply stood against the wall—one or two who couldn’t be stopped from repeatedly hitting the walls, so the walls, naturally, were soft. And there were a few who just stood, or sat, and looked. Looked out into space, didn’t see anything, didn’t hear you when you spoke to them. And it just hit me, suddenly, the waste of it all, the sheer waste. Here were children at the beginnings of their lives; they should have had everything to live for. Everything. But a misplaced gene, or a misdiagnosis in utero, or something else—in each of their cases something had gone wrong, something that not even our medicine could do anything about, not all our drugs and treatments and know-how would ever matter. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been there. Calling the place a school was a dreadful misnomer, or whistling in the dark, at best. Certainly