Intellivore - Diane Duane [37]
Crusher kept walking quietly. “And I broke down,” she said. “I cried for almost an hour—I just couldn’t stop. They had to take me away and calm me down, and for the next couple of days I would just start crying again, without warning, at the memory of that place. All my instructors were worried about me. I couldn’t explain to them that it was simply because, in that pretty, sunny building, I had seen the most horrible thing in the world. Human beings without the thing that makes them human, without minds. Creatures meant to be thinking beings. What’s the line? ‘A little less than the angels.’ And there would never be anyone inside, no matter what we did.”
She stopped, looked around slowly at the room, very quiet, then looked up at the captain. Her expression was as fierce with anger as the one a few seconds earlier had been fierce with grief. “Find what did this, Jean-Luc,” she said. “Find what did this … and make it pay.”
Quietly, as if not to wake the sleeping, Picard strode out of the cargo bay.
It was evening in the Caribbean. The rose and violet holodeck-generated sunset lay low on the horizon. There was no crew on deck; the sheets were down and reefed, and only two figures were to be seen, walking the deck more or less together: a tall blond man, a short curly-haired woman.
Picard went over to join them. As he came up with them, he noticed that Clif was shaking his shoulders oddly every few seconds. “I’m going to itch for a week now,” he said.
Captain Maisel snickered. “Serves you right for trying to feed me that stuff.”
She placed her hands on her hips in mock indignation as Picard joined them. “You set this up. He tried to feed me a piece of wood!”
“It was a biscuit,” Clif said.
“It can’t have been,” Ileen said. “It had woodworm. I saw.”
They all sat down together on the big steersman’s bench at the stern and felt the ship rock and looked at the evening for a while. Ileen breathed deeply. “I love that salt air,” she said. “Even though it makes me cough later.”
“Dr. Crusher says it’s a crude form of respiratory therapy,” said Picard, “and the coughing is good for you.” But he was aware of sounding a little absent as he said it.
“Jean-Luc,” Captain Maisel said—and the look in her eye suddenly reminded him strongly of the look just worn by Beverly Crusher. “Do me a favor. If that happens to me, whatever that is, my release statement is on file with my crew, and with Starfleet. Make sure it’s enforced. I’d sooner be dead than like that … not long-term. Not even for a few months. There comes a time when, when you’re gone, you should be let go. I won’t be kept.”
Picard sat quite still, sobered by the sudden intensity. He raised his eyebrows, glanced over at Clif. “And you, Captain?”
“Well …” He leaned back, looking not too concerned. “I have a similar release on file, but it’s not likely to be needed. Should something happen to the symbiont, then the host won’t last long. Should something happen to the host, the symbiont is probably dead anyway, either in the original accident or because this far out there’s no way to get home in time to beat the transfer deadline to another host.”
“I suppose,” Picard said, “that’s always a threat for your people when they go to space, especially deep space.”
“Always,” Clif said. “But some of us feel it’s worth the risk, in terms of the enhanced experience we bring home to our people—if we were successful, anyway. And when you come right down to it, it’s not much of a life without risk.”
Ileen leaned over the rail, looking down at the swirl of light in the water. “The algae are restless tonight,” she said, as a great curving whorl of green fire went by under the ship. “What was it they used to call it? ‘Demon rum leaking out of Davy Jones’s locker’ or something like that?”
Picard burst out laughing. “Where do you hear these things? I think you make them up.”
She shrugged.