Intellivore - Diane Duane [48]
“I beg your pardon?”
“If the evidence is correct, if it does indeed live on other beings’ life force …” She had the grace to look embarrassed. “Clif, I’m sorry, but I can see how you might empathize with it.”
He gave her a slightly shocked look, then shrugged, smiled a bit. “Meaning that a Trill’s form of parasitism might be more benevolent, but it’s still parasitism? Just not one that destroys the host, or the other species needed to survive?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite that way …”
“No, you let me do that.” From anyone else, the statement would have been fairly cutting. But Clif just shook his head. “Captain Maisel, evolution is a strange thing. Here I am, something that, if history on Trill hadn’t taken a strange turn or two, would have spent its life in a silt pool, in very nice telepathic contact with its own kind but no one else. Limited, constrained to one world, unable to leave it. Then something happened—the evolutionary twist that made it possible for us to ‘parasitize.’ And certainly our own history is obscure enough about the earliest forms of that relationship. There are stories of barbarities, exploitation, cruelty. Fortunately, we grew past the point where our bad habits could have killed us, as has happened to so many species here and there. And the host species came along—” Picard saw the odd smile on Clif’s face. “We were lucky. If some more powerful species had come along and seen our earliest host-client relationships, and had decided that they were immoral, and wiped us out … we would never have had a chance to experience what I’m experiencing now. To travel the stars, to meet other beings … do wonderful things.”
“History is full of these turnings,” Ileen said. “But the kind of relationship that a Trill would have with its host is completely different in nature from the kind of relationship that that thing has with what it feeds on. Whether it actually ingests mind or intelligence or it’s after something else, it doesn’t really matter; the effect is the same. We’ve got to come to grips with it, either through communication and dialogue or through investigation that will lead us to a way to keep it out of our spaces and away from intelligent species. Let it go off somewhere else and graze, if it must …”
“I would find the morality of that rather questionable,” Clif said gently. “Just because the drainings aren’t happening in your backyard, then it’s all right?”
She threw him an annoyed look. Then, “I think you’re making a mistake, Captain,” Maisel said to Picard.
Clif looked at him sadly. “So do I.”
“Someone has to make the call,” said Picard. “On this mission, I fear it’s ‘my turn in the barrel.’ Another time, another place, it’ll be one of you.” He shook his head, looked at them both affably. “I intend to have my turn at thinking one of you is mistaken. That’s why I make the choice I make now.”
He fell silent. A captain did not usually dismiss other captains, even when senior and in command. Ileen and Clif got up; Clif was smiling a little ruefully.
“Well,” he said, “I’ll have a little more time yet for the holodeck, I suppose. Will you come over to Oraidhe and see ours?”
Picard nodded. “A little later,” he said, “certainly.”
“Give me a call when you’re ready.”
The two captains and their execs left, leaving Picard and Riker looking at each other.
“It’s a hard call,” Riker said.
Picard breathed out, more a hiss than a sigh. “For the moment, I see no other way to proceed.”
Picard was awakened at the equivalent of three in the morning by Data’s voice calling him to the bridge.
Picard sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes. “Lights, low. What is it?”
“Oraidhe has pulled ahead of the task force and is accelerating toward warp nine.”
“I’ll be right up.”
He paused only long enough to throw last night’s uniform on again, then headed up to the bridge at best speed. Riker was ahead of him, looking nearly as raggedy and tired as Picard felt, and talking to Captain Maisel. “Not a word to us, either,” she said. “He just took off like a bat out of hell—”
“He is continuing