Intellivore - Diane Duane [52]
Picard looked at her sharply. “Define fine, Doctor.”
“They were active—alert, as far as that goes for crabs. Conscious, I guess, is the word I would choose, again, as far as that goes for crabs. Are crabs conscious?”
“I take it the question is rhetorical.”
“Not entirely, Captain. I mean, think about it. Is a dog conscious of itself—self-aware? Seems likely enough. A cat? Almost certainly. Mr. Data?”
“If Spot is not self-aware,” Data said mildly, “he provides an excellent imitation of the state.”
“But go a little further down the scale,” said Dr. Crusher, “and you get less certain. Are birds self-aware? Depends on the bird, I suppose. Insects? Probably not. They come very close to exhibiting nothing but instinctive behavior. A crab is barely more than an insect. These crabs were alive, and still going about their business, eating, sleeping, making more little crabs…”
“I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at, Doctor,” said Maisel.
“One answer fairly jumps out at me, Captain. They’re not intelligent enough to be self-aware. They don’t have the kind of highly developed associational networks that other biological life has. The apparent effect, if not the actual cause, of the condition of all the people the intellivore has attacked, is that their associational networks appear to have been stripped of associations, even the most basic ones—producing something like the most profound imaginable schizophrenia, coupled with complete catatonia. But crabs have no associations, at least not the kind that store memory or have active thought ‘in’ them. If the intellivore does genuinely drain or feed on those parts of the mind-body system that are strictly associational, the places where memory and experience and emotion and thought live—I say nothing of storage—then there’s a good chance that if you could avoid having associational networks when the intellivore attacked, it couldn’t harm you.”
Picard stared at her. Dr. Crusher was actually smiling at him.
“It’s a nice theory, Doctor,” Picard said, “but I would hate to have to test it with my crew.”
“You won’t have to, Captain,” Crusher said, and actually grinned from ear to ear. “It’s been tested already, with someone else’s.”
“What?”
“When we were evacuating Oraidhe’s crew,” Crusher said, “we found one person whose mind still works.”
“Doctor,” Picard said, resisting the urge to shout, “why didn’t you let me know about this earlier?!”
Crusher laughed out loud, the first such happy sound that Picard had heard in some days. “Because the client didn’t wake up until about three-quarters of an hour ago, Captain, while I was still getting ready for this meeting. When we brought him aboard, he was still unconscious like everyone else. He had been in Oraidhe’s sickbay. He suffered a concussion just before we found the pirate vessel—he actually fell off a levitator pad while he was putting up decorations for a birthday party. He was seriously concussed, and since good medical usage militates against interfering with the unconsciousness ‘process’ in cases where there isn’t some overriding physical need, the ship’s surgeon was letting him stay unconscious and heal at his own pace. He was still unconscious when Oraidhe was attacked. He woke up a little while ago, wondering where he was … and about three of my staff fainted.”
“What species is he?” Riker said.
“Homo sapiens,” said Beverly.
“By falling off that levitator,” Riker said softly and with some admiration, “that man may have saved a couple of thousand lives.”
“If one or both of our ships, Captain,” said Dr. Crusher, “is going to attack the intellivore, I would think it needs to do so while everyone is unconscious. That’s the only way we can be sure of surviving this encounter.”
“Are you suggesting that we run this attack on automatic? I wouldn’t care for that too much. Too many things that can go wrong …” said Maisel.
But Data was looking at Crusher, and she at him, and their expressions were those of two people in perfect sync. “No, Captain,” said Data. “What the doctor is suggesting is that