Intellivore - Diane Duane [65]
Some eight hundred pools of antimatter, scattered here and there. Some of them were from five to ten cubic miles in volume; and a massive system of conduits that serviced all those pods led to the huge main engines buried in the mantle of the planet.
It had been a cold planet once, Data thought. Someone had found it, come to it, worked it over—”chopped and channeled,” he could just hear Geordi saying. The captain had been right. In this regard at least, in terms of the intellivore’s venue, there had been choice. Someone had built this planet to wander, equipped it with so much antimatter that it would be tens of thousands of years, possibly hundreds of thousands, before it needed to refuel.
Idly, part of his mind that was not busy being the ship now turned its attention to the calculation. Eleven-hundred-forty-point-three cubic miles of antimatter, he thought. Antiwater, rather than slush deuteriun—interesting, that. Annihilating with equal amounts of matter—
—at which point something began to happen.
His mind began to change …
Data could actually watch it start to happen. Other parts of his mind, as yet unaffected, stood aside and observed the mechanics of it, the way a bystander at a stage magician’s performance will stand in the wings of the theater, and at that angle see what the people out in the orchestra cannot: the card vanishing up the sleeve, the scarf with the bird in it tucked up behind the jacket …
To the affected part of his mind, the image of the planet swelling in the viewscreen was now beginning to fill with a terrible pathos. There was trouble there, danger. Life was dying. Help was needed. But there was also danger in remaining in orbit. He must break away the part of the ship that could land, and bring it down to the planet’s surface, where it would be safe, it and its many people who slept. There the old intelligence, the endless knowledge that was stored on this planet, could be saved, preserved, put aboard Enterprise and taken away for the good of billions of people alive now, and billions more yet unborn. He must hurry. There was danger; that was why the planet had fled out of the dark. There was something coming, meaning it harm—and these other ships, too, they would all be destroyed. He must be swift, land quickly, help it save the knowledge, the old wisdom …
Data watched the “confidence trick” spreading through his mind, or trying to. For this eventuality he had been somewhat prepared. You have associational networks, Troi had said to him. But at the moment, he was running several “sets” of his mind in parallel. The effect was odd: he heard echoes every time he thought. He was surprised, though, when he sensed something like a sudden surge of power from outside himself, and another of the redundant minds fell to the influence that was working on the first.
Data tried—subtly, he hoped—to dislodge the influence that was acting on his “outer” mind. It would not be dislodged.
So he did something inelegant, and perhaps catastrophic, but (he thought) necessary. He shut that mind down.
The influence on the other part of his mind—the part still occupied—increased. He let it do so, watching it, again as if slightly from the side.
And then, quite suddenly, the influence was gone. To that part of his mind, the planet was simply the intellivore’s again, and the wisdom of the ages nothing but an illusion.
And then the pain came crashing down.
He would have thought this experience was impossible for him. “Like describing color to a blind man”—he had heard the saying often enough. Often enough, he had tried to get people to describe what pain was; and their descriptions, though obviously profoundly meaningful to those doing the describing, to Data only sounded like some terrible kind of fiction—stories of a body turned against its owner, out of control.
Now, though, the intellivore explained pain