Intellivore - Diane Duane [74]
Picard looked at her with considerable surprise, but he did his best to keep his face fairly still. “Ileen,” he said after a while, “you can’t believe that. Not really.” Because it was my fault …
“Bets?” Ileen said.
Picard looked at her. “Captain,” he said, “listen to me. You, better than most of us, know the dangers of operating way out here on the fringes. Without fail, sooner or later something comes along that’s completely alien to human experience, and that you’re not able to handle, for lack of resources, or luck, or even just anticipation. When it happens, all you can do is keep going, keep yourself and your people breathing, and get on with the parts of your work you can do. You did that. I did that.” He swallowed. “As far as he was able, Clif did that. He fell, doing it, but the circumstances in which he fell will not happen to anyone else, because of what we did, after. That particular menace, which hadn’t even been identified as such earlier, is now done forever. You know, I think, that Clif would have found the price acceptable. Well, it’s harder for us: we have to pay it over and over again, in our memories. But the best way we can honor his memory is by continuing to do our work with a good will, because he would be unhappy with the knowledge that things were going any other way on his account.”
Ileen had been looking out the window again. Now she looked at Picard, dry-eyed and frowning. “I hate it when you’re older-and-wiser,” she said. “I always did.”
“And I hate it when you don’t listen to me being older-and-wiser, you insolent pup,” Picard said. “You never did.”
For a moment, they just looked at each other. Then Ileen laughed, very softly, and so did Picard.
“All right,” she said. “All right. I’ll probably feel awful again tomorrow, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re right. Dammit.”
“Insubordinate,” Picard said. “I think he would also have said ‘insubordinate.’ “
Captain Maisel smiled a crooked smile. “Yes,” she said. “Well, come on. We both have memorial services to run, good cry afterwards optional. Then, later …”
“We’ll be running together for a day or so more,” said Picard. “Let’s make it tomorrow.”
Captain Maisel nodded; they went out.
The sky was just lightening at the fringes when, much later, he stepped on deck. There was a light breeze blowing; it sang softly in the rigging, and the morning was so quiet that the sound of the same wind stroking through the trees of the island a mile away could clearly be heard, a whisper with words in it, but no telling which words. Above the western horizon, the moon hung fat and golden, ready to slide under.
The deck rocked a little in the slight swell. Picard, in Starfleet uniform, stood there and looked down the length of the deck. The gun crews stood ready. Mr. Moore, also in Starfleet uniform, stepped up to Picard and said, “At your pleasure, sir.”
“Strike the colors,” Picard said.
Other crewmen, not assigned to the guns, stepped up to haul down the signals: a man’s name—two beings’ names, actually—and the two-flag sequence for “death aboard.”
“Make honors,” said Picard softly to Moore.
Moore turned, signaled at his crew. There were no shouts; no word was spoken. Of all gun drills, this one was silent. The first gun fired at the moon, in a cloud of smoke and a great spurting of sparks from the black powder, nearly as much from the touch hole as from the muzzles. The air whistled as the cannonball whipped through