Nightshade - Laurell K. Hamilton [80]
He came down the steps to stand beside Troi. She was crying and hadn’t realized it. Joy was as often tears as laughter. The Green touched her shoulder. “You feel our land?”
His sorrow flooded down her arm, sweeping through her. The loss, the horrible loss. Suddenly, she understood that the entire surface of this world had been like this once. Alive enough to whisper in your mind, to soothe your soul. The Orianians had not simply killed plants and animals, but the land itself. And the land had been their heart.
Breck staggered toward them. “The Greens tend this place. They made it. The land knows them all. It cares for them.” Even as he said it out loud, Troi knew that that wasn’t exactly the truth. Breck was being forced to put words to things that words could not hold.
‘They believe in life, Healer. They could not create this and create the poison that killed Alick.” There was a solid certainty to him. The land had told him, and it could not lie.
‘I would just as soon question the Green leaders, if you don’t mind,” Worf said.
Troi turned and stared back up the stairs at Worf. His face was empty of the wonderment, the exhausted joy that showed on their faces. Nor did the sorrow that traced Talanne and the Green haunt the Klingon. He stood alone and apart on the stairs. It would have been the same if Worf had been Picard or Riker. They would not have understood. Troi held out her hand, and Breck took it.
Joy, wellbeing, happiness-all of it was doubled, amplified. Her skin jumped with the need to feel! She stared into Breck’s tear-stained face and was very glad to have someone to share this with. And sorrow for Worf that he could not begin to understand why they stood crying in the middle of a bunch of plants. Some things Troi would not even attempt to explain.
Worf stood on the steps and scowled suspiciously down at the thick vegetation. Troi threw back her head and laughed. Breck’s laughter joined with hers, flying higher and higher like birds.
Chapter Twenty
Geordi passed his hands just above the panel, and the lights pulsed, following his fingers. But it wasn’t just the lights that followed his hands. The intelligence that made up the engines followed Geordi’s movements. It flowed under his hands like a dog sniffing at him, or a cat rubbing against his ankles. The engine was curious about him. It was studying him as hard as he was studying it.
Geordi had never experienced anything like talking to the Milgian engine. It was as if his hands could touch all the way through the outer metal skin and go inside. His thoughts could travel down the conduits. When he wanted to change direction he had only to wish to move. The engine welcomed him, drew him inside. Geordi could feel its eager energy flowing and pulling at his mind. Was this how Troi felt when she entered the thoughts of another person?
It was wonderful. The engine explained what it was, but the explanation was too amazing for Geordi to understand completely. The technology of combining living tissue with mechanics was not cybernetics or robotics. The melding of the parts was complete. It was a single organism, not pieces stitched together. It was a united system, a whole, like his own body. You could no more isolate a single system than he could have taken out his own respiratory system without affecting the rest of his body.
‘What have you found out?” Dr. Crusher’s words made him jump. His heart was suddenly pounding in his throat.
‘Beverly, I forgot you were there. I forgot anything was there but the engine.”
She gave a rueful smile. “I noticed.”
He smiled back. “Sorry, it’s just I’m an engineer and I’ve never felt anything like this. It’s like my mind is the tool and is all I need to do anything. The engine even wants to help. It’s incredible.”
‘I understand the enthusiasm, Geordi, but we don’t have much time. Have