The Eyes of the Beholders - A. C. Crispin [0]
LIEUTENANT COMMANDER Geordi La Forge, chief engineer of the starship Enterprise, awoke in his shipboard cabin from a sweating, heart-pounding dream of absolute blackness to the real darkness of his unassisted vision. For long moments he lay blinking and gasping, wondering whether he was, indeed, awake. As full awareness returned, he sat up in his bunk, right hand reaching unerringly for his nightstand, where his VISOR lay.
Slipping it over his eyes, he centered its sides over the bioelectronic sensing leads implanted in each temple, then pressed them quickly into place, automatically suppressing a wince of pain. It hurt to activate his vision.
Geordi was accustomed to the constant discomfort that “seeing” caused him; most of the time he was barely aware of it. He’d trained for years in biofeedback techniques that allowed him to live with the pain, master it. It was the price he paid for having a normal existence, and he paid it gladly.
But acceptance of the pain did not eliminate it, though it was the first step in living with it. La Forge sighed as the ache took up its usual place in his temples. His darkened cabin sprang into view as the VISOR illuminated the infrared portion of the spectrum. Objects showed as wavering, varicolored shapes, depending on how they retained or reflected heat.
The engineer swung his legs out of the bunk and sat up. Then he asked the room, in a voice roughened from sleep, what time it was.
Obediently, it replied. It was still the middle of the “night” according to La Forge’s duty roster.
“What day of what month?” he asked, seized by a sudden intuition about what had sparked his fear-filled dream. “Earth calendar, not stardate.”
“It is September sixteenth.”
On some level I must’ve been aware of that, La Forge thought. Even if it wasn’t consciously. Twenty-seven years ago on this date, at this time, I was experiencing my last hour of true blindness.
Geordi vividly remembered the smells and noises of the hospital where he had awakened the morning of his surgery, a small, frightened child—frightened but nevertheless determined to undergo this new treatment the doctors said would enable him to “see.”
“See?” he remembered himself asking when his parents and the doctor had first told him about the new techniques medicine had developed. He’d been holding his favorite toy, he recalled, a model of a starship. As he’d listened, his sensitive fingers had caressed its familiar sleekness, tracing every millimeter, every faint irregularity and crevice on its graceful shape. “Will I be able to see as well as everyone else?”
“In many ways,” Doctor Lenske had told him solemnly, “you will be able to see better than everyone else.”
“Well enough to go to Starfleet Academy?” Geordi had asked, his small, sturdy body tense with sudden, unexpected hope.
“I believe so,” the doctor had replied. “But … Geordi, I must be honest with you. There will be a price attached to your new vision. The VISOR is new, and using it will be painful for you.”
The little boy’s jaw had tightened. He knew what pain was—pain was when you stubbed your toe, or tripped and fell if you weren’t wearing your sensory-net clothing. His fingers had tightened on his sleek little replica. “I don’t care,” he said quietly. “I want to go to the Academy more than anything. I want to be a Starfleet officer. I want to see.”
Caught up in memory, La Forge recalled how it had felt to lie on the antigrav gurney and take that long journey down echoing halls to the operating theater. The scent of Mama’s perfume had warred with the muted but still nasty smells of the hospital. Her hand, and Daddy’s hand, had been clasped warm and tight around his fingers. Their touch was the last thing he recalled—that and the warmth against his eyelids that told him there was a bright light overhead.
When he’d awakened, and they’d first slipped on the VISOR, he’d screamed—partly from the pain but mostly from the disorienting shock of images that had flooded his mind, coiling and wavering and shifting. Color—to see color!
I wonder, Geordi thought as