The Eyes of the Beholders - A. C. Crispin [63]
Birth agony, death agony, orgasm, pain—raw physical and emotional experiences, all jumbled together as his mind was wrenched and wrung, attempting vainly all the while to function, to comprehend images, events, feelings that were totally, irrevocably, alien to it.
Emotions assaulted him, each alien, each intense, each fundamentally wrong—skewed, distorted, twisted. The commander felt those emotions ripping at his sanity, shredding it, sending his psyche gibbering away, back into the deepest recesses of his consciousness, as his essence, his anima, his sense of self—his soul—tried and failed to take refuge from this ultimate violation.
Will Riker had one fleeting moment of clarity to realize that he was lying on his side, curled up, the stink of his own vomit filling his nostrils, and that he was either dying or going insane. In that last second, he prayed desperately for death, knowing that no archaic conception of an eternal hell could equal what now awaited him within the depths of his own mind, should he by the worst stroke of fortune imaginable remain alive.
Geordi La Forge was screaming, but he could not hear himself. All he was aware of was the turbid cacophony of sound that surrounded him, the pandemonium of noise echoed by the chaos within his own mind. His skin was a prison of icy fire, and a taste filled his mouth that was so sour his tongue seemed to shrivel.
He had lost all sense of direction or location. He no longer knew where his comrades were. The engineer reeled along, crashing against walls and into shapes, screaming as he went, until finally his boots caught on something solid and he fell heavily.
Movement had apparently helped him hold the mental assault at bay, he discovered, for as soon as he was still, it tunneled into his mind with a savage intensity, seeking to reform, rechannel, reshape his very brain configurations. He could feel his body trying to breathe in an alien rhythm, his blood attempting to flow in nonhuman patterns, his flesh straining to reshape itself into a different envelope.
Oh, God, make me deaf! he thought, stuffing his fingers in his ears, trying to focus his mind on the multiplication table, natural logarithms, square roots—anything that was reasoned and ordered, anything that would protect him from the chaos.
And all the while he fought his losing battle, Geordi’s head swung back and forth, up and down, as he scanned with his VISOR, fighting the blackness that wanted to carry his mind into blessed oblivion. He concentrated, trying for one more minute, one more second, one more heartbeat of consciousness, because he could not bear to stop seeing.
Moments later, the blackness won out, and La Forge sank into nothingness, conscious only of a terrible regret that he could not endure—had not proved worthy—of his own vision.
It was the may’QeH, the battle madness, filling him, and it was good. Snarling, Worf raced through the halls, not sure whether they were, in fact, physical places or alien labyrinths imposed upon his mind—or perhaps he was on some other plane of existence, it was impossible to know. Nor did it matter. He was here to fight, and the lust for it filled him past all other knowledge or goals.
Forgotten was his struggle to maintain the demeanor of a Starfleet officer. That was over now. The fire had taken possession of his blood, casting out the weak inhibitions imposed by his upbringing and his Starfleet training. There was only the drunken, soaring knowledge of the enemy and the single-minded pursuit of victory.
He knew there was danger, but that knowledge was like the heat of HIq in his blood, as though he had indeed imbibed some heady liquor such as Romulan ale, not the feeble synthehol the humans drank. Blind with rage—or was he blind from the light exploding within his vision? It did not matter! Roaring, he struck out, sending his fist—it should be armored, where was his battle glove?—smashing against an unyielding surface.
Deaf from the glorious war chant singing in his blood—or was he unable to