The Eyes of the Beholders - A. C. Crispin [81]
Data began to walk, gazing all around him, listening. All the while, of course, he was recording with his tricorder. Such beauty must not be lost!
He passed little rooms where sculptures rested, rare and intricate, shining and flowing. Some of them moved also, and many changed in slow, fascinating ways—which was part of their message.
Each artwork had its accompanying emotional component and musical accompaniment.
Noticing that a small light was flashing on his tricorder, Data remembered suddenly that he had promised to report his progress to the Enterprise (the human word now felt so alien in his thoughts that it was difficult to think it). As he had previously arranged, he tapped a button on the tricorder, sending a signal to the ship that would indicate that he was unharmed and going about his mission. A different button would signal when he wished to be recalled.
Automatically memorizing the path he had traveled, Data went on, recording, savoring, but never forgetting that he was looking for the control center that must be somewhere in the artifact’s labyrinthine structure.
He went on, eyes following the images and stories on the walls, ears straining to catch the sweet, elusive tones of their accompanying music.
Many of the chambers he passed were too physically small for him to enter; he was forced to content himself with stooping or kneeling to peer inside. He gained the impression that the Artists, whoever they had been, were small beings, perhaps no more than a meter or so tall.
Mapping, observing, recording, Data wandered on, aware that he was the first being in hundreds—or it could be thousands—of years to gaze upon these wonders.
Some of the stories struck him as intensely sad (though he could only recognize that sadness intellectually), others were happy, others he could not figure out the purpose of—they reminded him of the human poetry called haiku, where a single impression was the purpose of the image and sound. Most of these impressions were incomprehensible to him.
He checked his tricorder readings, tapped the button that would send another “all’s well” message to the starship, and saw that he had covered barely a third of the monolithic structure.
The many small niches containing individual solidform works meant that there was a great deal of room within the alien gallery. On impulse, remembering the way human systems were designed, Data bypassed a number of corridors and headed directly toward the center of the artifact.
And in this one thing, if not in any other, the designs of the Artists proved like those of humans. The central portion of the structure possessed several chambers where artificial devices vibrated softly, maintaining atmosphere, heat, lights, and, somewhere it must be, the field that surrounded the gallery. The field that had trapped and killed the crews of more than a hundred ships throughout an unknown span of time.
Data began checking the functioning of the machines. Of course, the Artists’ language had been completely different from any human method of communication, but the Universal Translator that was a part of his positronic brain should be able to handle translations, if provided with a sufficiently large sample of their language.
Moments later, he found it—just as the Artists had left it, for whoever would come after them. One console, when touched, began projecting images. It was an interstellar Rosetta Stone that began with simple, universal concepts such as counting and numbers, terms such as planet and star. The images progressed gradually, logically, to more complex ideas and terms, such as light-speed, spaceship, and disaster.
Data’s positronic brain functioned with the speed of electrons (the same as that of light), so he was only constrained by the physical speed at which his eyes could scan—and they could scan, comprehend, and memorize at a rate far faster than human eyes.
In a very short time, he had