GHOST SHIP Page 7

  He sighed, and turned to his command crew. “All right. Ensign Crusher says ghosts. It’s as good a starting point as any.”

  Worf’s Klingon brow puckered. “But, sir, ghosts are fables!”

  “Perhaps so, from a metaphysical perspective,” Picard said evenly and without a pause. “But we’re not going to address that. We’re going to approach them from a wholly scientific vantage. Disband all thoughts of wraiths and think in terms of alternate life-forms and mind forms. Mr. Data, what can you give me on that?”

  Caught off guard by having so folklorish a subject cast at him, Data blinked and appeared suddenly helpless.

  Riker stepped in, knowing better, but still not fast enough to stop himself. “An android wouldn’t know anything about life, sir, much less the occult.”

  The captain’s eyes struck him like blades. “I’m talking about spectral apparitions, Riker, and you are out of line with that remark. Aren’t you?”

  Bruised, Riker nodded smartly. “Yes, sir, I guess I am.”

  “I asked Data a question.”

  Data may or may not have appreciated the dressing-down on his behalf, but the fact was he found himself floundering on such a subject. To a being for whom knowledge had always meant plain facts, this mystical concept was quicksand. Very conscious of the attention he was getting, Data glanced at Riker, straightened a little, and spoke.

  “Sir,” he began, “I would postulate that, since the life-forms were picked up by Geordi’s visor and then by the recalibrated bridge sensors, they are not foibles of Earth thaumaturgy, but indeed of a substantive hylozoic constituence.”

  Picard’s mouth crumpled. “What?”

  “They’re real.”

  “Oh. You might’ve said so.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “What you mean,” Picard continued, “is that something incorporeal need not be unalive. Traditionally, ghosts are unalive. These beings aren’t.”

  Data cocked his head. “Difficult to say, sir. That transgresses into the realm of semantics. We would have to isolate what it means . . . to be alive.”

  The android’s sudden discomfort with those words drew Picard’s attention once again to his eyes, to the boyish innocence of a being who had gone all the way through Starfleet Academy, spent a dozen years on Starfleet vessels, yet somehow remained the quintessence of ignorance. Data would have to have that word applied to him . . . but no book learning, regardless of its extent, could replace the priceless pleasures and brutalities of living interaction.

  “Do we have an analysis from the science labs yet?” the captain asked.

  Data played with the computer board nearest him and accessed the information as it was fed back to him through the computer’s sophisticated comparative-analysis system, then said, “They seem to be some sort of phased energy, sir.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Apparently they exist here in pulses. Here and not here. They don’t always exist in one place. It’s not energy as we commonly define it. It is more like a proto-energy. It has some of the properties of energy and matter, yet sometimes none of those. It seems unfamiliar to our science.” Data looked up. “Apparently stability is not their forte.”

  “That’s an interesting nonanalysis, Mr. Data. Seems to me the computer is turning backflips to avoid admitting that it doesn’t know.”

  “At the moment, I cannot blame it, sir.”

  Picard gave him an acid glare, but was pleasantly distracted when Troi came to him, deliberately holding her hands clasped before her, evidence of her effort to keep control. “Sir . . . ”

  “Go on, Counselor, nothing’s too outlandish at this point.”

  “If they are . . . ghosts—that is, the remaining mental matter of deceased physical forms,” she said, “can they be destroyed?”

  “Destroyed.” Picard tasted the word. “You mean killed, don’t you? To be able to be killed is one of the signs of life.”

  Moved by his blunt response to the problem, Troi forced herself to push the point. “And if they can be killed, does that mean they’re alive?”

  “No one has talked about punitive action yet, Counselor,” the captain said. “But these images of destruction you’re receiving,” he added. “I can’t dismiss those.”

  From her expression they could see she wasn’t trying to split hairs; the question was very urgent to her, a true matter of life and death. “Yes, sir, I know. But I’m desperate that my perceptions not be misread. I don’t trust myself to analyze them yet. I wouldn’t want you to take punitive action before it’s warranted, just because of me.”

  “Are you saying you do sense a danger to us?”

  Frustrated, she tilted her head and sighed. “I’m trying not to say it, but I’m also afraid not to. If you understand me . . . ”

  “Oh, I think I understand. These entities exist on a plane so different from our own that their very existence may endanger us. We’ve run into that sort of thing before in Federation expansion.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s what I mean,” Troi said anxiously. “Even if they pose a danger to us, do they deserve to be killed when all they’ve done is trespass onto the ship?”

  “Mmmm,” Picard murmured. “And will they be as generous when discussing us, I wonder.” He paced around her, contemplating the carpet. “I’ll keep all that in mind. Whatever the case, I will not allow my crew to succumb to superstition. We will find the answers, and they will be scientifically based.”

  Troi straightened her spine. “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, sir,” Data said, turning to his console.

  “I agree, sir,” Riker said. “Whoever these beings are, we have to assume they’re sentient, and that they have intentions that we’ll have to figure out before we can act.”

  “Yes,” Picard murmured. “And the question remains,” he added softly, scanning the bridge, now as eerie and silent as a graveyard at dawn, “what are they doing here?”

  The words put a pool of ice water around all their feet. The captain didn’t wait for it to warm.

  “Mr. Riker, my ready room. I’ll have a word with you.”

  Riker forced himself to follow the captain’s retreating form into the private room off the bridge. No sooner had the door brushed shut behind him than the captain froze him in place with a lofty glare.

  “You undermined my authority, Mr. Riker.”

  Trying to replay the past moments in his mind without the jitters that still ran the deck on the other side of that door, Riker asked, “Did I, sir?”

  The captain stood with his compact frame backdropped by the viewport’s starscape, appearing quite the nobleman among the peerage. “You did.”

  Inclining his head, Riker offered, “But I saw those forms closing in on you. I didn’t know what they intended.”

  “You needn’t have done your Olympic pole vault on my account,” the captain said. “A simple word of warning would have been sufficient.”

  Squaring his shoulders—but not too much—Riker proclaimed, “It’s my job to protect you, sir.”

  “Yes, I know that’s the official story,” Picard said. “When you’ve come back alive as many times as I have, you’ll earn the right to have someone look after you as well. I’ll thank you to allow me the dignity of taking my own punches from now on. Dismissed.”

  “Geordi, look at this. Geordi, look at that. Geordi, tell us what this is made of. Geordi, look through walls like Superman. Sure, no problem, I’ll look. All I am is what I look through.”

  “Take it easy,” Beverly Crusher murmured as she adjusted the tiny filter on the miniaturized low-power sensory compensator in LaForge’s visor. “You know, you should have a medical engineer doing this.”

  “No thanks,” the young man grumbled, blinking his flat gray unseeing eyes at her, trying to imagine what she really looked like—really.

  “And you should have rested after what happened on the bridge,” she told him evenly. “You can’t ask your body to power this sensor system to tha
t level without letting yourself rest. That’s why it hurts you so much, Geordi. You’re unremitting.”

  He nodded his cocoa-dark head in her general direction and said, “I don’t mind the hurt. I can’t just leave my post. But somehow I expected a little more appreciation from people who were stationed on Enterprise. I just assumed anybody who could get assigned to this ship would be a little more up to date than the run-of-the-mill ship’s crew.” He closed his eyes tight against the pounding headache and rubbed his hand across them, waiting for the medication to work. “Riker just expected me to tell him. It’s not that easy. I can’t just glance at things like you can. I can’t just pop out with words for the sensory impulses that make my brain act like a computer interpreter. Do you know that at close range a computer with a sensory readout can’t match me? It’ll miss or misinterpret things, because a machine doesn’t understand things like I do.”

  “That’s because it doesn’t have the intuitive sense for interpreting what it sees,” Crusher told him placidly. “You should be proud of that.”

  “I am,” he insisted. “But I didn’t know what those forms on the bridge were any more than anybody else did, including Mr. Riker. When people look at me, they don’t see me. They just see that thing.” He cast his hand in her direction, encompassing all of her and the item she held.

  “They don’t understand,” the doctor said, “and you can’t expect them to. They aren’t going to understand how much it takes out of you to make this visor work.”

  “I know!” he shot back with a frustrated slap of his hand on his knee. “I know . . . but it’s hard to be reasonable sometimes, specially when everybody’s kicking off a Geordi-what-do-you-see. They don’t know what it took to learn to interpret all the information I get out of every square inch I see. I’m not a machine, doc, you know? My brain wasn’t made to do this. It’s not like I look at a thing and a dozen little labels appear to tell me what it’s made of. I had to learn what every impulse meant, every vibration, every flicker, every filter, every layer of spectral matter . . . people don’t know what it takes out of me to say, ‘I don’t know what it is.’ ”

  Crusher stopped her adjusting and paused to gaze at him, suddenly moved by her ability to simply do that. Because he was blind now, without his prosthetic, he didn’t see her pause. He didn’t—couldn’t—see anything. And she was glad of it.

  “It’s not easy, you know,” he went on. “It took years of retraining—painful retraining—to make my brain do this. A human brain is never meant by nature to do what mine’s doing. And every time I have to say, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’ it goes through me like a steel bolt. It means I’m truly blind.”

  “Oh, Geordi . . . ” Crusher murmured.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I go through twenty or thirty levels of analysis and every one takes a piece out of me. When I can’t tell what it is I’m seeing, it’s not like a sighted person looking at a box and not being able to see what’s inside. It’s like holding your breath and diving deeper and deeper, no matter how much it hurts . . . and when you can’t touch bottom, you still have to plow back to the surface before your lungs explode . . . oh, I can’t explain it; I can’t make you see.”

  He reached out in his blindness and by instinct alone he found the visor she held as she stood nearby—a blind man’s instinct that told him where her hands were—and with his artificial eyes back in his own hand he slid from the table and somehow found the door. As it opened for him he went flawlessly through it, homing in on the sound and the faint gush of air from the corridor, as though to show her he could be a whole person without the burden of his high-tech crutch.

  “Geordi,” Crusher called after him, but she did so only halfheartedly, for she had no words to help him. She winced as Riker appeared out of nowhere and Geordi bumped into him. It would’ve been such a smooth exit otherwise . . .

  “Lieutenant—” Riker started to greet, then simply gaped as LaForge plowed past him without even a “sorry, sir.” After Geordi rounded the arch of the corridor and disappeared, Riker crooked a thumb in that direction as he came into the sickbay. “What’s eating him?”

  “You are.” Crusher folded her arms and sighed.

  “I am? How’d I get into this?”

  “Funny you should ask.” She grasped his arm and drew him into the sickbay, then planted him in the nearest chair and assumed her lecture position—any parent knows it. Sliding her narrow thigh up onto an exam table, she broached the subject with a practiced look of sternness. “He’s a little bothered by that episode on the bridge.”

  “He told you about that . . . okay, I’ll bite,” Riker said. “Why’s it bothering him?”

  Beverly Crusher’s lovely art deco features were marred by the situation. “You sure you want to know?”

  Frustrated, Riker held his hands out. “When did I start looking so aloof to everybody? I want to know.”

  “That’s not what you came down here for.”

  “No,” he admitted. “I came down because I knew LaForge was here and I wanted an analysis of physical composition of those life images. I figure he’s the best man to do it.”

  “I think you’d better get Data to do it.”

  “Why? All of a sudden, everybody’s functioning at half power. Isn’t Geordi LaForge the expert on spectroscopy?”

  “Only by necessity,” she said, “not by choice.”

  Riker looked at her; just looked at her. Then he shook his head. “You’re mad at me. Been conniving with the captain?”

  Suddenly a common thread looped around them and Crusher’s lips curved into an understanding grin. “Oh . . . I see. No, I’m not mad at you. But let me give you a bit of advice.”

  “Please!”

  “Listen to Lieutenant LaForge. Just listen.”

  “I do listen.”

  “You don’t. You hear what he has to say, but you don’t appreciate it. You think all he does is ‘see.’ ”

  Riker tried to interpret what she was saying by looking into her deep-set eyes and reading them, but after a few seconds of that he floundered and admitted, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She settled her long hands in her lap. “My God, Will. Do you think he just puts that thing on and sees? Okay, not fair . . . I’ll explain. Of course that’s what it looks like to everybody. I tried to tell him that just now, but from his perspective—well, Geordi LaForge is one of only four blind people successfully fitted with the optic prosthetic. I mean, four who’ve successfully learned to operate it. Four. That’s all in the whole Federation.”

  “Really . . . ” Riker muttered, rapt. “Keep talking.”

  Crusher drew in a long breath, trying to find the words to explain something she herself had never experienced. “When he looks at an apple, he has to interpret between twenty and two hundred separate sensory impulses just to get shape, color, and temperature. After that, he has to recalibrate to get molecular composition, density, and everything else he gets. Trust me—it’s mind-boggling. Which is what it does to Geordi. You’re talking some thousand and a half impulses just to look at an apple. Do you know that he gets exhausted if he doesn’t take the device off several times a day?”

  “No . . . I didn’t. But he doesn’t take it off.”

  “He refuses to give in to his handicap. And because of his dedication, he gets depleted and has to deal with some considerable pain.”

  Riker grasped the edge of the chair and crushed the cushion tight. “Pain? Are you telling me that thing hurts him?”

  “He never shows it.”

  “I had no idea. . . .”

  Dr. Crusher slid off the table and said, “That’s the kind of crewman you’ve got, Mr. Riker. Now you know.”

  The first officer slumped back in the chair, his blue eyes slightly creased as he tried to imagine something his own brain simply wasn’t made to visualize. But he understood pain, and he understood the resistance of it. And the dogged recurrence of it. Suddenly
he was aware of how little time he and these special people had spent together. Special talents, yes, but also special handicaps. Data and his mechanical self; Yar and her explosive temper and overprotectiveness; the constant tug and pull between himself and the captain with the undefined split of authority on a starship with civilians on board as regular complement; Troi and what she was going through on all fronts; and now this with Geordi LaForge—blind, but not—a man who could see phenomenally or not at all, no easy middle ground.

  This was hard. It was a strain. Since day one there had been troubles, troubles that made them put aside those all-important moments when people got to know each other. They had been through much together, yet they were still strangers. What did he really know about Geordi? How did Geordi feel about other things than sight and that helm he worked? What was Yar’s favorite pastime other than polishing her martial prowess? Certainly such a woman, so young and so vital, would think about something more fun. What music did she like? Did her shoes hurt sometimes? And surely there must be something more to Wesley than just a typical sixteen-year-old invulnerability. And Worf—was he lonely? As lonely as Troi seemed to be sometimes? What kept him in Starfleet when he could easily go back to his Klinzhai tribes and be completely accepted? It wasn’t a Klingon trait to reject one of their own blood, no matter the circumstances of his separation. Why didn’t he go?

  Somehow each had become nothing to the others but a name and one particular eccentricity. Data was the Android, Geordi was his visor, Worf was the Klingon, Crusher was the Doctor, Wesley was the Kid, Troi was the Empath, Picard was the Marquis—

  I guess that makes me the gentry. Or the rabble, Riker thought, not caring what all this did to his expression as Crusher watched silently. I don’t know them. I don’t know any of them yet, and all this time we’ve been depending on each other for life and limb. And Captain Picard . . . I know him least of all. But then, I haven’t shown him much of Will Riker, either—have I?

  “Damn it,” he whispered.

  Crusher pressed her lips inward and tried to avoid a softhearted nod, for she saw the changes in his face and especially noticed when he started absently picking at a nail and looking guilty.