Dark Mirror (25 page)

That
thought, that he would wish the Borg on anybody, no matter how they acted, so shocked Picard that he
stopped himself in his tracks and just breathed in and out a few times, which his own Troi would doubtless have told him to do if she were there. Picard turned to the bookshelves, desperate for something dependable, some breath of plain clean air in this miasma of destructiveness and cruelty, and reached out to the Shakespeare.

It fell open, typically, at a favorite spot near the end of
The Merchant of Venice.
Despite his distress, he smiled at the sight of the page: Portia’s speech.
The quality of mercy is not strained; / it falleth as the gentle rain from heaven / upon the place beneath; it is twice blest; /it blesseth him that gives and him that…

He blinked. Expectation and familiarity had deceived him, for the words weren’t there. Or, no, some of them were, but—He scanned down the page.

P
OR
. And hath this Shylock not such right to justice

as much as any other man in Venice?
Did not Antonio the merchant there
know well enough the rigor of the bond
when first its terms were named? Yea, though he did,
did he not laugh, and bind himself therewith,
no matter that he did not love the Jew?
Though justice be his plea, consider this:
that even so the Jew lent on his gold,
trusting the just completion of his bond.
And now Antonio comes, and mercy asks,
in lieu of justice in this noble court.
What, shall the weight of our old dreadful law
be bent by mere fond pity and soft loves,
the oak bowed while the reed stands by and mocks?
The quality of mercy must be earned,
and not strewn gratis on the common ground
as pearls for rooting swine, to any fool
who staggers eyeblind into his own folly

and cries, “Oh pity me!” Else mercy’s self
grows cheap and tawdry from her overuse.

S
HY
. O wise young judge, how do I honor thee!

Now, forfeiture: now justice, and my bond!

POR
. Nor shall men trifle with our law’s sense,

seeking their own escape. Saith not the bond

‘a pound of flesh’? And who beyond child’s years

is such a fool to think that flesh is cut

without blood shed? Such wry and cogging thought

does but betray itself as treachery,

deception in the egg, addled ere hatched.

SHY
. ’Tis very true: most wise and upright judge!

We trifle time: I pray thee, pursue sentence!

POR
. A pound of that Antonio’s flesh is thine:

the law allows it and the court awards it.

And let what blood may in this surgery run

be interest on three thousand ducats lost.

SHY
. Most learned judge! A sentence! Come, prepare!

Antonio being held, he cuts out his
heart and weighs it.

ANT
. Oh, I die! A curse on all your heads!

SHY
. Fie, such felons’ mouthings shall miss merely.

Nay, ’tis too much. Prithee, give it him back.

He throweth the excess back.

Horrified, Picard scanned back up the text of the play and found nothing but long humorous passages about the folly of people who entered into agreements and then
depended on the putative kindness of the other parties. The whole play was seen as an example of the triumph of the state over the pettifogging of special interests and sentiment, and everything in it was as blatantly and sensationally done as anything in
The Revenger’s Tragedy,
with stage directions to match—in Jessica’s case, where Lorenzo betrays her and then laughs in her face,
She runs on his sword and kills herself.

Picard swallowed, his throat gone dry, more betrayed by the black ink on the yellowed page than by anything that had happened to him so far. He turned the pages and found what frightened him more second by second: a Shakespeare horribly changed in all but the parts that were already horrible.
Titus Andronicus
was much as it had been. So was
Macbeth,
and oddly,
Lear;
but Picard paged through the latter and breathed out unhappily, almost a moan, to find one small part missing: that of Cornwall’s “first servant,” who tries to protect old Gloucester from having his eyes plucked out and is immediately killed—a matter of a few lines in the original, now gone completely. And the other two servants gone dumb, and not even a single voice raised, now, to protest the old man’s fate at the hands of Lear’s hateful daughter and her husband.

Slowly Picard shut the book, put it back, and looked mistrustfully at the Bible—and, beautiful language or not, decided not to pick it up.

Other books he did look at, briefly—just long enough to see that plots and other details were changed in some cases, not in others. The
Iliad
looked about as it should have. After its time, though, something seemed to have started—a slow, relentless moral inversion. Kindness, compassion, charity, seemed to have been declared a waste of time; greed, violence, the survival of the fittest—in this case, the most ruthless—seemed to have been deemed more useful to a species “getting ahead in the world.” The perfect government, in Plato, was now one in which “fear
is meted out to the populace in proper proportion by the wise ruler.” Civic virtue soon only mattered insofar as it served self-advancement. Acquisition, especially of power, but also of material goods and wealth—having, and
keeping,
at whatever expense to others—seemed to have become of paramount importance. It was a ruthless world, enthusiastically embodying the worst of many traits that humanity had been trying to shake for millennia. Some that
had
been shaken, in Picard’s own world, remained in full and evil flower here. In one spot and another, a little light of virtue, a kind deed or moment of pity, still shone through the prose. Shakespeare was not wholly lost; Kipling, idiosyncratic as always, was still himself; so was Aristotle. But the closer the books came to modern times, the more corrupt their philosophies seemed—and even the oldest ones betrayed him abruptly, for at the end of this universe’s
Iliad,
Achilles killed old King Priam while the pitiable old man was on his knees before him, begging in tears for the release of Hector’s body for the burial rites.
The one time in the poem when that terrible man showed mercy,
Picard thought, closing the
Iliad
and putting it down;
that one moment of awful pain and humanity… But not here, it seems. Not here.
There was no question, now, why the horrible events of this Earth’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries had produced the result they did. They were, perhaps, the final flowering of all this history: not a turning point, as he had thought, or a watershed, but rather the final roar of an avalanche that had started slowly, thousands of years before, in the slow settling of layer upon layer of coldheartedness and cruelty onto the high ground of the nature of Man.

He was filled with pity and horror for all the innocent lives in this universe that suffered from the result of the difference; and pitied, too, the “conquerors,” the Empire and its allies, who imagined that they rode this whirlwind and were its masters.
There must be something that can be
done,
he thought.
Something to stop all this, the suffering, the wanton destruction.

But what…?
He would have to try to find a way. Meantime, there was other business more desperate still. Picard went back to the desk and sat down at the computer again. “Computer, read mission instructions.”

“Retinal scan required,” said the computer voice. He leaned close, hoping against hope that his counterpart hadn’t had any injuries or surgery that he hadn’t also had. The light flashed red in his eye.

“Retinal scan confirmed,” said the computer, and the first screenful of data came up—

—and then the door opened, and Beverly Crusher walked in.

I thought I locked that,
was the first thought that went through his head, closely followed by,
Do I want anyone to see me looking at this?
He brought his hand down on the console and cleared the screen. “Stop run,” he said to the computer.

He was annoyed enough to be about to ask the doctor when knocking had gone out of style, but something about her look restrained him. She came slowly over to his desk, wearing the expression of a tired woman, and looked at him. “You
did
get a good one there, didn’t you?” Beverly said, sounding slightly annoyed.

He shrugged. “I cleaned it up.”

“Yes, you saved me that much trouble. Well, come on down to sickbay and we’ll get you put right.”

They went out together. As they passed Barclay, Picard threw him a later-for-you look; in return, Barclay made an expression that seemed to say, “Nothing to do with
me.”

“You’ll have heard how I got this, then,” Picard said to Dr. Crusher as they came to the turbolift.

“I heard, all right. Not that he hadn’t been thinking of it for a good while, under the circumstances. I suppose he had to try it eventually.”

They got into the ’lift and it closed and took off. Picard
looked at Beverly in slight disbelief, while Barclay carefully examined the ’lift’s ceiling. “You mean you’re not—concerned?”

“He knew the risks,” Crusher said, looking resigned. “If he’s going to try stunts like that… there’s nothing much I can do about it. And I’m not fool enough to try to save him from the consequences.”

You’re his
mother! Picard was tempted to shout. He restrained himself. This place tended to bring out the desire to shout more strongly than usual. Instead, he said, “I’ve told Troi not to do anything further without my authorization.”

Beverly breathed out, a little laugh. “You think that’ll work this time? Well, you can never tell. I admit, I had a feeling you might not simply let her go ahead and kill him. He is of some value as an officer: he has a gift with the helm, and math, that’s true enough.” She breathed out and looked over at him. “But I think you’re just storing up trouble by letting him off. Eventually, he
will
come after you again.”

“Doesn’t the thought that he might succeed concern you?”

She shook her head slightly. “Well, granted, my own position would be affected. But I have a fair amount of goodwill stored up, and the ship can’t do without a chief surgeon…. Anyway, he won’t get another chance. It’s a surprise he got even one. What got into you? What on earth were you thinking of? Especially with Riker hot at your heels all through this to get his hands on your position, to get the credit and the glory for this mission? Did you think he was going to try to stop
any
attempt to assassinate you at this point?”

“I suppose it was foolish,” Picard muttered as the ’lift stopped. Barclay put his head out, checked the area, then waved them out.

They headed for sickbay. Picard had already heard so many baffling things in one conversation that he decided to
just let it drop. When they came into sickbay, Picard found it slightly different from the one aboard his own ship. The color scheme was different, darker, as most things were, so that the feeling of space and airiness in the sickbay on his own
Enterprise
was missing: this one felt smaller. The diagnostic beds were a bit closer together, the ceiling a bit lower. “Where do you want me?” he said.

“Right where I’ve got you,” Beverly said, flashing him a small smile with more sheer wickedness about it than he had seen in anyone else’s face since he got here. “All I need is a protoplaser. Just sit down where you like.” She went to fetch the instrument.

Picard wandered around for a few moments, looking at the place, the diagnostic panels, the cabinets—and then he froze as his eye fell on one in particular. Everything fell into place.

He remembered looking at that cabinet back on his own
Enterprise,
and saying to Beverly, “This needs much better security—I want multiple authorizations required before…”

But that had plainly not happened here. It was open: it was unlocked. He slid one clear facing aside, reached in, and took the small container and the wafer that lay beside it, slipped them down into his tunic, and shut the cabinet again smoothly. He was wandering around again in the middle of sickbay before Beverly came back.

“Come on, sit down,” she said. “I have other things to do today.”

He sat. She ran the protoplaser along his jawline, and he felt the usual tingle as the severed nerves were reknit and complained about it, as skin sealed over and the derma rewove itself. She turned away, and he sat there rubbing his skin in the usual futile attempts to deal with the itch, which wouldn’t go away for another day or so.

“You’re very lucky it wasn’t any deeper than that,” she said. “You would have had a very amateur tracheotomy:
that knife grazed right past the cricoid cartilage. Now how are you feeling otherwise?”

“The stun?” He shook his head. “A bit of a headache… the usual.”

“Here.” She reached into another cabinet, came up with a spray hypo. Such was the level of his paranoia at this point that it was all Picard could do to hold himself still and let her administer it. He remembered what else had come out of one of her spray hypos, and poor Stewart, lying sweating and delirious in his sickbay, while this woman’s counterpart looked at him and said, “What kind of doctor…”

“There,” she said. “It’s Aerosal.” As usual, the headache began clearing itself away instantly.

“Thank you, Doctor,” he said, getting up.

Crusher looked at him sideways, with a small smile. “My, aren’t we formal today. I’ll see you later.”

That begged the question of where, but he let it be. He would have to go back to the bridge now, he supposed: there was really no excuse for him to go back to his quarters immediately. He was changed, he was “put right,” as Beverly had put it. He desperately wanted to get back to that mission report; and now, considering what he had in his tunic, there was other business as well….

But for the moment, it would be well if he was seen around and about. “Come on, Mr. Barclay,” he said at the door to sickbay, “let’s see what’s going on around here.”