Dark Mirror (5 page)

“Some, I think, though translation is still a problem. I’ve been with these people for nearly nine months, and most of that time was spent trying to solve the linguistic and semantic difficulties. The rest was spent trying to get a version that I could use of their data on the general ‘stringiness’ of this space. About two months ago, I got what I believed to be a reliable baseline—I think. The Lalairu’s methods of taking readings are as different as their coordinate system.”

Hwiii frowned—this expression looking almost exactly like a human one. “Anyway, I then started taking my own readings and barely got a baseline set of my own before the Lalairu changed course away from the ‘empty’ spaces—not bothering to tell
me
why… or if they did, I didn’t understand them. However, if I’ve correctly translated the statement you copied to me, the Laihe is nervous about remaining in this space because the Lalairu’s
own
baseline measurements of this area, taken fairly recently hereabouts, are suddenly no longer viable. Hyperstring structures do not match what they ‘should be’ for this space—what they were as little as a year ago. For space so empty, the hyperstrings are becoming very tightly packed together.
Something has been happening to derange the normal structure.”

“What does it mean?” Picard said.

“I don’t know.”

Picard breathed out softly. “If
you
don’t know, who do we ask?”

Hwiii laughed somewhat helplessly. “Me… later. Sorry, Captain, Starfleet would probably tell you that I’m the best expert they’ve got. And I don’t have enough data yet to give you a better evaluation, which I know is what you want. I have good hopes that, with a starship’s resources to aid me, I can find out… at which point I’ll tell you everything I can. Meanwhile, Mr. Data’s reputation as a researcher is a matter of fame. I would hope that with his help in analysis, and possibly Mr. La Forge’s to help me tune and install my detection equipment, we can quickly produce some answers for you.”

“Well,” Picard said, “clearly there’s no point in considering any change in our patrol schedule just now. And at this distance, pausing long enough to notify Starfleet and get a response would be a waste of time. We’ll continue as planned. Commander, I will expect some news from you at the earliest possible moment as to how
your
former baseline data match present conditions in these spaces. Meanwhile, please see Commander Riker about any technical assistance you need.”

“Yes, sir,” Hwiii said. “And thank you much for your welcome.”

“Are you sure you don’t want some more caviar?” Picard said gently.

The dolphin glanced at him, that mischievous look in his eye again. “Another pound or so would be nice.”

They went about their business for the next few days in an unremarkable fashion. Picard noticed with amusement
how quickly the crew stopped giving second glances to the dolphin swimming down the corridor. Hwiii seemed to spend most of his time in engineering anyway, surprising amounts of time. Picard sometimes began to wonder when he slept, and Geordi began to complain about it.

Picard caught Geordi in Ten-Forward one evening, looking rather haggard and smelling slightly of fish. “The problem is that he’s so concentrated,” Geordi said. “He’s—don’t misunderstand me, Captain, he’s absolutely amiable, he’s a pleasure to work with, competent, knows his subject inside out—but he’s just—” Geordi shook his head. “He’s collimated, like a phaser beam. When he’s in the middle of his work, you couldn’t distract him for a second. He can’t
be
distracted—he just
goes
straight for the throat of the problem, whatever it is.”

“I should think that would be more of an advantage than anything else,” Picard said, sipping his tea.

Geordi smiled wanly. “It might seem that way at first. But if there’s one thing human beings do when they’re working, it’s that they
stop
working. They do something to break the tension or the concentration every now and then: a joke, an aside. Hwiii doesn’t do that. It’s like he’s on rails, running right at the question in hand. Or fin.”

“Perseverance,” Picard said. “I take it the work you’re doing is going well.”

“We’ve got most of his equipment hooked up now. We’re getting good readings, he says. I’m still getting an idea of what he means by ‘good’—half the time it seems to mean blank files.” Geordi chuckled. “But we’re in a situation here where lack of data can be as diagnostic as solids full of it. In between times, he’s been helping Commander Riker with his subparticle hunting—seems that the technology that the Lalairu are using with hyperstrings is somewhat similar and can be altered to our purposes. He’s made some changes in the sensors for us.”

“Well, I’m glad he’s making himself useful.”

“It’s getting him to stop, Captain, that’s the problem. He’s having a sleep cycle now, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I must admit, he
is
a fount of information: it’s an education just listening to him while he talks. Or sings—you can’t help hearing the notes, they resonate through his waterjacket. The engineering crew like it.” Geordi smiled. “I can’t say I mind it myself. The funny thing is, some of the song turns out to be some kind of delphine opera. He says he doesn’t have a great voice, but the singing runs in the family.”

“An opera buff. You’d better keep him away from Worf. But I didn’t know there was any opera back on Triton.”

“Something like it, apparently. Or I may have misunderstood him: it was hard to tell whether Hwiii was describing theater or a ceremony of some kind—or just live performances of some sort of passion play.”

Picard nodded and sipped at his tea again. “I had been wondering—”

He stopped.

Something was happening.

Abruptly, everything seemed peculiarly dim. Was it his eyes? Picard blinked, found nothing changed—but at the same time became suddenly certain that his eyes were not at fault.

The effect persisted, got worse, a darkening and squeezing shut of everything around him, as if he were closing his eyes to sneeze. No, as if everything
around
him were closing its eyes to sneeze.

Then it cleared away. He put his tea down, blinked for a moment, and rubbed his head. “That was odd.”

Geordi looked at him. “You felt something?”

“Did you?”

Geordi nodded. “Something like—I don’t know: everything dimmed out for a moment.”

“Dimmed out for
you?”

“Not light,” Geordi said. “Not a decrease in intensity as such. Not visible light, anyway—just—everything went
attenuated
, somehow.”

Picard looked around. Other people, at other tables, were looking slightly confused, too, blinking, glancing around them. “Did you feel that?” he said to the ensign at the next table.

“Something, sir,” she said. “Something—I thought I was going to sneeze.”

Picard touched his badge. “Picard to Crusher.”

“
Crusher here,”
the doctor said. “
Captain, did you just feel something odd?”

“Yes. How many others?”

“
Half the ship, it seems.”

“What was it?”

Crusher laughed ruefully. “
I had just stood up, and I thought it was orthostatic hypotension—a fall in blood pressure from standing up too fast. That produces transient dimmings of vision like what I had. But it wasn’t that… not when so many people felt it at once.”

Picard thought about finishing his tea, then stood up frowning. “Very well, out…. Sorry to put you straight back into the traces, Mr. La Forge, but this is too odd. I want level-one diagnostics run on all ship’s systems. And I want a department chiefs’ meeting in an hour.”

“Yes, sir,” Geordi said, and headed away. Picard paused to look out the windows. The stars slipped by as usual, seemingly untroubled. Everything seemed perfectly normal.
Am I overreacting?
he thought.
We all seem fine now
.

But the memory of that dimming reasserted itself. Not so much a dimming, but—what was it Geordi had said? An attenuation. Things
themselves
going dark and strange, rather than his perception of them.

Picard made his way out hurriedly, heading for the bridge.

* * *

He had just seated himself and was having a look at reports from around the ship. Everyone seemed to have experienced the strange hiatus, but no one had experienced any ill effects.

This left Picard feeling uneasy. “Mr. Data, check Federation records for any incidents of this sort.”

“I have already done that, Captain,” Data said. “There are no such incidents on record as such. I have scanned using homologues for phrases being used by our own crewmen to describe the experience. There are none.”

Picard frowned. “Keep working on it.”

“
Ensign Wooldridge to Commander Riker,”
said a voice suddenly.

Riker touched his badge. “Riker here, Ensign.”

“
Sir,”
said a young male voice, “
I’m down by the mission specialist’s quarters: the dolphin gentleman. I think you’d better have someone come down here. He’s awful loud in there, and he’s not answering his door. I’m not sure he’s well.”

Faintly, in the background, they could all hear a high, eerie wailing.

“How long has this been going on?” said Riker.

“
I’m not sure, sir,”
Wooldridge said, raising his voice slightly over the racket. “
I just got off shift. I had been in my quarters to change, and I was heading to Ten-Forward, when I came by here and heard him. He’s been at it at least since I came by—ten minutes or so.”

“On my way,” Riker said, glancing at Picard. The captain nodded. “Mr. Data, with me. Dr. Crusher to the mission specialist’s quarters immediately, please.”

From right down the hall from his quarters, it was very plain that something was the matter. A great flood of untranslated Delphine was ringing out down the corridor; not entirely an unpleasant sound, for there was melody in the fluting whistles, squeaks, and shrills of it, and a kind of
rhythm as well. But at the same time, independent of the sound, there was such an edge of distress on the song that it made you twitch to listen to it.

Riker and Data came up outside the doors; Dr. Crusher came along toward them from the other direction. Data tapped the entry chime. There was no response—the piercing song merely went on, uninterrupted, from inside.

“What’s the matter with him?” Riker said. “What’s happened to his translator?”

“I do not know,” Data said, listening.

“What
is
that racket?” Crusher said, getting out her tricorder.

Data put his head to one side. “It is part of the
Song of the Twelve,”
he said, “a cetacean epic sung-poetic work in which an ensemble of—”

“Dolphins singing lieder,” Riker said, cutting him off. “Spare me.” He gestured at the door. “Override it.”

Data touched in a combination on the nearest access panel. The door slid open, and Riker saw, to his relief, that the force field inside was still holding the water in place. They gazed in through it.

Hwiii was there, swimming around and around in circles. Riker was suddenly, horribly reminded of old vids he’d seen from when zoo animals on Earth were still kept in tiny enclosures that literally bored them out of their minds: the dreadfully repeated behaviors, heads swinging back and forth again and again in never-changing patterns, beasts pacing back and forth until they dropped from exhaustion, what minds they had now long gone. But at the same time, the song still pouring forth from Hwiii didn’t seem to be the kind of sound a dolphin would make when it had gone mad. Then again—

Riker turned to Crusher. “Vital signs?”

She shook her head as she examined her tricorder’s readings. “His blood enzyme levels are indicative of great
stress, but other than that, no neurological damage that I can see.”

“Then why is he like this?” Riker said softly. “What’s going on? What caused this?”

His mind went back to that momentary flicker of darkness. He had been talking to Lieutenant Hessan, laughing back at those laughing eyes of hers, and suddenly—

“Wooldridge noticed this, what—twenty minutes ago?”

“That would be approximately correct,” Data said. The song scaled up in urgency, and all at once it became a bit too much for Riker. He turned, touched his badge, said, “Riker to Commander Hwiii!” then put two fingers in his mouth, leaned close to the wall of water for maximum effect, and whistled at the top of his lungs.

The dolphin almost matched his whistle a second later, with a shriek of equal volume, one that made them all wince. But then he slowly stopped circling, coasting to a stop, and just hung in the water for a moment—then rose to the top of his quarters to take a breath.

They waited. After a few seconds he drifted down again to the doorway and hung there, looking at them with a rather stunned expression from behind the wall of water. “Commander,” Hwiii said weakly, “that was vile language.”

“My apologies,” Riker said, “but you weren’t behaving in a way that suggested sweet reason was going to do much good right then.”

“No,” Hwiii said, sounding ashamed, “I suppose not. It’s just that it was such a shock—” He stared at Riker. “How can you be so calm?”

“Calm isn’t high on my list at the moment, believe me,” Riker said. “We’ve had a very odd occurrence in the last hour or so.”

“I’ll say we have,” Hwiii said. “You felt it too, then. We’re lost!”

“What?” Crusher said.

The dolphin looked at her in distress. “Can’t you feel it?”

“We all felt something a little while ago,” Crusher said, “but what it was, we can’t say.”

“Ship’s systems show no change in status,” Data said. “All readings, navigational and otherwise, seem nominal.”

“Commander, Mr. Data,” Hwiii said with dreadful intensity, “we are
lost
. I can feel it in my tail. We’re not—” He fumbled for words, and Riker found it odd to watch a being usually so precise now floundering. “
We’re not where we were.”

“Will you get into your suit, Commander,” Riker said, “and come up to the bridge with me and explain that—since you’re the only one around here who seems to have any kind of explanation for what’s happening?”