Gulliver's Fugitives Part 15

Picard felt his breathing speed up.

He stared at Smith's face, prayed for her to look at him again.

She flicked a switch on each of the rack-mounted components. Picard could see the scopes light up, hear the little cooling fans starting to blow.

She picked up the cap-like thing, and paused. Picard willed her to doubt what she was doing, and for a moment he thought she really was wavering. Then he realized she was just inspecting the electrodes.

She smeared conductor on the electrodes and then she put the cap on his head, seating it firmly. Through his scalp he could feel the sticky conductor, and the hot electrodes themselves. She picked up a roll of thick white tape from the cart and tore off a strip.

She met his eyes again, just for a moment, then she put the tape over his mouth, and turned toward the cart.

She hadn't seemed affected by the plea Picard knew was in his eyes.

A terrible thing occurred to him. What if Troi had been right all along, more right than she knew, about the way he kept his emotions in check? What if now in this last moment he was too cold to make this executioner feel enough pity to spare him? Maybe this was his hamartia, his doom waiting for him all along like an unnoticed face in a crowd in some huge painting ...

Picard closed his eyes, heard himself breathing, heard his blood roaring.

Then he heard the sound of a switch being pulled, and, immediately afterward, a buzzing sound.

He waited. He felt no change.

Smith pulled the tape off his mouth and went back to her machines. The buzzing stopped.

Had it already happened? Was it instantaneous?

Maybe it wouldn't work on him.

He needed a way to test his brain. What would never have survived a Rampartian brainwashing?

A line, the final moment of Leopold Bloom's fictional journey, a story so often censored, came to him.

"Going to a dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler."

It was as reverberant as the day he first read it.

Picard knew he was still Picard. Somehow the brainwashing hadn't worked. He was still alive.

He watched Smith remove her helmet. She was at that moment the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

She pointed at the antennae and camera in the corner.

"They'll register that I'm carrying out the sentence. They're fooled by interference when I have the machines in this mode. They can't hear us. We only have a moment to talk."

"Why? Before what?"

She sat on the edge of the bed.

Her green eyes, un.o.bscured by the helmet, showed her anguish.

"I've been doing this for years," she said. "I've blanked thousands of people. But this time, I don't know, something went wrong with me. What did you want to tell me?"

"That you're different," said Picard. "You see how this is an atrocity. You know the people here try to kill imagination because it comes from deep in the psyche, and they fear what's deep in the psyche. They can't even bear to look at it. And the more they try to keep from looking at it, the more fearful it becomes. They would sooner kill than look at it."

Picard moved his eyes to indicate the machines in the rack beside him.

"All their science is wasted," he said. "They've decoded brain waves but still know nothing about their minds. I can prove all this to you. I can show you things that imagination has done for the human race ... things that no one on this planet would believe possible, and yet which came to be, because someone once imagined them and was free to tell others. I can show you, if you just stop this killing. You can come away with me to a place of total freedom. I can't guarantee we'll escape, but I will give us a fighting chance."

Smith's brow corrugated in a frown. She nodded slowly.

"It's so strange ... I've been hearing the opposite all my life, but what you say actually sounds right. Which means either I'm going insane, or everyone else is insane. It doesn't really matter. I'm going to have to carry out your sentence anyway."

"Why?"

"Because there's no way to stop all this. Someone else would carry out the sentence if I didn't. Even if I set you free, we'd never make it out of here alive. Never."

"Then at least help my crew," said Picard. "Two of them are imprisoned here. You could give them their communicators. And help my ship. The CS is trying to destroy it. Please tell me you'll at least try."

She put her hand on his chest, but kept her head turned away.

"I'd like to."

Picard realized she was crying.

"I know there's something special about you," she said. "They don't tell me anything about the people I do this to, but I just know ..."

She took a deep shuddering breath, then stood up quickly.

"Sorry," she said.

She put the piece of tape back on Picard's mouth, and replaced her own helmet, hiding her eyes behind the rasters.

Then she went back to her cart, and with a quick, angry motion, flipped a red switch.

Later, Smith stopped at the doors to a computer room, dialed a personal code into a combination lock, and entered.

She took off her helmet and clipped her red hair in a tight whorl.

If you asked her right now if her name had always been Smith, she would say that it had. However, she would be wrong; it had been Smith only for the last two days. For many years before that, it had been Amoret.

When she had been captured along with Riker and Data at the ore factory, she had been taken to this building, put in a cell, and her mind had been wiped completely blank. On this planet, such blanking satisfied the legal demand for capital punishment, for the original person was indeed dead and gone. The body became a new citizen with a new ident.i.ty.

This new citizen's memory was filled, by computer, with real-life incidents from other people's lives, all verified as true, and sanctioned by the CS. Only the names and faces in the incidents were changed to make them fit the new citizen's new personal history.

Though the new memories weren't really true for the new citizen, they had been true for someone, and the Rampartians had declared that these re-used memories were not fictional. They did not carry the Allpox of imagination. A lot of tortured logic was used to justify this practice, but the real reason for it was pure necessity. Without it there wouldn't be enough sanitized new minds.

The practice allowed for instantaneous placement of the new citizen back into society, wherever there happened to be a need. In this way, the large number of arrests and capital punishments didn't decimate the population or disrupt the operations of the CS or the commercial sector.

Once in a while there were problems. The Rampartians had decoded brain waves and neural memory codes, but there was much about brain physiology that they didn't know. Sometimes the blanking and refilling didn't work completely and the original memories and "criminal" tendencies remained. In such cases the intransigent brain was written off as a loss and the body was killed by injection.

However, when successful, the brainwashing provided ideal citizens for Rampart society. The people who were most recently brainwashed were actually the "safest" of all Rampartians, and were often employed by the CS, which constantly needed more sanitized minds.

Smith, though she didn't know it yet, was turning out to be one of the failed attempts at mind blanking. A thread of the Dissenter spirit had persisted through her blanking, on some deeply buried stratum. She still thought she was someone named Marjorie Smith who had blanked thousands of people, but when she had tried to blank Picard, her Dissenter spirit had twitched and groaned remorsefully in its sleep.

And now, as she reflected back on her life as Marjorie Smith, a comfortable life among a lot of bland people, it seemed an unreal montage, an interminable, colorless, sleepwalk. She felt that this meant she had lived a meaningless life, having no idea the memories weren't of her life at all, but rather sanitized memories from the minds of others.

The CS was already aware of some of her doubts. They hadn't heard her conversation with Picard, but they had read some of her brain waves before and after, and identified her as a possible miscreant. They were simply waiting to see what she did next.

Now she checked the computer room's bulletin board for memos, an act she thought she had performed thousands of times. She found one from her boss, Bussard.

It read: "Smith: The Picard disk should be left in the safe. I will process it tomorrow. All other disks should be processed as usual."

She looked at a row of disk-eases on the rack in front of her. The disks were made automatically of all the material drained from each mind during the blanking process. At the end of the day, she was supposed to use a computer to cull any usable information off the disks-any facts about the Dissenter rebellion, for instance.

Once the facts were in the computer, the disks were always erased. What use did the CS have for the ravings and hallucinations of criminal minds?

Now, one by one, Smith put each disk on her rack into a disk drive and let the computer pull off the files it wanted. Finally, the computer erased the disks-the final death and disposal of each personality.

The CS administration were going to do something special with the Picard disk. They probably needed specific information from Picard's mind, and Smith a.s.sumed her boss Bussard would search the disk manually for it. Then it would no doubt be erased like all the rest.

Late in the afternoon, Bussard, a baby-faced, double-chinned, middle-aged bureaucrat, leaned his head in the door.

"I'm leaving for the day."

"Okay. I still have work to do."

As she loaded another disk on the main drive, she felt his eyes still on her for a good minute.

"I'm leaving my door open," he said finally. "Can't seem to find my key. Have to get a new one made tomorrow. Good night."

"Good night."

When she had disposed of all remaining disks except for Picard's, she opened the temporary safe. The case containing Picard's disk felt cold and heavy as she placed it in the safe.

She began to close the safe door, but stopped. She had a sense that she had done something terribly wrong and felt an imperious need to atone.

Then, like a leviathan rising up from unplumbed waters, a plan surfaced in her mind. It would be considered a high crime, of course, if she were caught.

Luckily for her, Bussard had left his door open. She took Picard's disk in and latched the door.

On Bussard's desk was a disk drive hooked up to a video screen and keyboard. Bussard had left it powered up.

Not like him, thought Smith, to be so scatter-brained.

The drive was used for manual searches of disks, in cases where the main computer couldn't find something. This manual system actually imaged the deceased person's memories on the screen. A bank of switches marked "enable" and "disable" was used to censor out all material of imagination so that the operator would not risk self-infection while searching for facts.

Neither Bussard nor any other trusted CS employees who had this job would operate the system in fully open mode. That would be like deliberately driving a car off a cliff. Rather, they would selectively disengage various of the filters, letting needed facts through, and if by error some material of imagination was viewed, immediate mind-cleanse would be used to remove it. Bussard had a small mental hygiene unit on his desk for such contingencies. It looked like an electric toothbrush with an electrode where the bristles would be.

One by one, Smith toggled all the switches to the "disable" position. A red warning light flashed: System Fully Open.

She locked the disk on the drive and typed a command. Images began to form on the screen.

Late into the night she sat there, exploring areas of Picard's memory. On the video screen she saw incidents from Picard's public life as a Starship captain, and images of his private thoughts as a quirky, creative man. She saw experiences she had never imagined and imagination she had never experienced; outlandish aliens Picard had met and incredible stories he had read.

As she watched she began to accept that the universe was teeming with intelligent life. It didn't matter that Rampart science had told her the opposite.

She watched without condemning anything as impossible. She just let the images unfold. They clicked; they felt more right than anything she had experienced in her gimcrack-plastic life as Marjorie Smith.

She saw how Picard handled a double of himself. She watched Picard's response to a supertyrant failed-G.o.d named Q. She experienced with Picard an encounter with vicious little rat-men for whom profit was everything. She saw through Picard's eyes intelligent life that looked like a grain of sand, a lizard-man, a pool of black tar, a moving ball of light. She saw two colossal jellyfish creatures embracing in connubial bliss. She saw a Dali painting called "A chemist lifting with extreme precaution the cuticle of a grand piano." She saw the holodeck image of Sherlock Holmes and Picard's own mental images as he read The Tempest and The Mahabharata.

She saw images of Picard's most private, creative musings, and unspoken jokes. She noticed that he had a great deal of affection for his crew but she could not catch him in any direct statements of those feelings. She chanced upon several love affairs, and many profound losses, such as the deaths of his crew on his former ship, the Stargazer.

She kept skipping around the disk, sifting randomly, compulsively, unable to stop. The intensity of the exhilaration, of the terror-joy of discovery, kept her going.

What finally made her stop was an excruciating realization. She, Marjorie Smith, had blanked a thousand people, a thousand personalities. For all she knew all of those personalities could have been as extraordinary as Picard's. Since she'd never looked at them, she'd never know. Murder, over and over.

She made up her mind what she would do.

Raising her eyes from the screen and keyboard, she saw gray morning light around the edges of the window blinds. She had been here all night. Bussard and the rest of the department would soon arrive for work.

She made a duplicate of Picard's disk, putting the original disk back in its case and the duplicate in another case. After moving all the switches on the viewer back to their original settings she left the power on, as she'd found it.

Back in her work room, she put the original Picard disk in the safe, and sat holding the duplicate disk in her lap. She'd taken the first step. The next would be a lot harder.

The sound of footsteps told her that Bussard was arriving for work. He was a good half-hour early. Maybe because he'd had to get a new key made ...

She got up and carried the disk into the long storage hall, far back between the shelves and file cabinets.

After a moment she heard someone enter the work room, open the safe, close it, and then shuffle through papers on her desk.

"Marjorie?"

It was Bussard.

Holding the disk in her hand, she stepped into a large steel storage cabinet and silently shut the doors.

She heard the click of Bussard's steps, and the hum of a one-eye pa.s.sing the cabinet.

Then she heard Bussard's voice coming from the direction of her own desk. She pressed her ear to the cold steel.

"Bussard for Mr. Hazlitt ... How are you, Rob? ... No, she's not here-I'm standing at her desk. She couldn't have left the building, though... . She looked at the disk all last night, unfiltered... . Yeah, I left my door open to see if she'd take the bait. A one-eye patrolling outside was attracted by the light... . She must have seen a lot; we'd already had the disk rated as High Crime. Bad as it gets ... and after only one day. Looks like the blanking didn't get rid of her Dissenter memories. She must have been a real sicko. We'll have to put her to sleep for good... . Yeah. I'll tell her she has to fill out some paperwork for a vacation... . Thanks."

He hung up and went back into his office.

For many minutes Smith stood in the cramped closet, a.s.similating the news that she was once a Dissenter, and that she was now scheduled for bodily destruction.

She wasn't Marjorie Smith. The realization exposed some buried memory fragments: sitting in a roomful of books, with other people who called her Amoret. Fleeing down a dark street, tracer bullets from a CS hovercraft flashing past her head. Writing something by the illumination of a penlight, a story she could no longer remember-a thought that made her oddly sad. And, as a little girl, chasing a ball into some bushes and finding a single wondrous ancient page, the contents of which were now lost to her ...

Everything dovetailed neatly. Her doubts when she blanked Picard made perfect sense.