Gulliver's Fugitives Part 25

She saw a Chiruwi half-man from Central Africa-a man with only one visible side-befuddling a CS officer who tried to shoot him, showing first his visible side, then his invisible side.

She saw a Chinese Nung-kua-ma-a ravenous creature with the body of a giant bull and the head of a measure of rice-devour a one-eye in one gulp. A CS man, terrified at that sight, dropped his gun and put his hands up. The Nung-kua-ma ate the gun.

Fresh squads of CS soldiers swarmed into the quadrangle and formed a line, firing their weapons continuously at the invaders. Crichton pointed here and there with furious gestures and barked orders into his headset.

But the line of CS soldiers was swamped by a tide of Hopi Kachinas, beings embodying the eternal forces of nature, which had humanoid shapes that were made of cloud-terraces, living trees, thunder, and interstellar s.p.a.ce.

The CS guns had no effect on them, and the line of CS soldiers broke up, scattered. The Kachinas pursued, laughing, thundering, singing, stripping off more CS helmets.

Proteus the shape-changer took form right in front of Troi, changing from a man to a fish to a puddle, and finally into a three-headed Cerberus dog, the guardian of the underworld. His roar, the voice of Past, Present, and Future, was deafening. A trio of de-helmeted CS soldiers backed away from him in terror.

The CS soldiers backed straight into another trio who made their stand together: Sir Gawain the Round Table knight, Uyemon the blind samurai, and Stagolee, the invincible blues-playing troubadour of African-American folktale.

"I'd say you'd best be on your way," the fearless Stagolee laughed at the soldiers, "or we'll have to whup you good."

"Yes," said Gawain, "ye must yield you as overcome men."

Gawain and Uyemon drew their swords, and Stagolee brandished his fists.

The three CS soldiers, having lost all taste for battle, bolted away.

Crichton stood on the flatbed of the mobile gun and frantically tried to rally his CS. But they seemed to be losing, their weapons ineffective, their helmets gone, confusion supreme. Some had abandoned the fight and were looking around in pure bewilderment. Some were laughing hysterically.

Troi saw several of the Dissenters walking among the myth-beings, helping them. She saw, impossibly, Caliban, even scruffier and bolder than when he had been alive; yet Troi sensed that he lived still-or lived again. She saw Rhiannon, now a beautiful grown woman in queenly dress, riding a magnificent horse. Rhiannon had become her own myth. The horse carried her about the quadrangle, leaping, galloping, taunting, neither man nor one-eye able to catch them or shoot them.

She saw Gunabibi dancing in the middle of the quadrangle. Her body was painted with thick white lines and circles. She was spreading her nature-fertility all around her. Vines grew from the concrete at her feet, spreading and multiplying like a time-lapse film, entwining guns and feet and jeeps in a green arabesque. Little bandicoot marsupials with young in their pouches were suddenly everywhere. One CS soldier found himself awash in a friendly tide of the bandicoots, and fell to the ground, not sure whether he should scream or laugh.

Troi saw a high-ranking CS officer who'd apparently defected. He was running about the quadrangle, ordering CS soldiers to destroy their own weapons, and the men were obeying. He got close to Troi for a moment and she saw he was Coyote, in disguise.

Still Crichton managed to rally his most dedicated men. A core group of them stayed round him, firing their weapons with fierce intensity at the impossible beings invading the seat of CS power. Some of the mythical characters were affected by the blasts of radiation. Some collapsed and some disappeared. Finally, the group of mythical characters began to fall back.

Then the colossal Aztec figure of Tezcatlipoca, the Mirror Man, thundered onto the quadrangle, dragging the leg that had no foot. His head reached the tops of the buildings. His mirrored surfaces reflected the scenes around him, splitting and multiplying them. His mirror-eyes flashed as he saw Crichton.

Crichton screamed orders like a man possessed. He looked wildly about him, up at the sky, where no CS air support was evident, and out beyond the buildings of CephCom, where no more ground support came.

But he still had his mobile radiation cannon, his one great gun that had done away with Gulliver. He reached into the turret and manually aimed the gun at Tezcatlipoca.

Tezcatlipoca stood his ground. He spoke at Crichton in an indecipherable booming language, but made no move to defend himself. He pointed at his own chest, a mirror-surface of smoke and darkness, where something throbbed redly: his heart.

Crichton's mask-face cracked into a bitter smile as he slammed the firing b.u.t.ton.

A great flash erupted from the gun.

The radiation reflected off the mirrored surfaces of Tezcatlipoca's chest and returned, in equal and opposite angle, straight at Crichton.

Crichton's frozen grimace unlocked itself and he cried out as his body dissolved. He disappeared in a cloud of vapor. A little puddle remained on top of the truck bed where he had stood.

His air strike came too late to save him.

CS jets and battlefield one-eyes filled the sky, firing their growling guns and launching their missiles and guided bombs.

The ground itself began to shake violently and the sky grew dark. A terrible wind began to blow. A female voice, the Matriarch, the voice of all living things, told Troi to lie down and absorb her protection.

And then the Matriarch and her husband, a pair otherwise known as biosphere and cosmos, Gaia and Ouranos, Awitelin Tsita and Apoyan Ta'chu, moved to re-establish natural harmony.

The CS buildings collapsed in on themselves, as earthquakes wracked the ground.

The wind reached the force of a continuous explosion and the planes were swept away like chaff.

Debris blew all over the ground, pinning Troi against a wall. Chunks of earth, wood, and plaster piled on top of her.

Suddenly the noise subsided. The wind and earthquakes had abruptly ceased. Supreme quiet.

Troi's head hadn't been covered by the debris and she had a clear view of the ruins of CephCom.

The mythical characters began to rise from the wreckage. They picked their way around, pulling wounded CS from the fallen structures.

Some of the CS quailed before the mythical characters. But some seemed to have been shocked to the point where they just accepted what they saw, and even welcomed the help. Some of the CS talked and laughed openly with members of the invading host.

Troi didn't see her crewmates in the crowd. She tried to push some of the debris off her and found she couldn't budge it.

Then she realized that she couldn't move her body at all. She couldn't even twitch her fingers or wiggle her toes.

She thought perhaps she had received an injury after all, but then she recognized the feeling. She had experienced it during her earlier encounters with the Other-worlders, the characters from imagination. The transformation they had tried to put her through twice before was now completed. It was as though her body had changed into a different substance. The feeling of immobility was terrifying.

She struggled and strained to move her eyes, but found them locked in their sockets.

She calmed herself as best she could. At least she wasn't blind. She started examining the scene presented to her. She couldn't see her body under all the debris covering it, except for part of her hand, which was extended in a reaching gesture.

It was covered with dust except for the upper edge of her index finger. The finger was dark and smooth, with flecks of sparkling material embedded in it. The finger looked like polished stone.

At that moment Troi realized that she had become a statue.

She panicked silently, cried out mentally. But no one came near her or even seemed to notice her. With her gaze now locked irrevocably straight ahead she couldn't search for Picard, Riker and Data.

She realized that she would never be found. A statue doesn't emit life signs. The Enterprise's sensors would never be able to locate her.

The sadness of the situation overwhelmed her, and she tried to weep, but couldn't. The sadness itself began to dry up. Her emotions were petrifying.

In another moment all emotions were gone. Nothing and n.o.body mattered to her. All that was left was a hard, dry rock of continuing awareness.

She watched a group of mythical characters pull a CS man from under an overturned jeep. Proteus turned himself into a stretcher for the injured man. Troi saw another figure, nearby, with his back turned to her.

The man turned in profile for a moment and Troi saw that it was Odysseus.

As she watched him she felt a slight pang of emotion-the most basic possible emotion-reawaken in her. It was a desire to live, a desire that he should come and help her.

He walked away from the jeep and was gone from Troi's view. But a few seconds later he came back and looked across the field of rubble, directly at her.

Troi strained to move, to make some kind of sign, but it was futile.

He noticed her anyway. He walked toward her, weaving his way around the piles of wreckage.

When he reached her he stood looking at her face for a long time.

He appeared slightly different in facial structure and dress than when she had last seen him. Yet it was unmistakably the same man. It was as if the specific aspects of the person she had known were diminished and a more universal Odysseus had emerged. This was Homer's Odysseus, the immortal, mythical Odysseus.

His myth-character was much the same as the man Troi had known-the resourcefulness, the endless fearless questing across the wide seas and the limits of the known and the unknown.

"I know you, do I not?" he said. "From some other place or time?"

He stared uncertainly at her.

"And wasn't I prophesied to meet you again? ... Well ... I can see you can't answer me."

He began to pull the chunks of earth and wood off her.

"If it's so, I know how to free you. I know how to reawaken the woman-trapped-as-a-statue. Pygmalion the sculptor did it once. With his touch he warmed the stone, and the stone softened into flesh."

He picked up a flat piece of wood and used it to fan the dust off her. When she was clean, a perfect, polished, poised stone image that looked as though it should have stood in a museum, he put down the plank and knelt next to her.

He touched her wrist, and squeezed it gently.

Slowly, her skin began to tingle where he touched it. It felt as a limb feels when it has slept and then been awakened by the tide of circulation, All the cells in her hand seemed to come alive. She could feel blood moving through the veins.

His hand moved up to her shoulder and squeezed it. The shoulder became soft under his touch. The warmth spread. She could move the arm. The sensation was so divine she wanted to utter some word or sound, but still she had no voice.

He moved his hands to her face, stroked her cheek and her hair.

Now she felt her entire body reawakening. The sensation was so intense, so electric, that she had to shut her eyes tight and couldn't breathe for a moment.

Then the transformation completed itself and she breathed and moved her limbs.

Emotions came back in a rush. She was supremely, inanely happy and sad at the same time. She let it flow.

Then she realized Odysseus wasn't touching her anymore.

She opened her eyes.

She was alone, lying on her back, staring at a night sky, a blue nebula with stars behind it.

A delicious warmth bathed her body. For a minute she just looked at the stars and enjoyed the feeling of being physically and emotionally alive. Some place inside her had been tapped and had released a secret, an inner conflict.

Then she became aware of voices around her. She moved her head and saw that she was in the middle of a circle of CS men and one-eyes. Crichton stood near her. A CS guard knelt beside her, his hand still cuffed to hers. Picard, Data, and Riker were still handcuffed as well.

She saw that she was still on the bridge, near the actual spot where Odysseus had died.

She understood that there had been no invasion by mythical characters. No Gulliver had come to rescue them, no Tezcatlipoca had destroyed Crichton. Odysseus had not come back to life. She had merely pa.s.sed out for a moment, and had one last Other-worlder dream, on the way to her own execution.

She stood slowly. The CS men helped her up, and the group resumed its progress across the bridge.

Still the emotions swirled within her, rising up from deep places long forgotten, more and more intense and insistent, as if to make themselves known in her last moments so that she could die with her totality. Tears were streaming down her face.

They neared the steel door that Lomov broke. As Troi was pushed through she sensed the presence of Picard, Riker, and Data very close behind her.

Then, suddenly, she felt the unmistakable body-dissolving rush of the Enterprise transporter.

In the next moment she found herself standing, safe and sound, in the Enterprise transporter room with her shipmates.

Chapter Seventeen.

THE FOUR OF THEM checked in at the bridge, and found that the ship was safe. All the one-eyes had been destroyed. The engines had been repaired enough to keep the ship in orbit around Rampart, with shields and a capability of warp four. The sensors had found a hole in the nebula and contact had been established with Starfleet.

Picard went into his ready room for a few minutes. When he emerged he said the Enterprise would be leaving this star system in an hour and Starfleet would be further pursuing the matter of the Huxley.

Worf was still busy with security mop-up and Geordi was asleep somewhere, so the four went to the conference room to debrief each other.

Troi still didn't know how the beam-up had been accomplished.

"We have the ill.u.s.trious Data to thank for that," said Picard. "He, Riker, and I had been hiding in a storeroom behind a lab, along with the Dissenter named Amoret, when a one-eye gained entrance through an air shaft.

"Data caught and disabled the one-eye, and then dismantled its antenna array. He fashioned a communicator out of the parts and tuned it to a frequency that would Punch through the surface jamming and give the Enterprise our coordinates. When all of us were in the same spot-just after your fainting spell on that bridge at CephCom-Data signaled the Enterprise. O'Brien was at the transporter controls. He'd stood there for two solid days waiting for any kind of signal from the planet's surface.

"Now, here was the keystone of Data's plan: He made sure Riker and I knew nothing about the one-eye he'd dismantled or about the communicator he'd made. He hid it all from us, even stuffed the dead one-eye back up the air shaft where we wouldn't see it. When we were caught, none of us humans-whose brain waves could be read-knew what Data had done. The one-eyes couldn't read his brain, so his secret was safe. All he had to do then was wait until we were all together so he could signal the Enterprise and have us beamed up."

"How did you disable the one-eye?" Troi asked Data.

"I will refrain from taxing you with an exhibition, Counselor, as I have noticed that humans have a peculiar reaction to it. Suffice it to say that I confused the one-eyes with my poetry. My poetry is apparently hard to cla.s.sify as poetry at all, and the one-eyes momentarily stymied themselves trying to figure it out."

Troi didn't know if she should ask the next set of questions, or pursue them on her own. Why had she experienced those vivid visions of mythical characters? What were their meanings? And why had Crichton appeared to experience them as well?

Picard's communicator came to life.

"Worf to Picard."

"Picard here."

"Sir, from our new position, atmospheric conditions are allowing us to pick up video from the planet's surface."

"Thank you, Worf. Send it down here, please."

Picard swiveled the monitor on the table so all could view it.