"Are you sure you aren't being unrealistic ..."

"Why would I be unrealistic? When have you seen me make a misjudgment?"

She was momentarily at a loss.

"You are no more infallible than anyone else," she said finally. "You've suffered some big losses in your past."

"Not true."

"Yes it is. It's your wife and son isn't it? You lost them, you feel that you failed them somehow."

Troi felt she'd stabbed into a deep wound and winced. But his Odysseus persona wasn't too badly shaken this time. In fact, he seemed to have been expecting her remark.

"I knew it," he said.

"Knew what?"

"I knew it from the beginning. You can read my feelings, like a seer-like one who sees into the mind. You aren't of this world at all. More like someone out of a myth. You don't even look like other women-your eyes are different. Why is it you've never said a word about where you come from? Why is everything about Rampart new to you?"

She was astonished at how he'd led her into this trap. Wily Odysseus. She wanted to terminate the conversation before her cover was blown. But he kept right on.

"You're the most mysterious, beautiful woman I've ever met. But either you deny your own feelings or you don't have any feelings."

"That's absurd. You know nothing about my feelings. What you don't seem to remember is that I have friends in trouble, and it's going to take everything I've got to help them. I don't have time for anything else. I don't have time for an affair with you, and I know that's what you want. I may decide to go with you into CephCom, but that's it."

"What I have to do is at least as hard as what you have to do," he replied, "but I don't turn myself into a stone to accomplish it."

She thought it was a ridiculous statement. Troi wanted to tell him why he was wrong, but stopped herself. How had the conversation become an a.n.a.lysis of her? She was supposed to be a.n.a.lyzing him.

Odysseus put his hand on her arm.

"Don't," she said, and moved out of his reach. "That's out of the question."

Troi took off the borrowed cloak and stood up to leave.

Then she paused and examined the situation rationally. She didn't want him upset. She needed to let him down without hurting his feelings. In fact, if she was going to accompany him into CephCom, she still needed to know more about him-if she could rely on him, or if he might suddenly go off the beam.

"Sorry," she said. "I do like you, but it can't be the way you want. This is hardly the time or place for such a thing."

"I'm glad you put it that way," Odysseus said. "Because there will be another time and place. I'm going to make sure of it."

"All right," Troi said. "Someday I'd like to know you better. I admit to curiosity about what happened to your family. In fact, it might make you feel better if you just got it off your chest now."

"That's just what I was thinking. See, there you go again."

Troi wouldn't be drawn along any farther and waited to see if he would unburden himself on his own.

"I was married when I was in the CS," he said after a pause. "I was a rising star in the service and had the highest arrest record of any officer. Worst of all, I was dead serious about what we were doing; I thought we were fighting for our lives and the lives of Rampart.

"One day I happened to have a one-eye with me when I came home. I found out my own wife, and my son, who was fifteen then, were Dissenters. They were hiding fiction in our own house. I did what a CS officer had to do-I had them arrested, and they were given the maximum penalty, they were blanked.

"I never saw them again; I wasn't allowed to. I told myself they'd been put out of their misery. But then I started to have trouble on the job. I kept blowing arrests, The CS pumped me full of military psychogens to keep me going, but I started to hate myself anyway, and I wandered off in a depression and never came back.

"Turns out some of the fiction my family'd hidden was still at the house. I found it and couldn't stop myself from reading it. The stories helped me cut through the pain. I had to have more of them, and I took up with Dissenters, just to get the stories, at first. When I actually became a Dissenter, I was Odysseus, because that was my son's favorite story.

"There have been other defectors like me. Through them I found out my wife's blanking didn't work, and they had to destroy her body. The body that was my son's belongs to a CS officer now. He wouldn't know me if he saw me. He thinks someone else is his father."

Troi felt that he was relieved to have talked about these things, and that his Odysseus persona was still strong as ever. His fascination with her was part of that Odysseus character-in order to fully live the myth, he wanted a woman from the myth-world, and she was that woman.

But he might, after all, be able to get them into CephCom. He'd once worked there, and he had a strong motive for atonement and revenge.

She asked him some questions about his mission, told him she'd accept his help getting into CephCom, and then bade him a cordial good night.

As Troi walked away she thought she had, as a counselor, figured him out pretty well. But she found herself beset by an unusual melancholy. She didn't know if it was the effect of talking with Odysseus or some spontaneous mood of her own. She remembered it had happened when she had first met him. Such strong pangs usually were symptoms and shouldn't be ignored, she knew. But she had to put it out of her mind, because there was just too much else to do.

Troi lay alone in a rough wool blanket, listening to the fugue of dripping and trickling waters, the snores and sighs of the Dissenters around her, and the occasional flapping wings of haguya high overhead.

She would be at CephCom by tomorrow. This would be her last chance to have contact with the Other-worlders. She would either find out what they were now or face Crichton without understanding what he was really about. Just getting into the CephCom building with Odysseus was not enough; she wanted options once she was there.

She lay on the cold stone, asking the Other-worlders to come, though she was sure they would put her through that icy transformation again. This time, she would let them-and maybe then she'd learn the truth.

Her teeth chattered and her body shook as she waited for the Other-worlders. She could feel their proximity; they were no farther than a footstep away, but still in their own state of being. The boulder next to her might have been the Mirror Man, the stalact.i.te above her the Lioness, but Troi could not make them reveal themselves.

She lay awake all night, waiting.

The Dissenters had walked for several hours along a rushing underground river. They were tired and thirsty.

Odysseus halted them, and went off to look for something in the rocks nearby.

The Nummo Twins climbed down to the river itself, and in a moment were pa.s.sing cups of cold, clear river water back to the other Dissenters. The draughts were accepted gratefully. There was an atmosphere of ceremony and finality to the act.

Troi was the only one who carried no books. Even the elderly Gunabibi had a sizable bundle, which now rested on the rocks next to her, along with a light but long tube of wood, apparently the hollowed branch of a tree. Though Troi didn't know what it was for, she thought the smooth, strong, ageless dark wood matched Gunabibi perfectly.

Gunabibi saw what Troi was looking at. "That is my dijiridu. A musical instrument. I'd play it for you now, but Odysseus has already told us we're getting close to the surface and we have to be quiet."

Gunabibi worked a couple of books from her bundle.

"Look at this," she said to Troi. "Look at how they're soaked from the flood at Alastor. We won't have a chance to dry them."

"You aren't taking them ..."

"Into CephCom? No. We're going to hide them here. That's what Odysseus is looking for; a hiding place. Even if the CS read our minds they'd have trouble finding some nondescript pile of rocks down here."

She opened one of the books to see if the pages could be unstuck. It was a richly ill.u.s.trated volume on Egyptian mythology and art. Troi glanced at one of the pictures and felt as though her heart had stopped.

For several seconds her shock at what she saw prevented her from speaking.

The picture was of one of the Other-worlders. The Lioness.

Gunabibi, unaware of Troi's stare, started to turn the page.

"Wait!" said Troi. "Who is that a picture of?"

"Sekhmet, the mythological Egyptian lion-G.o.ddess. She is a symbol of the heat of the desert sun, life-taking and life-giving."

Troi asked Gunabibi to tell her more. What she heard left no doubt that the mythological Sekhmet, and the Other-worlder Troi had called the Lioness, were one and the same.

Troi felt as though she were on the verge of discovering something she'd known, unconsciously, all along. She suddenly wanted to know if all the Other-worlders could be found in the waterlogged books.

She asked Gunabibi about the Mirror Man and the Matriarch-voice.

Gunabibi brought out a book and found Troi a picture of Tezcatlipoca the Dark Mirror, who was from Aztec myth and personified the savage, shadowy, militaristic side of humans-a sort of heart-of-darkness warrior who appeared to the night-bound wayfarer. Tezcatlipoca and the Mirror Man were one and the same.

The Matriarch and her mate, Gunabibi suggested, were the symbolic Mother Earth and Father Cosmos-Gaia and Ouranos of the Greeks, Maka-akan and Nagi Tanka of the Lakota, Awitelin Tsita and Apoyan Ta'chu of the Zuni.

There were small differences between all these myth characters and the beings Troi had encountered as the Other-worlders; but fundamentally, in their meanings and actions, they were the same.

Troi remembered the vision of the Other-worlders she'd had in Alastor, the vision of the great crowd of aliens. Now she realized that they, with their outlandish appearances, their many species and forms, might have all been characters from human imagination.

She started looking through other books that Gunabibi had laid out on the rocks. Once, every few pages, she would see an image that corresponded with an "Other-worlder" she'd encountered. As soon as she finished with one book, she went on to the next. She felt driven to understand as much as possible before the books were hidden.

Altogether, she went through dozens of books without being aware of time or of the other Dissenters.

At a certain moment she looked up and saw the huge pile of books that she'd looked through and cast down next to her.

Gunabibi and Coyote were putting more books down for her to look at, a.s.sembly-line style. Troi hadn't even been aware of their help.

Then she realized that all the other Dissenters had gathered around to watch her.

Odysseus laughed. "I'm sure we're all glad that you've taken such an interest in the literature of Earth. Is there something we can help you find?"

Troi looked at the scattered books, some of them wet, some of them falling apart but for makeshift string bindings, some of them just falling apart.

It took another few moments for her to remove her attention from the question of the Other-worlders and place herself mentally back with the people around her. They waited patiently.

"I'm sorry," she said finally. "I should have remembered how precious these books are to you. I hope I didn't damage them."

"Don't worry," said Odysseus, "Coyote was watching you as sharply as a ... coyote. He made sure you weren't hurting anything-at least no more than was necessary to find what you needed."

"But I shouldn't have hurt them at all."

Coyote, who was standing next to Troi, spoke up.

"Deanna, what good would they be if n.o.body read them? Now did you find what you needed, or will it be necessary to unpack everything?"

At first she thought he was being sarcastic. Then she realized he was quite serious; the Dissenters were ready to let her look through every book they had, no questions asked.

"I think I've seen what I needed to see," she said. "There was something I'd misunderstood, but now I think I understand. Thank you."

"You are welcome, as a fellow Dissenter," said Coyote, as he and Gunabibi started to pack away the books.

Troi waited for them to finish. She hadn't told them the whole truth. Actually, she didn't fully understand what she had just discovered.

If the Other-worlders were mythological characters that had somehow gotten stuck in her mind, characters of great vividness that she was compelled to remember and imagine, then why?

Perhaps they were actual living beings of some kind that had a will of their own?

And what about Crichton? If the Other-worlders were not aliens, and were in fact characters from literature and mythology, then was Crichton, the Director of Cephalic Security, guilty of the supposed crime he was charged with eradicating-the "crime" of imagination?

Troi again strained to remember what had happened that day on the Enterprise with Oleph and Una, just before she first experienced the Other-worlders. But her amnesia still covered that memory like a blanket of fog.

The Dissenters finished hiding the books and were ready to go. They stood for a moment, their stillness in contrast with the rush of the river.

Troi guessed they were saying good-bye to the caves. Some kind of era was ending. Dissenters had lived down here for two hundred years. Maybe these were the last.

Odysseus was the first to move.

The group followed the broad-shouldered, bearded man. After some slow climbing through broken scree, they emerged at a flat place, where the river rushed past a smooth concrete wall, the nether-surface of CephCom itself.

There would be no more time for Troi to solve the mystery of the Other-worlders.

Chapter Thirteen.

THE BLIND WOMAN standing before the a.s.sembly bench played its microwelder like a musical instrument. Geordi stood nearby to check her progress.

It was a sonata of love and fury, as intense as her ecstasies with her guitar. The Cyclops-buster machine was taking shape with time-lapse rapidity under her sensor-tipped fingers. Geordi knew this struggle to save the ship had a personal dimension for Chops.

For her, a progressive musician, Rampart was the great destroyer of all art-the Censor. She'd been known to put her life on the line to defy it. Once, before she joined Starfleet, her band accepted an invitation to play on a non-Federation planet where food and eating were considered shockingly obscene, and by law, eating had to be done in private.

When Chops' band played there she made sure all lyrics of food remained uncensored in their songs. Some members of the audience attacked the band and the Vulcan keyboardist had to use the nerve-pinch to defend Chops. The band were all arrested and taken to trial, where the Tellarite drummer defiantly answered all questions with luscious descriptions of gourmet dishes, and even smuggled in a sandwich which he produced and tried to eat while on the witness stand. The Federation had a difficult time negotiating the band's release.

Chops hadn't laughed when she told the story. She said that censorship just as ridiculous had been applied to artists, writers, and rock musicians in the twentieth century and that some of them had even been targeted for death because of it.

Now, as Geordi watched the frenetic movements of her hands, he knew no one on the ship could build the Cyclops-buster faster than Chops, but he doubted it would be fast enough. A call from Wentz, on the bridge, supplied confirmation.

"The one-eyes almost got into Impulse a minute ago. I think it's the same pair that got into Warp Engineering, the same locksmith and escort. We can tell by the dents; the soldier-escort has had dents since Worf tried to ambush them."

"You're telling me Worf actually laid hands on it, Lieutenant?"

"Don't know, sir. He hasn't been awake to tell us. But it looks like they're about to make another try and I think this time they'll get in."

"Have you tried fluctuating the temperature around them?"