Troi found herself in a large round cave-chamber filled with stalact.i.tes and stalagmites. Interspersed among the natural columns were statues, a whole forest of them. The stone figures were variously rough-hewn and finely worked, of many styles made by many different hands. Troi recognized some figures-Polynesian, African, Hindu, Greek. Light-stones, set along the walls, provided insufficient light for the large s.p.a.ce, and the statues seemed wrapped in their own shadows.

A giant strongman big enough for a circus moved the door-stone back into position behind Troi, then sat down to chisel with makeshift tools at one of the statues.

Another figure approached.

Troi found his age hard to estimate. He was broad-shouldered and had striking blue eyes, but his beard was flecked with gray and his face was well-weathered. His knee-length tunic was ragged. He spoke to the two who brought Troi.

"Rhiannon, Caliban, give yourself a meal," he said. "Call the Nummo twins to patrol outside."

"I'll wait so we can eat together," Rhiannon said to Troi, in a charmingly bossy tone that indicated Troi had better fulfill the appointment. Then the girl and her soiled companion disappeared into the statue garden.

The bearded man examined Troi with a cool stare.

She could sense his circ.u.mspection and self-confidence. A commander of some kind, she guessed. Her mental feelers sensed an indomitable will or guiding principle, strong enough to hold dominion over everything else within him.

"I'm Odysseus," he said.

He waited for her to speak.

"I'm Deanna," she said, and strained to feel his most private emotional strata.

She found a shamed, suffering man.

She was reminded of an incident on Rastaban III. She had been watching a performance of the royal pantomime actors. One of the actors' masks had fallen off, and she'd looked straight into the face of a cruelly beaten, humiliated slave.

Her feeling was quite sorrowful, and it had showed on Troi's face, then and now.

"What's the matter?" asked Odysseus.

"Nothing."

As their eye contact continued a moment longer she became aware of something else in him, a longing. It seemed to be directed at her, though Odysseus showed no outward sign of it. It was subsumed, like his suffering, under some great guiding force, a confidence and strength which she still didn't understand.

Two tall African men, apparently twins, came out of the thicket of statues. They said something to Odysseus in a language Troi didn't recognize. The huge guard moved the door-stone so the twins could leave, then heaved it back in place.

Odysseus watched Troi as if gauging her reaction, and said, "They are the Nummo, named after mythological water-deities of the West African Dogon people."

"I see."

"This gentleman guarding the door is Nikitushka Lomov, the Volga barge-hauler of the Byliny epics."

Troi waited to see where Odysseus was leading.

"Are you a Dissenter?" he asked.

"No, but I a.s.sume you are."

"I am."

"Then I can't join your group. I'm a traveler, and I'm looking for my friends who are prisoners of the CS. I would be thankful for any information you might give me that would help. That's all I can say."

"Why aren't you looking among the CS? Why are you here?"

"I knew there were tunnels that would lead me in the right direction. I didn't know there were people down here."

"But you do now. You know the location of Alastor. That means we can't risk letting you go, because you could be a CS informer. You'll have to stay with us, at least for now."

He said it as though he were annoyed, but Troi perceived that he was actually glad she would have to stay.

"I don't think you understand," she said. "Lives depend on me. The CS will execute my people if I don't help them immediately."

"What did they do? Are they Dissenters?"

"No-but they have violated the same laws that your Dissenters do."

"But you still can't tell me who you are."

"That's for your protection as well as mine."

"Then for my protection, you'll have to stay," said Odysseus.

"But you saw my reaction when you mentioned those mythological characters. You were testing me."

"I was. It meant little. The CS have tricked us before; you could be another trick."

"You don't believe I'm a trick. And why should I believe you? If you're Odysseus, where is your ship and crew? And do you have a wife named Penelope, and a son named Telemachos?"

His face grew as hard as the statues behind him.

"I don't want to talk about my wife and son. All you need to know about me is that I'm Odysseus. I'm different than the other people who live here. They're experts in many stories, but I actually am a story."

Now Troi could sense his emotions in greater detail. She understood that the mythical Odysseus persona, with its strength and determination, its quality of being 'never at a loss,' served as a support, a guiding principle on which he leaned the full weight of his life's suffering.

And his suffering had something to do with his wife and son. She'd sensed that quite clearly when he spoke of them.

"If I were from the CS," she said, "would I have asked you that question-with those mythical names?"

"You're tired," he said, ignoring her question. "Let me show you where you can rest."

He started to walk.

Troi didn't let herself become angry, but kept her emotional distance from the situation. She was trapped for the time being; there was no way she could get past that huge guard and the door boulder. a.s.suming there was no other exit-and she intended to check that if she could-then the best she could do was to figure Odysseus out and get his cooperation.

She put herself in her clinical frame of mind-something she did so often in her life it was reflex-but now, for some reason, it produced in her an unfamiliar aching melancholy. She didn't stop to think about her unusual mood, and kept her mind on the task at hand.

"Wait. Odysseus didn't imprison anybody," she said. "Why can you?"

"He trapped, in his own house, those who plotted against him," said Odysseus. "Anyway, even if I let you leave, you'd stand no chance on your own. No chance without our help, and for that you'd have to become a Dissenter."

He started to walk into the crowd of stone figures.

He looked back and saw that she hadn't moved.

"Are you going to stand there all night?" he laughed.

She followed, wondering if he ever let this mask of self-confidence fall, and if he did, would the man beneath be any more manageable?

They proceeded up a little stair and left the great chamber of statues. Neither of them noticed the lens staring from the small hole in the ceiling of the stairwell.

The one-eye had homed in on the infrared warmth from Alastor, and found its way from the main cave pa.s.sage to this vantage point. It had hovered near the hole like a bee, the rocks around it blocking its hum but also its ability to intercept brain waves. Still, its lens and shotgun-microphone had gathered a lot of good data.

Now it floated away from the hole, back to the main pa.s.sage outside Alastor. There, in the shadows of the mighty stalact.i.tes, it reported back by radio transmission to the waiting CS squad.

Odysseus showed Troi into a private little cave-room and left her there to rest. After a few minutes she snuck out, and, finding no guard, wandered along a narrow pa.s.sage, looking for an escape option. Instead, she found Odysseus' own cave-room.

He wasn't aware she was peering in at him. He was standing in front of a wall papered with old torn ill.u.s.trations and book covers, images from the story of Odysseus: the Cyclops Polyphemus, the Trojan Horse, a Bronze Age many-oared ship in a dark sea.

Near him, on a stone table, was a bowl of water. He broke his gaze away from the pictures, dipped his hands in the water, and splashed the water on his face. Then he stared some more at the picture of the Bronze Age ship.

Troi perceived his feelings. She understood that he was nourishing his Odysseus character. The sensation of the water on his face helped him to imagine himself on the many-oared ship.

So this is how he sustains the Odysseus persona, she thought. He uses all these accoutrements as artificial memory-props. She'd once read about method actors doing much the same thing.

He picked up a large rock and hefted it repeatedly over his head. A sort of strength-exercise, Troi a.s.sumed. She realized he would have to work constantly to maintain his heroic musculature.

Suddenly Troi heard the low voices of Dissenters coming up the pa.s.sage. She stole un.o.bserved back to her room.

Chapter Eight.

"SHIP'S LOG, Lieutenant Geordi La Forge recording. We have lost contact with all members of the away team, because of electronic jamming on the planet.

"I'm not prepared to send any more people to the planet's surface until we have an idea where the original team is, and we can guarantee countermeasures against the jamming. Hard to know how much the Rampartians stole from the minds of the Enterprise's crewmembers, and maybe the minds of the Huxley's too, but as commanding officer I'm making a worst-case a.s.sumption. So any countermeasures we already have may be antic.i.p.ated by the Rampartians. My Engineering staff is therefore working on new modifications to away team equipment.

"We have no recourse in using the Enterprise's main weaponry. Crichton contacted me and said that if we fired on any of his ships or anything on his planet, he would harm the captain.

"Meanwhile, the one-eyes on the ship have escaped from Security containment and are spreading out. I'm working with my staff to find a way to counter them."

Geordi rubbed his forehead. The prosthetic VISOR that covered his blind eyes and gave him visual perception-but not normal human sight-was making his head throb. The omnipresent pain seemed worse than usual.

Looking around at good old Engineering seemed a comfort, although Geordi's VISOR-acquired view of his environment would look, to a sighted person, something like a video-thermographic version of a surrealist painting.

But this was no place from which to command the ship. He touched his communicator.

"La Forge to Worf."

"Worf here."

"My cabin fever's running high."

"It is still not safe for you to attempt transit to the bridge. The route cannot be guaranteed secure from one-eyes."

"How about the battle bridge?"

"Same problem. I can't ensure your safety anywhere outside Engineering."

"Worf ... we have to balance the risks. Some risk will be necessary."

"The consequences," the deep Klingon voice said, gaining a decibel, "if a one-eye were to scan you, or kill you, are unacceptable. You are the only key officer whom the one-eyes have not yet scanned. You have more engineering knowledge than anyone on this ship. Your-"

"Okay, Worf."

"Thank you. One moment, I'm getting some new reports."

While he waited, Geordi's VISOR showed him a sudden increase in heat of a hundredth of a degree reflected off a nearby bulkhead. Someone or something was coming into the room.

The constant threat provided by the intruders on the ship had made him jumpy. He found himself rising quickly out of his chair and turning to confront the visitant.

"Chops!" he said.

For that was who had entered. Dorothy "Chops" Taylor, Geordi's most valued maintenance engineer.

As always, she looked a little wild. Her hair was as freeflowing as regulations permitted and there were hints of improbable colors in it, along with the first hint of gray. Her hands, with their metallic finger pads, flexed with everpresent, almost manic energy. The unconventional picture was completed by the dark visor which covered her eyes.

Chops was blind. Because of the particular type of congenital damage to her brain, she could not be fitted with a functional VISOR like Geordi's. Instead, she "saw" through the sensor pads on her fingers.

Her freewheeling personality was a deliberate attempt to offset the despair of her childhood.

Nearly forty years ago a race known as the Sadalsuudians, from Beta Aquarius V, made exploratory contacts with ships from the Federation. The Sadalsuudians appeared friendly. What they really wanted was not diplomatic relations but some living human reproductive cells. After the Sadalsuudians had stolen the cells they wanted, they withdrew to their own planet, got the human sperm and human egg together in vitro, and grew a human embryo as a means of observing alien genetic principles, though they had a poor understanding of genetics in general, including their own.

The result of the experiment was Dorothy Taylor. She turned out blind. The Sadalsuudians hadn't intended that, but they treated her as cruelly as their own native blind. On their planet, there was a huge population of birth-defect handicapped natives who had been forced into undercla.s.s status.

Dorothy Taylor was exhibited publicly. She was "degraded as a new kind of "inferior" being, an alien with a "mutation."

But one of the scientists who studied her saw things differently than other Sadalsuudians. He was far ahead of his time. He was the only one who had realized that the first life on his planet, the first tiny chain of nucleotides and sugars, must have been a kind of mutation on the random patterns around it, and that all subsequent evolution was also a result of mutation-of some organisms accidentally turning out a bit differently than their forebears and finding an advantage in their difference. If there had been no mutations on the first form, then all life on Beta Aquarius V would be nothing more than tiny replicating chains of nucleotides and sugars, no different than the very first. Life itself was mutation.

The scientist had tried to publish his findings but was ignored. The Sadalsuudians couldn't bear to relinquish their att.i.tudes about their "mutated" undercaste. The scientist found he couldn't change these att.i.tudes of ignorance but he managed to set one handicapped person free. He turned Dorothy back over to the Federation during a diplomatic contact.

When Geordi met Dorothy she was completing a five-year voyage as a maintenance engineer aboard the U.S.S. Feynman. Her reputation had preceded her, and Geordi took the opportunity to transfer her onto his staff.

When he was much younger he might have been uncomfortable working or socializing with another physically challenged person, particularly a blind one, as it would draw attention to his own condition. But as he became an adult, he lost that self-consciousness. He was now at ease with his blindness and with being around other blind persons. Transferring Chops Taylor to his staff was an expression of that maturity. It didn't hurt, of course, that she was the best maintenance engineer he'd ever met.

The name Chops came from her hobby. She played 28-string duotronic-enhanced guitar. "Chops," in the earliest rock-and-roll days, meant the ability to play well-a hot musician was said to "have chops."