Caretaker (15 page)

Quarters. What an interesting study in the power of language when a room can go from hospital to containment cell to quarters all in the span of a single day. Kim held out his arm to display the discolored growths littering his skin. “What’s wrong with us? What are these things?”

“We really don’t know,” the doctor admitted, obviously uncomfortable with the question. Brightening somewhat forcibly, he continued, “You must be hungry. Would you care to join me in the courtyard for a meal?”

The very mention of food clutched at Kim’s stomach with hunger.

It had been a long time since he had even smelled the holographic corn bread at the Array’s family picnic. He stole a glance at Torres, and found her looking a bit wistful, too, at the suggestion. “Give us a minute to change,” he told the doctor.

The Ocampa nodded agreeably, and scampered back out the door.

“I think he’s lying,” Torres announced the moment they were alone again.

Kim laughed wryly as he shook out a pair of loose trousers and held them in front of him for size. “Lying? About what? He hasn’t even told us anything yet.”

“About our being free to go.” She managed to make even that simple statement sound like an epithet. Turning her back to Kim, she tore off her gown and started shrugging into a long tunic.

“About not knowing what’s wrong with us.” She paused to stare down at herself in dour reflection. “If they didn’t do this to us, then who did?”

“Maybe nobody.” Kim passed her the second pair of trousers and waited while she stepped into them. “Maybe we just picked up something.”

Torres growled what was either an oath or an animal snarl. “I don’t like him.”

I never said I liked him, Kim thought. But he left Torres to her private steaming as he led the way out into the hall.

The doctor greeted them with a broad grin, but stopped himself just short of touching them. In a flash of pointless memory, Kim knew the Ocampa’s hands would be warm, and deliciously gentle.

He shook the image off with an effort.

“I’m so happy to see you up and about,” the doctor assured them.

He waved them down the dim, unadorned hallway, then fell into step beside Kim. “Treating visitors is always difficult, no matter how careful and clever we try to be.”

Kim exchanged a look with Torres. She made a face, obviously remembering the same archaic treatments as he. “If we’re not prisoners,” Kim told the doctor in as friendly a tone as possible, “we’d like to return to our ships and our own doctors.”

A sorrowful expression melted across the doctor’s face. “That isn’t possible. You see, there’s no way to get to the surface.”

Torres impaled him with a dark glare. “What do you mean, `to the surface’?” But Kim saw the answer even as the words came out of her mouth, and the doctor stayed wisely silent as they stepped from the dreary tunnel into the greater light of artificial day.

The city stretched farther than Kim could see, arching gradually downward until it disappeared beneath a horizon closer than any surface planetary horizon Kim had ever seen. Walkways and ramps and mechanized stairways glittered back and forth between the spare buildings—like webs, spun by the drifting antigrav platforms, to hold the weary place together beneath the great weight of stone and earth that formed the sky above it. Even the people dotting the scene seemed tired and worn.

They rode the sliding walkways as though not interested in finding their own ways to destinations, the uniform noncolor of their clothing in odd contrast to the studied differences carefully built into each of their outfits. Kim wondered if the addition of birds, or trees, or grass, or flowers would help the place look more alive.

Probably not. The lack of spirit rested in the quiet conformity with which the Ocampa went about their small, cheerless duties.

Besides, whatever painted the pale, bluish light across this cavelike world wasn’t a singular source—it probably didn’t produce enough radiant energy to keep algae alive.

“We’re underground …” Kim meant to say something more meaningful, but couldn’t stop the amazed exclamation from escaping.

The doctor nodded, apparently understanding of the ensign’s surprise.

“Our society is subterranean. We’ve lived here for over five hundred generations.”

“But before that—” Torres must have heard the same unfinished longing in the doctor’s tone. “—you lived on the surface?”

He nodded. “Until the Warming began.”

“The warming?” Kim asked.

“When the surface turned into a desert, and the Caretaker came to protect us.” Cutting himself off, the doctor stepped down toward one of the many moving walkways, but stopped before actually mounting it.

He glanced back as though expecting them to follow, and Kim tugged impatiently at Torres’s arm. He was hungry for answers even more than for food, and was glad when the Maquis came along without protest. The doctor smiled as they caught up to him, then led the way deeper into the sterile city.

“Our ancient journals tell us he opened a deep chasm in the ground,” he explained, looking at the Ocampa passing around them instead of directly at his patients, “and led our ancestors to this place. He has provided for all our needs since then.”

Which didn’t include the infusion of much brightness or color, as near as Kim could tell. And if the place had been any more silent, it would have made Kim want to scream. Leaning around Torres, he tried to see beyond the nearest archway for some sign of people congregating, socializing, talking, and found himself facing a small crowd of Ocampa who stared back at him with frank curiosity. They touched each other and glanced among themselves as though exchanging the same gossip and niceties as any other social gathering, only silently. So silently.

“Please forgive them.” The doctor moved in front of Kim with a bobbed apology, shooing the spectators on their way. “They know you’ve come from the Caretaker. None of us has ever seen him.”

He hesitated as the knot of people gradually cleared, revealing a softly lighted plaza crissed and crossed by a long queue of patiently waiting Ocampa. “Oh.” The doctor raised up on tiptoe to see across the quiet gathering. “I’m afraid one of the food dispensers has failed again. The service attendant must be busy elsewhere.” Pushing gently through the chain of people, the doctor startled Kim with the sound/feeling of his voice the way Kim had first experienced it the day before. (Would you please excuse us?) Maybe the silence in this underground city wasn’t so unhealthy for the Ocampa after all.

All around them, people glanced up as the doctor’s words touched them, their pale faces turning toward Kim and Torres like flowers toward a distant sun. Kim returned their wondering stares with a nervous smile, feeling oddly guilty for their attentions. When he and Torres reached the front of the line, the doctor reached around the first Ocampa in the queue and lifted the door to an innocuous wall unit so he could slide out two trays of moist, textureless food. It look distressingly like dog food, and it smelled like nothing much at all. Kim wrinkled his nose but didn’t comment, and passed one tray along to Torres as the doctor darted forward to liberate a third from the open dispenser unit.

The trays, the utensils, even the lumpy mounds of processed protein, could have all been holographic clones of each other, for all the difference between them.

Torres scowled at her slop as though contemplating being sick over it.

“Does he provide your meals, too?”

Despite the edge in Torres’s voice, the Ocampa doctor smiled while he led them off the plaza toward a sea of neat, gray tables. “In fact, he does. He designed and built this entire city for us after the Warming.

The food processors dispense nutritional supplements every four-point-one intervals.” He looked at his own plate with a wistful tip of his head. “It may not offer the exotic tastes some of our young people crave these days, but it meets our needs.”

Whether that said more about the Ocampa’s needs, or about their Caretaker’s sensitivity to them, Kim didn’t care to speculate.

A monitor as long and tall as Voyager’s main viewscreen hung above the sprawl of tables, sprinkling the subterranean darkness with gentle images from a world these people could never have known from the insides of this huge stone tomb. Oceans and rivers flowed in idyllic splendor beneath a ripple of soothing music; forests and prairies melted softly over the watery images, until some small foraging rodent dominated the screen as it dug through a carpet of autumn leaves. All around the eating zone, placid Ocampa studied the ever-changing pictures with almost hypnotic intensity.

Kim nodded at the screen as he slid into a seat the doctor offered.

“Is this how the Caretaker communicates with you?”

Glancing in the direction of Kim’s nod, the doctor shook his head and sat as well. “He never communicates directly. We try to interpret his wishes as best we can.”

“I’m curious …” Kim forced his eyes away from the weirdly captivating images, only to find himself drawn to a bank of similar screens on the opposite end of the alcove. He made himself focus on the Ocampa doctor instead. Torres remained stubbornly fixated on her food. “I’m curious to know how you’ve interpreted the Caretaker’s reason for sending us here.”

The doctor twirled what looked like a fork in the midst of his mash in an oddly human gesture of introspection. “We believe he must have separated you from your own species for their protection.”

Torres slammed her utensils to the table with a crash. “Their protection?”

“From your illness.” The doctor glanced uncertainly between them as Kim reached across to close his hand around her wrist.

“Perhaps he is trying to prevent a plague.”

“We weren’t sick until we met your Caretaker,” Torres pointed out.

Kim squeezed her wrist—hard—and earned a vicious glare from Torres right before she twisted effortlessly out of his grip and crushed his own hand in her fist. Refusing to give her the satisfaction of seeing him in pain, he ignored the discomfort as best he could and asked the doctor, “Why would he send us to you if he thought this is an infectious disease?”

“He must know we’re immune. From time to time, he asks us to care for people with this disease. It’s the least we can do to repay his—” Torres released her hold on Kim to lunge across the table toward the doctor. “There have been others like us?”

The doctor jerked back in his seat, blinking in surprise. “Yes …”

“Where are they?”

He straightened carefully, and looked Torres firmly in the eye as he pushed the remnants of his meal to one side. “Your condition is very serious,” he explained, carefully, as though thinking hard before he chose each word. “We don’t know exactly how to treat it.” He looked from Torres to Kim with a certain grim steadiness. “I’m afraid the others did not recover.”

Tuvok realized he should have anticipated problems when Neelix’s warbled “Come in!” answered his signal at a volume below what human ears could have heard. Removed by several rooms, he instantly deduced from the slight Doppler shift and loss of harmonic complexity. And distracted by some other attention-intensive activity. Tuvok determined that he lacked sufficient data to speculate as to the nature of that activity, so let himself into Neelix’s quarters as requested under the assumption that Neelix was not averse to interruptions.

The inside of the cabin smelled like a charnel house.

A moment’s inspection revealed a majority of the stench emanating from the charred remains of some unfortunate creature, whose partially deconstructed skeleton had been displaced across the table, the bedding, the floor. Aware that his distaste for meat was a cultural and species-related bias, Tuvok carefully relocated the associated negative connotations to a portion of his brain that would not interfere with his ability to deal civilly with their visitor. His equally strong preferences for hygiene were not so easily subverted, however. Picking his way primly between piles of clothing, scatters of half-eaten fruit, and pitcher after pitcher of water, Tuvok had nearly dissociated from his physical self by the time he reached the bathroom door.

What he had taken at first for the squealing of heat-stressed water pipes was now more clearly discernible as some primitive musical construction. Tuvok thought it not unlike the wails Xerxes howler bats used to stun the lyre birds that were their primary prey. It seemed unlikely that Neelix had managed—or desired—to smuggle a howler bat onto the ship so far away from Federated space, but a renewed whooping from inside the roiling cloud of steam made it impossible for Tuvok to completely discount this hypothesis.

Pausing on the bathroom threshold, Tuvok spent only 7.05 seconds attempting to see past the wall of steam. Then, when it occurred to him that perhaps he wasn’t truly interested in observing whatever went on inside it, he summoned simply, “Sir?,” and waited for Neelix to disengage himself from whatever communion he and the howler bat were sharing.

Liquid splashed an instant’s clarity through the steam as Neelix surged to the surface in a tub already overfilled with what appeared to be scalding hot water. “Mr. Vulcan! Come in, come in!” He smiled broadly, leaping sloppily to his feet to wave Tuvok forward with both arms.

In that instant, Tuvok learned more about the anatomy of Neelix’s species than he had ever wanted to know.

“Please—I can hardly see you!”

How unfortunate that the limitation didn’t go both ways.

Lifting his eyes to a point in the steam cloud several centimeters above Neelix’s spotted head, Tuvok took a single precise step farther into the bathroom and folded his hands behind his back.

That little bit of capitulation was apparently enough. “I want to thank you for your hospitality,” the lumpy little alien enthused. “I must admit, I haven’t had access to a … a food replor—replicator before.”

Tuvok raised an eyebrow. “I would never have guessed.”

“And to immerse yourself in water!” He flopped back into his tub with a great splash. Tuvok horrified himself by flinching, however imperceptibly, when a spray of hot wetness lashed across the front of his uniform. “Do you know what a joy this is?”