Riker sat next to her on the couch, close but not too close, trying to remind himself that he was speaking as her captain, not her husband. That was why he’d come to her in her office. “You must have known that we’d need your empathy when the time came. Your own reports said that emotion seemed to be their primary form of communication.”

“I know, Will…I’ve just been hoping to avoid it.”

He paused, choosing his words. “You told me, back on the Enterprise,that contact with the jellies was a beautiful experience. Exhilarating, you called it.”

“When they were happy, yes. But even then it was overpowering. And I was a different person then.” She looked inward. “You can’t know what it’s like…having another being’s emotions forced into you like that. Even though it’s not intentional or malicious, it’s still…like being inundated, swept away in a flood. Being totally helpless to control or resist it…”

To hell with protocol,Will thought, and took her in his arms. “Imzadi,”he said, and then nothing more for a moment. Then he pulled back and met her eyes. “Deanna…your ability to, to connect with others…to share in their feelings, accept them inside yourself and help others understand them…it’s your gift. You’ve used it to heal minds, to build bridges, to prevent wars and save lives. It’s your strength, Deanna. Your strength has always come from letting others in, not blocking them out.” He stroked her cheek. “Don’t let Shinzon take that away from you.”

She gazed at him for a long moment, a smile gradually growing. “You’re not so bad a healer yourself, you know.”

“Just something that rubbed off from my wife.”

“Hey, no rubbing during work hours.”

“Ahh…there’s the rub.”

After Will left, Deanna darkened the room, meditated for a few minutes to center herself, and then opened her mind. Her awareness expanded, letting in the emotional voices/flavors/colors of the rest of the crew (all except Dr. Bralik, of course, since she couldn’t read Ferengi). She took a moment to acknowledge them, acclimate to them, and filter them out of her perceptions. Along the way, she noted a faint twinge of awareness that she had sensed growing stronger over the past weeks—little Totyarguil down in sickbay. Such a pure little voice, all feeling, no thought, no taint of damage from the world yet, the empathic equivalent of untrodden snow—save for the vaguely registered trauma of his mother’s accident, the premature labor, the transporter surgery. But the turmoil had been brief and quickly eased by the comforting conditions of his artificial womb, and his still-forming mind had all but forgotten it. Now there was only a vague sense of incongruity about his existence, but one within the bounds of comfort: This is not my home. This is different. But it will do.

Deanna latched on to that pure tone as a model, willed her own mental state to the same smoothness, the same blankness open to input from the world. White snow, white paper, white light, racing outward unencumbered by mass or time, her awareness spreading through space, pervading it, a cosmic background immanence. Here I am,she declared by being—white snow, paper, light, awaiting footprints, writing, silhouettes. Diaphanous silhouettes, dancing shadow puppets trailing wispy, waving tendrils— here I am, awaiting you.

But nothing came. Time was subjective in this state, but the durationof the silence became palpably greater. Deanna looked at herself from without, asking herself if her timidity, her fear of losing control was holding her back. She searched her mind for self-sabotaging doubts and fears, did her best to smooth them out and leave only pure white. But still nothing came, and at length, on opening her eyes and existing within her skull once again, she had to conclude that the problem was perhaps not with her mind, but with her brain. Although the star-jellies were powerful transmitters, perhaps her Betazoid-sized brain was too small and weak a receiver at this range, and too weak a transmitter to catch their attention. She needed amplification.

Which brought her to Orilly Malar. “Thank you for seeing me, Cadet,” she said when the Irriol arrived in response to her page. She shook Orilly’s trunk in greeting and invited her in. “Please, sit,” she said, offering her a low floor cushion. The quadrupedal cadet thanked her and settled down on her haunches, then blinked her big black eyes inquisitively at the counselor. Deanna took a moment to drink in the Irriol’s features, her rounded head and golden pangolin scales, and found herself with a sudden craving for pineapples.

Deanna explained her problem, then said to the cadet, “I think that your people’s gestalt abilities could be helpful here. You could join me and the ship’s other psi-sensitives into a larger network of sorts, like an array of telescopes, and together we’d be more sensitive than I can be alone. Perhaps we could be strong enough to send a signal that would get the star-jellies’ attention and bring them to us.”

Orilly fidgeted, twisting her trunks together. “What you ask…it would be better if you had another Irriol. I am…not someone you should trust with a gestalt.”

“I know you’re an exile, a criminal by your people’s laws. But your service to Starfleet has been exemplary. I know you can be trusted.” She knew, indeed, that even the most malicious Irriol criminal could be trusted to serve Irriol interests offworld in order to earn points toward freedom from exile, since the desire to return home was an instinctive need, overriding all other concerns. But there was nothing in Orilly’s psych profile to indicate any malicious drives, and the nature of her crime was still unclear to Deanna.

“Not with this, I cannot,” Orilly said. “Failure of gestalt…it is at the heart of my crime.”

“Can you try to explain to me what your crime was?”

“It is not easy. Perhaps as an empath, though, you can understand better. I will try.”

Orilly explained as best she could, with both words and empathic impressions. She strove to convey to Deanna what life was like on Lru-Irr. It was not only the Irriol themselves who shared the empathic gestalt; it was allthe life of their world, everything sophisticated enough to have a nervous system—and, many Irriol believed, even the simplest plants and microbes, even the planet itself. All the life-forms of Lru-Irr sensed each other, knew each other, cooperated in an intricate, symbiotic dance of life and death, predation and submission, dependence and giving. The Irriol had never considered themselves above nature, but a part of it, the mind within Lru-Irr’s body, giving awareness to the whole and tending its needs. It was the embodiment of the old Gaia principle, Deanna recognized, a biosphere as a cooperating whole, almost a single organism. Animals didn’t quite fling themselves into their predators’ jaws, but the sick and elderly of a pack would often choose not to flee, sacrificing themselves for their fellows and also serving to feed their predators. Yet this happened less often when the predators were fuller and stronger. The needs of the whole and the interests of the one were given equal consideration—although that made it sound more conscious than it was. The creatures of Lru-Irr simply feltwhat was called for, felt how the patterns of the gestalt combined and affected the moment, and reacted as much in response to that as to their own individual drives—which were, after all, only part of the Whole.

The catch was intelligence. Sapient beings had more power of choice, a more complex range of responses than creatures of instinct. Irriol felt the gestalt as much as any animal, and it influenced their choices even when they did not know why; but sometimes choices were made in defiance of gestalt, and the balance was disrupted.

Orilly told Deanna of a day when she and her little sister were on a trip to the islands, and fell in a ravine while out exploring. She sprained a trunk, while her sister broke a leg and several ribs. A voliro,a local predator, came near, and she feltits need, its place in the gestalt. She filled in what she could for Deanna, contextualizing her instinctive awareness with specific knowledge she’d gained after the fact. The island’s ecosystem had been damaged by shifts in the climate which brought heavy storms and unwonted cold. The volirowas one of the last of its kind on the island. It was pregnant, but half-starved; one meal would make the difference between its litter’s life and death. If the litter died, there would not be enough of the animals left to limit the population of a small rodentlike creature. Out of control, the rodents would consume the roots of the local flora, killing them. Other species in the gestalt would normally feel the imbalance and react to restore it; but it was isolated, out of reach of other predators. The Irriol would do what they could, but only so many resources could be spared. If the voliro’s litter died, the region’s ecology would be damaged. Many creatures of multiple species would die. The local Irriol village, a community of hundreds, would also have to relocate in time.