Dark Mirror by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page B

that remained stubbornly shadowy. Right now, though, the shadows were deep.
    She breathed out as she worked over her padd, transferring its readings to the computer, then glanced up at the two security people standing on either side of the bed. “Brendan,” she said to Ryder, “that arm giving you any more trouble?”
    He shook his head, smiling slightly. “That last regeneration did the trick.”
    “Good. Stop breaking it, now.” She smiled briefly at Mirish and headed for her office, pausing a moment as the sickbay door hissed open. It was Jean-Luc; behind him came Geordi.
    “Doctor?” said the captain.
    “I’m ready for you, Captain,” she said, and together they went into her office. The doors shut behind them. “Or as ready as I’m going to be, since this is not one of my more cooperative clients.”
    She sat down and turned her deskviewer so that they could both see it. “Well,” Picard said. “Obviously, the question becomes, who is he?”
    “His DNA fingerprint identifies him as Mark Stewart. There is no mistake about that.”
    Picard breathed out. “Unfortunately,” Beverly said, “his
body
does not confirm that identification.”
    Picard looked at her thoughtfully. “In what way?”
    Beverly touched the console, sat back, and watched the data scroll. “This is Mark Stewart’s medical record. He’s had some minor troubles.” She paused the display and pointed. “Since he’s one of the ship’s flora specialists, he winds up on a lot of away teams, and he’s picked up the occasional bug planetside. The worst was a bad case of chronic paronychia—it’s a disorder of the nail beds, usually fungal. He picked up an ‘abetter’ organism on a survey to 1212 Muscae IV: the alien mycete chummed up with a more normal fungus, something a lot of us carry in us routinely, and the two potentiated one another and infected his fingernails badly. Took me a while to knock it down. Mark also has an old complex fracture of the ulna, from falling out of a tree while taking samples.” She chuckled. “Seems the tree spoke to him.”
    Picard looked surprised. “Delusional?”
    “
He
wasn’t. The
tree
was, though. But that’s another story. Anyway…” Beverly touched a control; another human-body graphic came up. “This is the scan of the man on the bed out there. He shows signs of the paronychia—just as the first Mark Stewart does; his nails have some additional ridges on them because of trauma to the nail beds. But
this
man has no trace of the old ulnar fracture… and such things cannot be made to vanish without trace, even with our technology. Properly healed bone always shows some slight sign of the heal, the ‘callus,’ whether you help it with a protoplaser or a splint. More tothe point… this man has no appendix; our own Mark Stewart does.” She sighed and sat back again. “So if you’re going to ask me, ‘Is this Mark Stewart?’… then I’m afraid the answer is yes and no.”
    She watched Jean-Luc digest that. “Has he said anything?”
    “He made a rude remark about having heard about what happens to my guinea pigs, which I took merely clinical note of. But he’s said nothing since: he’s become the classic unresponsive patient, though not withdrawn—I see him peeking out from under those ‘closed’ eyes every now and then. He won’t answer questions, though.”
    Picard sat quiet.
    “There’s something else I don’t like the look of, though I don’t know quite what to make of it. The neural diagnostic routines turned up some near-systemic damage in our duplicate out there. It’s very low-level stuff—myelin-sheath damage, some minor mononeuropathies, some involvement of dermatomes… and I’m not sure what would cause such a presentation. If the trauma were more serious, I would suspect something like Hansen’s disease, or even neurotransmitter-substance abuse. But it’s
not
that serious, and I have no diagnosis.”
    “Which annoys you,” Picard said, and smiled