Star Trek - TNG - 08 - The captain's Honor
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Sejanus ...
He was out there somewhere, Picard knew, still
pursuing his ambitions, undoubtedly planning
to pursue his mad dreams, to reclaim his lost
honor.
Picard doubted that he would ever know exactly
what motivations had driven Captain
Lucius Aelius Sejanus. That
Sejanus was truly a madman, Picard
did not doubt--but underlying the madness there had
been a brilliance and a capacity to make things
happen of a sort which altered the course of
civilizations.
Alexander, Picard thought. Julius
Caesar. Saladin. Napoleon. Gandhi.
Hitler. Schroeder. Colonel Green.
Kahless. Cochrane. Surak. Tagore.
It's such a fine line ...
Perhaps, as well, it was another case of power
corrupting? For Magna Roma to leap from the
equivalent of twentieth to twenty-fourth
century Earth technology in eighty years
had to be a heady, destabilizing experience.
To find oneself with so much power, so quickly ...
It could change a man--even one who had
passed Starfleet's strict psychological
tests.
And yet there was more.
For within Captain Sejanus there
had also been something else which, perhaps, only
Captain Picard could fully understand.
It was nothing he could name, nor did he
want to.
"But in Lucius Aelius Sejanus,"
he whispered aloud into the silence of his cabin,
"there was much of Jean-Luc Picard."
He stared at his desk, at his hands lying
folded atop it.
Our hands and our minds, he thought. These are
what make us human. What our minds can
imagine, for good or ill, our hands can build.
And from then on, there are no limits.
Outside the Enterprise were uncounted
gleaming stars, and things that had yet to be
understood, and the absolute silence of space.