Imzadi Forever

by Peter David

  But only as one would remember

  a bleak and distant whoa!!!”

  The last word was the result of Riker seeing that Deanna had suddenly grabbed up the vase that he had so carefully placed on the table. She swung it in a fast underhand arc and let fly. Riker barely dodged as the vase shattered against the wall next to him.

  “I read you poetry and you throw breakable objects at me in response?” he asked in astonishment. “How could you—?”

  “It felt right!” bellowed Deanna.

  “I’ll…I’ll see you back on the Enterprise…okay…?”

  “Not if I see you first!”

  Deanna flopped down onto the couch as she listened to Riker’s hastily retreating footsteps. She shook her head and sighed.

  “Either I’m going to marry him…or kill him,” she said after a time. And then she realized that the two weren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

  It made her feel a little better.

  Now

  Worf awoke with a start…and looked for Jadzia.

  She wasn’t there. Her scent remained in the chair, but she was gone. It took a moment for that fact to sink in, and when it did, he felt more empty than ever.

  Nothing. It had all been for nothing.

  He rummaged around their…

  …his…

  …quarters a bit more…and then he found a picture. A picture of the two of them from their wedding day. Worf and Jadzia, smiling toward the camera. Happy. So happy.

  For nothing.

  It had made no difference at all.

  He ran his fingers across her portrait…

  And the portrait was wet.

  He didn’t realize the origin at first…and then he did. It was liquid, coming from his own eyes, dripping onto the picture.

  And his mind suddenly went to the world of Soukara. The world where they were to meet the Cardassian informer, Lasaran…and Jadzia had become injured. Had he left her, had he completed the mission…she would have died, there on Soukara. Instead he had come back for her, abandoned the mission, tossed aside everything that he had ever learned about duty…

  …for her.

  …for Jadzia.

  Because of what he had felt for her. Feelings that were beyond anything, he realized, that he had ever felt for Deanna.

  More tears fell from his eyes and he moved the picture so it wouldn’t become wet.

  He was still Klingon. Honor was as important to him as ever. That had never lessened in him…and yet…

  …and yet…

  …his first duty had been to her. To them. To his wife, to his beloved.

  And he knew, beyond any question, perhaps with greater clarity than he had ever known before, that he would have done anything for her. That had been the plan, that they were to be together, forever and ever. Nothing could ever separate them. But she had gone away, and he had not expected it. And his first impulse had been to close off everything, to retreat once more, to look back on their life together and say it had made no difference. No difference…

  …but he was wrong.

  It had made a difference. For he felt things now, depth of emotion, passion, and the ability to covet a loving relationship beyond anything that he would once have thought possible. The death of their union did not end that. Those feelings, once tapped, could not be denied. He could try, of course. He could try and push it away…

  …but that would be wrong. Wrong for the legacy that she had left him, wrong for the man that he had always wanted to be and—thanks to her—now was.

  He held the picture tight to him and allowed the tears to cascade down his cheeks. He did not sob out loud; that would have been too much. Instead the tears flowed in eerie silence, but it didn’t matter.

  It hurt…but he didn’t mind. It was a good hurt, the kind that one can grow from and learn from if one chooses to.

  If he loved again, it could never be as it was with her. Never.

  For she had been his first.

  The first to get into his heart and soul. He realized that now. The first that he would sacrifice anything for. He would have died for her. Now he had to live for her.

  And love with another…would be different necessarily better or worse. Even though he had once said it to Alexander, only now did he truly understand. It was just different, and should be celebrated as such. And it would never diminish what they had. He would keep it close to his heart, tucked away, and even as he made his way through life, that first love would still always be there. Nothing could end that love…even the end of the lover herself.

  For he would always have in his head that first time they saw each other…the first time they held hands, the first time they kissed, the first time that their bodies pressed against each other, flesh to flesh, and they joined in a perfect union that neither time, nor distance, nor even death itself could ever take away.

  He could move on without her, but in a way, she would always be with him. A fragrant flower, gone, yet he still had the sense of her within him.

  And it would not be for nothing as long as he remembered that.

  He kissed the picture gently, and she smiled back at him. And a word came to him through the years…a word that belonged to neither his race, nor hers…and yet, somehow, it was a part of the heart and soul of all races.

  He pressed the picture against his chest, and in a voice that was deep and resonant and filled with hope for the future, he said…

  “Good journey…Imzadi…”

  A Look Inside

  Imzadi and Triangle: Imzadi II

  with Peter A. David

  Kevin Dilmore: Let’s go to 1989 and Strike Zone, your first Star Trek novel.

  Peter A. David: That was not my first foray into Star Trek; just into Star Trek novels. Predating that, depending on how far back you want to go. When I was fifteen or sixteen years old, I did some fanzine work. My first professional work for Star Trek was on the DC Comics run of Star Trek [in 1988]. The DC comic actually led to my getting the novel.

  KD: Tell us about that.

  PAD: What had happened was that the Star Trek comic license had lapsed. So the comic story that I was writing just went away. It caught me somewhat off guard, as I had started on a multiple-issue story line, which I was not able to finish. I got put together with Dave Stern, the editor [of the Pocket Books’Star Trek line] at the time, who was a big fan of my work on the Star Trek comics. We got together for lunch, and he said he’d like to talk to me about writing Star Trek novels. I said to him, “Well, there’s one I would love to do. I started a story for the Star Trek comic book, and I’d love to write an original Star Trek novel that continues and finishes up the story from the comic.” Dave said to me, “Okay, here’s the problem. I am booked up for original Star Trek novels for the next three years. However, we’ve just started up a ‘[Star Trek: The] Next Generation’ line, and we need books for that. If you can write a novel quickly, I can have you on the stands in six months.” And I said, “Did I say original Trek? I meant to say Next Generation.”

  KD: Fast thinking.

  PAD: I quickly took the entire story line that I originally intended to conclude as an original series story and converted it over into the Next Generation. I carried over one of the characters from the original comic book—and fortunately enough it was a Klingon, so I just aged him a bunch of years—and essentially told the same story but just dropped in the other characters. As a consequence, you might say that it was then very easily the longest continuing story in Star Trek because it jumped over the generations. That was the story that developed into Strike Zone.

  KD: Did the story require a lot of rewriting?

  PAD: I did, of course, do a lot of additional things to it to make it unique to the Next Generation universe. You can’t just substitute Picard for Kirk and think you’re going to tell the same story. I also wound up introducing an alien race in there called the Selelvians, who I continue to use to this day and actually are turning into somewhat of a threat to the
Federation. So, you see, waste nothing.

  KD: So, fast forward to 1991, when the concept of Imzadi was born. This was published as one of the first hardback novels for Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I assume that the first thought was to make it a big story, something that was quite an event.

  PAD: Yes. This was an idea that was presented to me. Essentially, they came to me and asked whether I would be interested in telling the story that would be the history of the Riker-Troi relationship. That certainly sounded intriguing to me. The thing is, I didn’t want it to be something just set in the past. I wanted to have some degree of resonance in “modern,” if you’ll pardon the expression, Star Trek. That’s when it occurred to me to essentially do a story that would be a reverse of [the original Star Trek series episode] “City on the Edge of Forever.” Instead of Kirk going back to set things right by allowing Edith Keeler to die, Riker was going to deliberately go back and change the world around him because he could not tolerate the notion that Deanna Troi had died.

  KD: I see.

  PAD: [Scriptwriter] Harlan Ellison’s original concept had Kirk trying to save Edith Keeler. He loved her so much that he literally was willing to let the rest of the universe go down the chute to save this woman. That’s an incredibly powerful concept. And indeed it winds up that it’s Spock who has to make sure that Edith Keeler dies, because he is the one who is nonhuman and is therefore not restricted by such things as emotion. But the sentiment was, “No, no, Kirk is the hero. Kirk can’t allow the entire universe to go down the chute for this one woman.” I always thought it would be interesting to do a story where we do just that. I put Riker in the Kirk role, and that is exactly what he is prepared to do. He is so convinced that this is a universe not worth living in, that he is willing to risk having the whole thing go right down the pipe or whatever if it means getting Deanna back. Then you have Data in the Spock role, and that just seemed to me to have a great deal of potential in terms of drama. So that’s what I went for.

  KD: Were you nervous about meeting fan expectations when dealing with not only one of the linchpins of the Next Generation in the Riker-Troi relationship but also in bringing in the Guardian of Forever?

  PAD: No, I wasn’t nervous about it because I was really confident that I had written a strong story. The further I got into the story, the more I was convinced that I really had something that the fans were really going to respond to. And it’s very rare that I have that kind of confidence. It’s not like I write a book and say, “Oh, the fans are going to love this.” Usually, I’m very, very uncertain as to what the fans will like, and I put the book out there and keep my fingers crossed. But I was pretty certain that Imzadi would strike a personal chord with the fans. There were points in the book where even I was getting choked up. The point in the book where the Riker from the future has come back to the Enterprise and he sees Deanna and he just starts to lose it…I was losing it when I was writing that scene just from the raw emotion of that sequence. In fiction, we’re almost jaded by the notion that “Someone’s dead? Well, they’ll come back. They can always come back.”

  KD: Especially in Star Trek.

  PAD: The thing is, the notion of thinking that somebody is dead—you buried him—and he is alive and here before you, the true, real emotion that that would provoke is just overwhelming, which is why I had Riker being overwhelmed by it.

  KD: And particularly in this case, given the intensity of the mental link that the two share.

  PAD: Exactly.

  KD: What else was it about the nature of that particular relationship that drew you to the project aside from being able to tell an emotionally intense story?

  PAD: The thing that is exciting about working on Star Trek is that you’re really contributing to a growing mythos. You know? Here I thought was an opportunity to contribute something really major to the mythos. If I’m writing a story that is simply an original story of mine, people will read it and get involved into what happens to those characters. But the characters of the Star Trek universe are practically mythic. It is a rare opportunity to make a substantive contribution to something that is so much bigger than yourself. So I was really eager on that basis.

  KD: And it is a story that the fans have embraced. I would imagine that if I questioned readers as to what is their favorite Peter David novel, Imzadi would figure among the top three for each person I asked.

  PAD: There have been people who have held polls for favorite Star Trek novels, and Imzadi invariably places near or at the top every single time, which obviously I am very flattered about. As I said, I really was confident that I had something magical there, but for people to respond to it as they did, even I could not have dreamed that. There’s one guy who took the poem that Riker wrote to Deanna and used it as his wedding vows. I mean, wow!

  KD: That would be pretty humbling to me.

  PAD: Yeah, I was amazed and flattered.

  KD: What kind of intensity were you drawing on yourself when writing Imzadi? I noted in the foreword that you mentioned your wife.

  PAD: To a very large degree, the book was a love letter to my then-wife. It was about the pure intensity and power of love and what it can make us do. And they always say “Write what you know.”

  KD: With Deanna being so in tune to emotion and sensitivity, do you think that makes her intrinsically a Star Trek character that embodies love?

  PAD: It certainly puts her in a unique position to be able to understand it as well as what people will do on behalf of it.

  KD: There were ramifications from Riker’s actions in Imzadi.

  PAD: Right, up to and including having Data trying to kill him.

  KD: So five or six years pass, and you are given the opportunity to write a sequel to Imzadi. Was that daunting?

  PAD: Well, daunting and annoying. You see, I didn’t want the book to be a sequel to Imzadi. I very much felt that Imzadi should be a piece in and of itself, not to mention the fact that this new concept was about Worf and Troi. My attitude was that Imzadi was Riker and Troi. If it’s Worf and Troi, it should be called something else. I really didn’t like the idea of the “sequel.” So the agreement we came to was that the title of the book would be Triangle and that it would say Imzadi II but in really small letters.

  KD: [laughs] And on the cover of my copy of the book…

  PAD: It has Imzadi II really huge and it has Triangle in really small letters, so little that I wondered why they bothered to put it on. So I don’t like viewing it as a sequel to Imzadi because the books are so different.

  KD: I think the books are radically different in tone and storytelling. But aren’t the two relationships themselves radically different?

  PAD: Well, yes. Imzadi was about the newness of relationships and the willingness to do anything and make any sacrifice on behalf of love. Whereas Imzadi II was about relationships ending. It was about loss and about the concept that love cannot conquer all. Why? Well, by that point, I was divorced. I was in the midst of a not-real-fun place in my life. Naturally, the person that I was while writing Imzadi no longer existed. I couldn’t write the same paean to love that I did the first time out because first, it would have been inappropriate in terms of the subject matter. I still felt that Troi and Worf had no business being together. And the other thing was that just from my own state of mind, that’s not where I was. To say nothing of the fact that I was not able to write the ending I wanted to write.

  KD: I had picked that sentiment up from other interviews I have read. That surprised me. You had posited a logical extension of the story ending with Riker’s marriage proposal to Troi.

  PAD: I wanted to end Imzadi II with them getting engaged. It seemed logical to me. I really felt that’s where the characters would be going. But the guidelines said I couldn’t change the status quo. So I had to write an ending that was not exactly what I wanted to do. I wrote a story that ends with them not getting engaged. As a result, the entirety of the story involved failure—failure to commit, failure to
succeed as a couple…failure, failure, failure. So that is kind of hard to compare that to Imzadi, which was about love conquering all.

  KD: It sure is.

  PAD: Many people said they didn’t like the second one as much as they did the first, and I really can’t blame them. I don’t think it would have been an issue had the book not been called Imzadi II. But because it was, fans were expecting something that was going to push all of the same emotional buttons that Imzadi did, and it couldn’t because of a variety of factors.

  KD: Chief among those factors has to be the relationship between Worf and Troi, which you already said didn’t ring true to you.

  PAD: Not only did it not ring true to me, but we already knew from [Star Trek:] Deep Space Nine that it had failed. In Imzadi, I was telling the story of a relationship that had incredible importance to both of them, and you found yourself wondering whether Riker from the future was going to succeed in his quest. Everything was up in the air. In Imzadi II, you knew that Worf and Troi were not going to remain together because Deep Space Nine already told you that.

  KD: And to top it all, there’s Worf’s ill-fated marriage to Jadzia.

  PAD: You were dealing with a lot more “knowns,” so it was trickier and ultimately less satisfying. I don’t think it’s a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, but compared to Imzadi, which is going to be inevitable when you call it Imzadi II, it’s going to come up short. That’s why I wish to this day that they had called it ANYTHING else.

  KD: But you still look back kindly on both books despite your ending of Imzadi II.

  PAD: There were some people who, I hope, were satisfied by the ending. It wasn’t exactly the way I would have wanted to end it and, given the events of [Star Trek:] Nemesis, you just find yourself just gnashing your teeth. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

  KD: This is great perspective on your work, Peter. Thanks for your time.

  PAD: Sure. Thank you.