Pathways

by Jeri Taylor

  It was Vorik who first succeeded in trading with other prisoners. He approached a seedy gathering of small, gnomelike creatures who had built a rather sizable lean-to and seemed to have any number of pots and pans and other artifacts strewn around their area.

  “My jacket is made of synthetic polyfibers which provide insulation against both heat and cold. It is of superior construction and can be expected to hold up against the harshest elements, as well as resisting wear and tear for some time to come. It is stain-resistant and can be rolled up to become quite a comfortable pillow, as I can attest after last night.”

  The wizened little beings stared at him, openmouthed. Vorik’s unflappable Vulcan presence seemed to mesmerize them. He stripped off the jacket and held it out in front of him. “I will accept fuel, containers for liquid, or any building materials you might possess.”

  Ten minutes later they walked off with an armful of jars and pitchers, a large tarpaulin, and four squares of dried dung to use as fuel. It was a good beginning. But even after each of them had managed to trade, and they carried their booty back to camp, Harry had yet to spot the young woman from the night before. The likelihood of finding, among these thousands, one person he’d only glimpsed in the light of a flickering fire was, he admitted, remote. But he suspected that she must not have been far from the place they made camp, and if he kept looking, he might find her.

  The away team’s morning was a successful one, and the afternoon was spent constructing two shelters which, while not luxurious, were large enough to accommodate them all and offer protection from the elements. When Chakotay asked for volunteers to fill the water containers, Harry was first in line. Something inside him said he would find her during this foray.

  He almost missed her. She was huddled on the ground, back against a tree stump some ten meters in front of the muddy marsh, knees drawn up to her face, head bowed. She was dressed in a kind of caftan, a dark robe that enveloped her small body. It was the black hair that made him slow down, then he saw a corner of her cheek, and he squatted down next to her.

  “Hello,” he said, and was sorrowed to see that she started and drew back at the sound. Her eyes, in the daylight, were glittering, prismatic disks of orange and yellow, but even in their strangeness he could see fear.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Harry assured her, and was gratified to see that she seemed to relax slightly. “I’m the one whose boots you tried to steal last night. No hard feelings.”

  She turned away, chewing on a lip that was cracked and sore. Her face was grimy, her hair a matted mess, but to Harry she possessed an unearthly beauty. “Do you have a name?” he asked. “I’m Harry.”

  The response was so soft he could barely hear her. “Coris,” she said.

  “Are you part of a group? Do you have friends here?” She shook her head, and Harry saw a moistness gather in her unusual eyes. Harry held his hand toward her. “Come with me,” he offered. “You’ll be safer with us.”

  There was a long silence, and then she reached out a hand and took his. It was tiny, again reminding him of a cat’s paw. He pulled her to her feet, which were bare and swollen. She reminded him of a fragile bird, all bone and feather, heart beating wildly, ready to fly at a hint of danger. She stood patiently by the marsh as he and the others filled their containers with the murky water and then headed back down the road they called Broadway, toward their camp.

  Coris said nothing during the entire walk, but kept her eyes fastened on the ground in front of her. When they reached their camp, Chakotay spotted her and raised an inquisitive brow, at which Harry shrugged sheepishly and said, “She followed me home, sir.”

  Chakotay smiled and said nothing else, and so young Coris the Saccul became part of their group.

  Rations that evening consisted of a handful of wet mush that smelled foul and tasted worse. It was full of bulbous sacs which, when punctured, ran a thin green juice that was bilious. Yet the crew from Voyager, and their new guest, ate it as though it were rice pudding. They were realizing that the grain cake from the night before wasn’t adequate nourishment for twenty-four hours, and they were famished.

  They had lit small fires against the chill, and their temporarily filled stomachs had once again given them a sense of well-being. They were alive, uninjured, and had shelter; tomorrow they would begin investigating the possibilities of escape.

  Chakotay turned to Harry. “It’s your turn to be storyteller, Harry,” he said. “Let’s hear about your trials with Nimembeh.”

  “Like you said last night, Commander, it goes a little deeper than that. It’s kind of—about my whole life.”

  “I told you mine—we’d love to hear yours.”

  Harry glanced quickly at Coris. Something made him uncomfortable launching into his life’s story in front of her. She was stretched out on the ground, head cradled in her arms, looking more contented than she had this afternoon, eyelids flickering shut against the welcoming heat of the fire. She was going to sleep.

  Relieved, Harry turned to the others, and saw they were waiting eagerly. He guessed that here, in this hostile place, even the unremarkable story of Harry Kim’s life was a welcome distraction. He determined to try to make it sound as interesting as possible.

  CHAPTER

  4

  THE FIRST MEMORIES WERE OF MUSIC. THE STRUMMING OF the P’i P’a and his mother’s delicate voice, wafting through shafts of sunlight that dissected the room with gentle planes of gold.

  He stood in his crib, pudgy arm extended, fingers straining to reach the motes that swam in the sunlight, hearing the tranquil sounds of his mother’s voice as she sang.

  The enticing motes danced just out of his reach. It was a problem that required a solution, even if fifteen-month-old Harry Kim couldn’t yet think of it in those terms. He wanted the tantalizing little specks in the same way he wanted nourishment: it was an unnamed need and it drove him powerfully. His hands clasped the rail of the crib and he tensed his arms, squeezing tightly, as though testing his own strength.

  Out. He wanted out. These bars were keeping him from what he wanted. His small body, rather than his mind, suggested the answer, as his toes found friction on the slats of the crib and he felt himself crawling higher, higher . . .

  Instinct told him he was about to fall, to pitch headfirst onto the floor below. Clutching the top rail tightly, he stretched his body along it and then shifted his grip so that his fingers now curled toward the crib, rather than toward the room.

  The rest was easy. His toes climbed down the slats on the outside of the crib and, when he could go no farther, he released the top rail one hand at a time, clasping the slats hand over hand, and in this way lowered himself until he could drop easily to the floor.

  He crowed with delight. That was fun! He stared up at the crib, wondering how to get back in so he could re-create the climb to freedom, but quickly realized reversing his course would be considerably more difficult. The urge instantly left his mind, and he turned to the first object of his desire, the fluttering motes that rode the sunlight. All the while, his mother’s singing, and the beguiling sound of the ancient instrument, flooded the room.

  He toddled somewhat awkwardly across the floor—this new upright mobility had been achieved only a short time ago—and reached toward the first pool of light he encountered. His fist closed around the specks and he drew his hand close. But when he opened it, nothing was there.

  This was a puzzle. But he knew from experience that many new tasks required attempting them over and over. That had been true of his first locomotion, on hands and knees, and certainly was the case when he learned one could put one foot in front of the other and travel much more quickly (this method also freed the hands for grabbing things, another plus).

  But grabbing the motes was proving a difficult task. No matter how many times his fingers closed around the flickering specks, they disappeared by the time he opened his fist. This caused him no anguish—Harry would not suffer a moment’s anguish throughout
his charmed childhood—but simply redoubled his determination to succeed.

  So focused was he on his task that he didn’t notice that the music had stopped. It was such a constant in his life that its presence or absence didn’t call attention to itself. And so it was that his mother opened the door and found him standing in the middle of the room, clutching and unclenching his fist, trying to capture the sparkling bits of dust that were illuminated by the streaming afternoon sun.

  She laughed, a sound not unlike the delicate tones of her singing. Harry looked up at her and he laughed, too. “How did you get down there?” his mother asked merrily, but Harry couldn’t understand her. He understood only the joy and love that glowed from her like the streams of lemon sunlight that illuminated his room.

  Every birthday was a vast celebration. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, in-laws, and friends jammed the beautifully appointed Kim home in Monterey. He remembered his first birthday, the first awareness of a cake topped with candles, the first gooey mouthful of frosting. Faces crowded round him, laughing eyes peering, murmured sounds of laughter, soft voices urging him to blow candles, to eat the cake, to tear paper from a massive pile of presents. It was then that one of his relatives presented him with a small bundle of fur that meowed comically, at which Harry pointed and said, “Mousie,” a word he had just learned from hearing his mother read to him, and Mousie was the cat’s name from that point on.

  On each birthday, the adults would drink a joyous toast, acknowledging the specialness of this princely child. On his fifth birthday, Harry asked his mother why they did that.

  Her soft hand reached out and caressed his cheek, brushed his dark hair away from his forehead. “We waited such a long time for you,” she said, gazing at him with shining eyes. “We’d given up any hope that you might come. So when you did, it was a miracle.”

  “Where did I come from?” Harry asked, and was curious about the small ripple of laughter that trickled around the room.

  “From here,” his mother said without embarrassment, patting her stomach. “I carried you inside me, safe and protected for nine months.”

  “I remember that,” the boy said, and was surprised by an even greater swell of laughter.

  But his mother seemed to take him seriously. “What do you remember?” she asked evenly.

  “Warm . . . and dark . . . floating . . . it felt good. But coming out was hard.”

  His mother and father exchanged a bemused glance, but made no utterance of contradiction. If Harry said he remembered being in the womb, they accepted it.

  They accepted everything about him, always. Harry, who could remember all of his childhood as clearly as he remembered the last hour, had no recollection of ever being censured, admonished, or denied. His childhood was a womb of another kind, sheltering him from sorrow and affliction, from obstacles and misfortunes. He was loved, cosseted, rewarded, supported, and approved, and though some under such tolerant handling might have become self-indulgent monsters, he grew instead into a child known for his sweetness and patience.

  He would sit for hours with his father, watching as John Kim painted elaborate, delicate designs on porcelain with a tiny brush, colorful flowers with trailing vines that wound around and around until the plate or vase was completely filled with color. It was one of several ancient arts that John practiced, and their home was filled with beautiful artifacts—intricate carvings in jade, lustrous sculptures in bronze, exquisite painted porcelain. Each piece was produced slowly, with infinite patience, with thorough appreciation of the process involved in creating a work of art. It was work not to be rushed, and Harry, sitting quietly hour after hour, watching, seemed to have inherited his father’s quiet forbearance.

  His mother started to teach him the fingerings of the P’i P’a when he was three and was amazed that he already knew them. He had watched her play, studying her fingers as she moved them over the strings and learning the correct positions without even realizing it. He played it as easily as he breathed. His mother, astonished, immediately envisioned him as a concert artist on the ancient instrument, which had enjoyed a resurgence in popularity during the twenty-fourth century.

  As it turned out, it would not be a stringed instrument that captured Harry’s imagination, but a reed, which he had first encountered in the form of a clarinet when he was seven. He had eyed the slender tubelike apparatus in the music school to which his mother took him and, with his teacher’s permission, had picked it up and attempted to produce a sound.

  Nothing came out. Surprised, for he had never picked up a musical instrument he couldn’t play almost immediately, he tried again. This time there was a rush of air and an ungainly squeak that didn’t sound musical at all, but more like the squeal Mousie had made once when he had inadvertently stepped on her tail.

  Harry was intrigued. This simple-looking device was a challenge, something he didn’t often encounter, and he determined to master it. He announced this to his mother in a firm voice, and though she was disappointed in his choice, she didn’t question him. If Harry wanted to play the clarinet, he had her support.

  And so his parents endured months of squawking, squeaking efforts to produce a mellifluous sound. Mousie had no tolerance for the learning period; whenever Harry withdrew his clarinet and began to puff into it, Mousie would scurry to the opposite end of the house and hide, all but clamping her paws over her ears to keep out the strident sound.

  But gradually, the persistence paid off, and within a year Harry was playing a repertory that included Mozart and Weber. By the time he was ten, he was transporting regularly to New York, where he played in the Juilliard youth symphony, while studying music theory, composition, and orchestration. He was considered a prodigy, and the instructors saw a limitless future for him in music.

  When he was fourteen, his life took an unpredictable turn that changed it forever.

  “How much farther is it?” asked Harry, breathing heavily and perspiring in the hot August sun. The cloth he had knotted around his head was already damp.

  “Not too far now,” replied his father, marching ahead of him on the foot trail, with pencils, charcoals, and sketch pad carried in a pack on his back. They had been hiking for almost two hours in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and Harry was secretly wishing he hadn’t agreed to accompany his father on this expedition, though he would never have said so because such a statement might hurt John Kim’s feelings. Harry’s feelings had always been treated with delicacy and caring, and he tended to respond in kind.

  “It’s a long hike, I know,” John was saying, “but you’ll agree it’s worth it when you see this little lake. I don’t think most people even know it’s there. It’s off the hiking trail and so small it’s not on most maps. But it’s the prettiest spot I’ve seen on this earth.”

  Harry’s father had traveled extensively, and so this statement carried weight. Besides, Harry enjoyed his father’s company, and liked to see him sketch, even if the price was a long climb on a hot day. He carried his clarinet in his day pack, and looked forward to practicing on the shores of a jewel-like lake in the pine forests of the Sierra Nevadas.

  Fifteen minutes later, they reached a ridgeline and John pointed downward. Below them nestled a pool of blue, completely surrounded by tall conifers. It seemed both magical and inviting, and Harry was glad he’d come along.

  “That’s it, Harry,” said his father. “It’s only about a tenminute walk down to the lake. We can have lunch on the shore.”

  He took one step and then disappeared from view as the trail collapsed beneath him.

  It happened so quickly that it took a moment for Harry to absorb the event. He peered over the ridgeline and saw his father, far below him, tumbling downward, out of control, and finally slamming into a huge boulder and coming to a stop.

  Then he didn’t move.

  Harry’s throat constricted with fear and he looked around as though someone might have magically appeared to help. But he realized with awful clarity that h
e and his father were alone in this wilderness, and now his father was unconscious—or worse—at the bottom of a steep incline. Harry had to act.

  He scrambled onto the trail past the point where it had collapsed and began hurrying down a long, snaking series of switchbacks, checking occasionally to see if his father had perhaps regained consciousness and was walking around, unharmed after all. But each time he peered downward, he saw the still form lying exactly as it had been since it had cracked against the boulder.

  It seemed to take forever to reach him, and Harry could hear his heart pounding in his ears as he maneuvered his way toward his still-prone father. Again, he looked around through the trees, wishing someone would suddenly appear in the woods, someone older, who would know what to do about an emergency like this. But the woods were empty.

  Fearful, he hurried toward his father, mind scrambling to remember some of the emergency medical procedures he’d learned in school. Don’t move him, that was foremost. You could exacerbate a spinal injury by moving someone.

  What else? First see if he’s breathing, if he has a pulse. Harry could see his father’s chest rising and falling, but he extended his fingers to check for a neck pulse, anyway, just to follow the procedure he’d been taught.

  Okay, he was breathing. That was good. But his eyes were closed and he wasn’t moving. He must have hit his head on the boulder against which he now lay. Maybe he had a concussion.

  Now what? Harry felt panic rising in him as he mulled over his options. He could start running, back along the trail they had taken this morning, and summon help. But that would take hours, even if he could run the whole distance, which he doubted. And it would mean leaving his father alone out here, which he was afraid to do. There might be animals, bears, mountain lions. He couldn’t leave John Kim unprotected.