Pathways

by Jeri Taylor

  Briefly the thought occurred to him that he might not be much protection against a bear or a mountain lion, but he willed the notion away.

  Nearby, the water of the small lake lapped gently at the shore. Water, that was something. He pulled off the cloth that was knotted around his head and ran to the lake, dipping the scarf into the cold water, soaking it through. Then he ran back to his father and applied the cold cloth to his forehead. Surely that would accomplish something.

  But his father did not respond. He lay with terrible stillness, eyes closed, mouth parted slightly, a dribble of saliva trickling down one cheek.

  Harry sat heavily on the ground, fighting anxiety, trying to remain calm. He’d have to go get help, there was no other choice. He remembered his father’s drawing materials and found them scattered on the ground from the tumble down the ravine. He used a charcoal to write a message on the sketch pad, telling John that he’d gone for help, and not to move from this spot.

  He put the sketch pad where it would easily be seen and then put his hand on his father’s forehead again. It felt clammy, and an icy squeeze of fear clutched at him. He turned and looked once more into the woods, for the magic rescuers that would come to his aid and handle this terrifying situation.

  And there they were.

  There were four of them, young men and women several years older than he, dressed alike, in drab jumpsuits that had the feel of a uniform. Metal badges were worn over their hearts.

  They caught Harry by surprise, but he had no feelings of alarm. They seemed benign and purposeful, and were in fact hurrying toward him as though sensing his situation.

  “What happened?” asked one of the young men as he moved quickly toward John Kim’s unconscious form.

  “He fell,” replied Harry, pointing upward. He was experiencing a vast feeling of relief now that these samaritans had appeared. They were older than he, more knowledgeable. They moved with purpose and dispatch. They would know what to do.

  One of the young women was passing a device over his father’s body. “It’s a concussion,” she said calmly. “We have to get medical attention.”

  The first young man briefly touched the badge on his chest. “Noftsger to base camp. We have an emergency situation.”

  A voice replied: “Go ahead, Cadet.”

  “We’ve encountered civilians who’ve had an accident. A man, forties, has sustained a concussion. He needs medical attention.”

  “Stand by to transport, Noftsger. We’ll be taking your whole team.”

  “Aye, sir.” The young man knelt to Harry’s father and put his hand on the man’s shoulder. One of the females put her hand on Harry’s, and within seconds they had dematerialized and were transported to a building that seemed still to be in the mountains, but was sleekly styled and teeming with people: more of the young people in jumpsuits, and older men and women wearing uniforms of black and red. One of these moved immediately toward Harry and his father, passing a device over John just as the young woman had done.

  “Get him to the infirmary,” said the older man, and the boy known as Noftsger said, “Aye, sir,” and knelt once more, touching John’s shoulder. “Energize,” he said, and the two dematerialized.

  “How did he get hurt, son?” asked the man.

  It had all happened so fast Harry hadn’t been able to assess who these people were, where he had been taken, or what he should do now. “He fell,” he stammered, and then blurted out, “Who are you? Where is this place?”

  The man smiled and put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Sorry. I thought you knew. Cadet Shanak, take our young friend to the mess hall and get him some lunch, and fill him in on Starfleet’s survival program.”

  “Aye, sir,” said the woman known as Shanak. She was Vulcan, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with brows that swept upward at the outer corners. She regarded Harry coolly and gestured down a hallway.

  “Starfleet?” said Harry in surprise. “I thought all that was in San Francisco.”

  “Headquarters is there,” she replied, “and the Academy. But there are facilities all over Earth. We do survival training in the Sierra Nevadas, and there are two base camps like this one to coordinate all the teams.”

  “You go to Starfleet Academy?” asked Harry curiously. He’d heard of Starfleet, of course—who hadn’t?—but only as a distant and not entirely well-understood entity. Harry’s life had been proscribed and insular, defined by family, by art and music, and his awareness of this legendary organization was unformed.

  Shanak gave him an imperious glance, but it didn’t carry any sense of ill will. It was just who she was. “Yes,” she replied simply. “I have just begun my second year.”

  A thousand questions flooded Harry’s mind. “How did you decide to go to the Academy?” he began. “What do you have to do to get accepted? How long does it take? Is it hard to get in?”

  Shanak looked at him imperturbably. “I made my choice when I was a small girl, and I began working toward the goal then. It is extremely difficult to be accepted. There are thousands and thousands of applicants from all over the Federation, so the competition is great.”

  “So . . . how did you do it? What do you have to do?”

  “As I said, I began as a small child. I reviewed the curriculum of the Academy and I structured my schoolwork to focus on that curriculum. I devoted myself to studies and the activities I knew would serve me well in the event of my acceptance. I allowed nothing to interfere with my chosen course.”

  Harry took this in with a heavy heart. That morning, he was barely aware of Starfleet. Now, all he wanted in life was to become part of it, to be accepted at the Academy and become one of these proud, capable, supremely proficient cadets. But if it required the kind of lifelong devotion Shanak had given it, he was much too late in making this decision.

  All through lunch, he peppered her with questions, which she answered in her cool, composed way. And when she received a communication to take him to the infirmary, he questioned her all the way on their walk there.

  John Kim was sitting on a cotlike bed, and smiled as Harry and Shanak entered. To Harry’s relief, his father looked perfectly healthy, and his smile was as warm and ready as ever. “These good people have me good as new, Harry,” he said. “We owe them a debt of thanks.” He opened his arms, and Harry ran into them, so glad to see his father well that he didn’t even feel embarrassed by the display of affection.

  From that day on, Harry had but one goal: to be accepted at Starfleet Academy.

  His parents were admittedly puzzled by his strange epiphany, and not a little concerned by the prospect of his becoming a space adventurer. Having been blessed with his birth after having given up on the possibility of ever having a child, they had fantasized a future in which he would remain a constant part of their lives. He would marry, of course, and have his own children, but that would be done within the geographical confines of their family community. The Kims had many relatives, and they all lived within a hundred kilometers of each other. It had never occurred to Harry’s parents that he would stray farther than that.

  Starfleet personnel, they knew, were often in deep space for years at a time. In some instances, their spouses and children were able to accompany them, but such provisions were not made for grandparents, or aunts and uncles and cousins. The prospect of a Harry Kim in Starfleet was that of an absentee son.

  But when Harry began talking about nothing but Starfleet Academy, they concealed their fears and threw themselves into offering whatever support they could. They urged him to speak with his school counselor about his new goal, and to determine what he would need to do to achieve it. They arranged for tutors in those subjects which Harry had heretofore taken lightly. They did their own reading about Starfleet’s history, so they would be able to discuss it intelligently with their son.

  Harry, for most of his life, had put his energies into music, and was woefully lacking in science and mathematics. He had studied only what was required, and that in a de
sultory fashion. He much preferred art, and literature, and history.

  But to stand even a chance of entering the Academy, he would have to shore up those other disciplines: biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and anthropology just for starters, as well as mathematics. He’d been exposed to algebra and geometry, but the vast array of mathematical studies that loomed before him was like a dark, impenetrable forest, terra incognita.

  He gave up every other aspect of his life in order to study. His clarinet stood unplayed on its stand; the P’i P’a rested in its case. He allowed himself one social outing a week, usually the Parrises Squares game at his school. He did not date. He kept his place on the volleyball team because he knew athletic participation was a requirement at the Academy. He had one burning, single-minded purpose: to become a part of Starfleet.

  He was vaguely aware that his parents were worried, and whenever he allowed himself to see the situation from their vantage point, he understood their concern. He had become a recluse. He didn’t go out with friends, he didn’t attend concerts anymore, he didn’t dance or ride hovercycles or do any of the things the other young people his age were wont to do. He was trading part of his adolescence in order to pursue his dream.

  And yet not once in the four years of his arduous preparation did he regret his choice. Nothing about it felt as though he were being denied; rather, he had a greater sense of purpose than he had ever imagined possible. Everything had always come so easily to him—love, approval, musical prowess—that he enjoyed taking on this overwhelming challenge. He used parts of himself that he’d never tapped before, muscles of the mind that had lain fallow for too many years. He felt an edge, a sharpness, in his thinking that hadn’t been there before.

  And, to his great surprise, he found that once he tackled their labyrinthine depths, science and mathematics were utterly fascinating. There was a purity, an exactness, to both disciplines that was as refreshing to him as a plunge into a cold pool on a hot day. He loved literature, especially poetry, but realized now that while poems were good at posing questions, they rarely provided answers. Good literature made you wonder, set your mind to bubbling with the possibilities of this or that, led you to ponder ideas heretofore imponderable.

  But it provided no absolutes. In physics, force equals mass times acceleration. In chemistry, a compound contains two or more elements combined in a definite proportion by weight. In calculus, the derivative of x squared is two x. Once you solved a problem, it was solved. The square root of forty-nine wasn’t somewhere between six and eight, it was seven. Period.

  Harry found this incontrovertibility comforting. It was firm ground rather than shifting sands, and that kind of stability was pleasurable to him. He redoubled his efforts, learning to get by on less and less sleep each night in order to have more time for study. He could feel his mind growing, expanding, stretching to touch truths he had never dreamed of. It was an experience far more appealing than sleep.

  And so it was, three weeks after his seventeenth birthday, that Harry Kim transported to San Francisco to take the entrance examination for Starfleet Academy.

  He sat in a vast room lined with long tables, at which sat four hundred people just like himself: seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds with the blistering desire to enter Starfleet Academy. This test session was just one of many that would be held in San Francisco, and there were similar tests held in locations all over the Federation, for the thousands and thousands of young people of many different species who wanted one of the coveted places in next year’s freshman class.

  The test lasted eight hours, with one ten-minute break in the morning, another in the afternoon, and an hour for a lunch that none of the test subjects really tasted. It covered a vast array of subjects: Federation history, astrophysics, interstellar treaties. It was the most grueling day Harry had ever spent in his life.

  But when it was all done, he felt good. Nothing had seemed beyond his capacity, nothing had come as a surprise. His years of arduous study had stood him in good stead. He transported home that evening, exhausted but elated, and told his anxious parents that he’d done as well as he possibly could have. They erupted in smiles of relief, and his father made them tea while he told them about the rigors of the exam.

  Then the waiting began. No one would be notified of the test results until everyone who had applied had had the opportunity to take the examination. It might be weeks before that information came from some of the far-flung outposts of the Federation. Then, after the results were in, the second phase of selection would begin: those who had made it past the written test would be given an oral examination. This was actually the more difficult aspect of the process, and the thought of it made Harry’s stomach lurch. It was one thing to write answers in a padd, and quite another to sit in a room with three Starfleet officers and respond verbally to a barrage of questions. He knew they would be judging not just on the answers he gave, but on his personality, his composure, his articulateness—all of them important factors to consider when grooming Starfleet personnel.

  His tutors had been giving him verbal exams for three years in order to prepare him for the process, and he determined to use the weeks of waiting to hone his abilities. He wanted to be as impressive as possible when he appeared before the examining committee. The more he practiced, the better he would be. So he devoted every waking moment to answering test questions orally, focusing on presenting himself in the best possible light. He recorded himself on his console and reviewed his performance, critiquing himself severely. He studied a dictionary and thesaurus, increasing his vocabulary substantially.

  In January, he received a communiqué from Starfleet Academy. It came as a transmission on his personal console, and when he saw the notification of the message, his throat constricted and his fingers tingled unpleasantly. Four times he started to key the control that would open the message, but at the last minute withdrew his hand.

  Finally, he went to his mother, who was singing as she prepared dinner.

  “I have a message from the Academy,” he told her, and heard his voice catch inexplicably.

  She whirled, excited. “What did it say?”

  Harry hesitated. He felt suddenly foolish, unaccountably childish. This wasn’t how a prospective Starfleet officer should behave; he should have boldly opened the message and shouldered the responsibility of whatever it said.

  But his mother knew him too well. She brushed his hair from his eyes, and said, “Why don’t I come with you while you open it?” Relief flooded him and he nodded.

  But even with his mother, his pillar of strength, at his side, it was hard to force his fingers to open the message. They were shaking as he keyed the controls, and when the message flashed on screen, he wanted to close his eyes and squint them open gradually. But he made himself look at it.

  The first word was “Congratulations.” At that, Harry let out a whoop and his mother gasped. He pulled her to her feet and twirled her around the room, laughing with a manic intensity. Nothing else mattered; he had made the first cut.

  Finally he sat down again and they read the entire communiqué, which announced that he had passed the written examination in the highest percentile and should report to Starfleet Academy for the oral exam in February. In under three weeks, he would face the second battery of tests.

  But Harry felt strangely relaxed about the oral. The written exam was the difficult one, the one that weeded out most of the applicants. Far fewer failed to make it past the verbal interview, and Harry had been practicing assiduously. This obstacle held no fears for him.

  In February he transported from his school to Starfleet Academy, wearing a suit his mother had just replicated for him and feeling quietly confident. He arrived early and strolled the manicured grounds of the Academy, imagining himself next fall as one of the uniformed cadets; it was an easy picture to conjure. He felt immediately at home here, as though he belonged. This oral examination was the last hurdle before he achieved the goal he had worked so hard f
or.

  He reported for his interview at thirteen hundred hours, and took his place across a table from Admirals Brand, Strickler, and Kel-Nah. They were friendly, with easy smiles, and Harry quickly relaxed. They began to pepper him with questions about astrophysics, which he answered with rapid-fire accuracy. They moved through the sciences, then into history, literature, government. He felt strong and articulate, never at a loss for words.

  Finally, the question every applicant got, the one Harry had been waiting for. “Why do you want to attend Starfleet Academy?”

  Harry was ready for this. He launched into his carefully prepared answer, one which spoke of Starfleet’s hallowed history, its legendary heroes and heroines, its explorations and discoveries. He cited specific instances of achievement and lauded the Starfleet people involved. He closed by saying he wanted nothing more than to be a part of this proud history.

  The trio of admirals nodded and smiled. They rose and shook hands with Harry and said he would be notified after all the examinations had been conducted. He left ebullient, and wandered the grounds for a while longer, feeling a sense of belonging that was palpable. Cadet Harry Kim. It had a good ring to it.

  “Get out of my azaleas!” The voice was ratchety and cross. Harry turned toward it to see a thin, wizened man with some kind of gardening implement in his hand. He was staring at Harry in pique, pointing toward the ground.

  Harry looked down to see that he had wandered off the path and was in fact standing among a bed of flowering plants. He moved back onto the path. “Sorry,” he offered. “My mind was someplace else.”

  “Oh? Where might that have been?”

  “I was thinking about next year.”

  “What about it?”

  “I’m going to be a cadet next fall.”

  “Really. Don’t ever remember those announcements coming out until April.”

  “Well, I don’t mean I’ve been told. I’m just . . . pretty sure it will happen.”

  “How’s that?”