Pathways

by Jeri Taylor

  Nimembeh stood above him, legs planted firmly, hands on his hips. Harry’s eyes traveled up and saw the dark, smooth-domed officer looking down at him with no discernible expression.

  “There’s this to be said for you, Cadet,” intoned Nimembeh. “You didn’t manage to kill yourself.”

  Harry struggled to his feet and was handed a flask of water. He drank greedily, knowing that drops were running down his chin but not caring. The water was cool, silver in his throat. He had never tasted anything so delicious. He was vaguely aware that a hypospray had been planted against his arm and an injection transferred.

  “A nutritional supplement,” explained Nimembeh stonily. “You were suffering from lack of adequate nutrition.”

  Harry sagged. He had failed in every way. His entire team had been “lost,” and he himself was rescued because if he’d been allowed to stay in the wilderness, he would have perished. How had it come to that?

  “What did I do wrong?” he asked Nimembeh sincerely. “I lost my first cadet within minutes after we arrived, and averaged one a day after that. But we all thought we were going by the book.”

  “Had you been moving through enemy territory, I doubt you would have lasted that long. I might as well have landed a troupe of acrobats, wearing bright costumes, who proceeded to thrash through the woods calling every possible attention to themselves.”

  Harry recoiled. He realized what Nimembeh was saying, but the injustice of it galvanized him. He drew himself to his full height. “With all due respect, sir, when we were sent on this excursion, there was no mention made of its being an evasive situation. We all assumed it was merely a test of our ability to survive.”

  “An assumption shared by most of your peers,” observed Nimembeh dryly. Harry looked around and saw a room full of dispirited cadets—the other team leaders, he presumed. Only one group, off in a corner, seemed to be somewhat animated.

  “You mean . . . everyone else lost their team, too?” asked Harry, somewhat mollified to know that this humiliation was not his alone.

  “One team took the appropriate evasive tactics and survived intact.”

  Rancor rose in Harry. He faced Nimembeh, cheeks flushed, all the desperateness and frustration of the past five days making him uncharacteristically confrontational. “Sir, the parameters of the situation should have been made clear. We couldn’t be expected to operate properly if we didn’t know exactly what was going on. This simply wasn’t a fair test.”

  Before Harry had gotten the last word out, Nimembeh’s hand had struck, clasping Harry’s arm around the wrist, holding it firmly. The commander was a small, lean man with not a millimeter of excess fat on him, but he was surprisingly powerful, a tensile strength that came from within; his grip felt more solid than titanium. Startled, Harry stared at him. Nimembeh’s dark eyes burned through him, and his voice was like a phaser beam in its intensity.

  “Not a fair test? I’m sorry you were put at a disadvantage, Cadet. But consider this: If ever you find yourself in enemy territory, I won’t be there to make it clear to you what you should and shouldn’t do. You’re going to have to learn to think for yourself, to anticipate the situation, to expect the worst and prepare for it. There won’t be any convenient transports back to base camp, no hyposprays to protect you from malnutrition. You may find yourself completely on your own, in hostile territory, and there won’t be any room for excuses in a situation like that. You won’t be able to say to the person who has phasered you to death that the situation just wasn’t fair. Do I make myself clear?”

  Harry could only nod, chastened under the withering harangue. But Nimembeh wasn’t done. “I am responsible for turning out cadets that know how to survive in any situation. Any time any one of my people dies in the field, a part of me dies with them. I won’t have my people making mistakes that can be fatal. My people will have all the training, all the mental focus, all the tenacity to help them make it out of the worst of situations.”

  Again, Harry nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said humbly, but Nimembeh didn’t release him from his brutal grip. “Now, Cadet, tell me what you did wrong.”

  “Sir, we should have taken cover immediately and assessed the situation. We should have traveled mainly at night, and not lit fires. We should have avoided the ridges of hills where we could be silhouetted and spotted. We failed to employ a leading scout. We followed none of the procedures for evasive maneuvers.” Harry eyed Nimembeh with as much dignity as he could summon, hoping this recitation would satisfy the commander and make him release his crushing grip. But Nimembeh held on as firmly as ever, and Harry began to feel tingling in his fingers from lack of circulation.

  “What else?”

  What else? There was more? Fatigue and bewilderment combined to tongue-tie him. He tried to make his mind grasp what other infraction he might have committed, but he couldn’t find it. He stared at Nimembeh helplessly. “I . . . I . . .”

  “Do you know what else you did wrong or not, Cadet?”

  “I don’t, sir.”

  “You foolishly refused to eat food that was available to you. You let your personal aversions dictate what you would ingest. Because of that, you became weak and disoriented from malnutrition. You must eat everything, no matter how repulsive it may seem to you, because even one lost meal can cost you weeks of lost strength. If you are going to survive, you must eat—no matter what it is.”

  Harry could only nod and stammer, “Yes, sir.” Even though he was taller than Nimembeh, he felt like a small boy, looking up into his father’s eyes. Except that his father had never castigated him like this, had never reprimanded him, had never made him feel demeaned and humiliated. He had always been treated with dignity and acceptance, from the time he was a toddler. For a moment the unfairness of it all made his eyes burn, but the further humiliation of Nimembeh’s seeing him with tears chased the moisture away. He realized that his fingers were now numb from the manacle-grip around his wrist.

  “Sir, I’ve lost sensation in my fingers,” he said with what he hoped was proper deference.

  “Cadet, your fingers are mine. All of you is mine. And I want you to know you’ve become a special project for me. From now on, if you turn around, I’ll be there. If you turn on your desk monitor, there’ll be a transmission from me. If you want to take a leave, or change your room, or wipe your nose, you’ll have to go through me to do it.”

  “Can . . . can you do that?”

  “I can and I will.”

  Harry was weak from exhaustion and pain. The prospect that loomed before him was so frightening that the only consolation he could find was in the knowledge that he could simply leave the Academy. But, as though reading his mind, Nimembeh removed that option as well.

  “If you’re thinking that you’d rather leave the Academy, you’re right. You can turn yourself into a victim and a quitter. And no one would even notice that you were gone.”

  Harry looked down at his fingers, which were visibly swollen now. They seemed like the appendages of some entirely different entity, an alien being that had somehow begun to occupy the end of his arm. He thought of his mother, suddenly, and her response if he dropped out of the Academy at this point. He looked up at Nimembeh.

  “Yes, sir. I’m yours. Will you let go now?”

  A charged moment passed, and then Nimembeh dropped his wrist, which fell heavily to Harry’s side as he did so. The young cadet resisted the impulse to rub his fingers with his opposite hand, as though that would somehow denote weakness and cause Nimembeh to revile him even further. He gently stretched them, wincing as blood rushed to the tips once more.

  “Report to me at oh-six-hundred Monday morning. We’ll set up your training regimen.”

  Nimembeh turned on his heel and walked away, erect and proud. Harry stared after him, now finally kneading his painfully throbbing fingers, wondering if there were any appeal to this program Nimembeh was levying. Could he talk to his group leader? His academic advisor? There had to be a way out of this.
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  Harry quickly discovered that all avenues to an appeal from Nimembeh’s regime were closed. This “special project” was not unprecedented at the Academy; in fact, there were usually several cadets a year singled out in this fashion. The only recourse was to leave the Academy, and Harry knew he’d rather face Nimembeh than his mother.

  He discussed the whole thing with George, who was unfailingly sympathetic and comforting. “I can’t believe this is happening,” moaned Harry. “He has approval over my academic schedule, my sports program, my extracurricular activities, my leave time—he was right: I can’t blow my nose without going through him.”

  “I don’t understand it. Why would he single you out? I could fathom it if you were some discipline problem, or disruptive, or a problem in some way. But you’re about the most perfect cadet I know.”

  Harry smiled. This kind of statement, he’d learned, was typical of George. Frankly, his ego needed that kind of rebuilding after Nimembeh had gotten through hammering at him. George’s attitude toward him was more like what he was used to from his family—approving and supportive.

  “I’ve asked around, but no two people have the same answer. Nimembeh takes on a ‘special project’ cadet now and then, but there doesn’t seem to be any common thread as to the kind of student he chooses.”

  “You’re just lucky, I guess.”

  Harry smiled. He knew he was lucky to have drawn George as a roommate. Some of the cadets he’d met would’ve driven him crazy, but George and he got along amazingly well. In fact, without George, he wasn’t sure he could have survived Nimembeh’s harsh regime.

  It quickly became clear what the commander expected of him: more than his all, on every occasion, in every aspect of his student life. He set goals that were rigorous and demanded that Harry meet them; failure to do so met with harsh disciplines. He drove Harry physically, academically, and emotionally. Without George’s calm, stolid presence, his unending reservoir of succor, Harry thought many times he might have quit.

  Nimembeh’s schedule for Harry was so grueling that it left little time for socialization, so Harry did his best to keep his mind off the female cadets. This wasn’t easy, as there were hundreds of bright, eager, talented and quite beautiful young women at the Academy; but Harry had learned strong self-discipline during his adolescence, when he had devoted himself to his studies in order to be admitted.

  “Who needs women,” he laughed ruefully to George, “as long as we have each other?”

  It was simply easier, and far more comfortable, to take a night off with George than to go to the effort of inviting a young woman he barely knew, make an evening of strained small talk, and then face the prospect of deciding whether or not he wanted to repeat the process. With George there was no awkwardness, no struggle to make conversation, no effort at all. When he had time on a weekend to transport home—a rarity—George often came with him, and his family had all but adopted his roommate as one of their own.

  And so Harry was unprepared for what happened to him on a windy spring day in April, when San Francisco sparkled like crown jewels after a series of thunderstorms had blown through, leaving the air sweet and brisk, the streets and building glowing with dampness.

  On this beautiful day, Harry was in a dark, cavelike building on an impossible quest. Nimembeh had ordered him to procure a book that wasn’t available in any form except the ancient one of printed, bound pages. Harry frankly thought that anything worth reading should be available on padds, but Nimembeh had insisted he find the centuries-old tale of a British sea captain who had piloted his men to safety after having been put overboard after a mutiny.

  Old books were rare commodities on Earth. A few serious bibliophiles had collections, but these were privately held and carefully guarded. Only one possible source existed in San Francisco, a huge, multistoried building in the Embarcadero, lined with rows of old bookshelves, and onto which were jammed a chaotic, disorganized array of books—of all kinds, on all subjects, fiction, history, art, cooking, everything one could think of.

  But there was virtually no way to locate a specific book. The building was manned by cheerful volunteers who claimed a love of old tomes, and who in fact read them almost constantly, but who had no idea just what books were in their keeping, nor how to find one that might be there. “It’s a browsing place,” said one robust, ample woman with neatly cut white hair and kindly gray eyes, and a rectangular tag on her bosom which read HARRIET. “There’s nothing more soothing than wandering around the stacks, just picking up a book that catches your eye and poring over it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Harry, a bit desperately, “I’m sure that’s true. But I have to find one specific book. Isn’t there any way to do that?”

  Puzzlement registered in the woman’s eyes. “Charlotte,” she called to another volunteer, “this young man wants to find a particular book. Do we have any way to do that?”

  Charlotte, who was a vision in neutrality—beige hair, beige eyes, beige sweater and skirt—seemed equally bewildered. “I don’t know of any,” she said vaguely.

  “You mean the books aren’t catalogued?” asked Harry incredulously, which produced gentle laughter from both women. “Oh, no, of course not,” said Charlotte. “There are millions of books here. How could we ever catalogue them?”

  Perspiration began to collect on Harry’s forehead. He wasn’t going to go back to Nimembeh and say he’d failed. “Maybe you’ve noticed the book I want,” he offered politely. “In your browsing, I mean.”

  “What is it, dear?” asked the older woman sweetly. “I’ve rummaged through these books for years.”

  “It’s called Men Against the Sea. It’s the story of a Captain Bligh—”

  “After the mutiny,” the woman chimed in eagerly. “It’s part of the Bounty trilogy. A thrilling story.”

  Harry’s heart quickened. “Then you have it here?”

  “I have no idea. I read it when I was a child, in Ohio. I wonder whatever happened to that book?”

  Harry’s spirits plummeted again. This was maddening— how could he convince Nimembeh he’d done everything he possibly could, and had come up short? But Charlotte had held up a finger, as though thinking of something, her pale beige forehead wrinkled in concentration. “Bounty . . . Bounty . . .” she was muttering. “I think I’ve seen it . . .”

  “Where?” asked Harry quickly. He stared at Charlotte, willing her to remember.

  “Was it on four? Or six? I think it was on an evennumbered floor. And it was near a window, because I remember looking up and seeing one of Starfleet’s hover-craft passing by.” She smiled at Harry, pleased with herself. He waited politely for her to add to her recall, but nothing more was forthcoming. He drew a breath.

  “So it’s probably on floor two, or four, or six—”

  “Or eight. That’s if I’m right about it’s being even-numbered.”

  “And somewhere near a window.”

  “I’m fairly certain. That is, if it was the book I was looking at when the Starfleet vessel went by. It could have been another one.”

  Harry stared at her, wordless. Then he nodded and thanked them, mentally calculating the time it would take to search for the book with that vague description of its possible location. As he climbed the old and worn stairs to the second floor, he realized he could spend all day and night in this place without success.

  Two hours later he’d given up on the second floor and climbed to the fourth, where he began sneezing. Dust had collected on the vast array of books—didn’t their airfiltration system reach to the fourth floor?—and was irritating his nose. Great. Trapped in a fruitless quest for a book that might not even be there, and invaded by allergens as well.

  He had headed for the window wall and begun his systematic search when, in the third aisle, he saw her, standing against a bookshelf, an open volume in her hands, reading.

  It was the woman in whose seat he had mistakenly sat when he went to the Ktarian music festival.

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nbsp; Her fierce concentration on the book seemed to endow her with a quality of mystery, and he found himself stopped in his tracks, staring at her, as intimidated now as he’d been when he first saw her weeks ago.

  Her eyes lifted and briefly caught his, then flickered back to her book without showing even a passing interest in him. But to Harry the look was electrifying, and he could feel the effect in the marrow of his bones.

  He forced himself to resume his search, carefully poring over the rows of books, checking the angle to make sure he could still see a window from where he stood.

  Then he went back to the third aisle and glanced down it. The woman was gone.

  He felt a momentary regret, then shrugged his shoulders. He was there on a quest, and didn’t need distractions. It was just as well this beautiful young woman had slipped out of his life once more. He headed for the as-yet-unsearched fifth aisle and began again. Then soft footsteps caught his attention and the black-haired woman rounded the corner of the aisle and began browsing just opposite him.

  Harry felt the air around him become suddenly close, and it was difficult to breathe. He glanced over his shoulder as the woman moved slowly in his direction, eyes scanning the books. He tried to concentrate on his own task, but was overwhelmingly aware of her presence as she inched, inexorably, closer and closer.

  From the corner of his eye, he saw her arm extend and her hand remove a book from the shelf. His mind worked desperately to think of some clever way to start up a conversation, but everything he thought of sounded trite and forced. He didn’t even want to mention the music festival because he was certain she wouldn’t remember him.

  Finally he decided on just saying hello and asking if she were looking for a specific book, too. He turned, smiling, and saw that she was now reading the book she’d removed from the shelf.

  It was titled The Bounty Trilogy.

  A small, undignified squeak emitted from Harry’s mouth and the woman looked up curiously. “That’s the book I need!” he all but shouted. “I’ve been looking for two hours.”