by Jeri Taylor
As he swung into the series of gates, Tom realized that one of the things he loved about skiing was the effort it required. He’d tried hoverboards, and they were fun and certainly called for an agility, a lightness of touch, that was demanding. But racing on skis was work. It took all his strength to knife the edge of his ski into the snow to keep himself from spinning out of control or go tumbling in a sprawl of arms, legs, and poles down the steep incline.
On this day, the turns seemed to carve like butter. His edges were strong, but not so deep as to cost him time. He felt as though he were flying. There was no sensation of wind, just the exhilaration of streaking through the air, unfettered, part of the air and the sky and the snow, a headlong flight that was so smooth, so perfect, he might have been falling through space.
He sensed—no, more than that, he knew—that this run was undoubtedly a personal best. He might not overtake the Austrian, but he would be able to say that on this day, he had excelled.
What happened next he couldn’t explain. For no reason, no stimulus that he could identify, his eye focused for a fraction of a second on the spectators that lined the course. There weren’t that many, and maybe that’s why he could see whom he saw.
A figure in Starfleet winter wear, bundled against the cold, a sandy mop of hair tucked under an insulated cap, chiseled features in a stern face, a face that was looking directly at him.
His father.
His father had never come to a meet. Had he actually made the effort, taken the time to transport from San Francisco to Jungfrau in order to see his son compete?
The moment of effortless euphoria was gone. Tom was suddenly aware of everything around him, the cold wind, the shuddering bumpiness of the icy snow, the muffled sounds of people calling out to him. His mind snapped from its state of bliss into a rude awareness of the now, and suddenly he had to think about what to do. His body had taken over for him until this moment, and now his mind had interceded, disrupting the purity and clarity of the experience.
He felt one ski begin to lose an edge as he carved a turn, and he compensated by digging in, knowing as he did that he would be losing hundredths of a second. He tried to block that thought but it was with him as he approached the next gate and he determined to make up the time. He came into the turn too fast, dug his edge, felt it catch, shifted his weight, knew that his balance was slipping away, tried desperately to right himself, using his pole for leverage but knowing all these efforts were fruitless.
He went down in a sprawl, flipping over in a drunken somersault while clawing at the snow for a grip to stop his downward tumble. His face scraped an icy outcropping and he felt the sudden warmth of blood, saw it fleck out behind him in a shower of pink on the snow. Down he tumbled, over and over, leaving a bloody smear behind him, feeling bones twist and muscles tear, and nothing, it seemed, would slow his ignominious descent.
And then, finally, he was able to clutch at the icy snow, digging in his hands, raking them through the snow pack, bringing his frantic tumble to an end. He lay there, staring up through immense treetops at a gray and rolling sky, unwilling to move for fear he wouldn’t be able to. In seconds he was surrounded by teammates, medical personnel, and competition officials. When he demonstrated that he could move every part of him they asked, wasn’t seeing double and could count backward, they did an emergency transport into the medical facility.
Before he dematerialized, he scanned the crowd for his father, but saw no one that resembled him even slightly.
That same night he was transported home, bones regenerated and muscle tears reknitted, still residually sore in places but essentially whole once more. He mother fretted over him and offered to bring him dinner in bed, on a tray, as she had when he was a child and was sick, but Tom wanted to be at the family table that night. Whatever his father thought of him for his mishap, he wanted to know what it was.
His sister Moira was with them that evening, home for the weekend from South Carolina, where she was in medical school. Moira had eschewed Starfleet Academy, as had his oldest sister, Kathleen, a fact that Tom had always appreciated, because both girls were brilliant students, and he had followed in their reflected glory during all of his school years. At least at the Academy he could chart his own course, unhampered by his sisters’ reputations.
Moira was an elegantly beautiful woman, in Tom’s opinion. She had classically delicate features, wide blue eyes set in an oval face, straight thin nose, lips a bit generous but not out of proportion. She pulled her dark hair back off her face in a severe fashion which seemed, on Moira, altogether fetching. She was straightforward and completely without guile, and Tom adored her.
“Didn’t you race today?” she asked immediately, in her frank way. “How’d it go?”
Tom felt his eyes flicker to his father, who sat at the head of the table, eyes on a padd he was studying. Tom wasn’t sure he had even heard the question.
“Not so well. I took a tumble in the middle of my run and lost my chance to compete.”
“I’m sorry. It’s a wonder to me everybody doesn’t fall every time they go scooting down one of those mountains. I don’t know how you do it, sliding around on those funny-looking slats. How can you control which way you go, anyway?”
“Practice” was Tom’s laconic reply. He had no desire to get involved in a discussion of the techniques of skiing.
“Tom was actually doing well at the time,” his mother added unhelpfully. His mother was a martial-arts instructor, in magnificent physical shape, and a paleontological scholar in her own right. She was also the most loving, warm, generous woman Tom had ever encountered. He had often wondered how she’d been attracted to his father.
Tom’s eyes moved again to Admiral Paris, whose eyes had lifted from the padd, looking at his wife and children with the dispassionate look of someone who was running multiplication tables in his head. But, as Tom had suspected, he had registered every word that had been uttered.
“Hope you didn’t hurt yourself,” he said, his voice neutral, with no shading or inference of any kind. What kind of game was he playing? He had seen the fall, had seen people surrounding Tom, testing him, transporting him right from the slope to the medical facility. Why would Admiral Paris ask this curious question?
“I got pretty banged up,” Tom replied, searching his father’s face for reaction. “Broke some bones, tore some muscles and ligaments. But everything’s been pretty well regenerated. I’m just a little sore.”
“Glad it wasn’t serious,” his father intoned, then turned his eyes once more to the padd.
“Owen, Moira hasn’t been home for three months. Don’t you think you could put that padd away at the dinner table?”
Admiral Paris smiled good-naturedly and turned the padd off. “Sorry,” he said. “The Ktarians have proposed an expedition into the Beta Quadrant. Just wanted to stay on top of it.” He looked at Moira and smiled fondly. “What’s new in South Carolina?”
Tom half listened as Moira launched into a rambling account of the miseries of medical school, a subject that seemed to absorb his father’s attention completely. He was completely baffled by the admiral’s behavior. Was his father so embarrassed by Tom’s performance that he didn’t even want to admit he’d seen it? Was he trying to spare Tom’s feelings by pretending he hadn’t been there?
Or was it—and this thought hit Tom like a fist in the stomach—that he hadn’t been there?
Tom felt color rise unbidden in his face, shame greater than that he’d felt this morning in Switzerland undulating through him. His thoughts tumbled over each other, as though in homage to his spectacular plunge down the mountainside. Could he have imagined he’d seen his father? Or had he seen someone who bore him a vague resemblance and turned that person, in his mind’s eye, into the admiral?
And if he’d done that—why? He didn’t expect to see his father at a racing event, he didn’t anticipate it; in fact, it was the furthest thing from his mind. That surprise was what had taken him ou
t of the moment and caused him to stumble.
So if he didn’t expect his father there, why would his mind have leapt to the instant conclusion that Admiral Paris was standing among the spectators on the icy slope?
The only answer Tom had for that one, he didn’t want. Because the answer was that, deep down, Tom wanted his father to see him compete and so had imagined him there even when he wasn’t. Tom’s mind, given any fuel at all, would create his father’s image and impose it on a stranger.
“Tom, you look a bit flushed. Are you feverish?” This from his mother, who was looking at him with concern. Tom shook his head, but couldn’t speak. His father and Moira stopped their conversation and looked at him, Moira’s eyes suddenly worried, the admiral’s opaque and unreadable.
Ask him, said the voice inside Tom’s mind. And the voice was right. Just speak up, ask if he was there; if he wasn’t, Tom could simply say there was someone who looked a lot like him, make a joke of it. And if he was there—well, it’d be his father who’d look foolish for not having said so in the first place.
Tom felt three pairs of eyes trained on him, waiting for him to speak. When he did, his voice rang hollow in his ears. “Maybe I’ll turn in early. It’s been a long day. May I be excused?”
And with that unremarkable statement, he rose and exited the room, leaving his family staring after him.
Skiing gave Tom an immediate, visceral sense of speed and danger, but of course it paled next to the sensations produced by piloting a starship.
Tom had been piloting since he was small, first on the simulators to which his father had access, then on small but (to him) clunky youth vessels that had to fly at certain prescribed altitudes over certain prescribed routes. More than once, he was censured and even punished for violating those careful rules. He won several shuttle derbies as an adolescent, always pushing at the boundaries of the rules.
But not until Starfleet Academy did he come to appreciate what it was like to be at the helm of a ship flying at warp speed. Not the physical sensations, of course—inertial dampers buffered the impact to the body that would accrue from achieving such incredible velocity. But what it did to the emotions was, to Tom, almost indescribable.
It had to do with control. A few delicate movements of his fingers, dancing gracefully over the controls, and massive forces began to respond—and all because of instructions from him, Tom Paris, cadet. It was heady, intoxicating.
He couldn’t resist demonstrating this prowess to Odile. She wouldn’t begin pilot’s training until next year, not having had Tom’s prior experience, and she was eager for the demonstration. But she was more of a rule-follower than Tom, and was puzzled about their middle-of-the-night excursion as they walked silently through the darkened halls of Breyer’s Hall, one of the classroom buildings.
“You do have the permission for this flight, n’est-ce pas?”
“Of course. I cleared it with Commander Barns, my flight instructor.”
“Then why are we going at this hour?”
“Because this is when the shuttles aren’t being used.”
“It feels like we’re sneaking.”
“What’s sneaky? We’re going to a transporter pad.”
“It’s dark, we’re whispering, and there’s nobody here. It feels . . . illicit. Like we’re going to get in trouble.”
He glanced over at her, went momentarily weak at the sight of her profile, and resisted the very strong impulse to pull her to him and taste those full pink lips. He sighed.
“It’s very simple. We transport to a shuttle. I take you out of the solar system and demonstrate the leap to warp speed. Then we come back. That’s it.”
There was silence as her eyes flicked over the deserted corridor. “It still feels sneaky,” she insisted, and he laughed at her stubbornness.
Minutes later they were inside one of the shuttles that the Academy kept in synchronous orbit for instructional purposes. It was a craft Tom knew well, and had piloted on many occasions. He had even, in strict violation of the rules, given it a female nickname—privately, of course, so as not to offend the female cadets, who resented the practice of referring to flying craft as “she.” He understood their feelings, and wasn’t unsympathetic, but it was an ancient and proud tradition, and in following it Tom felt part of a long line of pilots and captains stretching back, he was sure, to the most primitive canoes and barges.
The name he had chosen was Tess. This was the name of a young woman he had adored during his first year in high school, albeit from afar. She was dazzlingly beautiful, intimidatingly brilliant, and wildly popular. Tom fantasized endlessly about asking her out, even going to the lengths of writing out the dialogue he might use, and practicing it so he would sound fluid and spontaneous. But he could never summon the courage to approach her.
And so it gave him perverse pleasure to name the shuttle after her, and to feel “her” respond to his commands, docile and compliant.
Of course he would never tell this to Odile.
She took the seat next to him, staring in fascination at the cockpit. “I can’t wait to start my training,” she breathed. “I’ve wanted to fly since I was a small child.”
“Me, too. I just had more access to shuttles because of my father.”
“It was very generous of your father to help you learn.”
This caught Tom by surprise. Generous? It was hardly a word he’d use to describe the admiral. He wasn’t sure how to respond, and when he did, he could hear his voice in his ears.
“I’ve never thought of it that way. Maybe you’re right.”
He could feel her gaze on him, and resisted turning toward her. He was going through the prelaunch check, and forced himself to concentrate on the routine. He didn’t like conversations like this.
“My father and mother weren’t particularly interested in what I wanted to do,” she continued. “They wanted me to do what they considered important. That was to ski.”
“And look at the result. You’re a terrific skier.”
“But could I have been a splendid artist by now? Or a poet? Or a pilot?”
“Are those what you’d rather be?”
He heard her heavy sigh next to him. “I don’t know. I’m not really trying to find fault with my parents—they did so much for me. I wouldn’t be at the Academy now if they hadn’t given me such support.” There was a small silence, no more than a second or two. “But I can’t help but wonder what might have happened . . . if they’d been more like your father.”
Something ugly rose in Tom’s throat. The retort was on his tongue: You’d have ended up believing you weren’t good enough. But he squelched it, and focused instead on the prelaunch. “All systems on-line. You ready?”
If she was surprised at his sudden shift of subject, she didn’t reveal it. “Anytime” was her reply, and if anything, what he heard in her voice was eagerness.
Tom maneuvered the shuttle out of orbit, moved as always by the sight of Earth receding from them, then set a course out of the Sol system and in the direction of the Alpha Centauri system.
“We’re ready to go to warp,” he announced presently. “I’m only taking us to warp one this time. I warn you, it can be disorienting at first.”
“I thought inertial dampers prevented any g forces,” she commented.
“They do. But seeing the distortion of the stars . . . well, you’ll see what I mean. Unless you don’t want to look.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” she replied firmly.
And so he entered the commands, delicately as always, because a woman liked to be treated delicately, and then felt the palpable thrill as the shuttle responded, creating the warp bubble which cushioned it in a pocket of subspace, and then bursting forward into a speed faster than that of light.
He had gone through this process many times, of course, the first when he was only nine, but he never ceased to thrill at the sensation. The stars seemed to elongate, stretching as though they were rubber bands, further and fu
rther until it seemed they must snap and disintegrate before his eyes. When it looked as though they could protract no further, they blurred slightly. Then there was a brief moment of total silence, a vacuumlike stillness that seemed to pull at one’s stomach, which churned briefly, and finally the moment eclipsed into the smooth subspace currents of warp speed.
Transfixed as always by the experience, he almost didn’t hear the small groan from Odile. He glanced over and found her looking pale, her fingers clutching the edge of the seat, eyes filmy as she drew ragged breaths.
“Put your head between your legs,” he ordered, and she complied instantly. She sat like that, head down so the blood would flow toward it, for several moments. Then, gingerly, tentatively, she lifted herself upright again, but was careful not to look out the windows.
“I didn’t realize . . .” she said, still shaky. “You said dis-orienting. It’s more than that.”
“I guess I don’t remember how it was the first time. It’s all in what the eyes are telling the brain.”
“My brain was talking to my eyes . . . telling them not to look. But by then, it was too late.”
“You’ll get used to it. After a while, it’s almost narcotic.”
Gradually, she lifted her eyes again to the windows, where the stars now looked like luminous streaks of light. “Now it’s all right,” she murmured. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“It’s just the moment of going to warp that creates the sensation. For me it’s almost . . . holy.”
She looked at him pensively. He’d never shared a revelation so personal with anyone, and he found himself apprehensive. Would she laugh at him?
“I can understand why” was her reply, and Tom felt an enormous surge of gratitude.
They flew like that for a long time, not speaking, basking in the hauntingly beautiful sight of the stars streaking around them.
The week they taught Charlie Day to ski was the same week Tom decided to defy his father once more. This time, had the admiral asked him if a young woman were involved, he would have had to admit yes, there most definitely was, but his father didn’t ask the question and Tom never volunteered the information.