Burning Dreams

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  “Tracks,” he answered Charlie’s question, indicating with a jerk of his chin, emulating Charlie. What a month ago would have looked like merely heat cracks in the caliche he could now clearly see was the path the snake had made in its traverse of the desert floor. “The sidewinder’s, the lizards’, maybe a roadrunner, and some kind of rodent.”

  “Species?”

  “Mouse, but I don’t know what type.”

  Charlie nodded, satisfied. “You will.” He glanced up at the sun, stretched out his lower back, and went to where the horses waited. “Time to head for home. Hobelia said something about signing you up for a real school. She wants to take you around to see some of them today so you can choose.”

  “I’d rather stay out here with you!” Chris followed reluctantly, swinging up into the saddle with practiced ease now.

  “There’ll be plenty of time for that.” Charlie turned his horse with a simple voice command. “Race you to the Joshua trees!” he shouted, and they were off.

  That was how it had been since Chris arrived, and how he wished it could stay forever. Coming back to Mojave, where he’d been born, had in a sense been like coming home, but he’d never really known anything about the desert beyond.

  From a dusty little nineteenth-century mining town and insignificant spur of the railroads pushing inexorably West, to a forgotten twentieth-century stopover of burger joints and auto repair shops, Mojave, California, had benefited from the nascent environmentalism of that early era and become one of the models for integrated human habitation into the following centuries.

  From the wind turbines providing power to nearby Palm Springs as early as the 1990s to the weather screens of the late twenty-first century, what began as desert had been transformed into a virtual Garden of Eden, patterned on the Vulcan model, which surrounded desert cities with parklands to keep the heat and sand at bay, mitigating the climate for those in town without upsetting the ecology of the flora and fauna in the desert beyond.

  Forests of native trees—pines and junipers, redwoods and live oaks and scarlet-leaved liquidambar—alternated with rolling meadows lush with grasses and wildflowers, all of it crisscrossed with walking and riding paths, forming rings around small individual communities of pretty little houses built into cliffsides or nestled on sprawling properties that blended into the ecosystem, linked together into the Greater Mojave Area.

  In its natural state, the Mojave Desert could only have sustained a fraction of the population living there not quite three centuries after the adaptation began. The key was the weather screens.

  Constructed of a special alloy that could float at stratospheric levels and “tethered” by navigational beacons so that they remained in synchronous orbit above the cities they were designed for, examined close-up they really did look like screens, or perhaps fishnets—an open mesh that interacted with atmospheric conditions and made hot days cooler and cold nights warmer.

  Over northern cities, they raised the ambient temperature slightly and mitigated the wind chill but still allowed the snow to fall. Above Mojave, there was seldom a need to mitigate the cold. True, desert nights were chilly, and often winter mornings found patches of frost lingering in the shady places, but it was the desert heat that most needed management. Before the weather screens, days of hundred-degree temperatures were not uncommon. Once the screens were in place to moderate temperatures over the city itself and, to a lesser degree (so as not to disturb the natural growth and dormant cycles of the greenery), over the parks and forests, an interesting side effect was discovered.

  The contrast between desert temperatures and city temperatures created excess moisture, which could be collected and allowed to fall in the parklands as rain, and which, guided into reservoirs, raised the water table and, consequently, increased the number of inhabitants per square mile the desert could sustain.

  Christopher vaguely knew some of this. He would become more conversant with it as he grew older. For now, he knew not to be in the parks between five and seven a.m. unless he didn’t mind getting soaked. It was the least of his concerns; he had more important things on his mind.

  For one thing, he discovered that Charlie had a wife, for another, that Charlie was something of a hero. The two factors changed how Chris saw Charlie—no longer as a loner who drifted from job to job (“an underachiever” Heston had styled him once, during a particularly bad mood), but in whom he still found much to admire—but as a different man entirely.

  “You mean he didn’t tell you?” Hobelia marveled, watching Chris examine the medals and commendations in their case on the mantel. “That’s our Charlie! Doesn’t talk, just does. Some of those he got just for everyday things. You know, stopping a warp-core breach, transporting a landing party during a red alert—”

  “Hobe…” Charlie began, knowing it was useless.

  “But that big one there? That’s for saving his captain’s life. And almost losing his own in the process.”

  “Hobelia, that’s enough!”

  She’d wrapped one arm around his waist and beamed at Chris, who was taking all this in. “He doesn’t believe he’s a hero!”

  “‘Hero’!” Charlie snorted. “Never knew what that word meant. I just do what I need to do to be able to sleep at night, that’s all…”

  “He took a laser blast that was meant for his captain,” Hobelia translated. “Shoved him out of the way, knowing he’d probably die.”

  “Just my dumb luck I lived through it,” Charlie remarked. “Reflexes got in the way of common sense. Still don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

  Hobelia shook her head, as if they’d had this conversation a thousand times before. “Man believes no good deed goes unpunished!”

  Chris soon learned that Hobelia was a force to be reckoned with. Solidly built, with jet-black eyes and strong cheekbones and hands that were always busy—chopping vegetables, gentling horses, cuddling the neighbors’ babies—she barely came up to Charlie’s shoulder. Her long black hair hung in a single plait down her back, except when she was riding, in which case she coiled it up on top of her head, or for important occasions when she brushed it out and let it hang loose, dense and shimmering as silk, almost to her knees. Whenever he heard the term Earth mother, he would always think of Hobelia.

  “Her people have been here almost as long as the land,” Charlie explained after he’d taken her in his arms without a word and they simply held each other for a long moment, their eyes closed, his chin resting on the top of her head. “She’s mostly Mojave, with a little bit of Navajo. One of her grandfathers ventured out of Dineteh and came here.”

  “Wow,” Chris said, not knowing what else to say.

  “Guess he didn’t tell you he’s part Native, too, did he?” Hobelia asked Chris, who didn’t know what to say to that, either. “Only he’s an outlander. Cherokee came from Oklahoma originally, spread all through the South and Midwest until the Trail of Tears.”

  “Plenty of time for history lessons,” Charlie said, sensing Chris was more than a little overwhelmed with all this information. “Thought you might want to meet Tango.”

  Hobelia clapped one hand over her mouth, surprised at her forgetfulness. “Of course! Poor little guy—let’s see what we can do for him.”

  The colt had made some progress on the voyage home. Charlie and one of the other engineers had programmed the food dispenser for a formula that closely resembled the chemical composition of mare’s milk and designed a bottle for him to drink from, and after some balking and a lot of spluttering he’d finally gotten the hang of it. But he missed his mother and, even reunited with Chris, he still seemed inconsolable.

  “You leave him to me!” Hobelia said, stroking him and speaking to him in a language Chris didn’t understand. A little hesitantly, Tango let her lead him out of the trailer.

  Unlike Heston’s horses, Charlie’s horses were allowed to roam free. A few were grazing in an open field beside the house, and watched the arrival of the young stranger curio
usly. Hobelia led Tango near a mare with an almost-weaned yearling. Mare and colt touched noses and investigated each other. By the end of the day, Tango had a foster mother and a vast extended family.

  Tango was six months old when he arrived on Earth. As he grew, Chris worked with him daily, teaching him to walk on a lead, to stand in cross ties for grooming, to permit his feet to be trimmed, to load and unload from the trailer without balking. Most times when he rode out with Charlie or Hobelia or both, he would ride the mare who had adopted Tango and “pony” him, letting him run alongside the mare while Chris rode her on the trails. In time he would show the colt in halter at local fairs and the annual rodeo.

  By the time Tango was a yearling, his serious training would begin. Chris exposed him to all sorts of stimuli—leading him over tarps, puddles, the natural land bridges on the mountain trails—conditioning him so he’d be less likely to spook under unfamiliar circumstances.

  When Tango was two, Chris would begin “long-lining” him, having him obey commands while being led in a circle on a long lead. Next came double-lining, having him walk while Chris walked behind him holding two leads attached to either side of his halter. In true Western fashion, he would start working him in a hackamore, a bridle that looped over Tango’s nose, rather than a bit, and accustom him to wearing a saddle.

  By the time Tango was three, Chris would start leaning heavily against him to accustom him to his weight. When he finally swung himself into the saddle, Tango would be so used to him he wouldn’t buck. He would accept a snaffle bit and eventually a curb bit, and by the time he was five, he’d have herded cattle, ridden many kinds of trails; he’d have learned to jump and even barrel race. He would be a perfect working saddle horse, and he and Chris would move and think as one. Leaving him behind to attend the Academy would be one of the most difficult things Chris ever had to do; only knowing that Tango would recognize him and take up where they had left off every time he came home on leave made it possible.

  But all that was yet to come, and most humans could not foresee the future. Some, though, had a way of reading into events in the present that made it seem so.

  “I don’t know, Hobe,” Charlie said quietly, watching boy and horse together, he and Hobelia resting their chins on their arms atop the split-rail fence the way he and Chris sometimes did. “He’s remembered how to smile again. The nightmares seem to have eased, and God knows there’s nothing wrong with his appetite—if he doesn’t stop growing we’ll have to raise the doorways—but part of me thinks he may never heal completely.”

  “It’s early yet,” Hobelia soothed him, rubbing his back idly. “Boy only has but one mother. One thing, though. I think it’s past time you told him about his father.”

  Charlie gave her a sideways look. “I don’t have to tell you his father’s a tough case. Plenty of time to ease him into the idea.”

  “Says you!” Hobelia snorted. She stopped rubbing his back to clap her hands and cheer at some clever thing Tango had just done. “The longer you wait, the less he’s apt to forgive you for keeping it from him.”

  “I’d still be happier if he got some counseling,” Charlie said to change the subject.

  Hobelia indicated boy and horse working as one. “That’s all the counseling he needs.”

  “Says you.”

  Hobelia punched him lightly on the arm. “Yeah, Charlie Pike, says me! That boy there is sumach a’hot. Gifted.”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows. “Be careful with that.”

  “I only say it when I mean it,” Hobelia said with a look Charlie had learned meant she would not be contradicted. “Christopher has a gift that will take him far. But it will be a bittersweet gift…”

  9

  Earth

  There was a dreamlike quality to Christopher Pike’s adolescence. Could life really be this easy? Or had he earned this somehow, because of his past?

  The possibility of living with his aunt and uncle in Argentina somehow never came up again after that first time. On his thirteenth birthday, along with a hand-tooled saddle and his first real cowboy boots, Charlie handed him an old-fashioned printed document rolled up with a ribbon in the form of a scroll. It was an offer of adoption. Chris couldn’t think of any reasons not to accept.

  The following day he, Charlie, and Hobelia visited a lawyer in town and signed the document, and Chris kept his copy among his treasures. At first the name Christopher Pike struck him as odd but, trying it out in his mind and on his tongue, he found it suited him.

  He did well in school. Because of the way Willa had taught him to investigate things from the time he was a little boy, learning came easily to him, and he was very popular in his new school. He was absorbed by the knowledge itself and didn’t care about the grades.

  Nor did his learning limit itself to the classroom. Charlie taught him to live off the land, to acknowledge every creature who lived on it, to find water in the desert and food in seeming barren places, to sleep beneath the stars and know their names. Hobelia taught him to recognize that past, present, and future were not always distinct things, and that a wise man never dismissed his dreams.

  His boundless energy found outlet in riding and showing Tango at as many local shows as he could manage, and somehow he found time to captain the school football team, and allow the local girls to worship him. The sight of the handsome young man with the lopsided grin riding up to school on the striking bay gelding who was true to his name, strutting and waltzing and sidestepping in place—as much a clown and a show-off as his master was quiet and thoughtful—was enough to turn any girl’s head.

  He never got too deeply involved with any one girl; Charlie joked that he’d have needed a flyswatter to shoo the extra ones away if he had. And if once in a while a shadow fell across his face, and those dark eyebrows drew down in a frown and his gaze seemed very far away, if he was a little more serious than most young men his age—not quite standoffish, but reluctant to engage in the clowning and rough-housing of his peers—the story of how his mother had died before his eyes when he was very young would make the rounds, and those who knew him would cut him some slack.

  Every so often when he thought about Willa—and he thought about her a lot—he recalled that overheard conversation in the kitchen and he wondered. Wondered if it had meant what he thought it meant at the time, wondered if he should mention it to Charlie.

  What if Charlie and his mother had been having an affair? What if they hadn’t? It occurred to Chris a thousand times to ask, lead up to it in some subtle or not-so-subtle way, but he never did. What did it matter now, anyway?

  During his growing up years, Charlie left on two more one-year voyages, and Chris and Hobelia ran the ranch. When Charlie came home, Chris pestered him for stories, filling in the blanks in his own mind around Charlie’s laconic version. The Starfleet uniform Chris had been given to wear when his own clothes were destroyed in the fire still hung in his closet, though it had been made for a smaller person, and he’d long since outgrown it. Like the adoption scroll, it was a talisman, a piece of the past that might give him a clue to the future.

  Life was as close as any real thing could be to idyllic. How could he possibly give it up for what he needed to do next?

  “What do you want, Chris?” Charlie asked him on the cusp of his senior year. The two men—Chris was taller than Charlie by now and nearly as broad in the shoulders, no longer a child by any definition—stood as they always did, chins resting on their folded arms, leaning on the top rail of the split-rail fence, savoring the evening with one eye on the horses.

  “Want?” Chris pretended to be puzzled by the question. “I don’t want anything, Hoss. I’ve got everything right here.”

  Charlie gave him a sideways look. “Say that again and convince me you mean it. You know what I’m talking about. College, travel, something else? I’ve never heard you talk with any enthusiasm about anything other than horses and girls, not necessarily in that order. It didn’t seem to be my business to pres
s you on it, but there are some decisions to be made soon.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve also seen you looking at the stars, wondering.”

  Chris looked chagrined. “Okay, Hoss, you caught me. I’ve been thinking about joining Starfleet.”

  “Have you, now?” Charlie feigned surprise. He’d noticed the application hovering on Chris’s computer screen for months now.

  Chris nodded. “I want to see what’s out there. Can’t put it in any fancier words than that.”

  Charlie suppressed a small smile. “Don’t know that you need to.”

  Chris settled back down on the top rail with his chin on his folded arms, comfortable with the silence. Charlie squinted at the horizon, guessing what time it was. A finger to the wind told him tomorrow’s weather.

  “Academy deadline’s not far away,” he offered finally.

  “Starfleet Academy? I was thinking of enlisting. Don’t know that I’d qualify for the Academy.”

  Charlie took off his slouch hat and whapped him playfully upside the head with it. “Now I know you’re fishing! Why wouldn’t you qualify? You’ve got excellent grades, natural leadership qualities, you’re in top physical condition. A few little things like that. Plus you did look damn good in the uniform, even as a kid.”

  “Yeah, I did, didn’t I?” Chris said with his lopsided grin.

  “So—?”

  “So I don’t think there’s much use for a wrangler on a starship. I don’t have the engineering skills you have, and I’m okay at the sciences, but there’s no great passion for it. I don’t see that I have anything unique to offer.”

  Charlie scratched one ear thoughtfully. “Then by process of elimination, there’s nothing left but the command track.”