Burning Dreams

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  “Charlie’s in the living room,” Hobelia said over her shoulder. Whatever easy time he thought he’d have of it with a stranger in the house was taken from him, and Chris had to face his father alone.

  Charlie had his back to him, working at something on his computer, the screen set into a handmade table Chris remembered helping him build when he was in his teens. The first thing he noticed was that Charlie’s hair had gone completely gray—near-white at the temples, iron-gray and still stiff as a brush on top. The ubiquitous slouch hat lay to one side of the computer screen, a glance at which told Chris Charlie was working on the month’s accounts.

  “How’s it going, Hoss?” he began awkwardly, wondering where he should sit, if he should sit. The room had always been comfortable, with big soft chairs arranged every which way to accommodate one guest or a dozen. Uncertain, Chris decided to stand.

  Charlie looked up at him under his eyebrows, sat back away from the screen and contemplated his son.

  “Can’t complain. You?”

  Chris had rehearsed this a dozen ways, but none of them seemed to work right now. Not a demonstrative man, he found himself down on one knee so he’d be at Charlie’s level.

  “Is it too late to say I’m sorry?” he said before he could give himself time to think about it.

  “Never too late to set things right,” Charlie said with a twinkle. He looked thoughtful for a moment, as if he too had been rehearsing something for this moment, hoping it would come. “Guess I’ve been as much to blame. Could have ended this a long time ago if I hadn’t been so stubborn.”

  Chris scowled. “No, it was me. I started it. Up to me to finish it.”

  “Still, I could have met you halfway…”

  “No, I shut you out every chance I got. I—”

  They could go on like this all afternoon, Chris realized. He shut his mouth and reached out a hand to Charlie. The twinkle in Charlie’s eye told him Charlie had come to the same conclusion simultaneously. The older man clasped his son’s hand, used the momentum to pull himself to his feet.

  “If they see us watching ’em, we’ll never hear the end of it,” Hobelia whispered from the hallway, giving Siddhe a little squeeze as the two men embraced, decades of silence ended in a single gesture.

  “Just a couple of weeks,” Chris was saying, trying to decide if he could manage to eat just one more chile relleno and still have room for dessert. “Taking a group of cadets out on a training exercise. I’ll be home for Christmas.”

  Content and stuffed with good food, in the company of the people he loved, he was at peace. The last thing he expected was what Siddhe told him later that afternoon.

  They stood at the corral fence and she stroked Tango’s nose, murmuring to him in a language Pike didn’t understand.

  “Every time I see him, he’s got more gray in his coat,” he remarked, fussing over the big bay, who was loving the attention. “This old devil is the last link to my childhood. I don’t know what I’m going to do when he goes.”

  “You might start by not talking about his death while he’s listening,” Siddhe said a little sharply.

  Pike snorted in disbelief. “Oh, come on, now! I know you’re gifted, but you’re not going to tell me you can read a horse’s mind.”

  “He senses your sadness in your scent, hears it in your voice,” Siddhe said, and began to walk away.

  “You up for a hike?” he asked her. He’d noted when they set out that morning that she’d worn jeans and practical shoes. Her adaptation to Earth-style clothing only enhanced her Argelianness, if there was such a word. “There’s a place I’d like to show you where the sunsets are really special.”

  “All right,” she answered, and took his hand.

  The trail he took her on had a gradual upslope, a footpath worn through natural gardens of every kind of cactus and yucca and creosote native to the region. The stark outlines of Joshua trees, like broken crucifixes, made long shadows in the waning autumn sun. This was the best time of year for sunsets in California. Up a gradual incline, they came to a small escarpment where Chris had gone to be alone sometimes when he was a boy, and sometimes not alone as boyhood flowed into manhood.

  Even absent the Argelian Empathic Contact, Siddhe would have known what was on his mind.

  “I want you to marry me,” he said as the sun slipped over the horizon into a Pacific they could only imagine from there, splashing the surrounding sky with blues and oranges and pinks and purples and even a suggestion of the palest green. “If you say yes now, as soon as I come back from this training mission, we can—”

  “No,” she said quietly, her eyes on the changing light.

  “What?!”

  It was the last thing he’d expected. Ever since he and Charlie had ended their differences this morning, he’d felt as if he were floating. Sitting at the dinner table, surrounded by the people he loved most, he’d been almost drunk with the joy of it. He could see that Charlie and Hobelia were crazy about Siddhe and she about them, though he’d somehow expected no less. For the first time in his life, everything made sense. The ghosts were gone. The should-have, would-have, could-haves of his past were laid to rest. He’d finally found a woman who could accept him without trying to change him. He’d been imagining what their children would look like, and then—

  She was on her feet, looking back in the direction of the ranch house, as if uncertain he could lead them both back there safely in the gathering dark. She’d never lacked confidence in him before. Pike was wounded.

  “I’m sorry to be so blunt, Christopher, but I cannot marry you. Before you return, I will most likely return to Argelius.”

  The chill he felt was not about the sudden drop in temperature of the desert night. How could he have guessed so wrong? Was there some custom, some nuance of her culture he wasn’t aware of? Why couldn’t she—?

  “You’re married, aren’t you?” he asked slowly, remembering José Tyler’s warning, the words sticking in his throat. “Is that why?”

  Siddhe shook her head. “No,” she said again. “But please don’t ask me for reasons I cannot give you.”

  He reached out for her hand and she gave it willingly. How could she be so warm and so rejecting at the same time?

  “Then give me some reason, even if it’s a lie.”

  She looked at him curiously. “Is that what you want? A lie? Shall I tell you I won’t stay with you because I won’t stay anywhere for more than a year? That I’m an urban creature, and while your desert is charming, I need seacoasts and fog? Will that satisfy you?”

  “We can buy a house on the coast,” Pike offered. “I don’t care where we live. You don’t even have to stay on Earth. I can—”

  She put three fingers on his lips. “You can what? Remake your life for me? No one should have to do that for the one they love. It only makes them bitter afterward. What you and I have is unmixed sweetness. Don’t let’s make it bitter now.”

  Pike stood there dumbfounded, at a loss for words. Whatever reasons she gave him were not the real reason. Should he press it, or let it go for now? Maybe she would think it over, change her mind. Maybe when he returned from the training mission, he could ask her again.

  They hiked back to the ranch house in silence, hand in hand, sure-footed even in the darkness. His perfect day was now less than perfect, but he told himself there would be other chances. He had plenty of time.

  21

  Stardate 1709.2

  Subspace chatter talked of nothing else.

  “An old class-J starship,” Commodore Mendez would characterize it later in the official log, in his personal log, and in person to James T. Kirk when he asked. “One of the baffle-plates ruptured…the delta rays…He went in, bringing out all those kids that were still alive…”

  There were one hundred and one aboard, ninety-five cadets, five instructors, and Fleet Captain Christopher Pike. The initial explosion killed everyone in the engine room—thirteen cadets and two instructors—outright. The clas
s-Js were antiquated and poorly designed, and the blast doors were too far down the corridors to stop the radiation from seeping through the Jefferies tubes and into the turboshafts—one of those “structural flaws” Mendez had talked to Pike about when he’d passed by less than a week ago. By the time those on the bridge realized what was happening, nearly everyone belowdecks was feeling some effect of radiation poisoning.

  Pike ordered the blast doors lowered and the environmental controls set on high throughout the rest of the ship. Reverse flow began venting the excess radiation into space, and a remote diagnostic indicated the rupture hadn’t damaged anything vital, so they could make it back to Starbase 11 once the crisis was contained.

  Pike’s quick thinking spared those on the bridge and in the barracks, but it left several dozen cadets and the transporter chief trapped behind the doors, most probably too sick to even drag themselves into the corridors to await rescue crews in rad suits. Intraship beaming was something only an expert would try, and the ship’s only qualified expert was in the transporter room, which was inside the hot zone, and he wasn’t answering hails.

  Every minute of exposure to delta radiation meant tissue damage, first to the lungs, which meant oxygen deprivation, unconsciousness, eventually coma and brain death. Before the victim died, however, the radiation attacked nerve tissue, inducing first paralysis, eventually cessation of autonomic function—heart rate, respiration, all the processes that made it possible for a human being to live. After that the internal organs would begin to break down irreparably.

  Immediate treatment could stop the damage, and the younger the patient, the quicker the recovery. If help could be gotten in time.

  Trapped behind the blast doors, silent to hails from the bridge, those kids were dying by the moment. Pike could hear them in the silence.

  Leaving the conn in the hands of the senior of the two remaining instructors, with standing orders that no one (“Do you hear me? No one!”) was to leave the bridge, he stationed the other instructor, who had some paramedic training, in sickbay and, violating his own orders that no one was to open the blast doors without a rad suit, assembled those who’d been off shift and were still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, gathered at the blast doors where they could see their fallen comrades through the clearsteel beyond, those who were trained scrambling into the regulation half-dozen rad suits aboard, then slid the doors open just far enough to roll himself under and, to the horror of those watching, went in and began bodily dragging his cadets to safety, handing them off to the suited-up cadets (who then handed them off to those who didn’t have suits but at least had breather-masks), as they bypassed Pike and hurried down the curve of the corridor in search of more survivors.

  No one took the time to say, “Sir, you’re at risk here. Let us do this.” The fire in Pike’s eyes (It’s not your fault they died, Chris) would have melted their words in their throats if they’d tried.

  When he picked up and began to carry the last of the cadets fallen in the first stretch of corridor, a petite female Centaurian who weighed no more than a child, he felt his legs buckle. His eyes had sealed shut minutes earlier against the smoke from burning conduits coming from engineering in spite of the reverse venting, and he was aware of a slickness on the palms of his hands which he took to be sweat, but he paid neither any heed. What concerned him was that it was getting harder to breathe. Has to be the smoke, he told himself, though there was less smoke now, and screaming alarms and flashing lights told him more about the radiation levels than he wanted to know.

  Just one more, he told himself, staggering toward the transporter room. He’d always had a soft spot for transporter personnel, because of Charlie. His chief on this tour, a heavyset human, was snoring weakly against the wall which was as far as he’d been able to crawl before the coma that made him look as if he was sleeping. Pike was crawling himself now, unable to move the deadweight of the man, the wall comm shouting at him.

  “Captain, the rupture’s still leaking. The rad levels are off the scale. You’ve got to come out now or we can’t…”

  His muscles began to scream at him then and he realized: You’ve miscalculated. Not only can’t you save your transporter chief, but you’ve just killed yourself. Always trying to be a hero! What was it Phil Boyce used to say about setting standards for yourself no human could…could…

  The pain ratcheted up then, a fire coursing along his nerves, shutting down his mind until there was nothing left but the fire…

  Of those rescued from the radiation zone on the “flying death trap” as Commodore Mendez would characterize it, weeping openly when the worst of them were brought to the hospital section at Starbase 11, the transporter chief and two more cadets succumbed to their injuries within a day. The others—seventeen altogether in addition to the ones Pike had dragged or carried out—had at least some radiation exposure, as well as first- and second-degree burns, and one young engineering student had fallen from a catwalk during the initial explosion, breaking her leg in two places. They were young and strong and would eventually recover with only minor sequelae, except for Christopher Pike.

  He had to be told how long he’d been lying unconscious in the medical wing at the starbase. Even when he heard the words “six weeks,” they made no sense. He thought he knew enough about current medical treatment to understand how the docs would treat severe burns and radiation poisoning, and couldn’t understand why they’d immobilized his entire body, even his eyelids and his vocal cords, in some sort of body cast or stasis field—

  No, his eyes still worked, and what he could see by just lowering them to study the length of his supine body in the diagnostic bed (he couldn’t move his neck to look up far enough to see the panel he knew was above the head of the bed with its jumble of readouts, but he could hear it bleeping) told him he was dressed in Starfleet-issue medical section pajamas and covered lightly with a sheet. There was no body cast.

  What then? A stasis field? He looked for the familiar shimmer and couldn’t see it. Besides, stasis fields required vacuum. Even if he’d had to be put in stasis from the neck down, he’d have had to be able to move his head and to breathe.

  A glance to one side showed him respirators and feeding tubes leading in a maze over and into him. To the other side there were waste tubes leading away, and more machines humming and chattering with readouts he couldn’t begin to fathom.

  Why the hell couldn’t he move?!

  When José Mendez explained it to him, he found he couldn’t even weep. Whatever part of his brain experienced emotions like rage, grief, despair, was still active, too active. But the synapses that would allow him to cry had been destroyed.

  “It’s just as well, Captain,” the day nurse told him gently, watching his throat work after Mendez had had to leave to control his own grief at the sight of him, and knowing what Pike wanted to do. “Too many tears and your upper respiratory system would get clogged. You’d have trouble breathing, might even start to choke…”

  I am choking! Pike wanted to shout at her. Can’t you see?

  At first his body played tricks on him.

  Once the surgeons were able to fit him with the artificial heart—more a nexus of interconnected devices to control each of his autonomic functions, placed in the chest cavity surrounding his human heart with a neural net, supplanting its function without necessarily replacing it—and interface it with the controls of the chair that took instruction from the few undamaged neural pathways that allowed him to move it slightly and to respond to binary questions, he no longer needed to remain in bed. His view of the universe from the perpendicular rather than the horizontal was physically improved somewhat, but his sense of entrapment was only mitigated, not cured.

  And there were the “phantom limb” effects, the sporadic return of sensation in his arms or legs which momentarily fooled him into thinking he could move, only to thwart him when he tried. At other times one or several of his limbs would twitch uncontrollably, sometimes only once, at o
ther times for hours at a time. At still other times he would feel the fire, subsequently replaced by ice, an interior cold that made his teeth chatter no matter how warm the room.

  His doctors offered him sedatives, sleeping potions to provide oblivion until these assaults passed. He refused them. As daunting as the feelings were, at least he was feeling something.

  Gradually, as his damaged nerves accepted the fact that they could not be restored, the false sensations ceased, leaving Pike with a fine lamina of resignation separating him from his despair.

  That was when his mind began to trick him, too.

  Mostly it was voices, the siren song of every woman he had ever known but, unlike Odysseus, the danger to him lay not in responding to those voices, but in not being able to. He had already driven his ship onto the rocks. As he lay broken on the strand, dark waters washing over his unresponsive limbs, the susurration of the waves became the softness of voices.

  There were three Sirens in the Odyssey, he recalled. One by one, he heard them.

  Chris…Was that Willa, calling to him from beyond the grave?

  Mom! he thought, and for a moment he was twelve years old again, but this time he could change the past and rescue her from the fire.

  Chris-to-pher! That was Silk, calling from a life he’d long ago left behind. Where was she now, doing what? Probably the matriarch of some extended clan of little blond Neworlders, unless her spirit had somehow broken free. In his mind he could make her fly the way he had the first time she saw him on the ship on the way to Elysium.

  Now there was a third voice. This one called him Chris and Christopher by turns. Siddhe, he thought at first, because she’d called him by both names. But Siddhe had not drawn him on; she had sent him away.

  As if she knew, he realized at last. As if the Argelian Empathic Contact had foretold some doom, though she could not know exactly what it was or when it would befall him. If she had been able to tell him something, warn him somehow, would it have changed a thing?