The Sky's The Limit Part 17

"Then say no," she said in a rush. "Tell the elders to take the weight of this themselves, just as they should. You're not a councilman. It's wrong to make these demands of you, you're just a-"

"A what?" He eyed her. "An ordinary man?"

"Wesley Crusher." Mika touched his hand. "You have never been ordinary."

The knock at the door broke the moment. She pulled it aside and found Lakanta there, breathless from running.

"Wes," he called, looking past her. "There's word from the lodge. The Federation ship has made orbit. They're sending a delegation down by transporter to the square." He swallowed hard.

Mika saw the flicker of emotion when her husband said the next word, there and then gone. "Enterprise?"

Lakanta nodded.

Wesley studied the tea in his cup for a moment, then took a sip of it. He put it down and touched Mika's wrist. "I won't be long," he told her and followed the other man out into the brightening morning air.

There were five of them: old Anthwara; Sinta and Otakay, the more senior of the elders; Lakanta; and Crusher himself. Sinta's leathery face had a cast of genuine grat.i.tude upon it as Wes walked up to them, the woman looking at him as if she thought he would save them all. She'll be disappointed, he thought.

Otakay looked like he was on the verge of saying something acid, as he always did, but the noise of splitting air molecules silenced him before he could speak. All of them were drawn to the spot by the fountain where five dashes of blue-white scintillation appeared in midair, elongating in moments to resolve into columns of light and then into the solidity of humanoid forms. Wes found his gaze falling on the chest of the man materializing at the head of the landing party, on the oval-and-arrowhead sigil that rested on his left breast. The deep crimson of the uniform stood out against the muted earth tones of the clothes favored by the colonists.

The transporter cycle ended and the man in the burgundy tunic scanned them with a severe and uncompromising gaze that cut through Wes as if he were just empty air.

"My name is Edward Jellico," said the officer. "I'm captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise." Jellico made no move toward introducing the rest of his party, two watchful security men with holstered phasers at their belts and a slim Cygnian female in a mustard-colored uniform who kept her attention on a tricorder. The fifth and final member of the group wore a sky-blue overcoat that accented the plume of terra-cotta hair falling over her shoulders. Doctor Beverly Crusher gave her son a brittle smile of greeting but said nothing.

Wes returned the gesture woodenly. She looks older. The thought popped unbidden into the front of his mind, and he found he didn't know what to say to his mother. How much time had pa.s.sed since that day in San Francisco, when he told her he was leaving? Four years, five? Their last words had been hurtful to one another, and then as he traveled, it had become so easy simply to let her slip from his mind. Wes felt the sting of guilt; she'd aged and he couldn't help but think it was his fault.

Anthwara cleared his throat, and with nods of his head the old man introduced the representatives of the colony. Jellico gave all of them an arch look in turn but ignored Wes when his name was mentioned. "I speak for this settlement," concluded Anthwara, talking with his usual air of calm deliberation. "I will hear your pet.i.tion."

"Pet.i.tion?" repeated Jellico. "Has there been some kind of mis-communication here? A subs.p.a.ce message was transmitted to you over nine solar weeks ago, from the Office of Colonial Affairs on Starbase 310. You did receive it?"

"We did," snapped Otakay, bristling, "and we chose not to concede to the authority of your 'office of affairs.' "

Jellico smiled thinly. "Is that right? You're happy to be a part of the Federation for two hundred years, but the moment it's not going your way you decide to strike out on your own?"

"This colony has been on its own since the tribe first left their birth world behind," ventured Lakanta. "It has always maintained its independence and self-sufficiency."

The captain's cold smile became a sneer. "And you can thank Starfleet for that. While you lived your lives on this backwater, it was Starfleet vessels, Federation vessels, that kept the Dorvan sector free from invasion and piracy-" He stopped himself. "Mister Anthwara, I'm not here to debate politics with you. The Enterprise is here to do a job, and I intend to see that task through to its conclusion. Teku?" Jellico gave a sideways look to the Cygnian woman-a lieutenant, Wes noticed-and in turn she offered Sinta a datapadd with a milk-pale hand.

"This is a complete transcript of the Federation-Carda.s.sian Treaty and all communications and stipulations attending to it," said the woman, "along with a copy of the formal orders of relocation signed by the president of the United Federation of Planets."

Sinta took it and pa.s.sed it to Wesley without even looking at the device. He glanced at the page of orders. It was all there, in dense boilerplate legalese.

"Enterprise's cargo s.p.a.ces and holodecks have been converted to serve as temporary accommodation for your people," Jellico continued. "You'll find details of individual allowances for personal items for each transportee. Any special medical requirements should be made clear to Doctor Crusher, here."

Lieutenant Teku gestured toward the kittik fields. "Sir, I'd suggest that area would be best as a staging point for transport groups. We can beam up ten, perhaps sixteen people at a time and the sensors will give a clear lock-"

"We're not going." The words slipped out of Wesley's mouth. He looked up from the padd and met Jellico's hard gaze. "No one wants to leave here."

Jellico's jaw hardened. "You talk like you have a choice, son. Don't make the mistake of thinking you do."

"I'm not your d.a.m.n son," Wes retorted, and he saw his mother stiffen at the words, "and I'll tell you again, one more time so there's no misunderstanding between us. None of us will leave Dorvan V."

The captain looked at Anthwara. "I thought you did the speaking for your people."

"Wesley is one of my people," replied the old man. "His words are my words."

"Wes," said Beverly, and he tensed. Just hearing her say his name pulled his emotions tight. "You...The colonists can't stay. This planet belongs to the Carda.s.sians now. They already have a ship on its way to establish an outpost. If they arrive and find humans still here, they'll consider you trespa.s.sers."

Otakay gave a sour chuckle. "Trespa.s.sers? On our own land?" He glared at Jellico. "You make this pact without consulting us and expect everyone in our settlement simply to agree to it?" The elder snorted. "I imagine these Carda.s.sians will be angry when they get here-but that will be your problem, not ours! You'll have to answer for bartering away that which was never yours to begin with!"

Teku's face creased in concern. "With respect, sir, you will not be simply deported and left to fend for yourselves. Once you arrive at Starbase 310, you will be given the opportunity to resettle on any one of a thousand worlds all across the quadrant."

Anthwara spread his hands. "This is our home, miss," he told her. "What my grandson-in-law says is what every one of us will say." The elder looked at Jellico. "I apologize for your wasted journey, Captain."

In turn, Jellico shot Wesley a poisonous glare, as if the whole turn of the proceedings were his fault. "Crusher," he began, "these people have lived here all their lives, and maybe they don't know the score. But you? You've traveled, out on the fringe worlds. You've seen Carda.s.sians and what they're capable of." He took a step closer. "Explain the difference between us and them to your friends here. Tell them how Carda.s.sia Prime won't beam down representatives to talk but will just wipe this township off the map with a disruptor barrage from orbit."

"If they come, we will reason with them," said Anthwara.

Jellico ignored him, fixing Wes with a hard eye. "Two days. This colony will be evacuated within two days. This isn't some negotiation. It's a fact."

"The treaty terms allow for no flexibility," said Teku. "After the a.s.sa.s.sination of Amba.s.sador Spock and the fallout from the Klingon Civil War, the Federation cannot afford any incident that might disrupt the tenuous stability we have with the Carda.s.sian Union. There is no alternative."

Wesley met the older man's gaze and did not flinch from it. "Go home, Jellico," he told him after a moment. "Starfleet's not wanted here."

The captain of the Enterprise stepped away and nodded to his subordinates. "Two days," he repeated, then tapped his combadge. "This is the captain. Bring us back."

Wes watched the look on his mother's face as she faded away into the grip of the transporter beam, her sadness and concern melting into the morning air.

He felt Lakanta's hand on his shoulder. "Thank you, my friend."

"For what?" Crusher said bitterly. "Everything he said was right. The Carda.s.sians will come, and they'll arrive with guns first and questions later." A heavy weight settled on him, and with old regret he realized the sensation was unpleasantly familiar.

"Perhaps we should consider their offer in more detail," said Sinta. "Put it to the community, let the tribe take a vote upon it."

"Anyone who wants to go can go!" snapped Otakay. "They'll find themselves in the minority! Our forefathers were forced from their lands by the hands of men who cared nothing for their tribes and their culture.... Have we come so far and done so much on this world to let that happen all over again?"

"Kin," Anthwara said, "this is not an excuse to fight battles of the past. We must take the path that we know to be the true one, and keep to it. This man Jellico, he will see that we will not be swayed, and he will go on his way with his starship."

"And when the Carda.s.sians come?" said Sinta. "What then?"

"We'll answer them with the same voice." Anthwara approached him. "Wesley. The woman, your mother?"

He nodded.

"The distance between you is great. If you wish to, none of us would think ill of you to visit her on the starship."

Wes found himself shaking his head. "That won't be necessary." He began to walk away.

"Where are you going?" Otakay demanded.

"To be with my wife," he replied and left the square behind him.

He did not see Lakanta watch him go, measuring the desolation in his manner.

In the evening, Mika went to the porch and adjusted the gain on the telescope rig as it turned gently on automatic servos, plotting the star positions and correlating them with the data matrix in the house's computer. The information would be collated and processed by the settlement's central database for the farmers, allowing them to manage the growing season with even finer control than in previous years.

She suddenly halted, her hand on the body of the device. Was there any point to doing this now? If they were going to be forced to leave Dorvan V, it mattered nothing how many readings she took and figures she gathered. Her hand slipped to the manual control pad and she shifted the telescope around. The autosensor quickly found the ship in high orbit and displayed the image of it on a monitor. Mika made out a bright white oval and a cl.u.s.ter of tubes and smooth forms beneath it, gleaming dully like carved animal bone.

"Never thought I'd see that again." Wesley's voice issued out of the darkness, startling her. He stepped out of the house to her side. "Come in. It's cold out here." Her husband reached toward the power switch for the monitor.

"It won't go away that easily," she said quietly. "Everyone is afraid, Wes. And they look to me because-"

"Because of your husband?" He sighed. "Go ahead and tell them there's nothing I can do to make this unhappen. I'm not Starfleet and I never was."

Mika embraced him. "But you wanted to be. Once."

"No." He shook his head.

"Don't lie to me," she replied firmly. "You know you can't. You can't hide anything from me, Wesley Crusher."

He smiled ruefully. "That's right. That's why I love you so much." The smile faded almost as soon as it had formed. "It was all so far away from me. I wanted it like that. And now...now it's all come back, it's found me again. That ship...that life..."

"Your mother?"

A slow nod. "Yes."

Gently, Mika tilted his face down to meet hers. "Tell me," she said. "Tell me why it hurts you so much."

And so he did.

On the transport ship from Earth to Deneb IV, he watched the other kids playing together. They were younger than him, sure, but he still felt a little jealous. They had a freedom, a kind of randomness about them that was outside his experience, and Wesley found himself wondering what it would be like to be like them. As he sat with his padd and thumbed through books he didn't want to read anymore, he realized that he was missing something. It took the duration of the trip for him to form it in his mind. Back home, his life had been a landscape of adults. The friends of his mother, his teachers, librarians, neighbors. Rarely did he meet children of his own age, and even then he found it hard to connect with them. They played elaborate games full of shifting rules, social conflict, and noise. Wesley liked to talk but they didn't want to listen. The things that earned him attention and praise from adults gathered derision and disinterest from his peers. His intelligence didn't count there; he stayed on the outside, pressed against a membrane of schoolyard laws he didn't understand. He was fifteen and he had no friends.

But all those boys and girls were gone. On the ship, no one but his mother knew who Wesley Crusher was. He came to understand that he had an opportunity to change the map of his life, to reinvent himself. On Earth, all the adults had talked around him of the great futures he would live-as a doctor following in his mother's footsteps, perhaps a mathematician or an explorer like his Starfleet father-but now he rejected them all. The pressure of being different, of such expectation, weighed on his young shoulders. He wanted to make that go away. Suddenly, the novelty of being ordinary seemed like the greatest challenge of them all.

At Farpoint Station he slipped his mother's watchful eye and fell in with another youth, the child of a botanist due to ship out with Enterprise just like the Crushers. The boy was named Eric, and he had already made friends with Jake and Annette in the Deneban marketplace. Wesley put his books aside and stood among them, fighting down his need to impress, just listening, just surfing on the edges of their new and easy comradeship. He let himself go slack, be lazy, and it was like nothing he'd ever felt before. Wesley closed the door on the precocious little genius inside him and drifted, with all the aimless indolence that only adolescents have.

Sometimes the starship went to places where things more strange and fascinating than anything his books had shown him existed. He heard secondhand about dangers and deaths, and now and then the pull of the unknown threatened to tug him back to the path he had left-but science fairs and alien worlds were a poor second to the attentions of Annette as Wesley's first fumbling attempts at romance brought him into conflict with Jake. Best friends became rivals, vying for her affections in a contest that embarra.s.sed him now to think of it as a man. And at home, under his mother's judgmental eye, Wesley became sullen. She told him that things were expected of him, better and more important things than wasting his life on the holodeck and chasing a flighty girl whose looks concealed a dull and unchallenging nature. Perhaps, in his heart, he had known she was right, but he was a teenage boy, and everything that didn't come from his generation was something to kick against. The only one who seemed to know him was Picard.

At first, he refused to see past the uniform and the line of four gold pips on his collar. The man was authority incarnate, he was the adult world made manifest aboard Enterprise. Wesley expected stern lectures from him, but the opposite occurred. Picard watched him make his own mistakes, let him find his own path. When he had advice, it was on the mark and it never felt like reproach. Despite himself, Wesley Crusher found his respect growing for Jean-Luc Picard. He found common ground with the Starfleet officer; Picard had grown up in a family where much had been expected of him and where he too had refused to follow the road laid out by his parents. By degrees, Wes let his barriers fall, let this man rekindle the brilliance inside him. As much as he would have hated to say the words aloud, he needed a father, and Jack Crusher was more than a decade dead and gone. Picard represented what was missing from the boy's life-direction, purpose. The captain offered him the chance to apply to Starfleet Academy and for a while he rested on the cusp of that choice. Jake Kurland was, naturally, already in the program to become an acting ensign, making up in bravado what Wesley had on him in intellect. And Annette? Annette was dazzled by the cut and dash of a man in uniform. He was falling into the choice, dragged toward it by the inertia of his life, and perhaps he would have taken it, if not for an ill-considered argument in the ship's mall.

Jake had found out about Picard's offer to Wesley and he was incensed. Kurland had worked hard to prove himself capable of application to Starfleet, and the undercurrent of barely masked dislike toward Wes and his casual genius finally emerged in a furious tirade. He still remembered the other boy's words, the sting of them fresh after all these years.

"It all comes so easy to you, doesn't it? You could snap your fingers and be in Starfleet, but I have to work for it! I have to fight for it, just like I have to fight to make Annette notice me!" Jake's outburst cut Wes like a knife. "You don't deserve it, Crusher! You don't deserve any of it! Picard's only good to you because he's in love with your mother!"

He remembered the punch, the impact of his fist on Jake's face. Kurland spinning away, blood issuing from his nose in a dark fan. Annette screaming at him, disgust in her eyes. Eric's static expression of betrayal.

He ran and found the two of them, the captain and his mother, talking over tea in the Crushers' quarters. Picard's face, schooled and calm, and yet without a doubt Wes saw into the man he had just begun to trust and knew it was true. Jake and the others-who knew how many others?-had seen the growing bond between the doctor and the captain while Wesley the boy genius had been blind to it. His life detonated into wreckage, crashing down around him. He felt cheated.

"Wesley," Picard had spoken with a metered, paternal tone, "your mother and I are good friends. She and I only want what is best for you, for all of us."

And every rage and frustrated fury from his life channeled into his retort, all his hurt and loss, all his betrayals and loneliness. "Get out! You are not my father!"

Mika's hands clasped around his and she swallowed hard. Her husband was stoic, betraying no emotion as his story spilled out of him. She had heard parts of it before, in moments when he had been sad or melancholy, but never the whole thing, never in such rich and poignant detail. Wesley's wife gasped, holding in her tears. She wanted to hold him, but there was more to tell, and he needed to let it out of himself.

"What happened then?" she asked.

He gave a shuddering sigh. "After that, I met him for the first time."

The Enterprise's lifeboats were cubes no more than three meters to a side, arranged in rings on the dorsal and ventral faces of the starship hull, ready to accept pa.s.sengers and eject themselves into the void if the vessel succ.u.mbed to some catastrophe. Normally, a lifeboat hatch would not open unless a command from the bridge allowed it, but Wesley's idle cunning had made short work of the control systems; he had a favorite boat, at the end of one ring, the hatch out of sight from the main corridor. He could find some quiet inside, a place to brood and to sneak synthehol or just to get away. Many times he had sat in there, his hand on the manual ejection lever, wondering how much pressure it would take to fire the pod into s.p.a.ce. One jerk of the wrist, and he would be away, thrown out of the warp bubble and deposited in the interstellar void between stars. Free to drift. Free of everything.

Wesley's hand dropped away and he pulled his dark jacket close around his shoulders. Would anyone notice? He was tempted to do it just to see how sorry they would be when he was gone.

In the next second, the hatch below him was opening and he reacted with shock. If Yar's security people caught him, Wes would be in serious trouble. But the head that intruded into his hiding place was decidedly nonhuman and non-Starfleet. A face of pale, silvery skin turned to him, kind eyes beneath a thick brow that belied the intelligence of the alien's expression. The youth had a moment of recognition; he'd seen the humanoid aboard the ship some days earlier, in the company of an engineer from off-ship as part of some upgrade program. Wes recalled his mother talking about how a near accident had occurred belowdecks, where only Lieutenant La Forge's quick thinking had stopped Enterprise from racing away into subs.p.a.ce. He reverted to a default surliness. "You're not supposed to come in here," he grunted.

"I could say the same to you," the alien said mildly, and he pulled himself up into one of the vacant seats. He glanced around, running broad, long fingers over the walls. "So small and so complex," he breathed, "a very clever design.... But it lacks poetry, don't you think? It's so functional."

"It's a lifeboat," Wes retorted bluntly. "Doesn't matter what it looks like."

To his surprise, the alien nodded. "That's true. What lies beneath the surface is the true measure of a thing." He blinked slowly. "So, Wesley. Are you ready to go back yet?"

"Back?" Crusher leaned away. "Back where? What are you talking about?"

The alien frowned slightly. "Ah. Forgive me. My use of human speech is not as polished as I would like it to be. One can forget simple things when one travels as much as I do."

"How do you know who I am?"

"I'm very well informed," came the languid reply. "I make it my business to seek out people with...unique insights. I thought you might be one of them."

Wesley snorted. "Unique? How I am different from every other teenager who ever lived?" The words tripped off his tongue. "I'm angry at the world, nothing moves fast enough, my life is all rules and things I can't do..."

He got a smile. "True. But how many of your fellow adolescents have the capacity to step outside themselves and see that?"

"Seeing it doesn't make it go away," Wes replied. "I can't make something vanish just by thinking about it."

The smile drew short. "For the moment, I would suppose not."

He took a breath. "Look, if you want something from me, spit it out. Otherwise, could you go away? I like my privacy!"

"I will," replied the alien, moving back to the hatch. "I was looking for something in you, Wesley Crusher, but I can see it is not there."

"What the h.e.l.l is that supposed to mean?"

The dark, deep eyes met his, and Wes felt a sudden sense of impossible, unknowable distance. "For all species, how we meet a challenge defines what we are and what we will become. But if we refuse it, that too is a choice, the price of which is never fully apparent at the moment in question."

"I don't understand," Wes replied.

The alien climbed down through the hatch. "No," he said, with sadness in his words, "you do not."

The youth watched the strange humanoid go and a chill pa.s.sed through him. Wesley felt a peculiar sense of loss in the pit of his stomach, but when he searched inside for something to define it, it melted away, leaving nothing.