Burning Dreams Read online

  Would I really have been so shallow? he asked himself, and got no answer. His former life had been burned away by the trauma he had just survived. In the ordeal of the past few months, he had learned to disregard the trivial. Thus, he told himself, if their fates had been different and it had been Vina instead of someone else he had met at that diplomatic reception a little more than a year ago, he’d have found her just as attractive, if in an entirely different way, as he had when he thought she was a girl of eighteen and the only human on Talos.

  There was a third possibility, Pike realized as he waited in the antechamber deep belowground where the Keeper—

  No, he corrected himself: the Magistrate. When they captured you that first time and kept you in a cage, “Keeper” was appropriate. But hir proper title is Magistrate, and s/he has offered you another chance at life. The least you can do is set aside your old bitterness and begin anew.

  The Magistrate, then, had given Spock the coordinates to beam Pike down to one of the hundreds of interconnected chambers in one of several subterranean cities to which the surviving Talosians had retreated after they had all but destroyed the surface of their world. Following a brief farewell, Spock had gone back to the ship, and the Magistrate—looking, Pike thought, more smug than ever—having completed the necessary niceties that saw Spock on his way, had merely observed Pike for a moment without speaking, even in his mind, then floated ethereally into a nearby lift, leaving him alone.

  Now he heard the hum of the lift mechanism and surmised it was the Magistrate returning, bringing Vina to him. His anticipation all but overcame him as he considered the third possibility.

  The Magistrate might have used the power of illusion to vanish, instead of the mundane device of the lift. So too, the Magistrate might have made Vina appear out of nowhere like some magician’s trick. Why the drawn-out process of leaving and returning, unless—?

  Unless, Pike thought, Vina and I are to be presented to each other this time as what we “truly” are, she a “lump of flesh,” to use her cruel, self-deprecating words, a woman whose body was as damaged as—

  As yours is? he chided himself. Face it, Mister. It’s not how Vina will appear to you that worries you, but how you will appear to her. When you left her here thirteen years ago—abandoned her, some would say—what she saw was a handsome, vital young man in his prime—strong, in command, exactly matching her image of perfection. What will she see now? Will they let her keep that idealized image of you she’s been holding on to all this time, or will she see the ruined husk of you, your body insensate, useless, your mind still teeming with words and thoughts you can only communicate to other humans in binary, one light for yes, two for no?

  Oh, yes, eventually the Talosians will give you each back the illusion you have of the other but, knowing what lies beneath, will that satisfy either of you?

  It’s not how she will seem to you that frightens you more than any enemy real or imagined, but how you will seem to her. What will you do if the sight of you is so repulsive to her that she turns away?

  His thought process got no further than that. Suddenly, she was there.

  “Vina…” someone said. Was that his voice? He no longer remembered what it sounded like. How were the Talosians doing that? In reality, he couldn’t speak. But the Talosians were giving him the illusion that he could, just as they were convincing him that he was moving his arms, freeing them from the confines of the chair, his hands finding the mechanism that would detach all the sensors and tubes that connected him to the machines that breathed for him, forced his heart, his lungs, his digestive system, the entire complexity of his autonomic nervous system, to keep functioning.

  He watched himself as if from a distance as he opened the front panel of the chair, only to discover that somehow all those mechanisms had vanished and he was free, free to move his legs, stand up as if he’d only been resting there, as if the chair was not the complex device it was, but merely a conveyance that he could discard at any time, walk away from, and move toward Vina and take her hands in his.

  Her hands were cool, small and delicate, just as he remembered them; when he held them, they fit neatly into his, as if they were meant to be there. Don’t think of it as illusion, he warned himself, or you’ll go mad.

  “Christopher…” she said in return, her voice as sweet as he remembered, her small, heart-shaped face tilted up toward his, those feline eyes always a little sad, even when she smiled. “Chris…”

  Had she called him that the first time? Had she called him anything at all? Or had she been so afraid of losing him, so desperate to convince him to stay, that she hadn’t dared to even speak his name?

  “It’s good to see you,” he said carefully, and a puzzled expression, for the briefest moment, crossed her face. Then he remembered that she’d been living with an image of him, another illusion created by her keepers, since he’d left.

  “Then it is really you?” she asked, as if she wasn’t sure. She slipped one hand out of his and touched his face, resting her hand on his cheek as if she’d done it a thousand times before, and Pike shook off the thought that she probably had. “They said you’d been ill, that this time you chose to come here…. I didn’t dare hope…not that I wanted you to be ill, but…”

  She stopped, as if she didn’t know what she was saying even as she said it. He found himself taking her chin in his hand, something he’d wanted to do from the very first.

  “I know they gave you the illusion that I’d never left,” he heard that voice again, which must be his. He searched her face and it was just as he remembered it, and also not. She was no longer the lithe adolescent he’d wanted to cherish, keep safe, and yet she was, even as she was the mature woman she would have been if he’d met her in real life and her ship had never crashed on Talos IV. If he looked closely enough, he could see the devoted wife of several years’ familiarity, and the Orion slave girl, and a thousand other incarnations, but only one Vina. As his thoughts raced, his voice seemed to have a mind of its own. “But I’m real this time, and I’m here with you. Here to stay.”

  Though even as he “said” this, he wondered if it was true. Because, in a sense, he’d never left her at all.

  “Not your first love, then,” she suggested knowingly, reaching her arms up to clasp her hands behind his neck, “but your last?”

  “The only one that counts,” he said, wondering if that was true as well.

  She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and for the first time illusion and reality overlapped and melded, because the kiss was exactly as he’d imagined it, if he’d only ever really imagined it, and he cupped her face in his hands and leaned into the kiss, no longer bothering to figure it out.

  “I want you to tell me everything,” she said, leaning back against his chest, his arms around her, the two of them contemplating the horizon as the sea breeze made ripples in the saw grass and wafted her silky hair against his chin, tickling pleasantly. “I want to know your whole life, from your earliest memories until the day before you first met me. Then everything that happened from the time you went back to your ship until Spock brought you here.”

  “Here” at the moment was a beach house belonging to an aunt, where she’d spent school holidays as a child. It was peaceful and private, and seemed a safe place to begin.

  “Everything, hm?” he asked, settling into the illusion, trying not to search the edges to see where the scenery ended. Pay no attention to that Talosian behind the curtain, he thought grimly, forcing himself to relax.

  Where should he begin? At the beginning? As the old saying went, “First you were born, and then what happened?” What was the first thing he remembered? Or would she find his recounting his entire childhood and adolescence tedious?

  Should he start instead with the less emotionally fraught stuff, the swashbuckling adventures of the starship captain, youngest in the Fleet until James T. Kirk had taken Enterprise from him, to his great relief at the time? Should he tell her about the wonders he had
seen—about the spacefaring Leviathans, living creatures transformed into interplanetary vessels? Or about a Vulcan gemstone so huge and fraught with history that even a Vulcan would kill to possess it? Should he tell her of the strange little watering hole in San Francisco where time seemed to stand still, and improbable tales were told? Or about a crewman named Dabisch who had a transparent skull? Or perhaps about a race called the Calligar, who lived on the other side of a time portal that opened only once every thirty-three years? Or of a sad and mysterious Trill woman named Audrid, who once upon a time, in a cavern deep inside a wayward comet—

  No, he stopped himself. Begin from the beginning. What’s the first thing you remember?

  Pike closed his eyes and allowed himself to feel. Of all the faculties he had lost, that one was the most devastating. Following the accident he had lost all feeling, physical and emotional. At first his ruined nerves had screamed at him day and night as if they were on fire, and neither painkillers nor the auto-biofeedback monitors he’d been hooked up to could help him. In time the agony had eased and he’d gradually gone numb, and while at first he’d considered it a blessing, it had proved otherwise.

  The emotional numbness was worse. All he’d wanted to do was to die. Until he overheard the doctors, making the mistake of thinking his hearing was as affected as his other senses (it was not; if anything, it had grown more acute since the accident), discussing his case in the hall outside, and he’d learned exactly what they expected the delta rays would ultimately do to him. Then, perversely, offered a slow and vegetating death, all he’d wanted to do was live.

  Now here he was, as if all of that had been a dream and only this was reality—moving, speaking, feeling his own skin again, hearing his heartbeat rushing in his ears, aware of the scent of…something…it took him a moment to identify it as sea air and a touch of jasmine, and the scent of the bark of a particular tree he’d encountered on a world devoted to pleasure, and…

  How did they do this? How did they know? He would ask them about that later. He had, after all, a life’s worth of time.

  He cradled Vina in his arms, rested his chin on the top of her head, thinking. Where should he begin? Ah, he had it now!

  “Let me tell you about my first love…” he began.

  2

  2228: Leaving Earth

  Her eyelashes were perfect. Thick as paintbrushes and the same bright reddish-brown as the cheek they lay against, they covered eyes Chris remembered as being as deep as pools, and such a dark, liquid brown they were almost black. Her name was Maia, and she was nine years old, the same age he was.

  Chris knew Maia wouldn’t open her eyes again until well after the ship docked at Elysium. He knew that not so much as an eyelash would flicker or a breath be drawn until the effects of the stasis had worn off, but he couldn’t stop watching her through the thick plexisteel of the chamber, reassuring himself she was still alive.

  “It’s okay, son,” he heard the deep rasp of his stepfather’s voice behind him. “She’ll go on looking just like that no matter whether you watch her for the entire trip or not. Kid your age ought to be looking at the stars on his first offworld voyage, or off playing with the other kids on board, not staring at a horse.”

  “She’s not just any horse,” Chris said with a nine-year-old’s doggedness, still looking at Maia’s slumbering face instead of at his stepfather. He was careful to avoid calling the man anything; they’d had that discussion before they left Earth. Just because Heston Prescott had married his mother three months ago didn’t mean Chris had to suddenly start calling him “Dad.” He touched his finger to the plexisteel, as if counting the mare’s eyelashes. “She’s my favorite.”

  “She’s no different than any of the rest of the stock we brought along,” Prescott said, apparently having forgotten what it was like to be a child and find certain things special. “And when we get to Elysium, she’ll do her part in breeding some of the finest horses on the planet.”

  You mean the only horses on the planet, Chris stopped himself from saying, because the teletutor told me there are no large quadrupeds on Elysium. Even at nine, he knew that always telling the truth was a good way to get yourself into trouble. Sometimes it was better to keep quiet.

  “Go on now,” Heston said, putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You’ve got almost an hour before your next session with the teletutor. Go play with the other kids.”

  Chris knew the difference between a suggestion and an order. Whining “But I don’t want to play with the other kids!” wasn’t going to cut it. Besides, Chris wasn’t a whiner.

  “Okay,” was all he said, heading for the corridor, leaving Heston to check the gases in the stasis chambers holding the six mares he hoped would be the start of herds of fine saddle horses roaming free on the plains of Elysium.

  There had been some controversy about letting Heston Prescott be the first settler to bring horses to the colony world. Prescott was a terraformer by profession, one of the best in the business. He bred saddle horses as a hobby, which mostly meant he invested in them and went out to the horse farm on weekends to talk with the people who did the actual work. Still, they were his horses, and they’d been given all their inoculations and passed all the screenings, so Prescott had permission to raise them on the property ceded to him by the Elysium Council as one of the perqs for helping to make the planet self-supporting.

  That was how Prescott, his new wife and stepson, six brood mares, and several dozen frozen horse embryos ready for implantation, happened to be on the slow intercolony ship bringing them to Elysium.

  Elysium. When he first heard the word, Chris had asked his mother what it meant and, as always, Willa had sent him to the dictionary.

  “If I tell you what it means it won’t stick to your brain as well as if you look it up for yourself,” she’d said, her smile making her words seem less like a lecture.

  Mother and son had the same bright blue eyes, the same dark brown wavy hair (Willa’s prematurely frosted with gray at the sides), the same dark eyebrows against the same pale, high brow, too often knit in a serious expression, no matter what the rest of the face was doing. It was as if son had been cloned from mother, Heston said, with no father required.

  Willa’s frown had deepened when he said that. “Hes, not in front of Chris, if you don’t mind.”

  Chris didn’t know who his birth father was. He’d been afraid he might not like the answer. Whoever he was had gone away and left Willa alone with a newborn son to raise.

  Paradise, he thought once he’d looked up the word “Elysium.” The place where the Greek gods brought certain heroes after death. Pretty weird name for a Federation colony world.

  When Heston first announced that they were leaving Earth, Chris had gone to the computer to access a holo-program about the colony worlds—where they were, how they’d been discovered, how long they’d been settled. Elysium was one of the newest.

  The holo showed a planet dominated by the blue of oceans, wrapped in clouds like dabs of whipped cream, very much like Earth, right down to the Class-G sun and its position in the star system. As he manipulated the screen, the holo took Chris on a virtual landing through the cloud cover, skimming above mountains, polar caps, deserts. He knew enough about geography to recognize oceans and freshwater lakes and follow the course of rivers. A scrolling readout showed that climate and atmosphere were “within acceptable ranges” for human habitation.

  “Will we be the only humans there?” Chris wanted to know, telling himself he wasn’t scared at the thought.

  “Not at all,” Heston assured him. “There’s a Starfleet base here…” He stopped the holo’s movement and pinpointed the place, tucked into the curve of a bowl-shaped valley ringed about by snowcapped mountains. “…and colonists have begun settling further inland, mostly on small homesteads, near enough by hovercraft to get to the base in less than an hour. Your mother’s part of the team that will be constructing the first real city. They’re going to fill that enti
re valley with high-rises and parks and a transit system. Because there’s an existing Starfleet footprint, everything else is already in place—the defense perimeter, a satellite grid…”

  “A defense perimeter?” Willa had been busy cataloguing packing crates, but she’d heard that last part. “Is it necessary in that part of space?”

  She bit her lip after she’d asked it, as if concerned that the question, not to mention the answer, might be something else Chris didn’t need to hear. But the boy was more interested in how Starfleet could have “footprints.” The way adults talked confused him sometimes.

  Heston shook his head at the naiveté of Willa’s question.

  “The precaution’s always necessary anywhere in deep space,” he said. “In terms of its location, Elysium’s probably safer than Earth. Far enough away from either of the Evil Empires…”

  Klingons and Romulans, Chris supplied in his mind, having heard his stepfather’s speeches about both often enough to know that was what he meant by “Evil Empires.” He wondered what it would be like to meet a Klingon. He’d seen holos, and they looked pretty scary. No human had ever seen a Romulan, though, and he wondered what they looked like.

  “…and less of a target, in that we’re not hosting Federation headquarters the way Earth is,” Heston went on. “But you never know what else might be lurking out there.”

  “What will you do when we get to Elysium?” Chris wanted to know. He’d seen records of some of Heston’s work on barren worlds, asteroids and satellites mostly, as well as stabilizing the tectonic plates beneath the underwater environment where he and Willa had met, but couldn’t imagine what his stepfather would be doing on a world that seemed pretty much finished already.