Текст книги "Twilight "

Автор книги: David George

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Текущая страница: 34 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

54

Kasidy strolled down one of the cobbled lanes that led from the local transporter facility. The night had remained as balmy as the afternoon, an agreeable change from the first few days of the winter. Only a week ago, she had been peering out the front windows on a landscape frosted white by snow. And according to the Bajoran comnet, the weather forecasters were predicting another winter storm just a couple of days from now. All of which had helped her choose to take this opportunity to get out of the house, enjoy a change of scenery, and take in some fresh air.

Yellowish flickers of light danced along the cobblestones, thrown by the traditional oil lamps hanging from poles along the lane. Kasidy ambled along, not rushing despite the lateness of the hour. She knew that the shops would be closing shortly, but hurrying would have defeated her desire for a relaxing walk. She would stop in whichever of the shops she could, and then come back some other time to see the rest.

Except that’s not really the whole story, is it, Kas?she asked herself. She had been thinking about coming into town for a week now, ever since Prylar Eivos had called on her. The warmth of the man, his amiable demeanor and genuine thoughtfulness, the ease and humility of his faith, all had reminded her of how Ben had always spoken of the Bajorans. Working with the Commerce Ministry here, before she had become the wife of the Emissary, she had certainly met some nice people, but few who had inspired her to view Bajorans in quite the way Ben had. But, already determined to see out her pregnancy here because that had been what she and Ben had planned, she had now resolved to try to see in these people all that he had seen. Even so, she understood that she had not chosen to visit Adarak at this time of night by accident. Despite her optimism after seeing Eivos, she still had difficulty dealing with her prominence among the Bajoran people.

As Kasidy neared the main avenue of shops, she felt herself tensing. She had already been recognized during the few minutes she had been in town, and she worried that, even this late in the day, she would be faced with the misplaced veneration of strangers. Back at the transporter facility, the young man operating the pad had stared wide-eyed at her as she had stepped down from the platform. The attention and awe had made her uncomfortable, although she had to admit that the young man had recovered quickly. He had welcomed her to Adarak, and then offered to direct her to her destination or answer any questions she might have. She had thanked him, but declined his assistance. She had been to the town before—though not since she had first moved to Bajor—and she knew where she wanted to go.

Kasidy reached the avenue, which intersected the lane at a right angle. She stopped and peered both ways down the wide pedestrian thoroughfare. The old-fashioned oil lamps lined both sides of the way here too, and large trees marched down the center. The yellow lamplight wavered across the leaves, making them appear to move, as though blown by a breeze. At random, Kasidy opted to turn to her left.

The first couple of shops she passed had already closed for the night, though their storefronts remained lighted. Kasidy only glanced at the wares displayed as she walked by, thinking that she would window-shop on her way back. The next shop was open, though, and she stopped to look inside. A pair of paintings stood on easels at either end of the front window, with several interesting bronzes and other sculptures on pedestals between them.

As she gazed at the artwork, the door of the shop opened. A tall Bajoran man emerged carrying a bag in his arms, probably containing something he had just purchased. While the man held the door open for a woman following him out, he looked over and saw Kasidy. “Pleasant evening,” he said with a smile. To her surprise, she saw no hint that he knew her identity.

Not quite as renowned as you thought,she joked to herself. “A pleasant evening to you,” she said to the man. His companion, also a Bajoran, stepped past him and out of the shop. The woman nodded and smiled at Kasidy, then did a rapid double take, obviously recognizing her.

“Excuse me,” the woman murmured, quickly looking away, apparently abashed by her own reaction. The woman linked her arm with the man’s and guided him down the avenue.

Now, that’s more like it,Kasidy thought, chuckling. She entered the shop, still amazed that she could cause such a response in people, but not feeling quite as tense now as she had just a few minutes ago. After all, the woman had been embarrassed at her blatantly visible recognition of the wife of the Emissary. After Kasidy’s experiences with so many well-meaning Bajorans appearing on her doorstep when she had first moved to Kendra Province, perhaps the locals had decided not only to protect her from such attention, but to make sure that they did nothing themselves to discomfit her.

Inside the well-lighted shop, paintings lined the walls, and sculptures sat displayed atop narrow tables in the middle of the room. “Now, you’re out late, dearie, aren’tcha?” came a loud, friendly voice. Kasidy looked around and saw a Bajoran woman, older and a bit stocky, waving to her from the rear of the shop.

“It’s a nice night for it, isn’t it?” Kasidy said. She walked over to the first table, on which stood two bronzes. Both were tall, each about half a meter high.

“That it is, dearie, that it is,” the woman agreed. “It’s gonna be a cold winter, so I’ll enjoy as many of these days as we can get.”

“Me too,” Kasidy said, tickled by the woman’s gregarious nature. “Is this your gallery?”

“That it is,” the woman said again.

Kasidy moved around the table, studying the sculptures. One depicted a robed Bajoran woman in mid-stride, her hands oddly crossed in front of her waist; the other showed a bare-chested Bajoran man leaning forward, struggling to haul something unseen, by ropes he held over his shoulders. Kasidy appreciated the technique of the two pieces, which seemed rough and kinetic, and yet also somehow graceful.

The robed woman, Kasidy decided, did not really appeal to her, although it took her a moment to determine why: despite being completely different in composition and material, the work reminded her too much of the jevonite figurine that Eivos had given her. While she remained grateful for the prylar’s thoughtfulness, the statuette’s tie to B’hala had come to bother her. She had not yet taken it down from the mantel in the front room, but she had begun to consider doing so. If City of B’halahad not been Ben’s favorite print, she would have thought about taking it down as well.

“Those are by Flanner Posh,” the shopkeeper called. “Only twenty-six years old. Lost his father in one of the camps.”

Kasidy glanced over at the woman and nodded, not really sure of the significance of the comments. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she offered.

“We’re all sorry,” the woman said, though without any animosity. “I just mention it ’cause what happens to a person informs their art.” Kasidy nodded again, not really paying much attention, but when she looked back at the sculptures, a story unfolded in her mind. The man—the artist’s father—worked to death by the Cardassians during the Occupation, made to plow fields in the high heat of summer; the woman, a cleric of some sort, also imprisoned in the camp, and somehow a source of strength for the boy—the future artist—allowing him to make it through. She had no idea whether any of that was even close to the truth, but the artwork had that quickly taken on new weight, new meaning, for her.

Kasidy roamed deeper into the gallery, peering at the paintings and the other sculptures, and occasionally exchanging remarks with the shopkeeper. Quite a few different artists were represented here, and Kasidy found that she really liked the work of several of them. As she reached the rear of the gallery, she asked the woman, “Did you do any of these?”

“Oh, my good word, no,” the woman said. “My contribution to the world of art isn’t as a sculptor or a painter; it’s as a critic.”

Kasidy laughed. “Me too,” she said. “I can’t draw a blade of grass.”

“But you know a good picture of one when you see it, don’tcha?”

“That I do, dearie,” Kasidy said, good-naturedly mimicking the woman’s way of speaking.

To Kasidy’s delight, the woman threw her head back and laughed heartily. “Ah, you’re a kidder, darlin’,” she said. “I like that.”

“Good,” Kasidy said, unable to keep from smiling. “Maybe you’ll give me a good deal on this painting then.” She gestured to her left, at a pointillist landscape.

“Everybody gets the same deal, dearie,” the woman told her, “but they’re all good ones.”

“I’m sure they are,” Kasidy said. “Actually, this piece…it’s not quite right for me, but I love the style.”

“That’s Galoren Sen’s work,” the woman said. “Really maturin’ these days. I like that one myself. Course, I like ’em all, otherwise they wouldn’t be hangin’ in my gallery.”

“Will you be getting in any more of his work?” Kasidy wanted to know.

“Well, lemme see…Sen’ll probably bring me more of his work…oh, in about two months, maybe three.”

“All right,” Kasidy said. “I’ll be sure to come back then.”

“I hope I’ll see you sooner than that,” the woman said. “I do have a pretty good turnover.”

“All right,” Kasidy said. “I’ll be back sooner.” And she meant it. This woman had put her at such ease. Even though people had recognized Kasidy tonight, the man leaving the gallery had not, and now neither had this shopkeeper. Plus, now that she thought about it, the two who had recognized her had treated her with common courtesy, but not with reverence; they had even seemed to try to avoid being reverential. Maybe the people of Adarak would allow Kasidy—maybe she would allow herself—to look beyond the place the Bajorans claimed for her in their culture. Somehow, in just a few minutes, this loud, genuine woman had brought Kasidy a lovely sense of calmness and acceptance. “You have a very pleasant evening,” she told the woman. Then she thought to ask, “By the way, what’s your name?”

“I’m Rozahn Kather,” she said. “But everybody calls me Kit.”

“Well it’s very nice to meet you, Kit. I’m Kasidy.”

“Of course you are, dearie,” Kit said, and she winked. Kasidy felt her own eyes widen as she realized that this woman had known who she was all along. She also felt sure that Kit had treated her no differently than she treated anybody else.

Kasidy left the gallery feeling more comfortable here on Bajor than she had since moving here. When two women passed her on the avenue, she offered them a big smile. “Pleasant evening,” she said. The women returned both the smile and the greeting.

Bajor still did not feel like home to Kasidy, but she suddenly thought she could see a time when it would.

55

Vaughn awoke to the sound of fire.

Earlier, after he had sighted the complex surrounding the source of the pulse, he had descended the hill and walked the final kilometers to the outer walls of the buildings. The veil of night had dropped by then, and considering his exhaustion, he had decided to make camp and get some sleep. He would make his push into the buildings once he had rested and regained some of his strength.

Before laying out his bedroll, Vaughn had paced along the outside of the complex, searching for a way in. He had not needed to search long. The first door he had come to had been not only unlocked, but wide open. Beneath the light of his beacon, the yawning entryway—like so many things on this planet—had projected an air of abandonment.

Now, where he was camped, a hundred or so meters away from the complex, the crackle of flames reached his ears, not from the buildings, but from nearby. He floated slowly up out of sleep at first, until the incongruity of the sound brought him fully awake. In the instant before he opened his eyes, he perceived the flittering light on his closed lids, and felt inconsistent waves of heat breathing across his face.

Recalling that his phaser had been lost, Vaughn did not move as he opened his eyes, wanting to assay the situation before betraying that he was no longer asleep. The small fire grew from within a circular bed of stones, he saw, a couple of meters in front of him. Vaughn waited a moment, looking and listening for anything that might help orient him to whatever new circumstances he now faced. He remembered clearly his mission to stop the pulse, his location on this planet, what he had been through today—

Through the flames, movement caught his eye, just on the other side of the stone circle. Unable to tell what had caused it, he listened for any other sounds beside those of the fire. The movement came again.

“And that’s Rigel,” a voice said, the seemingly ordinary nature of the words and tone striking in the current context. Vaughn sat up on his bedroll and peered over the flames. A woman sat there, her knees pulled up against her chest, her head back as she gazed at the stars. She had dark hair that fell to the middle of her back, a bit wild despite being tied just below her neck. She looked to be in her thirties—and even younger when the wavering firelight sent an orange-yellow glow across her features—although Vaughn knew that she was older than that. He stared at her, and she looked away from the heavens and over at him. “Do you remember what you learned about Rigel, Elias?” she asked.

Vaughn recited the star’s mass, absolute magnitude, and spectral type before he even realized that he had spoken.

“That’s right,” the woman said, offering him an encouraging half-smile. “It’s also one of the most populated systems in the quadrant. Do you know how many planets orbit Rigel?”

This time, Vaughn did not answer. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on the ersatz nature of the woman, of the fire, of the moment. He envisioned the clouds whirling down and reconstructing this scene, manufacturing everything before him out of the dust of this lonely world. This isn’t Berengaria VII,he told himself, any more than this woman is my mother.

But somehow it did not matter. Vaughn had lived much of his life in control, but today he had been unable to elude the sentiments of his past. More must be happening here, he believed, than just the re-creation of incidents from his life; he had become too sympatheticto feelings of loss and abandonment. Even now, as he attempted to reason his way through this, the moment that had been remade around him pulled at his heart.

Vaughn opened his eyes and said, “Twelve,” identifying the number of planets in the Rigel system. He peered around, trying to see more of his surroundings, but the illumination of the fire did not penetrate very far into the darkness. It doesn’t matter,Vaughn thought again. This isn’t the planet where I was raised. This isn’t my mother.

Except that she looked and sounded so much like her. “That’s right, twelve,” she said, and there was that half-smile of hers again. Vaughn smiled back. He loved these times. His mother spent so much time out in the wilderness with her work, but only occasionally did they do this, heading out to sit by a fire and stare up at the stars.

Vaughn raised his eyes and peered up at the brilliant pinpoints of light that dotted the night. He wondered only briefly how the sea of clouds could have reproduced such an effect, when in reality it perpetually separated the surface of this abandoned world from the rest of the universe. He found Rigel, and shrugged off the fact that the star should not have even been visible from the Gamma Quadrant. He looked back over at his mother, and his heart filled with his love for her. They’d been so close. Genuine or not, he felt grateful for this time, an unexpected gift.

“Elias, I need to talk with you about something.”

Oh no,he thought, feeling a terrible jolt, as though he had fallen in frigid water. No. Not this night. Of all nights, not this one.And he told her that: “No, Ma. I don’t want to talk. I just want to look at the stars with you.”

“Elias—”

“No.” Vaughn threw off his blanket and stood up. “Tell me tomorrow,” he said, knowing that, in so many ways, there would be no tomorrow.

The flames, beginning to sputter now, lighted her eyes. She sat with her hands clasped in front of her shins, hugging her knees. She regarded him with an expression of love and compassion, and he thought that she would allow him the reprieve for which he had asked. Then she said, “I have Burkhardt’s disease.”

Vaughn said nothing. He had a sudden urge to throw himself on the fire, and thought, That’s new.He did not remember wanting to immolate himself as a boy. The past had come alive for him, but with the burden of the subsequent years also alive in his mind and heart, this moment had actually worsened.

“Ma, please don’t,” he pleaded.

“I was diagnosed this week,” she said softly, the expression on her face one of empathy. She seemed concerned less with the content of her words than with their effect on Vaughn. “It’s a progressive—”

“No,” Vaughn yelled, feeling like a boy trying to make something true by wishing it so. “No,” he said again, unwilling not only to accept the reality of this moment now, but to have accepted it all those years ago. He turned and walked into the darkness, beyond the reach of the firelight.

“Elias,” he heard his mother call after him. He did not answer. He kept walking, allowing the empty blackness of this place to close around him. “Elias,” she called again, but he did not hear her follow. He could not remember—he had never been able to remember—exactly what had happened when she had first told him this. Had he bolted like this? Had she come after him?

Now he walked on, the sensation of moving in the consuming darkness strange and unsettling. His mother did not call again, and no footsteps approached behind him. She had obviously decided to leave him alone.

Just as she left me all those years ago,he thought. Alone.

Vaughn stumbled and fell forward. His hands scraped against the ground as he went down. He lay like that for a long time, prone, palms flat against the ground, elbows up at his sides. Finally, he rolled over onto his back and stared up at the sky.

There were no stars. He could not even see the clouds for the lack of light. What he did see in his mind was his mother’s face, called up from memories not just minutes old, but decades.

She left me alone,he thought again, ancient anger and frustration and sadness accompanying the memories. And then came this thought: No wonder Prynn hates me.

Vaughn laughed in the night, more a bark than anything having to do with humor. Somehow, he had never made the connection, although it must have implicitly buttressed the guilt he had felt for the last seven years. Just as his mother had been taken from him, he had taken Ruriko from Prynn. In his daughter’s life, he had been no better than a disease.

All those successful missions,he thought, and yet, when she needed me most, I failed my own daughter. I left her alone.

He remembered looking into Prynn’s eyes a day and a half ago—the white of one made crimson by injury—and then turning and walking away from her. He had not looked back, and now he wished that he had. It seemed impossible, but he had somehow left her alone again. Ch’Thane had been at the camp, of course, but Vaughn had left Prynn with no mother, no father—

No father?he asked himself. Hewas her father. Her mother had been gone for seven years now, but he had not left her.

Or had he? Vaughn had been honest with Prynn about what had happened, about his role in Ruriko’s death. He had never even considered not telling her. Prynn had been furious with him, and reasonably so, and from then on their relationship had been defined by the depth of her anger and the enormity of his guilt. They had never really spoken of it again, other than him saying how sorry he was, and her blaming him. He had sought to—

To leave her alone.This time, the thought hit him like a club to the back of the head. He had taken her mother from her, that much had always been clear, but now he realized that he had also taken her father from her. Because of his guilt and Prynn’s anger, he had essentially removed himself from her life, because that was what she had wanted—although not, he saw now, what she had needed. And perhaps that had also been the path of least resistance for him, and an opportunity to practice penance. He had always thought that Prynn had a justifiable reason to hate him, but now he also saw that she had another, because he had not really been there to help her through that terrible time.

Vaughn clamped his hands over his face, then let his arms flop onto the ground on either side of him. He had failed Prynn as a father when she had most needed him, and the thought of abandoning her again—permanently, and leaving her truly alone—crushed him. He could not let that happen. He could not.

So thinking, he fell into a restless sleep, filled with dreams of his past, and dreams that were somehow not his own.