Текст книги "Deny Thy Father"

Автор книги: Jeff Mariotte

Соавторы: Jeff Mariotte
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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Chapter 27

The next day dawned clear and warm over San Francisco. This was the kind of day that, before the advent of climate control technology, had been so rare here that it brought the residents outside in droves. Even now, when everyone knew that the weather could be manipulated to a large extent, there was something about such a lovely late spring day that people were tempted to skip their responsibilities and lounge about in the sun.

Will Riker was not one of those people. He appreciated nice weather as much as anyone—growing up in Alaska made one particularly appreciative of warm, sunny days—but at this point in his Academy career nothing could tempt him away from the tasks he had set for himself. He had lunch with Felicia, and their concession to the weather was to eat at an outside table. The table was in a kind of alcove sheltered by a stand of bamboo which rustled in the gentle breeze, with a winding brook on the other side. Felicia had told him that this was one of her favorite spots on campus.

Over lunch, he recounted Dennis’s visit to his room the night before. As he told the story he saw her face darken with anger, until he regretted having brought it up at all.

“Will!” she exploded when he finished. “He’s your friend! I can’t believe you treated him like that!”

Will shrugged. “What was I supposed to do, Felicia? Throw away my own career for his? Cheat for him? How would that help?”

“You could have helped him out in some way,” she insisted.

“I offered. He didn’t want it. It was everything or nothing, as far as he was concerned.”

“Still.

“Are you going to tutor him?” Will asked.

“He hasn’t asked me to.”

“But he might. What if he does? And you could always volunteer, you know. Are you willing to spend hours every day helping him catch up?”

“Maybe it won’t really take that long,” she said. “Maybe he’s exaggerating the situation.”

“Maybe,” Will admitted. “But I don’t think so. It seems like he knows what his own position is, and it’s pretty precarious.”

“Even so,” Felicia said, anger still simmering in her voice and body language, “you ought to do what you can to help him out. Friendships are important, Will. Relationships are important. You can’t just turn a friend away like that.”

“Felicia,” Will said, feeling suddenly helpless. “I told you, I offered to do what I could. It just wasn’t as much as Dennis wanted.”

She nodded. “And then, instead of negotiating something in between, you just let him walk out the door. Have you seen him today?”

“No,” Will replied.

“Don’t you think you should find him? Make sure he’s okay?”

“If you had seen him last night, Felicia ... he turned into an iceberg, like our entire friendship rested on that one question, and when I said no, then it was just over. I don’t feel like it’s my place to track him down. If he wants to find me and apologize, he knows where I live.”

Felicia had folded her arms across her chest and looked toward where the brook cut through a sward of grassy lawn, instead of at Will. “You disappoint me, Will,” she said. “Truly.” She rose, then, and walked away from the table, leaving Will with the remains of their lunch. “I guess I’ll talk to you later,” she called back as she left.

Will genuinely didn’t know what he was supposed to say to that. Hadn’t he made the best offer he could to Dennis? Didn’t he need to keep his priorities straight in order to graduate with the best grades he could? He cleaned up the lunch mess, checked the time, and headed toward his next class.

Professor Knudsen was, Will believed, one of the best lecturers he’d had during his time at the Academy. She paced the front of the room as she talked, a slight, blonde figure in tailored civilian clothes, speaking with a heavy Scandinavian accent, stopping from time to time to accentuate a point with a jabbing finger or a fist punching the palm of her other hand. She knew her material, which was the history of the Federation’s first contacts with alien races, inside and out, and never needed notes when she lectured. Normally Will took pleasure in watching her. Her utter command of the subject matter was inspiring and she made it seem important and valuable.

But today he couldn’t even focus on what she was saying. He kept running through his conversation with Dennis in his head, and the argument with Felicia that it had precipitated. She hadn’t come right out and called him a jerk, but her tone of voice and the way she’d carried herself had done that job for her. He couldn’t think of anything he might have done differently, that was the problem. He couldn’t accede to Dennis’s demands; they were unreasonable. They would put his own standing in jeopardy, maybe even threaten his whole career. It just didn’t make sense to take a chance like that for anybody.

And then Felicia’s response had seemed out of proportion as well. It wasn’t as if his relationship with Dennis would necessarily affect her. She knew Dennis too, they were friendly. But if Will’s friendship with Dennis had come to an abrupt end, why did that have to change her own association with Dennis? It didn’t—she was just blowing things up for no reason. Maybe she was upset not because her connection with Dennis was impaired but because her own impression of Will had been challenged. Not that her impression had always been a favorable one.

He shook his head and tried to concentrate on what Professor Knudsen was talking about.

He was aware of his lack of focus, and hoped that this particular lecture would be one he could afford to miss most of. But that pointed to a larger problem: Even without agreeing to Dennis’s ridiculous demands, his own academic work was being affected. Dennis, and now Felicia, were threatening his career simply by being part of his life and having expectations that he couldn’t necessarily live up to. If this sort of thing—disagreements with friends and lovers—could draw his mind away from one of his favorite lecturers, then it was dangerous. He couldn’t afford to let his concentration lapse. His priority had to be getting the highest grades he possibly could and doing his best work in these remaining few weeks. As hard as it was now, when finals hit it would be harder still. He needed to be mentally and psychologically available for himself at that point, ready to take on whatever academic challenges were thrown at him.

His decision made, he tried to tune in Professor Knudsen.

He found Felicia after his last class of the day, in her room. Estresor Fil was in there with her, studying, but when she saw the look on Will’s face—Will wondered just how bad he must look—she quickly gathered her things and excused herself. Felicia regarded Will with a blank expression. Pointedly, she did not get up to hug or kiss him. Will sat down in the chair that Estresor Fil had just vacated.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” Will began.

“I’m glad to hear that.” Felicia’s voice was as flat as her face, as if she had pushed all emotion to the side.

“Yeah, well, it’s not always easy for me,” he said. She didn’t smile at the joke, and he decided not to try that again. “But what I keep coming up against, Felicia, is this. The school year is almost over. I had a rough first year, and some snags in my second too. If I want to get the best possible posting after the Academy, I have to really shine this year. That’s why I couldn’t devote the time to helping Dennis—because I need to devote it to helping myself. I have to push myself as hard as I possibly can.”

“Career isn’t everything, Will,” she said. “Friendships are every bit as important.”

“Friendships may be important,” he admitted. “But not ‘every bit as.’ Nothing is, not to me. The way I see it, there’s no reason to go into Starfleet unless I’m willing to give it my all. It needs a hundred percent of me.”

“That seems pretty narrow-minded,” Felicia responded. “What’s wrong with giving it seventy? Eighty? You need some of you left over for you.”

“I don’t agree. I mean, sure, that’s good enough for some people. But not for me. I’ve been trying to do this for as long as I can remember. Getting into Starfleet, moving up the ranks, becoming a senior officer—those have been my goals since I was a kid. Now they’re within range—I can almost close my hands around those gold pips. I can’t afford to lose my momentum. I can’t let anything get in the way of that goal. Not now.”

“And by ‘anything,’ you mean ... ?”

“You know,” he said, still unwilling to say out loud what had really brought him to Felicia’s room. “Dennis and his crazy schemes. Helping him cheat. That’s a sure way to get kicked out, to guarantee that I’ll never have a Starfleet career at all.”

“But tutoring isn’t against the rules.”

“We’ve been over that,” Will reminded her. “The degree of tutoring he needs is more than I can handle and still keep my own grades up. I can’t really spare any time for him, much less the amount he’s looking for.”

“So what you’re saying is that your career takes precedence over your friends,” she translated.

He paused, understanding that he was about to go over a waterfall without so much as a barrel to ride in. “That’s right. It has to.”

“All your friends?”

Will swallowed but answered quickly. “That’s right.”

“I had a feeling,” she said. “At lunch, when you just let me walk away.”

“I really am not sure how I’m supposed to stop everyone from walking away,” Will said. “Flying tackles? Is that better?”

“Usually a simple word or two will do it,” Felicia told him. “But you have to want to say them.”

“What words? You know I’m not good at this, Felicia. You want me to tell you that I love you? I do. Or I think I do, and if there’s a difference I don’t know what it is. But that’s not really what this is about, is it?”

“Not really,” she said, keeping her steady gaze fixed on him. “Not whether you can say it, anyway. More whether you can mean it.”

“I do mean it,” he tried to assure her. “As much as I have ever loved anyone, I love you.”

“Are you sure about that, Will?”

“But obviously,” he went on, ignoring her question, “that’s not enough. For either of us. You want more than I can give. And I feel like I’m already too committed—like just being in a relationship with you is costing me too much. I can’t concentrate on my work, I can’t separate my personal life, my emotional life, from the things that I need to do to reach my goals.”

Now he realized that her eyes had gone liquid. She sniffed once. “I had hoped that you were different, Will,” she said. “I saw—I still see—a great person inside you, a wonderful, loving man who is driven and ambitious but also kind and generous and giving. It’s those qualities, in combination, that make you the man I want to be with—the man I’ve wanted to be with since I met you, even though I had to wait so damn long for you to figure it out. And these past few months, when you’ve actually been that man, have been amazing. I’ve felt things, being with you, that I could barely have imagined in my wildest fantasies.”

A tear escaped her eye and trailed down her left cheek. She ignored it and kept talking. “Your problem, Will, is that you haven’t yet figured out how to be the whole person you really are. You think you can only be one part of you at a time, and that’s not true. So even though you really arethe man I love, you can’t seem to give yourself permission to bethat man.” She turned her head away, finally releasing him from the withering assault of her nearly unbearable scrutiny. “Funny how I’ve always known you better than you know yourself. That’s backwards, William. You don’t have to let it be that way.”

“But maybe I do,” he countered. “If that’s the way I am. You may be right, but I can only be the person I am now, at this time, in this moment. If I can change that in time, fine. But that still doesn’t help us right now.”

“Apparently there is no help for us now.”

“It doesn’t look that way,” he agreed.

“Well,” she said, sniffling and trying on a smile. “Fun while it lasted, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I am sorry. Really, really sorry.”

“Me too, Will. Me too.”

He sat there a moment longer, feeling impossibly awkward. There was nothing to say or do that was the right thing, in this situation. He wanted to touch her, to throw himself at her, to scoop her into his arms and apologize, to tell her that he’d been stupid and he’d be different now. But he knew that wasn’t true, and he wouldn’t fool her for a second. He was right, he could only be the person he was. And the person he was put his career ahead of everything else. There would be plenty of time for relationships after he had achieved what he needed to professionally. For now, he had to prioritize.

“I guess it’s my turn, then,” he said at last. “To walk away.”

“Looks like it,” Felicia agreed. “Since it’s my room and all.”

Nothing left to say, Will rose and went to the door. He caught a final glimpse of Felicia, the most beautiful, loving woman he had ever known, sitting curled up on her couch, knees pulled against her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, and he walked out.

And she didn’t say anything to stop him.

Chapter 28

Even at the time, those last months, weeks, and days of Starfleet Academy ran together in a kind of watercolor blur for Will Riker. By the time a couple of years had passed, he was almost completely unable to remember the precise sequence of events that had transpired. As he was living it, he couldn’t see any rhyme or pattern, just work and more work.

He got up in the morning, forcing himself out of bed even though he didn’t feel like he’d had nearly enough sleep. Usually, he hadn’t. But when he rolled from his bed, the first thing he did was to check the computer, to make sure that any notes he’d made the night before—he had, in recent weeks, developed a habit of waking up at various times during the night with fresh ideas and inspirations—were, in fact, comprehensible. Then he quickly scanned the material he’d studied before going to bed. After a rushed breakfast, he dashed off to his first class. A series of classes interspersed with brief study breaks followed. In late afternoon, after his last class, he went to the gym for a hurried workout, then showered and had dinner. After dinner it was up to his room for more studying until he either dozed off at the computer or could no longer retain what he was working on. That was when he finally allowed himself to go to bed, only to begin the whole process again in a few hours.

But somehow, he got through it, and his grades, when he saw them, were the highest he had ever received. Around campus there was mixed relief and concern at grade time, as those who had done well hurried to call friends and family and share the news, and those who had not agonized over their missteps and the possible cost to their future careers. Will didn’t have any family to contact, though, if you didn’t count his father who, he was pretty sure, was still missing someplace. And he hadn’t seen much of his friends lately—some, like Dennis and Felicia, wanted nothing to do with him, and the rest had been more or less abandoned in the mad rush toward finals and graduation.

Now that it was over, Will could exhale and start working on mending some of those fences, he figured. But his relief turned out to be a little premature. With graduation looming, that meant, he had every reason to believe, posting to a starship, and there was work to be done in preparation for that. He spent what seemed like hours filling out the documentation necessary for a Starfleet assignment, and he had to pack his personal items, some of which he simply gave away, or recycled, on the theory that a starship berth wouldn’t give him a whole lot of personal space. And then, before he knew it, graduation day was upon him.

“I’m no Federation president or galactic celebrity,” their graduation speaker began, his plain, folksy voice amplified to fill the cavernous space of the Academy’s vast auditorium. “I’m just a country doctor who has become sort of important, if at all, simply because I’ve managed to outlive all of my enemies.” Admiral Leonard H. McCoy looked out across the ocean of cadets, and Will could see the blue of his eyes even from his seat midway back. His tuft of hair was as white as the dress uniform he wore. “And some of my friends, too, I’m sorry to say. And I guess that’s what I’m here to talk to you all about today.

“You’ve finished your time at the Academy, which is a hell of an accomplishment, and you’ve every right to be proud of yourselves. But don’t sprain your arms pattin’ yourselves on the back, because what you’ve really done is just the first step in a long process. From here, you become Starfleet officers. Like a lot of Starfleet officers before you, including my best friend in the world, James Tiberius Kirk, some of you will be asked to give your lives in the service of Starfleet. Nobody wants to make that sacrifice—nobody wants to ask you to make it, either—but when they do, when the time comes, if it does, I hope you’ll do it in the spirit of the great Starfleet officers who went before you.

“Your chosen career is one in which violence sometimes plays a part. As a doctor and I hope some kind of humanitarian—though if you ever call me that to my face I’ll knock you on your keister—I abhor violence. I detest it, and I have always tried, and will always try to find a way to avoid it, like a barn mouse tryin’ to keep away from the farmhouse cat. But I also recognize that there are times when it’s necessary, and when it has been, then I’ve tried to face it head-on. I hope you’ll do the same.”

Will listened to McCoy, enjoying the old doctor’s thoroughly informal presentation. The graduates were seated alphabetically in the front section of the auditorium, with family, friends, and observers filling out the rest of the room, and Will sat between Paul Rice and an Andorian named Ritthar. On Paul’s other side was a guy he knew only in passing named Vince Reggiani. Will could see the back of Felicia’s head, a couple of rows in front of him, but she never seemed to turn around. Will’s achievement had been better than he’d dared hope for—he had finished eighth in his class, and that knowledge filled him with satisfaction and a little bit of anxiety, as if he had raised his own bar and would now have to continue to perform at that level. He thought he could do it, but if it meant pushing himself as he’d been doing for the last months of Academy work, he would either burn out fast or simply fall apart trying.

“I started out saying I was just a country doctor,” McCoy was saying. “And that’s true. But unlike some others, I’m a country doctor who has seen incredible sights. I’ve seen sunrise on Jupiter and sunset on New France. I’ve danced with a woman who was born on Rigel VI, and I’ve listened to an orchestra made up entirely of non-humanoid, energy-based life-forms whose instruments were part of their own anatomy. I’ve set foot on close to a hundred planets, and been nearly killed, kidnapped, or knocked in the head on almost half of those. For all the trouble I’ve seen, all the war and strife and danger, I wouldn’t trade my life for anyone else’s, anywhere, country doctor or no. I trust, when you’ve reached the end of the career that you’re just beginning today, you’ll be able to say the same thing, and mean it.

“Keep that in mind as you take your next step, as you become Starfleet officers, and as you grow into the men and women that you will be. The best thing to say at the end of your life is that you don’t regret a thing. Tomorrow, that new life will start, for each of you—you woke up this morning students, and you will wake up tomorrow officers. It’s a big change, don’t kid yourself into thinking it’s not. And I only have one more thing to say about that.” McCoy threw his hands into the air. “Congratulations, graduates of 2357! You’ve earned yourselves a party!”

This was met by a wild chorus of applause and cheers from the assembled graduates, and Admiral McCoy left the stage amidst the tumult. As was traditional, after that, each graduate was called to the stage by name to receive a diploma, and when the last one was handed out the graduates burst into a new round of cheering, before dispersing to find friends and family members with whom to celebrate their accomplishment.

Will was momentarily lost in the noise and chaos. He had no one to seek out, and his friends had all vanished toward the back of the big room. But as he turned in a slow circle, he saw Dennis Haynes, face flushed, walking nearby.

Hoping that maybe his former friend had cooled off a bit, Will stopped him. “Hey, Dennis, congratulations,” he said with all sincerity.

“Thanks,” Dennis said. He faced Will but there was no hint of a smile on his ruddy face. “Heard you were at the top of the class.”

“Eighth,” Will corrected. Kul Tun Osir had been first. “Not all the way.”

“You know where I finished, Will?” Dennis asked. He made it sound like a challenge.

“I really don’t,” Will admitted.

“Dead last,” Dennis told him. “That’s quite an accomplishment, isn’t it? Nobodywas able to do worse than me. When it comes to being bad, I’m the best.” He glared at Will, who simply watched him, straight-faced.

“You may have finished last,” Will said finally. “But you still finished. You’re here, the same as the rest of us.”

“I sure am,” Dennis said. “I’m here, and I did it by myself. No help from you, obviously, and none from anyone else either. Just my own efforts, my own two hands, and my own barely adequate brain.”

“I think you’re being a little hard on yourself, Dennis,” Will said. “On yourself and everyone else.”

“If you’d been in my shoes, you wouldn’t necessarily think that,” Dennis shot back. “But, luckily for you and Starfleet, you didn’t have to find out.”

“I’m sure your contribution to Starfleet will be an important one,” Will suggested.

“Maybe if I was going into Starfleet,” Dennis said. “But I’m not.”

“But ... you graduated from the Academy!” Will was dumfounded. “Even if you don’t want to join Starfleet—and I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t—you kind of have to now, don’t you?”

“You’d think so, huh?” Dennis asked. “But it turns out there’s a kind of special dispensation for cases like mine. It’s possible to do just well enough to make it through the Academy but still bad enough that they won’t make you enlist if you choose not to. They don’t really want me, any more than I want them.”

People were streaming around them now, graduates and family members alike, and Dennis had raised his voice to the point that people cast sidelong glances at them and tried to give them wide berth.

“I guess I just don’t understand,” Will said. “I thought the whole reason you put yourself through this was that you wanted to be in Starfleet.”

Finally, Dennis smiled. “I thought that too,” he said. “But you know what happened, Will? I met you.”

“Me?”

“You, Will. I think you’ll have a brilliant Starfleet career. You’ll be some big hotshot senior officer, probably a captain someday, or an admiral. And that’s exactly why I want nothing to do with Starfleet. Because the system rewards people who are willing to turn their backs on their friends, who will sacrifice friendships for advancement and accomplishment. You’ll thrive in that kind of atmosphere, Riker. But I want no part of it. I’m going home, back to the farm. At least there when you’re up to your ankles in manure, you know where you really stand.”

Will felt anger overtake him. “I feel like I want to say I’m sorry you feel that way, Dennis,” he said. “But really, I’m not. Whatever problems you think you have with Starfleet you really have with yourself. How you did in school is no one’s fault but your own. You can’t blame anyone else for that. You could have asked for help at any point, and you could have accepted help when it was offered. You could have pulled your own weight like the rest of us did. You chose not to, well, those are the choices you make. But then don’t go trying to blame others, or the ‘system,’ for your shortcomings. As Dr. McCoy might have said, that dog don’t hunt.”

Dennis shot Will a look of anger much like the one he’d left him with the night he’d demanded help. “Leave it to you to kiss up even when you don’t have to, Riker,” he said. “McCoy can’t hear you now. But it’s perfect for a Starfleet drone like you. Have a good life, Will. I’ll think of you every time I swamp out the barn or feed the hogs.”

Dennis turned and shoved his way through the crowd, leaving Will standing there watching him go. Dennis had really ticked him off—refusing to accept responsibility for one’s own actions was something Will hated, and Dennis seemed intent on making a lifelong pattern of it. But part of him couldn’t help feeling hurt, wounded, by Dennis’s accusation, and by the bitter tone in his one-time friend’s voice. And underneath the anger there was another feeling—a vague idea that maybe Dennis was right about more than Will wanted to admit. Felicia had implied many of the same things about him.

Will was excited about getting posted to a starship and seeing some action, but at the same time, he thought, a change of scenery might be a good opportunity to take a long, hard look at his own life. It might just be,he thought, that it’s time to make some changes.